The Association

by A. K. Caggiano

  “It was in a fit of passion.” Safiya paced quicker. “She didn’t mean to, but it happened before she knew what she was doing, and she fled. It was only later she realized how incriminating these letters are.”

  “And Evan? Why kill him too?”

  Safiya thought a moment then snapped. “You said Rufus and Evan went to dinner the night before he was found dead, right? I bet Rufus told him the truth about Hunter. Maybe he was going to split the company, the house, and everything between the two. Hell, maybe he was cutting his nephew out of his will completely?”

  “It’s…a stretch.” Ivy felt sick to her stomach. Evan never expressed the kind of anger that she expected to go along with all that. “And I’m not so sure Rufus died that morning anyway. Remember, he was wearing the same clothes he wore to dinner the night before with Evan when we found him.”

  “He called me,” Safiya said quickly. “You were there.”

  That was true. “Okay, but none of this explains the missing orb. What does Mae want with that?”

  “You just don’t want to believe it.” Safiya pointed at her. “Do you?”

  “I don’t know, maybe not!” Her eyes started to sting, but she held back frustrated tears. “It’s also something Calla said.”

  “You can’t trust her.” Safiya had been suspicious of the whole thing when she was told how the vampire had lured Ivy into the forest alone during the candlelight vigil.

  “But she was telling the truth. Calla’s the one who said—oh, god, it makes so much sense now! She told me she thought Alastair might be responsible for Rufus’s death for something that happened twenty six years ago.” She shook the letter. “She already knew about Hunter! Probably from her own affair with Rufus.”

  Safiya was gnawing on a nail by the bedroom door. “One truth doesn’t make a liar not a liar.”

  “Fine, but she also said she didn’t want to incriminate someone she thought wasn’t capable of murder. I think she might have been talking about Mae since she mentioned not telling other people’s secrets. If she and Rufus were sleeping together it’s very possible he told her everything. In fact, she even said she followed the Proctors after Evan’s party, effectively giving them an alibi for Evan’s murder. I don’t know, Saf, something just seems off.”

  “Something is off. We’re not even considering Hunter here.”

  Ivy’s eyes flashed over at her. She didn’t want to hear that, not out loud.

  “Think about it—Rufus tells him, he gets pissed off at this secret being kept from him for so long, then he kills him. Then, later, he finds out he’s not even going to inherit everything, so he takes out Evan too.”

  “I can’t believe what you’re saying right now,” she growled under her breath.

  “I can’t believe you’re being so dumb because of a cute boy,” Safiya shot back.

  “I’m not!” She crossed her arms over her chest when she saw Safiya rolling her eyes. “Anyway it seems more like you’re just looking for someone to pin this whole thing on instead of taking a second to think things through.”

  “What’s there to think about, Ivy?” She threw a hand out. “Affair, secret love child, lots to inherit, a whole family behind a murder plot. It was one of them, all of them, it doesn’t matter. All signs point to the Proctors, and just because you want to fuck one of them doesn’t make him incapable of murdering someone. Including you!”

  Ivy’s whole face went red. “You just want somebody to be angry at because Rufus is dead. That’s been the problem all along with these stupid theories. Maybe Rufus wasn’t killed. Maybe he just died. And maybe Evan got drunk and drowned. That happens, you know, people just have accidents!”

  Safiya looked as though she might scream back, her eyes flaring up with a dark and dangerous fire, but then all at once she calmed. Her mouth was drawn into a frown, her hands in tight fists, but her voice was restrained, and her eyes cast to the floor. “I need to go.” Safiya opened the door, not looking over her shoulder as she left. “If I need someone to be mad at, you’re certainly making it easy.” The witch stalked out of the house.

  Chapter 31

  Ivy got up while it was still dark after only a few hours of what could only generously be called sleep. She tossed and turned for a bit then started thumbing through the encyclopedia of herbs she had on loan from possible murderer Hunter Proctor. A lot of things could make a person quite sick, it turned out: nightshade, foxglove, hemlock, baneberry, the thought you’d been making out with a cold-blooded killer. Plenty of plants could kill too, but most of the herbs in the book were simply very pretty flowers that there was no way for a person to ingest in a large enough dose to send them across the veil. Unless, of course, one were stupid enough to open up and say, “Ahh.”

  When she’d exhausted those books, she remembered the little paperback she’d picked up at the holistic shop in Ogden Bluffs. She fished it out of her bag and laid back, flipping through the pages.

  The Human’s Handbook of Nether Creatures and Other Monsters felt like reading a book on motherhood written in the 1960s: full of advice that Ivy was sure was incorrect, but she didn’t have the experience or background to prove otherwise. The drawings showed progressions of beings that started out human enough, four limbs, a set of non-glowing eyes, maybe some fangs or claws, but then they became more and more like monstrous animals. Explanations beside the pictures told the reader that these beings were evolved, and through practice and sheer will they could shift their shape to become massive and powerful.

  Ivy paused for a long time to stare at a drawing of a half-man, half-wolf being. The descriptor said the affliction the beast suffered could be passed on to humans and then they would be cursed just the same to change under a full moon.

  There were other things, some grotesque with six arms and horns, giant serpents, tentacled shadow beings, but also some were beautiful, glowy-skinned people or beings with wings and cutesy antenna. Ivy was intrigued but terrified, and she closed the book with more questions than answers as the sun finally peeked in her window.

  She bathed, dressed, and checked her phone over and over for a message from anyone: Safiya coming to her senses or Hunter just saying hello. When neither came through, she got herself together and headed to the clubhouse. There were more than a few things Ivy didn’t know how to make right, but there was at least one she could think of to try.

  Safiya had left Rufus’s broken watch in a drawer in her small office at the clubhouse. They hadn’t been sure to whom it exactly belonged now that Evan was dead, and in the week following his death it had fallen off their radar, but Ivy remembered how gingerly Safiya had touched it when storing it away.

  Ivy retrieved the timepiece from the empty office and drove down to the dwarven workshops in the enclave. Sure, Tharman was still a suspect, if a marginal one, but his store had been littered in clocks, so who better to try and get it to work again? As Ivy drove, she looked out at the houses and the occasional neighbor watering plants and checking their mail. These people—they weren’t monsters like in the book she’d gotten from that stupid shop, and she felt embarrassed that she even had it tucked into a drawer back home.

  Tharman was surprised to see her but delighted. “Ms. Sylvan! What can I do ya for?”

  She pulled the watch from her purse and laid it on the counter. “I’m hoping you can fix this.”

  “Well, now.” He held it up with stubby fingers. “It ain’t every day your work comes back to ya.”

  “What’s that?” Ivy took a sharp breath, not expecting him to recognize the piece.

  “Made this one for the ole cur myself.” Tharman’s beard bristled with a grin. “Commissioned. Some of my best work, I think.”

  Ivy swallowed. “It is really beautiful. I’d like to restore it, if possible.”

  “Ah, of course.” Tharman held it right up to his eye. “Shouldn’t be but a snap to fix.” From his breast pocket, Tharman pulled out a small roll and laid it on the table. The fabric unfurled to reveal a
set of minuscule, golden tools. He laid the watch beside it and popped off the back with a tiny metal rod and a flourish.

  Ivy was glad he didn’t ask her any questions about how she got it, but he seemed so intent on the miniature cogs inside its back that she was sure he’d forgotten entirely the strangeness of the situation. He worked quickly, as if he didn’t have such stout fingers. At one point, there was a flash of something blue and smoke sizzled up from the watch. Tharman let out a whoop and then got right back to work. Finally, he flipped the thing over and picked out the remaining shards of glass with tweezers, rifled under the counter, and popped in a fresh lens over the face.

  “Now.” He took two fingers to the side of it. “Let’s see here.” With a press on the edge of the face, the watch whirred to life. It released a little, steam-like cloud from around the edges, and then the smoke came together, turning a bright red and forming a heart before dissipating into thin air. “Shame, that,” Tharman said with a frown. “Missed out on his little rendezvous.”

  “What was that?”

  “Rufus wanted something to hold his appointments. This was long before any of them smart watches and all that nonsense, and he said he wanted something classic looking anyway. So I whipped him up this. It alerts you when you’ve got an appointment, so you don’t forget. That little heart only meant one thing.” He winked at her.

  “But why did we just see it?”

  “It musta broke right around when the appointment was scheduled. In fact,”—he looked at the watch closely again, shook his head and muttered under his breath—“No, no, this is wrong. Here.” With a flick of another tool on the face, the hands wound themselves up and reset. “Looks like it broke at about 8:55 in the evening.”

  “The night before,” she whispered to herself, as Tharman manually set the hands to the correct time based on his own pocket watch.

  “Sad.” Tharman flicked the watch once more and another puff was released from around the edges. The smoke contorted more intricately this time and showed a little chart with a line going up and down. It was fairly straight but at its end erratic. “You know the old dog was a gym nut. That’s his heart rate. Weird to see a heart attack happen, but it looks like he broke the watch right after his heart went out.” Tharman sighed and handed the piece off to Ivy. “This one’s on the house, in memory of the mangy beast, may he be resting at the feet of whatever god those lycans pray to.”

  Ivy took the watch with wide eyes and thanked him, though her own voice sounded far away. So Rufus had died the night before, her suspicions about that, at least, confirmed.

  She drove in a daze back to 210 then sat in the driveway, a sinking in her chest weighing her down in the car’s seat. She hadn’t actually heard Rufus’s voice on the phone the morning she had arrived at Avalon Estates, she just trusted what Safiya said about getting that call and him being late.

  Safiya didn’t appear to have anything to gain from Rufus’s death, she was only the interim president, and she claimed the position had an end date, but did the presidency matter when there was some all-powerful orb out there that was supposedly missing? An orb that everyone already assumed Safiya had? An orb she could have grabbed when she ran up to the second floor of Rufus’s house all alone the very morning they found him?

  But, no, it didn’t make sense to investigate Rufus’s death so intensely when it had been ruled an accident by everyone else. And why wrap up Ivy, a human, in the whole thing anyway? And then there was Evan; why kill him too? Safiya didn’t seem to like him much—understandable—but then she’d been so touchy about Ivy going out with him, and so reticent about considering him as Rufus’s murder. Did she actually—

  A knock on her window made her yelp, pulling her out of her thoughts. Pauline was standing just outside the car door.

  Ivy stared back at the woman as Calla’s words rang in her mind: The killer you’re looking for is not Pauline Carter. Yet Ivy couldn’t get herself to leave the safety of the car. Pauline wore no expression, standing too still for comfort, focused too intently on the window.

  Then her mouth moved, her voice muffled, and Ivy was propelled to exit. The wind was rattling through the trees on the opposite side of the road, breaking off dying leaves and littering the ground with them, and it blew down Ironwood Place with a sharp chill.

  “Can we talk?” Pauline asked though it didn’t sound like a question.

  “Sure.” Ivy’s voice cracked on the single word, all of its mellow gone.

  “Inside?”

  With a slow nod, Ivy led the woman into 210.

  Chapter 32

  “I don’t bake, so I don’t have any sweets to offer you. And I don’t really make very good tea or coffee. In fact, the coffeemaker is broken, and I’m kind of afraid of this kettle. But I do have, uh…” Ivy opened the fridge, her hands shaking, and buried her head inside. She thought maybe if she kept talking and didn’t look at her, nothing bad would happen. “Water, milk, this weird diet soda that I thought would be good but really isn’t. There might be juice in here if Oakley didn’t drink it all, and—”

  “Ivy.” Pauline’s voice was deep and stilted. Straightening from the refrigerator and closing the door, Ivy turned to see Pauline standing in the middle of the kitchen, her arm outstretched, and in her palm she held a sphere about the size of a cue ball that emanated a bright, white light.

  It was the orb. The netherlight fragment. The incredibly important and dangerous thing that was inexplicably missing. And it was now bobbing in the middle of her kitchen. No one had to tell Ivy for her to understand; even a human knows an ancient, all-powerful sphere of archaic magic when they see it.

  “Wh—where’d you get that?” she asked with all the sweet naivety of a human hiding amongst the hexed in plain sight.

  “Rufus Vlcek.” Pauline’s eyes were locked onto the thing, her face lit from below with its eerie glow, body frozen.

  Ivy’s limbs went cold. Pauline’s tone had none of its former warmth and humor, gone monotone and dry as if her unblinking eyes and stiff posture weren’t creepy enough. “Yup, makes sense,” Ivy said, trying to lighten the mood and failing. “And, um, how exactly?”

  “Before he died.” Her voice strained, catching on the words. “He wanted to make amends.”

  She groaned. She had to ask. “Amends?”

  “For Penny. He wanted to make it right, and this was the only way he knew how.”

  Ivy didn’t understand, but she was able to take a step forward. “Awfully nice of him.” Her eyes flicked to the counter behind Pauline where the butcher’s block sat. It seemed impossibly far away. “So, um, why’d you bring it all the way here?”

  “Calla said you would understand.”

  Ivy made a confused noise in the back of her throat as she stared at Pauline, her arm steady with the orb hovering just over her palms. Pauline could not look away from the fragment of netherlight, she couldn’t even blink. It was quite shiny, pretty even, but Ivy didn’t exactly feel pulled to it in the way Pauline appeared to be. She took another step forward, shortening the gap between her and the orb.

  Like a statue, Pauline was still, but with all the potential of a deadly trick. Closer now, Ivy could see sweat beading on her forehead, the breaths she took so shallow she barely moved with them, but she was holding it out as far as she could like an offering. Ivy took a breath and reached out, slowly raising her fingers to the orb. Pauline’s eye twitched, and Ivy froze.

  “Take it.”

  Ivy plucked the thing from her hands and pulled it toward her in one swift motion, and the woman exhaled, doubling over. The orb was warm but had no weight to it, though Ivy supposed that was because it refused to touch her skin. She was able to move it at her will, but it continued to hover just above her hands. She gave it a little toss, and it came back down more slowly than it went up, stopping just short of contact.

  Pauline took several deep breaths, closing her eyes, hands on her knees. “Thank you,” she croaked out and coughed.

/>   “No prob.” Ivy tossed it again, intrigued by how it moved. Then she remembered that she had been pretty sure that whoever was in possession of the orb was probably a murderer. “Hey, so you didn’t, like, kill Rufus to get this, right?” She surprised herself at her own nonchalance.

  “Of course not.” The woman pulled herself to one of the stools at the kitchen counter and sat. “He gave it to me at the beginning of summer. Said he found a way to use it to heal Penny.” Pauline pushed her phone toward Ivy.

  She sat the orb down, and it did not roll as she would have expected but stayed just beside her on the counter. On the screen there was a photo of Penny with her big, bright smile, but her face was otherwise unrecognizable. The gashes across it were thick, the scarring bright white against her dark flesh, and much of the rest of her face was covered in shining, angry, pink lines. One eye was still intact, but the other, the one Ivy had remembered being wholly black, was permanently shut in this photo, the skin over it bulging and swollen. How she had survived the attack, Ivy had no idea, and how she could smile was an even bigger mystery.

  Pauline told her to swipe to the next photo, and there the girl stood again, her head tilted a bit to the side. She was holding up a drawing and grinning, but it was clear her mother was trying to document the changes in the girl’s face. There was an opening over her bad eye now, just a slit. The marks had begun to recede but were still much worse than Ivy remembered.

  Again, Ivy flicked to the next photo, and again the girl’s face was improving as if she’d had several surgeries with no recovery time. She was standing in front of the same wall, but it was increasingly covered in more artwork with each photo. She recognized the picture of 210 with her own car parked out front just behind the girl’s head. This time Penny was wearing a princess costume and sticking out her tongue.

  Ivy flicked through a few more, each more impressive, finally passing by the point she had first met Penny, recognizing the outfit she’d been wearing and the state of her face that day. This was the Penny Ivy was most familiar with, but there were still more photos after, and so she went through them, coming to the last one. If she’d seen it first and never met the girl, she would have never known that she’d been horrifically scarred. Even her eye had returned, matching the other identically. She was beautiful.