Wish Club (23 page)

Claudia tore her eyes away. “Can you imagine how much more we could mess things up if we tried to break these spells as
a group
? The same way we got ourselves into trouble in the first place? Face it. We need outside help. We need an expert.”

They were listening to her now. Claudia took a breath. “Maybe we could find someone at a New Age bookstore, or there might be information about witches on the Internet.” She hesitated. “There’s this woman I’ve run into a couple of times. I keep seeing her around and…I don’t know, but I get the impression she may be able to help us.”

“Some woman you’ve been seeing around?” Gail asked.

“I saw her at the bookstore. She said she’d read
The Sacredness of the Wiccan Way
a long time ago. She had a crystal. And I saw her at the juice bar at Wild Prairie and, oh, hell, I don’t know. I just think she might be able to help us somehow.”

“You saw this woman at a bookstore and a juice bar and you think she can help us fix our spells,
somehow
?” Gail shook her head.

“I’m still not convinced we even need help.” Lindsay held up the grimoire. “I’m not so sure a lot of it isn’t going to resolve on its own. It says in here if we—”

Claudia tilted her head at Mara and widened her eyes. “You think
this
is resolving? Just look at her.”

Mara put a hand to her chest and pressed her back deeper into the couch, a defensive look on her face.

“I’m afraid to mess with this again, Lindsay. Can’t you see? There’s got to be someone out there who can help us.”

“How do we know we’re not going to find some crackpot?” Gail asked. “How can we be sure we wouldn’t find someone that would put us under a psychic attack—”

“—make us his zombie-witch slaves?” Mara finished.

“Oh, please.” Claudia sank back into the couch. “I think we’re the crackpots. I think the hardest part is going to be finding someone who’s willing to help us once they hear the stupid things we’ve done.”

“We didn’t do stupid things.” Lindsay was angry again. “We wished for things. We asked for our wishes to come true, to make our dreams real.” She frowned, the anger in her face dissipated. She tilted her head to one side. “Okay, so maybe our wishes were a little self-serving. Maybe the dabbling-with-witchcraft part was stupid. I’ll give you that. And we probably should have done more research, or more homework, or been more literal, or something, but you’ll never convince me that making a wish is a stupid thing to do.”

They looked around at each other and it was apparent that everyone agreed with her.

Lindsay popped her eyebrows once in triumph. Finally, she had won an argument.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Claudia
pulled the envelope from her mailbox, thinking it strange; the school didn’t usually get the faculty mail out until the afternoon. The envelope had Strawn letterhead. Her name, Claudia Dubois, was hand printed in black ink on the front. She tore it open. The letter was written in the same black ink.

Claudia,

Please stop by my office this afternoon after classes.

Headmaster Charles Peterson

Well, shit. Here it comes. This has to be about Elliot.
Claudia looked down at the letter. Headmaster Charles Peterson.
Who signs their title?

She read it again, looking for clues, but found none. Great. Now she had something else she could worry about all day. Something to keep her distracted. Maybe April had confessed to the whole thing and now that Peterson knew Elliot was his grandnephew, he was going to tell Claudia to halt the fostering procedure. The memory of Elliot’s warm body filled her arms. Claudia looked at her watch. No, she was not going to sweat this out all day. Classes didn’t start for nearly forty-five minutes. April and her class could wait one more day for the results of their
Heart of Darkness
quizzes. She was going to go talk with Peterson right now.

Claudia left the faculty break room and hurried to Peterson’s office. The halls were dark and empty. She turned right at the main entrance and went down another hallway, but when she got to the end, his office was dark and so was the glass-enclosed reception area.
He must be here. He left the note.

Claudia walked back down the hall and turned left down the office corridor at the front of the school, heading back toward the faculty break room.
I suppose he could have dropped the note in there last night, but I left so late…

Light peeked out from under the door to the nurse’s waiting area. Marion might know what the letter was all about. She might even know what was going on with Elliot, the way she and Peterson were always whispering to each other, sharing their little looks. And she’d been involved since the day they’d found Elliot, too.

Claudia pushed open the door to the nurse’s waiting room and held it open, but the lights in the interior office were dark through the smoked glass.
Hmm. That’s strange.
Claudia turned to go, putting her hand on the light switch to turn it off on her way out, when she heard the distinct sound of paper crinkling, the sound the sheet of paper on a doctor’s examining table makes when you adjust yourself on it.
Someone’s in there? A burglar? A student looking for drugs?

“Hello? Is someone there?”

The crinkling sound grew frantic and she heard more movement, a dull thud, a whisper.

“Who’s in there? Marion, is that you? Answer me now or I’m calling the cops.”

The light inside the interior office switched on. “It’s just me—Marion,” Marion called through the closed door, her voice cracking and breathless. “Don’t call the cops.” Now she was trying to sound lighthearted, but lighthearted coming out of Marion sounded just plain weird.

Marion opened the door and stood there, trying on an innocent smile. Her usually crisp white uniform was a tad crumpled, and the buttons down the front veered off to her left as they descended, the bottom button hanging open over her knee. Marion’s frantic curls looked even more frantic than usual, perhaps because they contrasted so vividly with the classic white nurse’s cap perched on top of her head.

She sleeps here?

Claudia’s eyes dropped to Marion’s conspicuously absent white hose, her legs a mottled red, two plump stalks growing out of her white nurse’s shoes. But it was the shoes underneath the examining table behind her, tucked under the flat metal step, that caught Claudia’s attention: a gleaming black pair of Salvatore Ferragamo oxfords.

The
first indication that maybe things weren’t going to go as well as planned was the yelling and screaming in Greek. Lindsay stepped from the elevator into the top-floor banquet hall at the Metron Hotel and could hear shouting all the way from the kitchen.

The circular room was set up for the fashion show, a two-foot-high runway platform jutting out into the middle of it from the curtains and stage at the far end. The room could rotate slowly around, giving everyone, eventually, a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the lake and city. It was left over from when the top floor of the Metron had been a restaurant in the late 1970s, back when rotating restaurants were hip and trendy. All the tables had been arranged in a circular fashion in harmony with the shape of the room and they were supposed to be covered with ecru tablecloths to evoke the beaches of Lake Michigan, visible far below from the floor-to-ceiling windows.

But the tablecloths were not sand-colored. They were mauve, a color so embarrassingly 1980s that it made Lindsay’s jaw drop open when she stepped into the room.
Mauve.
When she got closer, the color made her wince. She panted out little “ha’s” of disbelief.
What in the world are they thinking?
This horrid shade of pink was causing her pain—real physical pain in the center of her chest. Lindsay took a breath and shook her head. She would have to deal with that later. Right now, she needed to find out what the trouble was in the kitchen.

As she walked along the curved aisle to the kitchen, the yelling grew louder. Just before she got to the double doors in the back, she could see a toque coming toward her, growing rapidly larger in the high round window. The doors burst open with such force that Lindsay had to ram her back against the wall to avoid being run over. A large, cursing chef charged by.

After he’d passed, Lindsay reached around to rub her back where it was throbbing. She’d jammed it into a panel of switches. She could see the large one in the middle that had poked her. Most of the switches were for lights, all labeled: “front rear,” “front center,” and so forth, but the switch that had jabbed her was the one under a square plastic cover labeled “floor rotation.” The switch was larger than the rest, with a little red light above it. How odd that they’d put
that
switch here, right out in the open. It seemed that switch should require a key, or should have been placed in a back room somewhere. At least it was under a plastic cover—even if it was a hard one with pointed corners.

Through the swinging doors Lindsay could still hear a voice yelling—probably cursing, she couldn’t tell, it was still in Greek—getting louder and softer as the doors swung back and forth. Rubbing her bruised back, Lindsay strode into the kitchen.

Nikki, the hotel catering staff member with whom Lindsay had been working, had her back to Lindsay and was still yelling and screaming, slapping both of her arms out in the air, as if she were repeatedly saying,
and another thing.

“Nikki?”

Nikki stopped her gesturing and turned around, an embarrassed look on her face.

“Is everything okay?” Lindsay asked.

“Yes. It is fine. Everything will be fine.”

“Good. I hope everything is okay because lunch is in three hours, and if we don’t have anyone to make it—”

“He was just the dessert chef. He is very arrogant. He wants to make what he wants to make and not what is called for by the order.”

Lindsay nodded that she understood.

Nikki continued. “He wants the apple cake with preserved lemon and cinnamon streusel for your dessert, Miss Lindsay. He says this is better complement to the chilled seafood salad entrée. He says he doesn’t like the looks of the berries today, either. He says, to him, they are not ready. But I point to the order, show him, ‘minted seasonal berries, with Grand Marnier cream sauce.’ He says the basil vinaigrette will stay on the palate from the poached shrimp and calamari, and that will make the minted berries taste strange. He says he is trained chef and so he should be one to decide. It is hard to argue with that, but I tell him we need to follow the order, because it is these same people who pay the bill. For him, it is hard to argue with that. So, he storms out because he cannot have his way.”

Nikki held a hopeful expression on her face, like maybe Lindsay would acquiesce to the apple cake streusel.

Lindsay smiled back at Nikki, a smile that said “minted berries.”

“We’ll have a delicious dessert for your luncheon, Miss Lindsay.” Nikki’s face betrayed her uncertainty.

“Thank you, Nikki.” Lindsay gave her a bubbly smile now. “You know I’m counting on you.” She paused, the smile still plastered on her face. “Well,” she exhaled, “I’ll leave you to your work. I have got to get these tablecloths taken care of.”

And Lindsay spun out of the kitchen to find some help with that.

She knew tablecloths were the kind of detail that no one paid much attention to. It fell under what she called her Wedding Cake Theory, her personal philosophy concerning
all the little details.
Lindsay believed that when it came right down to it, no one ever really paid much attention to the cake at a wedding. They all look the same, essentially, if you ever get around to seeing them up close before they get cut up. They just need to be there. But still, brides spent hours and days agonizing over finding the perfect cake and getting all the details right—three tiers vs. two tiers, white vs. pink flowers. But why? The cake will end up looking just like every other wedding cake in the eyes of the people who are there to eat it.

But this was her big break. She was coordinating the luncheon and modeling in the show. If she could pull all of this off, the sky was the limit. So, in spite of her Wedding Cake Theory, Lindsay still wanted everything to be perfect. It would be disastrous for her to go forward with
mauve
tablecloths and a pedestrian dessert like apple cake streusel.
Streusel.
Honestly. Why didn’t they suggest Rice Krispie treats, for crying out loud?
Next thing you know they’ll be trying to sell me on a Jell-O mold.

The visual assault of mauve was less of an ambush the second time Lindsay walked through the dining room. There were forty pink tables in the room, each seating eight. Lindsay thought perhaps she could go through and remove the tablecloths completely, letting the natural wood-tone of the tables provide her with her ecru. It would have been a simple solution, but she would need some help. A magician would have been nice, the kind who can slide tablecloths out from under plates and silverware without spilling a water glass, because the tables had already been set. Lindsay lifted a tablecloth to check the color of the wood, so she could make this suggestion, but was greeted by a metal leg underneath. She dropped the tablecloth in frustration.

Lindsay stormed out of the room and back to the elevator bank. She jammed her thumb onto the down arrow. She was going downstairs to have a little talk with the hotel events coordinator. Mauve tablecloths indeed.