A Cast-Off Coven (20 page)

“What’s your association with him?”

“I’m a friend of the family.”

Could’ve fooled me.

“Or I was,” Dave clarified. “Jerry and I had a bit of a falling-out ourselves.”

“What kind of falling-out?”

“A business deal gone awry, what else? I set up a big deal, and he swooped in at the last moment to steal it out from under me. Classic Jerry. Don’t worry, I told all this to the police.”

“So who do you think killed Becker?” I asked.

“Well, it certainly wasn’t Andi, here, and I told the police they should leave her alone already. Either charge her with something, or let it drop. She didn’t have any motive, anyway—his money’s slated to go to the school, not to his kids.”

“He wrote you out of the will?” I asked Andromeda. She opened her mouth to speak, but Kessler beat her to it. “Not entirely. She’ll still be comfortable; I’m just saying that the bulk of his wealth is going elsewhere.”

“So are you thinking someone connected to the school killed Becker?”

“Personally, I’d check out sweet little Ginny Mueller.”

“
Ginny?
What’s she got to do with it?”

“She was jealous of Andi here. Crazy jealous. Plus, Jerry was . . . well, let’s just say that Ginny had reason to be jealous on a number of fronts.”

“Aside from the fact that there’s a big leap from being angry at someone to actually killing them,” I said, “Ginny couldn’t have done it. She was with me at the time of Jerry’s death. Andromeda saw us.”

“Then there’s that whack-job, Walker—” Dave began.

“Could you give me a ride to school?” Andromeda asked, jumping up and knocking over her chair in her haste.

“Oh, um, sure.” The cheese plate remained untouched.

“Nice to meet you, Dave.”

He nodded but did not get up. Andromeda grabbed her purple backpack and left the house without saying good-bye.

“Are you . . . Do you not want to talk about Walker?” I asked as we closed the door behind us.

“I’m just tired of all these guys talking about each other, running each other down. And I am
so
sick of people telling me what to do.”

We walked the rest of the way to the car in silence. Andromeda went to the curbside to climb in the passenger’s seat, but she lingered for a moment, looking down over the cliff.

“A few months ago some poor guy was breaking into cars right here on this street,” Andromeda said. “And when some cop chased him, he jumped over this wall and fell to his death. He didn’t mean to—he thought it was just a low wall.”

She stood looking down over the cliff for so long that I started to get worried. I went to stand beside her.

“But sometimes when you jump,” she continued, “you don’t know how far down the other side is.”

“Andromeda, are you okay?”

“Sure. How do you mean?” She strode past me and climbed into the car. “Hi, pig,” she said to Oscar, who was snorting in the backseat.

I pulled out of the parking space and started making my way down the hill.

“Is there anything more you could tell me about your father’s death, about what happened?” I asked. “When I saw you that night, you were crying. You said you two had an argument?”

“We did, but that wasn’t what I was crying about.”

“What
were
you crying about?”

“I saw Todd. You know him? Marlene’s boy toy? He tried to talk to me about the whole Walker thing.” She shrugged. “Dave’s right, you know. My dad really was a head case, or at least made everyone around him a head case.”

“But Dave still counts himself a friend of the family?”

“Yeah, well, he’s still friends with the rest of us.”

“What was Todd going to tell you about Walker?”

“He thought Walker had some hold over Dad.”

“What kind of hold? About what?”

Andromeda shrugged and looked out the window. Several minutes of silence ensued.

“And your mother was which wife?” I changed the subject.

“Number two. Dad had two kids with his first, then me with my mom, Connie. The police have been talking to all of us, asking a lot of questions. I guess when people get murdered they look to the family, right?”

“That’s what I hear. Do
you
think any of the family was involved?”

“One of my half brothers lives in London, the other in Bangkok, trying to get as far away from Dad as possible, I think. So I guess they’re off the hook.”

“But you think one of them might have done this, if they were given the chance?”

She shrugged but started tearing up. Suddenly the mask of haughty artist and self-obsessed youth fell away, and she just looked like a child. My heart went out to her.

“Dad used to call us worthless, that sort of thing. He just wasn’t very nice. I mean, even my name. Walker told me about the myth I was named after—there was this father who gave his daughter as a sacrifice to the sea monster; had her tied up naked at the water’s edge. What kind of backstory is that to give a kid?”

Good question. Luckily, Andromeda was looking out her side window, so I didn’t have to come up with a response. We drove past one neat flowering garden after another, full of early-spring color.

“I heard something about your dad wanting you and Walker Landau to get together?”

“Yeah, that was weird. Like all of a sudden, he decided I should settle down already, and he sure didn’t mean with Dave. Dad said I had to go out with Walker some, at least give him a try.”

“Do you like Walker?”

“He’s okay. But he’s like the last guy I’d think of . . . that way. I mean, I guess I shouldn’t talk. I’ve got bad taste in men, like my dad always told me.” Andromeda ran chipped black-painted fingernails through her short purple hair. “But the weird thing is, Dad could be really . . . I don’t know, easy to talk to about things like my love life. It was strange, as if I knew he would tell me the absolute truth. There aren’t a lot of people who will do that, right?”

“True.”

“He was kind of hard to pin down. He kept reinventing himself: son of a poor immigrant, high school dropout, then hippie guy, then hardheaded businessman. I guess my dad had to be pretty tough, to get where he did, given his background. Here’s something I bet you didn’t know: He actually funded a scholarship for kids of immigrants. Sent a whole bunch of kids to school. But he kept it a secret.”

I
was
surprised. That was the thing about people. They’re multifaceted. Maybe Andromeda was right; Jerry Becker had to be tough to achieve what he had. Either that, or he’d had help.

“And your mom?” I asked. “Did the police talk to her as well?”

“Dunno. She’s been up a tree the last two months, so I doubt they can even talk to her. But then at least that gives her an alibi, right?”

“Up a tree?” I asked. Was that slang for something?

“You know, at Berkeley.”

I must have looked blank.

“You really aren’t from around here, are you?” Andromeda asked. “I noticed the accent.”

“People say I twang.”

“It’s cute. You make one-syllable words sound like two.” She studied my profile for a moment. “And you’ve got great skin tone, pale but really olive. Hey! Would you model for me sometime?”

I could feel myself blush. “I really don’t think . . .”

“Don’t be embarrassed. You’d be great. You don’t have to go all naked or anything, though that’s a plus. Luc Carmichael says we should all think about modeling naked at some point in our lives. It frees us.”

“Really. Luc said that?”

“I pose naked for him sometimes, along with half the student body. Ha! Sounds like a pun. Naked student body . . .”

Interesting, Luc had left out that little tidbit about the source of a father’s anger.

I could hear Oscar snorting loudly in the backseat. “So your mom is where . . . ?

“She’s one of the tree-sitters in Berkeley.”

“A tree-sitter?” An image flashed in my brain of a woman holding a sapling in her lap, watering it with a baby’s bottle.

“The university fascists want to cut down some old redwoods, so a bunch of people are living up there. You never heard of Julia Butterfly Hill?”

I shook my head.

“Where are you from, Mars?” She started riffling through her backpack.

“I’ve been traveling.”

“Must have been gone for a while.”

“A good while.”

“Anyway, these folks live in the trees so no one can cut them down. Aha!” Triumphant, she held up a crumpled pack of strawberry-flavored sugarless bubble gum. “Piece of gum?”

“No, thank you. So you mean they live in the trees full-time?”

“Duh,” she said, shoving two pieces into her mouth. The car soon took on the sweet, distinctive aroma of artificial strawberry.

Though I was raised in a small town, I had traveled the world and rarely felt provincial. Still, the Bay Area denizens had a way of throwing me for a loop. Try as I might, I just couldn’t envision living in a tree.

“How do they sleep? How do they . . . you know . . . go to the bathroom?”

Andromeda looked over at me with the first real glint of humor to enter her eyes since I had met her. “First off, there is no bathroom to go to. They pee and poo in a pot they lower to the ground.”

“Are you serious?”

“It’s worth it to save the life of a redwood.”

I was appalled. Before I perched on a branch trying to do my business in a pot that I lowered to my earth-dwelling associates, I think I’d volunteer to cut down the danged tree myself. On the other hand, this was one of the things that had drawn me to the San Francisco Bay Area: People were crazy in really interesting, socially conscious ways.

Clearing my throat, I got back to the subject at hand.

“Did you ever see your dad with anything strange, sort of occult-seeming?”

“Like the talisman you sold me?”

I inclined my head, hating to hear my own items referred to as occult. “Any medallions, jars of powders, old books of symbols . . . ?”

“He always wore a medallion. But that’s about it.”

“Was there a symbol on it?”

“Yeah, but nothing I recognized. Kind of like a horoscope sign or something like that.”

“Would you be able to draw a picture of it?”

“Nah. All I remember was it was kind of spiky, like a fork sort of, with four crosses at the tips. Something like that.”

“Why were you the one child still hanging around your dad?”

“He paid my way.”

“It’s that simple?”

She shrugged.

It seemed odd to me, but then I wasn’t sure what normal family dynamics looked like. My father had walked out before my first birthday, and my mother, overwhelmed, essentially gave me over to Graciela—the woman I called Grandmother—at the age of eight, when she figured out I wasn’t merely a strange misfit, but an out-of-control force of nature.

“My therapist says it’s more than that,” Andromeda said. “She says I’m trying to work things out. She says that that’s why I sleep with Dave, ’cause he’s older and kinda Dad-like and used to work with my dad, so there’s a parallel there, and transference stuff.”

Sleeping with Dave? As Ginny would say, eeeuuuwww.

“Do you think your therapist is right?” I managed.

Andromeda shrugged. “Maybe. I never slept with my dad, though,” she clarified with a quick, sidelong glance.

Thank goodness for small favors.

Andromeda thanked me for the ride and climbed out when we arrived at the school. I idled in the car for a moment, pondering what my next move should be. If only Sailor had agreed to come to the school and help to communicate with the restless spirits, I might know what the heck was going on. Then again, I might not be able to understand what they were trying to say, but at least after Sunday’s supersized dose of supernatural sensations, I was starting to tease out some distinct vibrations.

As I sat at the green curb in front of the school building, a student streaked by—quite literally. The young man continued running down the street, buck naked.

Oscar gaped at the boy’s pale posterior.

“Didja see
that
?”

Another nude student ran past. I tried not to look.

“This is one
nutty
school,” said Oscar, shaking his head and cackling.

“You can say that again,” I muttered, noting a small cluster of students in the covered hallway, arguing. Meanwhile, two couples embraced passionately under a bank of brilliant fuchsia bougainvillea.

“Wait here,” I told Oscar.

“Yes, mistress.” For once he didn’t argue; he must have had enough the last time he’d volunteered to accompany me.

I entered the doors to the main hall. There were a few papers strewn about the floor, and a smear of chalk dust and colored pigments near the entry looked like a modern expressionist painting. A dozen or so students lingered in the hallway or headed from one class to another; a few small groups argued about painting methods and materials.

“Kevin,” I called out as I spied the tall security guard breaking up a fight between two young women.

“Oh, hey,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going on with these kids lately.”

I smiled. Kevin wasn’t any older that the “kids” he was referring to, but in my experience, full- time employment tended to mature a person quickly.

“Do you happen to know Walker Landau?” I asked him.

“Sure. Why?”

“Have you heard anything . . . odd . . . about his relationship to Jerry Becker, or Andromeda Becker?”

“Not really. But I’m not really part of the gossip mill here. I work for a living.”

I nodded.

“Only weird thing I noticed was Landau changed his whole style of painting lately. Then last week I saw him working on a collage, of all things.”

“A collage?”

He nodded. “I always thought that was like, for kids? But a lot of folks here do it as legitimate art. Guess it takes all kinds.”