by Skylar Finn
“But I haven’t seen her.” I thought about when I’d seen Lindy last. Not since her “reading.” How could they be so sure I would find her again?
“She’ll be looking for you,” said Janice suddenly, with a certainty that gave me a chill. “She knows the places you go. She goes to the places you are.”
“We will perform an enchantment similar to the one that Mother Time placed on herself to follow Father Death, when she still believed he was Father Night,” said Suki. “Only in this case, you will be visible to all except Lindy. You’ll be able to see her, but she won’t be able to see you.”
“Okay. I mean, I can do that.” What was it to me to do a little bit of investigating and learn Lindy’s whereabouts? It would stop her from performing her dark ritual to take over my life, which was what presumably required the recent rash of human hearts. No one else would disappear, and I would be safe. So would Peter and my family.
“Do you need a lock of my hair or something?” I asked Suki.
“Hair?” She looked at me, confused. I understood then that I’d made some sort of obvious and embarrassing faux pas. “Why would we need your hair?”
“Aren’t you going to cast a spell?” asked Cameron. I was glad someone was on the same page as me.
“We don’t need her hair for that,” said Suki with a bright, silvery laugh. “We’re not barbarians. We don’t even need you to be present.” Her words were kind, but her tone was like, obviously.
Janice gave an amused snort. My humiliation complete, I got to my feet. Cameron jumped up beside me.
“How do you want me to get in touch with you?” I asked. “When I find her?”
“Send us a signal.” She gave an airy wave of her hand. A small plume of red smoke appeared on the table before her. “I’ll see it, too.” She glanced up at me, concerned. “Can you do that?”
“Of course I can,” I scoffed. I was too embarrassed to admit that I had no idea what she’d just done or how she’d done it. I’d ask Tamsin later. “If that’s all, we’ll be going now.”
“Be well.” Suki gave a solemn little bow. Janice barely inclined her head. They were so serious. I get that defending all of time was a big deal, but they were really intense. “If you get into trouble, make the smoke green.”
“Of course,” I said, like no sweat. Inwardly, I was panicking. I was also resentful towards my father for keeping me from learning the truth about my inherited powers of witchcraft for so long, thus later rendering me embarrassed in front of the other witches.
Cameron and I race-walked to the door, nudging each other out of the way to try and get through first. We squeezed out of the door side by side and threw ourselves in the car, slamming the doors and hitting the locks simultaneously. I caught a hint of burning rubber as he threw it into reverse and floored it backwards down the endless driveway.
“Who were those people? What were they talking about?” he demanded. “I thought you said they weren’t witches. And why were they talking to you like you already knew what they were talking about? And why,” he concluded, narrowing his eyes, “did it seem like you did?” He threw up a hand before I could reply. “And don’t try to lie to me, Samantha Hale! Because I’ll know.”
“I haven’t been entirely honest with you,” I admitted. “There’s something I have to tell you.”
“That’s quite the coincidence,” he said. “Because there’s probably something I should tell you, too.”
18
Secrets
“It started six months ago,” he said. “I started to notice strange things.”
“What kind of things?” I asked. I always assumed Cameron had developed amnesia surrounding the strange happenings in Mount Hazel when we’d first met. He never seemed to remember it, anyway.
“I’d been drinking a lot, as you know,” he said. “Even more than I do now. I attributed it to that, like maybe I’d finally formed some kind of brain damage and I should cut back on drinking. So I did. But it didn’t stop happening. Odd things. Small, but strange. Lights flickering on and off at random times in my apartment. The electricity would cut out during a storm, and I’d try to will it back on. I’d always done that, as a joke—like closing my eyes and saying ‘let there be light,’ you know? But it never worked. And then suddenly…” He paused dramatically. “It did.”
“Did you think it could be a coincidence?” I asked.
“The first time, I did. It was like, ‘oh, how wonderful.’ But by the second, third, and fourth times…it started to feel strange. It started to feel like…something else.”
“How often does the power in your building go out?”
“It’s a very old building,” he said. “Even then, if it had just been that, I probably wouldn’t have thought of it again. It could be any number of things. Certainly not magic. But it just kept happening. Like before you got to the shop, I went to Rita’s, right?”
“What did you get?” I asked.
“Gelato, obviously,” he said. “I got the chocolate vanilla swirl on a bed of coconut water ice. Heaven. And then I got distracted—first by a series of phone calls, then by a customer, and then an order came in. It was literally hours before I remembered my water ice, and it was with rage because obviously, I knew it had melted, right?”
“Obviously,” I agreed.
“So I ran back to the stock room, in an absolute tizzy because I’d really been enjoying it and was so mad I’d have to throw it away and get another, and do you know what I found?”
“What did you find?”
“The gelato remained unmelted,” he declared. “The gelato and the water ice! Both were solid. Neither were liquid. They were entirely unchanged.”
“How cold is your stock room?” I asked.
“What do you mean, how cold is it? It’s the hottest June on record, it was eight million degrees. It should have melted instantly.”
“That is weird,” I admitted.
Cameron slowed the car to a stop and parked. I looked up, startled. There was no way we were back at the shop already.
“I have to get more,” he said. “Just talking about it has made me so hungry.”
He had pulled into a small shopping center with a Starbucks and a Rita’s. “Do you want anything?” he asked. “You still have to tell me why those ladies were talking to you that way.”
“Um, no,” I said. “I think I’ll just get coffee.”
“Suit yourself.” He went into Rita’s and I went into Starbucks, ordered coffee, then went to the bathroom. I splashed cold water on my face and dampened a paper towel, pressing it to the back of my neck. It really was boiling hot outside.
As I threw the paper towel away, I caught a flash of movement from the corner of my eye and whirled around, my back pressing into the sink. It was Bea Wilson. She glowered at me from the corner.
“Forgetting something?” she asked snidely.
“What are you doing here?” I hissed. “You can’t just follow me into the bathroom at Starbucks!”
“Well, how else was I supposed to get in touch with you?” She sulked. “You didn’t exactly leave a forwarding address.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, wondering if there was a spell to no longer see annoying dead people. “I’ve been investigating what happened, and I think I have a lead.”
“What is it?” she demanded. “Do you know who deprived the art world of the next Warhol?”
“I’m looking for her now,” I said. “Or at least, I would be if I wasn’t stuck in a Starbucks bathroom, talking to a ghost.” I had an idea. “I know you don’t know how it happened, but do you remember where you were last?” If Lindy had been there once, she might appear there again.
“I was in Love Park, shooting an assignment for Cristo,” she said. “Night time photography.”
What a surprise. Only Cristo would assign young women to work alone in the dead of night in the middle of a city with an uncomfortably high murder rate.
“I was taking a picture of the Lo
ve sign,” she continued, as I thought how original that was of her, “and then everything went black.”
I decided to go to Love Park. This would solve both dilemmas I had: I needed to find Lindy immediately and get the signal to Suki, and I wasn’t sure how much I could tell Cameron. Suki and Janice had been pretty candid with him, but they clearly had an entirely different method of operating than my family, who’d sworn me to secrecy.
I didn’t want to keep secrets, but I didn’t want to endanger him or my family with the truth if it wasn’t safe. Even Peter didn’t know my secret, and to this day thought my family were merely eccentric pagan occultists, which was what I told him when we met in Mount Hazel and he got a little too inquisitive.
I got my coffee and went out the side door as I ordered a Lyft, texting Cameron that I had to go to Love Park and would meet up with him later. He texted me back immediately.
Are you avoiding explaining to me what’s really going on?
Yes. I typed with one hand while juggling my iced coconut milk coffee.
You’re going to have to tell me eventually, he texted me back. You can’t run forever.
* * *
All the talk of Rita’s had me craving water ice, so I stopped on the way to the park and got a gelato. The line was ridiculously long in the grotesque heat. The park teemed with dog walkers and families with small children. I retraced what I believed to be Bea’s footsteps to the large red sign. There was a hippie kid with a blanket spread out, selling DVDs of mediocre 90s movies and random electronics.
“That’s my camera!” squealed Bea suddenly. She had inevitably followed me in the Lyft, complaining the entire time I waited in line that I was prioritizing frozen dessert over her untimely death, which was perfectly accurate, but it wasn’t like she was coming back to life anytime soon. She was livid when I pointed this out and had remained stonily silent up until now, which I largely preferred.
I turned to her, raising my eyebrows. I didn’t want to look like I was talking to myself in a public space. Where? I mouthed.
She pointed wildly at the blanket. At one corner, weighing it down, was an old-fashioned manual camera.
“How much for the camera?” I asked the hippie. I didn’t know there even were hippies anymore. He looked pretty young, so he’d clearly made the conscious decision to become one.
“It’s priceless,” said Bea behind me. I ignored her.
The hippie contemplated the camera for a few seconds, declaring, “Five bucks.” He added an apologetic shrug. “Just so you know, it’s not digital or anything. You gotta go out and get film for it and then get it developed.”
“That’s fine.” I reached into my wallet.
“Five dollars?” Bea squawked indignantly. “That camera was a gift from my father. He’s an important figure in the art world—”
I tried to block out her awful voice mentally as the hippie handed me the camera.
“Does it still have my roll in it?” she demanded.
I studied it, baffled. “Um, how do I—”
“Don’t open it,” she screeched, startling me badly so that I nearly dropped it on the ground. “You’ll expose my film! Then we’ll never know the identity of my assailant. We have to go to the dark room at school. I can instruct you on how to develop it.”
“Won’t someone wonder what I’m doing there?” I asked. I looked around, paranoid. The hippie smoked, children shrieked, and dogs barked as they chased one another in circles. No one was watching me hold a one-sided conversation with an invisible girl.
“The only person who would be there is Cristo,” she said impatiently. “He’ll help you, if he’s there. Unbutton your shirt a little, maybe.”
“I’m not doing that,” I said, annoyed and more than a little disgusted. “What if he wants to turn it over to the police? To help them with the investigation?”
“Cristo won’t do that,” she said dismissively. “He’s too European for that.”
“What does that even mean?” I asked. “Europeans also believe in solving crimes.” I took my phone out and texted Tamsin. “I’ll ask my cousin.”
“Tamsin?” Bea whined. “Why? Why does she have to be involved in this?”
“What’s your beef with her, anyway?” I asked. “I don’t get it.”
“She’s Cristo’s favorite,” Bea said bitterly. “He recognizes talent, of course; but at the end of the day, he finds her attractive. Obviously. So she’s the favorite. Everybody knows it, and nobody can stand her because of it.”
I thought of how lonely that must make Tamsin’s world at school. “She didn’t ask for that kind of attention,” I said defensively. “That’s not fair.”
“Well, to be honest with you, she kind of does,” said Bea with a little sniff. I wanted to slap her, but my hand would have passed through her harmlessly, so even picturing it was an exercise in futility.
“If you’re serious about me helping you,” I said, “then maybe don’t say rude things about my family.”
“Sorry,” said Bea contritely. “It’s just—” I glared at her. “Well, never mind. So can we go now?”
I checked my phone. No reply from Tamsin.
“We can go,” I said. “But you’re going to have to tell me where it is.”
The darkroom was down the hallway from the classroom where I sat in on Tamsin’s photography class, but I still managed to get lost due to Bea’s self-indulgent directions (“and that’s where my first ever assignment for Portraiture hung for an entire semester as an example of capturing mood”), which were less concerned with getting us to our destination than they were with lovingly charting each landmark of her alleged artistic brilliance.
I tugged at the wooden door at the end of the hall. Locked.
“Now what?” I asked Bea.
“I can’t open locks,” she said. “Aren’t you some kind of private investigator or something?”
“No, I’m not,” I said. It occurred to me then that there had to be some kind of spell for opening the door, and I felt humiliated yet again at how impotent I was with magic to not even know such a simple thing.
“Sam?” I jumped, turning to see Tamsin approach me from the other end of the hallway. “What are you doing here?”
“I just got Bea’s camera from the park,” I explained, holding it up. “It still has the last roll of film she shot before she was taken. I told her I’d bring it here to get it developed.”
“You can hear her?” Tamsin looked around, alarmed. “Is she here now?”
“Unfortunately,” I said.
“Hey!” exclaimed Bea.
“Well, I’m very sorry about what happened to you,” said Tamsin to the wall. Bea was across the hallway, under the window. “But that doesn’t mean you were any less of a creep to me, so that’s all I have to say to you.”
She reached into her pocket and took out a key. “I was in the darkroom and I forgot something, so I came back. I can develop it now, though.”
“I tried texting you earlier,” I said as she unlocked the door.
“Oh, I always keep my phone off in the darkroom,” she said breezily. “It’s like Cristo says, it’s kind of like a church, you know?”
“Not really,” I said. Bea rolled her eyes.
Tamsin took the camera from my hand. She flipped a lever and rewound the film before popping open the back of the camera. Then she reached into a cabinet under the sink and pulled out a black canister, a can opener, a metal reel, a cardboard box, and a black bag with two holes.
I watched curiously as she put the canister in the box along with a can opener and then put everything into the black bag, putting her arms through the holes. Bea watched her intently.
“She better not mess this up,” muttered Bea, her eyes narrowed.
“Quiet,” I said.
“What?” said Tamsin.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Did she just say something insulting?” Tamsin asked.
“Mildly,” I said.
“What?” protested Bea. “She exposed her first roll the first week of class! Then she cried, then Cristo came over and comforted her. It was all too disgusting for words.”
“How’s Cristo?” I asked casually.
Tamsin gave a little shrug. “He’s fine,” she said, equally casually. “I just have to drop these prints off at his place later on, for my assignment. That’s what I was picking up.”
“Doesn’t he keep, like…office hours?” I ventured. I could tell she was skittish over the subject and didn’t want to put her off even further. Then she’d never tell me anything.
“Cristo doesn’t believe in offices,” said both Tamsin and Bea in unison.
The thought of her in Cristo’s apartment alone weirded me out, but I couldn’t come up with a way of subtly suggesting that I tag along without being completely obvious about what I was up to. I was still trying to come up with something when Tamsin pulled her arms from the bag, holding the black canister.
“All done,” she said brightly. “Like magic.”
“No, like the highest art of all the fine arts,” said Bea.
Tamsin added a series of chemicals according to the times posted over the sink and shook the canister. Bea waited impatiently while I walked in a slow circle around the room, examining the other students’ work.
Eggs balanced on piano keys. Alleys filled with trash. Old wooden doors, which seemed to be a popular theme. In the corner was a short series of Tamsin: holding a glass of wine, smiling on a hilltop with the sun at her back, studiously taking notes in class. I narrowed my eyes. An original series by Cristo, no doubt.
“All right,” said Tamsin behind me. “Are you ready for the verdict?”
She took off the lid and carefully unfurled the film from the metal spool, holding the damp negatives up to the light.
