Wind Raker - Book IV of The Order of the Air (25 page)

“Everything all right?” Lewis asked, downshifting as they started the long climb to the bungalow, and she reached across to squeeze his shoulder.

“We need to have a talk about Lily — tonight, if we can manage. But I was just thinking how lucky I am.”

“So am I,” he answered, his face softening the way it always did for her, and eased the Buick around another sweeping curve.

Chapter Eleven

M
itch opened the front door, lifting his head as a delicious smell hit him —frying onions, he thought, and oil, and something else he didn’t quite recognize that still made his stomach rumble. Dinner was well underway, from the noise that emanated from the kitchen, and he couldn’t help smiling.

“That smells good," Lewis.

"Oh yes," Alma said. She had never been a cook, not in all the years Mitch had known her, and she’d been happy to turn that job over to Stasi and Mrs. Fong. "I'm going to run up and change before dinner."

"Great."

Mitch headed into the kitchen, Lewis trailing behind him. The record player at full volume competed with Dora and Merilee making a racket. Both of them sat on the floor, their hair liberally dusted with flour, banging cheerfully on overturned pots, Dora with a wooden spoon and Merilee without. Douglas was standing on a chair with a paper airplane, and Stasi was frying something on the stove, the table covered in flour and scraps of dough.

Dora let out a shriek when she saw Lewis. "Daddy!"

"Hello, sweetheart." Lewis reached down and scooped her up, flour, spoon and all. "How was your day?'

"She's nearly beaten the pot to death," Stasi said. "I think she'll make a fine drummer. One of those enormous kettledrums… Douglas and I took them shopping. Miraculously we all survived."

"We got ice cream," Douglas said from the chair where he perched like a small, round humpty dumpty preparing to fall. "And we went in a shop where they burn insects!"

"Incense, darling," Stasi said, scooping out a little round packet of fried dough and plopping it with others on a dishcloth.

"And they had all kinds of gods and funny shoes and she bought me handcuffs so I put them on Dora."

Lewis looked perplexed. "Handcuffs?”

Mitch opened his mouth and shut it again.

"Chinese handcuffs," Stasi said, and he could swear she was smirking. "Those little paper things you put on your fingers. For children. All perfectly wholesome, darling. Besides, it's never too soon to let children start handcuffing each other."

"Only Dora didn't like them so I took them off," Douglas said, jumping down and pulling on Mitch's shirt reassuringly. "I wouldn't leave them on a little kid like that. We were just playing pirates."

"Ok," Mitch said. "Were you a pirate?"

"I was the pirate," Douglas said. "So I handcuffed them but I let them go again. Cause Momma said I had to. I mean," he stopped short. "Mrs. Sorley said I had to."

"You should always unhandcuff the girls when they want to be let go," Mitch said solemnly, unable to resist a quick glance at Stasi. She tried to look stern, but her eyes were laughing.

Dora stretched out her arms. "Pirate!" she yelled. "Pirate pirate pirate!"

"More like a parrot," Lewis said, lifting her up on his shoulders. "Are you a pirate or a parrot?"

"Pirate!"

Mitch took a look at the frying pan again. "Are those dumplings?"

Stasi seemed enormously pleased with herself. "They're Chinese dumplings. We're having them for dinner. I thought instead of making something usual we'd try something different."

"They smell good," Lewis said, a small pirate on his head holding onto his hair with both hands.

"Do Chinese dumplings have potatoes and sour cream?" Mitch asked. "Because these seem to. Not that I'm complaining, but they seem like very Austro-Hungarian Chinese dumplings."

"They're a cultural experience," Stasi said primly. "Like the League of Nations."

"I'm going to eat twenty!" Douglas proclaimed.

"I got something else too," Stasi said, turning the stove off and setting the empty pan as far from the edge as possible. "I need to change. Douglas, darling, come along and be my little manservant. Mummy can't manage the zipper alone." She swanned off, followed by Douglas, still proclaiming he was going to eat twenty dumplings.

Lewis snagged one and popped it in his mouth. "I hope she made a lot of these."

"About a hundred," Mitch said, looking at the plate and the dishcloth combined. "Stasi never does anything halfway." He picked up Merilee and futilely attempted to dust the flour off her. She put her arm around his neck and held on, her cheek against his as though she had known him all her life.

"Good," Lewis said.

“Yeah.” Mitch picked up a dumpling and tasted it carefully, since it was still steaming. It was very good. "Sort of a Chinese pierogi," he said thoughtfully. And then words failed him.

Stasi was standing in the doorway, one arm extended over her head along the frame, a long black lacquered cigarette holder in her hand. She was wearing a scarlet silk cheongsam, fitted tightly from mandarin collar to below the knees, a slit up the side all the way to her thigh giving a glimpse of garter belt at the top. It skimmed every curve, making the most of absolutely everything.

"Lordy, Miss Stasi," he breathed.

Her smile grew, wicked and insouciant. "You like it?"

"She looks just like the Dragon Lady!" Douglas said, popping around her and bobbing up and down like a cork.

She did, too, Mitch thought. Or even better, though that might be because it was Stasi… Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Lewis blushing.

"In the funny papers," Douglas said helpfully.

“
Terry and the Pirates
,” Lewis said, nodding. “Comic strips. Come on, Dora-bell, let’s go help Mama —“ He backed hastily out of the kitchen, leaving Mitch to stare.

"Very much like the Dragon Lady," Mitch said. Boy, did that dress skim every curve.

"She's a girl pirate," Douglas said.

"No, darling. She's the queen of the Chinese pirates," Stasi said, lifting her head with the cigarette holder in exactly the pose the Dragon Lady affected. "She's the head honcho, the lady of the seven seas."

"And she's after them for some reason," Douglas said. "There was this time she captured Terry and she wanted him to tell her something but then Pat showed up. He's the guy with the plane. And then Pat said she could keep him if she'd let Terry go, so Terry ran to go get help and…."

"Poor Pat," Stasi purred. "That poor aviator in the Dragon Lady's clutches. Who knows what terrible things might happen to him?"

"Only Terry went and got help so they came back and they stormed the Dragon Lady's hideout only she had this guy who was really good with a sword and then she threw knives and then she got away so they rescued Pat only they didn't catch the Dragon Lady so you know she'll be back with her pirates. Even though she's a girl," Douglas said. "So you look just like the Dragon Lady! I could be Terry. We even have a plane!"

"We do," Stasi said. She licked the corner of her bottom lip over Douglas's head. "Just like poor Pat. I wonder what unspeakable torments befell him."

"Torments,” Mitch said, feebly. Dinner. Children. She was going to let him stew like this for hours. It would be at least three hours, maybe four, before they got everyone fed and the kitchen cleaned up and the flour off the walls and the light fixture and Merilee, and then got Merilee put to bed and the boys settled down on the sleeping porch and….

Her smirk showed that she'd followed every single thought. She glided past, getting plates out of the cupboard, while Douglas jumped up and down telling Lewis every detail of the comic strip. "I wonder what kind of handcuffs the Dragon Lady has," Stasi said.

M
itch and Alma washed the dishes while Lewis and Stasi put the kids to bed, Alma cocking her head to listen to the last rowdy bounces from the girls' room upstairs. "He likes this time with Dora," she said. "I suppose most men don't, but coming to it so late…" She stopped as though she realized she'd just walked into a minefield.

Mitch rinsed a plate. "I see that," he said. Dora had been an unlooked-for miracle, and Lewis seemed to treasure every moment with her. She was daddy's girl through and through.

"Do you think you're going to keep the kids?" Alma asked quietly.

Mitch handed her the plate to dry. "I reckon if Joey was coming back, he'd have come by now," he said. "Not a peep out of the sheriff, and you know the whole town knew where we were going. When we get back five weeks from now…."

"Yeah," Alma said. "I know." It wasn't fair that anyone would leave these kids, not even Joey, not even as broke as he was. "I wish Joey had said something about it…."

"Well, he didn't," Mitch said. He refrained from saying that Alma had wanted to fire him. She knew that. That was probably the cause of the guilty sound in her voice, guilt that leaning on him maybe had something to do with his desperation. "All we can do is the best we can now." He rinsed another plate, glancing over at her. "I'm thinking Stasi and I need to rent a house in town. Fifteen years might be long enough to live over your garage."

Alma laughed as he'd meant her to. "I can't imagine not having you over the garage! It's been so good, having family nearby."

"Al, we'll just be in town. And you see me every single day at work."

"True." Alma was biting her lip.

Mitch held out another wet plate. "I'll miss it too," he said seriously. "It's a big change."

She took the plate, still chewing on her lip. "When Gil was so sick…. I don't know how Jerry and I would have managed without you. When he couldn't get around and had to be lifted…. I never thanked you enough."

"You don't have to say anything," Mitch said. "We're family. Always will be." He nudged her shoulder sideways, his hands in the sink. "You and Gil took care of me when I didn't know my own name half the time."

"Oh, you were never that bad," Al said. "Just a little strange sometimes. It was ok."

"Yeah, it was ok," Mitch said. And it had been ok because he'd had somewhere to go, family to look out for him, friends to give him purpose. If he hadn't had that he might be Joey, or one of those blank faced guys riding the rails.

Alma put the dried plate away carefully. "But we need to talk about Lily," she said. "And I'd like to have Jerry here while we can get him without Willi. Willi’s got something in town tonight."

Mitch felt his eyebrows rise. "Oh?"

"It's Lodge business, not Gilchrist Aviation."

"The Jonah thing?"

Alma nodded. "Will you go see if Jerry has a minute? Maybe we can have a discreet little meeting while Willi's out. Lewis and Stasi will be down when they're done."

Right. Which meant the Dragon Lady and Pat would have to wait. That was about par for the course. Mitch sighed. "Sure," He said.

Alma waited until they were all there, Jerry and Lewis taking the other two kitchen chairs while Stasi leaned on the sink with her legs crossed. She pulled out a cigarette and Mitch leaned over to give her a light.

"Thank you, darling," she said, still in that fabulous dress. Surely this meeting couldn't take too long.

"You were right, Jerry," Alma said. "Lily is the woman who talked to George and says she's under a curse." Quickly Al laid out what Lily had told her — the older boyfriend who turned out to be still married, his revenge when she dumped him — Lewis looking thunderous by the end of it.

"That's just plain evil," Lewis said. "To deceive a woman like that, and then…."

Jerry's expression was serious. "Lots of people are capable of malice when a relationship goes sour, but not many can make it stick like that."

"Half of it is belief, darling," Stasi said, taking a draw on her cigarette. "Lily believed he had the power to curse her, so he did. It's a twisted kind of consent. And possibly on some subliminal Freudian level she felt she ought to be punished for adultery so it was her just deserts."

Mitch looked at her sideways. "So you're saying that if she hadn't believed she'd done anything wrong, it couldn't have touched her?"

Stasi shrugged. "Pretty much. That's how oaths work, isn't it? You mean them when you take them and they mean what you think they mean. If you don't consent, they don't bind. Think about forced marriages. Even the law states that if a marriage is coerced it's not valid. If you take the oaths but don't consent to them, they don't bind you."

Lewis looked uncomfortable. "Yes, but if you consent to them you can't just take it back later if you change your mind."

Stasi didn't look away from him. "That depends on what you think you can do."

"There's more to it than that," Jerry broke in, a concerned expression on his face. "There are plenty of things that can damage you even if you don't consent to it. Remember how we nearly crashed in the Gulf of Mexico on the last leg of the Great Passenger Derby?"

"Vividly," Mitch said. "There's got to be some way to punch this guy in the nose too."

"But then we knew who it was, what the protocol was, and exactly what he was doing," Jerry said. "This is a curse of unknown type executed by an unknown man fifteen years ago with whom we have no contact. I'm not saying it can't be broken. I'm saying I don't see how to do it yet."

"We could ask Henry if he heard anything about this," Alma said. "He was in the California Lodge community at the time."

"That's possible," Mitch said. "He might know something. Doesn't hurt to ask. But it's kind of a long shot." He glanced at Stasi. "I don't suppose you knew anybody in California?"

"Darling, I wasn't in the country in 1920," Stasi replied. "And no, I didn't hear anything in particular. There are plenty of handsome older men. And besides, she said he went back east. If he left California five years before I got there, how would I know him? If I knew his name, maybe I would have heard something about him, but without that…" Stasi shrugged.

"I can ask George if he knows more," Jerry said. "But I doubt it. I don't expect Lily told him more than she told Alma. The other couple, the ones who are Brotherhood of the Rose, weren't exactly forthcoming either."