“Hi, I’m Delia.” I shook his hand, reassured by its weight and solidity. “I’m a friend of Max’s.”
“Mr. Bell…” Max hesitated. “I asked Delia out here because she’s done some work with situations like—well, like Carol Ann’s and, well, now Joe’s too, I guess. I know you’re working…”
“Ah-yup.” Mr. Bell looked around. The place was deserted except for us. “It’s okay. I can talk. I’ll let you know if my number gets called.” He cocked a glance at me. “You know his story better’n I do, though. Why do you need it from me?”
“I tend to remember things a little differently,” Max said. “It’d be a big help to get a perspective that’s not mine. I don’t mean to trouble you. I know it’s got to be a shock.”
“Oh, well, no,” Mr. Bell said, surprising me. He stared down at the ground for a long minute, then glanced up at Max again before nodding at me. “Poor Joe hadn’t really been with us for a long while. Much as it hurts me to say it, he’s at peace now. I truly believe that.”
Max sighed, then rubbed his hand over his forehead. “I have to think you’re right,” he finally offered.
John Bell nodded again, then clasped his hands together with the air of a man who’d told this story too many times, in too many places.
“Joe loved Carol Ann from the time they were babies, you know?” he began. “She was the dominant one, the show-off. He worshipped her.”
He sighed, and I sensed Max’s impatience almost at a soul-deep level. Mr. Bell must have too, because he straightened, refocusing on us both. “When Joe finally upped and proposed to Carol Ann, Mother and I like to’ve died a thousand deaths. She’d gotten different, over the years. Still lovely, ‘course, still a Graham girl and that made her family. But you know, strange. Like some kids do when they hit high school age. Figured she’d grow out of it. Joe wanted to go to whatever fancy college she got accepted to, but he knew he needed to stay and work. He knew what he wanted, though. Proposed to her on the first dayof summer, right in front of us. And she laughed—laughed. Not a mean laugh, either. She actually seemed happy.”
He shook his head. “It all went to shit after that. We found that out later, ‘course. All that nasty business she had him buy. And I know, I know, that makes it sound like she’s all to blame, when surely Joe had a brain as well, but—” He offered me a rueful smile. “You just had to know Joe. There was nothing he wouldn’t do for Carol Ann. It’s like she operated by an entirely different set of rules.”
“Do you know what she was trying to do—what she was trying to get at, with the stuff Joe had bought for her?” I asked quietly. I was still missing something critical here. “I mean, usually when people mess around with the occult, there’s a reason for it. Some wish they want to have come true, some wrong they want righted. Did Joe ever give a reason for Carol Ann’s requests?”
“None that he ever told me,” Mr. Bell said, shaking his head. “She wanted to feel powerful, he said.”
I frowned. “Powerful? What do you mean? I thought she was the Queen Bee at her high school?” I looked at Max, and he spread his hands. He’d been in law school when all of this had gone down.
“Well, yeah,” Mr. Bell said. “She was everything a seventeen-year-old girl could want to be, but she wasn’t Queen Bee that summer after graduation, you remember.” He smiled a little grimly at Max. “Your Aunt Emily had just had that TV thing come out, and that was a big deal when she came back to visit that year. ’Cording to Joe, it’s all Carol Ann ever talked about, how Aunt Emily was stealing the show, how Aunt Emily thought she was better’n the rest of you all, like that. Typical teenage stuff, but when you’re going through it, seems like the biggest thing in the world. So, anyway. She waited until the picnic and—boom. Everything else you know.”
They both fell quiet, but I clearly didn’t know. “Picnic,” I echoed.
“Fourth of July,” Max said. His voice was worn down, scraped raw. “I mean, Aunt Emily was there, sure. But she was still on the pageant and parade circuit at that point. If she was on TV back then, I totally missed that.”
I didn’t like the numb look on his face. “The Fourth of July was when Carol Ann played with the Ouija Board or whatever she did?”
Mr. Bell picked up the tale. “After the picnic. That night. That part even my tired old brain could remember. Joe was so happy that whole day, and I remember, Mother and I were worried that he’d gone and knocked up Carol Ann without waiting for the wedding. That was what we worried about back then.” He shook his head. “Seems crazy now.”
But I was only half listening. Ouija Boards were more popular now than they’d ever been, but they’d been causing problems for over a hundred years, to hear Mordechai talk. Of all the various ways people tried to tap into the spirit world, Ouija Boards held a particular energy that seemed to go straight for the shadow side. I knew he’d had a call four or five years ago on the subject, but that was one of the ones he hadn’t taken me on. Had he recorded it in his files, I wondered?
Mr. Bell’s words pulled me back to the present. “That’s pretty much all it seemed to be, though. Young girl, jealous of another girl’s success, tries to either bring more good stuff down for her, or, okay, some bad stuff to Emily. But Emily didn’t seem affected in the slightest, whereas Carol Ann…” He looked at Max apologetically. “Well, maybe she’ll find her way back soon.”
“Find her way back?” The phrase hit me like a physical blow. I’d heard it before—Mordechai had said it. Multiple times. About multiple people. But what did it mean?
“Something Joe would say when he got drunk,” Mr. Bell explained. “That Carol Ann just needed to find her way back.”
Back from where? I wanted to ask. But the look on Max’s face stopped me. He was white as a sheet, staring at nothing.
“We still hold out hope for that,” Bell finished softly.
Max managed a smile as I tried to corral all the research I’d done, parse out every word that Rabbi Mordechai had ever uttered. “What about more recently?” I asked him. “Did Joe give you any indication that he might be thinking about hurting himself?”
Mr. Bell blew out a long breath, and Max fielded the question. “Joe kept to himself,” he began, but Bell waved him off.
“We saw him, from time to time. Mother would bring him food, they’d talk on the porch—never inside. He never wanted her to set foot inside the place.”
Given what I’d seen of the cottage, I wasn’t surprised. But Bell continued. “But to answer your question, no. He seemed—I don’t know, almost happy, of late. Coming out of it. We never would have imagined he’d take this path.”
Once again, Mr. Bell’s words hit me oddly. Like I was missing something, something I needed to understand. Something I needed to learn more about.
But Max was starting to shake with his own impatience, filled to the brim with too many questions and nowhere near enough answers. “We need to go,” he said abruptly, turning away. “Thank you, John—we’ll…we’ll be seeing you soon.”
