The Association

by A. K. Caggiano

  Ivy placed the phone back on the counter but was unable to look away from the little girl’s smile, the one thing that hadn’t changed through the photos. “Wow.”

  “I know.” Pauline took her phone and pressed it against her chest. “My girl is healed.”

  Ivy knit her brow. It all seemed so simple. She glanced at the orb and bit her lip. “Forgive me for asking, but Penny’s been injured for years, right? Why didn’t Rufus just do that to begin with?”

  “We’re not supposed to use the netherlight for personal gain.” Pauline’s eyes flicked over it again, then back to Ivy. “It’s meant to keep the community safe, and that’s it. If people found out, everyone would want a turn. You saw what it can do, it’s too powerful for that. The Sylvan Society would take it back, and then where would we be?”

  “Sure, I get that.” Ivy put a finger on its top, and though she couldn’t actually touch it, she could spin it around. “But he did use it that way. So why?”

  Pauline shrugged. “He sort of…sort of changed the last couple months. He wasn’t so brusque with everyone, more thoughtful, kinder. It was out of character, really, but when he came to me with the orb I didn’t care what made him change. Rufus said he and I were the only ones who would know, so how Calla found out is beyond me, but if she hadn’t said I could bring it to you, I don’t know what I was going to do. When I found out Rufus died, I was terrified; how was I supposed to get it back without someone finding out and thinking I stole it? Then no one mentioned it being missing, and as the time ticked on I knew it would get more suspicious, but what could I do? And then when the Vlcek boy showed up face-down in the pool? I mean, gods, it looks like I did all of that. I don’t even have an alibi for that morning.”

  “That morning?”

  “When Rufus died. Calla told me you think it wasn’t really an accident. The night before we were out much later than normal, so I let Penny sleep in that morning, and went into the bakery all alone. I texted my early girl, Marci, and asked her to babysit instead of coming into the shop herself. She has a key and just lives a few doors down. I thought it was no big deal!” She was speaking quickly, rubbing her forehead, her voice exasperated. “While I was kneading dough and pulling muffins out of the oven all alone in the shop before opening, someone was killing Rufus Vlcek, but it really seems like that someone was me.” Pauline was holding her face, staring down at the counter.

  “Yeah, that’s pretty damning.” Ivy put a hand out when Pauline shot her a look of terror. “But you did just bring this here, and Calla has been adamant that you didn’t kill Rufus, for what that’s worth. I do have a question though. Don’t you guys usually turn in early because of the bakery? What were you doing so late the night before?”

  “Penny is good friends with the dwarven kids. They’ve never said a word about her, you know?” She gestured to her face. “So we were up at their little playground, and the Beryleaxes invited us to dinner. Dwarves know how to have a good time, and before I knew it, it was eleven o’clock.”

  Ivy rolled the orb from hand to hand absently as she listened to Pauline, but stopped when she said eleven o’clock, well after Rufus had actually died according to his watch. If she were telling the truth that didn’t just rule out Pauline but Tharman too.

  Pauline’s eyes had been tracking the orb, and she again had stopped blinking. With a little jerk, Ivy dipped her hands below the counter and broke Pauline’s gaze, and the woman looked back up at her.

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing.” Ivy smiled, then faltered. “So, you want me to hold onto this for now?”

  Pauline was nodding. “But be careful. It’s powerful, and it can suck you in. I could feel it calling to me every night from where I’d stashed it under Penny’s bed. Thankfully, Penny’s so young that she wasn’t drawn to it. Without dark thoughts, she wasn’t corruptible. I’m thankful it’s healed her, but if I never see that thing again, I’ll be a happy woman.”

  Ivy glanced down at the glow in her hands. It was very pretty, and she thought there was no way Pauline could have meant that. “And only you and Calla know where it is now? You didn’t tell anyone else?”

  The woman stood, taking a deep breath. “As far as I know. I didn’t even tell Penny. She just thinks, well,”—Pauline smiled wistfully—“She thinks her papa and Mrs. E are helping her out from the Great Tree.”

  “Oh!” Ivy had an idea then and hurried into the living room. The star-shaped amethyst was still on the shelf, and she took it and gave it to Pauline. “Here, I think Penny should have this.”

  Pauline’s eyes went wide.

  “Uh, yeah, it’s a little heavy and pointy, so maybe it’s not a great toy for a kid, but—”

  “She’ll love it.”

  Chapter 33

  Ivy pulled the suspect list from between the pages of The Witch’s Encyclopedia of Herbs where she’d hidden it. Her scribbles weren’t as neat as Safiya’s, but she managed to make them legible enough, notes about Pauline, Tharman, and Calla coming easy. The orb watched her from atop the dresser across the room. It gave off the perfect glow with the shades drawn.

  Beside Hunter’s name it was more difficult to think of what to say. Instead of writing anything there, she took the letter from Mae, folded it, and slipped it between two pages near the back of the book so she wouldn’t have to look at it anymore. Another couple pages back she’d already stashed the drawing Penny had given her of the two of them kissing. That she actually liked looking at, but it was making her feel increasingly guilty.

  A bit easier was crossing out Evan’s name. She put a single line through it and wrote “deceased,” then cocked her head and wrote “but by whom?” Heaving a sigh, she shut the list back inside the book and dropped it on her nightstand, trading it out for her phone.

  Hunter had texted her an apology for the night before. So much had happened it felt like her bolt from his condo had been days earlier, and she actually had a twinge at seeing his name pop up on the screen. Did she miss him already?

  Ivy shook her head, sending him a message that she had a wonderful time, she was just a weirdo. He seemed appeased by that, and she was glad for one thing being left unruined, noticing she had no calls, no texts, and not even an email from Safiya.

  Hunter hinted at them getting together soon. She had a momentary blip of excitement, then deflated. She would have preferred the secret she now knew to come from his family, but she had no idea how to orchestrate that, and holding onto it herself didn’t feel right either. No matter what she chose to do, she imagined things going up in flames. Of course, if it turned out Hunter’s mother and who he thought was his father had killed the man who was actually his father, things would devolve anyway, and probably pretty quickly, but that might take the heat off her.

  Ivy blew out a long breath, a little disgusted with herself for the thought, and she simply texted back that Safiya had her pretty busy with the election—another lie. She dropped her phone onto her chest and stared across the room at the orb. It was hovering there serenely like it hadn’t been on the lam for three weeks. “Don’t judge me,” she whispered at it. “I’m only human, okay?”

  Ivy spent the rest of the day pacing her bedroom, practicing how the speech to Mae might go. “I can’t tell you how I know this,” she said to the orb, a lively enough fill-in, “but I know Hunter’s dad is actually that dead guy, and you should tell him.” She shook her head. “I mean, he’s dead now, so, like, it’s not such a big deal, right?” Ivy groaned. “Woman-to-woman, I get it. Men are stupid, and sometimes we have to lie to them, but I think this might be an exception.” She cringed and fell backwards onto the bed. It didn’t really matter which of those things she said; if either Mae or Alastair were the murderers, she’d end up just as dead.

  By the time evening had fallen, Ivy still had not made a decision, but she knew she needed to get out of the house. She slipped the orb into her dresser drawer, but the light seeped out through the cracks, so she dropped it into he
r bag instead and zipped it up inside. It was well-concealed, but instead of leaving it on the chair by the door, she slung it over her shoulder, afraid to leave it alone.

  Before she reached the end of the staircase, an unfamiliar voice floated up at her. Someone was speaking, high and fast, and Ivy paused on the last step, the wall blocking her from whoever sat in the living room. Then she heard Oakley. He made some sort of noncommittal noise in response. The low din of his video game was humming in the background.

  Ivy peeked around the corner and saw a girl sitting on the couch beside him. She was one of the sirens from the clubhouse choir practice, Marci, she thought, pretty—too pretty for Oakley, but that seemed to be the trend lately. The girl’s hands were moving all about as she spoke, but Oakley’s eyes were locked on the screen. Neither noticed Ivy.

  “—so she came up to him and was like I can get my whole clan to vote for you, but we want our own pool, and Evan was like a second pool? But she was like, no, a pool for us only. And do you know what he said?”

  Oakley never pulled his eyes from the screen. “No, what?”

  “He said I don’t need a single one of your votes to win, so you can just go jump in the lake for all I care, and oh, my gods, you should have seen the look on her face. I thought she was gonna kill him right there!”

  She looked completely horror stricken at her own story, waiting for Oakley to respond in kind, but he only offered her a monotonous, “Wow.”

  “Which is totally weird because, ya know, then he did actually die.” She blew a raspberry. “But that’s what happens when you drink as much as he did and go swimming all by yourself. If anybody knows that, I sure as hell do. Anyway, can we make out now?”

  “Hell yeah.” Oakley dropped his controller, and Ivy looked away before she saw anything else. God, he got around like a regular Rufus.

  Ivy slipped out the front door silently and headed off to the back of the house, sending Oakley a text that she’d be out for the night. She had no desire to walk out where someone might see her, and she let her feet guide her through the open field behind the house, skirting around the edge of the woods. She wandered for a long time, trying to keep her mind as clear as possible until she made her way to the top of a hill where she saw it: the cockatrice.

  “You!”

  Ivy took off at a full sprint after the reptilian bird, and it looked back at her, not moving at first, confused. She dove for it, and it seemed to realize then that she meant business, flapping leathery wings and taking off, the cheap heart pendant it had absconded with still dangling from its neck. Ivy scrambled back up and gave chase, and the two were flying across the lawn in the dimming light, Ivy pumping her legs as hard as she could and the cockatrice zigging and zagging enough to just evade her grabbing hands.

  She gave a final jump for the thing, and the bird juked to the right off into the trees leaving Ivy face down in the cold grass. She lay there with her arms over her head for a long minute before pushing herself back up and looking around and wondering where she’d ended up as the sun set on Avalon Estates.

  The cemetery was well taken care of, a small plot of land with plenty of open space around it and rung with a low-lying, stone fence. Ivy blew a strand of hair out of her face and set her hands on her hips: of course this was where he’d brought her.

  Ivy knew ghosts weren’t real from Safiya’s reaction, and she didn’t really expect to ask Rufus or Evan if they knew who offed them, but she thought—or at least her feet did—that maybe talking to them would help. A jumble of possible words pinged all around her head, and as she tried to sort them out she wandered between the little plots, careful not to step on anyone. She made her way across the cemetery, but as she looked around for the newest Vlcek stone her heart stopped.

  A figure rose from the graves, tall and broad and white. With a slow but deliberate movement, it turned toward her, and Ivy was stuck to the dirt as if she were interred herself.

  The figure raised a hand and called out to her, “Hello, there!”

  It was the old lycan woman from the vigil, draped in a powdery blue shawl with her long, white hair loose down her back. She looked like she had crossed over from the other side, but no longer appeared to be the ghost of Rufus Vlcek that Ivy had made up in her mind. Relieved, Ivy walked over to her with a wave.

  “Thank you.” The woman blinked at her slowly, the creases beside her eyes deep as she smiled.

  “For what?”

  “Your help with the vigil. And the memorial. I’ve seen you running about these last few weeks.” She pointed toward where the estates lay. “But I haven’t got to properly express my gratitude.”

  “Oh, I didn’t really do anything,” Ivy said quietly. “It’s all Safiya.”

  “My dear, you will say ‘you’re welcome’ and be done with it.” The woman’s voice was sharp though she delivered the order with a smile.

  “Yo-you’re welcome,” Ivy sputtered.

  The woman tilted her head and looked off into the sunset. “It is difficult putting bodies in the ground of the ones you remember as children. It shouldn’t be this way.”

  Ivy nodded. She wanted to tell the woman how sorry she was, but she had a feeling she wouldn’t accept it.

  “Sit with me for a while.” The old lycan planted herself on the ground right in front of Rufus’s grave, the dirt mounded up over it.

  Ivy did exactly as she said and dropped down onto the grass beside her, mimicking her as she crossed her legs and pulled her bag into her lap, the weightless orb inside. She looked at the woman, who had closed her eyes and was smiling peacefully as a breeze blew through the cemetery and picked up a few of her brittle, white strands. Ivy pushed her own hair from her face and behind an ear, glancing over the grave markers and up toward the sky. The moon was out, unperfect in its roundness, but getting fuller, and the clouds were passing just in front of it.

  “So, what did you want to talk about?”

  Ivy looked back to the woman. She was still sitting with that peaceful smile. There was no point in asking how she knew. “I’m not sure what to do.”

  “With your life?” The woman swayed her head. “Oh, that’s a big one.”

  “No, no,” Ivy said quickly then laughed. “Well, that too, I guess, but more immediately, I’m not sure what to do with some…information I have.”

  “Ah!” She popped one eye open and caught Ivy’s gaze. “Gossip.” Ivy tried to protest, but the woman only closed her eye again and swayed with the breeze. “When I am faced with a difficult choice, do you know what I do? I sleep on it. Then one of three outcomes happens. The best of all is when you wake up, the problem has miraculously solved itself, and you don’t have to do a damn thing.”

  Ivy groaned. She had actually slept on it, though not well. “Okay, and if that doesn’t happen?”

  “Your mind is always clearer in the morning.” The woman was nodding to herself now. “When you sleep, your mind flushes out all the nonsense your consciousness builds up during the day. Then the answer to your problem will come more clearly, and you can do whatever it is you’re meant to.”

  “And what if it doesn’t?”

  “Well, you try again, of course. Just keep sleeping on it.”

  Ivy squinted at her. “That sounds like you’re just avoiding the problem.”

  “Did you come to me for advice, or did I come to you for judgment?”

  Ivy wasn’t sure, actually, but she tried to save the moment. “Okay, maybe not avoiding, maybe just…distracting from it.”

  She opened her eyes then and set them on the moon high in the sky. “Sometimes the best thing any of us can be is a good distraction”

  Ivy would have liked a more definitive answer, especially since time wasn’t exactly something she had an abundance of, but she admitted quietly to herself that she was partial to a do-nothing sort of approach. “You said there were three outcomes,” she ventured. “You only told me two.”

  “It won’t work for you, but at ninety three
when I go to sleep with a problem, there’s always the possibility I won’t have to deal with it in the morning because I’ll wake up dead!” She cackled and slapped her knee.

  Ivy chuckled even though it was a little terrible. She wanted to say that waking up dead might actually be more of a possibility for her than the woman but kept it to herself. Instead, she leaned in. “Do you think Rufus or Evan were just avoiding problems?”

  “Almost certainly.”

  The two sat in a peaceful silence as evening turned to night.

  Chapter 34

  Ivy successfully avoided her problems for two whole days. Safiya was texting her again, but only short, work-related things, and Ivy did all the work without complaint, somehow avoiding seeing the witch at all. She never brought up the orb, but thought it was probably better that way until she woke up sure of a course of action. Each night she tried flipping through the encyclopedia in bed, but always came across the suspect list before sighing and replacing it on the nightstand. Then she would take the netherlight fragment out, give it a good five minutes of staring, and stuff it back in her bag and stuff that under her pillow.

  When Hunter called her one afternoon and broke her of the cycle, she eagerly answered.

  “My parents are having this thing tonight, like a dinner and a party for their thirtieth anniversary, but I think it’s really to drum up votes for Dad. They expect me to be there, and I expect it to be incredibly boring. Do you think you could come and keep me company?”

  Damn it, she thought, if he’s an accomplice to murder, he’s a very charming one. She chuckled quietly enough she thought he couldn’t hear. “You want me to go to your parents’ house? With you? For dinner?”