The Magic of Murder

by Susan Lynn Solomon

  “I won’t tell.”

  The second voice belongs to Amy Woodward. She’s in danger. The other voice—whose is it? I have to find out. My safety, my life, depends on finding out.

  Elvira turns her face to me, and snarls as if to ask what I’m waiting for. The answer is here, she seems to say. If I stall, it will vanish.

  In panic, I run faster. Bare feet kicking pebbles. Stones, broken cement, glass. I feel the cuts. Surely the soles of my feet must be bleeding. Can’t stop to tend to my feet. Have to reach Elvira at the alley’s end. But the alley never ends.

  “I won’t tell. Never tell.” Amy Woodward is pleading for her life.

  Twenty feet ahead, a figure backs out of a rickety wood barn. The wood is dry, aged, the laths no longer flush. As if the barn is a mirage, I see the sky through it.

  Her hands raised, Amy turns to me. “Help me please!”

  “Help, help!” I scream.

  “Emlyn, what’s wrong?” Rebecca’s voice comes from Amy’s mouth. “Emlyn, wake up!”

  Wake up? I am awake. I’ve got to save Amy! I reach for her.

  Two gunshots shatter the night. Amy Woodward falls at my feet.

  I drop to my knees, cradle her head. Blood. Everywhere. So much blood. Didn’t know a person had so much blood.

  Elvira is beside me. She groans, rubs her face on my black silk robe. Amy is gone. I sit alone in the puddle of her blood, and gather the white cat to my breast.

  To my right, light from the single star glints off the barrel of a gun. I know what kind it is: a Glock .45 caliber—I’ve seen pictures of this gun in a book on one of my shelves. The weapon is pointed at me. The shooter is in a black robe like mine. But it’s not a robe, it’s a monk’s cowl. Inside the hood, his face is…he has no face. Just a shadow.

  “Help us, please,” I cry. “Roger!”

  Crack. Crack…

  Someone grabs my robe.

  “Come on Emlyn, wake up!” Rebecca shouted.

  “What? Where…?”

  She slapped my face. “You’ve gotta wake up.”

  “Help us!” I was crying. I clearly remember I was crying.

  “What’s happening?” Rebecca asked, panic in her voice. The same panic as was in mine.

  “Help us, help us! Roger!”

  Her hands rubbed my cheeks.

  At last my eyes opened. I was in my living room, kneeling at the French doors, my face pressed against a glass pane. I had Elvira cradled in my arms.

  But at the same time I knelt in an alley somewhere. Kneeling in two places at the same time?

  “No, no!” I raise my hand to ward off a bullet traveling in slow motion toward my heart. “Noooo!”

  The bullet crashes though my hand. I scream in pain…

  “Emlyn, you’re scaring me. Wake up!” Rebecca shouted. She knelt beside me and stroked my hair.

  Though I struggled to obey her, I couldn’t break the grip of my dream.

  Yet, I was awake. I was in my living room, my face against the cold glass of the French doors.

  And outside the window, a black-caped ancient crone now stands. Stringy white hair partly tied in back. She points a gnarled finger, moves toward me. She leaves no footprints in the snow.

  “Who…who are you?” I ask.

  Elvira whines, paws at the glass.

  Her head shaking as if she pities me, the old hag croons, “Seek ye after truth in the heart? The heart betrays.”

  “Emmy!” Rebecca called into my waking dream.

  The wind swirls. Snow swirls. My backyard is a mass of blinding white. From inside the curtain of snow, I hear the crone moan, “Remember this: betrayal.”

  My hand is on the glass, next to Elvira’s paw. My fingers scratch at the panes. I have to claw my way out of the white hole I’m falling into…

  ***

  The next thing I knew, I was laid out on my sofa, a cold compress on my forehead.

  “You’re awake,” Rebecca said. She sounded relieved.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “You tell us,” Roger said. He emerged from the kitchen carrying a pot of coffee.

  “You’re here,” I stated the obvious.

  I pulled the cloth from my forehead, then dropped it and grabbed my other hand. It felt as though the bones were broken. As though a bullet had smashed through my hand. When I tried to sit up the pain shot up my arm. The room spun.

  Roger sat next to me, laid the cloth again across my forehead.

  “I called him,” Rebecca said. “Didn’t know what else to do. I was so frightened.”

  “Did you see her?”

  “Who?” Roger asked.

  Even turning my eyes to him hurt. “The old woman.” Moving as little as possible, I extended my arm, and pointed to the French doors. “Out there. She’s caught in the blizzard. I’ve got to let her in before she freezes.”

  His eyes followed my finger. “It’s not snowing,” he said. “Hasn’t even been a flurry all day.”

  “See what I mean?” Rebecca said. “I can’t get her back.”

  Roger stood up. “We’re taking her to the hospital,” he told Rebecca. “Get her coat.”

  I shook my head and groaned when a bolt of lightning shot through it. “Not going anywhere.”

  Rebecca was by the table we’d set up near the window, her face as gray as her salt and pepper hair. Now she was as white as the snow on the ground; now, as translucent as an ice sculpture. “I’ve got something in my bag that’ll clear her head,” she said.

  “Why didn’t you give her that before?”

  She seemed about to cry. “I couldn’t wake her up to give it to her.”

  Roger glared at her. “I told you not to let her fool around with your witch nonsense—didn’t I tell you that?” His glance fell from Rebecca’s face to the end table by the doors, and to the dish of grated nutmeg and the remains of the incense. “That stuff probably got her stoned.”

  Assaulted by his tone, Rebecca took a step backward. “Did you ever try to stop a freight train?”

  “I’m not stoned,” I said.

  He looked down at me and his face softened. “Emlyn’s a freight train?” He smiled. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

  The ice sculpture that was my friend, Rebecca, went into the kitchen. In a few seconds she returned with a narrow vial. She shooed Roger aside and dropped beside me on the sofa.

  At the movement of the cushions, another sharp pain shot through my body. “Aaaah,” I groaned.

  Gently, she lifted my head. “Drink this down.”

  “You’re sure this stuff will work?” Roger asked. He hovered over us like an anxious husband.

  “It should. I brewed it myself.”

  “Not very comforting,” he said. “Won’t kill her, will it?”

  Rebecca smiled. “Hasn’t killed anyone yet.”

  “How many times have you tried it?”

  She flipped her long braid over her shoulder, and raised her chin to him. “Let me see. Um, this’ll be the first.”

  He snorted. “Great. On her tombstone we’ll write An Experiment that Failed.”

  “Hush,” she said. “This is my grandmother’s recipe and she lived to a hundred.”

  I knew what their by-play was about: when you visit a sick friend, you make jokes to raise her spirits. Right then, I didn’t want my spirits raised. I wanted my friends to let the old woman into my house.

  Rebecca pushed the vial against my lips. “Swallow!”

  The elixir tasted like— I have no idea what it tasted like. I’d never had anything like it. My lips curled. My stomach tightened.

  “What a face,” Roger said.

  I sat up, spitting. “That stuff is awful,” I gasped when my dry-heaves finally stopped.

  “See? It’s working. She’s back,” Rebecca said.

  I reached out and cried, “Water!”

  “No water!” Her command stopped Roger who had started toward the kitchen. “Don’t want to dilute the mixture.”
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  I’ve got to find out what she mixed together so I can feed that stuff to someone I don’t like, I thought, though I did feel a trifle better. Still, something bothered me. Something I had to remember. Damn, what was it?

  I looked to the altar, still set up in front of the French doors. The blue tapers had burned almost halfway down. How long had I been out? I turned my eyes to the railroad station clock screwed onto the wall near my bookcases. It was well past midnight. I’d been gone for hours. I must have done something, seen something, or learned something. What was it? I only remembered the old woman in the snow, pointing at me. The heart betrays, she had said.

  I rolled onto my side and saw Elvira at the French doors, peering outside. Looking for the gray-haired crone?

  “What?” Rebecca asked.

  “Huh?” I said.

  “You seem puzzled.”

  “No. Uh-uh. I’m…fine.”

  Roger’s pinched lips said he doubted I was fine.

  “Really, I am,” I insisted.

  “If you’re sure—”

  “She will be,” Rebecca said. “Just needs a few minutes to gather herself.”

  What can’t I remember? I thought. Something about an alley and why I ran through it.

  Still sounding uncertain, Roger said, “I’ll go home then, grab some sleep. Tomorrow I wanna catch up with Woody before he has a chance to lock himself in his office.”

  An alley? I thought. Woody. Amy— At last what I had seen rushed back. Though my head hurt when I moved, and though my hand ached where the bullet in my dream had shattered the bones, I reached out to him. “No! Not tomorrow, tonight. Amy Woodward—we have to help her. She’s been shot.”

  “What?” Roger said.

  “She was shot. So much blood. She’s dying. I saw it happen.”

  Rebecca’s jaw dropped. “You saw—? The divination spell worked? Tell me. I have to write it in the Book of Shadows.”

  This wasn’t the time to make notes about what we’d accomplished. I pushed her hand away, and sat up. “Amy Woodward’s in trouble!”

  Roger sat heavily in my wingback chair. “How did you…when…?”

  “No questions. Please.” I had to get him to move. “You need to trust me, Roger. This once, trust me.”

  “Do what she says,” Rebecca said.

  “Do what she says? I have no idea what she’s saying.”

  I took a breath deep enough to loosen the knot in my throat. Then, in a very few words I told them about the alley and the argument I heard.

  “You just described the back lane off Nineteenth Street,” Roger said. “That’s where they found Jimmy.” He looked at Rebecca. “She must have read about the alley in the Gazette.”

  Yes, I had read about the alley in the newspaper, but my seeing it in a trance wasn’t a drug-induced delusion. Explaining that, though, would have wasted valuable time.

  “We have to help Amy!” I shouted, and tried to rise. As if the pain in my head had a hand, it shoved me back on the arm of the sofa.

  For a nonbeliever, Roger reacted rather quickly. He grabbed his coat and car keys. “We’re not going anywhere,” he said. “You two stay here. I’ll find out if something happened.” At the door, he stopped, turned back. “And no more candles and incense, please. Not tonight, at least.”

  I held my head to keep it from toppling off my shoulders while I gave him half a nod—half a nod was as much as I could manage.

  Apparently, he didn’t believe I would stay put. He returned to the living room and snatched the athame from our altar. “Just to make sure,” he said as he slipped the knife into his coat pocket. Then he was out my front door.

  “Guess he’s not overly concerned about the Feds outside warning Chief Woodward he’s on the prowl,” Rebecca remarked.

  Roger was right not to take me at my word. Although, I hadn’t really promised—I mean, a half-nod could have meant anything. As soon as I heard the engine of his SUV roar, I said, “Turn off the lights. We still have time before the candles burn out.”

  Rebecca didn’t move.

  “Hey, come on. Help me get up. I’ve got another knife we can use.”

  She sat like a rock next to me on the sofa. “Uh-uh. If I let you do anymore tonight, Roger will wind up in jail.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He’ll get arrested for killing me if I let you do anything but lay there.”

  I stumbled to my feet without her help. “Who are you more afraid of, me or him?”

  “He’s got a gun,” she answered.

  I refused to be put off. “Rebecca, I have to get back there—into the trance. The old woman I saw? I think she’s Sarah Goode. She tried to tell me something.”

  Instead of giving me her hand, she went to the altar and pinched out the candles.

  “How many times do I have to warn you about unintended consequences?” she said. “Sure, the woman might have been Sarah. But it could just as easily have been a dark spirit who wants to lead you to a place I won’t be able to bring you back from. I know witches that’s happened to.”

  “They never came back?”

  “Never. Not their minds. They just sit, babbling nonsense. Do you wanna wind up that way? Thought not. So knock it off. You’ve done enough tonight. Let’s wait to see if Amy Woodward really is hurt.”

  It was only a couple of hours before we found out.

  Chapter Seventeen

  What Detective Frey Found

  The phone call from Roger was short and terse. Amy Woodward was dead, he said. He was with her husband at the precinct. They’d probably be there the rest of the night. We didn’t hear what happened until the next afternoon.

  Still dressed in the black robes we wore when Roger left, Rebecca and I just sat down to lunch—grilled cheese and tomato bisque, my favorite winter meal—when I heard the latch click, and my front door opened.

  I jumped from my seat.

  “Everyone decent?” Roger called from the hall.

  With all that happened last night, I’d forgotten I gave him my key.

  Rebecca grabbed my hand and eased me back down. “About as decent as you might expect,” she said. “We’ve been up all night.”

  Roger leaned through the kitchen door. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have phoned so late.”

  “If you hadn’t,” I said, “I’d have hit you with a spell to make your hair fall out.”

  “Yeah, huh?” I pictured him patting his head to be sure his brown curls were still there.

  “Or else I would have made you drink some of that elixir Rebecca fed me.” My lips curled and I shivered when I recalled the taste.

  “She’s not kidding,” my friend said. “After last night, you ought to realize Emlyn’s not a woman to mess with.”

  The hall closet opened. Hangers rattled. A moment later, Roger was in the kitchen doorway. His face was drawn. Lines and dark circles around his eyes made him look far older than his forty-two years. Instead of the sweatshirt and jeans he had on when he left my house, he wore a fresh green shirt and pressed brown slacks. I smelled the Royal Copenhagen aftershave he always used. Clearly, he’d stopped at home before coming over.

  “So, tell us,” I said.

  He pulled out a chair, sat next to me, and leaned over to sniff my soup. “Got any more of this? I’m famished.”

  “What do you think?” I said to Rebecca. “Should we feed him?”

  “That depends on whether he’s gonna tell us what happened.”

  “Very nice. I sneak out of an interrogation so I can let you know you were right—nearly get my head chewed off for doing it—and this is how you treat me?”

  I dipped a spoon into my soup, blew on it, and put it in my mouth. “This is rather good. What did you put in it?”

  “A little of this, a little of that,” Rebecca said.

  Roger took the spoon from my hand. “Let me taste it.”

  I pushed the bowl to the other side of the table. “I don’t hear anything about last night.
Do you, Rebecca?”

  “Nope, not a word. Oh, and try your sandwich. Three different cheeses in it.”

  Roger shoved his lower lip out in a sulk. “You’re just cruel, both of you.”

  “What do you expect?” I said. “I’m a witch.”

  He sat back and sighed. “After last night, I’m almost ready to believe you are.”

  If a mirror were nearby, I would have gazed into it to see if my skin had turned green yet.

  “So, if you don’t want to spend the rest of your life saying riiibit,” Rebecca said, “tell us.”

  “The soup’s awfully good,” I added.

  My mother always says a man’s stomach is the shortest distance to his heart. In this instance, it proved to be the quickest route to his vocal cords. While Rebecca grilled him a sandwich and ladled soup into a bowl, Roger began by telling us what he’d done the first time he left my house.

  ***

  Roger slipped out the French doors. So he wouldn’t be noticed if one of the DEA agents had camped in my yard, he hugged the wall of the house, squeezed through my azalea bushes, and scaled the fence dividing our property. He entered his house through the back door, put on heavy denim jeans, several layers of shirts, and his black hooded sweatshirt with the Niagara Falls Police Department logo. He zipped his blue quilted jacket over the sweatshirt. Prepared now for the cold night, he brushed more than a foot of snow from the tarp covering his motorcycle. Steadying the bike, he walked it through two neighboring yards to a point where the curve in River Road made him invisible to the men parked outside my house.

  As I expected he’d do, he took an indirect route to the Falls. Even bundled up, he was colder than he could ever recall being (colder than a witch’s tit, is how he described it, and then he leered at me). Through the twenty minutes from his house to where the Woodwards lived, he shivered, and cussed at himself for being so stupid as to be out on a night such as this. Still, he wouldn’t quit and return home before he caught pneumonia. Not Detective Roger Frey. Not once he’d made up his mind he had to find out what his boss was hiding (and he says I’m the most obstinate, pigheaded person he’s ever met).

  The house Harry and Amy Woodward owned was off Hyde Park Road, a few blocks from what used to be the Amtrak station. One of the many pre-war wood-frame homes along the tree-lined streets in Niagara Falls, it was painted white with blue shutters and trim, and had a covered front porch. In summer, the house was a welcoming sight. Not so on a late March evening when the headlight of Roger’s Harley lit snow drifts blown high against the clapboards, and icicles hanging from the eaves. When he steered into the driveway, the house was dark.