Sanctuary

by V. V. James

  But I plainly didn’t make it strong enough.

  “Sarah cursed him,” she gasps. “I came to ask her to lift it. And she cursed the cops who were at the vigil. She’s going to curse the whole town to punish us.”

  “Hush now, Mary-Anne,” Bridget says. “Calm down. I’ve known Sarah all my life. She wouldn’t do that.”

  But when my old friend looks at me, I see a question, and that question is: Did you?

  “She did. She did,” the chief’s wife insists, rocking back and forth. “My son’s going to die.”

  “Mary-Anne, that’s enough.” Bridget gives the woman’s shoulder a little shake. “You know lots of folk have been getting ill, from long before this happened. The kids with mono, like my Izzy. Even Cheryl’s off sick, and let me tell you, that woman has an iron constitution.”

  “Of course Cheryl’s sick,” gasps Mary-Anne. “Everyone knows she’s not expelling any of the boys. So she’s been cursed, too.”

  “Absolutely not,” I snap. “Bridget, tell me you don’t believe that.”

  “Of course I don’t.”

  But I see it again, that little flicker of doubt in her eyes.

  There’s only one way to fix this. I get on one knee beside Mary-Anne, to make myself look less threatening, and reach for her hand, which quivers in mine.

  “Mary-Anne, our kids have grown up together. I’ve never wished harm on any of them. I can try to help Jacob, but I have to see him to make a diagnosis. You know that.”

  She snatches her hand back. “No! I know what you’re trying to do. You tried to kill him, but Michael rescued him, so now you want to finish the job. You’re not going anywhere near my boy. You cursed him, so you can lift it.”

  “I didn’t, so I can’t, Mary-Anne, truly. It’ll be some normal physical sickness.”

  Mary-Anne’s hand flashes up and slaps me so hard my head rocks back. I’m sent sprawling on my butt, clawing at boxes. The chief’s wife crouches over me.

  “Witch!” she hisses. “Murderer! You and your witch daughter. First, we’ll burn you. And then you’ll burn in hell.”

  Seventy-Nine

  Abigail

  Bridget called to tell me about a scene between Mary-Anne Bolt and Sarah on Main Street. She asked if I could try to talk sense into the chief’s wife.

  I’ll do nothing of the sort. The whole episode couldn’t have been more perfect if I’d suggested it myself. Sarah using offensive magic in public? She’s practically announcing her own guilt.

  So when the phone rings, I expect it to be Mary-Anne, giving me her update. But it’s not—it’s the school. Cheryl Lee’s vice principal, in fact. He asks me to come in to discuss an “important matter,” but won’t say what.

  Once such a call would have filled me with dread, imagining the worst: a football injury, my beautiful boy strapped to a board in a neck brace, his life utterly altered. It can’t be that now. So it must be something about Harper. Perhaps they’ve found further evidence against her.

  “Mrs. Whitman, thank you for coming in,” says a man who introduces himself as the school counselor. He’s a prim guy in his thirties, who looks like listening to his students’ romantic troubles is the nearest he’s ever come to having sex. The other man is the vice principal. The principal is off sick, he explains.

  “Is that so?” I tell him. “She’s not the only one suffering. Jacob Bolt is in intensive care. Several police officers working on the Fenn case are also ill. And now Ms. Lee. A strange coincidence.”

  But the vice principal isn’t as quick to take the bait as Mary-Anne was, saying it’s nothing more than one of Cheryl’s sporadic migraines.

  I may be imagining it, but the atmosphere is cool. I’ve always been treated respectfully, as befits the mother of a sports star and the wife of a Yale professor. Since Daniel’s death, people have been falling over themselves with solicitude, and that’s only gotten more noticeable since Harper’s disgusting allegations. These two ought to be pulling out a chair for me and asking how I am. Something’s wrong.

  A small tablet sits on the counselor’s desk. The sort of thing kids use to stream TV. Daniel had several.

  “I confiscated this earlier from Freddie McConaughey,” the counselor explains, fingers framing the device like a cop trying not to contaminate evidence. “Yesterday, a tenth-grade girl said that she had seen Freddie showing some of her classmates inappropriate material.”

  I keep my face blank. I’m not Freddie McConaughey’s mother. He was Dan’s teammate, no more.

  “The girl is a credible student, so I alerted Freddie’s homeroom and subject teachers, and between classes one of my colleagues saw fit to confiscate this. There are several unpleasant videos on it, but one of them…”

  I’m still silent. What has this got to do with me? The vice principal clears his throat, a nasty, moist sound.

  “Us asking you to come in is irregular, Mrs. Whitman, but I hope you’ll understand why. We’ll be discussing this matter with the police next, and given the recent terrible events, I thought… That is, we…”

  So I was right. It is more evidence against Harper.

  “From the party? I’ve already seen it. Or rather, Jake’s version of it.”

  “You have? And yet you…”

  “The more the police have, the better. I mean, no version could be clearer than Jacob’s. He was right next to Harper when she did it. But he doesn’t catch the actual moment Daniel falls. Or what was happening on the landing beforehand. Whatever Freddie filmed can only help.”

  The two men exchange glances. The counselor has gone bright red—a classic anxiety flush. The vice principal appears to be losing all power of speech, though he manages it eventually.

  “Forgive me, Mrs. Whitman, it’s not that party.”

  Not that party?

  “The video in question appears to be the original of footage that the school authorities have been aware exists online in an, ah, edited version. The same footage that was shown on the night your son so tragically lost his life.”

  “The sex tape?”

  And the vice principal leans forward in his chair. He’s an unprepossessing man, the front half of his head almost entirely bald, but now there’s something in his eyes that tells me how he got this job. That he’s capable of putting the fear of God into disobedient or slacking students. I shrink back. Whatever he’s going to tell me will be worse than anything any student has ever had to hear in this airless little office.

  “I’m afraid that wouldn’t be the correct term, Mrs. Whitman. You see, in Freddie’s footage the audio hasn’t been edited. There’s no music track. It shows your son having sex with Harper Fenn, yes, but she can be heard saying—not clearly, but repeatedly—‘please stop’ and ‘no.’”

  As quick as reflex, I reach out to grab the tablet and hurl it against the wall, shattering it into pieces that no forensic geek will be able to put back together.

  But the counselor is faster, pulling it toward himself.

  “I’m truly sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Mrs. Whitman,” says the vice principal. “But I hope you can use this time to prepare yourself. We’ll be handing this to the police tonight.”

  Eighty

  Maggie

  The recording on Freddie’s tablet? It’s bad. Harper’s soft and slurry, but when she says “no” and “stop,” there’s no mistaking it.

  Chester has to get up and walk away as we watch, looking like his breakfast will be putting in a reappearance.

  I peer at the screen. There are ten minutes of this, not the cut-down version, on the porn site. Boys hoot drunkenly and yell encouragement from the other side of the door. At one point, someone hammers on it and cries, “My turn next!” Nothing to prove they know what’s happening on the other side is a rape, but sickening all the same.

  And Harper had to see them all at school, ev
ery day.

  “Christ,” Chester says when it’s all over, his face pale and sweaty.

  “Yup. No doubt now what happened. So, we have a narrative, of sorts. A rape. Leading to a confrontation at the birthday party. And Dan dies, accidentally or with premeditation. By magic, or not by magic. And at whose hands, do we think?”

  “I guess we’re ruling out the dad of the girl who Dan…who says that Dan… No, no…” Chester’s face screws up as his police impartiality wars with his revulsion at what he just saw. “He really did molest that girl, didn’t he? If he’s capable of that…”

  “Certainly looks that way.” I turn the tablet facedown so neither of us has to look at it. “Tell me again how he seemed when you spoke to him.”

  Chester reminds me of the main points of Angry Dad’s testimony. The account the man gleaned from his daughter, hint by fearful hint, culminating in a distraught revelation of everything Dan did. Each inappropriate touch, from standing too close as he showed her how to kick a ball, to a brush of hands at the bowling alley on a team evening out. How those hands later found their way under her skirt.

  “He said he was going to go to the cops, but his daughter begged him not to. She thought all the other kids at school would turn on her. Plus, the mom goes to the same church as the Bolts. This is such a small town and Dan was so popular that the kid was terrified of what it would mean for them all. You should have seen her dad—he was in pieces just telling me about it.”

  “Right. But if he didn’t go for Dan then, why would he go for him now? So perhaps put him low on the list. Harper, too, because if she did it, why would she go public with a motive? Plus…”

  “Plus,” says Chester, finishing my sentence. “There’s the magic thing. Rowan and I were discussing it on the way to Green Point. They’re frustrated that they can’t tell what it was used for specifically, but it was used with violent intent.”

  “No shit. It nearly blew Rowan’s face off. Did you see it…swirling? That wasn’t just me imagining things, was it?”

  My colleague shakes his head with the emphatic uh-uh of a child.

  “But Harper sort of needs to be higher on the list, doesn’t she? Because even if she couldn’t do the magic herself, she could have asked someone to do it. Like the Green Point witch, Siobhan Maloney.”

  “Or her son, Jonny,” I add. “We only have Siobhan’s word that he has no ability. And if you suspect your son of unnatural homicide, you’d hardly tell a random stranger that he’s a witch, would you? Maybe Harper asked one of those two to work magic on Dan. Perhaps one of them chose to do it without her instigation. Harper looked pretty tight with that community. If she confided in them about what Dan did to her, Jonny or his mother may have decided to act on their own initiative.”

  “But they weren’t there. The first thing we did was compile a list of who was at the party. I gave it to you myself.”

  “Tell me, Chester, who’s in this station this morning?” He looks puzzled, so I prompt him. “Here. Right now. Their names.”

  He reels off the names of the four colleagues in today—one of them an old dude brought back from retirement to cover the three that ate themselves sick at the barbecue.

  “Okay. Good. But you forgot the two folks sitting out front waiting to speak to an officer.”

  “But they… I wasn’t sure if they counted, and I don’t know their names.”

  “Exactly.”

  I watch his face as he grasps my meaning. The party attendees came from several groups: Sanctuary High seniors, but also football bros from across the state and girls from the private school outside town. No one could have named all the kids attending. So, everyone just mentioned the names they knew.

  “If someone was there who no one knew,” Chester says, “no one would have told us about them.”

  “You’re flying, Chester. We gotta ask those party kids about people they didn’t know, and specifically anyone who didn’t seem to fit a particular set.”

  I secure the tablet, run off a few photocopies of the guest list, and we head out. I ask him to recruit the colleague he rates highest from those outside, and he taps a good-looking dude in a nicely spruced-up uniform.

  “Can’t help ya, Ches,” the cop says, snapping gum in his mouth. “Chief’s orders. None of us are to go near this shit show of a case. In fact, when he’s back from checking on his kid in the hospital, where that witch put him, he’s gonna pull you off it, too.”

  “Wait, wait,” I interrupt. “In the hospital where that witch put him? What do you mean?”

  “Exactly what I said.” The cop’s gaze is low-key hostile, as if he’s challenging me to disagree. “The witch cursed Jake. Maybe even tried to kill him, to stop him from giving evidence.”

  What is this madness? What’s happening in this town is bad enough without the chief stirring it up worse with claims that the witch cursed his sick kid. Jeez.

  “Seems you’re in need of help,” says a slow voice behind me.

  The old boy brought in as cover has hauled himself out of the desk chair. His uniform barely fits anymore. It bulges around the hips, and a second soft belly spills over his belt. He looks like he’d keel over with cardiac arrest if he was called to get a kitten out of a tree, let alone chase a perp.

  “Bin a few years since I was on patrol,” he continues. “But I ain’t never heard of a uniform refusing to do police work when it needed doin’. Tad Bolt was a greenhorn fetching my coffee when he first joined. What’s the worst he can do—retire me?”

  The old fella gives a hoarse laugh, both his guts jiggling. He picks up his badge and follows me and Chester out.

  I’m glad to get out of the police station and brief Chester and Old Fella as we head to the school. I explain myself to the vice principal and see my guys installed in small cubicles. The secretary will call the party attendees in, one by one, and my colleagues will go through their recollections of anyone at the party they didn’t recognize.

  I’d bet my last doughnut someone will remember seeing the tanned and tousled form of Jonny Maloney.

  Eighty-One

  Maggie

  I leave them to it and go hunt down Mr. Maloney myself on the police database. But I’m scratching around. There’s a warning for cannabis possession, several years old and due to disappear off his record in 3-2-1…

  Nothing else. This dude has never gotten in a brawl or pulled a knife on someone—not that the cops ever heard about, anyway. Nothing to give me a clue as to whether he has a temper or is prone to violence. I wasn’t getting bad vibes off him in the beach café, but there are plenty of people who flip like a switch.

  I run back over what I saw of him and Harper in his tattoo shop, but again, no clues. She was at ease, proficient with that needle. As someone who winces just putting on a Band-Aid, I never imagined someone could tattoo their own skin. And he left her to it.

  He’s got to be responsible for some of her inking. As she’s a minor under eighteen, state law calls for up to a one-hundred-dollar fine or up to ninety days imprisonment, or both, if she didn’t have a parent’s permission. But again, if Mr. Maloney has a thing for illegally tattooing schoolgirls, it’s left no trace in the records.

  I go to ask her mom what she knows of her daughter’s out-of-town bolt-hole. But the sight that greets me at the witch’s house is shocking. Sarah Fenn is a shadow of herself.

  She trails back to her kitchen table and sinks into a chair. There’s a bandage from wrist to elbow on her right arm that wasn’t there before. She looks suddenly very small sitting there, elbows up. As if she’s a child and life is a meal she’s being forced to eat.

  Is anyone looking out for this woman? I can’t imagine what it feels like to have your whole town turn on you. Of the three women closest to her, one is now trying to destroy her, and one—Julia Garcia—must be ambivalent at best. Is Perelli still on her side? At least
Pierre Martineau is. I make a mental note to ask him to check in on her.

  Then I gently question her. How much does Sarah know of where her daughter goes outside Sanctuary, and her friends there?

  The answer, frustratingly, is almost nothing. Fenn gives her daughter a lot of autonomy and trust. It appears that’s the witch way of child-rearing. I wonder how she feels that her daughter doesn’t return much of that trust. Not sharing the details of her life at Green Point, and not even (if Harper told me the truth) telling her about the rape.

  “I couldn’t give her magic,” Fenn says sadly, “but I can give her the space to work out who she is, given that she’s not a witch. I thought that growing up with ability was hard—the way people judge you. But it turns out that growing up without it is harder. I show my daughter respect, Detective, and I do that by allowing her freedom.”

  I suppress the urge to tell her that her daughter has found a place nearby where she fits right in, and when my radio crackles, I’m guiltily relieved at the interruption.

  “Ma’am,” says Chester, formal as ever. “Can you swing back to the school. There’s something rather interesting…”

  I’m glad to shut the witch’s door behind me.

  * * *

  “We haven’t spoken to everyone,” Chester explains when I’m sat down opposite him and Old Fella. “Several of the kids aren’t in today—seems they’re sick.”

  He reads off three names: Freddie McConaughey, Oliver Welland, and Dale Hamilton. The boys from the fountain incident. They’re sick, just like Jake and some of Bolt’s cops? What is this?

  But that’s not what Chester wants to show me.

  “Nobody’s reported seeing anyone who matches Maloney’s appearance. All the partygoers were school-age. When they described people they didn’t know, they could still identify them as part of one group—I don’t know those girls, but they’re from that fancy school, et cetera. But there’s one name that wasn’t on our original list that got mentioned several times. They’d almost forgotten she was there, or they weren’t certain that they’d seen her.”