09 - Return Of The Witch (3 page)

Chapter 3

Eight o’clock the next morning, my phone rang, waking me from the deepest sleep I had fallen into in
over a week. It was Dominic. He sounded anxious if not excited, like a puppy with a new squeaky toy. But then Dominic often appears more animated than a given situation calls for, so I didn’t read too much into it.

“Lilith, wha
ddaya doing?”

I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and began unbuttoning the shirt I had
slept in. “Nothing. I just woke up. What do you want?”

“Can you come down to the station?”

“Why?”

“I want to talk to you about something.”

“Can’t we talk over the phone?”

“Lilith, please. It’s important. I wouldn’t ask you if it
weren’t.”

I peeled the shirt off and tossed it onto the bed.
“Is Ursula there?”

“No.
Why?”

“
No reason. I’ll get there when I can.”

“Lilith, why did you
ask—”

I hung up
the phone and dragged myself to the bathroom. One hour and a lousy cup of coffee later, I was dressed in blue jeans, a cap-sleeve V-neck and sneakers, standing on my front porch, soaking up the sun and contemplating heading back out to Gloucester Beach. I wasn’t there longer than a minute or two when a strange black car drove up in front of the house.

At
first, I thought Dominic had sent a car out to pick me up, until I realized it wasn’t a cop car. It wasn’t even a sedan. It was an Escalade, a badass one at that, all tricked out with chrome wheels, jacked suspension, tinted windows and a battering ram grill that looked like a lion’s sneer.

It sat there awhile, motor running, its angle skewed so that I could not see the
driver. My gut told me that something wasn’t right. My instincts told me to play it cool.

I stepped off the porch and began walking toward the car. As I did, it started in a backward roll. I picked up the pace. The car did the same. When I stopped, it stopped. When I started walking toward it again, it continued
backward.

When
I thought I had enough, I flipped the driver the bird and turned back toward the house. I only took about five steps when I heard the tires wind. I turned around. The car’s back end hunched up like an angry dog. The back tires were screaming, but the front wheels were locked in a classic break stand.

“You
punk son of a bitch!” I yelled, my arms spread wide in invitation. “You wanna piece of me? Com`on!”

I waved him on, inviting him to drop the hammer down and give it his best shot. He took the bait, flooring the gas and releasing the break. I leveled my palm and spun up a zip ball the size of
a grapefruit.

The car
kept charging. I stood my ground. A blue cloud of burning rubber billowed from behind the tires. I wound up and let the zip ball fly. It hit the radiator grill in a shower of white-hot sparks, blowing out both headlights and shredding the right front fender. The car veered left. I jumped right, hitting the grass in a tuck-n-roll and landing on my feet again.

When I turned
around, the car’s rear bumper was all I could see through the smoke spewing from the tires. I thumbed my chin and flicked him a “Bah-fungoo!”

And that was it.
Kids, I thought. They’re such assholes these days. It made me wonder why Dominic and Ursula were trying so hard to have one of their own. I mean, wouldn’t adopting a Tasmanian devil make just as much sense?

After changing out of my grass-stained shirt, I got in my car and drove on over to the Justice Center. Standing in front of Carlos and Dominic at their desks, I noticed that both looked a little guilty of something. It took me a second, but I finally realized why.

Carlos had moved to Tony’s old desk and Dominic to
Carlos’. I suppose they thought I’d find that morbid or something, but of course, I didn’t. It had been ten days since Tony died. I couldn’t very well expect the world to stop spinning or the flowers to stop growing. They had begun the difficult task of getting on with their lives. Though I’m sure they couldn’t see it, in the smallest barely perceptible sense, so had I.

“Lilith!” Carlos came around the desk and gave me a
big hug. “You look nice today.” He turned to Dominic and gestured a presentational wave of his hand. “Doesn’t she look nice, Dom?”

“Absolutely
.” He nudged Carlos out of the way and hugged me as he might a frail old aunt. “You know we missed you at the memorial service yesterday. How come you didn’t…?” I saw him steal a glance at Carlos who was gesturing no-go like a catcher waving off a fastball pitch. “Come?” he finished.

“I had plans,” I told him. “Now, tell me why you called me down here.”

He pulled a chair out and offered it to me. I sat. The two of them did the same.

“Well, I know that Carlos told you about th
ose two missing women yesterday.” He looked at Carlos, who acknowledged him with a nod. “And I know you told him you didn’t believe there was any creditability to the stories.”

“That they’re witches, you mean?”

“Yes, but there’s more to it than you know.”

“So,
enlighten me.”

He reached across the desk, picked up a newspaper and handed it to me. “That’s the Newburyport Daily News. Look at the front page.”

I looked down at the first column and then back up at him. “How nice. Shopping plaza courts more tenants.”

“Not that
. Below it.”

“Amesbury man indicted o
n money laundering charges?”

“Lilith
.”

“Okay, fine.
‘Woman’s disappearance similar to others in the county’. How sad. Another runaway.”

He snatched the paper from my hands. “She’s not a runaway. She’s a missing person. What’s more,
as the article indicates, her disappearance is strikingly similar to two others in the county. In all three instances, the only clues left behind were the clothes the women were wearing and the strange chalky substance inside them. What’s more, all three were witches.”

“Okay. Stop right there
. First of all, like I told Carlos, witches don’t generally advertise themselves as witches. Secondly, if a witch wants to disappear, as I myself have done on numerous occasions, especially after a rite of passage, then she does so without fanfare, cryptic or otherwise. So, if there’s nothing more.”

I stood
and pushed my chair up against the desk. Dominic palmed his laptop and spun the screen around for me to see.

“
Wait. There’s this.”

I leaned
in to look. “Ah, yes, Paige Turner. Carlos told me about her. Is that her web site?”

“Yes
. See here she mentions you.”

“
Me?”

He hunched over the top of the screen and gave it a tap. “Right there. She
says that a witch from New Castle recently traveled to the dark dimension and back. You know she’s talking about the Eighth Sphere.”

“
Come on. How would she know that?”

“I don’t know, but she does, and now everyone knows you live here in New Castle.”

Carlos said, “We think she works for Ingersoll’s Witness. This web site is her way of getting the word out to all its members.”

“Nooo,” I said, dismissing it as nonsense. “We talked about th
at, Carlos. Pastor Hilton is dead. James T. Putnam is dead. Ingersoll’s Witness, as an organization of witch-hunters, is most certainly dead.”

“It could be someone else, then,” said Dominic.

“Who?”

“There’s a group out there calling themselves, Satan’s Apostles. They’ve been known to hang suspected witches.”

“Yeah, but those women weren’t hanged.”

“Not that we know of,” said Carlos. “But they could have been. Just because nobody’s found them….”

“Still.” I shook my head. “I’m not worried.”

I turned and started away, when Dominic said, “
Tell me about the quintessential.”

I froze in
mid-step, turned and found them both looking at me as if they had accidentally mentioned the unmentionable.

“What did you say?”

I saw Dominic’s Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed. “The quintessential. What is it?”

I came back to him on a whisper of air. “Where did you hear that?”

He pointed to the computer. “Paige talks about it in her article. Says that this witch from New Castle must have acquired the quintessential to escape the Eighth Sphere.”

“Did she
now?”

“Her words. Not mine.”

I pulled the chair out again and took a seat. “The quintessential is the fifth element.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning there are four basic elements in nature: earth, air, fire and water. In witchcraft, they’re known as essentials. The fifth element, or essential, is the quintessential, which is abstract energy. Now then, a disciplined witch, such as myself, can sometimes harness fleeting bits of the quintessential in her witchcraft. It’s the true force behind magick. It’s what allows me to make zip balls, conjure up thought forms, shape-shift and perform a host of other cool witchy things. Yet, no witch can claim ultimate domain over the quintessential. It’s impossible.”

“Paige thinks you have,” said Carlos.

“She’s wrong.”

“
She also says that a ripple in the universe confirms it.”

“
A ripple? Seriously?”

Dominic offered, “Something in the
macrocosm. She called it a disturbance, an energy displacement in the time-space continuum.”

“No.”
I shook my head. “There’s no ripple. Someone somewhere must have picked up on the vortex perturbation. You know, a secondary influence causing interruptions in static wave particle placements will insinuate similar anomalies. That’s probably how they knew the disturbance originated here in New Castle.”

“What?” said Carlos.

“A false reading.”

“Oh.”

“In any case, I can assure you that I do not possess the quintessential. Furthermore, I highly doubt that Ingersoll’s Witness, or any other witch-hunting entity had anything to do with those women disappearing, despite what Ms. Paige Turner proclaims on her web site.”

Dominic asked, “
How do you explain the strange chalk dust in the women’s clothes.”

“
What’s to explain? Chalk is chalk.”

“Why the different colors?”

“What do you mean?”

“
The witch from Salem. They found brown chalk in her clothes. The Georgetown witch, red and the Newburyport witch last night had white.”

I
laughed at that. “Are you kidding me?”

“Why? What’s so funny?”

“Come on. It sounds like these girls obviously knew each other.”

“
They probably did. They all have guest member profiles on Paige Turner’s web site.”

“
So there you have it. Don’t you think that sounds just a little bit suspicious?”

“In what way?”

“Really? You call yourselves detectives? Guys, this has all the hallmarks of an internet hoax. It’s a coordinated deception. Come on!”

“But they’re witches,” Carlos argued. “Why would they perpetrate such a hoax?”

“Duh! Because they aren’t really witches.”

“
They have their web sites.”

“Their web sites don’t prove shit
. Don’t you get it? Any candle-burning, incense lighting Wiccan with a blog can call herself a witch. That doesn’t mean she is one.”

“
Still, I don’t like any of this. It bothers me that Paige Turner knows about Ursula.”

“She knows about
Ursula?”

“
You read her blog. She mentions another witch traveling with you to the dark dimension.”

“
Again, how would she know that?”

“
Oh, I don’t know, maybe because she’s a real witch like she says she is? Isn’t that information you’d be privy to?”

“No.
It’s not as if there’s some witches’ Yellow Pages one can refer to. Like I said, real witches don’t advertise.”

Carlos asked,
“So, what do you think we should we do?”

“
You shouldn’t do anything. It’s none of your business. You have three women, possibly missing, possibly not, in somebody else’s jurisdiction. You got some flighty chick with a web site trumping up bullshit about ripples in the universe. And you have some colored chalk that makes for interesting reading in small town newspapers where the most exciting thing on the front page is a story about a shopping plaza handing out cheese balls and wine to prospective tenants. Come on. Don’t you have any real crimes to investigate?”