Tarnished and Torn (11 page)

“Damn straight,” said Wendy, playing with a long strand of pearls that hung around the neck of a mannequin.

Bronwyn beamed. “Of course we do! When you put positive energy out into the world, it comes back to you threefold. You mark my words: You’ll be rewarded handsomely for all the time you spend with the elderly, writing down their stories. That’s important work.”

“Then I’m in trouble,” Maya said, “because I haven’t had much time for it lately. I’ve got a few interviews lined up this month—on Thursday I’m going to speak with Marisela’s grandmother, whom we met yesterday. But . . . my new hobby . . . well, it’s not a hobby, exactly, but more of a . . .”

She blushed, a flush appearing on her high cheekbones.

“A new hobby?” I asked, amused. Maya was usually so confident, mature beyond her twenty-two years, that I was surprised to see her discomfited. “What is it?”

“Toy trains?” guessed Bronwyn, handing Starr a necklace of glittering red, yellow, and purple rhinestones.

“What? No, I—”

“I know! Burlesque,” Wendy weighed in. “Or pole dancing!”

Bronwyn let out a peal of laughter, and I had to admit the idea of our serious Maya pole dancing was pretty funny.

Maya gave us all a withering look. By now Bronwyn, Starr, and Wendy were wearing multiple strands of beads and necklaces. What with their propensity for wearing gauzy tunics or, in Wendy’s case, layers of negligees over leggings and leotards, the three were taking on the aura of trick-or-treaters dressed up as gypsy dancers.

“Scrapbooking?” ventured Starr. “Or stamp collecting? I heard philately is making a comeback.”

“How about bonsai?” said Bronwyn.

“Ya’ll are a bunch of rhymes-with-witches,” said Maya, smiling wryly.

Laughter—and maybe even a witchy cackle or two—filled the shop as a half a dozen giggling young women entered the store. Oscar made a point of trotting in front of the customers, and as though on cue the women gasped and laughed, then tried to pet him as he led a merry chase through the aisles.

“Oscar, you little dickens,” Bronwyn said as she went to help a woman in search of an antiacne herbal concoction. Wendy and Starr drifted over to inspect an assortment of feather boas as they debated which of the beads and pearls to use in making necklaces.

“Hey, Maya. Want to go thrift-store shopping?”

I didn’t have to ask twice.

“You’re on,” Maya said, slinging her messenger bag over her shoulder. “Let’s leave this madhouse to the witches and pigs.”

“I better be the former, not the latter,” Bronwyn called out as we headed for the door.

•   •   •

I have a Pavlovian response to the smell of thrift stores: the scent of the laundry detergent, the hundreds of items imbued with the lingering aura of their former owners. The moment I walked through the door my hands started to itch at the promise of possibilities.

“Left or right?” Maya asked as we surveyed the large, open space.

“I’ll go left, you go right,” I said, and Maya peeled off to search the right-hand side of the store while I began working my way through the crowded racks and shelves on the store’s left-hand side. We flipped quickly through the offerings, which, as usual, were mostly cheap items a half step up from junk. But every once in a while we came across a treasure: a Dresden mesh handbag with faux sapphires found in a bin of cheap vinyl knockoffs; a delicate lace mantilla that needed only a little tatting to be good as new; a couple of old letterman’s jackets from the 1960s that would clean up nicely and sell like hotcakes.

The worries of the morning slipped away as I reveled in the familiar comfort of the search for really cool old clothes.

“Check this out.” Maya held up a French maid’s costume with a low neckline and a short skirt. “Ooh la la.”

“Oh, I think that’s a definite
oui
.”

“I bet it would fit you,” Maya suggested.

“
I
bet you’ll never find out,” I replied. “But it’s perfect for the costume corner. We’ll have to find a feather duster to go with it. Pink, I think.”

Maya laughed, and as she added the dress to the steadily growing pile in her cart I marveled, not for the first time, at how lovely she was. A natural beauty who didn’t realize it, Maya had mocha skin and large, near-black eyes. She wore no makeup and refused to pluck her eyebrows, but did have one vanity: her hair, which she wore in a multitude of locks tipped with beads, the ends dyed deep colors, depending on her mood. Maya was such a funny mixture of the serious and the frivolous, and far too cynical for her age.

I wondered why. Unlike me, Maya had drawn a winning ticket in the parental lottery, and had grown up in a happy home with a mom and a dad who were still in love after decades of marriage. Then again, one’s role models can only do so much to shape our individual lives. When it comes right down to it, we each walk the path of this life alone, and make our decisions based on our own distinct beliefs, desires . . . and fears.

“Score!” Maya called out, holding up a pair of what could only be described as bloomers: frilly women’s undergarments from the nineteenth century. “Wait—there’s a label. And get this: They’re made of a poly blend.”

“Who makes polyester bloomers?” I wondered.

“The real question is: who
buys
polyester bloomers?” Maya said.

“Someone, for sure. We can’t pass those up, especially since they’re machine washable. Into the basket.”

“I’m heading for furniture real quick,” Maya said. “I need a little bedside table.”

“Good luck. I’m going to swing through housewares.”

“Stay frosty, my friend,” Maya said.

I usually avoided housewares because old kitchen gadgets are a weakness of mine, and I feared I would acquire so much inventory I would have to open a vintage kitchen annex and relocate the store. But occasionally I found something too good to pass up. This time, I was tempted only by an off-white antique tablecloth festooned with hand-embroidered sprays of leaves and flowers.

“What do you think?” I said, showing it to Maya, who had returned from the furniture section empty-handed.

“It’s gorgeous. And if it doesn’t sell, we can always drape it over a display table or use it in the front window.”

“I like the way you think.”

When we had finally mined the last nugget of gold in the store, Maya and I pushed our laden carts to the register and took our place in line behind an elderly Asian woman buying a bright yellow-and-green Oakland A’s hoodie. While we waited, I perused the glass display counter. A faux tortoiseshell hair comb might be worth a closer look . . . and a woven silk medallion reminded me of Hans’s description of a hair amulet.

I remembered seeing something similar at the home of a local Rom witch I knew, Renna Sandino. I wondered whether Renna could explain to me how hair amulets worked, exactly, on the off chance that it might cast some light on the crime. Could the hair I had seen in Griselda’s room at the inn have been leftover from making an amulet? How could such a thing cover up a witch’s powers . . . and why would she want to?

I had an additional motive for wanting to speak to Renna. She was Sailor’s aunt. And even though she was angry with me—and, as a matter of general knowledge, it isn’t a good idea to have a powerful Rom witch holding a grudge against you—I was working up my courage to try talking my way out of that little deal gone bad, hoping Renna could tell me where Sailor might have disappeared to. After all, what’s the worst she could do—hex me?

Yes, as a matter of fact, she surely could
. But I doubted she would. Most witches respect their powers and do not abuse them.

“Fire dancing,” Maya suddenly blurted out.

“Um . . . I’m sorry?” I asked, looking up from the display case.

“I checked it out last night and I really want to do it!”

“This is the new hobby you were mentioning?”

She nodded. “It’s more than a hobby, actually. It’s like I’m . . . obsessed. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“Is this the fire dancing in the park? Conrad mentioned something about that. But . . . really? You want to . . . dance, with
fire
?”

Witches and fire—we have a complicated relationship. I might use fire in a very controlled setting in some of my brews and spells, but
dancing
with it? That sounded like trouble.

“It’s not nearly as scary as it sounds.” Maya smiled. “In fact, it’s really empowering. It’s . . . well . . . it feels sort of magical, for lack of a better word.”

“How did you get into it?”

“I had seen the dancers in the park last week, but then they did a special performance at the Gem Faire, and the head guy really encouraged me to try my hand at it. I gave it a whirl last night. It was incredible.”

“And how do they dance with the fire?”

“They have these pots, like, on the end of ropes? The pots contain fuel, which they light, and then they dance, spinning the pots up and around. Some use lit torches, but it’s the same concept. It’s . . . it’s hard to explain, but it’s mesmerizing.”

“But . . . why doesn’t the fuel fall out of the pots?”

“Centripetal force. If you spin the pots fast enough, the fire stays in the pot. But that’s why you have to learn how to do it safely—it takes total commitment, or it’s dangerous.”

Like casting a spell. And like so much else in this world.

“Oh. Well, then—”

“Next!” the cashier said.

As the cashier added up our purchases Maya and I placed our items—the French maid costume, the embroidered tablecloth, some beaded pullovers from the ’80s, a men’s cowboy shirt, an eyelet bolero jacket, a black velvet coat with a real mink collar, and an assortment of T-shirts and cotton peasant skirts that, while not vintage, were a style my customers liked and often asked for—into the burlap sacks we had brought along. Plastic bags were no longer allowed in San Francisco, and paper bags were expensive for a shop like this one, which donated its proceeds to charity.

As I paid the bill, I marveled at the low prices. For less than one hundred dollars, I had bought three big burlap sacks of clothes. Discarded clothing was so plentiful in the United States that thrift stores at times were overwhelmed with donations and sold the overstock by the pound. The clothes were shipped overseas and sold to people in poorer nations. Maybe one day I would make a documentary on the life of an American T-shirt. Perhaps it started out as a freebie from a computer company, was worn by a college student to play intramural soccer for one season, and then ended up at the bottom of the dirty laundry bag he brought home at the end of the school year and handed to his mother to wash. The T-shirt sat for a few years in his dresser at home until he moved across country for his first job after graduating, and Mom decided to convert his old bedroom into a home gym. She gave the T-shirt to the Goodwill, where it languished on a rack among thousands of other T-shirts until culled and sent to Uganda, where it was now protecting from the blazing sun a farmer who, I imagined, had no idea what the logo on the front of the shirt meant but had chosen it because he liked the color and the look of the swoosh.

“Lily?” Maya asked, bringing me back to the present. “Penny for your thoughts?”

“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” I said. The documentary would have to wait for another day.

We lugged our heavy bags out of the store and across the parking lot, the blacktop radiating heat. The unseasonably hot spell still blanketed the city, leading to the rare sight of people sweating in San Francisco. As they’d say back home: It felt hotter than a Billy goat in a pepper patch.

“So, about fire-dancing: How are you learning to do it safely?”

“There’s a man who used to work with a carnival,” Maya said. “He started out as a fire eater, a long time ago, but that’s too much for me. I’m just into the dancing. Anyway, he’s developing a fire-spinning troupe, and he’s training a bunch of us. Whoever can pass the test gets to be part of the group.”

“He’s training you . . . for free?” A whisper of a premonition, like the flickering of a butterfly’s wing, appeared at the edges of my consciousness.

“He’s sort of like a scout, looking for new dancers to join the traveling troupe. He teaches you some basics, and if you’re good enough you might be chosen. He’s
amazing
.” The fire was dancing now in her eyes.

I unlocked and opened the rear doors of my purple van, and we plunked our heavy bags in the back, then circled around and climbed into the cab.

“Are you saying you want to join this traveling troupe? What about school? And . . . your family?”

What I was really asking was: What about
me
? But I didn’t say it. Maya’s life was, after all, her own. And goodness knows I should be the last one to discourage anyone from traveling and learning new things. But having made friends and decided to remain in San Francisco, it had never occurred to me that my new friends might leave, to follow their own journey. I knew as well as anybody that there are no guarantees in life, and that all is transient. But still. I liked our Aunt Cora’s Closet family just as it was.

Maya laughed. “No way . . . You should see how bad I am—seriously, I’d never make the cut, even if I wanted to. But it’s still fascinating. I’m telling you, you won’t believe how this guy works with fire.”

As I pulled out of the parking lot, a glance in the rearview mirror confirmed what I thought I’d seen right on our tail on the way over: a big old Ford Scout, dented and colored a faded minty green.

It was following us. Conrad had been right to be suspicious.

“This fellow who’s teaching you to fire dance out of the goodness of his heart, you met him at the Gem Faire? What’s his name?”

“We just call him Gene. You haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen him work with fire. And in a suit, no less.”

Jersey Gene with the Jelly Beans. I would bet the farm this was oh, so much more than a coincidence.

“And you say you met him at the Gem Faire? When?”

“You were rescuing Oscar from the clutches of security. The dancing troupe came in to give a little exhibit, and Gene announced they’d be meeting in Golden Gate Park and offered to train anyone who was interested.”