by Roger Hayden
She spoke passionately and intelligently, laying out the advantages of being a medium, almost as if she were a professor giving a lecture on human decency and the supernatural. The more I listened, the more I lamented her death. The world needed more women like Leigh, compassionate, open-minded, and inquisitive as she was.
When we reached the yew tree, I glanced around to make sure no one was watching then took hold of the tree’s lowest branch and hoisted myself up. I climbed higher and higher, my arm muscles burning, until I found a forked branch to straddle. The thick foliage concealed me from prying eyes, though I could peer through the yellowing leaves and still see the town hall from here. With my back against the yew’s trunk, I could feel its liveliness pulsing through me. I closed my eyes and tipped my head back, savoring the smell of sap.
Leigh appeared on my branch, swinging her feet out into the open air.
“I used to climb this tree all the time,” I said, inhaling deeply. “It was one of my favorite places to go think. This tree, and an abandoned stable in the forest behind our house.”
For a few minutes, we sat in silence. From this height, ensconced in the yew’s protective embrace, I could almost forget that Leigh was dead and a murderer was at large. I imagined what it would’ve been like to grow up with Leigh as a friend, someone whose aura must have been too pure to exist in a world like this. I shook my head from side to side, as if the action would clear out the illusion of a wholly different Yew Hollow.
“Tell me about the preservation society,” I said to Leigh. “You had to interact with a lot of other townspeople as the head of the board, right? Did anyone ever have a problem with you being close to the coven?”
“If they did, they never mentioned it,” Leigh said. She leaned over to another branch, examining an abandoned bird’s nest. “I mostly worked with people who appreciated the town’s history, or at least knew that the coven was the main reason we could afford to keep the town running. We worked with your family in person to arrange the reenactment. No one on the board ever voiced any concerns over the witches’ involvement. Not everyone is so small minded.”
“What about that Parris jackass?” I asked, remembering how belligerent Parris had been at the crime scene the day before. “What does he do?”
“He’s a member of the town council,” Leigh said. “He teaches communications at the college in the next town over. As far as I know, everyone really respects him, despite the fact that he’s pretty high strung.”
“Well, he obviously doesn’t think very highly of the coven.”
“He had a run-in with one of your aunts a few years ago,” Leigh explained. “Ever since then, he’s been pretty adamant about keeping the coven under control.”
“What kind of run-in?”
“It was during the reenactment that year,” she said. “He was ruining the fun, saying how the reenactment shouldn’t be celebrated, that the coven shouldn’t subject the town to its oddities, so your aunt made him strip to his underwear and tap dance in front of everyone.”
I sniggered, imagining the scenario in my mind.
“Anyway,” Leigh continued, “he redoubled his efforts to squash the coven’s impact on the town. It’s a touchy subject for him.”
“Did he ever give you any trouble about being the head of the preservation society?” I asked, reaching out to pluck a leaf from the tree and relieving it of its needles.
“Just a few snide comments here and there. Nothing to indicate that he was plotting to murder me.”
“You never heard him talk about dark magic or anything like that?”
She shook her head.
Stretching my legs out along my branch, I sighed in resignation. Nothing seemed to add up. No one had a strong enough motive for killing Leigh. No one knew of anyone who dallied in human sacrifice. No one seemed to have any useful information at all.
“I wonder if the police have any leads,” I mused. I peered down to the base of the yew tree, where Leigh’s prone body had so recently lain. There were no signs of violence. The police had collected the evidence, and someone had scuffed out the pentagram. If Leigh’s spirit wasn’t sitting across from me, the whole incident would have seemed like a long-gone nightmare.
“I tried to go in the station last night,” Leigh said. “You know, while I was wandering around. But I couldn’t get in for some reason.”
“Had you ever been inside before?” I asked. “While you were alive?”
“No.”
“Not even for a traffic ticket?”
“Morgan, Yew Hollow only has one stoplight.”
I dipped my head in acknowledgement. “Touché. That’s probably why, though. Spirits usually can’t visit places they’ve never been to before. It’s unfortunate. A little eavesdropping could’ve gone a long way for us.”
“Next time,” Leigh joked. I actually chuckled. At least Leigh’s sense of humor hadn’t died with the rest of her.
“They’re bound to update the town at the next meeting,” I said. “I guess we’ll just have to wait.”
Leigh nodded in agreement. We lapsed back into silence. The air felt thick, heavy with uncertainty and anticipation, but I ignored it. I let my eyes close and my shoulders relax against the rough bark of the tree, listening to the light autumn wind peal through its leaves.
Chapter Five
In Which Parris Is an Asshole
In the week following Leigh’s preternatural appearance in my bedroom, we made little headway on the mystery surrounding her death. The challenging part about playing detective was the fact that I couldn’t very well stroll around town asking random people if they had a perverse interest in human sacrifice and dark magic, especially since most of the townspeople still suspected me as the killer. People crossed the street when they saw me walking toward them, or clasped their children close as if I’d kidnap one and run. My head ached from the amount of eye rolling I’d done that week.
It didn’t help that the coven was growing more active. Halloween loomed, the coven’s favorite time of year despite its stereotypical implications. Tourists began to arrive in droves, and the witches were busying themselves with magical preparations for the reenactment. One afternoon, a thick menacing fog settled over the town square, only to be washed away by a sudden rainstorm. Not a day later, fireworks exploded above the yew tree in broad daylight. Once, when I was walking to the library with Leigh, the town’s signature piece of classical music, The March of Yew Hollow, began to blare from behind a rosebush, effectively scaring the shit out of me with its iconic, brass-heavy fanfare.
In the Summers household, things were even more chaotic. Members of the coven flitted in and out on a daily basis, often in need of an ingredient for a spell or to consult my mother on a reenactment matter. I’d spent the week running into witches that I hadn’t seen in years, feeling like a five-year-old getting her cheeks pinched every time one of them mentioned how much I’d grown. At least three different aunts made comments about my absence from Yew Hollow, often expressing how much my mother had missed me. Numerous cousins wanted to know how I’d fared in New York, questions that I dodged successfully if not tactfully. And every once in a while, a stray child—of which there were only four or five in our coven—shot amateur defense spells at my ankles. I had the welts to prove it, something that Leigh had laughed uproariously at for a solid ten minutes.
The only upside to the week was the amount of hours Leigh and I had logged at the local library. While she was alive, Leigh had spent the majority of her time as a librarian digging up as much information as she could about Yew Hollow’s unearthly history. We pored through stacks of old newspapers, reading about reenactments from years past. We hadn’t turned up anything particularly helpful, but I began to look forward to the hours we burned in between the shelves of the library. Leigh was not only hilarious company, but she also had a knack for listening without interrupting. Soon, it seemed as if she knew about every facet of my life, including the time I’d spent away from ho
me. It was refreshing to talk to Leigh. She didn’t judge. She simply offered gentle opinions on my lifestyle choices. After a few library sessions, I informed her that she should’ve been a psychologist instead of a librarian.
On Sunday morning, the day of the next town meeting, we had a breakthrough. I’d been sitting cross-legged in a dark corner of the library, paging through a stack of old photocopies, when I came across something unusual.
“Leigh, look at this,” I said, waving her over.
“What?”
I brandished the pages at her. “They’re photocopies of instructions for a ritual. It’s handwritten.”
She sat down next to me, leaning over my shoulder to squint at the pages. “‘A righteous woman born on an autumn equinox. A boy of unfortunate birth.’ Blah, blah, blah. What is this?”
“It’s a power-snatching ritual,” I said. I thumbed through the rest of the papers on my lap, hoping to find more information. “But not one that I’m familiar with. It’s not from a spell book. It looks like someone created it specifically for their own use.”
“You can do that?”
“Not usually,” I said. “Or at least, you’re not supposed to. All sorts of things can go wrong if you perform a ritual incorrectly. When was your birthday?”
“September 25.”
“Shit.”
“What?”
“Well, I’d say you were a pretty good fit for ‘a righteous woman born on an autumn equinox,’” I said. I took the pages back from her and flipped through them again, hoping to find additional information on the ritual. When I looked up at Leigh again, her face had paled, an impressive feat for someone who was already dead.
“Is it dark magic?” she asked. “Who are they trying to steal power from? Does this mean that there will be two more deaths?”
“Leigh, relax,” I said, noticing the frantic tone of her voice. “It’s good that we’ve found this. It means we can guess what the murderer is planning next. And to answer your first question—” I flipped over one of the pages and held it up for Leigh to see. Someone had drawn an upside-down pentagram on it, with notated directions on where the sacrifice should be placed for the user’s benefit. “It’s definitely dark. This is exactly how I found you.”
We spent the rest of the day searching for other information on the power-snatching ritual. Unfortunately, nothing came up. Finding the photocopied pages almost seemed like a fluke. After hours of fruitlessly ransacking the library, we gave up and headed back to the house to get ready for the town meeting. It was the first meeting that I’d decided to attend with the rest of the coven. I needed to know what was going on with Leigh’s murder investigation, and it seemed the only way to do that was to subject myself to the one town activity that I despised the most.
After showering and getting dressed on the third floor of the house, I stopped by Wren’s room on the way down. Over the course of the week, I’d only gotten the chance to speak with him two or three times. He spent most of his time in school, plodding through his senior year. In the afternoons, he would hole up in his room with his noise-canceling headphones. Every time I looked in on him, he was hunched over AP Calculus homework or college applications. Were it not for the fact that he lived in a house full of witches, Wren could’ve passed for an ordinary human being any day of the week. Today, however, instead of his usual homework, I found him pulling a jacket on over a collared shirt.
“Where are you off to?” I asked in surprise.
“I thought I’d tag along with you to the town meeting,” he said. He leaned over his desk and shut down his laptop.
“You hate town meetings,” I said.
“Yeah, but they might talk about Leigh.”
Leigh, who had been waiting in the hallway, poked her head into Wren’s room at the mention of her name.
I punched Wren’s arm playfully. “I’m starting to think you had a little crush on her.”
“Shut up,” he said as his face flushed a bright red.
I let it go. I’d once again forgotten that the rest of Yew Hollow had been mourning Leigh’s death, while I shared laughs with her ghost in the depths of the library. Wren was clearly hurting. It seemed he had been more attached to Leigh than the rest of my family, even though that attachment stemmed from an unrequited crush.
“Ready?” I asked him. He nodded. “Off we go, then.”
Downstairs, the rest of the coven dallied, waiting for everyone to arrive. Wren tensed at my side, so I slipped my hand into the crook of his elbow as a show of solidarity. As we joined the others, I noticed a few disapproving glances directed at Wren’s presence. For the most part, though, the coven ignored him, as if he were nothing more than a piece of abstract art hanging on the wall. It was no wonder the men of the Summers family had never stuck around. The witches, content in their subtle misandry, had driven them all away.
Leigh disappeared momentarily, though I soon spotted her in the yard through a window. It was hard for her to be around a lot of people, as they tended to walk through her. I assumed she would meet me at the town meeting.
Once the entire coven had gathered, we began to make our way to the town hall. Wren and I lingered near the back of the procession. It must’ve been an unusual scene, all twenty or so members of the Summers coven marching into the center of town. As we filed into the town hall, taking up nearly two rows of seats near the front of the room, several townspeople watched uneasily. Fortunately, some of the townspeople were familiar and friendly with my mother, members of the same Historical Preservation Society as Leigh. Those few people waved cheerily at the coven, exchanged pleasantries, and sat among us.
I took a seat next to Wren near the outer aisle and located Leigh, who was leaning casually in one corner near the front of the hall. When we caught each other’s eye, I resisted the urge to wave and nodded instead. She smiled back. When everyone was seated, the mayor took the podium and asked everyone to settle down.
“First on our agenda,” he said, his bushy moustache bristling, “is an unsavory subject. At the town’s request, we have Chief Torres and Detective Johnson here to update you all on the matter of Leigh Lockwood’s untimely death.”
He turned the podium and the microphone over to Chief Torres and Detective Johnson. They were a strangely mismatched pair—the tall, lanky detective and the short, rotund officer—and their presence did nothing to ease the feeling of anxiety that seemed to be brewing in the pit of my stomach. Chief Torres spoke first.
“Ahem! As you all know, it’s been quite busy at the station since the tragedy last Sunday,” he began, lowering the microphone to account for his lack of height. “We’ve been working day and night to identify the culprit. There were several pieces of evidence left at the scene, but unfortunately we haven’t been able to lift any fingerprints from them.”
As Chief Torres continued his monologue, Leigh appeared beside me.
“Is it wise of the police to share this information with the town?” she asked me. “I mean, what if the person who did it is in this room?”
She knew I couldn’t answer out loud, so I left her to her speculation. In truth, with Torres’s every word, it became more and more evident that the police hadn’t uncovered any more information on Leigh’s death. Torres talked around the subject, emphasizing the effort of the police force rather than focusing on the case itself. Detective Johnson stood stoically by. Although more than once, I caught him glaring in my direction. When Torres finished up, Detective Johnson stepped up to the microphone.
“I want everyone to know,” he began, “that we’re working on this case as quickly as possible. It won’t be long before we’ll have a suspect in custody.”
He stared right at me as he said it. In my periphery, I saw Wren turn his head toward me, his lips parted as if he was about to say something. I put a hand on his knee to stop him. Detective Johnson didn’t have anything on me, despite how desperately he wanted to. To be honest, I didn’t understand why he was so dead set on apprehending me.
Then I spotted Roger Parris. He was seated to the mayor’s left-hand side, one leg crossed neatly over the other. As Detective Johnson spoke, Parris kept his beady eyes on me as if gauging my reaction to Johnson’s words. I’d managed to avoid Parris since he’d confronted me at the crime scene, but he clearly hadn’t changed his opinion of me.
Detective Johnson wrapped up his diatribe. As he and Chief Torres took their seats again, the hall filled with murmurs of speculation. I took a deep breath, trying to appear at ease, but half of the town now stared at me and the rest of the coven with no small amount of apprehension. Karma had been right. Yew Hollow really didn’t belong to the Summerses anymore.
The mayor ascended the podium again. I wondered if his only job was to mediate the town meetings. It certainly seemed that way.
“And now,” he said, “the Yew Hollow Historical Preservation Society has been hard at work preparing this year’s reenactment. The Summers family is here to inform us of its details. Cassandra?”
But before my mother even had the chance to stand, Roger Parris spoke.
“Tell me, why,” he drawled, “do we bother to entertain a group of people who engage in barbaric activity and only cause Yew Hollow trouble?”
For a moment, the entire hall sat in stunned silence. Though the inhabitants of Yew Hollow had always been wary of the coven, no one had ever had the audacity to question our presence in town.
Parris stood, usurping my mother’s place at the podium. I had to admit, he was an impressive sight, with his broad shoulders and square jaw. He drew himself up to his full height and planted his hands on either side of the microphone.
“Yew Hollow,” he said, gazing out at the townspeople as if he were running for some sort of political campaign. “Have you not had enough? We have put up with these oddities for years. We have allowed these people to diminish our quality of life. We have remained silent when we should have raised our voices. And now look! We’ve come full circle. One of them has murdered one of us.”