I called his cell right then, which was my earliest convenience, and he took the call.
“You both stink like bad salmon,” I said in response to his “Hello, Ms. Katz.”
“I’m glad to see you’re not yet using ‘witch’ metaphors,” he said. “When you do, I’ve smelled burning mandrake root and that’s not so nice, either.”
We both went silent. He was quick on the recovery, I’ll give him that.
“Now that the pleasantries are out of the way,” he went on, “why don’t we look for a way out of this impasse.”
“
A
way,” I repeated. “Is there more than one?”
“There’s always more than one choice,” he said. “At minimum, there are two—a good one and a bad one.”
“I hate you,” I said.
“Understandable,” he replied affably. “Nonetheless, how do you want this to go? And I mean realistically, not the ‘good for me, bad for you’ repartee of which you seem to be so fond.”
I hated him even more right then. He wasn’t just a bastard, he was a controlling man who had control over me like I was one of his damned students. It was tough to push that aside and think of Thom.
“You name the terms, I’ll agree to them,” I said.
“Wow,” Sterne said. “That’s frankly more than I hoped for—”
“With one provision,” I added. “If your putz of an attorney shows up at the deli again, Thom is immune from prosecution for any harm that may befall him.”
“Thom is a grown woman. She should be able to—”
“Hit the guy who did dirt to her brother, even if it was legal?” I said. “I agree. I want it in writing.”
“What if he comes to your award-winning deli for lunch?”
Now the guy was just being difficult. “Then I might poison him myself,” I said, hoping that Dickson didn’t, in fact, subsequently go the way of Lippy and Tippi. I’d be in a pretty tough spot then.
“Ms. Katz, I don’t know if we can indemnify Ms. Jackson against a murder—”
“Fine. Attorney Dickson does not come here, ever, for any reason,” I said. “And I don’t want him at my home, either. Those are my terms.”
“I’ll talk to him—”
“Your word, now,” I said. “I’ll
futz
around with witches to protect my property, but you mess with my friends, we’re at war. I will go down to my basement and take a pickax to the floor before you ever get near the place.”
“Don’t,” he said. “Please. I agree. You’ll never see Dickson again.”
“Bring whatever you need me to sign to my house, tonight,” I told him. “Eight o’clock. That includes a promise that Thom won’t be prosecuted for what happened this morning.”
“I don’t know if I can make—”
“Come eight-o-one, I won’t hear the door because of all the chopping.”
“I’ll be there,” he promised.
I hung up feeling good for having stood up to the guy, but bad for what I had just committed to let them do. I decided to leave the rest of my e-mails till later and figured, as far as the dig was concerned, that was that and I’d just have to live with it.
But in the life of any human being, when is “that” ever really “that”?
Chapter 11
I worked in the dining area the rest of the day and left after making sure that Thom wasn’t going to suffer a delayed reaction to the traumatic events of the morning.
“I’ll be okay,” she assured me. “Me and Lord Jesus have a good working relationship. I pray to Him and He supports me when I’m uncertain. In fact, I spoke to Christ in jail—along with my cellmate, Françoise Shabazz.”
I commented on the unusual combination of those names and Thom said she was a French African woman being held for a visa violation. It made sense, but it still sounded strange.
Since Jesus seemed to have things well under control, and the camaraderie of the staff seemed to buoy Thom, I felt all right when they left—Dani and Luke, who were an item, taking her to a new frozen yogurt shop for a shake or two. I quietly prayed that Dickson didn’t have a similar craving.
I made a pastrami on rye with mustard to go, got home around seven-thirty, fed the cats, and was just sitting down to eat when my “that was that” got flipped on its ear.
It wasn’t Robert Barron or Grant Daniels or even Andrew Dickson who showed up at my door—adversarial people and one annoyingly neutral person who had actually played a part in my day. No, with the growl of a motorcycle and the slamming of car doors, it was my friends. My
new
friends. Or, rather—as they called themselves—my sisters.
It turns out that in the Wiccan world, establishing a temple means just that: you’ve set up a house of worship where people could come and pray. For Wiccans, that turned out to be at night when there was a moon and stars, owls hooting on chimneys, and a general quieting of mechanized society.
At least, that’s how Sally Biglake explained it when she showed up at my door with Mad and a small group of women I did not know.
“I didn’t realize that consecration means my door is always open,” I said.
Sally seemed genuinely surprised. “What
did
you think it meant?”
I couldn’t tell her the truth; I thought it meant absolutely nothing.
“May we come in?” Sally pressed.
I stepped aside, not without some reluctance, and the women filed in. There were six in addition to Sally and Mad. My cats fled their dinner bowls when they entered—something they never did with strangers.
“How often will you be having these gatherings?” I asked.
“Every new moon, every night of the full moon, and every Samhain,” she said. Before I could ask, she said, “That is the end-of-summer celebration marking the final harvest and the arrival of dark winter. Typically, on November first.”
“Great,” I said. “You can help eat my trick-or-treat candy.”
“That’s very considerate,” Sally replied.
This was going to be terrible. The woman had no sense of irony. She wouldn’t see that this whole thing was a really bad joke.
“Don’t you have other temples you can use to kind of spread the worship?” I asked.
“It is customary to use the site that has been most newly sanctified,” she replied.
“Well, here’s the thing,” I said. “In about fifteen minutes, a man is coming who, through a strange series of circumstances, I’ve had to agree to let dig in the—the
temple
. You should probably bless some other place because this one isn’t going to be available for a year or so.”
The look that settled on her wide face could best be described as war-painted minus the paint.
It was little Mad who stepped forward and said, “Do you realize what you’ve done?”
“I think so,” I said. “I’ve obviously inconvenienced all of my, uh—sisters.”
“You’ve done far, far worse,” Mad said, pointing at me with a crooked finger. “You have made us unhappy.”
“I’m truly sorry,” I said. “It was either that or watch my friend, someone who is very dear to me—like a sister, a true sister—go to prison.”
“We are not your sisters?” Mad asked with a wounded expression.
“Apparently, we are not,” Sally declared.
“No, it isn’t like that,” I insisted. “We
are
a little sorority. But I thought the purpose here was to prevent an unhappy earth, right? To keep the bad guys from digging up the camp of the dead.”
Sally came closer. I smelled ugly weed on her clothes. I wondered if it was burned mandrake root.
“You used us,” she said.
“That’s not true,” I replied.
The other women were moving around in a kind of semicircle. I was starting to get a little scared. Whoever would have thought that my cats were smarter than me? Besides them, I mean.
I was considering making a dash for the bedroom and barricading myself inside when the doorbell rang. It was like a church bell on All Hallows dawn, when all the frolicking demons go home. The women stopped and looked to Sally. I took that opportunity to shoot over to the front door.
“Dr. Sterne,” I said, ridiculously loud and welcoming. “Come in!”
He seemed as surprised as I was by the effusive greeting. I almost slammed the screen door in my eagerness to admit the big man onto my campus. He entered and hesitated, obviously confused by the gathering. He was clutching his worn leather portfolio tightly, as if it were a life preserver.
“We sisters were just having a little impromptu meeting of the hive of the Nashville Wiccan Coven,” I explained.
“We did have an appointment—?” Sterne asked.
“Absolutely,” I assured him. “And appointment trumps impromptu,” I said to Sally.
If looks could kill—and perhaps they
could,
with this band of necromancers—I was not long for this world. Sally looked from me to Sterne to the ceiling. She turned her hands palm up and held them before her bosom, as though they were supporting an invisible cup.
“The tears of the One Source, the Divine Incarnate, flow on this, our sacerdotal womb,” she said. Her eyes drifted down to me. “We shall all know sadness until the earth is once again joyful.” The others raised their hands like hers and they all shut their eyes. And in a mournful voice accompanied by her own tears, Sally intoned with the others:
Mar to ainghlich is naoimhich
A toighe air neamh.
Gach duar agus soillse,
Gach la agus oidhche,
Gach uair ann an caoimhe,
Thoir duinn do ghne.
When they were finished, they began to hum.
Sterne leaned toward me. “That was Celtic,” he whispered. “A prayer, I think.”
“Saying what?”
“The only words I recognize are
ainghlich is naoimhich
, ‘angels and saints,’” he said. “I would imagine they are asking for celestial help.”
“Swell.”
The humming stopped a few seconds later and, as one, the women opened their eyes. From somewhere in the distance—the bathroom off my bedroom, it sounded like—the cats mewed miserably in unison. Smiling, Sally left, the women falling in behind her.
I watched them vanish in the darkness, then turned to Sterne. “Well, that was New Age-y,” I said.
“Old Age-y is a more apt description,” he said. “Fourth or fifth century
B.C
., I would guess.”
He had corrected me in that professorial manner that reminded me of just one more reason why I didn’t like him. We stood in dumb silence for a few moments after that. I realized I had nothing to say to this self-serving jerk who had helped set up dear Thomasina for a fall.
“You have papers for me?” I asked, turning my back and walking to the sofa. I slid behind the coffee table and sat.
He unzipped the pouch and stood there. “It doesn’t have to be like this.”
“Yeah, it does. Extortion is a dirty business.”
“I’m truly sorry about that,” he said. “Bringing in a coven wasn’t exactly fair play, either. And from where I stood, those Wiccans seemed none too pleased.”
“I was desperate,” I said.
“So was I,” Sterne replied. “This research we’re doing is important. Your uncle lived here long enough to understand that. We’re trying to retrieve history that has been plowed over. He said something to the effect that, as a kid, he was always frustrated by the fact that there were no pictures of Moses or Abraham or Solomon.”
I had been staring at a dent in the carpet made by the leg of the sofa. I looked up at him. “Uncle Murray said that?”
“On the record at a town council meeting,” Sterne said. “There are descendants of the African Americans who lived here who feel the same—”
There was a sharp rap against the front window that caused us both to start. I stepped over, saw a small crack in the glass, and went outside. A dead bat was lying belly up on top of the rose bushes in front of the window. Its head was bloodied. I looked across the yard. At the edge of the yellow glow cast by the porch light, I saw the Wiccans standing by the street, pointing at me.
It was too far for them to have actually thrown the poor—but disgusting—little creature. It must have flown right into the glass.
“Please go or we’ll call the police,” said my knight in shining tweed.
“Call whomever you wish,” Sally said. “
You
are the trespassers, not us. We will be back to see that our pact is not perverted.”
“Hey, I have a bat, too,” I said. “His name is Louisville.”
The women stepped back into the darkness. I heard engines start, saw headlights snap on, and in a minute they were only distant sounds on the rural street.
“You have gardening gloves and a Baggie?” Sterne asked, looking over at the dead bat.
“I’ve got a shovel,” I said. “I’ll deal with it—but thanks.”
We went back inside to finish our business. Sterne withdrew a manila folder and sat beside me. There was the letter I had requested along with three copies of my uncle’s signed agreement with the university—to which a new line had been added for my signature. I signed without reading it. He left one copy of the agreement and the letter promising to drop the charges against Thom.
“Is there any way I can make this better?” he asked as he put the letters back in the pouch. The zipping noise made me wince. It sounded final, impersonal, but triumphant—which it was.
“Not that I can think of,” I said. “But there is one thing you can do for me.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re going to hire some kind of security, right?”
“Yes,” he said. “The campus uses—”
“I want you to hire a woman I know,” I said.
“Has she been bonded?”
“I haven’t a clue,” I told him. “But she’s a good woman who needs a job.”
“You understand, Ms. Katz, that’s not typically the kind of recommendation we seek—”
“You asked me a question, I answered,” I said. “Her name is Karen Kerr and she’s a mixed martial arts fighter.”
“K-Two?” he said.
“Yes,” I replied. “How do you know her?”
“She gives self-defense instruction at the school,” he said. “My kid sister has taken her classes.”