Disappearing Nightly (9 page)

“Difficulties?” Max asked with concern.

The young man shrugged, looking a tad sullen.

“Well, then…Hieronymus,” Max said, “please allow me to introduce my new friend, Miss Esther Diamond. This is the brave young lady I mentioned to you this morning. She’ll be helping us from now on, and she’s doing a wonderful job of organizing the rest of our new acquaintances into productive tasks, too.”

Feeling moved by this little speech, I smiled warmly at Hieronymus. “How do you do? I gather you’re Max’s apprentice?”

A frown of irritation transformed his blank expression. “Athithtant,” he said.

“Pardon?” I said.

“Not appwentith. Athithtant.”

“What?” I said, thinking his accent was much stronger than Max’s.

“I’m hith
athithtant.
”

Max said, “He was promoted before coming to New York. Assistant is one level above apprentice.”

“Oh!” That was no accent, I realized, mortified at my clumsiness. It was a speech impediment. A pronounced one. “Assistant! Of course! My mistake!” I heard the exaggerated cheeriness in my voice and tried to modify it. “Assistant. Yes, that was what Max told me, I just got confused. How are you? I mean, it’s a pleasure to meet you.” I was conscious of every
S
and
R
in my jabbered comments.

Hieronymus gave me a curt nod.

“Well…” I looked at Max, who made encouraging gestures. “I and the others are going to help you research disappearances.”

“
Mythtical
dithappeawantheth,” he said tersely.

“Right. Mystical disappearances,” I said. “I mean, sure, New York City is full of ordinary disappearances. Uh, people who go missing. We’re looking for the supernatural kind. People who go
poof!
”

His eyes rolled. “Evewything ith natuwal.”

Not quite sure what Hieronymus had said, I looked at Max, who explained, “The notion of supernatural phenomena is a false construct.”

“It is?”

He nodded. “Everything in the cosmos is essentially natural—except for certain forms of fast food, of course, and possibly some aspects of Los Angeles.”

“I see.”

“And some natural things are mystical,” Max said. “Such as these disappearances.”

“Gotcha. Whatever.” I turned back to Hieronymus and started explaining the plans we’d formed and how we were dividing up our tasks. I concluded by saying, “But, of course, you’re point man on the research, so we should start by reviewing what you’ve learned or ruled out, as well as what specific areas, if any, you want the rest of us to start exploring.”

This friendly speech produced another sullen shrug. I smiled and exercised my patien
ce. Obviously, his speech impediment made him self-conscious and shy. His sullen demeanor was probably a defensive posture, a way of coping with his frustration and embarrassment.

“I will make a litht of what I’ve done,” he said, his tone still unfriendly.

“Good!” I said with exaggerated enthusiasm. “If you want to bring it upstairs when it’s ready…”

“You can come get it.”

On the other hand, while I felt sympathy for him, I didn’t think a speech impediment entitled him to bad manners. I didn’t care for the way his dark expression and brusque tone persisted despite my best efforts to be cordial.

Still trying to overcome his defenses, I moved a little closer to him and said, “Is there anything I can help you with?” When he raised his brows in silent query, I added, “Some specific research you’d like me to start going through?”

“Ah.” He turned his back on me, walked over to a desk piled high with books, and brought back three massive, leather-bound volumes. He dropped them into my outstretched arms heavily enough to make me grunt.

“Okay,” I said, taking a dislike to Hieronymus despite my sympathy. I looked down at the books in my arms. “I’ll just get started…uh…well, actually…”

“Pwoblem?”

“Yeah.” And I could tell from
the slight smirk on his face that he’d already guessed the nature of the problem. I gestured with my chin to the top book on my stack and read aloud, “Er,
Tomus Secundus De Praeternaturali
…um…
Microcosmi
…” I shook my head. “I don’t read Latin.” I struggled with my armload so I could glance at the title of the second book in the pile. “Or Greek.
Is
that Greek?”

“Modern education is sadly lacking,” Max said. “Never fear, Esther, we understand that you are to be pitied rather than blamed.”

Hieronymus’s expression conveyed his unmitigated contempt for my weak intellect as he removed the books from my arms. Then he pointed straight up, indicating the shop overhead. “Bookth in English.”

“Thanks,” I said. But he had already turned his back on me.

As Max and I went back upstairs, he confided, “The poor boy’s personality is not, it must be admitted, particularly amiable. But one can imagine how difficult his childhood must have been.”

“Didn’t his parents ever consult a good speech therapist?”

“Yes, but they knew there was little hope, and events proved they were right.”

“Why? With good training, people often overcome speech impediments.”

“The problem is mystical, Esther, and, alas, seems to be irrevocable.” As we reached the top of the stairs and reentered the shop, Max explained, “His
mother was a member of the Collegium. While she was pregnant, her womb was cursed by a particularly vicious djinn she was trying to destroy. Despite the unfortunate result, one is relieved the poor lad didn’t suffer something even worse.”

“Such as a sour disposition?” I said. “Oh, well, never mind. In any case, it seems that he will be happier working alone in the basement.”

“He is a rather solitary person,” Max agreed, as we reached the main floor and reentered the bookshop.

“But free-flowing communication is important, Max, if we’re to solve this problem and prevent another disappearance.” Or get back the people who’d already vanished.

Max sighed. “You’re right, of course. I’ll have a word with him about trying to be a bit more civil.”

“Good.” I wondered if it would have any effect. With the Collegium for an opponent, no wonder Evil was making such a good living in this dimension! Some assistant those masterminds had assigned to Max to help him protect the greatest city in the world: sullen, solitary and making things explode.

I found Satsy seated at the table again, this time with a large pile of books.

“Esther,” he said, “I think we may solve this case even sooner than we’d hoped!”

I stared at the book in his hands, which he waved in my face with excitement:
Supernatural Disappearances.

“Ah, but that’s a false construct, Satsy.”

“Excuse me?”

I made a gesture to brush aside my comment. “Sorry. I mean, yes, I hope there’s something very useful in there.”

A little bell rang, heralding the arrival of a customer.

“Well, howdy, folks!” cried Duke Dempsey, ushering his daughter into the shop. “Why, this certainly is a lovely place you got here, Maximillian. Looks just like an old bookshop.”

“It
is
an old bookshop,” I said. Being from Texas, maybe he’d never seen one before. “Thanks for coming.”

“Pshaw! You’re helping us, so we’re helping you. No thanks needed, young lady.”

“Duke, Dixie, this is Satsy,” I said, “who’s also got a stake in trying to solve this case.”

Seated at the table, Satsy gave a friendly wave from behind his stack of books. He eyed Duke’s fringe-and-rhinestone cowboy outfit with obvious delight and asked, “Darlin’, do you mind if I ask where you got those
wonderful
clothes?”

Looking pleased, the Cowboy offered to give Satsy the name of his tailor.

“T
ransportation…translocation…teleportation…transmutation…lateral levitation…dematerialization…dissolution…” I put down the book in my hands and gently rubbed my throbbing temples.

“Okay, Esther, according to this book, apparently the last two books I was reading were just
swamped
in Christian propaganda,” Satsy said slowly, turning the pages of the volume he held. “So ignore what I was saying before.” He glanced up and, seeing my puzzled expression, added, “The Church.”

“Huh?” I said.

“Well, the stuff I was reading about mystical disappearances being the work of witchcraft and devil worship was apparently a post-antiquity, pre-modern notion developed by the Catholic Church in an attempt to establish and maintain its power. And
the Church’s propaganda on this score was so influential that this stuff was considered ‘true’ even by Protestants—once, you know, there
were
Protestants.”

“Huh?” I said again.

“The point, girlfriend, is that the idea that mystical disappearances are the work of devil-worshipping witches—”

“An idea you were propounding so emphatically an hour ago,” I said, “that my whole skull started propounding.”

“—was basically just the Church messing with people’s heads.”

“I thought so,” said Dixie. “Everybody knows that witches aren’t really like that. I have Wiccan friends.”

“I dated a Wiccan,” said Barclay, who had joined us about an hour earlier. “She was a perfectly nice girl, but a vegan. I don’t have anything against vegans per se, but have you ever tried to plan dinner dates with one?” He shook his head. “It couldn’t last, of course.”

“So,” I said to Satsy, “we’ve gone from narrowing it down to witchcraft and devil worship to opening the field back up to any and all possibilities?”

“Uh-huh.”

Dixie frowned doubtfully at the book in her own hands. “I don’t think the Bermuda Triangle’s going to give us any answers. I think I should start on something else.”

Barclay, perusing another of the books, said, “Hey, here’s one from Europe, during the Napoleonic w
ars. A guy vanishes right in front of his cell mates. Disappears into thin air before their very eyes. Six witnesses swore to this!”

“His cell mates?” I repeated.

“French prisoners of war. Being held by the Prussians.”

“Of course,” I said, “the missing prisoner’s comrades-in-arms could have had no possible motive for making up such a story when asked by the enemy army where he was.”

“But their jailer supported their story when he was questioned by his superiors!”

“And it’s not remotely possible that the jailer was trying to avoid blame for having let a prisoner escape?”

“Oh. Hmm. Good point.”

Feeling a bit desperate, I asked, “Does it say anything about how the prisoner disappeared? I mean, how it was done?”

“No.” Barclay went back to reading.

After a few minutes, Satsy said, “Here’s another one from Europe, also during the Napoleonic wars.”

“It’s a pattern!” said Dixie.

I rested my forehead on the table. “Well?”

“He was a Pisces, which is…‘the most psychologically unstable zodiac group.’ I don’t agree with that,” Satsy added.

“Neither do I,” said Barclay. “
I’m
a Pisces.”

“You are?” said Dixie. “I’m a Leo. What sign are you, Esther?”

“Tell us about the disappearance, Satsy,” I said without lifting my head.

“His name was Benjamin Bathurst, and he was in Europe on a secret diplomatic mission for the British government in 1809. He broke his journey at a place called Perleberg, where he asked the Prussian army for an escort because he feared for his safety.”

“Prussians again!” said Dixie. “There
is
a pattern.”

“He rested at an inn called the White Swan by day, thinking he’d be safer traveling by night. After dark, he watched his coach being loaded. As he prepared to board it, suddenly…he was gone.”

I waited, but Satsy said nothing more. So I said, “A guy on a secret diplomatic mission during wartime, who has stated to the local military that he’s in danger, goes missing after dark. So why does the author think the disappearance was mystical?”

“As Bathurst prepared to leave, he walked around to the other side of the coach, out of sight, and…was never seen again!”

“It was dark,” I said. “And he stepped out of sight.”

“What could have happened to him?” Dixie asked.

“Did you ever lose a nephew at the department store?” I finally lifted my head. “You look away for a
second,
or he steps behind a toy display for a
second
…and the next thing you know, he’s gone, nowhere to be found, and you’re wondering whether even to try explaining this to his parents before you hang yourself. And then!
Then
the brat turns up twenty minutes later at the customer service desk, eating candy and claiming
you
disappeared!” Seeing they were all staring at me with puzzled expressions, I said, “Never mind. I mean to say, a couple of skilled, armed assailants, operating after dark, probably only needed that brief opportunity, when Bathurst stepped behind the coach for a minute or so, to capture a frightened diplomat.”

“Frightened! Exactly,” Satsy said. “The author says that supernatural disappearances can sometimes be a protective mechanism, something that happens to some people when they’re terrified or facing death!”

Dixie said, “Hey, maybe that’s what been happening here!”

I asked her, “Was Dolly the Dancing Cowgirl scared?”

“Huh? Oh…No.” Dixie looked deflated. “She and Daddy have done that act lots of times, and she was real excited about going shopping on Fifth Avenue next day.”

I asked Barclay, “What about Clarisse? Did she seem scared?”

“No.” He shrugged. “Before we started the performance, she was just complaining that her manicurist hadn’t done a very good job that morning.”

“What about Samson?”

Satsy shook his head.

“And Golly Gee,” I said, “didn’t seem to
be scared of anything the night she vanished. Not even bad reviews.” She’d fought with Joe about endangering her during the show, but she was obviously annoyed, not frightened. “Are we done with Benjamin Bathurst, Satsy?”

“No. Three weeks after he disappeared—”

“Went missing.”

“—they found a pair of his trousers in a grove.”

“How did they know the trousers were his?”

“A letter from him to his wife was in the pocket.”

“What did the letter say?” I asked.

“It said he was in danger and feared he’d never reach England alive,” Satsy replied.

“Indeed,” I said.

“It also asked her not to marry again if he died.”

“Jeez,” said Dixie. “Some guys are so selfish.”

“But here’s the interesting thing, Esther,” Satsy continued. “The letter was intact, even though the weather had been mostly wet since his disappearance. So it should have disintegrated if the trousers had been lying outside for three weeks.”

“So Bathurst was held captive for a while,” I surmised. “That makes sense. A diplomat with secrets would have been interrogated by his enemies rather than immediately killed. Maybe they even toyed with trying to ransom him. Anyhow, he somehow got separated from his trousers after three weeks. Maybe when he was executed, or maybe when he was recaptured during an escape attempt.”

“Actually,” said Satsy, “the author believes Benjamin Bathurst was transported to another dimension.”

“But his trousers stayed here?” Dixie asked with a frown.

“No, according to the author,” Satsy explained, “the trousers were ‘suspended between two dimensions’ during those three weeks, then recrossed the divide between the two worlds, propelled by the force of Bathurst’s love for his wife!”

Barclay had brought us coffee, so Satsy, who’d already drunk three of the cups I’d brought, had had two more cups in the past hour. I made a mental note to bring decaf only from now on.

“The other theory,” he said, “is that the trousers may have spent those three weeks in a dimension where time passes much more slowly than it does here. So even if the weather was bad there, too, the letter wouldn’t have had time to disintegrate.”

“Does anyone have an aspirin?” I asked.

Hoping it would help relieve my headache, I went back down to the laboratory and nagged Hieronymus for a report of his findings. Still sullen and brusque, he provided a list of the tomes he’d been through—all of them in Latin—and a few bullet points in English summarizing what he’d learned.

“Well,” I said, perusing his notes in disappointment. “This doesn’t tell us much, does it.”

“I have another theowy,” Hieronymus replied. “One I didn’t put on that litht.”

“Oh?”

“Youw people did it.”

“
My
people?” I blinked. “Jews?”

He snorted. “No. The mundane people.”

“Oh. Mundanes.” He was a jerk, but apparently not an anti-Semite. “I’m still willing to consider that, though I may be the only one by now. Do you have any idea how mundanes
could
manage these disappearances?”

He shrugged and said he was still thinking about it.

“Well, I’ll leave you to it, then.”

Happy to abandon Hieronymus alone in the cellar, I thought over his suggestion as I went back upstairs.

I wasn’t particularly surprised by how many people (many, it turned out) had disappeared mysteriously over the course of history; but I was stunned by how many people, past and present, believed that the causes of such disappearances were necessarily supernatural (false construct or not). Most of the cases we’d come across so far could be explained by any number of mundane possibilities, but emphatic assertions that they
must
be mystical events had persisted for centuries, right up to the present day.

I wondered if I was an unusually skeptical person. So far, everyone involved in this case seemed to have accepted the mystical nature of our problem (Hieronymus’s suggestion notwithstanding) much more easily than I did.

Of course, the magicians had all actually
felt
something extraordinary occur when the victims disappeared, something that even today, in a calmer frame of mind, Barclay still couldn’t really articulate. Having talked to him, Duke and Delilah, and recalling Joe’s guilt and fear after Golly’s disappearance, I supposed that whatever they had experienced had made them believers on the spot. But Whoopsy, Khyber and Satsy had already believed in Samson’s magical disappearance by the time Max and I arrived at the Pony Expressive a few hours later; and Dixie didn’t seem to have wrestl
ed much with skepticism before accepting that Dolly had genuinely vanished.

I, on the other hand, had strenuously resisted the whole idea of mystical disappearance until there was simply no escaping it. Maybe I was too secular, too unimaginative, too wedded to the earthly dimension?

Or maybe they all were just weird.

My cell phone, clipped to my waistband, jingled a happy tune. I held it to my ear while reading over Hieronymus’s notes as if something useful might suddenly leap out at me. “Hello?”

“This is Khyber, checking in. Did any of the disappearing acts involve lightning?”

I frowned. “Um, no. Why?”

“I’ve found a Web site. There’ve been a number of disappearances, going all the way back to Roman times, involving people being struck by lightning. I mean, you’re hit, and—
poof!
”

“Really?”

“Sometimes you reappear elsewhere, sometimes you disappear forever.”

I wasn’t particularly hopeful, but nonetheless I said, “Put together a summary and bring it to the shop tomorrow.”

“Check.”

“Good work.”

“Over and out.”

The phone rang again only a minute later. I took a seat near the fireplace, out of earshot of Barclay, Satsy and Dixie, who were discussing how someone (or his trousers) might move across dimensions. My caller was Cowboy Duke.

As predicted, Joe Herlihy was a seething mass of nerves and Matilda was shrill. Max felt they had learned nothing new, but the interview had not been thorough enough to satisfy him. Joe was so highly strung that it took considerable patience to get useful answers from him, and Matilda kept disrupting the proceedings.

“Maximillian eventually brought the conversation around to the other disappearances,” Duke said. “You know, looking for a common factor.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And the interview ended on the spot.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Matilda started screaming, fit to be tied.”

“Oh?”

“I’m not sure if she thought we were threatening her with blackmail, or accusing her husband of masterminding a deadly conspiracy, or if she just thought we were nutcases.”

“I gather her screams conveyed all of these possibilities?”

“Yes, indeedy. Anyhow, she threw us out of the apartment.”

“That was going to be my next guess.”

“She also made a number of unladylike comments about you, since Max met her and Joe through you.”

“Yeah, they were all sort of introduced in my dressing room last night,” I said wanly.

“Esther, I don’t want you goin’ near that woman anytime soon, you hear me?” he said. “She is the meanest person I’ve met in this whole city, and that’s saying something.”

“No argument, Duke, I’m steering clear of her.”

“Good.”

I had a feeling my answering machine at home had already been incinerated by a message of blistering fury. I hoped Matilda didn’t think to ask the stage manager for my cell-phone number.

Duke told me that he and Max had just finished an uneventful inspection of the rhinestone-studded hollow horse from which Dolly had disappeared two nights ago. Now they were headed back here to interview Barclay. After that, they’d go with him to his
apartment to examine the prop box in which Clarisse Staunton had vanished.

“How’s the research going?” the Cowboy asked.

“Not well. I blame my parents for forcing me to study Hebrew instead of Latin,” I said. “I’ll see you later, Duke.”

After hanging up, I found Barclay proposing a new theory to our companions: “What if some focus or effort of the mind, or some technical means we don’t know about, can reduce the physical body to sub-microscopic particles of vibrating energy?”