Chapter 6 #2
She whispered something that made Beatrix nod. He watched Beatrix stand up and put herself back to some semblance of rights. And though he was glad, intellectually, that she had such a friend, how he envied Miss Knight.
He stepped out of the doorway, took invisible demarcation stones from his invisible pockets and laid them along the hallway. Then he stepped into a corner and, so quietly even he could barely hear the words, said, “Lang rēad lēoht.”
The knob of the front door and the wall just above the entrance to the kitchen lit up starburst bright.
The former was obviously the unlocking spell the wizard used to get in. But what had the man cast on the wall? Peter tried the revealing spell that countered invisibility.
Voilà.
A camera. Not a compact one like his, either.
It was twice as wide, with an antenna that strongly suggested it was recording continuously and sending the feed to Washington.
Bad, very bad. But also, in a certain light, good.
Why would the wizards bother to monitor the house if they’d killed the occupant they were worried about?
Miss Knight, stepping from the study with Beatrix, drew in a sharp breath as she saw what the wizard had hidden there. Beatrix’s eyes widened. Don’t look at it, he wanted to call out, and couldn’t.
On her own, Beatrix angled her head, turned her friend away and marched her toward the front door, saying nothing—handling it.
The instant after she opened the door, though, she gave a raw cry.
He rushed toward her, heart outpacing his feet.
What she’d seen came into view over her shoulder: Her sister, alive, stepping onto the porch just behind an especially grim Miss Dane.
Their only tenant who wasn’t in the League trailed them both.
Beatrix threw her arms around her sister. “Oh, Lydia!”
Then she must have recollected that the tenant would be confused because she pulled back and added with admirable calmness, “I was worried something happened to you all when I got home and found the house empty. You might have …”
She stopped, clearly drawing a blank about what, besides wizards with ill intent, could befall someone in Ellicott Mills.
“Twisted an ankle,” he murmured into her ear, thinking of Miss Sederey’s faked injury.
“Twisted an ankle,” she repeated. “I’m—I’m so glad you’re all right.”
“May I go in?” The timid little tenant—Miss Massey—wrung her hands. “I don’t mean to interrupt, but I’m awfully cold.”
He spun around, cast an invisibility spell on the camera and got out of the way just in time for young Miss Harper to press Miss Massey inside.
“You were so kind to backtrack with us,” Miss Harper said. “Thank you for your company.”
“Yes,” Miss Dane said with something like her usual dryness. “Foolish of me to think I’d dropped my gloves.”
He had a mental image of the three women nearing the property, the lockets Miss Dane and Miss Harper wore flaring hot, and Miss Dane coming up with the first excuse she could think of to get Miss Massey to leave with them.
“We’ll have dinner ready in about half an hour,” Miss Harper called as the tenant disappeared up the stairs to her room.
He stepped up to Beatrix again and whispered, “Get everyone else outside.”
A minute later, they huddled together in the near-dark, the air around them enspelled to keep any outdoor recording devices—or invisible wizards besides him—from listening in.
“What kind of camera?” Miss Knight said after he explained what he found.
“Tele-vision,” he repeated. “I’ve seen one at the Pentagram. They won’t have to come back to collect the recordings. Everything will go directly to them via radio waves.”
“You know, I can’t begin to understand these people,” Miss Dane said. “They try to kill Lydia, and when that doesn’t work the first time, their fallback is filming us?”
A good point.
“We’ll puzzle over that later,” Miss Harper said, remarkably calm. She gave speeches as fiery as her hair, but he couldn’t remember seeing her outraged by anything in private.
Of course, being targeted for assassination would tend to put anything else that happened to her in perspective.
Then he suddenly remembered.
“Miss Knight,” he said, “tell us about the wizard. What do you know of this man—Morse?”
She sighed. “Nothing good. Former dirty-tricks squad, now the vice president’s right-hand wizard.”
The circle buzzed with the women’s shock. He, at least, was less surprised to hear it.
“What does he do?” Beatrix murmured. “Character assassination or … actual assassination?”
Miss Knight bit her lip.
“Ella—”
“Draden was one of four men President Abbott was considering to be his running mate. I don’t know if you remember what happened? Two bowed out to ‘spend more time with family.’ The other—” Miss Knight took a deep breath. “The other died.”
“How?” he asked.
“Car crash.”
“Witnesses?”
“No.”
“Oh my God,” Beatrix whispered. “Oh no. Oh, God.”
“I don’t know that he had anything to do with it,” Miss Knight said quickly, shaking her head. “It’s just … awfully suspicious.”
No one said anything for a moment.
“How do you know what you do know?” he asked.
Miss Knight gave a shaky, bitter laugh. “I spent most of my life on the same street as Draden. I—heard things.”
He wasn’t entirely satisfied with this answer. But he couldn’t tell how influenced he was by his general dissatisfaction with Miss Knight, so he merely said, “Anything else we should know?”
She looked at Beatrix standing next to her, then back at what from her perspective was the gap in their circle, where he invisibly stood. She shook her head. “No.”
“Omnimancer …” Beatrix’s sister touched his invisible sleeve. “I hate to ask for more help when we’re already in your debt. But he cast a lot of spells.”
“I know,” Peter said. “I’ll check the entire house. Let me do the kitchen first and then you can all wait there. You don’t want to be in the rooms I’m searching because any other cameras he might have installed will catch your reaction.”
“Won’t the cameras pick up your spells?” Beatrix asked.
“I don’t think so. In black and white, you shouldn’t be able to see the spell detector.”
“Check the car first, if you would,” Miss Dane said, and there were a few seconds of bleak silence at that.
“Yes,” he said, and went to do it. But the car, and the entire yard, was spell-free, so he circled back to the house.
Beatrix opened the front door for him. She dawdled in the hallway as he set his demarcation stones in the kitchen. This time there were three mystery spells glowing white.
He revealed and then re-concealed what each spell was hiding, one at a time. Another camera hung over the back door; audio-recording devices on the ceiling listened above the table and sink.
He tiptoed back to the hall. “Three recording devices,” he whispered in Beatrix’s ear.
She closed her eyes, every muscle in her face taut. Then she nodded and went out to bring the others inside.
He worked his way around the rest of the first floor, finding audio recorders in every room. The dining area they’d so carefully protected was fatally compromised. Downstairs, recorders had been hung all around the spacious basement.
He padded up to the second floor, feeling the weight of so many devices.
A few could be avoided. But these were everywhere.
Then it occurred to him to wonder what the wizard had done to the bedroom Beatrix shared with her sister, and he ran there, stomach twisting in awful anticipation. And indeed, it lit up brightest of all.
There were spells on the papers tucked in boxes inside the closet—copied, most likely.
There were spells on the bedsheets, their purpose unclear but concerning; the bedding would have to go.
The typewriter lit up white. So did three spots on the walls, under which were hidden audio-recorders.
And last of all, his spells revealed two cameras—one pointed directly at Lydia Harper’s bed, the other at Beatrix’s.
He sat on the floor, eyes squeezed shut.
So the magiocracy hoped to catch one or both of the Harpers at an activity inappropriate for unmarried ladies.
It could be worse, it could be worse—and that was true, it could be far worse, but here was proof that Draden and his ilk weren’t so very different from him.
The last time someone had aimed a hidden camera at Beatrix in order to force her hand, after all, he’d done it.