A Murder of Magpies (7 page)

The phone rang. Dad sighed and rose to answer. He walked around the living room then
the kitchen, listening, and popped a piece of nicotine gum in his mouth. “Sister Tremblay,
we both know that Jonah won’t speak to the likes of you. Give him some time to figure
out his mess.”

I doubted Jonah had told Dad how often the nun demanded he come to her office at school,
and this was her third call this week. Even Dad’s manners had worn thin. His jaw clenched
tight on his gum, and he carried the phone and a pile of mail to his study.

My hands ached with tension, and I set to work on supper, beginning with dough for
Spanish flatbread. From the time I was tiny, Mom propped me up on a chair by the counter.
Every dish created by memory, she assured me I’d figure out the measurements by visualizing
the pulse of the food.

Guessing had been Mom’s way. Dad protected us. Sometimes that meant we damaged his
mental walls. A slight slip of his barriers or mine was all it took to gather what
rolled through his mind from where he sat in his study.

—
no match for Jonah. Vayda’s too weak. Damn it, Lorna, I wish you were here.

My throat tightened. Dad couldn’t deal with us—he had no wife and was stuck raising
abominations. No wonder he spent his time hiding in his study or at Fire Sales.

The light flickered. I pulled in calm, freezing in all the cracks forming inside me,
and the lights regained their strength.

Vayda, I’m sorry.

Jonah reached out to me from his bedroom, but I let my mind build a barrier, row upon
row of stones with mortar caked between the layers. I wasn’t ready to forgive.

After a half-hour, I had completed my physics homework, and only minutes remained
before the flatbread with pesto and goat cheese finished baking. I entered Dad’s study.
Propping up his head with the heel of his palm, he slid a magazine my way. “Look.”

I knew the respected antiques magazine. Dad’s old shop in Hemlock was a frequent feature,
and he’d occasionally worked as a fact-checker. A blurb in the “of interest” section
lacerated me like a spear made from ice.

MAN WITHOUT A TRACE

Emory Murdock, a dealer of Civil War-era antiques and owner of Antiquaria, was at
the top of his game. A workaholic known for poaching deals from rivals, his fortune
was expected, and his expertise sought. “No one was as good as Em, and he knew it,”
says a friend.

Murdock owed some success to his wife, Lorna, a constant presence in Antiquaria. Yet
criminal charges against Lorna and the subsequent legal battle crashed Murdock’s idyllic
life. Lorna died in a house fire thought to be arson. Murdock and the couples’ children
vanished. Two years later, the sign for Antiquaria remains, its showroom empty, and
what happened to an influential name in southern antiques trading is unknown.

I handed over the magazine, not caring to touch it any longer. “Why are they writing
about you now? It’s been two years.”

“A good mystery’s always intriguing.” Dad stuffed it in his desk drawer and rubbed
his goatee and mustache. “This and the package last week, it’s no coincidence.”

I picked at the ends of my hair. We hadn’t done anything wrong. Why would anyone want
to scare us? “Do the police know we’re here?”

“Nah. They’d have brought me in already. I gotta check with Rain, see if he knows
of anyone snooping around.”

“Sister Tremblay—”

“Don’t go there. Magpie, you know better than anyone you don’t go making accusations
you can’t back up. If someone in Black Orchard sees this article and has visited Fire
Sales, we’ll be in trouble.”

“
Dati
, the picture with the article barely looks like you,” I offered. And it didn’t because
he shaved then, but…

“We’ll fit in here, but I gotta lie real low. You and Jonah do the same. We have to
be less than invisible. We have to be ghosts.”

***

After a silent dinner, Dad returned to Fire Sales to strip off the old varnish from
some tables. Before he left, he gripped Jonah’s shoulder, stern and eye-to-eye. “Careful,
boy.”

Jonah looked away first. Dad was the only person who could make him do that, but I
feared the day when he couldn’t.

Throughout the evening, gusting winds battered the glass chimes outside. The noises
of the house sounded like footsteps going up the walls, walking overhead, none of
which made me any less disturbed. A draft lingered above the hardwood floor and burrowed
through flesh into my bones. Even with a blanket swathing my shoulders, I couldn’t
warm up. Setting aside my history book, I gathered newspaper and kindling to start
a fire in the woodstove. No matches in the basket beside the stove, but I found a
flint and steel in an old box. I whacked them together, producing nothing more than
sparks.

“Want help?” Jonah asked, shutting off the television.

I set the flint and steel on the floor so I wouldn’t have to touch him. He was already
closer than I wanted. The ineptness, the hurt he created in me, I wanted to smack
him, to shove him, but I wasn’t that kind of person to lash out with my hands, not
even hands like mine. A gnashing grief ripped through me. He had gone after me. To
show me how powerful he was? I didn’t care. What he did wasn’t okay.

Jonah reconstructed my stick teepee among the shredded husks and hit the flint and
steel, blowing on the spokes of fire. The cinders reignited, and flames spread until
heat streamed from the stove.

“See? Boy Scouts
was
useful,” he joked, though his good humor was forced. He pressed his lips together,
whispering, “I’m sorry, Sis. For everything.”

“You need to be,” I said. “I don’t believe you. And that hurts.”

“You know acting like that isn’t me. Read me if you have to.”

He closed his mouth, and I felt his barrier drop, the iron door melt from his internal
heat and liquefy around us until it disappeared. I lifted my fingers, unsure, but
then I touched his cheek. He was warm and smoky. If his apology was anything but genuine,
I couldn’t feel it. “I don’t like being afraid of you.”

“I don’t want you to be afraid of me.” He curled in a ball and paused to tend the
fire. “And you were right. I worked a Mind Game on Chloe.”

“Jonah! Why?” I shook him. “Can’t you let things be?”

“Don’t worry, it’s all taken care of. We’re golden. I didn’t do anything bad. I wanted
to know why she dropped me after we hooked up before, so I got into her head, asked
her some questions. Let’s call it a chance for her to rethink things. If she then
decided to give me another chance and bare all, so be it.”

Sorry meant nothing to him. I jammed my fingers into my hair to stop myself from strangling
him. “You tricked her!”

“Now, listen to me, Vayda girl. I didn’t hurt her. I’m giving her a choice. I asked
her what she would do if she didn’t worry so damn much about what other people thought.
And you know what? She made a choice to hook up with me, the way she did before she
decided she cared about her reputation more than me. It wasn’t a trick. It wasn’t
forced. It was a question, and she answered it by going upstairs with me.”

Could I believe that she’d have done that without Jonah’s mental prodding? How’d he
go from parlor tricks to mastering skills with which he wasn’t born? He said I denied
what I could do. If this was where Jonah’s power led him, I didn’t want it.

“I hear you loud and clear.” Jonah lay out on the floor, arms stretched at his sides.
“I’ve always moved shit with my mind. I send out my energy. Objects react.”

“So you’re moving thoughts in Chloe’s head,” I argued. “That isn’t right.”

He stared at his hands, palms wide, fingers long and thin. The flames through the
glass door of the woodstove formed a wavering shadow on his face. “If you want to
blame someone, blame Mom.”

My stomach flipped. For all I thought about my mother, we didn’t talk about her. When
she was alive, she said we weren’t to speak of our dead because they were with our
ancestors. Now
she
was our dead, and I still had questions.

Mom, like so many
Rom
, read tarot cards. She taught Jonah and me as well, but she used telepathy to hear
her clients’ wishes and told them what they wanted. She had conversations with us
without parting her lips. She used herbs, spells, and candles. She recited prayers
and laid out charms. Most of what she did intended to remove negative energy and draw
in positive.

Yet there was a dark side of my mother, the side that muttered curses and warned us.
She’d said in a clan, she’d have been a
drabarni
, a medicine woman. Alone, she was Mrs. Murdock, the brownie-baking-classroom-mom
whose best trick was tying a cherry stem in a knot with her teeth.

Jonah’s smile was sad. “Do you remember when our house was burning, how all those
people stood outside yelling that Mom was a gypsy? A witch?”

Those voices rising above the fire haunted my dreams. No, I’d never forget.

“She had power.” Jonah was off somewhere in his mind, marveling at the memory of our
mother. How he wanted to remember her. I remembered someone different.

“She lost control of her powers,” I said. “They would have destroyed her if she hadn’t
been murdered.”

“She would have gotten control again. She taught me how to use mine, how to hold the
reins tight.”

So she groomed Jonah but not me. Why?

“I still hear you,” he said. “Maybe Mom didn’t teach you because you never wanted
to learn more Mind Games. What a waste.”

I stood and made my way to the base of the creaky stairs, observing my brother lying
on the floor with only heat and the faint red glow from the fire surrounding him.
“Not showing off Mind Games isn’t a waste, Jonah, not if it keeps our family safe.
You used to know that. You’re exactly like Mom, and that means you’re going to get
someone killed.”

Vayda

“How’s the weather on Planet Chloe?” I asked, closing my locker as she approached
me. She wore pink glitter devil horns with matching platform heels to go with her
school uniform. Leave it to Chloe to make Halloween cutesy. She scrutinized other
students, a tight smile as people gaped at her standing with me, but she handed me
several glittery ghost stickers. New cardinal rule: Be nice to everyone, even the
class pariah.

“I brought you this,” she said. “For your scrapbook. Right now it’s weirdo-recluse-in-the-woods
stuff, which is dead-on but scary.”

I murmured my thanks, sliding the stickers through the slot in my locker. Perhaps
I’d leave a token for the next student to take my locker.

“My mom hosted her book club last night and the subject of Heidi Brettenhoff came
up,” she announced.

My brow knotted. “That name matters why?”

“Heidi is Ward’s sister. After Heidi came up, you did. Because you’ve been seen with
Ward. Now I’ve heard rumors that Jonah and Ward are buddy-buddy, but you’re not getting
any ideas, are you? Ward shouldn’t even be on your radar.”

Chloe’s checklist today: cute costume, perfect hair, and the complete guide to insulting
classmates. Queen of the motor-mouth brigade, Kate Halvorsen delighted in sniping
about whose baby was as ugly as a Muppet. Hardly a mystery where Chloe inherited her
penchant for gossip.

She pulled me into the bathroom while she slathered on a coat of before-school lipstick
and said, “Vayda, you’re a bookworm with potential because you’re sort of pretty.
But you wear too much eyeliner. It makes you look like a cat.”

“I like my eyeliner.”

Her mouth wrinkled. “I guess if you think you can pull off whatever look you’re going
for…Anyway, about Ward. If you’re thinking about him, stop. He’s trash. You don’t
want to be seen with him. Birds of a feather and all. Look at the guy.”

This
was the Chloe I recognized.

“Ward isn’t trash,” I argued. “Besides, why do you even care what I do? You don’t
want to be seen with me or my brother.”

She jutted her chin. “Fine. Point made.”

“Hey, you’re the student ambassador,” I added. “What happened to being charitable?”

“Shove it, weirdo.” She cracked a wry grin. “I’ll go out there and hold my head high
while I elevate you off the low rung of the social totem pole. I have that kind of
pull.”

She had no idea what kind of pull my brother had on her.

Passing several nuns who waved at Chloe and me while whispering behind their Bibles,
we made our way down the windowless halls of St. Anthony’s, entering the wing where
the walls were painted deep red. The color of Christ’s blood. All the rooms in this
wing were wider: gymnasium, band room, cafeteria. For as much as I hated the claustrophobic
classrooms and tight hallways, the spacious ones were worse. They held more people,
more emotions, and no matter where I stood, I couldn’t be sure I saw everyone. Someone
could always be hiding.

Yet I forced myself to go with Chloe to the cafeteria where Ward and Jonah parked
at an isolated table in the back. Ward saw me coming and made a move to leave, but
I tucked my hand into my sleeve and touched his shoulder before he could escape. “Stay,
gadjo
. I want your company.”

The storm cleared from his face. I might’ve even seen a hint of a smile.

As Chloe took the seat next to Jonah, I settled in beside Ward, careful to keep several
inches between us. Amid sprinkles from a Donut World breakfast, an Othello game was
set up on the table. The board was one-sided in Jonah’s favor.

“You best be waving that white flag, boy.” He grinned, mischief dancing in the energy
around him. “I never lose.”

My brother hadn’t won a game of Othello by honest means in years. Board games with
telepaths weren’t fun.

“I surrender,” Ward admitted and cleared away the pieces. His hand brushed mine while
packing away the Othello board. Static dashed from my fingertips to my elbow. He froze,
staring hard at our hands, lips parting.