Writing Wrongs: Crow’s Feet Coven, Book One

by Gael, Christine

  I typed a quick text back.

  Thanks for the offer but I got it under control. Wasn’t as bad as I thought, Mee-maw was exaggerating a bit. I’ll give you a call sometime tomorrow. Thanks for dinner, it was delicious.

  That done, I went upstairs to get a trash bag from the kitchen before moving on to cleaning up the closet, eighty-sixing broken picture frames that he’d carelessly tossed on the floor into the bag. Then, I swept the floor for any remaining shards of glass before moving on to re-boxing the items he’d left strewn about.

  Nearly twenty minutes later, I put the last box, the one that had previously contained the typewriter, back onto the shelf. I sat down, my legs still sore and my stomach still convulsing, and finally allowed myself to truly feel.

  And what I felt was agonizing.

  Wracking sobs rocked through me, like the grief of a thousand generations. I’d lost a piece of myself that I hadn’t known I’d been missing my whole life. What had I done to deserve this? Just days ago, I wanted nothing more than to get the typewriter out of my life. Now that it was gone, I would give anything to have it back.

  I sat that way for who knew how long before the sound of the front door opening interrupted my mourning. I grabbed the broom, holding it in front of me like a weapon for a brief moment, before the sound of Zoe’s voice reached my ears.

  “Cricket?”

  “I’m down here,” I said, frantically wiping the tears from my face and walking, as quiet as possible, to my computer desk. I sat down, hitting the power button on my computer and putting on the most nonchalant face I could manage as the door swung open.

  “Hey,” I said, looking up from the screen as if I’d been engrossed in what I was doing online.

  Zoe gaped at me. “Hey? Don’t hey me, what the hell is going on?”

  “Nothing,” I said, trying not to cringe at how strained my voice sounded.

  “You’ve obviously been crying,” she said, pointing to my face. “Your face looks like you got stung by a thousand bees and your voice is all husky. Cut the crap and tell me what’s going on.”

  It wasn’t a request and I shifted in my seat.

  “I was just watching something really touching,” I said, knowing she wouldn’t buy it the second the words left my mouth. “It was, a, um, video of this pitbull who adopted these baby ducklings and treated them like her puppies. How cute is that?”

  “Real cute,” Mee-maw cut in as she came into view from behind Zoe. “But that video is, like, two years old, so try again,” Mee-maw said, a trace of her old harshness coming into her voice. “We know something is up.”

  I opened my mouth to speak again but was cut off by Zoe.

  “Mee-maw said you were having her do some secret research for you on witches for some ‘book’ you’re writing,” she said, making air quotes with her scarlet-tipped fingers. “Given how weird you’ve been acting, and the typewriter stuff that you were going on about before her heart attack, I can only assume that whatever is bothering you now is related. It’s time to fess up, Crick.”

  Strangely, a tremendous sense of relief flowed through me. Backed into a corner now, I really had no choice, and something about that was so freeing. I nodded, resolved to tell them everything, for better or for worse. They deserved to know the truth now that the typewriter was potentially putting us all in danger.

  “Okay. I’ll tell you. First things first, though,” I said. “I’m sure it’ll be hard for you guys to believe me, but I’ll make sure you do, soon. Until then, I hereby invoke the pact of Samwise Gamgee.”

  Mee-maw scowled and cocked her head. “Pact of whoosiewhatsit?”

  Zoe nodded, eyeing me speculatively. “He’s a character from Lord of the Rings who is super loyal. It’s something dumb we came up with when we were younger. If we invoke the pact, we make a promise to always support each other, even if we think the other is wrong. I think the kids today call it being ‘ride or die’.” She turned to me, nodding. “Fine. I agree, now spill it.”

  And spill it I did.

  For the next half hour, I spilled my guts. I told them about the Brett Copeland shark attack incident that I’d left Mee-maw in the dark on, the stuff I found out at the library, about how strange Connie had been acting, and the incident with the burglar. They had barely spoken or made comment the whole way through, though Zoe had begun to tear up a bit when the incident with Mee-maw’s heart attack came up.

  When I finished, they both just stared at me, looking shell-shocked.

  “So…” I said, trying awkwardly to break the silence.

  Mee-maw nodded sagely. “Yeah. It all kinda makes sense, I guess.”

  Despite my still-burning fingers and the pit that seemed to have been bored into my stomach, just hearing those words made me feel better than I had in days.

  “Does it?” Zoe asked hesitantly. “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think you’re making it up or anything, and I promised to support you no matter what, right? But this is…crazy. I can hardly wrap my head around it.”

  Luckily, I had just the thing to help her along. I pulled out my phone. “Have you guys been watching the news lately?”

  Zoe shrugged. “A little bit, why?”

  “Remember that giraffe that escaped the zoo last week?”

  She nodded slowly and I held out my phone. “That was taken the day before that giraffe escaped from the zoo. Check the timestamp.”

  Zoe gasped and Mee-maw’s eyes opened wide as she zeroed in on the dated photo.

  “Well, fuck a duck, would you look at that.”

  Chapter 15

  We were all sitting around the kitchen table twenty minutes later, drinking tea as we hashed out what to do next.

  “Are you sure you shouldn’t go to the walk-in clinic for your wrist?” Zoe asked, brow furrowed as she eyed it dubiously.

  It was red and a little swollen, but I’d had enough broken bones from playing superheroes as a kid to know it wasn’t. “I’m good.”

  On the outside, at least.

  Zoe seemed to pick up on the fact that the wound was the least of my concerns. “We need to figure out what we’re going to do about the typewriter. Clearly, you need it. It’s a part of you now. Not to mention what might happen if it’s in the wrong hands. So how do we find it?”

  “We don’t have to. We just wait.”

  Zoe eyed Mee-maw and the old woman shrugged.

  “Think back on the rest of Cricket’s story,” she continued. “She threw the typewriter out in a dumpster, but it was back on her desk the next day. Why wouldn’t the same thing happen now?”

  My heart lifted at the thought of the dull ache in my stomach and the burning in my hands being gone overnight, instead of being present indefinitely. In my panic, I hadn’t even considered it.

  “You’re right, it’d make a lot of sense…”

  Zoe nodded in agreement. “I guess we’ll know for sure soon enough.”

  I wasn’t sure about ‘soon enough’, but I clung to the nugget of hope their words had given me.

  “In the meantime, we’re best served by figuring out who sent that guy to take the typewriter and why.”

  “You don’t think he could just be working alone?” Zoe asked.

  “The other strangeness going on just doesn’t make sense unless it’s a whole organization behind it. How’d he know that the typewriter was here? Why was Connie acting so strangely? She clearly wanted Cricket to have it, and then she ghosted her. It’s almost like someone got to her first,” Mee-maw said.

  Zoe rolled her eyes. “Oh, Lord. Not the Illuminati nonsense again.”

  Mee-maw glared at her. “Wouldn’t count them out, is all I’m saying. Or could be some other powerful conglomerate. I don’t have any solid proof, yet, but I bet we’ll find out that I was right as we dig deeper. In the meantime, let me show you two something.” She spun around, bustling down the hall without waiting for a response. Zoe and I exchanged a glance and shrugged. For someone near death not a week before, she s
ure had a lot of vim and vigor now. Amazing what a good conspiracy could do for a body.

  We trailed after her until we arrived at her bedroom and, as we milled around at the doorway, she waved us inside impatiently. That in itself was weird. Since we were kids, she’d always kept her personal space private. I could hardly remember the last time I’d been inside the master suite. But what we saw as she opened the door was even weirder.

  “Whoa,” Zoe murmured.

  A huge whiteboard was mounted on the wall, covered in newspaper clippings and printed out forum posts about witches, all pinned to it with scribbled notes written on each that presumably explained their significance.

  “You happened to have a ten foot whiteboard just lying around when I asked you to do some research?” I asked, bemused.

  “You never know when something is going to come up,” she said. “I have a few others if you want to see them. Have you guys heard about those Bigfoot sightings in the surrounding area a few years back? I have a theory about that, too…” She began to lead us toward the closet.

  “No,” Zoe said, stifling a laugh, “nope, it’s fine. Tell us about this one.”

  “I’ve been working on this since Cricket asked me last night. I feel like I found some pretty solid information. Let me take you through it.” She approached the board, pointing to a group of papers on the bottom of the left half.

  I squinted to get a better look at them and saw a group of several forum posts and a historical article that must’ve been taken from some database.

  “These were the first things I found,” she said. “There were some weird things happening in Rocky Knoll if you go back to the 1600s. According to the posts I found, the town was a site for some of the first witch trials in the whole country. The interesting part, however, is that they also claim that the burnings and hangings continued sporadically into the 1800s, long after the last known witch trial in recorded American history, but it was wiped out of any scholarly historical record. Except one…”

  She gestured to the article, which I squinted to read without my glasses.

  “What’s it say, in a nutshell?”

  “It lays out evidence of the witch burnings in the 1600s, too, and floats the theory of a conspiracy to cover up the ones a couple hundred years later,” Mee-maw said.

  “But no proof of those?”

  “Well, if there was, then it would be a part of recorded history, duh,” she said, looking a little annoyed. “Don’t worry about that for now, I have some other stuff that might help.”

  I nodded, signaling for her to go ahead.

  She grabbed the document at the center of the board, pulling it off and turning it toward Zoe and I. “Take a peep of this. I’ll wait while you guys read it.”

  It was a picture of a journal entry written on faded yellow paper that appeared to have been folded many times.

  July 1, 1885

  Dear Diary,

  Just the three of us are left, and of course the Everlasting Conservator, to whom we’ve entrusted with the lives of our children and the tools of our craft. We can feel them closing in on us and we have little time left. We have nowhere to turn and it seems doubtful that we’ll make it out of this situation alive. Our clairvoyant has countered their plans so far but she fears it won’t be enough for much longer. This is likely to be my final entry.

  Long live the Crow’s Feet Coven,

  A. Cromwell

  “Where’d you find that?” I asked, shivering somewhat at the mention of a clairvoyant and their predictive ability.

  “It was on one of the forums I frequent. The person who found it said they found it in their parents’ stuff after they died. It was just a single paper that’d been ripped out of a diary,” she said, “pretty interesting, if you ask me.”

  “Could that not have just been fabricated by whoever made the post? Did you find anything else that makes you think some secret organization is behind the killings?” Zoe asked, though I could see she was almost as shaken as I was.

  “I’m not done yet, so pipe down,” Mee-maw snapped, slipping into full Warden-mode. “Wait until you see what I found next. Are you guys familiar with the pentacle?”

  “The star thingy in the circle?” Zoe asked.

  Mee-maw laughed. “Yeah. It’s supposed to be used in spells to energize items placed on it and it’s an item commonly associated with witchcraft. Well, look at this,” she said, pointing to a black-and-white photograph with several gravestones clustered together in a cemetery that were inscribed with the symbol, surrounded by a few that weren’t. They were all dated with dates in the early 1800s.

  “Is that here in Rocky Knoll?” I squeaked.

  “You bet your sweet bippy. It was here,” she said, pointing to a second photograph that had the circle of gravestones that had been around them but without the inscribed ones in the middle. “Someone went through all the trouble of removing those gravestones, the first photo was taken in the early 1900s while this one was taken in 1984. Who would bother doing something like that? It wouldn’t be easy to remove them. It’s almost like someone was trying to hide something, someone with access to a lot of resources. So, in conclusion, I think you’re a clairvoyant witch and there’s a secret organization, likely the Illuminati, that is hunting you.”

  “And you found all this in the past twenty-four hours?” I marveled, still staring at the gravestones as goose bumps broke out over my arms.

  “Yep.”

  “Okay, but still…where does the Illuminati fit into all this?” Zoe asked, frowning.

  “They tend to be behind all this kind of stuff,” she said casually. “They basically have their hands in everything.”

  I laughed, despite the perilous situation I was clearly in. Since the Illuminati was as good a guess as any, I opted not to argue with her. Fact was, it didn’t really matter much whether it was them—if they even existed—or some unknown cabal of witch-hunters. Point was, this was likely much bigger than just me, Connie and the burglar who had stolen the typewriter.

  “So why didn’t they just kill me like they did with the witch in the letter?”

  Mee-maw scratched her chin, considering it. “Maybe getting the typewriter was the goal this time. People don’t get a pass on just murdering folks nowadays. At least, not most times. The typewriter is all that matters to them, I guess. Think of what you could do with predictive power like that, if you had the resources of an entire organization to follow up on what the typewriter predicts. You could own Wall Street. The world, even.”

  The thought of that much power was terrifying.

  Zoe leaned in, picking the picture of the diary entry back up and pointing toward the top of it. “Look here. It says that they entrusted ‘the tools of their craft’ to the conservator. I bet they meant magical items, sort of like the typewriter. Maybe they got rid of them so they wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands?”

  I nodded. “That’d make a lot of sense, but what the heck is a conservator?”

  “Because I didn’t know about Cricket’s magical typewriter,” she paused to give me the stink eye, “I didn’t much pay attention to that part. I had assumed they meant wands or spell-books or some such. But now…” Mee-maw shuffled over to her computer, which was already logged in, and typed away in her hunt-and-peck typing method that seemed totally at odds with the amount of time she spent on the computer. “According to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, a conservator is ‘one that preserves from injury or violation: protector’ or ‘one that is responsible for the care, restoration, and repair of archival and museum articles’.”

  “So, in this case, it’s someone who takes care of magical items? Or, they could be seen as someone who protects the coven from injury,” Zoe added.

  Zoe and I locked gazes and both spoke at once.

  “Connie.”

  My mind rushed through all the events that’d led us up to this point. “That picture I found in the library. It really was her from all the way back then. It makes perfect
sense, if she is the Everlasting Conservator.”

  Mee-maw was grinning ear to ear. “Yup. Sounds about right to me. We look around the same age, so I thought it was weird that I didn’t know her, seeing as how she said she lived here until she was in her thirties. It all makes sense now. We’ll have to pay her a visit and try to figure out why she was dodging you last time.”

  “Let’s give her a call right now,” Zoe said. “I’ll look up the number for her shop.”

  I put my arm up, stopping her. “I have it. I called her a bit before you guys got here and she didn’t answer.”

  “Did you leave a message?” Mee-maw demanded.

  “And say what? ‘Hi, Connie, someone stole my magical typewriter. Call me back’?” I shook my head. “Seemed like a bad idea.”

  “Give it another try,” Zoe urged. “Maybe she’ll pick up this time. We need to figure out what she’s hiding.”

  I grabbed my phone and pulled up her contact, hitting the call button. “Sure,” I said, putting the phone to my ear. It went straight to voicemail.

  “Hello, you’ve reached Connie’s Curiosities. I’ll be out of town for a few days and the shop will be closed until I get back. Leave a message after the beep and I’ll return your call as soon as I can.”

  Strange coincidence, given the timing of the burglary and the fact that her outgoing message was different just a couple hours before. I was starting to doubt coincidences even existed, at this point…something was fishy.

  Had she changed her mind about me having the typewriter and sent someone to get it back? I’d have given it back last time I was at her shop. In fact, I’d thrown it in the trash on the way back. What the heck was going on here?

  “Hey, Connie, it’s Cricket Hawthorne. I was wondering if I could speak to you again about the item I purchased. Give me a call back when you get a chance,” I said, hitting the red button to hang up. I looked at Zoe with a frown. “It went straight to voicemail. She said she’ll be out of town for a few days and the shop’ll be closed.”

  “Super weird timing,” Zoe said. “I’m going to keep an eye on the shop and see if she comes in or out. It smells like bull-pucky to me. She’s not the only one we need to keep an eye on, though,” she added, eyes narrowed. “I think it’s a little suspicious that Ethan and Patrick both got involved with Cricket right at the time she got the typewriter. I’ll keep an eye on Connie’s shop, but we should do some digging on them both until we can get in contact with her.”