by Jessica King
After being threatened by one of the detectives that I would be considered as an accessory to murder if Aline Rousseau should turn up dead in the near future, I was released. Simply because I am regularly reached out to by anonymous sources, I am considered a criminal. Are we in such dire times that those of us most trusted by a group attempting to eliminate the evil darkness we witness are taken to be of the worst sort? I can still feel the tightness of the handcuffs around my wrists.
My unnecessary arrest and excessive questioning do not discourage me or make me afraid of those who continue in the pursuit of destroying evil. History has shown us time and time again that those who press forward for the good of the world are regularly oppressed, persecuted, and killed. My experience has only strengthened my resolve that we are in the right, that the hard work of tracking these witches through the ages is not for naught.
Witches beware. For no matter how many of us who hope for the destruction of witches are oppressed, those who believe know that right will win out. So, I do not fear. The black magic will not win.
—E
+++
Thursday, February 16, 2017, 10:12 a.m.
He sat back onto the bathmat. He hadn’t liked killing the past two women. It’d left him sick to his stomach for days, and now the preparation of it was making him ill all over again. His stomach heaved against the rice he ate, the only thing he’d managed to keep down consistently for the past week. He’d done it perfectly, thrown any law enforcement off his scent by purposely making his shot of Amber look like an amateur’s shot despite his expert marksmanship. He didn’t want to have to figure out another way to shoot someone.
There had to be a different way to do this. He’d established his reputation—could that be enough?
He considered his options and breathed in the scent of his bath soap, trying to ease the twisting in his stomach.
Witches were masters of dark magic, life, and death, but they had to love, too, right? He rested his head against the old wallpaper of the bathroom, and Timothy, his cat and only companion sauntered into the room. Timothy tilted his head to the side and meowed at him.
“How would you kill a person you didn’t want to kill, Timothy?” he asked, scratching the creature between the ears. He’d traveled all the way to L.A. for his first two kills, but this one was only a few miles from his hometown. What if he was recognized by someone he knew? He couldn’t bear the thought of his mother finding out that he’d killed people. She would likely never talk to him again. He read the biography of his target again, though he was sure he knew it by heart.
Jennings Ford was born in Orlando, Florida, on March 27, 1978. She attended the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida, leaving her education halfway through her junior year. She married Kyle Heins in 2002, and the couple had two children, Wesley and Caroline (associations unknown), before divorcing in 2011. She has been working as a real estate agent in Fort Walton Beach for the past five years.
Jennings Ford, the fifth known reincarnation of Martha Eaton, was believed to be practicing witchcraft in secret since her visit to a shaman in Peru in 2012 shortly after her divorce. After visiting Atlanta for an assumed meeting with other witches of some kind, it is assumed that her power has grown much stronger, in correlation with the sudden spike in her sales record. Jennings Ford is currently considered to be a “work in progress.”
He wished it was as simple as writing a character’s death, a measly little sentence in this case, or as easy as pouring out the pain he felt in killing. Even if the women were witches, they still had blood that made him have to run away immediately. The world of writing was much simpler than reality. He looked at Timothy, who had reached out a paw to him when he’d stopped scratching his head. “I think we need to get writing, Timothy,” he said, standing.
Timothy followed him to the kitchen and stood beside his bowl, which was full but was entirely empty according to the demanding meow. He grabbed a pen and paper. “Nothing fancy for this,” he said to the cat. “Just a quick note. To be watching for me. Waiting.” Timothy had changed tactics, now weaving between his legs. “I have a plan,” he told the cat.
+++
Thursday, February 16, 2017, 11:35 a.m.
“This doesn’t look good,” Vince said, scrolling back through the article. He swiveled his chair to face her, disturbing a crowd of dust motes. “At least we never told him our names. I mean, can you imagine if he knew that your mom—” he stopped before flashing his partner a sheepish look.
“No, I know,” said Ivy, massaging her temples. “I mean, only fanatics are going to be reading this unless it somehow reaches social media.” If it reached social media… She sighed. It was great sometimes, even for the police. The plethora of pictures, evidence, timelines—it was a helpful source. But if something like this got out, it would be copied and altered a thousand times over until the story said they were beating the free speech out of him.
“Knock on wood, please,” Vince said, and they both did. The irony of their superstitions was not lost on Ivy. “I just can’t believe he considers what he does to be reporting. It makes us look like we’re acting against the First Amendment.”
“Everyone thinks they’re a reporter,” Ivy said. “I could post on Twitter that you got me the only bad sub that Papa Jakes serves, and that would be reporting. Free speech, man.” She waved a “hang loose” hand sign at him.
“Thought you were trying to go healthy,” Vince said around a mouthful of pepper steak.
“Eggplant is too far.” Ivy picked at her sub. “I thought we were friends.”
“Do you think we’re going to get cited for misconduct?” Vince asked, cutting his own sub in half and giving a piece to Ivy. “We had a reasonable suspicion about him, right? I’m not entirely certain he’s not the killer, are you?”
Ivy took a bite into the far superior sub. “Maybe, but he didn’t kill my mom. I looked at his military record after he said he was on tour in 2002—he wasn’t in the country. Checks out.”
The office bustled around them as usual, computers humming, printers squeaking, and murmurs all around. The delicious smell of pizza drifted to Ivy’s nose, and she suddenly wished she wasn’t attempting to be on a health kick. She pulled a Crunch bar out of her desk and unwrapped the blue packaging.
“Half,” Vince said, pointing the chocolate. Ivy dialed the phone.
“Hello?” the always out-of-breath Emily asked.
“Did you convince her not to go?” Ivy asked. Emily’s sigh was enough of a response. “Keep trying. But in the meantime, let’s plan how this is going to work.”
They had one week to plan how to save Aline’s life in a place where almost anyone could show up, including Jeremiah Ethan or his contact.
By the time the chief reached Ivy’s desk, Ivy had promised Emily that she and Vince would be attending the Academy Awards as part of Aline’s security team, and Vince had eaten his half of the Crunch bar. Ivy looked up to the receiver the chief held to his chest, and he gave her a meaningful look.
“Emily, I need to go, but I’ll call you back about this later,” Ivy said, bidding the nervous woman goodbye. Ivy looked at the receiver and not at the chief, racking her brain for the Florida woman’s name.
“Jennings Ford?” Ivy asked, her head dipping.
The chief nodded, and Ivy closed her eyes.
“No, not like that,” the chief said. “Jennings Ford is on the phone for you.”
Ivy sat upright in her chair, which squeaked in protest.
Ivy reached for the phone, feeling as though she were about to talk to a ghost. “Hello? Ms. Ford?” Ivy asked. She glanced at Vince, who looked just as confused as she felt.
“Hi, yes,” the voice on the other side said. “I’m at the Fort Walton Beach Police Department. I heard that you are familiar with cases like mine?”
Ivy shifted uncomfortably. How did she professionally ask someone if there was a chance a group of conspiracy theorists believed her to be a witc
h?
“I wanted to ask for your help,” Jennings said, ignoring Ivy’s silence. “I’m not a witch. I don’t practice witchcraft. I’m a real estate agent and a mother. So, you can imagine how detrimental it is to my image when clients search for me on the internet and find that I’m among a group of supposed witches. I’ve pressed charges for libel, and nothing came through. I’ve considered plastic surgery, but I can’t afford it without the help of insurance, who have decided my case is not severe enough to cover it. And now that I’m seeing some of these other women turn up dead …” she paused. “I have my concerns.”
There was mumbling in the background.
“I received a threatening letter addressed to several women—my reincarnations.”
Ivy could almost see the woman rolling her eyes.
“The letter was written as a farewell to the darkness I’ve forced on the world. It was signed, The Poet.” Her voice took on a new strain as she said, “The letter states that I will be killed tomorrow. And that I should be waiting and watching for his signal.”
Ivy looked up at Chief Marks, who had been standing close enough to hear the conversation. He nodded and pointed to her computer. Ivy quickly began pulling up plane tickets. “My partner and I will be flying down today.”
There was a breathless sound on the other side that Ivy took for thanks, and she returned the phone to the chief. “We need a tail on Jeremiah Ethan as soon as he lands in Mississippi,” Ivy said. “I think we have our killer.”
Chief Marks nodded. “I’ll give them a call and make sure you have the officer’s number.”
“Vince, we’re going to Florida,” Ivy said, clicking on the flight they would be taking. She looked over at Vince, who had put on his sunglasses, had donned the lei that usually hung over the corner of his computer, and was shimmying.
“Will we be close to Disney World?” he asked. When Ivy said that no, they’d be quite far from Disney, he took off the sunglasses.
The flight to Florida was delayed. Ten minutes delayed, but Ivy couldn’t help her bouncing leg.
“Would you quit?” Vince asked. “You’re making people nervous.”
Ivy looked to the young girl next to her, who was watching her with wide, careful eyes. Ivy tried out a smile on the girl, who then looked away.
“Joyce is keeping an eye on Aline,” Ivy said. “Marks let me have her and her partner for the investigation.”
Vince nodded, taking a bite out of a ridiculously large cinnamon roll he’d bought from a café in their terminal. “Umh phur ill be fin,” Vince said. He laughed around the dough before swallowing. “I’m sure it’ll be fine. Ethan’s in Mississippi right now.” He took another whopping bite, and Ivy pulled a bit off the end, despite the dirty look Vince flashed her. “Buy your own.”
“Part of me still believes him when he says that he’s just the guy who updates the site, so I wanted to be extra careful.” Ivy’s fingers fiddled with the pages of the book she’d brought to pass the time.
“How big of a part?”
“Not as big as the part of me that thinks he’s doing the killing,” Ivy said. “Something’s just off about him.”
“Mmm,” Vince said, though the sound was surely meant as a mark of approval toward the cinnamon roll and not a confirmation of her suspicions. When Ivy reached for it again, Vince turned a shoulder to block her.
“Big baby,” Ivy said, standing and reaching for her wallet. She walked over to the café and scanned the terminal. She hadn’t expected that part of police work—the part that never stopped, even when she was in plainclothes, even when she was off duty. She was always scanning, always careful. And she felt naked without her gun. She’d never been a gun nut, hadn’t grown up around them the way Vince had. Before she joined the force, she’d been through more pairs of ballet shoes in her life than bullets.
Her phone buzzed in her hand. A message from Joyce.
“Did she tell you she thinks she’s an actual witch?”
Ivy laughed.
+++
Thursday, February 16, 2017, 4:18 p.m.
Jennings Ford moved her eyes between the note and her children. Their father would be picking them up soon, taking them to his house. To safety. Though none of them knew that. Jennings claimed that work was too busy, she needed time to catch up. She knew that Kyle had found that strange, but he hadn’t said anything or pried, and Jennings was grateful he hadn’t.
When the kids left for the night, she held it together well. They’d endured her tight hugs, told her they loved her, and then squabbled on their way to their father’s car. Kyle had done one of those two finger wave-salutes, and she nodded in his direction. She then went into the kitchen and chugged two glasses of water in an attempt to open the tightness in her throat. She sat down on the floor, letting its coldness sink into her. As her breathing sped, she laid out on the floor, realizing how strange the angle of the room was from down there.
She took five steadying breaths, counting each one, trying to clear her mind. She stood and grabbed her keys, which were heavy from homemade keychains, and drove to Fort Walton Beach Medical Center.
“Hi Linda,” she said on her way in.
The hospital from the outside made from light, thick material and surrounded by palm trees, which made it look like a hotel instead of a hospital, but inside, it smelled sterile and the sounds of hushed conversations bounced around the lobby. At first, she’d hated it. She felt like she had to hold her breath and found the colorlessness of it all upsetting. But once she’d started showing up regularly, it had stopped scaring her so much. They knew her here, and Linda waved back to her.
“Here to see Miss Andrea?” she asked, and Jennings nodded, heading toward the elevators.
Her best friend was asleep, but after Jennings had admitted that she’d left several times because she didn’t want to wake her, Andrea had thrown a napkin at her and told her to just wake her up.
She walked over to the hospital bed, taking in the cannula feeding her air and the wig she liked to wear even when she slept. It was Jennings’s hair. She used to have waist-length hair that she kept back in a braid. But when her best friend said she’d wanted a brunette wig after living as a blonde her whole life, she’d told her barber to chop her long locks.
She touched Andrea’s wrist, and when the woman didn’t stir, she shook her arm. Waking someone who was sick was a strange experience that Jennings had to get used to. She could tell Jennings was awake before she could manage to open her eyes. But when she did, Andrea smiled.
“I hate waking you, you know,” Jennings said, pulling up the chair next to the hospital bed.
Andrea huffed out a labored breath, but Jennings could still sense the sass behind it. “I sleep all the time,” she said. “It’s so boring.”
The room smelled like the liquid nurses used to start an IV before giving Andrea what she called “the good stuff.” Jennings pointed to the IV cart. “What they got you on today?”
Andrea closed her eyes. Her skin wasn’t sallow the way Jennings thought it might become after so many months of this. And she was allowed to go home on the weekends when her husband could look after her at all times, which Andrea jokingly complained about. He won’t even let me pee by myself, that man. But Jennings thought she still looked like a prisoner connected to those IV bags, her skin a bit purplish and bruised around the many places she’d been connected to medicine.
“I don’t know,” Andrea said, “but it is quite the sleepy-time tea,” she said. “Made me nod off in the middle of the second Lord of the Rings, can you believe that?” she said. “It’s my favorite one!”
Jennings laughed. “I feel that the fact that the medicine made you that sleepy and the fact that you like the second one the most says something about both you and the medicine.”
Andrea rolled her eyes but smiled. “They’re keeping me comfortable on my way out,” she said.
It was then that Jennings allowed herself to cry. Andrea reached out a hand, and
Jennings took it, resting her forehead on top of their joined hands.
“I thought we talked about this,” Andrea said, stroking Jennings’s hair with her free hand. “The grave doesn’t scare me anymore.”
There’d been a time after the doctor had told Andrea that she was terminal that Andrea hadn’t known how to talk to people anymore. Her fear of death had taken over everything, and Jennings listened to her confused mutterings about life and death. Things had changed about a month later when Andrea had decided that the rest of her life would be enjoying people. But Jennings hadn’t had the time to have those conversations with herself. She hadn’t had the time to decide to enjoy the company of others as her final earthly act. She’d been working. Saving money to help put her kids through college one day. Because she thought there was a future still. When Jennings cried harder, Andrea squeezed her hand.
“What is this about?” she asked. “Something’s happened,” she said, “and I need you to tell me.”
Jennings breathed in, trying to get enough air in her lungs to speak the words. “I- I think,” she said, wiping her face. “That I might beat you to the grave, actually.”
CHAPTER TEN
Thursday, February 16, 2017, 3:45 p.m.
Joyce flashed her partner, Kenshin, a look that he returned. This was a weird assignment.
The little actress who whispered that she was a witch was floating around on set, getting her makeup and hair fixed and giggling with whoever came by to speak with her.
Joyce, despite living in L.A. her whole life, had never been on a real television set before, and the motion of it all was dizzying. It was a talk show, and Joyce’s brain seemed to have a hard time seeing the popular host in 3D after so many years of seeing him through screens. The whole thing looked so entirely fake, with the large open ceiling covered in black bars and lights. The set itself that looked so large was nearly a simple cardboard cutout of a Hollywood sunset behind an outdated—but recently polished—desk next to a plush red couch.