by V. V. James
The girl looks at me. There’s something uncertain in her eyes. Did she see her boyfriend die? Watch him push through the partygoers after their argument, then stumble and fall? Will she start crying and be unable to get out any words at all?
A beat passes before Harper points to her throat. “No hot drinks,” she croaks.
“A cold one, then? Or maybe a deliciously room-temperature Coke?”
That doesn’t raise a smile.
“I can’t talk,” she says, and makes to move around me.
“Just a few questions, please. Did you see Daniel Whitman fall?”
“No. I was nowhere near him.”
“Where were you?”
“On the stairs. He went off the landing.”
That’s what I’ve been told, and it tallies with where his body was found, allowing for disturbance as the partygoers fled the house. It’s not what Harper said that makes me pause, though, but how she said it. He went off the landing. It seems cold to use so few words, and such plain ones.
But what am I thinking? She’s in shock. I’ve seen it plenty of times before—although I push down the memory of the last girl I interviewed in a hospital, who was all too desperate to talk before her time ran out.
“Had he been drinking? Were there drugs at the party?”
I expect a girlfriend’s loyal denial, but again, she surprises me.
“It was the first big party of the summer. What do you think?”
“Had you and Daniel had an argument that night?”
“I wasn’t happy with him.”
“Witnesses say you were shouting.”
“Yes.”
“At him? What about?”
“Not at him.”
“At who?”
But she doesn’t say, just massages her throat with her hands. A nurse frowns and moves toward us.
“Harper, do you have any reason to think Dan’s fall wasn’t accidental?”
“Not accidental?” And the noise she makes sounds weirdly like a laugh. Scratchy and raw. “Dan Whitman would hardly kill himself over a nasty little slut like me.”
The words are shocking. No less so her clear, pale gaze as she says them.
With the merest nod, Harper Fenn walks away.
Six
Maggie
Asshole Cop is on the front desk when I get back to the station. “Got something for ya,” he says. “And it’s juicy.”
He thumbs toward the back room where Tad Bolt, plainly not expecting to play host for long, has allocated me a desk and computer that look like they were fished out of a dumpster. Or maybe from the bottom of a canal.
I didn’t see Bolt all yesterday. He’s been with his son, who is taking Dan’s death hard. Jake Bolt wasn’t able to speak to me yesterday, either. I want to get to him soon.
His daddy won’t like the questions I’ll ask. I remember the chief’s not-so-subtle warning off anything that might draw scandal. And I understand, I really do. Two parents are grieving a child. Kids are grieving a classmate. A town is grieving a local star. Why prolong the pain with an unnecessary investigation?
But no investigation is unnecessary. The death of an eighteen-year-old should never go without an explanation, because it shouldn’t happen.
So far, the Whitman death is looking straightforward. Just two things are giving me pause. One is the fire. Typically, a death and a fire is a homicide-and-concealment strategy, but it usually happens far from an audience. Charred bodies are found in abandoned cars, disused storage units. You’d have to be either delusional or a bona fide criminal mastermind to kill a boy in the middle of a crowded party, then burn the place down to cover your tracks.
The obvious explanation is that something exploded—a faulty appliance or a firework—and ignited the fire. Hopefully, Forensics will have answers soon.
The other wild card in this case is the alleged sex tape. I’ll hazard a guess the desk sergeant’s “something juicy” refers to that, and not new data from Forensics.
Grainy footage is playing on my computer screen. Over the shoulder of a second officer, who is studying it with real dedication, I see a teenage girl dancing, holding aloft a can of Dr Pepper. She’s wearing tiny shorts and a crop top and shaking her sizable booty at the camera.
“Ye-ah,” says the cop.
Maybe he isn’t perving over my evidence. Maybe he’s assisting my investigation for extra credit on his lunch break. Maybe my name isn’t Maggie Knight.
“Looks gripping,” I say. “Party footage, right? How’d we get it?”
He springs up, scowling.
“One of the girls questioned yesterday emailed it in. She thought it might be helpful.”
Good for you, mystery party girl. Even if you do have lousy taste in soda. I take the clip back to the beginning.
It’s dark and crowded, so the phone camera isn’t catching much. I keep watching, expecting any minute to see something shocking—Daniel Whitman falling, or the flare of a fire igniting. But nothing happens. The song changes, the girl stops dancing, and the camera wipes down toward the floor before the recording cuts off. Nothing has caught my eye.
I watch it through again, trying to position what I’m seeing using a floor plan, the rental agency pics of the villa, and our own photos of the charred ruin. We’re in a room adjoining the central atrium where Daniel Whitman fell.
I replay it a third time, wondering what I’m missing. Maybe there’s nothing, and the girl who sent it is simply the conscientious type. We should trawl the public social media profiles of everyone who was there. Go through all pics and put out an appeal for people to voluntarily send us clips—because a high bar is needed to requisition phone footage, and I have nothing like grounds for that yet.
Then I see it. A strip of bright light plays around in the top of shot some forty seconds in. The resolution is poor on this monitor, but it’s a moving image projected on the wall of the atrium behind the dancing girl.
I freeze and magnify it and see pale skin against dark bedcovers. Unmistakably the curve of a female leg.
“You’re the officer in charge?”
A tiny blond woman has burst through the door like a pastel tornado. The desk sergeant is right behind and makes a grab for her arm. She lashes out, and under other circumstances, it’d be comical—a Chihuahua turned attack dog. But I recognize this woman as Abigail Whitman, the dead boy’s mother. She gets a free pass on the bad-behavior front.
“Mrs. Whitman? I’m so sorry for your loss.”
She stares around, her chin high and gaze formidable.
“My son’s dead, and you’re here trying to prove, what, that it’s somehow his fault? That he was drunk or high? Everything that journalist was asking about is just lies. It was an accident.”
A journalist?
“No one’s trying to ‘prove’ anything. This is a routine investigation. Right now, an accident appears most likely. But my job is to consider all possibilities.”
“All possibilities? You’re saying maybe someone killed him?”
The loitering officer raises his eyebrows. Then turns on his heel with a gonna-tell-the-chief spring in his step. Asshole.
What’s more important is that the woman standing in front of me just lost her son. You can never spare the parents pain in these cases, but you can damn well make sure you don’t add to it. Abigail Whitman looks almost as put together as in the family photos I’ve seen, where she always has one hand on her boy, or an arm around his waist. But there’s a gleam in her eye that I recognize. It’s wild, raging sorrow, barely held in check.
“No. I’m definitely not saying that anyone killed your son. What I’m saying is that when a young person dies, it’s a tragedy, and people—the parents especially—deserve a full explanation.”
“My husband is a medical professor at Yale. We’ll go th
rough every toxicology report, anything you come up with to try to smear him. If your test-tube jockeys have made the slightest error, we will sue you for defamation.”
“There’ll be no ‘smearing,’ Mrs. Whitman. I have a simple job to do, which is get to the bottom of what happened. I hope it’ll bring you closure.”
Mrs. Whitman quivers. Bereavement does this, especially the sudden, violent kind that falls on you without warning and rips half your heart away. One minute, rage; the next, helplessness and despair. Abigail Whitman has a long, hard path ahead. She’ll walk it for the rest of her life.
But she’s not walking it alone. I don’t know where her husband is, but the friend who came with her gently presses her down into a seat.
“You heard her, Abi. It’s routine. They just need to rule out foul play.” The friend turns to me. “You are ruling out foul play, aren’t you?”
“I can’t say anything prematurely, Ms…?”
“Mrs.,” she corrects me. “Bridget Perelli-Lee. My wife is Cheryl Lee, the high school principal. You can imagine she’s got a lot of upset kids on her hands.”
“I certainly can imagine. Now, Mrs. Whitman, I’m doing everything I can to resolve this, and I’ll keep you and your husband informed of any developments.”
“You will, will you? I suppose that’s why I got a call asking about some pornographic video of my son being shown at the party.”
“This call… You said it was a journalist?”
I need to know if anyone else is asking around, talking to witnesses. That can lead to evidence contamination—especially in small communities like this. It can also build up the notion that something was a crime, when it was nothing of the sort.
But while I’m worrying about a nosy reporter, Abigail Whitman’s gaze has slid past me to my computer. To the screen that’s exactly as it was when I sprang up after she came storming in here.
The screen that’s displaying the phone footage.
Fury kindles in her again. Was the fire in the party house as sudden and blazing?
“That’s from that night, isn’t it? They were right—you are digging. You bitch! Leave him alone!”
Mrs. Whitman flies at me, fingers clawing at my face. But she’s already crumpling, the rage burned up in the instant it flared. Just grief now, insubstantial as a curling flake of soot. She collapses against my chest.
“My boy’s dead,” she whispers. “Dead.”
I wonder how many times she’ll have to say that to herself before she believes it.
“May I?” asks Bridget Perelli-Lee, indicating the screen. “It’s just…”
I nod. The image isn’t identifiable or sexually explicit. Perelli-Lee bends to peer at it. She points to a cluster of marks that I’d assumed were dead pixels in the ancient screen. Now that she’s drawn my attention, I see that it’s on the girl’s bare skin.
“There—that? Looks like a butterfly? That’s one of Harper’s. Izzy’s obsessed with them. Copies them in her journal and begs me to let her get one done, too. As if.”
So the tape is Dan and Harper. That explains her anger at the party. No girl would want an intimate video of herself played before all her classmates. And I wonder, again, at our society’s double standards, when it’s a mark of prowess for a boy to be filmed screwing a girl, but a badge of shame for her.
Then I remember Harper’s bitter words as she walked away from me in the hospital. A nasty little slut like me.
What if the boy on the tape isn’t Dan?
Seven
Sarah
The sign in my shop window is turned to Closed, but I have work to do.
Hopefully, I can fetch Harper home from the hospital this afternoon. She’ll need what I’m brewing. And Abigail will need it, too. My daughter and my poor friend have lost the boy who meant more to them than anything.
This is what my art is for. Modern society reckons it’s found better ways than witchcraft of easing our paths through life: drugs for sorrow, apps for love. Insurance for sickness and lotteries for wealth. Across America, witches’ booths are disappearing from Main Street.
But there’s no more certain remedy for soul soreness, no better balm for a broken heart, than the one I can brew up in my workroom.
Time heals all things. But when there isn’t time, witchcraft will do.
I lift three tinted-glass jars from the shelves before picking a few ingredients fresh in the yard. That done, I take my time selecting the best chart for my purpose. The one I settle on is old and fragile, so I slip it carefully from the shallow drawer of my plan chest and carry it to the oak ritual table that belonged to my grandmother. I unroll the felt topper and place little brass weights on each corner of the chart to keep it flat.
As I lose myself in preparation, I feel my neck and shoulders unknot, my spirit relax for the first time since that terrible night at Bridget’s. I measure valerian root into the weighing scales, then flatten it with the side of my silver knife. Aira twines around my ankles, mewing. She knows that I’m at work.
The rhythms of it are ancient. The Veteris Opus they called it in Renaissance times: the Old Work. And folk have never stopped hungering for witch rites. Barely were they done persecuting us, when the Revolutionary War put us back in business. Generals needed cannonballs to fly straight, soldiers were desperate for lucky amulets, and sweethearts begged for charms for faithfulness. The Civil War was just the same. Vietnam too, my gramma told me. War is good business for witches.
Heartbreak is, too.
As I chop and grind and chant, I pour my love for Harper and Abigail into the work.
I’m blending a draft of tranquility with a heartsease tincture—a standard preparation. But I’ll add tea rose and sweet pea: the first for remembrance, the second for departure and farewell. I want them both to cherish their memories of Daniel, but also to move past this awful loss. Which requires one final ingredient.
I pull up the key that hangs always around my neck. The top half of my filing cabinet is for client records, kept as carefully as any doctor or psychiatrist—we’re bound by the same data-protection laws these days. The bottom half is my archive. It’s ordered alphabetically, too, and inside each named, hanging folder is a small vacuum-pack bag.
Their contents are always freely given. They have to be, for the magic to take properly. We witches knew about consent culture long before it hit sex-ed classrooms. But no one ever asks what happens to the…leftovers.
Everyone I’ve ever worked magic for is in here.
The folder marked WHITMAN, Daniel holds two bags. They both contain hair: two shades of blond, one darker and coarser than the other. The older, fairer one I should have thrown away a long time ago. I rub its contents, which are silky fine inside the airtight plastic. I’ll burn it when they bury Daniel.
But not today. I replace that bag and carry the other to my worktop. I harvested its contents last season, when Dan had a tendon injury and was impatient to get back on the field.
I cut the pack with silver scissors and slide out seven hairs onto my work counter. The chart tells me I’ve a little longer to wait before adding them.
My fingertips tingle as they trace the chart’s nested, interlocking circles, triangles, pentagrams, and hexagrams. Its spirals, scrawled symbols, and alphanumeric subdivisions. These marks are where the magic happens. These diagrams are witchcraft made visible.
They may look arcane, but in truth, they’re simply maps. Maps with many turns and branches. Magic is the art of choosing the best path to where you wish to be. And as with life, where you end up is the result of the choices you’ve made.
When Harper was little, she’d sit in here drawing and coloring while I worked. Every now and then she’d lift her dark head and solemnly ask what I was doing. But I could tell she didn’t quite grasp my explanations. Until one day I took the pen she was drawing with, always such cl
ever drawings, and said: “The ingredients and objects are your ink. The charts and symbols are your paper. And magic is the drawing you make.”
I’ll never forget how widely she smiled.
Harper couldn’t wait to be a witch. And I couldn’t wait to teach her, just like my grandmother taught me. Each gesture and incantation that corresponds to a symbol or letter. Wisps of Aramaic, Egyptian, and languages so old they’ve vanished from the earth. Intricate finger signs that I had to practice over and over. If I made any error, Gramma whacked me on the thigh with a ruler—not the palm or knuckles, as I needed my hands in working order. Gramma was more than my grandmother. She was my mother in the craft. Every witch needs one. The paths we make are dangerous to tread alone.
“You’ll be teaching her one day,” Gramma told me after Harper was born, as we both doted on her clear, guileless eyes and pudgy baby limbs. My grandmother never lived to see Harper’s thirteenth birthday and to learn that her great-granddaughter was no witch.
A rattling at the yard door pulls me from my memories. The first thing I do is check the brew’s progress. I’ve not missed a step, but the hourglass tells me it’ll soon be time to add the hairs.
My visitor must be Bridget. She’s the only one with keys and a token to let her through the protective wards. She’ll be bringing an update on Abigail. The three of us have arranged a visiting schedule: Bridget this morning, Julia this afternoon, and me tonight once I’ve finished my work and fetched Harper home from the hospital.
Bridge will just have to wait until this step is done.
To my annoyance, the door rattles again, then flies open. I turn, ready to give my friend an earful—but it’s not Bridget.
It’s Harper. She looks as surprised to see me as I am to see her.
“Jesus, Mom. Brewing?”
Her voice is raspy, like she’s been gargling with hot coals. Did they let her just walk out of that hospital?
I reach to hug her, but she evades with a graceful swerve. She does this more and more, and though I know it’s just a teenage thing, it still hurts.