Rosemary and Rue

Oh, well. Pasta’s probably better for you anyway.

Police cars lined the street in front of Evening’s building, lights spinning in an endless flashing dance of red-blue-red and shattering the illusion of wealthy, untouchable serenity that the neighborhood worked so hard to project. Those lights made it impossible to pretend that everything was perfect or that this was the mythic San Francisco the pop songs promised; this was too real for that. The people walking by looked nervously at the police cars, like they were afraid whatever crimes or tragedies their imaginations had conjured would rub off on them. Humanity has always had a flair for guilt by association. What was Evening guilty of—dying?

I found a parking place at the end of the block, where I wedged my car into the space between a news van and a battered Studebaker. My fender dinged the news van, and I felt a flare of satisfaction. They’d never pick out the dent in the colony already established on my car, and they deserved it. They shouldn’t have been rushing after the sound of the sirens like vultures after road kill.

The way I retreat into trivial concerns when I’m scared amazes me. All I have to do is get to the point where I’m so panicked I can’t see straight, and suddenly the expiration date on the milk is all that matters. I guess that’s how my mind protects itself.

It took twenty minutes to walk the half block to Evening’s building. I stopped to read flyers tacked to telephone poles and watch cats sitting on windowsills, doing everything I could to make the trip just a little longer. I didn’t want to get where I was going. Not that it mattered; all too soon, I was looking up at the elegant building that had been the home of the Countess Evening Winterrose for the last forty years. I didn’t want to go in. It wasn’t real until I went inside: it wasn’t a fact, just a possible plot twist, like a cat stuffed into a closed box. If I turned around and went home, I could wait until Evening called to gloat over how gullible I’d been. We’d laugh and laugh . . . if I didn’t go inside. The police would turn off their sirens and go back downtown. I’d be able to forget her binding me; I’d forget the cloying taste of roses and the stench of burning rowan.

I’d forget that it was my fault.

I turned up the steps to the door.

A policeman was standing by the buzzer, a clipboard in his hands. I paused. He was clearly checking off people as they came and went—an entirely logical thing for him to be doing at the door of a private complex where someone had just been killed, but one that was more than a little bit inconvenient for me. Straightening my shoulders, I dug a crumpled receipt out of my pocket, holding it up as he turned toward me.

“The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts, all on a summer’s day,” I said, thinking I am authorized to be here in his direction. The smell of copper and cut grass swirled around me as his eyes glazed over. I lowered the receipt. “I trust everything is in order?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and smiled, waving me inside. “Third floor.”

“Got it.” Whoever he thought he saw was allowed to enter the crime scene; beyond that, I didn’t care who he thought I was.

The hall was carpeted in a shade of gray that complemented the cream walls and the dark teak of the decorative end tables, tastefully elegant without being ostentatious. Of course it was tasteful—a month’s rent could probably have fed me for a year. I revised my estimate upward by at least six months when the elevator doors opened to reveal five police officers and an honest-to-Oberon elevator operator.