"Ouch." Elizabeth had to stifle a yelp of pain when a passing mother ran a stroller up her heels. She ducked into the small alcove before the door and shook out her ankles. The wind picked up and she regretted leaving the bookstore without her coat. She couldn't go back and get it without getting nabbed by Alice, so she endured, blowing on her fingers to keep them from going numb.
Becky was helping a teenaged boy with some boots; before the customer were arrayed several pairs decorated with varying quantities of chrome spikes. The boy was holding up a boot and talking about it. Elizabeth could not hear him, but she could see his lips moving. Becky was not listening. Instead, she had an ear cocked toward the back of the store where Marla stood beside the counter talking to a cadaverously thin young man. He was as tall as Marla and similarly complected, with very pale skin and dark hair. Marla's rawboned features were transmuted on this man's profile to a handsome, hard-edged masculinity, although Elizabeth revised her evaluation of his looks downwards when he turned his head and she saw the number of piercings in his face.
Marla opened the register and withdrew a handful of bills which she handed to him. Baring his teeth, he took the money and placed it in the wallet connected to his belt by a two-foot long steel chain. He stored his wallet in one of the myriad pockets of his black leather pants and chucked Marla under the chin. She raised a hand as if to slap him, but caught herself and slowly returned her hand to her side. She mirrored his carnivorous smile.
The dark man left the shoe store. He brushed past Elizabeth in a cloud of creaking leather and patchouli that made her head spin. She had to actively restrain herself from pinching him, as Prospero pinched Caliban, and then wondered if that was the effect of the ring eroding her morality. She almost forgot to slip in through the shop door as it swung closed behind him. Once he was far enough away that she was no longer in his zone of influence, she shook her head to clear it and nipped through the door at the last instant. It closed on her heels and she entered the shop with a thump and a stifled curse.
Neither Marla nor Becky noticed the noise, but the customer turned his head. Elizabeth held her breath until she remembered that he could not see her and then she let it out slowly. She tiptoed through the shop floor and tried not to sneeze from the smell of rubber outgassing from the merchandise. A floor board creaked beneath her foot and this time Marla looked directly at the space where Elizabeth was standing. Elizabeth moved more slowly after that, carefully placing each foot and shifting her weight slowly to avoid making any more noise.
After an eternity of slow silent steps, Elizabeth passed Marla and went through the curtain into the stockroom. Unsteady towers of shoeboxes rose above Elizabeth's head and created an even worse hazard than the creaking floor. She tucked her arms in close to her body so she could pass through the shoeboxes without inadvertently triggering an avalanche.
Back behind the boxes, she found a narrow door standing ajar. Identifying the chamber beyond as Marla's office, she gently opened the door wide enough to slip through. Her nerves receded from the breaking point when the door opened silently.
A rasping creak would have been more in keeping with the decor of the office. The cinderblock walls were painted an uncomfortable shade of red and were draped with crimson velvet hangings. The linty shag carpet was black, as were the desk, chair, and filing cabinets. An inverted cross hung on the wall above the desk, whereon the stumps of black candles stood surrounded by spreading puddles of congealed black wax. A human skull-cum-flowerpot held the remains of a dead cactus and a pungent smell hung in the air, reminiscent of the sulfurous smell in the basement at home, but more vegetal. Elizabeth looked around for a source of the smell and wrinkled her nose when she found a baggie containing a half-eaten sandwich. The bread was hairy and blue.
She returned her attention to the desk which held order forms, invoices, and bills, many stamped with red overdue notices, in addition to the black wax. A black NeXT computer purred on a folding table in one corner.
Elizabeth sat in the chair and quickly inspected the letters and papers, careful to return everything to its original location. She wasn't really sure what she was looking for, but she didn't see anything that looked incriminating. She opened up the desk drawers where she found dried up pens and vast quantities of stinky black licorice. In the third drawer she hit the jackpot. She found a long roll of paper which she unrolled to reveal a floor plan for an expansion of the shoe store into Miss Price's bookshop. She made a mental note of the designer's name and then replaced the plans in the drawer. She also found a number of letters to a law firm which, by the number of Martins in the name, she easily determined to be Trip's own. They were addressed to his sister Jennifer and concerned issues of title. All of this was adding up to a very ugly picture, although Elizabeth could not find anything specifically related to the vandalism at the Why Not? Bookstore or the Sisters of Sycorax.
She placed the letters back in the drawer and her eyes caught sight of a small card sticking out from a folder in the bottom. She pulled out the card and turned it over. It was a business card bearing the city logo and the name Edward Baggott. Elizabeth opened up the folder in which she had found the card, but it contained only a stack of invoices from a shoe company called Sky High. Elizabeth returned the folder to the drawer, but put the card in her pocket.
She heard the sound of footsteps moving towards the office. Shutting the drawer with more noise than she really wanted to make, she popped out of the chair as Marla walked into the office. Marla did not notice anything amiss and merely took a pen from a black cup, imprinted with a smiley face with a bloody bullet hole in its forehead, and returned to the shop.
Elizabeth breathed a silent sigh of relief and went out into the stockroom where she nearly ran into Becky who was loaded down with a large stack of boxed boots that she was returning to stock. After Becky moved out of the main path, Elizabeth went back out into the shop where Marla was swiping a credit card that likely belonged to the boy's father, who couldn't possibly be less creditworthy than his son looked. Elizabeth waited by the door until the boy left, wearing his new boots and leaving the old ones by the counter, and slipped out the door after him.
Back in the bookstore, Alice was lurking behind the counter where she had laid out some tarot cards in a cross. The display of pulp novels had been restored to order. Elizabeth could hear Miss Price's voice still arguing on the telephone.
She removed the ring and put it in her pocket. Alice barely looked up when her sister winked into sight.
"Don't you want to know what I found?"
"Why should I ask? You'll tell me anyway."
Elizabeth leaned forward and described the contents of Marla's office, down to the blueprint of the expanded shoe store and the moldy sandwich. She pulled the business card from her pocket and showed it to Alice.
Alice took the card and said, "Edward Baggott, ha. He must be Becky's father or brother. He's not in the tax department, but it says he's in general administration, so he might have the right kind of access to mess with property-tax records. What did you find on her computer?"
"I didn't look," Elizabeth said.
Alice expressed disbelief. "You only looked at papers? Welcome to the new millennium where all the real data is digital. Goddess! I can't believe you didn't even look. Give me the ring, I'll go do it." She held out her hand.
"I don't suppose you ladies have any work to do." Miss Price materialized beside the counter. Her arms were folded across her chest and she was tapping her toe impatiently. "I know that there is a cart of one hundred books to be stocked and at least a thousand more catalogs to go out."
Alice set down the rest of her tarot cards and went back to get the books. Elizabeth lingered for a moment by the counter to see the cards her sister had laid out. In the center of the cross, Death was face up and grinning. She shivered.