“Evil?”
“Yeah. Have you seen him?”
“Maybe. He didn’t give his name.”
I inadvertently looked down at the fingertip burn on my hand. The scruffy guy’s eyes followed mine and he gave his head a small shake.
“Wulf’s work,” he said.
He reached under my coat, unclipped my cell phone from my jeans waistband, and punched some numbers in.
“Hey!” I said. “What are you doing?”
“I’m giving you my number. Call me if you see Wulf.”
“Who are you?”
He smiled down at me, and when he smiled, his teeth were white and perfect, crinkle lines appeared at the corners of his eyes, and my heart did a little flip in my chest. “I’m Diesel,” he said. “I’ll catch up with you later.”
He crossed the street and disappeared behind a van stopped at a light. When the traffic moved, he was gone.
“Whoa,” Glo said when I returned to the shop. “That’s the most amazing hunk of raw testosterone I’ve ever seen. What was that a
bout?”
“He’s looking for a guy named Gerwulf Grimoire. He thought I might have run across him.”
“And?” Glo asked.
“I have.”
“It sounds like a warlock name,” Glo said.
“You’ve got to stop watching Bewitched reruns,” Clara told her. “The only warlocks in Salem are paid actors in the Salem Witch Museum.”
CHAPTER TWO
As the chief cupcake and assorted pastries maker at the bakery, I’m early in and early out. I left Dazzle’s at twelve-thirty and pointed my car south on Lafayette Street. I was driving a tan Chevy sedan. The age and model escape me, but needless to say it wasn’t new, it wasn’t expensive, and it was no longer pretty. There was a dent in the left rear quarter panel and a scrape running almost the length of the car on the right side. Aside from that, it was almost perfect. I crossed the bridge taking me into Marblehead, Lafayette turned into Pleasant Street, and from Pleasant I wound around until I came to Weatherby Street.
Great Aunt Ophelia’s house is a little saltbox dating back to 1740. It sits on a high rise of ground chockablock with other historic houses, and the back windows look down the hill at the flotilla of pleasure boats moored in Marblehead Harbor. The clapboards are gray, the trim is white, and there are two onion lamps on either side of the red front door. Somewhere in the late 1800s, a couple rooms were added. There were several more renovations and patch-up jobs after that, more or less bringing the house into the twentieth century. The ceilings are low, and the floors are wide plank pine and a little lopsided. Probably, I should have the foundation shored up, but it was going to have to wait for an infusion of money.
I parked at the curb and let myself into the house. I gave a squeak of surprise at seeing Diesel, boots off, sprawled on my living room couch.
“I’ve got a gun,” I said to him. “And I’m not afraid to use it.”
“Honey, you haven’t got a gun. And if you did have a gun, you probably wouldn’t know how to make it go bang.”
“Well, okay, but I have a chef’s knife, and I could carve you up like a Thanksgiving turkey.”
“That I believe.”
I was standing with one hand on the doorknob, ready to bolt and run for help. “How did you get in here?”
“There’s this thing I can do with locks,” Diesel said.
“Thing?”
“Yeah, I can open them.”