by Harper Lin
A lot of things had changed from when we were children. Being wealthy wasn’t just a pipe dream anymore.
“All right,” Mrs. Park said. “Min hates this town. After he sold the business, he traveled all over the world, looking for nice towns and cities, sending Mr. Park and I postcards saying that we should move there with him. Mr. Park refused him, told him to quit showing off.”
“Well, that’s harsh. Did Min come back as a final act of persuasion?” I asked, looking across the grocery aisle at Min and his father. They were shaking hands.
“No. He knows his father too well.” At last, Mrs. Park mustered up some strength behind her voice. “Still, he came back to this hometown of his, from his travels so far away. He couldn’t sleep. What do you call it? Plane…”
I thought for a moment. “Jet lag?”
“Yes. Thank you. He wanted to go out for a walk. When the other detective came to arrest him, he said the whole thing was suspicious.”
“Blake said so? Detective Samberg?”
“The nerve of that man!”
“He’s suspicious of everything and everyone, though.”
“What about the witness? That teenaged boy who said that Min started the fire! What was he doing? Studying the glow-in-the-dark plants and animals in the lake, in the woods, alone? I can’t believe it, but he … that detective—” She cut herself off.
I thought about Cody. When Bea had been his age, she’d gotten more interested in experiments and travel than just reading about scientific facts and foreign places. After graduating high school, Bea had planned and saved up to go backpacking around Antarctica, of all things. There’s a fine line between genius and crazy, and I sensed the same attitude in Cody. “I believe both of you. It’s complicated. Cody must have been mistaken.”
Mrs. Park, uncharacteristically, reached out to take my hand. “Thank you. This is the best life we could have hoped for, Mr. Park and I. Still, it’s so difficult in this town! The way people talk!”
I couldn’t tell her how much I understood. Being a witch might have been a private subculture for generations, but you couldn’t tell just by looking at us that we weren’t like everyone else.
On the other hand, once nonwitches knew who was a witch… Let’s just say that history doesn’t show a good record of people getting over it and getting used to it, so witches can just be treated as people again.
At least Min had gotten the chance to shine, to change whatever people used to think about him.
“That’s why,” Mrs. Park told me, “I told him that I would rather he go find a nice Korean girl to settle down with.”
I felt a brief twist of envy, which I tried to disguise as surprise. Min was a friend. Min was a good old friend. “If that’s what Min wants, he shouldn’t have any trouble! He’s obviously a catch, Mrs. Park.”
“It is difficult to catch a fish gone over the falls.” Mrs. Park made no gesture to emphasize what she really meant, so it took me a while.
“So that’s the real reason that you didn’t tell me,” I said to her. “You think Min likes me?”
Mrs. Park shook her head. “I don’t think. A mother just knows these things.”
“Min and I are friends,” I said, as much to her as myself. “We even need to get to know each other again. You’ve got the whole afternoon to see that we’re just big kids, and it’s just like before the fire. It’s just like it was before this awful investigation started.”
I wanted that to be true. I’d grown up with these people, even if Mrs. Park didn’t consider me an honorary family member. Everyone in every family has their… not secrets, not privacy, just boundaries. Expectations. The Parks didn’t deserve the suspicion that other townspeople would have.
But I couldn’t help having my own suspicions.
Respectable Accusers
At dusk, Bea called me on my cell. I could barely hear her over the background noise and electronic music.
“Bea, where are you?” I asked.
The grocery store had a balcony. I guess it was meant for employees on their smoke break. It was empty and had a view of the town.
“I’m at the Night Owl. Decent café, terrible library. Or that might just be for today, because everybody who would be at the Brew-Ha-Ha came here instead. It used to be quiet enough to browse and do some reading!”
“How’s Aunt Astrid?”
“Well enough to shoo me out for a night out with the girls.”
The girls in question hollered their hellos.
I groaned, thinking about that morning. “Has Nadia forgiven me yet?”
“Nadia? I talked her out of reporting you to Detective Samberg for a hate crime, but I’ll tell her that you’re sorry—”
Nadia’s voice rose above the background chatter to cuss me out. “Ruby’s brother is a sore spot with her, you know. If you think he was unpleasant to you at school, imagine living with him.”
“Let me go to the restroom where it’s quieter,” Bea said.
“He was unpleasant to Min at school. And so says the best friend of Darla Castellan! The only friend, by now.”
“With friends like Ruby, Darla doesn’t need to antagonize anybody,” Bea said.
The background noise grew muffled. Bea must have found the restroom.
“Darla killed Ted for fun, then. Some things never change.”
“Oh, don’t start! You know that I only have so much tolerance for mean, insipid gossip.” Bea droned, “Clutch the pearls! Darla strung our Ted along, and that’s why she didn’t divorce until recently! Oh, my stars! Min Park’s so handsome now—and a criminal! He’s sexy now because he’s dangerous!”
“No offense, Bea, but I thought your friends would have a better perspective after Naomi and Ruby got together.”
Another big change from when we’re kids: gossip becomes useful to know. Maybe I wouldn’t have put my foot in my mouth that morning if I’d listened more.
“Apparently, if you can’t beat ’em, then join them. The chef at the Night Owl is willing to stock our pastries once the Brew-Ha-Ha building is back up, by the way.”
“That’s great news.”
“Now,” Bea said, “you tell me something important.”
I told her about a possible fraternity that marked its members with magical pendants.
“And Min was a member?” Bea asked. “You’ve got to bring him over here! We can ask him together! Discreetly, of course.”
“With your friends treating him like an escaped felon when it was only an interrogation?”
“That’ll show more people that it was only an interrogation. And an interrogation is just questions, like we’ll ask him. Bookstore café, police department—just innocent, curious questions to find out the truth—”
At that moment, the door to the balcony swung open, and Min strode through talking on his phone, sounding upset.
“No, today—tonight, whatever!” He paused. “I’m not going anywhere. You already know where my parents live, and at which inn I booked a room. You should be the one to come to me for follow-up questions.” He paused. “Fine.”
And he hung up. He told me, “This is just embarrassing. The chief wants me to meet with him for some follow-up questions. It’s not as if they found new evidence in the past six hours.”
“Ridiculous,” I agreed, hanging up on Bea, knowing that she’d heard him. “I told Blake that you couldn’t fight your way out of a wet paper bag. He probably wants to update that information, since we aren’t ten anymore.” I laughed. “You know, I can’t even remember that? What was it, a wet paper bag in a pool beside the gym?”
Min didn’t laugh. “It was a burlap sack. Reuben Connors tied the sack shut, hauled me onto a boat, and pushed it downriver towards the falls. He called me ‘pipsqueak.’”
I remembered, now. I had chased after that boat, reached out with my mind for the Maid of the Mist, and begged her to do something. If she had had any part in it, I didn’t see her, but I like to think that’s when I awakened t
o my power. All the eels and fish and everything in the lake swarmed around to bump against the boat, pushing it away from the rapids and the falls. The boat found a riverbank instead, and I safely got Min Park out of the sack.
Maybe I’d thought it was a swimming pool because I was confusing myself with how Darla would steal my swimsuit or my clothes while we were swimming in phys ed class. The other girls in my grade, who tried to stay out of it, were probably even worse than the ones who laughed. I’d felt so alone.
It had been a lifetime ago for me. Min’s face, clouded over with an almost Blake-ish brooding, told me that—despite wealth, the achievements, and all the new friends that he’d met in foreign places—it wasn’t over for Min.
“Reuben wasn’t just a bully,” I realized. “He really liked to make people suffer, and it hasn’t served him well in this town. He’s a nothing, Min. He has no power over you.”
“Right,” Min said. I could tell that he was forcing a smile. “We’ve all grown up. Every encounter since high school ended is out of my mind. Reuben who?”
“That’s the spirit!”
“I won’t let him ruin this comeback!”
“Atta boy!”
“Although getting taken into police custody for arson and murder isn’t something that I’d ‘let’ ruin my day so much as it’s kind of a day-ruiner as a point of fact.”
“He did accuse you, then?” I wondered.
Min replied, “He threw a shoe at the police car window when it passed him, and I was in it.”
“That’s not a statement the cops would find worth considering,” I said, confidently. “No one in this town would bend an ear to such a lowlife.”
“And my more respectable accusers?”
“They’ll be proven wrong,” I said, with a simple confidence that I didn’t feel. I’d used magic for Min. Maybe he’d remembered those strange happenings when I’d let some magic slip or forgot that he wasn’t supposed to know.
Maybe he’d come back for revenge, and he knew that we wouldn’t use our magic to help him with that, so he’d somehow figured out we had a spellbook and had taken it.
I wanted to ask about his father and have Min answer something good about how their relationship would proceed. A growing part of me even wanted to have a moment with him on this balcony, watching the sunset. He seemed so innocent, and I wanted to fight for that innocence if it was true, against all the lies that were floating around town.
But the truth was, I didn’t know him anymore.
I didn’t know anything anymore.
So instead I said, “Do you want me to come with you to meet with Talbot?”
Min shook his head, still looking glum.
It was at the tip of my tongue to say, “Too bad, I’m coming with you anyway,” but I was too confused and had no plan.
Gone
So I went home. I took a detour to the falls to clear my head, though. I’ve seen enough photos and sunsets or sunrises over the falls to last a lifetime, but that time of day when drivers don’t know whether to turn their headlights on or keep them off just washes everything in soft blues. It’s nature’s own magic.
I might have accidentally discovered a cure for magic burnout, then. I wonder if nonwitches just feel magic burnout all the time. The static crackle that had been distracting me the whole day smoothed over until I felt more like myself again. My mind flowed out into the world and into all the connections that I’d made—like it was meant to.
An image entered my mind, of Aunt Astrid lying on the downstairs living room carpet, and my body went cold with shock when I smelled the blood through Peanut Butter’s nose.
Help! Oh, help! Peanut Butter wailed in my mind. Treacle’s gone, and Grandmommy won’t move! I found her this way, and I didn’t know what to do!
An image that felt more like a memory of Peanut Butter’s came into my mind. He’d followed the smell of Bea’s shoes to a loud place full of people—the Night Owl.
This was interrupted by an earlier memory—Min Park’s formal shoes in an alleyway.
“I thought that Chief Talbot wanted to meet me,” Min Park said. He must have been speaking to somebody.
“I said that to throw Miss Greenstone off our trail,” answered a low, gravelly voice. “I really apologize for the inconvenience, Mr. Ark.”
“It’s Park.”
“If things had gone differently, we would be calling one another ‘brother.’”
“Mom!” I heard Bea scream. Bea fell to her knees beside Aunt Astrid’s body. Sobbing, she checked for a pulse, then for magic burn, then she took about four deep breaths to calm herself down. She needed a calm mind to do her healing.
The memory flowed in. Peanut Butter was hiding in some old crate or box in the alleyway, knowing that Treacle was listening in from a nearby fire escape.
“I don’t have any brothers.”
“No. You don’t claim to be part of the Order anymore, right?”
Peanut Butter remembered Treacle yowling as he fell. He landed on his feet, as cats do, and Blake swore and grabbed my cat.
“I didn’t know what to do!” Peanut Butter wailed again. “They went away together. They took Treacle with them!”
I snapped out of it, reached for my phone, and dialed for an ambulance as I bolted home. The dispatcher kept asking me questions or giving me directions as if I were actually at the scene, which of course I wasn’t. I could only see through Peanut Butter’s eyes.
As soon as the dispatcher said that the ambulance was on the way, I hung up and crossed Main Street into the town square. I didn’t want the dispatcher to overhear the background noise of traffic and people milling about so she would know that I wasn’t actually at home. Hiding these things had become second nature. I could only hope that it was good enough, because I might have been getting a reputation with the dispatcher.
The ambulance had gotten there quick, which was a minor relief, but I wasn’t there with Bea and Astrid to know what was going on, which was a major anxiety.
When I arrived at the house, the door was closed and locked. I took the spare key from the flowerpot that hung on the trellis and went inside. I found Peanut Butter in the living room and Marshmallow still in her cage in Aunt Astrid’s bedroom. All Marshmallow knew was that Aunt Astrid had gone to make herself dinner, and she’d taken the book with her.
Peanut Butter caught me up on Bea’s cover story: She’d found Peanut Butter wandering around outside the Night Owl and decided to take him home. On the way, she met with me. We decided to go to Astrid’s place instead, where we found her. I called the ambulance and went upstairs, out of sight of the paramedics. Bea had called Jake to pick me up.
With a little of Peanut Butter’s help and a lot of Marshmallow’s, we searched the house for the book. The old Greenstone house had a few loose floorboards that Aunt Astrid used to hide things under, and Marshmallow knew them all. Peanut Butter and I searched them all.
There was no doubt about it. The real spellbook was now gone.
The Order
Jake and I were silent as he drove me to the hospital. I’d kept reaching out in my mind for Treacle, but something kept blocking me off—until suddenly, it wasn’t there anymore.
“Is it safe to talk now? I thought there was magic. Bad magic, from somebody else.” Treacle spoke in my mind, but I couldn’t see anything from him but pitch darkness.
Contrary to popular belief, cats can’t see in pitch darkness. Their eyes just function much better than most human eyes do at low light levels.
“Treacle,” I murmured. “What happened?”
“I’m not hurt.”
“But where are you?”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t smell familiar.”
I felt a steel grid through Treacle’s whiskers and smelled dye and fabric that had been used to cover the grid.
Treacle asked, “Why couldn’t I talk to you? Was it because of magic burnout? You seem fine now. More than fine!”
“No,” I told Tre
acle. “Not magic burnout. Something else.”
Jake cleared his throat as he drove. “Funny thing. Treacle and Peanut Butter interfered with the crime scene today.”
“I keep telling Treacle not to go wandering off!” I whispered, hating the tremor of terror and regret in my voice. Then I bit my tongue. “I mean, I do what I can. Locking the cat flap door and all that.”
Jake gave me a doubtful look. “They helped us to find evidence.”
“Really?”
Jake nodded his head towards the dashboard, where I realized there were fully developed photographs of the inside of Aunt Astrid’s bunker. I picked up one of a shoeprint. Through Peanut Butter’s eyes, Blake had some nice shoes, too.
“I think these animals really do know what’s going on sometimes,” Jake said.
I told Jake, “That’s more than me these past two days.”
* * *
After they’d rolled Astrid out of the emergency room, Bea slept sitting on a plastic chair by her mother’s hospital bed. That would make it easier for Bea to use her talent. I warned her about magic burnout, and she turned her despairing eyes to me and asked, “What use is my power if I can’t save my own mother?”
I sat myself down on the armchair in the corner and didn’t argue.
When she couldn’t heal any more, Bea said, “I can’t believe I didn’t check for the book!”
“It was gone before you came in.” That wasn’t exactly reassuring.
“There were supposed to be protection spells in the Greenstone house. What happened?”
I said grimly, “The Order. They have magic.”
“Min did this? Or Detective Samberg?”
“I don’t know. Still, it’s the Order that broke down the protection spells. Aunt Astrid’s magic burnout was worse than mine. She and Marshmallow would both have been numb to the spells disintegrating.” I massaged the sides of my head. “Something keeps stopping me from getting in touch with Treacle. It’s either Min or Blake. They were meeting with each other while Aunt Astrid was being attacked, that much I do know.” Peanut Butter had bolted out of his hiding place in the alleyway the moment Min and Blake walked away. He’d gone to alert Marshmallow that Treacle had been captured.
