“Perhaps.” Rosemarie did not sound convinced. “For now, try to avoid telling Ella or Miss Massey anything important. Meg, too, I suppose. And Beatrix,doplease get some useful information about your employer, will you?”
Beatrix swallowed, unaccountably torn. She shouldn’t feel any loyalty to Blackwell. She shouldn’t. But it took realeffort to make herself say, “He was visited today by a general.”
“Well, now—that’s interesting.” Rosemarie turned on the bench, giving Beatrix her full attention. “Why?”
“They talked in a sound-proofed room. I couldn’t hear what they were saying—I did try.”
She decided not to share the short exchange shehadbeen able to hear. Rosemarie and Lydia would see it as proof certain that Blackwell was in town on an anti-League assignment. She wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt until she could find out more.
That was only reasonable, wasn’t it?
On Tuesday,Peter putOmnimancing 101next to the sink and left Miss Harper alone with it for an hour while he repaired the settling foundation at city hall.
On Wednesday, he tackled Mr. Edderly’s roof after pullingUseful Spells for All Occasionsalmost entirely out of the bookcase to draw her attention to it.
On Thursday, he handed her an overflowing box of spellbooks and asked her to shelve them for him while he harvested a fresh batch of leaves he didn’t really need, not after the group effort.
She glanced atOmnimancing 101but didn’t touch it. She pushedUseful Spells for All Occasionsback into place. And the closest she came to cracking open any of the boxed books was when one slipped from her hands and fell to the floor.
He was getting desperate. On Friday, he decided, he would go for broke.
“Here’ssomething I’ve been pondering,” Beatrix said, keeping her voice as nonchalant as possible. “Can magic be used to record sound? Or images?”
The pan Blackwell had been drying clanged onto the countertop. “Sorry—clumsy of me. Without recording equipment, you mean? Like a telephone tap?”
“Oh—cana telephone be tapped magically?”
“I believe so.”
She made a mental note to tell Lydia and Rosemarie not to say anything of importance on the phone. But a tap couldn’t explain their leak. They avoided making long-distance calls—too expensive—and didn’t bother with the phone for talking to local League members, all of whom lived either at the college or at Cedarlawn with her.
“That’s interesting,” she said, “but I was thinking of an incantation that works like a Dictaphone or camera.”
“I’m afraid there’s no such spell. Why were you pondering that?”
Because she, Lydia and Rosemarie had spent all week trying to find recording devices in the house to no avail, so she wanted a magical eavesdropping explanation for their troubles rather than a traitorous boarder.
“Because,” she said, scrubbing the worktable furiously, “it struck me that magic could revolutionize the film industry.”
She was painfully aware how thin the reason sounded, so she kept going. “It would certainly make newsreels a lot easier to produce, wouldn’t it? And maybe it could even revive the idea of broadcasting images directly into people’s homes in a way that wouldn’t require such expensive equipment. I wonder why magic can do some things and not others. Is there a common thread?”
Dear God, she was babbling. But Blackwell seemed to take her question at face value.
“If thereisa common thread, we’ve missed it. Magic is frustrating that way.” He hung up the towel and glanced at the prioritized to-do list taped to one of the cabinet doors. “Painkiller is next. That’s one of the few brews that doesn’t require spellcasting until the very end. Think you can handle everything up to that point while I see to the Fischers’ beetle problem?”
She flipped to the instruction page in the brewing manual. “Looks simple enough. Go ahead—Mr. Fischer said the beetles are destroying his farm.”
“Don’t expect me back in less than two hours. Beetles are devious. Oh—do me a favor,” he added, pausing in the doorway. “When you finish, could you find homes for some new ingredients? A special order came in. I stuck the box in the receiving room to get it out of the way.”
“Certainly,” she said, surveying the worktable with pleasant anticipation.
She fell into a rhythm of chopping, enjoying the challenge of cutting everythingjustso, and in half an hour had hit the point where a wizard’s touch was needed. She covered the container to keep dust from floating in and went off to find the special order.
No box was evident when she poked her head into the receiving room. It proved to be sitting under the desk—he wasn’t kidding about “out of the way”—and she conked her head against the center drawer as she retrieved it. She shot an acid glare at the offender as she stood up.
It was open about an inch, the edge of a document sticking out. She opened it further to get the blockage out of the way, mainly so she could slam the drawer shut in a satisfying manner, but was stopped dead by the title page of the report she was about to shove to the back.
Instances of Magical Ability in the Female Population: Field tests, 1931-32.
