The Witch's Key

by Dana Donovan

  I had to wait for him to regain his composure, as the thought of that really set him back. I wanted to tell him it was all right and that I knew everything else that happened from there. I’m your son! I wanted to shout. Look, it’s me! I’m your long lost boy. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I wasn’t ready, and though I’m no psychologist, I thought neither was he.

  When Pops got his second wind he said, “After trying the bell, the young women must have realized it didn’t work. She took Anthony and little Skittle by the hand and escorted them to the back door where someone took them in.” Pops dropped his chin to his sunken chest and shook his head. “I never saw Anthony again. Next day I went back to my first love.”

  “You became a hobo again?”

  “Yup. I went back to riding the rails and sleeping under the stars. And I advertised, too. I did everything I could to get the word out there. I figured that if Gypsy was busy looking for me, then at least she wouldn’t stumble upon Anthony.” He reached down and began rubbing the top of his left knee. “Then one day I went and did something stupid. I tried hopping on a bumper while running a splash-n-dash. The train jerked on me, spilling me off the bumper and dropping me into Casey Jones’ trunk.”

  “You didn’t!”

  “I did. I got my damn leg under one of the wheels and lost it.” He knocked on his leg just below the kneecap. “Thought of changing my moniker to Woody, but we already had a Woody bumming out of Buffalo at that time. So I kept with Jersey Jake.”

  “That’s wild,” I said. “I bet it put the crimps on your freight hopping days for awhile, huh?”

  “Oh yeah, that it did. But it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to me.”

  I shot him a look like he might be kidding. “Oh?”

  “Yes, I’m tellin` ya. I was still in the hospital when this hotshot lawyer from Boston came to see me. With his fast-talkin` ways he soon convinced me to sue the railroad company. I really didn’t want to, but he made a good argument as to why I should, and an even better argument convincing a jury why they ought to reward me. Long story short, I ended up owning the railroad and changing the name to Gitana.”

  I leaned back and smiled at the irony. “I know that Gitana means Gypsy,” I said. “It’s kind of strange that you should honor her by naming your railroad after her.”

  He laughed lightly. “Honor her?” The look on his face made me think he might take his leg off and hit me with it. “Son, I named it Gitana because that company was like an albatross around my neck. Things were bad enough when I had Gypsy to worry about, but with Gitana I now had a money-losing train wreck of a freight company and I didn’t even own a train. It was just a business on paper. I leased everything: the office, the trains, the tracks. All of it. Probably did the old owners a favor. My attorney’s fee ate up what cash money there was. Looked like he was the only winner in the case. He got the cash. I got an albatross. Go figure.”

  “But you stuck with it?”

  “Had to, my freight-hopping days were over. But as luck had it, the 50s were a time of boom and prosperity. After the third year, I actually turned a profit. The funny thing about it, before Gitana, few railroad companies leased their equipment. Now, it’s the only way a small company like mine can exist.”

  “So, why the charade?” I asked. “Why are you using the name Anthony Marcella? Are you still worried about Gypsy?”

  “No,” he scoffed, and he almost looked disappointed. “What’s to worry about? Gypsy’s an old hag now, assuming she’s still alive.”

  “You seemed pretty worried yesterday when I brought my friend, Lilith, by here.”

  His face grew suddenly serious. “She scared me,” he said. “That girl looked just like Gypsy. But that was Gypsy sixty years ago. Even a witch can’t stop from aging, right?”

  He laughed, and I laughed, and a sudden twirl in the pit of my stomach told me to enjoy it while I could, because I knew better. And if Pops only knew about the rite of passage ceremony and how it restored a witch’s youth, he’d probably ask for a Kevorkian cocktail on ice.

  “So,” I said, “you don’t think she could cast some crazy spell to make herself young again?”

  He shook his head. “I suppose anything is possible.” Then he turned to me with a suspect look in his eye that worried me more than I can say. “Let me ask you. How well did you say you know her?”

  “Lilith?”

  “Yes.”

  I shrugged a little. “Fairly well, I guess.”

  “Does she have any tattoos?”

  The question struck me as unusually odd. “I’m not sure I follow.”

  He cupped his hand to the side of his mouth and whispered, “Gypsy has one on her left cheek.”

  “Her cheek?” I said, reaching for my face.

  “No!” he grumbled, swatting at the air as if erasing the image I had formed in my mind. “Not there.”

  A new one came to me. “Her butt?”

  “Yes.”

  The thought of that made me laugh. “Really? What is it?”

  “A scorpion,” he said, “about this big.” He formed a quarter-sized circle with his index finger and thumb. “Maybe a smidge smaller. It’s been a long time.”

  The image in my mind grew ever more vivid. I had pictured Lilith’s naked butt many times, but never with a tattoo on her cheek. Under any other circumstance, such an image would likely have made me smile. Now, however, the thought of seeing Lilith’s butt and that tattoo made me shudder. As much as I wanted to tell Pops the truth, that I had never seen Lilith’s ass, I didn’t want him to worry about it either. So, I looked him straight in the eye and I lied to his face like any good son would do.

  “No. Lilith has nothing like that. Not a tattoo on her.”

  He eased back onto his pillow. “Yeah, I didn’t think so.”

  “Then you’re all right with her?”

  “Of course,” he said, though he still did not seem sure about it. “Bring her back if you like. We’ll talk.”

  I reached over and patted him on his good leg. “No, that’s all right. I don’t need to bring her back. She probably doesn’t want to hear about trains anyway. You know how girls are.”

  He smiled, but more out of relief, I suspected. I waited until the lull in conversation gave us both some time to collect our thoughts before coming back to something that still bothered me.

  “You know, Pops, you still haven’t told me why you were going around calling yourself Marcella.”

  “Didn’t I?”

  “No.”

  He gave me a shrug like it did not matter, and I do not suppose it would have if my name were really Spitelli, or Spinelli or any other name I could have given him. But seeing it is the name he gave me all those years ago, I felt it more than just a curiosity that I know. He might have sensed it, too, because he seemed to change his mind about simply leaving it at that, and instead, offered up something I could swallow.

  “It’s just the name I picked,” he started. “Call it a tribute to my boy. I don’t know. I had to travel incognito if I wanted to experience the old days like they were when no one knew me. I don’t know why, but I just had to do it one more time before I die. You can understand that, can’t you?”

  “Not really,” I said. “I’m sorry, Jake, but I don’t see you hopping trains at your age, especially with a dummy leg.”

  “Hey, I may be old,” he shook a stern finger at me. “But six months ago when I set out, I could get around better than most angellinas. Oh, sure the shacks and the snakes were in on the gig. They had to for me to pull it off. But I only needed their help getting on and off the trains when other hobos weren’t around. They were the only ones that knew me. The rest of `em didn’t. The yeggs, the wolfs and lambs, the rat cats and the angellinas, none of them knew me at all. Hell, back in Ipswich they even made me the captain of the jungle. You should have seen me.” Pops laid his head back on his pillow and stared up at the ceiling. I doubt if he was ever as happy as when living the
days he spoke of then. “Yes, sir. I was on top of the world.”

  “But then you got sick, huh?”

  He rolled his head to the side and looked at me through hollow eyes. “Yeah, then I got sick. But you know I have no regrets.”

  “None?”

  “Nope.”

  “What about Anthony?”

  “What about him?”

  “In all these years, you never knew what became of him? You never tried to look him up? He could still be here in New Castle.”

  “No, he’s gone away.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because some rich couple from Vancouver adopted him in 48 and moved away. Their name was Klopper or Flopper or something like that.”

  “Klopfer,” I said under my breath. And I wanted to tell him that no they didn’t adopt me. They wanted to, but the orphanage wouldn’t let them because they lied about possessing dual U.S. and Canadian citizenship.

  “Eh?”

  “Nothing. Listen, Jake, what if I told you that, as a cop, I can find your son for you. Would you like that?”

  He answered quickly and to the point. “No. Don’t you do it.”

  “But why?”

  “Spitelli, I’m a dying old man. What good would it do anyone now to dredge up the muck and mire after all these years?”

  “Maybe he’d like to know you.”

  “Yes, and maybe he’d like to see me rot in hell for what I did to him.”

  “But, Jake—”

  “No, Spitelli. Let it be.”

  I opened my mouth to say more, but Pops shut it with just a glare. I resolved not to let it rest, though. Now that I had planted the seed I was sure he would come around to the idea soon enough. But exactly how I would explain the extraordinary youthful appearance of his nearly sixty-five year old son, well, that was another story.

  Our longer than usual conversation had Pops looking pretty tired and worn, so with no more argument about it, I stood up and slid my chair back against the wall. I patted him on his foot and said goodbye on my way to the door. Before leaving, though, I turned back and asked him if I could come back tomorrow and chat some more.

  “You better,” he said. You know my number.”

  “Yes, I got your number.” I tapped on the number 9 on his door and then gave him a wink. “Goodbye, Pops.”

  He winked back. “Goodbye, son.”

  As I neared the elevator, I could hear his block whistle blowing the catch out call again. It sounded soothing and mellow like wind chimes on a summer’s day. At once, my mind flashed back to a time long ago. I saw a man and his son atop a grassy hill, watching trains roll along on rusty tracks. “Where are they going, Dad?” The boy asks, his natural wonder never quenched. But Dad’s answer falls silent. Something in his eyes makes them water. The train rounds the bend and blows its whistle. Startled at first, the child snaps to attention and turns abruptly. “It’s catch out time,” he says, pointing at the train’s caboose. “Did you hear that, Daddy? It’s catch out time.”

  Dad smiles thinly and swallows back the lump in his throat. “Yeah, son” he says, and he rubs the boy’s back briskly. “I hear it. It’s catch out time.”

  Sixteen

  I grabbed the picture of Gypsy and Pops and met Spinelli at the front entrance of the justice center. He escorted me through the security layers and led me upstairs where he and Carlos had laid out photos from a recent surveillance for me to see.

  “What’s all this?” I asked.

  “They’re from last night,” said Carlos.

  “They look like surveillance photos.”

  “They are.”

  “Who were you surveilling?”

  He nodded at them. “Look.”

  I stepped closer to the table and noticed that the photos were of a woman, dressed in black with a dark hood pulled up over her head. I could not see her face, but I knew instinctively who to suspect. “Did you take these?”

  Carlos answered, “No. Wilson from homicide took `em.”

  “Are they in on this now?”

  “Homicide? No. They are starting to look into it, though. Seems that ten suicides in three weeks is even too coincidental for them. Dominic and I told Wilson about the eyewitness who identified Lilith from the photo. We asked him to tail her last night and this is what he came up with.”

  “You asked him to tail her?”

  “It wasn’t Carlos,” said Spinelli. “Don’t blame him. It was my idea. If you’re going to get angry, take it out on me.”

  Carlos chirped in, “The idea was both of ours, and you would have agreed, too, if you weren’t so close to this case.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry, but I know so. It’s a legitimate lead.”

  I turned to Spinelli. “You agree?”

  He nodded. “I do,” then added almost as a postscript, “Sir.”

  I took a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. Finally, I thought, the investigation could continue on a track guided by levelheaded thinkers. I was afraid that my bias had already compromised the case and that both Carlos and Spinelli respected me too much to say so. Now, at least, though I might not like the outcome, I could let it go where it needed without beating myself up over it. I turned back to the photos and began thumbing through them. “All right, so tell me what you found.”

  The two exchanged glances as if having just dodged the same bullet. Carlos came to the table first and pointed to the picture of Lilith leaving the apartment. “You can just make out her face in this one,” he said. “The rest are difficult, but you can tell from the clothes that it’s her.”

  “Yeah, and this one….” said Spinelli, singling out a photo of Lilith squeezing behind a locked gate at Minor’s Point. “Here you see where she’s holding something in her hand. If you look closely, it looks like a witch’s key.”

  “Is this about where you found the latest victim?” I asked.

  “Not but a hundred yards from there. Problem is, this is where she gave Wilson the slip.” He pointed to the lock and chain on the gate. “You know Wilson, don’t you?”

  I smiled at his inference. “Yeah, big guy, `bout two fifty?”

  He smiled back. “Try two eighty.”

  “Guess you should have gone, Dominic.”

  We all laughed at that, but inside we were thinking the same thing. Maybe he should have.

  Dominic looked down at my hand and pointed. “What do you have there?”

  “Oh, this?” I handed him the picture that Gwendolyn had given me. “I got this at Gitana Freight. Recognize anyone?”

  He studied the photo for barely a second. “That’s Lilith!”

  Carlos came around and peered at the photo over his shoulder. “Who’s that with her?”

  “That’s Pops,” I said. “And the woman is Gypsy.”

  They both stared at the picture again, their heads shaking in disbelief. Dominic said, “Man, if that’s not Lilith then it’s an uncanny resemblance, right down to the locket.”

  “What?”

  He turned the photo around and pointed to Gypsy’s necklace. “Sure, look there, on the chain around her neck. That looks like our locket.”

  Though it was difficult to tell in black and white, and the focus was not great, a closer look convinced me that the oval-shaped object around her neck did appear similar to the locket he and Carlos found at Dell’s crime scene.

  “That’s amazing!” I said. “I can’t believe I didn’t notice that before. Nice work.”

  He took the compliment graciously enough, telling me, “Thanks, but I’m sure you’d have noticed it soon enough.” I had not the heart to tell him I doubted it. In Gwendolyn’s office, I had studied the photo so long that my eyes nearly dropped out of my head. If I had not noticed Gypsy’s locket then, I likely never would have. As Carlos took the photo in hand for another look, I turned to Dominic and challenged him on the DNA results from the hair.

  “What can I say? It’s true,” he said. “Like I told y
ou over the phone.” He handed me the locket and the lab report. “They found enough DNA markers in sequence with yours to conclude that scarcely one in ten million people could possibly have donated that hair sample.”

  “One in ten million?”

  “Yes.”

  “Interesting. So, with nearly six billion people on the planet, that narrows the list of potentials down to about 600.”

  “I suppose, that is unless you have an identical twin. Then the odds are more realistic in your favor.”

  “How about a cousin?”

  “How about just admitting that it’s your hair?” said Carlos. “Considering your proximity to this case, you can’t reasonably expect that it’s someone else’s.”

  I opened the locket and examined the hair inside more closely. “This is kind of strange.”

  “You’re telling me?”

  “No, Carlos. I don’t mean that. I mean, look at this hair. Doesn’t it look a bit fine to you.”

  He leaned in closer. “Yes, it’s a fine specimen. Wouldn’t you agree, Dom?”

  Spinelli joined the huddle. “I see what you mean.”

  “There you have it.”

  “No, I mean, I see what Tony’s talking about. It is very fine hair—like girl’s hair.”

  “Or a baby’s,” I said.

  “A baby girl?” asked Carlos.

  “No!”

  “Then where do you suppose Lilith got it?”

  “We don’t know for sure that this was Lilith’s locket.”

  “Oh, boy, there he goes again.”

  “What? I’m just saying, we don’t know.”

  “Let’s say for now that it is,” said Spinelli. “Maybe it’s possible that right after your return to prime your hair was really baby-fine.”

  “I don’t remember,” I said, subconsciously reaching behind my head and stroking my hair. “I suppose it’s possible.”

  “You think she clipped a sample back then?”