By the time Natalie pulled into the driveway, the sky was inky black. She turned off the ignition and pushed her pain to another place. She rubbed her forehead as if she wanted to bury her fingers in her skull. Sometimes her mind burned furious and white-hot, a thousand thoughts cramming into her head all at once—but then, in a flash, they’d be gone, leaving her gasping for air.
The house was quiet and dark, except for a strip of light running underneath the front door. She let herself in and walked through the empty rooms. The curtains billowed in the wind. The few pieces of furniture she’d purchased over the years were economical and functional. Comfort was more important than style—big sturdy armchairs, plenty of reading lamps, blocky side tables stacked with stuff. Those fugly curtains had been there forever and she hadn’t bothered to replace them. There was no telling how old the kitchen appliances were. The gas stove and humming refrigerator had guest-starred in some of her earliest memories. Behind the counters in those hard-to-reach places was an intimidating amount of encrusted grease and grime. A cockroach’s dream home.
Inside her father’s old den—now hers—Natalie removed her shoulder holster and pressed her service revolver into the foam padding of her gun case. The oak bookcase held a motley collection of police manuals and forensic pathology books from her days at the academy. On the top shelf was a gift from her niece—a teddy bear wearing a “My Hero” baseball cap. She ran her fingers over the spines of old textbooks collecting dust and couldn’t recall the last time she’d opened one. As a child, Natalie had memorized all the BLPD rules and regulations, and when Joey used to test her at the dinner table, she could spit them back with pinpoint accuracy.
She recalled a time when her father took her to a pub with some of his cop buddies. They were all smoking cigars and drinking a thick dark ale, which tasted horrible (he let her have a sip), and there was a young man sitting with them at the bar, and they kept slapping him on the back. Her father explained, “This is the guy who saved my life.” A robbery, five years earlier, in a convenience store on Mountain Laurel Road, two robbers, and the first robber took aim at Joey, but the second robber stopped him from firing, and both got busted and put away. But now, five years later, the second robber was out of prison, and the cops were treating him like a hero, buying him drinks and slapping him on the back, offering him part-time work through a friend of a friend, because he’d saved Joey’s life, and they owed him. What Natalie learned that night was that, rarely, but occasionally, cops and robbers could be friends.
Joey liked to share stories about his adventures with his wife and children, but there were some things he couldn’t reveal. Secrets. One night, Natalie found him shredding documents in his den. He glanced up, pale and drawn, and told her to go back upstairs. He shut the door, and Natalie could hear him shredding paperwork behind the closed door.
Now she scooped out her old St. Jude’s medallion on its long silver chain, the one she used to wear close to her heart. St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. Joey had given it to her on her eighth birthday. It was their private joke. He called her a lost cause, but he meant that in the very best way—he meant she was stubborn and headstrong. That she wouldn’t give up. That she refused to listen to the status quo and didn’t let anything stop her. He was proud of her achievements at school, but even prouder that she relied on her conscience.
He taught her everything he knew about being a cop, but as the years passed, Joey became afraid for Natalie. After a lifetime of encouraging her to follow in his footsteps, Joey pleaded with her not to. It was too dangerous, he said. He didn’t want her risking her life for a paycheck and a pension.
“Dad, it’s okay,” she told him. “I have your St. Jude’s medallion to protect me.”
“But that’s not real, kid.”
Her fingers closed around the medallion, and she told him of course it wasn’t real … she knew that this pendant couldn’t protect her. How could it? It was supposed to have magical powers, and that was bullshit. “But everything you drummed into my head all those years … that’s going to protect me,” she said. “You’re my St. Jude’s medallion, Dad.”
He wasn’t convinced, but Natalie’s mind was made up.
Now she tucked the pendant away, took a seat behind her father’s desk, and unlocked the bottom drawer. She kept her Threat Level II protective vest in here, along with a pair of handcuffs and her off-duty revolver wrapped in muslin. The vest was scheduled for replacement next year, since they wore out every five years or so, but Natalie really liked this one. She’d worn it on a drug raid three years ago, and it had caught a bullet at point-blank range. She kept the deformed slug in a jar on top of her computer. It was her lucky vest. It had stopped a bullet from entering her heart. Sometimes you got lucky. Sometimes you walked away with your life intact.
Now she unclipped her shield and studied it. Natalie had taken one oath in her lifetime. She’d sworn to uphold the law and protect the community. She’d made this solemn vow to the entire town. She wondered if any human being was capable of living up to such a task. Protecting a whole town from evil.
The same evil that had taken Willow’s life.
The same evil that took Daisy’s life.
Like her father used to say, Grief fades. And that bothers me.
Grief may fade, but memories didn’t. Natalie’s heart pulsed with emotion. Every day during Justin Fowler’s trial, inside the courtroom, Deborah would clutch Willow’s favorite purple silk scarf in one hand, occasionally pressing it to her nose and inhaling the peachy scent of Willow’s perfume. Natalie’s mother had cried so much during the trial, she’d had to wear amber-tinted sunglasses to hide her anguish from the press. Toward the end of her life, Deborah stopped eating, and her skeletal frame became a hanger for her flowery clothes.
Joey used to call his daughters “triple trouble” because he loved them so much. He never shouted. He hardly ever raised his voice. Toward the end of his life, gravity dragged his face down, but he was the same old Joey, still strong and in charge. He used to say, “Life is long. It just feels short.” Death must feel longer.
After four years of college and travel abroad, Natalie was compelled to return home when her father became seriously injured after his car slammed into a tree. Natalie was twenty-two when she got the bad news. She came home to find Joey in the hospital. She was there one week later when he passed away.
Grief doesn’t come with instructions.
Her mother died a few years later. After the funeral, Natalie stayed on to help Grace with the estate, but then something kept her here—deep roots, a need for healing, unfinished business. She’d never been able to explain it to her more adventurous friends. A strange sense of belonging, or fate.
Upstairs, Natalie took a long hot shower, brushed her teeth, and changed into her nightclothes—her extra-large BLPD T-shirt, athletic socks, and a pair of pink boxers.
Downstairs, she grabbed a bottled water from the fridge, plopped down on the living-room sofa, and opened Hannah Daugherty’s file.
Hannah Daugherty was seventeen years old when she was raped by an ex-boyfriend in the foundation of the old Shell station. Afterward, while the police were doing a grid search, Luke and his team came across a peculiar message written in chalk on the cement wall of the foundation, which was open to the elements. New York State’s unpredictable upstate weather should’ve erased it within a week or two, at the most.
Now Natalie pawed through the pages until she found a photograph of the chalk message. Then she cross-referenced Minnie Walker’s case file to verify that it was located in the same corner of the foundation where Minnie was last seen giving head to one of her johns before she disappeared. Check.
Next, she did a side-by-side comparison of the pictures she’d taken of Teresa McCarthy’s gravestone, and the police photo taken at the scene of Hannah Daugherty’s rape. The handwriting looked eerily similar. She could only make out a few words, though. Delicate, your sins, pussy.
Okay. The police had discovered this bizarre message at the time of Hannah’s rape, which occurred two years after Minnie Walker’s disappearance. Natalie activated her laptop and checked her notes. Minnie was reported missing on March 17, four years ago. Hannah Daugherty was raped on March 23, two years ago. The incidents had occurred two years and six days apart. Was it possible that the vandal had returned to the scene of the crime on the anniversary of Minnie’s abduction, March 17, and left his message—just as he’d left a message on Teresa McCarthy’s grave? Natalie checked with the online historical weather database and discovered that two years ago, it hadn’t snowed or rained for ten days after March 17, which was well within the bounds of March 23, the day the police found the chalk message.
Next, she skim-read the police reports for any other clues she could find. Like a typical teenager, Hannah was an amalgam of conflicting emotions. She was both fascinated and terrified by horror movies. She collected My Little Pony figurines and soft-core romance novels. Her long blond hair was dazzling, like sunlight bouncing off a waterfall. She loved to sing “Milkshake” by Kelis. She was a happy child who was afraid to be alone at home. Nothing connected Hannah to Minnie, except for the coincidental location of the rape and the disappearance.
Perhaps this was an “anniversary” thing? Natalie wrote down Teresa’s disappearance date, April 4. There hadn’t been any precipitation over the following two weeks, not until Wednesday evening, when Natalie discovered the message on Teresa’s grave, but she wanted to be sure, so she checked the historical weather database again—zero precipitation between April 4 and Willow’s deathiversary. Which meant that the vandal could’ve left the chalk message on Teresa’s grave on April 4, the anniversary date of her disappearance.
She realized she’d been sitting in the same position for more than an hour and was beyond worn-out. She felt molded to the sofa, virtually part of it. Her phone rang, and she checked the number. It was Luke.
“Can’t sleep?” he asked tiredly.
“No. My mind’s going a mile a minute,” she admitted. “You?”
“I’m still at the office.”
She glanced at the clock. “It’s two in the morning. You’re aware of that, right?”
“I’ve been talking to Murph,” he said. “He’s got the night shift, so I’m standing in front of your desk. I think your plant is dead.”
“Um. No. You can’t actually kill an ivy plant.”
“Does your plant know this?”
She smiled. “You’re funny tonight. But you’re right, I am deadly to plants. It’s genetic. I inherited my father’s gangrene thumb.”
He laughed softly. Then he said, “What do you think of Hannah’s file?”
“I think whoever did this acted deliberately and calculatedly. He revisited the scene of Minnie Walker’s disappearance on the date she went missing, two years later, and left us a message. Just like the message he left on Teresa McCarthy’s headstone on April fourth, the date she went missing. Both messages were written in chalk, and there was no precipitation to eliminate them before they were discovered.”
“What kind of a message is he sending us?”
“I don’t know, but I suspect it might be connected to the dead crows.”
“You think?” Luke sounded surprised.
“It’s a stretch, I know. But somebody out there is trying to get our attention.”
“Not trying hard enough if it’s taken us this long to detect it,” he said. “Do you think it’s related to witchcraft?”
“Could be.” Natalie closed her eyes.
There was a brief pause before Luke asked, “What is it with teenage girls and witchcraft?”
She opened her eyes and made a face. “What do you mean?”
“Murphy told me that, statistically speaking, it’s mostly girls who get involved with witchcraft. Why’s that? Do you know? What’s the attraction?”
She considered it for a moment. “It starts with an unfulfilled wish, in my experience. You have a crush on a boy who doesn’t even know you exist. Somebody brooding and unreachable, like Neo from Matrix in his floor-length trench coat. Or the lead vampire in Twilight, with his sultry eyes and black eyeliner. Whatever—he’s your dreamboat. But then, at some point, you get tired of writing his name in your notebook with a Sharpie, so you join a coven and cast love spells on his oblivious ass.”
Luke chuckled. “Are you serious?”
“Yeah, absolutely. You try to hex him into loving you. Or maybe it’s more academic than that. Maybe you want to ace your midterms. Or you’d like the other kids at school to stop picking on you and mocking your outfits. I suppose there are plenty of reasons. And then one day, a friend invites you to join her coven, and it’s such an alluring proposition. You’ll be part of an exclusive club. It’s a chance to control your own destiny. So you join the sisterhood and learn about rites and divination. You cast your first love spell, conjure up straight As, and before you know it, you’re hooked … and now you’re spending all of your hard-earned babysitting cash on spell kits and Ouija boards and malediction books. Eventually, though, you realize things haven’t been working out the way you’d hoped. And so, when you don’t get your way, when the cute boy still ignores you, and you get a B-minus on your midterm, and the mean girls are still picking on you, well then … things can take a darker turn.”
“How dark?” he asked.
“It all depends. When you find yourself kneeling before a handmade altar, chanting to invisible forces … that kind of wakes you up. At some point, most kids quit the craft and move on.”
“What was your wish?” he asked her.
“My wish?”
“You just said it always starts with an unfulfilled wish.”
“Oh.” The moment stretched until it became painful. She wanted to confess her deepest secret to him, to tell Luke—it was you. The boy she cast a love spell on. The reason she’d gotten into witchcraft in the first place. Simple, really. Nothing complicated about it. Natalie hesitated, then said the only thing that popped into her head. “I had a lot of pain and shame whirling around inside, and so it was tempting to do something radical. To not let the world overwhelm me.”
“I get that,” he said softly.
That night, she fell into a merciless slumber full of black voids and swirling emptiness. She woke up the following morning to the sound of her blaring alarm clock. She thumbed the OFF button. The darkness gradually washed away and an odd drumming sound grew louder. Rain on the roof.
She took a shower, got dressed, and drank her coffee inside the drafty, outdated kitchen. The jerry-rigged plumbing should’ve been upgraded ages ago. The farmer’s sink wouldn’t drain properly. The stove light was always on, because that corner of the kitchen was so dark. She’d spent her entire youth inside this house, imagining herself elsewhere. Now she couldn’t picture herself anywhere else. It was a paradox.
After graduating from the police academy, Natalie applied for the position of a rookie patrol officer with the BLPD. When she was twenty-five, her mother died of breast cancer. Deborah spent the last few weeks of her life in the hospital. In the will, Natalie’s parents had bequeathed everything to her, which wasn’t much—but it meant the world to her. An old house on two overgrown acres. A collection of boxy rooms. The windows were drafty as tissue paper. The fireplace was unusable. Large flies buzzed around the ceiling in the summertime. Maybe it was time to claim the place as her own, tear everything down and start over again.
Joey loved telling stories—or more accurately, he told one long, rambling story his entire life, constantly interrupted, a story without end and punctuated by the phrase, “But the point is…” All those years later, he never managed to come to the point.
Toward the end of his life, during one of Natalie’s last visits to the hospital, after Joey had coughed up half a lung, she asked him, “Dad? Were we enough?” He didn’t seem to understand the question, so she repeated it. “Were we enough for you? Mom, Willow, Grace, and me. Were we enough?” After a beat, he cracked a smile and said, “You were the whole fucking point.”
Now her phone buzzed.
“Natalie?” said a husky male voice. A little desperate sounding.
“Brandon?” she responded.
“Can you meet me in twenty minutes?”
“Where? Your lawyer’s office?”
“Fuck that Ivy League gorilla. Meet me at the old farm in Chippaway. Remember the place I showed you last year?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“Thirty-six Crying Lane. Come alone.” He hung up.