Sacrificial Magic (5 page)

Second school. Any school. She couldn’t say the worst memories of her life came from schools—far, far from it—but the ones she did have weren’t fucking good, that was for sure. The memories she had of when she’d gone; when she’d been
forced
to go. All of her foster parents made her, because if her attendance dropped they wouldn’t get paid anymore, but none of them gave a shit if she actually learned anything, and her teachers hadn’t either.

Those voices still echoed with every step she took. Just the air in the building, that particular chalkboard-antiseptic-dust-and-despair smell of school, reminded her where she was, made her remember how it felt and
how much she’d hated it. The cold metal lockers lining the walls watched her, considered her, as her boots clicked on the polished concrete floors. She didn’t care what they thought, or what anyone she was about to meet thought, but she still felt that invisible cloud of judgment that seemed to hover near the ceiling of every school, ready to descend on anyone unlucky enough to walk beneath it.

Whatever. She’d never gone to this school, and it wasn’t her prison now. She was an adult, she was a fucking Churchwitch, and someone in this school was trying to scare people and scam some money out of the Church. So she would catch them. It was as simple as that, and she knew it and believed it as strongly and purely as she knew Facts were Truth.

Although … who would get the money, if the Church ended up paying a settlement? The Church owned the school, of course, and ran it, at least ostensibly. The Church wouldn’t pay a settlement to itself. So … another note in her pad.
Who profits?

The classroom doors she passed were closed. Through the narrow windows in each of them she caught glimpses of chalkboards and teaching Goodys standing before them, the occasional slice of backs bent over desks. Boredom and sadness seeped through the walls.

Finally she reached the end of the hall, another closed door.
ADMINISTRATION
was written on it in peeling black letters, with “Fuck the” scratched into the glass above it. Heh. Without knocking she pushed it open, got a good visual snapshot of three women standing around chatting before they stopped to look at her.

The one behind the desk, an enormous woman—she had to be close to six feet tall, and solidly built—with thin, frizzy brownish hair hanging limp from the top of her head, gave her the sort of disapproving smile Chess thought people with minor authority must practice in
front of mirrors. Inexpertly applied red lipstick made her mouth look like a wound. “Can I help you, Miss?”

The other two stepped away from the desk, almost in a flanking motion. Had they been Downside kids and not school ladies Chess would have thought they were getting ready to jump her. Then again, maybe they were. Just not physically.

“I’m Cesaria Putnam.” She didn’t offer her hand. “From the Church. I’ve come about your haunting.”

A moment of silence, as if none of them knew what to say. What the hell? They had to be aware of the procedure, they’d had another Debunker out there already. Then one of the women outside the desk, petite with red hair and a horrible baggy plaid dress, gave her a tentative smile. “Of course, yes. Please come in and sit down. Can we get you anything? Coffee, tea?”

“No thanks.” Like she’d ever drink anything a subject gave her, at least in a situation like this. She did sit down, though, on the dingy couch that sank too far beneath her, so her ass hung lower than her knees. Getting out of that would be fun.

The third woman just looked at her, an odd sort of smile on her face. As if she knew something Chess didn’t and was waiting for Chess to figure it out, or she was waiting for Chess to speak so she could belittle her. A smug look. Chess didn’t like it, and she didn’t think she liked the woman, although something in the way she stood, the tilt of her head and that smirk, reminded Chess for some absurd reason of Lex.

Yes, the woman was Asian, but that certainly wasn’t it. She didn’t know what it was. She’d seen other men who had some sort of Lex-like quality about them, but never a woman. Oh well. There was a first time for everything. Women could be smug bastards, too.

Then the woman shifted, and the resemblance disappeared, leaving just an attractive woman with straight,
shiny dark hair in a casual knot at the base of her neck. Compared to the other two she looked especially gorgeous, in her black pencil skirt and loose white Oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

“We weren’t sure we would get someone else,” she said, one graceful elbow propped on the counter. “Aros left so abruptly, and we haven’t heard anything since.”

Chess grabbed her notepad. “He told you he wouldn’t be back?”

The women smiled at each other, as though Chess had just said something adorably naïve. Bitches.

“We got that impression,” Horrible Plaid said, “when he screamed at us all that he was never stepping foot in this place again, broke a window, and ran off in the middle of the day.”

Damn. What exactly had he encountered?

She didn’t know Aros; he’d been a recent transfer. So she had no idea how tough he was, or what kinds of cases he’d handled wherever it was he’d come from. She made a quick note to ask Elder Griffin about it, and pushed the tiny flash of sadness out of her head.

“He never seemed comfortable here,” Big Frizzy—the name plate on the edge of the desk read
LAURIE BARR
—said. Or rather, deigned to say. She still looked at Chess as if Chess was something rotten that had melded with the refrigerator shelf. Whatever.

“Do you have any idea why that might be?”

“Working with youth isn’t for everyone.”

“Yes, but, did he seem to have any particular troubles?” It really wasn’t her business; it really wasn’t part of the case. But she couldn’t help being curious, and who knew. Maybe there was something there. If someone had been harassing him, that might be a good lead.

Or it might not. Anti-Church sentiment wasn’t too widespread in Downside—most people there didn’t give a fuck about the Church, either pro or con, save being
suspicious or getting the hell out of her way when they saw her ink—but on this side of town, that changed. That could very well account for the Asian woman’s smirks, too. People whose religion had centered on ancestor worship didn’t tend to appreciate the government that told them they weren’t allowed to do that anymore, not without paying a hefty fee and going through the Church itself.

This just kept getting better and better. As if it wasn’t shitty enough working a case that would put her in more contact with the wrong side of town, and how that would look—she was not looking forward to Terrible’s reaction when he found out where she’d be spending large chunks of her time—it was in an area where she’d be even more unwelcome than usual.

“He just seemed nervous,” the Asian woman replied. None of them had volunteered their names yet. How polite of them. “He seemed to particularly dislike Vernal Sze and his friends. I believe he was afraid of them.”

“Did he have reason to be?”

She shrugged. “I don’t think so. They like to look tough, but they’re really not. They just haven’t been shown enough examples of proper behavior.”

Laurie gave an eye-roll so elaborate Chess almost expected her head to topple off. Horrible Plaid noticed—or rather, noticed Chess noticing—and said, “Beulah is our Community Liaison. She’s not a teacher.”

Chess waited, but none of them explained what that meant or why it mattered. Okay. “And what does that entail?”

The Asian woman—Beulah—smiled that smug smile again, her eyes focused tight on Chess’s face. What the fuck? Those Significant Looks were starting to creep her out. “I’m actually here on a volunteer basis several days a week, working with students and helping to foster a
better relationship between the school administration and the community.”

Chess had never heard of such a thing. She supposed it made sense, given that most school administrators were Church employees—most of them were Elders, actually—and that might be tense in this area. She couldn’t see it being such a huge deal that they needed community outreach, but what the fuck did she know? Her pretty much sole experience with anyone on this side of town was Lex, and he didn’t care about anything enough to get angry about it.

“Who handles that?” she asked. “I mean, is there a charity set up that you work for, or …?”

“I’m paid out of school overflow funds,” Beulah said. “Whatever the school manages to raise through donations or other outside sources, beyond their annual budget, gets put into a separate account. That’s divided among several programs, and mine is the largest one. So technically I am a school employee, but I administer my own program.”

Must be nice, Chess thought. Laurie seemed to agree; she watched Beulah with a look of such open hostility that Chess almost expected her to start hitting her.

Something to think about later, because hadn’t Beulah just given her a very important piece of information? So any extra cash in the school coffers went to Beulah—well, Beulah and whoever ran these other programs. She’d need to see those records. Aros hadn’t included those, or even mentioned them, in his file.

But for now … she stood up. “Maybe one of you could take me around? And if you could show me where entities have been seen, or anyone experienced anything unusual, that would be great.”

Horrible Plaid’s name—surprise!—wasn’t Horrible Plaid. It was Monica— Monica Freeman—and she was the secretary to Master Elder Conrad, the school’s headmaster. She told Chess this with self-deprecating pride, as though she expected Chess to be impressed but wanted to seem like she didn’t, as though she thought it was silly to expect it.

Which of course it was. Chess tried not to mistrust the woman—mistrust all of them—on general principles, but she couldn’t help it. Even if she hadn’t been there investigating a possible haunting she would have mistrusted them. They might claim to be Church—at least the Elders did, and the teaching Goodys did—but they weren’t, not really. They didn’t give a fuck about any of the students, about anyone but themselves.

“In here is the theater.” Monica leaned against the thick door, its wood stained a horrible orangey color. Who the hell had picked that color? Almost every school she’d ever seen had it, and it looked awful in every one of them. “The first sighting was in here.”

Now they were getting somewhere. “Okay. Can we go in? And you can tell me what happened?”

“No one’s been in here since then.”

Chess raised her eyebrows. Okay. Monica didn’t seem to understand direct questions. “Can we go in, and you can tell me what happened?”

“I can unlock it.” Beulah pulled a set of keys from somewhere. Where she had room to hide them in that skirt Chess had no idea, although she had to admit the skirt was gorgeous. Either “community outreach” paid awfully well, or Beulah had a sugar daddy. Or simply lived beyond her means. Checking her financials would probably be a good idea.

Monica moved out of Beulah’s way a little too fast, as if she was afraid Beulah would mow her down. Funny. They’d all seemed perfectly friendly when Chess walked into the office.

The door opened with a creak right out of a horror film. For fuck’s sake, was the school budget really so tight they couldn’t afford a can of fucking WD-40? Chess had never seen a building so creaky in her life. Another note to make.

Through the open door she saw only darkness; the air breathing out at her smelled stale and felt cold against her skin. An air conditioner still hummed somewhere inside.

“No one’s been in here? Why? And for how long?”

Monica answered, standing right behind her. “It’s been about three weeks, I guess. Well, Aros might have been in here without telling us, but three weeks since any of us have been inside.”

If Aros had entered the theater without even bothering to lubricate that hinge, then something was seriously wrong with the man. Oh well. “Because of the haunting?”

“Of course.” Beulah pushed past both of them. For a moment her head and lower body disappeared, her white blouse just a faint glow in the gloom, before
something slammed like metal against metal and the lights came on.

Not that it made much difference. Shadows still lurked along the walls and between the rows of seats, which rose stadium-style from the sunken stage at the front to a small booth in the center at the back. It wasn’t a large room, really, but then it wasn’t a large school. Maybe a hundred seats, a hundred and fifty? Drama didn’t seem to be a popular activity at Mercy Lewis. It hadn’t been at any school Chess had ever attended.

Beulah walked toward the stage, her slim figure appearing and reappearing between the rows like a lion through tall grass. “A few students were in here after school, about three weeks ago.”

“Where they shouldn’t have been,” Monica muttered.

“They were hanging out on the stage,” Beulah continued, ignoring Monica. Ignoring, too, Monica’s next snide interruption, which was the word “Drinking.”

Beulah glared at Monica. “Talking. According to Vernal.”