Page 45 of The Witches of Cambridge

They sat at a rear table, in a dark corner, and after they’d ordered espressos, Lionel took out his tarot cards. He knew he would have one true love. He’d known it the moment he’d first seen Billy.

“Shall we take a look?” he said. “Let’s see if we can know a bit more about what’s going on with the girls who are missing.”

Billy said nothing, for he was beset by nerves, wondering what the cards might reveal. He was afraid that Lauren would see she’d been correct about him all along. He had fallen in love with someone, just not the person she’d thought.

The very first card drawn was the death card, signifying endings of all kinds. “Where we end, we also begin,” Lionel said. “It seems the missing are related. All have gone to the same place, or have disappeared for the same reason.”

Lionel turned over the Fool, what some would claim was the most powerful card, the protagonist of the story, the one who was on a journey, but who among them was that central character? And which among them would know what the fool knew? Mania, intoxication, folly, frenzy, betrayal. It was quiet in the back of the café, and it grew quieter still as they all concentrated on the cards. Next was the Two of Wands. Trust in yourself. Trust who you are. Trust who you always will be.

“They took the wrong path.” He looked up at Billy. “I see that you have a choice to make as well. Choose the right path and you might find everything you’ve been looking for, Detective.”

Billy immediately looked unnerved. “I think I’ll find some milk for this coffee. It’s too strong.” He stood and went to the counter.

“There’s something between you two,” Lauren said thoughtfully. “I knew he was here for his own reasons.”

“Don’t read my mind.” As children they could answer one another’s unspoken questions, but they weren’t children anymore.

“I don’t have to read your mind, it’s right there every time you look at him. You’re the one making a mistake. He’s a police officer, Lionel. That could be a huge problem.”

They gazed at Billy as he stood at the counter.

“It already is,” Lionel said. “He’s the one.”

Billy looked back at Lionel from across the café. He thought he’d never seen a man as handsome or as brilliant; he was a shining star who seemed to exist without any fear of who he was. Billy wondered then if he should walk out the door. His job meant everything to him, so why on this evening did it seem not to matter in the least? In that alleyway where he’d kissed Lionel he hadn’t been thinking, his adrenaline had been pumping, there were sirens wailing in front of the club. If one of his brother officers had happened to open the back door of the club and walked into the alley, he would have been finished. It wouldn’t be just snide remarks, which were sometimes tossed his way because of his good looks and the notion that he was riding on his father’s coattails; it would be the end of his career. On the night he’d met Lionel, he’d gotten into his car in a daze, then set off along Route 2 toward Concord merely to drive. Some decisions are easy to make, they’re as simple as this: Do you allow yourself to be who you are, or will you hide yourself away forevermore?

When Billy returned to the table, Lauren was gone.

“My sister had an appointment,” Lionel said. It was a blatant lie, and they both knew it. Lionel had asked Lauren to leave, and she’d done so, though she’d warned him to be careful.

“You got rid of her,” Billy said, flattered.

“I did.”

Billy and Lionel walked out together, their shoulders touching, their hearts beating fast. Houdini trotted beside them, quiet as always, grateful merely to have been rescued from his cage in the lab. They got into Billy’s car, and went to park behind the Harvard Stadium. The outside world dissolved as darkness fell. They had entered into a dream, but it felt real enough. Lionel pulled away and looked at Billy searchingly, hoping for something he didn’t quite see. Billy’s eyes were guarded; perhaps detective work had done that to him. Police departments, along with the state and federal government, had been rooting out public servants who were thought to be immoral. The Lavender Scare went hand and hand with the Red Scare, one to dispose of those who were left leaning, the other to root out people simply because of who they loved. The hearings in Washington were going after homosexuals, insisting they were untrustworthy, for they could easily be blackmailed, and belonged in prison for the laws they broke. The result was an executive order by President Eisenhower that included “sexual perversion” as reason enough to terminate employment by the federal government.

“Knight of Pentacles,” Lionel said. “That was what I saw when I read my own cards.”

“Who is that?” Billy said.

“It’s you.” The Knight of Pentacles was the hero who always thought before he acted, who could always be depended upon, who was patient and kind and cared for others more than he cared for himself.

“I can’t be who you want me to be,” Billy said. “Just as long as you understand that.”

At this very moment, Billy was missing drinks with the guys he worked with over in Central Square, and they’d likely laugh and say he was always one to disappear. Before the Lilith House incident he’d intended to act as if he didn’t know Lionel if they ever met on the street; he would continue to be fixed up on blind dates with the sisters and cousins of his buddies on the force, and it would never work out for one reason or another, and he would go to bed early and sneak out late, telling his mother and sister there was no one special in his life, even though they clearly knew the truth about him.

“That’s fine,” Lionel told him. “You don’t have to be anyone else. Just be you.”

Billy left his car around the corner from the Bells’ house to ensure it wouldn’t be spotted; then they walked toward the hedges. He kept his distance, though it wasn’t what he wanted to do. He wanted to be even closer. “I don’t think I belong here,” he said with a laugh.

He used to drive down Brattle Street late at night with his high school friends and toss beer bottles over the gates of the high-and-mighty residents with their perfect lawns and their perfect lives. Sometimes during the holidays they’d break into houses and take what they wanted; they’d open bottles of whiskey and sprawl on the velvet couches and talk with haughty accents and leave behind a mess. He’d never noticed this particular house, for it was well hidden behind the hedges. There was a tumble of roses, and the weeds were high.

“I’m hardly ever home,” Lionel said, to explain why such a splendid house had a ramshackle appearance. “I’m usually at the hospital. I just pop by to make sure Houdini is walked and fed, and then I let him take over the couch. I should find him a proper home, but he seems happy enough to hang out with me.”

They went into the kitchen, where Lionel fixed them drinks, but Billy didn’t touch his. He listened to Lionel recount his experiments with lysergic acid, illegal as far as Billy knew, and how he had tried to go as far inside his mind as possible, how he had a gift called the sight, which allowed him to see into other people with compassion, a valuable trait for a physician. He was interested in the spirit and how the soul was affected by experience and genetics. That was why he had decided to specialize in psychiatry.

“So you can study what’s wrong with people like us?” Billy said with a laugh.

“Nothing is wrong with people like us” was Lionel’s response. “I think you know that.”

If Billy stayed, anything could happen. Lionel laced his fingers through Billy’s. He knew what Billy was thinking.

“Don’t leave,” he said. “That’s what you did last time.”

In the alley behind the club, Billy had felt compelled to turn and run. But now it was already too late; it had been since he walked through the door. He followed Lionel upstairs, a guest in a house he never would have imagined he would be invited to visit, on a night when he would do exactly as he pleased, when he was not an officer of the law or a brother or a son, but only himself, a man who was already falling in love.