“Don’t you worry about that a bit. If necessary, we’ll finish your case pro bono.”
“She means on a contingency fee basis,” Sheyenne interrupted, rising from her desk. “One-third of the monetary award, plus costs, but only if we win.”
“We’ll fight for Justice, “Robin said. “Alma has been wronged, and you have been wronged. The publisher’s mistake caused your suffering, and I won’t stand for that.” Robin put her arm around the witch’s shoulders. “Come and sit down, and we’ll talk about the next step.”
With a wan, stiff-upper-lip smile, Mavis trundled toward the conference room with a swish of her black gown. The door to the room wasn’t wide enough to accommodate the large sow and the large witch at the same time, so Mavis let the pig walk in ahead of her. After they invited me to join them, I moved one of the chairs away from the long table so that the pig would have a place to stand.
Alma was Mavis’s sister, just as largely built, although she’d had blond hair (with occasional black roots, which might be the reason for the dark spots on the sow’s hide now). The two witches had bought a new book of obscure spells released by Howard Phillips Publishing—“We Love Our Craft.” But due to an unfortunate typo in the incantations, one of the spells had gone horribly wrong: Instead of turning the two rather homely witches into svelte Aphrodite look-alikes, the spell backfired and transformed Alma into a fat sow. She’d been that way ever since. All of Mavis’s attempts to reverse the spell had failed.
I remember how distraught the witch was when she first led the large pig into our offices, weeping. This was exactly the type of case that got Robin’s passion. “A spelling error in a book of spells is a clear example of gross negligence,” she said. “Look at the damage it caused! The publisher hasn’t even offered to correct their mistake. We have to stop this before others suffer the same fate.”
“I don’t think the book had a very large printing,” Mavis admitted. “We had to special-order it.”
“They could at least have used a spell check,” Robin said.
I offered, “Let me make some calls, put you in touch with witchcraft troubleshooting organizations that could help you find a reversal of the spell.”
“Sheyenne will get you a list of support groups, too,” Robin added.
Once the Wannovich sisters became our clients, I did some investigating, discovered that Howard Phillips Publishing specializes in collectible editions of arcane works, and they have offices here in the Quarter. So far, their largest seller has been an annotated but abridged edition of the Necronomicon bound in alligator skin (they had announced, but never published, an extremely limited numbered edition bound in human skin). Recently, the company had begun to offer publishing services, for a substantial fee, to print and distribute the memoirs and ruminations of unnaturals. Everybody, it seems, wants to write their life, and death, story. Most of these memoirs were available only in e-book formats and print-on-demand. Despite their fancy logo, Howard Phillips Publishing was little more than a vanity press.
Robin passed me the response letter, which was written in flowery legalese on formal stationery. The publisher’s legal department—probably one guy in a back room somewhere—insisted, “Witchcraft is a dangerous hobby, and every practitioner should use appropriate caution. The spells in our spell books are intended for entertainment purposes only. The publisher accepts no liability for any misuse or inadvertent accidents that may occur as a direct or indirect result of our books. We make no warranties, express or implied, about the accuracy of our content. Any damages are the sole responsibility of the user.”
“Reads like a form letter,” I agreed and handed it back to Robin.
“We’ll file a suit against them,” she said. “In order to protect other users, our first course of action will be to demand that they withdraw all copies of this spell book from the market until the typo is corrected. In fact, I can probably get an ex parte injunction by showing irreparable harm to the user—i.e., being turned into a sow.”
“But how long will all that take?” asked Mavis. The sow let out a squeaking snort, then sat on the carpet.
“I’m afraid it’s going to require some time. First, we have to serve the complaint, and they have thirty days to file an answer. If they don’t agree to take the book off the market, I have to file papers and go through written discovery, after which we take depositions, move for a trial date.” A glint appeared in her deep brown eyes. “As another possibility, we can go directly to the media. Obviously, one interview with you and your poor sister, and our case is won.” Robin leaned over to gaze at the mournful sow, and she put both her hands on the table. “But we are going to win this one. We’re going to win!”
“I believe you, but my sister’s a sow!” Mavis’s lower lip trembled, and I could see she was about ready to unleash a hurricane of tears and sniffles. “I always wanted to work in publishing. I even applied for a job at Howard Phillips, offered to help with proofreading. They never responded. And now . . . my poor sister!”
Alma nuzzled up against Mavis’s dark skirts. The witch straightened her back, and her expression darkened. As she rose from her chair, Mavis’s black gown seemed to grow more voluminous, her hair standing out like a big curly thundercloud. “If we can’t find a way to fix this, then I want to nail that publisher to the wall!”
Robin sounded cheery. “We can help you with that, too, if you like.”
Chapter 14
After I ushered the witch and the sow out of the offices, walking them down the hall to the elevator, Sheyenne was opening the day’s mail at her desk. She tore open an envelope and looked at the results with a disbelieving grumble. “You gotta love the post office.” She held up the paper. “This letter to me—important chemical results—took weeks to be delivered, even though I filed all the change-of-address forms as soon as I came back from the dead.”
Sheyenne had experienced a lot of trouble getting her mail forwarded. Since she was a ghost and gainfully employed, she used the Chambeaux & Deyer offices as her new physical address, but glitches still happened.
I plucked the paper from her ghostly hands. It was some kind of lab report, a spectrometer trace, tables of numbers and lists of complex compounds that I didn’t understand. While working on other cases, I had seen blood tests and DNA matches for paternity suits, but these results didn’t look familiar. “What is this?”