Bedroom Eyes (31 page)

Penelope gazed into the eyes of the woman who’d become her friend, seeking wisdom she knew she herself lacked. With a faint shrug, she took the incense stick, lit it at the stove, and hesitated before touching it to the wick.

“When it comes to love, don’t both people have to want the same thing?”

“What makes you think that’s not the case?” Penelope tossed her head back. “I don’t have to look up
rejection
in the dictionary in order to define it.”

“Don’t go all egotistical on me before you do this spell.” Mrs. Merlin sighed. “I’m too hungry to remain a bookmark any longer.”

“I’m so sorry,” Penelope said. “It’s selfish of me to be thinking of my problems when you’re in this condition. And you said it’s only okay to be selfish if it doesn’t harm anyone else.”

“True.”

Penelope let her hand hover between the dancing flame of the white candle and the silent wick of the cherry-red candle. She took a deep breath, then lit it, too. She wanted Tony, and she knew in her heart he wanted her, too. She might be an innocent, but she didn’t believe he’d only been toying with her affections when they’d made love. Perhaps he was afraid. Whatever his reasons, she’d win him back.

“You’re doing better,” Mrs. Merlin said. “Your aura just sparked with white energy.”

Penelope smiled. “Good. Let’s do this spell.”

They repeated the words they had uttered to no effect the evening before. Mrs. Merlin swayed, almost in time to the dancing of the white candle’s flame.

Without warning, the bookmark shape of her new friend burst into flames. The last sight Penelope had of Mrs. Merlin and her altar of candles was fire arcing from the figure of Mrs. Merlin to the white candle, then burning down the wick of the cherry-red candle.

Then Penelope felt herself hurtled back, back, back through darkness, a darkness ever so gradually illuminated by pinpricks of distant stars and the faint glow of a moon on the rise.

“Well, thank the stars,” Mrs. Merlin said, opening her eyes to find herself standing in her very own kitchen in her very own house in her very own corner of the city.

She moved her arms, her legs, swiveled her neck, checked her height against the edge of her kitchen sink. Her hip came right to where it should and she smiled in relief. She had to hand it to Penelope. For all her desire to stick to the rational and logical, the lady lawyer had come through on the all-important spell necessary to give Mrs. Merlin back her shape.

“Not only my pudgy body,” Mrs. Merlin murmured, “my life!”

Glancing around the room, she saw that most everything remained exactly as she’d left it. Her neighbor Ramona knew better than to disturb an altar with a spell in progress, but she had kindly washed up the cups they’d used for tea before Mrs. Merlin had undertaken her well-intentioned magick to rid her neighbor of that pesky tax collector.

Her cat’s food and water bowl had been filled, fairly recently, too, Mrs. Merlin concluded, judging by the untouched state of the dry food favored by her orange tom. She bustled out of the kitchen toward the front of the house, calling his name.

Having outlived three husbands, Mrs. Merlin got quite a kick out of having added the “Mr.” to her cat’s name, whom she’d named “M” due to the pronounced white M shape defining the area above and between his golden yellow eyes.

Her neighbors thought her daft, but then, they always had.

“Here, Mr. M,” she called, “be a good kitty and welcome me home. My, but I’ve had such adventures. And made a new friend, too.” She’d have to call Penelope up and invite her over for a cup of tea.

That reminded Mrs. Merlin of the grumblings of her empty tummy and she forgot all about finding Mr. M as she hustled back to the kitchen and foraged in the freezer for some jambalaya she’d put up only last week.

She set it to thaw in the microwave, then went to change her dress. She’d worn the same caftan for more days than she cared to count. Tossing it to the floor of her bedroom, Mrs. Merlin stretched her arms over her head, slipped into fresh underthings, and selected her very favorite caftan from her closet.

Purple, she thought, suited her best. She ran a brush over her bright hair, thinking it was about time to try another one of those rinses. She might be a grandmother, but she didn’t have to look like one.

Pleased with herself, happy to be home, she called again for Mr. M. When she still got no response, she figured he was sulking. He did that when she left him alone in the house for more than a day. Mr. M liked nothing better than to be the center of her world; second to that, he used to love to do battle with every cat in the neighborhood, but once he’d come to live with her, she’d put an end to that.

He lived inside, safe from the dangers of the streets.

She heard the microwave beep and headed back to the kitchen. As she passed by the table where she’d erected the altar for her neighbor, a silvery glint caught her eye.

She paused, struck by something she’d never considered during her stay at Penelope’s. Mrs. Merlin rarely used the kitchen table for the practice of candle magick. She’d done so that ill-fated morning partly out of laziness, as she was so comfortable drinking tea and chatting.

Then, at Penelope’s, she’d again used what Penelope called her dining table—the only table in the apartment. Mrs. Merlin frowned and bent for a closer look at the metallic reflection that had caught her eye.

What she saw caused her to clasp her hand to her throat.

“Poor Mr. M,” she said, staring at the silver ID tag attached to the purple collar he always wore. The collar lay wound around the base of the candle she’d used for Ramona’s spell. Stuck to the collar was the thick black hair belonging to Tony Olano she’d added to the altar back at Penelope’s apartment in an effort to help the woman who’d assisted her. And even more ominous, Penelope’s shoes sat next to the hair. Mrs. Merlin stared at that and nervously licked her lips. That hair had followed her home, her cat was missing, and the goddess only knew what might have happened to Penelope.

The tag, engraved with
RETURN TO MRS. MERLIN
plus her phone number, had been meant to protect him, but now here it was and her kitty was the stars only knew where.

Had he been shrunk? Or flattened? Or worse?

Then the thought hit her full force and she forgot all about her jambalaya.

There were no coincidences in candle magick. Mr. Gotho had told her that over and over again. She could see the wise but bothersome man shaking his head over this mix-up. Because mix-up it no doubt was, a confabulation that no doubt had resulted in trouble for the very woman who’d helped Mrs. Merlin find her way home.

Sinking to a chair, Mrs. Merlin fingered the tag on her cat’s collar, knowing in her heart that wherever she found Mr. M, she’d find Penelope and Tony Olano, too.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “What a muddle. I just hope they haven’t gotten their bodies crossed. That might be more than even I could undo. And I just know Mr. Gotho won’t help me out of this pickle.”

She brightened as she remembered the jar of bread and butter pickles in her refrigerator. Perhaps she would eat first. She worked so much better on a full stomach. Why, if she hadn’t been flattened and starved, surely this mix-up never would have happened!

“What do you mean, you don’t know where she is?” Senior partner Hubert H. Klees towered over Jewel, beetling his brows and wringing his hands.

“She . . . uh, had to take care of some business outside of the office today, but I’m not sure where she is right at this moment.” There, Jewel thought, that bluff should do the trick. She was far too loyal an assistant to say she’d not heard from Penelope all day, that no one had answered the phone the twenty times she’d rung her apartment, and that she, Jewel, was starting to worry and about to call her brother the cop to ask for advice.

“Well, you tell her the minute you hear from her that I want her in my office ASAP.” Hubert glared and strode off, trying to look like a man in control. Jewel had seen Mr. Fitzsimmons stroll into the office in his quiet yet commanding way half an hour ago, so she knew why Hubert was sweating it.

He wanted Penelope to appear and charm the guy again. Or maybe he wanted her to solve his tax problems. Jewel glanced down at the memo Penelope had left her to type, a memo that detailed quite a brilliant solution to Fitzsimmons’s dilemma.

She could have offered it to Hubert, but she’d worked in the legal world far too long to have done anything so naive. With Penelope missing from the office, Hubert quite likely would have taken the credit and felt quite justified in doing so. No, if Penelope didn’t appear soon, Jewel would find a way of getting the memo to Fitzsimmons. Under Penelope’s signature, of course.

Chapter 22

It was all too weird, Penelope thought, watching the sidewalk bob from her vantage point inside the ear of a fat and rather cantankerous yellow cat, a cat she’d be willing to bet belonged to Mrs. Merlin.

Trust the mistress of magickal mishaps to own a cat with an attitude.

Penelope figured she must have lost hours in some magickal time warp, because the afternoon sun beat down bright and hot on the sidewalk in front of the shotgun house where the cat had paused.

When she’d last been herself, the clock had been sweeping past midnight. Penelope shook her head and clung to the inside of the yellow cat’s ear. Honestly, to have been reduced to the size of a flea was more of an insult to her ego than she could handle!

But even as that thought crossed her mind, she banished it. Thinking of Mr. Gotho and whatever lesson he’d been trying to impress upon her, she somehow knew this was not the right moment to be demanding of the universe a different set of circumstances for something so minor as her ego.

No, right now she needed her wits about her, sans any distractions of pride, hubris, or whatever the bearded magician might have termed it.

She hoped she hadn’t imagined seeing Tony only a few minutes earlier walk out onto the porch of the house the cat had chosen to visit. She hoped she hadn’t merely fallen into one of her fantasies. But from her perspective, obscured as it was by the wavy hairs lining the cat’s ear, she couldn’t be sure.

Or could she?

Penelope sighed. She knew in her heart she’d recognize the man with bedroom eyes even if she were blindfolded. And hadn’t Mrs. Merlin insisted there were no coincidences in candle magick? As surely as Penelope had been thrust loose from her usual realm, she had in a miraculous fashion landed close to help.

In a cat’s ear, she reminded herself, feeling another sweeping wave of indignation. All she’d tried to do was help Mrs. Merlin back to normal, and look what she’d gotten for her troubles!

The cat must have turned its head rapidly, because Penelope felt herself tipping and sliding in a way that totally disoriented her. Then she experienced hurtling through a vast darkness, exactly the way she had last night during the candle spell.

The sensation lasted only a few moments, but whatever event had occurred, when things settled once again, she could now see the man on the porch ever so clearly. No more peering around fuzzy hairs inside a cat’s ear.

She caught her breath at the sight of him.

The wiry legs, muscle and sinew, were all Tony. He wore shorts, his usual uniform, it seemed, but these were much briefer than those she’d seen him wear before, treating Penelope to a mouthwatering view of sculpted, muscular thighs disappearing from her appreciative view under flimsy nylon shorts.

“Go on up to the porch,” she urged the cat. She didn’t know how she would accomplish it, but she knew she had to have Tony’s help to undo Mrs. Merlin’s spurious spell.

The cat didn’t budge.

She’d spoken to it earlier and it had in some way acknowledged her, either through gesture or kitty language. But now the cat stood on all fours, for all intents and purposes, frozen.

Penelope looked upward. Tony lowered his body to the top step of the porch. Funny how she could see so clearly now, as if she were looking straight at him from her own eyes. . ..

The thought she’d been about to think lodged in her mind. No longer was she looking through the fine hairs inside the cat’s ear. It’s only a test, she told herself, willing her mind to command one of the cat’s front paws to move.

Even as she directed the paw, she glanced down and saw that the cat’s foot was indeed moving forward. Now the right one, she said, and watched as she moved closer to the porch.

“Wingtips and whiskers,” she breathed.

She’d become the cat!

Across town, in the heart of the French Quarter, the telephone rang in the back section of the Bayou Magick Shoppe.

About to leave for his daily workout at the New Orleans Athletic Club, Alistair Gotho glanced toward the front of the shop to see whether his assistant would reach for the phone. Three customers crowded the counter; the phone continued to peal. Without setting down his gym bag, he reached for the phone to put the caller on hold for his helper.

As he did, he noticed the light flashing on the second line, indicating whoever was calling had dialed his unlisted number.

With a sigh, he lifted the receiver. “Gotho speaking.”

“Now, I know you told me you were washing your hands of me, but it really, really would be unfair to Penelope to write me off just now, so don’t hang up. Please. I knew Mr. M was somehow crossed with Penelope and I was only trying to straighten things out, but I have a terrible feeling I’ve really made things worse now!” Mrs. Merlin’s voice rushed over the phone line, sweeping into his ears and taking over like an unwanted relative come to stay for an extended visit.

“Ah, Mrs. Merlin, how are you?”

“How can you ask such a question? After what I’ve just told you! Could things be any worse?”

Alistair dropped his gym bag on the floor, settled into the chair behind the counter, and lifted a hand exerciser he kept for moments like these. Knowing Mrs. Merlin, that would be the extent of his day’s workout.

“Perhaps, perhaps not,” he said. “For instance, are you back to your usual size?”