Lilith sat back and chewed her lip thoughtfully, unable to dismiss her sense that she didn’t like the import of that.
Eventually, Lilith turned the successive cards face down, leaving only those up to The Emperor face up. With one last glance over them, she left the cards where they lay and went to make herself a pot of chamomile tea to help her ponder Mitch’s next move.
*
The newsroom was a familiar cacophony of sound and Mitch welcomed the evidence of organization after his muddled weekend.
“Get moved all right?” Isabel demanded cheerfully. Their current interim, she was young and idealistic, too thin to be healthy to Mitch’s way of thinking and a whiz with both her camera and their antiquated filing system. Today she wore black, despite the heat, her lips a decidedly Gothic burgundy.
“Pretty much,” Mitch admitted. He gave her clothing a significant glance. “You look like you’ve been hanging out with those Edwardian vampires on Queen West.”
“New guy,” Isabel conceded. “So, what’s going on today?”
“I don’t know yet.” Mitch noted that his boss was beckoning him into their morning meeting. He grabbed a coffee and decided to take a chance. “But maybe you could do me a favor in the interim.”
“Anything for the star reporter.” Isabel grinned. “Might as well learn from the best.”
Mitch took the compliment in stride, knowing an investigative reporter was only as good as his latest scoop. “Have a look through the files and see if you can find anything about cons done by fortune tellers. Maybe in teams. And whenever there’s a woman involved, try to get me a description.”
Isabel whistled. “Sounds like a juicy lead. We gonna bust somebody?”
Mitch shrugged, striving to look more casual than he felt about this. “You never know. You can only follow them up.”
“Okay. I’ll see what I can get.”
“Thanks.” Mitch nodded, then headed into the meeting, scalding his lip on the coffee. It wasn’t even worth it, the stuff tasted so bad. All the same, he felt a grim satisfaction with both his idea and Isabel’s agreement to help.
Because cons weren’t the only ones who could retrieve information and use it to their own advantage. A harmless wacko next door was one thing – but a scam being run on his stepmother by that neighbor was quite another. Mitch was markedly less well disposed to his beguiling neighbor. By the end of the day, he was certain he’d have the goods on Lilith Romano.
Or whoever she really was.
*
By Monday afternoon, Lilith knew she had a serious problem.
She hadn’t thought much of it when a trio of cable repairmen came to her door that morning, insisting that they had to have access to her yard to fix the main line. She didn’t have cable herself, but she knew the line ran across the end of the backyard, along with the telephone wires.
It had been a bit strange that the trio had lingered on the porch grinning goofily at her, especially after she told them where the gate was.
Even after she shut the door, they still stood there.
And when they turned up in the backyard, they seemed to spend a lot more time looking for her than fixing the cable line. One waved so hard when he glimpsed her in the kitchen that he nearly fell off his ladder.
Lilith decided they had just been compelled to sit through a seminar on improving customer relations or some nonsense and didn’t think too much more about it.
Monday lunch brought the paperboy, whom Lilith hadn’t even known still came to collect personally. And she didn’t even have the paper delivered – she bought it at the corner every day. An earnest twelve-year-old, he stood in her foyer and gaped at her like a fish out of water.
It was more than a bit uncomfortable, especially as the boy stammered and flushed and couldn’t manage to tell her why he was there.
Then he comped her for a month of newspapers, blushed scarlet, and ran.
Lilith watched him go in puzzlement. She checked her blouse and her skirt but found nothing odd about what she was wearing. Everything was done up as it should be, the foyer was orderly and there was no obvious indication of what could have made the boy respond that way.
Maybe it was something in the wind. Or the stars. Lilith checked her charts, but there was nothing adverse there.
She might have forgotten it all, if cranky Mr. Lewison next door hadn’t gone out of his way to be friendly when she was leaving to run errands. He even gave Lilith a bloom from his prize Austen rose, the one he guarded jealously from the most fleeting glance of admiration. He bowed, before her astonished eyes, and surrendered the rose with a romantic flourish.
“Beauty to beauty,” he declared gallantly.
Lilith put the rose in water and wondered if Mr. Lewison had gone back to drinking gin for breakfast again.
The boy at the grocery store insisted on carrying her box of acquisitions all the way to the house, flatly refusing a tip. He just grinned and said carrying her groceries was enough of a bonus for him.
Lilith was starting to think that things were definitely odd by the time she rode her ancient bike down to the occult bookstore for her afternoon session of readings. A startling number of car accidents seemed to occur right behind her.
She supposed the roads were getting really dangerous.
But she had never noticed so many men idling around, apparently with nothing better to do than whistle appreciatively at women on bicycles.
At least, not until she got to the bookstore. Oddly enough, there was a whole line of people waiting for her to read their cards. That was a bit disconcerting. Usually there were one or two anxious older women, or a few giggling teenage girls, but Lilith had never been confronted by fifty men who looked like they probably had real jobs.
Fifty men with their tongues hanging out.
She frowned and entered the bookstore, just as the first two started a shoving match as to who was actually at the front of the line. The argument quickly escalated into a fist fight, even though the proprietor – a reedy man of the gentle, daisies-in-guns variety – tried desperately to intervene.
One last punch resolved the matter and the loser went down. As Lilith watched in astonishment, the victor clutched his bloody nose and lunged into the chair opposite Lilith, a very familiar gleam in his eye.
“Hey, baby, what’s your sign?” he murmured, a wolfish grin at his own cleverness curving over his lips. “Maybe you and me could, like, make a love connection.”
And Lilith suddenly understood. These men were all in lust.
For her.
And it was all because of her spell.
She sat back in her chair and regarded the line of agitated men with dawning horror, the lines she had chanted trailing through her mind.
“Lover true, come to me,
Through the air or across the sea;
Once we loved through the night with style –
Come back NOW! I’ll make it worth your while.”
Oops.
Lilith checked the state of all the pants she could see and swallowed hard. Oops, oops, oops. She had concocted a love potion, drunk it, and flat out forgotten to make it specific to Mitch.
These men: the paperboy, the cable guys, the grocery clerk, they all hoped to seduce her. They were all expecting her to make it worth their while.
They didn’t even know why they were attracted to her – they were just like dogs following a bitch in heat.
And Lilith had done this to herself. Just like the song said.
She really had made Love Potion Number Nine was apparently irresistible to the male gender as a result.
Yet the one man at whom the spell was supposed to be targeted seemed to be immune. Didn’t that just figure? It was too bad, because Lilith could have used a staunch defender of her honor. She wasn’t entirely sure she could escape this bookstore unscathed otherwise.
It was doubly annoying to realize that defending a woman’s honor was probably something Mitch Davison did quite well.
/>
*
Mitch wasn’t in the best mood of his life. There seemed to be a lot of that going around. No doubt about it – when the facts didn’t come up the way he expected them to, the journalist in Mitch got cranky.
He climbed out of the subway station to the street and swung his briefcase into his other hand. Sweat trickled down his back as he trudged up his street.
He noted ruefully that his house was readily identifiable. Not only was it the worst-maintained dump on the block, the fastidiously kept house directly past it made the contrast unavoidable.
Lilith’s house. Mitch growled at the unwelcome reminder of the woman who was tormenting him. Not only had Isabel come up with a big fat zip on con teams in her foray through the files today, but they had discovered that Lilith Romano didn’t actually exist. Mitch had double-checked everything himself. But there it was.
It was as though she had never been.
Mitch smelled a story. But without anything in the files, he didn’t know where he’d find a lead.
Because people had to exist. They had to have social insurance numbers, they had to have immigration papers, they had to have bank accounts and various other numbers assigned to them.
Except Lilith didn’t.
Oh, she had bought the house ten years before all right, paid cash, which said something about the financial power of fortune telling that Mitch had never considered before. She had used a bogus social insurance number on the transaction, but it didn’t trace anywhere.
And before that property title, there was no record of Lilith Romance anywhere at all. She hadn’t been born here, she hadn’t immigrated here, she hadn’t ever been to the hospital, or passed a driver’s license test. She hadn’t had a run-in with the cops, she hadn’t filed a complaint with anybody anywhere.
She didn’t have a bank account. She didn’t have a phone. She didn’t answer surveys or buy investments or get on mailing lists. Somebody paid her property taxes in cash.
As far as Mitch could discern, she didn’t even pay income tax. That was a hell of a trick and one he wouldn’t mind learning himself. He eyed the winking neon sign in her window and resolved to check the business registry.
But Mitch was quite certain he wouldn’t find anything there either. He grimaced, pushed his way through the crowd of men on the sidewalk, and made his way up his own walkway.
The big question was why Lilith didn’t exist. Because people didn’t ‘disappear’ by accident. No, Lilith had spent a lot of moment making sure she couldn’t be found.
And honest people didn’t need to do that.
Mitch wasn’t going to consider that finding indications of Lilith’s nefarious intent was at the root of his bad mood. He wasn’t going to admit on any level that he’d been hoping that a little research would prove him overprotective and maybe even wrong.
He couldn’t be grumpy just because that hadn’t happened. After all, Mitch didn’t like being wrong, so being pleased by being proven wrong would have made no logical sense.
Mitch opened the front door and called as cheerful a greeting as he could manage. He had a policy of not bringing work – or its emotional fallout – home.
Jen squealed as she ran down the hall, the faithful Bun in tow, and threw herself into his arms. Mitch grinned and swung her high, very glad to see her giggling again.
“Daddy, we went swimming again. And we went to the store and Nana bought blue Jell-O and…”
Mitch shook his head with mock solemnity. “They don’t make blue Jell-O.”
“They do! Daddy, they do! We had some. It’s boo-berry.”
Mitch bounced his daughter on his hip and he headed for the kitchen, her litany of news running in one ear and out the other. Cooley nudged his knee, demanding his ears be scratched, his jowls dripping water.
Jason proudly displayed a mayonnaise jar. Its lid had been punctured, no doubt with one of Mitch’s better screwdrivers.
“I caught a cicada,” he declared and Mitch bent to squint into the jumble of grass.
“It’s a big one.”
Jen bounced Bun on her dad’s shoulder. “Nana made stir-fry and we helped and it took forever!”
Mitch looked up at that incredible bit of news. “Nana made a stir-fry?”
Jen and Jason nodded in unison.
Something was up. Mitch slanted a glance to Andrea who stirred honest-to-goodness vegetables a little too quickly to be entirely innocent.
What had happened while he was at work? Mitch wasn’t sure he wanted to know, the very presence of a healthy dinner hinting that it was something really bad.
Jen unwittingly spilled the beans. “And Daddy, Nana is going on a boat! A big white boat like on television!”
Mitch straightened. Andrea cast a tentative smile over her shoulder and stirred more quickly.
“Are you?” he asked, a decided frost in his tone.
His stepmother tossed her hair. “Love is in the gentle Caribbean breezes, Mitch,” she said. “I told you I was going.”
Mitch put Jen down as his temper came to a simmer. “I thought we had decided about this.”
“We did.” Andrea plunked a jug of grape Kool-Aid on the table with so much defiance that it sloshed high. “We just decided differently.”
Mitch kept his mouth shut while he counted to three.
It didn’t help a whole lot.
But then, Andrea didn’t know the whole story. Mitch cleared his throat and frowned. “Look, Andrea, I found out some stuff today. Someone” – he punctuated that word with a heavy glance – “has spent a lot of money to make sure she doesn’t have a paper trail. It’s like she doesn’t exist…”
Andrea dropped the spoon and spun in horror. “You snooped!”
“I did what I do best,” Mitch retorted. “And I did it for you.”
“Ha!” Andrea snatched up her wooden spoon and stirred with vigor. “You did it to prove that you were right. What is it with men? Why do you all have to be right, all the time, even when you’re wrong?”
“Andrea, what I found is not the mark of an honest citizen…”
“Oh, Mitch, give it a rest!” the older woman snapped. She threw the spoon into the skillet and turned a frustrated look on him. “I’m going on the cruise, and that’s that. Just let it go.”
“You should cancel it,” Mitch argued stubbornly. “Go on a cruise, any cruise, anywhere, just not that one. Book another.”
“It’s nonrefundable,” Andrea enunciated carefully. She banged a couple of pots. “And I’m glad. Now, sit down, the chicken’s getting cold.”
But Mitch wasn’t ready to let this go just yet.
Clearly, he wasn’t going to get through to Andrea now. She had that come-hell-or-high-water look that he knew better than to fight.
The argument had moved next door.
Because if Andrea was going to rely on Lilith’s advice, then Lilith had to be persuaded to abandon this con game.
Mitch knew he was the very man for the job.
“You go ahead,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
Andrea glanced up, no doubt hearing the resolve in his tone, but Mitch didn’t care. He strode down the hall, kicked open the storm door and stalked toward his neighbor’s porch.
It was only then that he noticed the collection of men and boys lingering on the sidewalk in front of Lilith’s house. There was even a cable television repair crew, their truck parked illegally, all three of them staring at Lilith’s house as though they couldn’t look away. Mitch followed their gazes but couldn’t see anything that would prompt such an expression of moonstruck wonder.
Mitch scowled and pushed his way through the small crowd, heading decisively for Lilith’s porch.
A lanky man stepped suddenly into Mitch’s path, holding a massive box of chocolates. ‘Are you going to talk to Lilith?” he whispered with obvious awe.
“Yeah. Why?” Mitch knew he didn’t imagine the wonder that swept through the ranks in the wake of his simple agreement.
Before Mitch could make sense of that, the man pressed the box insistently into Mitch’s hands. To keep it from falling, Mitch ended up taking it.
And the man darted away.
“But wait!” Mitch called. “You should take this to her yourself! Make your own apology!” But the man was running down the street as though the hounds of hell were after him.
It had to be the biggest damn box of chocolates Mitch had ever seen. And here he had thought that they only packaged them like this at Valentine’s Day. The smell of warm chocolate wafted through the cardboard and Mitch’s belly growled.
A teenage boy stepped forward then, offering a pink envelope, his expression hopeful. “It’s a card for her. Chicks like cards, don’t they? Don’t they?”
Mitch didn’t know what to say, his experience in such matters fairly limited and not particularly successful. “I guess.”
Mitch’s acceptance of this token seemed to turn him into the official envoy. He didn’t know what else to do. He certainly wasn’t expecting to get loaded up, but that was what happened. Every guy there had something for Lilith, some affectionate gift or another, and Mitch ended up carrying them all.
It was really weird.
Mitch wasn’t quite sure what to do to make them stop. He almost forgot that he was angry at Lilith, because the situation was so strange. The men and boys stepped back in turn as their tokens were entrusted to Mitch, their expressions hesitant and hopeful.
And horny.
Oh, yeah, Mitch knew that look. Been there, done that. He frowned not liking his role. He considered the chocolates, perfume, stuffed toys and balloons and thought about the yearning they represented. Before he could figure out what exactly to say, a throat was cleared.
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