The Flower Bowl Spell (25 page)

I calculate what he’s saying. “Okay, so
Cheradon is Sadie’s niece, which makes her Viveka’s cousin, which
makes her Romola and Cleo’s first cousin once removed. Right?”

Romola swallows a bite of food and asks,
“Who’s our cousin?”

Cleo doesn’t bother to swallow and says
through a mouthful of frittata, “That lady with the blue-and-pink
hair.”

“First cousin once removed, second cousin, I
never could get that straight.” Tucker wipes his mouth with his
napkin.

“And Gru is her grandmother?”

Tucker nods.

My thoughts are jumping all over the place,
trying to make connections. I wish Cooper were here. He would sort
this out with that elegant logic with which he seems cursed. “What
can you tell me about this confrontation?”

Tucker shakes his head. “It’s only a guess.
But from all you’ve told me, it’s inevitable.”

“But…but what is it? I’m assuming it’s bad,
right?”

“If it’s the Flower Bowl Spell, then yes.
It’s bad.”

“Excuse me.” I put my napkin on the table and
stand up, beckoning Tucker to come with. He follows me to the
hallway. “It seems to me going into the belly of the beast is
idiotic. Wouldn’t you agree? I mean, these are your granddaughters.
Someone murdered Bright Vixen and this fairy. And you’re just
sending us back out there? Shouldn’t you be doing something?”

Tucker shakes his head sadly. “My dear, I
have tried. Last night, after you all went to bed, I stayed up and
used every spell I know and called upon every power in my arsenal
to figure out what I could do. And what I learned is…this is not my
fight. It’s yours.”

Mine. Great.

We argue some more, but he won’t budge on
this. He insists the girls need to stay with me and that we are
safest all together. It’s like arguing with that brick wall people
talk about.

Man, do I need a break. “If it’s all right
with you, I’m going to check out your garden.”

Tucker points the way. I grab my coffee mug
and head through a set of French doors off the dining room.

Tucker’s backyard is plain but well cared
for. There are a few statues here and there, as well as flowerbeds
and a patch of squash, which is yielding a bumper crop of pumpkins
and zucchini. I sit in a canopied glider and watch as a marble
bunny holding a basket in its mouth grooms its ears with its paws.
The statue of a girl in the style of Sylvia Shaw Judson, with
smooth features and hollow, ghostly eyes, pets her dog. Both look
my way now and then. I close my eyes and count back from ten,
imagining delicious lollipops, all the colors of the rainbow. And I
ask myself the age-old question:
What the hell is going
on?

The argument, discussion, grilling—whatever
you want to call it—with my higher self, my Smarter Memphis, goes
on for some time. And at the end, I know what I have to do to get
closer to answering that question.

I go back inside. Tucker and the girls are
cleaning up, loading the dishwasher. I rinse my coffee mug in the
sink and add it to the rack. Then I turn to Tucker and, after
pulling it out of my jeans pocket, slap the locket on the counter.
“Apparently, just as you said, I have to take the girls with me,
much as I’d like to leave them here with you. And, apparently, just
as you said, I have to get back to San Francisco ASAP. So, we’re
leaving in one hour. But before that, I want you to tell me
everything you know about Viveka and this thing.”

He picks up the butterfly, running his
fingers over it.

“Where is she, Tucker?” I ask. “Where is
Viveka?”

The girls have stopped cleaning. They watch
us with interest.

“Girls.” Tucker beckons them over. When they
are within reach, he gives them each a hug. “Now go upstairs and
play.”

Romola starts to say something, but stops
when she looks in Tucker’s eyes. The girls turn and head for the
stairs.

Tucker gestures to a barstool. “Sit down,
Memphis, and I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

“Okay.” I sit. “Hit me with your best
shot.”

He doesn’t say anything for a moment, and I
let him gather his thoughts. “I’m not sure how to put this, so I’ll
just say it. My daughter has left the country, and I hope it’s not
for good.”

I feel a slow twisting in my guts. “What do
you mean?”

“I mean… Well, the truth is that Viveka
thinks she’s in love.”

Chapter Twenty-one

We arrive in San Francisco around dinnertime,
and as we approach my flat, the telltale fog has descended in all
of its tired, metaphorical splendor. A blanket, a shroud, a puff of
wet wool. In a blink, we pass from Indian Summer into this
cold-weather front. I shiver in my thin cotton cardigan and turn up
the car’s heater.

No one has spoken for at least a couple of
hours, and into this silence Cleo asks, “Are fairies angels?” We
are passing a bus-shelter poster for a theatrical production of
Angels in America
. In the poster, an actress is suspended
above the stage in a long, flowing gown. Enormous wings made of
white feathers, probably swan, spread behind her back.

“Nope,” I answer, concentrating on changing
lanes.

“Oh. Good. Angels are scary,” Cleo says.

“No they aren’t,” Romola says. “They’re just
weird and…strange. They’re just like people with bird wings.” She’s
quiet for a moment and then she says, “I guess they are kind of
scary.”

“Fairies are weird too,” Cleo says. “And
they’re little. But I bet they can get big too.”

“No. Tinker Bell is little.”

“Tinker Bell’s not real.”

“
No
fairies are real,” Romola
counters.

“Yeah-huh.”

“Nah-uh.”

“They are. They live in little holes.”

“Whatever,” Romola mutters, and there’s a
finality to this statement that Cleo can’t argue against.

The girls go quiet again, and I think about
how a normal mother, babysitter, or aunt would find this
conversation between young sisters charming and imaginative,
instead of relevant and a little sad.

In the long drive from Santa Cecilia to San
Francisco, I’ve had plenty of time to mull over the things Tucker
revealed before we left. He was not much help on the butterfly
locket, although he thought Viveka got hers from Gru, which makes
sense. Gru probably got it from Bright Vixen. But is it magickal
like mine? He didn’t know.

He did tell me that Viveka is on a Mexican
island where the man she has fallen for is apparently dying from
pancreatic cancer. Which means I’m waiting for a total stranger to
die before she comes back to collect the girls.

I have faith in the power of mother
love—perhaps the strongest love there is—to keep these girls safe.
But it would be so much better if Viveka were physically here to
watch over them. Though I felt strong at Tucker’s house, now I have
my doubts. His home is an epicenter of supernatural mojo, and as
soon as we pulled away from his driveway, the normal world flooded
in. I wonder if I left some of my cosmic zing behind in that guest
room, but I know I’ll be able to replenish as soon as the moon hits
full again and I can sky-dance in our backyard. It’s a little
epicenter unto itself.

We’re going to be okay, I tell myself.
Whatever I have to confront, we are going to be okay. But a huge
part of me wants to turn around, speed back to the safety of
Tucker’s house, and never leave. If only he’d let me.

I’m not completely panicking because Tucker
gave me something pretty damn cool before we left: his notebook on
the Flower Bowl Spell.

“This should inform you of everything that’s
not on the Internet. I myself once tried my hand at the
counter-curse on page eighty-three.” He tapped the page. “The
Flower Bowl Spell, for all its prettiness of name, is a curse. Not
on any particular individual. It’s a curse on the natural order of
magick.”

****

The lights are on in the living room windows,
and we’re rewarded with the presence of Cooper, who has kept an
extra-large pizza warm in the oven for us as well as a grandiose
tub of ice cream chilling in the freezer. The girls and I devour
the food before I tuck them in. Then I try to erase the memory of
Tyson’s kisses by dragging Cooper off to our bed. Yet as we
embrace, the memory of Ty’s lips covering mine burns in my
thoughts, a mental sex toy.

Cooper and I stay up late whispering in the
dark. He tells me about what’s been going on. Hillary and her
latest exploits—her mother’s discovery of a crumpled joint in Hil’s
coat pocket (she insisted, as if it would exonerate her, that it
was “too old to smoke”) after she’d been busted spending the night
at a boy’s house when she claimed she was at a girlfriend’s. And
it’s only the end of October, but Cooper is already weary of work.
His students are especially cocky this year, complaining about
their textbooks, which are twenty-odd years old. The French Club
members—Cooper is the faculty adviser—want to sell temporary
tattoos of fleurs-de-lys at the International Faire this year. He’s
so sick of fleurs-de-lys. Is there no other French symbol worthy of
notice? The Renault lion, perhaps, or a glass of red wine and
mashed-out cigarettes. A pile of
crotte
.

It’s my turn. I drain my tale of magick and
kisses, but leave in the rest of the high jinks. It’s not
difficult.

To Tyson Belmonte freaking out on me, Cooper
says, “Obviously, he’s conflicted. He has feelings for you, yet he
blames you for his sister’s death.”

“Feelings for me.” With that, I can’t argue.
But are they good or bad? “Maybe.”

To Jesus Christ showing up, Cooper is not
surprised. He suggests we call Child Protective Services right then
and there.

“Hang on,” I tell him. “There’s more to that
soap opera.”

“Go on.”

“It’s a tale as old as time, Coop. A
preacher’s wife falls for one of her husband’s parishioners, a
sickly man from a subtropic island who has sought out said preacher
for his touted healing ways. The wife, unable to do much more than
lend a sympathetic ear, befriends the man, and before she knows it
they’re sneaking off into the woods behind the revival tents. The
man’s visa runs out, he returns to his island home, and the woman,
realizing her true feelings, seeks him out in order to be with him
before he passes into the great beyond.”

Cooper doesn’t say anything right away. He
stares at the ceiling and I stare too, wondering if my fairy is up
there in his hole listening in. “He dies, yet her love lives on.
Flaubert couldn’t write it any better.”

“Oh, add a little cyanide poisoning and it’s
got Flaubert’s prints all over it.”

He turns to me quickly. “Has anyone been
poisoned?”

“Not in this storyline. No.”

“In another?”

“Sort of.”

“Tell me.”

This is the one I know would make him go
ballistic if I told the whole truth. So I don’t. I don’t lie but I
don’t tell him everything. This is the way it’s always been with
us. “You know the locket you gave me—which I love, by the way?”

“Yes,” he says warily.

“The woman you bought it from died.”

Cooper looks at me with the surprise I would
expect. I tell him about tracking down Gladys Jones, about my
discovery of the fact that she is someone with whom I share a past.
I don’t tell him about finding her body, definitely
not
about her ghost, my hoodoo spell that called up her last minutes,
or the other unsavory magickal tidbits that might cause alarm.

Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to
hop on the Internet this morning before leaving Tucker’s and scan
the latest news on Bright Vixen’s exploding house. A gas leak, the
news sites report. Gladys’s body crispified. Any traces of me or
the girls or her murderer—gone. There were some bits from her
jewelry business as well as some files from her old job as a
software developer, but nothing out of the ordinary, nothing odd.
If there had been, I might have told Cooper all about it. I still
might. But now is not the time.

He listens with the detached fascination of
one who has been but remotely touched by a freakishly tainted
tragedy. I picture his thoughts at work: should he say something
profound or nothing at all, or perhaps make a witty but off-color
joke?

“That’s the way the world works, I guess,
with no rhyme or reason.” He sighs, opting for a mild case of
nihilism. “I suppose if our Chez Remy date had been a week later,
my order wouldn’t have gone through.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“For the locket. She’d be dead and my order
would be lost in the ether of her Internet service provider’s
servers.”

“Lucky for us it’s not.”

“Yes.” He closes his eyes, ready to sleep. “I
suppose her guardian angel was out to lunch. It’s a shame.”

I can’t help thinking of Beulah’s mutilated
fairy body, and am reminded of something. Angels again. Guardian
angels. I wait until I hear the sounds of Cooper’s light snoring
before I sneak out of bed.

Centuries ago, Christians tried to turn the
stories of fairies into evidence of angels, and with gobs of
success. The thing is, I know a thing or two about angels. They are
real, and they are not fairies, as Cleo wondered. Angels are humans
who have evolved through many lifetimes to become pure goodness.
Holy ghosts. They do their best to keep us safe, but they aren’t
infallible. I met a future angel once. At the time, he didn’t know
what he was, and neither did I, not until much later, after he had
passed on from his last human life to his new angelic one. I think
back to my conversation with Ty about particle physics. I don’t
know if I can use that to explain angels. What he said makes sense
though: Maybe magick is just magick.

I walk down the hall to the girls’ room. They
are curled away from each other on the bed, and I wonder how much
longer Viveka will stay gone, how long it will take for her beloved
to die.