Our vault contains floor-to-ceiling oak bookcases on all four walls. The shelves are a foot deep, and each shelf holds six carbon fiber bins. In the old days, we used lead, but it was ridiculously heavy to carry around and not particularly healthy to handle on a daily basis. One must keep up, you know.
Each bin is engraved with its case and shelf number. The old bins had brass labels, but we found that proximity to such a reactive metal had an adverse effect on some of our pawned items. It is disconcerting at the very least to pop downstairs and find that two ordinary cat’s-eye marbles have shifted into a rather unpleasant saber-tooth cat.
We store larger items in a dozen stainless steel cages, set in a horseshoe in the middle of the vault. Each cage is a wire cube, three feet on a side. It looks a bit like the kennels you find at a veterinarian’s office, except that nothing is supposed to be alive down there. At least, that’s the rule. Just in case, each cage is secured both with the appropriate spell and a good old-fashioned padlock.
In the middle of the horseshoe of cages, facing the Eames chair, is a cute little Victorian writing desk and a battered vinyl recliner. There are times when we need to check paperwork downstairs, and it’s nice to have a good writing surface and a comfortable chair.
I checked the log and found an empty bin. I secured the Faraday bag containing the baboon tooth with a small spell and a big padlock and popped back upstairs.
♦
My next appointment was a childhood friend of Lissa’s. Hannah Carter was in her late teens or early 20s but looked much younger. She was mousy and timid, but I suspected that she could hold her own.
She reached into her purse and removed a square cedar box, the kind my mother’s people called a jewelry casket. It was about the size of a cigar box, but beautifully crafted and bound in brass and with a tiny gold lock. Hannah wore the key around her neck, and when she unlocked the casket, she revealed a beautiful pendant cushioned inside the padded, velvet-lined case. The stone was a giant translucent amber. It was the color of honey; the surface looked waxy. The stone was bound with braided and twisted silver wire, worked in a Tree of Life design.
She noticed the black light flashlight at the corner of my desk. “Take a look,” she said.
I switched on the black light and switched off the desk lamp. Before I even passed the black light over it, the amber was glowing. Fully into the black light, the stone was a dramatic sky-blue with swirls of sea green. The corona at its edge was neon red. “Blue amber,” I said in awe.
“It’s Dominican, of course,” she said. “A rather nice piece, I think.”
“I’ve never seen color like that.”
“That’s how you can tell it’s the real thing,” Hannah said, gesturing at the black light. “All amber fluoresces a little, of course, but this is particularly vivid. It’s because of the forest fires.”
I switched off the black light and turned on the desk lamp again. Hannah explained that amber has been found wherever ancient forests grew, from Prussia to New Zealand. These days, most of the world’s amber comes from areas around the Baltic Sea. Amber is actually prehistoric tree resin that became buried beneath miles of sediment. Over time the heat and weight transformed it into the soft gemstone I held in my hand. Because it began as a sticky gel, amber very often has inclusions, which are simply the twigs, leaves, pollen and other debris that’s found on tree limbs, then and now. Some amber also contains tiny bugs and other creatures that got trapped in the goo. This stone had no inclusions — it was the size of a chicken egg and as transparent as bottle glass.
She could tell I didn’t understand. “Baltic amber usually contains litter from the ancient conifers that produce the resin, but blue amber comes from a tropical tree that was an ancient relative of the pea family. But the trees that produced the resin that became this amber were consumed by fire. A gemologist told me that the resin dripped from the trees when the heat hit it. Any organic matter it might’ve touched was burned off. That’s why this is so clear.”
She misread the look on my face. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m a bit of a nerd.”
“Works for me.” I was finding all this fascinating. “So, what can I do for you?”
“I’m hoping I can leave this with you for a while. My mother passed away a month ago and left it to me.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said, and I meant it. I hadn’t known Deborah Carter, but she’d had a reputation in the magical community as a powerful and ethical practitioner. I was surprised Penelope hadn’t mentioned her passing, but things have been pretty busy around here lately. The snowbirds were back for the winter season, and the shop had been jumping.
“Thank you,” Hannah said automatically. She shook the thought away. “I had a break-in when I was away for the weekend. Nothing was taken, and the police couldn’t figure out how the guy got in. I’d feel a lot better if this...” she patted the top of the cedar box “... was out of the house until we get things sorted out.”
“How awful for you,” I said. “Of course — we’ll be happy to keep it safe for you.” I pulled a dollar out of my desk and started the paperwork. I noticed that Hannah kept her hand on the little cedar casket the whole time, reluctant to let it out of her sight. “Really,” I told her, patting her hand. “It’s going to be okay.”
Hannah picked up her purse and stood to leave. Her face was impossibly sad. Lissa gave her a big hug, as I sat in the Eames chair and popped downstairs to secure her family treasure.
Chapter Two
Hannah must have just left, because Lissa was still walking back to the counter after seeing her friend off as I emerged from the vault.
Just as I sat in my chair, the front door chimed and opened. I’d totally forgotten my 1 a.m. appointment, a referral from the Paris shop. A tall, elegant man stepped across the threshold.
He was a stranger, but someone I might be willing to get to know a little better. I don’t allow myself to be distracted like that very often, and that little voice in the back of my head said get your mind back on business. But he really was my type: tweedy without being sloppy, like he was right at home in a library or at the front of some college class teaching — what? — maybe medieval English literature? He had high cheekbones, the right amount of gray at his temples, and sparkling green eyes that were set off by just enough smile lines. I inwardly laughed at myself; I was sounding like some cheap romance novel. I’d been widowed for more than two years now. Maybe it was time to start getting out a little more.
The stranger extended his hand. “Simon Sterling,” he said. I thought I detected a slight Scottish burr.
I introduced myself. His handshake was warm and firm without being overbearing. “What may I do for you, Mr. Sterling?” I asked, inviting him to sit in the Eames chair.
He removed a small leather pouch from his inside coat pocket. “I’m told I might be able to leave this with you for safekeeping. I’m going to be working here in the United States for a few months and I have no way to secure it while I’m traveling.”
“Certainly, if it meets our qualifications. You understand: we have to restrict the items we allow on the premises for the safety of our staff and patrons.”
“That’s very wise, and I absolutely understand.” He fingered the straps of the pouch. “It’s harmless — I assure you. May I?”
I nodded, and he loosened the thongs and poured a man’s gold ring out onto the velour jewelry pad. I picked the ring up and examined the setting: a lovely scrimshaw cameo. “Mastodon?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Siberian. I’m told the cameo is my great aunt, several times removed. She had a rather scandalous affair with a sailor from a whaling vessel. She rejected him, of course...”
“Of course,” I said, playing along.
“So he carved this portrait. I’m told he wore it till the day he died, and then had the ring sent back to her.”
I wondered how I would feel to get such a posthumous gift from a spurned lover.
H
e was reading my thoughts, and he grinned. “She was horrified. She locked it away in the safe and never looked at it again. It got handed down through the family until it came to my mother. She was working on a spell that required ivory, and of course with the international ban...”
I finished the sentence for him. “... she used what was at hand.”
He had a lovely smile. “That, she did.”
I picked the ring up and looked at it through the loupe. The carving was delicate, much more detailed than I would’ve expected from a folk craftsman. The cameo was of a beautiful woman with a haughty expression.
“So, it’s a binder?” “I’m still trying to work that out,” he said. “I suspect it’s a finder, but I don’t have the spell. My mother’s spellbooks went missing after she passed — you know how it is in large families. For the time being, I just like having it with me as a reminder of her. You understand.”
I did, but I wasn’t sure I could help him. “We aren’t actually a storage facility,” I explained, “but we do hold items long-term for clients in our vault when they are here on pawn. I’m sure Penelope explained this to you.”
He looked amused. “She did. That’s fine with me.”
“How long will you need to leave it with us?”
“My current project will probably take six to eight weeks. Can I extend the pawn if it becomes necessary?” He said the word as if it was a private joke between us.
“Of course. Shall we say a hundred a week? We can bill you weekly or monthly.”
He took out a leather Prada wallet and extracted five one-hundred dollar bills. “That should get you started.”
I thanked him and quickly completed the paperwork. We placed the pawn value of the ring at a thousand dollars. I removed a single dollar bill from my desk and handed it to him.
“What’s that?”
“Ownership of the item must be transferred to me for the time it’s on the premises. This is value exchanged for that transaction.”
He seemed troubled by the idea. “Another of our rules, I’m afraid,” I said. “It’s a safety issue. I have to be able to control the items entrusted to me.”
He picked up the stone and contemplated it. “I’m afraid that’s not possible. It appears Penelope has given me some bad information. I’m so sorry to have troubled you.” He slipped the stone back into its pouch, and the pouch into his inside coat pocket again.
I could tell I was blushing, but there didn’t seem to be any way to save this transaction. “I’m so sorry for the misunderstanding,” I said, handing him his hundred-dollar bills.
He was smiling again. He wrapped his fingers around mine, closing the cash inside my palm. “No, you keep that for your trouble.”
I placed the money on the counter in front of him. “Not necessary. I’m pleased to have met you.”
He hesitated a moment before putting the bills back in his wallet. “Well, at least let me buy you dinner tomorrow. It’s the least I could do.” That, I could do.
♦
“I think I’ll duck out and grab a late supper,” I told Lissa just before 4 a.m. One of the things I love most about living in a resort town is that even the really good restaurants are open late. “Do you want me to bring something back for you?”
Right on cue, Lissa’s mother appeared with a red-enameled stoneware baking dish tucked into a quilted carrying bag. Lissa’s supper had arrived.
Penelope Silver is not physically imposing — in fact, I thought she looked rather ordinary the first time I met her — but she is an intimidating woman who wraps herself in the armor of her persona. Penny is a generalist, an enormously powerful white witch who is competent in all of the aspects of common magic from herbalism to arcane spells. Even the regular folks of our fair city understand that there is something formidable about her, but they’d be hard-pressed to explain what it is that makes them cautious in her presence. Those in my community, of course, understand.
My mother once let slip that Penelope is not really a widow. Her husband Alex was a prominent investment banker back in the days of penny stocks, and for a while, the family lived in the high clover. They had both come from modest means, but it didn’t take them long to become accustomed to the flamboyant lifestyle that serious money afforded them in the 1980s. Alex fleeced his investors and took off for parts unknown, leaving Penelope holding the bag and with toddler Lissa to support.
Penelope was the ultimate helicopter mom when Lissa was little. She volunteered as a room mother in every class that Lissa was in from kindergarten to middle school. When Lissa hit second grade, Penelope became her Brownie troop leader. Penelope, who always appears with perfectly lacquered nails and a coiffure held together with a binding spell instead of hairspray, has always hated sports of any kind, but she coached Lissa’s middle school girls’ soccer team to a district title. Lissa got quieter and quieter with every passing school year.
High school is traditionally the time when even obedient girls go to war with their mothers, fighting to establish their own blossoming identities. Penelope wasn’t having it. She refused to let Lissa have a drivers license, insisting that she was happy to drive her daughter anywhere she wanted — all she had to do was ask. Lissa was a straight-A student, but Penelope hired tutors for her in every subject and required them to report back to her on a weekly basis. As far as Lissa was concerned, there were spies everywhere.
Boyfriends were out of the question. Penelope felt that it was important that Lissa take part in high school social life, but her daughter attended every dance, prom and football game in the company of boys who were the sons of Penelope’s friends and business associates. None of them would have dared even to try to steal a kiss.
Newton’s third law applies, in particular, to teenagers: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The day Lissa turned 18, she moved out. The first Penelope knew of it was that night, when Lissa texted her mother that she wouldn’t be home for supper — ever again — and provided her new address without further comment.
Lissa loved being out on her own, and for several years she never gave her mother a second thought. But as she got older, she began to wish that she wasn't quite so alone in the world. Last year she decided to give it another try, and she accepted her mother's offer to live in the pool house on the estate where she’d grown up.
Lissa and Penelope have established a fragile truce. She makes concessions to her mother; after all, it’s never a great idea to get sideways with a witch as powerful as Penelope. Lissa picks up the phone when her mother calls or texts, and she goes to Sunday dinner up at the main house without fail. Lissa thinks of these gestures as damage control.
Still, Penelope hovers. Supper tonight was homemade lasagna, which was technically correct: it was made in Penelope’s home by her live-in cook. Lissa attended Arizona State University during the day and worked for me at night, keeping the time available to spend with her mother at a minimum. Penelope soon learned that Lissa had joined my staff, since it is nearly impossible to keep any secret in a community of witches — they gossip like any other small town. Sometime during Lissa’s first week at Pentacle Pawn, Penelope had popped in with a covered dish supper. She’d been here every night since, whenever Lissa worked. I finally gave up and added her to the door spell.
I grabbed my purse from my desk drawer as soon as I saw Penelope let herself in. I’ve always found her to be a bit much, and she’s not exactly my biggest fan, either. She knows my family from New Orleans days, and she’s always been jealous of their power and their place in the community. I tend to stay out of her line of sight.
Besides, my steak and eggs were calling.
♦
Breakfasts are always a problem for me since my days are upside down, but there’s a restaurant around the corner from Pentacle Pawn that serves excellent Western ranch-style meals at all hours. Since I’m pretty much nocturnal, I like to load up with gourmet carbs toward the end of my evening, so I’m nice and sleepy by the ti
me my shift ends at six.
At 4 a.m. I’m wide-awake and looking for red meat and fried potatoes. My concession to breakfast is to add eggs. In restaurants all over America, steak and eggs means two chicken eggs, fried sunny side up. But, remember, this is Scottsdale. Breakfast eggs in this neighborhood are gourmet frittatas filled with julienned truffles and imported prosciutto. I can’t really afford to eat like that, of course, but the chef is a pal and a client who cuts me a deep discount.
The food came to the table with the house salsa, available only in autumn when chef goes to visit his extended family in New Mexico and brings back a truckload of Hatch chiles. He sets up a big wire tumbler over the fire pit on the restaurant patio, pours in burlap bags of succulent green chiles and fire roasts them until the pepper skins blister so they can be peeled. The pungent aroma of the chilies and firewood draws people from all over the neighborhood. It’s quite a spectacle and a real crowd pleaser for the tourists from Europe and Asia.
In this restaurant, you are expected to be able to answer the question: “Red or green?” tourists assume that they are being offered two different kinds of chiles. Here’s the secret: they are the same plant. Red chilies are picked when they are mature; green chilies are the same peppers, picked when they are, well, green. Which one is hotter? It depends on where they are grown, what the weather was like, how much fertilizer and water they got, and a dozen other variables. The only way to find out for sure is to taste them. Diners in the know will respond to the red/green question with “Christmas,” meaning that you’d like a puddle of each on your plate. It’s a southwest thing.
Chef delivered a gorgeous medium-rare filet with a side of home fries cut from Yukon gold potatoes. The frittata was steaming hot, and I was reaching for the salsa when I looked up and saw Jim Hamilton sliding into the seat across from me.
Jim had left a message on the shop line earlier in the evening, but I’d been too tied up to call him back. The Scottsdale Police Department does not have that number for obvious reasons, but Jim is not an ordinary cop. He was a Pentacle Pawn customer long before he was a police officer. He’s actually my fourth cousin several times removed, through the Paris branch, which he’s never visited. He has a sort of love-hate relationship with the family and the magical community in general, not having grown up in the craft but seeing it out of his peripheral vision all his life. I suspect that under that skepticism is a very talented practitioner if he’d ever let it out.
Pentacle Pawn Boxed Set Page 9