Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib (Kindle Serial) (8 page)

“Creepy.”

“What?”

“I think you mean ‘creepy,’ not ‘spooky.’”

“Ah, OK. No. What? Anyway, maybe she didn’t get the message until Tuesday. But still. Nothing yesterday, nothing today. I am beginning to think that I am just a booty call.”

Hector sat down at the table. He was suddenly very tired.

“Maybe she’s been seeing someone else,” said Gray, and sat down across from him.

“I suppose that’s possible.”

“I’m not trying to cast aspersions, you understand. There could be extenuating circumstances. Maybe it’s a long-distance thing. Maybe it’s a guy who’s not treating her right, you know? Maybe she just doesn’t know how to say no to him. Maybe she likes you, but…” Gray shrugged. “Maybe she’s not into you that way, you know.”

“She was plenty into me that night.”

“I’m not saying you don’t know what you’re doing. I’m just saying, maybe she goes for taller guys, or blond dudes, or something. Sometimes the chemistry just isn’t there. Sometimes it’s just a no, and you have to accept that.”

Hector picked at his teeth with a thumbnail. This was not something he wanted to hear.

“Let me put it to you this way, Mr. Ay. Professor Ay. Agent Wilkins; what do you think of her?”

Hector shrugged. “She’s pushy.”

“I mean on a completely superficial level. And by the way, if you tell her we had this conversation I will deny it.”

“Superficial…she’s a little bit skinny for me, I guess. Not unattractive, but…”

“Not your type.”

“You’re saying the problem may be that I’m just not Zelda’s type.”

“That’s right. Women have choices too. But if you’re not satisfied with that, I would suggest that you dial things back to coffee, and try to tell her what you’ve been telling me. The worst she can do is say no.”

They were leaning toward each other; when the door opened they both jumped. Joy Wilkins squinted at them, but AD Flood pushed past her, his attention on a document he was holding. He slipped a copy of it in front of Hector and began reading.

“Hector Ay, you affirm that you have no involvement in the trafficking of nameless demons, past, present, or future, through your place of employment, Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic, and you further pledge to cooperate with the Federal Bureau of Magical Affairs by sharing any information that you come upon involving said trafficking, up to but not including certain methods of security magic that you claim as intellectual property, to be delineated by subsequent documentation. You further pledge not to share information about this investigation or Agent Wilkins’s employment as an agent of this bureau with any individual not approved by this bureau. If you agree to all of the above, please sign and date the document and verbally affirm your agreement by stating ‘I agree.’”

Hector reread the document twice. “I agree,” he said, and signed the paper.

Flood handed over a second paper. “This is to notify you that by signing and verbally affirming the points of the previous document, you have acquiesced to a magical gag, which is now in effect.”

“What? That was a dirty trick!”

“Standard operating procedure, Mr. Ay.” Flood kept the smile off his face, but Hector could tell from his voice that he was enjoying himself. “It’s not going to affect you unless you try to talk about the case with someone you shouldn’t be talking to about it.”

“Like, say, my lawyer?”

“Just tell the lawyer you need a nondisclosure agreement drawn up, and give us the contact information. We’ll get in touch and explain the situation.”

Hector put up his hands. “I feel like you’re steamrolling me.”

“We’re the United States government, Mr. Ay. We’re not the enemy…but yes, we’re steamrolling you. Sign the paper, please.”

Hector signed, and Flood took the paper. “You’re free to go,” said Flood, glancing at Gray and Wilkins for confirmation. “Unless the agents have anything else?”

“No,” said Gray. “Good luck, Mr. Ay.”

“We need to get back,” said Joy Wilkins. “Ready, Mr. Ay?”

Hector was, but he also felt like he didn’t have any choice.

At four a.m. Friday morning Joy sat on her bed in the dark, wearing her most practical dress shoes and her second-best suit. It was a rich shade of purple that contrasted nicely with her yellow silk blouse and the coppery brown of her skin.

She had picked out her clothes before she’d gone to bed the night before, knowing that she’d wake up too bleary to make fashion decisions. Joy was accustomed to doing without much sleep; she could get by on five or six hours a night for long stretches. But this had been her third night in a row of seriously disrupted sleep. She’d already drunk half a pot of coffee, but it didn’t seem to be having any effect.

Her crystal rang, and whispered to her when she grasped it: “Your portal is open. Return within three hours.” She cut the connection, straightened the pleats in her trousers, and walked out of her house and into Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, Wales.

Aberystwyth was a city on the west coast of Wales: bright, temperate, and six hours ahead of Gooseberry Bluff. Joy stood in the shade where she had emerged, on the landing outside a church, letting her eyes and her internal compass adjust. Private portal companies like Globe Gate made sure that all their entrance and exit points faced due east, but the FBMA wasn’t about to spend a little extra time and money to spare their agents a few seconds of vertigo.

The church faced a row of two-and-a-half-story houses. Joy scanned them for the address she wanted: 12 Stanley Road. She hurried down the stairs, opened the churchyard gate, crossed the one-way street, and knocked on the apple-red door.

A small gray woman answered the door; gray not like dust, but like sharpened steel. Her hair clung to her scalp in tight curls, and her face was all sharp angles — her skin was wrinkled and sagged in places, but she didn’t seem to be carrying a spare ounce of fat on her. Joy was bad at faces, but she recognized a fellow runner when she saw one.

“Amanda Drake?” she asked. “My name is Joy Wilkins. I believe you just had a call from my office.”

“From the Americans, yes. One could wish for more notice.” The woman’s accent was not Welsh as Joy had expected; she sounded more French than English. Her aura was orange yellow: a perfectionist. She pulled the door open and motioned for Joy to enter. “I’ll put on some tea.”

The house was sparsely decorated, almost spartan. To the right, a staircase climbed to the second floor; a sitting room to the left held two narrow bookcases, two chairs, and a table next to the window that held about a dozen flowering plants. The kitchen had a central island and two stools but no table. It opened onto a room with a simple white couch, a small television, and a treadmill.

“My daughter has been missing for nine and a half months, and this is the first time I’ve had the courtesy of a visit from anyone from across the pond. I should offer you some sort of a prize.” Amanda Drake set some water on to boil and scooped leaves into a pot. She turned to face Joy. “Do you know something? Or are you finally admitting that you don’t?”

“First of all, I want to assure you that we are still working the case. I can’t talk about specifics, but it’s possible that Carla’s disappearance is related to some other activity going on in Gooseberry Bluff. I’ve been brought in as part of a new phase of the investigation.”

Amanda shrugged. “I noticed that you stopped short of assuring me that you’re going to find her.”

“We’re going to make every effort.”

“A platitude which covers many sins. I was in Gooseberry Bluff once, you know. I visited Carla there. It was summer. In some ways it reminded me of Aberystwyth. Small, lots of students, everyone wanting to be next to the water. But I was never a particular fan of America. Demon country, we sometimes call it. Or do you think that’s unfair?”

“My agency exists in large part to put a stop to that sort of activity.”

“In other words, your agency is your country’s halfhearted attempt to clean up your own mess.”

Charming woman.
Joy decided to try to push past the subject. “What year did you visit your daughter?”

Amanda Drake considered the question for a moment before seeming to decide to let Joy off the hook. “2008, I think it was. June. I remember the humidity was beastly. I never understood why she would want to teach at a magic college. I tried to teach her magic when she was a girl, but she had no interest.”

“Are you a magician?”

Amanda waved a hand in dismissal. “I work for the Home Office. Records retrieval. Simple spatial distortion. It’s nothing interesting. Carla’s father was a chef, but he died when she was three. She and I have been on each other’s nerves ever since.”

“She studied history, isn’t that right? What eras was she interested in?”

“Oh, I don’t know. The Romanovs. The French Revolution — there is a Jacobin in our bloodline. But I suppose that American history was her particular favorite as a girl. She found Patrick Henry and Lafayette and that lot all very romantic.” She took the kettle off the stove and poured it into a pot to steep, then set the pot on a tray with two cups and saucers. “Why don’t we talk in the sitting room?”

Joy followed her to the room near the entry, glancing out the window as she sat. Sunlight splashed over the flowers on the table, drowning out the reds and oranges and purples in a wash of brightness. A silver taxicab rolled down the street.

“She never lived in this house, you know. Most of her things went with her to America. If you are looking for clues here…” Amanda shrugged and poured the tea.

“Where did you used to live?”

“We had a flat closer to the beach. Carla liked to swim. Sometimes I think maybe she went for a swim in that river there, le St. Croix?” She pronounced it in the French manner. “But that would not explain everything, would it?”

“No,” she said, thinking,
It wouldn’t explain
anything
.
Joy sipped at the tea; it was hot and flavorless. “Mrs. Drake, I wonder if you can remember any conversations you had with Carla in the weeks before she disappeared. Any correspondence, anything odd that she may have said that sticks out in your mind.”

“Carla didn’t like the telephone very much,” Amanda said. “She wrote letters, every week. She wrote them on Sunday and sent them on Monday. I usually got them on Thursdays. It was a Saturday that she went missing, and for five days I kept thinking that she was fine, that I would get another letter from wherever she had gone to.”

“I wonder if you’d allow me to see those letters.”

“If you wish. The ministry people here, they made copies.”

“Did she ever receive mail here?”

“No. Wait — yes. There was something that arrived a few months ago. Some sort of biblical research she had requested from a colleague. I have no idea why it was sent here. Apparently this man had not heard about her disappearance.”

“Could I see that?”

“I’m not certain I kept it,” said Amanda Drake.

“Could you please check?” she said through almost-gritted teeth.

Amanda Drake had been about to take a sip of tea, but she made a point of lowering the cup to its saucer and placing them both on the table. “Of course. Pardon me.” She left the room, and a moment later Joy heard her climbing the stairs.

Joy looked over the books on the shelves. Gardening books, fitness books, hardback editions of Dickens and Shakespeare. Amanda Drake struck Joy as being one of those rare persons who was the same underneath as she was on the surface: impatient, humorless, and unimaginative. She didn’t have secrets because she couldn’t imagine being that interested in anyone else’s affairs, so she wouldn’t think to keep any of her own.

Joy yawned and sipped at her tea. Part of her just wanted to hurry through this interview and get home in time to catch another hour or two of sleep. But she needed a lead. Carla Drake was the part of her investigation that was going nowhere, and Joy was afraid that if she was taken out of Gooseberry Bluff, the FBMA would stop looking for Drake. The demons were a more immediate threat, sure, but despite Amanda Drake’s coldness Joy could tell by the way her aura pulsed that her daughter’s disappearance weighed on her. She deserved to know what had happened, and maybe even to get her daughter back, if she was somehow still alive.

Amanda Drake came downstairs with a stack of letters and a manila folder. She handed them over without a word, but Joy noticed that her hand trembled as she picked up her teacup. The letters were all addressed by hand, and Joy recognized Carla Drake’s handwriting. She set them aside. The manila folder bore a typed address label and a return address of Toronto, Canada.

“Did you notify anyone when this arrived?” Joy asked.

“No, I didn’t think to. It just seemed like a mistake, and I didn’t understand what it referred to at all. Do you think it might be important?”

“I’m not sure.” Joy pulled out the stapled papers inside. The top page was largely an apology for the fact that the sender hadn’t been able to find more about something called “the Thirteenth Rib.” It wasn’t signed and had no identifying letterhead or any other clues as to its sender. The next seventeen pages contained references from various books and periodicals, going back as far as the 1950s. Joy skimmed over it but gleaned little; clearly it was going to require a closer reading.

“Would you mind if I took this, Mrs. Drake? I’d like to take a little time with it.”

Amanda Drake looked out the window. “Do you have a file going or something? Evidence boxes?”

“Yes.”

“Take it all, then.” Amanda Drake nodded, as if agreeing with herself. “Take it all. If it helps you find her, then I’ll ask for it back. If not, then I think I’d rather not have any of it here at all.”

“I’m going to do everything I can,” Joy said after a moment, her heart feeling for this sour woman.

“Do.” Drake stood. “Are we finished, then? I have a lunch date.”

Joy would have liked to ask more, but Amanda Drake had more or less left the interview already. She could always follow up once she learned something more.

“Thank you for the tea,” she said.

“Well, it’s not properly teatime,” said Drake, and Joy felt sure that she was being rebuked for dropping by off schedule. She gathered up the letters and the manila folder and took her leave. Amanda Drake shut the door behind her almost before she could say good-bye.