Mysticism, Mediums & Malachite
“It’s getting pretty late – I bet your family will be expecting you for dinner soon, eh?” Stanley peered at Jace over the top of the missing person case file he was re-reading; a baby had disappeared in western Idaho sixteen years ago and was never found. The problem was, the timeline was two months off. And the baby was a Honduran boy.
Jace shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Well, uh, my mother and Frank are usually just now sitting down to eat. I don’t eat my dinner until they’ve finished…” he trailed off, casting Lilah a sideways glance as he did.
Stanley raised an eyebrow. “Frank? You don’t mean Frank Wainwright?”
Jace grimaced.
“Frank Wainwright is your father?”
“Stepfather.”
“No wonder you’re camping out here,” Stanley scoffed. “That crook once tried to sell me a used car with a broken gearbox! I’d’ve had to replace the whole transmission within a week if I hadn’t brought my own mechanic to inspect it first… And whaddya mean, you don’t eat ‘til they’re finished? What kind of cockamamy arrangement is that?”
The tips of Jace’s ears grew red. “I don’t really—”
“Dad,” Lilah interjected. “Maybe Jace could stay for dinner? I can reheat last night’s stew. There’s plenty left over… That is, if he wants to?” she added, casting Jace a shy look.
Still blushing, Jace gave her a grateful smile. “I’d love to. Thanks.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Stanley grunted as he stood from his easy chair. “Except I’ll reheat the stew. You two stay right there and keep reading. Maybe you’ll catch something these old eyes might’ve missed over the years.”
“Thanks, Dad,” Lilah said, feeling a smile tug at the corners of her mouth. She supposed she still had every right to be angry with her father for keeping secrets from her, but as the days passed, she found it harder and harder to stay mad at him.
He gave her hair an affectionate ruffle while directing a pointed look at Jace. “Just give your friend a gentle reminder that nothing we discuss in this house is to ever leave this house. I am armed, after all.” With that, he disappeared into the kitchen.
Jace gave Lilah a startled look, but she just sighed. “In other words, he’s got two arms. It’s an old joke of his.”
“Oh.” Jace chuckled nervously.
“Don’t give away my trade secrets!” Stanley bellowed from the kitchen.
“Sorry!” Lilah picked up a yellowed piece of paper from the top of the cardboard box her father had brought down from the attic. “I can’t believe this is all my mother wrote,” she sighed, reading the faded note again. “We are very sorry for the inconvenience, but we no longer have the means to look after Lilah and her special needs. Please see to it that Lilah receives the love and care that we couldn’t provide her…” I mean, it sounds like it was written about a stray dog, not someone’s child!”
“It was a lousy thing to do,” Jace agreed. “May I see?”
“Sure,” she replied, handing him the paper.
He squinted as he tried to read the small, cramped writing. After a moment he gave a resigned sigh, then reached into his jacket pocket to fetch a pair of thick-framed reading glasses. “Don’t laugh, okay? I get enough grief from the guys at practice.”
She nodded solemnly. “I promise I won’t.” It wasn’t a difficult promise to keep. The glasses, though a bit oversized for Jace’s face, somehow made him look even more handsome, in Lilah’s opinion. His sandy-blond hair framed the black frames quite nicely, accentuating the deep ocean blue of his eyes. He looked a bit like a doctor, or maybe even a professor…
Lilah gasped. “I remember now!”
Jace gave her a startled look. “Remember what?”
“The other night – at the concert! You were older at one point – maybe forty years old. You even had a beard!”
His hand flew to his bare chin. “I did?”
“Yes! You were jumping back and forth between being a little boy and an old man.”
“Since when is forty old?” Stanley hollered from the kitchen.
Jace was staring at her dumbly. “I don’t remember that.”
“You wouldn’t!” Her father yelled again. “How would you have known unless there was a mirror right in front of you?”
Jace stared at the archway leading into the kitchen. “What would have happened if Lilah had sent that area of the balcony even further back in time? Like, twenty or thirty years?”
Stanley appeared in the doorway, drying his hands with a towel. “I’m no expert in time bending, but my guess is, along with the ten-year-old wood that made up the balcony, you’d have disappeared altogether.”
“And then what?” Jace swallowed.
Stanley shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. All I can say is, if she starts getting all glassy eyed, grab her and don’t let go.” His eyes narrowed as he considered his own words. “Actually, scratch that. Keep your hands off my daughter at all times. If you turn into an unfertilized egg and an erstwhile twinkle in your father’s eye, that’s on you.”
“Gross, Dad.” Lilah rolled her eyes.
Jace, in the meantime, was doing everything he could to avoid her father’s mischievous grin. “Hey, it looks like there’s some sort of smudge near the bottom here,” he murmured, frowning at the note in his hands. “Like something’s been erased—”
“What?” Stanley asked, striding into the room. “Let me see that.” He took the note over to the fireplace, where he carefully held it over the flames to get a closer look. “Well, I’ll be damned! The kid’s right!”
Lilah stood next to him, inclining her head to see. “Doesn’t that look like it might have been a ‘W’?” she asked, pointing to the left side of the smudge.
Her father nodded. “And three vertical scratches after that… maybe ‘I’s or ‘L’s?”
“Maybe ‘Willie’?” Lilah suggested.
“Wilburt?” Jace offered.
“Wilfred? Or maybe even Willamina?” She suddenly giggled. “Hey, wasn’t that the name of our sixth-grade class salamander?”
“Yes!” Jace groaned. “Did you know that Ricky Garza once dared me to kiss it?”
“I remember – you leaned in to do it and the poor thing clamped onto your lip and wouldn’t let go—”
“Don’t remind me!”
“Willow,” Stanley whispered.
“What?” Lilah and Jace stopped mid-giggle. “How can you tell?” She asked, taking the note to peer at it closer. “I can’t make out the last few letters. It’s just a smudge.”
“It’s Willow,” Stanley repeated. “Oh, how could I be so stupid?” He ran over to Jace, who was still perched on the edge of the couch, and scooped him into a forceful hug. “Jace, ol’ buddy, I could kiss you!”
As the younger man fumbled to retrieve his fallen glasses from between the couch cushions, Lilah was staring at her father, mortified. “Dad? Are you okay?”
“Willow!” Stanley was spinning in a circle beside the fireplace, raising the crumpled note to the ceiling with both hands. “It was them!”
He dropped beside the box, dumping folders and files and stapled packets of paper onto the ground as he did. Motes of dust floated into the air, making Lilah’s eyes water. After a minute of frantic digging, Stanley pulled out a single piece of paper – a photocopy from an old newspaper article. An article that was published sixteen years ago.
“This!” he exclaimed, thrusting the paper at Lilah. “This is what I’m talking about!”
Lilah took the piece of paper in her hands. “‘Reclusive Woman and Teenage Daughter Disappear Overnight’?”
“Keep reading,” Stanley instructed.
“This morning, at approximately 5:15 a.m., authorities discovered an abandoned vehicle on the side of I-90. Records indicate that the van, whose engine was still running at the time of discovery, is registered to 34-year-old Celeste Mayweather, also known as Vivienne Brown. A search is currently underway for the woman, as well as her 15-year-old daughter, Willow.” Lilah looked up from the article. “Dad, I don’t understand.”
“Look at the date,” he pointed. “In the middle of the night, on that exact same day, you were abandoned at the station. About a half an hour away from where their van was found.”
His daughter gasped. “You mean – the Willow in this article?”
“Yep – I’m guessing they’re one and the same. The only thing that confuses me is why Celeste would have her teenage daughter sign the note instead of her.”
“Maybe Celeste isn’t Lilah’s birth mother,” Jace remarked. “Maybe Willow is.”
Stanley gave him an appalled look. “Come on. She was just a kid. Younger than Lilah, even!”
The younger man shrugged. “I mean…teen pregnancies happen. When my cousin got knocked up a few years ago, they moved to a new town and my aunt pretended it was hers.” His eyes widened slightly. “Please don’t mention that to anyone. My mom would kill me.”
“As I said, nothing leaves this room,” Stanley replied dryly.
“How weird would that be?” Lilah shuddered. “She’d be more like a big sister than a mother!”
“Best way to find out is to ask her,” Jace said.
“Of course!” Lilah said, pivoting toward the kitchen. “I’ll go get the phonebook—”
“Not so fast, kid,” Stanley cut in.
“What?”
“It’s not that simple, Li. These women – Willow and her mother – they were never found. I followed the articles, from the first one published to the very last update. Here—” he said, fumbling around the box again. Eventually, he fished out a short stack of stapled papers. “Take a look for yourself.”
Lilah’s face fell as she took the stack of papers from him, then settled back on the couch beside Jace. Their knees brushed as she did, sending a tingle up her leg. “Sorry,” she mumbled, jerking her leg away.
“No problem,” he replied. Feeling Stanley’s eyes burning into him, he leaned away from her and into the armrest, as far as his ribcage would allow.
Lilah could feel the heat rising in her cheeks as she scanned the stack of photocopied newspaper clippings. It was strange, having so many conflicting feelings inside her all at once; though she did her best to focus on the matter at hand – finding clues about her birth mother – she couldn’t help but feel a shiver of elation. After everything that had happened that month, the one thing she still couldn’t quite believe was that Jace McKinnon was actually sitting in her living room. And what’s more, he was the only person in the world, besides her and her father, who knew her secret. She shook her head to help clear the shock.
“You see?” Stanley asked, taking the gesture as a sign that she’d finished reading. “Their case was labeled as ‘cold’ six months later. From what I remember, there were no leads, no witnesses, and no clues left at the scene.”
“So, they just disappeared into thin air?” Jace asked. “But that still doesn’t explain Lilah. It doesn’t mention anything about her in there?”
Stanley shook his head. “Not a damn thing. That’s why I gave up on their story all those years ago. There’s not even a hint of a missing baby. And let me tell you, I searched. Not just this article, but everywhere. I looked at birth announcements, hospital records, and police reports for the entire Midwest – you name it, Sheriff Reid and I tried it. There were no missing babies named Lilah listed in that entire year. And even the handful of “unmissing” babies by that name were born in all the wrong time frames. The way I see it, Lilah was never registered when she was born. Which means no one could have ever figured out that she was missing.”
“That’s seriously messed up,” Jace whispered, more to himself than anyone else.
“Oh my god,” Lilah gasped.
“What?” Stanley and Jace asked at the same time.
“Look at this,” she breathed, pointing to a picture in the middle of an article she was reading. Jace and her father each poked their heads over her shoulder to see. A girl in a black and white school photo stared back at them.
“Is that you?” Jace exclaimed.
Lilah wasn’t sure she knew how to reply.
“Let me see that,” Stanley instructed, snatching the page to get a better look. He’d made the black and white photocopy well over a decade ago, and it had since become worn and yellowed, with permanent creases snaking across the faded text. Still, Willow’s photograph drew a gasp even from him, as the resemblance between her and Lilah was uncanny. Almost eerie. They shared the same eyes, the same chin, the same splash of freckles across their noses. They even parted their wavy hair the same way: slightly off-center, to the right.
Lilah chewed on her lip. Staring at the photo was almost like staring at herself, and at that moment she knew: that missing girl was her mother. She had to be.
As if reading her mind, Jace muttered, “Well, I guess we have our answer.”
Stanley licked his lips. “Yeah, I’d say so.” He handed the paper back to Lilah, who read the rest of the article in silence. After a few minutes, she cleared her throat.
“Listen to this,” she said. “There’s a quote in here from some guy named Mike Hastings: ‘I was called to the Mayweather’s home on two separate occasions to cleanse the perimeter of their property line and also drop off supplies. Celeste was concerned about the negative energy that had been pooling in and around their rental home. I had hoped that the assistance I provided would have been enough to alter their fate; sadly, even a shaman with my formidable abilities isn’t enough for certain types of Sha Chi.’”
“‘Shaman’? Is this guy for real?” Jace raised an eyebrow.
“‘When asked to expound on his comments, the self-styled ‘Shaman’ merely added, “I do not mean to imply that I have any knowledge of what their fate came to be, I am simply expressing my despondency in what is likely to be an unhappy conclusion, given the nature of the Sha Chi those two appear to have attracted.” He then went on to add that anyone who is suffering with negative energy and disgruntled spirits should seek out his recently self-published book, Mysticism, Mediums & Malachite: Making the Most of a Metaphysical Existence.’”
“Guess he ran out of words that start with ‘M,’” Jace snickered. “Sounds like a nutter.”
“Yeah, but that’s not the point,” Lilah replied. “The point is – he knew them. He knew my mother! Which means, he might have known about me.” She didn’t say the other thing she was thinking, which is that the “bad energy” that had terrorized them was almost certainly her fault. What had she done to make them frightened enough to enlist the help of a guy like Mike Hastings? At that point, she knew she had to find out.
“Of course!” Stanley groaned, knuckling his forehead. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“We’ve gotta find this guy,” Lilah said, bounding to her feet.
Her father started to say something, but she had already bolted away and into the kitchen. A few moments later, she reemerged, nose-deep in the white pages. “There’s at least eight Michael Hastings in here. How will we know which one is the right guy?”
“I have an idea,” Jace offered. “Can I use your phone?”
Lilah nodded. “Sure, go ahead.”
Stanley raised an eyebrow. “If you’re thinking of calling all those Mikes, the answer is no.”
“My stepbrother’s girlfriend works at the library,” Jace replied, picking up the phone. “I bet we could look him up by the title of the book he mentioned.”
“Oh,” was all Stanley said in response. For some reason, he had an image of tearing the phone out of Jace’s hands, knocking him over the head with it, and then hurling it into the fireplace. He shook his head to clear the thought. What’s the matter with me? He’s just a kid.
“Library’s closed,” Jace sighed, hanging up the phone a moment later. “But maybe I could take you there tomorrow?”
A kid who’s swooping in and causing trouble.
“I’d love that,” Lilah smiled shyly.
Stanley leapt to his feet. “Now look here, both of you. We don’t know anything about this guy. We don’t know if he’s a nutcase, a serial killer, a pedophile, or what! So just… just everybody calm down for a minute,” he said, panting. “Just calm down!”
Lilah and Jace exchanged nervous glances.
“Um, Dad?” Lilah frowned, sniffing the air. “Something smells funny.”
“You’re damn right something smells funny! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you! This whole thing smells funny!”
“No – I mean, something in the house smells funny. Is the stew still on the stove?”
Stanley let out a four-letter curse and ran into the kitchen, where more curses – as well as a cacophony of clanging and clattering – ensued. A few minutes later, he stood in the archway with a peevish expression, a stained towel slung across his slumped shoulders.
“Li – hand me that phonebook… Jace – hope you don’t mind pineapple on your pizza.”
Jace’s wide smile was a genuine one, as though no one had thought to offer him fruit-topped pizza in years. “That sounds great, Mr. Quinn.”