A Murder of Magpies

by Sarah Bromley

  Before I could tell him it wasn’t either of those things—I wouldn’t have walked with him if I had a problem with him being gadje, and I didn’t care what kind of background he had—he wrenched open the screen door and disappeared inside the towering house. The door clattered behind him with such force I covered my ears to drown the sound and his annoyance with me still echoing where we had stood.

  Alone, I kicked the dirt. “Shit!”

  My vision swam, all the sharp evergreens jarring right. The woods were menacing as I faced them, the points of the branches like knives seeking to cut and bleed me. To open me. To Ward. My family kept the kinds of secrets we couldn’t share. With anyone. I stayed away from everyone for fear that the truth might slip out. Hiding was exhausting, loneliness tiring.

  As I walked home, I wrapped tighter in Ward’s coat, but nothing stopped the chills.

  ***

  A silver Toyota parked by the barn. Chloe’s car. I supposed when she’d dropped me off and saw Jonah again some bit of remaining feeling for him rekindled. Neither Jonah nor Chloe were around when I let myself inside.

  Yet I remained by the open door a moment. Energy swelled around me, the snarl of regret and want inside me. I tried to push out those feelings but only pulled them in deeper. The bleak sky swarmed with clouds as if my unrest could influence the weather. My hands vibrated, a smell of ozone touched my nose as sparks fractured around my fingertips. Seconds later, raindrops pinged on the copper awnings, falling so fast puddles spread on the gravel drive. Halloween was a few days off, and in another week, this rain could well be ice. I was beginning to like the cold.

  I backed away, slamming the door. The paranoia of locks remained undone, but I removed the curtains from their hooks. Jonah always let in the light, and I closed it out. I could pretend to protect the antiques from the sun’s glare. That was a fib Jonah could push past if he so chose.

  I spotted an iPod on the coffee table, tagged by masking tape scrawled with Ward’s name and number. I wound my hand into my skirt to keep a thin shield between any remnant of Ward and myself. Scanning his playlist, half the artists weren’t anyone I recognized. Old Crow Medicine Show, Sun Kil Moon. My, what a strange boy Ward was.

  I touched his coat and lowered my barriers for Ward. To really let him through. I didn’t practice the Mind Game often. Sometimes someone’s possessions carried enough energy to let me inside their head, to see what they did. Knowing what emotions adhered to objects was unpredictable, and I didn’t like using those objects to work minds.

  I held the iPod, concentrating, seeking Ward, when a massive wave of melancholy rolled over me so strong my gut churned. The lights flickered, dimming for a beat before glowing far more brightly than the led bulbs should’ve allowed. Dull-bright-dull-bright.

  Then I saw him.

  He washed his face in a bathroom with blue walls and white tiles. He was shirtless, defined muscles on thin arms. Freckles dotted his shoulders. A tattoo of a gray-scale raven began on his right shoulder and wound halfway down his bicep. It was an unkind bird, a broken bird, its head swiveled so it glared as if to say, “Back off.” Trailing away from his arms, I moved to his abdomen, which was boyish despite a shadow of muscles. His unbuttoned jeans hung open below his hips and brought my curiosity lower.

  My heart thumped faster as I lifted the telephone from its cradle and dialed the number on the iPod. On the second ring, I hung up and yanked myself from his mind. Not before I saw him scowl as he checked the Caller ID on his cell phone.

  He didn’t call back.

  ***

  There was little chance anyone from school would see Chloe leave my house, but she crept out with her head ducked and face obscured by enormous sunglasses as she snuck out after spending an hour in Jonah’s bedroom. I should’ve offered her a hooded cloak. It’d hide her better.

  She didn’t trust us. Didn’t trust what we’d say. Didn’t trust that she’d remain unseen.

  Only certain souls deserved trust. Dad taught us that. Even if we hadn’t been so superstitious, no one would’ve understood my family, how our minds worked. Not unless we counted Rain, but he’d known about Mind Games since before Mom met Dad. Mom trusted Rain and Dad with her secret, nobody else. She still wound up dead. Murdered.

  Jonah plodded down the stairs in time with the rainfall. “What the hell were you doing?”

  I took off Ward’s jacket and hung it on the coat tree. “What do you mean?”

  “The lights in my room kept dimming when I was with Chloe,” he answered.

  I lowered my face. Nothing got past him. “I was working a Mind Game.”

  He whipped his body off the last step and stood over me, his long shape stretched high over my head, burning. “You need to stop fucking around and get serious. Either work your Mind Games or don’t, but this half-assed stuff needs to stop!”

  Cold spread through my muscles, and I ducked out from under him. “It’s not as if I don’t ever use them. I just don’t rely on them. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Because you aren’t careful.”

  “Careful?” My jaw dropped. “Are you for real? You work Mind Games all the time! You can’t tell me you didn’t work one to get Chloe hanging around you again!”

  He folded his arms and leaned against the wall. “You worry about you, Sis.”

  “Jonah, someone knows we’re here. Someone’s watching us. This is how things went bad in Hemlock. Mom wasn’t—”

  “I’m not Mom!” He slammed his palm against the wall. “My Mind Games are fine! When you use the Games only when they’re convenient and deny them the rest of the time, you do things like screw up the lights! Why don’t you hang a sign flashing ‘Freak’ above your head?”

  I jerked my face as if he’d slapped me. My hands tingled with his anger, my panic.

  Jonah’s scowl shifted to the walnut coffee table. It was an enormous piece collected from one of Dad’s first buying trips for antiques after we came to Black Orchard, back when he was stocking Fire Sales. The legs of the table were thicker than my calves and lavishly carved. The table could support both Jonah and me as we’d learned when swapping out Rain’s contemporary chandeliers for ones to match the stone house’s period, and yet now the heavy table hovered above the floor as if taking a deep breath before it careened toward me. I had no time to react except to scream and steel my body for the blow.

  Nothing.

  Less than an inch away, the table froze and waited for the next command from its master. My arms trembled.

  “You should’ve seen that coming.” Jonah tapped his temple. “Use your head like I use mine. Get the thoughts before they become an action. You could have this kind of control. This is what a Mind Game really is, Vayda.”

  The door swung open. Glancing between Jonah, the table, and me, Dad slammed the door behind him and hurled aside his wet raincoat. “Put it down!”

  My brother lowered his hand. The table fell, and I slumped to my knees. Why, Jonah?

  Furniture polish from Fire Sales clung to Dad’s shirt as he placed his hand on my shoulder, guarding me from my brother.

  “Dati,” Jonah murmured.

  “Quiet!” he spat. “What the hell were you thinking? Room! Now!”

  Jonah slogged upstairs while I forced back tears I didn’t want to cry. “I’m fine. Really.”

  “I know you’re okay, Magpie.” Dad’s body droned with fear and papa bear-protectiveness. He pushed my hair from my forehead. “Didn’t expect to walk in on such a scene.”

  I gulped down a few calming breaths. I knew my twin. At least, I thought I did. His temper, his anger because I didn’t see Mind Games as the gift he did, what if he let that drive us apart?

  My heart sped, and the lights buzzed, dimming a second or two. Jonah was right: I needed control of my Mind Games, but how could I when I’d only seen them used to hurt?

  “You’re thinking awfully hard there,
” Dad said, sitting beside me, one knee to his chest, the other leg stretched out. “This business with the lights didn’t start up until last spring when that Pifkin boy—”

  “I’m not talking about him. Nothing happened.”

  “Except the lights go wild whenever you’re upset now.” Dad took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt, carefully regarding me from under the black and silver hair falling over his forehead. “Don’t get me wrong. Your brother’s in a heap of trouble, but you also gotta get a grip, Magpie.”

  “Sometimes I wish we could be normal,” I admitted.

  “Yes, well, you are your mother’s child, and that little fact altered what your normal could ever be.”

  He sounded so accepting of Mom and her Mind Games, of what her abilities had produced in Jonah and me. I didn’t have that peace. She died before I knew how to handle the Mind Games, and I didn’t want to be like Jonah, testing them on other people.

  The phone rang. Dad sighed and rose to answer. He walked around the living room then the kitchen, listening, and popped a piece of nicotine gum in his mouth. “Sister Tremblay, we both know that Jonah won’t speak to the likes of you. Give him some time to figure out his mess.”

  I doubted Jonah had told Dad how often the nun demanded he come to her office at school, and this was her third call this week. Even Dad’s manners had worn thin. His jaw clenched tight on his gum, and he carried the phone and a pile of mail to his study.

  My hands ached with tension, and I set to work on supper, beginning with dough for Spanish flatbread. From the time I was tiny, Mom propped me up on a chair by the counter. Every dish created by memory, she assured me I’d figure out the measurements by visualizing the pulse of the food.

  Guessing had been Mom’s way. Dad protected us. Sometimes that meant we damaged his mental walls. A slight slip of his barriers or mine was all it took to gather what rolled through his mind from where he sat in his study.

  —no match for Jonah. Vayda’s too weak. Damn it, Lorna, I wish you were here.

  My throat tightened. Dad couldn’t deal with us—he had no wife and was stuck raising abominations. No wonder he spent his time hiding in his study or at Fire Sales.

  The light flickered. I pulled in calm, freezing in all the cracks forming inside me, and the lights regained their strength.

  Vayda, I’m sorry.

  Jonah reached out to me from his bedroom, but I let my mind build a barrier, row upon row of stones with mortar caked between the layers. I wasn’t ready to forgive.

  After a half-hour, I had completed my physics homework, and only minutes remained before the flatbread with pesto and goat cheese finished baking. I entered Dad’s study. Propping up his head with the heel of his palm, he slid a magazine my way. “Look.”

  I knew the respected antiques magazine. Dad’s old shop in Hemlock was a frequent feature, and he’d occasionally worked as a fact-checker. A blurb in the “of interest” section lacerated me like a spear made from ice.

  MAN WITHOUT A TRACE

  Emory Murdock, a dealer of Civil War-era antiques and owner of Antiquaria, was at the top of his game. A workaholic known for poaching deals from rivals, his fortune was expected, and his expertise sought. “No one was as good as Em, and he knew it,” says a friend.

  Murdock owed some success to his wife, Lorna, a constant presence in Antiquaria. Yet criminal charges against Lorna and the subsequent legal battle crashed Murdock’s idyllic life. Lorna died in a house fire thought to be arson. Murdock and the couples’ children vanished. Two years later, the sign for Antiquaria remains, its showroom empty, and what happened to an influential name in southern antiques trading is unknown.

  I handed over the magazine, not caring to touch it any longer. “Why are they writing about you now? It’s been two years.”

  “A good mystery’s always intriguing.” Dad stuffed it in his desk drawer and rubbed his goatee and mustache. “This and the package last week, it’s no coincidence.”

  I picked at the ends of my hair. We hadn’t done anything wrong. Why would anyone want to scare us? “Do the police know we’re here?”

  “Nah. They’d have brought me in already. I gotta check with Rain, see if he knows of anyone snooping around.”

  “Sister Tremblay—”

  “Don’t go there. Magpie, you know better than anyone you don’t go making accusations you can’t back up. If someone in Black Orchard sees this article and has visited Fire Sales, we’ll be in trouble.”

  “Dati, the picture with the article barely looks like you,” I offered. And it didn’t because he shaved then, but…

  “We’ll fit in here, but I gotta lie real low. You and Jonah do the same. We have to be less than invisible. We have to be ghosts.”

  ***

  After a silent dinner, Dad returned to Fire Sales to strip off the old varnish from some tables. Before he left, he gripped Jonah’s shoulder, stern and eye-to-eye. “Careful, boy.”

  Jonah looked away first. Dad was the only person who could make him do that, but I feared the day when he couldn’t.

  Throughout the evening, gusting winds battered the glass chimes outside. The noises of the house sounded like footsteps going up the walls, walking overhead, none of which made me any less disturbed. A draft lingered above the hardwood floor and burrowed through flesh into my bones. Even with a blanket swathing my shoulders, I couldn’t warm up. Setting aside my history book, I gathered newspaper and kindling to start a fire in the woodstove. No matches in the basket beside the stove, but I found a flint and steel in an old box. I whacked them together, producing nothing more than sparks.

  “Want help?” Jonah asked, shutting off the television.

  I set the flint and steel on the floor so I wouldn’t have to touch him. He was already closer than I wanted. The ineptness, the hurt he created in me, I wanted to smack him, to shove him, but I wasn’t that kind of person to lash out with my hands, not even hands like mine. A gnashing grief ripped through me. He had gone after me. To show me how powerful he was? I didn’t care. What he did wasn’t okay.

  Jonah reconstructed my stick teepee among the shredded husks and hit the flint and steel, blowing on the spokes of fire. The cinders reignited, and flames spread until heat streamed from the stove.

  “See? Boy Scouts was useful,” he joked, though his good humor was forced. He pressed his lips together, whispering, “I’m sorry, Sis. For everything.”

  “You need to be,” I said. “I don’t believe you. And that hurts.”

  “You know acting like that isn’t me. Read me if you have to.”

  He closed his mouth, and I felt his barrier drop, the iron door melt from his internal heat and liquefy around us until it disappeared. I lifted my fingers, unsure, but then I touched his cheek. He was warm and smoky. If his apology was anything but genuine, I couldn’t feel it. “I don’t like being afraid of you.”

  “I don’t want you to be afraid of me.” He curled in a ball and paused to tend the fire. “And you were right. I worked a Mind Game on Chloe.”

  “Jonah! Why?” I shook him. “Can’t you let things be?”

  “Don’t worry, it’s all taken care of. We’re golden. I didn’t do anything bad. I wanted to know why she dropped me after we hooked up before, so I got into her head, asked her some questions. Let’s call it a chance for her to rethink things. If she then decided to give me another chance and bare all, so be it.”

  Sorry meant nothing to him. I jammed my fingers into my hair to stop myself from strangling him. “You tricked her!”

  “Now, listen to me, Vayda girl. I didn’t hurt her. I’m giving her a choice. I asked her what she would do if she didn’t worry so damn much about what other people thought. And you know what? She made a choice to hook up with me, the way she did before she decided she cared about her reputation more than me. It wasn’t a trick. It wasn’t forced. It was a question, and she answered it by going
upstairs with me.”

  Could I believe that she’d have done that without Jonah’s mental prodding? How’d he go from parlor tricks to mastering skills with which he wasn’t born? He said I denied what I could do. If this was where Jonah’s power led him, I didn’t want it.

  “I hear you loud and clear.” Jonah lay out on the floor, arms stretched at his sides. “I’ve always moved shit with my mind. I send out my energy. Objects react.”

  “So you’re moving thoughts in Chloe’s head,” I argued. “That isn’t right.”

  He stared at his hands, palms wide, fingers long and thin. The flames through the glass door of the woodstove formed a wavering shadow on his face. “If you want to blame someone, blame Mom.”

  My stomach flipped. For all I thought about my mother, we didn’t talk about her. When she was alive, she said we weren’t to speak of our dead because they were with our ancestors. Now she was our dead, and I still had questions.

  Mom, like so many Rom, read tarot cards. She taught Jonah and me as well, but she used telepathy to hear her clients’ wishes and told them what they wanted. She had conversations with us without parting her lips. She used herbs, spells, and candles. She recited prayers and laid out charms. Most of what she did intended to remove negative energy and draw in positive.

  Yet there was a dark side of my mother, the side that muttered curses and warned us. She’d said in a clan, she’d have been a drabarni, a medicine woman. Alone, she was Mrs. Murdock, the brownie-baking-classroom-mom whose best trick was tying a cherry stem in a knot with her teeth.

  Jonah’s smile was sad. “Do you remember when our house was burning, how all those people stood outside yelling that Mom was a gypsy? A witch?”

  Those voices rising above the fire haunted my dreams. No, I’d never forget.

  “She had power.” Jonah was off somewhere in his mind, marveling at the memory of our mother. How he wanted to remember her. I remembered someone different.

  “She lost control of her powers,” I said. “They would have destroyed her if she hadn’t been murdered.”