A Cast-Off Coven (25 page)

“Interesting.”

“I hear Todd lost his mom early—she walked out on him and his dad. Maybe he’s looking for a substitute,” Kevin suggested, not unkindly.

“Could be, though I’m not sure a big difference in age is necessarily a result of trauma,” I said. “Maybe it’s just one of those strange quirks, where they fell in love with each other despite the obvious differences.”

“You’re a romantic at heart, Lily,” teased Maya.

“I just think people can fall in love, even if they come from really different backgrounds,” I said. Or at least I hoped they could.

Just then I noticed Dave Kessler walk into the gallery with Andromeda Becker. I was surprised to see them; from our talk the other day, I had gathered that neither of them was a big Ginny Mueller fan.

“So what do you call that guy, then?” They all turned to look. “Dave Kessler, the man with Andromeda? There’s at least as much of an age difference between them as with Todd and Marlene.”

“That guy’s dating Andromeda Becker?” Kevin asked, surprise in his voice.

I nodded. “So what would you call him? A tiger?”

“More like a dirty old man,” Kevin said.

“That sounds about right,” Wendy agreed with a smile.

The crowd sipped wine and oohed and aahed over Ginny’s bright, abstract canvases and even more difficult-to-decipher sculptures. Fellow students and outsiders alike seemed to be bowled over by the work. I even saw Dave Kessler put a red dot sticker, signaling a sale, on the frame of one expansive, colorful oil painting.

I noticed Todd standing off to the side while Marlene chatted with a group of what looked to be potentially wealthy donors. I took the opportunity to talk with him alone.

“Hi, Todd. How’s it going?”

“Well, thanks. Great turnout, isn’t it?”

“I’m so glad for Ginny. Todd, I know this is awkward timing, but I wanted to ask you: Andromeda mentioned you two talked the night Becker was killed. She was upset.”

Todd’s eyes looked wary. His nostrils flared slightly.

“Becker was trying to talk Andromeda into pursuing a relationship with Walker Landau. I thought it was just plain creepy.”

“Isn’t Andromeda old enough to make her own decisions?”

“I guess . . . but Becker was a hard one to go up against. So I thought I could talk to Walker, get him to lay off.”

Speaking of Walker Landau, it dawned on me that he was rather conspicuous by his absence tonight.

“Did Walker have some sort of pull over Becker?”

I could feel Todd’s aura shift. He looked over at me, startled. Then he relaxed and shrugged.

“I guess now that Becker’s dead, it doesn’t really matter. You know the suicide that supposedly took place on the bell tower stairs? Walker thought Jerry Becker actually pushed the guy down the stairs all those years ago.”

“Did he say what made him think that?”

He shook his head. “Personally, I hated the idea. I was always rather taken by the romance of the suicide, loving someone that much. It sort of ruins it to think it was actually murder.”

“Murder? What was murder?” asked Marlene as she came up to us.

“These art openings are murder,” Todd responded smoothly. “How long do we have to stay?”

“Oh, you naughty boy.” Marlene poked him in the side and favored him with a coy smile. All I could think of was wildcats. “You know perfectly well we have to act as host and hostess tonight. Poor Ginny is overwhelmed.”

I followed Marlene’s gaze to her daughter, who lurked in the corner, looking glum. She was wearing her usual ripped jeans, but she had dressed them up with a black top slit asymmetrically on one shoulder, her short hair artistically tousled; lots of eye makeup; heavy lip gloss; huge chandelier earrings of worked silver that caught the light whenever she turned her head. She looked good as always, piquant and big eyed . . . but lost. One thing was certain: She did not have the mien of an artist whose dream had come true.

“Is she okay?” I asked.

“It’s all a bit much,” Marlene said. “With art openings, you work your fingers to the bone up until the last second, and it can be hard to be scintillating after that.”

“Marlene, I know this isn’t the best time to talk about this, but I think you should consider closing the school. Just for a few days.”

Her sherry-colored eyes fixed on me. “What are you talking about?”

“You know yourself that things are getting out of hand there. The students are bickering; they can’t be getting much done.”

“I just don’t know. . . . I’ll think about it,” she said, sounding distracted and looking over my shoulder.

“If you could close for a few days, I could . . .”

My attention was caught by something stuck to Marlene’s intricately crocheted coat—a small piece of paper. I picked it off.

“Oh, that’s nothing,” Marlene said. “I was working on a collage piece earlier.”

I studied it. Faded ink on yellowed parchment paper. I could make out part of a word; it looked French.

“Where did you get this?” I asked her, but Marlene had already moved on, fulfilling her hostess duties, chatting now with the mayor and his wife.

Todd began to follow in her wake, but I grasped his arm.

“Todd, you didn’t happen to take a letter from the third-floor closet, did you?”

“What?”

“There was a letter, written in French. It was with the stuff in the closet; it must have been written to one of the nuns.”

“I don’t remember seeing anything like that. Sorry. I’d better get back to Marlene,” he said, and headed after her.

I stood staring down at the little scrap of paper, trying to glean something from it.

“Did you buy the smallest painting Ginny had for sale?”

I looked up and smiled at Luc.

“Not exactly. Luc, do you know what happened to the French letter you started reading in the closet the other night?”

“I put it back in the box where I found it.”

“And I have the box at my store, but not the letter. Strange.”

“Maybe it’s still in the closet?”

“Maybe. Anyway, how are you?”

“Do you mean in the sense of making polite party chitchat, or in the larger sense?”

“The larger, I guess. How is . . . what we talked about yesterday?”

“Nothing new to report. Some weirdness to be sure, but I’m getting a lot of work done. I just don’t always remember doing it.”

“Luc, I told you yesterday: You should stay away from the school. It could be dangerous.”

“It’s not that easy. I work there.”

“Couldn’t you go stay with Max, or your father? Doesn’t he live around here? I think you should be around people you can trust. Just for a few days. I’m hoping to figure out what’s going on.”

“I have to hand it to Ginny,” Luc said, looking around the room and nodding absentmindedly. “This is some amazing artwork.”

“You like it?”

He nodded. “Very much.”

“Oh, me, too,” said Bronwyn as she joined us.

“Isn’t it something?” Susan said breathlessly as she whirled by, gushing about the newest young artistic talent, snapping pictures with a tiny digital camera, and jotting down notes in a leather-bound book.

Not for the first time, I was the pariah in the room.

Okay, so I wasn’t a modern-art lover. I really never even understood Pablo Picasso’s appeal; I could see that the cubist revolution was important to the art world, but I didn’t particularly care. Anything later than his blue period failed to evoke any emotional response from me. And don’t even get me started on Jasper Johns, or Jackson Pollock, or Rothko.

I tried to keep an open mind, but all I could think about was yet another story I knew from childhood:
The Emperor’s New Clothes
.

I ducked out of the reception early, not wanting to come up with one more polite way of not answering when people asked me what I thought of Ginny’s style.

Besides, something else had occurred to me. Maya mentioned that Jerry Becker had been staying at the Fairmont Hotel, on Nob Hill. Since the murder investigation was still open, surely the room would still be intact?

It was a long shot at best. If Inspectors Romero and Nordstrom had found something amongst Becker’s possessions that looked to be occult in any way, they would have asked me about it already, wouldn’t they? But that was presuming they would recognize it. Even I didn’t know what I was looking for. What might Becker have used to conjure a fiend?

I drove to the top of Nob Hill and used my parking charm—one of the best things about being an urban witch—to secure a good spot right in front of the revered Fairmont Hotel. I took my athletic bag from the trunk of the car and then climbed into the backseat, going through what magical tools I had on hand. I suppose some nonwitchy women could talk their way into a sealed hotel room without using witchcraft, but I fell back on old reliable methods. I mixed a few ingredients together, said a quick chant, and completed a spell of truth telling and persuasion on a stitched
paket kongo.

I walked into the lobby and paused to take it all in. The interior of the historic Fairmont building, completed right after the great quake of 1906, was decorated in sumptuous shades of cream and gold. A white marble floor and massive gold-veined ionic columns set the tone. Soaring potted palms reached toward the ornate ceilings. A venerable building. I supposed that if people had to have obscene amounts of money, at least a place like this let them spend it in good taste.

At the reception desk I asked to see the manager. He bustled out a moment later from a back office, a paunchy little fellow in his fifties, with male-patterned baldness, a round face, and an eager expression. His discreet gold name tag read LOU GARNER.

“Call me Lou,” he said as he held out his hand to shake. I held it in mine and cupped it with my other hand. I fixed my eyes on his, focusing my intention. I could feel the
paket
hum in my pocket, echoing my purpose. I couldn’t sway folks just willy- nilly, but luckily Lou was already inclined to be helpful.

“I need to see the room Jerry Becker was staying in,” I said.

“Well now,” Lou said with a toothy smile, “normally that would have been the Penthouse Suite, of course, since that’s the best, but Mr. Becker had no need of three bedrooms, four baths, so he took the Tower Suite instead.”

“Has it been closed off since the death?”

“Oh, yes. The police asked us to keep everyone out. All we’ve done is change the sheets. But we even had to cancel a reservation for the room—moved them to a Deluxe King Tower Suite—so, as you can imagine—”

“You’ll take me there now, won’t you?” I interrupted.

“Of course.”

Garner got a key card from behind the reception desk and met me back at the elevator, where I now suffered under the one unfortunate result of this spell that I never managed to eliminate: Once the target was doing what you asked of him, he felt compelled to tell you all his secrets. I really did not want to know that good old Lou had a mad crush on his wife’s sister, Patsy, or that there had been a skirmish amongst the personnel because someone had been stealing Veronica’s special yogurt from the communal refrigerator in the break room.

I nodded, watching the lobby, only half listening while we waited for the elevator and Lou droned on.

A tall man in motorcycle boots, a dark gray trench coat, and a generally bad attitude stormed through the main doors, paused, and looked straight at me. He then turned and scurried down the side hallway.

What was
Sailor
doing at the Fairmont?

“Wait for me here,” I told the manager.

“Yes, ma’am. Happy to do it. Wait for you here.” Lou was a people pleaser.

I hurried down the hallway after Sailor. Where had he gone? Out a side exit? Into the gift shop?

There was one other alternative—the men’s room.

I hesitated for a fraction of second before pushing open the heavy cherry door and stepping in.

A large redheaded man standing at a urinal quickly covered up and fled, blatantly ignoring signs exhorting all to wash their hands for the sake of public decency.

“You can’t just waltz in here,” Sailor said, indignant, as he stood over the sink, splashing water on his face.

“I most certainly can. I just did.”

“Is nothing sacred anymore? The last place on earth a man could escape for a little peace, and now you just make yourself at home.” He reached for one of the linen towels in a neat stack on the marble counter. “You women want it all, is that it? Even urinals?”

I ignored his bluster, intent on taking in the rare scene before me. The only other time I’d been in a men’s bathroom was an emergency situation at a gas station in Arkansas, and in that case I was pretty sure those women’s and men’s rooms were just about the same level of disgusting. The Fairmont men’s room, in contrast, was as refined and dazzling as the lobby; it looked pretty much as I imagined the women’s room did, but for a line of urinals rather than a fainting couch or makeup mirrors.

My attention shifted back to Sailor, and I realized he looked haggard under the restroom’s fluorescent lights. I hadn’t noticed it in the dimness of the bar the other night.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Washing my face.”

“I mean at the Fairmont.”

“Booking a room for my honeymoon.”

“Really?”

He gave me a disgusted look.

“I do beg your pardon,” I said. “I’ll try harder to keep up with your sarcastic wit.”

He gave a humorless bark of laughter, leaned back against the sink, and crossed his arms over his chest. He looked up at the bathroom door a moment before it opened and a gray-haired suit-clad businessman type entered.

“
Out
,” Sailor commanded. The man stopped in his tracks, looked at me, then up at the sign on the men’s room door, and then ducked back out.