Elena clears her throat. “I, for one, didn’t feel like summoning a few bottles of Mike’s Hard Lemonade would help at all, not when our best friend was dead.”
Before them, a tiny bird dips and soars in the open sky. Sophie can’t decide whether the move is a show of grace or power. It’s somehow both at once.
Joey scuffs her shoe against the rock. “I have a theory…about what happened that night.”
Sophie and Elena let her speak.
“Quinn died at about five o’clock. That’s what the coroner’s report said. After the last day of school, she went to her mom’s, but then she must have gone to visit her dad, and they must have gotten into an argument—maybe she was threatening him with rehab, or maybe he was just drunk and angry. I don’t know. Then, she ran to the woods, and he followed her, and they ended up right here, still fighting, and he…” She makes a shoving motion with her hands.
Sophie gives it a moment and keeps her tone controlled so she doesn’t upset Joey. “Interesting. I wonder, though, if Tom would get mad over his daughter suggesting rehab, no matter how drunk he was.”
“And he’d have to be pretty fucking mad to, you know…” Elena mimics Joey’s shoving motion. “Plus, the illusion spell would have hidden her if she ran this way.”
Joey is nodding, like she is agreeing with them.Maybe, Sophie thinks. Maybe she will come around on this all on her own. Maybe she’ll let it go without having to be convinced.
“You’re right on both counts,” says Joey. “But something happened with Tom that day. I know it did.”
Sophie hasn’t forgotten the words the trees supposedly whispered to Joey.
“Dad? No!”
She thinks back to that day. She remembers it all more vividly than she’d like. Finding Quinn’s body, legs twisted unnaturally, creek water soaking her sneakers. The police, the businesslike way they took care of her body, as if they saw this kind of thing all the time. She recalls the time-turning spell they attempted hours after they found Quinn’s body. They had never managed to turn time before, but they desperately wanted to go back a day to save her, and for some reason they thought their desperation would be enough to make it work. They sat in the spell circle and tried through their tears. The problem was that, just like today, they didn’t have the book. They couldn’t find it. Sophie remembers the moment she realized time-turning would be impossible. She remembers the sudden crushing blow right to the center of her. Quinn was gone. The magic was gone. Nothing could help them.
Something about this memory bothers her. “Was the book already missing before Quinn died?”
Elena bobs her head. “She said she lost it. It was the day before, and I wanted to do magic for something, but Quinn told me she couldn’t find it. I guess I should have asked her more about it then, but I thought she was lying. Like, how could you just lose the book? We were at school at the time so I couldn’t do much, but I planned to confront her about it later. Never got the chance.”
“We went looking for it the day we found her, remember?” says Joey.“We checked everywhere. Her room, the spell circle. We thought about asking Barbara, but we didn’t want to worry her.”
They’re quiet for a long time. Sophie watches the small bird swoop above them with startling speed. It beelines for a giant hawk that is circling a treetop. The sudden change of direction must take the hawk by surprise because it rears up. But the little bird does not relent. Fearlessly, it goes straight for the eyes. The hawk swoops away just in time.
They’re getting carried away with all this. Quinn went out for a hike and slipped. She fell. No one followed her. No one pushed her. It has nothing to do with the book. Sophie does not believe Joey heard Quinn whispering her killer’s name fifteen years after the fact. They grew up with impossible things happening, but that is beyond the scope of even her imagination. Joey wanted some kind of sign that Quinn was killed, and so her subconscious invented one. Although Sophie has to admit that the book disappearing right around the time Quinn died is really odd. She remembers thinking about that coincidence back then, but Elena left town the very next day, and Sophie herself decided to push through summer classes so she could graduate early. Neither she nor Joey had any desire to even step foot in the spell circle after Quinn and Elena were gone.
In front of them, the hawk is back, reassessing its approach, thinking it has a clear shot. But the small bird comes out of nowhere and speeds toward it with exacting precision, clawing at its face again. The hawk flaps and changes direction, but the bird doesn’t relent. It goes for the eyes again. At long last, the hawk gives up, its broad dark wings carrying it slowly away. Having diminished the predator’s power through desperation and grit alone, the tiny bird, understandably exhausted, returns to the tree, disappearing into the cover of needled branches. The little nest it was protecting isn’t visible, but Sophie knows it’s there.
“I want to go talk to Tom,” says Joey. She tightens her ponytail in one self-assured tug.
“Terrible idea,” says Elena. “What could you possibly have to say?”
“For one, I could get a sense of what he and Quinn might have fought about. And two, maybe he knows where the book is. Maybe he even has it.”
“I agree about the book,” says Sophie. “It’s been missing a really long time, and I think we should find it. But Joey, Barbara warned us not to bug Tom. He’s not well. I don’t know if we should push him over the edge.”
Joey folds her arms over her chest and glares at her.
“You know what I mean,” Sophie says.
“Sounds like a huge waste of time,” Elena says with a sigh.
“But what if we did find the book?” says Joey. “We could do a summoning spell. Maybe there are clues out there that could tell us exactly what happened that night.”
“I’m sorry, Joey.” Sophie tries to be as gentle as she can. “It’s just…what proof could there be that they didn’t uncover back then?”
“Could be anything,” says Joey, obviously undeterred. “A fiber, a hair, a fingerprint.”
There was a formal investigation, of course. Sophie recalls the burly frame of Mr. Berg, Marissa’s dad, in his police uniform. He was the one who moved them away from Quinn, ushering them into their new bleak existence. He and Jim Hunstad, River’s dad, strung up yellow police tape, the kind she thought was only in movies. At the time, they still had the illusion spell cast over the spell circle, and thank god for that because it served as a sort of secret hiding place. They stood mere feet from the two police officers, whose heads were bent against the drizzle, holding notebooks and rubber gloves inside windbreakers, poised for evidence collection. But ultimately, they found nothing, no trace that anyone else had been with Quinn. There are dozens of hiking-related deaths every year in Colorado, and this is a slippery rock with a treacherous drop. It was cut-and-dried.
“I think instead of going to talk to Tom, we just take a breath,” says Sophie. “Two days ago, it was the anniversary of Quinn’s death. There are bound to be emotions wound up in that. Let’s work through it instead of obsessing over clues.”
