Petty Magic

by Camille DeAngelis

  So it was just as the local chemist had suspected all those years ago, though he never could have proved she was behind it. “I tampered with his coffee that very Monday. Now that there are no more secrets between us, I must tell you that I felt no guilt, not even the slightest twinge. He promised to let Belva go right away, and I told myself that so long as he made good on his promise, I would never do it again.

  “Well, you all know how it turned out. He began to make excuses for keeping her on. He swore up and down that he had ended it, that it had never really begun because it had only happened the once. I kept an eye on him at his office—”

  “You did use that grimoire, for the fish-eye trick,” Morven says. “We saw it in the View-Master.”

  Helena nods. “I’m sorry, dear, but I couldn’t bring myself to admit that I’d ever opened it. The book itself was a token of maleficium—I told you I didn’t know who’d sent it, but you all know well enough who it was—and I knew I could shake it off by actually using one of the spells. Anyway, I saw them together, day after day, sometimes working … and sometimes not.

  “So I kept adding the methylene chloride, and he got a little sicker every day.” She pauses to press her hankie to her eyes. “It wasn’t that I wanted him to suffer; I only wanted to give him time to make good.”

  I picture Henry’s life as an hourglass filled with coffee grounds instead of sand, his life slipping away cup by cup. I won’t ever drink another coffee again as long as I live.

  Tingles of horror creep down my neck when I think of what she’s done—the cold precision of it and the apparent fact that in sixty years she’s never once felt the need to ease her conscience. Why has it taken a public accusation for her to confide in her own family? Perhaps that’s what sickens me most. After all, when I killed a man I came home and told her all about it. That’s what sisters do.

  Each of us, her daughters especially, must spend these few silent moments looking backward, reinterpreting every memory. Every home-cooked meal of the last sixty years was prepared by a murderess; every kind word, every embrace was bestowed by the mother who robbed them of their father. Rosamund finally says, “You didn’t follow Clovis’s instructions the night of the séance, did you, Mother?”

  Helena’s mouth twitches wryly. “The cufflinks and the other things were Jack’s, not Henry’s. Wouldn’t do to have Henry coming through loud and clear, so I used Jack’s things for interference. And I can’t really blame Belva for hating me even in the afterlife. Yes, I suppose I should come clean on that too: I put a curse on her. Every man she ever seduced soon tired of her, and she never found true love or happiness. After all, she took mine from me—at the time it seemed only fair.”

  Vega clears her throat. “I need to know, Granny. Grandpa Jack … did you …?” Jack, of course, was the only grandfather she could remember.

  “Grandpa Jack gave me no cause,” Helena replies. “Of course, it helped that the only pretty young things wandering about his place of business were to be made shortly into veal.”

  “What about Julius Mettle?” I ask.

  Helena frowns. “What about him?”

  “He came here to speak to you once—threatened you. We saw it in the View-Master. We …” But I can’t bring myself to say it.

  “You were afraid I’d done away with him, too? No, certainly not. Poor Julius … he had every reason to worry what his daughter was getting up to.”

  Mira gasps. “Belva killed her own father?”

  “It’s likely it was an accident, which is why the police never pursued it.” My sister gives a rueful little smile. “If you ever dig her up again, you might ask her.” Helena rises from her chair. “And now it’s time I made my confession to the rest of the coven.”

  “Oh God.” I hide my face in my hands. “How will we ever face Lucretia?”

  She looks down at me sadly and puts her hand on my shoulder. “I am the only one who has to face her. I regret that my sin has tainted your reputations, and I am very sorry that you girls have come to grief over it.”

  We make a move to stand, but Helena motions for us to stay where we are. She takes a long, deep breath, turns heel, and marches into the drawing room. The door muffles her voice. We wait in agonized silence.

  She comes back a few minutes later, sits down again, and takes the last sip out of her teacup. Always so composed, is Helena—far too composed. Would lead you to wonder if she’s even fully human.

  “I don’t understand, Granny,” Mira says. “Why did you wear his hair in a locket all those years?”

  “Penance,” she sighs. “I know better now, of course. My penance is only beginning today.” We watch as she rummages through her sewing bag and pulls out another of Olive’s marionettes, this one with a thick gray chignon, a tiny calico apron with a ruffle along the hem, and a relentlessly pleasant expression. She stands, props the marionette against the back of her chair, and loops the strings round the chair back. Then she straightens up, unties the strings of her apron, and hangs it on the hook by the door.

  She stands in the middle of the kitchen, her eyes roving hungrily over our faces. “This is good-bye, my darlings,” she says at last. “I can’t say when I’ll be back.”

  No pomp or ceremony here—there can’t be any, I suppose, when you’re departing in disgrace. It happens like a film reel with a missing frame: she’s there, and then she’s not.

  We stay seated round the kitchen table for a long time, still in silence, as if we’re waiting for the marionette to pick itself up and speak to us. From the drawing room we can hear the shuffling sounds of the rest of the coven preparing to leave, and eventually the noise moves into the hall, but nobody ventures into the kitchen. Can’t say I blame them—it would be awkward, now, wouldn’t it? The front door slams behind them.

  Vega begins to cry then, and when her sister tries to comfort her she weeps even more bitterly. This is all very dreamlike, nightmarish I should say, and when the rest of us start talking again our mouths feel disconnected from the rest of our bodies. “Tea?” Deborah murmurs, and we say, “Yes, please,” faintly, one echoing after another. The kettle boils, china cups appear on the tabletop, and the hot golden liquid rises to the brim of every cup.

  But I need something to clear the fog from my eyes. “Time for a nip if there ever was.” I get up and find the whisky bottle myself because it gives me something to do, and when I hold up the bottle everybody says, “Yes, please.”

  I pour a healthy glug into Morven’s cup, and there’s only the clink of her teaspoon stirring in the hooch and Vega still sobbing her poor little heart out. There’s a freshly baked ambrosia cake on a china pedestal on the table in front of us, but no one has the heart to cut the first slice.

  The Shadow at the Foot of the Bed

  30.

  The life that I have

  Is all that I have

  And the life that I have

  Is yours.

  The love that I have

  Of the life that I have

  Is yours and yours and yours.

  A sleep I shall have,

  A rest I shall have

  And death will be but a pause

  For the peace of my years

  In the long green grass

  Will be yours and yours and yours.

  —Leo Marks, SOE Codemaster

  A GOOD TEN years after the war, a letter came for me at Blackabbey. I got a chill when I read the return address; I didn’t recognize it, but somehow I knew to whom it belonged. She had sent numerous requests for my address over the last decade, not surprising given that SOE was shut down right after the war. Such requests for information would be forwarded from one department to another and back again. She couldn’t have found me otherwise; she didn’t know my name.

  But at long last some bighearted bureaucrat had found the right file and had taken the time to reply to her last letter. I want so much to know the facts surrounding Jonah’s last days, she wrote me. I would be so grateful if you would agr
ee to meet me. Indeed, I am grateful to you already. I stared at the perfect penmanship, telling myself I shouldn’t go but knowing that I would.

  Patricia Holt, formerly Rudolfsen, lived in one of those venerable buildings on Central Park East. She greeted me with a look of puzzlement, even dismay, and I asked her if there was something wrong.

  “Not at all, I … well, you must have been quite young when you were recruited.”

  “Hardly more than a teenager,” I replied, suppressing a smile.

  She ushered me inside, and a maid appeared only to whisk my coat into the hall closet. Patricia had what was known as elegant taste, but I could tell as soon as I walked into her living room that every bit of porcelain, every plush surface, every canvas had been hand-selected for her and her new husband by someone they had no doubt paid handsomely. I lingered on a wedding portrait on the end table and realized she’d now been with her “new” husband twice as long as she was married to Jonah. No dress of parachute silk for Patricia Holt.

  I looked at her, hard, and she gave me an uncertain smile as she fiddled with her diamond wedding band. She was just as Jonah had described her: plain but polished, capable yet awkward. Meeting her felt a little like coming face to face with the bogeyman.

  “May I offer you something to drink, Miss Harbinger?” she said at last, and I asked for a whisky and soda.

  “Thank you for making the time to meet with me,” she said as she fussed about the tray on the sideboard. “I’ve been quite fraught these last few days—thinking of it, wondering what you would be like. I was so afraid there might be … well … some degree of tension between us.”

  For heaven’s sake, why make it worse by speaking of it? “You said you were grateful to me,” I began as she handed me the glass. “I wondered what you meant by that.”

  “You spent every moment with him at the end of his life, and that makes you important to me as well as to him.” There was an awkward pause I filled with a healthy swig. “Won’t you come inside?” She indicated the bedroom. “There’s something I’d like to show you.”

  Patricia invited me to sit at her vanity table while she knelt to open the bottom drawer. The lamp beside her makeup mirror was completely out of step with the “tasteful” décor in the rest of the house: it was made of cast iron, a gnome crouching under a toadstool, with a pleated green lampshade.

  “What an odd little lamp,” I said, so that anyone else would have understood I loved it.

  “Isn’t it, though? It’s the one thing of Jonah’s that Alexander has let me keep. Keep out, I mean. Jonah had it on his nightstand in his boyhood.”

  She pulled out a broad wooden box, laid it on the table, and raised the lid with a reverent air. She’d been waiting ten years to share her memories with someone who’d known him, someone who would care. For half an hour she sorted through everything in that box, showing me photographs and small toys from his “boyhood,” and told me anecdotes of their courtship. At one point she even asked if I, too, had lost someone dear to me. I said yes, and she seemed embarrassed. I caught a glimpse of a small packet of letters tied together with a bit of twine.

  The whole thing was completely agonizing for me. I kept seeing flashes of his face in the darkness of the stable—white-whiskered in the shaving mirror—laughing as Addie’s dirndl-skirted marionette hopped up on his knee and flirted and cooed—cold and still in the moonlight as I took one long last look at him before I drew the blanket over his face and climbed out of the grave. And his hands—even now I felt his hands on me, his breath hot on my ear.

  “They told me a little of how it happened,” she said. “But I think it would help if I could hear it from you.”

  I was careful to tell her no more than she already knew; I didn’t even mention the Nacht und Nebel order. For what good? I only told her that we had gathered a great deal of intelligence, so much that Jonah spent too much time transmitting it in one go and that they were able to trace the signal to our safe house. He’d been warned only in time to destroy his notes and gather his arms.

  “And where were you while this was happening?”

  “We were quartered separately. It was the middle of the night. I didn’t hear of it until morning.”

  She paused. “And by that time it was too late, I suppose.”

  I nodded.

  “Alexander doesn’t like me to speak of him,” she murmured as she laid the box back in the drawer. “He says we must try to live in the present.”

  Right then something was welling in my gut—bile or bitterness, it tasted the same. Jonah deserved better than a cachet of photographs at the bottom of a drawer, and to hell with her second husband. Alexander Holt had spent the war behind a desk.

  We ventured back into her living room, where she offered me another whisky soda.

  “There’s—a delicate matter—I’ve been wanting to bring up,” she said once we had resettled ourselves in the leather armchairs.

  I didn’t flinch; I knew she wasn’t brave enough to ask that question. “Yes?”

  “Jonah’s watch,” she said. “I was wondering if you knew what became of it.”

  It was on my nightstand, still telling perfect time. “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “It’s just that, you know, it was a family heirloom …” She trailed off, gazing at me expectantly.

  “Oh. An heirloom in your family, was it?”

  She looked sheepish. “No, it was handed down from his grandfather to his father, who gave it to Jonah.”

  “He didn’t give it to me, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

  “But you do remember him having a pocket watch?”

  “Indeed I do.”

  “Perhaps the SS took it, then?” That she should phrase this as a question was only a small part of why she was irritating me now. Why shouldn’t I resent her for taking a job in the Chairborne while her husband was parachuting behind enemy lines? The only Nazis she’d ever seen were the POWs on the film reels.

  “Very likely.” I paused for effect. “You know, I always wondered why you didn’t follow Jonah into operational service.”

  She acted as though this hadn’t stung. “I wasn’t cut out for it.” She gave a weak laugh. “Surely Jonah told you that.”

  “He did,” I replied. “But men too often believe they are the better judge of our shortcomings.”

  She didn’t smile at this. “He was right. I hadn’t your fortitude, Miss Harbinger.” I could see she meant that as an honest compliment. “That watch,” she went on. The moment of goodwill vanished instantly. “He would have given it to his son, if we’d had one.”

  This I found most infuriating of all: she never so much as alluded to their impending divorce. In Patricia Holt’s revisionist history, both she and Jonah had remained faithful to his death. (Now, I know what you’re thinking—was Jonah being fully honest when he told me they both wanted out? She married Alexander Holt a scant two months after she got word of Jonah’s death—it was in the papers—and that was all I needed or wanted to know.)

  I wanted to tell her I knew she was a phony, but I decided I should be as dignified as I was able. Jonah would have wanted it that way. “But as it is,” I said, “there’s no one to give it to.”

  She hesitated, and I could see she was formulating a different tack—as if asking some other way might jog my memory. Why did she want that watch back so badly? It’s not that she thought I might be lying, though of course I was; she just wanted every stone turned. Perhaps she assumed that any message that might have been folded inside was intended for her.

  “Look, Patricia—the watch is gone. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

  Another long hesitation, during which time I polished off my second whisky soda and considered going after my own coat. Finally she said, “I am sensing some hostility, Eve—may I call you Eve?—and I am wondering why. Have I done anything to offend you?”

  I let out a little snort of incredulity—couldn’t help it. She was so tireso
me. “Just let me get this straight. You asked me here on account of a lousy pocket watch?”

  “It’s not—it’s not just about the watch.”

  I waited for her to continue but gave up. “What is it, then?” In a way, I wanted her unspoken questions to come out in an angry torrent—Just how close were you? How was it that you survived and he did not?—but I knew she’d never get up the courage.

  All brains and no guts is what he’d said. Very little heart, either.

  I rose from my chair. “I think I’d better go.”

  She nodded and fetched my coat as I waited by the door. “Thank you for coming, Miss Harbinger.”

  I paused at the door, my hand on the knob. “Did you love him?”

  She seemed even more taken aback than I expected her to be. “Why, of course I loved him.”

  “Not like I did.” And I made sure to look her in the eye as I pulled the door shut behind me.

  I NICKED TWO photographs of Jonah that day: his official SOE portrait, and another of him smiling and relaxed, shirt partially unbuttoned, sitting on somebody’s patio with a cigarette poised between his long, slender fingers. I muttered a few words as I stepped into the elevator and whoosh, they materialized inside my purse. I got proper frames for them and keep them displayed prominently in Cat’s Hollow. I wonder, did she ever notice they were missing?

  I shouldn’t have done it, I know. He didn’t belong to either of us.

  Pumpkin Day

  31.

  IT’S ALL over on the last night of October, just before five o’clock. A young man sidesteps a troupe of shrieking fairies on the front walk at Harbinger House, then rings the doorbell and holds his breath. Half a second later a young woman throws the door open and laughs a most maniacal laugh, and he sees now why the little girls were making such a racket. It’s a night for superlatives, all right, because she is wearing the most disgusting mask ever made: slithering things in her brittle black hair, glistening yellow fangs, a jutting chin with squishy purple warts sprouting hairs a foot long—and all of it unsettlingly lifelike. The foyer is lit only by a candle inside a jack-o’-lantern, and he can’t tell where the mask ends and her neck and eyelids begin.