“Right,” she said as the girl sat. “Have any of you passed information about us to the government?”
Rosemarie and Ella said “no” in unison. Meg, trembling, whispered “yes.”
“Meg!”Lydia’s eyes were wide with shock. “You were pretending to believe in the cause? All these years?”
Meg stared at her lap. “No. I do believe in it.”
“Then ... why? Did they threaten you?”
She hesitated. Beatrix stepped in: “Explain.”
The words poured out on command. “My family had a reversal at the beginning of the year. They don’t have the money to keep me at Hazelhurst. The government offered to pay my tuition.”
“Ah.” Rosemarie shook her head. “Never mind about equal rights and justice so long as you get what you want.”
Color flooded back into Meg’s face. “It’s notlikethat!”
“Oh? Do enlighten us.”
“I gave them a lot of completely pointless information. And I thought when I occasionally had to tell them something sensitive, or do something damaging, I could just”—she waved a hand—“fix it after the fact.”
“Like the conference invitations,” Ella said, eyes narrowed. “You handed them over ten short.”
“Yes, but then I ‘discovered’ the problem and mailed out the rest, so it didn’t do any harm.”
Ella slammed her hands on the table. “It most certainly did! It made Lydia, Rosemarie and Beatrix—Beatrix, my best friend—thinkIwas the spy!”
Meg looked away. “I’m sorry.”
“The caterer who backed out—was that your doing?” Beatrix said.
“I just told the wizard who it was. I didn’t think the company would break the contract,” she said, half-pleading, half-defiant.
“And the hotel?” Rosemarie loomed over Meg. “What about that?”
“I didn’t switch the contracts or know they were going to be switched, Iswear.”
But only Beatrix’s questions had the force of magic behind them. And she didn’t trust Meg anymore, not one whit. “What roledidyou play in that?”
“The wizard said he wanted to see it. I told him when the house would be empty. I came along to show him where the safe and key were hidden, and to make sure he didn’t steal anything. I don’t know how he switched the contracts. He must already have had the altered copy.”
As she looked around at the glares aimed at her, Meg added: “He said he just wanted tolook!And the contract had such a penalty for backing out, it never occurred to me that we’d have a problem!”
“Which wizard?” Simply asking the question made Beatrix’s chest constrict. “What’s his name?”
“Smith, he said. I don’t think it really was, though.”
“Amazing bit of deduction,” Ella muttered.
Beatrix swallowed, trying to ease the vise-tight feeling. “Handsome man? Tall, reddish eyebrows, high cheekbones, Romanesque nose, mid-thirties? Or a bit older, high forehead, perhaps a tendency to wear dark glasses?”
“I—I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Did you pay absolutely no attention?” Rosemarie snapped.
“All wizards look basically the same,” Meg said, a sullen edge to the words. “It’s difficult to see past the blinding silver hair. Besides, I only met him the one time.”
“It was a different wizard the other times?” Lydia asked.
