“Okay, good,” I said, “But I don’t think any cop is going to pay attention to magical evidence, especially when it disappears on you.”
“Agreed,” Max said. He had a funny expression on his face, which I’d seen before when he’d been privy to some of my magical antics. It was rather like somebody just after they woke up. Most likely, I decided, he was doing his best to disbelieve everything he’d just seen, the instant it was no longer of use to him.
“Okay, what do we do next?” Lucy said, brightly.
“You go home, go to bed, and don’t even think of trying to help or perform magic or do anything until I get back and think what to do with you,” I said. I tried to keep my voice from sounding harsh, but that didn’t stop Lucy from looking crestfallen, and then angry.
Max stepped in between us. “It might get actually dangerous, and remember that you’ve been seen near the scene of the crime. Sure, it was a shadow person thing that looked like you…” Max trailed off after saying that, the look of confusion back on his face. “But… but that won’t mean anything to any cops out there, okay? If the police find us doing some investigating, well, I’m a newspaperman. It’s kind of my job. You…”
“But… but…”
“Don’t argue kid,” I said, and I gave her a hug which she did not welcome at all. “We’re going to see this through, and while I don’t approve of you doing magic like you did, if we didn’t have your spell we wouldn’t know what to do next. But now we have to take you home.”
Lucy looked at us, then down at Kashmir, who was suddenly and thoroughly asleep. Then she sighed, and her shoulders slumped into resignation.
We dropped her off at the house, where Sibyl stormed out practically before Max’s car stopped. She looked ready for battle — but I was going to avoid that at all costs. I called from the window, “She’s learned her lesson,” and then gave Max a look, and we took off again before Sibyl could get a word in edgewise.
“So you’re going to train her how to use magic?” he said.
“Oh, heck, no,” I said. “That kid’s got to be put under wraps. But I can’t tell her that now when we need to get out and catch that killer handyman.”
Chapter 14
“So you’re certain it was him?” Max said.
“Of course. His van, he had keys to the house. You saw him pull them out of his pocket.”
“I saw somebody go up to the door, driving the van. I saw him pull something out of his pocket, but I don’t think it was a key,” Max said. He was driving through the residential streets of Lafay, wending his way through a little maze of side streets and stop signs and not, like I was expecting, B-lining right to the main road which heads to the freeway.
“If it wasn’t a key, what was it?” I said.
“It was too long to be a key. And too shiny — do your house keys gleam like that?”
“Well… if I had a new one made for somebody, it might.”
“Doubtful. And it was long. It looked to me like a lock pick.”
“And how do you know what a lock pick looks like?” I said, eying him suspiciously.
Max just whistled, until he pulled us onto Rochemon street.
“What are we doing here?” I said, alarmed.
“I want to ask Mr. Wright some questions about… lots of things. He should be back from the Sheriff’s station by now,” he said.
But we pulled up in front of a completely dark house, with no car in the driveway in front. There might be one in the garage, but that wasn’t how Glen Wright had parked earlier — he drove a red pick-up truck, and it was on the driveway this morning when I’d seen this house.
It was a little eerie, seeing it at night after having watched that whole magical presentation from the captured spell. I looked over my shoulder, half expecting to see a crouching, almost invisible creature made out of shadow kneeling beside the car, staring at me.
I didn’t see anything, of course… except for the house across the street, with windows that faced directly out toward the Higginbottom house. And I knew, just knew, that I was being stared at by the strange old woman Sandinski who’d seen Lucy’s spell walking around here, and thought it was the girl herself.
Max didn’t wait for me, but headed up the porch to the door.
“I don’t think he’s home,” I whispered.
“I want to look at something,” Max said. He tried knocking on the door, and waited for a few seconds. Then he rang the doorbell.
“Max,” I said, looking back across the street. I didn’t wave at the woman I believed was watching me, but I kept my eyes on that window, willing her not to find us suspicious.
A sudden bright light went across my face, then whipped in a different direction. Max had turned on a powerful little flashlight, and was poking around at the doorknob.
Now, I knew this had to look suspicious. And we were being spotted, recorded, the police being called…
“Mimi?” Max said, then he called in a whisper-shout, “Mimi, where are you going?”
I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t be watched and not do something. So, smart or not, I was soon across the street, at the neighbor’s door, knocking.
The door opened almost before my knuckle hit it the third time, and a face about at my chest height peered out from the crack, a fierce look on the tiny, wrinkled face.
“I’ve got my phone right here, I can call the police,” Old Lady Sandinski said.
“Why would you do that?” I said, with as pleasant a smile as I could muster on my face. “We’re trying to find Mr. Wright, to talk to him.”
I could see the “none of your business” expression on her face, so I cut that short with a little tidbit for her: “He got in a bit of a fight tonight, and we wanted to see if he was all right.”
Her mouth opened, but she didn’t speak. I figured any woman who spends all night staring at her neighbors, writing down what she sees, has got to be some kind of gossip, even if she’s a gossip with nobody to talk to.
“What kind of fight?” she said, trying not to sound too eager and failing.
“In a bar. With the man who drives the van you saw last night,” I said, in a confiding whisper, and nodded at her new expression, simultaneously scandalized and delighted.
“Oh, I just bet that’s the man that killed his wife. I’ve seen that van come by so many times during the day,” she said, then she giggled. “That’s a lot of repair work.”
“Hmm,” I said, then I saw her go thoughtful. I leaned down close.
“What are you thinking about now?” I said.
“Well, I’ve seen it drive by… but I’ve only ever seen it parked out there three times. I could look up the exact dates, I keep notes. I don’ t know what any of it means… That boy is waving at you.”
I looked back over at my shoulder. Max was trying to flail without being noticed — at any rate, that was the best way I could interpret his odd movements. I shrugged, turned back to the old lady and smiled. “Good keeping your eye out,” I said.
She was looking more disturbed by Max’s movements, so I moved quickly back to the car, and tried not to glare at him.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Trying to get your attention without being noticed. Did it work?”
I just shook my head, and ducked back into the car. When he came in we both started to talk at once, and stopped.
“Me first,” he said, plowing ahead. “There were scratches on that door knob that looked like the kind you cause with a lock pick.”
“So?” I said.
“So, Glen Wright isn’t going to pick his own lock.”
“Hmm…” I said, “Unless he wanted to make it look like it was the handyman who came there that night. The old lady said she saw the van drive by plenty of times, but it only parked out front three times, during the day. I’m guessing those were the times he was hired to do work. The rest of the time, he was more discrete.”
“Well, we might find out more when we talk to the guy,
” Max said, pulling his car out toward the main street, heading toward the freeway. “I want to ask you about this magic stuff.”
“Why? You’d be happier if you didn’t,” I said. It was something I felt was true — you couldn’t explain magic to someone who couldn’t do it — it just didn’t work. Besides, so much of it is supposed to be a secret. It wouldn’t do anybody any good.
“I mean, it seems like sometimes you’re pulling things out of mid-air, making water buckets appear in somebody’s hands, things like that. Yes, I noticed that.”
I looked out the window, nonchalantly.
“But then other times, you’re doing super-complicated things that you don’t even seem to understand, no offense. So… how does that work? Are they different schools, different disciplines?”
“I… Let me explain it to you the way Grand-Mere did to me, many years ago. You can write some of it down, she said, you can set up rules and practices and the like, but ultimately, you have to feel it. If it were scientific, it would be science. But it’s not, it’s magic.”
We went smoothly out onto the freeway, and drove in quiet and darkness for a while.
Finally, Max said, “Well, that just doesn’t make any sense.”
“If it did, it wouldn’t be magic.”
He grumbled for a little while, but didn’t have any more to say.
“What do you think we’re going to find here?” I said, as we pulled off the freeway into Halcyon Hills. It was a more rural area than Lafay, with only a filling station next to a convenience store lighting up the intersection just off the freeway.
“Some guy with an ice-pack on his head who doesn’t want to answer our questions,” Max said. “But we’re going to be clever… somehow. I haven’t figured it out yet.”
The handyman’s house was a couple of blocks off of the main drive in town. To get there, we had to drive by his place of business, and we saw that a light was on inside, and door open.
There were two cars out front — that panel van, and a red pick-up truck. Glen Wright’s truck.
“Oh, crap,” I said. Max flicked his lights off and drove slowly by the lot. Whatever light source was on inside of it was sending flickering shadows across the wall in the shape of a man. A man holding something in his hand that looked frighteningly like a handgun.
“Oh, crap,” Max said. We stopped the car on the street, about 30 yards from the building. Only that front door was open, and to get there meant a jog across a mostly open parking lot. Plenty of time to be out in the open and get shot by the crazed jealous husband.
“What do we do?” I said.
Max had his hand on his phone, and was punching in the number for the sheriff’s station. “When you’ve got seconds, the sheriff’s only minutes away,” he said.
“Okay, you do that. I’ve got to… I don’t know!” I said, opening the door and charging outside before I knew what I was doing.
I made it to the van, and flattened myself against it, when I heard the voices inside. There was Mr. Wright, ranting incomprehensibly. The handyman, Zeke Whitten, practically blubbering…
And then a third voice. A man, talking in a low tone, saying things in a whisper that somehow carried all the way out into the parking lot. Those were words I could almost grasp… and then I realized I wasn’t hearing them with my ears.
It was my inner senses, the ones that could pick up magic. The same sort of sensation I felt in the bar when I found that magic spell with the water bucket. This wasn’t something that concrete… but it had that same kind of feeling. This wasn’t like the magic that I performed. This… smelled like something that had been frozen a little too long.
Holy cats, this was somebody reading magic out of a book, not from themselves. When I figured that out, I remembered something I’d seen in Grand-Mere’s book — “Inside magic is true magic, outside magic can’t fight inside magic.”
Did it mean anything at the time? No, but now I think I could feel my way through what was happening. Someone was casting a spell on at least one of these men, a spell that confused his senses. He was going to make Glen Wright shoot somebody without even knowing why.
Well, I could take these crude building blocks and with a whisper or two of my own power…
Suddenly, red and blue lights flooded the area. A man shouted on a bullhorn — “All three of you, out with your hands up!” And then five men stormed in the front of the building, shouting and waving clubs.
There was screaming inside, somebody fell back. Crashing, groaning.
And just as quickly as it had come, the lights and the cops disappeared. I had taken someone else’s illusion and turned it against them. Something had made them cut off their own spell, so my power source was gone.
So… what would I do now? There was still a man with a gun in there. There was somebody casting bad magic. There was… every reason in the world to sit down and wait for the real sheriffs to come in and take care of this mess…
Except I was curious. So I walked around the van, ignored the sudden shout from behind me when Max saw what I was doing, and I walked into the shop.
There was only a single, bright work light illuminating the place from the side. It was a regular workshop, with tools and all kinds of heavy equipment all around the place, and three men sprawled on the ground.
Glen Wright was the first, the gun beside him. He was staring at his hands, like he didn’t recognize them. The handyman, Zeke Whitten, was also on his back, looking much worse for the wear. He had taken quite a beating earlier that night, and had decided, apparently, to finally pass out.
Then there was the third man, one who had apparently tumbled over a metal footstool, and landed right on his head. So my scary cop illusion had done it’s trick, hopefully not too well.
I leaned down over him, as I heard sirens blaring down the street, real red lights flashing in through the windows.
In the red light, the bright red shirt he was wearing looked weirdly like skin, and his Marvin the Martian tie looked like an odd colored tongue. Brent Wagner was shaking on the ground, one hand opening and closing on a sheet of parchment.
It had writing and diagrams on it, the kind I recognized. Spellwork. I reached for it, to take it away and end the magic mischief for once and all.
Except the spell grabbed me first.
A hand pulled out of it, like it were a pool of water, and it was going to down me in its magic. I fell forwards, landing on the ground right next to Brent.
The hand was wrapped around my wrist. It was so strange, barely even human, looking like a paper glove. It crawled higher on my wrist, squeezing so tight I could see my fingertips going white. And while it moved, I could hear its spell, whispering to me like an almost forgotten nightmare.
“That’s right,” it said. “I am a nightmare. I’m your nightmare, and when I get into your head, I will never come out.”
It clamped on my elbow, squeezing hard until the pain made me shout out. I flailed at it with my other hand, uselessly, and felt it going further up, getting closer to where it could get into my head, and hurt me from the inside.
But there was something else there, in my head. A different voice, waiting calmly for me to, finally, listen to it. “Well,” this new voice said, with matronly patience, “are you some kind of victim, or are you a witch?”
“I’m a witch,” I said, feverishly.
“And does a witch let some piece of paper push her around?” she, for it was a woman’s voice, my Grand-Mere’s voice, said.
“Heck, no,” I said, then I remembered some of the things I carried around in case I needed spell work. All kinds of accoutrements, including a box of matches.
I pulled it out, and one-handed struck the match like a pro. Without a qualm, I set it to the reaching hand, which became a piece of parchment as it exploded into sudden flame.
I got a look at it right before it became ash. There were magic diagrams, scribblings, notes. And on the top, in big printed letters: “Jiggs Practical M
agic.”
Chapter 15
“So it was all just to get to the top of the high school English department?” Lucy said, swinging her feet against the metal kitchen counter, going bang, bang, bang. I had to glare at her for about three booming kicks worth before she got the hint and quit making noise.
“Weird as it seems, it looks like it. When the police looked through Brent’s apartment, they found all kinds of things on his computer. Surveillance tapes of Mrs. Higginbottom’s house, Mr. Whitten’s work schedule.”
Frisco also told me, completely off the record and 100% secret, that there were a half dozen of those pieces of parchment. Which was good, because it meant he didn’t have to arrest me for destroying evidence. That whole strange fight with the parchment-hand seemed like it took a long time, but was actually over in a matter of moments, so when the police charged into the room finally, all they saw was me standing over Brent and burning a piece of paper.
A weird scene, let me tell you, but Frisco was used to me being weird around him. He even let me look at the parchment they’d found for just a second before they were put into an evidence locker to be officially ignored forever. I’m not all that adept at figuring these things out yet, but when I told Kashmir what I saw he knew it right away.
“Shadow spy,” he’d said, and then he’d curled around to take a nap, just as Lucy came into the shop. That was a couple of hours ago, and while we prepared for an afternoon baby shower to come and chatted, I tried to keep steering the conversation away from the Jiggs and murders and all those negative things and back onto her schoolwork, her friends.
Lucy wrinkled her nose at the word. “I thought I had some friends, but now people at school seem to think I’m some kind of freak.”
“Give it time,” I said, being no help whatsoever.
“Well, I was thinking that if I’m a freak, I should be a freak who knows how to freak right. Yknow, a learned freak.”
I stared at her, pretending I had no idea what she was talking about.
“Come on, teach me magic. Let me learn while you are, we could be witch sisters together.”
Undercover Coven (Sister Witchcraft Book 3) Page 9