Witches of The Wood

by Skylar Finn

  Paul hadn’t liked it, but I dug in my heels and insisted he meet me at school. There was a long strange pause on the phone and then he said “okay” tonelessly. Like he was mad. Like I cared if Paul was mad or not.

  When he got there, instead of even addressing my lesson, Paul immediately wanted to whine about why did he have to meet me at school? It really was an inconvenience for him, and—

  “Why?” I interrupted him. “Why is it such an inconvenience for you?”

  Paul pursed his lips. This was the part where he’d act entitled to be this huge jerk, like everything was out to get him and not the other way around.

  “My studio is my workspace,” he said. “I’m providing a valuable service. It’s not for you to tell me where that happens—”

  “Other coaches come to their students’ houses,” I said. “Why don’t you?”

  “I’m very successful at what I do,” he said. “I could have any number of students. I have a waiting list that’s pages long.” I thought of a list filled with names of other girls and I shuddered.

  “Yeah, but you don’t wanna touch them, right?” I stared at him.

  Paul’s eyes widened. For a second, I thought he might hit me.

  “Martha, I admit I feel close to you, but it’s as if you’re my family.” He rested a hand lightly on my shoulder. Like, what did I just say?

  “Get your hands off of me,” I hissed.

  He dropped his hand, stung. “I just—”

  “You’re being a pervert, Paul,” I said. “You pretend you’re being friendly, but why are you touching me in the first place? You’re forty-five years old, touching a sixteen-year-old girl. What do you think people would say about that?”

  Paul looked afraid. I realized then that he kept doing what he was doing because he thought he could get away with it. He’d keep pushing the boundaries of what was appropriate, to see how far he could go and how much he could get away with. That was what people like Paul did. And I was glad that I said something.

  “Is everything okay in here?”

  My chorus director, Mr. Powell, popped his head into the music room.

  “Everything’s fine,” said Paul.

  “No,” I said. “It’s not fine.”

  Paul looked like somebody who had just been pushed off a cliff and was now struggling for a handhold.

  Mr. Powell came into the room, looking suspiciously at Paul.

  “What’s the matter, Martha?” he asked, concerned.

  “My parents are firing Paul, and he’s not taking it well,” I said sweetly. Everybody said I was like this angel, but I wasn’t. I could turn on a dime when I had to. “He’s making me uncomfortable.”

  Mr. Powell turned on Paul, his eyes narrowed.

  “I think you’d better leave,” he said.

  “I have a pre-existing financial arrangement with Martha’s parents,” he protested. “You can’t just order me around.”

  “Be that as it may,” said Mr. Powell. “You’re on school grounds. You have no right to be here if I say you don’t. And I’ve asked you to leave. If you’d like to get security down here, we can do that.”

  Paul grabbed his jacket and fled the music room with one last glance over his shoulder. I glared at him, filled with pure hate. Come for me again and see what happens.

  “Are you all right, Martha?” Mr. Powell looked concerned. He had three daughters and he was a teacher. Mr. Powell was like the anti-Paul.

  “I’m okay, I just think he’s really sleazy, and there’s something wrong with him.” I hated myself for it, but I was almost starting to cry a little bit. This had been bothering me for months now. Seriously bothering me. Like, keeping-me-awake-at-night bothering me.

  “I’ll give you a ride home.” Mr. Powell went to get his jacket from the chair behind his desk.

  “Mr. Powell?”

  “Yes, dear?” His voice was so kind, I almost lost it right then.

  “Will you come inside to talk to my parents with me?” I asked. “I’m afraid they won’t believe me.”

  “Of course,” said Mr. Powell quietly.

  He opened the music room door for me, turned out all the lights, and locked the door behind us as we left.

  The next day, I was walking home from school. I took my usual shortcut, through the woods. When Mr. Powell came to my house and explained what happened with Paul in the music room, my mom cried. My dad got this very dark look on his face and disappeared into his study. Probably calling the lawyer, knowing him.

  “Why didn’t you think we’d believe you?” she asked.

  “Because you want me to be a star,” I said.

  “Oh, honey.” She took me in her arms, the way she used to when I was little. “There are so much more important things than that. Like that you’re safe. And you’re happy.”

  I felt kind of bad then for underestimating my parents. I thought the thing they cared about most was my singing, but I guess it was me.

  I was crossing the clearing that led to the nature trail that came out behind my house when I heard a crunch. I whirled around.

  It was Paul.

  I reached into my pocket for my Mace. My hand closed firmly around it.

  Had he seriously followed me home from school? I knew he was a pervert, I didn’t know he was a psycho. I thought that if my parents fired him and I never had to go back to his stupid studio again, it would be enough.

  My dad was talking about restraining orders and all this stuff—I was actually supposed to be getting a ride from my mom, but her Pilates ran late, so I said Mr. Powell was taking me home. I didn’t feel like waiting around for him to get done monitoring detention and I kind of thought they were overreacting. I walked home from school five thousand times, why did I have to stop because of Paul? I stood up to Paul. He was out of the picture. Done deal.

  Or so I thought.

  “What are you doing here, Paul?” I demanded. In my mind it was like, you need to blind this person. Stab him in the neck with a stick and bash him in the head with a rock, if you have to.

  He held up his hands and didn’t come any closer.

  “I had to talk to you,” he said. “I was afraid I’d never see you again.”

  “That’s the whole point,” I said, pulling the Mace from my coat and squeezing my phone in the other. Could I run? How fast was he? How far could I get?

  “I didn’t mean to upset you,” he said, pleadingly. “I know I’ve been inappropriate with you, Martha, and I just want to apologize. I wish we were the same age, but we’re not. I imagined that we were, because there’s no one like you in the world. I know that we can’t work together anymore, but I hope you can forgive me. I want to tell you that I’m sorry and it will never happen again.”

  I took out my phone as I backed slowly away.

  “Who are you calling?” Paul sounded frantic.

  “You followed me home from school through the woods, Paul,” I said as I dialed 911. “Who do you think I’m calling?”

  “No!” Paul came toward me, looking frantic. “Please, I’ll leave. I’ll never contact you again, just don’t—”

  “Get away from me!” I screamed.

  Paul froze. His eyes were wild and his breath was short. My brain was going a million miles a minute, like killpaulkillpaulkillpaul. Before it’s too late! Before he kills you.

  Paul stared at me. Or at least, I thought he was staring at me. His eyes were glazed, fixed on a point somewhere behind my shoulder. His mouth was slack.

  I knew I needed to run or call for help or fight, but something about Paul made me confused. He wasn’t coming any closer to me. I don’t think he was even looking at me anymore.

  He was looking over my shoulder, and he looked afraid.

  I woke up screaming. I think I might have screamed myself awake. I was drenched in sweat, and my heart was pounding.

  Martha Hope sat at the foot of my bed, regarding me solemnly. I understood then that this had been no ordinary dream. I had dreamed her memorie
s. I sat up in bed.

  “Did he hurt you?” I asked.

  I don’t know, she said. I can’t remember. It seems like he must have.

  “Was there someone else in the woods with you that day?” I asked. “Someone besides Paul, I mean.”

  That’s the thing, I don’t know, she said, and I could feel her frustration emanating from her in waves. I think Paul is an evil person, but I don’t know if he’s a murderer. But if it wasn’t Paul, who else could it have been?

  I didn’t want to tell Martha that her vocal coach had almost certainly killed her. Statistically speaking, it was more unlikely that he hadn’t. But in Mount Hazel, it was possible that it didn’t end there. It was a strange place, with different rules.

  And there were many kinds of evil in this world.

  21

  Protocol for Dangerous Witches

  No one seemed to know the missing guy’s name. This made tracking him down on the Internet a dubious prospect at best. I knew it started with a C, and most likely had an O as the second letter, but that was about it.

  I went to Risotto’s, thinking it better to conduct my investigation outside of the manor. And to see Peter, if I was being honest. I hadn’t spoken to him since the night before last, when I went with him to take Tamsin home after dinner. While I technically had his number, I would never have called him in a million years. But that didn’t mean I didn’t want to see him.

  The line was to the door and he was knee-deep in customers, so I chose a seat by the window—my favorite one—and cracked open my laptop. The first thing I started was my plan of action regarding Margo’s brand. It was getting more and more difficult to work the stranger things got. If I was just dealing with a spoiled pop star obsessed with convincing the public she’d become a serious artist, it would be enough of a challenge. But if I was, in fact, dealing with a spoiled pop star who was a witch murdering her entourage on the regular, it would make marketing her brand exponentially more difficult.

  It seemed reasonable, from this perspective, to first determine the likelihood of whether or not she had anything to do with the seemingly inexplicable absence of Connor-maybe-Colin. From there, I could determine whether to put in my two weeks’ (or two hours’) notice, depending on how ominous my findings were.

  Then there was the issue of what to do about my family. I wanted to accept what they’d told me and be excited about it, but there was just something about it that shook me to the core. What I’d seen in Martha’s memory was severely horrifying. I never wanted to see anything like that again.

  I didn’t want her hanging around, asking me to do things for her: an invisible girl no one else could see. What I really wanted was a powerful pharmaceutical cocktail of prescription drugs that would eradicate her from my line of sight entirely and enable me to forget that any of this had ever happened.

  But I couldn’t unsee what I had seen. I couldn’t shake the burden I felt; the sense of obligation. The feeling that if I didn’t help her, who would?

  And where was this kid? Connor or Colin? Why had no one called the police, or otherwise expressed concern that he dropped off the face of the planet after cracking from the pressure of picking up sandwiches for a questionable celebrity? There was a certain level of inefficiency to this whole operation that I found maddening. I just wanted to enter all those loose ends into a spreadsheet and organize them according to priority. So that’s exactly what I did.

  I’d just started my third column of questionable goings-on when Peter appeared across the table from me. I glanced up and saw that his line of customers had disappeared.

  “Working hard, I see.” He surveyed me over his tortoiseshell glasses.

  “Yeah.” I didn’t really know what to say to him. He was starting to make me really nervous. I kind of just wanted to get up and run away.

  “What do you do, exactly?” he said. “I never asked.”

  “Image. Branding. Damage control. Managing other people’s lives, basically.” I stopped short as something I’d never realized before occurred to me. “I kind of hate it, actually.”

  “What do you hate about it?” he asked.

  “Everything. I hate how shallow it is. I hate social media and I spend half my day on it. I hate lying about people who aren’t that great and making them look good.” I felt startled by my own admission. I’d never stopped to think about whether I liked it or not.

  “What would you rather do instead?” Peter asked. No one had ever asked me that before.

  “I don’t know.” I felt bewildered. “I guess I never really thought about it.”

  My father encouraged me to develop hard skills: practical, applicable ones I could translate into the economy of the future. He actually said that, “the economy of the future.” It was one of his favorite things to say, second only to “pragmatism.”

  “Maybe you should,” said Peter, regarding me thoughtfully. “What are you working on now?”

  “I’m not actually working on anything,” I admitted. “I’m trying to find this kid who used to be a PA for Margo.”

  “Colin?” said Peter, surprised.

  “You know him?” I stared at him in disbelief. Of course; he knew everything. Inwardly, I kicked myself for not just texting Peter in the first place. Peter was basically like Encyclopedia Brown, the Bartending Years.

  “Well, I did. When he was here.” Peter looked pensive as he thought about it. “He used to come in every day for coffee. Nervous, high-strung kid. I usually gave him decaf. He seemed like he could use it. He didn’t seem to like talking about the house much or what he was doing there.”

  “Did he ever say how he got the job?” I asked.

  “He was doing it for college credit. Some internship requirement he needed to graduate. He didn’t even know who Margo was. He was studying Entertainment Business and basically took the first position he could find. I guess he put it off till his last semester and was in a bit of a hurry.”

  “When was the last time you saw Colin?” I asked.

  “Did something happen to him?” Peter asked, raising his eyebrows. “Because these sound like questions I ask when something’s happened to someone.”

  “I mean, aside from the fact that nobody seems to know where he went or how to get ahold of him?” I said. “No.”

  Peter frowned, pulling out his phone. He tapped at the screen and studied it briefly.

  “He hasn’t updated any of his statuses in weeks, but he only updated them sporadically to begin with,” he said. “So it’s hard to say.”

  “Were you friends with him?” I asked.

  “Not beyond talking to him in order to serve his coffee. But the larger my network is, the more people I have at my disposal to question when I need to,” he said. He looked at his phone again. “This looks like his dad. I’ll message him and see what he says.”

  “Thanks,” I said, gratefully. I thought, it’s all in your head. Your family is strange. Everything can be solved if you only have the right spreadsheet.

  “Why the sudden need to investigate?” Peter glanced up from his phone. “What’s going on at that house, anyway? Besides a curious lack of professionalism on the part of your co-workers and a correlating penchant for drunkenness?”

  I noticed a slight edge in his voice when he said “your co-workers” and thought of Les’s reaction to him at dinner. I thought he was going to climb across the table and murder him before dessert.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Tamsin thinks there’s something…” I stopped before I said “evil.” “Seriously weird about them,” I continued. “This kid has disappeared; the house creeps me out. I’m distracted by meeting my mom. It’s kind of a sucky job overall, I would say.”

  “I have a couple of those,” said Peter. His phone chimed. He glanced at it. “According to Colin’s dad, he doesn’t typically hear from him the last six weeks of the semester. Too busy with school.” He typed a response.

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  “H
e wanted to know who I was and why I was asking. I said I was a friend he met during his internship and that I hadn’t heard from him for a while.” He sighed and put the phone down on the table, facedown. “Maybe he’ll be inspired to do something.”

  I wondered briefly if he didn’t want me to see his phone, then dismissed this thought as paranoia. “Do you think he will? Do something?”

  “Maybe.” Peter shrugged. “It’s insane to me how disengaged people have become, even from their own families. If I was away from home and didn’t call my dad for six weeks before there were cell phones and social media, he would have thought that I was dead. You know? It’s like, just because we’re so accessible all the time, people think we must be fine. Like if we weren’t, everyone would automatically know about it.”

  “Usually what people do know is heavily fabricated.” I thought of all the lies I invented for people on a daily basis. “You never really know where anybody’s at anymore.”

  “Where are you at?” Peter said suddenly. “With your…co-worker.”

  I was taken aback by his bluntness. I knew he didn’t like Les, for what I supposed were obvious reasons, but I hadn’t expected him to express it so forwardly.

  “I’m not anywhere with him,” I said. “I mean, I’m nowhere.”

  “Good,” he said, getting to his feet as the bell over the door rang. “I’m glad to hear it.”

  I watched him go behind the counter. This time, I did follow the urge to gather my things to leave. It wasn’t that I didn’t want Peter to be glad that I was definitely not with Les the Terrible. It was just that I wasn’t sure I was ready to hear it.

  I walked down the block, completely in my head and utterly unaware of my surroundings. It was little surprise, then, that I didn’t notice Tamsin until I collided with her a block away from Risotto’s.