Chapter 12 #3
“Think of the uproar,” Ella said. “Hardly anyone knows that women are capable of magic at all, albeit in an extremely minor way.”
Miss Sadler nodded slowly, brow creased. Not entirely sure she believed it?
They should have thought of another tall tale. They should have insisted that the connection to the League was purely coincidental.
“Who was it who tried to recruit you?” Beatrix asked, expecting her to demur.
“Marianne Fowler,” Miss Sadler said, giving her friend up without a second thought. Either she didn’t care if Miss Fowler spent years in federal prison, or she’d decided to believe their story.
Beatrix glanced at Ella. Ella shook her head. “She’s not ours. I’ll check, but I’m sure she was taught by an operative.”
“And you are not to tell her about that,” Beatrix said, giving Miss Sadler a hard look.
“No! No, of course I won’t. But—but I’m not a member of the League. I don’t understand why she would try to recruit me if the plan is—”
“Unlike you, Miss Sadler, Miss—Fowler, was it?—doesn’t know the plan,” Ella said. “I imagine she took it upon herself to teach you because she saw you as a friend.”
“She doesn’t appear to have good judgment,” Beatrix said, unable to help herself.
“Well—no, I’m afraid she doesn’t, poor dear.” Miss Sadler shook her head.
“We need you to impress upon your friend that she must not teach others,” Ella said.
“It’s one thing to have a few League members learning a spell or two to ease their fears, but what she’s done is quite another.
We don’t want to have to arrest her. Can you speak to her?
Without mentioning anything we’ve told you, naturally. ”
“Oh, yes! Yes, I will.” Miss Sadler smiled in a self-satisfied way. Then her eyes lit up. “Oh! What about that Lydia Harper? Is she aware of this plan?”
“No,” Beatrix said—perhaps a shade too quickly.
“Miss Harper is the sort to go right to the newspapers,” Ella put in. “She has the most unreasonable dislike for wizards, that one.”
Miss Sadler nodded, face clear this time. She was buying it. She really was.
But now came the time to ask the question to which Beatrix dreaded hearing the answer.
“When you called the FBI’s tip line”—she paused just long enough to note that Miss Sadler’s expression hadn’t changed, so clearly it had been the tip line she’d called—“what exactly did you say?”
Now Miss Sadler’s expression did change. She frowned. “Didn’t they pass on the message?”
“Yes,” Beatrix said, drawing the word out slightly to suggest that Miss Sadler was being dense. “‘Report of illegal magic use.’ But I want to know what you told them. This is of the utmost importance, Miss Sadler,” she said, standing and glaring down at her. “What—did—you—say?”
Miss Sadler’s eyes went wide. Beatrix knew exactly how alarming it was to face an angry wizard, and she took a step closer to drive the point home.
“I—” Miss Sadler cringed into her chair. “I said I had information about illegal magic use I wanted to report to the authorities.”
Beatrix’s heart leapt. “Nothing else?”
“No! Nothing. But I don’t understand why it matters. You’re all with the FBI.” An outright suspicious look crossed her face for the first time. “Aren’t you?”
“Miss Sadler,” Ella said in soothing tones, “this operation is top secret. Even most of the investigators don’t know about it, and the tip-line operators certainly don’t. They aren’t supposed to ask for details about illegal magic use, but if a caller starts divulging information willy-nilly …”
“The director will have both our heads if this gets out,” Beatrix muttered.
“It won’t,” Ella told her. “Isn’t that right, Miss Sadler?”
Miss Sadler nodded, her head bobbing rapidly.
“Now, I believe you will get a visit at the appointed time in”—Ella glanced at the clock—“six minutes,” she said, her voice amazingly calm.
“You see, the director can’t just start assigning his top agents to check out lowly reports of magic use.
People will talk. So for the last few weeks we’ve been going in advance, off the books, to make sure there’s no problem. ”
“And there hasn’t been, until now,” Beatrix said.
“That puts you in a difficult position, Miss Sadler,” Ella murmured, leaning in. “When the assigned investigator asks you why you called …”
Miss Sadler blinked. Then she seemed to collect herself. “I will tell him I was mistaken about what I saw. It wasn’t magic at all.”
“That would do nicely.” Ella took her hand. “Thank you, Miss Sadler, for your service to our country.”
Miss Sadler flushed. “It’s my duty, Wizard Smith.”
“If only every citizen were as upstanding as you,” Beatrix said, getting to her feet. “Good day, Miss Sadler.”
There was a knock on the door.
“Oh, dear!” Miss Sadler put her hand to her mouth. “That must be the investigator now!”
They couldn’t be seen. Even if their disguises did pass muster, surely the presence of unexpected, unknown wizards would prompt the man to make inquiries the moment he got back to the office?
Beatrix opened her mouth to suggest they remain in the sitting room while Miss Sadler dispatched the investigator at the front door, but Miss Sadler got there first.
“Oh, silly me! Of course you can just leave from here—what was I thinking?” She gave “Wizard Smith” a beatific smile. “Ever since I heard such travel was possible, I’ve always wanted to see it.”
Another knock.
“Quickly now,” Miss Sadler urged.
Beatrix glanced at Ella, whose eyes communicated what she assumed: Ella had not somehow managed to master teleportation while neglecting to mention it.
Neither of them could teleport the conventional way—that took an entirely different, highly specialized type of leaf—and Beatrix had managed it with knitting only once, when her sister’s life was in imminent danger.
Just one thing to be done. Beatrix pulled a handful of leaves from her coat, grabbed Ella by the arm and hoped—prayed—that she could manage the invisibility spell on the both of them at once.
“Heoloe,” she whispered—and mercifully, they disappeared.
Miss Sadler looked delighted. She put out a hand as if she wanted to see whether they were still there—good God—but at that moment a third knock sounded, and she rushed out of the sitting room to answer it, the old door complaining as she flung it open.
“My apologies,” she said. “Are you the investigator?”
“Yes,” said an irritated male voice. “I believe we had an appointment.”
“Yes, I know, and I am sorry,” Miss Sadler said. “You see, I’ve just discovered that I was completely mistaken. I—I’m afraid I mistook a bit of very clever stage magic for the real thing. It wasn’t on the stage, you see, and—well, even so, I feel very foolish …”
As Miss Sadler went on in that manner, Beatrix found Ella’s ear by trial and error. “Is there a way out the back?”
“I want to hear the end of this,” Ella whispered, and pulled her into the cramped space between a chair and the wall.
“—and I’ve only just realized my error, or else I would have called,” Miss Sadler said, finally coming to a stop.
The man—wizard?—sighed. “Fine. Next time, lady, be sure before you ring the tip line.”
“Yes. I am very sorry.”
“Yeah. I get that a lot. Good-bye.”
They heard the pop of teleportation, the sound hitting Beatrix like a blow as the implications settled in. Wizards Smith and Brown hadn’t made a sound when “teleporting.” Now that Miss Sadler had seen and heard the real thing, they’d just given themselves away.
What were they to do?
Miss Sadler walked into the sitting room, her prim mouth grave. She picked up Beatrix’s plate of uneaten cake and cup of unsipped tea, close enough to where Beatrix and Ella were crouched that either of them could grab the hem of her dress if they were so inclined, and exited to the kitchen.
Think. Think.
The click-click of heels announced Miss Sadler’s return a few seconds before she arrived.
As she picked up Ella’s nearly empty plate and cup—how had Ella managed to eat through the stress of it all?
—she simply stood there, her back to them.
Beatrix could read the future in Miss Sadler’s too-straight spine: She was coming to a decision.
She would call the tip line again and tell the FBI everything.
They needed to stop her. Now. No time for a complex plan, no time to consult with Ella—Beatrix knew she had less than a minute to react. She thrust her hand into her pocket, pulled out a fistful of leaves and—
Miss Sadler turned. Beatrix saw with a start that the woman was smiling in a patently soppy fashion.
“Thank you, Miss Sadler, for your service to our country,” their host murmured, gazing at the teacup in her hand. Then she put her lips to it, as if it were a person and not a piece of china.
Beatrix stared at her in blank shock. She leaned her head against the chair, hands shaking. What on earth could she have cast to stop Miss Sadler from calling that wouldn’t have stopped Miss Sadler from doing anything ever again?
What was wrong with her?
They had to crouch behind the chair for a few more minutes, variations of these thoughts jigging through her head, before Miss Sadler stepped into the powder room near the front door.
“Time to go,” Ella whispered, pressing at her back.
Beatrix crawled out and tiptoed past the powder room, still shaky with the shock of how close she had come to—she didn’t want to even think the word. Then she remembered the trouble with the front door. She stopped with her hand on the handle.
Ella poked her in the back with increasing vigor, but they were too close to the powder room for explanations.
The toilet flushed. She wrenched open the loud door, pulled Ella out, pressed it closed behind them and—clinging to Ella’s arm so they wouldn’t lose each other—walked away as quickly as possible on the icy sidewalk while hysterical self-recriminations buzzed in her head.
“Oh my God,” Ella whispered.
That summed up the entire escapade.
Ella made a sound like a swallowed laugh. “She kissed my cup.”
Beatrix tried not to sob. She could have killed Miss Sadler.
No, not killed, murdered. She was panicked and hadn’t specifically intended her any harm, but what good would that have done?
Was it only a few weeks ago that she’d told Peter she knew where the line between good and evil lay, and he didn’t?
Hell and damnation, what was wrong with her?
“I mean, I thought our disguises were good, but I didn’t think they were that good,” Ella whispered. After a moment with no response, she added: “Beatrix—are you all right?”
This wasn’t something she could explain. Not out in the open, certainly. Probably not even in their soundproofed R&D room. What would Ella think of her?
“Shaken up,” Beatrix whispered as they climbed into the car. “I’ll—I’ll be OK.”
“Hang on, you can’t drive while invisible. I’ve got it.” A pause. A rustling sound, like leaves coming out of a pocket. “Sweotolung!”
Beatrix caught herself snapping into focus in the rearview mirror—though not exactly herself because she still wore the masculine face Ella had given her. “You can put us back to normal … right?”
“Yes,” Ella said, but she sounded tired, and when she said “there you are” a while later, still invisible herself, exhaustion tinged her voice. “The hardest part was making your hair look like your shade of brown again. I think”—she gave a jaw-cracking yawn—“I think I’d better stop there for now.”
“Rest while I drive.”
“What I’d really like to do is—is”—Ella yawned again—“eat.”
No wonder. It was after eight and they’d never had dinner. Just cake, in Ella’s case. Beatrix started the car. “We’ll get something on the way.”
Shortly afterward, soft snoring sounds came from the passenger seat.
Beatrix swung through the city, bought sandwiches at a corner store and stopped at Joan’s. She helped Ella, still invisible and half-asleep, into the apartment and left her on the couch while she and Joan closeted themselves in the bathroom.
“Very close,” Joan said, shaking her head after hearing the summary version of what had happened. “How did you stay calm through all that?”
“I didn’t. My heart still feels as if it might burst from the stress.”
Joan sighed. “Should I pass down the word to stop?”
Beatrix hesitated. It would be so much easier if they did. No longer would she have it hanging over her, this potential disaster in the making. This lie to Peter that felt like a physical presence between them.
This could be the day.
She took a deep breath. “No. Emergency averted. We’ll just need to be more careful. Pass down the word not to recruit League members—say it’s too risky, given … given the attention on the League and some of its members’ feelings about magic.”
She thought Joan might object. Most people would, given the scare they’d just had. But Joan nodded. “I’ll do that.”