Work Like a Charm

by Cate Martin

  By the time they were done asking me every question backwards and forwards, it had stopped raining, but the sunset was a distant memory. The front of the house was a bustle of activity as police officers gathered evidence and prepared to move Mrs. Olson's body to the medical examiner's van waiting at the curb. Sophie and I ducked out the back door instead. A tall fence divided Mrs. Olson's backyard from ours, and there was no gate, but that wouldn't be much of a problem for Sophie, I was sure.

  I was just tucking the detective's card into my pocket when I noticed someone standing at the bottom of the back porch stairs. At first, I thought it was another officer, searching the trashcan much as I had done, but when Sophie's prattle about our dinner options abruptly ground to a halt, I looked more carefully and realized it was Nick.

  He had his hands in his pockets and gave Sophie a polite nod, but when his eyes met mine, I knew he was upset with me. If he were my parent, he'd be telling me he wasn't angry so much as disappointed. But everyone knew that was worse.

  "There was a window," I said, taking a few steps off the porch to point up at it.

  "There wasn't, before," he said.

  "I didn't notice it at first either," I said, but words failed me as he just glared at me. It was probably the darkness or the yellowish tone to the light over Mrs. Olson's back porch, but I would swear the green of his eyes had darkened. I couldn't lie to those eyes. "Something here was wrong. We both felt it."

  "I was working on it," Nick said. "The right way. By the rules."

  "I know," I said. "I'm sorry. I just couldn't be that patient. I had to know."

  "Nelson tells me she had been dead for some time," Nick said. "You didn't help anything by breaking in."

  "I know," I said, and Sophie hissed in a breath. Now they were both pissed at me, one for lying and one for telling the truth.

  "I should have listened to my gut when I first felt like something was wrong," I said. "I regret that. I don't regret this."

  Nick looked like he wanted to argue, like he wanted to say so much at once that he locked up the gears of his brain.

  In the end, he just gave me a curt nod and said, "understood." Then he turned his back to me and walked away.

  I kind of wish he would have yelled at me instead.

  Chapter 9

  One of the strangest things about living in Miss Zenobia Weekes' Charm School for Exceptional Young Ladies was how Mr. Trevor was very seldom seen, and yet always knew just what we needed. Or, more accurately, just what we were about to need.

  Case in point: when Sophie and I came in the house we were both starving but knew there wouldn't be time to cook anything. We really needed to check in with Brianna in the cellar right away and see how her tests were going.

  So we weren't exactly surprised to see a plate stacked high with turkey sandwiches still warm enough to emit little curls of steam. Not surprised, but deeply grateful. Sophie scooped up the platter, and I grabbed napkins and plates, and we carried it all through the solarium and out the back door then down the steep wooden steps to the cellar.

  "We have food," Sophie announced as we followed the glow of light to the little alcove filled with alchemy equipment. A couple of Brianna's boxes from the dining room had found their way down here, and an array of more modern lab equipment was interspersed with the Bunsen burners and hand-blown glass beakers.

  "Just a minute," Brianna said in that faraway voice that said the number of brain cells she was devoting to talking to us was somewhat few. Sophie set the platter down on the woodworking bench, and I handed her one of the plates and napkins.

  "So, that was awkward back there," she said as she daintily bit into one of the sandwiches.

  "You mean with Nick?" I asked.

  "I mean with Nick," she said. Her eyes were twinkling at me with good humor.

  "Yeah, I think I might have ruined that," I said, not quite able to keep my tone as light as hers. "Not that I know what it was, or if it was even a thing."

  "Oh, hey," Sophie said, switching from teasing to real concern. "I'm sure it's not so bad as all that."

  "He was pretty mad," I said.

  "He'll come around," Sophie said. "Just give him a little time."

  "All this stuff I can't explain. That’s always going to be a barrier," I said. Sophie nodded in a way that felt like something more than mere empathy. But then, we were all in the same witchy boat.

  A timer beeped, and Brianna pushed a button on a little machine, peering at the screen for a moment before walking over to where Sophie and I were leaning on the woodworking bench and eating.

  "Wash your hands first," I said as a distracted Brianna tried reaching for a sandwich. She looked down at her hand, the tips of her fingers stained with some sort of chemical that, while not Mrs. Olson's blood, was probably something a lot less safe to ingest. She headed to the sink in the corner.

  "Anything?" Sophie asked as Brianna scrubbed her hands dry on a clean white towel then took the plate I held out for her.

  "I've done everything I can think of," she said. "No sign of magic."

  "What signs would there be?" I asked.

  "Magical weapons, either specially forged or spelled mundane weapons, leave traces of the magic behind. There is no sign of that here," Brianna said. "It definitely wasn't just some sort of piercing spell; that would have glowed so brightly we would have seen it when we were standing around her. I even checked for magical poisons, either injected or coated on the blade, but nothing."

  "You've ruled out a lot of things. That has to help," I said. Brianna just shrugged, still unhappy. "Sophie, you sensed something around the house," I prompted.

  Sophie nodded, swallowing the last bite of sandwich before answering. "I'm not sure what that was, how long ago the warping happened let alone what caused it. It might have been there for decades. Or it could be related to the murder; I don't really know."

  "Brianna, do you have any way of studying it?" I asked. "One of your machines or something?"

  "Maybe," Brianna said doubtfully.

  "What about you?" Sophie said to me.

  "I don't think I'll see a thing," I said.

  "No, that feeling you had," Sophie said.

  "I've had lots of feelings," I said. Sophie was about to respond, but I held up a hand. "I'm not being dismissive, really. I do have lots of feelings. The one I know the best is the compulsion one, the one I have to obey. This wasn't that. Then there was the sense of wrongness that wouldn't go away until I got inside that house. Personally, I don't think that was anything remotely magical. I was just worried."

  "Are you sure?" Sophie asked. "I mean, when you were feeling it, it was really strong, right? But you kept setting it aside, forgetting about it."

  "Don't remind me. I wish I hadn't set it aside," I said.

  "That' just it, maybe it wasn't really you choosing to ignore a thing," Sophie said.

  "Being busy is no excuse," I said, but Brianna was shaking her head at me as well.

  "I see what Sophie is saying. If your worry was rooted in some sense of the magic warping that Sophie noticed, the fact that you kept forgetting about it might have been a sort of counterspell."

  I liked the idea. Perhaps too much. I shook my head. "No, I don't think it was that. It didn't feel like being under a spell. I just got wrapped up in other things."

  "Being under a spell doesn't necessarily feel like being under a spell," Sophie said.

  "We can't prove it one way or another now, but let's keep it in mind," Brianna said. "What about that sick feeling you had?"

  "Yes, that's new," I said. "That definitely felt like magic, like an outside force directing me. Or, I guess the opposite of directing me? It would hit me whenever I thought that Mrs. Olson's death was natural causes or not something we should investigate."

  "A spell to keep you on a path," Sophie mused.

  "More like one to keep me from going off it," I said. "I don't see the path, so there's no way I can avoid going off it. But boy does it let m
e know when I do."

  "Hopefully that's over now that we're committed to investigating," Brianna said.

  "Hopefully," I agreed.

  We finished off the plate of sandwiches and Brianna went back to the alchemy station to clean up and put away the equipment. There was still some fluid left in the vial that stood alone in a test tube rack, canted to one side in a way that looked forlorn.

  "The tissue in that vial," I said, then fell silent again.

  "Yes?" Brianna asked as she wiped her microscope down with an alcohol swab then pulled the plastic cover over it.

  "I know I didn't grasp even a fraction of the reading you assigned to me," I said, "but there was a thing in there about sympathetic magic."

  "The tissue in the vial shares a bond with Mrs. Olson," Brianna said, nodding. "Both her body and her spirit. But summoning spirits is a bad business. We don't really understand where they go, and they are often angry to be yanked back here. Angry and not cooperative."

  "Oh," I said. "I hadn't even been thinking of that." Summoning spirits of the dead? I guess it sounded like a witchy sort of thing to do, but not one I was anxious to try. "No, I was just thinking. It also touched the weapon, right? Which is why you ran all the tests for magic."

  "All of them," Brianna said. "There's nothing else to look for, I'm sure of it."

  "So it was a mundane weapon, no magic involved at all," I said. "But there's still a link to the tissue in the vial."

  "Oh," Sophie said as if she'd jumped ahead of my rambling explanation. "That might work."

  "A locator spell?" Brianna said, also jumping ahead of me. "I think that would work. But what if it directs us to something inside Mrs. Olson's house? That's a crime scene now. We can't go back in there."

  "If only we'd thought of this before we called the police," Sophie said.

  "Maybe it's not in the house," I said. "Maybe it's in the yard, or still in the murderer's possession."

  "It could lead us to the murder," Brianna said.

  "And then we could lead the police to both somehow," I said. "Can you do it?"

  "Not a problem," Brianna said. She took out her wand and paused a moment to call the words to mind. Then she raised the wand and began that double-throated chant until a silvery light rose up out of the vial and streaked like a comet across the cellar.

  "Follow it!" Sophie yelled, nimbly leaping the stool set close to the woodstove and racing for the stairs. Brianna made some motions with her wand as if trying to reel the light back to her, but it was already out of sight, leaving nothing but a silvery glow that was rapidly fading from the top of the stairs.

  I ran after Sophie, Brianna close behind me. We burst out into the yard. The soles of my Converse sneakers slid over the wet grass, and I nearly fell back onto my butt, but Sophie danced ahead as if she hung from wires.

  "There it goes!" she cried, pointing up into the sky from where she stood in the center of the orchard. Brianna spoke a word and gestured with her wand.

  "Did you catch it?" I asked.

  "No," Brianna said after a moment's silent assessment. "It's gone."

  "Gone where? Over the wall?" I asked.

  "No," Brianna said, looking around us and twitching her wand. I knew she was seeing something I didn't, which was deeply annoying.

  "It couldn't have gone straight up into the sky. That doesn't make any sense," I said. "Maybe we should go out to a wide open area and try it again. It didn't go towards Mrs. Olson's house, so it must be leading us to the murderer."

  Sophie walked back to us, her face grave. "Did you see that?" she asked.

  "Yes," Brianna said.

  "No," I said, hating how sullen I sounded, but hating more the fact that in a world filled with magic, I was worse than blind.

  "But I don't understand," Brianna said. "We didn't let anything pass."

  "We didn't let anyone pass," Sophie said. "But a thing? A small thing?"

  Brianna pushed past Sophie to examine each of her brass detectors. "I should still have known," she said when apparently none of them told her anything.

  "Mrs. Olson was murdered days ago," I said. "Before I got back from Iowa. Maybe days before."

  "Maybe those first few days, when everything was so overwhelming," Sophie said as Brianna continued to shake her head.

  "Brianna, we have to face facts," Sophie said. "Whatever weapon was used to kill Mrs. Olson, the police are never going to find it. Because somehow, whether it was originally from there or from our time or from some other time altogether, the murder weapon is in 1927."

  Sophie and I looked at Brianna, but she just kept shaking her head.

  "If someone had punched through the fabric of the portal, I would have known," she said.

  "But if the weapon was small-" I started to say.

  "I would still have known," Brianna said. "If a mosquito tried to pass through, I would know."

  "Okay," I conceded. "Well, then perhaps the locator spell went awry."

  Brianna was angry enough to make eye contact with me, to give me a truly withering look. "My spell did not go awry."

  "Then I guess you're at a logical impasse," I said, letting my annoyance show. "You figure out which of your premises doesn't hold true."

  I regretted those words even before they were out of my mouth, but even more when Brianna's face started to crumple.

  "Hey," Sophie said. She moved as if to give Brianna a hug, but at Brianna's instinctive flinch she quickly changed the motion to a bare two fingertips on the back of Brianna's wrist a tap of comfort. "It won't hurt to just go back to 1927 and take a look around."

  "It really doesn't make any sense," I said. "Who in 1927 would even have a motive? Mrs. Olson wasn't even alive then."

  "It won't hurt to take a look," Sophie said, giving me a hard look.

  "No, it wouldn't hurt," I said. "Except, it's the middle of the night."

  "She's right," Brianna said, and Sophie and I exchanged a glance and a shrug. We had no idea which of us she was agreeing with and which she was speaking to. "We'll go in the morning and try the spell again on the other side of the time bridge. In the meantime, I'm going back to the library. I need to think some things through."

  "Okay, but be sure to get at least a little sleep," I said.

  "I'll go with her," Sophie said. "I actually have a thing or two I want to look up myself about the warping I felt. You coming in?"

  "I'm going to grab the dishes first," I said, and went back down into the cellar. I gathered up the platter and plates and dirty napkins and carried them up the stairs then set them on the grass as I pulled the heavy cellar doors shut over the stairwell and clicked the padlock shut.

  I started to head up the porch steps, but a sudden urge struck me to try again to sense the magic I knew was all around the backyard and particularly the orchard. I set the platter and plates near the door and pulled out my wand.

  It felt warm in my hand, warmer even than my body heat. Did that mean something?

  I walked out to the center of the orchard, where all of Sophie's dancing medications always began and ended, and tipped my head back to look up into the sky. A tattered wisp of cloud blew past the crescent moon, and a few cold stars twinkled down at me, but I saw nothing more. I closed my eyes, raising my wand up high, rising myself up on tiptoes. I didn't know any words or movements, nothing I could do to make the vision come except wishing. So I did that, with all my heart and soul.

  Then I opened my eyes.

  Another wisp of cloud was rolling in over the moon. Just that, nothing else.

  Then I heard a sound behind me, the grit of a paving stone grinding under a sneakered foot than someone clearing their throat. I whipped my wand behind my back, stuffing it desperately in the general direction of my back pocket but being thwarted by the folds of my hoodie.

  "Hey," Nick said as he stepped into view.

  "Um, hey?" I managed, my throat suddenly painfully dry.

  Crap. Had he just seen me flailing around while I gazed u
p at the sky like a crazy person?

  Chapter 10

  He just stood there for the longest time, hands deep in his pockets and looking pretty much everywhere but at me. Which was just as well, as I was still fumbling at the back of my hoodie. Finally, I got it pulled up enough to tuck my wand in underneath it and smoothed it back down just as he finally looked my way.

  "I know it's late, but I thought I heard someone moving around back here, and I thought I'd take the chance it was you," he said.

  "It's me," I said. Now that I had my wand hidden my hands were suddenly acutely aware that they had nothing in particular to do. I touched my hair and realized that I had done nothing with it since getting soaked in the rain earlier and it probably looked a fright. It could have matted down, it could have frizzed up, but I was pretty sure it had managed both in random patches all around my head.

  I pulled up my hood.

  "You wanted to talk to me?" I finally managed to ask.

  "Yeah," he said, but then he lapsed back into that maddening silence.

  "About the case?" I prompted.

  "Yeah. No. Kinda." He seemed to be frustrating even himself as he pulled his hands out of his pockets and ran them through his hair. "It's chilly out here. Can we go inside? For just a minute," he quickly amended.

  "Sure," I said. "Tea?"

  "Lovely," he said, in the tone of someone very eager to agree to anything at all. I picked up the stack of plates, and he rushed to open the screen door for me. If he thought it was odd that I had been out in the yard at nearly midnight with a stack of plates and napkins, he said nothing about it.

  I put the dishes in the sink then made sure there was water in the kettle before switching it on. I thought Nick would sit at the table, but perhaps he truly did only intend to stay for a minute, as he just leaned against the counter and watched me take mugs out of the cupboard and put a bag of chamomile in each.

  Clearly he wanted to say a thing, and clearly, he couldn't figure out a way to just get the words out. I tried sneaking little looks at him out of the corner of my eye, but I could get no sense of his emotional state beyond being deeply conflicted. He had a lot of feelings roiling around.