Sailor was staring at me, his confusion apparent. Carlos glanced at him, then at me. “All righty, then. Lily, let me know if there’s any more trouble. And, Sailor—don’t kill anyone. Matter of fact, stop threatening to kill anyone. We clear?”
Sailor didn’t react. He did this often: The curtain would come down over his handsome features like a wall of ice. On the rare occasions that ice melted . . . well, it made my heart go wonky.
But right now it irritated me. Couldn’t he just once be cooperative and say, “Sure thing, Inspector”? Then again, I reminded myself, not everyone lies as easily as I’ve learned to do.
Carlos waited. “Sailor, I’m serious. You got a history with this guy?”
Sailor shook his head.
“Did you threaten him?”
Sailor shrugged.
“Sailor was feeling protective,” I volunteered, “because Tristan’s a bit of an odd fellow, as I’m sure you noticed.”
“And because he gave you a mysterious forty-eight-hour deadline,” said Carlos.
“That, too.”
“I have no plans to do anything to him,” Sailor said. “But if he bothers Lily—”
“You won’t back down. Okay, got it. Lily, may I see the card he gave you, please?”
I handed Carlos the business card for the Hotel Marais. He nodded. “I know the place. I’ll have a uniform go over and have a chat with this Mr. Tristan Dupree, make sure he understands we don’t want any trouble in our fair city. You’re certain you don’t know what he’s after?”
“Very certain. But I’ll look into it—that’s a promise.”
“You do that,” Carlos said as he headed for his car. He paused before getting in and said, “In the meantime, both of you: Keep the peace, will you? I’ve got homicides to deal with. I can’t afford to be riding herd on the two of you.”
• • •
As Sailor and I stepped into Aunt Cora’s Closet, Oscar peeked out from behind the brocade curtain that separates the workroom from the display floor. Apparently relieved to see it was only us, he ran around in circles, his hooves tapping on the wooden floor, then excitedly butted my shins.
“A lot of help you are,” I grumbled, but gave him a smile and a scratch behind the ears. “So much for being a fearsome guard pig.”
“What was all that about?” asked Maya. “Who was that guy?”
“An old acquaintance. He thinks I have something of his.”
“Like what?”
“A . . . blegh, I think?” I tried to recall what Tristan had said.
“A blog?” Maya asked. “That can’t be right. You’re scared of the Internet.”
“No, not a blog. A . . . bag, maybe?”
“Sounded more like a beeg to me,” said Sailor.
“And what’s a beeg?” asked Maya. Without waiting for an answer, she opened the shop laptop—the one I avoided like the plague—and started to search the Internet.
“We don’t know,” I said, moving to look at the computer screen over her shoulder. “Does anything come up?”
“Let’s see. . . . There’s a movie review site, and Bleeg is a last name . . . and the Urban Dictionary says ‘bleeg’ is slang for something sex-related, but no surprise there. ‘Beeg,’ without the l, brings up nothing but porn. Lily, I know your past is a bit mysterious, but were you at one time into pornography? Because that really doesn’t sound like you.”
“Pretty sure I wasn’t,” I said, elbowing Sailor, who looked amused—and perhaps a little intrigued—at the idea of my being a secret porn princess.
“None of this makes sense—you say he’s looking for an item of some sort?” Maya asked.
Sailor nodded. “He claimed Lily stole it from him.”
“Given my previous encounter with Tristan Dupree, it’s probably something arcane and magical, or at least he thinks it is,” I said. “I have a few boxes of mementos tucked away upstairs; I’ll look through them and see if I can figure out what he’s talking about.”
Oscar rubbed against my legs again, and absentmindedly I reached down to tug his soft piggy ear. Oscar is a very special witch’s familiar. Technically he isn’t a familiar at all, but a shape-shifting creature that Aidan Rhodes had “gifted” me upon my arrival in San Francisco.
Speaking of Aidan . . . the self-proclaimed godfather of Bay Area witches might know something about what Tristan was after. Tristan Dupree had an oddly inflected style of speaking—was it possible he was asking about “the bag”? The most significant “bag” in my life was a special satchel Aidan had asked me to guard when he was out of town not too long ago. Could that be what Tristan was referring to? Aidan might know, and even if he didn’t, he had an occult research library in his office. Some of his books dealt with obscure aspects of witchcraft.
And Aidan was a night owl.
That decided it: If I had time, I would drop by the wax museum after closing Aunt Cora’s Closet this evening, once I’d gotten the busload of witches settled in with Calypso. It was high time Aidan and I had a powwow, anyway, to discuss the supernatural threat looming over San Francisco. I would also warn him not to agree to hold the Magical Match fund-raiser at the wax museum, just in case a member of the Welcome coven got to him. And I felt like I should invite him to my wedding, a wedding he was dead set against. That should be fun.
Great Goddess, my life was complicated.
“Hey, Sailor,” said Maya. She’d stopped searching for mysterious bleegs and was making sure the store’s Web site was up-to-date. “What was the deal with you yesterday?”
“Yesterday?”
“At that Chinese herb place the Lucky Moon, on Sacramento near Grant? A little after four?”
Sailor frowned. “The Lucky Moon is my regular herb shop. But I wasn’t in Chinatown yesterday. I worked with Patience all afternoon, then came here for dinner.”
Maya tilted her head, the way she did when she was puzzled. “But . . . this is so weird. Honestly, Sailor, you’re not easily mistaken for someone else. We were standing right next to each other at the cash register. Motorcycle
