It didn’t take long for a small crowd of shocked onlookers to gather around Kenny’s body. Lila and I were among them, Lila sniffing soft, quiet tears. A few in the group gasped, covering their mouths with their hands. Others cried, though I wondered, given that Kenny was a man the whole town loved to hate, if that was more the effect of a dead body in the street than whose body it actually was. Most people just stood there staring. Like I did.
Kenny was faceup, his back bent into a wooden arch. His arms were twisted, his hands curled into hooks, his legs sprawled. His eyes were open, frozen and terror-filled, with a stream of red flowing from each as though he were crying blood. His mouth was agape, locked as tight as the rest of him. His skin was mottled with dark purple splotches.
My throat constricted and I wrung my hands, unable to look away from the ghoulish vision. Those marks, the bloody eyes, the stiff bends in his body—I recognized what this was. I knew how Kenny had died, and I knew he had been murdered.
A dark shadow of the life I’d thought I had left behind enveloped me like a death shroud, and I stroked my snake pendant.
“What a terrible business.”
I cleared my throat, blinking quickly to bat away the sting of tears I hadn’t expected. I turned to see Henry Walton beside me. Even with half of his face covered in his thick grey beard, my friend looked pale.
“Hi, Henry.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Did anyone else in the crowd realize what they were witnessing? Everyone looked shocked, but was it the shock of seeing a corpse or seeing a murder victim?
A coldness gripped my soul. What if I was the only person who could see this heinous scene for the crime it actually was? The only person besides the killer, that was.
As if sensing the turmoil twisting around my insides, Henry put his arm around me. I tensed. I appreciated the gesture, but the closeness made me uncomfortable. I wanted to step away, but I also didn’t want to be rude to him when he was only trying to help.
“Kenny wasn’t sick or anything, was he?” Henry said.
“I have no idea,” I said. It wouldn’t matter if Kenny had been sick. This was a Mortis curse, and there was only one end once the victim had been targeted.
The officials arrived. Sheriff Dalton Bonney—a small man who always reminded me of a boy playing dress-up in a sheriff’s uniform—shifted his hat back off his brow, surveying the scene with the same grim look everyone else wore. Deputy Margie Garon, was making notes in a flip-top pad and ordering people to move away.
In the short time I had lived in Blackthorn Springs, the only crimes I had heard about were the occasional traffic violations, a bit of teenage graffiti, and an ownership argument about a ram who liked to wander between houses on the other side of town.
Had either Bonney or Garon ever come up against an actual first-degree crime? Would they even know what they were seeing? I doubted it, but at least that morning, they looked like they were trying to play the part of serious law enforcement.
Blackthorn Springs’ only ambulance, an old box-like truck leftover from the 1970s, pulled up to the curb, its lights flashing but its sirens silent.
Abbi Flannagan stood toward the front of the crowd, still shaking, talking to Garon. She was wrapped in a blanket given to her by one of the two EMTs. Tom Jenkins approached Abbi and placed a tentative arm over her shoulders in an attempt at comfort her.
Tom Jenkins had opened the new Blackthorn Springs diner not long before I had moved in. I had only been there a couple of times, preferring BrewHaHa even with its questionable service, but it was good to have another place in town to eat besides Kenny’s and the local bar, Bar Armadillo. I had seen Tom’s wife, Helen, and Abbi together often. Tom stared with a look equaling the horror on the face of the woman who had found the body.
I pulled my coat around me tighter against the cold bite of the morning that had just been made all the more chilling.
Henry removed his arm from my shoulders. “I can’t watch this,” he said. “I’m sorry, Belinda, I have to go.”
“Are you alright?” I said. If Henry ever smiled or frowned, it was hidden in the depths of his beard, but his silver eyes, lined with crow’s-feet, expressed in the most honest way. His eyes that morning betrayed a deep worry.
“Come see me at the shop later?” he said, trying and failing to put a chipper tone on his voice. “I haven’t forgotten about the Scrabble rematch we said we’d have later this week, either.”
“Sure,” I said. I couldn’t blame him for wanting to get out of there. I turned back to the scene.
A man, tall and broad with serious eyes, chestnut hair, and a short shaggy beard of the same color, moved through the crowd near me. He carried the same BrewHaHa travel coffee mug that I owned. He glanced at the body as if it were nothing more than an idle curiosity, stood for a few seconds and then moved away quickly. I watched him get into an old white truck and rattle off down the road.
“Who was that? He was certainly in a hurry to leave,” I whispered to Lila. She’d been too caught up in the commotion to have noticed who I was talking about.
“Maybe he just didn’t want to gawk,” she said.
It was a reasonable assumption.
“Looks like a heart attack,” Elsie Norton said from behind me.
“Or a stroke,” Elsie’s husband, Neville, replied. I knew it was neither.
The ambulance officers loaded the body, now covered in a white sheet, into the back of the ambulance.
Margie Garon looked my way and nodded, jotting something down in her notebook before walking over to me. My heart leaped into a tumble. Was I about to be questioned? Did they see this for what this was? Did they know I was a witch?
“Morning, Ms. Drake,” the deputy said. She was all business.
“What an awful thing, Margie… I mean, Deputy Garon.”
“It’s okay, Belinda. Let’s skip the formalities. It’s easy to slip into that mode when faced with something like this, right?”
“Can I help you with something?” I prompted, not wanting to waste any more time on idle chitchat if I was about to be called out as a witch, responsible for the most heinous spell known to witchkind.
“I just wanted to ask you if you’d noticed anything off about Kenny this morning, or in the last few days. You lived next door to him, probably saw him more than most since he didn’t have any family in town.”
“I didn’t,” I said. “I mean, I bought a coffee from him this morning, like always, but we hardly said anything. We’re not really on speaking terms.” I thought it best to leave out the fact he’d abused me only hours before his death.
“You didn’t like each other?” Margie said, her interest piqued. I swallowed hard. I had made myself look like an enemy of a murder victim without even trying.
“No, no. I mean, I didn’t know him. We didn’t know each other, it was just a normal business transaction. I like to keep to myself and haven’t made friends with many people yet,” I said. Was I talking too fast? Did she think I was a weird loner?
“Fair enough,” Margie said. She smiled, and I relaxed.
“We’re likely calling this natural causes for now. We just want to know if he seemed unwell or anything. Do you know if he was on anything? Any health conditions?”
I shook my head and shrugged. “I’m sorry. I don’t know much about anyone.”
Margie smiled. “Well, that’ll change. Live in this place for long enough, you get to know just about everything about just about everyone. And they do the same to you.”
Great. Precisely what I needed.
What remained of the lingering crowd disappeared as the sheriff packed away and drove off. Abbi stayed, Tom still beside her. Abbi had stopped shaking and sobbing, but her face was still ashen.
“Would you like to come back to the shop?” Lila offered. “A cup of tea and something sweet, maybe? Sweets are good for shock.”
Abbi shook her head, and I was secretly relieved. “No, no, I’m fine. Did I hear them say it was a heart attack? I never knew a heart attack could do that to a person.”
“Hearts attacks can do all sorts of things to a body,” Jenkins offered quickly. “Or so I’ve read.”
I turned to leave the scene but stopped. Neville Norton was hurrying over toward me. Damn, I was too late to slip away. If only I hadn’t hesitated.
“Belinda, don’t forget there’s a committee meeting tomorrow,” he said.
Was he seriously bringing up the hedge maze committee to me when someone had just died in the street?
“I haven’t forgotten, Neville,” I said.
Like anyone, I’d made a few mistakes in my life. Agreeing to join the Blackthorn Springs Tourist Board Hedge Maze Committee on a whim was one of the most recent. That’s what I got for being such a sucker for anything even resembling a puzzle. Mazes were one of my favorites.
“You’ve missed every meeting, and we’re getting close to—”
“I’ll be there, Neville,” I said sharply.
Neville looked at me over the top of his old man spectacles, pressing his lips into a thin, hard line. “Very well, then. No excuses this time.”
“What a tragedy,” Lila said as we came back inside the shop. She had stopped crying but still looked like she had lost her closest friend. Death has a way of leveling people’s niggles in life.
I opened the box of chocolates that I wasn’t supposed to be eating any more of. Not even gooey nut caramel could sweeten this moment, but it wouldn’t hurt to try.
It was terrible enough that someone had died right there in the street, but this whole thing would be concluded by the end of the week, ruled a medical tragedy, natural causes. Unfortunate, but not uncommon.
It was absolutely not natural causes.
Kenny had been killed by a Mortis curse.
There had to be another witch in Blackthorn, and whoever that other witch was, they were about to get away with murder.
My hand went again to my pendant, stroking the smooth silver back of the twisted serpent. My twin brother, Quentin, had given it to me on our sixteenth birthday. He had a matching one, and when the two were pressed together, they made a serpentine figure eight. In times like this, when I was reminded of him, I sometimes wondered if he still had his necklace. I wondered if he was still alive.