Witches of East End Page 16

  They had been happy once, as happy in a marriage as anyone could be, imperfect and struggling against each other as all couples did. There had been fights and rages and tempers. He was not a patient man and she was as stubborn as he had been. If not for the trials, perhaps they would still be together. If only he had done as she had asked maybe things would have turned out differently for them. . . . What was she thinking? There was nothing he could have done, nothing any of them could do to stop the trials from happening. That was made clear the moment the bridge was destroyed and they were trapped in mid-world. To remain here, they would have to follow the laws of its original inhabitants; they had no jurisdiction and could not interfere in the human realm.

  Joanna removed her coat and sat on the futon, with Gilly perched on her shoulder. She was going to wait for as long as it took for her husband to come home.

  After a few hours, she had dozed off, when the door opened slowly.

  “Norman?” she called. “Is that you?”

  chapter thirty

  The First Stone

  The next day, Ingrid was still thinking of the hidden door she had discovered in Fair Haven. The minute she arrived at work she sent an instant message to the address she knew by heart. There had been no communication the night before, which she found a bit strange, and she was eager to find out what her source had discovered. He usually responded within minutes, if not seconds, but after an hour there was still nothing.

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  She hit Send and waited. The screen remained unchanged. She went back to work, deciding to tackle the rest of the Gardiner prints and ready them for the framer. The other day she had picked out a nice balsa frame, cheaper than the ones they were accustomed to in years past, but now that every little penny counted she had to cut corners somewhere. Strange, the drawer where she usually kept them was empty. She distinctly remembered putting the main floor plan back in its storage container with the rest of the drawing set when she returned to the library yesterday afternoon. Maybe someone had moved them to the conference table? No. There was nothing there.

  Ingrid’s heart began to pound. She walked quickly back to her computer and sent another message to the same address.

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  She saw her messages piling up on the screen with no response. Finally, she wrote:

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  “Did you move my prints?” she asked Hudson after hitting Send. “You know, the Gardiner blueprints of Fair Haven for the show?”

  Hudson looked up from his work and removed his noise-canceling headphones. He cleared his throat. “No. I haven’t touched them. Maybe Tabitha knows?”

  Tabitha did not know anything about the blueprints and neither did Caitlin, who was back to work after a bout with the flu. Hudson had locked up the night before, activating the alarm as usual. There was nothing amiss: the alarm hadn’t gone off, and aside from the blueprints, there was nothing else missing. Not that there was anything particularly valuable in the library in the first place.

  Ingrid tracked down the janitorial services they used, but they reported seeing nothing out of the ordinary the night before. She went back to the storage room and opened the drawer again. Empty. She checked her computer. No reply yet. The blueprints were gone and her source was unreachable. She picked up her phone and dialed Killian Gardiner.

  “Hello,” he answered sleepily.

  “Killian—hi. It’s Ingrid Beauchamp.”

  “Hi, Ingrid,” he said sleepily. “What can I do for you?”

  “Killian, did I wake you? I’m sorry but it is half past noon,” she couldn’t help but add.

  “And your point is?” he asked amiably.

  “I apologize, that was rude of me. It’s been a long day. I was just calling about those blueprints of Fair Haven. Did you by any chance come by to take them back?”

  “Why would I take them back?” he asked, sounding more alert this time. “I gave them to you. Why do you ask? Did something happen to them?”

  “No, no . . . no.” Ingrid shook her head vigorously even if Killian could not see her. It would not do to panic anyone else. “I think the staff moved them to the other closet. Sorry to bother you.”

  “No worries,” Killian said.

  She hung up the phone, her heart beating wildly. The scans. She had scanned all the prints, she thought, executing a search on her computer. She had scanned all the sheets that contained the strange tags and elaborate symbols. But just as she suspected, every single file connected to the blueprints was gone.

  Ingrid tried not to panic. Who would steal the blueprints? And erase all the records on her computer? And why? Then Hudson burst into the room. His tie had come unknotted and he looked uncharacteristically frazzled. “I think you better come out to the front—it looks as if Corky Hutchinson has lost her mind.”

  Ingrid followed hudson to the main area to find the news anchor standing by the returns desk, looking hysterical and crazed in a pajama top and baggy sweatpants. When she saw Ingrid she pointed a red-manicured finger in her direction. “It’s all her fault!” she screamed.

  “Excuse me?” Ingrid asked. The library was full of mothers with toddlers, teenagers at the computers, and the regular patrons at the magazine racks. Matt Noble was returning a few paperbacks and rushed to her side.

  “What’s going on?” he asked, looking from Corky to Ingrid.

  “She was the one! She did it!” Corky screeched. “She made me give Todd this . . . this knot under his pillow! He couldn’t sleep . . . he’s been acting so strangely—she did something to him!”

  “Corky, calm down, what are you talking about?” Matt came around to restrain Corky by the shoulders since it looked as if she might take a swipe at Ingrid.

  “She’s a witch! She did it! She made this happen! With her black magic and those stupid knots!” Corky screamed.

  “I’m so sorry . . . but it doesn’t work that way,” Ingrid said, backing away and shaking her head. Every part of her body was shaking as well, but she tried to project a sense of calm.

  Matt looked questioningly at Ingrid. “Hold on . . . what do you mean? What’s all this about magic?”

  “He hung himself! With a knot! It looks just like this one!” the woman hissed, holding up the little brown knot that Ingrid had given her a month ago.

  “What’s going on?” Ingrid looked to Hudson for help. People were beginning to stare and congregate, looking at Ingrid with curiosity and fear. Ingrid had a flash back to her past, when the crowd had first gathered around her at the square that fine morning. They had circled her, just as the patrons of the library were doing now.

  “As if you didn’t know! They found his body this morning! Todd hung himself! At some skeezy motel on Route 27!” Corky cried.

  Ingrid gasped. “Is that true?” she asked Matt.

  The detective nodded. “We answered a 911 call from the motel this morning. The police are still there. Corky, calm down. Let’s get you to the station.” He gave Ingrid a long, searching look and led the newswoman out the door.

  “Christ . . . what a crazy bitch!” Hudson said, walking out of the office. Ingrid noticed that everyone in the library was looking at her skeptically, some with outright hostility. “Are you okay?”

  Ingrid nodded even though she wasn’t. First the blueprints went missing, and she had stopped receiving texts or instant messages from her source, and now she was being accused of what . . . she wasn’t even sure . . . but she couldn’t shake off Corky’s hateful words and accusations.

  Tabitha gave Ingrid a pat on the back. “Don’t worry, no one will listen to her. You had nothing to do with this,” she said stoutly. “She’s lost her husband and she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

  There were only a handful of women waiting to consult with her that day, which made Ingrid feel even worse. She tri
ed not to think too much of it, but she couldn’t help but think it had something to do with those terrible things Corky had said that morning. What was it that awful woman had said? Black magic? That she was a witch—a hag—a false medicine woman?

  Ingrid thought of what Freya was going through: Sal had told her to stop making potions and had, effectively, fired her. From now on, the town would keep its eyes on them. Ingrid felt a chill up her spine. She had lived through this once before; she knew how the story ended.

  Once upon a time in Massachusetts, Ingrid had a thriving practice, a clinic just like this one, but then the whispers had begun, and the accusations had started to fly. But this was not back then, Ingrid tried to tell herself. Maybe no one needed her help because everything was peachy-keen. Right. And if Ingrid believed that, she had a bridge she could sell to herself. Gallows Hill might be gone, but its shadow lingered, and Ingrid was not foolish enough to think that what happened once could never happen again.

  And the day was still not over. Before the library closed, she received another visitor. Emily Foster walked in, pale and trembling. “Ingrid. Do you have a second? I need to talk to you.”

  chapter thirty-one

  Marooned

  Freya watched Killian put the phone gently back in its cradle, admiring his profile and the arc of muscles on his broad back. She placed the palm of her hand on his skin; she could never stop touching him. They had spent the entire evening pleasuring each other, trying new and exciting variations of the same dance, and for a moment there she had been worried he would never tire, he had been that insatiable. . . . She had never met a man who could keep up with her, but she had found her match in him. They would finish only to start again a few minutes later, an innocent hand on a leg, or a brush against a cheek leading back to where they began, and Freya discovered she was getting turned on just thinking about all the things he had made her feel last night. His skin was smooth to the touch and, like everything about him, physically perfect, no nubby ridges or dryness or scars, evenly bronzed all over.

  They were in his cabin on the Dragon, and through the portholes she could see it was daylight, probably just after noon since the sun was casting no shadows. What day was it? She wasn’t sure. Where did time go when she was with him? She never noticed, it was an elusive quality, and she could never remember what they did—when they weren’t in bed, that is—and it seemed as if they were always in bed whenever they were together. There should have been a hermetic, somewhat stale quality to the room, since they had not left it in a few days, and Freya had made all their meals on the small galley stove with whatever she found in the fridge. But instead of smelling like sex and sweat and cooking oil, the room was bright and clean, and when she closed her eyes she inhaled the fresh scent of pine and flowers. She wondered why he preferred to live on the boat rather than in Fair Haven, which definitely had enough bedrooms, but ever since the beginning Killian had made the fishing boat his home.

  “Who was that on the phone?” she asked, releasing her hold.

  “Your sister,” he said, lying back down on the pillow and folding his arms behind his head, a thoughtful look on his face. His dark bangs covered one eye and he brushed them off impatiently.

  “Ingrid? What did she want?” Freya propped herself on an elbow.

  “I lent her some blueprints of the house a while back for her art show. It sounds like they’re missing,” Killian explained. “She didn’t say so, but I could sort of tell.”

  “What is it about those blueprints? Bran asked about them the other day,” Freya said, picking at the lint on the sheets. “Ingrid told him she found something cool in the design keys in those blueprints. There’s some kind of code that she’s almost figured out, which has some historical significance.” She was babbling and trying to change the subject, as she was talking about Bran in Killian’s bed.

  Killian raised his eyebrows. “You spoke to Bran?”

  “Yesterday.” She leaned back and pulled the covers over her face.

  “Hey,” he said, gently drawing down the covers.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing here.” She shook her head and couldn’t look at him.

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Listen, I gotta go,” Freya said, pulling away so that she could put her clothes back on.

  “Don’t go.” He began to kiss her neck, soft butterfly kisses that electrified every sense in her body. “You just got here.”

  Freya had a déjà vu feeling—hadn’t she been in this same situation with Bran not too long ago? And now she was in a different bed, with a different brother. “Killian, come on. I got here four days ago.” She pushed his arms away gently.

  “I love you,” he whispered. He was leaning forward so that his head rested on her shoulder and his hands cupped her breasts gently, making her feel warm all over.

  “You’re not allowed to say that,” she said. “I told you. Nothing’s going to change. I’m still going to marry Bran in September.” She bit her lip.

  “Don’t do this to us,” Killian warned, gripping her shoulder tightly.

  “There is no us, Killian. There never was.”

  “Don’t say that,” he said desperately.

  “Stop it, you’re hurting me,” she said. Her heart was breaking, as well as his. She loved him so much. It was love she felt for him, deep and abiding and entrenched, a fierce white fire, and yet it was wrong. She knew it was wrong, that being with him was wrong. If only she had met him first. If only . . . But it was too late now. She and Bran had found each other and she had promised Bran she would marry him, and marry him she would. It was the right thing to do, it was what she was meant to do. She couldn’t change her destiny.

  Killian stood and began to pace the room, running his hands on his face, looking lost and confused and anxious. “Freya, please” was all he said.

  “This is . . . this is just a mistake,” she told him, zipping up her jeans and putting on her shirt. She jammed her feet back into her sneakers. “I’m so sorry, Killian. I really am. But I told you from the beginning that this wasn’t a good idea.”

  After leaving the boat, Freya had to walk for a while to clear her head. She didn’t want to keep thinking about Killian and wandered aimlessly for a few hours. With a start she realized she was practically in the middle of town, near the police station, a small building near city hall. Since she was there, she thought she would ask about the progress they had made in their investigation of Molly Lancaster’s disappearance, maybe ask if she could talk to some of those boys, see if she could sense anything from them. While she was still mostly confident that there was no way her potion could have been part of what happened to Molly, she was beginning to entertain the possibility that perhaps something in her magic could have gone awry, and she wanted to see if she could do anything to help. While she still did not believe the boys had anything to do with Molly’s disappearance, she knew she was in the minority. Many people in town were already grumbling that the boys had received preferential treatment from the district attorney.

  The police station was its usual shabby chaos. “Hey, Freya.” Jim Lewis, one of the patrolmen, greeted her with a smile. “What’s up?”

  “Just thought I’d drop by, see what was going on with the Lancaster case?”

  “Yeah, I can’t really talk about that right now,” he said, shaking his head.

  “You can’t or you won’t, Jim? Come on, it’s me. Remember how I helped you catch that bicycle thief?” Freya wheedled.

  “I know, girl. But this is different.”

  “What’s going on?” she asked, as she noticed all the detectives crowded around Matt Noble’s cubicle. “Is that Corky Hutchinson? Did something happen with Todd?”

  “Can’t say. Can’t say.” Jim drummed his fingers on the reception desk. “But I will tell you about the Lancaster thing. One of those college boys looks like he’s going to crack. There’ll be an arrest soon, you can count on it.”

  When she got back to the house, Gracel
la practically pounced on her the minute she walked through the door. “So sorry to bother, Miss Freya, but it is Tyler.”

  “Of course, not a bother at all. What’s going on?”

  The housekeeper twisted the chamois she was holding. “His fever is very high. Since last night. I think maybe I take him to hospital but I am scared. Hector is away and . . .”

  Freya followed the anxious mother to the cottage. Tyler’s room was on the second landing, a cheerful place filled with cartoon imagery on the wallpapers and whose bookshelves were stocked with toys of every shape and size. The toy soldiers were heaped in a pile, the puppets lay still on the footlocker. The train set was silent and waiting. In a bed shaped like a racecar, Tyler was wrapped up in a comforter, like a small turtle. She was shocked to find him so changed from just a few days ago. He had lost a lot of weight, and he had no color in his cheeks.

  “Hey, kid,” she said gently, putting a hand on his forehead. It was burning. “Yes, let’s take him to the hospital now. There’s no point in waiting,” she said to Gracella. “I can drive.”

  They bundled the boy in the backseat. “He’ll be okay; I’ll call Joanna as soon as I drop him off,” Freya said, as she drove mother and son through the empty streets of North Hampton to the small county hospital. “I promise,” she said, even though she knew she had no right to promise anything. Freya knew as well as her sister the limit to their mother’s powers, especially when it came to those she loved.

  chapter thirty-two

  Thief in the Night

  Later that same evening, Ingrid had a dream. It began when she realized she was not alone in bed. There was a heavy weight on her body, and now there was a tug at her pajama bottoms. She stirred and attempted to pull them back up but she found she could not, and now her top was being unbuttoned, the air cold on her skin, and she was not sure what was happening—where was her blanket? Then there was a hand on her mouth and she was jolted awake but she could not scream. She could not even open her eyes.