Work Like a Charm

by Cate Martin

  "Definitely a nice bonus," he said, smiling back at me.

  He wasn't wrong about the sausage.

  When we finally reached the cellar under the former beer hall that was Otto's headquarters, the normally clammy coolness of the air was positively delicious on my overheated skin. This time Edward didn't have us wait outside the final inner circle of crates, just rapped loudly on the corner of one as we walked into the walled-off space.

  Otto was at the table that sat under the bare bulb that hung from the low ceiling. He appeared to be examining some sort of hand-drawn map of a building, making a notation with a stub of a pencil, but when he glanced up and saw the four of us coming in, he tossed the stub aside and came around the table with a big grin on his face.

  "How lovely to see you all again. Miss Sophie," he said, taking her hand and pressing a kiss to the back of it. Sophie slipped it out of his grasp when I think he would have preferred to hold it a bit longer, folding her arms as she looked around the room. The usual collection of stolen items and boxes of illegal alcohol were strewn around the space, stacked up high against the crate walls.

  But Otto himself was looking very different. Gone were the clothes of a dock worker. Now he wore a tailored suit complete with shining watch chain, and his thick blond hair was slicked back in what was a stylish haircut in either of our eras. His blue eyes were all over Sophie, but eventually he spared a glance at the rest of us.

  "What can I help you all with today?" Otto asked, rubbing his hands together.

  "We're looking for someone," Sophie said. "A medium by the name of Cora Fox? She might be doing business under another name."

  "Cora Fox," Otto said, his voice brimming with admiration. "Ah, she's a fine one. Not as fine as you, to be sure, but a real shrewd operator."

  "So she is a con artist," I said.

  "She's a medium," Otto said with a shrug. "She has her own network of sources, but there's a bit of overlap between her network and mine. Not the sort of situation I usually let stand. No man can serve two masters and all that. But I make an exception for Cora."

  "In exchange for a cut of the action?" Edward guessed.

  "Hey. I'm a businessman," Otto said. "What are you looking for Cora for?"

  "We just need to talk to her about something," I said. "Charm school business."

  "Indeed," Otto said, stroking his chin as he regarded me. I didn't think he quite believed me, but he let it go.

  "Can you give us her address?" Sophie asked.

  "I can do you one better," Otto said with a grin. "I can take you there."

  "I'm sure that's not necessary," I said.

  "It's too hot to walk so far, and I have a new car I'm just dying to take for a spin," Otto said. "Who wouldn't want to ride around town with such a trio of lovely ladies?"

  Before any of us could answer, he went to the gap in the crate wall and shouted for someone named Benny to pull the car around. Then he rolled up the drawing and a few others and stuffed them in a chest which he locked, putting the little key in the pocket of his waistcoat. Then he took a hat down off a peg and offered Sophie his arm. She seemed to consider it for a moment before sliding her hand around it, letting him walk her back up out of the cellar to the street.

  The rest of us trailed a bit further behind.

  Knowing that Otto ran some sort of criminal enterprise - one that had taken a recent more successful turn to judge by the dapper suit and bowler hat that had replaced the work clothes and flat hat we had seen him in before - I was in no way surprised to see the car that pulled up in front of us as we waited on the sidewalk. It was just the sort of car gangsters would flee from a robbery in, hanging out the suicide doors and firing Tommy guns at the coppers.

  The boy behind the wheel didn't seem old enough to drive, or indeed tall enough to reach the pedals. Otto opened the passenger door and all but shoved Edward and me into the front seat before opening the back door and helping Sophie glide into the back seat. Brianna was left pretty much to her own devices, climbing in after Otto and tucking herself tightly into her own corner.

  There were no seat belts, and the shifter in the middle of the floor compelled me to crush up close against Edward.

  "Here," Edward said, sliding his arm out from between us and resting it on the back of the seat, not quite touching my shoulders. "Better?"

  "Yes," I said.

  He had no right to smell so lovely. Especially not when I, having spent the day perspiring in a wool sweater, definitely did not.

  Otto leaned over my shoulder to give Benny directions on where to drive, saw me pressed up against Edward and gave us both a cheeky wink before sitting back and turning all his attention to Sophie.

  "Miss Sophie, you look positively sinful in that dress," Otto said, sliding closer to her.

  "Thank you," Sophie said with measured coolness. "What can you tell us about Cora Fox?"

  "Ah, Cora," Otto said, that warm tone dripping from his words again. "She is special. Life can't keep Cora Fox down, and believe me; it's tried."

  "How so?" Sophie asked.

  "Well, she's from New York City originally," he said. "Her mother was from Ireland. She came over alone, no people to look out for her, and she got herself in a bad way pretty much at once. Unwed mothers don't get the plum jobs, to be sure. So Cora grew up no better than Edward or I."

  I looked up at Edward, curious what sort of childhood Otto was eluding to, but didn't want to ask and risk missing something Otto said about Cora. Edward noticed me looking up at him and gave me a smile. He had the warmest brown eyes. I could believe Otto had endured a hard-knock childhood, but if Edward had too, I saw no sign of it in the earnest young man pressed up beside me.

  "Did Cora also go into service?" Sophie asked.

  "No," Otto said with a laugh. "No, that definitely wasn't the life for Cora. She was far too ambitious for that. No, she was determined to marry well and improve her station. Once you meet her, you'll know, but she beats even our Edward here for seeming swanker than she is. Dress her up, put a glass of champagne in her hand, and set her down in the middle of any upper-crust party and no one would ever know that she doesn't belong there."

  "I don't know. Those tend to be pretty tight circles," Sophie said.

  "Here, maybe, but in New York things are different," Otto said. I rather doubted he had ever been further away from St. Paul than across the river in Minneapolis, but I didn't interrupt. "She did land a fellow who was all set to marry her, but then he left to fight in the war and never came back to her."

  "How sad," Sophie said, and Otto seemed to read more emotion in her tone than I did because he took her hand as if she were in dire need of comfort.

  "That's not the saddest bit," he said. "He had fully intended to marry her, but he needed time to bring his father around, who was dead set against the match. So Cora carried on alone. The day she found out he had died in the trenches from some godforsaken disease was the day she found out she was with child."

  "That is tragic," Sophie said, gently extracting her hand from his grasp.

  "She tried to make a go of it in New York. With no chance of marrying into the wealthy class, she took that same skill set and put it to better use."

  "Working as a medium," Sophie guessed.

  "Indeed. But eventually, she had worked that market dry and came here to test the waters. So far she's been doing gangbusters." He fell silent for a moment, and I glanced back to see him giving Sophie another assessing look. "Miss Sophie, that dress was just made for dancing."

  "Yes, it was," Sophie said. If it were possible for words to drip with icicles, hers did. "Otto, it's very kind of you to help us out, we appreciate it very much, but I'm afraid anything more than a business relationship between us is quite out of the question."

  "Not good enough for you?" he asked with an edge to his voice that sent a chill up my spine.

  "Of course that's not it," Sophie said, warming up her tone to an almost friendly level. "You in that suit, in this love
ly car, would be a date worthy of any girl. Alas, my heart belongs to another."

  "Who is he?" Otto asked.

  "No one you know," Sophie assured him. "Just a boy back home in New Orleans. A childhood sweetheart."

  "Childhood sweethearts. Always a lovely thing," Otto said begrudgingly. "Still, New Orleans is awfully far away."

  "Yes, it is," Sophie said wistfully, and for the first time it occurred to me that she might not just be telling a story to keep Otto at arm's length. Had she really left someone behind when she'd come to the school?

  The car lurched as the boy inexpertly engaged the parking brake. We had reached our destination.

  Chapter 14

  I hadn't been paying attention to where we were going and didn't recognize the neighborhood we were in. The houses were modest but well-maintained, so I guessed the people here were comfortably middle class. The house we were parked in front of had a hedge that framed the walk up to the front porch then took right angles to form a border between the yard and the sidewalk. It looked a bit shaggy and overgrown, but given the unseasonably warm weather, this wasn't so unusual. Whoever did the gardening would be in leaf raking mode now, counting down the days until snow would need to be shoveled.

  "Wait," Sophie said as Otto started up the walk. "I think the three of us should speak to her alone."

  "You don't want an introduction first?" Otto asked, looking at Sophie but still taking a step or two closer to the door.

  "I don't think that will be necessary. She'll know who we are," Sophie said.

  "Right enough," Otto said and walked back to the car. "I'll wait here to give you a lift back to your house when you're done."

  "I'm sure we can find our own way back," I said. "You must be busy, and this might take a while."

  "No worries," Otto said, climbing back into the back seat and stretching out. "I can use a little cat nap."

  "If you're sure," Sophie said. He gave her a wink then took off his hat, settling back against the far door of the car before setting the hat over his face to block out the sun.

  "What about you?" I asked Edward. "Your lunch break must be long past over. And you have that promotion coming; you don't want to compromise that."

  "I'll be fine," Edward said. "To be honest, I'm kind of curious what this is all about."

  "I'm not sure how much I can even explain," I said, glancing at Sophie and Brianna. It wasn't like when Cynthia had been murdered. That had been pretty easy to convey with the magic bits carefully excised. But this? With all the magic redacted, there wasn't going to be much left to convey.

  "Don't pry, Edward," Otto said from beneath his hat. "Charm school business is none of our business."

  "You don't have to stay," I said.

  "I'll be here," he said and gave me a little nudge to follow Sophie and Brianna up the walk.

  Sophie gave her usual brisk knock, which was answered almost at once. The interior of the house was quite dark, and the girl who opened the door seemed to know it, as she took half a step out onto the porch before looking up at us. She was young, younger even than Coco, I would guess nine or ten, so it was a bit of a mystery why she wasn't at school.

  Or why she dressed like someone's super religious maiden aunt. Even in the heat, her wool dress was buttoned all the way up her throat, her lovely brown hair pulled back into a bun so severe I was surprised any of it stayed attached to her scalp.

  "Yes?" she asked, blinking up at us.

  "We're here to see Miss Cora Fox," Sophie said, speaking slowly as if the girl might have trouble understanding her Creole accent.

  "You don't have an appointment. It's only barely one, far too early for appointments," the girl said.

  "We're not here for a… seance," Brianna said. "We just have a few questions."

  The girl blinked up at us for another long moment. If she was trying to decide whether to let us in or not, I saw no sign of it on her face. But then she nodded and stepped back to let us follow her into a cramped foyer. Straight ahead of us the narrow hall split into an even narrower staircase going up and a hallway continuing on to the only patch of sunlight I could see. There was a set of French doors to our right which even closed ought to be letting in a little sun, but all I could see through the glass was what appeared to be the back of a cabinet of some sort.

  Strange furniture arranging choice.

  "You can sit in the parlor," the girl said, waving a hand to the room beyond an open set of French doors to the left. "I'll go upstairs and see if she is receiving." She looked at us again for a long moment, assessing us one at a time, then heaved a sigh. Her next words had clearly been dictated to her on many occasions, and she read them back to us now with all the obvious reluctance a kid of ten could muster. "The spirits occupy her nights and convening with them is quite exhausting. As such she is required to rest during the daytime hours, but I shall inquire if she is capable of seeing you at this time." She waved us towards the parlor again, and only once we were all moving in that direction did she turn and head up the stairs.

  "Strange kid," I said.

  "That sounded like a rehearsed speech," Sophie said as she moved around the room, touching the various knick-knacks. They looked mostly like the sort of cheap knock-offs that a particularly unknowledgeable tourist might accumulate from China, Japan, India, and Egypt. If I had to bet, I'd say Cora had gotten them all in New York City.

  "We're not the first people to come during the daytime with questions," I said. "Prior run-ins with the police?" A familiar shape caught my eye, and I slipped around a loveseat to take a closer look at a cabinet in the shadows under the heavily draped front window. Art deco. The sort of thing meant to be passed down over generations.

  "Or with truancy officers," Brianna said. "Why isn't that girl in school like Coco?"

  "Because she learns at home," said a voice from the doorway and we turned to see the outline of an imposing woman framed by the French doors. Somehow a beam of sunshine had penetrated the gloom of the house to light up the foyer behind her, putting her own features into shadow.

  Then she plucked a shawl higher up on her shoulders and stepped into the parlor. She was tall, over six feet I was sure and statuesque. In another age, she would surely have become a supermodel with her high cheekbones, sultry dark eyes, and thick waves of chestnut hair that hung loosely around her shoulders.

  We all stood rather stunned where we were, Sophie on tiptoe as she examined a painting on the wall, Brianna actually with a bronze figure in her hands, me half bent over the cabinet I was sure had been in Mina's living room in 2018. But the woman didn't seem to notice any of us, just slipped past the round table in the center of the room and perched herself on the edge of the largest chair, its tall back higher even than the top of her head.

  Sophie was the first of us to recover her wits. "We have some questions," she said, but the woman spread out her hands, indicating the other chairs clustered around the little table.

  "Please, sit," she said. "I am Cora Fox. I will answer any questions you might have, but I have some questions of my own first."

  "What sort of questions?" Sophie asked as we each took a chair.

  "Not questions for you," Cora said and held out a hand for me. I was puzzled at first and had the urge to flinch back, but she gestured again, and I realized she wanted to see my hand. I held it out, and she turned it over, her warm fingertips tracing over the lines of my palm. "Just as I thought. You are a pawn in a larger game than you know."

  "Me?" I all but squeaked.

  "Really?" Sophie said, with that level of disdain she was so good at mustering. Cora shot her a quelling look, then reached out for Brianna's hand. Brianna looked like she'd really rather not, but Sophie gave a little shrug, and she relented. Cora gave her palm a more thorough examination than she had mine before saying, "you serve a mistress who is not who you believe she is."

  "Me or us?" Brianna asked, her eyes firmly on the floor as she hugged her palm close to her chest. But Cora didn't answer
, just turned her attention to Sophie, who held out her palm while somehow managing to look down her nose at the far taller Cora.

  "Very interesting," Cora said, tracing line after line across Sophie's palm. She kept doing this without speaking further until even Sophie's patience gave out.

  "What is interesting?" she demanded.

  "You have a calling," Cora said, finally releasing her hand. "A calling more powerful even than your mistress."

  "Are you talking to all three of us?" Brianna asked, but Cora ignored the question. She reached forward, catching the edge of a purple square of silk cloth that was draped over the central table and pulling it away to reveal a crystal ball. A single beam of light from the foyer found it, refracting in the heart of the glass to dazzle all of us gathered around it.

  I knew she was a con artist, but I couldn't help respecting her game.

  Cora leaned forward, moving her hands around the ball without touching it. Sophie crossed her arms and sat back in her chair. Brianna continued to hug her own hand close and mostly studied the floor. I watched the patterns of the light within the ball but saw nothing unusual. There was a smell like incense but more perfumey. I had smelled it when we first came into the parlor, but it was stronger now. I was pretty sure it was clinging to the clothes Cora wore, trapped in the fringe of her Spanish shawl and the thick folds of her heavy, floor-length skirt.

  "Yes," Cora said as she gazed into the glass. "There is another power, more powerful than the one you serve, and through you, that power will find a justice long delayed."

  "Okay," Sophie said like an adult playing along with a child's game.

  "Do you think that's why we're here today?" I asked, trying to bring the meeting back on track. The smell was making my head swim, and I had a strong urge to throw open the blackout curtains and let in some sun and fresh air.

  Cora looked deeper into her ball before answering me. "No. That's not why you're here. You are here on a terribly mundane matter."

  "Yes, I suppose to some murder is terribly mundane," Sophie said.

  "Whose murder?" Cora asked, sitting back in her own chair and folding her arms in an imitation of Sophie. I wasn't sure if that was deliberate or not.