Dorothy Mcintosh - The Witch of Babylon

“Doesn’t ring a bell.” Laurel eased herself up and walked over to a credenza against the wall. Every inch of its marble top was covered with stacks of file folders and documents, along with some dusty photos sitting beside her computer. One of these, her wedding picture, showed a bride with high cheekbones, a slight Slavic tilt to her green eyes giving her face a faintly exotic look, her shiny brown hair swept up. She was dressed simply in a white satin sheath, holding a spray of ivory roses and baby’s breath. Beside her, Hal, ramrod straight in a severe black suit, looked uncomfortable, as though he already knew the marriage was doomed to fail. Like some omnipresent ghost, Hal’s mother, Mina, a little blurry but clearly identifiable, could be seen in the background.

Laurel saw me looking at the photo. “Do you know there isn’t one wedding picture with just the two of us? Mina always lurked somewhere, making sure she was in the shot.” She ran her fingers through her hair. Usually this was the gesture of a flirt. In her case it simply revealed an overload of worry and tension. She flipped through some of the files but didn’t find what she was searching for. “Somewhere Hal listed all the property that hadn’t yet been sold, mostly from this place, but I can’t find it.”

She turned toward me. “John, there’s something you need to know. Hal and I had talked about getting back together. With Mina gone and Peter in a place he’ll never leave, there was finally an opening for me. Hal was brow-beaten by his father and too close to his mother. He adored her. Did you know he used to call her his jewel?”

I shook my head and let her talk.

“Things had been going well. My sublet was up and he offered to let me stay here because he’d moved back to the townhouse temporarily to care for Peter. Everything was great until I discovered he was using heroin again, even though he’d sworn that was over with. We used to see each other every day. That stopped last week when I found out. I was furious.” Her bottom lip trembled.

“Junk is the devil, Laurie. It’s so hard to shake. Hal once told me he’d crawl through a sewer just to get some. He got that from an expert, by the way—William Burroughs. You can’t change the past. Try to just focus on the good times.”

A gush of tears threatened to turn into a waterfall. “Hal was desperate for money. He had to cover all the costs for the townhouse and for here. Taxes alone were more than six thousand a month, plus paying for Peter’s care.”

“Why not just sell the townhouse?”

“The power of attorney forbade Hal from selling it. Peter made sure of that before he got too sick to think.”

“What did Hal do with the cash from Peter’s collection?”

Laurel shut her eyes for a moment, trying to regain her compo sure. “He went through it all. He was losing his position, too. You know he was deathly afraid of social events, but he threw that party as a last-ditch effort to get on Colin’s good side—his contract was up.”

“Hal told me Colin fired him.” The few times I’d met Colin Reed he hadn’t impressed me. “How well do you know Reed? Does he know anything about antiquities?”

“Not well. I’d see him at NYU when I’d go there to meet Hal. Or at parties and stuff. That’s about it. Never liked the man much. He teaches the great German philosophers—Kant, Schelling. He’s considered an authority on Hegel. As far as I know, that’s about as close to the past as he gets.”

“Reed was there last night. Tried to implicate me, the bastard. I’m wondering why he’d do that.”

Laurel shrugged her shoulders. I noticed how graceful her movements were, even in her slightly inebriated state. “Don’t take it personally,” she said. “Reed’s the type who’d do that just for a laugh.”

“Where would Hal’s computer be—at the townhouse?”

“His laptop’s there. His desktop’s in his cubbyhole at NYU.”

I’d have to check both of them out. There had to be something on them to give me a lead on Eris’s identity.

Laurel let out a deep sigh. “It feels so strange to be surrounded by Hal’s family things. Now it all belongs to the bank.”

“Speaking of his possessions, he still wore your wedding ring. Did you know that?”

“You mean the gold ring with the solitaire diamond? That’s not his wedding ring. He had it made from an antique ring when his mother died. He was more married to Mina than he ever was to me.”

An odd way to put it, but accurate. Hal’s mother had always been very possessive. I could see what a challenge it would be for a new wife to wedge herself in between the two of them . “What about this place? It must be worth a fortune.”

“Mina’s brother left it to her. Peter deliberately held off separating from her until she’d been awarded the estate to make sure he got half the value. She had to take out a mammoth mortgage to buy him out. Everything will have to be sold just to cover the debts.”

I didn’t challenge her on this. Maybe she was just bad at math. Even if Mina had been forced to mortgage half the place, that still left a sizeable sum. But perhaps Peter had somehow managed to entail this place too.

I got up to stretch my legs. I wasn’t sure I wanted to share Hal’s letter with Laurel just yet, but I desperately needed some advice. I took the sketch of the puzzle I’d printed from my pocket. “Hal created a kind of game to show me where he hid the engraving. Does this make any sense to you?” I held out the drawing to her.

“Why would he want you to have it?” Instead of me. I could hear her thinking that loud and clear.

“There was nothing altruistic about it. He set a trap. He deliberately sent Eris after me.”

Laurel took the paper from me and scrutinized it, then put her hands up to her face. I folded my arm around her and let her cry. After a few minutes she moved away and found a tissue, holding it to her eyes. “He expected you to figure this out?”

“Looks that way.”

She let out a deep sigh. “He always beat me at these word games. Trying to solve it would make me feel like I was playing with a ghost.”

“I don’t think there’s a lot of choice. Not for me, anyway.”

“You’re telling me Hal is lying in the morgue now because of this. Is that where you want to end up too?”

“He was totally out of his league. I’ve got a few street smarts, don’t forget. The words he’s used, they’re unusual.”

“Some of them refer to alchemy, like the Picatrix . It’s a handbook on magic going back to the thirteenth century. The words black and white probably refer to two of the stages of converting base metals to gold. Melanosis, the blackening, comes first to eliminate the impurities by fire and next is leucosis, the whitening. The final stage would be iosis, the reddening or achieving the pure form.”

“Alchemy? Honestly? That’s surprising for a committed academic like him.”

I found it curious that Hal’s puzzle was loaded with words relating to alchemy. How did that link to a Neo-Assyrian relic? Had the Assyrians experimented with methods to turn common metals into gold? I’d always thought alchemy originated with the Egyptians, not the Mesopotamians.

Laurel handed back the sketch. The tip of her fingernail was shredded and the cuticles red, signs that her worries had begun well before Hal’s death. “Actually it’s not. Come with me—you need to see something.”

Seven

Ifollowed Laurel through the kitchen into a dark corridor that seemed to stretch to infinity. Dim lights came on when she flicked a wall switch. Laurel led me to a closed door about thirty feet down the hall. “I don’t usually come in here. It’s too eerie.” She pushed open the door. “You’ll have to wait a minute. The wires leading to this room were purposely cut off; there’s no electricity in here.”