by Mara Webb
“Well I don’t think I can afford either, so I hope you take I.O.U’s,” I replied.
“Your first murder defense is free,” he laughed as he looked over his shoulder to reverse away from the curb. He had wrapped his arm around the top of my chair to get a better view through the rear window. “If you get arrested again though you might have to sell Quin on the internet for some extra cash. I don’t come cheap.”
“You think Quin would fetch enough in an online auction to pay for a lawyer? Well I will have to lie in the description,” I smiled. “Where are you taking me now?” He had started to drive away, and it wasn’t in the direction of Charm Close, he wasn’t taking me home.
“Council meeting, cursed jewelry puts you top of the priority list,” he announced. “Quin said he saw Brent take something off Joanne’s hand, if he has taken the ring then your problems have only just begun.”
7
Pulling up to the square building brought me out of my blank stare and energized me enough to speak. The ride from the police station to the strange little cube in which we had our council meetings had been largely silent and I had zoned out to try and piece together anything that might help us figure out what had happened last night.
There had been no time for me to read the note I found in her hand, if it was something incriminating then the police would never believe that I intended to hand it over. I didn’t even know for sure if I had planned to, was I just going to keep it hidden away?
“Would you like to borrow a jacket?” Ryan asked. He had parked the car on the dust lot beside the entrance doors and I turned to him questioningly. “You are wearing your pajamas and this place isn’t famous for being warm.”
“Right, yeah. A jacket would be great,” I said. We both stepped out of the car and he took a jacket from the back seat and handed it to me before walking around to help slip it over my arms. My hair was trapped underneath the fabric and I reached up to swoop my hands along the back of my neck to pull my hair free.
My long, dark tresses fell into loose waves, they were messy and unbrushed, but I had basically been taken to the station straight from my bed. Any energy I would typically waste worrying what everyone else looked like was redirected to Ryan’s comment that Brent might have taken the ring.
Ryan pushed open the tall wooden doors and held them open as I shuffled inside. He was treating me like a fragile object, likely because he thought I was in shock. Was I? I had seen plenty of dead bodies at this point, obviously it was a surprise to see someone dead on top of my own car, but it didn’t frighten me.
The possibility that I was going to be held responsible however, that was a new fear. What would I tell my mom? Would I have an opportunity to speak to her? I didn’t even have my cell phone to communicate with Brent, but I also had no idea what we would talk about.
As we walked along the entrance corridor, we both grabbed our robes from the hooks beneath our engraved name tag and continued on into the main room. The rest of the council were, as always, already there. Jennifer and Justin sat either side of Amber, the head of the council. There were two seats remaining which allowed Ryan and I to sit next to each other. We took our places, held hands and closed our eyes to begin the meeting. As we each focused on our responsibilities as council members, a fire beneath the cauldron behind Amber sprung to life and cycled through several colors before settling on emerald green flames.
A typewriter appeared on the desk beside Amber. We hadn’t used the automated stenographer for a while, this machine looked significantly more modern than the last one and as I began to speak, the tapping of the keys was almost inaudible.
“Want to catch us all up to speed?” Amber asked.
“Body of a cursed woman found on top of my car; I called the police last night because she was acting in an intimidating way, so I look like the main suspect. She is Brent’s ex-fiancé, and he thinks her engagement ring was cursed, and Ryan thinks Brent now has the ring. Who wants to fix this for me?” I asked.
The others laughed. I was glad they appreciated my sense of humor because the reality of the situation was quite bleak. Ryan had his fingers locked together and was twirling his thumbs in circles around each other, no one spoke for a full minute during which I thought they might be planning to drive me back to the station themselves and wash their hands of the whole mess. I needn’t have worried.
“Cursed jewelry huh?” Amber said. “Are we talking about the Lundeen curse? I didn’t know there was still any of that on the market.”
“I spoke to Quin,” Ryan responded. “He said that based on what he overheard from Brent it was bought from that weird little store in town, the one the rest of us avoid. That’s got Lundeen written all over it, bigger stores know to check their products for the Lundeen curse, but it’s an expensive process, small places don’t bother.”
There seemed to be a conversation going on that I wasn’t really a part of, if I were to guess then I would say ‘Lundeen’ was the name of the woman who cursed all the stuff in the divorce thing Quin had told me about. It wasn’t a huge surprise that Quin had been eavesdropping either. Everyone here seemed to have heard of that curse before, it had been brand new information for me, so trying to keep up was a challenge.
“Okay, so you’ll need all of the names and we have to get that ring back. I don’t know if I still have the number of the curse-breaker, what’s her name, you know, the witch on the hill? Anyway, one thing at a time, follow the trial because the humans won’t have a clue. Then we can deal with the curse after that,” Amber said. Jennifer nodded in agreement and turned to me.
“Nora, do you know all of the names for Brent’s ex-girlfriends? Both before and after Joanne?” Jen asked.
“Not a clue, why?”
“Well the curse has been known to affect all the relationships involved so it might work retroactively as well as seeping into subsequent relationships. You’re probably fine because of Edith’s magic, she was powerful, and I doubt she would get stung by this sort of nonsense,” Jen said.
I looked searchingly back at her as it felt like I didn’t have all the information I needed to go out and fix the problem.
“Joanne is the woman with the cursed jewelry, right? She went cuckoo bananas, that’s why they broke up isn’t it?” she asked. I nodded. “Well it has probably cursed every girlfriend he ever had, the Lundeen curse is a strange one. It kind of seeks out love between two people and ruins it, she was pretty bitter when she came up with it, so it makes sense.
“Anyway, that will mean that all of these other women will have struggled to date anyone else successfully because of the curse and if they have found out Joanne is at the heart of the problem, they might have killed her. I don’t know how many people he has dated, but I would put money on it that one of them killed her. This curse has been at the center of more murders than you would believe. Love is a powerful motive.”
As I sat and contemplated everything that had been explained to me, the typewriter was rapidly depressing its keys to record the minutes of the meeting. Once it had finally caught up, I opened my mouth to say something and I heard a loud grunt of annoyance from it before it started to type again.
“What if he won’t speak to me? He thinks I have killed someone,” I said.
“He will, but if he keeps hold of that engagement ring for too long then it will affect his personality and he will become unpredictable, he won’t be the man you know. It won’t be his fault of course, but you know…you’ll need to keep yourself safe. Don’t be alone with him,” Ryan instructed.
Ryan’s warning made me take pause and reflect on the way that Brent had so brazenly accused me of Joanne’s murder. Was that evidence of the ring changing him already?
The council meeting concluded with a plan to keep everyone in the loop about the location of the engagement ring, Amber said she would track down the address of the curse-breaker witch and Ryan offered to drive me home.
The journey back to Charm Close was a little mor
e lively than the trip to the council building, Ryan was talking to me about some of the weirdest cases he had worked on as a lawyer for magical folk and I couldn’t stop expressing my disbelief that his career had never been mentioned before.
Was I that self-centered that I had never thought to ask? Apparently so. As we turned onto my street, I could see that there was some type of crime scene tape around my driveway, it appeared that my car had been taken as evidence too which complicated things. It looked like I wasn’t going to find out if I had the ability to fix that tire now.
“I can take you back and forth to work if you need it, I work whatever hours I like so I’m available,” Ryan said as he pulled up along the curb.
“That would be great, I can learn all the things about you that I should already know. Maybe you can set up a quiz for me on Friday to see how much information I have retained,” I joked. Quin was staring out of the lounge window, it prompted me to speed up my exit from the car. “Ryan, I can’t…I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t shown up today. I can’t thank you enough. I really-”
“Happy to help,” he said. “Go get some rest, or catch up on The Masked Singer, or whatever it is you were planning to do today and let me take care of the police. You’ve done nothing wrong here, just get those names from Brent and then give me a call.”
He checked his cell phone and then looked up at me. “Huh. Okay, word is that the note said: ‘She does not know you, look away, I will wait forever, your fate is sealed.’ whatever that means.”
I waved goodbye as he sped off down the street and turned out of sight. The empty driveway almost felt harder to see than if they had left the body there. The absence of my car would be a reminder of the knife sticking out of the wheel and Brent’s scream when he arrived, everything that I wanted to fade away.
I couldn’t process what was written in the note, it was weird and just straight up nonsense. It probably sounded really cool if you were under some creepy curse, but it was only serving to make me look like the bad guy. ‘She does not know you.’
Was the note supposed to be for me or Brent?
“Take your time why don’t you!” Quin shouted when I finally walked through the front door. “The day I’ve had, you wouldn’t even believe. Also, you will not guess who was dressed as the octopus! Do you know that soap opera from—?”
“Quin! Don’t spoil it for me please, for crying out loud it’s one of the only good things in my life right now. Where is my cell phone?”
“On the counter. It has buzzed a couple of times, Brent has sent you a few messages,” he replied. I had turned off the message previews on my phone so that Quin couldn’t read everything that was sent to me from my lock screen.
He was so nosey and hungry for gossip that he would only need the first few words from a message and then fabricate some fantastical tale that was in no way connected to reality. Like the time he saw a text from my mom that started ‘Just packed and leaving the ho-’ and he created a whole story about how she must be really ill if she is visiting the hospital so much and started ordering flowers and chocolates to be sent to the house, but she had just checked out of a hotel on some road trip she was on with my step-dad. His lack of interest in gathering all the information before spreading a rumor was probably how he ended up thinking that Brent was coming here to propose last night.
I walked over to my phone and unlocked it with my thumbprint. I had three messages from Brent, they were all short and had been sent within a minute of each other. Based on the time, he must have sent them while I was in the middle of the council meeting. I wondered what he had been thinking about in the hour leading up to that. His messages read, ‘I want to believe that you didn’t do anything’, ‘I want to trust you’, and ‘I feel torn’.
I didn’t want to do the text message dance where I try to skirt around the topic or avoid being direct. I replied, ‘I need the name of every girlfriend you have ever had’ and put my phone down. “Quin, I’m going to get started on my runes book,” I shouted.
As if I didn’t have enough on my plate, I now had to learn some weird ancient witch language. I was running up the stairs and could hear the thunder of paws chasing after me from the kitchen floor. Quin was trying to shout something to me, but I didn’t hear him. I didn’t hear the warning before it was too late. I was standing in my bedroom doorway when Quin caught up to me, breathless.
“Oh yeah, I forgot to mention. Joanne is a ghost now and she is really angry about something. I trapped her in this box.”
8
I hadn’t seen a ghost like this before. When I had moved into this house, I had been startled by something moving in a mirror behind me, when I had focused in on the shape I was seeing I realized it was my dead aunt Edith and passed out from the shock.
I later learned that witches could become ghosts that inhabit the mirrors of their homes, this allowed Edith to interact with me every day when I brushed my teeth. For some reason though, my ghost aunt was unable to talk, so we communicated using sign language. I was quickly able to see that it would not be the case with Joanne.
“What have you and that stupid cat done to me?” she screamed. Her voice was harsh and filled with rage, but at least she could speak. I smiled, more out of pleasant surprise than anything, which obviously made her more upset. “What is so funny? You think it is a joke to trap me like this? Let me out!”
“I won’t be letting you out of anywhere until you take a few deep breaths and calm down. Not actual breaths obviously,” I mumbled anxiously. I didn’t want to aggravate her further.
“I don’t think she knows,” Quin whispered at a volume as loud as speaking.
“Knows what?” Joanne said. I looked down at Quin and he shook his head. Joanne didn’t know she was a ghost, or that she had died. I had been thrust into the position of needing to deliver horrible news to someone that already hated me.
This wasn’t going to end well for anyone. I wished that I could utilize the ‘slow down’ spell I had used on the police officers and quickly research how to diplomatically work my way through this minefield, but I suspected that the guidance on telling someone they have died would be limited.
“Do you remember anything about how you got here?” I asked. Part of me wanted to help her, I knew that none of her behavior was within her control and that in ordinary circumstances she wouldn’t have been stalking her ex-boyfriend for years. Or at least I hoped that was the case. She seemed to be working her way through recent events to piece it together before answering me.
“I came here because of Brent. My little honeybee. He shouldn’t be with you and I wanted you and him to be over so that we could be together again. I was mad at you about something, but I can’t remember what it was now. I was watching you, looking up at the house to see into your windows and then I had a really bad headache. It came out of nowhere, and next thing I know I’m inside and your cat is chasing me around and won’t stop talking so I thought my headache had messed me up,” she laughed a little, but the smile faded. “I don’t understand how I am in here.”
“You died!” Quin blurted out. “Sorry, I just wanted to get to the point quicker. Did you see who killed you?”
Her face dropped and I gave Quin a glare that I prayed was able to convey my feelings about his lack of sensitivity. Whatever answer he was hoping she would give; this wasn’t it.
“I… what?” she said slowly.
“You died,” Quin repeated blankly. “Look at your hands. They’re all see through and stuff.”
Joanne looked at her hands, and noticed, for what looked like the first time, that they were transparent. “I’m dead?” she asked herself. “I’m a ghost? I died? I’m dead?”
Quin nodded. “Totally dead. Murdered. Do you know who—”
“Murdered?!” she said, her entire demeanor suddenly changed. “Murdered?! You murdered me?! Why you conniving and sufferable monsters, I—I—!”
It was probably for the best that Quin had trapp
ed Joanne in this shimmering, rectangular light prison, as Joanne started to thrash about furiously against the walls of her cage. She slammed her fists against the solid air and kicked in all directions, cursing seven ways until Sunday about all the terrible ways she would get her revenge on us.
Quin half-heartedly tried to talk over her screaming to explain that we hadn’t killed her, but even he couldn’t make himself heard. I was too transfixed by her sudden and volatile change in behavior to even say anything. All I could do was watch.
She shouted and screamed but it wasn’t long before her rage gave way to defeat. Joanne dropped to the ground and screamed for us to leave. In my panic to obey I managed to run over to grab my laptop and the book from my desk before the screaming started again.
I closed the bedroom door on my way out so that she wouldn’t be disturbed by the other cats as she tried to process what was going on.
“You died? Seriously? Why do I live with seven of you creatures? I should get a dog,” I grunted, taking my things to the kitchen counter to work. I checked my phone and Brent hadn’t replied yet. Conflicting thoughts about whether or not I should tell him about the ghost upstairs were fighting in my mind.
If I was trying to profess my innocence, then it didn’t look good for me to have imprisoned the ghost of a murder victim in my house. Maybe Ryan could help? No. I had a language to learn, I could give myself an hour to focus on something else, that assuming I could block out all of the distractions.
The bedroom door wasn’t doing a great job of muffling the screams from upstairs.
I opened up my computer and first went to search for the audiobook that my tutor had recommended I purchase. There was a witch that had been cursed so that she could never stop talking, she started recording audiobooks of various magical scripts so that she could make a little extra cash.