A Murder of Magpies

by Sarah Bromley

  I sat in the Chevy, fingers splayed on the foggy window. The clouds rippled with every shade of gray and blue like God scooped the ocean’s froth and threw it skyward for a change. A storm was brewing.

  “We can’t trust her. She wants something, Dati,” I said as he reached across my lap and muttered something about how doors of old beater cars sometimes stuck. The Chevy’s doors never stuck. “Stop it. I won’t leave until you tell me why you insist we dump our low-profile shtick.”

  “It’s not a shtick,” he replied. “It’s who we are, and who we are doesn’t work here, Magpie. Monsignor’s right. We need to fit in better. I’m going to some heinous Chamber of Commerce meeting, so you’re not the only one suffering.”

  “But hanging out with Chloe?” I argued.

  “She’s a teenage girl, not the devil.”

  “We can be one in the same.”

  He snorted. “Don’t I know.”

  I climbed out of the car with a canvas bag on my arm, and before I could change my mind, Dad was gone. I trudged up the leaf-strewn sidewalk where I fingered the cutesy garland of candy corn and pumpkin lights strung across the Halvorsens’ porch. An inflatable pink octopus wearing a witch’s hat decorated the lawn for Halloween. “The Dunwich Horror,” this was not. Lovecraft would shudder at this tentacled abomination.

  Maybe Jonah and I hadn’t exactly been approachable, but since coming to Wisconsin, the times classmates asked me to hang out numbered less than five. Keep saying no, and eventually people stop asking. Even when Jonah dated Chloe, she and I were nothing more than passing hellos. Then that morning she sent an email begging me to come over.

  Maybe it was Find-the-Loneliest-Loser Day, and she decided I was her pet charity case. Her usual method was to give the underlings enough attention to ensure they’d wear a button with her smile plastered across it around student election time and that the nuns and priests noticed her saintliness, but really, never count on Chloe to be less artificial than the fruit flavors in a pack of Gummy Bears.

  “Vayda!” she called while bounding down the steps, dressed in a purple plaid skirt with coordinating tights and turtleneck. “I’m so glad you came! I half-expected Jonah to be with you. It’s like you can’t do anything without him.”

  “Oh, you know. Protective brother. You wanted me to scrapbook with you?”

  Ushered into a home that smelled of cinnamon buns, I followed Chloe through a kitchen that couldn’t squeeze any more beige into the design. Act like everything’s normal, that you hang out with her all the time, I reminded myself. Dad hadn’t asked much of me, and I tried to keep that in mind as she led me downstairs. My jaw dropped. Dad had no idea that nothing was normal about scrapmania in the Halvorsens’ basement.

  Ribbons cascaded off a shelf in a neatly organized waterfall by a lagoon of papers arranged by color, theme, and thematic colors. Packages were labeled “punch-outs” and “die-cutters.” Who knew scrapbooking was so violent? A bookcase was loaded with scrapbooks marked “school.” I’d long been convinced Chloe remembered the name, favorite color, and zodiac sign of every classmate. Now I suspected she made scrapbook pages with that information.

  She fluffed her Nordic-blond hair. “Jonah said you have tons of scrapbooks.”

  Jonah, of course. His fight with Marty made him interesting again.

  Seizing my bag, she dove into the pages of my scrapbook and creased her forehead at the seedpods and leaves pressed in wax paper. “This is unusual. I might be able to brighten up this…layout.”

  Perhaps the buttons I scrounged from Dad’s shop and blue jay feathers found in the woods weren’t what Chloe expected. She gathered an armload of glittery embellishments.

  “You aren’t putting that junk in my book,” I blurted.

  “You need help. Your style’s natural. Like organic.”

  Organic? Was this Chloe-code for creepy-girl-who-collects-dead-things? I wasn’t surprised. She leaned in closer, enough to release a wave of fizzy currents. Even if I wanted to be offended, I couldn’t—her cheerfulness was emotional cotton candy. Yet when I picked up a pack of her shimmering stickers, that giggle, which left my barriers on a sugar-high, died away, insecure and tense. She’d left emotional residue on the package, a touch of the real Chloe, not the one I avoided every day at school. The change was enough of a jolt that I gawked at her; the way her glossed lips pressed together in thought, how her eyelashes batted—she had a few false ones glued in. She probably hoped no one ever looked at her so closely.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I muttered.

  “You are so bizarre.”

  For a while, we worked separately. She didn’t touch my extra supplies, but I spied a spool of leather cord similar to a magenta choker Mom wore and snatched it, flipping to a pencil doodle of Mom that Dad scribbled on a Thai menu outside Memphis. I wove the cord through some holes at the paper’s edge.

  “Is there a method to your madness?” Chloe teased as she stacked some homemade cards.

  Ignoring her, I asked, “So what do you want to know about Jonah? I know he’s why you invited me. Why don’t you ask him yourself? He’d like it if you called.”

  Her cheeks blushed, but she said, “Is he suspended?”

  “For all of next week,” I confirmed. “He’ll be in the class for deviants.”

  “Jonah’s a deviant all right.” She gave a husky giggle. “I overheard Monsignor say Jonah should be expelled. Sister Tremblay said no, and no one messes with her. She’s a…”

  “Megabitch?” I asked.

  “You said it, not me.”

  Such thoughts about a nun should send me to the Confessional, but there was something off about that woman. From her dull eyes to the way she floated. I was used to plump, chatty nuns who got chalk on the backs of their black skirts. One of them, Sister Mary Elena, fell in the parking lot last winter and looked like a penguin sliding on ice. Sister Tremblay wasn’t like them. She wasn’t like anybody in Black Orchard, and that made her like us. Untrustworthy.

  “In all the time Jonah and I dated, I didn’t realize he has such a temper,” Chloe interrupted my thoughts. “Granted, he and Marty haven’t gotten along since, well, you know.”

  I cracked my knuckles. My hands were hot again. “Jonah doesn’t forgive easily, and he doesn’t forget the past. Especially not when it comes to Marty.”

  “I guess not.” Her stare held me a second too long. “Anyway, he should be careful. People talk about him. About both of you, really.”

  Great. Exactly what we needed.

  Chloe rose from the scrapbooking table and motioned me to follow her upstairs to her bedroom. An ornate wooden bed swallowed much of the room, and some pungent smell—the wet rot of mildew—emanated from between the cracks in the floorboards. The clouds had whipped into a dark swarm, and I could hardly tell where I was going. She grabbed some matches from her nightstand, scratched one across the flint and paper, and brought the flame to a candle’s wick on her dresser. The fire guttered and rose in a smoky point.

  Thunder grumbled as Chloe brought out a junky white box. “You ever see one of these?”

  The box read Ouija and contained a board painted with letters, numbers, and a Yes in one corner, a No in the other. Goodbye dead center in the top. Spirits talked through a plastic triangle, a planchette. Fortunetelling was nothing new to me. Mom read tarot cards and taught me palmistry. She’d also believed spirit boards were the devil’s playthings.

  “This is a bad idea,” I said.

  Chloe pulled me to the floor and giggled. “Are you scared?”

  “No. Just—” I had to be careful how I answered. “I come from a superstitious family.”

  “It won’t hurt you,” Chloe insisted. She opened the box, tossed the lid on her quilt, and dumped out the board. “You’re doing this, and what happens stays between us. I swear to God.”

  Her eyes flicked to the s
ilver cross hanging above her bed. She vowed her honesty on that cross. Promises made on a cross, if broken, brought upon a curse.

  The board sat between us, and the planchette was a celluloid triangle, once white but jaundiced with age. Chloe placed her index and middle fingers on one side.

  “Come on, Vayda,” she coaxed. “You’re not afraid of a little game, are you?”

  I wasn’t about to be called chicken, but Chloe had no idea what she asked of me. I was wedged between fitting in like Dad wanted and my superstitions, but I ultimately had to live with my father, not my ancestors and their beliefs. My barriers rose, steeling against any residue left behind by past hands, and I placed my fingers on the game piece.

  The planchette bounced.

  “No way,” Chloe whispered. “You feel that?”

  “Shut up.” I teased and tried to sound dismissive. “It was the wind.”

  But there wasn’t a draft.

  Rain plinked off the windows. In the storm-darkened room, the hollows in her cheeks were sickly. I’d never seen her so unwell. It was the bad light, nothing more. Wasn’t it?

  “Spirits,” she began, talking to the board as she tried not to laugh from nerves, maybe from the ridiculousness of hoping the Ouija board had power, “tell me a secret about Vayda.”

  “What? Why me?”

  “Quiet!” She noticed my fingers lifting off the planchette. “Don’t you dare let go!”

  I choked on a reply when the celluloid triangle moved in a lazy circle across the board. Chloe was moving it. She had to be moving it. Yet emotions never lied, and she felt spooked.

  The planchette spiraled inward on the alphabet before coming to rest on the M. From there, it skated to U. A chill shot down my veins to my hands.

  “M-u-r-d-” Chloe read aloud as the triangle dashed from letter to letter.

  Shit. I didn’t like how this felt, and the planchette moved too fast for either of us to control it. I could tell Chloe that Murdock was a family name. She didn’t have to know. It could be a coincidence—

  M-u-r-d-e-

  That wasn’t how to spell Murdock.

  Lightning cracked close outside, and a blue-white flash reflected off the board’s sheen. I ran my tongue along my lips, and the nervousness streaming from Chloe soared until the flutter of energy in my fingertips grew so strong the planchette vibrated. An acrid smell, something burning, hit my nose. The legs of the triangle began to melt. I yanked my fingers away but not before the planchette settled on one last letter.

  M-u-r-d-e-r.

  ***

  We didn’t speak during the drive home. Leeriness squeezed Chloe’s expression, and the evergreens jammed the road’s shoulders, growing wilder away from her safe suburbia. After the Ouija board incident, she decided to take me home. She hadn’t asked if I was ready to leave. Before we left, she let me wash my hands, observing as I murmured the prayers my mother swore would remove bad spirits. The storm passed by the time she placed the board under her bed and blew out the candle, but the afternoon sky remained tinged by fireplace smoke and threats of sleet if the wind grew colder.

  “I forgot how crazy isolated it is by your house. Do you like living out here?”

  “It’s home,” I replied and hugged my bag of scrapbooks.

  “Well, I guess you can’t complain about nosy neighbors.”

  Just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean no one’s there. The evergreens melded into a blur of dark green and shadow. Plenty of places someone could hide between the trees.

  “Vayda?” Chloe said my name as if she’d called me a couple of times.

  “Sorry.”

  She slowed and swerved into my driveway. “What happened at my house—” I didn’t know if she would finish, but I waited. Being Chloe, that didn’t take long. “I think we both shouldn’t talk about it.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t tell anyone who matters you were with the likes of me.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “I’m giving you grief.” I cracked a half-smile. “It was the storm, right?”

  “Right.”

  As she steered up the drive, the trees hunched over the road. Above, a gray sunbeam pierced the clouds. Someone was crouched on the front steps. My hand gripped the car door. No one but Jonah should be home, and that boy wasn’t Jonah. He had a vagabond-poet air, dark trousers and shirt, scuffed combat boots, his fingers laced in the pages of a paperback. Messy, auburn hair hung over his forehead as his head bobbed in time with music from his headphones.

  Ward.

  Chloe shut off the car and waved me ahead, begging off to call her mom, and I approached the steps where I cast a shadow over Ward. He squinted as he peeled off his headphones.

  “You’re blocking my light.”

  “There is no light, gadjo. Too many clouds.” I pointed to the open book. “What are you reading?”

  “Tennessee Williams.”

  I pushed my hair over my shoulder and peeked into his script. Pencil underlined sections of the play’s text, scrunched writing in the margins. “Williams, huh? You reading it for school?”

  “Nope,” he answered. “I have nothing better to do.”

  He wasn’t being sarcastic.

  “Everybody knows about ‘The Glass Menagerie,’” I rambled, checking the windows for any sign of Jonah. Ward didn’t turn away from his book, but I kept on because not talking about Williams meant asking him why he was here. “‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ is good, though I’m partial to ‘Sweet—”

  “—Bird of Youth.’” He showed me the book cover and offered it to me. My barriers rose, and I examined the binding. Old, worn from many readings. Ward tilted his head. “What are you doing?”

  “My family works with antiques. Jonah likes old books, so it’s habit. Whoever wrote in it hurt the value but makes it interesting.”

  He took back the book. “I wrote in it.”

  I hadn’t yet stopped cringing when Chloe joined us and held out her hand, which he regarded as though offered a poison apple. She asked, “You’re new, right?”

  “Well, I’m not old,” he muttered.

  Her perpetual grin faltered before she reached for the door. “I’m gonna see what Jonah’s up to. God help you, Vayda.”

  She let herself into my house, leaving me with Ward who slipped on his headphones and snickered as she disappeared. “That girl ditched you.”

  “She couldn’t handle your cheery disposition. Not the best way to make friends.”

  “What if I don’t want friends?”

  “I get it. You don’t play well with others. But everyone wants friends, especially guys who need to be cool by saying they don’t.”

  Ward smiled. His teeth were straight but for one too-sharp canine. “If that were true, you’d have friends other than your brother.”

  Touché.

  “What are you doing here?” I finally asked. “You’re outside reading when it could storm again any second.”

  “I had some time to kill.”

  “And if another thunderstorm came along?” I asked.

  “I’d knock on the door, or, you know, become a human lightning rod.”

  Ward studied the house with the oddly angled roof and copper awnings. It wasn’t the homiest place. Drafty on the inside while the flagstone exterior needed more maintenance than Dad had time to work on. Some rocks had broken away, mortar crumbling against the blustery wind. Cracks marred the slate roof; the gutters rusted. Water from the earlier rain gushed down the drain and pooled near our feet in a black soup. Across the yard, the weathervane atop the barn groaned, and Ward glanced over both shoulders. “Where are the gargoyles?”

  “Since it’s daytime, they’re on the north side in the shade,” I answered. He laughed—score one for Vayda—and I pushed open the front door. “Don’t worry. It’s not haunted.”

  He reached for m
y hand to help him stand. I backed away from his outstretched fingers, but he grabbed my hand anyway, discharging a zap of electricity. The surprise jolt hiccupped in my throat as he rose. Maybe six inches taller than my five-foot frame, he stood close enough for his knee to bump against my long skirt. My pulse struggled to calm down. No boy ever got this close, near enough to smell skin that was clean but metallic. His skinny wrists opened into wide palms, his fingers long with knuckles like knots of burled wood. Scars new and old mangled his skin. They were hands that had worked. I knew these hands.

  I’m around. And I know what you can do.

  An anxious undercurrent needled the air between our palms. Pulling. Repelling.

  “You okay?” he asked. “It’s the scars, isn’t it? They’re ugly.”

  “They’re not ugly,” I answered, “only unexpected. What happened?”

  “Nothing happened. I work with metal. Sometimes it bites.”

  If he was at all self-conscious about the mess of his hands, it didn’t show, nor could I sense it, and that was a relief. I pointed him inside. The door clicked behind me. We had a guest in the house, two if Chloe counted.

  No matter where we’d lived, my parents mixed their traditions with southern hospitality. Southern hospitality got my mother killed. I was in the north now, but southern habits lingered like gray tendrils of Spanish moss hanging off cypress trees.

  I prepared glasses of iced tea for our guests and brought them to the living room. Jonah perched on the couch with Chloe taking the seat closest to him. She angled toward him, and I sensed his barriers. Yet through his wall, a need to impress poked through. Hope. “I reckon your mama’s gonna be griping tonight. Something about babysitting her friend’s holy terror?”