A Cast-Off Coven (21 page)

“I guess so.”

“He did have the grace to seem kinda embarrassed about it, though, when I walked in. I was just closing up; didn’t know he was there. He doesn’t usually work past midnight.”

“Was he alone? Was anyone posing for him or anything?”

“No one posing, but yeah, now that you mention it, there was somebody else in the studio.”

“Who?”

He shrugged. “Dunno. The whole back of the studio was pretty dark; I could tell someone sort of slipped behind the partition when I walked in, but I didn’t see enough to even tell you whether it was a man or a woman. Wasn’t really my business, though, right? I felt kinda bad. I try not to interrupt artists at work. They’re doing some important stuff here. Look, I’d better get back to work.”

“Of course. Thanks for talking to me.”

“See you around,” he said as he loped off down the hallway.

I headed in the opposite direction, toward the bell tower stairwell. This time the ghost—was it John Daniels?—wasn’t wasting any time. As soon as I arrived, the breathing and footsteps began to sound.

Scattered herbs, a pentagram drawn in chalk, and the stubs of three candles had been set up on the second stone step. Was someone casting spells? I held the sage bundle to my nose and inhaled. Stale. No witch worth her salt would use less than potent herbs, especially when going up against an entity from beyond. And there were no strong vibrations here, no remnants of power. Strictly amateur hour.

That was good. Unless, of course, whoever was fooling around had managed to rouse a spirit anyway, without any idea what to do with it. People didn’t realize what they were fooling around with when they failed to take such things seriously. I was a powerful witch, but things like Ouija boards scared the heck out of me. And they were sold to little children, in the
toy
section.

The ghostly sounds grew louder in intensity, making the stucco walls vibrate.

“I can’t understand you,” I said to the empty stairs. The moaning intensified.

“For cryin’ out loud, I hear you already. Hearing is not understanding, you get me?” This ghost was treading on my last nerve. I had no idea if he could understand me, but it was worth a shot. “Either
do
something, or figure out a way to communicate, or shut the heck up.”

The noises subsided.

“I’m sorry,” I said in the general direction of the stairwell. “I didn’t mean to yell.”

“Who are you talking to?”

I whirled around to see Ginny standing behind me. “Ginny! Good to see you,” I said.

She looked around, a question in her eyes. “Who were you talking to?”

“The, um. . . . the ghost.”

“You’re apologizing to a ghost?”

“Sort of.”

Now her eyes looked wary. “Isn’t this the ghost that, like, pushed the Big Cheese down the stairs?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think it was responsible.”

“Then who was?”

“I have no idea.”

“Oh.” Her vibrations were frightened, and angry. Very angry. A bitter smell of chicory floated over to me.

“Hey, I hear you’re to be congratulated on your deal with the gallery,” I said, moving aside as a trio of squabbling students jostled by us. “That’s great news.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Ginny said, decidedly lacking in enthusiasm. “I’ve got a show coming up. Will you come?”

“I’d love to. Are you working at the café today?” I asked, noting the coffee-stained apron she was wearing.

“I was, but . . . everybody’s sniping at each other. I bounced.”

“I don’t think anyone’s intending to do it,” I said. “There’s something going on. . . .”

“Something to do with the ghost?”

“Sort of, yes. Ginny, could you tell me, when you were with Jerry Becker, did he ever have anything strange with him?”

“Strange?”

“Odd symbols, or jars of salts or powders . . .” As I said the words I realized how peculiar they sounded. “Just anything out of the ordinary?”

She shook her head. “But we weren’t exactly best buddies or anything. Except for the fact that he was . . . ‘close’ . . . to my mom, we didn’t have a lot of connection.”

Again, the wafting scent of bitter chicory. It reminded me of the cheap, weak coffee we drank in my hometown.

“How about when you and your mom opened the closet upstairs? Did you notice anything unusual?”

“Unusual how?”

“I don’t know . . . just anything out of the ordinary?” She shook her head. “It smelled kind of funky. But there wasn’t anything cool in there—no offense, but I couldn’t care less about old clothes, if you get my drift. That’s my mom’s deal. She was Miss Fashion back when this place was a fashion institute. But I’m all about real art.”

“Your mom was a student here?”

“Yeah. Didn’t you know? Anyway, I gotta go. Maya’s picking me up, and we’re gonna take some of my paintings to get gallery framed for the show, and start packing some of the sculptures. She said you probably wouldn’t mind if we borrowed the van.”

“She knows she’s welcome to borrow it anytime.” For a young artist with a major gallery show coming up, Ginny didn’t seem very happy. On the other hand, she had just walked away from her job, and her home life seemed to leave a bit to be desired. Maybe those things were weighing on her mind.

I made a note to talk to her mother about the good old student days. Marlene wasn’t old enough to have gone to school with Eugenia and John Daniels, but it was an interesting tidbit nonetheless.

“Ginny, one more thing before you go: How did you know what John Daniels looked like?”

“What?”

“John Daniels. You showed me a sketch of him, but I can’t find any photos of the man.”

Ginny’s big eyes looked anywhere but at me.

“Ginny?” I persisted.

After a long moment of silence, she mumbled, “I saw him.”

“Saw him where? How?”

“In the mirror. Up in that creepy closet.”

A chill came over me. “How did you know it was him?”

She shrugged.

“This is very important, Ginny. What did you do after you saw him in the mirror?”

“I got scared, so I just left. That was why Maya thought you might be able to help.”

Just then a fire alarm sounded. Everyone evacuated the building.

It turned out to be a false alarm, but Ginny disappeared into the crowd before I could ask her any more questions.

“You’re prob’ly pretty hungry after your day running around, huh?” Oscar said as soon as I let us in to Aunt Cora’s Closet.

My familiar was many things; subtle was not one of them.

“Prob’ly you’re feeling just a might peckish?”

“Give me just a minute, Oscar,” I said.

My familiar harrumphed and curled up, pouting, on his silk pillow.

I took a moment to hold Eugenia’s designer clothing in my arms, feeling the sensations. There were mostly light wool skirt suits and Jackie O-type sheaths. They gave off a confident, arrogant, self-satisfied hum, much like the woman herself. They wouldn’t be right for everyone, but perfect for some, such as the customer who needed a brash, self-assured outfit to take on a corporate board, or to face a soon-to-be-ex-husband during divorce proceedings.

A few of the outfits went beyond arrogant. I didn’t sell items that seemed to contain overwhelming amounts of negativity, anguish, or evil, certainly, but many darker items had their matches. A lot of people in the world were drawn to the dark side, in need of gravity, even solemnity, in their surroundings. For them, shadows were necessary to underscore the lightness.

Lastly, I drew John Daniels’s coat into my arms. The letterman’s jacket smelled of leather and old fabric, and creaked slightly as I hugged it. The vibrations were subtle, aged. I felt profound melancholy, betrayal, grief—all emotions in keeping with a suicidal personality, to be sure. But the sentiments could also apply to a man who had just discovered that the sapphire-eyed love of his life was boffing the art supplies delivery boy. Maybe—

“I’m sooooo hungry,” Oscar said, interrupting my thoughts. His little belly growled loudly enough for me to hear it across the room.

“I know, Oscar, I’m sorry,” I said, laying down the jacket. Enough of death; it was time to focus on the living for a while. “Let’s go upstairs and start dinner. You can make the salad dressing, just like I taught you. And afterward we’ll practice cleaning the kitchen.”

He made a face, I think. Given Oscar’s gruesome, gray-skinned countenance, it was sort of hard to tell.

 

“So you said Aidan was out of town?” I asked Oscar a couple of hours later, as we were finishing up washing the dishes after a meal of jambalaya and red beans and rice. Discussing Cajun food with Susan earlier had put me in a nostalgic mood; the mere aroma of sassafras filet gumbo was enough to bring me back to humid, lazy evenings at home in Texas. Though my mother and I weren’t what you might call “close,” there were times I missed her with a visceral yearning. And don’t even get me started on my grandmother.

“Where did he go?” I continued.

In nonanswer to my question, Oscar shrugged a scaly shoulder.

“When will he be back?” I persisted.

He gave me a wide-eyed look and shook his head.

“Oscar, how are you connected to Aidan? How do you know so much about his comings and goings?”

“Could we make cookies?”

I wasn’t sure how far to push my familiar. I knew Aidan well enough to know he wouldn’t like being crossed, and if he had sworn Oscar to secrecy, the little guy might be vulnerable to some sort of punishment if he told me the truth. Knowing Oscar, he wouldn’t be able to keep the guilt off his gnarled face.

Besides, did it matter? If Oscar was spying on me, could he be telling Aidan anything I wouldn’t be willing to tell him myself?
Only the details of my love life
, I thought to myself. Or more to the point, my current lack of a love life. I had checked the message machine first thing upon walking into my apartment. Max hadn’t called.

After whipping up a batch of Toll House cookies using local Ghirardelli chocolate chunks, Oscar and I both overindulged while discussing the further details of the shortstop position and the San Francisco Giants’ current pitching lineup, and then he curled up in his cubby atop the refrigerator to sleep.

I brought out yesterday’s paper and read Max’s article on Jerry Becker’s meteoric rise. Interestingly, it was entitled
The Devil’s Own Luck
. The son of a poor immigrant, Jerry grew up in a poverty-stricken neighborhood in the city of Richmond, across the bay. He dropped out of high school by his sophomore year and got a job driving a delivery truck. Finally, he went back to school at night, managed to secure a small loan to develop a hair-curling device, and then attracted one investor after another as he founded one of the nation’s most successful chains of hairdressing schools. He then diversified into auto mechanic training and business schools, and had fingers in real estate and several pharmaceutical companies.

Indeed, despite his humble beginnings Becker seemed to have had the devil’s own luck: He won a scholarship to go back to school when the first-place winner was killed in an auto accident; he sold off his first business mere days before the stock plummeted upon announcement of a new invention that would make his obsolete; his business partner went blind from a rare condition and eventually killed himself, leaving his half of the business to Becker.

I sat back and pondered for a moment. The article had only whetted my appetite. Clearly, I needed to do some further research on the Internet. But technology makes me nervous. Since my senses are so primal, I feel put off by cyberspace and all those bits of code jumping around, uncontrolled. Theoretically the computer programs had all been developed and engineered by humans, so they had no inherent spirit of their own, but I had seen energy attracted to too many odd places not to believe that some opportunistic entity might jump right into the high-tech world. And then where would we all be?

Still and all, search engines were useful research tools.

Feeling rather silly, I laid out stones of hematite, malachite, and amethyst on the kitchen table, then lit a white anointed candle for protection before starting up my notebook computer and logging on to the Internet.

I searched for “nuns in San Francisco.” Up came a site for an “order” of gay male nuns called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, established by a Sister Hysterectoria. Apparently they were huge in the Castro. Next I found a used clothing store in the Richmond district called Get Thee to a Nunnery. I made a note of the address, figuring I should check out the competition the next time I was in that part of town. Finally, there was a punk rock group called the Nuns who once opened for the Sex Pistols.

These were not exactly the nuns I was looking for.

Neither could I find anything significant with regard to the building that housed the San Francisco School of Fine Arts. I did find that Andromeda was right; there had been a cemetery on the site a long time hence. But it turned out that there were small graveyards all over San Francisco at one time; most of the bodies had been exhumed and moved to Colma and Oakland a century ago.

As usual, there was an overwhelming amount of information on the Internet but nothing pertinent to my particular questions, odd as they were. Tomorrow I would go to the California Historical Society, where Susan had found the photo of the French novices, and talk to a human. I liked my chances there better.

“Funny that the nuns left right after the earthquake.” Oscar’s voice startled me.

“What are you doing up?”

He shrugged and shoved one of the few remaining cookies into his mouth. “Couldn’t sleep. Hungry.”

“Why do you think it’s strange the nuns left after the quake? Everyone left the building; it needed to be repaired.”