Martin Greenberg: Crime Spells

She put the tea kettle on to boil. “The devil doesn’t care whether the mortgage on this place is paid off, missy. Fifty-five. Take it or leave it.”

In the end, the girl walked out clutching her worthless claim receipt, with cash in hand and a complimentary cookie. And Addie spent her teatime sipping on Earl Grey, munching, and gazing at her younger self, dropping crumbs onto the looking glass.

Once upon a time, she’d had auburn hair that fell in thick waves to the shoulders, dusky olive skin, bright brown eyes that turned near to black when she got angry. She’d have been a beauty if not for the bruises, the too-hollow cheeks, the track marks she couldn’t see in the mirror but knew were there on her twenty-two-year-old arms nonetheless.

She’d wanted to save up money back then. To get out of the neighborhood, find a nice apartment, have a little fun. She never got the chance. Instead, she got booted from home and every place she stayed after that until Hot Corner Fred became the only person she could turn to. She turned tricks for him, and she got high when he wanted or he tuned her up.

He made her cringe. He made her feel like a coward.

She saw a ripple in the mirror and blinked. Her reflection had changed-it wasn’t even hers anymore.

Fred’s image filled the looking glass. Chin raised into the wind. Lips curved. Mean baby blues. Hadn’t he been something? Yes, he had. The bastard.

What comes around goes around, even if it took a few lifetimes for fate to catch up . He’d gotten his, hadn’t he? She’d made sure of it.

The reflection rippled again. Addie held her breath, waiting to see which face from her past would come clear next. Slowly, she picked out the new features.

Eyes: too shiny green, with the whitest whites she’d ever seen. Like a doll’s. Nose: acorn. Mouth: a stitched, uneven line of black thread, cross-hatched with little black thread Xs. It had stick arms and legs and hands and feet. Fingers crafted of brown and black safety-pinned buttons. It wore a yellow baby bonnet, a yellow polka-dotted matching shirt and bloomers.

She’d made that thing. Created it on the worst night of her life. The night she fell into the pit of hell and clawed her way out. She’d made a deal with the Fae. She’d snatched a baby. Kidnapped a human child and replaced it with a changeling, that stick figure in the mirror, Fae-charmed to resemble the human child in every detail.

The Fae told her she wouldn’t regret it. She’d never see the baby or the changeling again. None of it would come back to haunt her. And she’d believed him. After all, remorse had never been her strong suit.

What freaked her out the most? Not only could she see the poppet, the poppet saw her. It glared at her, in point of fact.

It couldn’t be a coincidence that this mirror found its way to her. Coincidences didn’t happen to people like her. No. Her past had come back to haunt her.

If so, she was in way over her head. She needed help. Asking for it could get her killed-or worse. Bargains with the Fae required absolute adherence to the letter of the agreement. Breaking the contract resulted in a fate worse than death. No mercy.

She’d vowed never to tell a soul. That she’d allow no one to find out what she’d done.

She trusted exactly one person enough to go to him with this. Michael. He had a strong, true gift for seeing into people and things. What’s more, he could gauge patterns and motivations.

She’d known him since grade school, when they’d been best friends. Hell, they’d been only friends. They’d lost track of each other after high school. She’d always counted that a blessing. He never knew the things that’d happened to her. The things she’d done to survive. It was better that way.

That way, she’d always be the girl who lived around the way, the one who traded him bologna sandwiches at lunch, whose laugh made him smile.

He was the only person in the world to whom she’d ever come close to confessing what she’d done or why. In the end she hadn’t because of what would happen to her if she broke her end of the Fae bargain-and because he just plain didn’t need to know. He would’ve fallen out of love with her faster than she could blink.

Even so, when the Fae came calling again to ask for another “favor,” Mike protected her. Although he didn’t ask her direct questions, he asked plenty of indirect ones. The kind she could answer without breaking oaths.

He figured out too much. Put himself in danger. Her, too. She couldn’t have that. If he wouldn’t stay out of her business for their own good, she’d put him out. She married him because of his bravado-and divorced him for it, too.

They stayed close after they split. He brought her things. Half the treasures on her shelves, in fact. They did business together, too, sometimes. Traded information.

She needed information more than anything right now.

She wrapped the mirror in a handy black dishcloth to keep it safe from prying eyes and prying eyes safe from it for the time being. Slipped it into her coat pocket and let herself out into the cold, bright afternoon.

A loose corner of the yellow notice stapled to her door whipped in the wind, caught at her coat. Her blood pressure rose. She tore at the paper. Some of the peeling paint came with it. She crumbled the mass into a ball so small you couldn’t see the brown streaks of color, or where the paper said CONDEMNED.

Had the inspector messed with anything when he’d come to fix that godforsaken thing to her door? She scanned the short, wide porch meant for warm weather sitting, for catching a breeze and listening to the cicadas. All her shiny glass baubles still hung from the eaves. The windows on either side of the door looked like rheumy eyes. There was life in them still.

Grass grew tall and seedy against the sides of the house, the tips of the stems thick as fingers. One of them clutched a size ten brown work boot.

So much for the inspector.

She stepped lively down the walk to the gate, sparing some narrow-eyed contempt for the three-story town homes across the way with their manicured hedges and beds of red and purple pansies soaking up the late afternoon sun. The developers sold them for three hundred grand and up. Criminals, she called them.

But there was also the corner store she’d shopped at for years, its parking lot stained with grease and stinking of burned motor oil, its windows still tacky with fake, sprayed-on snow and the gummy outlines of stick-on Christmas trees taken down two weeks past. Mr. Johnson waved at her from behind the counter.

And Rick, who hunkered down on the asphalt around the way and out of sight of Mr. Johnson, who had been homeless for years and preferred it that way, eating out of a Styrofoam to-go container and sharing his meal with his two big, yellow dogs.

Cars, pickups, and buses roared past, racing the traffic lights. Everyone in a hurry. Headed north into downtown’s glass, steel, and concrete canyons. Or out to the freeways and the suburbs.

Addie walked east, briskly at first and then more carefully as the cold seeped through to her old bones and her arthritic hip began to mouth off. Seven long blocks, into the shadow of the baseball stadium and the warehouses to the bar.

She knocked on the door. Seven-foot-tall Ingram, the bouncer, tipped his ball cap to her as she went inside. She inclined her head, although he didn’t much notice; he’d already returned his attention to cavernous main room, where a few regulars clustered around tables drinking and doing business amid the low hum of conversation and the clink of glasses. The dry heat that pumped from the vents didn’t quite chase away the chill, and it made her cough.

She took the winding staircase one ache at a time to the PI offices on the second floor. What the heat failed to do downstairs, it made up here in spades. She took her coat off.