A Murder of Magpies (4 page)

Ribbons cascaded off a shelf in a neatly organized waterfall by a lagoon of papers
arranged by color, theme, and thematic colors. Packages were labeled “punch-outs”
and “die-cutters.” Who knew scrapbooking was so violent? A bookcase was loaded with
scrapbooks marked “
school
.” I’d long been convinced Chloe remembered the name, favorite color, and zodiac sign
of every classmate. Now I suspected she made scrapbook pages with that information.

She fluffed her Nordic-blond hair. “Jonah said you have tons of scrapbooks.”

Jonah, of course. His fight with Marty made him interesting again.

Seizing my bag, she dove into the pages of my scrapbook and creased her forehead at
the seedpods and leaves pressed in wax paper. “This is unusual. I might be able to
brighten up this…layout.”

Perhaps the buttons I scrounged from Dad’s shop and blue jay feathers found in the
woods weren’t what Chloe expected. She gathered an armload of glittery embellishments.

“You aren’t putting that junk in my book,” I blurted.

“You need help. Your style’s
natural
. Like
organic
.”

Organic? Was this Chloe-code for creepy-girl-who-collects-dead-things? I wasn’t surprised.
She leaned in closer, enough to release a wave of fizzy currents. Even if I wanted
to be offended, I couldn’t—her cheerfulness was emotional cotton candy. Yet when I
picked up a pack of her shimmering stickers, that giggle, which left my barriers on
a sugar-high, died away, insecure and tense. She’d left emotional residue on the package,
a touch of the real Chloe, not the one I avoided every day at school. The change was
enough of a jolt that I gawked at her; the way her glossed lips pressed together in
thought, how her eyelashes batted—she had a few false ones glued in. She probably
hoped no one ever looked at her so closely.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I muttered.

“You are so bizarre.”

For a while, we worked separately. She didn’t touch my extra supplies, but I spied
a spool of leather cord similar to a magenta choker Mom wore and snatched it, flipping
to a pencil doodle of Mom that Dad scribbled on a Thai menu outside Memphis. I wove
the cord through some holes at the paper’s edge.

“Is there a method to your madness?” Chloe teased as she stacked some homemade cards.

Ignoring her, I asked, “So what do you want to know about Jonah? I know he’s why you
invited me. Why don’t you ask him yourself? He’d like it if you called.”

Her cheeks blushed, but she said, “Is he suspended?”

“For all of next week,” I confirmed. “He’ll be in the class for deviants.”

“Jonah’s a deviant all right.” She gave a husky giggle. “I overheard Monsignor say
Jonah should be expelled. Sister Tremblay said no, and no one messes with her. She’s
a…”

“Megabitch?” I asked.

“You said it, not me.”

Such thoughts about a nun should send me to the Confessional, but there was something
off about that woman. From her dull eyes to the way she floated. I was used to plump,
chatty nuns who got chalk on the backs of their black skirts. One of them, Sister
Mary Elena, fell in the parking lot last winter and looked like a penguin sliding
on ice. Sister Tremblay wasn’t like them. She wasn’t like anybody in Black Orchard,
and that made her like us. Untrustworthy.

“In all the time Jonah and I dated, I didn’t realize he has such a temper,” Chloe
interrupted my thoughts. “Granted, he and Marty haven’t gotten along since, well,
you know.”

I cracked my knuckles. My hands were hot again. “Jonah doesn’t forgive easily, and
he doesn’t forget the past. Especially not when it comes to Marty.”

“I guess not.” Her stare held me a second too long. “Anyway, he should be careful.
People talk about him. About both of you, really.”

Great. Exactly what we needed.

Chloe rose from the scrapbooking table and motioned me to follow her upstairs to her
bedroom. An ornate wooden bed swallowed much of the room, and some pungent smell—the
wet rot of mildew—emanated from between the cracks in the floorboards. The clouds
had whipped into a dark swarm, and I could hardly tell where I was going. She grabbed
some matches from her nightstand, scratched one across the flint and paper, and brought
the flame to a candle’s wick on her dresser. The fire guttered and rose in a smoky
point.

Thunder grumbled as Chloe brought out a junky white box. “You ever see one of these?”

The box read
Ouija
and contained a board painted with letters, numbers, and a
Yes
in one corner, a
No
in the other.
Goodbye
dead center in the top. Spirits talked through a plastic triangle, a planchette.
Fortunetelling was nothing new to me. Mom read tarot cards and taught me palmistry.
She’d also believed spirit boards were the devil’s playthings.

“This is a bad idea,” I said.

Chloe pulled me to the floor and giggled. “Are you scared?”

“No. Just—” I had to be careful how I answered. “I come from a superstitious family.”

“It won’t hurt you,” Chloe insisted. She opened the box, tossed the lid on her quilt,
and dumped out the board. “You’re doing this, and what happens stays between us. I
swear to God.”

Her eyes flicked to the silver cross hanging above her bed. She vowed her honesty
on that cross. Promises made on a cross, if broken, brought upon a curse.

The board sat between us, and the planchette was a celluloid triangle, once white
but jaundiced with age. Chloe placed her index and middle fingers on one side.

“Come on, Vayda,” she coaxed. “You’re not afraid of a little game, are you?”

I wasn’t about to be called chicken, but Chloe had no idea what she asked of me. I
was wedged between fitting in like Dad wanted and my superstitions, but I ultimately
had to live with my father, not my ancestors and their beliefs. My barriers rose,
steeling against any residue left behind by past hands, and I placed my fingers on
the game piece.

The planchette bounced.

“No way,” Chloe whispered. “You feel that?”

“Shut up.” I teased and tried to sound dismissive. “It was the wind.”

But there wasn’t a draft.

Rain plinked off the windows. In the storm-darkened room, the hollows in her cheeks
were sickly. I’d never seen her so unwell. It was the bad light, nothing more. Wasn’t
it?

“Spirits,” she began, talking to the board as she tried not to laugh from nerves,
maybe from the ridiculousness of hoping the Ouija board had power, “tell me a secret
about Vayda.”

“What? Why me?”

“Quiet!” She noticed my fingers lifting off the planchette. “Don’t you dare let go!”

I choked on a reply when the celluloid triangle moved in a lazy circle across the
board. Chloe was moving it. She
had
to be moving it. Yet emotions never lied, and she felt spooked.

The planchette spiraled inward on the alphabet before coming to rest on the M. From
there, it skated to U. A chill shot down my veins to my hands.

“
M-u-r-d-
” Chloe read aloud as the triangle dashed from letter to letter.

Shit
. I didn’t like how this felt, and the planchette moved too fast for either of us
to control it. I could tell Chloe that Murdock was a family name. She didn’t have
to know. It could be a coincidence—

M-u-r-d-e-

That wasn’t how to spell Murdock.

Lightning cracked close outside, and a blue-white flash reflected off the board’s
sheen. I ran my tongue along my lips, and the nervousness streaming from Chloe soared
until the flutter of energy in my fingertips grew so strong the planchette vibrated.
An acrid smell, something burning, hit my nose. The legs of the triangle began to
melt. I yanked my fingers away but not before the planchette settled on one last letter.

M-u-r-d-e-r.

***

We didn’t speak during the drive home. Leeriness squeezed Chloe’s expression, and
the evergreens jammed the road’s shoulders, growing wilder away from her safe suburbia.
After the Ouija board incident, she decided to take me home. She hadn’t asked if I
was ready to leave. Before we left, she let me wash my hands, observing as I murmured
the prayers my mother swore would remove bad spirits. The storm passed by the time
she placed the board under her bed and blew out the candle, but the afternoon sky
remained tinged by fireplace smoke and threats of sleet if the wind grew colder.

“I forgot how crazy isolated it is by your house. Do you like living out here?”

“It’s home,” I replied and hugged my bag of scrapbooks.

“Well, I guess you can’t complain about nosy neighbors.”

Just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean no one’s there
. The evergreens melded into a blur of dark green and shadow. Plenty of places someone
could hide between the trees.

“Vayda?” Chloe said my name as if she’d called me a couple of times.

“Sorry.”

She slowed and swerved into my driveway. “What happened at my house—” I didn’t know
if she would finish, but I waited. Being Chloe, that didn’t take long. “I think we
both shouldn’t talk about it.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t tell anyone who matters you were with the likes of
me.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“I’m giving you grief.” I cracked a half-smile. “It was the storm, right?”

“Right.”

As she steered up the drive, the trees hunched over the road. Above, a gray sunbeam
pierced the clouds. Someone was crouched on the front steps. My hand gripped the car
door. No one but Jonah should be home, and that boy wasn’t Jonah. He had a vagabond-poet
air, dark trousers and shirt, scuffed combat boots, his fingers laced in the pages
of a paperback. Messy, auburn hair hung over his forehead as his head bobbed in time
with music from his headphones.

Ward.

Chloe shut off the car and waved me ahead, begging off to call her mom, and I approached
the steps where I cast a shadow over Ward. He squinted as he peeled off his headphones.

“You’re blocking my light.”

“There is no light,
gadjo
. Too many clouds.” I pointed to the open book. “What are you reading?”

“Tennessee Williams.”

I pushed my hair over my shoulder and peeked into his script. Pencil underlined sections
of the play’s text, scrunched writing in the margins. “Williams, huh? You reading
it for school?”

“Nope,” he answered. “I have nothing better to do.”

He wasn’t being sarcastic.

“Everybody knows about ‘The Glass Menagerie,’” I rambled, checking the windows for
any sign of Jonah. Ward didn’t turn away from his book, but I kept on because not
talking about Williams meant asking him why he was here. “‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’
is good, though I’m partial to ‘Sweet—”

“—Bird of Youth.’” He showed me the book cover and offered it to me. My barriers rose,
and I examined the binding. Old, worn from many readings. Ward tilted his head. “What
are you doing?”

“My family works with antiques. Jonah likes old books, so it’s habit. Whoever wrote
in it hurt the value but makes it interesting.”

He took back the book. “I wrote in it.”

I hadn’t yet stopped cringing when Chloe joined us and held out her hand, which he
regarded as though offered a poison apple. She asked, “You’re new, right?”

“Well, I’m not old,” he muttered.

Her perpetual grin faltered before she reached for the door. “I’m gonna see what Jonah’s
up to. God help you, Vayda.”

She let herself into my house, leaving me with Ward who slipped on his headphones
and snickered as she disappeared. “That girl ditched you.”

“She couldn’t handle your cheery disposition. Not the best way to make friends.”

“What if I don’t want friends?”

“I get it. You don’t play well with others. But everyone wants friends, especially
guys who need to be cool by saying they don’t.”

Ward smiled. His teeth were straight but for one too-sharp canine. “If that were true,
you’d have friends other than your brother.”

Touché.

“What are you doing here?” I finally asked. “You’re outside reading when it could
storm again any second.”

“I had some time to kill.”

“And if another thunderstorm came along?” I asked.

“I’d knock on the door, or, you know, become a human lightning rod.”

Ward studied the house with the oddly angled roof and copper awnings. It wasn’t the
homiest place. Drafty on the inside while the flagstone exterior needed more maintenance
than Dad had time to work on. Some rocks had broken away, mortar crumbling against
the blustery wind. Cracks marred the slate roof; the gutters rusted. Water from the
earlier rain gushed down the drain and pooled near our feet in a black soup. Across
the yard, the weathervane atop the barn groaned, and Ward glanced over both shoulders.
“Where are the gargoyles?”

“Since it’s daytime, they’re on the north side in the shade,” I answered. He laughed—score
one for Vayda—and I pushed open the front door. “Don’t worry. It’s not haunted.”

He reached for my hand to help him stand. I backed away from his outstretched fingers,
but he grabbed my hand anyway, discharging a zap of electricity. The surprise jolt
hiccupped in my throat as he rose. Maybe six inches taller than my five-foot frame,
he stood close enough for his knee to bump against my long skirt. My pulse struggled
to calm down. No boy ever got this close, near enough to smell skin that was clean
but metallic. His skinny wrists opened into wide palms, his fingers long with knuckles
like knots of burled wood. Scars new and old mangled his skin. They were hands that
had worked. I knew these hands.

I’m around. And I know what you can do.

An anxious undercurrent needled the air between our palms. Pulling. Repelling.

“You okay?” he asked. “It’s the scars, isn’t it? They’re ugly.”