The first thing we did after leaving Lilith’s was go back to Ricardo Rivera’s place. We phoned ahead requesting that he have the gate opened for us when we arrived. Naturally, he resisted, but when I told him we had information concerning his brother, and that his failure to cooperate could endanger his life, he reluctantly obliged.
Carlos pulled up under the canopy at the front entry where Rivera stood waiting with his phone in hand. We barely stepped from the car when he approached us, clearly agitated and probably a little drunk.
“I’m telling you now, Detective,” he warned, waving his phone like a saber. “I have Joseph Petruzelli on speed dial, and he knows people in high places. If you continue to harass me—”
“Calm down, Rivera. Nobody’s harassing you. All we want is some quick answers and then we’ll get out of your hair once and for all.”
“You said over the phone you have some information concerning Benjamin.”
“We do, and we’ll share that with you if you cooperate.”
“And then you’ll leave here once and for all?”
“Yes, I promise.”
He dropped his hands and relaxed his guard. “What do you want?”
“I want you to tell me about Eddy.”
“Eddy who?”
“I think you know. He attended Doctor Lowell’s workshops with Benjamin.”
“Oh, that Eddy.”
“Yes, that Eddy. Tell me, why do you keep his secret? What does he have on you that prevents you from telling even your own brother who he is?”
“Detective, I don’t see what all this has to do with your investigation.”
“You don’t. Then let me ask you about Mallory Edwards. Yesterday at your office, you let us know how much you detest her, how you hate the fact that she has a thing for Benjamin. Why is that?”
“It’s personal.”
“Is it? Or is it because Crazy Edward Mallory and Mallory Edwards are really one and the same?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think I do. Benjamin attended Doctor Lowell’s workshops with Ed Mallory. Since then, Edward has undergone a sex change operation and legally changed his name to Mallory Edwards. Isn’t that true?”
“I don’t know that.”
“Yes you do, because you conducted the compulsory background check on Mallory when Petruzelli hired her. Didn’t you?”
Rivera kicked at the gravel by his feet. “All right. So what? I knew about Mallory. Fine, and that’s why I hate her. I think she’s a disgrace to humanity, a disgusting, vile and repugnant excuse for a living being. I don’t like her. I don’t like what she stands for and I especially don’t like it that she has a thing for my little brother.”
“So, why don’t you tell your brother who she is?”
“Because he wouldn’t understand, Detective. He needs sheltering from the real world.”
“Then why don’t you do something to get Mallory fired from Hartman, Pierce and Petruzelli? You have all the clout you need to make it happen. Unless….” I held my finger up to accentuate the pause.
“Unless what?” He said.
“Oh, I see now. Carlos, are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
Carlos smiled. “Yeah. I see. Ricardo and Mallory must have their own little thing going on.”
Rivera confronted Carlos, breasting him toe-to-toe. “That’s a lie! How dare you?”
“Easy,” I said, ushering Rivera back. “You don’t want to get Carlos angry. Trust me.”
“Then tell him to take it back. The only thing Mallory and I have going between us is a mutual hatred for one another.”
“All right. Carlos takes it back.”
“I didn’t hear him say it.”
“He’s the quiet type. Cut him some slack. In the meantime, why don’t you tell us about Benjamin’s money?”
That got his attention. Rivera stepped back and looked at me as though I had just sucker punched him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about Benjamin’s inheritance. You forged documents relating to your father’s will, and then you changed Benjamin’s name as the sole beneficiary to your own.”
“That’s absurd!”
“No, it only sounds absurd if no one else knows about it, which no one does. Oh, but wait. Hey, maybe that’s why you don’t try having Mallory Edwards fired. Maybe Mallory knows because the only person in the world you told was Bridget Dean, and she went and told Mallory.”
“You’re crazy,” said Rivera, “as crazy as that transgender pervert.”
“Am I?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then, I take that as a compliment. Seeing that Mallory is crazy enough to keep her job and extort a healthy contribution from you in the process.” I turned to Carlos and said, “Don’t you think so, Carlos? Isn’t that a compliment?”
“That it is,” he said. “Because that Mallory, she’s crazy like a fox.”
I laughed. “Yes, like a fox, or maybe a wolf. After all, she’s just a dog in sheep’s clothing. What else would you call someone who knows a secret about her boss and uses that knowledge for personal gain?”
“A blackmailer?” Carlos offered.
“Yes. That’s a good one.”
“Look, Marcella. You can never prove anything regarding my father’s will, and neither can Mallory. But…” he softened his aggression. “You’re right about one thing. I don’t get her fired because I don’t want her telling Benny something else that she’s found out. He gets confused easily, and I don’t want his feelings getting hurt.”
“That’s understandable,” I said. “But why don’t you tell us the truth. What’s she got on you?”
He looked down at the ground and kicked at the gravel some more. “All right, it’s like this. Benny is not my brother. He’s my son.”
“Oh?”
“I was sixteen, in high school and wild as a boar. I had a girlfriend and we liked to party and drink and…well, you know the drill. Anyway, the girl got pregnant and had twins. I thought our lives were ruined. But my father stepped in and agreed to help us. He said he would raise the boys if we both finished school and went on to college, which we did. We went to college and studied law and then we both became lawyers.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Bridget Dean is Benny’s mother.”
He nodded. “She wanted nothing to do with him since the day he was born. All she’s ever wanted in life was money and power.”
“And you resented that.”
“Of course!”
“Enough to kill her?”
“No! Absolutely not! I didn’t kill her. She was my son’s mother, for Christ’s sake.”
“Is that why you got so defensive when Carlos asked you if she aborted your child?”
“What do you think? But in a way, she has, hasn’t she?”
Carlos and I shared a glance of apathy. “How does Mallory fit into all of this?”
“You mean, Ed, the pervert? He went to Doctor Lowell’s class for psychics, along with Benny, Ana, Karen and the whole lot.”
“And Bridget, too.”
“Yes, Bridget, too. She’s the one that got Benny into the classes. I believe she may have even slept with the good doctor to make it happen.”
“So, you knew about the ties everyone had to Lowell and the workshops all along?”
“Of course.”
“You know how that will look to a jury.”
“Forget it, Marcella. A jury will never hear it.”
“We’ll see.”
I turned to Carlos again to see if he was taking any notes on our conversation, and was glad to see he was. I came back to Rivera and asked, “If Bridget didn’t want anything to do with Benny, then why did she want him to attend the workshops with her?”
He laughed. “To piss me off, why else? She knew I didn’t like the idea one bit. But you see, at the time, she still stood in the good graces of my father. As far as he was concerned, she was the responsible o
ne, not me.”
“So, what about Eddy? You still haven’t explained why you’re beholden to him.”
“I’ll tell you. Now, keep in mind that Benny was just a kid, like eleven or twelve maybe. Mallory wasn’t there a month when he touched Benny in an inappropriate manner. These days there’d be a Spanish inquisition over the matter, but back then the simplest thing to do was to remove Benny from class, declaring that he had no special attributes or paranormal abilities and sweep everything under the rug.”
“You’re saying he made a sexual advance towards Benny?”
“Detective, Edward Mallory was crazy about Benny. We just didn’t know how badly until after he left town and someone found a notepad full of love letters he wrote to him, letters he’d written, but never sent.”
I reeled back in utter disbelief. If what Rivera said was true, and if, as I believed, he was capable of murder, then I couldn’t imagine why he hadn’t already killed Mallory Edwards for what she did to Benny. I turned to Rivera with reservations and said, “All that being what it may, it still doesn’t explain why you hired Mallory and continue—”
“I know,” he interrupted. “Why I hired her and continue paying extortion money. I told you, it’s because Bridget told her that Benny is my son. Can you believe it? Benny’s own mother. She’s the one that put her up to it. Bridget told Mallory about Benny, and even suggested she blackmail me into paying her so she wouldn’t tell him.”
“But why?” said Carlos, his voice high pitched.
“To distract me. Bridget figured that if I had a big enough distraction going on in my life, I would start screwing up at work, I would lose my concentration in court cases and derail my chances for that promotion.”
“Guess it worked,” I said.
He looked at me coldly. “I guess so.”
Carlos tapped me on the shoulder and asked, “So, what now?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, and then said to Rivera, “You should come downtown and file a formal report asserting Mallory Edwards blackmailing you.”
He scoffed. “Sure, then Benny will find out everything. I don’t think that’s such a good idea.”
“Don’t be so sure. I think Benny has greater issues to deal with right now. Maybe the truth will help him sort things out.”
“Yes, and maybe not. I know my son. He’ll do fine if you just let me handle this my own way.”
I looked again at Carlos to gauge his assessment of things. He offered up a shrug and gave me a look as though it was none of our business. He was probably right, at least where Benny was concerned, still, I felt uneasy about the whole affair. If Benny wasn’t our killer, then he certainly had the potential of causing trouble later on with an alter ego like Leo fighting for dominance. His need for professional help seemed clear and immediate. But for the more pressing issues before us, I bowed to Carlos’ inclinations and gave in to Rivera’s request.
“Okay, fair enough,” I said. “If you feel you know what’s best for Benny, then we’ll let you work it out your way—for now. But I’m going on record telling you that the boy needs help.”
He smiled back modestly. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“So now,” he said, folding his arms at his chest. “What do you need from me?”
“Tell us where to find Mallory Edwards.”
He reeled back some. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
“Don’t you?”
“Should I?”
Carlos said, “Her driver’s license lists here address as here.”
“Are you kidding me? Detectives, I assure you, Mallory Edwards does not now, nor has she ever lived here in this house. I’m sure that’s just a pipe dream of hers.”
“So, you have no idea where she lives?”
“Maybe. Last I heard she was staying at the Rue Valley apartments on Concord.”
“What about Benjamin? Where is he now?”
“Actually, I thought he was upstairs, but I looked a few minutes ago. He’s gone.”
I glanced at my watch. It was nearing ten-thirty. I said to Carlos, “We have to go to Leona’s.”
He looked at his. “She’s probably in bed by now.”
“Yeah, let’s hope so. Mister Rivera, if you hear from Benjamin, will you call the police station? Ask for Detective Spinelli. He’ll get word to us.”
“Better yet,” said Carlos, reaching past me to hand Rivera one of his cards. “Call us direct.”
Rivers took the card. “Is Benny in some kind of trouble, Detectives?”
“We still don’t know,” I said, “but I think we will by the end of tonight.”
Carlos and I got back in the car and headed out, our tires spitting gravel all the way to the gate. I called Spinelli on the way and told him to have some backup meet us at Leona’s. Then I asked him to send somebody back to Rivera’s to watch for Benny or Piakowski to show up. I believed I could count on Ricardo to tell us if the former returned, but he owed me no favors regarding the latter.
“And while you’re at it,” I told him, “check whatever database you can tap into and verify Mallory Edwards address for me. The one on her driver’s license is bad.”
He told me to hang on, and within a minute came back. “Looks like we have a possible address on Concord.”
“Right, the Rue Valley apartments?”
“Yeah, unit 197.”
“Great. Can we get someone over there?”
“Um…and do what?”
Good question, I thought. I looked at Carlos. He seemed curious to know how I might answer that one, as well. Again, the irreconcilable weight of indecisiveness consumed me. Had we not already committed every available resource to the case, a case that, technically, didn’t even exist? For all I knew, both Carlos and Spinelli would lose their jobs for circumventing protocol, investigating otherwise closed cases. I must have lingered there, lost in cognitive paralysis much longer than I thought, judging from the way Spinelli tactfully nudged me back.
“Detective Marcella? It’s probably my phone, sir, but I missed that. Can you repeat what you want us to do at the Edwards location?”
I shook the cobwebs from my head and answered, “Scratch that, Spinelli. Just make sure someone gets down to Leona’s right away, okay?”
“You got it, sir.”
After Spinelli terminated the call, I turned and said to Carlos, “He’s a good kid, isn’t he?”
Carlos merely smiled. Silence carried us the rest of the way across town, which was nice. It gave me time to think and to connect the dots more clearly, establishing and prioritizing the possible motives that the key suspects may have had. The only problem was that there were still too many suspects with way too many motives to come up with a definitive conclusion on anything.
Twelve
Officer Burke arrived at Leona’s place ahead of us. When we arrived, he explained that he observed the apartment for about ten minutes prior. “I’ve seen her silhouette pass by the window shade a few times,” he said, “so I know she’s home. But I haven’t seen anyone come or go since I got here.”
“And you won’t,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean she hasn’t got a visitor already.” I slapped Carlos on the chest with the back of my hand. “You ready?”
He blinked back. “For what?”
“For whatever. I thought you were a Boy Scout.”
“I was.”
“Then let’s go.”
He smacked Burke on the chest in a similar fashion. “You heard the man. Let’s roll.”
We went up to the door and knocked. As we waited for Leona to answer, I advised the two to play it cool. “We don’t want to scare her,” I said. “After she lets us in, I’ll try to get her to sit on the couch and talk to me. Burke, you start checking out the other rooms, make sure no one’s gotten in without her noticing. Scope out under the beds, in the closets, that sort of thing. Carlos, you stand guard by the door. Keep your ears out for Burke’s call in case he needs you. Got i
t?”
“Got it,” they both said, just as Leona opened the door. She seemed surprised, understandably, and even gasped a little before recognizing me as the ringleader. I tried smiling to defuse any apprehensions she might have, but Leona probably hadn’t seen me smile much in the past, and I suppose I’d have done her a favor by maintaining my usual stone-faced expression. Regardless, she did recognize me, and that shaped a smile on her face more authentic than any I could muster.
“Detective Marcella? Why you are here?”
“Hola, Leona. We need to talk. May we come in?”
She opened the door wide. “Mi casa es su casa.”
I crossed the threshold and stepped aside, allowing Carlos to pass upon entry. “You remember my associate, Detective Rodriquez?”
“Sí! Detective Carlos, ¿Cómo está?”
The two hugged. “Bien, Leona, y tú?”
“Muy bien, gracias.”
I introduced Burke next, explaining that I hoped she wouldn’t mind if he checked out her apartment to assure it was safe.
“Yes, officer,” she said, though now she appeared worried. “Please, look around.” She turned to me. “Is everything not all right? Do you believe someone to come to mí apartamento?”
I pointed to the sofa. “Please.”
She sat at the end closest to the door. I came around the coffee table and sat down beside her. She reached for me. I instinctively took her hand and held it tight.
“Leona, you don’t need to worry about a thing. The reason I’m here with Carlos and Officer Burke is because we believe that someone might want to get in here tonight, and we’re here to prevent that.”
Her eyes widened. “Do you mean like a bugler?”
I tried not to laugh, but it slipped out anyway. “Burglar, but no, not a burglar. Do you remember earlier when I asked you about your out-of-body experiences?”
“Sí. You wanted to know if I killed Miss Webber and those other two women.”
“Right,” I said, wincing, and feeling just a bit uncomfortable with that. The girl had an uncanny gift for bluntly stating the obvious without really meaning to. I lost eye contact for just a moment, but found it again when I felt her give my hand another squeeze.
“Well…I hoped you wouldn’t remember it like that, exactly,” I said, “but anyway, we still think someone may have influenced the actions of those women through paranormal channels. It’s just one of several ideas we’re tossing around, and I want you to know that even though we suspect bilocation as a factor, I don’t consider you a suspect in the slightest.”
She smiled, forgivingly. “It is okay if you do, Detective. I understand. I do not hold for you my resentment. I believe you are a good man and you are only doing how you must.”
I smiled back, humbled. “And I believe that you’re a remarkable young woman.”
She blushed and turned away. Burke emerged from the bedroom, shaking his head and giving the all’s clear thumbs up sign. I gave him a nod for him to join Carlos by the front door. I turned to Leona again. Her cheeks had regained some of their mocha color, but her eyes still looked away shyly. I hooked my finger to the bottom of her chin and gently steered her face toward mine. “Are you okay?”
She smiled timidly. “Sí.”
“Good. As I was saying, we have come to a crossroad of possibilities regarding the deaths of Karen and the others. At this moment, we’re following the most promising lead, which brings me to your birthday. I hear you celebrated one yesterday?”
“It is true,” she said, now lighting up like a candle, “though I did not celebrate so much. I stayed in mí apartamento and dreamed of home.”
“Back in Honduras?”
“Sí.”
“You miss it, don’t you?”
Her gaze wandered to a corner of the room where they found anchorage. From there, I imagined her visualizing her homeland, the blue skies, green mountains and sandy beaches. “I miss my old home,” she said, returning on a whisper. “But I love my new home more. I can go to Honduras in my dreams any time. That is enough for me.”
“Someday,” I said, “if you like, I’ll go back with you for real, maybe spend a week there. You can show me the sights.”
“Ooh, sí, I would very much like that.”
“Then you got it.” I patted her on the knee. “Before I forget.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out the charm that Lilith gave me at the coffee shop. “I want you to wear this for a while.”
She took it from me and held it up by the chain, allowing the ring to dangle freely. “This is my ring,” she said, puzzled. “I wanted you to have it.”
“Yes, and I do want it. I’ll keep it and cherish it always. For now though, I want you to have it back. That chain it’s on, Lilith made it. It’s very special. She made it to protect you.”
“I do not understand.”
“I know you don’t, but you see, Carlos and I fear you may be in danger. We don’t know if it has to do with your associations with Karen and Bridget, or whether your previous involvement in Doctor Lowell’s workshop has anything to do with it. But that you had a birthday yesterday may contribute to the problem. This will protect you. Here, let me help you with it.”
I took the charm and slipped it over her head. She seemed frightened at first, and I doubt she would have let me help her put it on if not for her absolute trust in me. She pressed her fingertips to the base of her neck and traced a path along the length of the chain, all the way down to the ring. Then she clasped the ring in her hand and squeezed it tightly, as if embracing its powers.
“This will protect me?” she asked.
“That’s what Lilith tells me, and I believe her. You must not take it off before midnight. If you feel like someone or something is trying to make you act against your will, then you must pull the ring from the chain.”
“Like this?” She slipped her finger into the ring and motioned a tug, as to pull the ring free.
“Yes,” I said, touching her hand to assure she would not yet do it. “When you’re sure. Snap it off.”
“Then what do I do?”
I looked up at Carlos, who shrugged. “Then don’t do whatever it is that someone is trying to make you do.” It sounded simple enough. I only hoped it was. “After that, I want you to call me right away. Understand?”
“Sí, I understand. You do not want me to kill myself. Do not worry. I will do my best.”
“I know you will. Now then, do you remember Officer Brittany Olsen from the research center?”
“Sí. She was most kind to me.”
“Yes. She’s a wonderful person. Is it okay if I call her and ask her to stay here with you tonight?”
“To stay here in mí apartamento?”
“Yes, to watch out for you.”
Leona shook her head delicately. “No, please, Detective. I do not wish to let this make a deal so big for me.”
“But Leona, this is a big deal. You may be in grave danger tonight.”
“No. I am fine.” She smiled politely. “You have given to me this charm, no?”
“Yes, but that may not be enough. If you let––”
“Please, Detective.” She shook her head again, more defiantly this time. “I wish no one to stay here tonight. I am fine. You will see.”
I eased back in my chair. “Fine,” I said, following it with a sigh of exasperation. “But I’ll ask Officer Burke to wait outside your apartment tonight. He’ll be down in his squad car if you need him. All right?”
She looked up at Burke and smiled. He smiled back. “Sí. That will be fine. You are most kind to worry for me so much.”
“Leona. I will always worry about you.”
I stood and offered her my hand to help her up. She accepted, and when our hands joined, I felt a warmth in her touch beyond mere tepidness. I realized at once that the ring had radiated its energy through her. I didn’t know if that meant it was working to protect her, or if something more ominous had begun to manifest paranormally.
A flash of paranoia ran through my mind. Had Lilith played me? For a moment, I imagined that Lilith had tricked me into giving Leona the charm so that she might control her actions through witchcraft. I looked to Carlos, remembering when he held the obsidian stone for himself and said that the only thing he saw was Lilith. ‘Doing what?’ I had asked him. He didn’t know.
“Leona?” I pressed the back of my hand to her forehead. “Are you feeling okay?”
“I am fine,” she answered. “Why do you ask?”
“You’re not dizzy or disoriented, are you?”
“No. I am hungry a little bit.”
“Hungry? Oh, right.” I felt suddenly flush with guilt. “Hey, about that. Listen, I’m sorry for spoiling your dinner date with Benjamin earlier. We didn’t—”
“No. Detective, do not apologize. For to tell the truth, he made my feelings uncomfortable.”
“Oh? Did he touch you inappropriately?”
She shook her head emphatically. “He did not. But he said something bad to make me think I did not know him as I believed I did.”
“Leo, that bastard,” I said under my breath.
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing. Tell me, dear. What did he say to you?”
She turned away in a blush. “A woman does not repeat such things, Detective. I will say only that you did me a favor when you came to the restaurant as you did.”
“Okay, fair enough.”
I had no need of knowing what Benjamin or Leo might have said to her. That he said anything offensive at all seemed enough to peel away the facade that masked his true intentions. I thought that if Benjamin co-possessed his victims in order to kill them, then at least he would not gain Leona’s confidence by first appearing before her as a benign apparition. After everything that had happened, I hoped she would act quickly and pull the ring the moment he or anyone else materialized in a specter state.
I let go of Leona’s hand and said, “Aside from a little hunger, are you sure you’re well?”
She tugged at my sleeve to turn me around. “Sí, Detective, I am very well.” I felt her petite fingers drilling into the small of my back, as she pushed me toward the door. “Now go and let me fix supper so I can go to bed and make sleep and wake up and go to my job with the op-tom-e-trist.”
A mouthful, yes, but she said it laughing, and even pronounced optometrist like a pro—but then, she had been practicing. I opened the door and waited for Carlos and Burke to step out first before addressing Leona again. “You remember what I said, now? The moment you feel something, you pull the ring from that chain and give me a call. You have my number?”
“Sí, I have your number still in mí speedy dial. It is the same, yes?”
“It’s the same number. It hasn’t changed.”
“Then you see I will call if trouble becomes to me. So, do not worry. Adiós?”
I leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. “Adiós, señorita. Stay well.”
“Y tú, señor. Bye-bye.”
We left her apartment and huddled in the parking lot out front. I told Burke to go grab himself a cup of coffee down at the corner, adding that he could be in for a long night. He agreed, and as he pulled away, Carlos asked me, “Well, what do we do now?”
I was still staring at the red tail lights of Burke’s cruiser, thinking the very same thing. Not until they rounded the corner did I finally answer. “I hate to suggest this,” I said, “but I think as soon as Burke returns, we should go back to Lilith’s.”
“Lilith’s” I could hear the surprise in his voice. “Why there?”
Because I’m a gullible idiot, I thought of telling him. Instead, I said, “It’s a bad feeling I got while up in Leona’s apartment. I’m probably wrong, and I hope I am, but the charm that Lilith gave me to give to her, I’m questioning its purpose now.”
“You don’t think it’s to protect Leona?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know what to think anymore. That’s been my problem all along. My gut feelings are polarized. I used to go with my hunch and rely on instincts, but now I can’t decide which is which.”
“What did your gut tell you up in the apartment?”
“Up there, it told me that Leona’s new charm is an instrument of conduction that might possibly allow Lilith to manipulate Leona’s actions through witchcraft.”
“But there’s a problem with that.”
“You see it, too?”
“Sure. If Lilith needs an instrument of conduction to manifest her will through witchcraft, then how—”
“How the hell did she manifest her will on Karen and the others?”
“Right. They didn’t all have a spirited charm around their necks.”
“No, but what is a charm? She could have cast a spell on anything and then made sure her victims received it, anonymously or otherwise.”
On that point, Carlos agreed, but by then I had all but talked myself out of blaming Lilith again. I was about to suggest we head back to the box, when I noticed something strange about Leona’s apartment. Carlos saw me looking up and trained his eyes that way.
“What’s wrong?”
I pointed. “That’s Leona’s kitchen window, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“The light’s off.”
He hemmed a little. “Keen observation. What’s your point?”
“Didn’t she say she planned on making something to eat before turning in for the night?”
“Yes.”
“Then why isn’t she in the kitchen?”
Carlos checked his watch. “It’s getting late. Maybe she changed her mind.”
I shook my head. “Do you change your mind about eating when you’re hungry?”
That hit home. He started toward the stairs. “We better check on her. You with me?”
“With you?” I pushed him aside as I came around him. “I’m all over you, pal.”
We trampled up the steps and began beating on the door. When she did not answer within the first ten seconds, I gave Carlos permission to break the door down.
“Me?” he said, his brows gathering tightly.
“Yes, you!”
“Why don’t you do it?”
“You’re younger, bigger and stronger.”
“You forgot better looking.”
“DO IT!”
On the count of three, we both broke the door clear off its hinges, but not without Carlos and me tumbling to the floor like a couple of wet sacks. I got up onto my elbows and saw Leona standing over me with a twelve-inch butcher knife. My first thought was that she wanted to stab me with it, but when I looked into her eyes I saw a wild, disconnect spirit. I knew then that she planned to plunge the blade into her own belly.
Carlos rolled over on his back and realized immediately what was happening. He grabbed Leona’s ankles and yanked her feet out from under her, spilling her to the carpet on her butt.
“The knife!” I hollered. “Get the knife!”
He reached for the blade, and as he did, she slashed at his hand and cut it open above the wrist. Carlos pulled his hand back. Leona’s knife came around a second time, missing his forearm by only inches. She dug at him again, and he rolled off to his left, just out of reach.
“Leona!” I cried, diverting her attention for a critical moment. I lunged forward, landing on top of her, knocking her flat on her back. Her hand came up over her head, exposing the blade to the gleam of the living room lights. I grabbed her wrist and forced it to the floor, squeezing as hard as I could to get her to drop it. She screamed, and for a second, I wanted to let her go for fear of hurting her.
Carlos, perhaps reading my mind, shouted for me to hold on. He came up from behind us on his knees and successfully wrestled the knife from her hand. At that moment, I grabbed the ring from the chain around her neck and pulled it free with a quick, clean jerk.
“No!” I heard someone cry, but it came from neither Carlos nor Leona. At once, a mantle of grayish fog engulfed us at floor level.
It hissed and swirled like a swarm of angry bees before rising in a vertical column.
I looked at Leona, astounded, as it appeared to come from inside her. Her eyes were stitched wide with pain. Her jaw unhinged. She screamed, yet made no sound.
I grabbed her shoulders and shook her hard. She gasped, as if surfacing from under water and taking in a much-needed breath of air. I noticed then that untamed spirit I’d seen in her only moments before had gone. I rolled off her and sat up. Carlos helped us both to our feet.
“What is that, Tony?” he asked, pointing at the cloud, which had since taken on nearly human form. It swirled and meandered lazily around the room, confused, if that was possible, bumping into things, though not affecting their physical dispositions at all. “Is that Benjamin?”
“No,” said Leona, and she seemed sure about it. “Benjamin has not so much hate in him.”
“Then who?”
“It’s Crazy Eddy,” I said, as certain as Leona was about it not being Benny.
With that, the vaporous apparition condensed to an almost solidified state, manifesting in portions undisputedly recognizable as Mallory Edwards. It looked around the room and seemed to grow cognizant of its surroundings, even as it grew more defined in physiological properties.
There came a moment when the form, which we had come to accept as the life force of Mallory Edwards, seemed to recognize Leona again. It swelled in size like a sinister cloud, morphing into shapes as grotesque as the mind could envision.
I looked to Carlos and Leona, whose eyes scudded and pierced the shadowed specter as differently as any two people could. I believed then that we were all interpreting the experience in our own way and undoubtedly witnessing the phenomena from unique perspectives. It appeared as though its control on our psyche, though diluted, remained intact and continued to strengthen, influencing our perception and our ability to react decisively.
In the back of my mind, I could see Karen Webber and the others, their cognitive process hijacked and compromised, unable to override the dominance that Mallory held over them. I imagined that they likely knew and understood what their psychical bodies were doing, killing themselves, as their mental control lay hostage to the fiendish resolve of its captor.
I set my sight upon the life force once more and noticed it moving toward Leona. Its energy seemed stronger now, intensifying in color and size, its swirling mass blistering with spikes and snapping with angry electric jabs.
Leona stood motionless, and beside her, Carlos, both captivated by its hypnotic grasp. I stepped forward, toward the cloud, hoping to disrupt its flow. But a sudden force pushed me back into the wall like a cannon blast.
The next thing I knew, Leona’s apartment descended into chaos. The burst of energy expelled from the mass erupted in a virtual cyclone and ripped through the room, tossing furniture about like plastic toys.
It was then I looked down and felt Leona’s ring burning a hole in the palm of my hand. Remembering the incident with the witch’s ladder in the woods the year before, I took the ring and pitched it as hard as I could into the heart of the swirling black mass. The cloud swallowed the ring, allowing it to pass, yet it never hit the wall on the other side.
At that moment, the room ignited in a flash as bright as lightning. A sound like crackling fire popped and hissed until we thought our eardrums would burst.
And then nothing.
In an instant, it was gone. The room fell calm. I looked at Carlos and Leona. Their hair stood on twisted ends. The expression on their faces told me they hadn’t a clue as to what just happened. Processing the moment, I don’t think I had much of a clue myself.
“What the hell happened?” asked Burke.
We turned and found him crouched in a shooters stance at the front door.
“It’s okay,” I said, gesturing a wave for him to stand down. “Everything’s under control.
I hurried to Leona and grabbed her arms at the cups of her shoulders. “Are you okay?”
Her eyes melted into mine, and I knew then she was all right. She started to smile, but waited, as if maybe it were not yet okay to do so. Then a tickle from inside her seemed to coax a giggle from her lips and she smiled wide and bright. “Sí, Detective, I am fine.”
I turned to Carlos. “You?”
“Never better,” he said, and he twitched as if jolted by a residue electrical shock.
My heart jumped. “What was that?”
He smiled his boyish grin. “Just kidding.” He pointed to a white spot on the carpet by the door. “Is that Mallory?”
I walked over to the spot, got down on one knee and felt the carpet. I don’t know what I expected, but I definitely didn’t expect it to feel so hot. I pulled my hand away sharply, and looked back at Carlos. “It’s like molten lava.”
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know.” I turned to Leona.
She backed away slowly, her fingertips steepled below her chin. “It is El Diablo. He has taken her away.”
“The devil?”
“Sí. The devil.” She leaned over and stole a glimpse behind me. Carlos and I turned around to see what caught her eye. The full moon shone bright outside her window, and from that vantage, its light cast down directly on the spot that Mallory’s spirit form left on the carpet. I considered it a coincidence, but then remembered Lilith’s words when she said to me once that coincidence was just another way of explaining the unexplainable. How true, I thought.
I took out my phone and called Spinelli. He seemed distracted upon answering, and I got the feeling he was no longer at the justice center. I heard noises in the background, people talking and lots of static. He would say something to me, stop in mid-sentence and then finish it only after obvious interruptions. I was about to hang up on him, when he came back and filled me in on the news.
“Unbelievable!” he said. “You just simply won’t believe it, Detective.”
“I might,” I said, “if you tell me. Where the hell are you, and what’s going on there?”
“I’m at Rivera’s house with about twenty other cops and some ambulances. It’s nuts here! Rivera is dead! Piakowski is dead!”
“What!” I held the phone away from my ear and put it on speaker so that Carlos could hear.
Spinelli said, “I came here to watch the place like you asked me to.”
“I didn’t ask you to go there,” I said. “I told you to send someone.”
“I got bored.”
I looked at Carlos and shook my head. “He’s your boy, Carlos.” Carlos merely shrugged. “Spinelli, what happened?”
“No, take it outside,” he said, his voice distant. I assumed he was speaking to one of the cops on the scene again. He came back on the phone louder than before and slightly out of breath. “Okay, right after I got here, I mean like two seconds later, I heard two men arguing. It was Rivera and Piakowski. From outside the window, I heard one tell the other that he would kill him first before he ever let him tell Benjamin the truth. I figured that was Rivera talking, to which Piakowski replied, ‘Then give me forty thousand dollars and I’ll disappear for good.’”
“So, what happened?”
“He shot him!” said Spinelli. “Rivera pulled out a handgun and shot Piakowski dead!”
Carlos and I gasped. “You saw him do it?”
“Yes, through the window, and so I came around the house to the front door and kicked it in. I drew my weapon on Rivera, identified myself as police and ordered him to drop his weapon. He heard my order. I know he did, but he turned and took aim at me anyway. I had no choice, Tony. I had to….” His voice started breaking up, but I knew it wasn’t the connection this time. “I had to….” he said again, and then the phone went silent.
I looked at Carlos, who looked at me, and we both looked at Leona. She seemed uncertain about what happened at Rivera’s, but Carlos and I knew well, and we thought it better that Spinelli couldn’t finish what he tried to tell us. I pulled Carlos aside and instructed him to
have Leona brought to the station for debriefing.
“Have them get her some coffee and something to eat,” I told him. “Maybe see if officer Olson wouldn’t mind spending some time with her.”
“Brittany?”
“Yeah, she helped Leona a lot after we rescued her from—”
“Right. I remember,” he said, saving me from having to say it. “I’ll see if she’s available.”
“Thanks, and oh, you better send a unit to Mallory Edwards’ apartment. Send an ambulance, too, just in case.”
“You got it, Tony. In the meantime, what are you going to do? You going back to Rivera’s?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I have to take care of something first. I’ll catch up with you later, okay?”
“Sure.” He reached for my hand and shook it as if it were goodbye forever. I told him that wasn’t good enough, and I gave him a hug in case it was. Then I went to Leona and hugged her, too. She wrapped her arms around my waist and squeezed me harder than I thought a girl her size could.
“Goodbye, Detective Marcella,” she said. Her eyes were glossy but her cheeks were still dry. “I will miss you much.”
“Ooh,” I said, and it came out jagged, as if stuck in my throat. “We’ll see each other again.” Though I knew I couldn’t say with certainty if and when. “In the meantime, you do what Detective Rodriquez tells you. He’ll take care of you and get you anything you want.”
She rocked her head back and smiled up at me. “Will he get you if I ask him?”
I kissed her forehead and then left before my tears had time to show.
Thirteen
Carlos let me take the car without asking why I needed it, though I think inside he knew. For the last year I had yearned for a reason to return to New Castle, not to help him solve crimes, but to address an even bigger issue, one I couldn’t resolve unless I met it head on.
I pulled up in front of Lilith’s house and shut the motor off. For a long time, I sat there. I knew the pretext I would use to explain my presence if asked. I just wasn’t sure if I was ready to admit to myself that my need for mannered intervention is what drove me there to begin with.
I thought of everything that happened since I closed the Surgeon Stalker case so many months earlier. I thought about the uncertainties that plague nearly all my decisions, the insecurities, inadequacies, lack of satisfaction; the insomnia, mood swings, loss of appetite, feelings of remorse and regret, all of which follow brief but euphoric episodes of self-righteousness and false grandeur for a stellar career gone uncelebrated.
I almost turned the key and started the engine up again. The urge to drive away from there and keep on going seemed overwhelming. If not for the thought that I might just drive myself off the end of the pier at Suffolk’s Walk and drown a chilly death, then I might have done it. Instead, I let go of the key, got out of the car and walked up to Lilith’s door.
The night grew cooler and the moon higher in the starry sky. I took a deep breath, knocked on the door and waited for Lilith to answer. I didn’t think I would have to wait long. Somehow, I knew she expected me.
When the door opened, I stepped inside. I didn’t say hello. I didn’t comment on the candles burning in little saucers and dishes throughout the house, and I didn’t even wipe my feet. I simply shut the door, took my coat off and sat down at the kitchen table. Lilith still had on her black robe, long cords of black beads still adorned her neck. She sat at the table across from me, her eyes like diamonds, shimmering in the candlelight, unblinking and cold.
“You have it?” she asked.
She knew I did. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the witch’s ladder that I had taken from Leona’s room the night we rescued her from Doctor Lowell’s basement prison. I passed it across the table to her. “I’m sorry I didn’t—”
“Say no more.” She took the beads and placed them around her neck. “Is she dead?”
“Mallory?” I said, but then realized I didn’t really have to ask her that. Lilith and I had made a connection: a connection we always had. “Yes, she’s dead. It happened a little while ago. I gathered some details from the chatter over the police radio on my way here. We sent a unit across town to check out her apartment. They found her body. The coroner will likely rule her death natural, heart attack or something, but….”
Lilith nodded, knowingly. I watched her play with the candle setting on the table, running her fingers over the flame slowly, but without burning herself. I took that as a metaphor of our relationship, realizing that the same would not hold true for me, should I decide to play with the fires she offered.
“The ring did it,” I said. “Didn’t it?”
Without looking up, she replied, “I told you it would work.”
“You never said it would kill her.”
“It wouldn’t have killed her if it wasn’t supposed to. The spell only exercises to the degree it must to work.”
“You should have told me.”
“Why? Would you have done anything differently?”
She knew I wouldn’t. To save Leona, I would have jumped out a window and landed on my head in the middle of the street.
I watched Lilith pinch the candle’s flame and remove it from the wick. Still it burned with indifference between her fingers.
“Tell me,” she said. “At what point did you know that Mallory was the one co-possessing her victims through bilocation?”
“At what point did you know?” I returned.
She smiled, rolling the flame across her hand the way a magician rolls a silver dollar between his fingers. “Have you figured out why she did it?”
I offered up a passive shrug. “Revenge, I guess. I think she wanted to get back at everyone that ever teased Benny or made fun of him in Doctor Lowell’s workshops. She loved him, you know. I suppose, in her own twisted mind, it was the least she could do for him after molesting him.”
“So, the rumors were true?”
“You knew?”
“I heard things.”
“Lilith, then why didn’t you tell me about that earlier? It could have helped me in my investigation.”
She lifted her hand and blew on the flame percolating from her fingertips. It seemed to go out at first, but then ignited again like a trick candle on a birthday cake. She smiled at that, and I could not help but smile, too.
“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know it as fact,” she said. “I’m not one to perpetuate rumors.”
“Still….” I said, and then left it at that.
She looked up at me above the flame. “Why do you think she went after Leona?”
“Jealously. It’s the oldest motive in the book. Mallory knew that Benny liked Leona. She was the last thing standing in her way.”
“So, Ricardo is dead, too, yes?” That she asked meant she already knew, although I couldn’t imagine how she figured that one out.
“Spinelli shot him.” I said. Funny, but it came out so easily. In a way, I guessed it made me feel like he had earned his rank in doing so. It didn’t make sense, though. I had been a detective fifteen years before I ever had to shoot a man, and Carlos never has.
“It’s still too early to say for sure,” I told her. “But the working theory now is that Piakowski tried to extort hush money from Rivera to keep silent about Benjamin’s real relationship to Ricardo.”
“His real relationship?”
“Ricardo Rivera was Benny’s father. It’s complicated, but—”
“Never mind. I get it.”
“Anyway, things got out of hand, Rivera shot Piakowski and then….” I stopped there, finding it harder to say the words than to let her finish saying them for me.
“And then your boy, Spinelli, tied up the score. How tidy.”
“It was self-defense. He had to shoot him.”
Lilith pinched the flame back onto the candle’s wick. “Oh, I’m sure the DA will clear him.”
“Why shouldn’t he? It was justified.”
&nb
sp; “He reminds you of yourself, doesn’t he, Detective?”
“Spinelli? No. If anything he reminds me of a younger Carlos.”
She looked up over the candle. “I told you to watch that one, didn’t I? He’s impetuous. That scene he caused at the restaurant is typical of his over-zealousness.”
“He’ll do fine,” I said, feeling a little agitated. But then, Lilith always had a way of pushing my buttons like that. I leaned back in my seat and straightened my shoulders. “Look, Lilith, I didn’t come here to—”
“Wait,” she said, holding her finger in the air. She tilted her head to one side in anticipation of it, and before I could ask why, the old grandfather clock by the door struck midnight. As the chimes rang, she stood and offered me her hand.
“What?” I said, admittedly confused.
She broke into a giddy laugh. “Come on, Anthony. It’s why you came here tonight, isn’t it?”
It was, I thought, or I guessed. I had come for a reason. I just didn’t know exactly what.
I took her hand and followed her to the living room. She pointed to a spot on the floor by the sofa and I understood that to mean I should stand there and just watch.
She crossed the room, stopped at a bookcase and removed a large book from the top shelf. It looked to me like an old bible, but of course, I knew that wasn’t the case. Still, she handled it with all the reverence befitting a sacred scripture, dusting the cover with the brush of her hand before gently blowing over the top.
She cradled it across the room, setting it on a podium of sorts, before opening it carefully to a section previously book-marked with a black ribbon.
The podium stood only inches from me, so close that I might have read from the text, had it not been written in script unknown to mortal men. I looked up from the book and found Lilith looking at me. Her eyes appeared cat-like, big and round with pupils shaped like long thin diamonds.
“This is the grimoire,” she told me, “a book of witchcraft used for invoking spells and spirits. It’s a text of ages, written by my ancestors and passed down through generations. Some people call it the book of shadows, but that’s a misnomer, as is the case with most things associated with witchcraft. The perversion of this religion exists only within those who don’t understand it. Tonight you will come to understand it for yourself.”
Her words struck me like a blow to the chest. I felt my heart flatten and the wind in my lungs compress to a shriveled wedge of air. I swallowed back the lump in my throat and smiled at her thinly, knowing thirty years earlier I would have run from that place as fast as I could.
She looked down at the book and ran her index finger over a single line, mouthing the passage to herself as she had, no doubt, recited a dozen times before. I felt uneasy watching her, yet I also felt filled with anticipation, the likes I hadn’t known in years.
After reading the passage several times, she closed the grimoire and then glided on a thread of air back to the bookcase. This time she retrieved a brown canvas pouch and returned it to the center of the room.
Untying its drawstrings, she began spilling the contents of the pouch onto the floor. I thought it looked like sand at first, for it poured out fine and dry, though it sparkled like glitter and smelled like mulberry. She poured the substance in a circle, maybe the size of a large round table top, her body positioned directly in the middle.
“Are you wearing any metals?” she asked, but before I could answer, she added, “If so, remove all of it now.”
At once, I emptied my pockets of all my loose change, my keys and my cell phone. I removed my rings and a gold chain from around my neck, and even my belt.
“Done,” I said, suddenly feeling a little naked and just a bit foolish.
She pointed at my shoes. “Those, too.”
“My shoes?”
“They’ve got heels, don’t they?”
“Yes.”
“Are they glued or nailed?”
I kicked them off without further discussion. She continued pouring out sand within the circle, this time drawing two points connected by opposing arced lines that formed what looked like a cat’s eye. That done, she stood erect, the fringes of her robe barely brushing the highest peaks of the sand piles.
I noticed then how the candles she placed around the room, if connected by lines, would have also resembled that cat’s eye pattern. She smiled at me upon that discovery.
“Earlier tonight,” she said, “I gave you a charm and told you it was the eye of the witch. I thought you might find strength in its symbolism. I was wrong.” She splayed her arms to encompass the design she had drawn on the floor with the sand. “This, Detective, is the real eye of the witch. Focus with me, your thoughts and energy, as I summon the four guardians of nature into the circle.”
What happened next still astonishes me as I think about it. Lilith closed her eyes, tilted her head back and echoed the words from the grimoire that she practiced earlier.
Nearly at once, four tiny white lights appeared like fireflies, buzzing about the room in spirited play, darting and zigzagging until finally descending to the floor by Lilith’s feet. They gamboled there in rhythmic tempos within the circle, tripping from point-to-point along the arced lines and around the outer edges in no particular order.
More words spilled from her lips, and a bluish white light formed only inches above her head. It hovered there nervously, filled with static heat like an electric halo.
She drew a line with her hands down the center of her body from the bridge of her nose all the way to the floor. As she did this, a light from that halo followed the path of her hands, entering the circle of sand and lighting it up in a glow of white-hot energy.
Next, she motioned with her right hand to her left shoulder, and then with her left hand to her right shoulder. That gesture directed the path of energy along the arced lines to the end points of the sculpture, thus completing the Eye of the Witch.
“A year and a day ago,” said Lilith, grasping the witch’s ladder around her neck. “I cast a spell upon these beads and committed my involvement to a cause unbefitting my convictions. In the vein of returning energy, I submit and relinquish this object to the coven, my ancestral guardians and keepers of the Witch’s Lineage.”
With those words, the ring of energy surrounding her body exploded in a flash as bright as day. I started to back away, but as my eyes readjusted to the relative dim of candlelight, I saw Lilith motioning for me to step into the circle with her.
I don’t think I felt a moment’s hesitation after that. I only remember wanting to join her, and wanting to do it quickly before she changed her mind, or before the power of the eye subsided.
I moved to the edge of the circle and reached for her. Our hands joined, and I immediately felt a sense of comfort like slipping into a warm pool on a chilly morning.
She pulled me fully into the circle, removed the beaded witch’s ladder from around her neck and draped it over my head. I think, at that point, I started to say something, but she held her finger and thumb to my mouth and pinched my lips closed. Then she squeezed both my hands and recited this:
“Banish weaker mortal souls, we summons thee of witch’s role. Through hexing slight of wizard’s slant, invoke thy magick, and essence grant. By Rite of Passage this night begun, bestow upon thy soul plus one.”
I’m not sure what I expected next, but I was surprised when nothing at all happened right away. I looked into Lilith’s eyes. The normal human-like features returned. Gone were the cat’s eyes with thin diamond-shaped pupils. Though with Lilith, they still presented a haunting ebony gaze that one dares not stare into too long. I watched them narrow with her growing smile, which tipped me off that she wasn’t at all done.
A tickle in my stomach filled me with the sensation one gets when poised at the top of a roller coaster that’s about to plunge over the first hill. I smiled back at her in anticipation of something greater to come.
That’s when she leaned in close and blew a puf
f of air into my face. I felt her grip against my hands tighten and then all hell broke loose.
The ring of sand at our feet ignited in a vertical shower of rushing wind, light and sound, a noise so loud I could not hear myself think.
The ground shook. The walls of the house rocked and the ceiling opened up completely, exposing us to the moon and stars and a cascading column of energy unlike anything I’d ever witnessed before.
I let out a holler full of rapture and bliss, consumed by the power unleashed barely within my touch. Furniture filled my peripheral view in colorful blurs flying skyward and beyond. I imagined myself standing in the plume of a fiery rocket, a sublime display of the supernatural invading the world of mediocrity.
It astounded and frightened me, knowing that if I stepped outside the circle even a bit that the blast from that plume would propel me into orbit like a tiny speck of dust.
In a moment of euphoria and awakening, I pulled Lilith in closer and I held her tightly. I meant no implications about it, but that the kinship I felt went beyond the temporal sense to a boundless sphere. And in the middle of absolute commotion, with chaos churning all around us, I found a sense of love and belonging when she wrapped her arms around me and locked her fingers behind my back.
“Lilith!” I screamed, my voice hoarse from shouting above the noise of the rushing wind. “If anything happens to us, I want you to know—”
“Can it!” she hollered back. “Something is happening to us! So, shut up and let it happen!”
She closed her eyes and pressed her cheek to my chest.
Now, I don’t want to say that she was snuggling, but I did feel her arms around my waist tighten some. I covered the other side of her face with my hand to protect her from possible flying debris, but I think she knew that was only an excuse for me to hug, rather than hold her. I closed my eyes and set my chin atop her head.
Sometime later, I can’t say when, but I felt a hand upon my shoulder. I got the strangest feeling that I had somehow drifted off to sleep. The night fell silent. A distant hiss from a broken gas line filled the air with the smell of sulfur.
Lilith was still in my arms, both her hands still locked around my waist. I pulled back to look at her, almost believing that she had fallen asleep, too. I brushed her cheek, and like a budding flower, she peeled back and gazed up into my eyes.
“Hey,” I said. “You all right?”
She smiled softly, her chin riding the rise of my chest as I breathed. “Yeah. You?”
“Yeah.”
The hand on my shoulder shook me, and a voice accompanying it said, “Are you two all right? That must have been some weird tornado.”
I looked around. The house was gone, the walls, the furnishings, all of it—gone. Lilith unclasped her hands and took a single step back. She slapped her palm against my chest and smiled teasingly, the way girls do sometimes when you work that tickle spot under their arm.
“What?” I said. “Why are you smiling?”
“Look at you,” she said, running the back of her hand up and down my cheek. Her eyes sparkled curiously, as if seeing me for the first time. “You’re very handsome. You know that?”
I turned away bashfully. “So are you...I mean, you’re beautiful.”
“Look,” said the man behind me, and only then did I realize he was a police officer. “You kids look like you’re doing fine. Just so you know, the ambulance and fire trucks are on their way.”
I turned to say something to him, but he had already started away.
“What’s with him?” I said, hiking my thumb up over my shoulder. “He’s not so old he should get away with calling me kid.”
That’s when I saw it. I looked deeper into her eyes. Something remarkable happened. I couldn’t say for sure, but if I had to guess, I would have said that Lilith looked seven or eight years younger, a noticeable difference for a twenty-something year-old.
I cupped her face in my hands and steadied it to the moonlight spilling over my shoulder. “Lilith? What was that spell you cast?”
“Why do you ask?”
“You look younger.”
She pulled back some, so I let her go. “Detective, do you know how old I am?” Her smile seemed prettier than I had ever noticed before.
“I don’t know. I suppose you’re about twenty-five, six…something like that?”
“No. I’m much older.”
“Thirty? You can’t be older than thirty, because you look seventeen.”
“I’m over one hundred.”
“A hundred what?”
“Years, Detective! Over one hundred years! In fact, I’m a hundred and seventy-two.”
“That’s impossible.”
She planted her hands on her hips the way I had seen her do, say—oh, maybe a hundred and seventy-two times before. “Come here,” she said, leading me by the hand to the part of the slab that used to be her bathroom. She picked up a piece of broken mirror and handed it to me. “Careful. It’s sharp.” I took the mirror and held it to her face. “No!” she scolded, slapping my hand away. “It’s not for me. It’s for you. Look.”
If I live another hundred and seventy-two years, which I might, I’ll never get over the initial shock of seeing my face in that broken piece of glass.
In my wildest dreams, I never could have imagined it. As I held the mirror to my face, the person I saw staring back was a version of me that I hadn’t seen in over forty years.
“My, God!” I cried. “How is this possible? How….” I patted myself down from head to toe. I looked at the palms of my hands and then at the backs of them. I peeled my socks off and looked at my feet. I pulled my shirt up and marveled at my washboard abs. Every part of me looked young, smooth and tight. I turned to Lilith, unable to speak. She reached up and closed my opened mouth.
“You’re not upset, are you?”
“Upset? No! Of course not.”
“Oh, it’s just that some old fogies can’t wait to die. I didn’t think you were one of them.”
“Are you saying I’ll never die?”
She laughed robustly, even snorted. “No, you’ll die…someday, just not as soon as you thought. Unless I kill you, that is.”
I knew she was kidding, but still, I let the comment go unchallenged, considering her questionable past with the Lieberman workshop. “So, what now? Where do I go from here?”
She stepped toward me. “Where do you want to go?”
I put my arms around her and pulled her in closer. “I want to go where ever you go.” I leaned in to kiss her.
“Wait,” she said, and pulled away. “This is not why I did this. I included you in my rite of passage because I thought you had lost yourself. I wanted to help.”
“And you have. I truly was lost. If not for you, I don’t know what I would have done.”
“But it’s different now. You know that.”
“Yes. I see. We’re nearly the same age now.”
“Hardly,” she said, in her typical sarcastic breath. “I’m still thrice your age.”
“Funny, you don’t look a day over twenty.”
The lights and sirens coming around the corner let us know that the ambulance and fire trucks were almost there. Lilith took me by the hand and led me off to the side of the yard where we melted into the crowd of onlookers that had spilled out of neighboring homes.
Behind the fire trucks and ambulance came more police cars, one of which carried Carlos and Spinelli to the scene. We faded back further behind the crowd, took a seat on a rock wall partitioning her yard from the neighbor’s, and disappeared into the shadows.
“I’ll have to tell them,” I said. “They’ll think we died in the tornado if I don’t.”
She shook her head. “Tell them what you will about yourself, but leave me out of it.”
“But, why?”
“Because, don’t you see? Every once in a while I have to make it look like I died. How else can I explain my age?”
“You mean you’ve done this be
fore?”
She raised her right shoulder to her ear and dropped it. “Eh, a few times.”
“How many?”
“Well, you have to figure that witches only age about a year to every three that mortals age. After ten or fifteen years, people start asking questions. You can’t just go around telling them you look so damn great because you eat right and exercise. Why do you think we used to get burned at the stake so often? People back in those days looked like shit at thirty. At least now it’s getting so that a careful witch can wait a decade or two before she renews her rite of passage.”
“So, you have to renew it from time-to-time?”
“I don’t have to,” she scoffed. “Not if I want to become an old hag like my grandmother.”
“Is she a witch, too?”
“Detective, all the women in my family are witches. We came over on the Mayflower.”
“Huh.” I looked out over the crowd of people that ventured closer to the spot where Lilith’s home once stood. The police did little to keep them away, seeing there wasn’t much more than a slab left for them to look at.
I turned to Lilith, who didn’t seem the least bit concerned about losing her house. I asked her, “How does that work again? The ceremony, I mean. I look forty years younger, while you, forgive me for saying, have changed little, relatively speaking.”
She laughed, which made me feel silly for asking. But it really didn’t make sense to me. “It’s your prime,” she said, and I nodded as if I knew what she was talking about. “The rite of passage restores the body to its biological prime. For women, that’s usually about age twenty, for men, about twenty-five, regardless of where you start. I last renewed my rite of passage eighteen years ago. That reset my clock back to what you see now. If you knew me then you would have expected to see me as a thirty-eight-year-old last night. And you saw me. I mean, let’s face it. Did I look pretty damn good for thirty-eight, or what?”
“Shah! You looked smokin`.”
“I know.”
“Right, then. I see what you mean. Another couple of years and someone would have started asking questions.”
“Exactly.”
“But you could help yourself look older if you wanted to. You could do something funky with your hair, baggy up on the pants….”
“What, and deny an ass like this?” She hopped off the wall and modeled her rear end for me. “No way!”
“All right. I get it,” I said with a laugh. She did have a fine ass, witchcraft notwithstanding; the girl had earned the bragging rights and then some.
“Besides,” she added, and I thought she sounded a little disappointed. “There’s been a major shift in the celestial alignment that facilitates the passage. I won’t have the opportunity to renew my vows again for another ninety-nine years. I’ll be two hundred and seventy one by then. Even for a witch, that’s old. If I couldn’t have completed the ceremony tonight, I don’t think I would have made it to another one.”
“Really?” I said, and my mind drifted off somewhere, wondering what might happen to me in the meantime. If my biological clock slowed to the pace of hers, then ninety-nine years might only add thirty-three to my now twenty-five. In that case, I’d still look only fifty-eight. Perhaps then, she and I could renew the vows again.
I leaned back on the wall and nearly fell off it. Lilith laughed, but it brought home her point. Nothing she or I did anymore could ever seem so simple. How does one keep reinventing one’s self in the face of near immortality? How does one carry on a normal life? I turned to her, hoping to find answers in the subtleties of her mood.
“Lilith? May I ask you a question?”
“No.”
“No? I can’t ask you a question?”
“No. That’s the answer to the question you were going to ask. Actually, your question was a two-part question. Wasn’t it?”
I hated that she could still do that. “Yes.”
“Then the answer is the same for both.”
“I see.” I sat on the wall, stewing over the matter, unsure if I shouldn’t ask her anyway just to clarify things. When I couldn’t take it any longer, I said to her, “So, you were never married?”
She kept her gaze straight ahead. For all the people and equipment picking around at the tornado site, it seemed remarkably quiet. “No, I never married.”
I nodded. “Yeah, me neither. And no children?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Right. Same here.” I reached out and took her hand. “So do you—”
“No, Tony, I don’t. So, don’t ask.”
“Okay. I won’t ask.” I let go of her hand. She turned around to face the crowd again, but then stepped back, settling against the wall between my knees. I pulled her in closer, wrapping my arms around her waist and setting my chin upon her shoulder. Her hair smelled so very fine and her cheek so smooth against mine.
I know she wanted me to think I knew that she knew what I wanted to ask her, but I’m banking on the hope that she didn’t. After all, Lilith is a complicated woman. She knows what she wants, and I’m sure she gets what she wants when she wants it.
Me, I’m not so complicated, and I’m a patient guy. Add to that the real possibility that I may have another hundred or so years to get what I want.
Earlier, I set my hand upon the obsidian in my pocket and made a wish that I might start my life over, that I might know then what I know now. I prayed that the powers of witchcraft bestowed on the granitic glass through Lilith’s spell might somehow bend to my will, if only I believed hard enough.
She later told me that the obsidian wasn’t the true eye of the witch, but at the time, I didn’t know that. I cannot say with certainty whether or not the obsidian had anything to do with what took place that night, or if the evening’s events were all part of Lilith’s original grand scheme. Either way, I believe that any given circumstance comes with its own built-in variables.
I listened to the words of Lilith’s rite of passage ceremony. She invoked the powers of the coven, ‘…Invoke thy magick, and essence grant,’ she said. I know I heard it. Towards the end, she added, ‘…by Rite of Passage this night begun, bestow upon thy soul plus one.’
Now, I’m no expert on the ways of witchcraft, but seeing that I’m now some forty years younger, I’m thinking that ‘plus one’ means that I, like Lilith, had been granted the secrets and essence of magick.
I still have a way to go before I catch up with her. I mean, I won’t be casting spells anytime soon, but I can wait. Besides, I think it will be worth it. And it should be fun, too. After all, Lilith’s not the only one who can stare into the Eye of the Witch without blinking.
Author’s note:
Thanks for reading, or listening, as the case may be, to book two in the Detective Marcella Witch’s series. Below, you’ll find a listing of the rest of the titles in the series in order, along with other non-series titles. For more info and updates, visit author Dana E. Donovan on Facebook.
Books in this series include:
The Witch’s Ladder
Eye of the Witch
The Witch’s Key
Bones of a Witch
Witch House
Kiss the Witch
Call of the Witch
Gone is the Witch
Return of the Witch
Bury the Witch
Soul of a Witch
Other books by this author:
Abandoned
Resurrection
Skinny
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Eye of the Witch (Paranormal Detective Mystery series, book 2) Page 4