Forests of the Heart

  Ellie nodded. “I wonder how old? Ms. Wood gave me the impression it’s completely ancient, but how long does wood stay in such excellent condition?”

  “Don’t ask me,” Chantal said. “I work with clay.”

  “Anyway,” Ellie went on, “I’m supposed to make a copy of it in clay for a casting.”

  “What will you cast it in?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Ellie said. “My only instructions were that there’s to be no iron in the metal I end up choosing.”

  “Weird.”

  “Mmm.” Elbe’s gaze drifted to where Chantal’s busts stood alongside her more whimsical work. “I wonder why they didn’t just ask you to do it?”

  “Beats me.”

  “Because of your brujería,” Bettina told Ellie.

  As Ellie turned to her that strange buzzing that Tommy’s Aunt Sunday had woken in her whispered up her spine again.

  “My what?” she said.

  “Your magic. It is very potent. As is this mask. To make a new one as potent as the old needs a person such as you—someone with a powerful spirit as well as the necessary artistic skills.”

  Twice in one day was just too weird. Like Sunday, Bettina stated it completely matter-of-factly, none of this glib, trying-to-impress, New Age, aren’t-we-spooky-and-wise-stuff here, which only made Ellie feel all the more uncomfortable with it. What was happening anyway? Did she have “I’m gullible, tease me about mysterious stuff” written on her forehead or something? But before she could get too caught up in the strange coincidence of it, Chantal gave one of her merry laughs.

  “Bet you didn’t know we have our own resident wise woman,” she said. “Seriously. It’s kind of eerie the way Bettina can pick up on stuff no one else notices. And she makes these charms that really work.”

  “Um, no offense,” Ellie said, “but I don’t really buy into that kind of thing.”

  “You can be a friend of Jilly’s and say that?”

  “I think Jilly has enough belief for the both of us and then some.”

  Chantal smiled. “Yes. But don’t you want to believe?”

  “Not really.”

  “We’ll just have to win her over,” Chantal said to Bettina.

  The dark-haired woman shook her head. “The spirits do not require anyone’s belief to exist. They were there at the beginning of the world and they will still be here, long after we are gone. Whether or not we believe in them is irrelevant.”

  “She can be way more fun than this,” Chantal assured Ellie.

  The twinkle in her eye made it plain she was teasing, but Bettina seemed to take it seriously.

  “Me pasa,” she said. “I’m sorry. I was being rude.”

  “No,” Ellie told her. “I’m the one who should be apologizing.”

  “Oh, please,” Chantal said. “Enough with the ‘I’m sorrys’ already. The one of you’s worse than the other.”

  Ellie and Bettina exchanged self-conscious smiles.

  I like her, Ellie thought, talk of spirits and magic notwithstanding. And if she could put up with the way Jilly and Donal carried on about the strange and mysterious at times, then she could do it with Bettina as well.

  She turned to Chantal and said, “Maybe we should go find Nuala and see where Kellygnow stands on shared studios.”

  “Are you certain this is what you want?” Nuala asked Ellie when they caught up with her in an upstairs hallway.

  Ellie thought it was a little odd that the housekeeper seemed to be making a point of only asking her, but she nodded. Nuala regarded her for a long moment, as though giving Ellie one more chance to reconsider.

  “Very well,” she said. “I will speak to the executors about it. I’m sure they’ll agree when they learn this is your wish.”

  “And in the meantime … ?” Ellie asked.

  “Enjoy each other’s company,” Nuala told her.

  They waited until they were around a corner and out of Nuala’s sight before giving each other high-fives, smiling and laughing like a trio of schoolgirls on an unexpected holiday. Ellie didn’t know why she was so giddy. Part of it was simple relief that she wasn’t going to be responsible for Chantal’s getting sent away. But mostly it was the unexpectedness of making new friends in a place where she hadn’t really anticipated she’d fit in at all. Truth was, she’d half-expected to be found out as a fraud and turned away from the front door before she’d even gotten a chance to step inside. Because, really. The caliber of artists who’d been in residence here was way out of her league.

  “I am so happy,” Bettina said, linking arms with them as they continued down the hall. “My old friend and my new both get to stay.”

  “Actually,” Chantal told Ellie, “it’s just that she’s really vain and didn’t want me out of here until I finished the bust of her that I’m working on.”

  Bettina blushed, but she smiled when Ellie laughed.

  For once, Ellie thought, things were going her way.

  When they reached the stairs, they went down single-file. Halfway down, Ellie paused at a side window. She’d been distracted at first by a group of figures on the lawn, a group of men, Natives, she guessed from their dark skin and black braided hair, standing in a loose circle, smoking and looking up at the house—right at her, it felt like. Then she realized that they were only wearing thin white shirts and broadcloth suits, some of them not even bothering with their jackets. She leaned closer to the window. And standing barefoot in the snow.

  “What is it?” Chantal asked from a few steps lower down.

  “There’s these guys out there,” Ellie replied. “It’s like they think it’s summer.

  When Chantal and Bettina joined her at the window, the sculptor gave Ellie an odd look.

  “What guys?” she said.

  “Ha, ha.”

  “No, seriously,” Chantal told her. “I don’t see anything except for an empty lawn, covered in snow.”

  Ellie turned to look at her and was shocked to realize that the other woman wasn’t simply teasing her.

  “Chantal can’t see them,” Bettina said.

  Ellie slowly turned to face her. “What do you mean?”

  “Dark-haired, dark-skinned men,” Bettina said. “Dressed in dark suits and white shirts. Barefoot. Smoking. Staring up at us.”

  Ellie nodded along with the description. “Exactly.”

  “I don’t see anything,” Chantal repeated.

  “Your sight isn’t strong enough,” Bettina said.

  Ellie shook her head. “Hang on here. Are you trying to tell me—”

  “They stand in la época del mito,” Bettina told her. “The spirirworld. That is why you can see them and Chantal can’t.”

  “No. That isn’t possible.”

  “Everyone carries magic in them,” Bettina said. “But to be able to use it, one must be either trained in its use, or have a high natural ability.”

  “But… I’ve never seen things before. Things that aren’t there, I mean.”

  Except they were. Dark eyes watching her from below, cigarette smoke wreathing about their heads.

  “Then something has woken it in you,” Bettina said.

  “Tell me you’re just putting me on,” Ellie said to Chantal. “This is all some kind of initiation prank, right?”

  Chantal continued to stare out the window, but she shook her head.

  “I swear to you,” she said. “I don’t see anything. I wish I did.”

  Ellie turned away from the window and leaned against the wall. That eerie sensation of something moving up her spine had returned and her chest was tight, as though her bones were shrinking.

  “I don’t want this,” she said.

  Bettina laid a steadying hand on her arm. “Unless you specifically seek it out, the spiritworld makes those choices for you. It’s better to accept its interest in you as best you can, for fighting it only adds to the stress you feel. Come,” she added. “Let’s go back to the studio. I’ll make you a tea that will calm you d
own.”

  “More …” Ellie had to clear her throat. “More magic?” Bettina shook her head. “No. A simple herbal remedy, nothing more.” “Okay,” Ellie said and let the smaller woman lead her away. “Can you make me one that’ll let me see this stuff?” Chantal asked from behind them.

  Ellie didn’t know if Bettina had put some enchantment on the herbs and the boiling water she used to make her tea, or if it was simply the natural properties of the ingredients, but the tea did calm her down. The soothing liquid couldn’t erase the memory of what she had seen, nor the unfamiliar sensations it had woken in her—a kind of floating in her nerve ends, a sharpening of her vision, a clarity in her thinking. But it laid a thin gauze between the immediacy of the idea of magic, the anxiety it had woken in her, and her normal self.

  After a while she was actually able to take her suitcase up to her room and unpack, then rejoin the other women in the studio. There she set up her side of the studio and worked on some preliminary sketches for Musgrave Wood’s mask while Bettina sat for Chantal on the other side of the room.

  She was a little jealous of Chantal having Bettina as a model and kept glancing in their direction. It wasn’t simply that Bettina was so beautiful, though she certainly was. No wonder Donal had been smitten with her. But there was more to her than that. She had great character in her still-youthful features and something else as well. Some undefinable charisma that made it impossible to not want to make a rendering of her.

  In the end, Ellie found herself filling a half-dozen pages of her sketchbook with surreptitious drawings of the pair, Bettina on her stool, Chantal at the modeling stand, her large fingers pulling the most delicate details from the bust. She didn’t think Ms. Wood would mind. After all, there had to be a settling-in period, didn’t there, and she had already come up with some great ideas for the mask.

  The one thing she did, Bettina’s tea notwithstanding, was keep her gaze away from the windows in the studio. They looked out onto the rear lawns where she’d seen the strange group of men and she wasn’t taking any chances. Perhaps it was childish—pathetic, really, for a grown woman to expect that if she couldn’t see something, then it wasn’t there—but she couldn’t help herself. From the way Bettina had spoken earlier, if she did look, she might find a whole other world waiting for her out there, and Ellie truly wasn’t prepared for anything but the simple winter landscape that rationality told her had to be on the other side of the window’s panes.

  6

  “Oh, man,” Fiona said when she heard about what had happened to Miki’s apartment. “That really sucks. What is wrong with people, anyway?”

  She sat perched beside the cash register on the front counter of Gypsy Records in full Goth mode: long straight hair, lace blouse, calf-length skirt and leather bodice, all black and contrasting sharply against her porcelain skin. Here and there silver jewelry twinkled about her person like stars viewed through a layer of dark clouds. Rings, bracelets, earrings, an eyebrow ring, choker.

  “Many of them,” Miki said from where she was slouched on a chair behind the counter, “are simply shite.”

  “Yeah, really. I wonder who you pissed off.”

  Miki only shrugged.

  “Because a friend of mine—remember Andrea? She’s sort of gangly, with long black hair and a slinky wardrobe.”

  “Fiona, that describes most of your friends—male and female.”

  “Yeah, well. When the people in her building found out she was a pagan, there was this big fuss about having a Satanist living in the building, you know, conducting unspeakable rituals and all that crap, as if. But before it all died down, someone broke into her place and trashed it, wrote Biblical quotations all over the walls and stuff.”

  “It’s not exactly the same thing.”

  “No, but it just goes to show you. Nobody had anything personally against her, there were just people who didn’t like who she was on principal, and even then they didn’t have a clue.”

  “And the point is?”

  “The point is, I don’t know. Maybe somebody really hates Celtic music or accordions or something. It could be a clue.”

  Miki had to smile at that.

  “Anyway,” Fiona said. “Do you want some help cleaning up?”

  Miki shook her head. “I’m never going back there.”

  “But all your stuff…”

  “Is ruined,” Hunter put in as he passed by the cash filing CDs. He paused to lean against a browser. “It’s like somebody emptied out the vats of a piss factory in her place.”

  Fiona grimaced. “Well, thank you for that lovely image.”

  Hunter shrugged and went back to filing CDs.

  “It’s true,” Miki said. “They didn’t miss anything except for my old Hohner. I swear, they must’ve had bladders the size of hot air balloons.”

  “You’re grossing me out.”

  “This from a woman who enjoys Marilyn Manson.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  Miki nodded. “No, I don’t suppose it is.”

  Hunter tuned them out as they got into a discussion of Goth versus Metal and where various artists fit in. Humming along with the Sam Bush CD that was playing on the store’s sound system, he went to the front of the store and started rearranging the new release display to accommodate the latest set of Verve reissues that had come in that morning. He didn’t know what made him look up and out at the street, but when he did, he found himself face-to-face with one of the hard men standing outside the store, smirking at him. When the man saw he had Hunter’s attention, he took a hand out of the pocket of his trench coat, did a Michael Jackson crotch grab, and sauntered off.

  Hunter stood there for a long moment trying to fight down the sudden rage that had flared in him, Oscar Peterson and Bill Evans CDs forgotten in his hand. It was hard to let the adrenaline rush go, because fear had been as much a part of what had called it up as anger. When he finally felt calm enough to trust his voice, he turned slowly to see if Miki had noticed the hard man, too, but she and Fiona were still arguing musical classifications. He found a place on the rack for the CDs he was holding, then returned to the counter.

  “Fiona,” he said, breaking into their conversation. “You know a lot of these New Age types, right?”

  She looked confused. “What, you mean like John Tesh and Yanni fans?”

  “No, not music. The other kind of New Age. Healing crystals and Tarot cards and that kind of stuff.”

  “I guess. Why? You planning on consulting an oracle to find out when business is going to pick up?”

  She grinned at him and turned to Miki to share the joke, but Hunter could tell Miki knew where he was going with this and she only managed a halfhearted smile for Fiona. He wondered if her nostrils had filled with the memory smell of that rank urine back at her apartment the way his just had.

  “I was wondering if you knew anybody into Native American spirituality,” he said.

  “You mean like for real?”

  Hunter nodded.

  “Well, Jessica goes up to the rez all the time—”

  “You know her,” Miki put in, obviously unable to pass up the opportunity to tease, even in her present mood. “Kind of gangly, with long black hair and a slinky wardrobe.”

  Fiona punched her in the arm.

  “Like it’s not true,” Miki said.

  “What about Jessica?” Hunter asked.

  “Well, her boyfriend’s father leads a lot of the sweats and he’s really into the old ways of doing things.”

  “Any chance I could talk to either of them?”

  “I suppose, but neither of them’s easy to get hold of. They live back in the bush, without a phone. You might be better off with one of the Creek sisters.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Oh, I know them,” Miki said. “Or a couple of them, at least. Verity and Zulema. They often help out at those benefit concerts for street people that I play at every year.”

  “Interesting names,” Hunter sa
id. “Are they Natives?”

  Fiona nodded. “There’s like twelve or thirteen of them and everybody up on the rez treats them with deference.”

  “So how do I get hold of one of them?”

  “I don’t know,” Fiona said. “I’ll call Jessica when she gets home tonight. I can’t call her at work because they’re not allowed to get personal calls there.”

  Hunter gave a thoughtful nod. “Maybe I should start thinking about that.”

  Fiona gave him a whack on the arm at the same time as Miki threw a section of the newspaper at him.

  At closing time Fiona asked Miki if she wanted to stay over at her apartment.

  “Depends,” Miki said. “Are you planning any Satanic rituals?”

  “Only if you’re still a virgin, as if.”

  “And you won’t expect me to dye my hair black?”

  “No, but you will have to wear something black and slinky and listen to at least a couple of hours of All About Eve.”

  “You still listen to them?”

  “Hey, at least the people who write the music I like are still alive.”

  Hunter just shook his head. He couldn’t see the pair of them surviving the night, if they kept this kind of thing up.

  “You’ll be okay?” he asked Miki.

  She nodded.

  “Then I’m going to let you lock up.”

  “Do you want me to do up the deposit?” she asked.

  “We made enough for a deposit?”

  “Well…”

  “Leave it till tomorrow,” Hunter said. “And good luck. Both of you.”

  “What, you don’t think we can get along?” Fiona asked.

  Hunter gave them an innocent look. “No, I think you get along famously.” He paused for a moment, inserting one of Fiona’s “as ifs” to himself. “I meant good luck getting home. Crappy weather and all.”

  His excuse wasn’t that far off the mark. Over the afternoon, the skies had gone from dismal gray to what it was doing now: letting fall a steady drizzle of freezing rain. The streets and pavement were already slick with ice. Buildings, traffic and street lights all sported long dripping icicles. The traffic was bumper to bumper on Williamson and in the past couple of hours he’d seen more than one pedestrian almost take a fall. Near the bus stops, clumps of wet commuters huddled under the closest awnings, ignoring the way the canvas drooped alarmingly under the growing weight of the ice. Or maybe they no longer cared, just wanting to get home as quickly and as dry as possible, given the circumstances.