I shuddered.
“I told you he had taken over,” he accused me. “Carabosse is wild with grief over this. She says you’ve risked so much, and for what? For vengeance. I told you to let it go.”
“I could not let him go on!” I said, suddenly angrier than I have ever been. “Who are you, or Carabosse, to tell me to let it go? It wasn’t you he did it to!”
He sighed. He turned pale. He looked at the floor, at his bare toes. I was sorry I had spoken so. “Tell Carabosse I’m sorry,” I said. “No harm done.”
He shook his head. “That may not be so,” he said. “Something saw you while you were there. Carabosse doesn’t know who or what it was, but something saw you. She wants you to come home.”
“I’ll come home,” I said. “Soon.”
“Now,” he begged.
“Soon,” I said tiredly, looking at the plant in my hands. Evidently my tone of voice was final. I looked up and he was gone.
I went into the kitchen where I’d already put a sack of potting soil and a flowerpot. I planted the herbs, watered them carefully and labeled them with a large, white plastic plant label. If Jaybee has given up trying to find Beauty, he will never see the plant and I will go home. If he hasn’t given up, it is likely he will show up here, at Janice’s house, within the next three or four days.
January 17, 1993
Several days ago I went to the optometrist and got glasses, bifocals. I hate them. Whenever I eat the line is right where the food is, and I keep spilling things down my front. I went to the beauty shop, too, and had a cut and set to make me look different from the woman Jaybee met on the boat. Younger, a little, though perhaps it is really only neater.
Jaybee showed up this afternoon, drove up with a squeal of tires, parked by the curb, stepped over the picket fence. I was raking the lawn. A kind of memorial for Bill. Jaybee asked me where Janice was, and I told him she’d had to go out of town. He knew that. He’d been out of town himself. That’s why he hadn’t been here earlier. He asked me where “Dorothy” was, and I told him she’d moved. He asked me where, and I told him I had it written down somewhere in the house. He followed me into the kitchen where I made quite a drama of searching for the address everywhere but where I’d put it.
The flowerpot was sitting on the counter with its huge label. He couldn’t miss it: black felt-tipped block letters on white. “Oculum Root,” it said. His eyes flicked around the room, looking at everything, as they always did. Photographer’s eyes. Always seeing. They came to the plant, flicked away and returned, fascinated, remembering something that had happened a long time ago, something someone had said.
By the time I found the address and gave it to him, his eyes were firmly fixed on the plant label.
“What is this?” he asked, putting one finger on a leaf, as though to be sure it was real.
“Oh, it’s a very rare herb,” I told him. “Janice learned about it in her research. It’s extremely hard to obtain. She’s been wanting some of it for a long time, and she located a man who grows it just before she left.”
I handed him the scrap of paper with the address on it. He glanced at it and saw it was the address of the college “Dorothy” had been attending. “I’ve been there,” he said. “She didn’t come back there after the holidays. She must be somewhere else.”
I pretended to be puzzled. “Janice did say something about another address. Maybe it’s in Janice’s bedroom.” I went out into the hall and around the corner into the back bedroom, leaving him alone in the kitchen. I sat down on my bed and waited, stroking Grumpkin, my mind totally empty. Some time went by. Long enough. I heard footsteps, then his car leaving. When I went back to the kitchen, the plant was gone.
I have not done anything. I have not injured him. I have not met violence with violence. All I have done is to put something where he could steal it if he came hunting for a woman he had abused. Now, perhaps, I will not need to do anything else at all.
Am I revenged? It’s very strange, but I don’t know. Except for the tiny furnace behind my breast bone, I don’t feel anything at all.
January 18, 1993
Janice returned from her trip with word of a job for me. The university needs a part time librarian to work evenings who reads enough Latin and medieval English and French to help students. I thanked her, not telling her I won’t be here long enough to bother. I was going to leave last night, but my conversation with Puck had reminded me of something I wanted to find out from her.
“Janice,” I said, “Dorothy told me how she met you and the others.”
“Did she,” sniffed Janice, suddenly suspicious once more.
“She told me you were doing a documentary on the last of the fairies, the last magic. You were the researcher on that, weren’t you?”
She relaxed. “I was, yes. Piles of old books I had to plow through to find the answers to that one!”
“Where did all the magic go, Janice?”
“The Church took most of it,” she said, giving me this strange, wild-eyed glare.
“The Church?” I asked stupidly. It was what Puck had said, but somehow I hadn’t believed it.
“Making magic,” she said. “All their sacraments are magical. Turning this into that. Making spells to forgive sins. They don’t admit it’s magic, but that’s what it is! ‘The recitation of formulae by an elect, resulting in a condition contrary
