by Jenn Bennett
He wasn’t the only one. I shouldn’t have agreed to give Hajo the potion. God only knew what despicable things he’d end up doing with it.
I wasn’t the only one upset about the barter with Hajo. Lon was livid, more at Hajo—and Bob—than at me, he said, when I called him on my way back to my place with a report of what had transpired. He didn’t say much, but he never does on the phone. I could hear the anger in the loaded combination of grunts and poignant silences. And it was still bugging him the next day when I drove to La Sirena to meet up with him for some reconnaissance.
Bishop’s former house address was in Dare’s box of paperwork, so we decided to check it out. Maybe we’d see something useful, some clue that pointed to where he would’ve corralled seven teens in the weeks leading up to All Saints’ Day. Dare said that he and Lon’s father found no indication that they were kept inside the house when they searched it thirty years before, but at least we’d have a point of reference from which to start.
“Do you have Hajo’s phone number?” Lon asked as he made a turn into a small neighborhood on the east side of La Sirena, a few miles inland from the coast. Traffic hummed in the distance on the main highway leading to Morella—the one I drove back and forth to work.
“Bob has it.”
“What if he doesn’t show tomorrow? We have to send Bob to track him down?”
I pressed the button to lower the passenger window so I could see the houses we were passing. “I suppose. But he’ll show. He wants the damn vassal medicinal.”
Two slits of green slanted in my direction. “I still can’t believe you promised him that.”
“Me either, but my options were limited.” No way was I telling him about Hajo coming on to me. I squelched that thought before Lon had time to figure out what was on my mind. “He’s not country-club material, Lon. He’s a junkie. You wanted a dowser, I got you a dowser. If you want someone more respectable, Bob says you’ll have to go out of state.”
“‘Bob says.’” His hand hung loosely over the top of the steering wheel as he slouched in his seat and stared straight ahead like he was daring the road to piss him off. “I must remember to thank Bob and his big mouth.”
“He’s excited to meet you, too.”
No answer. A muscle in his jaw flexed. The long hollows under his cheekbones deepened.
Two blocks of crowded, boxy homes sailed by my window before he spoke again. “I wish you’d driven to La Sirena last night after all that.”
I blinked several times, trying to decipher what he meant, which was often more than what he said. “I was tired. And mad at myself. I didn’t need you mad at me too.”
“I wasn’t mad. Not at you. I was worried.”
“No reason to be. I could’ve shocked him if I had to. But I didn’t.”
Another grunt. Another block driven. “I don’t like sleeping alone anymore.”
I glanced at him, but his concentration was on the road. Stoic. “Me either,” I admitted.
The tight angle of his shoulders loosened. Just slightly.
As he rounded a corner onto Dolores Street, where Bishop used to live, I said, “Look, I’m over being mad at Bob, but if you want to challenge Hajo to a duel when we’re finished with him tomorrow, I’m totally cool with that.”
That got me a light grunt. Then another askance look. Then the tiniest twitch of mustache at the corner of his mouth. Finally. I grinned back.
Bishop’s one-bedroom house clung to a steep hill in the middle of the block. The siding looked brand-new, and the inclined driveway was darker than the street, freshly resurfaced. Public records said it had been empty for nearly twenty years before it was resold several times, bank-owned, then purchased earlier this year by one Simon Cleeton.
We parked on the street and glanced around before exiting the car.
“These old houses are being bought and fixed up by people who work in Morella and commute,” Lon noted. “Easy access to the highway on-ramp, cheaper property taxes than living in the city, low crime rates.”
“Except for that pesky child snatcher.”
“Except for that.”
Lon exited and set the car alarm. I sniffed the air. Burning leaves somewhere nearby. I always liked that smell. Sort of comforting and pleasant. As I walked around the SUV, I eyed the houses on either side of Bishop’s place, then the ones across the street. Cute, well-kept. We’d looked up the property owners of those, too. Everyone who’d lived here thirty years ago had long since sold their homes. No one left with memories of their neighbor at 658 Dolores Street. A pity.
“Nothing unusual,” Lon noted as he stuffed his hands in the pockets of a tailored brown jacket.
“No deserted playgrounds or creepy ravines,” I agreed. The house itself was small and square. “One bedroom. He never married or had kids, huh?”
“Nope.”
We climbed stone steps that cut up the hill to the front door. Lon peeked around the side, over a shoulder-high wooden fence, which still had lumber tags stapled to several boards. “Tiny backyard. Barely worth owning a lawn mower,” Lon said.
I stood on tiptoe and peered over the top of the fence. “No ominous old shed back there. No John Wayne Gacy crawl space under the house.”
Lon pivoted and surveyed the block. I did the same.
“What’s that at the end of the street behind the fence? Looks like a parking lot.”
Lon squinted. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say that’s the back of La Sirena Junior High.”
“Really?” I must’ve been turned around. I didn’t know La Sirena all that well, but I’d dropped off Jupe at school on occasion. And there was, of course, the time when Jupe had been held hostage by a rival magician, Riley Cooper. But I wasn’t paying much attention to the school’s location that night.
“We normally come from the other side,” Lon said. “This whole area’s changed. I didn’t realize this street butted up to Madison.”
“Was the junior high here thirty years ago?”
“Yep. The same one Cindy Brolin attended.”
“You mean to tell me that Bishop lived a block away?”
“It looks that way. Come on.”
We walked back down to the sidewalk and headed in the direction of the parking lot, crossing over Madison, and stopped at the chain-link fence. It was Jupe’s school, all right. And the bit we could spy from Bishop’s old house was faculty parking. The roots of a knotted cypress had buckled the sidewalk here. An old cement bench sat beneath the tree, its back touching the fence. The parking lot exit was only a few feet away.
“Jesus, he probably scouted out his victims from here,” Lon said.
The hair on my arms rose at the thought. But the new missing kids didn’t go here. They attended the private school across town. I was reminding Lon of this when a woman with a pale blue halo exited a door at the back of the school. An alarm beeped. She was heading toward a car parked nearby, on the other side of the fence.
“Ms. Forsythe,” Lon said in greeting.
She glanced up, confused, then smiled and stepped up to the fence, speaking through it. “Mr. Butler. I was just headed out to lunch. There’s nothing wrong, is there?”
“No, we were just in the neighborhood and thought we’d walk by the school.” He put his hand on my lower back. “This is my girlfriend, Arcadia,” he said, then turned to me. “This is Grace Forsythe, one of Jupe’s teachers.”
She was Earthbound, both a couple inches taller and decades older than me. She wore no makeup and was dressed in a flowing poncho-style shirt over polyester pants. Her hair was in a long, dark bob with straight bangs that covered her eyebrows. A little frumpy, a little flower-power. Exactly as I’d pictured her. Not only was she Jupe’s science teacher but also his homeroom teacher and his favorite. He talked about her all the time.
I held my hand up and waved once. “Nice to meet you.”
“Cady, right?”
“Yes.”
She smiled. “Oh, yes. I’ve hea
rd all about you from Jupe.”
Uh-oh.
“I expected you to be wearing a rubber catsuit and wielding a sword.”
Errr . . .
“He’s got a big imagination,” she explained with a smile.
“And a bigger mouth,” Lon grumbled.
Her laugh was confident. “Better than being afflicted with shyness.” She turned to me. “You’re the one who’s been teaching him about constellations.”
The way she said this, I felt like I was in trouble. “Is that a bad thing?”
Her face brightened. “Oh, no. It’s good. Though he’s gotten a few wrong, and insists on correcting me in front of the class.”
“That’s Jupe’s short attention span, not her lessons,” Lon said with a hint of a smile.
“Oh, I never doubted that. You know, I think it’s wonderful that he has a new female role model in his life. I’ve noticed a real difference in him recently. He’s much more positive.”
“Thanks, but I doubt that’s because of me.” I shifted uneasily on my feet.
“Don’t be so sure. He’s more focused. Scoring better on exams, too. Confident—though he’s never really had a problem being sure of himself,” she said with a wink.
Lon crossed his arms over his chest. “He’s been more confident than usual around the house. Seems to think he’s coming into his knack.”
Ms. Forsythe’s eyebrows raised. “Oh, really? I haven’t heard this tidbit. He’s too young, don’t you think?”
I nodded. “That’s what we’ve been saying.”
“I once had a female student who came into her knack early, maybe ten years ago. But it’s rare. And I haven’t noticed anything unusual going on with Jupiter.”
“Well, if you overhear him claiming to be able to persuade people with the sound of his voice, please do me a favor and tell him he’s full of it,” Lon said. “He’ll listen to you.”
She chuckled. “That Jupiter. So wonderfully dramatic!”
Lon’s expression said that he did not quite agree with that assessment.
“I overheard him saying in homeroom that he was going to the carnival tonight,” she said, tugging her purse onto her shoulder as she stepped back to unlock her car door.
“We’re going to try to make it over there after school, before it gets dark.”
She opened the car door and braced her hands on the top edge. “That’s probably wise, with all the Snatcher talk floating around town. The kids are starting to invent danger around every corner. I don’t normally allow negative talk in my classroom, but I do encourage them to stay alert. Better safe than sorry, I tell them.”
Lon mumbled an agreement. But I couldn’t help but wonder if the teachers who worked here thirty years ago had recited the same adage to their students . . . while Bishop stood in the same spot where I stood now, making a mental list of his potential victims.
“How many times have you been here?” I asked Jupe as the three of us approached the entrance of Brentano Gardens amusement park later that afternoon.
“This year, or my whole life? ’Cause if you just mean this year, then that would only be three times, but if you mean since I was born, then, uh, let’s see—”
I whistled and drew my fingers across my throat. “Never mind.”
“But—”
Lon reached over his son’s shoulder, clamped his hand over Jupe’s mouth, and pretended to punch him in the stomach. Jupe’s muffled cry of laughter echoed off the pavement. They wrestled the entire way inside.
Brentano Gardens sat opposite the boardwalk in the heart of La Sirena, just across Ocean Drive. The brick wall surrounding it stretched over several outlying blocks of the Village and was shaped like the crenellated wall of a European castle, the rooftop outlined in white lights. It originally opened in the early 1920s, and its claim to fame was having one of the oldest American wooden roller coasters still in operation.
During the last two weeks of October, the park stayed open nightly until midnight for their annual Spooktacular carnival. When we arrived, would-be revelers were already lined up shoulder to shoulder at the ticket booths.
The park was sweetly old-fashioned, with bales of hay and pumpkins stacked around small kiosks shaped like overgrown toadstools. A tree-lined promenade filled with quaint restaurants and shops welcomed us at the entrance. Good thing, because I was starving. However, my excitement over the possibility of dining at the smiling-penis-rated Alps Fondue Chalet was trampled when we discovered the wait was well over an hour. We decided to skip it and go for bad carnival food instead. No one was happier about this development than Jupe, who happily polished off an entire corn dog and a fat pile of cheesy fries in a few short bites.
As we sauntered further into the park, Jupe hammed it up as our tour guide. Sure, the park brochure might tell you that the Whirling Wammie ride was built in the 1960s, but did you know that Jupe had thrown up after riding it—not once, not twice, but five times? He proudly pointed out all five vomit spots. There was also Thor’s Lightning, on which Jupe lost a flip-flop when he was seven, and the Black Forest Water Flumes, the ride that “almost drowned” him the following year when he wriggled out of his seat restraint and tried to go overboard while waiting for the ride to start. Lon rolled his eyes and silently shook his head behind Jupe’s back as his son related the dramatic event in stunning, high-def detail.
Two Spooktacular attractions were set up in the center of the park: the unfortunately named Jack-O-Land—which Jupe, and probably every other kid under eighteen referred to as Jack-Off-Land—and our intended destination, the Spirit Cove ride.
“Eye of Horus, the line is long,” I mumbled in frustration.
“It’s a Butler family tradition,” Jupe said brightly. “We have to ride it.”
“No, you have to ride it.”
“Dad said we can’t separate tonight,” Jupe argued.
Yeah, but I wasn’t in danger of being kidnapped by some elderly ex-Hellfire member with a chip on his shoulder.
“Buck up, witch,” Lon said. “I hate crowds. If I have to endure it, so do you. What’s two hours out of your life?”
“Two hours?” I glanced at the the queue area. It snaked around a dozen or more handrails. Hundreds of people shuffled along a few inches at a time.
“It looks like a cow pen,” I protested.
“Moo-ove,” Lon wisecracked as he urged me into the line behind Jupe. It kind of smelled like a cow pen, too. Someone needed to pass a law forcing people to use antiperspirant. I would vote for that; moreover, I would happily stand in line for two hours to do so.
While Lon checked his phone, I busied myself with thinking of ways that he was going to repay me later. We’d been in line only a few minutes when Jupe spotted someone he knew ahead of us and leaned over the rail to chat. While doing so, he conducted some discreet scratching beneath the waistband of his jeans. “Look,” I whispered to Lon. “Did you see that? What’s going on with that? He told me it was an injury.”
“Hmph. I’ll bet.”
“Is this a boy thing? Did you injure yourself when you were his age? Being . . . overenthusiastic?”
“More chafing than I care to admit . . . the occasional carpal tunnel flare-up,” Lon said with a self-deprecating shrug. As I bit back a laugh, he assured me, “I wouldn’t worry. He’ll be fine.”
“But will I? Now I’m gonna have to scrub those images out of my brain. I liked it better when he was sweet and innocent.”
“You’re a little late boarding that train. He hasn’t been innocent for years. He’s had his hands in his pants since kindergarten.”
“Stop!” I protested, covering my ears.
Lon laughed heartily and tugged me against his side. “Parenting sucks in all kinds of ways.” He followed Jupe’s movements with his eyes, shaking his head at his son’s obvious discomfort. Then I noticed someone from Dare’s brunch party walking past the ride queue.
I elbowed Lon. “Look. Isn’t that Dare’s son, Mark?”
At the sound of his name, the blond man looked up and spotted Lon, then me. The wince was barely perceptible, but it was pretty clear that we were the last two people he wanted to see. He pasted on a polite grin and stopped outside the rail near us. “Lon . . . Arcadia. Twice in one week. Imagine that.”
“Small world,” Lon agreed.
“I’m here with the family,” Mark said, lifting up the collar on his jacket to shield his neck from the wind. “My wife is waiting with my son to get a pumpkin carved. I’m surprised the crowds are so large tonight. A pretty big turnout for a town fighting against Halloween right now. Did you see that civil action group on the news this morning?”
“Yep.”
“Maybe they’ll have better luck in Morella.”
“Maybe.”
“Can’t keep down the Halloween spirit here. Too much money to be made.” He laughed, rubbing his hands together, then blew into them to keep warm.
Lon nodded absently, as if he couldn’t possibly care less.
“Hey . . . I was wondering about why you two were visiting my father the other day. Everything okay?”
Dare hadn’t told Mark that we were trying to track down Bishop? Guess he really wasn’t lying about all the animosity between them.
“Everything’s fine,” Lon said, avoiding Mark’s original question.
Mark waited for more, then tried another tactic. “No one from the club sees you much anymore.” He paused, then added, “Though I did hear you brought Arcadia to the last Hellfire event at the caves . . .”
“Mmm-hmm,” Lon answered. Blank, cool. No emotion whatsoever.
“You two coming again for Samhain?”
“Not if my life depended on it.”
Mark’s chuckle was dry and awkward. He cleared his throat. “Don’t see you around the Village these days either, but I’ve been busy working long hours and I hear you’re always out of town on those photo shoots of yours. Still the big celebrity, I guess. Life in the fast lane, all that. Speaking of celebrity, how’s Yvonne? Heard from her lately?”
