Spellbinder: A Love Story With Magical Interruptions

by Melanie Rawn

  The Rowell residence was forthright New England clapboard outside, and on the inside a chaos of toys, discarded sweaters, skates, schoolbooks, halfeaten peanut butter sandwiches the mutts hadn’t yet found, and other effluvia of a family of three boys and three girls. Jemima herself had grown comfortably plump, presiding over the turmoil with the benign neglect of the absolute monarch who doesn’t have to prove it. When she escorted Holly through to the kitchen, the Babel of sons and daughters instantly moved itself elsewhere when she hollered, “Out! And take the cookie jar with you!”

  Holly sat in numbed silence, watching her old friend bustle, not thinking at all until Jemima spoke. “Her mother wants us to sing tomorrow, you know.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Me, neither. I’ll get us out of it, don’t worry.” Seating herself on the other side of the kitchen table from Holly, she poured coffee and dispensed macaroons. “She gave me a piece of music Suze had written—it was in her jacket pocket when — when they found her. Holly, it’s the most dreadful thing I’ve ever seen.”

  Holly shrugged dully, circling the edge of her coffee mug with one finger. “We both nearly flunked Composition.”

  “When I think of what a glorious voice she had, I just can’t believe she’d write something so awful. I didn’t even know she noodled around with writing music.”

  “She didn’t.”

  Joshua Rowell—six feet of former hockey star, with the twice-broken nose and capped teeth to prove it — came in, greeted Holly, kissed his wife, and said, “I’ll ride herd on the kids tonight, Pudds. You and Holly don’t stay up too late, all right?”

  “Thanks for lending me the spare room, Josh,” Holly replied.

  “No trouble. I already took all your stuff upstairs—third door on the right. The girls should be out of their bathroom by seven thirty for school, so you’ll have it to yourself.” He smiled, poured himself a cup of coffee, and left the kitchen.

  “I could do with a bath tonight,” Holly said. “I’m all stinky from the planes.”

  “The kids will be in bed by nine,” Jemima replied. “More or less. Are you sure you don’t want something to eat? Okay, but if you get hungry in the middle of the night, you know where the fridge is. Everything’s fair game except the pies — they’re for the reception tomorrow.”

  “Aunt Lulah used to bring a couple of jars of moonshine for after a funeral.”

  “Jesus, I remember that stuff! You got the most interesting care packages from home I ever saw. How is your aunt? And those two hunky uncles who used to take you out to the most expensive dinner in town on your birthday?”

  “All fine. Alec and Nicky are retired now. Aunt Lulah’s got a new mare at Woodhush, sweetest gallop you ever rode.” Holly scraped both hands back through her hair, still unused to how short it was. “Jimmie, I’m not ready to start going to my friends’ funerals.”

  “Nobody ever is. I should call Mrs. Wingfield and let her know you’ve arrived safely. And think up some reason why we won’t be singing tomorrow. And especially not singing that thing Suze wrote.”

  “Okay, I can take a hint — tet me look at it while you talk to Mrs. Wingfield.”

  While Jemima spoke softly on the telephone, Holly examined the single Xeroxed sheet of something written on a yellow legal pad. The original was undoubtedly still with the cops, bagged as evidence. Jemima was right: the piece was musical gibberish. Four/four time and a treble clef were the only things that made any sense. The rest of it didn’t even have the virtue of a twelve-tone experiment; it was simply irrational. Holly read through Susannah’s scrawled notation, memory automatically supplying the scene of her dorm room the night before their Composition project was due, when they’d loaded up on coffee for an all-nighter and despaired of ever coming up with anything that would —

  “Hellfire and damnation!”

  Jemima hastily concluded her conversation with Mrs. Wingfield. “Holly? What’s wrong?”

  “Paper and pen — quick.”

  “Inspiration hit?”

  “In a way.” While Jemima rummaged her kitchen drawers, Holly stared at the rioting ivy wallpaper, deliberately blanking her mind. When a stack of construction paper and a selection of Magic Markers were set before her, she jumped.

  “Hell of a time to be thinking about your next book,” Jemima offered, a fond hand on Holly’s shoulder taking the sting from the words. “I couldn’t find anything but leftovers from Becca’s last project.”

  “It’s okay. It’s fine. This has nothing to do with a book, Jimmie. It’s something Suze and I cooked up in college.” She began ruling off one of the blank pages into two columns and twenty-six lines. “Remember Professor Dominguez? No, you wouldn’t, he left before you took Comp. He was a big John Cage fan, anything that fooled around with the way music was written. Anyway, Suze and I sat up until dawn figuring out a way to impress him. And we came up with this.”

  She wrote out the alphabet, then started at H, and in the next column marked down a D and a half-note symbol. “The first seven notes are easy. Whole notes correspond to letters. But once you get to letters eight through twenty-six—H through Z—you have to use half- and quarter-notes to make it work.”

  “Half of a D? No—double it, get eight, and that’s H!”

  “Exactly. Four times two gets the eighth letter of the alphabet. Some have more than one way to do them —”

  “A quarter-note quadruples the value, right? So a quarter-note B gives you H as well,” Jemima said briskly. Seating herself next to Holly, she grabbed paper and another Magic Marker. “Do your chart and then dictate Susannah’s letter.”

  “Thank God for clever friends!” As she worked at completing the guide, she said, “We did ‘I Am the Walrus’ this way for Dominguez—which ain’t easy, because there’s letters in it that you can’t get with this code. Like M, which is more essential than you know until you can’t use it. But if you play with the phonetics, you can usually get the meaning across.”

  Jemima had been doing some calculations in her head. “No prime numbers above seven, so no S, either. What did you do, use a TH and call it a lisp?

  “Clever and snide,” Holly retorted. “We used C. And the W was just that — a double U.”

  “And two Ns for M?”

  “Yep.”

  “What about ends of words? You couldn’t have done it like a telegram and used ‘stop.’ And it couldn’t have been the end of a bar or a measure, either.”

  “Well, we were thinking about using a bar of silence, but the thing was ugly enough without making it even longer. The words sort of fell into recognizable patterns.”

  “Even if the music was crap. I am so not disappointed that this never occurred to John Lennon. You ready?”

  With Susannah’s pages to her left and the chart to her right, Holly began. Jemima wrote in neat capital letters with no spaces between — occasionally drawing a backslash when a word became clear.

  “E whole, C half, C three-quarter—ELI.” Holly paused. “Elias Bradshaw. Susannah had been seeing him.”

  “I know. Her mother told me about him—the judge with the sailboat, right?”

  “He likes to sail, yes.” Giving the lie to the old one about Witches being unable to cross water. Susannah had loved Long Island Sound of a Sunday afternoon; Holly begged off the twice she’d been asked along. She did get seasick.

  “Mrs. Wingfield wants to scatter Susannah’s ashes at sea. They’re renting a launch or something in a few days. Anyway, Elias Bradshaw will be here tomorrow. Sorry—go on. First word is ‘Eli.”’

  They continued, with Holly muttering to herself and reciting letters. What emerged bewildered Jemima, but sent a fiery flush of terror through Holly.

  ELI / HALLOEEN / THREAT / HOLLI / BLOOD / RITE / LEADER / NOEL / NOX / INCARNATA / REGRET / DONT / NO / LOCALE / ELI / DEAR / HEART / NO / GRIEF

  “And this means — ?” Jemima asked.

  That by the time she finished this, she knew she was goin
g to die. “Nothing I can explain right now, and nothing you’d want to hear about anyway.”

  “Who’s Noel?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  “‘Nox incarnata’ — incarnation of night? My Latin’s a little shaky these days.”

  “Works just fine,” Holly replied grimly. “Jimmie, I have to use your phone. In private.”

  “Believe it or not, there actually is such a thing as privacy in this house,” Jemima added with a slight smile. “Try Josh’s office. The door locks.”

  HOLLY NEEDED TO KNOW EXACTLY what had happened to Susannah, beyond the finding of her body in Central Park and the fact that her neck had been broken. She couldn’t consult Susannah’s mother, or Elias Bradshaw — the former hadn’t been able to talk much on Sunday night when Holly phoned her from London, and she wasn’t ready to deal with Elias. So she called Sophia Osbourne.

  Ten minutes later she curled up in Joshua’s oversized desk chair, arms wreathing her knees, and thought over the conversation. A recital, actually, of the police report, with tears thickening the redoubtable Mrs. Osbourne’s voice.

  Last Friday afternoon Susannah left Elias’s chambers to have lunch with a friend in the Manhattan D.A.’s office. That was the last anyone saw of her. Who took her, where, how, and why were mysteries likely to remain unsolved. An early-morning jogger found her body on Sunday, beneath the three cypress trees of Strawberry Fields. She was dressed in the beige linen trouser suit, blue silk shirt, and hosiery she’d worn Friday, with four little splinters of wood stuck in the trousers at the left knee. The clothes were stained with grass and soil, but no blood, except at that knee. Her purse, shoes, and briefcase were gone. Her neck had been expertly snapped: clean, quick, painless. There were no signs of rape, no bruising, no physical trauma. The medical examiner’s first cursory appraisal had revealed a needle-mark on her right hip; toxicology would identify the drug used, but obviously this was how she had been subdued for the snatch. She wore pearl earrings, gold chain necklace, and her class ring; in her jacket pockets were about an ounce of dirt and a diamond bracelet, a felt-tipped pen, and a crumpled page of musical notation.

  The dirt was being analyzed. “That girl knew evidence,” Mrs. Osbourne had said. “I bet they took her shoes to prevent this very thing—there are too many cop shows on television these days, any idiot knows about trace evidence. But that dirt in her pocket, that’ll tell us something. And the splinters, too.”

  Holly wasn’t counting on it. Too easy—way too easy. But Mrs. Osbourne was right about Susannah’s perfect grasp of the importance of evidence. She stared at the note, laid out on the desk. A blood ritual on Hallowe’en — old Samhain—led by Noel, whoever he was. Nox incarnata. She thought about the presence of dirt, note, jewelry, and splinters; the absence of shoes, briefcase, and purse.

  “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” Holly muttered, quoting the archaeologist’s credo. Too, there was “the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime”—the dog whose silence had told Sherlock Holmes so much. There was an absence of evidence here, or an evidence of absence; certainly something about this constituted a curious incident.

  ELIAS FLED THE CHURCH IMMEDIATELY after the service. He couldn’t go to the Wingfield home to pay his respects. He simply couldn’t. He’d been asked to join the family to scatter the ashes, but the thought of being in some boat with all that was left of Susannah horrified him. The beautiful, passionate body he’d held in his arms was now soft gray ash and fragments of bone in a green-glazed Japanese urn.

  Would he rather have known her to be whole and untouched and six feet beneath the ground? Lying in black silence, hands folded, until the years and the cold had done their work and the fine bones of her fingers showed through crumbling skin and the wheat-gold hair tarnished and — and —

  He couldn’t think about that, either. Not thinking about it, he nearly threw up onto the carefully manicured lawn.

  The October afternoon was a glory of sapphire sky, shimmering sun, and a freshening breeze off the sea to stir the leaves hinting at their glorious autumn show. Picture perfect, this white church with its postcard steeple and austere stained glass. How many weddings, baptisms, funerals, and staunchly Protestant Sunday services had occurred here? Thousands upon thousands. Susannah had returned home to her ancestors. Why couldn’t they at least have been Irish? Then he could’ve gone to a wake, with a socially acceptable excuse to get mindlessly drunk —

  “Elias?”

  He turned. Holly McClure wore a plain brown dress, a white scarf draped around her shoulders — a relief after all the black. She was heavier than he remembered, and her hair had been cut short around her cheeks and neck. Her eyes were red-rimmed and she looked exhausted.

  She took his elbow and walked him across the lawn toward the ocean. He resisted for a moment, then heard others coming out of the church and decided this was as good an escape as any.

  Though why Holly was providing it, he had no idea. The last time he’d seen her, she’d been screaming at him about Evan Lachlan. He hadn’t seen her since. She hadn’t seen Lachlan since, either, judging from something Susannah had said a couple of weeks ago —

  It hit him then, how soon “a couple of weeks” would become “a couple of months,” and then “a couple of years”—and he’d never see her again, never touch her, never take her out sailing and watch the wind play with her hair, never —

  “I won’t allow you to hate yourself,” Holly said softly. “Not when Susannah loved you so much.”

  He shook his head.

  “Don’t do it, Elias,” she warned. “I won’t profane her memory by letting you hate the man she loved.”

  “You’re not usually redundant. Lost your writer’s touch?”

  “I’ll say the same exact thing a thousand times if that’s what it takes to get through to you.” Holly tugged him along toward the shore, over the dunes, tall sea-grasses shifting in the breeze.

  “I don’t know why you give a damn.”

  “Because she did love you.”

  “As much as I’d let her, and more than I deserved.” The beach stretched out on either side of them, reeds lazily waving, blue water beyond. “Her mother asked—my sailboat—she always talked about how much she loved saiting —”

  “I’m glad you said no.” Holly paused a minute. “Mrs. Wingfield wanted us to get a few of the Chorale together. We begged off, too — I think Jemima said that we couldn’t possibly choose among Susannah’s favorite songs.” She sighed quietly and stared out to sea. “Your sailboat, the songs—they wouldn’t have been for her, Elias. They’d be — I don’t know, glimpses of her for other people to see, people those things don’t belong to. Not even her family.”

  He took the hand resting in the crook of his elbow and squeezed it gently, grateful that she understood. Susannah’s mother had not. It occurred to him that Holly McClure was possibly the only person who would understand.

  “The candles were for her, though,” Holly said.

  “Your idea?”

  She nodded. “Twelve around the—the urn, to protect her. Nothing evil can cross into a circle of lighted candles. I told her mother it was an old Irish custom.”

  “You did the candles yourself? Magic?”

  “Last night, when they brought her to the church.”

  They stood watching the sea in silence. Then Elias said, “I need a drink. Care to join me?”

  “No. You don’t need a drink.” She bent, slipping off her shoes, tucked them into the lee of a dune, and wriggled bare toes in the sand. “Come on. Let’s walk.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, he shrugged. Shoes and socks off, he loosened his tie for good measure, and after about a quarter of a mile of walking found he was holding Holly’s hand. He wasn’t sure who initiated the gesture. But he figured he ought to say something. “I’m sorry about what happened with Lachtan —”

  “We’re not here to talk about him. Elias, I have to know if you’ll be all right
.” He shrugged. “Eventually.”

  “That’s what I said, too.”

  He stopped, turned her to face him. Her face was grieving and older and much harder than he remembered. He stood with her in the shelter of a dune, reeds humming in the wind that ruffled her curling russet hair.

  “Holly, I am sorry. Let me finish. I don’t know if there was anything more I could’ve done. All I know is she fought like hell for him. Not only for your sake, but for his. But it just—it wasn’t going to happen.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, Elias,” she said fiercely. “I mean it.”

  Again he shrugged. “Okay.”

  “Tell me what to do for you,” she said, almost pleading. “I won’t see you make wreckage of yourself. She’d kill me.”

  “I killed her.”

  There. He’d said it out loud.

  “How’s that again?” she asked, a dangerous note in her voice.

  “I should’ve protected her. I should’ve told her what I am, what the risks are.”

  “You, you, you!” she shouted, wrenching away, abruptly furious. “What makes you so fucking important? What makes you think the world revolves around you, Bradshaw? I think Susannah did love you too much! Just because you were the center of her world doesn’t mean the whole of Creation turns on what you do!”

  The tears came then, as they had not in all the long days since—since. They hurt; he hadn’t cried since his mother’s death twenty years ago. He didn’t know how to weep anymore.

  Holly didn’t try to hold him. She simply stood there, blue eyes bleak with understanding. But after a time he reached for her. She was real and warm and she had loved Susannah, too.

  She was too tall. Her hair was too short, too curly, her shoulders were too square, her body too rounded. Doubtless she was thinking similar things: not tall enough, not broad-shouldered enough, not anything she truly wanted to hold.

  She wasn’t Susannah Wingfield. He wasn’t Evan Lachlan.