Tarnished and Torn: A Witchcraft Mystery Read online

  I nodded and stood. I peered down the hallway, where I had last seen my father.

  Okay, I have a few father issues: Abandonment. Anger. Guilt. Fear. But despite it all, he was still my father.

  What in tarnation was going on?

  • • •

  Back at Aunt Cora’s Closet, Bronwyn hustled out from behind her herbal stand, beside herself with worry. Hot on her heels was Oscar, his piggy hooves clacking on the wood floor.

  “Lily, oh, my goddess! Conrad told us you were taken away by the police! Are you all right? Did you see Carlos?”

  Inspector Romero had come by the store often enough that he knew my friends well. Though I liked Carlos, it seemed sad that not only had one of my first acquaintances in San Francisco been a homicide inspector, but we’d spent enough time together to develop a relationship.

  “I did,” I said, stooping to give Oscar a kiss. Once more I wondered how much to tell Bronwyn and Maya about the events at the Gem Faire. Their being in the building while a murder had been committed didn’t seem worth worrying them over. My father being in town . . . that might be something to be concerned about. But what would I say? Best keep on your toes because my father’s deep into magic and, oh, by the way, he’s kind of nuts. I felt protective of them, didn’t want to expose them to disturbing ideas of demons and the like.

  Then I reminded myself of what Bronwyn kept telling me: friendship wasn’t a one-way street. True friends didn’t just offer help; they also asked for and accepted help when they needed it.

  Bronwyn searched my face. “You’re probably getting sick of my asking this, but is everything okay, Lily? Because I can’t help thinking something’s bothering you.”

  “I’ve got a few things on my mind, but nothing to worry about at the moment. If something develops, I’ll talk to you about it, okay? In the meantime, I’ve gotten way behind on my bookkeeping. But before I tackle that, I want to get changed.”

  “VCT?” Bronwyn asked, our code for “Vintage Clothes Therapy.”

  “Full-on VCT.” I smiled.

  After perusing the many options I found the perfect thing: a neat little ’40s-era seersucker jacket and skirt, worn with a simple tank. Its vibrations were jaunty, making me feel as if I were attending the state fair back in the day, and I hoped its devil-may-care brashness would help me adjust my attitude.

  Now properly attired, I sat down at the counter to start the process of adding up the store’s receipts and comparing them to our overhead and inventory expenditures. I hauled out my calculator and files of financial papers, and started tallying receipts. Prior to opening Aunt Cora’s Closet I had no idea how much work was involved in running one’s own business. I could handle the long hours and lack of vacation and bottomless to-do lists, but the paperwork nearly drove me screaming into the street. It was even worse than the never-ending laundry.

  Most frustrating of all, when it came to paperwork my witchy skills were useless.

  My reward for finishing the job at hand was to go thrift-store shopping. Weekends were a prime time for folks to clean out their closets, attics, and garages, so Mondays were the best days to scope out the local Goodwill and Salvation Army stores. I always look forward to these trips: the serendipity of it; the possibility of what had been unearthed from old trunks, grandma’s attic, or a fit of spring cleaning. At Aunt Cora’s Closet we stock some very old items—true vintage clothing—but we also carry goods from as recently as the seventies and eighties. Polyester shirts with wild designs and candy pastels had become popular with the city’s hipsters, much to my surprise. Polyester doesn’t breathe the way natural fabrics, such as cotton, linen, and silk, do, and thus tends toward the . . . icky.

  Happily for me, though, I wasn’t required to like, much less wear, all the clothes I carry in the store. We all have our favorite styles and eras, the ones that match our figures and personalities best. Bronwyn is drawn to the clothes of the late 1960s, while I gravitate toward those from the late 1950s and early ’60s.

  I worked well for a while, deciding that paperwork was an effective way to get my mind off mundane concerns, such as a possible demon infestation and mysterious long-lost fathers who pop up when one is being interrogated by the police.

  My father is in town. Why? And could he really be implicated in Griselda’s death? I knew he was a rotten father, but this was something else entirely. What was going on?

  My fingers hovered above the buttons on the calculator. Dang it all. My train of thought had jumped the rails, and I had lost my place in the long string of numbers I had been totaling. I didn’t know whether to blame my lousy math skills or my father’s lousy parenting skills.

  Since I was already feeling bleak, I figured I might as well look up the Malleus Maleficarum. It turned out that the horrid tome was, indeed, available online . . . and a person could even search the document for specific types of torture and modes of execution. Unfortunately, I learned nothing new, much less anything that could help me understand what was going on. I succeeded only in making myself depressed, pondering the terrible things people do to one another.

  I sat back in my chair and looked out over my shop floor. Saucy little hats with their midface veils sitting on a shelf next to the door, brightly patterned vintage scarves and the colorful strands of costume jewelry from the Gem Faire hanging from the wooden pegs that dotted the walls at convenient intervals, dozens of pairs of prim white, go-to-meeting cotton gloves buttoned at the wrists so they looked like butterflies pinned to the display table. Rack upon rack of flounces and lace, leather and cotton, evoked other eras, long-past romance and rebellion. The store was redolent of rosemary and sage sachets, and, underlying everything, the homey aroma of fresh laundry.

  I felt my heart swell with pride. I had worked hard to make Aunt Cora’s Closet a reality, the old-fashioned kind of sweat-and-elbow-grease hard work with scarcely any magic involved. After years of wandering from place to place, continent to continent, it had felt so good, so right to settle down in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood with its history of tolerance and openness.

  The thought that my life here might be at risk somehow because of my father’s arrival . . . It was too much to bear.

  Plus, I might as well admit it: I was heartsick. Yearning for a man with deep brown eyes and a really bad attitude. Sailor, a powerful psychic, understood who I was and how hard it was for me to maintain the balance in my life between the normal and the supernatural. Or so it had seemed. He had rescued me on more than one occasion, and though for the longest time he insisted he didn’t like anyone, including me, his kiss proved otherwise. . . .

  “Stop, Lilita. That’s enough.” In my mind I heard Graciela taking my eight-year-old self to task. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Witches don’t cry. Remember?”

  “But the other kids are picking on me!” I had protested.

  “What do you care? You are the granddaughter of a curandera, the descendant of generations of powerful women. It is the future that matters, m’hija, not the present.”

  I frowned. Graciela’s words hadn’t helped much then, either. Focus, I scolded myself. If I started thinking like that the numbers would never add up.

  My affair with Sailor had been all too brief, and I hadn’t felt right since he had left, suddenly and without explanation. I was fairly certain he’d disappeared because Aidan, a powerful witch overlord and Sailor’s boss, had somehow banished him from the area. But a part of me, a tiny, lingering doubt, wondered if he had gone because of me—because I was just too hard to handle. I knew it was childish and self-pitying to allow my thoughts to go there, but . . . I couldn’t help it. What if Sailor had left for the same reasons everyone else in my life had? Because I wasn’t worthy of love . . . ?

  The tinkling of the bell above the shop’s door interrupted my gloomy reverie. Maya arrived with two high priestesses from Bronwyn’s Welcome coven, Wendy and Starr.

  “Wow, you weren’t kidding about the new jewelry. This is awesom
e. Anyway, sorry we’re late,” effused Starr. “Some of the coven sisters were helping with another fund-raiser for the women’s shelter. Maya kindly offered to move some boxes.”

  “Not like I was given much choice,” Maya groused, but her smile belied her true feelings. “You know, you do-gooders have an awful lot of energy.”

  “Damn straight,” said Wendy, playing with a long strand of pearls that hung around the neck of a mannequin.

  Bronwyn beamed. “Of course we do! When you put positive energy out into the world, it comes back to you threefold. You mark my words: You’ll be rewarded handsomely for all the time you spend with the elderly, writing down their stories. That’s important work.”

  “Then I’m in trouble,” Maya said, “because I haven’t had much time for it lately. I’ve got a few interviews lined up this month—on Thursday I’m going to speak with Marisela’s grandmother, whom we met yesterday. But . . . my new hobby . . . well, it’s not a hobby, exactly, but more of a . . .”

  She blushed, a flush appearing on her high cheekbones.

  “A new hobby?” I asked, amused. Maya was usually so confident, mature beyond her twenty-two years, that I was surprised to see her discomfited. “What is it?”

  “Toy trains?” guessed Bronwyn, handing Starr a necklace of glittering red, yellow, and purple rhinestones.

  “What? No, I—”

  “I know! Burlesque,” Wendy weighed in. “Or pole dancing!”

  Bronwyn let out a peal of laughter, and I had to admit the idea of our serious Maya pole dancing was pretty funny.

  Maya gave us all a withering look. By now Bronwyn, Starr, and Wendy were wearing multiple strands of beads and necklaces. What with their propensity for wearing gauzy tunics or, in Wendy’s case, layers of negligees over leggings and leotards, the three were taking on the aura of trick-or-treaters dressed up as gypsy dancers.

  “Scrapbooking?” ventured Starr. “Or stamp collecting? I heard philately is making a comeback.”

  “How about bonsai?” said Bronwyn.

  “Ya’ll are a bunch of rhymes-with-witches,” said Maya, smiling wryly.

  Laughter—and maybe even a witchy cackle or two—filled the shop as a half a dozen giggling young women entered the store. Oscar made a point of trotting in front of the customers, and as though on cue the women gasped and laughed, then tried to pet him as he led a merry chase through the aisles.

  “Oscar, you little dickens,” Bronwyn said as she went to help a woman in search of an antiacne herbal concoction. Wendy and Starr drifted over to inspect an assortment of feather boas as they debated which of the beads and pearls to use in making necklaces.

  “Hey, Maya. Want to go thrift-store shopping?”

  I didn’t have to ask twice.

  “You’re on,” Maya said, slinging her messenger bag over her shoulder. “Let’s leave this madhouse to the witches and pigs.”

  “I better be the former, not the latter,” Bronwyn called out as we headed for the door.

  • • •

  I have a Pavlovian response to the smell of thrift stores: the scent of the laundry detergent, the hundreds of items imbued with the lingering aura of their former owners. The moment I walked through the door my hands started to itch at the promise of possibilities.

  “Left or right?” Maya asked as we surveyed the large, open space.

  “I’ll go left, you go right,” I said, and Maya peeled off to search the right-hand side of the store while I began working my way through the crowded racks and shelves on the store’s left-hand side. We flipped quickly through the offerings, which, as usual, were mostly cheap items a half step up from junk. But every once in a while we came across a treasure: a Dresden mesh handbag with faux sapphires found in a bin of cheap vinyl knockoffs; a delicate lace mantilla that needed only a little tatting to be good as new; a couple of old letterman’s jackets from the 1960s that would clean up nicely and sell like hotcakes.

  The worries of the morning slipped away as I reveled in the familiar comfort of the search for really cool old clothes.

  “Check this out.” Maya held up a French maid’s costume with a low neckline and a short skirt. “Ooh la la.”

  “Oh, I think that’s a definite oui.”

  “I bet it would fit you,” Maya suggested.

  “I bet you’ll never find out,” I replied. “But it’s perfect for the costume corner. We’ll have to find a feather duster to go with it. Pink, I think.”

  Maya laughed, and as she added the dress to the steadily growing pile in her cart I marveled, not for the first time, at how lovely she was. A natural beauty who didn’t realize it, Maya had mocha skin and large, near-black eyes. She wore no makeup and refused to pluck her eyebrows, but did have one vanity: her hair, which she wore in a multitude of locks tipped with beads, the ends dyed deep colors, depending on her mood. Maya was such a funny mixture of the serious and the frivolous, and far too cynical for her age.

  I wondered why. Unlike me, Maya had drawn a winning ticket in the parental lottery, and had grown up in a happy home with a mom and a dad who were still in love after decades of marriage. Then again, one’s role models can only do so much to shape our individual lives. When it comes right down to it, we each walk the path of this life alone, and make our decisions based on our own distinct beliefs, desires . . . and fears.

  “Score!” Maya called out, holding up a pair of what could only be described as bloomers: frilly women’s undergarments from the nineteenth century. “Wait—there’s a label. And get this: They’re made of a poly blend.”

  “Who makes polyester bloomers?” I wondered.

  “The real question is: who buys polyester bloomers?” Maya said.

  “Someone, for sure. We can’t pass those up, especially since they’re machine washable. Into the basket.”

  “I’m heading for furniture real quick,” Maya said. “I need a little bedside table.”

  “Good luck. I’m going to swing through housewares.”

  “Stay frosty, my friend,” Maya said.

  I usually avoided housewares because old kitchen gadgets are a weakness of mine, and I feared I would acquire so much inventory I would have to open a vintage kitchen annex and relocate the store. But occasionally I found something too good to pass up. This time, I was tempted only by an off-white antique tablecloth festooned with hand-embroidered sprays of leaves and flowers.

  “What do you think?” I said, showing it to Maya, who had returned from the furniture section empty-handed.

  “It’s gorgeous. And if it doesn’t sell, we can always drape it over a display table or use it in the front window.”

  “I like the way you think.”

  When we had finally mined the last nugget of gold in the store, Maya and I pushed our laden carts to the register and took our place in line behind an elderly Asian woman buying a bright yellow-and-green Oakland A’s hoodie. While we waited, I perused the glass display counter. A faux tortoiseshell hair comb might be worth a closer look . . . and a woven silk medallion reminded me of Hans’s description of a hair amulet.

  I remembered seeing something similar at the home of a local Rom witch I knew, Renna Sandino. I wondered whether Renna could explain to me how hair amulets worked, exactly, on the off chance that it might cast some light on the crime. Could the hair I had seen in Griselda’s room at the inn have been leftover from making an amulet? How could such a thing cover up a witch’s powers . . . and why would she want to?

  I had an additional motive for wanting to speak to Renna. She was Sailor’s aunt. And even though she was angry with me—and, as a matter of general knowledge, it isn’t a good idea to have a powerful Rom witch holding a grudge against you—I was working up my courage to try talking my way out of that little deal gone bad, hoping Renna could tell me where Sailor might have disappeared to. After all, what’s the worst she could do—hex me?

  Yes, as a matter of fact, she surely could. But I doubted she would. Most witches respect their powers and do not ab
use them.

  “Fire dancing,” Maya suddenly blurted out.

  “Um . . . I’m sorry?” I asked, looking up from the display case.

  “I checked it out last night and I really want to do it!”

  “This is the new hobby you were mentioning?”

  She nodded. “It’s more than a hobby, actually. It’s like I’m . . . obsessed. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  “Is this the fire dancing in the park? Conrad mentioned something about that. But . . . really? You want to . . . dance, with fire?”

  Witches and fire—we have a complicated relationship. I might use fire in a very controlled setting in some of my brews and spells, but dancing with it? That sounded like trouble.

  “It’s not nearly as scary as it sounds.” Maya smiled. “In fact, it’s really empowering. It’s . . . well . . . it feels sort of magical, for lack of a better word.”

  “How did you get into it?”

  “I had seen the dancers in the park last week, but then they did a special performance at the Gem Faire, and the head guy really encouraged me to try my hand at it. I gave it a whirl last night. It was incredible.”

  “And how do they dance with the fire?”

  “They have these pots, like, on the end of ropes? The pots contain fuel, which they light, and then they dance, spinning the pots up and around. Some use lit torches, but it’s the same concept. It’s . . . it’s hard to explain, but it’s mesmerizing.”

  “But . . . why doesn’t the fuel fall out of the pots?”

  “Centripetal force. If you spin the pots fast enough, the fire stays in the pot. But that’s why you have to learn how to do it safely—it takes total commitment, or it’s dangerous.”

  Like casting a spell. And like so much else in this world.

  “Oh. Well, then—”

  “Next!” the cashier said.

  As the cashier added up our purchases Maya and I placed our items—the French maid costume, the embroidered tablecloth, some beaded pullovers from the ’80s, a men’s cowboy shirt, an eyelet bolero jacket, a black velvet coat with a real mink collar, and an assortment of T-shirts and cotton peasant skirts that, while not vintage, were a style my customers liked and often asked for—into the burlap sacks we had brought along. Plastic bags were no longer allowed in San Francisco, and paper bags were expensive for a shop like this one, which donated its proceeds to charity.