by Mary Bowers
“Maybe even Nineteenth,” I said.
“Right. Uncool. Old farty. I mean, they get together in smoking jackets and do this secret handshake and take the secret pledge – excuse me, blood oath, for God’s sake! – and then sit around trying to sound high-brow until you want to smack them all upside the head and tell them to get over themselves!”
“You go to these meetings?”
Her image glared at my image in the mirror. “I have to wear this housemaid getup and serve canapés and brandy from a silver tray.”
“And cake?”
She rolled her eyes. “If I never see another cake . . . .”
“Oh, I understand completely,” I said drippily. “You poor thing! After what’s happened to Vanessa, you must be so traumatized. So, Vanessa knew Gavin before she met Orwell?”
She snorted. “You bet she did. There wasn’t a chance in hell she’d have gotten that interview if she just contacted him in the usual way and asked for one. She did her homework, got to know Gavin, and next thing you know, bada bing.”
“Bada bing in the Biblical sense?” I asked, all agog. I know, I know, I should’ve been more subtle, but the woman seemed ready to pop if she didn’t unload, and there’s something about girl-talk in the Ladies’ Room that loosens you up. Besides, the Pixie that I was talking to then was a different animal from the Pixie who’d stepped out from behind Orwell Quest the day before and looked up at us with big brown eyes.
She shrugged. “Probably. I didn’t know them then. Gavin told me about it.” Suddenly she turned to me and looked directly at me for the first time. “Wait a minute – why are you asking me about that Sparky character, anyway? You know him, right? I forgot about that. Just what is it he wants from Orwell? What’s his game?”
“Sparky? I just met him this week. He’s an electrical expert that Edson Darby-Deaver knows. He installed a security camera on the grounds just outside my house. We had prowlers. Other than that, I don’t know him at all.”
“Oh, please! Aren’t you Ed’s mistress? You know everybody he knows, right?”
“Mistress?” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The thought of a sexless creature like Ed even having a mistress! “We’re friends, that’s all.”
She was staring at me with an expression that made her look like a veteran streetwalker instead of the timid creature she’d been the day before. “Friends. Yeah. Uh huh.” She dug around in her shoulder bag and came out with tweezers, then proceeded to pluck a few eyebrows. As she plucked, she muttered at me sideways. “He seems to know a heck of a lot about you, and from that book of his about Your Cat the Goddess, he’s got what you might call unusual access to you, but what do I know?”
I only just managed to control myself. This kid wasn’t anywhere near what she tried to appear to be for Orwell, and apparently, she didn’t care what anybody else thought. Keeping a grip on myself, I made a few more dabs with the lipstick and said, “By the way, Pixie, how did you get close to Orwell?”
She threw the tweezers back in her bag and hoisted it onto her shoulder. “Same way anybody gets close to Orwell,” she drawled, and she sashayed out.
I put my lipstick away and stood there at the sink for a few minutes, thinking. If I remembered correctly, Orwell had said something to Pixie about “her friend, Gavin.” She didn’t dispute that Gavin was indeed, her friend. It had hit me a little oddly at the time. Orwell Quest’s entourage didn’t strike me as a bunch of friends; they were focused on staying close to Orwell, not one another. So I made the assumption that Gavin had brought Pixie to Orwell’s notice. He had described her as a delivery girl for a bakery, but I didn’t see Orwell answering the door for deliveries. From there I didn’t exactly need a roadmap. Still, I decided to ponder on it a while, and maybe try to get a little more information from Ed.
* * * * *
By the time I left the Ladies’ Room, Orwell’s speech was over and he was receiving congratulations at the foot of the podium. Ed was dealing with a minor crisis at the Zone of Silence. Apparently, a compulsive hummer had gone in at the same time as a great big warlock, and the two had nearly come to blows. I waited for Ed to calm them down, hovering around to make sure he didn’t need physical back-up, and when the hummer and the warlock finally gave one another smoldering stares and walked off in opposite directions, I asked Ed if he’d given Orwell the cinnamon roll I’d brought.
“Let’s not let it pass through too many hands,” I said. “You didn’t give it to Gavin, did you?”
“I’ve been holding onto it since you gave it to me, and I gave it directly to him as soon as he finished his lecture. See? He’s got it in his hands now. I told Sparky to watch and make sure he didn’t let anybody take it away from him for any reason.”
“Oh, good. Have you got a minute now? I just saw Pixie, and –“
“Sorry, I don’t. I’ve got a workshop to conduct, and then I’ve got to go over and talk to Purity about something.”
“Oh? Why?”
He looked at me obliquely. “I’m not sure.”
He walked away.
Summoned, no doubt, I said to myself, only half joking. As I turned to go, I noticed the crowd around Orwell had thinned out. He was still holding the white cardboard box, which had now developed a few grease spots. Sparky, Phineas and Ricky were talking to him, and Orwell was listening with a serious look on his face.
I decided to go over and make sure the cinnamon roll didn’t get passed around. And if he wanted a hot beverage with it, I was going to supervise the making of it.
“Taylor!” he said when he saw me coming. “Just in time. I was about to retreat to my sanctuary and enjoy my little reward. Would you like to accompany me?”
“Thank you, I think I will.”
“And these boys are telling me something,” he said, looking at Sparky and his friends. “I’m afraid I’m not very mechanically minded. Electricity has never been my friend. It’s no use, Sparky. I don’t understand. But please, come along, come along. We’ll have a little gathering of our own and talk of many things, shall we?”
Sparky and the gang were overawed, and followed Orwell as he walked toward the dressing room.
“It’s like a private meeting of The Questian Society,” Phineas said.
Orwell threw him a look and said, “Um, yes. I suppose so.”
Encouraged, Phineas stepped up beside Orwell and in his courtly manner, opened the door for him and swept him inside. Then, elaborately gallant, he waved me, the lady, into the room. The other two just had to trail in behind him, because Phineas didn’t hold the door for them.
Phineas had affected a Victorian jacket that day, three-quarter length with velvet lapels and a slim fit that actually looked good on him. The white shirt underneath had a large collar, but no ruffles, thank goodness. I realized that physically, Phineas was well set up to play the role of the man who was born too late. Even his dark, sad eyes went with the concept. He reminded me of the way rock groups went all frilly and fancy in the ‘60’s, right before abandoning all that and just staggering onstage in rags, looking like they’d just been pulled out of a dumpster and slapped awake. Hopefully, that wouldn’t be Phineas’s next stage.
Ricky rolled his eyes at me as he came in behind Phineas, and then widened those big blue eyes as a voice from behind him growled, “What’s going on here?”
“Ah, Gavin,” Orwell said. “Come in. I think you know everybody. And this,” he said as if he were introducing a person, “is my cinnamon roll. I’m sorry it isn’t big enough to share, but I’m sure the boys will understand.”
Gavin strode across the room, lifted the box out of Orwell’s hands and said, “I’ll take care of that.”
“Where are you going with my cinnamon roll?” Orwell said as Gavin pivoted to leave the room.
“To the nearest garbage can. Or better yet, to the nearest cop. He may want to take this to the lab. Where did you get it, by the way?”
“My friend Taylor provided it. I’m sure it’
s perfectly pure.”
“We’ll see about that,” Gavin said, glaring at me.
“Knock yourself out,” I said angrily. “The only ones who have handled it are myself and Edson Darby-Deaver, and I trust him with my life.”
“Really, Gavin, you’re being terribly rude,” Orwell said. “At least let me have the frosting shooters.”
Gavin looked at him meltingly, the way I tend to look at sleeping puppies. “We need to be careful, Orwell. You know that. If anything ever happened to you . . . .”
He left.
“I suppose he means well,” Orwell sighed. “But if I want that cinnamon roll – and I believe I deserve it – we’ll just have to go out for it. Boys, would you like to accompany us? I believe there’s a back exit at the other end of the hall just outside this room.”
“You guys go ahead,” I said quickly. It had just occurred to me that leaving Gavin in charge of that cinnamon roll might be just as dangerous as leaving him alone with yesterday’s cake. He was going to take it to the police and tell them that it had come from me. I wanted to make sure he didn’t stop off along the way to add something with an extra kick to it.
Chapter 14
I never found out whether Orwell got a police escort to Karma Café, but I suspect he did, whether he knew it or not.
After I watched the hand-over of the cinnamon roll, I decided to head over to the Crystals and Potions booth and see if Purity had any kind of definite plan for that night. As I walked up, she lifted limpid eyes and said, “Ah. There you are.”
“You summoned me again?” I asked with a smirk.
She shrugged. “I wished to see you, but I didn’t want to interrupt. I saw you going off with Professor Quest, so I felt you were doing something more important than what I wanted to talk about.”
“Not at all. He was only in quest of cake, or in this case, a cinnamon roll, and he went off down the road to get it. I decided not to go this time. So, what’s your plan for tonight? Do we just sit around and play pinochle until we hear the patter of little feet?”
She gazed at me silently for a moment. Then she said, “I know you’re a doubter. It doesn’t make any difference, Taylor.”
“Well, you have to understand, Purity, I’m one of those non-magical people. It isn’t always easy to accept . . . strange things.”
She gently shook her head. “Non-magical?” Then, murmuring sadly, “Oh, Taylor.”
Ed walked up to us, saving me from having to respond to that.
“Everything going all right, Purity?” he said briskly.
“Oh, yes, Ed. Thank you for coming. I wanted to consult you about your friends. You know that they’re behind all the pranks that are going on, of course.”
Ed blinked. “Did you want to talk to me? Nobody told me.”
I clamped my mouth shut over the word, “summoned,” and Purity didn’t bother to explain. Instead, she said, “Taylor and I are setting a trap for them tonight. I wondered if you would be willing to help. I would like to have a documentarian on hand. You’re quite good at that. And afterwards, we may want to do a paper on the subject.”
“What subject?”
“Ed, you haven’t been paying attention at all, have you?”
He gestured at the seething crowds all around us. “I’ve been a little busy, Purity.”
“Oh, all right. I forgive you. The Wee Folk. Sparky has been annoying them.”
“He has,” Ed said noncommittally, trying to hang in there.
Surprising even myself, I said, “Why don’t you come, Ed? We’re expecting the next attack at Girlfriend’s, for reasons I’m a little hazy about, but Purity is pretty sure about it, and that’s where we’re setting up surveillance. It’s your kind of thing. Think of it as a change of scenery.” I realized I really wanted him to come. It was like recruiting a “friendly.”
“Well, if you think it’s important,” he said doubtfully. “The True Hauntings Open Mic is tonight, but I can get somebody else to keep an eye on that. I’m not very good at ejecting people from the stage anyway. It’s being recorded for uploading to the website, so if anything of real interest happens, I can review it. I didn’t get any sleep last night, but I find I can’t make up for that by taking a nap, so I won’t even bother. In fact, the longer I go without sleep, the better I seem to function, after a certain point. Things begin to get really clear. You know, the first time I ever actually saw colored auras around people was after a 52-hour stretch without sleep. Or I might have been hallucinating.” He stared at me with bloodshot eyes.
“Maybe you should try to take a nap anyway. Listen, Ed, I was just talking to Pixie in the Ladies’ Room, and she said something about Sparky using Orwell to get his reality show back. Anything in that?”
Purity moved to help a customer.
He considered. “I don’t think so. There’s genuine admiration there. They’ve all read Orwell’s book, and even if it is just the three of them, they love hashing out conundrums of the physical world. They’d be naturals for The Questian Society. Especially Phineas, but they’re all wonks when it comes to Outsider Physics. And frankly, Sparky’s too much of a scatterbrain to have ulterior motives. No, I don’t think there’s anything in that, but if they end up getting their reality show back, what’s the harm?”
“I don’t know. It just seems like everybody around Orwell is there because they want to use him.”
“That happens with all great men,” he said. He dismissed all that with a shrug and asked about the details of our surveillance later on, which was a short discussion, because I didn’t know and Purity hadn’t elaborated. Then he picked up a small object from the counter and waited for Purity to finish with her customer so he could buy it.
“What have you got there?” I asked.
“A worry stone,” he said. “I left mine at home.”
“Heck of a time to be without your worry stone,” I said.
“It’s madness to be without it, with so much to worry about. Where’s Orwell?” he added, not quite changing the subject.
“Where the hell is Orwell?” came an echo from above, and we looked up to see Gavin Lovelace bearing down on us, glaring at me in particular.
“You took his cinnamon roll away,” I said, not being overly friendly. “He had to go out and look for another one.”
Gavin bristled, looking alarmed. “Where? Where did he go? Who took him?”
“Sparky and the boys. They said they were going to Karma Café. I took him there yesterday and he really liked the place. They have frosting shooters.”
“They have what?” he exploded. “We have enough trouble controlling his weight and cholesterol without people feeding him extra frosting all the time! It’s gotten ridiculous. When he put that into his Principles of Life it was meant to be purely symbolic, and ever since everybody’s been feeding frosting to him as if that’s what he meant literally. Where is this place they’re taking him to?”
I told him how to get there, mostly so he’d go away, and after he stomped off I said, “I hope Orwell gets his shooters before Gavin gets there and spoils all the fun.”
“That man is dangerous,” Purity said. “He feels his hold slipping.” She mused for a moment, then looked directly at me. “Stay away from him. He means you harm.”
Then she turned away as if she’d just told me to have a nice day.
I decided I wasn’t worried. Gavin only meant harm to anybody trying to get between himself and Orwell, and I had no interest in going there.
* * * * *
Before I left ParaCon to go home and get myself ready for that night’s surveillance, my old buddy Jack Peterson saw me and came across the conference room to say hi.
Jack and I have spent many hours together chasing around in strange places, but not for the same reasons I’ve chased around strange places with Ed. Jack is a young patrolman on the Tropical Breeze Police Department, and he volunteered for Animal Control. Back in my Chicago days, I had very good training for that kind of thin
g with the Chicago P.D., and Jack and I have gone out on scores of calls about feral animals, abandoned litters, possibly rabid raccoons and anything else you can imagine. Nobody’s ever called about Bigfoot or Mothman, but it’s only a matter of time. When they do, we’ll be ready.
Anyway, dealing with that kind of thing forms a bond, and I’ve always had a kind of motherly fondness for Jack. He’s so smooth-skinned and boyish he’s almost pretty, but once he gets into his thirties he’ll harden into something worthy of a romance novel. The young ladies of Tropical Breeze tend to act like he already has. It embarrasses him.
“You guys making any progress on what happened yesterday?” I asked him once he was close enough for quiet conversation.
He shrugged. “The poison was in the extra frosting,” he said. “But that was kind of obvious. Speculation among the detectives is about why the lady would eat something that had obviously been tampered with.”
“That’s kind of obvious, too,” I said, hoping to bait him.
He shrugged. “She’d been dead for hours when her body was found. The murderer had plenty of time to come back and stage the scene. Still, it’s beginning to look like she went ahead and ate the cake even though it had obviously been tampered with, God knows why.”
“I may have some inside information on that.”
“Care to elaborate?”
“Confirm or deny?” I asked, making it a condition.
In answer, he silently nodded.
“She ate the tampered cake because she did the tampering herself,” I said.
He silently nodded.
“Is there any evidence – fingerprints or whatever – to show that anybody else handled the container of frosting or the frosting knife?”
He shook his head slightly.
“There wouldn’t be, but I had to ask. So she added a little something to it herself to make her role as the official taster look – what’s the word? – valiant. To make Orwell grateful when she got sick instead of him. Only sick – not dead.”