Magic for Liars

by Sarah Gailey

  “Of course not,” I answered. “After all, you haven’t been doing this part of the job all along. Only since Sylvia died, right?”

  “Five months,” she said with a dark twinkle in her eye, “is certainly not long enough for anyone to get pregnant.”

  “Certainly not,” I said. I didn’t wink at her, even though I wanted to. She didn’t feel like a woman one should wink at. “Now, let’s say—hypothetically—that a student approached you who was not in the earliest stages of pregnancy?”

  At this, she shook her head, the dark twinkle gone. “I have the expertise for it, but I wouldn’t take that risk on school grounds. That’s a surgical procedure.”

  “Really?” I was taken aback. “There’s no potion for it? No magic?”

  She rapped the table with her knuckles. “That’s not what I said, girl. Listen better next time.” Her voice was sharp. “I said that’s surgical.” She reached out a finger and jabbed it into my left shoulder; I felt a twinge of terror at the sudden memory that arced through me. My shoulder, dismantled and floating in front of my face. Her wand, zapping away the infection.

  I swallowed hard as I understood. “So that’s, uh, that’s how it’s done?”

  Mrs. Webb nodded. “It’s perfectly safe if it’s done by a medical professional in a sterile environment. The girl gets a sedative so it’s not too traumatic. She walks out when the sedative has worn off. Much less invasive than the nonmagical version of the procedure.”

  “Is it?” I asked before I could stop myself.

  “Of course it is,” she said. “No stirrups. No pain. Twenty minutes at the most.” She sipped more tea, then tapped the side of the mug twice with her ring finger. Fresh steam swirled from inside the mug. “I performed hundreds of them, back when I was practicing. But never here.”

  We sat in silence for a minute or so as I digested this. Finally, she made a harrumphing sound. I looked up at her and saw that she was watching me, impatient.

  “Can I ask one more thing?” I said, and was frustrated at the quaver in my voice.

  “What is it?” she asked. Her face was still impatient, but her tone had gone gentle.

  “What you did to my shoulder—what you used to do for the women in your clinic. Can you do that for other things?” She didn’t answer, waiting for me to stop dancing around the real question. “I mean, if someone had cancer. Could you take it out?”

  Her face went still and cold. “You’ve been talking to Tabitha, have you?”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “I’ll tell you what I told her: not cancer at that stage.” Her voice was level, but the table trembled with the force of what I realized must have been a lifetime of frustration at the limitations of healing. “Theoretically? A healer can do anything,” she said, “but realistically, it’s just not possible to do that to someone. To take them apart for hours, and hold everything alive, and find everything in the bones that’s wrong. And then to put them back together again.” Her mouth twisted as though she were going to spit. “It can’t be done. It’s never been done. There’s nothing we could have done.”

  She stood up and waved a hand over her mug of tea; when I looked down, it was empty and clean, although a faint smell of cardamom lingered in the air. She turned on her heel and made for the door. She let it swing shut behind her. I sat in the chair and stared at the place where she’d been sitting. I thought back to the night before—to Tabitha crying on my couch, telling me that she couldn’t have helped Mom. That even if she’d wanted to, even if she’d known how to, she couldn’t have saved our mother from the painful death that I had to watch her endure. I let out a shaky breath.

  After a few minutes I walked out after her, taking deep breaths. A few students were milling in the hall, doing some class activity that involved sticking pieces of paper to each other and then turning them pink or blue with a snap of their fingers. I recognized Courtney—she was working with another girl, directing her partner to stick papers to the back of her baggy, paint-stained gym-class sweatshirt. She kept vacillating between turning them pink or blue, pink or blue, pink or blue.

  Courtney caught me watching and lifted her hand in a wave, knocking one of the papers from her shirt. As it fell, it folded in the air, falling to the linoleum and bouncing high before falling a few feet away—an elaborate star. She laughed as she and her partner stooped to pick it up at the same time. Her partner tossed the folded paper back to her, and she caught the star easily.

  She turned it over in her hands, and then looked back up at me. She tried to smile again, but she wasn’t fast enough to keep me from seeing the way that star broke her. She turned away before the tears could fall, but I saw them there, brimming already. And then she was gone, back into the classroom, her project partner abandoned.

  Courtney dropped the star behind her as she walked away. It unfolded as it fell, but the light caught the contours of the folds in the paper, and I knew: in the shadows of those creases, there were answers.

  CHAPTER

  EIGHTEEN

  HERE’S THE TRUTH ABOUT MOST detective work: it’s boring, grueling, and monotonous. It involves a lot of being in the right place at the wrong time. But if you spend enough hours being in the right place, eventually, it’ll be the right time. You have to be able to recognize it.

  I recognized it when I saw Courtney crying in that hallway.

  I waited until she went into her classroom, then poked my head in. There were only fifteen or so kids in the class. All of them sat at desks that were littered with scraps of multicolored paper—white, blue, pink. Rahul stood at the front of the room, not noticing me. I took the liberty of watching him, feeling only a little creepy. He moved his hands a lot while he talked. I’d noticed it during our dinner, but it was more pronounced here, in front of the students. His fingers were blunt and callused, but incredibly agile. Rahul demonstrated a set of complicated gestures, explaining the principles that would allow his class of seniors to change the way light was absorbed by paper. I didn’t understand a word of it, but I could have watched him all day.

  It didn’t take long for the students to start whispering and nudging each other and pointing at me. Rahul finally looked over. The look on his face was complicated—a combination of what-are-you-doing-here and excited-to-see-you and dear-god-not-in-front-of-the-students. I gave him a cool, professional nod-and-smile, and said, “Sorry to interrupt your class. I just needed to borrow one of your students for a minute, if that’s alright?” I pointed to Courtney.

  Relief and worry crowded his expression. He nodded, gesturing to Courtney without looking away from me. As I waited for her at the front of the room, I felt my right hand growing hot. I held the door open for her, taking the opportunity to discreetly peek at my palm: the place between my love line and my life line had reddened. It faded as I watched. I looked over my shoulder just before I closed the door, and Rahul was watching me with a small, tentative smile.

  In the hall, Courtney crossed her arms and stared up at me from between hunched shoulders. Her cheeks were dry—freshly scrubbed with the sleeve of her sweatshirt, no doubt—but her eyes were still rimmed with pink. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, at least none that I could see, and her hair was still in that twist, held up with a paintbrush and a pencil. She was doing everything she could to make sure that her defined role as “artist” came across loud and clear. I wondered if she even liked the aesthetic, or if she just felt like she was supposed to like it.

  “Hey, Courtney,” I said, trying to figure out how to start. Her eyes darted back and forth along the hallway.

  “Hey, um, hi,” she said, her voice soft. She didn’t want to be seen, didn’t want to be heard. I flashed back to the conversation I’d overheard just an hour before—if you tell anyone, I’ll say you’re a lying slut.

  She was afraid.

  I handed her my card. “I know you can’t talk here, but we need to have a chat.” I looked over my shoulders, let her see that I was watching out for her
. Let her feel clandestine. I stepped out onto the limb and tested whether or not it would hold my weight. “All that’s gold doesn’t glitter.”

  Her eyes snapped to mine. She looked hunted. “What did you just say?” Bingo.

  “I know about you and Dylan,” I whispered. She shook her head vehemently.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she hissed back.

  I crinkled my nose at her, conspiratorial. “Come on, Courtney. I found the stash of notes.”

  “What stash?” She looked genuinely confused, and I had the panicked thought that somehow I’d totally miscalculated, but then I saw the flash of fear in her eyes. He wasn’t supposed to save them.

  “We shouldn’t talk about it here,” I said. “Meet me in the library after school. Theoretical Magic section. I’ll get you a pass, and nobody will be able to see us in there. Or hear us. I promise.” I ducked my head so our eyes were level. “This is important, Courtney.”

  She stared at my card with unseeing eyes. Pink blotches had spread across her chest and were climbing up her neck—an ugly blush, one she hadn’t figured out how to magically control the way my sister had. After a long minute of silence, Courtney turned and walked back into Rahul’s classroom without a word, my business card crumpled in her fist. As the door swung shut after her, I caught Rahul’s eye. He looked uncertain. I waved at him, holding up my hand for a few seconds longer than necessary. A tiny lopsided smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.

  Then the door clicked shut, and I was alone, and all I could do was wait.

  * * *

  I stood at the end of the Theoretical Magic section, holding the two passes that Torres had given me. Most of the school day had slid by with alarming speed. I’d slipped in two more fruitless teacher interviews, listening to a lot of hemming and hawing about small disagreements between Capley and the econ teacher about whether students should be given aspirin. A kindergartener could have told them that didn’t come even close to constituting a motive, but instead I let them talk for hours. They turned into white noise, and I pretended to listen while I watched through those huge library windows as the clouds thinned, parted, and then merged together again.

  The Theoretical Magic section was still dizzying to look at, and I could hear the books inside whispering. The sound was nothing like pages turning—it was more like the sound of a room full of people who have just realized that a celebrity is sitting among them wearing big dark glasses and a scarf. I kept trying to make out the words, but they all blended together into a steady patter of hushed scandal.

  None of the other sections had talkative books. I’d asked Torres about it when I’d gotten the passes from her.

  “If I had to guess?” she’d said. “The books whisper because they saw something so terrible and powerful happen. It’s part of why I don’t believe Sylvia had an ‘unfortunate accident’—it would take something big to make those books talk.”

  “What are they saying?” I’d asked, hoping that there was an easy answer to be found.

  “No idea,” Torres had replied. “I had Tabitha working on it for a few weeks, but she said that it’s a new book-language, beyond what we can even begin to translate.”

  I’d shaken my head, disappointed. “So you don’t know what caused it and you don’t know what it means.” She’d nodded. “I guess magic isn’t an exact science, huh?”

  Her eyes had grown wide and she’d leaned back in her chair. “It’s exactly like science, Ivy. We’re making a lot of guesses, some of which are right, and we’re trying our best to name phenomena we may never truly understand. So I’d say that it is absolutely science.”

  I chewed on the conversation as I waited for Courtney, who might not show up. Who might not have had anything to do with anything, but who was the closest thing I had to a lead in this case. If I was honest with myself, I had to admit that I still had no idea if I was handling the investigation the right way. I usually scraped out my living by following people who were in shitty situations—they were trapped and they were petty. I’d found a couple of missing people before, including one kid who’d run away from home and gotten on the right side of the wrong crowd by doing some things I hadn’t known how to tell his parents about—but even the horrible things that boy had gotten involved with were pretty tame, if I compared them to this case. I felt like I was just barely keeping my head above water, swallowing brine with every new wave.

  Finally, Courtney showed up and dropped a life preserver over my head. She walked right past me, looking down every row of shelves as she passed. At first, I thought maybe she’d forgotten where we were meeting—but then I realized she was checking to make sure no one would catch us. She blinked hard and shook her head when she passed the Theoretical Magic section, but she didn’t actually acknowledge me. After she’d checked all of the other sections, she doubled back, stalking toward me with one hand held out for her pass. I stepped out of the shadow at the end of the row of books and slapped the slip of paper onto her palm, then unclipped the rope at the end of the shelves so we could cross the boundary that hid the bloodstains from the students. As we did, the whisper of books grew louder, like autumn-red trees rustled by an incoming wind.

  She dropped her book bag at her feet and crossed her arms, her brown eyes narrowing as she looked everywhere but at me. Her baggy sweatshirt drooped off one broad shoulder. She bit her lip, tapped her fingers on her arm—this girl was ready to jump out of her skin.

  “Hi Courtn—” I started, but she interrupted, as though she’d been waiting for a starter pistol to go off before she leapt into the conversation.

  “You don’t know anything about me,” she said in a harsh whisper. “You don’t know anything about me and you don’t know anything about Dylan and I don’t have anything to tell you anyway, and it’s not like we did anything wrong—”

  I didn’t whisper like she had, but I kept my voice low. “I just want to ask you some questions. I don’t think you did anything wrong.”

  She ran a hand through her brown waves, still not looking at me. “I don’t care what you think,” she said, and it was convincing. Which is not to say that I was convinced.

  “Courtney, I really mean it. I don’t think you did anything wrong. I think you did what you had to do.”

  Her eyes shone. “She told you?”

  “Who told me what?” I asked, but she didn’t seem to hear me.

  “She said we couldn’t tell anyone—but—”

  A trickle of understanding crept down the back of my neck like an ant looking for a honey jar. I took a calculated risk, and guessed. “About the potion?”

  There was a second of hesitation. Two seconds. Four. Then: “Yes. The potion.”

  The books fell silent for a beat, then began whispering more loudly than ever. I caught snatches of phrases, but it was like listening to a conversation through a wall—the words didn’t come together to form anything other than a general impression of angry and sad and tired.

  “Can you tell me about it in your own words?” I asked. “I’m not writing anything down, and I’m not recording.” I was telling the truth this time, about not recording—I’d tested my recorder in the aisle before she arrived, and all it would pick up was the constant rustling of the books. “I just need to know if I’m headed in the right direction, okay?”

  “I don’t have to tell you anything,” she hissed. “You’re not even a cop.”

  Something in my chest shifted, then settled. Enough. “You’re right,” I said. “You’re absolutely fucking right.” She flinched when I swore. Good. “I’m not a cop, and I’m not a teacher, and I’m not your parents. I’m a private detective, and that means I get to decide what I tell people and what I don’t. It means I get to decide if I help you cover your ass or if I throw you right under the goddamned bus. Right now I’m pretty low on leads, and you’re the only one I can find who had a problem with your dead teacher. I’m giving you a chance to tell me why I shouldn’t cut my losses, tell the a
uthorities that you’re the killer, and walk away from this shitshow of a case. So what’s it gonna be, Courtney?”

  She chewed her lip, wide-eyed. Cornered. She was out of options, and her tough-girl act was disintegrating. “Okay. I’ll tell you.” A dart of her eyes. “I’ll tell you if you give me all the notes you found.”

  “Sure,” I said, no hesitation. I would say that I considered mentioning that I had digital copies of all the notes, but it didn’t cross my mind. I wasn’t there to be scrupulous. I was there to solve a murder.

  She scowled at the floor for a while before muttering, “I didn’t have a problem with Capley.”

  “No?” I shot back, just a little aggressive.

  “No,” she said, her voice a bit stronger.

  “So she just gave you the potion, no questions asked?”

  Courtney chewed on the side of one thumb before answering. “I mean, she asked some questions. About how long it had been since I had my period and stuff. She wanted to know if the—um, if the father knew and was okay with everything. She asked if I was safe.”

  “Did Dylan know?”

  She gave me a look that clearly communicated her complete and total disdain for my deathly idiocy. “Of course he knew.”