Lullaby

  My pager starts beeping.

  And this Mona person says, “So you’re saying Helen uses this same culling song?”

  The message on my pager says to call Nash. The pager says it’s important.

  And I say, it’s nothing I can prove, but Mrs. Boyle knows how. I say, I need her help so I can control it. So I can control myself.

  And Mona Sabbat stops writing on the pad and tears off the page. She holds it halfway between us and says, “If you’re serious about learning how to control this power, you need to come to a Wiccan practitioners’ ritual.” She shakes the paper at me and says, “We have over a thousand years of experience in one room.” And she turns on the police scanner.

  I take the paper. It’s an address, date, and time.

  The police scanner says, “Unit Bravo-nine, please respond to a code nine-fourteen at the Loomis Place Apartments, unit 5D.”

  “The mystical depth of this knowledge takes a lifetime to learn,” she says. She picks up her lunch and peels back the foil. “Oh,” she says, “and bring your favorite meat-free hot dish.”

  And the police scanner says, “Copy?”

  Chapter 15

  Helen Hoover Boyle takes her cell phone out of the green and white purse hanging from the crook of her elbow. She takes out a business card and looks from the card to the phone as she punches in a number, the little green buttons bright in the dim light. Bright green against the pink of her fingernail. The business card has a gold edge.

  She presses the phone deep into the side of her pink hair. Into the phone, she says, “Yes, I’m somewhere in your lovely store, and I’m afraid I’ll need some help finding my way out.”

  She leans into the note card taped to an armoire twice her height. Into the phone, she says, “I’m facing . . .,” and she reads, “an Adam-style neoclassical armoire with fire-gilded bronze arabesque cartouches.”

  She looks at me and rolls her eyes. Into the phone, she says, “It’s marked seventeen thousand dollars.”

  Her feet step out of green high heels, and she stands flat-footed on the concrete floor in sheer white stockings. It’s not the white that makes you think of underwear. It’s more the white of the skin underneath. The stockings make her toes look webbed.

  The suit she’s wearing, the skirt is fitted to her hips. It’s green, but not the green of a lime, more the green of a key lime pie. It’s not the green of an avocado, but more the green of avocado bisque topped with a paper-thin sliver of lemon, served ice cold in a yellow Sèvres soup plate.

  It’s green the way a pool table with green felt looks under the yellow 1 ball, not the way it looks under the red 3.

  I ask Helen Hoover Boyle what a code nine-fourteen is.

  And she says, “A dead body.”

  And I say, I thought so.

  Into the phone, she says, “Now, was that a left or right turn at the rosewood Hepplewhite dresser carved with anthemion details and flocked with powdered silk?”

  She puts her hand over the phone and leans closer to me, saying, “You don’t know Mona.” She says, “I doubt if her little witch party means anything more than a mob of hippies dancing naked around a flat rock.”

  This close, her hair isn’t a solid color of pink. Each curl is lighter pink along the outside edge, with blush, peach, rose, almost red, as you look deeper inside.

  Into the phone, she says, “And if I pass the Cromwellian satin-wood lolling chair with ivory escutcheons, then I’ve gone too far. Got it.”

  To me, she says, “Lord, I wish you’d never told Mona. Mona will tell her boyfriend, and now I’ll never hear the end of it.”

  The labyrinth of furniture crowds around us, all browns, reds, and black. Gilt and mirrors here and there.

  With one hand, she fingers the diamond solitaire on her other hand. The diamond chunky and sharp. She twists it around so the diamond rises over her palm, and she presses her open palm on the face of the armoire and gouges an arrow pointing left.

  Blazing a trail through history.

  Into the phone, she says, “Thank you so much.” She flips it shut and snaps it inside her purse.

  The beads around her neck are some green stone, alternating with beads made of gold. Under these are strands of pearls. None of this jewelry I’ve ever seen before.

  She steps back into her shoes and says, “From now on, I can see my job is going to be keeping you and Mona apart.”

  She fluffs the pink hair over her ear and says, “Follow me.”

  With her flat open hand, she gouges an arrow across the top of a table. A limned-oak Sheraton gateleg card table with a brass filigree railing, it says on the note card.

  A cripple now.

  Leading the way, Helen Hoover Boyle says, “I wish you’d let this whole issue drop.” She says, “It really is no concern of yours.”

  Because I’m just a reporter, is what she means. Because I’m a reporter tracking down a story he can’t ever risk telling the world. Because at best, this makes me a voyeur. At worst, a vulture.

  She stops in front of a huge wardrobe with mirrored doors, and from behind her I can see myself reflected just over her shoulder. She snaps open her purse and takes out a small gold tube. “That’s exactly what I mean,” she says.

  The note card says it’s French Egyptian Revival with panels of papier-mâché palmette detailing and festooned with poly-chromed strapwork.

  In the mirror, she twists the gold tube until a pink lipstick grows out.

  And behind her, I say, what if I’m not just my job?

  Maybe I’m not just some two-dimensional predator taking advantage of an interesting situation.

  For whatever reason, Nash comes to mind.

  I say, maybe I noticed the book in the first place because I used to have a copy. Maybe I used to have a wife and a daughter. What if I read the damn poem to my own family one night with the intention of putting them to sleep? Hypothetically speaking, of course, what if I killed them? I say. Is that the kind of credentials she’s looking for?

  She stretches her lips up and down and touches the lipstick to the pink lipstick already there.

  I limp a step closer, asking, does that make me wounded enough in her book?

  Her shoulders squared straight across, she rolls her lips together. They come apart slow, stuck together for the last moment.

  God forbid anybody should ever suffer more than Helen Hoover Boyle.

  And I say, maybe I’ve lost every bit as much as her.

  And she twists her lipstick down. She snaps her lipstick in her purse and turns to face me.

  Standing there, glittering and still, she says, “Hypothetically speaking?”

  And I pull my face into a smile and say, of course.

  With her open hand against the armoire, she gouges an arrow pointing right, and she starts walking, but slow, dragging her hand along the wall of cupboards and dressers, everything waxed and polished, ruining everything she touches.

  Leading me on, she says, “Do you ever wonder where that poem originated?”

  Africa, I say, staying right behind her.

  “But the book it came from,” she says. Walking, past gun cabinets and press cupboards and farthingale chairs, she says, “Witches call their collection of spells their Book of Shadows.”

  Poems and Rhymes from Around the World was published twenty years ago, I tell her. I did some calling around. The book had a pressrun of five hundred copies. The publisher, KinderHaus Press, has since gone bankrupt, and the press plates and reprint rights belong to someone who bought them from the original author’s estate. The author died of no apparent cause about three years ago. If that makes the book public domain, I don’t know. I couldn’t find out who now owns the rights.

  And Helen Hoover Boyle stops dragging her diamond, midway across the face of a wide, beveled mirror, and says, “I own the rights. And I know where you’re going with this. I bought the rights three years ago. Book dealers have managed to find about three hundred of those original five hund
red books, and I’ve burned every one.”

  She says, “But that’s not what’s important.”

  I agree. What’s important is finding the last few books, and containing this disaster. Doing damage control. What’s important is learning a way to forget it ourselves. Maybe that’s what Mona Sabbat and her group can teach us.

  “Please,” Helen says, “you’re not still planning to go to her witch party?” She says, “What did you find out about the original author of the book?”

  His name was Basil Frankie, and there was nothing original about him. He found out-of-print, public domain stories and combined them to create anthologies. Old medieval sonnets, bawdy limericks, nursery rhymes. Some of it he ripped out of old books he found. Some of it he lifted off the Internet. He wasn’t very choosy. Anything he could get for free he’d lump into a book.

  “But the source of this particular poem?” she says.

  I don’t know. It’s probably some old book still packed in a box in the basement of a house somewhere.

  “Not Frankie’s house,” says Helen Hoover Boyle. “I bought the whole estate. The kitchen trash was still under his sink, his underwear still folded in his dresser drawers, everything. It wasn’t there.”

  And I have to ask, did she also kill him?

  “Hypothetically speaking,” she says, “if I had just killed my husband, after killing my son, wouldn’t I be a little angry that some plagiarizing, lazy, irresponsible, greedy fool had planted the bomb that would destroy everyone I loved?”

  Just like she hypothetically killed the Stuarts.

  She says, “My point is that original Book of Shadows is still out there somewhere.”

  I agree. And we need to find it and destroy it.

  And Helen Hoover Boyle smiles her pink smile. She says, “You must be kidding.” She says, “Having the power of life and death isn’t enough. You must wonder what other poems are in that book.”

  Hitting me as fast as a hiccup, me resting my weight on my good foot, just staring at her, I say no.

  She says, “Maybe you can live forever.”

  And I say no.

  And she says, “Maybe you can make anyone love you.”

  No.

  And she says, “Maybe you can turn straw into gold.”

  And I say no and turn on my heel.

  “Maybe you could bring about world peace,” she says.

  And I say no and start off between the walls of armoires and bookcases. Between the barricades of curio cabinets and headboards, I head down another canyon of furniture.

  Behind me, she calls, “Maybe you could turn sand into bread.”

  And I keep limping along.

  And she calls, “Where are you going? This is the way out.”

  At an Irish pine vitrine with a broken pediment tympanum, I turn right. At a Chippendale bureau cabinet japanned in black lacquer, I turn left.

  Her voice behind everything says, “Maybe you could cure the sick. Maybe you could heal the crippled.”

  At a Belgian sideboard with a cornice of egg and dart molding, I turn right then left at an Edwardian standing specimen case with a Bohemian art-glass mural.

  And the voice coming after me says, “Maybe you could clean the environment and turn the world into a paradise.”

  An arrow gouged in a piecrust occasional table points one way so I go the other.

  And the voice says, maybe you could generate unlimited clean energy.

  Maybe you could travel through time to prevent tragedy. To learn. To meet people.

  Maybe you could give people rich full happy lives.

  Maybe limping around a noisy apartment for the rest of your life isn’t enough.

  On a folding screen of blackwork embroidery, an arrow points one way, and I turn the other.

  My pager goes off again, and it’s Nash.

  And the voice says, if you can kill someone, maybe you can bring them back.

  Maybe this is my second chance.

  The voice says, maybe you don’t go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don’t do. The things you don’t finish.

  My pager goes off again, and it says the message is important.

  And I keep on limping along.

  Chapter 16

  Nash isn’t standing at the bar. He’s sitting alone at a little table in the back, in the dark except for a little candle on the table, and I tell him, hey, I got his ten thousand calls on my pager. I ask, what’s so important?

  On the table is a newspaper, folded, with the headline saying:

  Seven Dead in Mystery Plague

  The subhead says:

  Esteemed Local Editor and Public Leader Believed to Be First Victim

  Whom they mean, I have to read. It’s Duncan, and it turns out his first name was Leslie. It’s anybody’s guess where they got the esteemed part. And the leader part.

  So much for the journalist and the news being mutually exclusive.

  Nash taps the newspaper with his finger and says, “You see this?”

  And I tell him I’ve been out of the office all afternoon. And damn it. I forgot to file my next installment on crib death. Reading the front page, I see myself quoted. Duncan was more than just my editor, I’m saying, more than just my mentor. Leslie Duncan was like a father to me. Damn Oliphant and his sweaty hands.

  Hitting me as fast as a chill, chilling me all down my back, the culling song spins through my head, and the body count grows. Somewhere, Oliphant must be sliding to the floor or toppling out of his chair. All my powder keg rage issues, they strike again.

  The more people die, the more things stay the same.

  An empty paper plate sits in front of Nash with just some waxed paper and yellow smears of potato salad on it, and Nash is twisting a paper napkin between his hands, twisting it into a long, thick cord, and, looking at me across the candle from him, he says, “We picked up the guy in your apartment building this afternoon.” He says, “Between the guy’s cats and the cockroaches, there’s not much to autopsy.”

  The guy we saw fall down in here this morning, the sideburns guy with the cell phone, Nash says the medical examiner’s stumped. Plus after that, three people dropped dead between here and the newspaper building.

  “Then they found another one in the newspaper building,” he says. “Died waiting for an elevator.”

  He says the medical examiner thinks these folks could all be dead of the same cause. They’re saying plague, Nash says.

  “But the police are really thinking drugs,” he says. “Probably succinylcholine, either self-administered or somebody gave them an injection. It’s a neuromuscular blocking agent. It relaxes you so much you quit breathing and die of anoxia.”

  The woman, the one behind the barricade at the movie shoot who came running with her arm out to stop me, the one with the walkie-talkie, the details of her were long black hair, a tight T-shirt over right-up tits. She had a decent little pooper in tight jeans. It could be she and Nash took the scenic route back to the hospital.

  Another conquest.

  Whatever Nash is so hot to tell me, I don’t want to know.

  He says, “But I think the police are wrong.”

  Nash whips the rolled paper napkin through the candle flame, and the flame jumps, stuttering up a curl of black smoke. The flame goes back to normal, and Nash says, “In case you want to take care of me the same’s you took care of those other people,” he says, “you have to know I wrote a letter explaining all this, and I left it with a friend, saying what I know at this point.”

  And I smile and ask what he means. What does he know?

  And Nash holds the tip of his twisted paper a little over the candle flame and says, “I know you thought your neighbor was dead. I know I saw a guy drop dead in this bar with you looking at him, and four more died when you walked past them on your way back to work.”

  The tip of the paper’s getting brown, and Nash says, “Granted, it’s not much, but it’s more than the police hav
e right now.”

  The tip puffs into flame, just a tiny flame, and Nash says, “Maybe you can fill the police in on the rest of it.”

  The flame’s getting bigger. There’s people enough here that somebody’s going to notice. Nash sitting here, setting fires in a bar, people are going to call the police.

  And I say he’s deluded.

  The little torch is getting bigger.

  The bartender looks over at us, at Nash’s little fuse burning shorter and shorter.

  Nash just watches the fire in his hand growing out of control.

  The heat of it on my lips, the smoke in my eyes.

  The bartender yells, “Hey! Quit screwing around!”

  And Nash moves the burning napkin toward the waxed paper and paper plate on the table.

  And I grab his wrist, his uniform cuff smeared yellow with mustard, and his skin underneath loose and soft, and I tell him, okay. I say, just stop, okay?

  I say he has to promise never to tell.

  And with the fuse still burning between us, Nash says, “Sure.” He says, “I promise.”

  Chapter 17

  Helen walks up with a wineglass in her hand, just a glimpse of red in the bottom, the glass almost empty.

  And Mona says, “Where’d you get that?”

  “My drink?” Helen says. She’s wearing a thick coat made of some fur in different shades of brown with white on each tip. It’s open in the front with a powder-blue suit underneath. She sips the last of the wine and says, “I got it off the bar. Over there, next to the bowl of oranges and that little brass statue.”

  And Mona digs both hands into her own red and black dreadlocks and squeezes the top of her head. She says, “That’s the altar.” She points to the empty glass and says, “You just drank my sacrifice to The Goddess.”

  Helen presses the empty glass into Mona’s hand and says, “Well, how about you get The Goddess another sacrifice, but make it a double this time.”

  We’re in Mona’s apartment, where all the furniture is pushed out onto a little patio behind sliding glass doors and covered with a blue plastic tarp. All that’s left is the empty living room with a little room branching off one side where the dinette set should be. The walls and shag carpet are beige. The bowl of oranges and the brass statue of somebody Hindu, dancing, they’re on the fireplace mantel with yellow daisies and pink carnations scattered around them. The light switches are taped over with masking tape so you can’t use them. Instead, Mona’s got some flat rocks on the floor with candles set on them, purple and white candles, some lit, some not. In the fireplace, instead of a fire, more candles are burning. Strands of white smoke drift up from little cones of brown incense set on the flat rocks with the candles.