See No Evil

by B. A. Shapiro

  She wanted to find the book—she needed it for Nat and for Rebeka Hibbens and to see if she could find the “really big” something Jackie had alluded to on the phone just before her death. Not to mention that they had promised Deborah they would return the book tonight. On the other hand, Lauren couldn’t forget Deborah’s words: “It is said that anyone who reads the chronicle and isn’t a member of the coven will either die or go mad.”

  Jackie wasn’t of the coven. Jackie had read the chronicle. Jackie had died. She, Lauren, wasn’t of the coven. She was here to read the chronicle. She would then …

  Lauren shifted on the hard stoop and scanned the sidewalk. Dan was nowhere to be seen. She twisted the new turquoise ring she had picked up at a dress shop for a few dollars to replace the wedding band she now kept in her jewelry box. As she pulled her legs into her chest, Lauren was once again reminded of that terrible night, of the click of the back door, of the shadow in the hedges. No, Lauren told herself, there are no such things as evil curses. She had imagined the click and the shadow. Paul Conklin had sent the poppets.

  But Paul had denied it when she had asked him. “It’s a tough addiction to kick,” he had said after a long pause, “but I swore off practical jokes after Gabe’s BMW got towed.” When Lauren pressed him, he had added, “I’ve got to admit it’s a good prank—one I’d be proud to claim—but I can’t.” But the shame that had colored his voice, and his indirect denial, had left her uncertain.

  Lauren felt a tap on her shoulder and swung around.

  “Helene’s having a tough time,” Dan said as if they were in the middle of a conversation rather than starting one. He was tall and slight and his face was very pale. He pushed his black hair from his forehead with a weary gesture. Dan had explained at the funeral he had next to no bereavement time, and Lauren figured between his regular shifts, taking care of Helene, and dealing with the aftermath of Jackie’s death, the guy was working the equivalent of at least two full-time jobs.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he said, his hair falling back to where it had been before.

  Lauren jumped up. “No problem.”

  Dan nodded and flipped open Jackie’s mailbox. He retrieved the key and twisted it in the lock. “Helene’s barely slept since last Friday,” he said over his shoulder as he opened the door. “And I don’t think she’s eaten a thing.”

  Lauren followed him into the tiny foyer, instinctively turning toward the dining room, Jackie’s room. Dust motes danced in the narrow rays of light that shot through the half-closed curtains, highlighting Jackie’s clutter: her spinning wheel and the toasting forks hanging from the fireplace lintel; her books, computer, and Colonial bottle collection. But despite the comfortable jumble, the room felt unused, deserted.

  Lauren took a step backward and tripped on the edge of the rag rug. She lurched toward the steep stairway and grabbed a narrow baluster for support. Jackie was really gone—and she wasn’t ever coming back.

  “Want to sit for a minute?” Dan asked, futilely pushing his hair back again. “Wouldn’t mind myself. I’m bushed.” He pointed toward the living room.

  Lauren nodded gratefully, but when she reached the threshold she stopped as a pain knifed through her stomach. Moving cartons were scattered everywhere. Some were sealed and stacked neatly in the corner, but most were open-mouthed and half packed, their future contents strewn around the room: Jackie’s Betty lamp collection, the first lamps brought to America, small, shallow repositories with projecting spouts for the burning of whale oil; Jackie’s candle molds; her framed samplers; her iron pots, copper kettles, and wooden and pewter kitchen utensils. Jackie’s life, all the things she had loved, lay at Lauren’s feet.

  “The Cambridge Antiquarian Society was here ’til past midnight yesterday,” Dan said. “Jackie left the house to Helene and Matthew—along with any of the contents they wanted. Everything else is going to the society.” He paced the tiny entryway, crossing and uncrossing his arms. “Matthew wants the computer and Helene some jewelry, but neither of them seems interested in much else. The society’s thrilled.”

  Lauren shook her head. “It feels so, so—oh, I don’t know. So carnivorous, or cannibalistic, or something.”

  “The house is going up for sale next week. My father-in-law’s very anxious, and we’ve all agreed that the sooner this stuff is all sorted out, the sooner everyone’ll be able to get back to normal.” Dan leaned against the nail-studded front door. “Simon’s particularly keen on getting Matthew back into his regular schedule of hyper overachievement.”

  Pushing thoughts of Simon and the unpleasant conversation they had had after Jackie’s funeral from her mind, Lauren looked around the room. But seeing the half-packed cartons filled her with such sadness, with such a piercing sense of loss, that she raised her eyes to the ceiling. She focused on the huge wooden beams that formed rectangles across the plaster, trying to think of anything but Jackie. She reminded herself that the large middle beam was called the summer-piece and that the joists were the cross-beams. But she could still see Jackie’s body lying so motionless.

  She turned abruptly, almost knocking into Dan. “Why don’t we just get this over with?” she asked, pointing back at the dining room. “Let’s take a look at what she’s got in there—and hopefully find that book I need.”

  He nodded and stepped aside to let her pass through the narrow foyer. “Helene said to take anything you need—and she means it. The less stuff there is for her to go through, the easier it’ll be.”

  Lauren looked at the mounds of materials and shook her head. Slowly, she walked around the table, searching for the large leather volume. She checked the chairs. She looked under the table. Starting from the left, she ran her eyes methodically along the rows of bookshelves. No chronicle.

  Dan leaned against the chair rail and watched her in silence. “She’d been working really hard on this book,” he finally said. “She was really into it.”

  “Your mother-in-law was a very organized and thorough woman.” Lauren picked up a pile of folders from the far end of the table. It didn’t seem possible all of Jackie’s energy could be gone. Vanished as if it had never been.

  Dan stared out the dining room window at the busy Cambridge street, his hand resting on a stack of books. “It’s really kind of strange.” He turned and looked at Lauren. “About the step stool, I mean.”

  “She must’ve needed a book,” Lauren said, flipping open a file Jackie had labeled “Concord Wicca.” Inside were notes on a coven of witches Jackie had found in a western suburb of Boston. Modern day Wiccans referred to themselves as witches and practiced an earthy, feminist religion based on pre-Christian pagan beliefs. Lauren shut the file and opened another. It contained notes on sorcerers and black witches, descriptions of their use of wax pentagrams, and voodoo, and snakes stuffed with hair and fingernail parings. A shiver ran up her spine.

  “You know how organized she was about her books,” Dan said. “She even showed me how everything she needed for Rebeka Hibbens had been moved to the lower shelves.”

  Lauren nodded, not really listening. For although Jackie’s files filled her with unease, she was also strangely mesmerized by their exotic contents. Observations of the Sabbat Rite. The Invocation of the Horned God. The Casting of the Circle. Between two pages, she found a note Jackie had made to follow up on a rumor of a group of sorcerers in Cavendish, Vermont, who, just like the seventeenth-century black witches, used poppets and mandrake roots to cast their voodoo spells. At the bottom of the paper was a fax number.

  “I’m sorry, Dan,” she said. “What were you saying?”

  “Nothing, I guess.” He shook his head. “I’m just tired.”

  Lauren stared at the manila folder in her hand as if it held some magic answer. The chronicle wasn’t here. The chronicle—the irreplaceable, priceless chronicle for which she was responsible—was gone. She thought she had seen it on the table the night Jackie died, but she couldn’t be sure.

  Could someone have tak
en it? It didn’t seem likely. Lauren dropped the folder onto the table and looked at the exposed scars in the old wood, at the deep crack that ran almost the entire length of the table. The colonists had called them turn tables, she thought idiotically. One side of the table was used for cutting and cooking, then when company arrived, the table was turned smooth side up. Lauren scanned the room one last time. Things were very rarely what they seemed. “I don’t see my book.”

  “There’s a box of weird stuff in the living room,” Dan said. “Maybe it’s in there.”

  “What kind of weird stuff?” Lauren asked, rubbing her arms.

  He shrugged. “Witchcraft stuff, I guess. Candles, stones, incense, a creepy doll …”

  “Made from rags with crooked eyes?” Lauren asked.

  “How did you know?”

  “Because Jackie showed it to me—and because I got one just like it.”

  His eyes widened. “With the same note?”

  Lauren nodded. “But it was all a joke. A dumb joke that backfired—and my guess is the guy who came up with it is feeling pretty bad about now.” She told him about Paul Conklin.

  “How can you be so sure it wasn’t the witches?” Dan asked.

  “The witches are the ones who gave us the chronicle in the first place,” Lauren said.

  “Did you get an ugly brown urn too?”

  Lauren shook her head. “What kind of urn?”

  “Some sort of pottery, I guess. Kind of big with a fat stomach. There’s a man’s face on it that looks half wolf and half human.” He shuddered. “Strange symbols. And something rattling around inside.” He gave her a sheepish smile. “I didn’t open it.”

  Lauren nodded. “A Bellarmine urn. They were used by sixteenth-century sorcerers. Black magic at its finest.”

  “Black magic,” Dan murmured as he began absently fiddling with the nails hammered into the front door. “This whole thing is starting to weird me out.” He pressed the tip of his finger to a doornail in the top left corner, then methodically worked his way down the uneven row.

  Dead as a doornail, Lauren thought as she watched him. The saying was actually derived from the Colonial practice of hammering nails into their front doors as a display of their affluence. The wealthier a house, the more nails in the door. And because nails were a limited, and therefore valuable, commodity in the seventeenth century, the resourceful colonists cut off the ends of the nails so that they couldn’t be removed—or ever used again. Hence, if someone or something was “as dead as a doornail,” their usefulness had passed. Just like Jackie, Lauren thought, tears welling in her eyes.

  “Black magic only has power over those who believe in it,” Lauren said more harshly than she intended.

  Dan stared past her into the living room. He shrugged. “It’s all in there,” he said, waving toward the cobbler’s bench in front of the couch. “Go look for yourself.”

  But despite her words, Lauren wasn’t ready to face the “weird stuff” in Dan’s box. She turned her back on the bench and walked to the fireplace on the opposite side of the living room. Although this fireplace wasn’t as deep or as wide as the one in the dining room, it had the comforting aura of long-ago meals and families and laughter—of continuity, of the cyclical rhythms of living.

  Lauren was reminded of the Wiccan concept of the wheel of life. Just as the year was a cycle of spring, summer, autumn, and winter, so too did life go through birth, growth, fading and death. And, just as nothing really died in nature, so too, the Wiccans believed, the life of a human soul was never over.

  Lauren glanced toward Dan, but he was lost in his own sadness, staring despondently at an open carton. She turned back to the fireplace, thinking of a book she had read by Ian Stevenson describing how people remember snippets of their previous lives, how phobias and talents can cross from one life into the next, how birthmarks are often the site of an earlier death wound. Lauren also thought of Deborah’s sages and Brian Weiss’s entities, living on a higher spiritual plane, refreshing souls and then sending them back to earth to work through their destiny. She pressed her palm against the fireplace’s rough-hewn lintel.

  The moment her hand touched the lintel, she found herself standing off to the side of a room with weathered wood for walls. She was watching a pretty girl who was sitting on a three-legged stool, the gray skirt of her dress pulled above her ankles. The child dropped a log onto the roaring fire, then threw a worried glance over her shoulder, as if to check that no one watched her. Obviously convinced she was alone, the girl smiled mischievously and leaned into the fire, twisting her head among the pots and kettles hanging from the lug pole. The child raised her eyes into the huge throat of the chimney. The heat of the blaze reddened her cheeks and her face was filled with awe as she watched the sparks of the fire float up into the night sky.

  Lauren blinked and she was back in Jackie’s living room. She yanked her hands from the fireplace and pressed them together. “Let’s see what we’ve got here,” she said with a heartiness that startled both Dan and herself. She marched across the room and looked into the carton.

  The objects were pretty much as Dan had described them: long tapered candles; black stones; small bunches of coral. She reached into the open carton and pulled a wooden amulet from the box. It was shaped like a hand and covered with intricate carvings: snakes and frogs and pinecones. “Weird, all right,” she said, putting the amulet on the bench.

  Dan walked over and stood next to her. “There’s your voodoo doll,” he said, pointing to the shoe box.

  “And another handsome fella.” She lifted a wax mask out of the carton. It looked familiar, a man’s face breathing leaves, but she couldn’t quite place it. She shivered as a wisp of a dream returned to her of something, or someone, flying through a dank, lowceilinged cave. Lauren dropped the mask on the bench. The thing was definitely creepy.

  “Where’s the urn?” she asked, lifting the carton and putting it on the floor so she could see into it better.

  Dan reached into the box and wordlessly raised the urn. He held it out toward her.

  Lauren scrutinized its large body and rather narrow neck. “That’s a Bellarmine, all right,” she said, tentatively touching its nose. The fierce, bearded face stared angrily back at her. “Though I’ve never actually seen one outside of a book,” she added, dropping her hand. “These are called Bellarmines because some people say the face is a likeness of a sixteenth-century sorcerer, a cardinal named Bellarmine. Others say it’s Satan.”

  Dan shook the urn. A raspy, hollow rattle filled the quiet room. “Should we open it?”

  Lauren sat down on the couch and looked up at Dan. The urn appeared larger and more ominous from this angle. “You can’t keep running away from the things that scare you,” Jackie had told her.

  She reached up and took the urn from him. He didn’t move as she placed it on her lap. “Oh, what the hell,” she said, pulling the wide cork from the urn’s neck. The odor of dirt and dampness and long-dead animals assaulted her nostrils. She hesitated and looked up at Dan again. He nodded.

  Lauren upended the urn and spilled its contents onto the bench. A braid of white hair—the exact color of Jackie’s—studded with sharp nails slid across the shiny wooden surface. A scattering of fingernail parings followed. Lauren shuddered and shook the urn again. A red felt heart, pierced through with pins, fell on top of the fingernails. Embroidered across the center of the heart were the words “Jackie Pappas: Silence or Death.”

  Ten

  LAUREN STARED IN HORROR AT THE CONTENTS OF THE urn strewn on the cobbler’s bench.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” Dan cried, taking a step backward.

  “You don’t think that could actually be Jackie’s hair?” Lauren’s voice was a hoarse whisper as she inched her way to the far side of the couch. “Or her fingernails?”

  Dan shook his head. “It looks like the same color, but how the hell …” He stood motionless for a few minutes, then he began to pace the room. “Remember what I was
saying about the step stool?” he asked. “Why would she need a step stool if all the books she wanted were on the lower shelves?”

  “Well,” Lauren said slowly, pulling her eyes from the gruesome objects on the table, “you never know exactly which books you’re going to need when you’re working on a complicated project—”

  “I had a strange feeling about this right from the start,” Dan interrupted, his dark eyes blazing. “And now with this voodoo doll and this urn—something’s not right here, Lauren. I can just feel it.”

  Lauren dropped her gaze back to the table and met the hollow eyes of the wax man breathing leaves. She looked up at Dan. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” she asked, unable to bring herself to speak the word.

  Dan stopped in front of the bench, his legs wide apart. “Yeah,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest. “I guess I am.” Although he was not in uniform, there was something about his stance and the cut of his bomber jacket that gave him the look of a policeman.

  “But no one would want to hurt Jackie,” Lauren argued. “Everyone liked her. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It does if you figure someone wanted her out of the way because she was messing where she wasn’t supposed to.” Dan stared pointedly at the cobbler’s bench and then looked back up at Lauren. “Messing with witchcraft.”

  Lauren met his eyes but said nothing. Dan was a cop—an overeager rookie, to boot—and, as a surgeon would propose surgery as the means of curing a back problem while a chiropractor would propose chiropractic, Dan was apt to see a crime where there was none.

  “But how could the research Jackie was doing be a threat to anyone?” Lauren asked. “Granted, the witches and sorcerers she was meeting with might have been a bit odd, but their religion isn’t about black magic and evil. It’s mostly just pagan: worshiping nature and goddesses and such.”