The largest group, represented by the dragonfly sigil, is led by a woman named Sosie Powell. George contacted her through her website, PorticoWitch.com before we arrived in town.
Besides being a witch, she’s also a waitress and bartender at the Corner.
We park on Main Street with two dozen other pickups and grime-coated cars that are a constant presence outside the building. A steady rain has settled in. As Mitch pulls up to the century-old building, I can see into the front windows of the bar, the colored-glass lights glowing above the century-old bar, a line of old men seated beneath them.
The french-fried scent billows out the door as we enter. Morning mist has developed into rain, and we move gratefully from the cold, late-autumn morning into the warmth and beery smells of the bar. Electronic poker machines along the wall play a cheerful melody.
Every eye turns toward us.
It’s lunchtime, and the place is crowded. All tables are taken, so we sit at the last three seats at the bar. We have just sat down when Sosie appears from the kitchen with three plates of burgers and fries lined up on her arm.
Sosie Powell is mid-thirties, with long hair dyed blue-black and gathered into a messy bun at the nape of her neck. Her eyes are a gorgeous golden hazel rimmed in thick layers of black liner and mascara. She’s dressed in jeans and a bottle green sleeveless blouse with a dragonfly pin on the collar.
She recognizes us. I see her double-take as she puts the last plate in front of a bearded, flannel-wearing old-timer. She reaches beneath the bar, wipes her hands on a towel, and takes a sip of soda from a straw before approaching us.
“You’re back,” she says. “I wondered…when Beverly posted that video.” She bites a green-polished thumbnail but just as quickly, as if catching herself in a bad habit, drops her hand to her side. “I’m sorry about George. I didn’t get a chance to say before. It all happened so fast, and then you all were gone back home.”
I nod. Her eyes are large and mesmerizing. I look away and open a menu.
“She had no right to post that video. To say the things she said. To claim that George said them. It’s disgusting.”
“You’re not a fan of Beverly Donneville?” asks Mitch.
“That fake psychic? She has no power over the Throne, no understanding of real witchcraft.”
“Do you have time to answer a few questions?” asks Rita. “About the night George died.”
Her finely groomed eyebrow arches toward Rita, then Mitch. “Who are you?”
“Friends of Thea’s.” Mitch elbows me, and I nod, glancing up from my menu.
“I told the police everything I knew. He came in here that day, had a couple drinks. That was the last time I saw him.”
Sosie searches for something to do. She picks up a glass and begins to wipe it with her towel.
“Did he say anything about going out to the Throne later that night?”
She shrugs. “We didn’t talk about any of that. I’d already told him all there was to tell about the Throne, the coven, the rituals, all that.”
“What did you talk about?” asks Mitch.
She throws down her towel. “I don’t remember. Why does it matter?”
“Because we heard you two argued.”
She places the glass carefully on the bar.
“We heard you took his phone,” says Rita.
“He left his phone. On the bar. He came in here shouting about it, and I gave it back to him. Ask anyone here.” She tilts her head at the line of old men.
“But you saw him three nights before.” I say.
She doesn’t meet my eye.
After George told me he sat on the Throne, that same morning, I found the emails between him and Sosie. I had opened his laptop to check if he’d written anything, and there they were.
All two hundred plus of them.
They started two weeks before, right after the Donnevilles arrived in Portico.
I opened the latest message she had sent him and found an agreement to meet at the Corner the previous night:
We’ll take my car. I know a place to park on the back road, and we can walk from there. Fisher will never see us.
I found George in the back garden of the inn, drinking coffee with Mrs. Lowry.
“Was it her?” I asked, marching up to them. “Sosie Powell. Did she sneak you to the Throne? Did she record the video?”
“I’ll get some coffee for you, Mrs. Drake,” said Mrs. Lowry, rising and hurrying away.
I glared at George who had frozen with his mug to his lips in mid-sip. He lowered it and grinned.
“Yes, but I promised not to get her in trouble for trespassing, so keep that quiet.”
“Mmm, any other secrets?”
To be clear, I didn’t think he was having an affair with Sosie Powell the witch. But I did think he was supposed to be writing. To be honest, the reason I had come along and dragged the girls with us was so I could keep him motivated, make sure he was working and not getting carried away.
Because the thing is, he can’t resist these people.
When he was researching, sometimes he would disappear for days, even weeks. He forgot all about us.
When he was writing his third book, Lady Grace, he lived for eighteen days with an eighty-two-year-old woman named Maude O’Brien who had never married, never had children, and, from the time her mother died when Maude was thirty-three, had lived alone—except for a life-sized doll in Victorian dress she called Lady Grace.
He became obsessed with people living out these fantasy lives, drawn to all people claiming to have paranormal experiences.
Like me.
Would he have been so interested in me when we first met if I hadn’t claimed to have seen a ghost?
George stood up, grimaced, and stretched, as if he’d slept all night on the iron patio furniture.
“Why are you so upset?” he asked. “I came here to research the Witch’s Throne, ergo, you had to assume witchcraft and witches are involved.”
“I’m upset because this always happens. You...you turn away from me. From us. You become fascinated with these weird people.”
“Because they’re fascinating!”
“Think about it. This Sosie knew you planned to sit on the Throne. She wants you to die.”
He stepped back, held up his hands. “No, I don’t believe that.”
“Why else would she help you?”
He huffed a short, humorless laugh. “Maybe she thinks I’m fascinating, too.”
“You snuck him on to Martin Fisher’s property,” I accuse Sosie. “You filmed him sitting on the Throne.”
“He asked me to help him. I know a camouflaging spell. Renders you only visible only to the night world. No creature of day can see you.”
Rita snorts.
Sosie lifts her chin. “Our coven meets there at every new moon, and Martin Fisher has never caught us there. Not once. Not in the eleven years I’ve been conducting the rituals.”
“Because you know the back road,” I say. “You know a place to hide your car and sneak onto the property. It’s marked by a sign for Blue Creek.”
“How did you know about that?”
“George told me.”
I can see this surprises her, but she goes on. “The camouflaging spell is essential. We have two dozen women out there for rites. You think he wouldn’t catch that many people? Even if we snuck in the back way? His cabin looks right down on the Throne.”
“You believe these spells actually work? That they influence the rational world?” asks Rita.
“Have you read the Inquiry?”
Rita presses her fingertips to her temples. “What the hell is that?”
“Adeline Tenatree’s masterpiece. Her legacy. An Inquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft. It explains the power and practical purposes of legitimate magic. If you’d read it, you would believe. She was real.”
“You believe the Witch’s Throne has magical power, then? You think George was killed by a curse?” asks Mitc
h.
I slide off my barstool and back up. Confrontation. Here we go.
“That’s why she helped him gain access,” I say loudly. A few men at the bar turn their heads. Mitch and Rita turn to me, surprised. “She thought he’d be killed. She wanted it to happen. She’s that desperate to be right.”
“That’s not true!” shouts Sosie.
I’m shouting now. “If you wanted to prove the curse was real, why didn’t you sit up there?”
“He was the one who chose to sit on the Throne, to defy the legend. It was his choice. How could I ever make someone do that, even if I wanted to?”
“But you were you helping him. Why?”
“He was legitimately interested in the history of the Throne. He promised he didn’t want to ridicule the practice of witchcraft. He only wanted to prove Beverly Donneville was a fraud, that she wasn’t capable of any sort of cleansing of the Throne, and that was something I wanted to help with. I swear…” She leans forward against the bar and squeezes her eyes shut, shaking her head, then opens them, looking directly at me. “I never thought he would sit on it. I only agreed to get him on the property. To get him close to the Throne. He never said anything about filming himself sitting on it.”
“And yet, when he asked, you did it.”
She looks away.
I lean forward on the bar. Even trembling with anger and anxiety at shouting in a bar in front of fifty strangers, I notice Rita’s admiring look.
“If he had lived, you would have lost something you believed in. You would have looked like a fool.”
“Where were you that night?” asks Rita.
Sosie glares at her. She slaps the bar. “Here. All night.” She throws her arm out at the line of men at the bar. “Ask anyone.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Outside, the rain falls steady and fast, straight down. Rita opens an enormous black umbrella that, up to this moment, I had no idea she was carrying.
I tremble on the sidewalk outside the Corner, arms hugged around my waist, and try to regain my equilibrium. I feel like I’ve plunged seven hundred stories in an elevator: slightly nauseous and desperate for space and fresh air.
Was Sosie lying? Had she left the Corner to meet George later that night? Would any person in that bar tell me the truth? Would any person in this town?
Pelting rain roars in my ears. Water drips down my face into the front of my sweatshirt. I zip it up to the chin and pull the hood over my head.
“Thea!” Rita is waving her hand in front of my face.
“What?”
“I said, do you know where the Donnevilles might be staying?”
“We should have asked in the bar,” says Mitch. He takes the umbrella and scooches in between us, holding it over us all.
“I think we’ve burned that bridge,” says Rita, eyeing me. “What about that inn you guys stayed at last time?”
“No,” I shake my head, “they stayed at a house in town. We never knew where.”
Rita digs the car keys out of her purse. “We’ll drive back out to the Throne, push through the crowd if we have to. Or we wait and follow them.”
She starts toward the car, and Mitch turns with the umbrella. Rain is now drenching the entire left side of me. I’m standing in a current of runoff from the gutter, and my feet are soaked. I have barely slept the past two nights, and I’m exhausted.
“Wait.”
They stop.
“I’m just…I’m so tired. I need to rest.”
“We haven’t made any progress,” says Rita. “We need to talk to Beverly.”
“Maybe we all need a break,” says Mitch.
“We haven’t even started!”
“We have time—”
“No,” insists Rita, “we really don’t. All we’ve done is waste time. I’m going to talk to Beverly Donneville. Right now.”
She leaves the protection of the umbrella, and by the time she’s walked six steps to the car, her blonde hair is plastered to her face. She swipes her forearm across her eyes, fumbling with the key fob.
“They’re not going to be filming in this rain!” Mitch shouts. “It’s too late!”
Rita manages to open the car door, and I shiver—mostly from the cold but also a burgeoning apprehension about how this is going down. I have no doubt Rita will leave me standing here in the rain watching her taillights disappear around the corner. But will she leave Mitch?
I look up at him. “Um…”
“She’s not leaving,” he says, watching the headlights come on, the wipers start to swish back and forth.
“You sure?”
Two impatient beeps of the horn are my answer.
“Told you.” He digs his elbow in my side, and it’s so reminiscent of how George used to do the same thing that my stomach turns. “So…this inn you stayed at. What’s it called?”
The Apple Inn is decorated and flyers are posted about the various events of the All Hallows’ Eve Festival. It’s three days until Halloween, and the inn is decorated for the town’s most profitable holiday. Rooms have been booked up for months, but they have one room vacant from a last-minute cancellation.
We check in, Rita practically emitting heat waves with the flames of her impatience. With only one room, we have to share, so they bring in our bags and agree to check on the crowd at the Throne while I rest.
When they’re gone, I find my phone and dial Lydia’s number.
“Hi,” she answers in monotone.
“Liddy, how’s it going there? You guys okay?”
“Yep.”
“I really miss you both. I hate being away.”
“Did you tell Jules you saw a ghost when you were in college?”
“What? Oh, right. Yes, I told her a story about that.”
“Because it’s all we’ve heard about all night here, this ghost you supposedly saw. The night you met Dad. Grandma and Grandpa are loving it.”
“I’m sure—”
“When are you going to be home?”
“Monday, before you get home from school. I promise.”
“Whatever…so, was it true?”
“What?”
“That story about you and Dad. You really think you saw a ghost out in the woods?”
“Yes, it’s true.”
I receive mostly one-word responses from her for the duration of our call, then listen for twenty minutes as Juliet takes over and tells me every detail of every moment that has happened since we’ve parted.
“Jules,” I interrupt, “remember how Grandma and Grandpa don’t exactly love my ghost stories?”
“Oh.” I imagine her shoulders dropping. “I forgot.”
“No, it’s okay—”
“I’m sorry, Mom…”
“Honey, I promise it’s fine. Just…maybe talk about other things instead.”
I change the conversation to the possibility of purple basketball shoes, and by the time we disconnect, she’s happy again. My Juliet: never sad for long.
I, however, feel worse. I drop the phone and lie back on the bed.
I lied to my children. My ghost story is only 99.9 percent true. I did see a ghost in the woods. I met Rita, Mitch, and George that night.
But I met Calvin Drake two weeks before.
Freshman year. Halloween. Celebrations had been allowed for the first time after a fifteen-year ban following a disastrous year where over fifty kids were arrested for underage drinking. The party in my dorm covered all floors and, it seemed, every single student was dressed in costume—except me.
Around midnight, I’d had enough. I pushed through the crowds of wizards, ghosts, and skeletons in the hallways. Day of the Dead was the trend that year, and every other person had a painted skull face with grotesquely huge teeth.
Outside, the crowds were even larger and rowdier, but at least there was space to move between them. I followed the campus lights down the wide walkway and across the street to Old Town Liquor. The whole street was barricaded from through traffic and f
illed with people wandering in and out of bars, yelling at each other, singing, crying.
The liquor store was crowded. I wandered through the snack aisles, not hungry but unable to think of anything else to do until morning. Lighted coolers lined the back wall, and I opened each door in turn, pretending to decide.
“Thank Christ!” came a shout from behind.
I spun around and found a tall, extremely handsome upperclassman looking right at me.
Unsure if he was talking to me, I froze. I noticed that he, too, was not in costume. He wore jeans, black boots, and a beat-up military-style jacket, faded grey. His mop of black wavy hair fell over his forehead. He brushed confetti from it as a terrifying clown ran by.
I was about to turn back to the coolers, convinced he was shouting at someone else, when he took my hand.
“I thought I was the only normal one.”
He opened the cooler next to me, lifted out a case of Keystone Light, and dragged me with him through the chaos to the cashier.
“We’ll take a pint of Old Crow, too.” He waved a vague arm at the rows of cheap liquor behind the counter.
“I.D.” The cashier eyed me as the boy dug his driver’s license out of his wallet and held it up. He turned to retrieve the bottle.
The boy leaned into me. He swayed a bit, bumping into me, throwing me off balance. “Hey, what’s your name?”
“Thea.”
He stepped back. A full step. He swayed again, and only then did I realize he was drunk. He stared at me while handing the cashier a twenty. “Really?”
“Why would I lie?”
He considered this, holding my gaze.
The cash register dinged. I blinked and looked away. Two zombies stumbled in front of us. One of them grabbed my arm.
“Hey, watch it!” My companion lifted his heavy boot and pushed the zombie away. The other zombie lunged, and he punched him full in the face.
A girl screamed. The crowd closed in. Behind the counter, the cashier picked up the phone, glaring at us.
The boy turned to me and held out his hand. “Come with me if you want to survive.”
He led me into an alley. I wouldn’t have followed a complete stranger into an alley if there hadn’t been hundreds of other people around us. We climbed the rickety fire-escape stairs to the roof of the building, where there were only a few costumed revelers. He sat down at the edge, groaning as if he were an eighty-year-old man, and dangling his legs over the edge. He patted the space next to him, and I sat.
The Witch's Throne (Thea Drake Mystery Book 1) (Thea Drake Mysteries) Page 13