Witches' Bane (7 page)

I gave Ruby a respectful glance. She had hit the heart of the matter. And she had zinged the mayor in a very tender spot.

“I am
not
suppressing self-expression.” Pauline shifted her weight. “I’m just trying to ... to smooth things over. To effect a compromise. But if you can’t find it in your heart to cooperate, perhaps Reverend Harbuck will.”

“I’ll compromise,” Ruby said. “I won’t advertise my class. How’s that?”

Pauline beamed. “That’s the spirit!”

I looked at Ruby, shaking my head. She hadn’t advertised in the first place. The newspaper had turned her down. But I wasn’t about to blow it for her. I turned to Pauline. “You’d better have more than that up your sleeve before you talk to Harbuck,” I said. “He says God’s on his side, and you’re going to need some pretty powerful leverage.”

Pauline looked coy. “I wouldn’t call it leverage, exactly. But it does so happen that my husband has a major interest in KPST-FM. That’s the station that carries Reverend Harbuck’s gospel message every Sunday morning.”

“That’s what
I
call leverage,” Ruby said, admiringly.

I wanted to plug my ears. Talk about the First Amendment!

Pauline was all business. “Would you come with me, Chief Harris? It’s time we had a talk with Reverend Harbuck.”

Pauline and Bubba went out on the sidewalk, while Ruby and I watched through the window.

“I can’t believe she’s using the radio station like that,” I said. Pauline took the Reverend off to one side, where his choir couldn’t hear what went on.

“I can,” Ruby said. “How’d you think she got to be mayor?”

From the look on the Reverend’s face, Pauline’had him in a tight place. In the end he accepted the inevitable. He returned to his band of followers and raised his hands and his eyes toward heaven.

“The Lord be praised!” he cried. “Our work here is done!”

“Praise the Lord!” the choir echoed, relieved. It must not have been any fun, marching up and down carrying signs all day.

“I wonder how he’s going to explain this to his congregation,” Ruby said, as Bubba and the mayor climbed into their cars and drove off. “I mean, it’s not even close. It’s Witches one, Billy Lee zip.”

“I’m sure he’ll think of something.” I frowned. “Demonstrating is at least out in the open. I hope he doesn’t decide to try something more devious.”

It was Ruby’s turn to frown. “There are worse things than demonstrating?”

“I’m sure there are. And the Reverend is perfectly capable of dreaming them up.”

Ruby sighed. “I don’t want to think about that now. I’m going to go light some incense and do a visualization.”

“What are you going to visualize?”

Ruby started toward the door. “What else? A store full of customers and a cash drawer full of money.”

Whether it was the power of Ruby’s visualization or the simple fact that the sidewalk wasn’t cluttered with witch-bashers, we both had a decent afternoon. When we closed, we grabbed our gear, climbed into Ruby’s red Honda, and drove to Jerri’s Health and Fitness Spa, where we take an aikido class from Shirley Kanazawa every Friday evening.

The class is Ruby’s idea. She says the martial arts make you less head-oriented and more belly-oriented. As she puts it, belly-people are spontaneous. They come from their “true selves.” She decided on aikido because of all the martial arts, it is what she calls the “most ethical.” It operates on the basic principle of harmony and balance, and the student in aikido is taught to respect her opponent’s body.

Harmony and balance are fine for Ruby, but I go for the exercise. I don’t have the discipline to get up at six every day to jog, and aerobic exercises seem stupid, all that flopping up and down. Aikido’s not bad, though. We wear white cotton baggies, so the midriff doughnut doesn’t show. Shirley is patient, even with me. And I like the slow, deliberate movements, the intuitive evaluating of your opponent’s intentions, the subtle and sudden shifts to decisive action. I’m afraid my true self still lives mostly in my brain, not my belly, but it’s getting there.

Ruby’s much better at aikido than I am, maybe because she also does yoga. Shirley says Ruby is
tsuyoki,
meaning that her
ki,
her inner energy, is strong and one-pointed. She’ll soon be ready for a
hakama
—that’s the ankle-length black robe that advanced students wear. Me, I’m
yowaki,
meaning weak
ki,
although in my case, Shirley says, the
ki
isn’t so much weak as scattered, unfocused. My mind wants to take over my body and my body isn’t in harmony in all its parts. I’ll probably be in white baggies forever.

Class over, Ruby and I went into the office to pay for next month. Jerri was there, her blond ponytail swinging, talking to her sister Rita. I was struck again by the difference between the two. In a red leotard that revealed absolutely no extra midriff, Jerri glowed with energy and vitality— obviously
tsuyoki.
Rita, wearing no makeup and dressed in a mustard-colored dress that hung limply from slumped shoulders, seemed sallow and listless—terribly
yowaki.
They were talking about Rita’s job when we came in. She’s an assistant manager at Lake Winds, the upscale resort com- munity where Sybil Rand lived. C. W. Rand, Sybil’s husband, was Rita’s boss.

“What kind of person is Rand?” I asked, and handed over my check.

“Yeah, I’m curious too,” Ruby said, taking my pen. “Is he anything like his wife?”

Rita’s mouse brown eyes opened wide behind her blue-rimmed plastic glasses. “Heavens, no. He’s not anything like
her.
She’s dangerous. C. W.—I mean, Mr. Rand—is very nice. The sweetest person.”

Sybil dangerous? I thought. Obviously, her poison garden had made a deep impression.

Jerri shook her head disgustedly. “Swear to God, if I was C.W., I’d divorce that nutty woman. No way would I hang around wondering when she was going to chop up something nasty in my salad.”

“I don’t want you to think I meant to criticize Mrs. Rand,” Rita said in the anxious tone of someone who has spent a lot of years practicing to be a good girl. “I just meant that Mr. Rand is a
very
kind man to work for. In the entire three years he’s been at Lake Winds, he’s never once yelled at me. It’s not easy, managing a big place like that. There’s a lot of pressure on a person.”

Lake Winds
is
big. There’s the real estate development, of course, which involves leasing as well as sales. According to the promotional brochures, there are also two eighteen-hole golf courses, a three-hundred slip marina, a four-thousand-foot paved airstrip, and a world-class tennis center, not to mention horse-back riding, swimming, a gym and sauna, and a restaurant. C. W. Rand was probably too busy to worry about what went into his salad.

Jerri put our checks in the drawer. “Be sure and take the posters back to the office,” she reminded her sister. “C. W. said to post them on all the bulletin boards. I teach aerobics at Lake Winds and give massages,” she told us. “There’s a sauna and a gym, and all the equipment any-body’d ever need.” She looked around and wrinkled her nose. “It’s a helluva lot better than this dump. The air conditioning’s on its last legs, the plumbing’s shot, and the carpet’s a rag. Somebody hand me the money, I’d move in a New York minute.” She glanced up at the clock and slammed the drawer. “I’m outta here, guys. I’ve got a date.”

Rita flashed a look at Jerri. “But what about tonight?”

“What about it?”

“It’s Mama’s birthday. Don’t tell me you forgot again, after the huge fuss she made last year.”

“No big deal,” Jerri said carelessly, “just another birthday. Ma gets one every year. Tell her I’ll call her tomorrow.” She patted her sister on the shoulder. “You take care of it, Rita. You’re good with Ma. A lot better than me.”

Rita’s shoulders hunched and her face went dark. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her. It looked like a classic case of the plain sister stuck with the demanding mother while the pretty one went dancing. And from the resentment that raked across Rita’s face, I’d guess it wasn’t the first time, either.

“Are you going out with McQuaid tonight?” Ruby asked as we walked to her car.

“He’s still working on that damn conference. Why? Did you have something in mind?”

“All that balance and harmony dehydrates me,” Ruby said. “Let’s stop by Lillie’s.”

Lillie’s was the usual yup-dudes, marrieds with children, cedar-choppers, and Bob. But the ferns were gone. In their place hung pots of genuine fake philodendrons with plastic bluebonnets stuck in. Even I had to admit that it was an improvement. There’d been no hope for the real ferns. All they did was drop dead leaves onto the bar.

I pulled up a barstool and ordered a Lone Star. Ruby got a Lite and Bob brought us a basket of corn tortilla chips and a cracked white cup filled with Maria Garcia’s tomatillo and chile salsa, made with lime juice and plenty of garlic and flecked with cilantro leaves. Maria runs Taco Cocina, over on Zapata Street. Her salsa is even hotter than McQuaid’s, which peels the roof off your mouth. Bob was looking gloomy.

“What’s the matter?” Ruby asked. “Did you lose another goat?”

Bob shook his head. “Lost the shed,” he said glumly, swiping the mahogany bar with a wet rag.

I swigged my beer. “The
shed?
You mean, the one where Leroy was hung?”

“Yeah. This time, though, it wasn’t the Santeros. It was the Jesus freaks. Billy Lee Harbuck’s bunch.”

“Oh, yeah?” Ruby asked, interested. “How do you know?”

Bob dropped the rag and grabbed a flyswatter. Around here, we have flies until the first killing frost, which hadn’t happened yet. ‘“Cause they spray-painted ‘Jesus Saves’ on a half-dozen trees,” he said. ‘Then they burned down the shed. Guess they figured it needed purifyin’. I don’t know anybody else but Billy Lee who’d think of somethin’ like that.”

Ruby dredged a tortilla in Maria’s salsa. “Just like a gang.”

Bob swatted a fly. “Yeah. That Harbuck, he’s bad news. Has been, ever since he was a kid.”

“You know him?” I asked.

Bob’s mouth went hard. “You bet I know him. That ol’ boy might like people to b’lieve the stork delivered him lily-white and sinless on the church steps, but I know different. He was a coupla years ahead of me in high school, back in Abilene. Real hell-raiser. Not just kids’ stuff, neither. Big-time hell.”

“Is that right?” Ruby said, with greater interest. She washed down the salsa with beer. “What sort of hell?”

I looked at her. I could see the wheels turning. Ruby has always wanted to be a private investigator but the closest she gets is private-eye novels. She’s a charter member of Sisters in Crime, an organization for crime writers and fans. She’s also the only adult woman I know who was still reading Nancy Drew when V. I. Warshawski and Kinsey Millhone cracked their first big cases.

Bob scratched his nose with the flyswatter. “Somethin’ about a car,” he said. “Been so long ago, I can’t rightly remember. But my brother Dickie, he’d know. He was in on the deal some way. The sheriff took ‘em both to the pokey. Dickie got to come home, and Ma, she tanned his fanny good, sixteen or not. Ol’ Billy, though, he got more’n a hidin’. He got to do time.”

Ruby slapped the bar. “There it is, China.”

“Where is what?”

“The ammunition we need to scare off the Reverend, in case we need it. All we have to do is take a look at the records up in Abilene and—”

I shook my head. Ruby’s P.I. tendencies worry me. “Ruby, you don’t go snooping into people’s lives just because you don’t like them. It’ll get you into trouble. Believe me.”

Ruby wasn’t listening. “Do you know any lawyers up there who could get the court records for us?”

I tried to be patient. “Number one, the records of youthful offenders are sealed after they’re eighteen. Number two, the Reverend’s got a loyal following. What’ll they do if you start persecuting their hero?”

“I really think we ought to—”

“Anyway, it’s the principle of the thing. How’d you like it if somebody dug up something you did when you were sixteen and waved it in your face? How’d you feel if one of your misdeeds came back to haunt you?”

There was a long silence. Ruby turned the Lite between her hands. Finally, she drained the glass and set it down.

“I’ve got to get home,” she said. “Andrew’s stopping by in an hour, and Shannon’s coming down from Austin to meet him. Want to come over?”

“Thanks anyway,” I said. “Ask Shannon if she’s going to get us season tickets.” Shannon, who is three inches taller than her mother, plays forward on Jothe Conrad’s Lady Leghorn basketball team. She looks like Ruby must have looked in her early twenties, all elbows and knees, with the promise of real beauty when things settle down into the right proportions.

Ruby frowned. “I wish you liked Andrew.”

“It’s not that I don’t like him,” I said, “it’s just that—” I didn’t like him. I was instinctively suspicious of him. But I didn’t want to hurt Ruby’s feelings. “Maybe I’m jealous.”

Ruby’s eyebrows flew up under her orange fringe. “Jealous? Of Andrew?”

“Of you. That you can care about people the way you do. That you can be passionate.” As the words came out, I realized they were true. I hold back great tracts of myself, post “No Trespassing” signs over entire territories of my psyche. When Ruby falls in love, there are no fences, no walls, no boundaries. She invites total invasion. I envy her ability to open herself this way, and yet I’m afraid for her. To me, vulnerability is more of a curse than a gift.

“You care. About McQuaid, I mean. Don’t you?”

“I guess.” I stopped. “But that’s different. I’m not swept off my feet, the way you are. I’m not a romantic.”

“I’ll take romance.” Ruby looked at her watch. “Cheer up, okay? At least the Reverend’s thrown in the towel.”

I scowled at my beer. “I’m glad Pauline got the pickets out of our hair, but I don’t like the way she did it.”

Ruby got halfway to the door before she came back. “Don’t forget. Tomorrow’s Halloween. We’re going to Mary Richards’ party.”

“Oh, yeah. With the witches.”