A Cast-Off Coven (24 page)

I brought both dresses into the large communal dressing room and helped Claudia put them on. Dressy clothes from earlier than the forties were famously difficult to adjust properly by oneself; the nice stuff, especially, was made with the assumption that the woman wearing the clothes had a maid to help.

Claudia tried the floor-length gown first. It was a lovely piece, but didn’t do much for her. Next I helped her put on the flapper dress.

“Like a lot of flapper dresses, it’s easier to leave all the snaps and hooks closed and simply slip the dress over your head,” I said, carefully bunching the lamé in my hands to make it easier. The ample fabric slunk down the length of her body, over her hips and chest.

We both stood back and looked at her reflection in the mirror.

“You look just lovely,” I said. Though the dress was a tad large for her petite frame, its looseness fit the style. “A few nips and tucks and it’ll be perfect.”

Claudia looked delighted. “Is that really me?” “Wow, that dress looks
perfect
on you!” exclaimed Maya. I smiled at her wide-eyed expression. Maya wasn’t usually much for gushing. She glanced at me and smiled, a little sheepish. “It didn’t look like much on the hanger.”

“They never do.”

“It’s really perfect,” said Claudia, smiling and twisting around to see herself at various angles in the full-length mirrors.

“Would this go with it?” Maya asked, holding up a posh embroidered raw silk duster. Simply tailored, the coat was quintessential art deco, wrapping asymmetrically with a large button and loop closure and single interior snap. The collar, cuffs, patch pockets, and wide band around the hemline were all heavily embroidered by hand in silk floss. The only flaw was a very slight bleeding of the silk floss onto the raw silk, but this was faint and hardly noticeable.

Claudia pulled it on over the gold lamé dress. It was as though they were made for each other.

“Good call, Maya,” I said.

I made note of a few simple alterations, promising to have it ready for her in two weeks.

While Claudia poked around the shop, Bronwyn and I mixed some herbs for a simple love charm. I had to run upstairs to my garden to supplement Bronwyn’s stash with a few items.

The recipe for the love spell read a little bit like a recipe for muffins, if you ignored the rocks and tree bark. I gathered together an orange slice, two sticks of cinnamon, a handful of cloves, two teaspoons of garlic, a tiger lily petal, a dash of muddy water, chips of tiger’s eye and rose quartz, and a tablespoon of olive oil. I folded these ingredients together and added a handful of dark chocolate chips, one pinch each of sugar, sage, and ginger, a drop of amber oil and one of vanilla, a piece of bark from a witch hazel tree. Finally I added one smooth rock from a riverbed and a chip of real gold.

After mixing all of this together, I placed the ingredients into a black silk bag.

“Keep this with you at all times,” I told Claudia.

“Stroke it, hold it, and think about the object of your desire. Concentrate on that person, but think only about positive things. And here’s the weird part: Bodily fluids enhance the power of the potion, so if you want, you can add a drop of your saliva or even blood.”

“Ew,” she said.

I laughed. “I told you it was the weird part. It’s not necessary to the charm, but it does intensify the effects. Just FYI.”

“Aren’t you supposed to . . .” She looked embarrassed. “You know, say something?”

“You mean like ‘abracadabra’?” I held out my hand and said the word. “Just kidding. It’s more a token than a spoken charm.”

Claudia laughed, eyes shining. “I’m so excited! Hey, you should come to the dance, Lily. You’d love it. We have a great time.”

“I think I might, thanks,” I said, exhilarated at being invited not once, but twice, to the ball, just like a witchy Cinderella.

“So, Lily,” Bronwyn said, turning to me after we watched our excited customer leave, “I got you a present.”

“A present?”

She handed me a heavy rectangle wrapped in birthday paper. I ripped it open to find a used copy of
Introduction to Algebra
and a slick new math workbook. My heart sank.

“Oh,” I said. “Thank you, Bronwyn,” I managed, trying to keep the loathing from my voice, but failing. I wasn’t that good a witch.

“Don’t think of it as algebra,” she said. “Think of it as the route to a high school diploma. It’s pretty exciting when you think about it that way.”

“Where did you find the book?”

“Believe it or not, I still had the textbook in my daughter’s old room. It’s a little outdated, but the great thing about math is that the answers are always the same. The methods of teaching it might change, but the results never do.”

That was precisely what I
didn’t
like about math, I thought. Nothing in life should be that predictable.

“Shall we get started?” Bronwyn asked.

“Now?”

“No time like the present, I always say.”

I looked around the shop, hoping for a reprieve. But the half-dozen customers on the floor were absorbed in their private searches, the clothes racks were neat, and Maya was staffing the register. I was trapped.

We started my first algebra tutorial. Bronwyn was gifted at math and was a patient teacher, guiding but not doing the work for me. I could feel my brain getting smarter as it tried to wrap itself around the unfamiliar material. But after about forty minutes, my eyes were bleary and my mind felt like mush. Give me a musty tome of ancient spells over a slick algebra workbook any day. Recipes that called for blood and claws and teeth, no problem. But solving for the mysterious “x”? Torture.

Just as it had during math class as a child, my mind wandered.

I was willing to bet Jerry Becker had made some sort of deal with a demon, given his meteoric rise from obscure delivery boy to billionaire entrepreneur, his “devil’s own luck,” his consistent success with women. Was Aidan helping him? I had known Aidan only a short time, and my first instinct had been not to trust him. Still, after he stood by me the last time I faced down a phantom, I thought perhaps I had misjudged him. But if he was assisting humans to make deals with demons . . .

I took a couple of deep breaths to calm myself. It was a big deal to accuse someone of making a deal with a demon. I may not have read
The Great Gatsby
, but I was pretty familiar with Goethe’s
Faust
. Faust’s deal with the devil has been an enduring theme in movies and literature, and it was even sometimes played for comedy. But actually calling up a demon to achieve a goal required a level of audacity bordering on the psychotic. It was kind of like conjuring a tsunami to put out a campfire; effective to be sure, but you’d have to be crazy to try it. And there was always a whole lot of collateral damage.

What really bothered me was Aidan’s inconvenient disappearance. Had he been part of the earlier antics at the school? But how? I didn’t know his exact age, but he couldn’t be more than forty. He wasn’t even born when Jerry was romancing Eugenia, was he?

“Lily?” Bronwyn interrupted my thoughts.

“Hmm?”

“I don’t think you’re concentrating. You’ve been staring at that same problem for ten minutes now.”

“I . . . oh look, here’s Susan!”

Susan Rogers swept into the shop with a flourish. She had a woman of similar age and coloring at her side.

“I decided it was simply too evil of me to outshine my sister on her baby’s wedding day,” Susan said. “So here we are! Lily, this is my sister, Joanne. Make of us what you will. I’ve been simply
dying
to try on some of those old dresses you dug up at the art school.”

Susan donned a few of the Victorian-era garments and fell in love with an exquisite jet-beaded Victorian cape, but in general the style didn’t suit her. Besides, all the dresses from the closet were sized too small; no way around that one. Instead, I pulled out a 1960s Pat Sandler floral gold and copper brocade. Both sisters loved it.

“It’s a size fourteen,” Susan said. “I’m a twelve at most.”

“There’s no way you’re a twelve if I’m a fourteen,” said Joanne. “Have you looked in a full- length mirror lately? You might want to check out the rear view, is all I’m saying.”

“You’re just jealous. You’ve had three children, Joanne. It’s only natural that I would have kept my figure.”

“I’m not saying you didn’t keep your figure—you’ve always been at least a fourteen.”

“Says
you
,” Susan said with a gasp.

Their sniping made me nervous until I noticed that Bronwyn was chuckling at their quips. Then I leaned back against the sales counter, observing their obvious closeness. I envied them the ease of their teasing sibling relationship.

“Sizing has changed over time,” I pointed out. “I always advise people to ignore labels, rather to look at the fit. Besides that, if it’s slightly too big, we can take it in. That’s an easy fix. The other way around is a lot tougher.”

People used to be smaller than they are now; not just skinnier, but more petite all the way around. Daily vitamins and improved year-round nutrition had grown a healthier populace, in general, than our forebears. But this made it tough for today’s average adult to find vintage clothes that actually fit.

Maya’s mother, Lucille, was an excellent seamstress, and she had come up with many clever ways to modify old clothes for twenty- first-century dimensions: Inserting extra panels when we replaced old zippers in the back, for instance, to broaden the waist; or releasing darts for more ample busts and wider shoulders. Lately Lucille and I had been planning a new venture: making patterns from old styles and cuts to be manufactured in any size. But that plan was still on the cutting board, so to speak.

“Would it be too over-the-top if I wore the dress with these great cowboy boots?” Susan asked. She was standing in front of the three-panel mirror, trying to see herself from the back. The “mod” Pat Sandler style suited her perfectly, and the fit was just right.

Joanne just chuckled and rolled her eyes.

“If the
Chronicle
fashion editor can’t get away with it, I don’t know who can,” I said with a smile.

“I like your attitude, Lily,” Susan said, giving her sister a significant look. “
Some
people know original style when they see it.”

“Uh-huh. Whatever floats your boat, there, my dear sister.”

Joanne tried on the same dinner dress that Claudia had just an hour ago, but on her it looked perfect. Twenty minutes later Maya rang up the satisfied customers, wrapping the dresses carefully. They didn’t even need to be altered.

“Lily, what time do you want to leave for Ginny’s opening?” Maya asked.

“Is this Ginny Mueller’s art show? I’m going to that,” mentioned Susan. “I just got the assignment to cover the opening. There’s buzz about it already.”

“I thought you were the fashion editor,” I said.

“I am, but they’ve laid off half of us at the paper. Now I’m Arts and Entertainment as well, as though I know anything about the subject.”

“Don’t be so modest,” said Bronwyn. “I’ll bet you have a great eye for art. And entertainment, for that matter.”

“I don’t know about that, but what little I’ve seen so far of Ginny’s work, I do think it’s just stellar.”

“Who knew, right?” said Maya. “I mean, she’s my friend and all, but I couldn’t believe how she pulled it all together. Everyone’s really excited about the show.”

The gallery was right downtown, on Geary not far from Union Square. It was a lovely, airy space with brick walls, arched windows, and soaring white walls. Ginny’s works, both paintings and sculptures, were mounted and hung very professionally; unfortunately, all the lovely curating in the world couldn’t make up for the fact that the art wasn’t very good.

Or at least, it didn’t seem very good to me. Apparently, I was the only one in the room who remained underwhelmed . . . but what did I know about modern art? I found it hard to enjoy pictures and shapes I couldn’t decipher. I had enough hard-to-understand murk in my life as it was.

The gallery was jammed with people, some of whom I recognized: Marlene and Todd, of course; Kevin Marino, the security guard; and even Wendy and Xander from the café.

And one man who looked vaguely familiar: handsome, rather corporate looking, with slick, styled hair and blue eyes. He stood next to a pretty, noticeably pregnant woman. I couldn’t quite place him but felt as if I had seen him before.

“Would ya look at that,” Wendy said, solving the mystery for me. “The freaking
mayor
is here with his wife. Ginny must be pretty connected.”

“Maybe they come to everyone’s opening,” suggested Maya, sipping the bright glass of Chardonnay Kevin had brought to her. “Support the arts and all that.”

“Ginny
is
the provost’s daughter,” I said. “And the school’s important to the city, I would imagine.”

As if on cue, Marlene Mueller ambled by, holding tight to Todd’s arm. He looked especially handsome in a nice gray suit, and she was chic as always in an artsy, hand-crocheted coat worn over a plain black shift. The couple seemed relaxed and happy; Todd was leaning down to hear what Marlene was saying, and they smiled into each other’s eyes.

“What do you make of the whole cougar thing?” Kevin asked us after the pair passed by.

Wendy and Maya shrugged.

“I like all the big cats,” I said.

Maya laughed. “Not that kind of cougar. He means the older woman-younger man thing.”

“What does that have to do with mountain lions?”

“The older woman in that kind of relationship is called a cougar,” Kevin explained.

“Really? Why?” I asked.

“I have no idea, now that you ask,” he said with a laugh. “All’s I know is that when you get a woman in her forties with a man in his twenties, they call the woman a cougar.”