Indigo Springs (17 page)

Jemmy colored. “I shouldn’t have told anyone. I was having a bad week…June Field told you?”

“Chief Lee.”

She winced. “Sorry. I guess it’s all over town.”

“What’s it gonna do, ruin Dad’s reputation?” As she said the words, Astrid found herself smiling. Dad had everyone fooled.

“It’ll give people an excuse to hash over our torrid affair again.”

“I don’t care if you don’t. What happened?”

Jemmy set to work assembling a pile of bike components. “Albert came over one night, looking for you. He said it was an emergency.”

“Where was I?”

“Spokane, at that garden show. He wanted to try catching up with you, so I lent him the car.”

“When was this?”

“Just before he got sick.”

“He never showed up. He wreck the car or something?”

“He never told you?” Jemmy raised her eyebrows. “Someone took a shot at him.”

“What?” She reached for the counter to steady herself, only to discover it was out of reach.

“It’s okay—they missed.” Dropping her tools, Jemmy nudged Astrid over to a crate, urging her to sit. “He came back late that night with the windshield blasted in.”

Ma’s ravings echoed through Astrid’s mind: He was killed…. Banged up, baby…bangbang!

“How do you know Dad wasn’t inside?”

“From the holes. He’d have been splattered all over the driver’s seat. Sorry—I just mean there was shot all over the upholstery.” Jemmy cranked a pedal onto the bike frame, shaking her head. “Thing was, Albert insisted on fixing it right away. He’d only returned to talk me into giving him my credit card. He wanted to go to Portland and get the windshield replaced—”

“You
didn’t
give my father your credit card.”

“Crazy, huh?” Jemmy colored. “There was something in his voice…”

Astrid swallowed. Sahara’s mermaid.

“He was gone for a day. When he got back the car looked…”

“New?”

“No. He’d gone out of his way to dirty it up. New windshield, new seat, new paint job, but the car looked just like it always had. He gave back the credit card and promised he’d pay me before the charges went through. And he begged me not to tell anyone.”

“Didn’t that make you suspicious?”

“Of course. Oh, Astrid, I figured he’d gotten into something shady. A drug deal maybe. I told myself if anything popped up on the news: somebody heard the shot, police looking for a car—I’d tell you. But then Albert was in the hospital, doctors said he had less than a week…”

Astrid flashed back to those days, the two of them sitting in the hospital, bleak and shell-shocked. Had it only been a year ago? Here was a memory she wished she could lose: sitting at Dad’s bedside while he slapped at the side of her head. Holding his hands down, saying it was okay when it wasn’t…

She fought a rush of tears. “Did you guys talk again?”

“No,” Jemmy said. “A few days later…”

A few days later he was gone. Astrid swallowed thickly. “You never told anyone what happened?”

“It felt like a last request.”

“And when the credit card bill came?”

Jemmy ducked her head. “It wasn’t just the windshield. He’d gone to some pawnshops.”

“Tell me how much,” Astrid said.

“I feel rotten about this.”

“Don’t. I’m looking to keep it quiet too. How much did you tell June Field?”

“Only that he died owing me money. I couldn’t admit I’d given Albert my MasterCard.”

“You tell anyone else?”

“No, but June obviously told the Chief.”

“A few thousand, am I right? More?” From Jemmy’s eyes, she had it about right. “It’ll take me some time, but—”

“I can’t take money from you, Astrid—”

Equally embarrassed, they haggled until Mrs. Skye turned up, chatting away amid a trio of other old ladies but wearing a tired expression that let Astrid lay down a check for some of the damage and escape with the last word.

“I drew the vitagua from Sahara and Henna on a Saturday,” Astrid tells me. She expertly shuffles a pack of gaming cards covered in trolls and flame demons. “Some of the grumbles said Sahara would leave me. Others said it was me who’d be leaving. I’d be taken away from them all—Jacks, Ma…”

“Even Mrs. Skye?”

Her eyes crinkle fondly. “They didn’t mention her.”

“I see.”

“I had maybe a pint of vitagua soaked in my body, Will. A fraction of what I carry now, but even so the grumbles had so much to say about my future: handcuffs, jail cells, cameras watching my every move. They said I would cut my leg—” She tugs up her jeans, revealing a pink scar on her ankle. “—on a rough edge of a bedframe, it turned out—and there’d be a hue and cry. They said Arthur Roche would think I’d attempted suicide.”

“Why didn’t you try to change the outcome?”

“How? Stop making chantments? Perhaps that would send Sahara away. Magic was pulling us together, Will. The secret made us so close; nothing could break us up. I had to believe the grumbles’ predictions could be avoided: that the premonitions weren’t set in stone.”

I bend close. “Astrid, this is important.
Have
the grumbles been wrong?” I need to know if there is a window for free will in her worldview, if she believes the things she predicts are inevitable.

Suddenly we are plunged into darkness. The artificial sunlight vanishes from the windowscreens, and the overhead lights die.

“I don’t know if they’re always right.” Astrid’s voice is a thread in the blackness. “The real problem is they have an agenda. They told me just enough to get me in trouble.”

She takes my hands. A trickling sensation, like blood flowing, spreads across my palms. I can feel the paint rolling over the cards, as if my skin is made of their paper surface.

Fear edges through me like a razor blade. I pull free and the sensation fades. “What’s happening up there?”

“It was…is Jemmy,” she says. “She’s one of Sahara’s Primas now, remember? Roach’s men grabbed her, and now she’s shut down the power in this cage. Sahara taught her a cantation that converts electricity to magic. It’ll pull power from any nearby source of electricity.”

“Enough electricity to black us out?”

“Looks that way. If she needs more, we might get lightning strikes. It’s something to see.”

“Is Jemmy trying to escape?”

“No. This is a message.”

“To whom?”

“To the Roach, and I’m not about to translate it.”

The darkness is beginning to get to me. The sense that my eyes would have adjusted by now, had there been any light at all, is strong. Where are the backups?

Astrid continues her story: “On Sunday, Sahara was sleepy and surly both. Every time we touched, I sensed how much she resented my pulling the vitagua out of her. She wanted to recontaminate herself, so I made sure there was no magic to be had—none pooled anywhere, none coming up through the fireplace. She thought I didn’t trust her.”

“Which you didn’t.”

“We pretended everything was okay.” Pain thickens her voice. “I made chantments: a Christmas tree ornament that helped sick people get well. A cigar box that always had a little present in it, every time it was opened: neat rocks, a mounted butterfly, a fish skull. A snowglobe that, when you shook it, made you think you were on the beach.”

“Bet you wish every day for that one,” I say.

“Now you mention it, we did send it to a convict. I also chanted the tripod.”

“Four chantments. How did you feel afterwards?”

“Better. Less…doomed.”

“What did the tripod do?”

“Made violins out of dust,” she says. “Ridiculous, huh? But that’s what it does. Beautiful old violins.”

I sit in the dark and imagine it, an old-fashioned camera platform weaving dust into wood and strings.

“While Sahara sulked, she surfed the Web. I think she was looking for proof that vitagua contamination was safe. Evidence, to change my mind. Instead, she must have typed a new combination of words into her…”

“Search engine?” I suggest.

“That’s it. She found another newsgroup thread, much like the first one…but it was years older. Marlowe was in that group too. She was using another name but the messages she sent were identical. The people in the group, the ones who had chantments—vanished one by one.”

“What did you think it meant?”

“Sahara tracked down a few of the people who stopped posting, figured out who they really were. They’d all been murdered or had fatal accidents.”

“Murdered by Marlowe?”

“Who else? She had to be one of the chantment thieves Albert told us about. She’d look for people with magic, earn their trust, figure out who they were.” She shudders.

“Good thing you found out the truth.”

“Yes. Still, we’d mailed chantments to a murderer. And without her, our only source of cantations was gone.”

“You didn’t know she was a bad guy,” I say.

“I was almost glad to have a reason to stop talking to Marlowe. It was risky. But Sahara was devastated. She’d found Marlowe, remember? First I’d drained her vitagua reserves, then her big discovery turned out badly.”

“It’s understandable,” I say.

“Yeah. I decided I had to cheer Sahara up. I took her and Jacks out hiking, brought a picnic. When we were thinking of heading home, Jacks found someone’s Dalmatian knotted up in an old fishing line. He untangled it, and the owner was so grateful he took us out onto Great Blue Reservoir on his boat.

“I found another sparkly object there—a lantern. I chanted it when nobody was looking. I figured if it did anything conspicuous, I’d toss it overboard.”

“Did it?”

“Sat there not making a peep and lured in all the big fish. Sahara and the boat’s owner hauled in whopping bass while Jacks pretended he wasn’t reminded of fishing with his dad. The dog ran around and we barbecued and the sun set over the lake so beautifully….”

Her voice breaks. Her hand tightens on mine.

“I left the lantern on the boat. The couple was from out of state. They could tow the thing home and nobody would know.”

The emergency lights cut in suddenly, blinding me. When my eyes adjust I see Patience, embracing Astrid, as she so often does, and whispering in her ear. Patience is a new sort of goddess now—short, South Asian in appearance. Her hair is waist-long and thick, and her fingers, curled around Astrid’s arms, are inexplicably compelling.

“It isn’t time for that,” Astrid’s voice rises.

Patience coaxes her toward the hallway. “You should call Roche, Lawman. Tell him Astrid didn’t speak in tongues during the blackout.”

I do as she suggests, halfheartedly placating Arthur while I wonder what the two of them are up to. Astrid’s voice is teary; Patience’s soothing.

She’s vulnerable, I think. I have always been good at sensing people in despair. Caroline saw this as predatory. opportunistic; she hated that part of me passionately.

Roche is eager to confirm that Astrid is under control, and just as eager to get off the line.

“Jemmy Burlein is barricaded in the infirmary—with hostages,” he says. “We’re locked down. You’ll stay there for the duration of the emergency. It’s perfectly safe.”

“Fine,” I reply.

“We’ve got cameras and mikes running, so just keep working on Astrid.”

“Okay.” Good-cop time, I think. Hanging up, I head for the kitchen. By the time Astrid appears, I’ve made tuna sandwiches.

“I thought we’d take a break.” Making food is a deliberate attempt to remind her of Jacks, and it works—her eyes brim. She takes up a sandwich, blinking.

She asks: “How bad is it out there, in the world?”

“You don’t know?”

“I’m not omniscient.”

I ponder my response. After a moment, I say: “About fifty people from Indigo Springs have been alchemized and are turning to animals. The rest seem fine, though some are still quarantined. The town has been the epicenter of three large earthquakes, and the government has burned out several acres of wilderness to keep the contamination from spreading.”

“It isn’t working,” she says.

“No.” I shake my head. “Some of it is in the rivers.”

She runs a hand over the table and a painted sea monster takes shape on its surface. “Sahara claims she created the monsters?”

“Yes.”

“They’re just contaminated fish. What else?”

“A lot of people are missing. Economy’s in the tank, and seventeen countries have banned Americans from traveling within their borders.”

“Sounds bad.”

“The government needs to get a handle on the situation, Astrid. Sahara’s going out of her way to make us look helpless.”

“She’s very in-your-face that way.”

“For every person who has a chantment and some genuine magical power, there are ten fakes. People are shooting women who resemble Sahara.” I gesture with a carrot stick. “If we catch her, Astrid, everyone will calm down. We’ll be able to fight the contamination, establish order.”

“You can’t turn back the clock, Will. Magic’s here to stay. Capturing Sahara won’t change that.”

“Do you mind if we try?”

She tilts her head, as if listening. “The rate of contamination will accelerate.”

“Is that what the grumbles say?”

“Yes.” She flips through the growing pile of painted cards. I examine the pictures as they flash by. Astrid lingers on a picture of a fishing boat, then digs out a picture of a bookstore. “The day after we were out on the boat, one of my gardening clients came out of her house, yelling that there was an emergency at Olive’s shop.

“I thought something had happened to Jacks—he’d gone off to mail some chantments. I was so stressed, I was shaking—thinking of Albert getting shot in Jemmy’s car, dying a week later…”

“Was Jacks okay?”

She nods. “The emergency was Ma.”

Ev Lethewood appears on a card, postal uniform rumpled, rage contorting her fair features, a book in each hand.

“She was pacing up and down Olive’s shop, swearing, tossing books, pushing over shelves. She said Olive murdered Dad, I was in on it, we were going to jail…

“‘Killers, killers, killers,’ she was screaming.”

“What did you do?”

“Called Sahara, what else? She showed up with the mermaid, and I coaxed Olive out of earshot. Sahara got Ma calmed and we took her home. Then…”

“What?” I have to go gently now. There’s something here, details Astrid doesn’t mean to share.

“Nothing. We nearly argued, that’s all. The day before, Sahara forgot to check on Ma. I asked how she could forget and she said she wasn’t feeling well. I said she’d been well enough to go fishing—”

“She was punishing you for siphoning the magic out of her body.”

“Maybe. Anyway, we couldn’t fight in front of Ma, and when we got to her place, the argument petered out.”

“Just like that?”

“Something else happened—Ma had torn her house apart. Carpets, furniture, clothes, pictures—all of it busted up or chopped to rags. And on the wall in the bathroom where she’d been keeping a big poster of a Picasso print…”

“Yes?”

“There was a blue stain, like the one on our ceiling.”

“Vitagua? At Ev’s?”

Astrid nods. “Using the mermaid, Sahara found out that when Dad was in the hospital, Ma ended up with some of his things. She’d gone with me to visit, and the nurse gave the stuff to her instead of Olive. One thing she got was this ratty coat of his—”

“Let me guess—it was a chantment?”

“Yes. It disguised him—made him hard to identify when he was out working magic. Anyway, Ma was pacing around her house, waiting for me to call from the hospital. She didn’t feel welcome there—the ex-wife, you know? Awkward.”

I think of Caroline. Would she come, if I was hospitalized? “Ev must have been very concerned about you,” I say. Still calm, sympathetic.

“Sure, and Albert. She lived with him all those years, and she never stopped loving him.”

I nod. “Ev said something to me the other day in an interview. She said Lethewood women have loyal hearts.”

Astrid swallows, seeming to struggle for equilibrium. “Ma was pacing, and she had the coat, and she saw it was full of holes, right around the belly. She filled the bathroom sink with water and dunked the coat. The water in the sink turned red—”

“The coat was soaked with blood. Albert did get shot?”

“Yes. Then Ma pulls the coat out of the sink and wrings it out…and she finds Dad’s little glass vial in the pocket. There’s vitagua in it, just a drop. She pulls out the stopper and it comes spurting out. Some hits the wall…”

“The rest struck your mother.”

“Right. Ma was contaminated, Albert was gone, and I had forgotten the chantments. She covered up the stain on her bathroom wall with a picture, and nobody knew.”

“And right after Albert’s death Ev began acting strangely.”

Astrid rubs at her eyes. “Ma told Sahara that a week or so after she got splashed, she picked up a sealed envelope at work and knew what was inside. Who it was for, what it said, everything.”

“Ev was never opening people’s mail at all?”

“Will, Ma didn’t know about magic. But she knew what was in every envelope she touched. It was impossible. So she developed the Everett Burke delusion, told herself she was
deducing
what was in the mail.”

“How did these revelations make you feel?”

“Excited. I figured I could siphon the contamination out. If Dad was right, there’d be a trace of vitagua left in Ma, but maybe she’d improve—be her old self.”

“Did you do it?”

“Sahara said we couldn’t.” Astrid sucks on her lips. “I thought she was angry, because I’d taken away her vitagua, but she insisted she had to show me something.”

“What was that?”

Astrid brushes a tear off her cheek. “The night before, while we were out on the tourists’ boat, Henna had curled up on Sahara’s bed and died.”