"Sensitive soul, aren't you?"
Max was pulling out Styrofoam containers and frowning at the contents. "This is like Sunday dinner on the farm, Grant Wood edition."
"Isn't it fun?" Temple didn't wait for an answer, but pulled plates and silverware from drawers and cupboards she had checked out on previous visits.
The baronial breakfast table was of burnt oak, with captain's chairs burly enough for Bluto.
Max was laughing by the time he brought the food to the table, along with a thin elegant bottle of wine from the walk-in wine cellar.
"The sublime and the ridiculous," he announced, setting the bottle on the table with a marked emphasis.
"Who's the sublime and who's the ridiculous."
"We both are both."
The cork teased out of the wine bottle, releasing a dry pungent scent. Temple guessed that this one bottle would have paid for a month's worth of fast-food dinners, but she didn't know, and didn't care.
She searched for her tote bag and found it by the side of her chair.
"Thanks. I suppose you can't wait for this fine cuisine to digest before I get to the manuscript."
Max was staring at the meatloaf as if wondering what to put on it. Perhaps a wig.
"Here's the sauce. It's good, really! Pretend you're having a nice hot meal at home, and dig in."
"That's what this is about, hmm? My missing family dinners. You don't exactly go in for them yourself nowadays."
"No. But I had deli with my aunt in New York. Besides, my taste buds are on Minnesota wintertime, no matter the climate. I've got that squirrel-it-away-for-the -winter mentality."
Max dished up servings from the various steaming boxes.
"All right. I'll load up on starches while you critique the starch out of my manuscript."
"Gee, I wish I had my glasses. I have an absolute craving for frames balancing on my nose as I make my pronouncement."
"I prefer to see your unadorned eyes, all true blue and absolutely honest."
Temple sampled the meatloaf, corn and potatoes before pulling the stack of white pages to her side.
"Well, it's pretty seamless where Gandolph's part ends and yours begins. I like your history of magic and psychic phenomena intro. You need more contemporary examples. And why don't you exploit the Houdini seance?"
"That's . . . still under investigation. I prefer not to give anything away."
"Don't hold back. Put in what you have now. You can always update it later. Houdini is your thread. He should bracket the entire book: the mystery of his magic tricks, the mystery of contacting the dead. He's still the most famous magician of all time, and he ended up fascinated by the hope of contacting the dead, then disgusted by the fraud that passed for psychic power then . .. and now? What would Houdini think of the Russian ESP experiments? Et cetera, et cetera."
"I'd have to . . . rebuild the whole book."
"You've sawed half-naked ladies in two and put them back together again."
"Not since I was seventeen. That's much too obvious to be real magic."
"So's the book as it stands now. It needs more personalization. Maybe you could parallel Houdini's development as an escapologist with your own development as a magician."
"But Temple, a good magician is always both front man and unseen operator. What you're talking about would expose my life, and you know how dangerous that would be."
"Didn't you say the best disguise in Las Vegas is loud? Maybe in magic, it's naked. And you said that revealing yourself as 'just' a magician might disarm all those nasty terrorists out there that don't want to believe you're not an active counter-terrorist."
"It's true. The more I put myself into this book, the more I blow my cover, the less useful I am to anybody."
"Besides, any book is written on water. It can always be changed. Until you sell it, of course."
Max was cutting the meatloaf Continental-style--with his fork in his left hand, his knife in his right--into neat cubes as if it were the finest steak. He didn't seem to be aware that this was no way to treat a nice, mushy, down-home meatloaf.
"And," Temple added, not hampered by having to excessively chew anything on her plate,
"it would be really nice to add Orson Welles and this house as a bracketing element too."
"That would really blow my cover!"
"Maybe, by then, you wouldn't need it anymore."
"By . . . when?"
"Oh, the three to four years you'll need to finish the book and find someone to publish it."
"Three to four years?"
"Didn't you say a good illusion takes years to develop?"
Max gave up on the dinner and devoted himself to the wine. "I had no idea you would be such a stern taskmaster when it came to the book."
"You could always publish it yourself, of course."
"I could?"
"All it takes is a little money, and then you wouldn't have to worry about it blowing your cover. It would probably print about twenty-five hundred copies to be sold to a very exclusive readership."
"That's not what I wanted for Gandolph's book."
"Then you must make it yours and Gandolph's book."
"I'll have to think it over."
"Of course. I wouldn't expect to sit down to dinner with you on virtually no notice, throw a major, life-altering proposal your way, and have you fall for it hook, line and signet ring right there and then."
Max winced. "I get it. You accepted my proposal in a spirit of game impulsiveness. I can do no less. Now. What is this about hyacinth?"
"That, you'll be happy to hear, I'm at a loss on."
Max lifted his wine glass so she could mirror his gesture of conciliation.
"Sometimes ignorant women can be very reassuring."
Temple chimed rims with him, watching the opal ring on her finger glitter under the overhead sparkler of light. Everybody had a bailiwick.
*****************
First they attacked Gandolph's computer.
"I seem to remember encountering the word 'hyacinth' somewhere in this house when I first came back here," Max said. "Since I've been messing so much with Gandolph's files, I'm wondering if I didn't see it in here."
But a search turned up nothing but a spell-check definition: "any of various bulbous herbs."
"Hyacinth is an herb?" Temple was amazed. "That's news to me."
"What's so special about an herb?"
"Nothing, except that herbs usually have a long history as folk remedies, and I've never heard of hyacinth in that context."
"I've got a dictionary of toxins on hard disc. I'll check that."
"A dictionary of toxins, Max, why?"
"For emergencies?"
He grinned as the file came up and the search program box obscured the regular screen. He stopped grinning when an entry came up.
"Digitalis. It's a potent toxin, our friend the hyacinth plant, though probably in unwieldy amounts if it's to be fatal."
"Max! You're putting down the poor hyacinth because it would take too much of it to kill someone?"
"Efficacious poisons require minute amounts for morbidity, and, of course, the most useful ones are also the least detectable. And perhaps the least well known."
"Like hyacinth, in that regard?"
"Like hyacinth."
"What now?"
Max looked up at her, his narrow face uplit by the computer screen and looking utterly sinister. "Now we consult the magi-cian's grimoires."
"Grimoires," Temple said on the way to Gandolph's storage room, her heel taps far too gay on the hardwood hall floors for this grim errand. "Such a nice, nasty word. What does it mean?"
"A book of spells, of herbal knowledge, of incantations. It sounds better than it is. Any grimoires I've seen were either obvious frauds or benign and boring compendiums of dubious home remedies."
"Did Gandolph really have any?"
"No, but he has 'many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.' "
"Poe man."
"I assume you have suddenly developed a Southern accent."