Then her face got serious, her eyes started to get wet, and the beginning of the end of everything I had hoped for was about to be unleashed with her public apology for using magic to drug people.
“You have to find real purpose in your life,” I said, loudly, bellowing over my sister. “And that purpose isn’t going to be in television shows or obsessions, but in helping other people. Knit an animal for the local kid’s hospital. Volunteer at the animal shelter. Don’t go around playing dress up and terrorizing poor cookie shops because it’s all you have to do on a Monday night.”
I shook my head, sadly, and Lucy tugged at my collar, trying to bring my ear back toward her.
“Mimi…”
“Most important, remember what brought you out of whatever state of strangeness you’d found yourself in: good, honest tea. Become tea drinkers. It’s natural, it’s healthy, it clears the mind and invigorates the body.”
I went on like that, for a while, once bodily shoving Lucy onto a seat next to the still blinking and confused Michio, who was listening very intently… until I got to talking about the cholesterol reducing powers of Green teas, where I think my audience began to get bored, and started to disperse to their homes and wherever the heck poor, confused ex-vampire slayers spent their time.
Max had wormed his way through the crowd, and while he was still taking photographs with the camera strapped around his neck, sporting a lens roughly the size of my arm, he no longer had the cellphone camera up, taking video. I guess my long advertisement for my public career of tea mistress was not as noteworthy a thing as I would have liked it to be.
“So… I was at the police station talking to Frisco when a call came in about this place. He paid me $10 to take a look and see if any cops were necessary. Would either of you like to explain what the hell all of this is and why you’re in the center of it?” Max said, looking without expression from Lucy to me and back again.
“If I tried, I think Mimi would punch me in the mouth,” Lucy said, grimacing.
“And why would she do that?” Max said, bending down toward her. I got loud again.
“Because it would all distract from the major narrative of the evening: tea is good. That’s what we should take away from all of this. These people were in a bad way, about to start a life of baked goods theft when just a whiff of my tea made them all see the light.”
“Uh-huh,” Max said, his tone a little less light than I wanted it to be. I wanted him to see this as a lark, my secretiveness as fun and exciting. That he wouldn’t learn what really happened was just part of what you dealt with when you hung out in a witch town. Only he was looking more guarded, more irritated than I’d seen him before.
“Max,” I said. “What’s wrong? This isn’t a big deal. It’s just weirdness. It’s not like a murder investigation.” I gave him a very knowing look, letting him know I was ready for him to spill whatever new information he’d gathered on our joint operation.
“What murder investigation?” he said.
I rolled my eyes. “Oh, you’re going to play games with me? Why? You have no right to be upset. I went and helped you when you asked me to, and that was when I really still didn’t want to have anything to do with this whole mess. You’re not the sort of person to hold a grudge,” I said, though I had no certain knowledge about that one way or the other. It may be that I’d already stretched my friendship with Max further than it was supposed to go.
“No, I’m not playing games,” Max responded, frowning. “I’m saying the coroner’s preliminary investigation says that Wilhelm Spengler died of a coronary episode, likely brought on by general ill-health and a poor eating lifestyle. He had clogged arteries. He might have died by pizza, kid, but it wasn’t the one he held in his hand. It was years of other pizzas, cheese and bread and fatty meats all working together to shove cholesterol into his heart and choke it to death.”
“You know, my health teacher said there wasn’t a real consensus that cholesterol causes heart attacks, but it’s really just symptomatic of the problems that lead to heart attacks. So, when you have inflammation the cholesterol… I’m not helping, am I?” Lucy said, going off the stone cold looks both Max and I favored her with.
“Button it for a second, sweetheart,” I said, then I turned to Max, but found I didn’t have anything to say. All my words had completely dried up and gone away. All these suspicions I’d been harboring, against pizza delivery boys and my sister and Hank hadn’t meant anything. I’d seen the man collapse through the bird’s eyes, and I saw the pizza sitting there, cold in his hand… but I couldn’t remember if there was a bite taken out of it.
And of all the ways I could think of bringing death by pizza, they all required a huge number of either coincidences, or the kind of elaborate planning that would require an enormous staff and crackerjack timing to pull off. Not something somebody did on the spur of the moment. I’d been so worried that I was getting into a murder investigation I didn’t stop and look hard enough to see that one wasn’t needed.
He just died, that was it. Nobody did it to him. And a bunch of coincidences all happening around the same time didn’t mean much.
But wait a minute. Wait a minute.
“Wait a minute,” I said, and then I lowered my voice. “There was still a demon there. He was still being chased by something. He was scared. If he died of a heart attack, it was caused by whatever was dogging him, making him frightened.”
I wouldn’t say the exact words to Max, who really wasn’t ready for this sort of thing, but I knew that whoever had done him in, they did it by the medium of demon.
Which meant… a lot of things. But it meant this wasn’t some normal grudge. It wasn’t a pizza poisoning, okay. But it was a murder.
One that would never see its day in court… Oh, heck. This was precisely what I didn’t want to get wrapped into, and now I was knee deep in it with my sisters and all kinds of unanswered questions.
“So, does that mean that Hank guy is going to be moving on? He only came here to town chasing after that poor old guy. I guess you could say he chased him to his grave.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said, absently. I felt like there was some small detail, some little thing I had not picked up that I needed to fully grasp that was just there, outside of my understanding. Some little piece of information I had not connected to something else.
“Who else had contact with him?” Max said.
I knew that and could not say. It felt like there was going to be a lot of that going around. Magic may have been, like I’ve said before, an open secret to a lot of the citizens of Lafay, but that apparent openness hid something much deeper and darker beneath its surface, something I hadn’t even realized fully until tonight: there was a kind of secret war going on, and whether I liked it or not, I was a participant.
“Well, that’s that, then,” I said, to myself and to Max. “I have to get home. Young lady, you have to come with me,” I said, grabbing Lucy by her arm. I saw that closed-off expression on Max’s face grow even more distant.
Right now, I had to make a decision. Was I cutting this off, one of the few friendly relationships I’d had in Lafay? Or was I going to get someone involved in something he couldn’t fight, learning secrets he couldn’t divulge, when his entire job was about telling people things he thought they should know?
I didn’t have a lot of guidance here. What would Slate the Slayer do? I hadn’t seen more than 10 seconds of that show, but I knew how that sort of thing worked. He would lie to his friends to keep them safe, pushing them further away when he needed them most. Or he would bring them in, and they would get in over their heads and be hurt and that would make things even worse.
I looked at Max, who was making a show of not looking back, skimming through the photographs he’d taken, pursing his lips, looking very intent.
I sighed, then said, “It’s a terrible idea to get involved with any of this stuff. You’re basically a civilian and it’s really dangerous. I’m
new to it all myself and have barely any idea what I’m doing, and no reasonable expectation that I can keep myself safe and sane, let alone anybody else.”
Max just grunted, and still kept his eyes off me.
“So, you want in?” I said.
“Hell, yeah,” he said, without a second’s hesitation. His eyes were on me now, eager and alive.
“Great. Let’s go and knock out your old girlfriend.”
“You got it. Wait, what?”
Chapter 24
First step was going home and getting Sibyl, and on the way there (we all took my car) I got to explain to Max my very simple reasoning about the whole thing.
“She lives next door to a demon,” I said.
“Okay. Run that by me again?”
“She lives next door to a demon. It does demonic things to a person. That entire episode that happened out there in the square with those costumed weirdos,” I said, then I stopped. I glanced over at Lucy in the backseat before I continued, in case she was making some sort of ‘no don’t’ gesture, but she just looked a little stricken, like she was going to be car sick.
“That entire debacle was because a demon got the suggestion into Lucy’s mind to use magic to make her new cookie baking operation a success. She did things, innocuous innocent and totally not dangerous things, in a way that turned out to have terrible results. Or could have, had she not come forward and asked for help,” I said.
Lucy looked at me in the rear-view, and I was expecting a bit of a thaw, like she’d be happy that I set things up for her to look… well, like a dupe, but not like a malicious dupe.
Max turned to look at her too, all sympathy. She didn’t want to see either of us, and just stared at her hands in her lap. “So… what was that like?”
“What?” she said, still not looking up.
“Being controlled by—”
“I wasn’t controlled.”
“She wasn’t controlled,” I said simultaneously. “It was more like subtle hypnotism. A suggestion, you know? An idea that she thought was her own, but really came from that insidious whisperer. I could hear it, too, when you and I visited the house.”
“And you haven’t been caught up in any suggestions, been doing things you wouldn’t otherwise do?” Max said, looking a little too sly for my liking.
“Nope, the most out of character thing I’ve done is decided to trust some newspaper gossip with secrets that man is not meant to know.”
“Man is not meant to know. Girls only?” he said.
“That’s right. Down with our male oppressors!” Lucy said, laughing for what seemed like the first time in a while. I smiled at her, and shook my head.
“Magic is for everybody,” I said, sternly. “As long as they’re nice.”
“Like Mr. Handsome,” Lucy said.
That brought a touch of chill fingers up my spine, because I knew for a fact Mr. Less Handsome Now That I Think About It was far from nice. He’d wormed his way into my… affections? I don’t know if that’s the right word for it. Trust might be more accurate. And from there, where I was willing to give the benefit of the doubt to a Warlock! He betrayed me.
There was no other word for it. Complete and utter betrayal, one that, despite my apparent growing openness and willingness to tell everybody everything, I couldn’t share with anyone else. To let them know that slightly stodgy Mimi, worried about what everyone else was doing, lost the legacy of their grandmother because some guy helped her out in the kitchen for a few minutes?
No. This was a mistake that would have to be fixed later. In secret.
“So what in the world does this have to do with Trish?” Max said. “Other than that you obviously don’t like her.”
“I like her fine,” I lied.
“No, I could see that you had claws out for her even though she was being perfectly nice to you. Nicer than she usually is, really.”
“She was nice to me like you might be nice to the staff. The hired help. Not one woman to another. And I don’t want to talk about this until I’ve got things squared away with the demon expert in the family.”
“Who is?” Max said, but I sealed my lips. Some secrets were mine to give away, some were mine to keep to myself. And some weren’t my secrets, at all. Even if Max already, actually, knew.
I told Max to wait in the car while I went in and squared things away with the family. I didn’t want Sibyl to feel like she was being ambushed, nor did I want Max to be able to overhear what we had to say to each other… especially the parts where I called her out for hiding things even after we said we’d be open now.
We had sisterly disagreements, and I really wanted this to stay on that level. With an audience, Sibyl would get all high dudgeoned and full of righteous wrath, and she just doesn’t do things straight when she’s like that. Maybe it was holding court in PTA and town council meetings that made her act a little like TV cameras were on her then.
So Max twiddled his thumbs in my front seat while Lucy and I trundled to the front door. I took a quick look at her to make sure she didn’t look like she’d just been in the middle of a bizarre throng of brainwashed cookie zombies while she pretended to be an angel from a TV program. I saw no sign of this on her, and let us in.
“Sib?” Gary called out, getting up from his chair.
“Not me,” I said, smiling.
“Not it,” Lucy said, piling in behind me.
I glanced around and reasoned that, if Gary was asking for Sibyl, that meant she wasn’t at home.
“Where is she?” I asked, after giving Gary a wave. That was as intimate as we got as in-laws. I believe I have hugged Gary once, at Sibyl’s wedding, and it was like hugging a wooden mannequin.
He shrugged. He was in his accustomed place in the evening, a chair situated in front of a TV, tuned to a news-channel but with the sound off. Gary read books most evenings, always on an e-reader so you didn’t know quite what he was up to. I joked with Sibyl that he was a secret romance book fiend, but the one time I glanced over his shoulder to see what he was actually reading, it had the words “Oxford History Of” and then I got bored.
That e-reader was sitting on the chair, while Gary stood above it, seemingly rooted to the place.
“Hmm,” he said, shaking his head. “She left me a text saying she had some errands. Grace was here until I arrived. Were you busy, Lucy?”
Grace was the go-to babysitter, one who had seen less work since Lucy had, at some point, committed to being available “whenever you needed me” and grown to deeply regret that choice of words in the months that followed. Sure, Cathy and Molly were dolls of the first order, but they were still children. They had springs that were perpetually wound.
“I had to clean up a mess I made in the kitchen,” Lucy said, with admirable aplomb. I admired it, anyway. Gary just stared on with a kind of benign confusion on his face.
“Well, she hasn’t answered my texts for a while. I suppose I ought to be getting worried,” he said, sounding very much like he was going to draw up a diagram on a yellow legal pad of the pros and cons of getting worried.
He might have had the luxury of considering it. To me the whole notion of Sibyl being out on her own drew little daggers of fear across my spine, cutting at me with words of real worry. I had a sneaking suspicion that she had come to the same conclusions that I had about that demonic house, but did not have the same generous commitment I was trying to build to keeping it all in the sisterhood.
She went on her own. Right into danger.
“I’m sure it’s nothing. We’re just about to step back out, anywhere you want us to look for her?” I said, turning right back toward the door.
“Oh, wait, Mimi, I got to get some stuff,” Lucy said, dodging under my arm and heading toward the hallway. “Two shakes.”
“Lucy!” I said a might too quickly, too much emotion in my voice. Gary, as happily oblivious as he was to much that went on around him, gave me a very concerned look on that.
“So, you
are just dropping by to go away?” he said, brow furrowing.
“Of course not. Lucy needed something,” I said, smiling.
“Mm-hmm,” Gary said, still looking, still not sitting back down like I wished he would. One of the things I liked best about Gary was his calm acceptance of things around him that really ought to have been questioned. Like, why was Sibyl practically in the shape of an Olympic gymnast? Why did strange things keep involving her sister?
And he was an old townie, he had to have known about Grand-Mere’s reputation. But he didn’t ask questions. He was by no means stupid, or incurious about other things. It was like he had a secret Man’s Intuition to understand there were questions that did not benefit from answers.
But I also needed to make a show of doing something not to make him too self-aware. If he started looking down the rabbit hole, and discovered that, yes, he had married into a witch family and his two daughters were at some point (no matter what Sibyl did to forestall it) going to learn about the craft as well, it might be too much for old Gary. So I walked into the house to check on what Lucy was doing.
Whatever it was, she was not doing it in her room. That door was still closed, and when I opened it and peered inside (which becomes a less and less safe thing to do as a girl gets older) I saw the light was off, the computer was closed, and she wasn’t taking sneaky looks at her phone or crying on her bed or any other normal teenage girl things. Then I heard a bump, and turned to see the moppets looking at me from the hallway.
Cathy stood a couple heads taller than Molly, who was always looking at what her elder sister was doing then trying to copy it. Right now, Cathy was giggling, and though she wasn’t sure what was funny Molly giggled right along, holding her hand over her mouth, her eyes locked on Cathy’s every move.
“What are you sillies being silly about?” I said, trying to sound as serious as possible and not doing the most credible job.
“Lucy’s sneaky!” Cathy said, and Molly burst out laughing then covered her mouth tighter. Her cheeks were turning red from keeping in her noise.
Never Date A Warlock (Sister Witchcraft Book 4) Page 19