Petty Magic (19 page)

“I have a file?”

He laughed, then went silent for a moment. “Why haven’t you ever offered to read my palm?”

I looked at him sidewise. “Because I don’t want to know. And what’s more, I don’t think you do either.”

There was another pensive pause. “You believe the future is fixed?”

“I wish I could say I don’t,” I replied. “But it’s hard to deny when there’s a portent everywhere you look.”

“Don’t you ever see one of these … portents … and seeing it causes you to change your plans, thereby eliminating what you were warned of?”

“It happens.”

“But not often?”

I regarded him sadly. “Not often enough.”

Maxwell Faust

20.

I
DON’T EVEN
have a photograph of us. What I would give for a single dog-eared snapshot, sunburned arms round each other’s shoulders and heads thrown back midlaugh! I wouldn’t care if it was only the size of a business card, water stained and criss-crossed in Scotch tape. What I would give for some small proof of all those happy memories we never got the chance to make.

It’s marvelous, the resemblance. Sometimes I just sit there staring at him until he starts to look at me funny. Of course, they aren’t alike in every respect—Jonah didn’t have any freckles but Justin has loads of them, and we spend so much time together that I’ve begun to pick out the constellations on his arms. He’s got the Pleiades on a right-hand knuckle and Cassiopeia just above his elbow.

But the similarities are so striking that I believe if I can find some quirk of Jonah’s in Justin—something even more uncanny than a confluence of hair, build, and features—that perhaps I can prove it to myself beyond all doubt. There was that weird little knob of flesh Jonah had behind his right ear, and one night when I ventured to touch a soundly sleeping Justin in that same spot, I found precisely what I was hoping for.

The next day I told Morven all about the ear knob. “He
is
Jonah,” I said. “I’m sure of it.” Morven rolled her eyes as she picked up my hand and guided it to her face. She pressed my fingertips to a spot behind
her
ear, and she’s got a knob there as well.

“You’d think I’d have noticed that long before now,” I’d sniffed. “You didn’t grow it just to spite me, did you?”

“Unlike
some
we know, I do not squander my energies on such petty things as growing squishy bumps behind my ears for the sole purpose of spiting my sister.”

So I would need something else to prove it, and one Saturday night in February I decide on a new test.

Some nights we go into Manhattan and other times we just spend the evening at the Blind Pig, but either way I’ve got to make my exit before the oomph runs out. On this particular evening we’ve eaten at a darling little trattoria in the Village and come home early. In his room above the toy shop I watch his eyelids grow heavy. He gives me a sleepy smile. “Will you stay the night?”

“Sure I will.”

“You never do. I wish you would. I’d like to wake up beside you.”

I smooth his hair away from his face and he smiles with his eyes still closed. “Oh, you dear, sweet boy.” I watch his face, the face of a grown-up cherub, as his breathing gets slow and even.

Death is somewhat easier to meet when you believe, as we do, that to end is to begin. You will learn to walk and speak again, lose your teeth (but hopefully only once), bite into apples, count stars lying on your back in the dewy grass—and you will know, again, what it is to lust and to love. It will be a different face you turn toward the sun, and that someone dear will call you by another name, but there are many other things you go on remembering even when you can no longer recall their meaning.

I look at Justin and think,
But sometimes your face stays the same
. I murmur his name, loud enough to rouse him.

“Hmmm?”

“Do you believe in reincarnation?”

“Hmmmm.”

I wait for a minute or two for a more complete answer and, receiving none, I venture, “Are you mulling it over?”

“Mmm rmm shleep,” he says.

“Justin,” I murmur in his ear.
“Mein Schatz …”

“Hrmmph,” he says. “Shleep.”

“Weisst du noch?”
I whisper.
“Bist Du zu mir zurück gekommen, mein Liebling?”

No answer.

“Sometimes,” I whisper, “sometimes I
swear
it’s you, but then you have to go and do something foolish. And then I think,
How can he be Jonah? Jonah was never a skirt chaser and only hung around in bars waiting for loose talk
. But you—you watch football games and stuff your face with beer nuts.” I pause. “But to be fair, you’re a lot younger than you were then.”

Then I hear a low growl from deep in his throat, and I begin to fear I’ve said too much.
“Lass mich schlafen!”
he barks, and rolls over with an emphatic squeak of the bedsprings. I lie there for a while longer just staring at his back, jaw hanging.
I was right!
I’m positively tingling with excitement.

Alas, not excitement. Toes a-tingle, I put on my coat and let myself out.

F
ULLY RESTORED
after a good night’s sleep, I go down to Mira’s early the next afternoon and find Justin reading the paper over coffee and a pastry. He looks up at me petulantly as I take the chair opposite. “You didn’t stay.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I had horrible dreams. People were beating me up. And then I was rotting away in jail for something I didn’t do.” He shivers to himself, then looks at me accusingly, like it’s my fault he slept poorly. All right, so maybe it is.

“Justin, do you remember what you said to me just before you fell asleep last night?”

“I remember you were babbling a lot. Do me a favor and don’t do that again, all right?”

I dismiss his irritation with an excited flick of the hand. “You don’t remember you spoke to me in German? You said,
‘Lass mich schlafen!’
Isn’t that marvelous?”

“Not possible,” he says. “I don’t know any German.”

“Aha! You don’t
think
you know any German. I’ll have to tape-record you next time. It’s all in your subconscious, see. You do remember it.”

“Remember it? I’d have to have learned it first.”

I try to gaze at him meaningfully but he just rolls his eyes, smiling, and then he sighs and checks his watch. “I’ve got to go up to Emmet’s now. His nurse took the day off and Uncle Harry wants me to check in on him.”

“Can’t they send a replacement?”

“Not on a Sunday,” Justin sighs. “Not for a crank like him, anyway. Will you come along?”

J
USTIN RINGS
Fawkes and takes down a short food list—milk, bread, eggs, coffee—and I go along with him to the grocery store. Against my better judgment, I also accompany him to Fawkes’s place. Justin knocks on the bedroom door and opens it just wide enough to stick his head in. “Have you had breakfast, Emmet?”

The old man perks up at the rustling sound of a brown paper grocery bag. “Who’s there?”

“I brought Miss Harbinger along with me.”

“Can she fry an egg?”

Justin pulls his head out and looks at me with a cocked eyebrow. “Sure,” I say, and Justin ducks in again to tell him so.

“Good,” says Fawkes. “I’ll take four. Should be some bacon left in the fridge. And I’ll have a cup of coffee too.” Justin leaves the bedroom door ajar as we make our way down the dingy corridor to the kitchen. “If it’s not too much trouble,” Fawkes calls after us, but with a definite insinuation that if it
is
too much trouble then we are nothing but a couple of lazy hoodlums.

“Eighty-odd years on Earth and he still hasn’t learned to say ‘please’ or ‘thank you,’ ” I grumble.

The kitchen is far tidier than I remember it, and I make a remark to this effect. “The nurse gets overtime for doing the cleaning,” Justin says as I pull a frying pan off the drain board. The whole place still has that sickroom stink, but no help for that I suppose. Justin spoons the grounds into the coffeemaker while I crack the eggs. They turn out better when they fry themselves, but I haven’t the oomph to spare.

I pause in the doorway while Justin brings in the breakfast on a plastic cafeteria tray he found under the sink. Fawkes looks up at me for a moment but does not greet me. I lean against the jamb with arms folded and gaze idly about the room. Besides the bed, its principal furnishing is a massive rolltop desk piled high with books and newspaper clippings. The crossbar on a front-wheeled aluminum walker by the window is draped with discarded undershirts. The nightstand is covered with soiled Kleenex and empty juice boxes.

The old man takes a sip of his coffee, grimaces, and spits it onto his fried eggs. “Bog water! What
is
this?”

“It’s regular coffee. You asked for regular,” Justin says.

“It’s
Crapwell
House,” Fawkes snarls.

“Maison de Merdewell,” I say cheerfully. “Maxwell Mousedroppings. Maxwell Faust, as you’d sell your soul for something better …”

“You didn’t tell me which brand to get,” Justin says patiently.

Fawkes picks up his plate and tilts it so the spit-up coffee runs down the mounds of fried eggs and drips back into the mug. Justin eyes the old man in abject disgust. Fawkes reaches for his wallet among the dross on the nightstand. “Why don’t you make yourself useful, girl, and pop down to the shop to get me a decent cup of coffee?”

I throw Justin a look—as if frying his stinking eggs and bacon wasn’t enough!—before I say with exaggerated cheeriness, “For the price of your immortal soul?”

“Here’s a dollar,” he says. “Now get going.”

W
HEN I
get back from Mira’s Justin is watching television in the sitting room. I knock on the bedroom door and enter without pause, hand Fawkes his coffee, and take the tray off his lap and make room for it on the nightstand. He mumbles a thank-you and I fight the urge to smirk at him.

Fawkes takes a sip of his coffee as I have a seat at the great messy desk by the window. I pluck one newspaper clipping, then another. I recognize many of the names in the headlines. Some of them were neighbors.

“These are all obits,” I murmur, and turn to the figure in the bed. “Are these all people you knew?” He doesn’t answer me. I read the headline on the next clipping I pull from the pile and my heart gives a queer thump. “Why did you save Henry Dryden’s obituary?”

“Awfully fishy, the way he died. Always thought I might just be able to piece together what really happened to the poor fellow.” Given the stacks of obituaries on the desk, it seems he found a
lot
of local deaths worthy of suspicion. (I flip through a few more, coming upon Julius Mettle’s, but oddly enough I don’t find one for Helena’s second husband. Jack was the manager of an abattoir two towns over and came home every night with blood on his collar.)

“What made you suspicious, Mr. Fawkes?”

“There was talk of him running around with his secretary. Plenty can go wrong when a man strays—seldom doesn’t.”

“That’s my family you’re talking about, Mr. Fawkes. Gossip doesn’t make fact no matter how many times you repeat it.”

“Well, yeeeeeah. I remembered too late that he was your granddad. Sorry, kid. He was still a good man and all though,” he adds quickly.

I brush his words aside and fix him with a stare. “Did you know his secretary? Belva Mettle? I see you have her father’s obituary here as well.”

“Dr. Julius,” Fawkes says with a sigh. “He was a good man too. Used to pay me to do odd jobs around his house when I was a kid. Paid well.” He pauses. “I’ll tell you one thing—them two deaths was linked somehow, I just know it.”

The gooseflesh rises on my arms. “You mean you think the same person murdered them both?”

“No, no, not saying that exactly …”

“It doesn’t seem likely,” I say. “They died almost ten years apart.”

“That don’t matter.”

“And what about Belva? Did you know her?”

“A little,” he says with a shrug. “I can say this about her: she wasn’t so meek as she pretended. Not much to look at, but Lord, she had
something
. I saw her work her charm on a man once. Never saw anything like it. Uncanny.”

“Which man? Henry?”

Fawkes eyes me with renewed suspicion. “Why d’you call your granddad by his given name, anyway?”

“Grandpa
Henry. Happy? Now tell me whom she bewitched.”

“Don’t know. Some fellow down at the Blind Pig. It was long after Henry passed.”

“Did you hear any talk about Hel—my grandmother? His wife?”

“What kinda talk?”

“That she might have been implicated in his death.”

Fawkes frowns in thought, then glances out the window, distracted by the laughter coming from the mews below.

“Think, man! You said it was suspicious—now whom was it you suspected?”

“If I knew, I might have gotten somewhere,” he says with an exasperated swat of a hand. “He
was
murdered. No question in my mind.” He pauses, and I catch a malevolent glint in his eye. “But with a family big as yours, I guess you’ve got more skeletons in your closets than average folk do.”

“You
, talking of skeletons! Now there’s a gem.” I hold out my right hand and wiggle my fingers so my ring glitters in the sunlight. “Do you recognize this?”

Fawkes shrugs.

“I bought it in your shop. Mr. Ibis told me you’d gotten it off the finger bone of a French aristocrat.”

“I’ve never robbed a grave in my life,” Fawkes says darkly. The look he’s giving me very clearly says
If I weren’t infirm I’d be making you mighty sorry right now
.

“That may be, but does it matter if you paid some local scag to do it for you?” I give a little shrug of triumph. “By rights, I’d say you deserve to have your own grave looted a hundred times over.”