Possessed

by Stephanie Doyle

  Cass reached up to touch her neck. She thought about the pressure of his hand on her skin. The way it had felt. Skin to skin. There had been something different about it. She didn’t want to dwell on it, but her mind kept wandering back. It was like a rush of energy that she had felt flow from his body into hers. Cass hated to overdramatize the sensations and feelings that went along with her gift, but she knew it was important to document each new experience. If nothing else, Dr. Farver had taught her that.

  Control came only through understanding.

  And it had been a new experience, hadn’t it? Cass thought about the last time she’d touched or had been touched in any meaningful kind of way. The fact that she knew that it was a year ago bothered her. It was a sign of how far she had distanced herself from others.

  An image of Claire surfaced, but she pushed it aside. Claire wasn’t connected to Lauren.

  “You’re touching your neck. I know you don’t want me to apologize again, but I will.”

  Cass turned and saw that he was looking at where her hand rested over what she guessed were some faint bruises. “I don’t. Seriously. Don’t worry about it. It wasn’t a big deal, okay?”

  “It was to me,” he said gruffly. “I’ve never been so out of control before. Right now I feel like I’m standing on some sort of precipice. I’m not sure which way I’m going to fall.”

  “That must be a hell of a thing when you’re used to always being on steady ground.”

  “Yes,” he said quietly.

  Cass nodded. Despite his hostility she could at least offer him her experience with this. Death was something she knew a lot about.

  “That’s what it’s like with Lauren’s kind of death. It’s different from an illness, even different from a sudden accident. Murder tends to shake the living to the core, not because you can’t prepare for it-no one can ever prepare themselves for losing someone. It’s the violence of the act. It’s not just that she’s gone; it’s the fact that she was taken from you, forcibly, against her will and yours. It’s going to make you a little crazy. Probably for some time to come.”

  She couldn’t tell if her words penetrated as his eyes stayed focused on the red light hanging above them.

  “It doesn’t give me the right to take my pain out on anyone else,” he finally said.

  “No, it doesn’t,” she agreed.

  “Especially you.”

  That had her raising her eyebrows. “What does that mean?”

  “I just meant that, well, you’re very…small,” he finished awkwardly.

  Cass smirked. “Small doesn’t always mean ‘weak.’”

  He turned his head and studied her for a moment. She couldn’t imagine what he was thinking. After a second, his scrutiny became almost uncomfortable. Fortunately, the light turned green.

  “We should go,” she prompted.

  It was no more than eight or nine blocks from Cass’s apartment to Lauren’s. Parallel parking with ruthless efficiency, Malcolm settled his SAAB into a tight spot. Cass had reached for the handle when he put a hand on her arm and stopped her.

  “Wait.”

  He exited, circled the car and opened her door-the habit of someone who had been taught manners and used them.

  “Gentleman,” he said. “Remember?”

  He offered his hand, and Cass looked at it as if it were a snake. She didn’t want to touch him. It was too soon, and she still hadn’t processed all that had happened when he’d touched her the last time. Misinterpreting her reticence, he scowled slightly but moved away from the car door to let her out.

  Lauren’s apartment was the top floor of what was essentially a row home. The block was lined with narrow, three-story buildings that were kept in only moderately good condition. Cass had surmised from what Dougie had said that Lauren didn’t live far down on Addison Street from where Cass’s current apartment was, and her old apartment was just a few blocks further up. She knew the neighborhood well enough to know that there was nothing high-class about any of the buildings in this particular section of the city.

  She considered all the money Malcolm had at his disposal, not to mention what she knew about how Lauren had grown up, and figured that Lauren must have rejected that lifestyle. It could have been a pride thing. She wanted to make it on her own, or it could have been a family split. She wondered if Malcolm would comment, but he said nothing.

  “It’s this one,” he indicated, pointing to the third house on the right. There were front steps that led to a door that, once unlocked, led to another door that served as the entrance to the downstairs apartment. Another set of stairs, still blocked by yellow tape, would take them to where Lauren had lived.

  Together they climbed to the top, where they stood on a handwoven mat that covered the small landing, while Malcolm unlocked the door.

  Cass glanced down at her feet.

  Blessed Be.

  Malcolm pushed open the door, then took a few steps down to allow Cass to proceed ahead of him. It was well past midmorning at this point, and the light from the sun was more than enough to illuminate the tiny space.

  The first thing that caught her eye was the stain of blood that could be seen so clearly on the floor. Large and ghastly, it resembled a small lake covering the cream linoleum of the kitchen floor. It got even darker as it spread out to the cheap, pale beige carpet.

  “You don’t have to come up here,” she said, looking over her shoulder to where he stood still two steps down.

  “I’ve already seen it,” he muttered.

  “That doesn’t mean you have to see it again.”

  He pinned her with a gaze that suggested he didn’t need to be coddled, and she guessed he was right. It wasn’t her place to tell him what he could or could not bear.

  He was on his own.

  Ignoring him, she stepped into the apartment and focused her senses. There was something here that Lauren thought was important. Something obscure enough that the police had missed it.

  It stood to reason that if they had missed something, it wasn’t going to be easy to find.

  Cass waited for the tingling sensation to hit her, but, for a long moment, there was only silence. “I’m going to need a little help here,” she mumbled.

  “Help with what, exactly?” Malcolm asked as he stepped inside, closing the door behind him.

  “Uh…I was sort of talking to her,” Cass admitted.

  She watched his jaw tighten, but this time he managed to maintain his cool.

  The space wasn’t as she’d expected, but then she’d probably been associating Lauren too much with her brother. There was nothing austere or elegant or high-class about it. Instead, it was a chaotic mess of knickknacks, wall hangings and two shelves that were filled with books and tiny porcelain figurines. At the center of all of it was a plump, bright-yellow couch and an end table covered with more books and magazines and…well, stuff.

  There was also a hint of vanilla, she determined, in the air. Cass couldn’t understand how that was possible, given the blood that had been lost, but it was there.

  Heading for the end table, the first thing she spotted was an oblong, carved wooden bowl that held two slim sticks inside of it. She lifted a stick, sniffed the top of it and knew where the vanilla had come from. Next to the incense holder was a box with a pentagram carved into it. As she scanned the book titles and magazines on the table, a picture began to form. Magickal Digest, Spells and Cants for Beginners, The Wicca Almanac.

  A set of pentagram chimes blended with a dream catcher that hung from the ceiling near the window that overlooked the street below, and, moving to one of the bookshelves, Cass could see rows of tiny figurine fairies that sat almost as if protecting the reading material behind them. Gently pushing past them, she pulled out Advanced Spells. It looked unread.

  The reading material, the pentacle box, the doormat out front.

  “She was a witch,” Cass said, lifting one of the porcelain pieces. It wasn’t particularly well crafted, but it was wh
imsical and said a great deal about the person who would buy it in the first place.

  Behind her, she felt Malcolm’s approach, and before she could close her hand on it, he was snatching the fairy out of her grasp and placing it back on the shelf. Hard.

  “She was into a lot of things,” he explained.

  And maybe that was true, but one of the things she was very much into was the practice of Wicca. Although based on what Lauren had been reading versus what had been left untouched, Cass was guessing she’d just recently pursued the religion.

  “There’s nothing wrong with having alternative spiritual beliefs.” As so many of the people she’d been committed with in the asylum had told her.

  Malcolm cringed, and Cass had to admit she took a perverse pleasure in it. She could only imagine his reluctance to listen to his sister prattle on about nature, the moon cycles and which herbs were best for love spells. She could see him now trying to reason her beliefs right out of her.

  Did he feel guilty? Now that she was gone, was he sad that he had so quickly dismissed her and her beliefs as nonsense?

  A bright bolt of pain smacked her, and a voice echoed in her head.

  He didn’t like it, but he always listened. He never made fun of me.

  Lauren’s voice startled her, but Cass quickly worked to construct her room so she could hear clearly what Lauren had to say.

  Interesting. “You were okay with her being a witch.” Cass was astonished.

  He straightened the figurine so that it was exactly where it was before she had disturbed it. “Lauren believed what she did. Practiced the religion she chose. She was a grown woman. I might have thought it was ridiculous, but it was her life and not my call to interfere. Why are you looking at me like that?”

  Cass immediately shook her head to try to erase whatever expression she was currently wearing. “I’m sorry, it’s just so unexpected.”

  “Unexpected of me? How? You don’t even know me.”

  The reproof hurt. Mostly because he was right. She didn’t know him at all, but she did know how he had reacted to her and to her gift. For someone who saw things in black and white, was being a medium very much different than being a witch?

  “You didn’t give me a whole lot of leeway when I told you what I was,” she countered.

  “You pretended to be talking to my dead sister.”

  Pretended. Ouch.

  “Don’t,” he said, holding up his hand as if to stop her. “Please don’t tell me anything else ‘she said’ or what you know about me. I just don’t think I could handle it right now.”

  Since he appeared to be even more exhausted than he’d been an hour ago, she let it drop. She wasn’t the type to showboat her talent, but with him, there was this irrational need to prove something. He was right, though. This wasn’t the time or the place.

  “Okay.”

  “You were looking for something.”

  Cass closed her eyes for a second to better concentrate on the voice inside her head.

  There was a ticket. Find the ticket.

  “A ticket,” Cass stated. “I’m looking for some kind of ticket.”

  “A movie ticket, theater ticket, plane ticket?”

  But she could see that the door was closing. Lauren’s face disappeared behind it, and Cass stood alone in her room. The mental image faded, and she shrugged to let him know that was all the information she was going to get.

  The two of them moved around the room. Thankfully, there wasn’t a large area to search. The couch took up most of the space. The shelves lined the walls of the rest of it. She had a framed picture of her family. It was a snapshot taken outside of what looked to be a downtown restaurant. Cass’s eyes fell to the strawberry blonde in the shot. Lauren was more beautiful alive. Clearer, more vivid.

  Malcolm searched the kitchen, but it was tidy, with only a single orange mug in the sink that still had an herbal tea bag in it. She heard him opening and closing doors, and she moved from the shelves back to the end table. The magazines had been stacked next to the books, no doubt by the cops who had gone through them. Given all the natural clutter, Lauren didn’t strike Cass as overly orderly.

  She’d bet a million dollars, though, that everything in Malcolm’s place was in neat piles.

  Shaking the useless thought from her head, she forced her attention back to the magazines. The one on top had a shiny cover that was coated with a fine, black powder that suggested it had been fingerprinted. Probably not the best surface to extract a print, but the thought process behind it hadn’t been bad.

  Neither the lock on the door downstairs nor the one to her apartment had been tampered with, and Lauren had been killed inside her apartment. She’d let whoever did it inside. One of the reasons why Malcolm had been an easy suspect. If it had been a friend or someone she’d known casually, it was conceivable that that person might have sat on her couch, rifled through a magazine, maybe…

  Cass lifted the first magazine and shook it gently by the seam, letting the pages flap about freely. She did the same with the one underneath that. By the fourth magazine, she was growing discouraged when a short stub fluttered to the table.

  She picked it up and studied it. It was the second half of a train ticket. Baltimore to Philadelphia.

  “You found it.” Malcolm could see through the open kitchen area to where she was standing.

  “It was stuck between the pages of one of the magazines,” she told him. “Had she been outside Philadelphia recently?” Cass read the date on the ticket. “Within the last two weeks?”

  “No. She just got a job. Some New Age store a couple of blocks from here. She was excited about it. I know for a fact that she was working at least six out of her last seven days.”

  “Did she have any friends who lived in Baltimore?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  Cass had grown up in Baltimore but kept that information to herself so as not to trigger another round of suspicion. Not that it was anything more than a coincidence, anyway.

  “Last night, you said you weren’t close.”

  Reluctantly, he nodded. “We weren’t close in age. I didn’t spend much time around her friends, as I’m sure you can imagine. They were all…like her.”

  “Witches.”

  He frowned. “Can you not use that word?”

  “It’s politically acceptable within their practice.”

  “You know about…witches?”

  “I know a lot about people who are on the fringe. The unaccepted. The unusual.”

  “Because that’s where you fit,” he logically reasoned.

  “It’s where I belong.”

  He didn’t respond but instead looked away when he finally answered her first question. “No, we didn’t hang out together a lot. But we spoke on the phone at least once a week. She would have told me if she was having company from out of town.”

  “Even if that company were male?”

  “Especially that. Lauren was always very excited about the prospect of meeting her true love. She’d had three of them by the time she was seventeen. If a man was coming to visit, one she cared about, she would have told me and…” He sighed. “She’s never going to have that now, is she? There’s never going to be the one. Not for her.”

  “You said she had three.”

  “That was school stuff. Childish, immature crushes.”

  “Love is love. And whoever said there had to be only one real thing and it had to come when you were ready? You can’t spend your life thinking about what she missed. You have to remember what she had.”

  “Yeah. Are we done?”

  “I found what I came for.”

  “So what happens next?”

  “We find out who from Baltimore came to visit Lauren.”

  “We?”

  “The police,” Cass amended. “I know you don’t completely trust me. But you can trust them.”

  Malcolm stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked away from her. “It seemed like too muc
h of a coincidence that you happened to be there this morning. It wasn’t the most ridiculous theory.”

  “No, I suppose it wasn’t.”

  “This time I’m definitely not going to apologize. Not for what I thought.”

  “I didn’t expect you to,” Cass told him. “You’re the type who can apologize forever when you know you’re wrong, but you won’t budge if you think you’re right.”

  He turned back to her, his gaze sharper. “You keep assigning me these types. Why do you do that?”

  It was a fair question. She imagined because it made him easier to deal with if she believed him to be a black-and-white, close-minded, high society, inflexible man. If he was all those things, then he was to be kept at a distance. If he wasn’t…then she wouldn’t know how to deal with him.

  That idea slightly unsettling, Cass replied by going on the defensive. “Please. You pegged me as a nut the moment we met.”

  “I didn’t peg you. You did that yourself when you told me what you were.” He closed his mouth abruptly. Then he tried to apologize. “I didn’t mean to say you were actually crazy. I just…”

  “It doesn’t matter.” But she could hear the bitterness creeping back into her voice. It was her fault for using the term nut. It conjured too many bad memories of her grandfather after he stopped being her family and instead became her jailer. Deep down they had all believed she was crazy. A nut. Her grandfather, the doctors at the asylum, all of them.

  “We should go,” she said quickly, cutting him off before he could say anything. “Do you need to get…you know, the dress?”

  He paused for a moment but then nodded and made for the room off the living room that was separated by two folding doors. When Malcolm pushed them aside she could see that the room was almost as small as hers back at the apartment. But Lauren had a dresser. Nice.

  Cass watched him sort through the different hangers, stopping occasionally to give one outfit more consideration. Or maybe he was just remembering the last time he’d seen her in it. Again, she felt a twinge, just a twinge, though, of sympathy for a brother who was now alone in this world.

  Finally he extracted a hanger.

  A small pain behind her eyes signaled contact, but Cass didn’t even bother with forming the room. This message was quick and clear.