by Cate Martin
"Sorry," Brianna said. "The wind took it."
"What's that sound?" Sophie asked. At first, I didn't hear anything except the patter of rain against the windows, but then I heard a voice speaking in a low drone.
"Where's it coming from?" I asked in a whisper. We all looked around, each of us tipping our heads like dogs as we tried to catch the almost inaudible voice.
Brianna pointed to a closed door at the left side of the hall, and I nodded. That was where I thought it was coming from as well.
Brianna clutched her wand and advanced on the door. Sophie took out her own wand and held it at the ready. I patted my back pocket and felt my wand still there, jutting up the back of my hoodie. But I didn't pull it out.
Brianna slowly turned the doorknob until it could go no further then pulled the door open enough for the three of us to peek inside.
The room beyond looked much like the parlor back at the charm school. Old but well-maintained furniture gathered around a fireplace that didn't look like it ever saw much use. The light in the room had an electric glow to it and flickered in random patterns of dimness and brightness.
A television. The voice was still too low for me to make out the words, but the rhythm of the speech was that of a newscaster.
"Hello?" I called, and Brianna and Sophie both jumped. I pointed to one of the chairs with its back to us, the one that seemed to be blocking us from seeing the television. It was a high-backed chair, the kind where the sides formed wings to give a sense of privacy. A handmade lace doily was draped over the top of it.
And above the doily, we could just see the very top of someone's head, gray hair floating untidily around it.
The head of someone who didn't turn when I had spoken.
Brianna and Sophie advanced with their wands, moving away from each other to circle on opposite sides of the chair. I followed behind. I had my hands up like a martial artist waiting for their opponent to make the first move.
Not that I know any martial arts. I've seen a few movies, and I had a friend in high school who had studied karate for years and used to try to teach me some of his moves, but I knew I didn't remember any of it.
With or without a wand, I wasn't going to be any use in a fight.
Brianna came around the chair first. Her whole body slumped as she lowered her wand then tucked it away.
"Oh, poor Mrs. Olson," Sophie said, putting her own wand away.
Then I finally saw her, and sickeningly realized where the smell was coming from. She must have been in that chair for some time.
She must have been dead before I'd even returned from Iowa.
"We should have come sooner," I said. "I noticed she wasn't around the day I got back. And I had the feeling of wrongness then too. I should have made you come over with me then. I got distracted."
"This isn't your fault," Brianna said. "She was likely already dead anyway. There was nothing any of us could have done."
"Something is very wrong here," Sophie said. I was about to agree when a sudden feeling like the most intense cramps of my entire life had me doubled over. I reached out for support, catching one of the arms of Mrs. Olson's chair.
"Amanda!" Brianna cried.
"I'm okay," I said through gritted teeth.
"You really don't look okay," Sophie said. "We should get you back home."
"No, it's not me," I said. "I mean, there's nothing wrong with me." I took a few more breaths as the last of the crampiness released its hold. "It was that feeling of wrongness. It's like it decided all of a sudden to physically manifest itself."
"But we found what's wrong, didn't we?" Sophie asked.
"We should call the police," Brianna said.
"I think Nick was already doing that," I said, and they both looked up at me with a start.
"You were here with Nick?" Brianna asked.
"The police are coming?" Sophie demanded at the same time, albeit more shrilly.
"He was worried about Mrs. Olson too," I said. "But he didn't think we should go in without probable cause or someone's permission."
"So you got us instead," Sophie concluded.
"Not just to help me break in," I said. "Maybe this is something we have to solve again."
"I don't know, Amanda," Brianna said. "She looks like she sat down to watch one of her programs and just passed away peacefully."
I glanced at Linda Olson's face. She had already started to decay, but even tuning that out I had to agree with Brianna. She looked like she had died in her sleep of natural causes.
I cried out as another cramp rippled through me. Sophie caught my arm, and I could hear her voice as if across a great distance, telling me to just breathe.
The cramp faded and I found myself clutching Sophie's arm and taking deep controlled breaths with her as if one of us was a doula and the other was giving birth.
"We should get you home," Brianna said. "Maybe even to a doctor."
"No," I said, taking another deep breath. "I think I triggered it by thinking there was nothing wrong. It didn't like that."
Brianna was frowning at me. "I've never heard anything like what you're describing. I would really like to give you an examination. It might be what you say, or it might be something like appendicitis, in which case we should really get you to a doctor STAT."
I was about to object again, but Sophie spoke first. "How would you tell the difference?" she asked.
"I have a spell," Brianna said. "I created it on my own as a way of examining the insides of animal specimens without having to kill them or slice them open. It makes a ghost image like a CT scan. I can see anomalies, both magical and mundane. Although the mundane ones are outside of my field of knowledge."
"Do it," Sophie said, pointing at Mrs. Olson.
"Yes, do it to her," I agreed.
Brianna looked startled, then intrigued. She took out her wand and started speaking in a voice I'd never heard come out of her before. It was like two voices at once, a lilting high one and a rumbling bass one that spoke slower.
I saw this video on YouTube once of a Mongolian throat singer. I had been blown away at the thought that any human throat could make that kind of sound, it had been so eerie yet cool.
The sound coming out of Brianna was beyond even that. The lilting voice had a heartbreaking melancholy to it that brought tears to my eyes. The lower tone echoed through my chest in a low rumble that made me feel uneasy like something was hovering over me, just behind me, just out of sight, but if I turned to look, it would be gone.
Then Brianna made a flicking motion with her wand and a silvery light drew up out of Mrs. Olson's body. An exact replica of her body floated up out of her. Brianna made some more flicks of her wand, and the ghostly Mrs. Olson straightened out to lay flat on her back, floating five feet off the floor.
"Woah," Sophie said. "That's amazing, Bree."
But Brianna's attention was focused on the form she had created. It looked like a ghostly form of Mrs. Olson's naked body, but I found if I changed the focus of my eyes I could see inside of her.
"Look at her heart," Brianna said. "See all of the color concentrated there? It looks like it really was just a heart attack. Poor dear."
She raised her wand to dismiss the ghost, but I caught her wrist before she could.
"Do you see something else?" she asked, but I didn't answer. I really didn't know what it was I was looking at. All of the structures of Mrs. Olson's body, I suppose, although I was less confident than Brianna that I knew normal from abnormal.
But the twinge in my gut was guiding me. When my gaze swept the wrong way it would threaten to cramp again, and I would move my eyes back, but too far that direction would bring the cramp as well. Eventually, I found what I was apparently meant to see.
"What is that?" I asked, lifting a hand over the floating form to point to the corner of Mrs. Olson's eye.
Brianna and Sophie both leaned in, eyes narrowing as they too adjusted their focus. It was like when you were looking at the 3D
image of a boat that had a picture of a shark hidden within it. You had to relax, stop trying, and all at once you would just see it.
"Wow," Sophie said. "What is that?"
"I'm not sure," Brianna said, moving around to get a closer look.
"I'm sure," I said, my gaze sweeping up and down the short silver channel from the corner of her eye to the center of her brain. "It's proof of murder."
Chapter 8
We stared at that ghostly form until the spell began to fade. The floating simulacrum of Mrs. Olson's body sank to the floor, silvery bits of it gathering up and dispersing as if being blown away by a wind we couldn't feel.
Then it was gone.
Brianna looked around for a light switch, gave up and pointed her wand at the light fixture above us, commanding it to turn on. It had a warm, yellow glow, not particularly bright but enough for the three of us to lean in close around Mrs. Olson's body.
"I don't see any sign of it from here," Brianna said, putting her face far closer to the corpse than I would have done, what with the thick smell of it so much stronger when you got too close. "Not a puncture, not even a drop of blood. There might have been tears, I suppose, but after so many days…"
"What do we do now?" Sophie asked.
"We have to call the police," I said.
"I meant before that," Sophie said.
"Before that?"
"We're agreed that this seems like something magical, aren't we?" Sophie asked.
"I don't know," Brianna said. "It's definitely something that might be missed, especially if no one sees any reason to do an autopsy, but it also seems like something that could be done by anyone."
"Any psychopath with a really long needle," I said.
"So she wasn't killed by magic," Sophie said. "But magic was somehow involved. The patterns around this house are odd."
"But you never looked at them before today," Brianna said. "Maybe they always were. Maybe it's a side effect of being so close to our house."
"Then there's Amanda's gut," Sophie said.
"My gut definitely says this is on us," I agreed.
"We can't hide this," Brianna said. "We can't risk looking like we tried to cover up something."
"They're going to be suspicious," Sophie said. "First Cynthia, then Mrs. Olson. Twice inside of a month we three have found ourselves standing over a dead body."
"They knew Cynthia wasn't us," Brianna said. "And they'll think this is natural causes."
"Do we want them too?" I asked. Brianna gave me a puzzled look. "I mean, I totally agree with Sophie that we have to investigate this, but the police have resources we don't have. We should make sure they are using them."
"How are we going to do that?" Sophie asked. "We can't tell them what we saw. Or get Brianna to show it to them again."
"No," I agreed.
"Hold on," Brianna said, patting the pockets of her skirt and then her sweater before pulling out a small glass vial.
I decided not to ask why she had such a thing in her pocket, or if she always had one in there just in case.
"I'm going to take a sample from the inside of that channel," Brianna said, making little circles with the end of her wand at the corner of Mrs. Olson's eye. "Tears and blood. It might tell me something. But I'll leave just a little behind at the corner of her eye. A tear of blood. I think that should be enough to make the medical examiner look further."
"Good idea," I said. "You know a lot of useful spells."
"I've been studying," Brianna said, her cheeks coloring even as she focused all of her attention on the stream of fluid she was directing into the vial. She stoppered it with a little cork and slipped it away back inside her pocket.
"In Miss Zenobia's library?" I asked.
"Yes. It's a neverending sequence of rabbit holes. Fascinating rabbit holes, but a distraction from my proper studies all the same," Brianna said.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I know how important your studies are to you."
"They are," she agreed. "But our responsibility to guard the time portal is more important."
"It's hard now because we're new," Sophie said. "It will get easier when we get more used to it. Miss Zenobia managed to do it all alone while also running a secret school within a school. How time-consuming must that have been?"
"Yes," Brianna said, but she looked like she was really thinking about something else as she twiddled with the vial in her pocket.
"Why don't you take that sample back to the lab and do your testing. I'll call the police and wait here for them," Sophie said.
"What are we going to tell them?" I asked.
Sophie shrugged. "We found a door unlocked, maybe?"
"No, Nick and I checked less than an hour ago," I said. "That's the problem. We had no reason to break in."
"Maybe we could pretend we heard something?" Sophie said.
"But what? She's clearly been gone for days," I said.
"It's really a shame we can't just tell them the truth," Brianna said.
"Maybe it's best that we can't," Sophie said glumly. "Just in case this turns out to be partly our fault."
"Our fault?" I asked.
"Maybe something slipped through when we were struggling to hold the bridge across time stable," Sophie said.
"I don't think so," Brianna said, at the same moment I said, "that could scarcely be blamed on us."
The three of us fell silent for a long moment. In some distant corner of the house, a clock ticked.
"I'll break a window," I said at last. "I'll say I found it after Nick left and decided to investigate. I found the body and called Sophie. Then Sophie calls the police."
"What about me?" Brianna asked.
"You were never here," I said. "You need to be figuring out what you have in that vial, not answering the same questions that Sophie and I can handle without you."
"Yes, go," Sophie said. "We'll take care of this end of it."
Brianna nodded and left the room. A moment later the front door banged shut.
"Which window?" Sophie asked, looking around the room.
"None of these," I said. "Nick and I walked around the whole house. It would have to be something believable that we missed."
"Second floor?" Sophie said.
"Good idea," I said. We went out to the grand hall and climbed the stairs. I found myself walking on my tiptoes, anxious not to make a sound that might disturb the house. As if it were a living thing. As if it might be grieving or upset over the loss of its one remaining resident. I couldn't tell if Sophie was feeling the same way. She always glided softly and lightly everywhere she walked.
"The bathroom, I think," Sophie said, looking in each doorway until she found it.
"Why the bathroom?" I asked.
"It's a smaller window, tucked against the slope of the back porch roof," Sophie said. "Easy to miss if you were looking from the ground, and yet a prowler could get to it pretty easily by pulling up onto the porch roof."
"Perfect," I said just as we found the room. The window was narrow but tall. A person could slip through easily enough if they turned sideways. I started to pick up the heaviest object in the room, a cast iron magazine holder filled with glossy fashion magazines that were surprisingly current given Mrs. Olson's rather mundane choice in clothing.
But a thought hit me. "Is this too perfect?"
"What do you mean?" Sophie asked.
"Assuming they don't somehow figure out that we did this," I said, not sure that was even a safe assumption, "is this giving them a bunch of clues that will lead them to nothing but a dead end? I mean, how did the murderer get out of the house? Some more subtle escape route they'll never look for if we give them a really obvious one?"
Sophie bit her lip, eyebrows furrowing in thought. "This wasn't random," she said. "All of her stuff is still here, so it wasn't a robbery gone wrong. It doesn't seem very serial killer-y."
"Okay," I said, prompting her to continue.
"Brianna is going to figure out what she
can about how Mrs. Olson was killed," Sophie said. "And unless it really was magic, the medical examiner will figure that out too. What we really need the police for is finding the list of suspects. Who benefits from Mrs. Olson being dead? They'll compile that list either way, right? I would have to guess that would be routine. How that person got in and out shouldn't matter."
"Unless this whole thing from beginning to end is all magic-related, in which case it doesn't really matter either way. It's not their jurisdiction," I said. But I set the magazine rack down with a sigh. "Is there a way we can break the window and make it look like an accident?"
"Maybe," Sophie said, leaning in close to the window and looking around.
"I'll say I saw the window and was worried," I said. "I know it's technically breaking and entering. I guess if they want to charge me with that I'll go with it. I mean, we did do it. But only one of us gets in trouble that way."
"There's a tree," Sophie said.
"Not terribly near," I said, leaning over her shoulder to also gaze out the quickly fogging window.
"Stand back," Sophie said, taking out her wand. She summoned a rush of wind, and the gentle patter of rain became like a hail of bullets. Then a branch broke from the tree, spiraling towards us with such speed I shrieked out loud. It burst through the window like a spear, sending showers of glass and rain throughout the bathroom. I threw up my arms to protect my face but realized none of the glass was quite touching me. I looked down at my hands and saw them glowing faintly. The glow faded even as I looked at it.
I looked up at Sophie.
"Yeah, I've been practicing a few things too," she said, tucking her wand away. "So this is where you came in. And you went downstairs and found Mrs. Olson in front of the television, and then you called me."
She took out her cell phone and gave me one last questioning look. I gave her a nod, and she stepped out into the hallway before dialing 911.
I don't think they really believed my story. In truth, I didn't try very hard to sell it. I leaned hard on the one true thing I could tell them: that I had a bad feeling about Mrs. Olson that wasn't going away and I was very, very worried.
Sophie pointed out the bloody teardrop to every officer who came into the room until they kicked her out of the crime scene.
