“Oh.” Lydia stared at her. “Oh, I see.”
“You do?” Beatrix said, hoping her sister had put two and two together.
“You’re falling for him.”
She stamped her foot in frustration. “No I’mnot. Listen—I don’t like the man, but he’s not trying to undermine us. Please trust me on this.”
Rosemarie looked as if she wanted to continue arguing, but Lydia held up a hand. “All right—we’ll leave Blackwell out of it,” she said. “It might make a big difference to us whether he’s working against the League, but for purposes of showing the world that we didn’t reserve the wrong weekend, it’s neither here nor there.”
Thank goodness. Beatrix leaned against the wall, relief and exhaustion turning her legs rubbery. “I showed the film to Helen Hickok. She expects to have a story in Sunday’s paper.”
Lydia’s brow furrowed. “How did you get to Baltimore? You didn’t take the car.”
“Train,” Beatrix lied. “Were you able to find a venue?”
Rosemarie heaved an aggravated sigh. “For Sunday, yes. But Meg and I were only able to get meeting space on Saturday through four o’clock.”
“But the vote’s at six!”
“Iknow,” Rosemarie said. “We tried all the other hotels again, each of the universities, the high schools—no one has space on Saturday. Our only option is a church that’s having bingo at 4:30. Oh, and I did manage to book rooms for all the out-of-towners, but only by spreading them across the other hotels and not mentioning we’re with the League.”
“Well, that’s ...” Beatrix groped for the words.
“Still a catastrophe,” Rosemarie supplied. “Inconvenient to all involved and—now that we can prove the governmentreally is out to get us—unnerving. I suspect the majority of the League, if pushed, would choose convenience and comfort over the possibility of effecting change by putting up a real fight.”
“If we can find a halfway decent place to stage the election, Imightstill have a chance at winning,” Lydia said. “If we can’t, I’m sunk.”
Beatrix bit her lip, trying to think of a solution. “We could rearrange the schedule, move the election earlier in the afternoon?—”
Rosemarie snorted. “Our esteemed president absolutely refuses to allow it.”
“I called her after dinner,” Lydia said. “She was as sympathetic as a vulture.”
“Never let it be said that Patricia Gossard doesn’t know a gift when it drops in her lap,” Rosemarie said, heading for the stairs.
“Wait,” Beatrix said, recollecting the oddness of their location. “Why did we have to watch the film down here? What’s wrong with the study?”
Rosemarie and Lydia glanced at each other.
“What?” she said, unable to take the suspense.
“Ella’s room is directly above it.” Lydia slipped a hand into hers. “Whoever switched the contracts needed access to the safe and the key. Someone living in this house had both.”
Beatrix pulled back, heart racing. No.No.“But Miss Massey?—”
“You don’t really believe it was Miss Massey,” Rosemarie said, almost gently.
Beatrix sank onto the stairs for lack of anywhere else to sit, pressing her palms against burning eyes. Rosemarie was right, of course. And if it wasn’t Miss Massey, all clues pointed to the woman she’d thought was her friend.
Beatrix staredat the report stamped CLASSIFIED and TOP SECRET. Something at the back of her mind balked at the idea of copying it.Don’t do it. Stop!But she needed the report to prove women could do magic. She threw her shoulders back and chanted the spell.
In burst Blackwell, and she remembered with a thrill of horror what came next. She couldn’t go through this. Not again, not even in a dream, which surely this was.
With a tremendous wrench that felt like extracting herself from drying cement, she forced her body to move, to do something other than reenact the worst moment of her adult life. She caught a glimpse of his shocked face as she dashed past him—out of the receiving room, straight out of the house.
The surprise value bought her a few seconds. But she could hear his footsteps pounding closer and closer behind her, feel the tips of his fingers as he tried to grab her by the almost-wizard’s coat she had no choice but to wear at work. She tore it off and hurled it behind her, hoping to catch him in the face. As she crossed into the woods, she pulled off her high-heeled boots, delicate and feminine and detested, andchucked those at him as well, not slowing to see if they connected.
Still he was almost upon her. So she shrugged out of her dress, its heavy brocade and useless ruffles weighing her down, and kicked it back. Feeling as if she would explode from the inability to take in enough air, she shed her corset, too.
