He looked surprised and then annoyed. I couldn’t believe he’d fallen for that one again.
She turned to Linwood. “Why did—”
Luckily, the drinks and menus arrived, which were beautiful. Pink water the color of roses and big velvet books, tasseled in silver. To be fair, the Arabian Room was more like the treasure house of the gods in Jason and the Argonauts than like the Cyclops’s cache. My bias against the Jason story, all that stuff about Hera and so forth, was that it was real—I mean, it was an actual myth. Hercules getting stranded because Zeus had something better for him to do and the clashing rocks and Neptune and all of that. You couldn’t enjoy the story because it was preordained. Like when they tried to snazz up stories from the Bible and make believe they were real stories. But Sinbad. He could have done anything.
“I’m having Sultan’s Ecstasy,” June announced.
I scanned the menu.
SULTAN’S ECSTASY!
Succulent roast baby piglet seasoned in mouth-melting spices. Festive pilaf rice with plump raisins complements this Far-Eastern taste pleaser. Just the thing to tease and tantalize the palate, whether you be sultan or peon!
The description gave me a headache, and there were dozens of them. So I applied the same theory I used on all random choice: rely on the name. Persian Prince was my selection, and I didn’t care what it was.
“Well,” said Linwood gaily, after ordering Serendipity in the Seraglio, “tonight we’ll be in our new home!”
“Tonight we’ll be in another motel,” said Stan. “Tomorrow we look for something to sleep on.”
A glum silence fell over the table. I was sure they were all thinking what I was, that we no longer had any furniture to have shipped. We would have to fill the house with new things, strange things.
“We’ll order some stuff in New Orleans,” Stan pointed out. “When…”
“When we go pick up stupid old Deane.” June pounded her fist on the table. “I wish she’d burned up with the house.”
Nobody answered. Nobody told her it was a bad thing to wish.
Chapter Sixteen
“Look,” I said, after picking at Persian Prince for ten minutes or so. “Can’t I just run next door to one of those auction houses and meet you back here in fifteen minutes?”
Stan consulted his wristwatch. “It’s after one now.”
“It only takes half an hour to get to the house,” Linwood said. “You said we weren’t meeting her until three.”
“June’ll go with you,” Stan ordered.
“And miss dessert?” Her outrage was mortal.
“I’m nine years old,” I announced, chin high. “I don’t want dessert. I want to go to the auction house right next door,” I pointed, “on this side of the street. Fifteen minutes.”
Stan and Linwood exchanged looks. Perhaps they were remembering how I’d gone into the Quarter and back that morning, without mishap.
“Okay,” Stan said. “Meet us in the lobby at one-thirty.” He wiped his mouth with his napkin. “There’s a shop your mother wants to go to on the other end of town.”
I pulled my coat around me, taking pleasure in the power the toys gave me. Then I made tracks.
Back through the golden lobby, I walked swiftly and keenly, vanishing out the front door in jet-powered haste. Right next to the hotel was the dusty storefront, shabby oriental rugs and bronze candlesticks shaped like cobras.
I pushed open the grimy glass door. A bell jangled from a knotted rope.
Rows and rows of metal folding chairs were facing the far end of the rectangular space, marked by a card table and a podium of sorts. Festoons of bric-a-brac cluttered the swaying shelves on either side of the seats.
But nobody was inside. No auctioneer, no audience.
My heart sank with disappointment, the way I’d thought my bottom would sink into the brocade pillows.
I went up to the front row and sat down anyway, clutching my treasures about me. A clock chimed and I glanced at its broad, cracked face: one-fifteen.
From behind a curtain at the far left end of the room, out walked a dapper gentleman in a suit the pale shade of lettuce, those white leaves close to the core. His pecan-colored skin set off the grim cold of his ice-chip eyes.
He walked to the podium and banged the gavel.
“Let the auction begin.”
I was calm, calm and strong.
“For sale today,” said Sammy, “I have your heart’s desire. I have what you need to set your troubles to rest. I can make the worst fear in your heart turn to dust and sift through your fingers. I can ease your pain, a silk cushion you eternally sink in.”
I cleared my throat. “I want protection for my family.”
Sammy nodded his head. He moved like water.
A moment passed.
“It’s yours,” he said. “I start the bidding at one red magic book.”
The gavel rang out.
When my fingers touched the book, it was warm and lively, the leather living and breathing. What did the book contain that had never been found? What could he find inside it that was lost forever to me?
But there had to be more courage in trading its mysteries and receiving the lives of June, Linwood, and Stan.
I held the book aloft.
After all, the spell was still mine. Things got bad, I could make Sammy appear again.
“Sold!” The gavel rang the third and final time.
Sammy walked around the podium and stood before me, palm extended.
“Protection first.”
Sammy smiled, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. Those eyes were like an Arkansas pond right after it frosted over. “You already have protection,” he said, vanishing the book from my hand.
Right then, I knew I’d been cheated. “Those amulets?”
His smile was gone. “The spell,” he said. “The one you purchased to make me appear.”
My head clouded up like bumblebees, and all the bad things that had happened to me danced before my eyes like a circle of crazed Apaches. “But who needs to appear, besides you?”
“You want someone to disappear.”
Deane, of course.
“You want someone to disappear, you do the spell backwards. Instead of the night of the full moon, you do it on the day of the new moon.”
That was today.
Sammy scanned the room, full of gew-gaws but empty of other people. “You can do it right here, right now if you please.”
I started to feel relief, like the whole shebang was finally over. Then suddenly something niggled at the back of my brain. “But does making Deane disappear mean that the stuff in the book won’t work anymore?”
Sammy had already turned his back, walking away from me. The energy of Deane’s magic grew fainter and fainter. The power of the toys and my individual person grew stronger. “That’s a chance you’ll have to take, isn’t it?”
What other chance was there?
He vanished behind the curtain. You knew there was no way he was coming back out.
I sat in the chair, puzzling it all out, even past the chiming of the weird old clocks for one-thirty. They’d still be drinking their coffee, anyway.
The book was gone, Sammy was gone, and there wasn’t anything to do but try the spell backwards. So Deane would disappear, and maybe the bad stuff with her. What if I’d never stolen the money? When I had the money, Sammy had never appeared to me. But then I never could have bought the amulets or the magic spell.
All there was to do was fare forward.
I took out the spell.
Seemed like the opposite of love was always disappearance.
PART II