Bell, book, and murder

by Edghill, Rosemary

  Twentieth-century occult thought holds that the major population centers are a generation ahead of the rest of the world—or, what New York is now, Tulsa, Oklahoma, will be in twenty years.

  Makes you long to see what 2015'11 be like at Fourth Street and Sixth, doesn't it?

  I tried Belle again. She was still out. Which was annoying, considering how much I wanted to talk to her.

  It's not that I run to Belle with every little thing. But this was not a little thing. This was theft—crazy, extensive, and stupid. It might even be connected to murder, an explicit, real-world murder that our friends the police were even now investigating. I wanted to know what she thought, what she knew, what she'd heard.

  I Wcinted to shove the responsibility onto someone else so that I wasn't even a psychic accessoiy-beside-the-fact to Ned Skelton's life. Backward, turn backward, O time in thy flight. But childhood was a long time gone.

  My apartment was airless, but not yet an oven. I got the fan down from where it lives the rest of the year and propped it in the window and turned it on, facing out. Air began sliding through.

  From the hag and hungry goblin, that into rags would rend ye / All the spirits that stand by the Naked Man in The Book of Moons defend ye.

  I stretched out on the bed, tried to think about The Book of Moons, and fell asleep.

  The phone woke me. It was hours later, and the temperature had dropped to where I was shivering. I hoped it was Belle calling back, but it wasn't. I picked up anjAvay as the caller began leaving a message.

  "Hi, Stuart," I said, just as if I were a normal person.

  "Hello," he said. His voice was sultry and edged, like good Scotch. "I was wondering if you'd care to have dinner with me this evening?"

  238 Bell, Book, and Murder

  Oh, Jesus, no! my mind said, while my moutJi said, "Sure, Stuart, that'd be great." I regarded the phone with the horrified feeling you have when the car's front wheels leave the paving, but it transmitted my words without editorial comment.

  'That's lovely, then," Stuart said. "Why don't we meet somewhere and go on from there? What about the Russian Tea Room?"

  I laughed out of sheer nerves, though he couldn't know why I found the suggestion funny. "I'm off things Russian," I said, feeling all my old heterosexual diplomacy skills come raging back. My turn to curtsey, your turn to bow.

  'Top of the Sixes, then?" he said.

  I blinked. According to the formal Rules of Engagement that govern dating, if you decline the first suggestion made for where to go you have to accept the second one, since two refusals imply lack of interest.

  But the Top of the Sixes is an authentic New York Legend located at 666 Fifth Avenue and has commanded a panoramic top-floor view of New York City for lo these many years. It is expensive. Very, very expensive. Either Stuart had been struck independently wealthy or was expecting more out of this evening than I thought he was going to get.

  I mentally reviewed my wardrobe, wondering if I even owned anything I could wear there. Nothing to wear was a valid justification for negotiation.

  "Sweetheart?"

  "Huh? I mean sure, great. When?" Why was my mouth doing this to me?

  "Perhaps an hour?"

  "Oh, yeah, fine, sure," I said, with the immense suavity that characterizes my dealings with real grown-ups.

  Stuart swore he was looking forward to seeing me and also to a delightful evening, which 1 thought was more optimism than the English are generally credited with. I put the phone down and stared at it.

  I'd agreed to go out on a date to the Top of the Sixes with a man I'd barely met and hardly knew. I ran a quick sanity check and found all systems stable.

  I realized that I was going to enjoy this evening. It would be the tonic antithesis of murdered booksellers. The Book of Moons, and all the byzantine Community politics that were beginning to grate on my nerves. It would be awkward and tense, possibly expensive.

  I

  Book of Moons 239

  almost certainly mortifying in spots, and would leave me feeling massively incapable of coping with the innocent social interactions of our culture.

  It would also be normal. Supremely normal. It was a date, a thing that everybody did—people who had never heard of the Goddess or Mary, Queen of Scots, people who had never known someone who'd been killed, people who had never been handed a dead man's legacy to return, people who owned televisions and didn't live in a coffin-shaped and coffin-sized apartment on the edge of Alphabet City.

  People who owned suitable clothing for the occasion.

  I got up, shoved my hair out of my eyes, and went to my closet.

  I own any number of clothing items, including skirts (most in basic black), but only two dresses: the Laura Ashley print that makes me look like an escapee from a Bume-Jones painting and a lined black linen sheath that unfortunately does not make me look like Audrey Hepburn but does allow me to state truthfully that I have a dress from Sak's, even if bought on sale. I could also field an envelope clutch and shoes that matched each other and the dress.

  Fine.

  Half an hour later I was standing in front of my mirror smudging my eye sockets in with expensive grisalle powder the purchase of which (if not the use) is one of my few unjustifiable vices, realizing that I owned no jewelry that went with the dress and that if I spent much more time worrying about it I was going to be late. I left the silver studs in my back piercings and put big silver crescents in the front ones and decided I was understatedly elegant. Time to go.

  Wearing a dress in my neighborhood made me feel vulnerable and out of place, as though I were somehow out of contact with the ground. I decided on yet another in a series of taxis, but they don't come down into my locality much. I walked across the Bowery and got lucky, snagging one cruising LxDwer Broadway. I got to Top of the Sixes a little after seven.

  I did not belong here. The sense of inappropriateness was as seductive as a drug.

  The first thing you see when you walk into Top of the Sixes is a wall of glass looking out over the city. Sunset turns every visible window into a mirror flashing back gold sunset light, and

  240 Bell, Book, and Murder

  down below the streets are already in shadow, even though the sky is light. It's a stage set, meant for after the theater, for later evening, for someone I wasn't and didn't want to be.

  But the power to be this far from my proper place was, all side issues aside, power. And, as Lx)rd Acton said, power delights, and absolute power is absolutely delightful.

  I was not in a harmless mind-set.

  The wait-staff elicited the information that I was waiting for someone, which seemed, somehow, to relieve them. I was installed on a real leather end stool in front of an intimidating sweep of mirror and mahogany, where I allowed a bartender to pour me a Scotch on the rocks for seven-fifty. I set my purse on the edge of the bar and felt that someone ought to offer to light the cigarette I wasn't smoking. Ah, expectation.

  I sat and read the labels on the expensive booze and admired the pretheater diners and the collection of people who thought nothing of coming to the Top of the Sixes for a drink before dinner and marveled at the infinite diversity of human society. How lovely it is to have money, as the song goes.

  It was a good thing that I found so much to amuse myself with, because Stuart didn't make an appearance. Seven-thirty became eight. I ordered another drink and tried not to feel the twitch from that old bad girly-girl hardwiring: he boots it and it's your fault. Prepackaged inferiority.

  But he had said Top of the Sixes and he had said seven. I sat there, giddy with disrupted sleep patterns £ind emotional dressage and the sublimated terror of unconnectedness. Possibly everyone else felt this way all the time. Maybe that was why they were here. Maybe that was why all of twentieth-century culture was here.

  And what about Mary Stuart? my mind demanded.

  I wasn't surprised to be thinking of her. It's like that old Dis-cordian koan: "All things happen in fives, or are d
ivisible by or are multiples of five, or are somehow directly or indirectly appropriate to five . . . depending on the ingenuity of the observer."

  Mary was my five. Mary, Mary, quite contrary, who, if she ix^os a Witch, knew when she went to the block that her co-religionists had abandoned her, the latest in a long series of abandonments, jiltings, and betrayals.

  Speaking of which —

  At eight-forty-five I decided that Stuart had either stood me up or been unavoidably delayed, aind I wasn't going to invest any emo-

  I

  Book of Moons 241

  tion in either possibility until I found out which it was. We are all so modem and reasonable here at the end of the millennium.

  I settled the bill and got ready to go. So far the evening was living up to expectations—embarrassing and expensive. Nobody paid any attention to me, but then, nobody would. This is New York's great gift to the neurotic: anonymity.

  I'm not neurotic, but I try to keep up with my friends' interests.

  It was dark outside; the place looked less surreal. There are things meant to be seen only in darkness that exist, ainticlimacti-cally, in the light of day. Like Julian.

  Who I was supposed to be banishing from my consciousness with this little exercise.

  I returned to the elevator. It opened. I recognized Stuart before he recognized me.

  "What— Good heavens, sweetheart, I didn't even see you!"

  He was wearing a suit and tie, which added to my sense of unreality. I don't know people who dress like that.

  "Hello, Stugirt," I said. "You're late," I added.

  He looked cross that I'd mentioned it and contrite all at the same time, which was amusing, but probably not amusing enough to make me continue the evening any further.

  "Oh, you poor girl—you must be starved. Come on, let's go get dinner. Give me a chance to explain. There's a little place around the comer."

  He took my arm. I didn't like it but I didn't object. My mistake.

  The technical name for Stuart's little maneuver is bait and switch, but the consolation prize was hushed and elegant, three blocks away, and so self-effacing and dimly lit that I wasn't quite sure what its name was. The decor seemed to run to polished copper implements, leather, and wooden ducks in various states of preservation. We were ushered directly to a booth, suggesting that this was where Stuart had been heading all along. Leather menus the size of solar panels were tendered unto us. I discovered that the restaurant's name was Sandalford's and the entrees started at $22.50. Stuart asked me what I was drinking.

  "Perrier with a chunk," I said, feeling it would not be a good idea to send a third Scotch to live with the other two just yet. Stuart ordered a double Bushmill's, no ice. His shirt had French cuffs and his cufflinks were gold lions' heads. Very fancy. I wondered if they were Scottish lions.

  242 Bell, Book, and Murder

  "You must think I'm a perfectly dreadful person," Stuart said charmingly, in a fashion that encouraged me to disagree.

  "Not yet," I said.

  I am not easily charmed. Neither am I anyone's sweetheart, baby, darling, or poor girl, which you may consider a moral failing on my part, if you like. Stuart was oh-so-subtly pushing me around—manipulating me, if you prefer—a practice of which I disapprove.

  "1 tried to reach you, but you'd already left," he said. Win-somely. There was something underneath the winsomeness, some dark current of self-congratulation that interested me; I'm not trophy enough that possession of me would engender it. "I was just about to pop out the door myself when les gendarmes appeared upon the horizon." He raised his eyebrows, inviting sympathy.

  "What?" I said blankly.

  'The police," Stuart amplified. He shrugged. "I'd already told them everything I know, but apparently something new had come up and things had changed." He finished his drink and called for another with a practiced flick of the finger. "I don't mind telling you, I'm quite at the end of my tether. What a horror."

  "You had to talk to the police," I said, wondering if I'd heard him correctly.

  "Well, of course," Stuart said. "Ilona was my aunt; they usually want to talk to the family. I'd ask you to the funeral, but I'm having the body shipped home, and—"

  I was suddenly far beyond sober, in the nauseated nightmare realm of three a.m. awakenings poisoned with adrenaline, among jagged annunciations that it takes years of practice to learn not to reject.

  Stuart was Ilona's nephew.

  Ilona had been supposed to come to the picnic on Sunday with her nephew, her new partner.

  But Stuart had come alone, with never a mention about Ilona to me or anyone else.

  Why?

  If she'd been alive, he would have brought her. If she couldn't come, he would have made her excuses. Ilona was a lady of the old school. She had manners. She would have sent her regrets.

  If she were alive.

  If she was dead, what kind of lunatic would register that fact and then go on to his next social engagement?

  Ilona had died sometime Saturday night. She'd been going to bring him to the picnic; they would have met at her place or his. He must have known she was dead, all the time I was talking to him that Sunday.

  What kind of lunatic . . . ?

  "Bast, darling, are you all right? You look a bit illish," Stuart said.

  "Bad drug reaction," I said automatically. The fresh drink arrived.

  "Look, I can't go on calling you by that ridiculous name," Stuart said. "You must have a real name somewhere." He put his hand over mine and I realized he was trying to pry my purse out of my fingers. "Let's see what it is." Plaj^ully.

  "I suppose Lothlorien is yours now," I S£iid, tightening my fingers on my purse.

  "Yes, of course," Stuart said, letting go of my hand. 'The will has yet to be proved, but as far as I know I'm her only relative; in fact, she'd asked me to became a partner in that bookstore others. I don't know what I'll do with the place. Sell the books, I expect. I suppose they're worth a bit."

  "In the right market," I said. My brain was occupied with how to get out of here before I asked Stuart why he'd killed Ilona.

  And Ned. The killer of one had to be the killer of the other, because he was after The Book of Moons.

  Because it was worth a lot of money and it was an old famiily heirloom and Ilona had been going to sell an old family heirloom to finance Lothlorien but Ned had stolen The Book of Moons just like he'd stolen all the other Books of Shadows —

  And I had The Book of Moons now.

  "I know it sounds rather callous and mercenary of me to be reckoning up pounds-shillings-pence so soon, but I hadn't seen her in years, really," Stuart said.

  "Excuse me," I said to Stuart. I stood up. He stood up. I fled.

  The bathroom at Sandalford's is pink and extensive, with decor dropped down from another manque: black and pink with glazed and sandblasted lilies, savagely retro and antiseptic. I looked in the mirror and saw a scared raccoon, painted and blue-eyed, teetering on the edge of cobbling together a real-world explanation for her terror, denying the fact that it was a reasonable response to the acquisition of information she could not possibly possess.

  244 Bell, Book, and Murder

  I was certain of Stuart's accountability in the murders, even while I shied away and tried to find alternative justifications for my feelings.

  I was just spooked at going out on a date. Sure.

  No. There was something wrong here. But if 1 clung to my conviction of Stuart Hepburn's homicide I'd simply talk myself out of it and walk back out onto the killing floor.

  I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. What was wrong? Don't ask for specifics: magic is an analog system, not digital. I breathed deeply and sorted through my last half hour with Stuart. Something wrong. Forget murder. Cool premeditated murder was too grandiose to easily believe in.

  But violence was not. There was something odd, unreasonable, unreal, forced, faked in Stuart's behavior. Something that didn't fit into the continuum of t
wo casual meetings and the suggestion of dinner.

  Stuart was setting me up.

  I did not have to believe he'd killed two people to accept that warning. His character fault might be something as mundane and ugly as a taste for date rape. I didn't have to stay to find out what it was. The only question remaining was how to leave.

  People die every year from the fear of looking stupid. At least when you're a Witch you have enough experience at looking stupid that you know it won't, of itself, kill you.

  I walked back out to the table. Stuart stood up.

  "I've already ordered," he said. "When you didn't come back, I-"

  "Stuart," I said, interrupting. 'This is not working out. I'm sorry about the police, but I'm leaving now. Good-bye."

  He grabbed for my arm, but there was a table between us and I was expecting it. 1 moved fast, aceing the restaurant traffic with elite New York pedestrian chops. Stuart was tangled with waiters and explanations, unable to follow.

  I reached the outside air and ran down the first subway steps I saw.

  It took me a while to get out of the area and to transfer to a line going somewhere I wanted to go, and by that time it was as easy to take the Uptown A as it was to do anything else.

  By now it was rising ten. So far today I'd been accused of murder by Glitter, conspired in occult psychodrama with Julian,

  taken a fling at being a yuppie and spent twenty dollars for two Scotches at Top of the Sixes, and almost had dinner with the real murderer.

  Now that I was away from him I could go back to believing it, and the more I thought about it, the more it all made a horrible Agatha Christie kind of sense.

  All it took was one leap of unproven feiith: that Ilona Saunders, expatriate Brit, had The Book of Moons, a family heirloom, the (reluctantly chosen) sale of which was going to save Lothlorien.

  Maybe she consulted with Stuart about selling it. He'd said she'd offered him a partnership. I wondered with a sudden intense yearning for knowledge what it was that Stuart did for his day job that allowed him to possess those lovely suits and gold cufflinks and familiarity with posh eateries. The proceeds from the sale of The Book of Moons could enhance a lifestyle like that: make it possible, or make its continuation possible.