Lydia communicated this to her in notes shared furtively and then burned in the bathroom, just as she herself had slipped Lydia notes explaining what had happened. Neither of them wanted to trust that they weren’t being watched.
As for the explosion in the New Mexico desert, she could find no news about it. She hoped that meant no one had died.
Now, as she sat with Peter, Rosemarie keeping her company on the other side of the bed because Lydia was back in class, she tried to push these considerations from her head. But new anxieties kept popping up. Peter had no insurance. How long would the money he’d socked away pay for his care? She had no source of income now. How could she get a new job, with no one in town hiring and her car on the fritz? She could teleport reliably, now that sheunderstood the secret to knitting was treating dayside as if it were dreamside, but would it not be tempting fate and a jail sentence to travel that way all the time?
“Miss Harper?”
She looked up. Detective Tanner with the D.C. police, who’d questioned her twice before, stood in the doorway. “Could I have a word?”
Rosemarie got up from her seat.
“No, wait,” the detective said. “This is going to be a bit of a shock, Miss Harper—you may want someone here with you.”
Beatrix swallowed, holding Peter’s hand tighter. “Yes. Rosemarie, please stay.”
Tanner closed the door to the room, which Peter had to himself. The detective pulled up a chair, sat and let out a long sigh. He ran a hand through his dark crew cut. “Well. First off, both you and Wizard Blackwell were drugged.”
She stared at him, open-mouthed. How did they know?
“The hospital ran the usual tests, but then we asked for some less usual ones, given the lack of information about what happened to you. You both had a banned substance in your system that morning that produces confusion and extreme suggestibility.”
“Why—how—” she began, trying to think of what she would ask if this was the first she were hearing of it.
“When did Wizard Garrett propose marriage to you?”
The question hung in the room. None of the officers had asked her anything about Garrett until now. She licked dry lips. “In—in October.”
“And you declined.”
“Yes.”
“But he kept returning.”
She hesitated, then nodded.
“And on Monday, he convinced a Miss Sederey to pretend to injuries so Wizard Blackwell would come out to tend to her.”
“Yes,” she said, dread rising in her throat.
“What happened, Miss Harper? What did Wizard Garrett do?”
“He … he …”
“He broke into the omnimancer’s house,” Rosemarie said. “He’d found out that Beatrix had agreed to marry Wizard Blackwell, and he was angry. Omnimancer Blackwell, as you probably have heard, discovered the ruse and teleported back, worried for Beatrix’s safety.”
“Miss Harper?” Tanner looked at her for confirmation.
Beatrix bit her lip. Rosemarie had backed her into a corner. “Yes,” she whispered.
“Omnimancer Blackwell convinced Wizard Garrett to leave,” Rosemarie said. “Didn’t he, Beatrix?”
“Yes,” she said again, the word sounding all wrong in her ears, meaningless.
Tanner leaned in. “And then what happened, Miss Harper?”
“I … I …”
“She left for work the next morning,” Rosemarie said. “But what happened between then and when she and Omnimancer Blackwell were discovered in the park, we haveno idea. Her memory is a blank. And now I think we know why.”
