“No, it’s just sulking. I moved it from the bedroom, and it hasn’t forgiven me yet.” She turned back to the drawing, shaking her head irritably as she studied it, but still speaking directly to him. “It sounds as if you’d switched roles overnight, doesn’t it? Now you’re the one asking impertinent questions, and she’s being not there. Very odd.”
“She doesn’t look good,” Farrell said. “Whatever truly went on between her and Aiffe and Baby New Year, it took something scary out of her.” He rubbed the side of his knee, which was blue-green and swollen. “At that, she looked a whole lot better than the girl. That’s the one I felt sorry for; I couldn’t help it.” Julie’s head came up swiftly, the dark eyes suddenly disquieted, wind-ruffled water. “Well, I did,” he said. “She was like a kid at her first grown-up party, she was so sure she was in control, part of everything, the big time at last. Poor little twit, she didn’t even know what to wear.”
Julie said, “Never feel sorry for her.” Her voice was tight and sharp, but it broke upward on the word sorry. She asked very quietly, “And you? Do you have any idea what did go on there last night? What games did they play at the party, Joe?‘’
Farrell looked back at her for what felt to him like a long time. Then he put his hands in his pockets and wandered to the window behind the drawing table, where he rested his forehead against the dusty, sunset-warm glass and watched Mushy the white cat trudging after starlings in Julie’s tiny back yard. “I lived with a werewolf once,” he said slowly. “Did I ever tell you about her?” Julie raised her left eyebrow slightly and curled her upper lip on the same side. Farrell said, “In New York. It isn’t so much that she was a werewolf. What she mostly was, was nice, Jewish, very unhappy, and with a mother. She said, I remember, she said once being a werewolf was actually a lot less trouble than her goddamn allergies. It wasn’t, of course. She was just saying that.”
“I’m sure there’s a reason for your telling me all this,” Julie said. “Fairly sure.”
“Just that I don’t have any particular trouble with the supernatural. It bewilders me about as much as the natural, I can’t always tell them apart.” He turned from the window to watch her playing with the bamboo pen as she listened, the long, supple fingers gripping the shaft so strongly that it skidded and twisted like a desperate fish in her hand. He said, “Okay, Point A. The girl, Aiffe, she’s a witch. A real one—maybe not major league yet, but working on it. Working very hard. How’s that so far?”
“Go on.” Julie put the pen down carefully, swung her chair to face him, and began clicking her thumbnails against each other. Farrell said, “Lord, I bet she clowns around a lot in school, drives the home room teacher crazy. Point B. Seems she’s been trying to summon up demons, three times anyway. I don’t know what happened on the first two tries, but this last time she got Nicholas Bonner. Now, he’s not a demon, says so himself, so I can’t even guess what he is, except old and bad and cute as a button. And clearly a chronic acquaintance of Sia’s, sort of like you and me, which leads us to Point C. Am I going too fast, or too weirdly?”
“No.” Seeing Farrell looking at her hands, she clasped them firmly together in her calm lap. “I’ve never met her, you know. She never comes to the League things with Egil. Ben. I think the Countess Elizabeth went to see her a few times.”
Farrell considered that, remembering the cat-faced, strudel-bodied woman who had teased his palm at the dance. “The mind reels. Right, okay, Sia. Who is Sia, what is she, that Ben is a completely different man, physically changed, because of living with her? That she can make a crazy drunk with a gun kneel and grovel and shoot himself in the leg, without touching him? That she can mess with your memory, speak languages that I know do not exist, and keep a vigorous young witch and a—a person of indeterminate species but great, great strength of purpose from coming into her house? I mean, this is no ordinary landlady, Jewel, it’s time to face facts. I will go further and say this is no ordinary marriage counselor. Incidentally, you are aware that we’re having our first high-level conference? I just didn’t think it should go unremarked.”
He was clowning for her to some degree, and she did smile then, with genuine pleasure, but also with too much understanding. She said, “Look at you. Can’t ever get you talking about what’s really going on in there, and then, when you do start, it’s like a flash flood. A little dangerous.” Farrell was not sure what she meant; but when she bowed her head for a moment and knuckled wearily at a place at the top of her spine, his own backbone shivered and sparked in greedy tenderness, and he took a step toward her. Julie said, “Point D.”
“Point D,” Farrell said after a silence. “Ben. She was starting to tell me something, I think, right before the trick-or-treaters showed up.” He closed his eyes, trying to hear Sia’s rough, sudden voice asking him, “What do you know about possession?” Slowly, laying the words out as precisely as Julie had set down the bamboo pen, he said, “I read one time, whenever Mozart feels another flute concerto coming on, he takes over this housewife in Strasbourg, dictates it through her. Chopin, Mahler, Brahms, apparently they all take turns using the some poor woman. She says it’s a great honor, but very tiring.”
“And you think that’s what’s happening to Ben? Some ninth-century Viking just borrows him every now and then to run around in Barton Park?” The words were mocking, but the way she sat watching him was not.
Farrell shook his head. “I did at first, I guess because that’s the only kind of possession you ever hear about. Now I don’t know.” He hesitated, remembering the words that had been all but lost in Briseis’ terrible crying, and added, “It’s not what Sia thinks.”
Julie drew breath to speak and then didn’t. Her thumbnails were scraping at each other again. “Well, you’ll have to bring me over there for dinner sometime,” she said at last. “Sounds like quite a crowd.”
Farrell looked at his watch. “Dinner. Point E. High-level conference to be continued over sashimi and sake at the Half-Moon House. Say amen, and let’s boogie.”
But she was already turning her chair around again, rotating the drawing to sketch the retina from another angle. “Joe, I can’t go anywhere, I’m going to be up all night with this stuff. Call me tomorrow.”
“I’ll cook,” Farrell said. He found himself childishly reluctant to leave her in the quiet, warm clutter of her workroom and walk out into aimless twilight with his mind still bustling with shadows. “You’ve got that fish in the refrigerator, I’ll make lemon fillets. Just work, don’t worry about it. Lemon fillets, nice orange and onion salad, I fix. You got any real garlic?”
Julie stood up and came to him, putting her hands in his hair. “Baby, go home,” she said gently. “This is what I do. I’m not hungry and I like working at night and I really have trouble working with anyone in the house. It’s getting to be a problem with men.”
“Never used to be a problem.” The sound of his own complaining voice fed his strange fretfulness back on itself. “The first time I ever saw you, you were painting a still life in the middle of a party. In the kitchen, by God—people rampaging in and out, necking, fixing drinks, something going on the stove, smelling like a home urinalysis, and you eating an apple, painting away, not paying no mind to nothing. You remember that? I think I was looking for the paper towels. A whole bunch of paper towels.”
“I was eighteen years old, what did I know?” Julie said. “Go home, Joe. This is what I do now. The drawings have to be ready tomorrow morning, because somebody needs them. The Lady Murasaki, that scared, show-offy girl you want back, she’s for weekends, special occasions, whenever I need her.” She kissed him then, biting his lower lip and shaking her head slightly. “I still do,” she said, “once in a while. Maybe it’s the same way with Ben.”