Miss Price had Elizabeth follow along when she rechecked the wards on the first floor. The wards on the dining room windows were fading fast. Miss Price frowned and touched them with her fingertips until they brightened up.
"You may have to come in here and fluff these ones up every so often," Miss Price told her. She indicated the last one. "You try doing this one."
"Okay." Elizabeth raised an unsteady hand and stuck a finger into the center of the pentagram as Miss Price had done. She felt a wavering vibration around her finger tip. It felt like touching the cone of a speaker blasting Beethoven. She tilted her head slightly as she tried to hear it. As she listened, the vibration became stronger and steadier, although it felt as though the wavering might return at any moment. The glow from the pentagram increased and Elizabeth withdrew her finger when Miss Price told her to.
Miss Price complimented her technique and the two women walked together to the front door where Elizabeth helped Miss Price find her coat from among the many hanging on and off the coat tree.
Miss Price asked casually, "How long have you been aware of Mr. Penrose's presence?"
"Since right after I moved in. He was playing the piano one night and I went down to see who it was."
"Have you found him to be a benevolent spirit?"
Elizabeth snorted. "Benevolent? He's a human and acts like one. I don't think he's any better or worse than anyone else."
Miss Price nodded thoughtfully. "That's very interesting. I've only encountered people in his situation a few times before. They often become twisted by their disembodiment, by being apart from this world but still in it. One man thought he was a god, another an angel. The one thing they did not see in themselves was any remaining shreds of humanity."
"I don't think that's a problem with him," Elizabeth said. "And he isn't behind any of the problems we've had."
Miss Price buttoned up her coat. "That was my impression as well." The teacher look, as Elizabeth thought of the authority and command that Miss Price wore like armor, left her face, which relaxed for a moment into a distant, ageless smile.
The moment passed quickly. Miss Price threw back her head and resumed teacher mode. "Do you find that you often see things that others don't?" she quizzed Elizabeth.
"You mean like Penrose? Well, I can see the pentagrams that we drew all over the house. Nobody else said anything about them at all. It looked like you and Charlotte were the only people who could see them."
"Yes."
"Does this mean I have second sight?"
Miss Price laughed. "No, there's no such thing. This is more like other sight or better sight. It's a gift of being able to see a little more clearly than most people. And it's a gift you might make use of. Would you be interested in learning more?"
Elizabeth shifted uncomfortably. If she had been asked that question at anytime in her life before the past few days, especially during her fairy tale-drenched childhood, her answer would have been an unequivocal "yes." Now, however, the memory of the sand tugging at her ankles and the quarreling that always erupted around the magic ring hovered at the forefront of her mind. She said hesitantly, "I'll think about it? I guess?"
Miss Price looked at her with a sharpness that peeled Elizabeth down to her wayback longings and left her ashamed of her timidity. "It's up to you, of course. When you make up your mind, let me know."
Elizabeth closed the door behind her and leaned against the wall. She slid down until her bottom rested on her heels and she put her head in her hands. She was still processing the notion of Miss Price as her mentor in sorcery when she felt a cold draft. She opened her eyes and looked at Penrose in the knees.
He was looking as faded and washed out as she felt. She wondered if the banishment ritual had affected him. Maybe the elimination of negative energy from the house had visibly drained away some of his obnoxiousness. Or maybe Miss Price just had that effect on people.
She raised her eyes to his face. "Well, they know I can see spirits and they don't seem to think I'm insane."
He plopped down on the coat-covered futon. He had to agree with her.
She said, "Someone was here from the trust earlier. A man named Unthank. He said he had some papers for you to sign."
"Unthank? Here?" Penrose frowned. "What kind of papers?"
"I don't know. He wouldn't leave them with me. He said he had to deal with you directly."
His frown deepened. "I've never dealt with the firm in person. He couldn't possibly have had business that requires him to come here."
"Maybe it's something about the property taxes. Oh!" Elizabeth remembered what she had wanted to tell him before, only now the information was even curiouser, what with Mr. Unthank's appearance. "I wanted to tell you. When I was snooping around in Marla's office, I found some plans, architectural drawings of an expansion of her shop into the bookstore. The architect's name was Unthank. I wanted to ask you if that meant anything to you. It must! Do you think it's the same Unthank as yours in the trust? Or a relative?"
Penrose's eyes widened. "I have no idea. I know nothing about Mr. Unthank's family, but this is a little too incestuous for my taste."
Alice and Joe clattered into the front hall.
"Who are you talking to?" Alice demanded. "Is it him?" She looked around wildly.
"Yes, it is. He's sitting on the futon."
Alice knelt before the futon, a good two feet to the left of where Penrose sat, and looked intently into the air.
"He's about two feet to the right of you," Elizabeth said dryly.
Alice adjusted herself. Penrose leaned back away from her and looked at Elizabeth with alarm.
"I can't see a thing," Alice announced. "Are you sure you're not fooling with me?"
"You're practically sitting in his lap," Elizabeth said.
Joe evinced dismay. "Hey! You shouldn't be messing around with haints."
"I'm not a haint," Penrose said.
"He says he's not a haint," Elizabeth said.
Joe expressed disbelief. "How do you know? He acts like one. The haints in my grandmother's house throw things around. Does he do that?"
The corners of Penrose's mouth lifted wickedly. "I can. I can start any time." He groped around on the futon for something to throw, but the futon held only large soft items that would not loft.
Elizabeth did not pass that on.
Alice continued to feel around for Penrose, but he scrambled out of her reach. Her arms passed through the air he had occupied moments before. "Brr. It's really cold here." She rubbed her arms a little to restore the heat. She told her sister, "Ask him about that cone of power trick."
"Oh, that." From his pocket, Penrose removed the copper armband, retrieved from Miss Price at some point during the proceedings. He passed his fingers over the heavy stones and bands of light sprang into the air around him. "This is just a little something that Friar Bacon came up with when he was working on his brazen head." He quickly slipped it into his sleeve so it would not be visible to Alice.
"Wasn't that a little before your time?" asked Elizabeth. "Like a hundred years?"
"Four hundred years. I'm talking about Roger Bacon, not Francis Bacon. Besides, I didn't say I got it from him personally," Penrose said.
When the light show began Alice had sprung back into the muscley arms of Officer Joe, from the shelter of which she demanded, "What's going on?"
Elizabeth elaborated on Penrose's remarks for her sister. Assuming that Alice did not know much about Roger Bacon and his alchemical activities, she gave them a quick prés of the information she had gleaned when writing a paper on James Joyce: Roger Bacon was a thirteenth century Franciscan friar who, when he wasn't trying to turn lead into gold, developed a brazen head to serve as an oracle. The brazen head only ever made a couple tautological statements, then fell over and broke. Not, all in all, a very successful project.
Alice said, "Never mind all that. Have him tell me how it works." Figuring that Penrose was behind the light, she reached out her hands towards the light and tried to find the armband.
Penrose had to move out of the way again, but he reached into his sleeve to manipulate the armband and form the light into a cylinder. He left the light behind him as a distraction for his pursuer. He declined to hand over the armband.
Elizabeth asked him, "Do you have a chalkboard in this house? You might as well dig one up and start communicating with them directly. This conversation relay business is going to get old fast."
"Never mind that," Penrose said. "I'm hardly going to hand this over to your sister."
"And ask him if he has that brazen head too, or at least some chunks of it," Alice said. She moved toward the empty spot to which Elizabeth was speaking.
"Tell her I use a magic eight ball," Penrose said sarcastically. He dodged Alice again. "Will you distract her or something? Tell her about Unthank."
Elizabeth wondered why he didn't just stop beaming light all over the place if he wanted to put her off. She said to her sister, "Hey! Remember that man Unthank who turned up during the ritual? He's related to the architect that Marla got to design her shoe store expansion. I saw the plans with the architect's name and everything when I was in her office."
Alice was duly distracted. "Marla infiltrated the trust!" she exclaimed. "She must have bribed Unthank by giving that lousy shoe store design job to his brother or sister or whoever." She turned to Joe. "Can you arrest her? That can't be legal."
Joe scratched his head. Clearly he didn't want to disappoint Alice, but he had to say, "No, honey. That's a civil matter. I can't do anything about it. What were y'all doing in her office anyway?"
"Just visiting," Elizabeth said quickly. If he asked anything more, she was ready to redirect his attention to Alice's trip into Marla's office for her little foray into cyber crime.
Alice turned to Elizabeth. "Does Miss Price know about this Unthank yet?"
Elizabeth said, "No, I only just put it together myself. We can tell her first thing tomorrow."
"But we have to do something," Alice cried.
"Well, we can't do anything right now," Elizabeth said. "It's the middle of the night."
Alice planted a fist decisively into the palm of her other hand. "I know. We'll talk to Bob when he gets back. He always knows someone who knows someone who can deal with just about anything."
Penrose stopped fiddling with his copper armband and the rosy light faded. He said thoughtfully, "That won't be necessary. I can deal with this myself. Unthank isn't in charge of the trust, I am. He won't be long for that job if he can't explain what he's doing."
"But he may not need a job if he's getting some kind of payoff, or skimming off the trust funds," Elizabeth pointed out.
"Oh, I hadn't thought of that." Penrose looked deflated and faded even more around the edges than before.