The Devil You Know (6 page)

“Would you?”

“Of course.” The worse that could happen was that I’d come back laden with Mrs. Bailey’s most excellent apple butter.

After Mrs. Bailey left, Morgana gave me a funny look. She stood behind the counter in one of her sheer, flowy lavender gowns, big gold half-moon earrings dangling from her ears. She looked like a very beautiful gypsy . . . except for the frown on her face.

“She’s an old woman,” I said with a shrug as I set the angel dolls in their tissue paper down on the counter. “What can it hurt?”

I unwrapped the dolls. “Any chance you can take a look at these? Maybe identify them? They might be nothing, or maybe some kind of talisman. I’m not sure.”

Morgana glared at me.

“Look, what’s the deal about Mrs. Bailey?”

“Not that.
That
.” She pointed at the floor where I’d tracked in some muddy footprints. Then she turned to the backroom and I swear to God a mop just flew into her hands. She handed it over to me. “Clean it up, Mr. Wizard.”

After I’d cleaned the shop, I showered, shaved, and put my muddy, Brownswick-musky clothes in a laundry bag—I couldn’t decide if I should wash them or burn them. Then I changed into a woolly white pullover and a fresh pair of jeans and, looking human again, went down to relieve Morgana for the night. There were more customers than usual, mostly locals looking for little additions to their upcoming Samhain and Halloween parties later this month. I made a note in the ledger we keep in the kneehole to order additional Ouija boards and black candles. They seemed to be selling out.

Around eight o’clock, Morgana swept back into the shop. She was wearing a very becoming while silk dress with Celtic embroidery around the sleeves and collar. Her long silvery blond hair was crimped and glittering and she wore her favorite rose crystal around her neck.

I wolf-whistled. “Hot date?”

“Anton is taking me to see Clannad at the Old Opera House,” she told me. She leaned over the counter and wrote down the hours she expected to be gone. It had become a routine with us. Our safety net, so to speak. At eleven, when the concert was over, she’d leave a message on my cell if she planned on spending the night at Anton’s. I did the same for her. Sadly, Morgana was leaving many more messages on my phone than I was on hers.

“You and Anton getting pretty serious?” I asked, leaning on the counter and cradling my cheek as I talked to her. Call it brotherly concern, but I liked to keep track of who was keeping time with Morgana. She did the same for me. That way, we knew who to hex next.

She shook her head, her moon earrings flashing. “I’m not sure, to be honest. He’s nice enough. Older.”

Anton McGinley was the high priest of the Morristown coven, a nice enough fellow, if you liked dry academics with receding hairlines in tweed and glasses. “You’re just spoiled, being with a stud like me,” I teased.

“Maybe,” she said with a deep grin. She leaned in close so I could smell her flowery shampoo. She looked deep into my eyes. “You have that whole scruffy, burned-out detective thing going on, Nick. It’s hard for guys to compete with that.”

“Prince of Darkness. Don’t forget that.”

“As if I could.” She kissed my cheek and tousled my hair. “At least you shaved.” She picked up her purse, settled it on her shoulder, and started for the door, then stopped. “Oh . . . I researched the dolls and marked the pages in the books upstairs. Take a read. Some interesting things.”

After Morgana left, some punks came in and started going through the DVDs, disappointed to find no horror movies or porn. Then they stepped up to the counter and asked to see the wands in the open box in the display case. “You got any like Harry Potter?” one of the punks asked.

I showed them the wands. “They’re not toys,” I warned.

“So they do actual magic?” the one girl with them asked with genuine interest.

“They only do what you want them to do,” I told her. “No more, no less.”

The boy with her, who had his hand in the ass-pocket of her jeans, said, “You a real magician?”

“Criss Angel is a magician. I’m a witch.”

“A real witch?” The kid challenging me smiled slyly, crookedly. “If you were a
real
witch you’d know I’d taken something from your shop.”

“The blue crystal in your back pocket,” I told him. I smiled and narrowed my eyes at him until he shirked. I can do the whole Prince of Darkness thing when I need to. “And if you don’t pay for it, the penis in your pants—which, by the way, you stuff out with a sock—will shrink even more.”

He paid for it.

By nine I realized I hadn’t eaten all day. It was something that had a tendency to get away from me when I got busy.

I’d been like that when I did the beat in Brooklyn. It was usually Peter who reminded me to eat. I swear he could have bought stock in Dunkin’ Donuts. I closed the shop for half an hour and walked down the street to Sonic. I ordered two bacon double cheeseburgers, large fries and a monster Mountain Dew to get me through the rest of the night. All that mountain climbing had given me a bit of an appetite, I had to admit. On the way over I’d given brief thought to dropping in Molly’s Steakhouse, but they didn’t have take-out, and I didn’t think I’d be able to pull that off without looking like a stalker. So I carried my bag of greasy heart attacks down the street, stopped in Dollar General to buy a new pack of peanut M&M’s, then headed back to the shop. Things generally slowed down during suppertime, so I doubted I’d missed any customers.

I retrieved the books that Morgana had marked for me and settled on a stool behind the counter, my dinner in one hand and some not-so-light reading in the other while a few customers browsed the shop, looking at mood rings and handmade Shawnee beaded necklaces. None looked particularly enthusiastic, there to kill time until their shift started in one of the many twenty-four hour shops down on The Strip, I knew.

Morgana’s book made for interesting reading. The handmade angel dolls were likely effigies used in sympathetic magic, similar to corn poppets in folk magic, or power objects used in Haitian Vodou. The image was representative. But since they were
angels
, I couldn’t imagine what they represented aside from actual angels, and the book had nothing to say about that. The idea bothered me. Angels were a uniquely Christian concept not found in those religions. Vodou, mountain conjuring and other pagan religions recognized upper and lower deities. Seldom were they human-shaped or winged.

And there was one other problem with the dolls. In no Christian religion—no religion at all—could a mortal human being hold dominion over an angel. The only thing that could conjure an angel was another angel, so the whole idea was ludicrous.

An old man stepped up to the counter and handed me the third tract of the night. He said in a somber voice, obviously used to being heard, “Young man, have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?”

“I don’t think anything can save me, to be honest,” I said without looking up from the book.

“You are not beyond salvation. None of us are.”

“You might be surprised,” I told him, not that he believed me. They never do. If I became a priest and lived in absolute consecrated piety for the rest of my life, I would still die and go to hell. There was no question of that. I knew there was a place set aside just for me.

The front of the tract he’d given me had a picture of badly drawn angels descending a long ladder from Heaven to the earth. Beneath them lay a small suburban house, presumably the house they were protecting from evil things like me. It was then I decided I had to go back to the Berger house and take a look around those woods.

After the old man left, I had one last customer before I was ready to close up shop for the night. A young woman stepped in with bright bottle-red hair. I instinctively looked up, then felt a letdown inside. It wasn’t Vivian; it was Holly King. She crept up to the counter like a criminal and said she was interested in books on folk medicine for a school project she was working on, specifically abortifacients.

Le sigh.

The following morning I woke to find Ben had left a message on my cell.
He said he was going back to interview the Bergers that afternoon and I could ride shotgun, if I wanted to. He thought maybe I could gleam some kind of information if I went through Cassandra Berger’s possessions. Ben labors under the assumption that I can do psychometry, the psychic ability to learn about an object by touching it. It’s a nice thought, but I can’t do that. I have other mad skills, like the ability to recognize clues. But I wasn’t about to correct Ben; I wanted to see the Bergers again too much.

I called him back and told him to pick me up on the way. I was fresh from my morning shower and I hadn’t overslept. See, I really do know how to act like an adult. After I was dressed and looked human, I put the kettle on in the kitchen. Then I leaned against the sink and called Morgana, who hadn’t come home last night. I felt a small stab of guilt when she picked up. She sounded . . . ahem, busy.

“Yeah, Nick,” she said, sounding out of breath and a tad annoyed. Morgana likes early-morning romps, though I can’t fathom it myself. I am so not a morning person. Sex in the morning is like breakfast; such things should never happen on this plain of existence.

“Sorry. Interrupting, am I?”

“You are. But you’re not sorry about it.” I could hear her squirming around in the sheets, probably trying to find a more private position to talk on her cell.

“Is he good?” I asked.

“Nick!”

“Better than me?”

“Nick, stop it. You’re such a pervert.”

I smiled. “Ben called. He’s going back to interview the Bergers again. He wants me along to look at the little girl’s room.” I paused. “I want to go, Morgana. I want to help find the girl, if I can.”

“What do you need from me, Nick?”

“He’ll be here around eleven. Any chance you can take the shop then? I don’t want to close up with the busy season and all.”

I waited as Morgana checked her schedule on her iPad. “I don’t have any appointments until tonight. I’ll try and get back by ten.”

“I appreciate that.”

“You’re still a pervert,” she said, and hung up.