He smiles and crunches ice between his teeth. “It was my idea to shoot here.”
She doesn’t know what to say to this. She’d thought this was a Phillip Granger film, but Cal seems to have much more of a hand in things than she thought.
“So what’s with the…?” She gestures to all the massive window walls.
He laughs. “For the view.”
Elena nods. His voice has grown quieter, and she realizes that he’s only a couple of feet from her. Her cocktail is perched on the slate table next to his, so she doesn’t have anything to do with her hands. She needs to pick something up, to fidget. She thinks about plugging her hand into her pocket to feel for her phone, but she stands stock-still. The energy in the room has shifted. She sees, now, that he is holding her in a dark, intense stare.
She knows that look.
He wants her.
50Joey
Violent flashes of distant lightning foretell a bitch of a storm.
The boxes by Joey’s front door are half-empty their contents gutted and strewn all over her floor. She told Sophie that they were things she kept meaning to get rid of, and it’s true. Some of it was her mother’s. Old shoes and purses and makeup and books that she treasured, a hideous brooch passed down from Joey’s grandmother, and other trinkets. She shoved these all into this box ten years ago on that hotter-than-average September day when her mother didn’t wake up, and she hasn’t opened it since. She’s never been through them. But now that she’s free of the obsession with Quinn’s death that’s occupied her for the last fifteen years, she might as well keep going, cut her life wide-open, expose the underbelly of all her problems, and discard what isn’t necessary.
She looks at her phone, at Elena’s text from hours ago.Quinn update.Joey didn’t reply, ignoring her own curiosity. She is done talking about Quinn.
She pockets her phone and sifts through a stack of oldCosmopolitanmagazines and sees a small note. It just saysLove you, Mom! written in the laborious hand of a young child. The love she had for her motherwas more than normal, she always thought. Because it went beyond love. It was admiration, adoration, obsession. Her mother would get dressed to go on dates with men she met through a friend of a friend, men from distant towns, and Joey would watch her from the bedroom door. Carly Close had deep blue half-moons under her eyes, even then. “The exhaustion of living,” she told Joey when she’d asked what they were from. And that was the thing, in the end, that killed her. Exhaustion. Joey tried cracking jokes, making meals, letting her lie in bed for as long as she needed to, and trying to lift her mother’s spirits even as she was weighed down with grief for Quinn. But the summer just after Joey turned twenty-two, her mom’s latest boyfriend left her for a younger woman in Santa Fe, and that was it. Carly couldn’t fight it any longer. She let go and was pulled under. It was the second time Joey had discovered the dead body of someone she loved. The second time she both recognized and didn’t recognize a face that she had seen thousands of times. It was a Friday evening when they folded up the wheels of the gurney and slid her mother’s body into an emergency vehicle. The sunset was one of the most beautiful Joey could remember, and all she kept thinking was that her mom could have seen it. If she had just hung on for three more hours, she could have seen it.
Joey swallows and sets the note inside the garbage bag. Rain is scratching at the windows, at the roof. She’s swimming in a sea of memories, and she needs to come up for air. She slides the pile off her lap and peels open the other box. This one isn’t full of her mother’s things. This one is filled with Joey’s keepsakes from high school, and, she remembers with surprise as she rifles through, some of Elena’s things.
They found Quinn’s body on a Thursday morning, and the very next day, Elena came and dumped a shoebox of trinkets into Joey’s arms before leaving without an explanation. Elena wasn’t allowed to have posters or pictures on her walls at home, so there wasn’t much. Joey had never looked through it. She’d just put it in her closet, expecting Elenato eventually come back for it. But she never did. When Joey moved, she brought Elena’s shoebox too.
She digs through it now, distracted immediately by a group photo, capturing a moment of pure glee, the four of them with their smiles wide and open, their eyes closed, heads tipping toward each other.
At the bottom of the box, she lifts a small Bible that seems out of place among Elena’s things. Beneath that, the first thing she sees is a pink sticky note. The room sways around her. On the note is the same scribbled handwriting she found on the one in River’s closet. The same handwriting as the one on the journal that Sophie found. Joey starts to peel it off. Then she looks at what it’s stuck to. She blinks and looks again because she doesn’t quite understand what she’s seeing.
It’s a DVD case. On it are two names. One she doesn’t recognize. And the other is Nicola Bianco.
51Quinn
June 2011
The day of the fall
Yesterday, Elena cornered me in the bathroom at school and asked if we could do magic for something important. It seemed secretive, like it had something to do with Collingswood. But I was preoccupied, so I lied to her and said I couldn’t find the book. It was shitty of me, I know, and, in hindsight, deeply ironic too.
Because now I can’t find the book.
I try not to panic, but it’s kind of hard when you’ve torn apart your entire room and it’s still nowhere. Nothing in my nightstand but my journal, some pens, a lighter, and a few small candles. Nothing in my closet but clothes and bags and shoes. I did a brief search of the house, but then I spotted my mom in the garden, and I didn’t want her to see how worried I was.
Because I am worried. Actually, I’m freaking the fuck out. And my heart won’t stop clattering against my rib cage. A ringing in my ear has started, and I can’t make it stop. I don’t have to think too hard about this. I know he took the book. Maybe this morning on his way to work? I know what it means. It means he has figured out what bloodspell is. And in my stupid ignorance, I told him exactly how to access it when Itold him how I revealed all those spells in the book. The fear that tears through me is like physical pain.
My heart is thrumming and thrumming, and my head spins because it’s only a matter of time now. I don’t have time to worry about the book. I have to go. I spin my grandmother’s ring around my finger, as if this fierce, witchy piece of jewelry might give me strength. Then, I race to the front door, but my sweaty hand stays plastered to the handle. I can’t bring myself to turn it. Not yet. I need to say goodbye.
I swallow back tears and force myself to keep my head.
I walk through the kitchen and peel open the screen door. I can’t seem to slow my heartbeat. “Hey, Mom,” I say.
She looks up, startled, from her crouch over the seedlings. “What are you doing home?”
“I forgot a textbook,” I say. “I’m just going to grab it and head back.”
She stands and glances at a watch on her wrist. “It’s the last day.” Her hands are covered in dirt.
