Bedroom Eyes (10 page)

“If you let him in,” Mrs. Merlin said sensibly enough, “you can find out why he rang your buzzer.”

“You’re pretty logical for a creature who deals on the outer edges of reality.”

Mrs. Merlin shrugged. “The universe follows its own order. I merely tag along.”

“Except when you mess up,” Penelope mumbled under her breath.

“What an ugly thing to say!” Mrs. Merlin leaped up from the throw pillow Penelope had placed on the dining table for her to use as a chair. She ran to the edge of the table and peered down.

“Don’t jump!” Penelope ran across the room.

“Very well.” Mrs. Merlin settled down again. “But it isn’t nice to say hurtful things.” She sighed. “Even when they’re true.”

“I’m sorry.” Penelope did feel contrite. Mrs. Merlin, despite her frank tongue, seemed like a nice enough person. Certainly an interesting person, far more intriguing than most of the men and women Penelope worked with day in and day out.

The knock at the door grew more insistent.

“I guess I’ll let him in.”

The woman who’d dropped into her life nodded. “That would be karmic payback for hurting my feelings.”

Penelope shook her head, wondering at the new language Mrs. Merlin was teaching her. “I gather that means you think this won’t be a pleasant interview.”

She blinked her eyes. “Let him in and see.”

“What do I do about you?”

Mrs. Merlin waved a hand. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll sit here and pretend to be a what’s-it, a napkin ring.”

Penelope started toward the door, then halted. The idea of Mrs. Merlin watching from the table made her nervous. “He’s going to see you. He’ll think I’m nuts.”

“Have a little faith. Open the door.”

What did she have to lose? Penelope muttered “I’m coming” for what seemed like the
n
th time that evening, then opened the door.

Tony Olano fell into the apartment, managing to save himself from a pratfall on his face by extending his arms.

On his knees on Penelope’s carpet, he looked up, managing not even to look embarrassed. ” ‘Bout time,” he said.

“Were you listening through the keyhole?”

“Caught me.” He grinned and Penelope thought he actually seemed happy to see her.

Then she remembered the way he’d flirted with the brunette only seconds before. Folding her arms across her chest, she said, “Would you care to get up and tell me why you’re here, Mr. Olano?”

He rose, echoing that same fluid motion as when he’d stood after checking under her bed for his imagined intruder. “Tony,” he said, extending a hand. “My friends call me Tony-O.”

Penelope raised her brows. “How nice,” she said, not extending her own hand.

Tony glanced down, rubbed his hand on his shorts, then stuck both hands in his pockets. “Well, Ms. Fields, I did return for a reason.” He craned his neck and despite Penelope’s obvious body language, moved farther into the living area. “But tell me, am I interrupting?”

“Interrupting?”

“You know, Hinson the golden boy. You don’t have him stashed in the bedroom?”

Penelope closed her eyes for a moment, then counted to ten. “No, no one is stashed in the bedroom. There’s no need to draw your gun and frighten Mrs. Mer—”

“So you do have a guest?” Tony settled onto her loveseat.

“I was referring to my cat,” Penelope said, hoping Mrs. Merlin wouldn’t get offended. “Her name is Mrs. Mer.”

He looked interested. “What kind of cat?”

Penelope knew nothing about cats. She threw a glance toward Mrs. Merlin, who watched the scene with interest from her perch. “Orange,” she said.

“Orange. A very rare breed,” Tony said. He was rolling something about between his fingers.

“Oh, most.” Penelope nodded. “She’s a fairly magical cat.”

“And does she have the same number of toes as other orange cats?”

Wishing she’d never started down this silly train of conversation, Penelope managed a nod.

“Where did you get her?”

Penelope laughed nervously, thankful he hadn’t quizzed her further on the number of toes. If only her mother had let her have pets! But she’d never had a dog or a cat. Once she caught a frog and wanted to keep it, but her mother insisted she let it go in the woods behind the trailer park.
Nasty things,
she’d said, as if that settled everything. She realized Tony was waiting for an answer, so she said, “Oh, she just followed me home one day.”

“What an interesting life you lead,” Tony said.

Penelope was pretty sure he said that to mock her. That idea put her back up. “Look, why don’t you tell me what you want, starting with why you’ve been following me and ending with when you are going to take your leave?”

“Whew! I bet you’re a tough cookie in court.”

“If you need a lawyer, call me at my office.”

He shook his head. Holding out his hand, palm up, he said, “I came to return your earring.”

Penelope touched both her ears. Sure enough, her right ear still held the round gold earrings she favored, the first fourteen-karat gold jewelry she’d purchased after she’d finished law school and the financial payoffs were finally coming to fruition. Her left earlobe was bare. “I didn’t even realize I’d lost it.”

He moved toward her, earring in his outstretched hand. Then he hesitated. Watching her with those dark eyes of his, lids halfway shuttering them in an intense way that made them even more mysterious, he crossed the rest of the way, pausing directly in front of her.

Penelope’s breath came faster. Why was it this man could transform from annoying her to tantalizing her in the shimmer of a second?

He lifted his hand and held the earring up to her earlobe. His fingers brushed the side of her jaw, setting her senses aflame. He glanced down into her eyes. “They suit you,” he said, then dropped the earring into her hand.

Surprised at the effect his touch had on her, Penelope almost didn’t grasp his words. Then what he’d spoken settled on her like the heavy fog of the city’s mosquito trucks.
They suit you.
Yes, plain Penelope with her plain boring earrings. The woman next door wouldn’t be caught dead in such pedestrian jewelry.

He backed toward the door, watching her in an intense way that seemed at odds with his words. Wrapped in her own thoughts, Penelope followed him to the door. She wished she could think of some cute thing to say, some flirtatious way to let him know she’d like for him to stay, to let him know she wasn’t as boring as she appeared. But her tongue might as well have been on strike.

“Later,” he said, then disappeared once again from her doorway.

Chapter 8

STEP INSIDE FOR THE POWER OF VOODOO proclaimed a banner hung above the entrance to the Bourbon Street shop Mrs. Merlin had instructed Penelope to visit.

“Don’t worry about the schlocky voodoo stuff,” she’d told her only that morning over another bowl of oatmeal. “That’s for the tourists who think it’s some sort of rule that when they visit the French Quarter they have to buy a voodoo doll to go with their daiquiris. The true magick is in the back. Just tell the man behind the back counter I sent you.”

Now, hesitating on the sidewalk, feeling pretty much like one of the tourists Mrs. Merlin had derided, Penelope didn’t know whether she could go through with the errand.

It was all so unbelievable. Here she was, a lawyer who dealt in the well-defined world of revenue codes and Tax Court decisions, about to purchase supplies for Mrs. Merlin to use in some oddball candle ritual.

But unless she accepted that Mrs. Merlin had been bom six inches tall and would go to her grave six inches tall, logic argued for her to go through with whatever it took to help bring her temporary houseguest back to life-size.

The sun beat down on her as she dallied in front of the narrow old townhouse that housed the Bayou Magick Shoppe. The weight of the heat reminded her of the fiasco she’d undergone only yesterday, and she knew she should either enter the shop or seek the shelter of an overhanging balcony.

Still she hesitated, one part of her mind wondering why Mrs. Merlin couldn’t simply cast a spell on her own without sending Penelope out for supplies. Another part of her mind drifted to the sidewalk on Canal where she’d fainted in Tony Olano’s arms.

The flurry of her tummy, the alarming beating sensations she’d experienced inside her head just before she’d swooned, seemed worth the trade-off of being captured and held close in a pair of arms stronger than any Penelope had envisioned in her fantasies.

She sighed and wondered whether he’d magically appear again, or if he’d given up on following her after she’d fallen so tongue-tied last night. Crickets and Crisco! Any woman half her age could have come up with something flirtatious to say to a living, breathing Tony Olano poised only a few inches from her parted lips.

But not Penelope.

She sighed again. She’d better go in or she would faint. If not from heat, then from frustration with herself.

A skinny young man wearing a denim shirt, with the sleeves tom out, hanging loose over baggy shorts appeared from out of nowhere. Penelope clutched her purse and tried to look unapproachable.

“Hey, lady, I betcha I can tell you where you got them shoes,” the man said, rubbing his hands together.

“No way.” Penelope couldn’t help but object to such an impossible statement. There was no way this unkempt person had even heard of Chicago’s
Macy’s on State Street
, the store where Penelope had begun shopping once she’d received her first paycheck from the august firm of Pierce, Turner, Steicker, Wagner and Resnick.

“Yessir,” he said, and spit out of the side of his mouth. “You pay me a dollar if I’m wrong.”

“You’ve got yourself a deal.”

The man studied her shoes, swaggering around her in a broad circle. He put a hand to his chin, then pronounced, “You got them on yo’ feet, and yo’ feet on Bourbon Street!” The man went off in a peal of laughter and held out his hand. “Now gimme the dollar.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Penelope said, feeling incredibly foolish for getting set up so easily. Nonetheless, she opened her purse and pulled four quarters from her change compartment.

The man pocketed the quarters. “For another five dollars I’ll show you around.”

“No, thanks.”

“What’s a matter, you don’t like me?” The man sounded more hurt than menacing.

“It’s nothing personal, but I’m going into this store and then home.”

The man rolled his eyes. “This store? Why you going into this place?”

“That should be obvious.”

The man shook his head, a long rolling movement. “You don’t want to do that. Go someplace else. Go anywhere but here.” The man backed away a step.

At least that had succeeded in discouraging him from continuing to offer his guide services. Penelope settled one foot on the first step.

Walking off, the man called, “You should pay me another dollar for telling you not to go in there, but I ain’t gonna wait for it!”

Penelope looked again at the front of the store. It looked hokey, but fairly harmless. Unlike the man who seemed afraid of what lay behind the sagging door, she was more bothered by the silliness of it.

Well, Penelope would take a voodoo practitioner over a street hustler any day.

“Excuse me. We’d like to go in, please.”

Penelope turned her head. Next to her on the sidewalk stood a group of five women wearing badges featuring the name of a nationally known tour group.

She hurried into the store, followed by the others, reassured that such normal-looking people visited the shop.

A teenager with purple hair and three crosses dangling from her left ear glanced up and smiled as Penelope entered. “Let me know if I can help you,” she said.

Despite the clerk’s unorthodox appearance, Penelope sighed in relief at the friendly greeting that had already helped put her at ease. She dug Mrs. Merlin’s list out of the pocket of her linen slacks and looked around her.

Poof! went her sense of ease. Glittering glass eyes stalked her from the dried grass bodies of dozens of dolls. Dressed in multihued fabrics, they were marked with slashes of red paint, but to Penelope, it looked like it might well be blood.

Skulls hung from hooks in the ceiling and sprouted from the walls. Plastic ones made in China, Penelope assured herself, but disconcerting nonetheless. Especially the ones with tufts and patches of hair, setting the impressionable Penelope to imagining how they’d been scalped by doers of evil magick.

Every shelf and counter in the cramped and narrow shop was covered with objects running the gamut from witchcraft to voodoo to tarot cards to the zodiac. And those were only the types of magick Penelope recognized.

A counter ran across the back of the shop. Behind the crowded space sat a man with a long brown ponytail, the brown shot through with strands of silvery gray. Despite the silver and the hippy-style bandanna coiled around his forehead, Penelope thought he was younger than he appeared at first glance, far too young to have experienced the hippy heyday.

He watched her approach, his eyes glittering, producing the same effect on Penelope as did the voodoo dolls that occupied so much of the front part of the shop. But this was the man Mrs. Merlin had described as her mentor in magick and told her she must find.

She swallowed nervously as she stepped toward the counter. Before she could speak, he said in a low voice, “Penelope, I presume?”

She halted. How did this man know her name? Her skin crawled, then common sense gained the upper hand. Mrs. Merlin must have phoned ahead.

Trying to act as if a visit to a magick shop was a regular part of her routine, she nodded and said, “Mr. Gotho?”

He returned her nod. “You are on a mission today?”

“Yes.” Penelope glanced around. It couldn’t have been too difficult for him to recognize her, had Mrs. Merlin called. Unlike the other customers who’d followed her in, she wore no name tag. Unlike them, she carried no shopping bags from Café du Monde or Sallie’s Pralines or House of Blues.

He folded his hands atop the counter and regarded her steadily. Slowly, Penelope realized his eyes weren’t at all threatening; they were, in fact, quite gentle.