Bell, book, and murder

by Edghill, Rosemary

  soften, because even if the breech between them was permanent, it wasn't solid yet.

  "He wasn't up there at the Circle," Maidjene said softly. "I would have seen him. He wasn't there."

  "Do you have a gun, Mr. Wagner?" Sergeant Blake asked.

  Larry did. Larry, in fact, had several. The deputies didn't like that much, and when he brought them out they confiscated all of them, tipping them into evidence bags. Blake and Fayrene'd seemed to have had the same idea I had, and the guns were going down to the main office for testing.

  And so was Larry, apparently.

  "Just a formality, Mr. Wagner. You're going to need to make a statement."

  Sergeant Blake went back inside with him while Larry got his jacket and wallet. While he was in there, the ambulance containing Reece Wheeler came slowly down the hill and headed off for the local hospital, lights silently flashing.

  Maidjene was crying quietly.

  "Mrs. Wagner," Fayrene said gently, "why don't you go back to the bam and rest? There isn't anything you can do here."

  "Come on, Maidjene," I said, and took her arm.

  Despite the Gotham County Sheriffs Department's best efforts at crowd control, people were spread out all over the Paradise Lake Campground. It was a lot harder now than it had been this morning to find a quiet place to take statements, and it would have been impossible if almost everyone here hadn't already been through it once.

  The patrol car with Arnold the Shotgun Man came gliding, shark-smooth, down the road while Maidjene and 1 were walking up. A few paces further on we ran into Bailey, and I handed Maidjene over to him.

  'They're taking Larry down to the station to talk to him," I told Bailey.

  "Hope they fry the ratfucker," Bailey said, and his voice was so amiable it took me a moment to realize what he'd said. "C'mon, Meiidjene."

  I went back toward the parking lot.

  Fayrene's car, driven by somebody in uniform, passed me on the way, and when I got back down to the lot. Sergeant Blake and Larry were just getting into it.

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  "You just bring tiiat back here in one piece, you hear me, John-Boy?" Fayrene said. Blake waved, and backed it around.

  I closed the distance between me and Fayrene.

  "1 do hate amateurs with guns," she said to me.

  "So do I," I said feelingly. There was a pause while I remembered something else 1 had to do. "About those registration forms?" I said. I tried not to look toward the Snake's van and twitched instead, body language I somehow suspected Fayrene would have no trouble reading.

  "A little bird told me that we were going to have some trouble getting those after this evening. I truly do hate to lay paper on Mrs. Wagner, but I'm not sure she's giving us a lot of choice."

  I hesitated. Fayrene had obviously heard that the forms had been burned; considering that all of Summerisle knew, a leak wasn't too surprising. But of all the things Maidjene needed in her life, a subpoena wasn't one of them.

  "If you could wait until Monday, probably we could work something out," I said reluctantly. Reluctantly, because I knew that tomorrow I was going to go and tell Maidjene what I'd done and try to convince her to hand the documents over freely. And if I couldn't manage that, I'd hand them over myself, but I wouldn't lie to Maidjene.

  "Could we." Fayrene's voice was flat. "You sleeping down here?" she added.

  "Maybe," I said. "I haven't made up my mind yet." And she hadn't told me whether I'd won my reprieve.

  "What about your fella?"

  It's disorienting to be on close terms with the police; they're always coming up with conversational icebreakers based on confidences you don't remember telling them.

  "You mean Julian?" It's best to get these things clear. "He wanted some privacy tonight." I wondered where Julian was right now, not that 1 suspected him of shooting anybody.

  "Hm-m." Fayrene was noncommital. "If we wait until Monday, you are going to hand me those HallowFest forms." It was not a question.

  "I will or Maidjene will," I said, and felt the weight of intention make my scalp tingle. As though, somewhere. She was listening and taking note of what I'd said.

  "Mm-n," Fayrene said, letting me off the hook for now. "Is there anyplace a person can get a cup of coffee around here? Or do we have to go back and wake up Helen?"

  Privately, I doubted if Helen Cooper ever slept.

  "1 think there's a pot on up at the bam. She told me Reverend Harm had been up here that Friday?" I asked. There was nothing wrong with checking.

  "Mm-n. The way Bat figures it. Harm came back later looking for trouble. And found some. Now, about that coffee?"

  "Come on."

  We headed back for the bam at an ambling pace. Fayrene was content to be silent, and I had meditations of my own. The sheriffs deputies hadn't found the gun used in tonight's shooting, emd conventional wisdom said that if they hadn't found it yet, the odds were good they wouldn't find it.

  But what about the knife?

  They hadn't found that either, and like Fayrene said, the thing that had made that hole in Reverend Harm wasn't any Buck knife. So where was it? At the bottom of Paradise Lake with the gun?

  Maybe, but 1 doubted it. A gun is a gun is a gun, interchangeable and anonymous. Even if they found it, if they didn't have the good luck to have the bullet out of Reece Wheeler for a ballistics match, they wouldn't be able to weave a chain of evidence. But the knife, by its particular uniqueness, would retain a stronger connection to its wielder. Latent prints, occult (which is to say, hidden) blood, even someone, somewhere who'd remember the murderer buying it or showing it off. The wise murderer wouldn't do something as rash as simply throw it away. It could all too easily be found.

  And that was only assuming this was murder most secular. Once you assumed that the murder had taken place in a ritual context, it was even more unlikely that the murderer would get rid of the knife. In most schools of magic-with-a-K, the knife— athame to us Witches—is the symbol of the will, and in magic, the symbol not only represents the thing itself, the S3rmbol is the thing.

  No magician would throw away his will.

  So where was it?

  And would I recognize it if I saw it?

  Mirabile dicta, there was an actual percolator set up inside the bam. It was on a card table, and there were three boxes of Dunkin' Donuts next to it. Ragnar was standing beside the table, doughnut in one hand, the other supporting Iduna, who was slung over

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  one shoulder like a bag of laundry, fast asleep. He was talking to a uniformed deputy, and both sets of body language told me they were meeting as equals. Hell, for all I knew Ragnar might be a LEO, when he wasn't being here.

  It's a strange dichotomy that our Community has. Thirty years ago the counterculture was politically homogenous: liberal and left-leaning, white and upper middle class. These days there are a thousand countering cultures, and my particular slice of it— NeoPaganism —contains left- and right-wingers in about equal numbers. It would be possible, if you looked long enough, to find among us representatives from both sides of the barricades at Kent State and Chicago.

  "Well, I better go put Punkin to bed. You let me know if there's anything 1 can do for you. Lieutenant Dix," Ragnar said, wandering off.

  Fayrene drew herself a cup of coffee. So did 1. 1 usually take it light and sweet, but tonight drinking it black seemed more appropriate.

  While we were standing there. Detective Wayne came in through the front. He looked like he'd been seriously interrupted from something that he liked doing better than this, and zeroed in on the coffee by what seemed to be some kind of preconscious radar. He didn't speak until he had a cup in his hand.

  "Whadda we got?"

  I listened while Fayrene and Lieutenant Dtx gave it to him all over again. By now I'd heard the evening's events described over and over to the point that their real-life randomness was starting to take on symmetry and meaning.

 
"Nothing to do with your case. Bat," Fayrene said. "They weren't even members of Harm's congregation."

  "Neither was whoever shot Reece," Mad Anthony Wayne said, "but I'd sure like to have a chat with him."

  "Shooters don't usually change their luck that way," Fayrene mused. It took me a moment to realize it was shorthand for: "He probably isn't the same person who stabbed Harm, because ..." While I was piecing that together, she continued: "John-Boy's down at the shop taking a statement from a Lawrence Bernard Wagner, the soon-to-be-ex of the woman running this thing. Mr. Wagner came up here with a number of personal firearms and no permits."

  "Did he?" Wayne said with interest.

  I restrained an impulse to defend Larry. He hadn't stabbed Harm (probably), or shot Reece, and the Sheriffs Office knew it.

  Probably.

  "I tell you," Wayne said to nobody in particular, "I ought to shut this place down, and if one more thing happens, I will, I swear to God. Sometime tomorrow I'm going to try to get some people out here to drag the lake, and I don't want to have to do it while the Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy's going on."

  I thought of mentioning that Paradise Lake'd be deserted inside of forty-eight hours anyway, but decided he didn't want to hear it. As for Sugarplum Fairies, the Transgender Ball is held at Pairesis Hall in NYC, not here. I didn't mention that either.

  Coffee in hand, Wayne wandered off to find someone else to talk to, and Dix went with him.

  I looked at Fayrene.

  "He's just cranky 'cause he doesn't think we're going to get this one. I think he's right," Fayrene said. "It's looking like anybody could've helped himself to one of Mr. Wagner's guns," she added in disgust, which was about as close as she was going to come to leveling with me.

  In fiction we'd unbosom ourselves to each other and become fast allies with a simpatica that transcended job barriers. I would become her trusted eyes and ears in the NeoPagan Community, and she'd become my judiciary imprimatur, to be wielded at will once I'd scoped out the villain. But this was reality, and things didn't work that way—at least I was pretty sure they didn't. There was no reason for Fayrene to suddenly treat me as her equal. For all she could know, Fd popped Jackson Heirm.

  "So what do you think?" Fayrene said to me.

  I shrugged. "I think it would help to know why Jackson Harm was killed." Never mind that if you know how you know who, to quote Lx)rd Peter; if I knew why I'd be able to make a better guess at the killer.

  Take a stab at it, so to speak.

  Fajn-ene blew out a long sigh. "It would that, not that we're likely to ever know. We won't have the complete autopsy report until next week, but the M.E. can tell now there wasn't any unusual trauma. Our boy just lay down and took it like a man."

  "Did he come here to meet somebody?" I asked, because whether she'd tell me or not, I was curious.

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  "When you find out, you let us know. You take care of yourself now, Bast."

  I was dismissed.

  The rest of the evening, like so much of life, was anticlimax. The deputies pulled out in increments, still without finding—so gossip ran —either the shootist or the shooting iron. A couple of people got to join Larry down at the station to make extended statements. I wondered if Bat Wayne would get his wish and be able to drag the lake tomorrow, and if so, what he'd find.

  Some determined people went back up to the bonfire to have a Bardic Circle in spite of everything, but I wasn't one of them. I'd gone to the interrupted ritual for a healing and relinking that'd gotten overtaken by events, and I felt peculiarly unconnected from the warp of myth and deity in which I usually spend my life. There wasn't, as the headshrinkers say, closure. The evening felt unfinished, though considering how it had started, maybe that was a blessing.

  And Jackson Harm was still dead.

  The whole campground was alive with the separate lights of various tents —all battery operated, because of the fire regs. The fire at the Bardic Circle was plainly visible from lakeside. I prowled around for a while and finally found Lark.

  He was sitting on the edge of the party that had gathered around Ironshadow's tent with a guitar on his knees and a bottle by his ankle and for just a heartbeat it was forever ago and none of us would ever grow old.

  "Yo, Bast," he said, looking up. I knelt down beside him.

  Across the party, I could see Ironshadow holding court under the tent awning, the usual ladies-in-waiting around him in long skirts or embroidered jeans. I wondered if I could brace him for backup when I faced Maidjene. Doing that was something I wasn't looking forward to, but the alternative was forfeiting my own good opinion of myself. And I was willing to go through a lot to avoid that.

  "You feeling better?" Lark asked tentatively.

  "Oh, sure, getting rousted by weasels with weapons and then doing the masochism tango with our friends the police sets me up real good," I shot back without thinking.

  "Hey," Lark said, with only a little edge to it, "I thought you liked the police."

  I looked up at him. The unwavering lantern light left his face half in shadow, the brights and darks making it hard to read.

  I thought about it. "Not really. I like justice."

  "Justice." Now Lark sounded definitely bitter. He handed the guitar off to someone else, who took it willingly and began to re-tune it. He picked up the bottle and stood up. "Go for a walk?" he asked. I walked with Lark away from the lantern light, out between the oases of parties.

  "You still living in that place in Brooklyn?" he asked.

  I remembered the place in Brooklyn, though it's been about ten years. It'd overlooked Fort Hamilton Park and there'd been six of us living there, some of us running away, some of us running to. More than the apartment, I remembered the bed, which had been lumpy and untrustworthy and had tended to collapse at inopportune moments. I remembered Lark.

  "No; I got Van's old place when he moved back to Ohio." Common friends, common history. I slid my arm around his waist. Lark had muscles I didn't remember from the last time I'd seen him. I wondered what changes the years had wrought in Lark's body. I wondered if I was going to be self-destructive enough to try and find out.

  "What? That coffin down in Alphabet City?"

  This was unfair. My apartment is bigger than a coffin, though not by much, and it's several blocks north of Alphabet City. At least five.

  "Yeah." And would Lark have looked so attractive if there hadn't been Julian? Was Lark my anodyne to that sweet nepenthe? And who would be my antidote to Lark when that time caime?

  "Damn if it's big enough for two. Too bad; I'm kind of looking for a place to crash for a while," Lark said regretfully. "You know of anybody with crash space?"

  Once I'd been younger, with infinite optimism and resource. In those days I would have invited Lark to move in with me anyway, certain that rising above the cramped inconvenience would be an adventure. I am older now and no longer certain there is that much generosity of spirit anj^where in the world.

  "Maybe Belle," I said, thinking it over. Belle has four bedrooms and a landlord she likes to annoy with the specter of illegal sublets. "I can ask her."

  "But you're not in Changing anymore," Lark said, as if I needed reminding. 'That going to make a difference?" I thought again

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  about what Glitter had said; that Belle was going to give up the coven, and that she might let me use her space to run one of my own. If I started one, something that looked more likely by the moment.

  "It was an amicable separation," I said dryly. "And you can ask her yourself if you'd rather."

  "Not me," Lark said hastily. "You do it, okay?"

  "Yeah, sure," I said. It wouldn't make any difference, and I thought Belle would probably do it. I wondered just how Lark was planning to keep himself in cigarettes and gasoline while he was here; when I'd known him last he'd been working in a bookstore, but that had been in the eighties and we'd all been pretending we didn't want to be yu
ppies.

  Of course, / was still doing what I'd been doing in the eighties.

  Behind us, the guitarist swung into the opening chords of Gwyddion's "We Won't Wait Any Longer," that confrontational marching song of the (Not Very) Old Religion.

  "So, what do you think's going to happen to us?" Lark said. It took me a moment to realize that Lark was using "us" in the greater cosmic sense—i.e., the attendees of HallowFest.

  "Nothing much," I said. 'They'd like to find the gun that townie got shot with." And I'd like to find the knife Jackson Harm got stabbed with, come to that "But they don't have much in the way of suspects."

  Lark sneered. "You don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows," he misquoted. "They'd rather it was one of us. They'll look till they find out it is."

  City people are sometimes surprised at how fast the United States turns redneck, once you're outside of the major population centers. And anyone with half a brain can see that the winds of change are blowing very cold on the fringes of society these days. While it hasn't yet gotten to the point that difference itself is a criminal act, I wondered how many things were being assumed about us by the Gotham County natives on the basis of the knives we carried and the clothes we wore. Which prejudgment is not in and of itself an uncommon act, but usually the stakes aren't as high as murder.

  Lark put his arm across my shoulders and offered me the bottle. I stopped and tilted it back—Ironshadow mead and worth the trip all by itself. I drank and passed it back, and Lark drank. We walked on. His arm was still around me.

  "So who's that guy you came up here with?"

  "Julian?"

  Was Lark jealous? Flattering if true, but I was smart enough to know that it probably wasn't Lark I wanted, really, so much as the gilded past we'd shared.

  And what about Julian? Gratifying to think of having the need to choose between them, if unlikely.

  "He runs the Snake —the Serpent's Truth; that big occult bookstore down in—"

  "I've heard of it," Lark said. "Didn't it get bombed last year?"