We were cruising slowly along a narrow lane lined with garages on one side and backs of businesses on the other, with a normal, decorous street ahead. Rain drummed on the roof. Scraping back and forth with each pass, a leafy branch caught under a windshield wiper seemed the only residue from our wild ride.
“Are we there yet?”
“We’re in Oak Alley,” said Ted in my ear. He leaned forward, his left hand gripping the driver’s seat. “Well, Tiger Lily, I never heard you use words like that before. Your first brawl? You did good back there.”
Johnny activated the four-ways, pulled to a stop and unhooked the mike to report our whereabouts and get an update on the courthouse situation. He didn’t mention our recent scuffle. Units from surrounding boroughs had arrived on scene and were assisting the mop-up. The knuckles on his right hand were skinned. Otherwise, he looked a little scuffed and rumpled, but intact.
I took a surreptitious inventory of my person. I hurt in a number of new places, but I also seemed intact. Other than his hand, and a graze and a bruise below his cheekbone, Ted appeared similarly unimpaired. I thought we were very lucky.
After a few minutes of crackle and code, Johnny twisted and surveyed us both. His gaze lingered on me. Not with approval, as near as I could read him.
“I thought I told you to run for it.”
“You did, Sergeant. It’s a bad habit you have,” I snapped. “Try to cure it.”
Ted sniggered.
Johnny’s gaze narrowed as if I’d provided him with grounds for another reassessment. I hunched down in my seat, but refused to drop my eyes.
Finally, he said, “Ted, that hand needs attention. Give me directions to the hospital, one of you, that avoids the blocked-off streets. And since we pulled you from a pile of bleeding bodies, Lillie, you need to be checked over.”
“Ted, yes. He said his fingers didn’t work right. Me, no. I’m fine.” Too much sensitive equipment. Too many vulnerable people. I was bruised but not broken. There was no blinding need to risk it. I couldn’t avoid the hospital two weeks ago and that had been a fatal mistake. For Nathan anyway.
“Lillie.”
“No. I will not. I can’t.” Silly tears seeped down my cheeks. I turned my head to the window and wiped at them, hoping he wouldn’t notice.
“But I’ll get out there. No doubt you have things to do regarding this. Lots of things. I can get a taxi.”
“Lillie, shut up. I’m driving you home. There’s an even chance some of that crowd might decide to target your residence for dessert. I’m sure they know where you live.”
I couldn’t see that happening. Not today anyway. And I didn’t bother to point out that—in the unlikely event that the SOS mob hadn’t slaked their lust and managed to regroup—if I saw a crowd of slavering townsfolk waving scythes and torches, I could just tell the taxi driver to keep driving.
“Lillie, if you need a place to stay, the wife and I can put you up,” Ted put in.
“Thank you, Ted, no. I’ve already caused you enough trouble. Besides, the property has a reputation. So far, it’s worked.” I didn’t see the need to mention Dumbarton’s occasional presence in front of Ted. After all, he was the bylaw control person.
Johnny didn’t bother to point out that reputation hadn’t worked over the garrote on the porch and phone line. He just looked at me. I shut up.
We dropped Ted under the portico at Emerge. He said his wife would pick him up when they were done with him. Before he climbed stiffly out, he punched Johnny on the arm and patted mine. “Interesting times, amigos. I’ll see you later. We’ll have a beer.”
“You seem to have a strong aversion to hospitals. What do you do for regular medical attention?” Johnny asked, pulling back into traffic.
“I have reason, as I told you. Chief Secord put me in touch with a doctor who runs a private clinic. Members of the force sometimes use her. She…doesn’t have a problem with Talent.”
“Hunh. What would you do if you run into something more serious than shots and a checkup?”
“In that case, I wouldn’t have much choice, would I?”
My rain-swept street was quiet. Not unnaturally quiet, just normal quiet. My little white house stood like a normal house, quiet and sedate behind its fence, gleaming a little in the half-light. I relaxed against the headrest, closed my eyes and let out my breath.
The quiet, the stillness, roused me. Johnny, one arm over the wheel, watched me. Inscrutable, as always.
“I’m sorry. You must be in a hurry,” I said, lurching upright. I released my seat belt and fumbled for the door handle. “Thank you, Sergeant. Everything looks peaceful and serene. I’d like to apologize again. I’m sorry I led you into that…mess. Thank you for hauling me out of it. I had no idea things would turn violent. They never had before. I hope no one was seriously injured. I appreciate everything…”
“Lillie.” His use of my name stopped the flow of words. In the past twenty-four hours, the way he said it had changed.
“That ‘mess’ was not your fault. Let me emphasize that. You didn’t cause it. I anticipated something might happen, if you remember.”
“Why didn’t you insist that I stay away, then?”
“Because it was bound to happen sooner or later. Another time I might not be there. Give me your keys, now, and stay where you are until I check out the house.”
I stayed. No point in a silly argument. No silly questions based on attempts to uncover some personal meaning in his riding-to-the-rescue comment. Or wondering if his lack of insistence meant he was interested in seeing how I reacted to confrontation. I was too tired to parse out motives. I was glad he’d been there and I was glad he’d offered to check the house.
I sat, twisting my bracelets, as I watched rain trickle down the windshield in runic patterns.
Just when it seemed he’d been gone an inordinate length of time, he opened my door to a gust of wet, sweet wind.
“All clear. Rain’s coming on hard again. Can you run for it?”
“Run? There you go again. You must be kidding. I will try for a gentle jog.” I hauled myself out and down from the SUV, deliberately ignoring his offered hand.
Johnny followed me to the porch and into the house. The house had that same sense of emptiness, of waiting, that houses have when one has been gone a long time. Maybe it was just me. I felt I’d been gone a long time. Within the placid, expectant stillness, I heard water running and smelled lilies.
“I’ve started a bath for you. Get out of those damp clothes, get in it and soak.” He picked up a handful of folders from the stairs. “I’m taking hard-copy membership lists I found in your husband’s files. Your husband seems to have acquired membership data from the SOS as well. Looking for infiltrators or traitors, I suspect. I need to do some cross-referencing after that riot today.”
He turned to go. “And make sure you eat.”
“Just a minute. Wait,” I bleated. “I haven’t asked. I meant to ask. Are you all right, yourself? All that punching and pushing. How do you feel?”
“Feel?” He hesitated, turned back and gave my besmudged and bedraggled body another slow up and down survey. He reached down and lifted a straggle of wet hair from my cheek, examined it, twined it around his fingers before smoothing it back.
“I feel an infinite curiosity,” he said, and was gone.
18.
The reminder mark on the bathroom tile where the Nathan-thing had dissolved like melted plastic got only a cursory glance and a shrug. Other events had overpowered it, diminished it from its first horrifying magnitude. I soaked. I washed my hair.
I got dressed again. In case. Jeans and baggy pullover seemed more substantial, more practical, more combat-ready, than a diaphanous nightie and a thin dressing gown. I planned to sleep fully clothed for the foreseeable future. Just in case.
I ate, still in a mechanical stupor. Then I made coffee and went to sit on the back porch to comb out my damp hair and try to figure out what the hell was going on
.
The rain had moved on. A few ragged gray clouds fled across the sky, embarrassed by the setting sun. Young grass glimmered, edged with pale radiance, silver and green. The sundial and the flagstones gleamed soft gray against delicate shadows. A gentle garden from another time.
My attempts to analyze the situation were not particularly fruitful. Maybe I lacked the right kind of mind. But his parting comment disturbed me.
An infinite curiosity. What did that mean?
Based on the modus, there seemed to be two main parties who actively wished me ill, or dead, though the evidence was not exactly clear-cut. One seemed to be personal; the other seemed directed more at my occupation. One had sent first a simulacrum, followed by a zombie, against me—in Nathan’s form. That was very personal. That also meant a Talent or someone with a tame Talent in their employ. Or maybe a ceremonial mage.
The other chose physical discouragement, like harassment. They didn’t like what I did for a living. That suggested the SOS. Put them clearly on the suspect list. Had their group dynamics progressed to a new stage? The violence of the protest this afternoon clearly indicated that it had. Pretty violent to use a pipe bomb to breach a building. An action certain to bring official scrutiny. Were they targeting others with Talent? Or was it just me, because of Nathan and the ASP’s devout belief in the complete eradication of the paranormal population? The opposing parties might have different motives but the same agenda, the same target—me.
Every thread I tried to follow, to separate and untangle from the snarl, the central mass of questions balled tighter. Just like the tension in my guts. All one can do against unseen enemies with unknowable motives is react. Precognition had never been part of my Talent. Uncertain and misleading as it often is, I wouldn’t have minded a glimpse or two of the future, rather than be forced to be passive, submissive. Helpless. I hated that. With Nathan, I’d felt powerless plenty long enough.
A cold nose nudged my hand. Dumbarton lolled against the side of my chair. I reached out, rubbed his big head and pulled at his ears. He smelled of mud and wet dog.
What about the nonhuman contingent? What about Ric’s classic run-in with the dullahan? Was the blood thrown at him a warning against interference? Or just a dullahan being dullahanish? On the other hand, the bean sidhe had also warned me. But to be careful, not to stop. Not an inimical position, in my view, unless I read more into her words than warranted. Why had she called me cousin? One could say the supernatural parties, if they were concerned at all, were ambivalent, as always.
From the first, Dumbarton had acted like a guardian entity. Maybe not all of them were ambivalent. He offered me a paw. I hugged him. Even if he wasn’t totally real, he was better than nothing.
An infinite curiosity. What the devil did Johnny mean by that?
At the office, next morning, I fielded anxious inquiries from the town’s female legal counsel over the status of the courthouse apparition, along with some gloomy speculation and subdued hand-wringing over the possibility of further legal suits based on physical injuries received and/or emotional trauma sustained by sensitive souls as a result of the riot and bombing.
After she made some thinly veiled inferences that my presence may have been responsible for any or all of the aforesaid damages, I reminded her that I had been present at their express behest and demand. That I, along with some other town employees, including a bylaw control officer, had suffered physical harm in varying degrees and I resented their attempt to cover their asses with mine. And, further, they could stuff it. I may even have told her where to stick her torts.
Painkillers seem to have the same effect on my mouth as alcohol.
I typed up and forwarded a curt report on the courthouse exorcism, and two more on yesterday’s other cases. Then I spent some time online on a largely fruitless search for information about curse stones.
No curse lasts forever, the bean sidhe had said. But what if curses were renewed, generation after generation?
As soon as I got caught up with the backlog, I intended to do a lot more reading up and research to refresh my knowledge about whatever legendary creatures and constructs might reappear. Our world contained more than ghosts now, and I didn’t want to rely on sporadic and after-the-fact reports from other parts of the country for information on the emergence of creatures formerly of myth and legend. I wanted to be able to immediately recognize any and be ready with countermeasures. If there were any.
From what I could piece together from various sites, this particular cursing procedure sounded truly ancient, almost primeval. Curse stones were ordinary round stones—the curator and the folklorist seemed to have gotten that detail right—placed in hollows in a larger rock of some significance. St. Brigid’s Stone, with numerous carved depressions, was one example of a bullaun, as they were called. Brigid, obviously, represented a Christian replacement superimposed on some older divinity. The darkness, the malignancy, however, had continued, just under a different sponsorship.
Curses were affirmed by turning the stone against the sun three times while uttering one’s chosen malediction and by naming the recipient. Curses could be reversed by turning the stones sunwise, deiseal. The curses then broke and rebounded. Usually, in a belief like this, the power, the efficacy, the potency, resided in the larger rock. By themselves, the smaller individual stones would be inert, innocuous, it seemed to me. Hauling the smaller stones across the Atlantic in the belly of a crowded boat didn’t make much sense, unless those had been removed and taken away as a talisman or to prevent, in perpetuity, a reversal—or a repeat—of the original spell. Would removal of the small stones lock the curse in place?
Such curse stones were usually found at specific locations, by a sacred spring or well, or by a tomb.
I leaned back to ease my aching ribs. This morning I’d discovered a bruise there, nicely livid, the size of a fist. I hoped they weren’t cracked.
A tomb.
Maybe only the idea had come across the water.
I thought I might make another visit to Cemetery Hill to check for hollows in the base stone below the name St. Claire. At the grave of a woman who may have been, or was thought to be, more than a mere immigrant.
Perhaps I should have a talk with the folklorist who had provided the stones to the museum. I didn’t have a name. For that I needed Ted. I wanted to know how he fared from yesterday. But he must be taking sick leave since there was no sign he’d been in—at least by the looks of his desk; no coffee cups.
A call to his house was answered by his answering machine. I left a message.
I debated whether to call Ric again and decided not to. Last night when I called he’d been garrulous with gratitude for my warning about gold, and at the same time oddly reticent about the attack itself. I learned little more than I had from Johnny Thresher’s brief description.
Instead, he wanted to talk about his TV interview. He seemed alternately exhilarated by the media attention and terrified by his fifteen seconds. When he began close questioning about the riot and the bomb, not the exorcism, and asked if I intended to do an interview, I cut him off.
I did media interviews only under duress.
I caught the brief clip of Ric, all dolorous countenance and solemn declarations with his wife hanging on one arm, on the late news, just before the coverage cut to the melee in front of the courthouse. I hoped to God he’d left off the asafoetida.
I almost missed it.
Somewhere, somehow, the station had acquired a photo of me. One I had never seen before and hadn’t known existed, though I remembered the occasion well enough. They used the photo to introduce a short follow-up segment about the courthouse ghost, exorcists and the SOS, and the outlandish claim from an SOS spokesman that I was not a Talent but a paranormal entity myself.
The shot showed me sunbathing, seminude and semiprone, all bare arms and legs, birch pale in my red bikini bottom, my trademark hair glinting loose and streaming over my shoulders, my face half-turned away.
Sex and death. Not exactly the professional persona I tried to cultivate.
Nathan continued to taunt me from beyond the grave. Only he could have taken that paparazzi-style picture in our back garden last summer and passed it on to some male friend. His trophy wife. His tool. His proxy. To selected spirits I was death and oblivion, and that, combined with our intimate connection, had doubtless given Nathan a thrill.
I had to wonder how long that photograph had been circulating behind my back and in what venues. I began having fonder thoughts about, and a deeper understanding and appreciation of, curse stones and the dolls you stick pins into.
When I calmed down enough to speak, I phoned the station, all I got was a tape. I didn’t try again. Sometimes bitching makes matters worse. Better to let it fade behind the next news item.
Fortunately, the clip wasn’t repeated in the morning news. Perhaps wiser heads at the station had prevailed. Public figure or not, it represented a gratuitous invasion of privacy.
Imagining a future where people nudged and whispered, “There’s that St. Claire woman. Saw her flashing her tits on TV,” I found it difficult to screw up the courage to come in to work this morning. I was glad the building had a back door.
The phone rang.
“Tiger Lily. Got your message. Thanks. I just finished talking to the sergeant too. How you doing?”
“Grumpy but fine, Ted. How’s your hand? How are you?”
“Taking my ease. Eight stitches on my drinking hand from our shindig. Took them forever to get to me too. Finally got some action when I told them if they were too busy soothing the brows and anointing the scratches of malcontents and rabble-rousers, just give me a needle and thread and I’d sew it up myself. What can I do for you, Lillie?”
“Information, if you have it. A man in the folklore society collected Irish curse stones and donated them to the museum along with a monograph about them. Seems the collection is missing. When I was there yesterday, the present curator said she couldn’t find the documents that came with them. I’d like to talk to the man and find out the history, where he got them. Wondered if you might know who he was?”
Dark & Disorderly Page 14