Timothy
As usual, the station house is too cold. The furnace is old and the windows are poorly insulated. So, the interview room is
just warm enough that our breath is not coming out in clouds.
Give me salty, hot, humid days where even the breeze is warm. Must be the Florida kid in me. This cold, it shrinks you up,
makes your shoulders tense and your muscles ache.
Paul Hayes’s sister, Regina, hasn’t taken off her long black coat, and she leans into the bulky Ross Avidon for warmth. He
keeps a possessive arm around her. Plaid wool jacket, black beanie cap pulled down to just about his eyebrows. They seem very
coupled. Like their energies meld together.
“Ana Blacksmith is a witch,” says Regina. “Like, literally.”
Ross looks at her and releases a sigh, like maybe he’s heard this before. He rubs at his beanie cap.
“What does that mean?” I ask.
“It means what it means,” she says unhelpfully, with a tight shrug and a shift of her eyes. In the hard light of the interview
room, her eyes are rimmed red and shadowed by fatigue.
“Can I smoke in here?” she asks.
“No,” I say. “Sorry.”
I wish I could let her. I’m itching for one, too, and I wouldn’t mind the secondhand smoke.
She runs those black-painted fingers over her bright orange buzz-cut crown.
I’ve seen bodies in the morgue with more blush to their skin.
Beside her, Avidon sits silently attentive.
I note his girth again, his obvious strength.
I try to envision them carrying Paul Hayes’s stiff body through the woods.
Would they argue? They bring to mind nothing so much as Bluto and Olive Oyl, his muscular bearing, her slimness.
She seems to fit easily in the crook of his arm.
He hasn’t said much except to grunt the occasional assent.
“When you say witch . . .” I press.
“She’s Wiccan.”
“I still don’t know what that means.”
“It means,” she says, leaning in, narrowing her eyes, “she’s a practicing witch. Like spells and rituals, a worship of nature, trees and plants. Paganism.”
“Okay,” I say, drawing out the syllable.
“Google that shit,” she says, leaning back then coming forward again, agitated. “You must know. There’s a whole bunch of them here in Little Valley and The Hollows. You know that shop in town with all the crystals
and dream catchers, tarot cards, all the books on mysticism? That’s where they meet. And out in the woods. In fact, there’s
a meeting coming up for the first full moon of the year. The Wolf Moon.”
Her eyes are a little wide; she’s gripping at the edge of the table. And I’m trying to decide if she’s unstable, sick with
grief, or both. I know the place she’s talking about, the occult bookshop on the outskirts of town. I also know about our
so-called Wiccan contingent in Little Valley. And our neighboring town, The Hollows, has a wild reputation of dark occurrences,
unexplained happenings, is home to a number of alleged psychics and certainly has an unusually high crime rate. I try to keep
an open mind about things. But I’m not exactly a believer.
“The Wolf Moon—?” I let the words dangle, giving her the opportunity to say more.
“That’s when they do whatever business they do out there.” She flings a dramatic arm. “Cast spells, throw curses, worship nature, whatever. They have a big bonfire. People come from all over for it.”
I feel like I would know if there was a yearly gathering of area witches. Large gatherings and bonfires tend to attract a
lot of attention.
And then there’s the “voodoo doll.” Which, one has to admit, looks extremely witchy.
“So, you’re telling me that Ana Blacksmith is a witch.”
“And she killed Paul.” She says this with a satisfied nod. “When are you going to arrest her?”
Ross puts an arm around her and offers a gentle squeeze. “Babe, we don’t know what happened to Paul.”
“Then who?” She looks up at him, eyes narrowed.
“I don’t know, but—”
“But what?” She turns back to me. “You said he was poisoned. Is that right?”
“Toxicology is consistent with that.”
She lifts her palms. “Her mother poisoned her father. Did you know that? She and her sister came here to live with her aunt.
Who was also—wait for it—a witch.”
“She was a florist, wasn’t she?” says Ross.
Regina snapped back. “Which was a cover for her other business.”
“Okay,” admits Ross, looking at me as if for help. “In addition to being a florist, Agnes Blacksmith was an herbalist. Like
a doctor, but she offered holistic cures for various ailments. Teas, tinctures, salves.”
“Spells, curses.”
“Regina.”
“Poison.”
“Stop,” he says finally, pulling away from her.
She rolls her eyes at me. “He’s just protective because his mother was a Wiccan.”
Ross withdraws his arm. “Stop it, Regina.”
“You’re such a mama’s boy.”
Ross’s face clouds with anger; he folds his arms, slouches. I’m clocking him at over six feet, two-fifty. She’s five two if
she’s an inch. But she cows him. Power is not just about size.
“Okay, look,” I say before their argument can devolve any further. Once a couple starts bickering, you’re not going to get
anywhere with them. “You say you saw your brother last week. He’d just broken up with Ms. Blacksmith.”
“And she was in a rage,” Regina says, seeming to calm a little. “She was calling all the time, texting, stalking Paul and
his new girlfriend, Amanda, in social media.”
“Did she threaten him?”
“I think the threat was implied. She was following him. Turned up at work.”
“But did she actually threaten to harm him?” I press. “Is it documented somewhere, a post in social media, a voicemail that you know of?”
People do get angry, act irrationally at the end of a relationship. But an actual threat gives me a reason to start digging
deeper, gives me a reason to ask for a warrant to search her house, or seize her cell phone records.
Regina sags a little, shakes her head. “I don’t know,” she admits. Big tears start to fall, and Ross puts his arm around her
again. She leans into him.
“That was Tuesday, the last time you saw him.”
“He came for dinner.”
“Did he tell you he was leaving town?”
“No, but he wouldn’t. Paul—just did whatever he wanted.”
“I understand that there was some dispute between you, over an inheritance.”
Her eyes widen in surprise, but then she nods. “Our mother died. Once her estate clears probate, we stand to inherit quite a bit. I wanted him to pay me what he owed me from that sum. But he was refusing, saying he still needed the money. We were discussing it. I wouldn’t say it was an argument.”
“How much did he owe you?”
She looks off to the side of the room. I can see it in her tight grimace, anger. “A hundred thousand.”
I glance at my phone, at the text chain Ana forwarded between Paul and “The Witch.” Did he mean his sister? Did he owe someone
else a hundred grand?
I don’t want this to get ugly, The Witch in Paul’s contacts had written.
Things had certainly gotten ugly for Paul.
“Whoa,” I say. “That’s a lot.”
She nods, offers a slight lift of her shoulders. “I loaned it to him when he got fired and started his own business.”
I make a show of looking at my notes. “He was fired for sexual harassment.”
Regina wraps her slender but muscled arms around her middle. There’s a kind of wiry strength to her. I picture again her and
Ross carrying Paul’s dead body through the woods. I can see them, struggling with the weight, arguing about how to carry him.
Maybe it’s dark. Maybe they drop him. Old Bob is out there now, taking a closer look, casting a wider net.
She scowls and squares her shoulders. “That—the sexual harassment charge—was like a he-said-she-said thing. I don’t know what
really happened. He claimed he was innocent and I believed him.”
Willful ignorance. I’ve spent less than twenty-four hours getting to know Paul Hayes and I already know he was a bad guy with
lots of enemies, most of them women. The fact that he gave money all over town, including funds that were supposed to save
the gym where I volunteer, seems to have bought him a lot of goodwill and some powerful allies.
“Did Paul have any connection to a woman named Iggy Rose?”
Regina purses her lips, shakes her head slowly. “I don’t think so. But I didn’t know all the women in his life.”
“She’s in a coma,” I say. “Her symptoms are consistent with poisoning.”
Regina blows out a breath, looks up at Ross, then back at me. “Did she know Ana Blacksmith?”
I don’t answer, slip the photograph I took from Amanda Alessi’s house across the table. She stares at it a moment, goes quiet.
Regina Hayes is in the photograph, too, standing in the back, apart, partially shadowed but holding her glass up to the camera.
I didn’t see her when I first looked at the photograph, only when I was staring at it later. Regina knows Iggy, Vera, Ana,
and Amanda, at least well enough to join them for drinks.
She freezes a moment, then shrugs.
“So, we were all at the same bar one night. Small town.”
I stay silent, let it sit a moment. I think that she’s about to go on when Ross stands up suddenly, scraping the chair back.
“That’s enough, Regina,” he says. “Nothing further without an attorney present.”
I lift my palms. “It’s not like that.”
“It’s always like that,” he says, voice gravelly.
Ross has had a couple drunk and disorderly arrests over the years. He stole a car when he was a kid, spent a few months in
juvie. Been on the straight and narrow for a while, has a YouTube art class that seems popular, an Instagram feed that features
all of his tattoos, artfully photographed by Regina.
He offers her his hand; she takes it and rises.
“Ms. Hayes, you told me that you didn’t know Amanda or Iggy. Did you lie?”
“No,” she says. “I don’t know them. Just because we were in the same place at the same time doesn’t mean we know each other.”
She looks at the image. “That was more than a year ago.”
“So you remember the night?”
“Enough,” says Ross, scuttling her toward the door.
“Is this a text exchange between you and your brother?”
I show her the printout. She stares at it, flushing. She blows out an angry breath.
“Were you in his contacts as The Witch?”
“I don’t know.”
But the tension in her face tells me she does. I already know that the number is hers. Birch confirmed it earlier. I let them
go because I don’t have a choice, and I’m not one of those to bluster and issue threats, to strong-arm or bully. I know where
to find them. We’ll talk again.
“Regina,” says Ross. “Don’t say another thing.”
“Just one more thing,” I press. “Do you recognize this or know what it is?”
I slide the picture of the stick doll across the table. Regina takes a step back, a hand coming to her heart.
“No idea,” says Ross, ushering her away. “Looks like a bunch of sticks to me.”
“It’s a voodoo doll,” I say. “An effigy.”
“Dolls aren’t always used to harm. Sometimes they’re for protection,” she says.
“Hush,” says Ross, casting an angry look back at me.
“So, you’ve seen one before?” I press. “Mind telling me where?”
But they’re done, moving down the hallway toward the door, whispering urgently to each other.
I follow them out slowly, arriving in the foyer in time to see the Blacksmith sisters enter from outside with a tall nattily
dressed man with a shaved head. Another power lawyer. Great.
I couldn’t have timed this better. I stand back to see what type of fireworks will go off as Ross and Regina exit and Vera
and Ana enter, bringing the cold in with them.
Outside the day is gray, threatening snow. Inside the station bustles with ringing phones, people coming and going. The Christmas decorations are still waiting to be taken down.
I expect Regina to start shouting, maybe Ana to answer with her own accusations. But nothing like that happens. Ross steers
Regina toward the door, and I observe Ana and Regina lock eyes, a kind of stare down, quiet, electric. And then Regina and
Ross are gone into the winter morning.
When I look back at the sisters, the elder Vera is staring at me, gaze unrelenting. I feel like she’s looking right through
me, seeing everything, all my secrets.
Involuntarily, I shudder.
Ana’s staring at me, too. I find myself imagining backing her into a corner somewhere and pressing my mouth to hers. She yields
to my touch, opens like a flower. Something passes between us, and I can tell she’s remembering our encounters, too.
Then she turns and whispers something to the man who is obviously her lawyer. He, too, gives me a look that someone else might
find intimidating.
This should be fun. I feel like I do right before I’m about to climb into the boxing ring. Wired, adrenaline pulsing.
I’ve learned a few things since the last time I saw Ana. And I’m looking forward to landing those punches.
I gesture for them to follow me and we all head to the interview room. Fine for the Blacksmith sisters to be interviewed together.
I have questions for them both, and for now it’s a good idea to keep things friendly.