Bram returned to the circle and started the chain. He looped the rope around his wrists, then raised his bound hands to Deborah. Lauren noticed he had a tattoo of a face that looked a bit like Cardinal Bellarmine cut into his forearm. “May he be punished in a manner fitting his crime,” Bram said. Deborah took the hemp from him and bound her own wrists; passing it, she repeated Bram’s wish.
As the rope went around the circle, Cassandra explained what was happening. “What you send returns three times over,” she told Lauren. “She who casts the spell becomes one with she who receives it. So you can’t wish for anything you wouldn’t wish for yourself.”
When the rope reached Lauren, she bound it tightly around her wrists. “May he be punished in a manner fitting his crime,” she said, her voice loud and strong.
When the rope returned to Bram, he dropped the remaining coil to his lap. “May he be punished in a manner fitting his crime,” he said, closing the circle. No one spoke or moved for a long moment, their silence made deeper by the soft, lapping waves.
Then Bram began to disentangle the rope from his hands. As the unraveling traveled around the circle, he pulled a series of objects from his backpack: a mirror, a mason jar, a lock of hair.
Fascinated, Lauren watched him. “What’s he doing?” she whispered to Cassandra.
“I don’t know,” the older woman said. “The Craft—the Wiccan—encourages the creation of personal spells—he’s doing something that’s meaningful to him. But he must have stored up a large amount of energy to cast two powerful spells so close together.”
Carefully, Bram placed the hair and the mirror inside the mason jar. He pressed the metal latch and locked the jar shut. Then he stood and walked to the bonfire, holding the jar above the flames. “This is the hair of Nigel Hawkes,” he said. “So this is Nigel, caught in this jar with this mirror—with his own reflection. He’s locked in forever, forever faced with himself. Forever seeing what he has done—and who he is.”
Watching Bram and listening to his words, Lauren could not help but be moved. This man was trying to right a wrong in a way that made sense to him. He believed in the magic of his religion, in the power of his rituals and of his people—more than in the power of the state. And perhaps, given the circumstances, he was right.
Bram raised the jar over his head. “There is no escape for Nigel Hawkes.”
A smattering of applause for Bram’s clever spell came from the circle. “Nigel Hawkes is locked in forever,” they began to chant, “There is no escape.” The chant was repeated with greater and greater volume, and everyone swayed in rhythm to the words. To her amazement, Lauren found herself swaying too.
Deborah broke from the circle and walked slowly toward the bonfire. She raised her arms. Mesmerized, Lauren followed Deborah’s movements and, as she looked heavenward, she suddenly saw another heaven; she was in another place. This moon stood out more starkly against a much darker sky, and the Milky Way was so clear and distinct that it formed a vaporous backdrop for the closer stars. Fascinated yet strangely unafraid, Lauren looked down. Rather than the running shoes she had put on that morning, her feet were covered by roughly crafted leather boots, and the hem of her long coat was ragged and muddy.
Lauren raised her eyes. The woman who stood at the bonfire, her arms lifted to receive the power of the stars and the moon, wasn’t Deborah. And yet, in some way, she still was Deborah, even though she was suddenly old and tiny and frail. After a long moment, the old woman lowered her arms and turned toward the water. The ocean was dark and compelling, its waves pulled by the force of the new moon. It beckoned with its beauty and its promises, and Lauren felt its force within her. Her usual fear of water gone, she was pulled by an irresistible desire to walk into the waves, to become one with their power.
Lauren broke from the circle and started toward the ocean. But as soon as she took a step, the old woman transformed into a much younger one, her dark curls wild and free. “Bury it,” the dark-haired woman said. “Bury the jar far from the child.”
Bury what jar? Lauren wondered, blinking at this new reality. Far from what child? Disoriented, she stood motionless as waves of words rose around her, words she knew were English but made no sense. Then bodies slid by her, parting like a school of fish as they swept past, rushing toward the woman and a man in a brown and blue serape. Arms whirled before her. Soon, so many arms were entwined with each other that it was hard to tell where one person stopped and another started.
Then the group began to disentangle and separate people emerged: The man in the serape reverently placed a glass jar in his backpack; the woman with the dark curls picked up a knife from the sand; a tiny woman started to play a flute. Stumbling backward, Lauren reached a rock near the edge of the woods and sat down. Soon the whole group was dancing around the bonfire, singing and laughing and throwing their arms in the air. She sat alone, suddenly chilled, struggling to comprehend what had just happened.
Taking a series of deep breaths, Lauren watched the dancers and the flames being whipped high by the ocean wind. As she came back to herself, she saw the scene before her from a fresh perspective. Despite eye rings and binding spells and consecrated athamas, were these witches any more irrational than the people at Jackie’s funeral taking communion, symbolically tasting the blood and body of Christ? Was their dance any more absurd than that of her own great-grandfather and his minyan: ten Jewish men wearing embroidered shawls, bobbing rhythmically before a hand-lettered scroll? Was their esbat bonfire all that different from midnight mass or the Passover seder or the feasts of Ramadan?
And yet, if these witches were no different from Jews and Christians and Muslims, then what had just happened to her? They believed in their magic and, Lauren had to admit, in the throes of Bram’s spell, she too had believed. It had seemed so sane, so logical. Staring into the flames, chin resting in her hands, Lauren watched the dancers’ earthy grace and clearly saw their connection to each other—and to their spiritual beliefs. For a moment, feeling the mesmerizing power of the bonfire and the lilting notes of Alva’s flute, she could almost believe that their ritual had caused her to go into some kind of trance. That the witches had put her in touch with some other reality.
Suddenly, the wind picked up and brought with it the whooshing sound of movement. Lauren whirled around but saw nothing. Returning her gaze to the spiraling dancers, she couldn’t help thinking that maybe Carl Jung wasn’t so far off after all. Maybe there was a collective unconscious—and maybe she had just tapped into it.
Muffled sounds rolled in from behind her. Something or someone was coming. Lauren turned again. This time she heard the pounding of footsteps, the barking of dogs. Startled, she jumped up. Lights were bobbing down the path through the trees. “Hey!” she yelled as half a dozen policemen raced onto the beach.
“You folks got a permit for this fire?” demanded the first cop to reach the group, a smirk of derision on his face. He waved Lauren over to the bonfire. She obeyed immediately.
The dancers stopped abruptly. Dazed, they all turned to confront the policeman; no one answered his question.
“Well then,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest in obvious satisfaction, “you’re all under arrest.”
Fifteen
LAUREN STARED THROUGH THE FOUR-INCH-SQUARE window. If she twisted her neck just the right way, she could see a small slice of the sergeant’s desk through the matching window of a door that stood at a ninety-degree angle to the door of her cell. The cell in which she was locked. In jail. She took a long breath, forcing air deep into her lungs, but when she released it, she felt as if she hadn’t breathed at all.
Looking around her, Lauren noted that the Moorscott jail didn’t look anything like jails on television. Her cell had no bars, no seatless toilets, no bug-infested mattresses hung from the wall by rusted chains. It was a narrow cinderblock room, ugly and cold but clean. On the way over, the talkative young cop had explained that the jail had only two cells: one large and one sma
ll. Lauren assumed that, because only five of them were in here, she was in the small one and all the others were in the larger. Taking another ragged breath, Lauren ran her hand along the edge of the door, along the metal plate that was screwed in where the handle would normally be. It was smooth. There was nowhere to grip. There was no way to get out. She pressed her nose to the glass.
Through her strip of window, Lauren watched a blue sleeve moving back and forth across a scarred wooden desk. She was overwhelmed by the intensity of her claustrophobia and surprised by her hunger to follow the motions of someone who was free. Rebeka Hibbens would understand. An image of the squalor and misery of a seventeenth-century dungeon flashed through Lauren’s mind: snake-infested water leeching up through the mud floor, bugs, shackles, frigid cold. What must it have felt like being confined in a place like that for a crime she hadn’t committed? A humorless laugh caught in Lauren’s throat, the irony of the situation not lost on her.
She knew it was all a mistake. She knew that Gabe would arrive and arrange for her release soon. She knew that when she told this tale in years to come, she would pause to build up the suspense of the approaching flashlights, lean forward when she told of their capture at gunpoint, chuckle as she described the “criminals” entering the police station. Nevertheless, her stomach churned.
She looked at her watch. Gabe should have been here by now. He had promised to leave right away. Gabe. Even as she yearned for him to come and free her, Lauren was uncertain. She didn’t really know him well, and there was a good chance he’d be annoyed at her presumptuousness. Who wouldn’t be annoyed to be asked to drive twenty miles in the middle of the night to make bail for someone he hardly knew?
But she hadn’t been able to think of anyone else to call. All of her friends had young children or had been in bed for hours. Todd was taking care of Drew, and Aunt Beatrice would faint dead away if she ever saw Lauren behind bars. If Jackie had been alive, Lauren would have called her, but as it was there had been no one else but Gabe.
Gabe Phipps, the well-known night owl and liberal. Gabe Phipps, who had kissed her just last night and with whom she was having dinner on Saturday. Lauren took another deep breath and pressed her palms together. He hadn’t sounded annoyed on the phone.
The snide policeman’s sleeve reached into Lauren’s vision to pick up the phone; it disappeared and then reappeared to put the receiver back down. His hand jotted a quick line in a loose-leaf notebook, then picked up the telephone again. She knew it was the snide cop because she recognized his ruby ring. She remembered how it had hurt when he grabbed her and pushed her into the Jeep. She rubbed her forearm; the band of skin he had gripped would be black-and-blue tomorrow.
What was taking Gabe so long?
“Can I look for a while?” Robin stood at Lauren’s shoulder, her hair once again pinned up with the bamboo clips. While they were in the Jeep, Robin had told Lauren she was a transportation planner. She worked for a consulting firm and traveled around the country designing transportation systems for the disabled.
Lauren moved reluctantly away from the window. “Not much to see.”
Robin shrugged and stationed herself exactly where Lauren had been standing. She pressed her nose to the glass, saying nothing as she watched the blue sleeve.
Lauren almost tripped over Alva, who was sitting on the floor, cradling her flute like a baby and staring off into space with the glazed look of one who is listening to her own inner music. Lauren edged toward the cot at the opposite end of the cell; the cot was exactly the width of the cell and was the only piece of furniture in it. Tamar was huddled on one end, crying; Deborah was sitting next to her, an arm around her shoulders. Now that Lauren got a closer look at Tamar, she could see that the girl was even younger than she had guessed. Deborah nodded for Lauren to sit down with them, but she shook her head and leaned against the wall. She rubbed her damp palms against her jeans, not wanting to eavesdrop but unable to do anything else.
“My mother’ll kill me,” Tamar was wailing.
“We’ll see if we can keep her from finding out,” Deborah said.
“No way.” Tamar shook her head vigorously. “This will be all over the papers.”
Robin turned from the door. “Tamar’s right, you know. I can see the headlines now: ‘Witches Arrested During Weird Moon Ritual.’” She snorted and turned back to the window. “I’m surprised the reporters aren’t here already.”
“Maybe your mother won’t see it,” Deborah suggested, glancing up at Lauren to see if she was listening. When Deborah saw that Lauren was, she smiled, including her in their conversation.
“She reads the Globe every day.” Tamar began to cry harder. “I told her this was a sorority.”
Deborah shook her head. “Such unnecessary prejudice and ignorance.”
“Some things haven’t improved much in three hundred years,” Lauren surprised herself by saying.
Deborah raised her eyebrows and smiled slyly at her. “Far less than one might think changes over time. People stay remarkably the same.”
Lauren played with the collar of her shirt, wondering if everyone at the ritual knew Deborah and Cassandra believed themselves to be the reincarnation of seventeenth-century witches. “It’s all too true,” Lauren said, purposely choosing to misunderstand Deborah. “Human beings seem to have a tremendous capacity to hate anyone who’s a little bit different from themselves.”
“Karma returns three times over,” Deborah told Lauren. “The ones who persecute suffer much more than the ones who are persecuted.”
Lauren sighed. “I wish I believed that.”
Deborah gave Tamar’s shoulders a squeeze and then looked up at Lauren. “If you’re interested in learning more about what we believe—and more about us—I’d be happy to spend some time talking with you.”
“You would?” Lauren couldn’t keep the surprise from her voice. Deborah had never been so warm and forthcoming. “I mean,” she corrected herself quickly, “I mean, that would be great. Terrific. Name the time.”
“We don’t open the store on Sunday ’til noon,” Deborah said. “If you want to come by, say about nine, that would give us plenty of time.”
“Don’t get near those witches.” Dan’s warning reverberated through Lauren’s head, but she chose to ignore it. If Deborah had had second thoughts about helping with the book, perhaps she would also change her mind about the chronicle. “I have to drop Drew off at Sunday school in Porter Square a little before nine,” she said. “I can be there by nine-fifteen.”
“It’s all set then.” Deborah nodded at Lauren, then turned and offered Tamar a tissue.
Robin, her face still pressed to the window, said, “I’m afraid this is going to cost me my job.” She twisted around and threw a glance at Lauren as if she, like Deborah, wanted to make sure Lauren felt included in their discussion.
Mothers and jobs, Lauren thought. It was all so incredibly ordinary. These women were just normal people with the same mundane concerns as everyone else. And what had happened to her out on the beach hadn’t been magic; she had merely been moved by Bram’s ritual. The power of the ritual must have created her dreamlike illusion. The more she thought about it, the less vivid and clear the experience became. Actually, nothing that strange had happened at all.
“Would they really fire you for something like this?” Lauren asked Robin.
“They might.” Robin shrugged and turned back to the window. “Most of the work we do comes directly or indirectly from the feds. And they can be—Hey,” she interrupted herself, “there’s some guy here who seems to be stirring things up.”
Lauren jumped from the cot. “What does he look like?”
“Hard to tell,” Robin said. “Good-looking. Older. Seems important.”
“Let me see.” Lauren was at the window in a few long strides. As Robin turned away, Lauren glimpsed a suede elbow patch on a tweed jacket, followed by the emphatic wave of a hand. “Thank God,” she said, relief overcoming her appr
ehension about confronting Gabe. She didn’t care if he was annoyed with her; she was going to be free.
Twenty minutes later, Lauren climbed into Gabe’s car. Leaning back against the soft leather seat, she stared up through the sunroof at the clear sky above. The sliver of crescent moon returned her stare; a Cheshire cat grin shining down on the earth. Could only one day have passed since she and Gabe had sat drinking wine in her living room? Could it be only hours since she had turned onto the narrow dirt road leading to White Horse Beach? It didn’t seem possible.
“They had no right to treat you like that.” Gabe slid under the steering wheel and crossed his arms. Glaring out at the small parking lot, he said, “I’m going to call my lawyer first thing in the morning. We’ll file charges. Wrongful arrest. Assault and battery. Police brutality.”
“It’s really nice of you to come all the way down here at this hour,” Lauren said. “And I’m really sorry that I had—”
Gabe waved her words away. “My lawyer’s topnotch—Allysa St. Gelais at Hubbard and Hobbs. You’ve heard of her?” Gabe seemed disappointed when Lauren shook her head. “She’ll make sure these small-town hackers get what they deserve.”
“I don’t know, Gabe,” she said. “Maybe we shouldn’t make a fuss. No one was hurt.”
He turned to her and their eyes met. “Pushing you into the back of a paddy wagon?” he demanded. “Throwing you in a cell like a common criminal? That’s plenty hurt in my book.”
“It wasn’t a paddy wagon,” she said with a smile. “It was a Jeep.” The closeness of Gabe’s body and the seclusion of the sensuous sports car brought back the previous night: his incredible smile, the hair curling over his collar, their kiss. The inside of her bones felt hollow, and it was suddenly very warm.
Gabe’s eyes didn’t leave hers. “Whatever,” he said, reaching over and touching her cheek lightly.
“Thanks for putting up everyone’s bail.” Lauren turned away and hooked her seat belt, purposely breaking the mood. She had had enough emotion for one day; there would be time for Gabe on Saturday night. “I’ll pay you back Saturday.”
See No Evil Page 15