Indigo Springs (10 page)

Astrid bent, peering into his palm and seeing a drop of vitagua there. She reached for it, but Dad pushed her fingers aside.

“Don’t touch it,” he said. “Not until you’re ready to chant it into something.”

“Is it poison?” she asked, glancing at the foxgloves—she knew they were toxic.

“Sort of. Could make you sick.” Dad tapped his skull.

“Head sick?”

“Worse. You know how, in stories, princes get turned to frogs?”

Shivering, Astrid lifted her hands from the ground so she could rub her forearms. The flow of memory faded. How could she have forgotten?

Magic, of course.

Deliberately this time, she began to garden again, sinking her hands into the soil. The memories were waiting.

“Don’t be afraid,” Dad said. “Vitagua is just like bug spray, campfires, gasoline, or anything dangerous. Nothing to be afraid of, if—”

“If you’re sensible,” Astrid said.

“You got it.” He poured the blue droplet from his palm into a small glass vial, sealing it carefully before handing it over. “I’ll initiate you soon.”

Astrid flipped the vial over, watched the fluid slide around. “What is it?”

“Spirit blood,” he said. “Liquid magic. Vitagua. I used it to make your kaleidoscope.”

“Vitagua,” she said, savoring it. She liked grown-up words—she had a collection of them.
Oscillate, idiosyncrasy, germane, ignition, propagate, iridescent…

Dad tucked the vial into his toolkit. “Astrid, this is a big secret, okay? Nobody can know. Not your mother, not your friends…”

“Secrets are bad,” she said, quoting Ma.

“Magic grows best in the shade, Bun. Only way to keep it safe is to hide it from daylight….”

The whinny of a horse broke Astrid’s reverie. She straightened, briefly disoriented as Leeda, grinning cheerily, came up beside her, her white hair loose and wind-tangled.

“Been here long, Astrid? Garden looks beautiful.”

“Um, not long.”

“Come inside,” Leeda said. “You wanted to jaw over what you’re buying from the greenhouse for me, didn’t you?”

She nodded, stunned. Don’t touch the fluid, Dad had said. She and Sahara had splashed it all over themselves.

Princes into frogs…

“I’ve got a check for you too,” Leeda said, offering her a hand up.

Astrid drew away, as if she might infect the older woman by touching her. “I’m dirty,” she said by way of explanation as she scrambled to her feet.

“Hell, girl, I’ve got horse spit all over me.” Crooking a finger, Leeda sauntered back to the house.

Astrid followed, struggling to find a place for this latest piece in the puzzle that was her father’s life.

“I got away from Leeda as fast as I could,” Astrid tells me. “Even as we talked, I was thinking about my client list, trying to figure out who’d been around longest. To remember, I’d need to work in gardens where Albert and I had been together.”

“You wanted to know more,” I say.

“I
had
to know more. All I’d learned was that you weren’t supposed to touch vitagua.”

“But Sahara had gotten a pint of it in the face.”

“Exactly. I had to find a way to clean her up.”

“You were exposed too. Weren’t you worried?”

“Not as scared as I was of having my best friend go crazy.”

“You always worry about others first, or just her?”

She hunches over the coffee table and does not answer.

“Don’t you know? Or is it that you don’t want to say?”

“What do you want, Will? I give you one answer, I’m some kind of saint. The other, I’m obsessed with Sahara.”

“Aren’t you?”

She looks down, face sulky. A jumble of containers has been brushed onto one playing card. I see the jar of magical blue fluid and a plastic tub full of gold flakes. There’s a bottle of plant fertilizer too, and tubes of acrylic paint. Water surrounds this stash: tin cans, buckets, teacups, and brimming pots. The picture’s shadows are tinged bloodred.

“Watch this.” She lays out the completed cards in a block and they begin to form a mural in miniature, a series of illustrations that flow into one another. The greater image has a grandness to it; it ought to be enlarged a thousand times, not confined to scraps of paper.

“Jackson Glade is very talented, isn’t he?” I say.

Her tone is sad. “He should’ve left town, gone to art school. Staying in Indigo Springs…”

“Why didn’t he leave? I’d have thought, given his relationship with his father, he’d be dying to get away.”

“He was attached to his friends.”

“His friends? Or one friend in particular?”

“You’re asking if he stayed because of me.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yes. Are you the reason he never left town?”

“No.” Her tone is certain. “Jacks tried to leave, but stuff kept getting in the way. Colleges losing his applications, funding drying up. Olive got hit by a car one year, and needed him to run her bookstore.”

“Bad luck.”

She grunts. “Finally Jacks struck a deal with his dad. He’d give the Fire Department a try and after a year if he still wanted to paint, the Chief would pay for school.”

“Seems fair.”

“Funny thing was,
my
dad was always after Jacks to go—spread his wings, he’d say. I think that’s why he gave him the watch, to see if he could save him….”

“Save him from what exactly?” Was Albert Lethewood the sort of father who hates competing for a daughter’s love?

Covering her mouth, Astrid takes a shuddering breath. “Jacks wasn’t bitter. He had his painting, his buddies—”

“And you.”

“No rush, he’d say, the world wasn’t going anywhere, and he’d always come back to the Springs anyway.”

“Didn’t that seem odd?”

“Indigo Springs is home for us both.” Her hands clench. “You can get up and stretch if you want, Will.”

“Pardon?” I realize my neck is sore, that one of my feet is nearly asleep. The furniture is too hard.

I decide to take her up on the suggestion, walking slow circles around the room, swiveling my head to get the kinks out. I half expect her to yank me back to the unreal. But she doesn’t grow fur or sing an aria or even squirt vitagua through the whites of her eyes again.

Instead, she tilts her head, speaking wistfully. “Patience must be in a TV station by now. Holding court.”

“Probably.” Patience’s cult smacks of the sort of devoted fandom celebrities have always garnered. She preaches common sense: Don’t panic about the magic, don’t take everything Sahara says at face value. Along with her overwhelming loveliness, the wisdom and authority with which she speaks makes people take her seriously.

An electronic shriek issues from the foyer.

“That’s for you,” Astrid says. She is watching the latest card—the picture of the containers. Crimson paint flows between the bottles, pooling underneath them.

“I’d forgotten you have a phone.”

“My own personal hotline. Why should Roach come all the way down to my cage for a two-minute conversation?”

I follow the sound to the foyer. I must have seen the phone when I came in, but its normalcy made it invisible.

“Yes?”

“Like the lady says, it’s me,” Roche says. Reminding me, none too subtly, that he’s listening in.

Arthur Roche and I met in college, around the same time I met Caroline; the three of us took a few psychology courses together. For a time we were close; we’d hung out, gone skiing and camping. We’d stayed in touch, a little, after he was posted overseas. I’d e-mailed him when he was caught in an explosion in Afghanistan; he’d sent a card when Carson was born.

“We missed Sahara at the highway.” Arthur was always a bit terse, but his hearing was damaged when he was wounded. Ever since, he has spoken in clipped sentences, with precise diction. A hearing aid adequately compensates for what he has lost, but he seems to have a dread of seeming, in any way, disabled. “No idea where she is now.”

He seems to want an answer, so I say, “Astrid said Sahara was headed here.”

“We scared her off. Got one of the followers, though. The one you saw in the car. Burlein.”

“Good.”

“You should tell Astrid we’ve captured Sahara.”

“You must be joking.”

“Give it a try. If she thinks we don’t need her, she’ll be more forthcoming.”

“She’s showing signs of prescience,” I murmur.

“If she laughs it off, blame me and go on with the interview. I want a better sense of her capabilities.”

“She’s capable of hearing my half of this conversation from the living room.”

“She’s in the bathroom,” he says. “Maybe she hasn’t seen that Sahara’s escaped. Maybe she won’t know for a couple days we haven’t captured the little psycho.”

“Maybe she’s known for weeks. I’m not going to lie, Arthur—it’ll alienate her, and she’s finally cooperating.”

“Relax, Will. It’s just a suggestion.” Backpedaling, I think. Good. “We have an advantage; I want to exploit it.”

“What you have is another prisoner. Go exploit her. Don’t ask me to jeopardize the relationship I’m building.”

I wait out a long silence.

“The braincrackers up here say Astrid’s encouraging you to think I’m stupid, Will.”

“Please. Give me a little credit.”

“There’s got to be a reason she’s opening up now.”

“There is—I know what I’m doing.”

“She wants your sympathy.”

“She’s a murderer,” I say—though I am not sure I believe it. We don’t know the whole story yet. “My sympathy is more limited than you think.”

“You said you thought Sahara did all the killing.”

“It’s a tactic,” I murmur. Is she truly out of earshot? “Arthur, lying to her—”

“You’ve never hesitated to lie to a subject before.” Frustration burns in his voice.

“Except when it’s likely they’d catch me out,” I say. “Arthur, what’s the sudden rush? You did run Sahara off, didn’t you?”

“Hardly matters—she’d never get in here,” he scoffs. “This facility is secure.”

“Then let’s stick with the plan.”

“We almost had them, Will. Sahara, that second-in-command of hers, Passion, maybe Caroline too.”

Caro…now I’m the one struggling for control.

“Until Astrid gives me a preliminary statement, we’re playing a guessing game. And we’re getting somewhere here. We thought she’d be raving, remember?”

“Okay,” Roche says. “It’s your show, I guess—sing your heart out. Just come home with good reviews.”

“It’ll be just like St. Louis.” I interviewed a kid there, a young man convicted of killing his sixteen-year-old girlfriend. He’d been up for release after six months in minimum security. He was a clean-cut boy from a well-off family, a model prisoner showing model displays of remorse. If he’s sorry, the victim’s parents said, let him go.

But he wasn’t, and I sank him.

Sahara’s Primas—her high priestesses—may have fished the aircraft carrier crew out of the Pacific, but the Alchemite cult has plenty of blood on its hands. Women resembling Sahara and Astrid have been shot in twenty cities across the country. Sahara has taken responsibility for two major earthquakes, the epicenters of which were near Indigo Springs, quakes that have taken over ninety lives. Alchemized animals—crows, mostly—have caused horrific traffic accidents. A Wiccan who disputed Sahara’s claims to godhood was beaten to death by an Alchemite mob.

Poor Roche. The calls he must be fielding!

“Prisoner’s headed your way,” Roche says. “Showtime.”

“I’ll get results,” I promise, and he hangs up.

I put the receiver down, turn…and almost jump out of my skin. Astrid is right behind me.

“Ever fire a gun?” she asks.

“I’m a policeman,” I say, “I go to the target range.”

“You didn’t ever point a gun at someone? Never went hunting? Ever see someone get shot?”

“Have you?”

“What about hitting someone? Fighting?”

“We’re talking about you, not me.” I gesture down the corridor toward the couches.

She closes her eyes, seeming to listen. “I’m sorry you’re caught between us. Me and Roach.”

It is easy to see this comment of hers as a stratagem, a means of driving a wedge between me and Arthur. “What makes you think it’s like that?”

“He wants me dissected. You’re the knife.”

“What do you want?”

“To get through Will day.”

“That’s not much of a goal if you know how everything’s going to play out.”

“Do you think seeing a train wreck before it happens makes it easier to live through?”

Train wreck? “Doesn’t it?”

“There’s the cutting edge now,” she whispers.

“Astrid, nobody is here to dissect you.”

“Roach wants you to take me apart. That’s what you do, isn’t it?” When I open my mouth, she adds, “Don’t lie.”

“Sometimes.”

“But you can’t help liking me. This was all harder than I thought it would be….”

Was
harder—her sense of time is slipping again. “You’re worrying about me?”

Her hands have become entangled in the phone cord, twisting its coils as she presses her ear to the fake white door of her prison. “Keep them out, right? It’s all about keeping them out, just long enough to hide the spill. Daddy knew I was going to blow it…. He avoided initiating me, looked for another apprentice, anyone, anyone, marry Olive, get money, any alternative—”

“Shhh.” I pry the cord out of her hands before she can break the telephone. “Astrid, it’s okay.”

“Did you call my father a hypocrite once?”

“I never met him. And why would I say something like that?”

“Which part is this? Patience?” Her voice rises to a scream.

“Astrid, listen to me.” Glancing around, I see a laminated picture on the wall, a square board with an image of a country cottage on it. I pull it off the wall and the fastener comes with it, harmless plastic hook and a chunk of plaster. “Listen to me. You can’t live like this, can you? It must be painful—”

“Of course it hurts.” Thick fury in her voice now, and tears are running down her cheeks.

I offer her the picture. “I can help. You talk of me dissecting you, Astrid, but what if I could cut away some of the hurt?”

“Confession is good for the soul, is that it?” Her voice is still raw, but I’m on the right track. It is so obvious she longs for peace of mind.

“Stay with me.” I lay the picture on her trembling palms. Immediately it fades to blankness. “Show me how I can help.”

She pants shallowly. “Right. Okay.”

I give her a nudge and she shuffles back in the direction of the couch, eyes locked on the picture. Paint begins to color in the interior of Albert Lethewood’s house: wood and wallpaper, old tile and worn carpets. All vastly different from this elaborate, modern prison cell.

I glance around, struck by how colorless the room is.

Inhaling raggedly, Astrid begins to speak. “That afternoon in Leeda’s garden, I learned the basics. The magic fluid trapped beneath my fireplace—the vitagua—was the source of the chantments—”

“I know—” Then I remember she told me this in the unreal, where Roche could not hear. “Did you learn how to deal with your and Sahara’s alchemic exposure?”

“No.” She regards me soberly. “And I had other reasons for wanting to learn more.”

“Such as?”

She reaches for one of the scattered playing cards, poking it with a finger. All its color seems to flow toward her skin, shrinking to a black dot. Then small drops of ink ooze up from beneath, as if the card is mesh lying just above a sea of paint. She raises her hand and the multicolored seepage resolves into an image of her father’s face.

“In Springer eyes, my father was a deadbeat. He took care of me while Ma brought in the bacon. When he started doing odd jobs…then he became the guy—every town has one—who paints your fence every other year, hauls your dead leaves to the dump for ten bucks. Dad was the town drunk, except he didn’t drink.”

“Instead he shopped for junk, is that it?”

“It destroyed him,” she says. “He lost Ma, he nearly lost Olive, he was always broke. Whenever something odd happened in town, the police questioned him. Most Springers thought he did drink, or gambled.

“When Dad cheated those people out of their damage deposits, when he actually went to jail—I was ashamed of him.” Her face colors, and I see strong emotion straining to break the dams of her self-control. “But suddenly, it looked as if there was a reason for it. The junking, the money he spent on things that vanished afterwards—”

“He wasn’t a deadbeat, so you could love him?”

“I always loved him,” she snaps.

Point for me, Roche, I think. You happy?

“I wanted to look up to him, like I did when I was little.”

Time to push. “You weren’t concerned about the fact that you and Sahara had been exposed to the vitagua, were you? Or that you’d told Albert’s secret to the least discreet person in the world. He spent all those years playing the buffoon, and you had tossed it away.”