Chapter 9
Dinner was already underway when Beatrix arrived home, giddy from a day spent using her brain more than her feet. She sat in the empty chair next to the newly moved-in Ella and tried to avoid Rosemarie’s piercing gaze from across the table. The woman was practically scowling at her.
“I hear you have a new position, Miss Harper,” said Caroline Massey, now the only boarder out of three who wasn’t connected with the League. She had a habit of speaking so softly you could barely hear her, but tonight the dinner table was quiet enough to give her no competition. “How does it suit?”
“Very well, thank you—to my great surprise.”
Lydia had a short coughing fit.
“Oh dear ... Are you all right?” Miss Massey murmured.
“Very well, thank you,” Lydia said, pinning Beatrix with a carbon copy of Rosemarie’s look.
“It’s fortunate, really, that I don’t hate every minute of the job,” Beatrix said, fed up with Rosemarie and closer to fed up with her sister than she liked to admit. “After all, I didn’t have any choice about taking it and can’t really quit.”
“I see,” said Miss Massey, who looked as if she didn’t see in the least.
“Would you like seconds?” Ella asked, handing Beatrix the casserole dish even though her plate wasn’t close to empty. As Beatrix took a small spoonful to be polite, Ella murmured: “The caterer’s pulled out.”
Beatrix bit back a gasp. Food at a conference was critical. The only thing worse than no caterer was no conference room.
They’d been so worried about that horrible possibility, they’d paid the Key Hotel extra for a clause in the contract that required hotel management to cough up a huge penalty if it defaulted on the terms. Too bad they hadn’t done the same for the catering company.
The Key wasn’t nearly ritzy enough to have an in-house team, the events in its ballroom consisting primarily of pizza-and-beer retirement parties for the factory and port workers who toiled along Baltimore’s harbor.
She gulped down the remainder of her dinner, leapt to her feet as soon as the others showed signs of rising and signaled her sister to follow her.
She ended up with both Lydia and Rosemarie.
Feeling like the leader of a grim parade, Beatrix marched outside to the bench in what had once been the front-yard flower garden, when there had been money for fripperies like flowers.
“What’s happened?” she said, keeping her voice low. “Ella says the caterer’s quit.”
“Called this afternoon to report that he’s lost two employees and can no longer handle such a big job,” Lydia said, pacing about.
“A likely story,” added Rosemarie, who sat down—Rosemarie was always better at keeping her emotions in check.
“Might I point out that this happened just three days after the wizard you’re so happy to be working for arrived in town, Beatrix.
A wizard who has a knack for making people do what he wants. ”
“A wizard who’s been working overtime on the town’s huge to-do list,” Beatrix retorted, crossing her arms. “When exactly would he have had time to figure out who our caterer was, let alone go to Baltimore to strong-arm him?”
“We must have a leak.” Lydia slumped onto the bench between them. “Who would do such a thing? Who would betray us?”
Beatrix put an arm around her, earlier indignation melted away to nothing.
No leak was required for wizards to make the League’s conference efforts generally difficult—Lydia’s role as head organizer was public knowledge, appearing as it had in both the Star and the News-Register.
But some of the problems would have been nearly impossible to create without inside help.
“Who knew which catering company we managed to get, and who had access to the conference invitations that went missing?” Rosemarie asked.
They chewed over this.
“Everyone who came to last month’s meeting knew about the caterer,” Lydia said. “Nearly two dozen people. That was when we worked out conference-day assignments for everybody.”
“Meg handled the invitations,” said Beatrix, who had been relieved that their treasurer was assigned that task, the sort that she usually ended up with herself. “But she’s also the one who discovered the problem—I don’t think she caused it.”
“She and I have been in most of the same classes for the past three years,” Lydia said. “She’s been gung-ho for women’s rights from the start. There’s no mistaking it.”
Rosemarie frowned. “Did she take them to the post office herself?”
Beatrix cast her mind back. She had a vague memory of Meg bringing a big box with her to a meeting ...
“She set them by the door when she arrived,” Lydia said. “Weren’t they left alone there until the meeting broke up?”
Beatrix grimaced. “You’re right. They were. So strictly speaking—”
“Miss Massey could have done it,” Rosemarie said. “And listened at the door to hear which caterer we picked.”
“The mind boggles at the thought of Miss Massey as a spy,” Lydia said, shaking her head.
“That would make her a very effective one, then.” Rosemarie gave a grim smile.
Beatrix was trying to wrap her mind around the thought that she might be giving room and board to an enemy when something even worse occurred to her.
“Ella,” she whispered, heart sinking. “Ella took the box of invitations home. Meg was going out of town to see her family for Easter, so you asked me to take care of it,” she said to her sister, “but Ella pointed out that she lived two doors up from the post office.”
“I really don’t think it was her,” Lydia said, putting a hand on Beatrix’s shoulder.
But none of them had to state the obvious: more likely Ella than Miss Massey. And not simply because one was shy and the other, bold.
Miss Massey, not quite thirty, had lived with them for seven years, ever since her widowed father had died and long before powerful wizards would have had any reason to take an interest in Lydia.
No doubt Lydia and Rosemarie had started plotting together around that time about the best way to build a powerful women’s rights campaign—they were thick as thieves by the time Lydia finished middle school—but it wasn’t until Lydia actually started at Hazelhurst College that plans turned to action.
A brilliant idea, really. Her sister ignored the active women’s rights club on campus, which had no national reach, to breathe life into the county’s dwindling Women’s League for the Prohibition of Magic chapter.
She accomplished so much in two semesters that every other chapter in the state took notice.
The Star wrote an only slightly patronizing profile of Lydia that called Hazelhurst the epicenter of the new “ladies’ movement.
” The summer before last, Rosemarie retired and Ella took her job—so eager to volunteer that she’d left a teaching position in a wealthy Baltimore neighborhood for Ellicott Mills and its ancient one-room schoolhouse.
After Washington would have had a reason to monitor what Lydia was up to.
Beatrix didn’t want to believe her friend was not actually her friend in the same way that she didn’t want to jump off a bridge.
They had such an easy connection, with no awkwardness, no second-guessing, no trouble finding common ground.
Ella had always struck her as the most honest person she knew, charging in with the truth like a well-meaning rhinoceros when a pleasant fib would be easier.
If her entire life here turned out to be a lie—
“Perhaps we’ve been bugged,” she said, the words tumbling out. “A wizard could have slipped into the house months ago to hide recording devices or cast a listening spell. Assuming there is such a spell.”
“Perhaps.” Rosemarie did not sound convinced. “For now, try to avoid telling Ella or Miss Massey anything important. Meg, too, I suppose. And Beatrix, do please get some useful information about your employer, will you?”
Beatrix swallowed, unaccountably torn. She shouldn’t feel any loyalty to Blackwell. She shouldn’t. But it took real effort to make herself say, “He was visited today by a general.”
“Well, now—that’s interesting.” Rosemarie turned on the bench, giving Beatrix her full attention. “Why?”
“They talked in a sound-proofed room. I couldn’t hear what they were saying—I did try.”
She decided not to share the short exchange she had been able to hear. Rosemarie and Lydia would see it as proof certain that Blackwell was in town on an anti-League assignment. She wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt until she could find out more.
That was only reasonable, wasn’t it?
On Tuesday, Peter put Omnimancing 101 next to the sink and left Miss Harper alone with it for an hour while he repaired the settling foundation at city hall.
On Wednesday, he tackled Mr. Edderly’s roof after pulling Useful Spells for All Occasions almost entirely out of the bookcase to draw her attention to it.
On Thursday, he handed her an overflowing box of spellbooks and asked her to shelve them for him while he harvested a fresh batch of leaves he didn’t really need, not after the group effort.
She glanced at Omnimancing 101 but didn’t touch it. She pushed Useful Spells for All Occasions back into place. And the closest she came to cracking open any of the boxed books was when one slipped from her hands and fell to the floor.
He was getting desperate. On Friday, he decided, he would go for broke.
“Here’s something I’ve been pondering,” Beatrix said, keeping her voice as nonchalant as possible. “Can magic be used to record sound? Or images?”
The pan Blackwell had been drying clanged onto the countertop. “Sorry—clumsy of me. Without recording equipment, you mean? Like a telephone tap?”
“Oh—can a telephone be tapped magically?”
“I believe so.”
She made a mental note to tell Lydia and Rosemarie not to say anything of importance on the phone.
But a tap couldn’t explain their leak. They avoided making long-distance calls—too expensive—and didn’t bother with the phone for talking to local League members, all of whom lived either at the college or at Cedarlawn with her.
“That’s interesting,” she said, “but I was thinking of an incantation that works like a Dictaphone or camera.”
“I’m afraid there’s no such spell. Why were you pondering that?”
Because she, Lydia and Rosemarie had spent all week trying to find recording devices in the house to no avail, so she wanted a magical eavesdropping explanation for their troubles rather than a traitorous boarder.
“Because,” she said, scrubbing the worktable furiously, “it struck me that magic could revolutionize the film industry.”
She was painfully aware how thin the reason sounded, so she kept going.
“It would certainly make newsreels a lot easier to produce, wouldn’t it?
And maybe it could even revive the idea of broadcasting images directly into people’s homes in a way that wouldn’t require such expensive equipment.
I wonder why magic can do some things and not others. Is there a common thread?”
Dear God, she was babbling. But Blackwell seemed to take her question at face value.
“If there is a common thread, we’ve missed it.
Magic is frustrating that way.” He hung up the towel and glanced at the prioritized to-do list taped to one of the cabinet doors.
“Painkiller is next. That’s one of the few brews that doesn’t require spellcasting until the very end.
Think you can handle everything up to that point while I see to the Fischers’ beetle problem? ”
She flipped to the instruction page in the brewing manual. “Looks simple enough. Go ahead—Mr. Fischer said the beetles are destroying his farm.”
“Don’t expect me back in less than two hours. Beetles are devious. Oh—do me a favor,” he added, pausing in the doorway. “When you finish, could you find homes for some new ingredients? A special order came in. I stuck the box in the receiving room to get it out of the way.”
“Certainly,” she said, surveying the worktable with pleasant anticipation.
She fell into a rhythm of chopping, enjoying the challenge of cutting everything just so, and in half an hour had hit the point where a wizard’s touch was needed. She covered the container to keep dust from floating in and went off to find the special order.
No box was evident when she poked her head into the receiving room. It proved to be sitting under the desk—he wasn’t kidding about “out of the way”—and she conked her head against the center drawer as she retrieved it. She shot an acid glare at the offender as she stood up.
It was open about an inch, the edge of a document sticking out. She opened it further to get the blockage out of the way, mainly so she could slam the drawer shut in a satisfying manner, but was stopped dead by the title page of the report she was about to shove to the back.
Instances of Magical Ability in the Female Population: Field tests, 1931-32.
She picked it up with shaking hands. The red CLASSIFIED stamp under the title stared back at her, mockingly. Beneath that was another stamp: TOP SECRET.
It was like standing at the edge of a cliff right before jumping off.
Blackwell wasn’t due back for well over an hour. There was no monitoring spell to worry about and—if the classified book that slipped out of her hands yesterday was typical—no alarm that would blare when the document was opened. Who would know?
She ran around the room, pulling the curtains closed, before perching on the leather chair behind the desk. Heart pumping fit to burst, she picked up the report and turned to the first page.