From Herring to Eternity (9 page)

The women were standing. Their hands were pressed lightly together in front of them. Their eyes were shut, but their faces were turned to the bowl. Inside was one half of an apple lying skin down with the seeds plucked out. That was definitely unexpected—and weird. Unless Dalila had sneaked it in under her cloak, I didn’t see any way they could have brought it down here. Or why. To fool me? I wasn’t going to convert or anything. Sally had to know I didn’t
really
care whether this was authentic, only that it was bona fide enough to pass the legal standard for “holy site.”

The women were stationary for a few minutes, after which Sally broke away and the others followed. They appeared a little worn, unsteady.

“The she-spirit has blessed us,” said Sally. “This ground is now sanctified.”

“Just to make sure,” I asked quietly, “that includes the den, right? Because that’s where those guys wanted to dig.”

“The area within the confines of the greater structure is now sacred to the Earth Goddess,” Sally droned, her eyes still shut—more like hooded, really, because the lids were vibrating a little. “The Great Goddess, through her servant, the serpent, first offered the apple to humankind in the Garden. She offered it anew today to refute the jealous God, He who sought to be the only God. Let Him be as He was at the beginning of things, the Patriarch God of Men. We are neither fearful nor moved by His violent, retributive ways.”

I take back what I said; if that was the entirety of their faith, I could definitely sign on.

The women recovered their books. They left the bowl and apple.

“Leave that for now,” Sally said.

“The bowl too?” I asked.

She nodded. “That’ll keep mice from the Goddess’s apple. We’ll throw it out in the yard when Dr. Fassbinder has validated our service.”

“Who?”

“The head of the theology department at the university,” Sally said. She smiled. “Wiccan, Cherokee, African, and Jew—it’s a minefield of political correctness no one will dare to challenge.”

I felt as if my Aunt Rose’s girdle had been loosened from my waist. “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you very much.”

“Thank
you
,” she said. “The earth is no longer unhappy. Now—you have any juice? Summoning the apple takes a lot out of us.”

I did have some, though it wasn’t really mine. I was all about vitamin water and diet soda, but healthy ole Grant, he liked to guzzle his morning juice. I hoped Sally would be pleased. In one of those ironies that threads through life, it happened to be apple.

Chapter 9

Anita Fong Chan came by shortly after we opened. She not only asked for my crullers and coffeepot, she asked if I ever use rat poison.

“Never,” I said. “Just traps. And I’ve never had to empty one.”

I didn’t ask why. I knew. That’s how Tippi had been killed. That told me something, as I’m sure it did Anita and Grant. The first murder, of Lippy, was planned. The second seemed improvised, and hastily. Then she asked a follow-up question that intrigued more than alarmed me.

“Do you use bamboo in any of your foods?”

I told her I did not. That was a puzzler.

I worked the kitchen. I didn’t think I should be in the dining room, taking orders and interacting with human beings. I was tired, not having gotten to bed until after two, and then I was up at five. I was still a little woozy from whatever was in the candles, from the fact that I’d had a Wiccan ceremony in my basement, and from the reality, settling in, that Lippy and his devoted sister had both been murdered.

The phone rang in the kitchen. Thom was busy making change so I didn’t expect her to grab the call. We don’t do delivery and my vendors know to call on the office phone. So I assumed it was a wrong number or someone calling to ask for directions or else to arrange one of our rare catering gigs.

It wasn’t any of those. It was Andrew A. Dickson III, attorney-at-law, legal advocate for
Dr
. Reynold Sterne, drummer-with-a-spoon of after-dinner mints, a man who made me wish we were Skyping because I wanted to see his face.

“I’ve called to arrange a time when the initial dig team can come and survey the interior property,” he said all formal-as-you-please.

“Let me see,” I replied. “Let me think,” I added. And then I said, “They can’t.”

He sighed. “Ms. Katz, perhaps you need to revisit the terms of—”

“I don’t need to revisit anything, Mr. Dickson the Third. My home is now a temple. No one is doing any excavating there.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The structure has been blessed, bottom to top. Made hallow by a recognized priestess, witnessed by members of her congregation,” I said. I read from the back of an envelope I’d stuffed in my bag the night before from while I was on the web. “By virtue of statute 501(c)(3), and subsets thereof, my Bonerwood abode is now recognized, by law, as being a site used for religious purposes.”

The pause that followed was more than pregnant. It was bulging with quintuplets.

“What is the definition and affiliation of your church?” he asked.

“Wiccan,” I said proudly. “It’s a hive of the Nashville Coven.”

“A hive?” he said flatly.

“That’s right. It’s how we witches describe a spin-off, a bud.”

“
You
witches?” he said, less flatly. “You’ve been a Wiccan how long?”

“Since my priestess initiated me,” I told him.

“What is the name of your priestess?” he asked.

“Sally Biglake.”

“Of the Cherokee?”

“Of the Cherokee
Nation
,” I corrected him.

Dickson was silent for a moment. “I recommend you get yourself an attorney,” he said. “You will be needing one very soon.”

“Thanks for the legal advice,” I replied, and hung up.

It was a slow day—it happens, for no reason that I have ever been able to ascertain. Sometimes there are more tourists, less regulars. Sometimes the reverse. Sometimes both. Today was light on either and I decided to get out.

It wasn’t quite so random as that. Ever since Tippi’s visit, I’d been wanting to put some claws into Robert Barron. Some of that was my own unfinished business with his stupid, swaggering way and some of it was wondering if he had had a reason to swipe Lippy’s trumpet case.

The Oak Slope Marina was a short drive east along I-40, located on the reservoir known as the J. Percy Priest Lake. There was a big sign at the entrance to the lake grounds themselves that talked about how the Percy Priest Lake was the home of the Stewarts Ferry Reservoir project, which was undertaken by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1946, renamed in 1958 to honor Congressman Priest, and was completed in 1967. The USACE still operated and supervised the dam, the power house, the lands and waters, and so on.

Once I reached the marina—self-described by a billboard that proclaimed A R
ESERVOIR OF
F
UN
!—Barron’s boat was easy to find. There was no cutesy nickname for his thirtysomething-foot SP Cruiser, which looked like a cross between a motorboat and a sailboat, gleaming white and proud in the sun. No, it was called simply and boastfully,
The Baron
. The gently rocking vessel was moored in a slip or a berth or whatever you call them, right where the land met the wharf or pier or whatever you call
them.
The entirety of my brush with boating was the Staten Island Ferry, and only then to take friends and relatives visiting Manhattan on a quick harbor scoot past the Statue of Liberty. I had never even taken a rowboat out in Central Park. When I crossed water, it was by bridges, tunnels, or air—and, once, in summer camp, on a rope.

I didn’t know whether Barron would be there but chances were good: he’d had a bag of galley-type supplies when he was at the deli—toilet paper, veggies, and beer—so I hoped he intended to be here for a couple of days.

Maybe to get yourself a treasure map?
I thought as I walked up the plank or ramp or whatever you call the boarding-thing toward the front of the boat.

There was a chain across the top. I stopped.

“Robert?” I called toward the back of the boat. “You here? It’s Gwen Katz!”

I heard light footsteps.

Two sets of them.

Barron stuck his big head through a big window or porthole or whatever you call them. Another man stuck his head out the hatch or door, just beyond. I didn’t know whether I had stumbled on a business meeting or a tête-à-tête. Possibly both.

Barron smiled crookedly. “Hi, Nash. Never expected to see you out here.”

“Life is funny,” I said vaguely.

“Come on aboard,” he said. “Just unlatch the—”

“I see it,” I told him. The hook-and-eye latch was about as complex as a half-century-old country fence. I saw one, once, when I was nine, visiting my great-uncle Oskar in Maine, where he’d retired because it reminded him of his native Croatia. Except for the lack of pogroms, or whatever they called the anti-Semitic attacks in the Balkans. A week after that visit, I had tetanus. I swore never to leave a city again. I hooked the chain back behind me as I boarded. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

“Nothing that can’t be continued some other time,” Barron said. “Just planning an excursion.”

“Sounds interesting,” I said. And it might have been, too, if just being around Barron didn’t make me seasick.

I walked in, past the other fellow. Barron was dressed in a blue jumpsuit that hugged his thickening-in-the-middle frame. The man with him was swarthy, about five-eleven, chiseled, with slightly Asiatic features. He was wearing a white t-shirt and swim trunks. He looked a little peaked. Barron introduced him as Yutu White.

“Gotta love those double entendre names, eh?” Barron roared, winking.

“They’re a riot.”

“He’s an Inuvialuk, a Western Canadian Eskimo,” Barron went on, either not having heard me or not caring what I had to say or both. “Not very happy to be on a boat, you may have noticed. Can you imagine? An Eskimo who has never been in a kayak.”

White pointed to a brown bag on the table. I couldn’t read the writing, but there was a picture of a wave on it. Dramamine, I guessed.

“Yeah, Robert, that’s funny,” I said. “Like a free-spending Jew.”

He looked at me with an expression that suggested agreement. He didn’t realize I was being ironic.

“Hi, Yutu,” I said.

He nodded gently.

“Yutu says he knows the location of a Russian treasure ship from the early twentieth century,” Barron went on.

“Shhh,” White said.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I won’t steal it.”

“No, I meant he’s talking too loud,” Yutu said. “Use your inside-cabin voice, Robert, not your on-deck one.”

“Nash isn’t after my treasure. She’s got plenty of her own.” He winked again. God, what a boor. “It’s a fascinating story about that ship,” Barron said as he walked to a large chart table, which filled most of the room. Various maps were spread on it, held flat on the sides with empty beer bottles. Barron pointed to one which bore Cyrillic labels and the date 1917. “It was reportedly full of Romanov treasure the Czar was trying to sneak out before he abdicated. Gold, jewelry, art, all kinds of things. A barge left Moscow and went north to Arkhangelsk where it was loaded onto a battleship of the Imperial Russian Navy. The ship skirted the Arctic, headed east, bound for Canada—where it was supposed to be met by agents of the dynasty. Never made it.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Ice floes and storms, according to a letter we found from an officer with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans who was in the region where it was supposed to make landfall,” Barron said. “Very severe weather that year.”

“That would be quite a historic find,” I said.

“It’d be colossal!” Barron said. “I”—he shot a look at Yutu—“
we
will be rich and famous!”

My eyes wandered around the table. The story was interesting, but not why I was here. I saw the top of a small map, with folds, that said Fiji—1790. Judging from what little I could see, it
might
have been just the right size to fold and tuck in a trumpet case. “What’s this one?” I asked.

He looked where I was pointing, shuffled maps to cover it. “Nothing,” he said. “South Pacific, dead end, not a happy story.”

“Tell me,” I said.

“Yes, I am interested, too,” Yutu chimed in.

“Rather not,” he said emphatically.

“Why?” I pressed. “You trusted me with your Russian warship—”

“This is different,” he insisted. “Sorry . . . just a sore topic. Actually, Nash, Yutu and I should probably get back to work. He has to get back to the Great White tomorrow. If you want to visit after that . . . ?”

“Sure,” I said. I was trying to think of some way I could bump or lean on the table top, knock everything over to get a better look at that other map.
Screw it
, I thought. I reached for where he had tucked it, found the corner, pulled it out. “Hey, there is just one thing I wanted to ask about this—”

Barron slammed a thick palm down on the map as the edge emerged. “Stop, dammit, you pushy J”—he caught himself and said more quietly—“jerk.”

I smirked knowingly—there was nothing to add; he had shot his own fat foot—but I kept my eyes on the document to take in all there was to see. I saw a faded image on yellowing paper, a splotchy stain about an inch across, and a stamp of some kind, the first two letters of which were F–I.