See No Evil

by B. A. Shapiro

  Deborah hesitated before saying, “Oh, that’s too bad. I had some good news for you.”

  “Good news?” Lauren asked, wondering whether she was making the right decision. “What good news?”

  “Well,” Deborah said slowly, “the coven met yesterday and we discussed the curse of the chronicle. And, ah, after a long deliberation, we decided that it’s highly unlikely Jackie’s death had anything to do with the curse.…” She paused before continuing. “So, this being the case, we thought we’d be willing to share it with you.”

  “The chronicle?” Lauren breathed, visions of diplomas and royalty checks floating in front of her eyes. “When?”

  “There’s, ah, one stipulation,” Deborah said haltingly, as if she were stalling for time. “I reread the portion of the chronicle that discusses the curse and, ah, my interpretation is that, if the reader participates in a waxing crescent ritual, then he or she will not be susceptible to the curse.”

  “I already participated in—”

  “That was with the Wiccans,” Deborah interrupted quickly. “This must be with just the coven.”

  “Are you saying that if I come to the next waxing crescent ritual you’ll let me read the chronicle?” Lauren was incredulous.

  “That’s right.”

  Lauren could hardly believe her good fortune. Then she thought about the break-in, and Dan and Gabe’s suspicions about Deborah and the coven, and she wasn’t sure if her fortune had changed for the better.

  “The next waxing crescent is December eighth,” Deborah was saying. “Less than three weeks away. And the best part is that it’s the night of the Immortalis—when we reenact the glorious 1692 ritual.”

  “Sounds very interesting.” Lauren said slowly. Did she dare risk attending another ritual? Or involving herself with these crazy, perhaps even dangerous, people?

  “The Immortalis is a fascinating event. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it immensely.”

  Lauren thought quickly. Dan and Gabe might not want her going to RavenWing or spending time with Deborah, but if all she had to do to make Nat happy was participate in a silly ritual …

  “I’d-I’d love to,” she said, figuring she could always back out at the last minute.

  “You won’t be sorry,” Deborah told her warmly.

  “I’m sure I won’t.”.

  Twenty-One

  AFTER TALKING WITH DEBORAH, LAUREN SAT DOWN TO compile a list of Jackie’s occult contacts for Dan. But before she got a single number transcribed, Dan called. They hadn’t spoken since he’d come by after the break-in.

  “Bad news again,” he began. “Lieutenant Conway doesn’t think someone breaking into your house and burning candles is—to quote him—’sufficient reason to assume foul play in a completely separate incident,’ and he won’t open an investigation into Jackie’s death. This despite the fact that Deborah Sewall and Cassandra Abbott, along with someone named Bram Melgram, have been on Zaleski’s ‘cult watch’ list for years.” Dan paused and sighed. “Conway flashed one of his smiles that says I’m just an overeager rookie, but this time he showed lots more teeth.”

  “Not a good sign, I suppose,” Lauren said.

  “Not good at all.”

  “I’m working on that occult list for you.”

  “Good,” Dan said. “But you know, I’ve been thinking. What if witches didn’t murder Jackie? What if we’ve been looking at this all wrong? What if the motive was normal human greed?”

  “How could greed be the motive?” Lauren asked, wondering if perhaps Lieutenant Conway’s assessment of Dan’s overeagerness was correct. “Jackie didn’t have any money.”

  “She had the Deodat Willard print.”

  “Are you saying Simon murdered Jackie to get the print back?” Lauren was incredulous. Then she remembered Simon’s fingers digging into her arm and the icy fury of his words. “Just make sure her name isn’t on that book.” Simon Pappas was not a nice man. Still, that didn’t make him a murderer. “You think your father-in-law killed his children’s mother for a painting?”

  “I suppose not,” Dan said. “And I’ve got an even more absurd suspect for you—your friend Gabe Phipps.”

  “What?”

  “Helene was contacted last week about some federal grant Jackie and Gabe did together eight years ago.”

  “The National Endowment for the Humanities project,” Lauren said slowly. As she spoke, she recalled Simon Pappas goading Gabe at the restaurant. She struggled to remember what Simon had said. Something about rumors of trouble and Jackie’s records.

  “Right,” Dan said. “Apparently, the feds discovered a big chunk of money missing, and Jackie’s the only one who would have been able to corroborate—or contradict—Phipps’s account of where it went. They wanted Helene to go through Jackie’s files and see if she could find anything.”

  Lauren remembered Gabe’s glum mood and distraction last night. This must be what he hadn’t wanted to talk about. This was why he was going to Washington. She recalled the worry in his eyes, and her heart lurched in apprehension.

  “—couldn’t find anything,” Dan was saying. “And I guess it means some pretty serious trouble for Phipps. They used words like ‘misappropriation of funds’ and ‘embezzlement.’”

  Lauren thought of the last scandal in the department, when an article Benjamin Greerson had written for The American Historical Review was found to be plagiarized. Greerson had lost his job, his career—even his wife—and the university had lost Greerson’s large research grant, wreaking havoc with the department’s budget for years. Lauren realized she was biting her cuticle as she listened to Dan and she yanked her finger from her mouth.

  “Gabe doesn’t need to embezzle money,” she said. “He’s got plenty of his own. And there’s no way he killed Jackie.”

  “Just bear with me,” Dan said. “Did Gabe ever express any interest in helping you with Rebeka Hibbens before Jackie died?”

  “Of course not,” Lauren snapped. “Before Jackie died I didn’t need any help.”

  “Had he shown any personal interest in you?” Dan persisted. “Why did he choose this particular time—right after Jackie’s death—to start up a relationship?”

  “What could Gabe possibly stand to gain from dating me—or from helping me with my dissertation?”

  “I don’t know,” Dan conceded. “It doesn’t make much sense, but on the other hand, why would a man like Gabe Phipps suddenly offer to help a graduate student he barely knew with her dissertation?”

  “Maybe he thinks I’m cute.”

  Dan chuckled. “Touché.”

  “I think this whole line of inquiry is off base,” Lauren said. “And I think that you do—” She was interrupted by the buzzing of her intercom. “Someone’s downstairs. Let me call you back.”

  “No need,” Dan said. “Just give me a ring when you’ve got that list together and we can take it from there.”

  As Lauren hung up the phone, there was a knock on the door. It must be Todd. He had keys—to both the front door and the apartment—but she had insisted when he moved out that he not use them unless she wasn’t home. As she pulled open the door, she made a mental note to get Todd a key to the new lock.

  “Hi,” Todd said, striding into the hallway. “I was supposed to be in Boston fifteen minutes ago, but I had to talk to you.”

  Lauren followed him into the living room, wondering who in Boston was going to be very annoyed. She was glad it wasn’t her. “Want some coffee?”

  Todd dropped into his favorite chair and put his head in his hands.

  “What is it?” Lauren demanded. “Is Drew okay?” Tuesday nights Drew stayed with Todd. She hadn’t seen her son since yesterday morning when he had left for school. “What?”

  “Drew’s fine,” Todd said, lifting his head. “Or he’s fine physically, anyway.”

  Lauren sat down on the couch near Todd’s chair. “You talked to Dr. Berg?” When Todd had called Dr. Berg on Monday to discuss their concerns, the s
chool secretary had said the psychologist was out of town until Wednesday. “What did she say?”

  “One of Drew’s paintings from art class is on display in the school lobby, so when I brought him to school this morning he took me inside to see it,” Todd explained. “Since I was already there, I stopped by Dr. Berg’s office. I told her about Bunny and the little girl in the playground.”

  “And?”

  Todd looked down at his hands then back at her. “She said he’s using his anger in very inappropriate ways, and that despite the fact that he hurt his own property, his behavior is cause for great concern.” Todd paused and Lauren touched his knee. He let out a shuddering breath. “She said we have to watch him very carefully. That if he does something like this again …”

  “If he does something like this again?” Lauren prompted, pulling her hand from his knee.

  “Then he’ll need a complete evaluation by a psychiatrist. She recommended someone at McLean.”

  Lauren stared at Todd. McLean. McLean was where Deborah had been locked up for psychotic delusions. Where Bram had spent time. It wasn’t a place for Drew. Not for her sweet little boy. “I can’t believe it-would come to that,” she said, tears filling her eyes.

  “Dr. Berg said she’d check in with him a few more times over the next couple weeks, and that we should be especially loving and supportive.”

  “We can do that,” Lauren said, coming to sit on the arm of Todd’s chair. He reached up and hugged her. She kissed the top of his head and held on to him tightly. They sat quietly for a long moment.

  Todd jumped to his feet. “I’ve got to go,” he cried, glancing at his watch. As she stood to follow him, he turned and said, “I almost forgot, I’ve got a favor to ask, I have plans Sunday afternoon, so can you pick up Drew earlier than usual? Say around two o’clock?”

  “Sure,” Lauren said. “No problem.”

  “Thanks,” he said, his face grim as he opened the door. “See you then.”

  As Lauren watched Todd walk down the stairs, she thought of how sweet he had been at Friendly’s on Sunday, how nice it would be to be a family again, how happy it would make Drew. She remembered a dress she had seen in the window of a consignment shop on Mass Ave. It was short and clingy, yet still casual. Just the kind of dress Todd found irresistibly sexy. She would buy it and wear it on Sunday. They could take it from there.

  * * *

  Dorcas stood on the edge of a meadow, facing a dense green wood. “Come bunnies, come!” she commanded. She pulled up the hem of her long gray skirt and knelt on the ground. “Now!”

  There was a fluttering of underbrush, and suddenly dozens of rabbits leapt from the woods and scampered over to where she squatted.

  “Good bunnies, good,” Dorcas cooed as the animals jumped on her knees and nuzzled her about the ankles. “Good little bunnies.”

  “No!” Lauren cried. “You mustn’t!” Startled by the sound of her own voice, Lauren became aware of the hum of the car’s engine, of the steering wheel under her fingers, of the warmth of the sun on her face. She blinked at the sparse foliage clinging to the tree branches. Autumn, she thought, somewhat dazed, it was late autumn. But where was she? Suddenly terrified, she pulled the car off the road.

  Yanking up the parking brake, she took stock. It was Sunday, the tail end of November 1995. She was driving west out of the city, trying to cheer herself with a bit of fall foliage before picking up Drew at Todd’s. She looked around at the last wisps of autumn color, the rusted reds and brown-yellows. Yes, she was definitely in western Massachusetts. But how far west? And how had she gotten here?

  Icy runners of fear shot through Lauren’s chest and formed a knot in her throat. She remembered leaving her apartment at eleven-thirty that morning. She could visualize herself driving through the suburbs of Lexington and Concord, thinking what nice places these towns must be to raise a family. But this was no suburb. This was wooded and hilly and rural—and quite far from Cambridge.

  Filled with trepidation, Lauren looked down at the clock on the dashboard. It was one o’clock. She had lost a full hour. Gone. She had descended into what she was beginning to think of as her personal black hole. A black hole in which she had watched Dorcas Osborne tame wild rabbits.

  Lauren dropped her head to the steering wheel. Her black holes had been coming more frequently of late, and they were of longer duration. Just yesterday she had forgotten her ATM number. She had stood pushing buttons frantically on the machine, trying to recall a number she had used almost daily for five years. But that small memory lapse didn’t compare with her waking fugues. Fugue states that she had initially summoned to better understand the seventeenth century. Fugue states that were now getting out of her control.

  The fugues were becoming frighteningly real. She fell into them more deeply and stayed longer. And now they were appearing when she hadn’t summoned them. Gould there be something physically wrong with her? A brain tumor? Early Alzheimer’s? Or were the fugues the not-so-unexpected result of dealing with a divorce, a troubled son, and the death of her best friend? Maybe it was the stress of writing the book, of spending so much of her life immersed in a time and place that were not her own.

  Lauren stared, unseeing, through the windshield. Todd and Jackie had warned her about her tendency to use work as an escape from reality. And Gabe had remarked that, if she wasn’t careful, she would become like Deborah—so lost in history she could no longer separate fantasy from fact. At the time, Lauren had insisted she wasn’t like Deborah, but suddenly she wasn’t so certain.

  Lauren took a deep breath and turned the car around. She might not know exactly where she was, but she knew it would take her at least until two o’clock—the agreed-upon pickup time—to get to Todd’s. As she settled in for the trip, she once again found herself wondering about Todd. And Gabe.

  Gabe had come home from Washington on Thursday and called the next morning to see if she was available for dinner Saturday night. “I don’t think we should see each other for a while,” she had told him. There was silence at the other end of the line, and Lauren’s palms began to sweat.

  “Is this because of the NEH investigation?” Gabe finally asked.

  The department had been buzzing with the news all week. After a number of improprieties had been found, the federal government had begun an audit of all university grants. The National Endowment for the Humanities had been particularly vigilant. While reviewing their records, they had found $100,000 in unsubstantiated charges in Gabe and Jackie’s final budget report.

  “You don’t believe I’d do anything like that, do you?” Gabe asked Lauren.

  “No,” she told him. “I know you wouldn’t. And anyway, it’s not like the Benjamin Greerson thing—it’s not like it was plagiarism.”

  “It’s just a paperwork screwup,” Gabe said quickly. “But my meetings in D.C. were a disaster. It was clear from their attitude that if I don’t find the backup receipts to support my position, they’re going to hang me out to dry.” Gabe’s sigh was audible. “They want to send a message, and they figure if they do it with someone as visible as I am, they’ll get a bigger audience.”

  “You haven’t been able to find any of the receipts?”

  “Nope—and neither has Jackie’s family. But they’ve got to be somewhere. Terri’s working on it and so am I. The receipts exist—and they’ll prove my innocence—but we may have to go through twenty years of files to find them.” He paused, then asked, “So why don’t you want to have dinner with me?”

  “It has nothing to do with you,” Lauren said, which was both true and untrue. It was mostly because of Todd—and Drew—and her sudden indecision about the state of her marriage. But she had to admit it was also because of the doubts Dan had planted in her mind. “Why did he choose this particular time—right after Jackie’s death—to start up a relationship with you?” Dan had asked. “Why would a man like Gabe Phipps suddenly offer to help a graduate student he barely knew with her dissertation?” Althou
gh Lauren knew the questions were ridiculous, Dan’s queries had left her uncomfortable.

  “It’s not you,” she repeated, “or anything directly involved with you and me. This is about me. About decisions I need to make in my life.”

  “Do you still want my help with Rebeka Hibbens?”

  “Of course I do,” Lauren assured him. “But I’ve got at least a month—probably more like five months—of work to do on my own. I’ve tons of rewriting and integrating of Jackie’s materials, and I’m still collecting new data: from the library, Jackie’s notes …” She paused before adding, “When I called Deborah to cancel my meeting—as I promised I would—she said she might let me read the chronicle after all.”

  There was a long pause. “Do you think that’s smart?” Gabe finally asked. “Are you going to do it?”

  “Let me work on the book on my own for a while,” Lauren said, avoiding a direct answer. “And let me work through my personal stuff. Then we’ll talk about everything.”

  “I’m not going to overstep and try to tell you what to do about your personal life.” Gabe’s voice was hollow with resignation. “Although I wish to hell you wouldn’t close me out—”

  “I’m not closing you out,” Lauren protested. “It’s just more than I can handle right now.”

  “Whatever,” Gabe had said. “I just want you to think twice about getting involved with Deborah and her cult. You know she’s nuts—and the rest of them probably are too. I still feel very strongly that they, and their chronicle, should be left alone.”