Ellsbeth
“I’m here to see Officer Marcos.”
“He’s out right now.”
“Really? When I called, they said he’d be here at the end of the day.”
“Sorry, he’s out.”
Ellsbeth sighed. “I can wait.”
The receptionist blinked eyelids heavy with mascara. According to a plaque slotted into the bulletproof glass, her name was Rosa. “You’ve been here before, right?”
“Yeah, last spring. A few times.”
“You’re the one with the sister?”
Ellsbeth nodded.
Rosa sighed and scribbled something on a Post-it note. “Look, I’ll tell him you came by, but I don’t know if it’s going to be much help.” She gave Ellsbeth a pitying glance, then returned her attention to her computer screen, waiting for Ellsbeth to leave.
A month after Bertie’s funeral, Ellsbeth had driven alone from New Jersey to Newlyn in order to speak to a police officer who had handled Bertie’s case.
She knew she couldn’t explain on the phone, and she had spent the entire eight-hour car ride rehearsing exactly what she would say when she finally was in front of someone.
What could she say that wouldn’t sound insane, or like she hadn’t gone mad with grief?
My sister, Bertie Storer, committed suicide here on campus, do you remember her?
Well, you said she committed suicide. I was taking the Arcanus—do you know about the Arcanus?
—and I did a scrying ritual. It’s probably not worth getting into what that is.
But I saw her bleeding. And it looked strange to me.
It didn’t look like a suicide. There were plenty of people in the general public who viewed arcane mechanicals as sinister and off-putting, especially after the Maxwell Keene disaster.
Ellsbeth certainly couldn’t expect the police officers to give her words any weight, but maybe if she could see Bertie’s file herself, the anguish and uncertainty that had been with Ellsbeth since that day might be put to rest.
It didn’t look like a suicide. That thought had repeated on an endless loop in her brain since the Arcanus, like a thumping heartbeat in Ellsbeth’s head, a constant companion that burned her from the inside. Sometimes with rage, sometimes with shame, sometimes as a taunt, but always there.
She had tried to explain to her parents what she saw during the scrying ritual, but they had met her with blank faces and confusion.
They were broken and deep in mourning. Ellsbeth felt cruel, asking them to trust her amateur ritual enough to unravel their daughter’s death, forcing them to wade through the grotesque details when they needed to find a way to move forward and make peace.
But Ellsbeth had seen the image in the basin with her own eyes and she couldn’t get it out of her head.
It didn’t look like a suicide.
Bertie had been in a bathtub somewhere, a clawfoot tub with white linoleum stained pink with her blood.
Her body was contorted and unnatural—a foot hanging over the edge of the tub, her waist twisted, and her arm thrown over her head.
There was violence to the scene. The way it looked to Ellsbeth, someone had put her there.
In the weeks since, there were moments when she had half convinced herself that her memory was lying to her.
Maybe grief and trauma had distorted her recollection of the scrying image.
Had Bertie’s legs really stuck out at that terrible angle?
Was the blood really splattered across the room?
The memory of what she had seen became distorted and grotesque in Ellsbeth’s dreams. It burned itself onto her brain like a ghost image on a fuzzing cathode-ray television.
If she could see Bertie’s file, make sense of it slowly, perhaps the nightmarish uncertainty would diminish.
When Ellsbeth finally arrived at the Newlyn police station that day, her breath stale and knees tight from the drive, they hadn’t made her wait long.
Officer Marcos had been kind and sympathetic, leading her to sit in his office and offering Ellsbeth a small Styrofoam cup of coffee.
When she told him that she was Bertie’s sister, his face sagged with genuine empathy.
“I was hoping to see her file myself,” Ellsbeth said.
Officer Marcos’s mouth tightened as he tried to gauge exactly how much trouble this mourning family member would be.
“I can get you the file,” he said. He pulled his hand through his thinning hair.
“But I’m telling you, I’ve seen this before.
People looking for big answers where there aren’t any.
Conspiracy theories. Foul play. Young suicide is…
it’s unthinkable. It’s hard for anyone to accept. ”
“I would like to just see her file, please,” Ellsbeth said.
Officer Marcos sighed, the first indication of impatience, and left the room. When he returned, it was with a thin manila folder with a single piece of paper inside.
“This is it?” Ellsbeth said. She turned the paper over in disbelief, as if it could have been hiding a ream of detailed reporting underneath. “This is one page.”
“Some cases don’t require much investigation. This is a standard report.”
“Nineteen-year-old female. Found in bed. Lacerations consistent with suicide. That’s it?
That’s everything you have on her?” Ellsbeth was aware that she was raising her voice, that other officers in the precinct were turning their heads, but she couldn’t help herself.
“This was a person. This was my sister. And she didn’t die in bed! She was in a bathtub.”
Officer Marcos stared at her. He had a gap between his front teeth, and when he sucked in air, it made a small whistling sound. “And why would you think that?”
Ellsbeth’s stomach dropped. She would need to try to explain. “I—saw it in a scrying ritual. It’s an arcane mechanicals ritual to—”
“I’m aware what a scrying ritual is, Miss Storer.”
“Okay, well, then. Yeah. I saw her. In a bathtub. You need to reopen this case. I have information that can help! I remember what I saw.”
Agent Marcos plucked the file—was it even a file?—from Ellsbeth’s hands and stood. “I would advise against you giving too much credence to a little magic spell.”
“It’s not a spell. It’s a scrying ritual. And I know what I saw.”
“Maybe you made a mistake,” Marcos said gently. “Arcane stuff is complicated, right? It’s hard even for professionals.”
Ellsbeth could feel her cheeks burning. “I didn’t make a mistake.
” She watched as Officer Marcos sighed and stood, smoothing at a pleat in his khakis.
“Please,” Ellsbeth said, making her voice as gentle as possible.
“There has to be more to her file. Some sort of investigation. Surely the college makes you do more. Aren’t there notes from the officer who found her?
Interviews he did with people who knew her?
Where did those reports go? If I could just see them myself… ”
Officer Marcos was done with her, Ellsbeth understood that very well. His face had closed off; any pity he had felt was replaced with exasperation.
“There are no more files,” he said, his voice filed to a sharp edge.
And Ellsbeth realized something: He was lying.
“There are,” she said. “Of course there are. How could there possibly be one sheet of paper for the death of a teenage girl? Is it Newlyn? Did they put you up to this? Do they prefer that these things are kept quiet and covered up? I get that maybe a suicide is more palatable than—”
“If you’ll excuse me.” Officer Marcos stood, scratching at the pink spots visible on his scalp, and left Ellsbeth sitting alone with her Styrofoam cup of coffee turning cold and bitter in her hand, her mind already working a thousand new ways she could get the answers she needed.
She had returned to the police station a few more times, but she was met with increasingly curt dismissals.
The university had been even less helpful throughout the spring.
There were the polite expressions of sympathy, but then Ellsbeth’s emails had been shuttled from the dean of the college to the administrator student coordinator.
One day, Ellsbeth waited on hold for an hour before her call was connected to someone who turned out to be the campus therapist specializing in trauma.
“I don’t need a therapist!” Ellsbeth had spat in exasperation when she realized who she was talking with.
“I just need someone to say something other than, ‘We’re so sorry for your loss.’ ”
“I understand,” the therapist had said in a tone dripping with condescension. “And I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Their reticence to reopen Bertie’s case was obvious—it had been a tragic suicide, but that was it.
There was nothing more to investigate, and she, Ellsbeth, was clearly distraught with grief, attempting to cause problems where there weren’t any.
“It’s a common phenomenon when a loved one takes their own life,” the therapist had told her.
“There’s the grief, of course, and then sometimes an element of self-blame—Is there something I might have done differently?
And then there’s what you seem to be experiencing, which is very, very common.
Looking for an external answer even where one doesn’t exist.”
The university wanted to let the past rest. Why couldn’t Ellsbeth?
There were moments in the months since Bertie’s death that Ellsbeth found herself so exhausted by the bureaucratic walls and tormented by her own doubts that the thought of simply accepting what she had been told seemed tantalizingly appealing.
Wouldn’t that be easier? Maybe she could convince herself that she had made a mistake in the scrying incantation, or that she hadn’t seen anything terrible at all: The image that played in her nightmares was just her mind playing tricks on her.
Maybe she could believe that the pressure had just been too much for Bertie, that Bertie had been lonely, and heartbroken from a bad boyfriend.
But then the vision of the bathtub came back to her, as real in her memory as the moment she had conjured it in the basin. Her little sister, broken and bloody. Ellsbeth hadn’t been mistaken. That image would stay with her until she got the answers she needed.
There was a way to get people to do what you wanted, to make condescending university administrators or bored sheriffs open file cabinets, to tell you the truth, even if they didn’t want to.
There were areas of study within the field of the arcane that were obscure and verboten, ways of controlling people’s bodies and people’s minds.
The months since seeing Bertie’s death had changed Ellsbeth, made her hard and angry and on-edge.
She spent her days adrenalized, new ideas for formulas and incantations causing her fingertips to twitch.
She was here, at Newlyn, where someone knew the truth. The pieces of her plan were forming day by day. Whether he knew it or not, Professor Rawlins was the key to Ellsbeth getting what she needed.