Nineteen

Iris and I shrank farther into the shadow of the boxes. I could see Fitch reach up to the highest shelf, grab a jar. As he did, gold dust sprinkled down on us. It tickled my nose, and I nearly exploded, holding a sneeze inside.

He closed the closet door behind him.

“You know, cuz,” he said. “Your attitude is really disturbing.”

“My attitude?” Minerva asked.

“You know I need this for my work. My research. It’s integral to finding the cure.”

“Gold dust, Fitch?” Minerva asked. “Have you been reading the old tome? Daphne’s magic spells? I thought you were the scientist of the family. How would your mother feel to know you’ve forsaken medicine for soothsaying?”

“Shut up, Minerva. Leave my mother out of it,” Fitch said, and I heard anger building in his voice.

“Doctor Constance Martin,” Minerva said. “You could have made her proud.”

“I do make her proud,” he said.

“Right. By telling people you’re going to find a cure. But Fitch, you’re really just trying to reverse the curse. Good old Sibylline magic. Here you are, stealing the dust I sweep off my workbench. The ore, the spent tailings, the leftover grindings of all that precious gold?.?.?.?for what? For a new spell? Next you’ll be wanting wool of bat and eye of newt.”

Fitch muttered something, and I heard the shop door slam behind him. I strained to hear, finally letting myself sneeze as the Jeep revved and drove away.

“He’s gone,” Minerva said, letting us out of the closet.

“Why did you say I didn’t have to explain about Fitch, that you get it?” I asked her.

“Because he’s obsessed, in a way that hurts people,” she said. “He’s brilliant, but he’s got problems. He’s so focused on this ‘cure,’ but it’s just as much about proving himself to his mother.”

I knew that part, about his mother, but until I’d learned all these unfolding truths, it had just made me feel sorry for Fitch—a kid worried about his sister, whose mom left them alone too much.

Minerva took a deep breath. “I love my aunt Constance, but she’s so preoccupied. In a way it’s understandable, dealing with the gene that only affects the women of our family. Daphne—our great-aunt—says it’s like the Sword of Damocles.”

There were songs about the Sword of Damocles. My parents had a record where someone sang about the sword about to fall. But it was the Greek parable that affected me most: a deadly weapon hanging over your head. You might escape it forever, or it could crash down at any moment. Like an evil monster hovering above, biding his time, deciding whether to take you or not.

“So all of you have the gene, but not everyone gets the disease?” I asked.

“Yes,” Minerva said. “And we don’t know who it will hit—whose gene will mutate into the full-blown disease. That’s the thing about Abigail. She’s had the antibodies for a long time, but the disease didn’t manifest till she was almost a teenager.”

“It’s progressed?” Iris asked.

Minerva nodded. “Every night she’s at risk of dying,” she said.

That stabbed my heart. I ached to think of anyone losing their sister. But what part did kidnapping girls play in Fitch’s search for a cure?

“Why did Fitch apologize for hurting you?” Iris asked. “What did he do?”

Minerva’s face twisted with remembered pain. “An experiment. I’d like to forget about it,” she said.

“But you lived to tell,” Iris said.

“Of course I lived, it wasn’t life-threatening. What do you mean?” Minerva asked.

“Fitch kidnapped my sister and me,” Iris said sharply. “Gale—Abigail—was with him. They shoved us into a van and took us somewhere.”

“Took you,” Minerva said, looking into the distance as if at a bad memory. “Earlier, you asked me about the blue van.”

“And you said it belonged to a family foundation,” I said. The detective in me knew even before she spoke what she would say.

“Yes, the Agassiz Foundation,” Minerva said, and I nodded.

“Fitch loves to talk about that foundation,” I said. “He makes it sound so important.”

“The van is registered to the foundation,” Minerva said.

“It’s his kidnap van,” I said, watching the color in Minerva’s face drain away.

“What did he do to you and your sister?” Minerva asked Iris.

“I remember everything now,” Iris said, looking determined. “He took us to the attic that had those panels—the ones of the Sibylline sisters. He told us we were doing something good for humanity. We were going to save the goddess. Then he took blood samples to make sure we were AB negative, like his sister.”

“Like all the girls in our family who carry the gene,” Minerva said. “It’s my blood type, too.”

Mine too , I thought. If Fitch’s research required girls with AB negative blood, was I on his list? Why couldn’t he have taken me instead of Eloise? I wished he had, so she could still be alive. I would have fought him off, hurt him before he could kill me or my sister.

“He put a band around my head, tightened it,” Iris said. “He hooked me up to a machine and said it would just take a minute, it was just to measure brain waves. But it looked as if it came out of a horror movie—it was so old-fashioned and weird-looking.”

Minerva nodded. “I know that equipment. Remember when I said the Sibylline sisters were moved to the health spa?”

“The Miramar?” I asked.

“Yes. All kinds of doctors came there, trying to help the sisters. The girls were famous, and beloved, and everyone wanted to save them. They were in their early twenties?.?.?.?it was nearly eighty years ago. You can imagine how old the equipment is,” Minerva said. “Fitch used it on you?”

“Yeah,” Iris said.

“Me too,” Minerva said. “That was what I was referring to, when I said he hurt me. I thought he was joking when he first put the band around my head. But he flipped the switch, and it shocked me.”

“Us too,” Iris said. “He told us he was putting us to sleep, that we’d wake up refreshed. Then he gave us sedatives or something. He’d run the test, but it would hurt—it felt like a shock. And then the last time, I didn’t wake up for a while. It must have looked like I died. I only regained consciousness when Fitch was burying me in the woods. I realized what was happening and played dead, because I knew it could be my chance to escape.”

“Oh my God,” Minerva said. “Iris! Fitch buried you? He tried to kill you?”

Iris looked down, as if trying to gather her thoughts. “I don’t know if he meant to,” she said. “I think it was an accident, because he cried. I could hear him when he was burying me. And I felt his tears on my face. He sprinkled something on me—it tickled my face. He kept saying he was sorry.”

“How sorry could he have been?” I asked harshly. “Considering he was shoving you into a hole in the ground?”

“Come on, Oli,” Iris said. “It was just an impression.”

“And considering he did the same thing to my sister,” I said, feeling almost rageful at Iris for describing Fitch in such an understanding way.

“What are you talking about?” Minerva asked.

“I found Iris buried alive,” I said. “In the same place my sister was found.”

“The same place?” Minerva asked, stunned.

“Yes,” I said.

“You’re saying Fitch put your sister there?” she asked.

“He must have,” I said.

“Is your sister okay?” Minerva asked me.

“No, he killed her,” I said. “He murdered Eloise.” Grief welled up inside me, washing over the rage, merging with it, creating one gigantic tidal wave of terribleness, of loss, of the worst feelings in the world.

Minerva held one of my hands, and Iris held the other. Even though I never cried in front of people, nothing could have stopped the sobs from ripping out of my chest, the tears from flooding down my cheeks. Iris and Minerva were new in my life, but it felt as if I had known them longer than anyone else, anyone but Eloise.

When I was finished crying, Minerva used one of those soft white towels to dry the tears from my eyes. Iris brought me a glass of water from the sink next to the workbench. I sipped it until I could breathe normally again.

“We have work to do,” Minerva said.

“Like what?” I asked.

“First, Iris—you said Fitch sprinkled something on you, when he thought you were dead.”

“Yes, what was it?” Iris asked.

“You know, don’t you?” Minerva asked me.

“Gold dust,” I said. “Like the kind he took from you?”

“Yes,” she said, looking more worried than before. “He might think he’s doing medicine, as far as the brain wave tests go, but he’s also practicing alchemy. He’s taking a page from the tome.”

“What tome?” I asked.

“Daphne’s magic book,” Minerva said. “It’s the Sibylline version of Malleus Maleficarum —the Hammer of Witches .”

“Witchcraft?” I asked, thinking of the little charm, the tiny witch flying through the fog.

“Not exactly,” Minerva said. “It’s more like a family treatise about goodness, healing, seeing the future to improve lives, to bring love, to cause happiness. We’re an old New England clan. Daphne traced our lineage all the way back to Alse Young—the first girl executed for witchcraft in America. She was a botanist from Windsor, right here in Connecticut, blamed for a flu outbreak.”

“You’re related to Alse?” I asked, with some awe. Minerva nodded. We’d learned about the Connecticut Witch Trials in school; they had started in 1647, held in Hartford, just up the river from where Eloise and I lived in Black Hall.

“Some said the Sibylline sisters contracted the disease as retribution for Alse cursing the state with flu,” Minerva said. “Others were accused of fortune-telling—just like the Sibyllines—and people called them witches. It all weaves together, and I think Fitch might have bought into it more than he’d want anyone to think.”

I remembered more about what I’d learned. The Connecticut Witch Trials of the 1600s were evil and devastating, totally wrong and unfair, and directed mostly at women. Awesome women who threatened the status quo—including Lydia Gilbert, who was accused of bewitching Thomas Allyn’s gun. So when on October 3, 1651, Thomas killed a man, it was deemed not his fault, but Lydia’s—for having cast a spell on the gun. And she was executed for it.

Just within the last few years, our Connecticut state lawmakers had officially absolved twelve of the seventeenth-century witch hunt victims, eleven of whom had been executed. It had only taken them 370 years.

“But Alse was innocent,” I said.

“Totally innocent,” Minerva said. “Like all those accused witches, she did have powers—but we all do! Emotion is power. Love is power. My creating charms to celebrate our family legends—power. Those tears that just shook you to the core, Oli—they are power. Iris, your desire to save Hayley—that is power.”

I nodded. Minerva was absolutely right.

“But we have to move fast,” Minerva said.

“And get to the Miramar?” Iris asked. “Are we even sure that’s where he has Hayley? Does it have an attic? Full of dead birds and panels painted with the girls in long white dresses? The sibyls?”

“It does have an attic just like that,” Minerva said. “But the Miramar is a strange place. Too many corridors and back staircases and secret passages. I don’t even know how to get to that attic.”

“Maybe we need to slow down and figure out a strategy,” I said.

“There’s no time, Oli,” Minerva said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“The gold dust,” she said. “I hadn’t put it together before, but now that I know he sprinkled it on you, Iris, after he thought you were dead?.?.?.”

My pulse raced, and the blood in my veins felt cold.

“It’s written in the Hammer of Witches ,” Minerva said, “that the dust of silver and gold is for anointing the dead. So if he needs more?.?.?.”

“It means he’s going to kill Hayley,” Iris said.

Minerva grabbed her car keys, and the three of us ran out to the street.