Quests of Simon Ark (26 page)

I was standing near the window looking out on the backyard that ran down to the woods and thought I saw a movement at their edge. “The law will deal with Gregory’s murder,” Chimera was saying.

“As a man of the law you must make a choice, Mr. Chimera,” Simon told him. “You must serve your friends
or
uphold the law—you cannot do both. You can no longer cover up what goes on here. None of you are gods and you never were. Perhaps in truth you are more like the beasts whose names you bear.” He turned to Phoenix. “The war is over now and the revolution never happened. It’s time to come home with the rest of us.”

Her face hardened as she stared at Simon. “Shoot him, Toby,” she said.

“Simon! There’s a child in the woods!” My shout brought them running to the window in time to see a little girl in raggedy clothing vanish into the underbrush.

“We must hurry,” Simon Ark urged, “before she gets away.”

I didn’t know if a bullet might stop us, but they let us go.

Simon didn’t move fast and by the time we reached the edge of the woods the child was gone from sight. We went further in, searching for her. “We’ll never find her,” I said after a few minutes.

“Yes, we will. She’s not afraid of people. Cross’s manuscript said she liked strangers.”

We hurried on into the deepest part of the forest until at last we came to a little clearing by a brook. And then we saw her, playing down by the water. The unicorn’s daughter.

“Six of them, Simon. The four in the house and the two that are dead. We never got to the seventh. We never got to Unicorn.”

The little girl turned at the sound of my voice and smiled up at us. “Who are you?” she asked. “Are you the wise Wufniks from the desert lands?”

“We are your new friends,” Simon told her, kneeling in the grass by her side. “We have come to take you away with us.”

“No, you won’t!” a voice behind us said.

We turned and I saw the woman who stood at the edge of the woods, clad in jeans and a shirt. Though I’d never seen her in anything but her office dresses, I recognized Martha Scane at once.

Her head was down, sighting along the barrel of the shotgun pointed at us. At that angle it might almost have been a unicorn’s horn protruding from her forehead.

“Get away from them, Lilith!” she shouted to the child, and the little girl obeyed instantly, running for cover in the woods.

“Martha—” I started to say.

She fired once, and the blast from the shotgun thudded into the ground near Simon. I saw little specks of blood appear on his hand.

Her second shot came like an echo of the first, almost drowning out the simultaneous crack of a revolver. But this shot was wide to the left, and then I saw the blood on Martha Scane’s shirt.

She fell on her face in the soft grass, still clutching the shotgun.

Toby Chimera came out of the woods holding his service revolver. I saw that he was crying as he walked to her body, but I knew he had made his choice at last.

It was much later that day when Simon and I finally drove back to New York. The little girl, Lilith, would find foster parents to care for her and the four we’d left at the house would go their own ways when the investigation was completed.

“She did it all for the child,” Simon explained as we drove. “In some misguided way she thought she was protecting Lilith from the world. She’d threatened to destroy Harvey Cross many times before, and when he heard her voice come over that intercom in your office he must have thought she was a true demon. He’d never known where she or Ash worked, you see, and he’d unwittingly brought his manuscript to the very publisher who employed her. It must have been an overwhelming rush of sheer despair that made him leap through your window to his death.”

“And his death brought matters to a head.” Simon nodded. “Ash Gregory began to realize that his daughter had to be removed from the commune. She wasn’t a goddess—only a child. He and Martha must have argued about it driving up yesterday. She got him to stop the car—perhaps by pretending to see Lilith in the woods—and then stabbed him to death. She had to keep the child at all costs, to raise her as a daughter of nature.”

“And you knew it was Martha all along?”

“The way you described the event to me, only her voice on the intercom could have affected Harvey Cross so quickly. And doesn’t it seem reasonable that if Gregory was the child’s father, then the mother—and Gregory’s killer—who was driving up with him from New York might be someone who worked with him during the week?”

“I can’t believe the coincidence that brought Cross to the same publisher where they worked,” I said. It was early evening now, and the lights of Manhattan were coming into view across the Hudson.

“Oh, it was no coincidence, my friend. Harvey Cross was lured to your office by the same conscious urge that brought Martha Scane and Ash Gregory there as employees in the first place. Don’t you see it yet? These seven people believed in the old Roman and Greek gods. They established their commune in a place called Olympus and took the names of mythical creatures. It was not coincidence but a logical choice that brought them to a publisher named Neptune Books.”

I
T WAS A JUNIOR PARTNER
at the law firm of Nevins & Scott who first contacted Simon Ark regarding the unlikely affair of Maud Slumber, the millionaire witch. Simon was speaking on “Religion and the Decline of Magic” at a workshop on the Middle Ages being conducted at a university in The Bronx, and this had brought him more than the accustomed amount of notice in the press.

“What am I to do, my friend?” he asked me over lunch at a Bavarian cafe on the, west side of Manhattan. “I give a simple, straightforward interview to the afternoon paper and now I have requests like this one.”

“What do they want you to do with this millionaire witch?” I asked. “Marry her?”

“Heaven forbid! Will you come with me to the lawyer’s office?”

“I suppose I could.” There were things to be done back at the office, but nothing that others couldn’t handle for a few hours. And my curiosity was aroused.

So after lunch we took a taxi down to the Wall Street suite of Nevins & Scott and were ushered promptly into the office of Greg Hopkins, the junior partner who’d contacted Simon. “It’s a pleasure,” he said, rising to shake hands. I guessed his age to be around thirty, though a bushy mustache the same shade of red as his hair made it difficult to estimate exactly. His blue eyes were clear and honest, and I imagined him to be quite effective in a courtroom.

“You must understand,” Simon told him, “that I’m not a private-inquiry agent. I can answer your questions about witchcraft but that is all. If you have a problem with this woman—”

“Oh, we have a problem with her all right. At least I do. Maud Slumber is seventy-eight years old and her estate is the largest one I handle. Frankly, I wouldn’t want to offend her—it wouldn’t be good for me or for the firm.”

“You said on the telephone she’s a millionaire.”

“That’s not violating any confidences. She donated a new wing to a New England medical school last year and she’s talked publicly about establishing a foundation to handle the estate after she dies. About the only thing she doesn’t mention in public is the fact that she’s been a practicing witch for most of her life.”

“How do you know that?” Simon Ark asked.

“Because she told me, in this very office. We got into a discussion about a year ago on how she managed to acquire her wealth. It seems it came mainly through large bequests from distant relatives and friends. That’s when she told me she’d hexed them, that she was a witch.”

“You couldn’t have believed her,” I said.

“Not at first, certainly. But Maud Slumber is an enigmatic woman. I came to realize that whether or not she really is a witch, she believes herself to be one.”

“Sometimes believing is all that’s necessary,” Simon murmured. He was staring hard at the young lawyer. “Tell me, Mr. Hopkins—other than her persuasive conversation, has this woman demonstrated any evidence of witchcraft?”

“Well,” he said slowly, choosing his words carefully, “there was the matter of her husband.”

“You hadn’t mentioned she was married.”

“And I didn’t believe her to be when I first acquired her as a client. She’d been with one of the older members of the firm who passed away and his clients were divided among several junior partners. The file listed her as unmarried and I never questioned her about it, but some months back she telephoned me one afternoon, quite agitated. It seems her former husband was back in town, demanding money from her. I learned they’d been divorced about twenty years earlier, before she came into most of her money. He was a few years younger than Maud, still in his early seventies, and quite spry.”

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“Lyle Caser, but I’m afraid he’s no longer with us.” Hopkins hesitated, as if wishing he didn’t have to tell us the rest of it. “She put a hex on him and he died.” He showed us a photo of a bald man with glasses.

Simon leaned forward in his chair. “How did he die?”

“He fell through a plate-glass window in a department store. Apparently he had a seizure of some sort, but it was the glass that killed him. A sliver of it cut his throat.”

“And Maud Slumber took credit for this?”

The young lawyer nodded. “She claims—But it’s all nonsense, of course. It’s not even worth repeating.”

“And yet you’re troubled enough to have summoned me.”

Hopkins took a deep breath. “Attorneys have a certain responsibility for their clients—at least the responsibility to see that they don’t break the law or harm anyone. Lyle Caser is dead, but he has a brother named Eric who’s still very much alive. I’m afraid Maud Slumber might—might harm him next.”

“Is this a matter for the police?”

“It’s not a matter for the police or private detectives or anyone like that, Mr. Ark. Frankly, I was at my wits’ end when I saw the notice of your appearance at the university. Maybe, just maybe, you could talk to her before anything else happens.”

Because I knew Simon would never ask it, I interrupted with a practical question. “Is your firm offering to hire Mr. Ark as a consultant in this matter?”

“You must realize this isn’t the sort of service that can be rebilled to the client. But the firm is willing to pay for any reasonable expenses, and for your time, of course. Could you call on Maud Slumber and persuade her to drop this foolishness?”

“By foolishness you mean her threat to put a hex on Eric Caser?”

“Yes,” he answered quietly. “She’s convinced the brother’s reappeared to get her money. I suggested she simply disinherit them, but instead she’s doing this.”

“Threatening to kill Eric like she killed her ex-husband?”

“Yes.”

Simon Ark stood up. “I’ll be happy to talk with her. Please arrange for an appointment as soon as possible.”

The appointment was for the following afternoon and I arranged to accompany Simon. The idea of meeting a millionaire witch who lived in a luxury Park Avenue condominium attracted me as much as it did Simon, and as we arrived by taxi I asked, “Do you think she’s really a witch?”

“Greg Hopkins thinks she is—he thinks she can kill people by hexing them. When one is dealing with witchcraft appearances can often become reality.”

“You mean that a person can fall through a plate-glass window simply because he believes his ex-wife has willed his death?”

“Something like that. In the Australian bush, where witchcraft of a sort is still practiced among the aborigines, the practice of pointing a bone at one’s enemies has been known to cause their illness and death. But it only happens if the victim knows the bone has been pointed, if his imagination can be set to work to such an extent as to bring about a physical illness.”

We passed through the revolving door of the building into a stark chrome-and-glass lobby where a security guard waited to ask our business. “And you think something like that has happened here?” I asked.

“We shall see, my friend,” Simon replied. He gave the man the name of Maud Slumber and we waited to be announced.

Her door on the twenty-second floor was opened by a uniformed maid who greeted us with a French accent. She left us in a plush living room where gold-flecked wallpaper matched the golden threads of the furniture, momentarily distracting me from the breathtaking view of the Manhattan skyline to the south.

Then we were joined by Maud Slumber herself. She was a large woman, who moved to her chair with a sort of rolling motion. White-haired, wrinkled, showing the obvious signs of her seventy-eight years, her eyes were still alert and calculating as she faced us. “My lawyer sent you,” she said, not bothering with introductions. “For what purpose?”

Simon cleared his throat. “My name is Simon Ark. I am a researcher into matters—”

“I know who you are. The Satan-hunter. The scourge of necromancy. The undying detective. What do you want of me?”

“Merely a conversation. I do not come to burn you at the stake or to test you with torture. You have said you are a witch and I accept that.”

She bowed slightly, regaining something of her lost composure. “I have no caldron and no broomstick, Mr. Ark. I am not a threat to anyone.”

“Young Greg Hopkins seems to think you may have been responsible in some manner for the death of your former husband.”

She turned in her chair and issued orders to the maid. “Marie, bring us some tea.” Then she returned to the conversation with Simon. “I trust tea is satisfactory. Now, Mr. Ark, in the matter of Lyle Caser, his death was tragic—but not unexpected by me.”

“You had placed a hex or spell on him?”

She acknowledged that. “Not to kill him, but to drive him away. He and his brother had come back after all these years simply to see what they could get out of me. I sent someone to talk to them, but it did no good.”

“So you killed your former husband.”

“That’s a harsh word, don’t you think? I created an atmosphere in which he would be uncomfortable. If it caused his death I am sorry.”

“And now Eric?” Simon asked with a slight smile.