The Witch of Babylon

“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.”

She shuffled forward. After a moment a match struck. Flames leapt from tall white tapers fixed into two large crystal candlesticks, the flickering lights glittering on their facets. “Voila,” Laurel said, waving her arms, “‘the spirit room.’ That’s my name for it, anyway.”

The room was windowless and had probably once been a large pantry. Its walls and ceiling had been painted dusky grape. Lingering in the air was a scent of must mixed with a strange odor I couldn’t place, like the smell of rotting fruit. There were no pentacles drawn within a circle on the floor, no goat skulls or upside-down crosses, no dripping black tapers—nothing hokey like that. Still, the room possessed an aura that was chilly and uncomfortable; it was a place you wouldn’t volunteer to spend time in.

An old cabinet with glass doors held curious objects: prisms of several sizes, egg-shaped stones in different colors, an old-fashioned brass scale with weights and measures, blue apothecary bottles filled with powders. A silver statue of a horned goddess sat on top of the cabinet beside a cruel-looking knife with a blade curved like a sickle. A large tapestry hung above that, a medieval scene showing a robed and masked woman mounting steps leading to a citadel on a hillside, a wounded knight in the foreground, a raven wearing a gold circlet flying in the sky.

“This is wild,” I exclaimed. “What on earth was Hal tangled up with?”

Laurel crossed her arms over her chest as if protecting herself. “This was Mina’s place, but lately Hal spent a lot of time in here.”

“Mina was into all this new-agey stuff too?”

“She’s the one who originally got Hal involved. I know most people think it’s flaky, but you can’t dismiss it out of hand. The old alchemists laid the groundwork for modern chemistry.”

“When Hal and I were kids Mina wasn’t around a lot; usually only the staff were there—housekeepers or maids. The rare times I did see her she was pretty distant. She always came off as a bit formidable, almost scary.”

“You’ve got that right.”

I sensed there was more to Laurel’s words than simple agree ment. “What do you mean?”

“Hal never said anything?”

“About what?”

“Mina was a practicing witch.”

I had a sudden vision of Mina drinking some potion, her image transforming before my eyes into a hag with green skin, a long hooked nose, and one tooth, sailing off the terrace at midnight to cast her evil spells. I broke into a laugh. “I know you didn’t like her, but that’s absurd.”

Her eyes registered a quick flash of annoyance. “The last thing I’d do is make a joke about it. She took it very seriously. That knife on the cabinet is a boline, a witch’s tool. Witchcraft is older than most religions, and it’s become quite widespread, you know, especially here and in the UK. Mina was an eclectic.”

“And that is?”

“A sole practitioner. She didn’t belong to a coven. She became an authority on witchcraft practiced in medieval Germany. Well-known scholars would come from around the world to consult her.” Laurel shivered and crossed her arms. “I found out about all this just after her funeral. Hal was very emotional, and one night it all tumbled out. He said he was going to make her immortal.”

“How did he plan to pull that off?”

“He wouldn’t say and I didn’t want to indulge him in that crazy talk. I wanted to get his mind off her.”

“As far as I could tell Mina was strictly Park Avenue. You’re making her sound like the madwoman in the attic.”

“Look at the book over there if you don’t believe me.” Laurel pointed to a single large volume sitting on a table in front of us. “That’s the Picatrix, her spiritual guide.”

The book’s cover consisted of an intricately worked ivory relief with a border of interlinked geometric designs and a center panel of occult symbols. Fine cracks in the yellowed ivory told the book’s age. Two tarnished