Hex Marks the Spot

by Madelyn Alt

  “What do you mean, not ‘publicly’?” I narrowed my eyes, wishing I could see into my mother’s. “What do you know, Mom?”

  “Well, nothing, really. There was a rumor, a few years back, but that’s all it was. A rumor. Back when her husband was still living. Of course he’d been ill for quite a while with his liver attacks, and she tended to him the whole time without a single complaint. Nothing ever came of the rumor—you know how they are—and eventually it just faded away.”

  You hear a lot of stories in small towns. Some true, some not so much. Some based in fact, some based on lies and jealousy. It was the ones that you heard over and over again that you tended to worry about. Or the ones that gathered more tinder to feed the fading coals. New stories to add to the old fires.

  “I don’t remember anything like that.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t. Too busy with your own life. It must have been, I don’t know, eight years ago now. They say she became fixated on a man in her neighborhood. A younger man, with a young family. Sent him love letters and everything. But that’s all water under the bridge. I’ve never heard another thing attached to Louisa’s name that anyone could consider bad.”

  “What happened to the family?”

  “Moved away, I guess. That summer.”

  That bad feeling that had been twisting through me? It was tightening to a breaking point. Something was about to give. I knew it.

  “Thanks, Mom. Gotta go. ’Bye.”

  Hester was staring into the woods, a distant look in her eyes. “Peaches…”

  “Will be fine,” I assured her. “Tom will be there in no time flat.”

  She turned to me, her expression fierce. “We could cut through. He has to go all the way around.”

  “Tom asked us to stay here.” Not that that had stopped me before, but I was supposed to be turning over a new leaf. Minding my own beeswax. Heeding the wisdom of others, and any number of other clichés.

  A series of barks sounded, closer than expected.

  “I think I can call her,” Hester said, hunching down to peer through the underbrush into the deeper gloom of the woods. “She’s not far, I don’t think.”

  I wondered whether I should tell Hester about what my mother had said. Tom should know for sure, I decided. I thumbed through the menu on my cell and texted a message to him, short and sweet. LM obsessed w/man B4. Luv Ltrs & all. Famly moved 2 get away. 8 yrs ago. The message completed, I pressed Send and looked up.

  Hester was gone.

  “Hester?”

  But it was too late. Hester, it appeared, was as headstrong and determined to make her own way as I was. “Peaches, come here, girl!” I heard her call from somewhere close by. “Peeeeeeaches!”

  I had two choices. I could stay where I was, allowing Hester to blunder her way toward Louisa Murray’s house alone, or I could try to catch up with her and do what I could to convince her to leave the chase to Tom.

  Was Louisa Murray a threat? I didn’t know for sure. But I wasn’t sure that any of us, least of all Hester, should take that chance.

  I couldn’t let her go it alone. I had to follow. Threat or no, there was a reassuring kind of safety in numbers.

  Following Hester’s lead, I turned and started pushing and ducking my way through the underbrush and low-hanging branches. It was amazing how quickly these old logging woods became dense, how much sunlight was filtered out by layers of…I glanced up. No, not filtered by leaves; it was too early in the year for anything more than a pale green wash of color from newly spreading leaf buds. High above, the daylight was leaving us as the hazy clouds darkened and swirled their way into a thick and ominous state of being. Storm clouds.

  April showers bring May flowers.

  Ahead of me I saw a flash of blue skirt and sensed movement. I headed in that direction.

  Tom was right. There were paths cut through these woods. I stumbled across one as I hurried to follow Hester as best I could. Things went much faster once I wasn’t forced to fight against clinging vines and snagging brambles.

  Was that smoke I smelled?

  I redoubled my efforts. I was clutching my side by the time I finally caught up with Hester I don’t know how many minutes later. Actually, I really didn’t want to know how many minutes—this was the longest and farthest I had run since Mrs. Hooper’s gym class (aka The Torture Chamber) in the ninth grade. It was better to not know these things.

  Hester wasn’t making it easy for me. Living a clean and active lifestyle must make a huge difference—she was barely breaking a sweat when I grabbed her arm. She swung around to face me, a strange fierceness in her eyes. “Fire. Do you not smell the smoke?”

  She was right. The acrid scent and eye-burning haze clung like swaths of wispy batting to the tree limbs above our heads.

  “We should go back,” I wheezed, trying to ignore the stitch in my side.

  “We are nearly there. Come on, Maggie. I can hear her.”

  I hoped she meant Peaches.

  For some reason, I found myself following her. She no longer dashed, but prowled along the path toward a grove of tall pines looming ahead of us. A flicker of light caught my eye at ground level. Definitely a fire, but not a big one. Who in the heck would be roasting marshmallows with a storm coming?

  I knew the answer in my mind, but I was just trying to keep my spirits up, dontcha know. Trust me. It works if you work it.

  Considering her earlier headlong dash, Hester was being downright guarded now. We were walking cautiously, placing our feet carefully before shifting our weight into the next step, trying to keep noise at a minimum as we eased toward the pines; keeping ourselves out of a clear line of vision from the fire, just in case. I didn’t know if whoever set the fire was paying heed to the woods around them or not, but I didn’t want to draw attention to our presence if I could help it. We hid behind tree trunks that were not nearly wide enough and listened for signs of life.

  Nothing except a rumble of thunder.

  Where in the name of heaven was Peaches?

  I took a deep breath and peered around the edge of the tree, letting my breath come out in a whoosh of relief when I found no one there—just the snap, crackle, and pop of the fire itself. It was in a small clearing between the pines, a makeshift fire pit at its center, lined with fieldstones. The trees made the safety measure of the stones a moot point—in a dry season, an upwafting spark could send the trees up like torches.

  With that thought came the first soft patter of raindrops all around, and another low rumble.

  Hester went straight toward the fire pit. I waited a moment, still not certain that we weren’t being watched. I didn’t like this place; it felt dark, even darker than our hasty path through the woods, and it wasn’t just an effect of the storm rising above us. This was astral dark, energy dark, bad feelings and bad intent dark, and I didn’t like it. It reminded me all too much of the dream I had had the night before, and I shivered, remembering.

  Big round eyes. The sigil.

  “Look.” Hester stood at the edge of the pit. I edged closer. The wood used to fuel the fire must have been wet, because the flames weren’t spreading well along its length. Surrounding the branches were three small boxes. Pink. Frilly. Photo boxes.

  Hester reached her bare hand out to nudge the smoldering boxes away from the flames. I caught her arm. “Wait.” I picked up a decent sized stick and knocked the boxes aside. “Those photo boxes belong to Louisa Murray, I’m sure of it,” I murmured. “I saw some exactly like them at her house just the other day. She’s a photo-and-scrapbooking fiend.”

  I wondered if Hester would even understand the explanation, living, as she did, apart from hobby fads and trends.

  I squatted down and carefully poked at the boxes with the stick. Whispers of smoke slithered from the heavy-duty cardboard frames, but whatever flames had licked at them had gone out. I wasn’t taking any chances on burning myself—the stick would have to do all the work for now.

  It was enough. The
first lid popped off when I knocked the box sideways. A plume of smoke and cinders emerged, along with a spill of photographs. The edges were slightly crisped, but the damage had gone no further. I flicked them away from the flames before they could get too close.

  Hester reached out and took one. “It’s a picture of our farm.”

  It was, and there were more like it. Many more. Different distances, different perspectives, different zoom settings. And then there were pictures of Hester. The children. But most important…

  Luc.

  Luc driving the buggy, wonderfully aloof in his black, round-brimmed hat. Luc walking the fields. Luc riding an old-style bicycle. Luc, in coveralls, crossing a street, a hardhat in one hand and a metal lunchbox in the other. Luc kneeling, a hammer in hand, atop the roof of a barn.

  Luc, Luc, and more Luc.

  Big round eyes looking out from the depths of the forest at the farm buildings some distance away.

  The dream again. And then it hit me. I hadn’t been dream-linking to the imagery on the sigil, guided by Luc’s spirit.

  It was Louisa.

  Louisa, watching the Metzger farm from the woods, the big, round eyes of her binoculars and telephoto lenses bringing everything into crisp focus.

  “We have to get these to Tom,” I said.

  “Maggie?”

  “Yeah?” I asked, sifting through to get a good sampling. She tapped me on the shoulder, repeatedly. “What is it?” I glanced up finally as I tucked the photos into my jacket.

  And looked straight into Louisa Murray’s surprised stare.

  “What’s this?” she asked, circling warily around us. She held a hoe in one hand, a can of kerosene in the other, and had a bag slung over her shoulder. She shrugged out from under the bag and let it fall to the earth at her feet. “What are you doing here?”

  I scrambled to my feet, using the stick as leverage, my brain whirring frantically in a search for an acceptable response. Anything that wouldn’t raise her suspicions overmuch. Of course that was probably a lost cause, since she had seen me tuck the photos inside my jacket. My eye was drawn to the hoe in her hand, and I groaned. Why hadn’t I looked up sooner?

  Hester was much less intimidated. She stepped forward, her eyes blazing with a cold light beneath the simple black bonnet. “You killed my Luc.”

  Oh, shit! My eyes widened to maximum potential.

  Louisa laughed in disbelief, but I could see the secrets in her eyes. I could hear their whispers. I knew their truth. “What are you saying?”

  I cleared my throat. “Hester—” I said, touching her cape.

  But Hester was in no mood to mince words. “My Luc. You killed him.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Hester reached down to the crisped photos and grabbed a handful, then threw them in Louisa’s face. “I know. I know what you are.”

  Louisa’s face froze into a tight mask, reptilian in its absence of feeling. “And what am I?”

  “A brazen woman. One who seeks and takes away. You killed my Luc.”

  Louisa sneered at the photos that had bounced off her proper little jacket. “Those are just pictures. A few harmless pictures,” she said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Maggie, tell her.”

  Another handful of pictures. “I don’t need Maggie to tell me. I can see for myself.” Hester advanced on Louisa, flicking the pictures at her, one by one.

  Louisa tried a different tack. Her expression softened slightly, her voice became a coax. “This is all a mistake. We are collecting things for you…money…for you and your family…to make up for what was done to you.”

  “You. Can. Never. Make. Up. For. What. You. Did. To. Me.”

  Hester stood there a moment, eyes blazing, and then she dropped to her knees in the wet dirt, surprising both Louisa and me. She rocked back and forth on her hands and knees, breathing deeply, becoming someone, something else. As we watched, spellbound, she began to etch lines into the earth, deeper and deeper.

  Symbols. Magical symbols.

  Hex marks the spot.

  “What are you doing?” Louisa flexed her fingers around the handle of the hoe. “Stop that. Stop. That.”

  Hester didn’t appear to hear, or if she did, she didn’t heed the warning in Louisa’s voice. Maybe she should have, because in the next instant Louisa snapped.

  What happened next came in a kind of slow motion that would have dazzled and bewitched and bemused even the most experienced magical practitioner. The kerosene can dropped to the ground with a metallic thunk. Louisa’s fingers gripped the handle of the hoe, once, twice. Her lips pulled back over her teeth in a primal snarl. Her face contorted. Flattened. I saw a shift, as though another face was superimposed over the top of hers or under hers, the features merging so that you couldn’t tell where one started and the other stopped. The hoe came down across her body, dropping into her waiting palm. For a moment the hoe hovered there in her hands, and I knew in an instant what she was about to do. I stumbled over my own feet, one hand in my pocket scrabbling for the canister of pepper spray I just remembered I’d brought with me. Too late…too late. I hit the ground hard, tucked my shoulder under at the last second, and rolled over just in time to see Louisa swing the hoe back in a stance that would have made a home run hitter proud, her gaze pinpoint focused on Hester, oblivious on the ground before her.

  “Noooooooooooo!”

  The shriek tore from my lips; I felt it. I know I did. But it was quite another shriek that I heard screaming through the storm-whipped forest. A huge brown shape arced down from the pines, six feet wide if it was an inch.

  The owl is a symbol of protection…

  Before Louisa could initiate the forward motion of the deadly swing she intended for Hester, the shape zoomed down, dive-bombing at her full speed, startling her so badly that she stumbled backward. Her scrambling feet tripped against the canister of kerosene as she sought purchase, knocking it over. The golden liquid burbled out against the dampened earth and trickled into the deeply cut symbol that Hester was still etching. We all watched, transfixed, as it filled the symbol and then continued on down a little hillock none of us had seen, in a straight line toward…

  I grabbed Hester by the shoulder, pulling her backward, away from her sigil, just in time. The line of kerosene ignited instantly, flames licking along the path it had taken, gathering speed and force as it rushed toward its target.

  Louisa reacted a split second too slowly. The kerosene that had spilled beneath her feet had soaked into her shoes and the hems of her slacks. The flames of the fire she had set to remove all evidence of her guilty conscience proved her undoing. She screamed, stamping her feet, but the flames only licked higher. Before I could think or react, she turned and ran, legs ablaze, back toward her property at the edge of the woods.

  Hester and I stared after her, and suddenly the slow-mo effect dissipated. Time and space returned to normal, as abruptly as they had turned moments ago, and with the return came tremors of adrenaline, shaking my body to its core. I realized my mouth was hanging open; I closed it, hard enough to make my teeth hurt.

  I turned to Hester, and noticed with more than a little relief that the otherness was leaving her eyes as well. “What happened?” I asked her.

  She shook her head, a tiny frown crimping her brows. “I—I don’t know.”

  “We should go after her,” I said, still trying to get my feet and body to follow the intent being set by my mind.

  Hester shook her head again. Turning away, she began to walk, slowly and wordlessly, along the path toward her home.

  Later—much later—after I used my cell to call 911, after Tom’s colleagues on the force came and found Louisa Murray sitting in agony under a stream of water pouring from her outside faucet, after the ambulance carted her away for the medical care she was going to need so badly, and after I reconnected with Tom (who had found Peaches wandering along the road to the north, happily hunting for bunnies, while Hester and I stu
mbled into the path of danger; and who would, I hoped, in time forgive me for my unintentional disobedience)…after all of that, I sat alone in my dark apartment, replaying the events in the woods in my head. Muddling. Wondering.

  Worrying.

  Louisa had found God again in the midst of the flames. Sitting beneath the cold, streaming water, her teeth gritted against the pain, she told anyone who would listen how she had been shown the evil of her ways in a split second of shocking reality. She repeated over and over the tale of how she had asked Luc to come to her house to fix some loose shingles on the roof that he and his crew had replaced the summer before. A ruse, of course. She told the story of his rejection of her, and she explained how she took his life in a fit of blind desperation and rage. Like a broken tape recorder, she told it over, and over, and over again.

  Louisa had seen the light, and it scared the hell out of her.

  But it wasn’t Louisa’s admission that was troubling me. It was the words of wisdom that Marion had imparted that were swimming freestyle through my brain:

  People lie. They lie, they cheat, they try to purposely misdirect, to pin blame elsewhere.

  It was Hester’s final, brutal hex that guided my inner eye and molded the thoughts into a useful pattern and helped me to see, for once and for all. It was the hex that reminded me once again so clearly that magic itself is neither black nor white. That it can be used to protect or heal, as was Luc’s intent with his sigil in the woods, or it can be used to inflict harm or pain, as was Hester’s.

  It all came down to the intent housed in the heart and soul of the practitioner…and sweet, innocent Hester was not as pure of heart as everyone, including me, wanted to believe.

  Hester, who had suffered the addition of insult to the injury of Luc’s supposed affair each time an anonymous letter came to her, had recognized instantly that her only chance for justice was about to pass her by as we awaited word from Tom, and it was in that split second that she decided to act.

  Only I had witnessed the speed with which Hester had traveled the paths in the woods, a speed I was hard pressed to imitate as I followed. Only I had seen her face in the shadow of the pines as she traced a mysterious pattern upon the hard forest floor. Only I had seen the giant owl that she had conjured from the very air itself that had helped to bring about Louisa’s fall from grace.