Chapter Eighteen
Eighteen
Sipping her third cup of coffee, Harper dug Sigrid’s card out of her bag. She gave Detective Serrano a call and gave him her number, then dialed Sigrid herself.
“I knew you’d be calling,” said Sigrid in that ominous, knowing tone of hers. “Tell me what happened.”
Harper hesitated. She wasn’t accustomed to confiding in virtual strangers, and in any event was not at all sure she wanted to hear Sigrid’s thoughts on last night’s events. She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear her own thoughts, either.
Surely there was a rational explanation. There had to be.
“I was hoping I might come see your garden,” Harper hedged.
“My garden?”
“Yes. The detective assigned to the case is interested in the tinctures and tonics Delilah made, and since you mentioned you supplied her with plants from your garden…”
“Of course, sure. Come see the garden,” Sigrid replied, her tone suggesting she did not believe for a second that was the reason for Harper’s visit.
“Also, I should tell you that he might be calling.”
“He who?”
“Detective Serrano.”
“You told him about me?”
“I—I did, yes. Is that a problem?”
Sigrid paused. “What did you tell him?”
“That you provided Delilah with herbs, and that you left some things at the house that you would like to retrieve.”
“I sincerely wish you had not done that,” Sigrid sighed. “But thank you for the warning. Come by this afternoon, if you want. I’ll text my address.”
As Harper hung up, she wondered: Why didn’t Sigrid want the police to know about her? Was it because she identified as a witch and feared the reaction of authorities? Or had she and Delilah been engaged in something not entirely aboveboard?
Or maybe it was as simple as Detective Serrano had suggested: Nobody liked to hear from a homicide detective.
Plumes Coffee House stood on the corner of Franklin and Alvarado, next door to the allegedly haunted Monterey Hotel. Harper spotted Jenny sitting with Blanca at a table by the rear wall.
She ordered a double latte—her fourth cup of coffee that day, or maybe the fifth?
—and told herself that she had to start getting more sleep or give up coffee entirely because surely that much caffeine was not good for a body.
The barista handed her the drink, and Harper joined her students, setting her tall glass down next to two plates on which were the remnants of sugary pastries.
Had Jenny and Blanca been here awhile, getting their stories straight?
“Good morning, Professor,” said Blanca.
“Good morning,” said Harper. “What are we all drinking today?”
Blanca’s concoction was served in a mason jar with a straw and crowned by a mountain of whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles. All it was missing was the colorful paper umbrella.
“It’s a Nutella frappe. So good. Wanna try?”
“Thanks, I’m more of a coffee person.”
“It has coffee in it,” said Jenny, holding up her own glass. “Mine’s a Mexican mocha.”
“When it comes to coffee, I’m a purist. Those look more like milkshakes than coffee to me.” Sheesh, way to be a wet blanket, Harp. “But they do look delicious. Enjoy, by all means.”
The students each took a gulp of their drinks.
“So. Jenny, mind telling me what you were doing at the Perles Mansion yesterday?”
“How did you know?” Jenny asked.
“Never mind that. Were you there, too, Blanca?”
Blanca shook her head. “I’m, like, just here for moral support?”
“Okay, then, Jenny, start talking. Was this some sort of stunt for your podcast?”
The young women exchanged a glance. “No. I mean, sort of? I, like, did record it. But it really had more to do with the chicken.”
“The chicken,” Harper repeated, remembering the nightmarish scene in that mirrored room, walls and floor painted in blood and feathers, the gory reflections stretching to infinity.
“I’m an animal lover?” began Blanca. “And I heard they were going to sacrifice a chicken, and—”
“I was the one who—” interrupted Jenny.
“Because they usually use other body parts, and—”
They were talking over each other, arguing, and Harper could make no sense of what they were saying.
“Stop!” Harper said, using her teacher voice. Her tone was so effective that a young man passing by their table obediently halted in his tracks. “Sorry, not you,” she said, waving him off. “Go on about your business.”
She turned to Blanca and Jenny. “Listen, you two—”
“Are you going to tell?” Jenny asked.
“I haven’t decided yet. I’m leaning that way.”
“But it wasn’t anything about Delilah Mason, honest! It’s just that I’m a real animal lover. I went there to make sure they didn’t hurt the chicken.”
“But…they slaughtered the poor thing,” Harper pointed out.
“I mean, yeah. But they were quick about it. It didn’t suffer.”
“Uh-huh,” said Harper, sipping her coffee.
“Are you a vegetarian?” Blanca asked Harper.
Harper shook her head.
“Then think about it,” said Blanca. “Is it better for a chicken to be killed at an industrial farm and show up under plastic at the supermarket, or to kill it—quickly—yourself? I mean, really, I used to go visit my abuela on her farm, and she raised chickens, and sometimes you make pollo en salsa verde, and…”
“I get it,” said Harper, not up for the debate over industrial food production and animal cruelty.
“I’m just trying to understand why you—or both of you?
—were at what appeared to be some kind of satanic ritual at the Perles Mansion yesterday.
Not only were you trespassing, but you were disturbing a potential crime scene. ”
“We didn’t commit a crime!” Jenny said.
“That’s not what I meant,” Harper replied. “It was illegal for you to be there.”
“And it wasn’t satanic!” said Blanca, touching the cross at her neck. “I wouldn’t put up with that for a second.”
“Okay, I shouldn’t have described it that way. But whatever it was you were doing didn’t exactly look wholesome. You were trespassing on a crime scene.”
“I thought she was found outside, in the garden,” Jenny protested.
“How do you know she wasn’t attacked in the house and then moved to the garden?” Harper asked.
Blanca looked stricken, and Jenny had the grace to blush. “It wasn’t like we were messing with anything related to the murder investigation. This was a separate-type deal.”
“Totally,” insisted Blanca, backing up her friend.
Harper raised her eyebrows. “So, you were there, Blanca.”
“I’m sorry I lied to you,” Blanca said. “Are you going to tell the police?”
“Any reason I shouldn’t?”
“Um…” She and Jenny exchanged a look. “We had a good reason.”
“And what might that be?”
“We met these people? And they said they could call on Soren Perles’s spirit. Because it’s getting close to Halloween. They said they had done it before—that Delilah Mason even let them use that weird mirror room one time.”
“Who were these people?”
“We were sworn to secrecy, and even though I don’t really believe in that sort of thing…I mean, what if they really would hex us if we said something?”
“A person can’t go through life under a hex,” said Blanca. “Also, they said they were going to use real body parts in the ceremony. And that fit right into this upcoming episode of the podcast.”
“What do you mean, ‘real body parts’?” Harper asked.
“You know…parts. Of a person’s body,” Jenny said.
“Where would they get these parts?” Harper asked.
“The internet,” Blanca explained. “You can buy anything on the internet.”
“Are you serious?”
Jenny nodded. “Joel told us about it.”
“Joel Aristide? You know Joel?”
“The ghost tour guy? Sure. Everybody knows Joel.”
“Was he part of your chicken-killing group?”
“No way,” Blanca scoffed.
“Then how…?”
“He wanted us to sell some of his products, said we could make a lot of money. You know, sort of like Mary Kay cosmetics. My mom used to do that. Multilevel marketing, I think it’s called,” Blanca explained. “He was really pushing it. He’s kind of a…creeper, in a ‘clueless old guy’ way.”
Joel is several years younger than I am, Harper thought. I feel old.
“I think he’s cute. And he’s not that old,” said Jenny. “He’s not, like, dad-old. He’s kind of cool old, you know? Like, he has his own car and a job and everything.”
“Not much of a job, if you ask me,” said Blanca.
“Better than most of the guys we know,” responded Jenny with a cynical snort. “They’re still living with their parents.”
Blanca rolled her eyes, and a silence fell over the table.
Harper suspected this was not the first time the two had had this discussion, whether over Joel, or over men in general.
She remembered that feeling, the tension between the tug of female friendship and the lure of potential romance.
Strangely enough, it made Harper realize that she missed that kind of interaction.
She needed to make more friends. Women friends.
As much as she appreciated Tariq, he was a man.
And he was Tariq. She could hardly confide in him that her feelings toward him were starting to feel… complicated.
A loud clacking of high heels on tile broke into Harper’s thoughts.
Great. The Nemesis. Not exactly the woman friend she was hoping for.
“Dr. Grae,” Naomi said with a cool nod as she passed their table, a to-go cup of steaming coffee in her hand.
“Dr. Ruger.” Harper returned her greeting and watched as her colleague wound her way through the café’s tables and took a seat near the window.
“It’s weird to see professors here at the café,” Jenny said in a soft voice. “Like when you’re a kid and you see your teacher at the grocery store.”
“Right?” answered Blanca.
“Want to hear some tea?” Jenny asked, leaning over the table.
“Sure,” Harper said. “Spill.”
Jenny lowered her voice. “I heard that Dr. Ruger is doing the guy who wants to develop the land the abandoned buildings are on, on base. You know, like the ones we explored?”
“She’s— You mean she’s seeing Benjamin Philips?”
Blanca nodded. “Yeah, I think that was his name. Rich guy, lives on 17-Mile Drive.”
Interesting.
“I was hoping to talk to him for the podcast,” said Jenny, determination shining in her eyes as she typed a note to herself into her phone. “I wanted to ask him about the development plans. A lot of people are saying he paid people off to hush up the contamination issues.”
Blanca gestured toward her friend with a smile. “She’s becoming a real investigative journalist, this one. Oh, by the way, we got a picture of the thing we wanted to show you, the thing in the barracks. The weird box.”
Blanca handed Harper the phone to show her a photo of a hinged wooden box filled with bottles and little drawers.
“This looks like an old medical cabinet,” Harper said. “Very cool.”
“The kind that goes on a wall in a bathroom?”
“No, these were portable. They were used by doctors, back in the day.”
“So it doesn’t have anything to do with vampires?” Blanca seemed disappointed.
“Not at all.”
“It has some weird symbols on it, and like a strange language, see?” asked Blanca.
The cabinet was engraved on the top: Gift est in pondere * Medicamentum in Gift est *Kuu ku me koypon.
“Huh, that is a bit odd,” said Harper.
“Do you recognize the language?” Jenny asked.
Harper shook her head. “A few of the words are Latin; ‘medicamentum’ refers to medicine, obviously. No idea about the rest.”
“Medicine is a gift, maybe?” suggested Jenny.
“Maybe. The question is: What’s an antique medical cabinet doing in the old barrack ruins?” Harper mused.
“Maybe you could talk to the MPs and ask them about it?” suggested Jenny. “I was really hoping it might open up some ideas for a new episode. Weird things hidden in the bowels of the abandoned barracks…”
“Aurelio’s been keeping tabs on the MP patrols,” said Blanca. “They’re pretty regular and go by there every day around eleven in the morning and three thirty in the afternoon. In case you wanted to talk to them or, you know, go there without getting caught.”
“Good to know, but I don’t think I’ll be going back. This one might have to remain a mystery.”
“So, I went online and checked out Harvard Medical School, back into the 1800s,” said Jenny.
“They have online records that go back that far?” Harper asked.
“Are you kidding me? Harvard graduates love to boast about their school. And here’s the thing: Soren Perles was a student there but never graduated. Ever.”
“And…?”
“I don’t think he was a real doctor. And get this: When he was there, he was arrested for grave robbing!”
“What?”
“Back in the day medical students had to dig up their own corpses to practice anatomy, if you can believe it. It was against the law, and Soren Perles got caught. And check this out: The current manager of the lab there just got arrested for marketing human body parts. Or something along those lines.”
“You’re talking about now? Modern day?” Harper asked.
Jenny nodded. “You should listen to the podcast. Like we were saying, there’s a whole online market for human bones and body parts.”
“I can’t believe that.”
“They’re usually listed as ‘hooman’ ”—she spelled it out—“to avoid the search engines. Lots of people are into them. You can make loads of money.”
“Do people use them for ceremonies of some kind?”
Blanca shrugged and checked her phone. “A lot of people bedazzle them.”
“They do what to them?”
“You know, decorate them, with a hot glue gun and glitter and stuff?” Jenny called up a site on her phone and showed it to Harper. Skulls, pelvises, and other bones had been painted, bedazzled with beads and spangles and glitter, and were selling for large sums of money.
“I’m…stunned.”
“I know, right? I think Joel might have been involved somehow, too.”
Blanca nodded.
“In the sale of body parts?” Harper noticed Naomi watching them. What was her problem?
“Mostly just bones, I think.”
“Told you he’s weird. Kinda delulu, you know what I mean?”
“I don’t, actually.”
“Delusional.”
“Okay, gotcha. Joel is a bit of a character, it’s true,” Harper conceded. “But none of this explains what you were doing at the Perles Mansion.”
“It was just, I mean, how often do you get invited to a séance in a haunted house?” said Jenny.
“Who invited you?”
Jenny and Blanca exchanged a long look.
Finally, Jenny said: “Okay, it’s just some students.
We always go to the Perles graves to decorate them for Day of the Dead.
This friend of ours has been studying occult stuff and hunts for ghosts and stuff, and she leads the group.
Her father ran for city council once, and he’s super opposed to this sort of thing, so… ”
“…so it makes her even more interested,” Blanca finished. “We thought it would be fun to include on the podcast. They don’t hurt anything. Usually.”
“It was a pretty stupid thing to do, I guess,” said Jenny.
“It certainly was.”
Harper watched as Naomi clacked out of the café.
“Are you going to tell?” Jenny asked again.
“Still deciding. Tell me more about these body parts.”
Why have we mere mortals lost our way?
Nature holds the truth, the secrets to health, to happiness. Just as an artist dabs pigments upon a white canvas, transforming a clean slate into a new world, so the seeds and leaves can open their souls to us. To cure us.