She wore a moss green suit with a neckline plunging down to reveal more cleavage than Elizabeth would have dared show even on a warm day. The short skirt crept up a silken length of thigh with Trip's hand in hot pursuit. Her face was a gracefully proportioned oval of ivory, set with jewel-blue eyes and framed by large black curls that gleamed red where they were struck by the pale winter sun. And her lips! The woman must get a bulk discount on collagen at her plastic surgeon's. Elizabeth marveled at the lush pillows, more like a cartoonish ideal of lips, as they pressed against the rim of a wine glass.
"Are you going in already?"
Marla had come up behind Elizabeth while she stood frozen in place at the door of the restaurant.
"Sorry." Elizabeth started to step back from the door, but Marla did not wait for her to clear out of the way and shoved her roughly aside.
Stumbling out into the sidewalk, off-balanced as much by her surprise at Trip than by Marla's rudeness, Elizabeth remembered her errand and quickly moved off down the street. A cloud rolled over the sun and the shadows of trees and people faded into gray. She had to remind herself that, as she had told her housemates the night before, Trip was not her boyfriend. The jealousy coursing through her was hardly reasonable and Trip probably had a sensible reason for lunching with a woman who ought to be strolling down a catwalk in Paris. Perhaps she was a client.
Elizabeth managed to hold that thought all the rest of the way to the coffee store and most of the way back to the bookstore until she reached the restaurant where she had seen Trip. Now Trip, his dining partner, and Marla were standing out in front of the restaurant.
Trip held out a hand and greeted her warmly as she drew near.
Elizabeth's smile sprang crookedly back to life and she walked into the circle of his arm.
He said, "Titania, this is my neighbor Elizabeth. Elizabeth, Titania."
Elizabeth's smile crumbled and she struggled to keep it plastered on her face despite the sting of being introduced as nothing more than a neighbor. He's not your boyfriend, remember?
Titania held out her hand and shook Elizabeth's with resignation. She expressed no interest in Elizabeth, even as a possible rival.
Trip asked her, "Elizabeth, have you met Marla? She's Titania's sister, she owns the shop next door to where you work."
Still suspended from the cable over the street, Alice's shoes bonked together in the breeze, a reminder of their first encounter.
Elizabeth said, "We have, but we've never been formally introduced."
Marla's eyes were sharp as knives. "Oh yes, we've met. How's your head?" she asked in an insinuating tone.
Elizabeth's smile faded in earnest now. The lump on her head from the Halloween encounter with the Sisters of Sycorax had not been giving her much grief, but now it twinged sharply. She pretended, not entirely successfully, to appear puzzled. "My head? It's fine, thank you."
Oblivious to the undercurrents among the women, Trip attempted to make small talk. Titania sighed with ennui and Marla, instead of giving the conventional replies to his conventional remarks, twisted his words around and left him confused. Elizabeth excused herself before she lost her temper with them all.
When she entered the bookstore, she closed the door firmly behind her and leaned against the plywood, drawing a melodramatic hand over her brow. "Phew!"
Alice and Dirk looked up from the counter where they were bent over a layout of tarot cards. Dirk was holding a book, the title of which included the words "channeling" and "inner". Elizabeth immediately averted her eyes.
Dirk asked, "What happened to you?" A flutter of motion outside distracted him and he looked with interest out the plate glass window. "Oh, Shevrells. Is this place infested with them, or what?"
"Shevrells?" Alice looked out the window and Elizabeth craned her head around. Trip and Titania were passing by.
"Yes, Shevrells. That girl with Trip, what's her name?" Dirk snapped his fingers. "Titania, that's it. She's Carl and Marla's sister."
"Their last name is Morton, not Shevrell," said Alice.
Dirk said, "I think they're half-sisters, so she has a different last name. Titania was going out with Trip when I was dating Carl, back before Trip moved in next door. We went on some double dates, and that was a major mistake. Titania was working on Trip, trying to turn him into her own private plastic Ken doll (like, he's halfway there already), while Carl was trying to subvert the whole process. And Trip is such a clod, he'd call her 'Tits' for short."
Alice said, "And she let him live? But anyway, the person who's trying to get our house is named Shevrell. It's got to be Titania or Marla working through her." She leaned forward and lowered her voice. Elizabeth drew closer.
"When I saw Marla go out, I went and looked in her computer. I didn't see anything about Titania, but I saw Marla's been writing letters to Jennifer Martin asking about the tax situation of the house. And she exchanged some really cryptic e-mails with that Edward Baggott. I didn't have enough time to read it all and I couldn't save it to disk or anything, because that NeXT OS is probably not compatible with my machine, but—"
Miss Price cleared her throat and they all jumped. They had not seen her walk in from the other room. Her glasses reflected the bookstore and their startled faces; they could not see her eyes. "I don't suppose you'd mind telling me how you came to be messing with our neighbor's computer," she said to Alice.
"I, um, just sneaked in and Becky was busy out front with a customer, and Marla stepped out of the shop, so…"
"Indeed?" Frowning, Miss Price looked out the window to where Marla and Titania stood in front of the shoe store. "I think this purification ritual that you're trying to set up is definitely in order. We will do one here in the shop tonight too."
"Do we need to get the coven together for that?" asked Alice.
"No, you just stay late tonight and help me. I think this space is small enough that the two of us can get it done quite easily. As for you two," Miss Price transferred her attention to Elizabeth and Dirk, "you will need to get to work at your house. Get it as clean as you can, and I do realize that that is quite a task, and we will have the ritual tomorrow night. We don't need all thirteen of us there, but if all your housemates are together, that should be sufficient."
"But I have a date tonight. I can't stay late, I have to go home and get ready," Alice protested.
Miss Price said, "Don't mind that. You'll have time and besides, I don't think that Officer Joe will really mind all that much. And we may use him in the ceremony ritual at your house too."
"Really? What for?" Dirk looked doubtful.
"I don't have anything specific in mind just yet." Miss Price looked down at the tarot cards on the counter. "Really, Alice, if you keep playing with that deck, I'm going to make you buy it."
"We can't sell this. It's the one that Becky got gum on," Alice said. "Besides, it keeps giving weird readings. Death comes up every time."
"Let me see." Miss Price bent over the arrangement.
Everyone else did too. Alice had the cards laid out in a cross. Death was face up in the center.
"What are you trying to do, exactly? Are you doing readings over and over again until you get the answer you like?" asked Miss Price. She passed a hand over the cards, not touching them, but pausing briefly over the Death card.
Alice blushed. "Yes, but I get the same reading every time. How often does that happen? It's like flipping a coin and getting heads ninety-two times in a row."
"Death is not necessarily bad, dear. It might simply mean a big change of some sort." Miss Price waved her hand over the cards again and frowned. She scooped up the cards and shuffled them together with the remainder of the deck which she retrieved from Alice. Some of the cards stuck together and she fought with them a little bit, then held the deck in the palm of her hand for a few moments while she looked at it closely.
Elizabeth heard a crackling sound like the snap of a static electric shock and saw a small flash of light around the cards. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a quick dark form, like a cockroach, scuttling away. Or thought she did. She rubbed her eyes and looked again. In a corner by a bookshelf, a leaf, which had probably ridden in on her own shoe, twitched slightly in a draft. Alice and Dirk betrayed no notice of the pyrotechnics. Either they were accustomed to this sort of thing, or Elizabeth had only been imagining it.
Miss Price handed the deck back to Alice. "Play with it now, dear. It should give you more normal readings, I think."
Miss Price watched Alice lay out the cards again. They all held their collective breaths and sighed when this time the Hanging Man turned up, and then the Sun. Smiling brightly, Miss Price looked around at the others with a pleased expression that quickly evaporated. She peered first into Alice's face and then into Dirk's.
She said, "Actually, you've both been looking a little hexed lately. Have you been messing around with gratuitous spells?" Without waiting for an answer, she pressed a thumb to each of their foreheads.
Elizabeth heard another cracking noise. Surprised, Alice and Dirk jumped back from Miss Price.
"Ouch! What was that for?" Dirk rubbed his forehead, but the tension that had lingered around his eyes and mouth for the past few days relaxed and the smudged look lifted from his features.
"Oh, my sinuses!" Alice's hands flew to her face and she emitted a honking noise. "They're all, like, clear now."
Miss Price smiled opaquely.
Elizabeth drove Alice's car home from the store. "And be careful," she said aloud to herself, repeating her sister's words as she eased the battered car into a parking spot. A familiar BMW was parking across the street and Trip met her at the gate to the house.
"Hi, neighbor!" she said with a saccharine smile.
Trip was not so oblivious that he didn't catch her meaning and he had the grace to look embarrassed. He surprised her with an apology. "I'm sorry about that. It was kind of a touchy situation. I don't suppose I can make it up to you with dinner?" His winning smile flashed in the glow of the gaslight. A breeze ruffled his golden hair and pushed a whorl of leaves along the sidewalk.
That will cost you way more than dinner, Elizabeth was about to say but didn't. She was startled by a sudden rush of self-respect that drowned out the little voice in her head which cried, 'But he's cute! He's the cutest guy you've ever gone out with!' Instead, she said, "No, thank you. I've got a lot of things to do around the house this evening. See ya." She left him standing at the gate.
Bob was in the kitchen, browning frozen mini-eggrolls in the oven and opening a can of clam chowder. Rififi followed his every move with rapt attention.
"That's your dinner? I guess doctors don't study nutrition," Elizabeth commented.
Bob scraped the contents of the can into a saucepan. "If they wanted us to get good nutrition, they would give us time to go to the grocery store once in awhile." As he rinsed out the empty can, Rififi danced with rage and then hopped up on the stove to get into the saucepan. "No dairy for you," said Bob. He tossed the can in the recycling bin and then scooped Rififi into his arms and tickled his tummy. Hissing with affronted dignity, Rififi struggled free and retreated to a corner of the kitchen.
"Why no dairy?"
"Rififi is lactose intolerant, we found out when Alice gave him all the feta off a Greek salad once. It was bad. He made it to the litter box, but then stepped in his own.Anyway, he had bad poopy foot." Bob laughed at Elizabeth when she pulled a frozen pizza out of the freezer. "Like that is so healthy," he said.
She defended her pizza. "This is one of the fancy ones, see? It has actual vegetables on it."
They shared a companionable meal. Elizabeth offered Bob a slice of pizza and he gave her some eggrolls. Ever persistent, Rififi sat under the table and waited patiently in case a crumb of cheese or shrimp should fall to the floor.
"What you doing tonight?" he asked her.
"Pagan cleaning. They want to do their purification ritual right away," she said, scrutinizing the ingredient label on the box of eggrolls. She had just taken a bite which turned to ashes in her mouth as she read.
"Why? Is the moon in the seventh house?"
"No, the forces of evil are arranging themselves in opposition to the house and the bookstore, so we have to get everything all magically protected as soon as possible." She added, "Not that I actually believe in any of this."
Bob look around the spotless kitchen and said, "The place could stand to be cleaned. And if it makes them happy to sprinkle herbs around and chant, then I guess that's all right as long as I don't have to participate."
"I don't think they can make you do anything you don't want to do. That would probably create negative vibrations and cancel out the spell."
"But you don't believe in this, or anything."
Elizabeth detected a suspicious note in his voice. She snapped, "Of course not. But lots of weird things have been happening lately and it can hardly hurt."
After dinner and washing up, they wiped down the counters and mopped the floor. It looked good enough to Elizabeth, but Bob was still not satisfied. She left him polishing the tops of the spice jars.
She found an antique vacuum cleaner in a broom closet and decided to run it over the monumental carpets in the main rooms. She lugged the vacuum cleaner to the living room. It was solid steel and plated with enough chrome to satisfy a Harley aficionado; it must have weighed fifty pounds. The form of the base was reminiscent of a hammerhead shark, except for the Cyclopean headlight which sat in the center and cast a dim light through a scratched and grimy fresnel lens when she plugged the vacuum into the living room's lone socket.
"Where is the switch?" she asked herself as she examined the Bakelite handle.
"Down there," said Penrose. He knelt beside the vacuum cleaner and flipped a switch located in a hidden spot on the back of the head.
The vacuum cleaner roared to life and took off across the carpet. Elizabeth ran after it and caught it by the handle before it could reduce a delicate chair to a heap of gilt splinters. Industriously, she maneuvered the vacuum cleaner around the conversation circles and swept the broad areas of the carpet that she could cover without rearranging the furniture.
Watching her work, Penrose stretched languorously across the sofa in much the same position as the evil Carl had yesterday. "You don't have to get it so terribly clean. The pagans do everything by candlelight. They won't notice a wad of cat hair behind the couch."
"Are you sure that leaving it there won't create more bad energy that we'll have to clean up?"
"You're getting the hang of it, aren't you? You'd better be careful. If you play along with them too well, you might start falling for that nonsense."
Elizabeth touched the switch with her toe so they could converse in normal tones. "I'm beginning to wonder how much of it really is nonsense. Says the girl who nearly got sucked into a sand pit to the 350-year-old ensorcelled spirit."
Penrose shed his insouciance and sat up straight. "That's completely different," he said. "That's sorcery. There's no comparison. Sorcery is to those neo-pagan rituals what nuclear magnetic resonance is to a magnifying glass."
Elizabeth said primly, "Even a magnifying glass can be useful or destructive depending on what you do with it, or want to do with it, for that matter. If Alice and her friends can get rid of whatever is haunting this house, and I don't mean you, with their ritual, then I'm going along with it. Do we have an alternative? You keep saying that you don't know what's happening, or that you can't tell what it is. How do you know that the purification ritual won't work?"
Penrose admitted, "I don't know, and I did say that it might have some effect. But have you seen those books your sister and Dirk read? They make no sense at all. None of those spells have any basis in the practice of magic."
Elizabeth said, "It's supposed to be religion, not science, and it makes them happy. At the very least we'll get the house cleaned and have kind of a party. You're looking forward to this, I know you are."
"Well, yes, but not because I think it will exorcise the demons in this house."
"Demons?"
"For lack of a better word." Penrose frowned and rose from the couch.
"I don't suppose I can talk you into doing the dusting," Elizabeth said.
"Not a chance." Penrose vanished
"That figures," Elizabeth said to the empty air.
"What?" Bob walked into the room.
"Nothing, I was just talking to myself again." Elizabeth switched on the vacuum cleaner and began to attack the cat hair which clung to the carpet with infuriating tenacity. There had been something that she wanted to tell Penrose, but she could not remember what it was, and it hardly seemed worth hollering for him to reappear so she could tell him that she couldn't remember what she wanted to tell him.