Miss Dane, standing on the porch, frowned at him. Miss Dane frowned at everybody, so he didn’t take it personally.
“Thank you, Omnimancer, I do appreciate this,” Lydia said, holding up the bottle as if to make it easier for an invisible watcher to see. Was Garrett lurking nearby, staring at them?
He nodded to Lydia, rubbed his arms and tried to think of something else.
When church was done,Beatrix drove everyone home, waiting until she turned up the driveway to casually say, “Ella and I will go right back out to pick Dot up, OK?”
She had hoped this would slide by. But there was no sliding anything by Rosemarie.
“It’s just ten o’clock,” she objected. “Pick her up in an hour. First, clean the bathroom.”
“I did that,” Beatrix said.
“Then double-check the assignment charts for the march.”
“Idid that,” Ella said.
Rosemarie snorted. “Then help me make the sandwiches for lunch.”
“I’ll do that,” Lydia said. She sounded—Beatrix couldn’t quite identify the emotion. Almost sad. “Go ahead, Bee.”
Beatrix drove herself and Ella to the women’s college in silence, promising herself—vowing, to use a word she did not take lightly—that she would spend more time with her sister. Once they’d given Dot the leaves and taught her thespell to magically preserve fresh fuel, they were done. Plan B wouldn’t need them.
Unless, of course, it went off the rails.
The doubt and dread she’d fought to keep at bay roiled her stomach. There had been no calls from Dot about a sick sister while she was gone for the Christmas break, but something still could have happened. With no way to safely communicate with her, they hadn’t been able to pass on the message about recruiting no League members. What if something was going awry in Philadelphia? How could they fix it from more than a hundred miles away?
But Dot gave them a sunny smile as she opened the door. Inside the bathroom, she assured them that all was well. Because she’d insisted on getting details about each downstream recruit, she knew for a fact that none were League members. She explained the code she’d come up with so her lieutenants in Philadelphia could stay in touch, a bit of subversive substitution that used “cooking” for magic and played off the theme from there: “flour” for leaves, “recipes” for recruits, etc.
Then a student banged on the door—“give someone else a turn, for Pete’s sake!”—and they had to make a hasty exit. The young woman waiting on the other side of the door stared at them as they came out, clearly not expecting more than one occupant.
“Dress emergency,” Ella said, deadpan. “You don’t want to know what I looked like ten minutes ago.”
Beatrix, smothering a laugh, brought up the rear. It wasn’t quite time to ferry Dot to the meeting, so they duckedinto her dorm room and found two boxes of the right size to each hold half the leaves. Dot addressed them and tucked the boxes in a good spot—at the foot of the coat rack, hidden by a long cloak.
Beatrix walked out of the building feeling astonishingly good. No more worrying about leaves. No more sneaking off. Plan B was now on automatic, and soon they would have the numbers they needed to descend on Washington and force the magiocracy to change.
Peter slumpedonto the pink toilet seat in Clara Daniels’ boarding-house bathroom, the bright-white of magic use staring back at him. A wizard had cast here recently, and not to plant bugs—nothing was hidden under these spells. It seemed Lydia’s fears were not misplaced: The magiocracy had flipped another of her leaders.
He rushed from the house, of a mind to return early to Ellicott Mills to warn her before the meeting. But he changed his mind and headed for Baltimore instead. Lydia already knew that any of the women there, minus Beatrix, Miss Knight and Miss Dane, could be a saboteur. This was his only near-term opportunity to check on Joan Hamilton, and he couldn’t afford to miss it.
When her bathroom also lit up like a Christmas tree, similarly unbugged, he leaned against the wall, feeling sick as a new, ugly suspicion popped fully born into his head. Heleft hoping—praying—that these spells reallyhadbeen cast by a wizard.
Marilyn Zuckerman’s house had spells just as bright as the other two, and once again in the bathroom, nowhere else.
He sped back to Ellicott Mills, headed for the women’s college, because he had to know. Was Dot Yamaguchi’s bathroom—the bathroom she took Beatrix and Miss Knight to before Christmas—similarly bespelled?
He crept invisibly up the stairs of the dorm, avoiding a student clattering down them, and waited at the end of the second-floor hallway until it emptied out. Then he opened the bathroom door.
It wasn’t the multi-stall affair he’d expected. The room was single-serve, which meant he could lock the door—and so too could Beatrix and Miss Knight, if they’d been leading Miss Yamaguchi here to tell her the secret about women and magic. He braced himself. He cast the spell.
He stared dully at the results, not wanting to believe it. Then he grabbed his demarcation stones, slipped out and forced his way into Miss Yamaguchi’s dorm. How far had this gone? Had Beatrixtaughtthese four women magic, not just demonstrated it?
Would he find leaves hidden here?
It was possible to go through every nook and cranny of a small dorm, and he intended to do it. No spells had previously been cast here, but he pulled the clothes from the hamper, looked under the mattresses, opened suitcases and checked for loose floorboards.
Fifteen minutes into this, he found two boxes stacked behind the coat rack, obscured by a cloak and addressed to women in Philadelphia. He opened them. And he saw just how wrong he’d been to think he understood Beatrix Harper, let alone could trust her.
