Autumn Bones

Seven

Having faced down the dragon in her den, I went to the station to write up a report on the orgy. Since I was there, the desk clerk, Patty Rogan, gave me a stack of yesterday’s reports to file.

I browsed through them first, looking for signs of eldritch involvement. That’s how I had come by my unique role in the department in the first place, which led to Hel’s invitation to serve as her liaison to mundane authorities. Nothing jumped out at me in the first few reports—a minor fender bender, an altercation outside a bar, a citation for public urination—but the fourth one intrigued me. Some irate tourists had come in to file a complaint about being pickpocketed after playing a shell game that a pair of kids was running on the dock.

“Did you take this one?” I asked Patty. “The shell game?”

“Yeah.” She smiled. “I thought that one might interest you. There are a couple of others like it.”

I flipped through the paperwork and found them. In all three instances, the complainant had won money at the shell game, only to find nothing but dry, brittle leaves in his or her wallet afterward. “Anyone check it out?”

Patty nodded. “Oh, sure, but the kids running the game were long gone.” She raised her eyebrows. “If they were kids in the first place.”

“Right.” Since I’d been going through the files, other members of the department had gotten more savvy about spotting eldritch signs. The dead leaves were a dead giveaway. “Give me a call if you get another complaint.”

“Will do.”

I took a stroll down the dock anyway. No sign of the kids this morning, but I stopped by a few of the restaurants and bars along the river and asked the managers to call me if the kids returned. My phone buzzed with a reply from Jen, offering to meet me for lunch at Callahan’s Café at twelve thirty. After sending a confirmation, I swung by the Sisters of Selene, Pemkowet’s local occult store, to pick the Fabulous Casimir’s brain.

Technically, I guess Casimir is a drag queen, although his cross-dressing has to do with the shamanic tradition, too. Either way, he cuts an imposing figure. He’s over six feet tall without the wig, and the towering Marie Antoinette number he was sporting today put him closer to seven.

He caught my eye as I entered. I waited patiently while he finished ringing up a purchase and the store emptied for a moment.

“Hey, Miss Daisy.” Casimir fussed with a display of charmed crystals that the last batch of tourists had disturbed. “Whatever went down at Rainbow’s End last night, I hope you know none of my people were involved.” He gave a little shiver. “From what I heard, that was no love spell.”

“No, I know,” I said. “It was a satyr.”

“A satyr?”

“A satyr in rut,” I clarified. “Any thoughts?”

Casimir’s lips pursed. “I deal in magic, not mythological beasties.”

“Okay,” I said. “How about obeah? That’s a kind of magic, right? Do you know anything about it?”

His long-fingered hands went still. “Not really, dahling, no. It’s a little outside my geographic purview.” Beneath heavy makeup and false eyelashes, his eyes were shrewd. “Mind if I ask why? Because I don’t think that had anything to do with the shenanigans at the club last night.”

I shrugged. Sinclair hadn’t given me permission to discuss it, so it was best to honor the eldritch code.

“Never mind.” Casimir tapped his carmine lips with one fingertip. “I can guess. Is it causing . . . problems?”

“No,” I said honestly. “I’m just curious.”

“Curiosity killed the cat, girl. There’s a time and a place for gathering knowledge, and it ain’t necessarily during the early days of a young romance. Romance is fragile, Miss Daisy.” He shook his finger at me. “If you want my advice, don’t go looking for trouble or you might just find it.”

“I’m not!” I protested.

The door chimes rang as another group of tourists entered the store, and the Fabulous Casimir turned his fabulous attention toward them. Checking the time on my phone, I decided to pay a visit to Mr. Leary before lunch.

“Daisy!” Casimir called after me.

I paused in the doorway. “Yeah?”

“I didn’t mean to put you off, honey.” Beneath the mask of white makeup and strategically placed beauty marks, the expression on his face was serious. “If your young man finds himself in trouble, I’m sure we can figure out a way to help him.”

I smiled. “Thanks, Cas. No one’s in trouble. You’re right—I’m just being nosy.”

He made a shooing gesture. “Then go on—get out of here!”

I drove across the bridge from Pemkowet to East Pemkowet, a distinction that many find confusing for good reason, since the communities are intertwined. In terms of tourism, they’re joined at the hip. In terms of governance, they are actually two separate entities, and there’s a little bit of rivalry on the local level, too. I have fond memories of taking part in the annual Easties vs. Townies battle that goes down every Halloween night, complete with water balloons and eggs.

Once upon a time, East Pemkowet was a little more down-to-earth and homespun than its sister-city across the bridge, but in the past ten years, it had become a haven for upscale dining and boutique shopping. Driving down Main Street, I couldn’t help but notice the improvements, which included some pretty ambitious street- and landscaping. Well, except for Boo Radley’s house.

That’s what we called it in high school, anyway. I don’t know what it was called before To Kill a Mockingbird came out. It was the oldest house on Main Street, a rambling Tudor Revival with crumbling white stucco and dark exterior woodwork, the kind that looked like it was integral to the structure, not just a veneer.

According to local legend, Clancy Brannigan, the last living descendant of Talman Brannigan, owned the place. I’d never seen him, but the cashiers at Tafts Grocery claimed there was a standing order for a weekly delivery dating back decades. No one ever got to go inside the house, though. The bill was paid in advance by a check drawn from a business account and deliveries were left in the shuttered, decrepit wooden gazebo in the front yard. Generations of schoolkids had haunted the place, trying to catch a glimpse of our local Boo Radley, to no avail.

Anyway.

Mr. Leary’s cottage was infinitely more pleasant, a charming little place with a wonderful garden. Late-blooming cosmos and zinnias provided a riot of color, and a line of tall sunflowers nodded alongside a weathered picket fence.

“Daisy Johanssen!” My former teacher hailed me from the screened porch, hoisting a glass as I came up the front path. “If it isn’t my favorite teleological conundrum. Would you care for a glass of iced tea?”

I did a little bit of a double take; first, because I’d never known Mr. Leary to voluntarily partake of nonalcoholic beverages, and second, because he had company. As far as I knew, he was a lifelong bachelor, and I’d always found him to be fairly reclusive outside the classroom even before he retired. But no, there was a woman on the porch with him.

And then I did a triple take, because I knew her. Emma Sudbury. I’d, um, killed her sister.

It’s a long story, but the upshot of it is that Emma Sudbury’s sister, Mary, was a ghoul, cast out from heaven and hell for drowning her infant son and believing it was God’s will. That happened back in the late 1950s. For the next fifty-some years, Emma took care of Mary, growing older and more desperate while Mary stayed ageless and batshit crazy. Right up until the end, at least. At the very end, after doing some pretty terrible things, she had a moment of lucidity and begged me to administer Hel’s justice.

I swallowed hard, my right palm tingling at the memory of dauda-dagr’s hilt clutched hard against it, the shudder of Mary’s final death.

“Come in, come in!” Mr. Leary held the door open for me. “Miss Daisy Johanssen, may I present Miss Emma Sudbury?”

“We’ve met,” I said softly. “Nice to see you again, ma’am. You’re looking well.”

It was true. When I’d first encountered Emma Sudbury, she was haggard and unkempt, worn down by grief and terror. Now her white hair was rinsed and set, and she wore an attractive old-lady pantsuit.

But the shadow of sorrow was still there. It would never leave.

“Thank you, dear,” she said with quiet dignity before turning to Mr. Leary. “Thank you, Michael. I’ve enjoyed our chat, but I should be going.”

I watched him usher her out the door and down the front path, his head with its leonine mane of white hair bent solicitously over hers. The last time I’d seen her, Cody and I had delivered the news of her sister’s death. I hadn’t told her it had been by my own hand, only that her sister Mary was at peace with it. We hadn’t volunteered details and she hadn’t asked for them.

I wondered if she suspected she’d rather not know.

Mr. Leary returned to the porch, the expression on his saturnine face unreadable. “Please, have a seat. May I pour you a glass of tea?” He indicated a pitcher sweating on the table. “It’s a blend of jasmine and lemongrass, with just a hint of ginger.”

“Yes, thanks. It sounds wonderful.” I accepted a glass. “How did you and Miss Sudbury meet?”

He took a sip of tea, swishing it delicately around in his mouth. “We met at the senior center. That infernal do-gooding busybody Sandra Sweddon persuaded me to attend a function there. I believe she’s a friend of your mother’s?”

I nodded.

“Well.” Mr. Leary set down his glass. “As it happens, it wasn’t as entirely dreadful as I’d imagined, and Emma has an interest in gardening, although of course she hasn’t pursued it for many years. I like to think our chats have helped draw her out. Hers is a terribly sad story, you know.”

“I know.”

His gaze lingered on me. “I daresay you do. So!” His tone lightened. “How may I enlighten you today, Daisy?”

On the one hand, Mr. Leary was probably a good bet for some satyr lore; on the other hand, his knowledge was largely academic. If I got him on the topic, I’d most likely get an earful of Euripides or Sophocles, not practical information regarding satyrs’ rutting cycles, which was what I really needed. And once Mr. Leary got the conversational bit between his teeth, it was hard to get him to change course. So I went ahead and asked him about what I really wanted to know.

I guess Sinclair’s revelation bothered me a little more than I realized.

“Obeah,” I said. Usually, all it took was one word. I waited for Mr. Leary to go into his familiar mnemonic trance, tilting his head back and closing his eyes before rattling off a string of facts, anecdotes, and conjecture mined from a lifetime of arcane research.

Instead, he frowned. “Alas, I fear obeah is far and away the most oblique and poorly documented of the Afro-Caribbean belief systems. But I have some excellent resource material on vodou or Santería if that might help.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. How come there isn’t more on obeah?”

“Why,” he said.

“Um . . . why what?”

“Why isn’t there more information available on obeah,” Mr. Leary said sternly. “Not how come.”

Once a strict grammarian, always a strict grammarian. I winced. “Sorry. Why isn’t there more information available?”

He crossed his legs. “For one thing, unlike other belief systems emanating from the African diaspora, obeah doesn’t appear to have been syncretized with Christianity.”

“Could you, um, elaborate?”

“Plantation owners in the Caribbean did their best to suppress any expression of faith rooted in the traditions of African slaves and their descendants,” he said. “They feared, not without cause, that those they oppressed would find sufficient inspiration in such worship to entertain notions of rebellion. In some places, such as Haiti and Cuba, practitioners continued to worship in a covert manner. They simply established an association between their own existing deities, their loas and orishas and what have you, and Catholic saints. For example, Papa Legba in Haitian vodou, a probable descendant of the Yoruban Elegua, is the god of the crossroads. He’s commonly associated with Saint Peter, who performs a similar function as a gatekeeper.”

“So someone could appear to be praying to Saint Peter when in actuality they were praying to Papa Legba?” I asked.

“Precisely.” Mr. Leary nodded. “Or Saint Lazarus, I believe . . . something to do with a cane and a dog. I’d be happy to look it up for you if you think it might be helpful— Oh, but you were asking about obeah.”

“Right.” I sipped my tea, which really was insanely refreshing. “Which wasn’t syncretized. So that meant it was driven deeper undercover?”

“It’s conjecture on my part,” he said modestly. “It’s also entirely possible that little is known simply because there’s little to know, that rather than a complex, multifunctional belief system, obeah is merely an umbrella term for a particular accretion of superstition and folklore.”

I give Mr. Leary a lot of credit for the fact that I have a not-totally-embarrassing vocabulary for a small-town hell-spawn with a high school education, but it took me a few seconds to tease the meaning out of that one. “Maybe.” I had the sense that the Right Honorable Mrs. Sinclair’s Mom was involved in something a bit bigger than an accretion. “But I wonder, does it work?”

“Does it work?” he echoed.

“Obeah magic.” I swirled the tea in my glass, making the ice cubes rattle. “How can it? You know the saying: As below, so above. As far as I know, Jamaica doesn’t have an underworld. So I don’t see how it can have functioning magic.”

“Ah.” Mr. Leary laid one finger alongside his nose, à la Saint Nicholas in “’Twas the Night Before Christmas.” “Forgive me for being trite, but there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. But that, my dear Daisy, is your bailiwick. I can tell you what history has or has not recorded of obeah. I cannot tell you if it works.”

After finishing my iced tea, I thanked Mr. Leary and headed back to Pemkowet to meet Jen for lunch.

Callahan’s Café is right downtown, but maybe because it’s only a block and a half from the police station, it’s always been more of a cop shop and local hangout than a tourist joint. It’s plain and unpretentious, a diner rather than a bistro; the kind of place where you can always get a decent sloppy joe or tuna salad sandwich. My mom has her own business as a seamstress now, but she waitressed here for a lot of years when I was growing up, so it holds fond memories for me.

“Hey, Daise!” Jen, already seated in a booth, waved me over. I slid into the seat across from her. Her brown eyes were sparkling with curiosity. “What’s the scoop? I’m dying! Were you out at Rainbow’s End last night? What happened out there, anyway? The whole town’s buzzing.”

“Oh, yeah.” I glanced around to make sure no one was in earshot, then leaned forward and lowered my voice. “I was there. And that’s just the beginning.”

I gave her the story. The whole story.

Jennifer Cassopolis and I have been best friends since high school, when her older sister, Bethany, took up with an insufferable vampire prat named Geoffrey Chancellor and I was the only person willing to go out to the House of Shadows with Jen to check on her. Eight years later, that situation’s still unresolved, but at least we check in on Bethany often enough to know she’s okay, or as okay as she can be under blood-thrall to a snotty vampire. Anyway, Jen and I are a good balance for each other. She grew up with a crappy home life: slutty older sister; abusive, alcoholic dad; battered mom; and a much younger brother she tries to protect.

Meanwhile, my mom’s great. Growing up, we had a pretty good home life under the circumstances. Jen used to take refuge there a lot when she couldn’t deal with her own situation. But then there’s the Belphegor factor. Demon father is a pretty big trump card, especially since he totally took advantage of my mom’s teenaged naïveté to knock her up when she accidentally summoned him with a Ouija board.

So, yeah, Jen and I balance each other pretty well. Since we’ve been friends, I’ve only kept one secret from her and that was my crush on Cody. Which, to be fair, I kept in part because he and the whole Fairfax clan are on the eldritch down-low. But it all came out earlier this summer, and the upshot of the matter is that I admitted my crush to Jen and outed Cody as a werewolf in the process. Which I should have done a lot earlier, since Jen’s friendship is more important to me than the eldritch honor code, and I knew she’d keep Cody’s secret.

So, okay.

What that all meant now was that the whole story included the part at the beginning where Cody and I were groping and making out like über-horny teenagers, as well as the evening’s culmination in bom-chicka-wow-wow sex with Sinclair.

Jen stared at me. “Are you serious?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Wow.” She toyed with some leftover fries on her plate. We’d both ordered the daily special, Monte Cristo sandwiches. Yum. “You and Sinclair used a condom, I hope?”

“Yeah, of course!” Although I felt a little guilty thinking about all those orgiasts who hadn’t.

“So what happens next, Daise?” Jen asked me. “I mean, how do you feel about it all today?”

“A little confused,” I admitted. “Okay, a lot confused. I mean, I like Cody, and obviously he feels something for me. But it never would have happened if it hadn’t been for the satyr. Cody’s made it clear that he’s looking for a mate and I’m the wrong species. I like Sinclair, too. I like him a lot. What happened with him was pretty awesome, too. And the whole idea of having an actual boyfriend . . . it’s appealing, you know?”

“I know.” She sounded sympathetic. “So . . . no temptation scenarios?”

“No.” I shook my head. That was the term I’d coined for the times when my father, Belphegor, was able to whisper through the gaps in the Inviolate Wall, which was not exactly as inviolate as its name suggested, to promise me the wonders that would exist if only I claimed my birthright. “So maybe there are worse things in the world I could do than act like a normal, healthy twenty-four-year-old woman, right? Hey, that reminds me. Ever hear anything about a lawyer named Dufreyne?”

“No.” Jen frowned. “Why?”

I told her about the guy in the PVB office.

“Huh.” She propped her chin on one hand. “You know, now that you mention it, I have heard rumors about some out-of-town investor buying up lots around the river channel. You think this guy’s representing him?”

“I bet.”

Jen eyed me. “Sounds like he’s got some kind of power of persuasion if he could actually get Amanda Brooks to consider it. She’s always going on about the founding families and her heritage.”

I thought so, too. And okay, my tail gave an envious little twitch. It kind of sucked to be a hell-spawn with no discernible benefits. But envy was one of the Seven Deadlies. I was already skating on thin ice with lust, and thanks to my mom’s upbringing, I was committed to being one of the good guys, dammit.

“Yeah,” I said. “But I talked her out of it—or at least I think I did.” I made a devil-horns sign with my right hand. “Oh, and by the way? The hell-spawn lawyer dude? Stacey Brooks thinks he’s hot.”

Jen made a face. “She would. Did you warn her?”

I smiled. “Nope.”

She laughed. “I wouldn’t have, either.”