“Not in love,” Bronwyn clarified. “More like in lust.”
“I tell you what, Bronwyn, you give fiftysomething a good name.” I laughed.
She gave us a cat-and-the-canary smile. “You get to be my age, and like men as much as I do, you learn a few tricks. When I was younger I always worried about how I looked, or what the man was thinking. Now I just have fun.”
“So, Lily, what’s your story?” Maya said, turning to me. “Tell us about your love life.”
“I . . . uh . . .”
Oscar trotted in and gazed at me. This was his kind of gabfest.
“There’s not much to tell, I’m afraid. I’ve moved around a lot,” I evaded. I heard an electronic sound. “Oh, Bronwyn, isn’t that your cell phone ringing?”
Her phone made the sound of the music that accompanied the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz. I hoped I would soon be able to lighten up enough to find it funny.
“Oh! I guess it is. . . .” She pawed through her satchel until she unearthed the phone, then chatted for a moment.
“That was my friend Casey. He tends bar down at the Lucky Star. He says there’s a great estate auction going on right down the street from him.”
“At ten o’clock at night?” I asked.
“He says it’s been going since noon, and they’re closing at midnight no matter what, even if they have to give the stuff away for free.”
I looked at Maya; she looked at Bronwyn; Bronwyn looked at me.
“Free’s my favorite price,” Maya said.
“Mine, too.”
“Mine three,” Bronwyn added with a grin.
We drove to the big warehouse down off Harrison, between Second and Third streets. The industrial metal doors were propped open, and a few dozen people milled about under harsh fluorescent lights, perusing red-lacquered armoires and end tables, wooden carvings, stone sculptures, oil paintings, woven rugs, carved brass dishes and cups. . . . According to the flyer, the man who had passed away was an inveterate traveler who couldn’t help but buy something in every country he visited. No doubt about it, these were the leftovers of a fascinating life. He had rented the warehouse just to house all his goodies.
I understood the impulse. I could easily have wound up that way myself—that was one reason I opened my shop, to be able to acquire great old clothes and pass them on, rather than hoard them.
Since the auction had been going on for most of the day, there were a whole lot of bright red Sold stickers attached to precious objects, but dozens of lots were still unspoken for. We wandered around looking at the many offerings. Bronwyn was taken with a Japanese iron tea ceremony kettle and brazier, decorated with a spray of intricate flowers that managed to make the heavy metal object seem at once strong yet delicate. Maya lusted after a hundred-year-old cloisonné elephant-shaped jewelry box that opened under the colorful, decorated trunk. In typically strange fashion, I fell in love with a huge bag of brass goat bells; don’t ask me why.
I had to learn the rudiments of auctions when I opened my business and realized that, despite all the clothes I had gathered in my travels, I still needed more inventory before opening the doors of Aunt Cora’s Closet to the public. I had seen auctions in the movies, but the reality was a lot less glamorous. Perhaps if we were bidding at Christie’s in New York City it would be a different ball game, but the auctions I had attended consisted of ordinary jeans-clad people, like me, vying for mildewed cardboard boxes full of classic LPs or ceramic pitchers shaped like cows.
My particular interest, of course, was textiles, with special attention to women’s garments. But bidders couldn’t be choosers. You bid on a “lot,” which might be a single piece of furniture, but more often is a grouping of items either of a particular theme or from a particular seller. The winner of the bid takes all—you might want only one item in a lot, but you have to take the whole shebang. This could lead to the discovery of some little unexpected treasure that had been tucked under another item, but most times the real junk makes its way straight to the Goodwill donation box or, if beyond redemption, to the landfill.
A registration table was set up by the main doors. In exchange for my name and contact information I was given a wooden paddle marked with the number 32, then bid on and won a lot that included a bunch of silk pajamas and kimonos. I also landed a big, funny carved wood chair that looked a bit like a child’s conception of a throne. The back was entirely decoupaged with a 1920s theme. It would look great in my store, right next to the coatrack. I even gave in to temptation and bought the goat bells, although if I had waited until midnight they would probably have been given away for free. Not a soul competed against me.
Finally I bid on an evil-looking, powerful stone statue, in large part to keep him out of the wrong hands. Only about a foot tall, he was squat and crudely formed, his features blunt and expressionless. According to the three-by-five card that listed his origin, he was acquired at a roadside stand not far from Machu Picchu, in Peru, though as far as I knew the Inca rarely produced freestanding sculpture like this one. The vibrations were powerful—not necessarily malevolent, but he was the sort who would appreciate being buried and left alone, or given his own altar with the proper respect. He could be a powerful ally, if you could keep him under control.
Someone was bidding steadily against me. This is by far the most annoying thing about auctions—you can’t help but feel animosity toward the one or two bozos insisting on driving up the price. I looked around to take a look at my competition: an older guy with a full Santa Claus-type white beard, and a woman . . . The voice sounded a little too familiar. She was hidden behind the crowd, but I craned my neck and scootched over about six inches to see who it was.
A small woman with pretty eyes and a habit of rising up on her toes, up and down, up and down. Sandra.
What was she doing here?
The old man dropped out of the bidding when we passed the two-hundred-dollar mark. Sandra seemed so intent that I backed off as well, and she clapped when she was awarded the cold stone statue.
I made my way to the back of the bidding floor and edged up to her.
“Hi, Sandra. What are you doing here?”
“I’ve been here for hours. Got lots of great stuff.”
“Oh, good for you. Are you buying to sell in the shop, or just for you?”
“Oh, resale, or at least that’s what I say,” she said with a wink. A resale license allows a person to buy things without paying sales tax, the assumption being that you would in turn give the state its slice of the pie by charging sales tax upon reselling the item. A lot of people with resale licenses play a bit loosey-goosey with the tax-free privilege. But questionable business ethics were not paramount in my mind at the moment.
“Sandra, do you know anything about that little guy you just won?”
She looked at me with trepidation. “You backed off the bid, Lily. It’s mine.”
“I know that.” I wondered how much to say, and how to say it. Sandra clearly believed in something beyond the concrete world, but she had a curious take on things. I couldn’t help but think about the odd gleam in her eye when she showed me the Malleus Maleficarum, and the way she mentioned, oh, so casually, about Bronwyn being a witch. “I just think you should be careful. I know a little bit about—”
“I know everything I need to know, Lily, or soon will,” snapped Sandra.
Before I could ask her what she meant, Bronwyn and Maya joined us. Maya was flushed with victory after scoring her very first auction buy: the cloisonné elephant.
“Maybe I should bid for the teakettle,” Bronwyn pondered out loud. “I can’t decide.”
Maya’s gaze met mine, and we shared a smile.
“Bronwyn, you have at least three kettles at the shop already,” Maya pointed out. “I’m afraid to ask, but how many do you have at home?”
Bronwyn smiled, chagrined. “Several, but I only ever use the old copper one my mother gave me, anyway.”
“Why would anyone
need more than one teakettle?” Sandra demanded, her eyes darting about, looking at each one of us in turn.
We all laughed and shrugged.
“Well, I’ve got to run. Great to see you.” Sandra quite literally trotted off to claim her sinister prize.
We watched her jog across the crowded room.
“Is it just me . . . ?” I began.
Maya shook her head with a rueful smile. “Sandra has not mastered the concept of personal space.”
“So she seems kind of . . . odd . . . to you, too?” As one who had been looked on as an outsider all my life, I didn’t make the accusation casually.
“Oh, yes, she’s got her own way of doing things,” Bronwyn said. “In fact, she wanted to join the coven at one point, but she just didn’t fit in. It was quite awkward, since we pride ourselves on staying open to all. But there was something about her approach to the whole thing. . . .”
“I knew her from before,” Maya added. “She’s involved in the neighborhood association over by Frances, not Hunters Point per se but near India Basin. But she was always after Frances to sell her place. As a matter of fact, that’s why I first asked to interview Frances, because Sandra sounded so sure she would be leaving the neighborhood soon.”
“That reminds me: Have you ever heard about Frances renting out her house for tours?”
She shook her head. “I wouldn’t be too surprised, though. She was always looking to make some cash, which is why she wanted to sell the clothes. It made me wonder why she didn’t just sell that big old house and have done with it.”
“Do you have any recordings from your interviews with her?”
Maya shook her head. “She wouldn’t let me record her. And even the written notes I took . . . to tell you the truth, I couldn’t get her to tell me much beyond what I told you the other day: when she married, the dates of her children’s births, that sort of thing. I was hoping with time . . . . You know how it is with some people: They take a while to open up. Frances seemed sweet and friendly, but she was actually pretty closed off.”
I finally got home about midnight. Oscar was beside himself, walking along the backs of the furniture and jabbering nonstop about the day in the life of a neighborhood celebrity. He had already made his way through most of the Chinese leftovers, so I offered him a cookie, took a long shower, and pulled on some old flannel pajamas and new fluffy wool socks.
By the time I came out of the bedroom, Oscar was snoring in his nest of blankets on top of the refrigerator. When he first chose this spot for his bed I worried that he would get a crick in his neck—he had to fold himself up to fit in the little cubby. But he seemed content and refused my offer of the couch. He had found an old green wool blanket and a threadbare wedding-ring quilt in the linen closet, made them into a little nest, and settled right in.
I tiptoed around the kitchen as I made a cup of tea, though I had already learned that nothing short of a bomb would awaken this particular goblin when he was in deep slumber.
I looked at him with some envy. Despite my lack of sleep lately, I wasn’t ready for bed, my thoughts still on the bizarre events of the past couple of days. Feeling rather foolish, I decided to practice some basic magic to be sure I hadn’t lost my powers altogether. Sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of my coffee table, I commanded the electric lights on and off. I lit the candles scattered throughout the apartment without touching them. I closed and opened the bedroom door with my mind’s energy.
Finally, I looked through my Book of Shadows, flipping the pages with the wind from my thoughts. I looked up La Llorona to see what the book had to say, in case there was anything obvious I had forgotten. I read about her story, her ghostly calling, her dragging people down into the water with her. Of course, Aidan was right: She wouldn’t kill in a house, in a circle. And the only hope for Jessica was to trade a soul, and not just any soul. It had to be one La Llorona truly wanted.
I checked it against the book Aidan had lent me. There I found a snippet of an old song:Don’t go down to the river, child,
Don’t go there alone;
For the sobbing woman, wet and wild,
Might claim you for her own.
She keens when the sun is murky red;
She wails when the moon is old;
She cries for her babies, still and dead,
Who drowned in the water cold.
It sent a shiver up my spine, but it didn’t tell me anything new. The murky red sun was sunset, and the old moon was full. La Llorona would be strongest during the full moon, which was coming up in two days.
While I was looking through Aidan’s tome, the pages of my Book of Shadows started flipping on their own, stopping at a recipe for a sweetness charm. Strange, I didn’t remember this page. Which was odd, since I had read through this Book of Shadows for so many years that the pages were soft as cloth from the frequency of their turning. On the other hand, it wasn’t the first time something had been added to the book without my knowledge; all I could assume was that, like any living thing, it had its own life.
This page was written in Graciela’s shaky pen. When she was a young woman her script was lovely and formal, but with age it had deteriorated until it looked like chicken scratches interrupted by an occasional loop-the-loop. I used to tease her about it. The thought made me miss her with a visceral, physical yearning deep in my gut. One reason Frances’s death bothered me so much was that she reminded me of Graciela. But then again, maybe all sweet old ladies had a certain way about them. On the other hand, Graciela wasn’t sweet as much as formidable and impressive.
I read the page that had opened for me. Sweetness charm bags usually took the form of sewn packets rather than bags that could be opened and their contents changed. This wasn’t an easy spell to cast, much less to maintain. Changing one’s physical or psychic appearance took great power and skill. In order to charge the bags, a spell was cast with a great sacrifice. A blood sacrifice.
The witch in “Hansel and Gretel” had used a sweetness charm to cover her evil intentions. Nibble, nibble, little mouse. Wasn’t that how the refrain went in the story? I cast my mind back to the tale, remembering when my mother used to read to me, before she sent me away. We had a big, thick book of classic illustrated Grimm fairy tales that seemed as large and heavy as I was. I had a memory of snuggling in my mother’s lap, holding the massive book on my knees while she read to me in her deep, lovely voice.
Closing my eyes I experienced the scent of my mother, the timbre of her voice, the part in the story where the starving children are eating from the magical house made of cookies and candy, and the old lady says, Nibble, nibble, little mouse. Who’s that nibbling at my house?
I had a sudden image of Frances beckoning Maya and me down the hallway, just like a sweet witch luring us to our doom. Wasn’t that what Tomás had said?
My cuckoo clock struck one, making me realize I had been staring at the books for nearly an hour.
Before retiring to bed I poured a small circle of salt on the coffee table and drew a pentagram within it, laid out two white candles, one blue candle, one red, one yellow, and one green, all of which had been dressed with olive oil. I combined two drops of rosemary oil, three of frankincense, and one-fourth teaspoon of dragon’s blood resin in my oil censer, and set out stones of red jasper and Apache tears. Then I chanted a protection charm, asking for strength and clarity.
As I laid out a white cloth for the stones, I remembered: I still had Frances’s wedding dresses! Why hadn’t I thought of them before? Maybe they could tell me something. I ran down the stairs to the back room of the store, flicked on the overhead light, and opened the storage closet. I had stashed the gowns here shortly after the police confiscated the other clothes from Frances’s house.
They weren’t in the closet.
I checked all the changing rooms, out on the floor, behind the counter. Plenty of wedding dresses, but none were the ones I was looking for.
Frances’s wedding gowns were gone.<
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Chapter 13
The next morning I dressed in another recently acquired vintage outfit, this one bought from a charming widow who lived in a palatial French-château style home in the hills of Piedmont, overlooking Oakland and the bay. On a clear day, the woman told me, one could see the Golden Gate Bridge and all the way through to the open ocean. When I had arrived for the clothes, she invited me to stay for lunch and proceeded to launch into a series of risqué stories about her many romantic escapades.
The garment was called a “wiggle dress” because it fit close to the body down to the knee-length ruffled hem, and, I could only presume, looked best when one wiggled as one walked. It was rather ridiculous, a black background with hot pink polka dots, but I felt the need for a little absurdity lately. More important, its vibrations were brash and gutsy. I wore a short pink jacket over the spaghetti straps for the sake of modesty and the cool, cloudy day.
About noon I looked up to see Frances’s lawyer, Delores Keener, walking into the store. She paused and looked around briefly, then smiled warmly when she saw me.
“Lily, how are you? I would have come earlier, but I’ve been a bit under the weather,” she said. She was beautifully dressed in a charcoal pantsuit, but her color was off, slightly grayish green, like those kids after the ill-fated camping trip so many years ago. “Can you believe what happened with poor Frances? I begged her to leave that neighborhood, but she said she’d never think of selling that house.”
“I was just thinking about you yesterday,” I said. Her unexpected presence in my store made me wonder if I had accidentally summoned her. “I saw the article in the paper about you running for the DA’s office.”
“Can you believe it? Me, district attorney?”
“I’m sure you’d be great.”
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