Ahead of them all,
a woman wraps herself around
red-silk strips,
and spins with verve,
until
she herself
she proceeds.

The next morning Jonathan saw Red Ballerina in the Bijou lobby. Her tutu swished as she walked quickly toward him. He had never seen her stray from this uniform in public. She pulled him behind a rose-quartz pillar. "I have something to tell you."

His heart quickened as he felt her grasp his wrist. “Um. Hello?” It must be important, he thought. They hadn’t even been introduced. The people here seemed to have few formalities.

“It’s about Bigalow. You’re his husband, right? He took me to see Madame Dodi before she died,” she said.

“When?” He was hungry for any information that might solve the crime.

“A week ago Saturday, out-of-the-blue, he caught me downtown and invited me.”

Jonathan pulled out his cell and scrolled through his calendar. The date she cited was before he rejoined Bigalow in Seattle. “Let’s go into the diner.” They crossed the aqua-and-cream checkerboard-tiled floor and found a booth in the back corner.

“Why just then?’ Jonathan asked as he sat on the red-vinyl bench. “Haven’t you had countless opportunities for Madame Dodi to tell your fortune?”

“I generally avoid soothsayers. But this time I felt I had to.’ She pulled a compact from her shiny red purse and checked her make-up. “I could sense that moment coming.”

“Is that reverse déjà vu?” Jonathan wondered out loud.

She pointed her finely made-up face directly at him and said, “No. It’s recognizing fate.”

The waitress took their order for coffee, then left them menus on the chrome-edged tabletop.

“We went Tuesday evening,” Red Ballerina said. Her face was very still beneath her scarlet hair; but her sky-blue eyes danced above her button nose. “He was wearing a huge white puffer coat over white jeans.”

###

Madame Dodi greeted Bigalow and Red Ballerina in a kimono cascading like a midnight waterfall over a black catsuit.

“Oh! Wunderbar! I’ve just stepped out of the shower,” she’d exclaimed. Her damp hair was swept up into a bun secured with two chopsticks. She had just finished applying eyeshadow and lipstick.

Her overstuffed chair almost swallowed Red Ballerina while she examined the fortune teller’s tabletop roller coaster.

“What brings you? Are you dissatisfied with life? How can you plan accordingly if you don’t see the forks in the road?" Madame Dodi posed the question not seeming to expect an answer.

Red felt a speck of dust at the end of her nose and flipped her mane in response.

Bigalow looked up at her. "It’s better if you have a question in mind when she drops the eyeball," he said.

Their hostess left the room. She returned decked with a tremendous obsidian necklace. She held a tiny pyramid set with semi-precious stones in her outstretched palm. The sight reminded Red Ballerina of a priestess. When the seer opened the triangular case, it emitted a glow similar to a dime-store nightlight.

Perched in her gold-brocade chair, Madame Dodi removed the magic eyeball from its pyramid with her thumb and forefinger. Her fingers were affixed with large onyx rings. "Without further ado," she pronounced. Her eyes gleamed as she dropped it into the contraption.

The three of them watched in rapt attention as the orb embarked on its journey. It spiraled through corkscrews, rolled over miniature hills, and loopedy-looped on parallel wire tracks. All the while, it only stared forward, never toppling its vision.

Turning their heads, they witnessed the tracks up close as it showcased its gravity-defying ride on TV.

“How odd,” Red exclaimed. “It rolls, but the eye only looks forward. How could that be?”

“The eye has an independent glass shield. It hovers a fraction of an inch inside it, suspended by electromagnetic energies,” Madame Dodi told her.

Red saw the magic eyeball flip levers and initiate chain reactions—mimicking perpetual motion in a delightful cacophony until the last crest of its hills yielded to the final lever flipped flat.

“The apparatus shakes the eyeball from its reverie and focuses it on my client’s fortune,” Dodi explained. “It’s like rolling dice.”

The glass eye fell to the floor and clattered into a drain at the center of the room.

“Oh dear,” Red was confused. “How do you get it back?”

“It makes its way through time to get back to its case,” Dodi said. The monitor became enveloped in darkness. Several seconds passed until light reappeared on the screen. The stage of the Bijou came on.

Their gaze fixed on the image of Red twirling high above the stage. Two red Dutch windmills full of twinkling lights turned their sails behind her. Near the ceiling, on a narrow platform that looked like a diving board, a Blue Velveteen Dormouse wielded a sword. He severed her silk.

A collective gasp escaped them as the fabric frayed and snapped. They held their breath as she watched herself hurtle toward the stage floor. The TV lapsed to black, never allowing them to see how she landed—or if she survived.

###

Jonathan turned to make sure that none of the other diners could hear them. He found Red’s story entrancing, but couldn’t see how it helped Bigalow’s case. In fact, it made it look worse for him. The waitress returned with two mugs and a pitcher of coffee.

"Tell Bigalow that a couple of days after we saw Madame Dodi, I went back without him to see what I could learn. The magic eyeball told the same fortune again. Only this time, it went further. Nobody tried to kill me. I fell to the floor only to be caught by a ring of Blue Velveteen Dormice. I never hit the stage,” Red told him.

"You saw more than one blue dormouse together?” he asked.

“Too many on her TV to count. She said only the dance would bring her murderer to justice.”

Jonathan took a sip of his strong coffee. “If she knew she was going to be murdered, why didn’t she try to stop it?”

“How could she?” She stood and adjusted her red tutu, then sat back down in the booth. “It was her fate.”

“Whoever killed her had a pretty good way of hiding their tracks,” Jonathan observed while he looked at the laminated menu. Anybody with access to one of the suits could have done it.

“Only the dance will solve the murder,” she repeated.

Jonathan wasn’t sure how literally he should take her, but felt it was something Bigalow should hear about.

###

“Are you doing okay?” Jonathan asked Bigalow the next day, then put his fingers up in the shape of a heart.

His husband looked like a big panther confined to a phone booth. “Better now that I see you,” he said.

“I had the strangest conversation with Red Ballerina. She mentioned she visited Madame Dodi with you while I was still in L.A.”

Bigalow rolled his head back and raised one hand. “Glory hallelujah! That prophecy really freaked me out. I was sure Red Ballerina thought it meant I was going to kill her.”

“Well, actually, it freaked her out too. She went back to Madame Dodi and saw how that scene ended. Turns out it was all part of an act. At the end she’s caught by a ring of Blue Velveteen Dormice. She said that Madame Dodi said only that dance would solve her murder.”

“That so? It makes no sense whatsoever.”

“Right?” Jonathan asked.

“Leave it to Madame Dodi to leave us with a prophecy like that—a puzzle. I’ll have to think about this for a while. Any word from Babs?” he asked. His voice was now muted.

It was as if he was talking from the other side of a tunnel, whereas before he had been. . . what? Almost clownish. “I got proof of the spell from her. She certainly seems to believe it works.”

Bigalow jerked his head a fraction. “Do you?” he asked.

“I might. Or maybe it’s just a story. Hype for an urban legend someone can write about.”

Bigalow huffed a bit, and wrinkled his brow. “If you don’t fully believe me, it’s pointless going forward. Would you believe the spell is true if you experienced it for yourself?”

“I couldn’t otherwise. But how? The other dormouse suit is being held by the Seattle police.”

“I know. And that would be simplest if you and I could just try them on and see. But—and you can never tell anyone besides Babs about this—there’s a ring of cities that have them in pairs. The original eighteen were split into nine sets of two. Two costumes in the same city can link anytime, no problem. For some reason, the spell only works near the 47th latitude of the northern hemisphere. The costumes can link between cities at that latitude for two hour windows when the moon is in the proper phase.”

“That corresponds with what Babs said, that all the costumes disappeared over the years. How did you come to learn all this?”

“By being at the Bijou. What do you say? Are you willing to strap on a blue dormouse head and teletransport? Just to prove to yourself the spell works?”

“Is it dangerous?”

“The costumes aren’t. I’ll send you where you can safely experience the spell. Will you do it for me? So can we get rid of your doubts?”

Jonathan wanted to believe without proof, but couldn’t. And now Bigalow was offering him a means of obtaining it firsthand. If he really loved him, he thought, he should have no reservations. He had to go forward, just so he could know for sure this wasn’t all pure hooey.

“Yeah. I’ll give it a test drive.”

Bigalow relaxed and grinned. “That’s my boy. You’ll find a key taped beneath a barrel by a detached garage in an alley off Jackson and Twenty-Third. It goes to a station wagon in a parking garage at the corner of Bellevue and Pine. There’s no fence. It’s in a parking pavilion underneath some funky 70s apartments. Open the back-left car door and look inside the fort made from boxes. I call it the Cardboard Castle. You’ll find a Key of Solomon. ”

“What’s that? Is it literally a key?”

Bigalow smiled. “No silly, it’s a book on metaphysics. Take it and give it to Babs.”

“Aye, aye, sir!” Jonathan laughed. If that book and costume were the keys to getting him out of jail, he was happy to oblige.

“Love you always,” his husband said. “Keep up the good work.”

Jonathan nearly skipped out of the visiting room while listening to Elton John sing “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” on somebody’s boombox.

###

The next day, Jonathan took a twenty-block bus ride on the number 14 through Pioneer Square and Chinatown, then back to lower Capitol Hill. There he found the junk station wagon marooned in the apartment complex—a brown 1971 Pontiac Bonneville—next to a van for Bupkus Plumbing. DIY Plumber? You don’t know Bupkus! was stenciled in bold-italic letters on the van’s side.

A foil sunshade blocked the Pontiac’s windshield. From the exterior, the inside looked filled by a jumble of packing boxes—the Cardboard Castle Bigalow mentioned. He supposed this helped avoid detection by the landlord.

He used the key he’d found a twenty-block bus ride away, and crawled past a cardboard flap into the fort. A twin mattress fit the cabin’s rear. He laid down like a bottled ship sending out an S.O.S. His heart settled. He reached up to tap a battery-powered LED light. He studied the ceiling plastered with pictures torn from magazines—a dreamscape of destinations that spanned the globe—then started searching beneath the mattress.

His hand pulled up the Key of Solomon, a torn paperback version. He flipped through its pages until a glint of yellow highlighter caught his eye. He opened it to a Table of Planetary Hours. Certain times were highlighted; each had a name and city written next to it in the margin. Glancing up, he realized the cities were the same as the ones on the ceiling.

###

“What do you suppose it means?” Jonathan asked Babs in her fussy front parlor. Old books, porcelain urns and figurines, and stuffed birds filled every available bookshelf. Murky seascapes in gilt frames decorated the walls above the wainscotting and oak bureau. He settled into the velvet sofa and stifled a sneeze from the dust. He filled Babs in on everything Red Ballerina had told him earlier that day .“If only the dance will solve the murder, then maybe we should just do the dance and skip the investigation.”

“We can’t just do that. Bigalow’s trial is coming up.” Babs sat in her leather armchair and adjusted her cat-eye glasses to look at the Key of Solomon. “These charts show when the Moon is in specific aspects. Bigalow told me it’s a schedule of when Blue Velveteen Dormice can switch souls,” she said. “For instance, the window of opportunity for Bennet in Vienna is Saturday at seven P.M.”

Light poured in from the bay window as he tried to make sense of it. He took the book from her, flipped through the tables, and read the written notes aloud. “Bennet, Vienna. Nico, Krasnoyarsk. Kingston, Prague. Byron, Montreal. Lucien, Paris. Kadir, Belgrade. Sullivan, Minneapolis, and Xander, Kazakhstan. I wonder which of them is the killer if it’s not Eduardo.”

Babs picked up her basket of knitting. “Is the time of the murder highlighted? It was Friday between ten and eleven that night.

Jonathan flipped through the pages. “That time is for Nico, Krasnoyarsk. Where’s that?”

“Russia.”

“That doesn’t sound like friendly territory to me. Bigalow suggested we start with something easy, like Kadir in Belgrade,” Jonathan said.

###

Babs sat with Jonathan at her kitchen table on a late afternoon a few days later. Rain poured outside the window over the sink. Jonathan could hear the hushed roar from traffic on wet streets outside. Water for tea brewed on the gas stove.

“Seriously?” he asked her. “How can I switch places with Kadir and have him not know what’s going on?”

“We’ll knock you out,” Babs replied. “He’ll just experience your blackout. Are you allergic to sleeping pills?”

She must be insane. He bent over to fix the cuff on his jeans and said, “No.”

She nodded. “Perfect.” She went to a shelf and pulled off a tin box.

“What makes you think this will work?” he asked.

“Bigalow told me this is how they handle it. I guess the only way we’ll find out is to try.” She set the ornate tin on the kitchen table and opened it. “I made these tablets myself with valerian. Following the key should allow you to switch at the allotted time and find the real murderer,” Babs answered.

Jonathan was puzzled. “And do what?”

She looked surprised at him. “Spy. Look for clues. If you find yourself in an awkward situation, take the head off. Don’t let on that a switch has been made. It can only last two hours. Then the moon is no longer in the right phase and the portal for the switch will close, returning you to Seattle.”

Jonathan’s thoughts swirled in his head like confetti. It was like they all immediately assumed he was trained in this sort of thing. He was 21. He hadn’t been to detective school. “You are crazy. You want to drug me and lock me up in your guest room?”

Babs adjusted her eyeglasses and looked like a concerned goat. “But how else can we prove his alibi?”

Jonathan squirmed in his seat. “I don’t know exactly. I don’t suppose Bigalow would put me in any real danger. But there is a real murderer out there after all, and he can’t be too far behind in knowing about Bigalow’s arrest.”

“It’s risky business for sure. You’ll need to be very brave.” She leaned toward him. “You do want to prove the spell works, right?”

“If I have the balls. What if I fuck up?”

“Again. Just take the head off. According to the Key of Solomon, Tuesday evening at seven is your next opportunity for Belgrade. You can sleep in my spare room. If you won’t do it, you might as well kiss your future with Bigalow goodbye.”

Jonathan tapped his fingers on his temple multiple times. Perhaps this would promote blood to his brain and stimulate some courage. “I guess not many people experience a chance to swap bodies. And it’s for Bigalow.” He had to admit the opportunity to find out if magic was real was tantalizing. Not many people had a chance to do that. His heart raced. He grimaced and made his hands into fists. “Alright, I’ll do it.”