Bell, book, and murder

by Edghill, Rosemary

  'That shooter of his is going to tell us most of what we need to know," Hodiac said. He sounded pleased.

  "Oh, good," I said inadequately. I felt numb, as if crying would be appropriate if only I could work up the interest.

  A patrolman came in and handed something to Hodiac, who wrung it in his hands and then handed it to me. It was one of those cold bags that freeze when you twist them. I held it to my jaw, wishing everyone would leave me alone.

  "Are you all right? Do you want someone to take you to the hospital?" Hodiac asked.

  "I'm fine." I don't have insurance. 'Thank you for coming," I added, feeling I had to say something.

  Hodiac smiled. "It's our job, miss."

  One of the patrolmen caime back with coffees from the deli next door. Hodiac sorted through them and handed one to me. After what Stuart had done to the studio, our coffeemaker was probably broken anyway.

  "Drink it, miss. It'll help."

  "Bast," I said. "It's Bast."

  Not Karen. Not "miss." Not "Witchie" or "sweetheart" or "pet." My name is Bast.

  I sipped it. It was tepid and horribly sweet. I shivered.

  "It isn't going to work out quite the way you see in the movies, but I think we'll be able to hold on to Mr. Hepburn," Hodiac said. "You may not have to testify in court." This was supposed to be reassuring. "Detective Larsen will explain the procedure to you, and what you need to do. Here's my card. You can call me if you need anything."

  I looked for a pocket to put it in and realized I didn't have my jacket. I set the card on the desk, lining it up carefully with the edge. Lieutenant Hodiac was called away. I finished the coffee, winced at the sugar pooled in the bottom, and walked over to where my jacket was.

  "It's mine," I said to the officer who'd followed me. He looked a young fifteen, if that, and had a white-on-black tag on his shirt that said his name was Sanchez.

  272 Bell, Book, and Murder

  I put on my jacket. It didn't make me feel any warmer. I realized the entire front of my little black dress was soaking wet and my nylons were nothing but snags. My boots were wet. Every muscle, without exception, hurt.

  "Detective Larsen wonders if you could talk to him now, miss," Officer Sanchez said politely.

  I wondered what he'd do if I said no. I was tired beyond imagining; I would gladly tell them anything in the world if they'd just let me sleep.

  / slept not since the Conquest / Nor since then have I waked—

  Mad Tom. Bedlami's boys are bonnie. 1 wondered if girls were allowed into their club. 1 wondered where you went to sign up. I walked back over to the desk.

  Detective Larsen was an unshaven blond wearing a pale blue sport jacket over jeans and the gold shield medallion dujour. He was probably singing arias of thanksgiving at the prospect of being able to clear two murders off his caseload. 1 sat down. I smiled. He smiled. Meaningless.

  He tookparticulairs: name, address, phone number, profession. Had I really been working here this long? I wondered. Then we got down to specifics.

  Detective Larsen interrupted me every other sentence with questions until I got the idea of what he wanted to hear. Had Stuart shown me the gun? Yes. Had he threatened me verbally? Yes — he'd said he'd kill me. Had he threatened me physically in £iny way? He'd hit me.

  Detective Larsen seemed pleased that Stuart had hit me. I was glad somebody was pleased. We went on.

  Stuart had broken into my apairtment using passkeys stolen from his previous victim Ned Skelton. Stuart brought me to the studio at gunpoint, because I had told him that the rare book that Ned Skelton had stolen from Ned's employer—Stuart's aunt—and stashed with me, was here. No, I hadn't known what it was when Ned had left it with me; I'd found out later. No, I hadn't thought it was odd that he'd do that. Well, yes and no. Okay, never mind.

  I'd been supposed to meet Ned the night he was murdered —

  "Why?" Detective Larsen said.

  "I was going to do a blessing on his apartment."

  "Why's that?" Larsen said sharply.

  Hodiac had come over to listen. I stared supplicatingly at him, feeling the fear that all of us fringefolk feel when our explanations may be twisted into unintended confessions.

  I

  Book of Moons 273

  "She's a Wiccan, Don," Hodiac said. "She blesses people."

  "Oh," Larsen said, losing interest in that line of inquiry. "One of them. Go on, miss."

  I went back to Tuesday night. I'd seen the police take Ned's body out of his apartment. We went over the time that Ned had called me and the time I got there, including why I thought those times were right and then (in my statement) I came back to the studio. I opened the box and found the book, and thought that Ned must have taken it from Ilona.

  "Why'd you think that?" Larsen said.

  Because it had been in a box with all the other Books of Shadows that Ned had stolen and Ilona's was the only place it could have come from, but if I told him that, what would he do?

  "I don't know," I said unconvincingly. 1 rubbed the bridge of my nose. "Ilona was related to Mary, Queen of Scots," I said, and at the time it sounded like a reasonable explanation.

  Hodiac said something to Larsen that I didn't hear.

  "We can come back to that. What did you do then?" Larsen said to me.

  I'd done nothing, wondering what to do with the book since Ilona and Ned were both dead. And Wednesday night, Stuart had been waiting in my apartment.

  Reality, as simplified for the legal process.

  While we'd been talking, phone calls had been made from the Rolodex—though not from the studio phone—once the police'd found it. Mikey and Ray would arrive as soon as they could make it from Fort Lee and Fort Hamilton Parkway, respectively.

  Larsen walked off. Hodiac knelt by the chair, bringing himself down to eye level with me.

  "Don's okay," Hodiac said. "He just wants to get everything straight for the charge sheet. You'll need to come down to the precinct to make your statement and so on; probably talk to the DA. I'm afraid it's going to take a while, but we'll try to make it as quick as we can. Are you ready to go? Sanchez can take you down. Don has a few things to finish up here."

  "My apartment's unlocked." I guess I realized then I was going to live, and, living, had to take up my responsibilities again.

  "I can have Sanchez take you by there on the way downtown. He can go up with you, check out your apartment, make sure everything's all right."

  "Oh, good," I said.

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  "Why didn't Hepburn find this Book of Moons he was looking for?" Hodiac said. "Didn't you leave it here?"

  "It was supposed to be here," I said. "But it wasn't here, and I don't know where it is," I said, and finally started to cry.

  Mikey got to the studio a few minutes later. I was still there. Mikey Pontifex has tiny brown eyes and thin greige hair and stands five-foot-four in his socks. He looked at the wreckage of the studio, the cops, the remains of his stat camera. His face turned redder and redder and then he noticed me.

  "You'd better have a good explanation for this," Mikey said to me.

  I didn't. But I did have some advice that I earnestly encouraged him to take. Officer Sanchez put his hand gently on my arm and pulled, gently. I wailked out with him. The hall was decked with yellow tape. Police Line: Do Not Cross. We crossed it.

  Where is the boundary between the real and the unreal? Between faith and insanity? Between the world of the Gods and the pleasant realms of Men?

  I met Ray on the stairs.

  "Jesus Christ, what happened to your face?" Ray demanded.

  "Another beautiful day in Paradise," I saiid. He went up. Sanchez and I went down.

  The material world was the flat fake dark that it only gets between well after midnight and just before dawn. I rode in the back of what Officer Sanchez called his unit and gave directions to my apartment.

  When we got there, he got out of the car and came around to let me out. Ther
e are no door handles in the backseats of police cars.

  We went upstairs. He called me ma'am and suggested I let him go first. His belt was covered with loops and pouches and boxes in black leather with nickel-plated snaps. He carried a revolver and a nightstick and a walkie-talkie as long as my forearm that murmured constantly to itself in gematria and static, but I wasn't afraid of him. He was safe.

  I was safe.

  No one had been in my apartment. Officer Sanchez pushed the door open very carefully and shined his light all around before he flipped the switch, but the place looked just the way Stuart and I

  I

  Book of Moons 275

  had left it. Officer Sanchez looked in my bathroom. He looked in my closet. Nothing was gone. No one was there. No one had noticed this vulnerability.

  1 wondered if this was all that strength was: a vulnerability unnoticed through the exercise of random chance. Maybe nobody's strong, only lucky.

  Officer Sanchez inspected my door. He told me that my locks were all still functional, but that I might like to get them replaced an3rway; a secular charm against invasion.

  He made me feel middle-aged aind unworldly, and though 1 was happy to have him there I resented the fact that what had torn my life so far apart didn't seem to touch him at all.

  I wanted to change clothes but he said not to. I compromised, grabbing socks for the boots, a warmer coat. My hands were shaking. Officer Sanchez locked my door for me and then handed me my keys. I clutched them so hard it hurt—distantly, as though the person being hurt were someone else.

  We went back out into the night.

  It was eight o'clock in the morning before I got back from what its inhabitants refer to—with varying degrees of facetiousness — as the Palace. One Police Plaza.

  I had had bad coffee and vending-machine food. I had told my story to several detectives several times, and finally to someone from the DA's office; flurries of activity interspersed with hours of waiting while people waited for other people to show up. I carefully answered only the questions I was asked, and it turned out they didn't care a lot about Ned's package or my intuitions; they expected to match Stuart's gun to the bullet that killed Ned, and in the fashion of law as distinct from justice, were not going to bother with anything but their single strongest case.

  The machine of bureaucracy, as adapted to enforcement. They took pictures of my bruises. I didn't see Stuart. They were caireful about that. It was kindness.

  I refused lawyers and EMTs and finally got to sign my statement. There was a grand jury appearance in the not-so-distant future, where the People of the State of New York would decide if what Stuart had done would merit a trial. It was a formality, Detective Larsen assured me. I might even not be called. They hadn't decided yet. There would definitely be a trial.

  A m£Lrked car drove me home, clutching business cards and

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  form-subpoenas and a list of instructions. The daylight and color seemed wrong and unreal; a world of life and reason that I shouldn't be able to see, somehow.

  The door was still locked. I unlocked it, went inside, locked it again.

  1 took off my coat and hung it up carefully. I took off my boots and put them neatly in the closet. Then I walked into the bathroom to assess the damage, feeling as though I was insulated from the world by a thick sheet of glass.

  I'd washed my face at the station after they'd gotten some pictures of the damage, but 1 hadn't really looked at myself there. The woman in my mirror had dark purple moth-wing curves under her eyes and a flushed-red bruise on her face and looked as if she'd been dead for a week. My mind made the compcirison before I realized it would be a long time before a joke like that would be funny again.

  The ear the earring had been ripped out of was pink and smudged with blood, but not torn through. Small favors.

  1 washed my face again. The linen sheath would never look the same. 1 pulled it off carefully and hung it on a hanger over the showerhead. Dry clean only, the label said. I wondered if soaking it with photographic chemicals counted.

  I'd put on my socks downtown; they stuck to the broken blisters now. I peeled them off carefully, but there was still a mess.

  I washed my hands and my face again and peroxided the ear, putting a light silver post through it so the piercing wouldn't close while it healed. Just doing that made it start to bleed again, and the pale smears of blood made me want to weep. Shock. Sleep deprivation. Reality.

  The phone rang.

  There are very few people who phone me at eight in the morning. I picked up the receiver, glancing down at the phone. The answering machine tape was choked with incoming messages.

  "Hello, Belle," I said. "I was right." Victory, as the poets say, is gall and wormwood.

  There was a pause. "Bast?" Belle said. "Are you all right?"

  I wondered what a truthful answer to that would be.

  "I'm home now," I said unnecessarily.

  "I tried to call you at the studio but 1 couldn't get through. I called Lieutenant Hodiac."

  "Yeah, he came over and arrested Stuart."

  I was so tired I was almost mumbling and the words came out

  with arrogant matter-of-factness. Apathy is the secret to sangfroid. "Look, I'm really zoned, so I'll call you tomorrow, oka}^" I added. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, but tomorrow never comes. Or is it another day?

  "Do you want me to come down?" Belle said.

  I realized with a pang of leave-taking that there would have been a time, once, when I would have wanted that, but not anymore. From her worldview to mine was finally too far to travel.

  "No. I'll be fine. I'll call you. Thanks for asking."

  'Take care of yourself. Bast," Belle said.

  Sure. If not me, who?

  There was Tsing-tao in the refrigerator and Slivovitz in the cupboard. I administered both, plus a long hot shower. I scrubbed until I looked like a boiled lobster, until vast tracts of skin were abraded and raw. I came out and put on my one surviving Banana Republic jumpsuit and padded around the apartment with my feet surgically swaddled in aseptic white socks. Everything hurt.

  I wanted to go to bed, but I couldn't sleep while my apartment bore such witness to Stuart's presence. I shuffled around it like a zombie, putting things away, making things right, finding my shoes and earrings. Doing for myself what Ned had wanted me to do for him, a thousand years ago.

  The two still-unretumed Books of Shadows I put on the kitchen table, along with the biography I'd borrowed from Daffydd.

  Mary, Queen of Scots. Who drew everyone in her orbit into intrigue and violence. Whose influence did not stop with her death. Did Mad Maudlin haunt Elizabeth's bloody chamber down the long years as Elizabeth watched Mary's son—the rival's son who would be king thereafter while she herself was childless—grow up across the border?

  For to see Mad Tom of Bedlam, ten thousand miles I'll travel / Mad Maudlin goes on dirty toes, for to save her shoes from gravel. . .

  Scotland's queen. Catholic or Witch—the Old Religion or the Oldest Religion? Always going home; never quite reaching it. Shadow queen and the proof—if it had been proof—gone once more.

  By a knight of ghosts and shadows, I summoned am to tourney / Ten leagues beyond the wild world's end, methinks it is no Journey.

  Last of all I found the scattered pieces of my altar and assem-

  278 Bell, Book, and Murder

  bled them again. It was almost noon, but I turned out my lights, lit my candles and incense, and petitioned my own Queen.

  Thank you. Lady, for keeping me alive. Now tell me what I'm. going to tell. . . everyone.

  There was no answer. I hadn't expected any. I finished my beer, and snuffed the caindles, and went to bed.

  lO

  MONDAY, MAY 23, 9:00 a.m.

  People who are fond of justice or sausages, to adapt a phrase, should never watch either being made. My testimony to the grand jury consisted of answers to questions that s
eemed meaningless; maybe they were parts of a pattern I wasn't privileged to see.

  Mary, Queen of Scots, was not mentioned. Ned Skelton and Ilona Saunders were killed by Stuart Hepburn. Here's the proof. End of story.

  And because this was so, my involvement in the actual trial— whenever it occurred—would probably be only as a footnote. Detective Larsen might have been right, and I wouldn't be called at all. Who wanted my unwelcome complications introduced into this particular passionless play?

  Bail was set at the hearing, and Stuart Hepburn did not make bail. I wasn't there for that; ADA Morales, the assistant district attorney who had shepherded me through the case—and who would be prosecuting Stuart in the sweet bye-and-bye —called to tell me, which was kind of her. I felt a distant, dutiful sense of relief; while there was very little point in his killing me now that The Book of Moons was gone, I felt that Stuart was the sort to hold a grudge.

  With one thing and another I didn't go back to Houston Graphics for two weeks, but 1 got reports. Houston achieved full em-plojnnent through having to let the freelancers bill for cleaning up the mess Stuart had made. Ray finally convinced Mikey that what-

  280 Bell, Book, and Murder

  ever I'd done, Fd done while being held at gunpoint by a deranged killer. I kept my job.

  And life went on, just as if Stuart had never been.

  Julian got most of his stolen inventory back when Ilona's apartment in the back of Lothlorien (where Stuart had been staying) was searched. The insurance company was delighted.

  Ilona's cat, which had also been staying at the apartment, was adopted by Glitter, a move that did not bode well for the future of Glitter's gold-lace curtains. She told me later its name was Yarrow. I did not make the obvious pun about a yarrowing experience. I didn't seem to have much sense of humor lately.

  Belle was able to trace both Diana-27 and Otterleaf and get phone numbers for them. I used the Criss-Cross directory at New York Public and mailed their books back to them anonymously.

  Maria Stuarda played all six of its performances to what Beaner said was critical acclaim. I didn't go to amy of them. Beaner said he now considered that opera in the light thespians viewed "The Scottish Play" and hoped Goddess would strike him straiight if he ever sang Robin Dudley again.