Part 1 of "Out of the Frying Pan" for #SampleSunday / Feb. 20, 2011

Part 1 of “Out of the Frying Pan…”

She was arguing with a werewolf about the price of saffron when the veiled woman wandered in.

Veils were presently having one of those small renaissances that the fashion features of bygone years sometimes have, so the shoulder-length sweep of dark gauze by itself wasn’t enough to seriously distract Annabelle from the ongoing disagreement. She turned back to Harl and said, “Look, you can't expect to pay supermarket prices for this stuff, especially since this is not a supermarket! In case you haven't noticed. When you consider what my saffron goes through before it gets here – ”

“I know what you say it goes through,” Harl said, leaning on his elbows on the counter and absently twirling one side of his mustache, “but the prices you’re discussing are insane! Only the fact that you're the extremely nice lady that I know you are – for a one-skinner – has kept me from complaining about the markup until now…”

Oh boy, Annabelle thought, here we go, the Witch With A Heart of Gold ploy. Why is it we’re all either Good Mommies or Crone Mothers and never anything in between? And next, I bet, comes the not-so-thinly-veiled request for a discount. How many seconds will it take? She decided not to wait -- possibly since Harl had arrived in a middle transitional stage, and his studded biker leathers were starting to come across as increasingly incongruous when taken together with his burgeoning ear hair and the muzzle that Annabelle could swear was lengthening as she watched. “Smile when you call me that,” she said. “How would you know how many skins I have hanging in the closet?” She pushed some of the small impulse-buy merchandise off to one side of the cash register and leaned on the counter too, while the veiled lady in the dark amber kaftan ambled around the far product island, apparently intent on the cookware. “Harl,” Annabelle said, looking up at him, “my markup has a whole lot to do with what my suppliers charge me. We're not talking about scamp short-stigma saffron grown on some vacant lot in Marbella! We are talking about prime violet-petal sativus-x corms containing back-patched genetic material from the original Akkadian azupiru heritage strain, and planted on a particular south-facing hillside outside a village in the Cevenne hills in the department of Gard in southern France. And it’s not,” and she held up a finger as Harl started drawing breath to say something, “just the corm stock at issue. Before the saffron was planted, that hillside had to be certified safe by the Institut Nationale des Thaumatoxisme, a government regulatory agency which, at great expense which you’d better believe gets passed down the line, first cleared the ground of piled-up malign influences. Kind of like dealing with toxic waste, except that toxic waste doesn't normally leap out of the ground in the shape of a blood-colored dragon and twist your head off.”

Harl idly picked the lid off the bowl of lollipops by the cash register: Annabelle slapped his hand, took the lid out of it, and replaced it on the bowl. “Do you want to rot your teeth? Stick to Milk-Bones. Then the detoxed ground in question got checked over by not one but two feng shui agencies, one hired by the grower and one commissioned by the distributor, each of them checking the other, and trying hard to find details about the topology that the other geomancer has missed. And that cost got passed down to me too. Along with the labor costs of the nice local people who break their backs picking all those fiddly little stamens out of the flowers on Samhain Eve every year.” She sighed, picked up the lid off the bowl, and went burrowing among the lollipops, hunting for one with a chocolate center. Unfortunately she had eaten them all: she dropped the lid back on the bowl. “So you should not be complaining to me that this stuff costs eighty bucks a gram. Because the price means that when you and some nice lady friend who’s also in her second skin and also in the mood for luuuuuuve get together at the full of the Moon and stick it up your noses, you’ll get the desired effect…and not find yourself stuck in your skins the next morning when you need to change and go to work. Nor will you fail one of those embarrassing random mana tests later in the week. So if you want to pay less, sure, go on, go down the street to Dominick’s or the Jewel and pay twenty bucks a gram. What you get’ll be either the Marbella vacant-lot saffron, or maybe dyed safflower stamens, and you’ll deserve it.”

Harl rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on, Annabelle, they have to be ripping you off somewhere along the line. If you go online there are bulk-order places that’ll cut you a much better deal, all you have to do is…” Blah, blah, blah, Annabelle thought, doing her best to look courteously interested, but feeling less inclined by the moment to indulge Harl’s pouting. This was the third or fourth time this month he’d started giving her grief about prices. The first couple of times, an insufficiently clued-in customer might be allowed to get away with it: but Harl knew perfectly well that the special needs of weres called for a much higher-grade spice than “single skinners” or other varieties of just plain mortal could get away with. I may lose him as a customer…

But Annabelle was finding it harder to bring herself to care. Harl had never referred anyone to her, as far as she could tell, and he frankly didn’t buy enough stuff in the course of a month to make it worth her effort to try to hang on to him. Getting more weekday traffic in here was a much bigger issue. She flicked a glance at Mrs. Kaftan-and-Veil, who was still eyeing the cookware, and now reached up a thin wrinkled hand to touch a pot; cast iron clonged faintly against iron in her wake as she moved away and headed around the far side of the island toward the generic spice racks. If I could please have about fifty more like you every morning, Annabelle thought. More plain-vanilla mortals who can touch cold iron and don’t make me order in high-end nonferrous utensils at high-end prices and low-end profit margins… I’ve got to find ways to leverage our advertising to a wider customer base without alienating the supranormal market. It was just one more aspect of her ongoing problem. The overhead involved in keeping this place going was proving to be higher than she’d thought it would be at first, after the rent increase last year. In fact, after this morning’s jolly little visit to from the shopping center’s unit management agent, who after a look at the store’s books had started sweetly insinuating to Annabelle that she really should move downstairs into a smaller unit – Yeah, off the main drag where I’ll get even less walk-in than I get now. She looked up at Harl again. Oh, come on, the phone’s been ringing all morning with bad news, can’t I have a little more, please, just to shut this mouthy wolf up?...

But the phone would not oblige her. I’ll throw a cantrip at it, Annabelle thought. Or him. And the Threefold Rede can just go chase itself. The thought was tempting. But no. “Harl,” Annabelle said, “the heartbreak of mange is a terrible thing. I wouldn’t wish it on a dog…”

He gave her a sudden horrified look. See, that’s all it takes: I’m the Crone Mommy now. And ask me if I care!

“Oh, all right,” Harl said, checking his watch. “I have to get going or I’ll miss my train. Just give me a gram to hold me over.”

Train, shmain, Annabelle thought as she pulled out the electronic scale pad and set it on the counter. Around the curve of the world, the moon’s going full, and you have a hot date waiting… She slipped out from behind the counter and made her way to the spice cabinet at the back of the store. It looked very rustically domestic, all distressed oak and diamond-paned glass: but it had better security on it than the cash register did, and a more advanced alarm system than some drugstores. Everything in it would bring street prices in the hundreds of bucks per gram: the saffron was not the most expensive thing in there by a long shot. Darkmoon asafetida, wattleseed, chokepard aconite, king basil, melegueta, calamus, double-detox nightshade, whiplash galangal, pepperbush, forest anise, the usual range of psychotropic mushrooms and chiles, and even the wolfsbane that Harl would probably be scandalized to see sitting in carefully measured sachets right underneath the saffron that was a were’s preferred aphrodisiac – they were all here, and dozens more: some genetically tailored for supranormals’ use, some for spellwork, some just the best of their kind for whatever purpose. Annabelle prided herself on having the best spice selection in the center city: since she opened up, no practitioner of the Art had to go outside the Loop for that special potion ingredient, for a really good hiera picra or the sixty-six ingredient mithridatium that had won her the silver medal in the Esoterica Magazine “Compound Interest” competition last year. Or, for that matter, for tyrannosaurus garlic, or a decent pair of oven mitts that went all the way up to your elbows: you couldn’t be expected to spend your day muttering protective spells over everything.

She put her right thumb to the particular spot on the woodwork that her witchery had sensitized to her aura, and said three words under her breath. The door unlatched, and Annabelle took the precautionary look around her before reaching back for the saffron: she’d had snatch-and-run jobs done on her before. But Harl was leaning on the counter, looking more bored by the moment, and Mrs. Veil-And-Kaftan was flipping through a pile of screen-printed Irish linen dishtowels, and nobody else was in the place.

Annabelle picked up the saffron container, checked it the regulation three times, and locked the cabinet up again. Back at the counter she paused a moment to rummage underneath for a shopping bag and a slip of measuring paper. “Harl, how do you want this today?” she said. “Envelope? Capsule?”

“Capsule will be fine,” Harl said. Now he was fidgeting and looking eager to be out of there. Annabelle busied herself with the scale, carefully tipping out the little golden threads onto the white measuring paper. The scale spun up to .998 gram, then to 1.004: Annabelle looked at the tangle of saffron, then pulled out a couple of extra threads to bring it up to .005, sealed the service container and put it down.

Harl raised a quizzical and increasingly furry eyebrow at her. “Four’s a death number,” Annabelle said, and tapped a button on the scale to bring up the total. “Call my part of it eighty even,” she said. “Eighty-six seventy after the City’s cut.”

“I think we need a new mayor,” Harl growled, doing a little shimmy to get his wallet out of the pants pocket of the very tight leathers.

“Always thought one more Daley was one too many,” Annabelle said. “Especially one who’d just come back from a council-sponsored junket to Haiti. At least for a change this politician can’t sue when the papers accuse him of being a zombie.” She folded the measuring paper scoop-fashion, tipped the saffron into the capsule, snapped its top shut, wrapped the paper around it, reached down and snapped off a length of red anti-demon thread from the spool, wound it around the paper and capsule, dropped them both into the little shopping bag. “There you go, Harl. Enjoy!”

“Will do. Thanks – ” And he was out the door.

“And in Hecate’s name don’t use it in risotto!” she called after him: but he was already around the corner.

Annabelle sighed. It wasn't as if every word she told him about the production of the saffron wasn't true. Somehow, though, he still thought she was cheating him, and she felt wounded. This is not the job for me, Annabelle thought for the hundredth time recently. I’m too thin-skinned for retail. I should be doing something creative --

The phone rang. “Now you do it,” Annabelle said under her breath. “Thanks so much.” She picked it up. “A Taste of Spice, good morning, this is Annabelle, how can I help you?”

A busy signal blatted into her ear. Annabelle frowned and hung up a lot more gently then she wanted to. It was one more of what seemed like an endless number of hang-ups that were the legacy of the phone company having typoed her number in the new directory: the swapped digits meant she kept getting calls meant for one of the local massage parlors.

The phone rang again: she picked up. “A Taste of Spice, good morning, this is Annabelle, how can I help you?”

“By not using your I-am-a-stern-mommy-and-not-a-dodgy-masseuse phone voice on me?” George Dimitri’s voice said.

She grinned and leaned on the counter again, watching Mrs. Kaftan turn away from the towels toward the cookbooks. “It was an accident,” Annabelle said. “How’s business this morning?”

“Three divorces, two injury suits and a C&D letter,” George said. He was an old college buddy of Annabelle’s, the only one of her fellow freshman biochemistry students who had been completely unfreaked to finding that there was a witch in the class. They had dated briefly, then stopped dating, but remained fast friends even when their university tracks had wildly diverged and George had dumped his humanities major and gone pre-law. Now he was a paralegal working out of a shopfront community-services operation in Humboldt Park while he worked on his Masters. His daily pre-lunch phone call was always a breath of fresh air to someone whose personal universe often seemed bounded on three sides by cookware and on the fourth by mulish rare-herb distributors.

“Busy morning,” Annabelle said, watching idly as Mrs. Kaftan got down a copy of The Kitchen Minimalist and started going through it, head bent. The problem is that the veil makes it impossible to see what she’s thinking. Or looking at. And now that I think of it, there’s the kaftan, too…

“You have no idea,” George said. “The cease-and-desist was for a ghost.”

Annabelle started wondering about that kaftan as she watched the woman wearing it page through the cookbook. You could hide a lot of things in a kaftan’s sleeves… she thought. “For a ghost,” Annabelle said, “or to a ghost?”

“To.”

The woman turned the book’s pages carefully. Clean hands, Annabelle thought. And well kept. Not homeless…. Yet you couldn’t always tell. New Bloomingdale’s bag… But the bag you were carrying wasn’t necessarily a reliable indication of anything, either. “Think it’s likely to work?”

“You can never tell. Then again, if the ghost retains counsel, it gets interesting.”

“Messy, I bet,” Annabelle said.

“Please,” George said. “I wasn’t going to get into the ectoplasm, so close to lunchtime.”

Annabelle chuckled. “What’s legal precedent for a dead person countersuing a live one?”

“Depends on the nature of the suit,” George said, “but generally, I’d say a good rule would be, try not to get caught in between them…”

The veiled woman put the cookbook away and started to make her way toward the counter. “Can I call you in a few?” Annabelle said.

“Sure, no probs. Got time for lunch today, if you do.”

“It’s been quiet this morning,” Annabelle said. “I might take half an hour.” The veiled woman stopped in front of the counter, put her bag down. “Talk to you shortly. Bye.” She hung up, and as she did, the woman reached up and put back her veil.

Annabelle found herself taking a breath of surprise, one that she tried to keep from being too long or obvious. She wasn’t sure exactly what she’d been expecting to see under that veil – someone very old, perhaps, uncertain about their looks, possibly even disfigured – but not this: not this astonishingly young-looking face, clean-cut, high-cheekboned, almost fierce. The hands she had seen as thin from across the room were not, as she’d at first assumed, much wrinkled with age: they were just very slender, very fine-boned. But the hands would not long hold anyone’s attention while those eyes were on you. They were a brown so dark they were almost black: and though the hair pulled back from the brow above them was long and silver-white, Annabelle somehow felt sure that it had once been nearly the same color, a dark malt brown -- maybe with the occasional russet highlight speaking of hours spent out under some southern sun. “How can I help you, ma’am?” Annabelle said.

“Well, I have these – ” The lady bent a moment to go rummaging in that bag again. Strange how so Midwestern an accent could come from such an Italianate face: but then there’d been a lot of Italian blood around here for many years. Annabelle found herself looking, not at the hands now, but the sleeves of the kaftan as the lady rummaged. The garment’s color, that nondescript beige, now seemed a lot less important as Annabelle realized it wasn’t actually a kaftan at all, and was made of some kind of slubbed silk, fabulously lustrous, multiply wrapped and draped. Vintage, Annabelle thought. Or antique -- She was beginning to think that what she had here was one of those wealthy, eccentric older ladies, unmarried scions of trust-fund families, who occasionally escape the keepers in their city penthouses and run off for a few hours to do something, anything, unsupervised.

“Here we are,” the lady said, and brought up an armful of rolled-up things that rustled, placing them carefully on the counter.

They were almost the same color as the kaftan: at first glimpse, Annabelle thought they were perhaps rolls of the same silken material. But as she got a better look, she saw she was mistaken. The lady took one of the rolls and spread it out; it crackled softly under her hands. The material was something like a thick, coated paper, softly glossy, written all over with beautiful abstract patterns -- some kind of lovely, non-repeating linear design. “Oh,” Annabelle said. Old wallpaper? she thought. But there was no reason not to put the best possible construction on what was before her. “I see. …Table runners? Yes, they're very handsome, aren't they?” She stroked the surface of one: the ink or caustic used to produce the dark patterns could be felt as something slightly raised. “But there's not much market for this kind of thing the past couple of years, I’m afraid. Right now the ‘naked table’ look is all the rage – tablecloths are out, not even placemats are in any more. Napkins are still hanging on, but…” She shrugged: it was one of those fads that came and went in home design, and Annabelle for her own part looked forward to the day when it would pass.

“You’re not interested, then,” the lady said.

Annabelle sighed, unable to simply ignore the disappointment in the voice. Often enough some senior citizen would bring a package of some unidentifiable herb or some attic-derived artifact that he or she thought was rare, trying to make a little money off it – or in some cases, just looking for a little contact with another human being. Overheads or no overheads, Annabelle thought, how much would it cost me to make this lady feel a little happier than she is at the moment? “Well,” Annabelle said, “it would depend on the price, of course – ”

“Three hundred and eighty-nine thousand, five hundred and twelve dollars,” the lady said. “And seventy-six cents.”

Annabelle’s eyes widened. “Uh,” she said. “Uh, no, ma’am, I’m sorry, I don’t think I can quite see my way to spending that much for them. My apologies.”

“That’s quite all right, dear,” the lady said, “quite all right.” And she gathered up the armful of rolls again, dropped them into her bag, smiled at Annabelle, and turned away.

Annabelle let out a breath and raised her eyebrows. And seventy-six cents, she thought, bemused. Mrs. Kaftan had stopped by the cookbook display near the front of the store, and was fussing with her bag again, rearranging her rolls. There’s one for the books, Annabelle thought. George’ll be fascinated to hear about this, I bet. I wonder, does the number mean something, or… But she abruptly lost her train of thought as Mrs. Kaftan came up with several of those rolls and a cigarette lighter, flicked the lighter into life, and touched it to one end of the rolls.

“Uh, excuse me, ma’am?” Annabelle said, hustling out from behind the counter. But it was already much too late. Mrs. Kaftan dropped the rolls onto the floor and stepped back, watching with a rather clinical interest as they burst enthusiastically into flame. Dear Lady above us, did she soak those in lighter fluid or something, look at them go –

A second later the smoke detector began to screech, and the sprinklers directly above the spot where the scrolls lay burning merrily on the floor went off instantly – Annabelle had made sure that they were reset that way, after that last time with the fire elemental. But the sprinklers’ aim wasn’t at all what it should have been, and they managed to soak everything but the spot where the flames were rising. Out in the mall, the area fire alarm went off, clanging enthusiastically as Mrs. Kaftan turned her back unconcernedly on the burning scrolls and headed out into the concourse.

Annabelle was much too busy stomping on the scrolls to see where the lady went. She shortly became busier still as mall security showed up, and the shopping center’s fire officer and his staff, and about half a dozen other people who had no particular business responding to a fire alarm. The crowd wound up taking up most of the front of Annabelle’s retail space, but there didn’t seem much point in any of them being there -- the fire had burnt itself out within a matter of a minute or so. Nothing remained of the scrolls but a few charred scraps, and a scatter of soot and ash.

“I can’t believe how fast they went up,” Annabelle said to the fire officer: “it was as if they were soaked in something – ”

“Not much smoke,” the fire officer said, looking around him thoughtfully. “You got lucky. The ventilators’ll clear it out in half an hour or so.”

“Random vandalism…” said one of his subordinates. “Been seeing too much of that kind of thing lately.”

“Or some kind of grudge, maybe,” said the center’s publicity manager. “Like the people who turned those basilisks loose in Macy’s because they’re still not over the name change from Marshall Fields – ”

“Or someone looking for an insurance payout,” said the building’s business manager, a little pale man in a shiny suit.

Annabelle gave him a look. “What kind of payout?” she said. “Are you suggesting I set this up?”

“No, of course not, but – ”

“You’ve never seen this woman before?” the fire officer said.

Annabelle shook her head. “Never.”

“Well, we’ll put a banning order on her,” said the head security officer. “She won’t get back in.” He glanced out into the mall, then looked over his shoulder at his assistant. “Get down to the office and pull the recording from the number three and four cameras on this level. One of them will have her.”

The assistant disappeared – literally: he was a licensed teleport, as most of the security people were. One by one the interested parties started to go away, leaving Annabelle staring at a sooty, scorched patch of floor and at the business manager, who was looking at Annabelle as if she was just as besmirched. “It’s always a problem,” he said, “when a business starts attracting the wrong kind of clientele – ”

This is the same song that what’s-her-name the unit management lady was starting to sing the other day, Annabelle thought with some annoyance. Begins with a B. Barbara…? “Mr. Farnsworth,” Annabelle said. “This is not a conversation we need to be having right this minute. Right now, I need to scrub this floor – ”

Farsnworth hastily took himself away, probably not wanting to be associated with any labor so plebeian. But he wasn’t through with her yet, as Annabelle discovered about ten minutes later as she finished cleaning the floor up. That was when one of Farnsworth’s minions arrived with a stack of papers, the incident report Annabelle had to fill out.

Half an hour later, when George finally arrived, she was still muttering in astonishment at how much paperwork one crazy lady with a few rolls of antiquated wallpaper and a twenty-five-cent lighter could produce. Now it was George’s turn to lean over the counter as Harl had done, but with a lot less mustache-twirling: for all his six feet of height and what he called his Serious Lawyer suit, George’s fresh face and big blue innocent eyes made him look more like an escaped choirboy than anything else. “You’re not even going to have time for a sandwich, at this rate,” he said, watching her start signing the bottoms of the forms.

“Yeah, I will,” Annabelle said, glancing out at the concourse. “Wednesdays are usually dead, and this one’s deader than usual, fire or no fire. I’ll close up for an hour.”

“And you never saw this lady before?”

Annabelle shook her head, signed the last form, pushed the paperwork away. “It’s all a mystery to me,” she said, reaching under the counter to get her purse out of the locked drawer.

“You should do a scrying when you get home,” George said, heading out to stand in front of the store while Annabelle pulled out her keys and started the security gate rolling down out of the ceiling above the doors.

She ducked under the gate and stood looking up and down the concourse for a moment while the gate clanged into place: she knelt to spell the padlock closed, then stood up, dusting off her knees. “I’ve been thinking about that,” she said. “Where’s lunch?”

“Your choice. Plantain City or Dodo’s.”

They walked down the north stairway together. “No more pastrami,” Annabelle said, “not after last week. What’s at Plantain City?”

George went off into one of his patented restaurant reviews, in this case involving much Jamaican food and some spices even Annabelle wasn’t entirely sure she could identify. After the fourth or fifth lovingly described entrée, she stopped him, laughing. “I will never understand how such a desperate foodie is working the paralegal side of the street!”

“Because it’s a foodie that likes to be able to afford being a foodie,” George said. “And today was payday, so the jerk chicken’s on me. But, seriously, ‘Belle, if Miss Amateur Arson shows up again, call me first and I’ll do lawyer magic at her. The last thing you need is to lose all that high-priced stock to some dementia-ridden firebug. Has the insurance company ever paid off on that fire elemental thing?”

She sighed as they headed out the center’s doors into the street. “Still working on it.”

“I told you, you should have called me first. Make sure you do it next time!”

She promised him, of course: and she promised him again, over the jerk chicken, and again, on the way back to the store. The afternoon was perhaps mercifully quiet after that: from lunch to closing time Annabelle sold nothing but a cast-iron frying pan, a copy of Cordon Bleu Cooking For Dummies, and two ounces of leaf malabathrum -- guaranteeing the demure young woman who bought it, at the very least, an extremely interesting bath if she and the friend who might be in the tub with her both knew the cantrip that went with the herb.

Annabelle closed up the store and caught the bus home to South Lawndale, still musing over the veiled woman, who hadn’t struck her as anything like a firebug, despite what George might have said. All right, Annabelle thought as she headed up the front steps of her condo and got out her house keys, maybe I’m not a mental health expert, but crazy? She wasn’t crazy. There had been something very thoughtful about those eyes: crazy would have seemed the exact opposite of what was behind them…

She let herself in, shut the front door behind her, and just stood there in the hallway for a moment. But it wasn’t the hallway she was seeing: it was those scrolls…

Don’t ignore your instincts, she remembered her scrying instructor telling her. When you’re seeing, see. And the advice had paid off often enough.

Annabelle slipped out of her coat, threw it over the coat rack, and went into the living room. There she turned on a couple of lights, for it was starting to get dim outside. Twilight’s always good for scrying, she thought. Not quite day, not quite night, both sides of the border visible. When’s nautical twilight today?...

***