Spun by Sorcery (16 page)

“I grew up around here. You’re going to have to trust me on this.”

Back in Sugar Maple I was the one with most of the answers. I think I liked that better.

“So what do I do in town? Wander around asking where the faeries are?”

“Why don’t you try looking for some of those symbols Sugar Maple is so nuts about.”

“That’s not a bad idea.” I shot a conciliatory glance his way. “Almost like you did this for a living.”

“Yeah,” he said with an answering grin. “Almost.”

Clans, families, and individuals all had their own avatars, so to speak. Easy-to-recognize symbols that were woven into our art and our history. Sugar Maple was, not surprisingly, a leaf from the sugar maple tree. The New England Fae were represented by the infinity symbol. My mother’s gravestone bore a glowing sun; my father’s, a crescent moon.

“Tell me again why we’re doing this,” I said.

“Because there’s a damn good chance not everyone fled to Sugar Maple during the Witch Trials and a lot of knowledge found in the Book of Spells stayed here with them. Maybe as oral tradition, maybe passed along some other way.”

I shrugged. “Maybe that and a miracle will bring Sugar Maple back.”

“You got anything better?”

“No.”

“So we go with plan B.”

Luke would search for information about the mysterious Bramford Light while I headed into the heart of town. We would meet back at the motel around lunchtime to exchange notes with Janice.

We drove along Washington Square, looping around Salem Common, where I saw the empty band shell that apparently had served as the model for the gazebo that graced Sugar Maple’s village green. It felt both familiar and uncomfortably alien.

“When was that band shell erected?” I asked Luke.

He thought for a moment. “I’m thinking maybe a hundred years ago.”

“Not 1692.”

He shook his head. “Not even close.” His eyes slid toward me. “Why?”

“The gazebo on the green looks exactly like it.”

“So?”

“Our founding population fled Salem during the Witch Trials two hundred years earlier.”

He was quiet for a moment. “That makes a copycat gazebo a little weird.”

I nodded. “That’s what I was thinking.”

I was also thinking maybe Luke’s original theory about magickal beings left behind might have more merit than I’d first thought.

So where were they?

I willed myself to stay open to whatever might be out there (within reason, of course) but no thought probes or blueflames or anything else attempted to make contact. I was starting to wonder if maybe the two spirits I saw in the bath the previous night had been the product of exhaustion after all.

Luke left the car on the third floor of a parking garage near the visitor center and gave me the keys as we exited the tiny elevator.

“Drive the car back to the motel when you’re finished. We’ll meet up there for lunch.”

“Be careful.” He could handle whatever his world threw his way but my world was a whole other story.

He pulled me into a quick hug. “You have the cell with you. I programmed in my number and Janice’s. Use it if you need it.”

I stood on the sidewalk and watched him walk away. We didn’t have much time. The only way we could accomplish what we needed to accomplish was to split up. I accepted that. But that didn’t mean I had to like it.

Especially not in a place like Salem. I walked to the visitor center then along New Liberty and made a right onto Brown, fully expecting the weight of all that tragic history to land on my shoulders. But I felt nothing.

No connection at all to my surroundings.

No sense that magick had ever walked here except maybe on Halloween for the tourists.

I didn’t care about Salem. Long may it thrive but it meant nothing to me. What I did care about was the fact that I was afraid we had been played. Dorothy and the Scarecrow hadn’t faced half as many obstacles on their way to Oz as we’d battled on the drive to Salem. Pissed-off trees lobbing apples at your head? Piece of cake. I’d take that over crashing through a guardrail any day.

So what was all that drama about? Had someone or something been screwing with our heads for the fun of it or was it really trying to keep us away from Salem? I was more confused than ever.

For all the good I was doing, I might as well have been in Boise. I had no sense of the ancestors at all. It was pretty clear that Aerynn had left no blood family behind.

When it came to Salem, I wasn’t feeling the love.

But if there was one thing Luke and all my years of watching
Law & Order
had taught me, it was to keep on looking.

Even if the whole thing seemed pointless.

Detective work is a hell of a lot easier when you know what you’re looking for. Not only didn’t I know what I was looking for, I didn’t know where to start looking.

The waterfront was a long shot but it was as good a place as any to begin. Salem’s early history was largely seafaring. If any of Aerynn’s ancestors remained behind, the waterfront was most likely where they would gather. It was away from the center of town where most of the population lived and the sea would provide an easy escape route if trouble erupted again.

It wasn’t much but at the moment it was all I had.

Lighthouses had been on my mind since I got out of bed. I’d walked over to the window to enjoy the view of the lighthouse I assumed was out there beaming its light through the fog.

At least that was what I thought. The morning fog had lifted. The visibility was great. And there were no lighthouses visible from our window. We did, however, have a great view of the New Pinky’s Crab Shack but I don’t think that was what kept me up last night.

Then again, anything was possible.

I wasn’t crazy about splitting with Chloe but there was no choice. I set off at a reasonable pace, trying to keep the cop vibe under wraps and a more benign local vibe front and center. It wasn’t hard to do. I pretty much was a local. I’d put myself through two years of community college working in this town. I ate my weight in chop suey sandwiches and rolled my eyes with the rest of the summer workers at the tourists who blew their vacation looking for things that didn’t exist.

Irony.

You gotta love it.

One thing about Salem: you were never far from the water. I started near Central Wharf and worked my way toward Derby.

It was still too early in the year for the pleasure boats to be out. Here and there rowboats thumped against the docks where they were tied. A RENT A KAYAK sign was posted over the window of a shuttered sporting shop.

The sun was rising higher in the sky. The morning chill was turning warm. The smell of fish was strong but not unpleasant. Spring in this neck of the woods was capricious—especially by the water—but the signs were good.

I stopped in at the usual conglomeration of businesses you would see along a waterfront.

“Any idea where I can find Bramford Light?” I asked the manager of a boat rental place near the Maritime Historic Site.

He looked up from his
Sports Illustrated
. “Bramford? Never heard of it.”

I tried the mechanics at the engine repair shop. “Bramford Light?”

“You sure you’re in the right town?” the oldest of the group asked.

“Thanks anyway,” I said and moved on.

I nodded at two young guys in T-shirts and leather wrist-bands who were leaning against an abandoned shack across from the House of Seven Gables. The words BAIT AND TACKLE were painted over the door in faded white letters. A Harley was catching its breath ten feet away. If I were on the force in Salem, I’d stop for a moment, make a comment about the hog, make sure everything was the way it should be, then continue on my way.

But I wasn’t a cop here so I stopped and said instead, “Bramford Light?”

Maybe they didn’t hear me.

“Bramford Light?” I asked again.

Dead-eyed stares a cop would envy. I took the look as a no and moved on.

It was hard to believe Salem had once been a thriving fishing village. Now it was more a shore community with great seafood and lots of tourists.

And, as far as I could tell, no magic.

As it turned out, Salem had been waiting for the right moment to let me know I wasn’t welcome.

It happened first at the Witch House. The building was undergoing renovations and visitors were instructed to go around back. I attempted to follow the path but it was like being on a treadmill. No matter how hard I tried, I got nowhere.

Even stranger was the fact that nobody around me noticed. Other people came and went with no problem. Small children dashed past me like trained athletes while I metaphorically treaded water.

Not being a big fan of humiliation, I dashed across Washington Square North to Salem Common with the purpose of checking out the band shell that had been duplicated in Sugar Maple. Great plan, right? Too bad I couldn’t seem to get in.

“Not funny,” I muttered under my breath, to the consternation of a jogger stretching near me.

Who needed the common anyway? A few trees. Some scruffy, winter-pale grass. Some sad-looking joggers and dog walkers. Nothing I could use there.

A steady wind blew in from the water. I shivered and wished I had worn one of the sweatshirts I’d picked up at Target. I had spent most of my life feeling lonely but the sensation of actually being alone was a new one. Where were the tourists? I had expected to see scores of them dashing up and down the streets and alleyways, snapping photos and filming videos and generally soaking up all of the witchy lore they could.

And, while I was asking questions I couldn’t answer, where were the townies? The place seemed—no pun intended—more like a ghost town than a tourist mecca.

Then again, so did Sugar Maple much of the time. It was only the beginning of April, I reminded myself. Most of New England was still looking over its collective shoulder, waiting for the last snowfall. If Salem was anything like Sugar Maple, tourist season wouldn’t kick into high gear for another month or so.

I followed the Red Line (which really was a red line painted down the middle of the sidewalk) deeper into the heart of town. The homes ranged from magnificent two-story brick edifices to clapboard cottages badly in need of fresh paint and roof repairs. They had been laid out haphazardly over the centuries. Some were a sneeze away from their neighbors. Some had been set kitty-corner on their tiny lots. Others nestled gracefully atop a small rise. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t relate any of this to the plight of Sugar Maple.

Did you ever dream that you were naked at the supermarket and all of your neighbors had picked that day to dash out to buy milk? I felt more self-conscious than I had as a gawky twelve-year-old and that was saying something. It wasn’t that I felt like I was being watched exactly, but a vague prickly feeling settled itself between my shoulder blades and wouldn’t leave.

I spotted a café on Washington near Lynde. It wasn’t that I was hungry exactly but the thought of a butter and sugar transfusion was irresistible.

The first problem was I couldn’t get through the front door.

The other problem was nobody seemed to notice.

For a moment I wondered if I was invisible but an old man with a walking stick glared at me as he pushed his way out of the shop. I grabbed for the door but yelped as an electric shock knocked me back a step.

Luke thought I had a combustible temper but I really didn’t. Those flames that suddenly shot out from my fingertips were just a coincidence.

Kind of like the fact that every shop in Salem seemed to be turning its back on me.

I was starting to feel like a five-foot, ten-inch ant at a picnic.

So far the Red Line hadn’t been working out too well so I veered off down another side street where I hoped the welcome would be a bit friendlier. I strolled past a hair salon, a kitschy tourist shop that specialized in sparkly glass witch’s balls in every color of the rainbow, three candle shops, and a quilter’s paradise and was about to continue on past a dusty-looking antique shop, when I saw it.

There in the window was a late-seventeenth-century wheel. Tall, graceful, originally created to spin flax and look utterly beautiful while it did. It looked so much like the wheel that had been handed down from Aerynn that I had no doubt it had been made by the same craftsman.

The modern wheels were wonderful—fast and quiet and unfailingly efficient—but I was a sucker for the moody, romantic wheels of the past.

You didn’t see an Irish castle wheel every day. I was lucky enough to have learned to spin on one but most spinners wouldn’t know where to start.

I had to see the wheel up close. I had to touch it, run my fingers along the smoothly polished wood, see it do what it was made to do: spin floss into gold just like magick.