by E. M. Moore
Jackson motioned toward his car pulled up next to the curb just outside the theater department. We walked toward it, and I got in on the passenger side. When we were both in and the doors were shut, he said, “Yes, I think that it was probably Molly’s costume, but in reality, that doesn’t mean she did it. The costumes were just all over the place which means anyone who has access to that room could’ve just taken it. I’m sure more people have access to it than we care to know. Students, teachers. Heck, we just walked right in there. If we knew what we were looking for, we probably even could’ve walked in, grabbed any costume we wanted, then walked right back out without ever being seen.”
Sad, but true.
“What did you think about Molly other than that?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I like to withhold my judgments until we have more information.”
“Well, if it matters,” I said. “I liked her. She seemed genuine.”
Jackson looked over at me, his eyes roaming over my face, most likely trying to see if I was going to have another breakdown. “Your opinion matters.”
I gave him a small smile. “Good.”
“What did you think about Edward Lyle?”
“He seemed like an overworked, underpaid theater director whose star just got murdered.” I shrugged. “There wasn’t a lot to go on there.”
“Agreed,” Jackson said.
He pulled away from the curb, and I had a small inkling that I was pretty much exactly like Nancy Drew now. They’d been my favorite novels as a kid, and here I was living out that fantasy. Except it wasn’t a fantasy at all, it was very, very real.
Chapter Eight
I didn’t know how Mel had talked me into it, but somehow, I was in my most modest black dress and driving toward Mount Norah Cemetery in Marblehead.
I shifted again in my seat and Mel eyed me. “Would you calm down? You act as if you had ants in your pants.”
“Maybe I do,” I said daringly.
She rolled her eyes. “It’s not weird that we’re going.”
“I didn’t say it was weird.” I’d been thinking it though. What she’d said this morning made sense. Taylor Hawkins was a fledgling Wiccan. With everything going on lately and Troy Levine trying to exploit our very heritage and throw in our faces what happened to our ancestors, it seemed normal to want to connect with someone who was like us. “She may not have even taken it seriously.”
Mel wrapped her fingers around the steering wheel so hard her knuckles turned white. “She was dressed up as if she had burned on a stake. For that, we owe her all our support we can.”
My stomach turned over. I got it now. Everything that had been happening had been throwing me for a loop. It still seemed odd that this was all going on at the same time. The Crucible, finding Taylor’s body, Troy Levine trying to push this stupid reenactment thing through the Salem Business Administration. If it wasn’t all connected, it was one heck of a coincidence. “I’m sorry,” I said, turning toward her in the seat. “I understand. It was an awful thing, and whether she was a true Wiccan, or a witch, or not, no one deserved to be put up there like that.”
Mel took her hand off the steering wheel and patted my leg.
Before long, we were pulling into a long, winding cemetery with rolling hills. The grass was nicely trimmed, and the sun was out in full force. It was such a contrast to the solemn, dark-clothed bodies that walked toward one area of the cemetery.
Mel pulled just off the side of the road and we both got out. Following the crowd, we ended up on the side of a small hill. The Hawkins site was down the hill in a little ravine. Green carpet was rolled over the spot in the ground and a beautiful light wood casket with a rose bouquet on top stood there, glinting in the sun. My heart constricted. Though we were in a cemetery wrapped up in death and grief, this was still a hundred times better than being at the crime scene. I hadn’t even seen the body, and I was glad I didn’t. It would’ve been too gruesome.
My eyes locked onto a grieving couple, which I could only assume were Taylor’s parents. My heart went out to them and I was very, very glad they hadn’t seen their daughter like that. Even with the plastic around her, with the backdrop of the crude cross and pyre, it was a memory they wouldn’t be able to get rid of.
Next to the mother was a young girl with short brunette hair. She had a tissue to her eye and looked distraught.
Mel elbowed me. “I wonder if that’s her sister.”
I shrugged. I didn’t know for sure, but she didn’t look anything like the picture the media had been pasting on every news show since the murder happened, always making things sound completely dire and dredging up too much specifics that I was sure would never let her parents fully heal. They may want to know, but some things, you just could not get out of your head. Ever.
My gaze kept roaming around the crowd until a body broke off and came toward us. Mel and I stilled at the same time. Jackson.
He moved toward us, my heart in my throat the entire time. “What are you doing here?” we both asked.
He dropped his head and looked at me. “Mads… What are you doing here?”
Mel squared her shoulders. “We’re here in support of a fellow witch.”
He opened his mouth to say something, and knowing that Mel got under his skin, I was sure it wouldn’t have been pretty. I shook my head at him, hoping he’d take the hint and not push it. Mel acted as if she was two seconds away from losing it all morning, and the last thing we needed was to draw attention to ourselves. “Your turn.”
He moved into line with us. “I come to the funerals sometimes of the cases I can’t quite crack.”
Well, that was awful.
Ever the talker, Mel said what I’d been thinking. “That’s morbid.”
Jackson’s voice hushed as a man in black robes began to talk. “It does two things. One, reminds me of why I do this, and two, oddly enough…” He shifted from foot to foot as if it made him uncomfortable to tell us what he was about to. “It can give you a lot of insight into interpersonal dynamics.”
“So, you’re on the clock?” I asked.
“Inadvertently, yes.”
“He’s always watching,” Mel said. “It skeeves me out.”
Jackson’s lip pulled up. “You can tell a lot by the way people act. For instance, what if you saw the mother down there not crying at all?”
I looked at the clearly grief-stricken woman.
He answered the question without me pushing him. “It might not make her immediately guilty, but it would definitely give me something to think about, and maybe ask her about at a later time. For instance,” he said, gesturing down to the group. “The girl next to the mom?”
Mel and I both nodded.
“Taylor’s roommate.”
Oh. My mouth dropped a little in shock, not that a roommate wouldn’t be upset, but she sat so close to the mom I at least thought it would’ve been a cousin or a childhood friend or something. Not a college roommate.
“She looks very sad,” Mel mused.
Jackson nodded, agreeing.
I peeked up at him. “What does that tell you?”
“It tells me she looks sad.” He shrugged when I glared at him, but there was a hint of laughter in his gaze. “I’m not sure yet. I haven’t talked with the roommate yet, but you better believe I’ll be filing her behavior away for a later date. So, yes, I watch people,” Jackson said, sticking out his head so he could look around me and at my sister. “It’s what I do.”
“Creepy,” she mumbled, thinking only I could hear her.
“I listen, too.”
She shook her shoulders out as if a tremor ran up her spine. “Double creepy.”
I almost rolled my eyes at her. Wasn’t she just telling me how much she liked Jackson and that it was okay to like him myself? Now she was calling him a creeper. I loved my sister, but man, she was hard to follow sometimes.
Chapter Nine
I clutched the brown paper bag to me tighter as I walked up th
e steps to the Salem Police Department. Mrs. Ward had gone above and beyond just hinting. Now, she was in a full-fledged let’s throw Maddie and Jackson together mode. Earlier in the day, she’d asked if I’d planned on seeing Jackson, and when I’d told her no, I hadn’t heard from him, she slyly came up with this plan. The thing was, Mrs. Ward wasn’t as sly as she thought. I knew full well that the paper bag in my hand was nothing, and that her sending me over to his work at lunch meant something else entirely, but, I listened as she went on about her arthritis flaring up and not being able to take whatever this was to Jackson today.
I shook my head and smiled when I first walked in. Dezi gave me a little wave when he peeked up. “He’s—”
Just then, his door opened. A young college-aged girl walked out. Her shoulders were back, and her blonde hair was nicely pulled away from her face into a sleek ponytail.
Jackson’s gaze went to Dezi first, but then Dezi pointed at me. He looked up. “Hey, Mads.” He came over and pulled me into a hug. I stiffened at first, but then put my arms around him as well, hoping he hadn’t noticed my initial reaction.
“Hi,” I said, working the sound out minus the surprise I felt.
“I was just going to call you.”
“You were?”
He nodded, then moved over so Dezi could hear him too. “That was a fellow actress in The Crucible. According to her, Molly downplayed the argument Taylor and she had. She said it was awful, and that Molly even threatened her.”
“That warrants another talk,” Dezi mused.
Jackson evidently agreed. “You up for it, Maddie?”
“Well, I—” I pointed out toward my car, but the truth was, I didn’t really have an excuse. I was on lunch.
Jackson eyed the brown bag in my hand. “What’s that?”
“Your mom asked me to bring it over to you. I have no idea what it is.”
I handed it over to him, and he peeked in it. He smiled, then shut the bag. “Great. You ready to go?”
He walked back into his office, dropping the brown bag on his desk and then returning to my side. I shrugged. “Sure.”
“See you guys later,” Dezi called.
We walked out the front entrance and I turned to Jackson. “I swear your mother has a sixth sense about these things.”
He chuckled under his breath. “She’s got a sixth sense alright.” He turned the car on and pulled out onto the street. “According to the girl who came to see me, they have another rehearsal in about a half hour, but Molly should already be there. I want to talk to her when she’s alone. She might open up more if that’s the case.”
I nodded and enjoyed the ride back out to our old stomping grounds. He parked just outside the theater hall again even though he had to go around the block several times for a spot to open. Mondays were a lot different from Saturdays.
We walked in and found Molly on stage. She had a new costume on, and she spoke her lines to an empty room. Jackson started clapping in the middle of her soliloquy. She jumped and turned. After seeing us, her face blazed red. “Detectives…”
Jackson glared at me, and I took so much pleasure from hearing her say that. Just call me Miss Librarian Detective, or Miss Detective Librarian. I didn’t know which one I thought sounded better, but I’d come up with something.
“What can I help you with?”
He walked up to Molly and crossed his arms in front of his belt buckle. “I don’t think you’ve been completely honest with us Molly.”
Her face turned an angry red. “Oh?”
“We had someone stop by the station today and tell us that the fight you and Taylor had was bigger than you let on. You threatened her?”
She sighed. “I threatened to punch her, not to kill her. I would never do something like that even though she deserved it.”
“So, you think she deserved what she got?” I asked, my stomach rolling over itself.
She shook her head. “No! I meant she would’ve deserved a punch in the face.” Molly walked over, dropping the booklet she had in her hands onto a table, and then turning toward us again. “Since people seem so chatty, has anyone told you this? That Taylor wasn’t well liked by anyone. She gloated over the part she won, especially over me. She knew I wanted it and did everything in her power to say things in front of me. I probably would’ve been able to let it go if it weren’t for her talking about how good she was in it at every chance she got, and how it was always her part, and she didn’t even know why anyone else had tried out.” Molly took a deep breath. “It was only ever her part because Mr. Lyle doted on her.”
“Because she was such a good actress?” Jackson asked.
“She was good,” Molly admitted. “I have to give her that, but that didn’t mean she had to be so nasty about it. I can’t think of one person who liked her. I know her roommate hated her.”
“Her roommate?” I asked, picturing the crying girl at the funeral. That didn’t seem like someone who hated Taylor.
“Rae?” Molly said. “Yeah. I’m in her bio class, and all she ever did was talk about how awful Taylor was to everybody including her. Even people who they thought were her friends were fair game when Taylor was with Rae. Rae just sat there and listened, soaking it all in while fuming inside. She tried to transfer out of her room and everything, but there’s literally nowhere else to put her. Rae just had to put up with it.”
A roommate that wanted her gone. That was motive. Molly had a motive, too. Taylor had gotten the part she always wanted.
“So, Rae hated her, what about you?” Jackson asked.
“I was…indifferent.”
“So indifferent you threatened to punch her?”
“Like I said, I never threatened to do more than that, and if I had punched her, she would’ve deserved it for all the backstabbing she did.” She looked up, her eyes intense. “I didn’t kill her though. I could never do that to anybody.”
Jackson ran his hands through his hair as Molly looked down. A tear splotch matted the script in front of her. Sighing, Jackson said, “The thing is, Molly, you need to tell us the truth right away. When something like this happens, and we have to hear the true story from someone else, even if you didn’t threaten to kill her, it still doesn’t look good.”
“I know,” she said, the tears falling now. “I messed up. I just got scared because you were there, and I’ve been under so much stress trying to pull this character together for the big night. Mr. Lyle is riding on us, and I need to get it perfect. I knew if I told you how bad the argument was I’d be a suspect, and I really can’t fit that in my life right now.”
I lifted an eyebrow. She couldn’t fit being a suspect into her life right now? How terrible that Taylor’s death was such a distraction for her. “Just remember that you’re the one still alive,” I said, walking toward her. “You’re the one who gets to put on the costume and walk out on opening night and not Taylor. She’ll never walk again, breathe again, live again, so if there’s anything more you need to tell us, I suggest you do.”
Molly’s jaw locked tight. She shook her head, her eyes wide with shock and fear.
I immediately felt bad, but people got caught up in their own lives too much. They needed to look outward, care about someone other than themselves once in a while.
Jackson and I walked away. He put his arm around me and pulled me close to his side. “Wow, Styles. Maybe I should start calling you the enforcer?”
“Please, don’t,” I said, trying to let out all the tension inside of me. “That was a lot harder than it looked. I don’t like confrontation.”
He made me stop. Then, he quirked my chin up to look him in the face. “I was going to go pay a visit to this Rae girl now, but if you’re not feeling up to it…”
“It’s fine,” I told him, trying to smile. “I’ll go.”
We hopped back in Jackson’s car as he looked through his notes for what dorm room Taylor had lived in. We passed the dorm where Reggie lived, and I looked up at the big brick structure
. “Sounds like Taylor had a lot of people who disliked her. This roommate, and Molly. Of course, there’s Reggie and his girlfriend, Lenora. I hope not that many people dislike me.”
Jackson shrugged. “I think just by going through life, you’re bound to make some enemies. People have different personalities, different quirks about them that might rub others the wrong way. I imagine I ruffle people’s feathers without trying sometimes, and I’m sure you do, too.”
Now, him I could understand, but me? I didn’t think so. I chose to let that go though. “Either way, she made some enemies. Broke up with Reggie but turned his whole life upside down. If I were him, I’d be upset because—and don’t get me wrong, I think he’s a sleezeball—but he was willing to go out with Taylor and not Lenora, which meant he abandoned his whole life, including a kid. Then, she just ups and decides she doesn’t want him anymore even after he made those sacrifices for her. And Molly,” I said, continuing, “…it sounds like it wasn’t all about Taylor just getting the part over her. It was the way Taylor hoarded it over her.”
“So she says,” Jackson said.
“You think she’s lying again?”
“I don’t necessarily think she’s lying. I just think there are two sides to every story, and Taylor isn’t around to tell hers. That’s where we come in. I come in, I mean. We have to detangle all this mess and come up with a probable solution to all this mess.”
“Is there anything else to help out?” I asked. “Any other evidence like the costume?”
Jackson shook his head. “We got the costume and everything back from the lab. Not a thing on it that would help us catch the killer. There’s a bunch of different DNA on the costume, and it’s impossible to tell whose might the killers be. You saw how the costumes were all thrown together back there. I didn’t even run the samples because their DNA could’ve been all over the costume, and that wouldn’t help us out at all. The fact is, there was just too many, and nothing that would pinpoint the killer, so it would be a moot point.”
“A dead end?”
He nodded. “As far as I can tell so far, Reggie and Molly had the motive. We’ll have to talk to Rae to see if she did too, but according to Molly, she did. She said she hated her, and if she did hate her, she did a great job of hiding it at the funeral. Motive isn’t enough though. They also had to have the opportunity.”