Part 24 (1/2)

She nodded. ”Roman numerals.”

Miles grinned and started writing.

VIII ID. DIVIII. VDIIII.

”Maybe it's an address . . .” he said.

”Or a date . . .”

I grabbed the paper from Miles and started listing more numbers.

Sarah leaned over, next to me. I felt her arm touching mine.

We looked at the list.

”There's so many possibilities . . .”

We tried to make dates, addresses, Dewey decimal notations for books, lat.i.tudes and longitudes--anything that might point us to an answer. It was too much! We made dozens of numbers just by swapping letters around and inserting s.p.a.ces. There was nothing to guide us. Nothing to tell us what we were looking for or how to know it when we saw it.

I was starting to feel a sinking sensation--that we weren't a bit closer than when we started.

Sarah was still hammering away when I noticed Miles had been silent for a long time. Then he started chuckling. He said, ”Oh, that's good.”

”What's good?” I asked him.

He shook his head and smiled.

Now Sarah was looking at him too. He was staring off, with a satisfied look on his face.

”What's good, Miles?”

”Say what you want about the V and D,” he said to us, ”but they haven't lost their sense of humor.”

I felt a tingling in my arms and legs.

He was taunting us, enjoying the victory. I felt the thrill of a mystery about to be revealed.

”What's good?”

”You saw drums. You saw a ritual. We just didn't know what ritual . . .”

He grabbed the pad from us.

”Not four i's. Four eyes,” he said.

”Huh?”

”You still don't see it? Just like they told us. Look at the V and D with four eyes. Four big round eyes.”

Sarah and I just stared at him. He wrote something triumphantly on the pad and pushed it toward us.

VOODOO, it said.

Miles tapped on his pad and smiled broadly.

”We need a witch.”

24.

We came to a store called the Flying Mushroom, a place I'd pa.s.sed many times but never actually entered. It was a brick building painted with broad wavy zebra stripes. During business hours, the neon sign flashed purple and pink; white shoe polish on the windows promised ”vintage alb.u.ms, psychic readings, and more . . .” In my lonelier moments, I had sometimes considered finding out what the more was.

We came at it from the back, reaching the Mushroom through the dark service alley that ran behind the stores. If anyone was following us, we would've seen them coming up the narrow path after us. At least, that's what I kept telling myself.

We followed Miles until he disappeared behind a Dumpster. Moments later, he came out with a key.

”How did you know where the key was?” I asked him.

He shrugged, unlocked the door, and ushered us in.

There were rows of wooden shelves, with dusty vinyl records in no discernible order: Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, Neutral Milk Hotel's Aeroplane Over the Sea, a Steve Martin stand-up alb.u.m, Miles Davis's b.i.t.c.hes Brew. I thought it would be a great store to visit if you had no idea what you were looking for.

Miles motioned for us to be quiet. He left the lights off and kept us away from the front windows. We went through a beaded curtain into a back room. Miles reached up and unhooked a thick black drape. It unrolled behind the beaded curtain and fell to the floor with a soft thud. We were in total darkness until he flipped a switch, and then I heard a soft bubbling sound and saw black lights illuminate the room from under the high cabinets. Planters with overflowing vines hung from the ceiling. An iguana stared at us blankly from a terrarium. There were lava lamps, of course; one yellow, one red. There were little fountains everywhere: spheres with smoky lighted holes, piles of wet pebbles, tiki volcanoes with water flowing like lava.

We sat at a small card table and waited. Miles looked nervous. The excitement of the puzzle had worn off a bit; the cold air had let a little chill of reality back in. Miles kept scratching his beard. I had no doubt he was dreaming of his Rubik's Cube, twisting his imaginary squares under the table. I stole a glance at Sarah. She didn't look happy, but at least she didn't have that how many times can you ruin my life in one week look that I kept expecting to see. Actually, when we were working the puzzle, I saw something totally different on her face, something that bothered me. She looked like she was enjoying herself. I admit a certain thrill in solving the riddle, but in her it scared me--because I was coming to the conclusion that I might care more for her than I did for myself. She hadn't asked for this. And I had a sneaking suspicion that the moment this became a game to us--that would be the moment someone got hurt.

Miles's phone rang. He s.n.a.t.c.hed it up, looked at the caller ID, and breathed a giant sigh of relief. ”It's Chance,” he said. They spoke softly, then he closed the phone.

”He's fine,” Miles said. ”He's heading out of town to crash with some unnamed social rejects.” Miles shrugged. ”He wishes us luck.”

”Great. That's very generous of him.”

A door opened somewhere in the building, and all three of us turned to the black curtain at the same time. Heavy footsteps came toward us. I saw Miles slide his chair back. I looked down at my hand, which was clenching itself so hard the knuckles were white. I let it relax and watched the blood return.

Then the curtain was pushed aside and a large figure came into the room. She was giant, almost as big as Miles. But where Miles looked messy and distracted, she looked like the magnificent queen of a warrior people. Her hair was a wild tangle of thick black curls, with a long elegant strand of silver in the front. Her skin was a warm caramel brown, and her eyes were green, glowing with absolute confidence, almost on fire. She wore a full-length coat dusted with snow, and a Dr. Seuss scarf, striped with a dozen shades of blue, tossed around her neck like an aviator's. She filled the room. You couldn't take your eyes off her.

”Everyone,” Miles said, grinning, ”meet Isabella.”

”This is your store?” I asked, after we had all shaken hands.

”My father,” she said, ”was a graduate student at the university. One of the first black international students. My mother”--here she gave Miles a smile--”was a local celebrity: a townie philosopher, agitator, free spirit. The first person to sell Janis Joplin records. The first person to read palms and do tarot. I was the little girl running around behind the counter in a moon dress. You wouldn't believe the famous people who came in here as students--as a joke of course--wanting to know if the stars predicted greatness for them.” She sat and draped her arm on my chair.

”My mother and father were an improbable couple. An African man and an Irish woman, at a time when that was still scandalous. A university scholar and a red-haired hippie. The only problem was, the longer my dad was here, the more he resented his past. His new religion was economics, political theory. No matter how much they loved each other, she was obsessed with the one part of him he couldn't wait to leave behind. She became something of an embarra.s.sment to him. He turned into a celebrated professor, and she disappeared to San Francisco.” Isabella took in the room, seeing it through our eyes, like an alien zoo. ”My mother never left me a forwarding address. But she left me this store.”