"Maybe, maybe not. Ever since Frank said that, I've been remembering some things. Even with all his magic, Aaron could never get the best of him. Adam kind of bullied him, and I remember thinking that Aaron could just lay him out with a single zap – but he never did. Do you suppose it's because he knew that Adam could give as good as he got?"
She still looked puzzled. "But why? Why would he hide it?"
I had no answer for her. "Frank also thinks that Adam killed John. He caught Adam at the front door, trying to change the password."
Daisy looked shocked. "But what could John have possibly done to Adam?"
I shrugged. But then Daisy seemed to come to a revelation. "What if John accidentally saw or heard something? He probably didn't understand what he saw, but whatever it was, Adam knew that John could blow his cover. I think he was the one who lured John outside. It could've been quite simple. You and your cousins are always complaining that you can't get any bars in the library. Maybe Adam stuck his head in and told John that you'd been trying to call, that you had invited him to join you and your friend."
"But John would've called me."
"Unless he decided to surprise you. You know how he loved surprises."
Which explained the single rose in his lapel. He'd picked it from Daisy's garden to bring to me.
There was no way I was going to allow this to be true. "Are you saying that John was just collateral damage?"
Daisy sipped her tea, letting me calm down. "I'm saying that if Adam killed John, then none of us is safe."
Chapter Eight
My mother hadn't actually been told yet that I was leaving New Orleans, although I was pretty sure she suspected, so we were careful not to bring it up at breakfast. On the other hand, Daisy was excited for me, and about the prospects of the new life that John and I had wanted to build in Arizona. When my mother got up to fetch another bowl of buttery grits from the stove, Daisy leaned over and whispered, "Meet me in the workshop after breakfast. I have a surprise for you."
It was just like Daisy to build me an herbal charm to speed us on our way. I helped clear the breakfast dishes, then met her on the back gallery. She looked alarmed.
"There's somebody in there," she whispered.
She was right: I could hear someone moving around on the creaky floorboards. Adam had left the house early, Aaron was already out with one of his tour groups, and my mother was upstairs re-washing the dishes – I could never do them to suit her. So who was in the shop?
"Wait here," I whispered back. I mumbled the lock incantation and pushed the door open with my toe.
Adam – Adam?! – stood in front of the open safe. He had been going through its contents, and the floor around him was littered with a jumble of small aluminum cages and little lead boxes.
Adam whirled as Daisy and I stepped inside. "I was just looking," he said. He sounded like he did when he was six years old. "I didn't mean anything."
"How on earth did you get that safe open, anyway?" Daisy asked.
Adam looked away. "It was already open when I came downstairs," he said to the wall.
Fat chance.
But that presented a problem. Adam could barely open a regular doorknob, let alone work the powerful incantation that it took to open that huge antique safe. So, if the vault door was already open, who opened it? Only members of the family knew that incantation. That meant that it was my mother or Daisy – impossible – or, in the next generation, Aaron. Or, I realized, me.
Which meant that I was now confirmed as the primary suspect, not just in the safecracking, but in the death of Marie-Eglise and, by extension, my own husband. Adam's glare told me he had just come to the same conclusion.
Daisy wasn't having any of it. "Show me what you have in your hand," she demanded of Adam.
His big fist opened, and we saw Philippe's cat's-eye ring in the palm of his hand. He'd been clutching it so tightly that his palm was bruised.
"Adam!" Daisy scolded. She held out her hand, demanding that he surrender it.
I noticed that the eye of the ring was open. It was watching Adam, and it never blinked while Daisy took it from his palm.
"What were you thinking?" Daisy demanded.
Adam blushed, a bizarre sight on somebody so brutish. He wasn't able to stand up to the tiny woman who had raised him. "I was just curious, that's all, Aunt Daisy. I swear – I heard you all talking about it, and I just wanted to see it."
Maybe, I thought; maybe not.
"Upstairs, young man," she said, looking sternly up at the bottom of his chin. "I'm sure my sister will want a conversation with you later." The color drained from Adam's face and he fled the room.
Daisy and I looked at each other in bewilderment, then down at the ring in her hand. Its eye had closed again. "Did you see that bruise on his palm?" Daisy asked quietly.
I nodded. "He must've been holding it really tight."
"Or it was defending itself. The ring may have felt threatened."
I hadn't thought about that. If the ring gave protection from the evil eye, and it didn't like Adam, what did that mean?
Daisy's mind was back on business. Several dozen containers had been removed from the safe. They were strewn around on the floor and counters. "What a mess," Daisy said with a sigh. "I guess I need to do a new inventory."
♦
Daisy worked through lunch, so I took a bowl of Aaron's famous gumbo down to her. I found her cross-legged in the middle of the floor. The old safe was empty. She was talking to herself as she checked her clipboard and placed items back inside, one by one.
"It just doesn't add up," she said. "I’ve checked this three times and I can't figure out what's wrong."
Let it be said here that Daisy is a genius with herbal potions, but basic bookkeeping sometimes escapes her. When I still lived at home, the inventory was always my job. I didn't miss the tedium of checking hundreds of items – some of which were so rare that I couldn't name them – against the spreadsheet. It was mind-numbing work, and occasionally dangerous. Not all owners are forthright about how well they've trained their objects. I'd once opened a box that the inventory said contained a baby rattle to find a young (and very annoyed) rattlesnake.
I wasn't thrilled to deal with that whole mess again, but Daisy looked so lost that I sat down beside her and took the clipboard. The first step was always to count the number of boxes and see if the tally matched. Daisy was right: we had 143 boxes, but only 142 lines on the spreadsheet. Something had never been entered into inventory.
Each box and cage had a little brass plate bearing its catalog number, which corresponded to a line on the spreadsheet that also contained its description. I picked up the first box and sighed. "Let's run it again. Containers or clipboard?"
Daisy sounded so grateful. "Oh, you choose. I just appreciate the help."
In that case, I'd take the clipboard. Fewer surprises that way.
We spent the next half hour sorting through the piles. We had checked off more than 120 boxes when Daisy called off a number that didn't appear on the spreadsheet. It was one of the lead containers, maybe the size of a cigar box. The box was legit, brass plate and all, but it should not have been in the safe if it hadn't been logged in.
The next step was to determine its contents. An untagged box was a magical hand grenade: open it at your own peril. We took it to the workbench where Hazel kept her tools.
My manipulation spells had always been much stronger than Daisy's, so it was up to me. I held the box in both hands and said the first half of an incantation that would grant me personal control of the contents. I saw the bound edges glow a little, so I knew that it was working — but I was not about to open that thing out in the open.
Hazel also kept a massive bell jar on the workbench. The dome, made from bulletproof glass, was big enough to cover the box, and it fit into a groove on a marble disk base to form a seal. I lifted the dome and placed the lead box inside, then secured the glass bell into its base.
"You might want to go stand over there," I said to Daisy, motioning to the hallway behind the big bookcase. I didn't have to tell her twice.
I placed my hands on either side of the dome, palms against the glass as I said the second half of the incantation. The lid of the small box began to rise. It was actually pretty dramatic. It took a couple of seconds for it to open all the way.
Inside was Marie-Eglise's tortoiseshell comb.
I'm not sure what we were expecting, but it certainly wasn't that. Neither Daisy nor I knew quite what to say. I think we'd both been hoping that the comb had just been misplaced during the chaos of the evening when Marie-Eglise died. Finding it in the safe like this meant that someone had intentionally taken it, and it had to be a member of the family. The list of suspects was short.
"I guess we need to give this to my mother," I finally said. Hazel, as the new matriarch, would be managing the distribution of Marie-Eglise's possessions. Daisy quickly agreed. I think she was pleased not to have to deal with it. This was going to be ugly.
♦
"He's up to something," Frank told me that evening. He'd been following Adam all day.
"Duh."
"No," Frank said, "he's working on some kind of project. He spent most of the day up in the library."
I was skeptical. "Adam hates to read."
"It was research, I think. He was working mostly in that bookcase that holds the spell books."
The reading materials in our family library are eclectic, from my physics textbooks to classic 1930s mysteries. In one corner, a graceful Victorian book cabinet with leaded glass doors holds the archive of grimoires passed down through the family for hundreds of years. Many were written in French, a language I was pretty sure Adam could neither read nor speak.
"What was he after?"
"Madam, I do not read. I am a cat." He said it in a way that made it clear that he was the superior species.
I sighed. "Show me."
The library was dark when we entered. I snapped on a reading light as we approached the book cabinet.
"Raise me up, please," Frank politely requested.
I lifted him from the table and cradled him in my arms. He was warm and fuzzy, as any cat would be, but he did not snuggle. I carried him to the cabinet.
Frank extended a paw and touched the spine of a journal bound in alligator hide. "That one," he said, "and there was one next to it that he was using." The space next to the journal was empty.
The books are in chronological order by the death date of their owners. The journal was one I had read many times as Marie-Eglise taught me her elegant spells from it. I knew the missing journal, too, but I had never been allowed to read it. It belonged to her lost son, Samuel.
♦
The family gathered in the parlor the next afternoon to read Marie-Eglise's will. Or, rather, my mother read it to us. She was already clearly taking charge.
It made me smile to think of Marie-Eglise watching over us from her teapot on the mantelpiece as we slumped into the soft chairs. I noticed a tear on Daisy's cheek, and I saw Hazel shake her head in admonition. Tears were for later. Right now, we had business to conduct.
The document was concise. As we all expected, the Royal Street house in all its furnishings now belonged to Hazel. The inheritance laws didn't allow Marie-Eglise to weigh in on what happened after Hazel's own death, but that didn't keep her from letting her wishes be known that Daisy and the boys were entitled to live there for the rest of their lives if they wished.
Marie-Eglise believed that Aaron should be Hazel's heir, even though I was the eldest. I wasn't even mentioned; I was already out on my own, married and deep into a secular career. It stung a little, but I understood why she did it. The one in the room who was genuinely shocked was Adam. He was the older brother, the seventh son of the seventh son. The fact that Marie-Eglise believed he had no magic — and that he had gone to great pains to encourage that belief – was in his mind irrelevant. The house and the business were his, and he wanted them. He stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
We looked at each other, stunned. The boys had grown up knowing how Marie-Eglise felt, and what shocked us was not that she had disinherited Adam, but that he was surprised by it. This was the final insult. It couldn't be fixed.
The other stunner in the will was that Marie-Eglise left her tortoiseshell comb to Daisy, not to my mother. Nobody had seen that one coming, but when I thought about it later, it made sense. The comb brought strength, calm, and patience to the wearer. My mother was a rock, but sometimes Daisy was just a bunch of loose pebbles rolling downhill. I guess Marie-Eglise figured that her younger daughter could use the help.
To her credit, it didn't take Hazel long to absorb this new reality. "There's a full moon at the end of the week. Let's plan a circle for then. Everyone agreed?"
The circle would accomplish a few things. It would bind us together again, literally closing the gap after the loss of Marie-Eglise. Coming together with shared purpose would help smooth over the disruption and the hurt feelings. It would also be the time when the tortoiseshell comb and all of its magic would come to Daisy.
I hoped for good weather. We could use all the auspicious signs we could get.
Chapter Nine
There had been sun showers throughout the day, a weird Gulf Coast phenomenon in which the sun is bright and the sky is blue and clear — except for that one tiny cloud that seems to be dumping its rain just on you. The scattered cover intensified as the sun dropped in the sky, and by sundown the overcast was complete. High clouds scudded across the sky, playing hide-and-seek with the moon as our family gathered on the beach.
Daisy and I were the first to arrive. Frank insisted on riding along, but he disappeared as soon as I opened the car door.
I helped Daisy walk down to the water's edge. She sat cross-legged in the sand, meditating while we waited for everybody else. It was still hard for me to believe that she was in her seventh decade. I hoped she would live forever. There'd already been too much loss.
Aaron arrived next, with my mother in the passenger seat of his old Jeep. How strange to think that this was the entire circle now. I remembered the circles of my youth, when the extended family would gather from all over the world and dozens of us would gather on this beach.
My mother was leaning on Aaron's arm as they made their way across the sand toward us. I felt a pang of guilt. If I went through with my plan to flee New Orleans, she was going to have to lean on him from now on. The shop and the house would be his, but so would the responsibility. I wondered how Aaron would feel about that.
Part of my training — the training for all of us, growing up in Pentacle Pawn — was to learn how to honor the creatures from which magical objects were made. Once in each generation, our family gathers to pay tribute to the sea turtle from whose shell Marie-Eglise's tortoiseshell comb was crafted.
There are wonderful old family photos of these gatherings, showing people in horse-drawn carriages that they have driven down to the water line. One of my favorites shows Hazel and Daisy as children, holding hands with their older brother. Samuel had rebelled early and loud, and by the time he was 16 the whole family had had enough of him. The feeling was mutual. Samuel had a strong affinity for magic, but the craft requires discipline and Samuel had none. He was all about the shortcut, the shady deal, the quick buck.
Samuel stumbled on through his teen years, sullen and vaguely dangerous. On his 21st birthday, he stepped out the front door and disappeared into the Mardi Gras crowd, leaving behind his drugged-out girlfriend with his two small sons.
My mother Hazel wanted nothing to do with the whole mess, but Daisy raised Aaron and Adam as if they were her own. Aaron showed an early talent for the craft. Adam was the eldest but less gifted.
When Adam was nine and Aaron seven, word came that their father was dead. Samuel walked away from magic when he walked away from the family. He'd been working as a roustabout on one of the big oil rigs out in
the Gulf, and he was swept overboard during a hurricane. The corporate lawyer who delivered the news also brought a waiver of liability that, once signed, provided a tidy income for each of the boys until they turned 21. Adam's last payment had been in January; Aaron's still had a year to run.
It was cold solace. Aaron bonded almost immediately with Daisy, but Adam drew into himself. He still kept the walls high, his father's abandonment preventing him from accepting love. He was the eldest son of the eldest son, but he made himself an outsider. Aaron would have to stand in the circle for them both. Before he took my hand, he wedged his late father's talisman upright in the sand in front of him.
Hazel began the ritual with a traditional remembrance song for Marie-Eglise. That brought us to the matter of the comb. The tradition is that, as her life nears its passage, the current owner of the tortoiseshell comb takes it from her hair and places it on the sand. With appropriate blessings and incantations, the family looks on as the new owner picks up the comb and binds her own hair, and so it is handed down.
Because my grandmother had died before the comb could be given to Daisy, a different ceremony must be performed. Marie-Eglise had bequeathed the comb, but the object had to give its permission.
My mother served as elder. It was the first and only time she would wear the comb. She removed it, letting her long braid fall to her waist. She knelt and laid the comb close to the swirling shallows.
Because the comb is very old and very powerful, the ceremony requires the attention of the entire family. One moment, the comb was at our feet, gleaming in the setting sun. Everyone was concentrating on it, working the incantation in unison. The next moment, an ancient sea turtle lay at the edge of the water.
We watched him in respectful silence as he made his way into the ocean. We could see his shell bobbing through the waves, and then, just as the sun dipped below the horizon, he was gone.
It was Aunt Daisy's responsibility to keep watch through the night, waiting – hoping – that the turtle would return. I offered to sit with her, but she just waved me off. Her eyes were open, but her focus was deep below the waves with the sea turtle. She knew only what he knew.
The Sea Turtle Spell Page 5