The Witch's Key (3 page)

I started by apologizing for the awkward
circumstances surrounding my confession, and yes,
confession
, was the word I used. I confessed that I had
probably used bad judgment in not bringing forth the testimony that
would have dissolved the shadows of grief hanging over New Castle
and the Second Precinct. I also confessed culpability in a scheme
to deny friends and coworkers the truth of what happened to a
beloved member of their extended family. And I especially confessed
to Carlos, explaining that I had never lied to him before in my
life, and that I was sorry for having done so now.

“Lied about what?” he asked.

“About who I am. My name, it’s not Tom, it’s—”

“Tony. I know.”

“You know what?”

“I know it’s you.”

“You do?”

“Yes, you son-of-a-bitch! What’s wrong with you? You
couldn’t call? You bastard! You couldn’t drop a line or
something?”

Spinelli piped in. “What’s going on?”

Carlos pointed at me. “It’s Tony!”

“Who?”

“Him.”

“No, I mean, Tony who?”

“Marcella,” I said. “I’m Tony Marcella.”

“You’re Marcella?”

“Yes.”

“But how?”

“It’s a long story.”

“It’s been three months,” said Carlos. “You couldn’t
tell your story in three months?”

Spinelli again, “I don’t get it.”

Lilith reached across the table and tapped his hand.
“It’s witchcraft, honey. You don’t need to get it.”

Carlos came back. “Look, all I’m saying is that after
all these years, you think you could have—”

“I know, Carlos, I’m sorry.”

“Sorry don’t cut it, man. I thought you were
dead.”

Spinelli, “Will someone please explain to me what’s
going on around here?”

“Coffee?”

We all stopped and turned to the waitress, who had
arrived at the table with a tray full of cups and another pot of
coffee. In perfect chorus, we all shouted back, “NO!”

Again Spinelli, “Can we get back to the discussion
please?”

“What’s to discuss?” I said. “Lilith included me in
on a sacred ritual that restored my youth and so now I’m forty
years younger. Bam! End of story. I said I was sorry. What’s done
is done. There’s nothing more to it. So, is everyone good now?”

Lilith clapped her hands together and wrung them
clean. “Yup, I’m good. Spinelli?”

“Sure,” he said, though not so convincingly.

I leaned over the table, ingratiating Carlos with a
repenting smile. “¿Y tú, mí amigo?”

Carlos is an old soul, as they say. If you believe in
that kind of stuff, and if you knew Carlos then you know what I
mean. He has an Inner Light that burns with compassion and
forgiveness. He also has a strong sense of loyalty and respect for
those who have earned his trust. To say that Carlos would lay down
his life for a friend is not an exaggeration. But the price for
that loyalty is loyalty returned. His is the Ying and Yang of
friendship personified. I knew that in time Carlos would forgive
me. Thirty years of comradery mandated it. What I hoped for,
however, was that the emotional capital accrued in that time would
trump all else, and that we could hug it out, there and then, and
get on with that which conveys our souls on parallel tracks through
this brotherhood of life.

He looked at me from across the table, studying my
face, no doubt wondering what happened to all the wrinkles and
crevices. Every furrow and crease he once knew, etched by
experiences we both shared, were now gone. Witness lines to years
of harmony and strife, disappeared. Every dog-day summer and
hell-bit winter that ever left its mark on leathered skin, now
scars but one. Could he forgive me for not telling him that I was
still alive? I believed he could and would. But that I shaved forty
years off my life, that I all but assured his Earthly departure
decades before mine? I could not know for sure.

I watched his interest in my unblemished face wane.
No stories could he recall from a book that had not yet been
written. Nothing there reminded him of what we once shared. He had
all but abandoned his search for the Marcella he knew, all but
given up on a friendship forged in time.

But then his eyes once again settled heavy upon mine.
They drilled in deep, as though anchoring onto something within me
that one could not see from the outside. I felt him searching my
soul in a way I thought only Lilith was capable of doing. My brain
began to ache. I sensed a subconscious surrendering of secrets, yet
the flow of data seemed encrypted even to me. Down at my side I
felt Lilith holding my hand. She squeezed it tightly for a moment,
and when she released it, Carlos was done. He leaned back in his
chair, took a deep breath and let it out with a tempered smile.

“I’m good, Tony,” he said, to my utter relief, but
then added, “Not great, but good.”

He reached across the table and shook my hand, and
this time it was not a cold fish sort of shake. It was a good hard
bone-crushing man-to-man handshake. And it felt right.

“Great,” said Lilith, hoisting her coffee thimble
into the air. “Now, what does a witch have to do to get herself a
little brew around here?” she looked to Spinelli. “See what I did
there, Spinner? Witch…brew…huh?”

“Yes, very clever, Lilith. How original.” He turned
to me. “Detective, tell me again how this rite of passage thing
works?”

“It’s complicated,” I said. “Lilith would have to
explain it.”

“But I won’t,” she said. “Or then I’ll have to turn
you into a toad.”

I laughed at that. “Sounds like you have a thing
about toads this morning.”

“I do, don’t I? I must be hungry.”

“We have muffins,” said the young waitress, who had
returned (with great reluctance, I’m sure) to our table.

Lilith did not hesitate. “I’ll have a blueberry.
Spinster?”

“It’s Spinelli, and make mine a whole grain
please.”

The young woman turned to Carlos. “Sir?”

“Thank you, no,” he said, which told me that he still
was not completely okay with things between us.

I passed on the muffins as well, and when our
waitress left, I asked Spinelli, “So, what have I missed these past
few months? Working on anything exciting?” He turned to Carlos, and
the two exchanged glances that told me something was definitely up.
“What? Is something wrong?”

“Not really,” said Carlos. “We’re working on a case
involving the alleged suicides of some transients in and around New
Castle.”

“They’re hobos,” Spinelli injected.

“Oh?”

“That’s what the papers are calling them.”

“Yes, I read about one this morning,” I said.

“That was from yesterday. There was another late last
night.”

“That is strange. Are you thinking it’s another case
of cohabitation through bilocation?”

Carlos answered, “We don’t know. It’s not Mallory
Edwards. That’s for sure.”

“No,” I said, remembering the spot on Leona’s carpet
that Mallory’s life form left behind when she died. “What about
Benjamin Rivera?”

“He’s at Benton Hill, under twenty four hour
care.”

“You mean watch, don’t you? Isn’t that an insane
asylum?”

Carlos’s eyes broke contact with mine and his gaze
fell away in disappointment. “Yeah, well, he sort of lost it after
he found out about his brother, Ricardo.”

“I see.” I gave Spinelli the floor. “So, what’s the
rub?”

“That’s just it. We don’t know. In the past week,
eight hobos committed suicide by throwing themselves in front of
trains. It’s unprecedented.”

“I’ll tell you what’s unprecedented. That New Castle
even has eight hobos to begin with. I didn’t know there were still
such things.”

“Oh, but there is,” said Carlos. “There’s resurgence
in freight riding going on in this country. No longer does the
stereotype of the old disheveled bum apply to hobos. Today you’re
just as likely to find mixed among them a population of college
students seeking adventure, white collar professionals quelling a
mid-life crisis and punk kids looking for a rush.”

“Punk kids?”

Lilith chimed in. “Sometimes called Flintstone
kids.”

“What?”

“She’s right.”

“No, you’re putting me on.”

“It’s true,” Spinelli said. “You’d be surprised who’s
out there.”

“Out there, maybe,” I said. “But why here? Unless
these eight represent a disproportionate number for one area, then
why are there so many here?”

“For the jamboree,” Carlos offered.

“Come again?”

“This year the annual hobo jamboree takes place right
here in New Castle.”

“Okay, now I know you’re joking.” I turned to Lilith,
who seemed less dubious. “Do I deserve this? Have I pissed him off
that badly?”

“You did and you do,” she said. “But he’s not joking.
You should have finished reading that article this morning. You
would have known.”

“Thanks.” I gave her a little sneer and she ate it
up, pursing her lips and smacking them in a mock kiss. I can’t tell
you how I hate when she does that. If only I could collect them all
and cash them in for real kisses some day, I could die a happy man.
I am sure she knows it, too.

With the sting of her puckered lips still fresh on my
mind, I turned back to Carlos and Spinelli, only to find Carlos
grinning like a serpent over my obvious frustrations. “Did I miss
something funny?” I asked.

He wiped his smile clean and squared his back to his
seat. “Not at all.”

“Then why don’t we get back to this? So, you have a
pilgrimage of hobos flooding into New Castle for their big
jamboree. Have you done any research on this? Are there usually
spikes in suicides among the flock during one of these events?”

“Yes,” said Spinelli, “I’ve done the research, I
mean.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“And no, these spikes are not common. What you
usually see is a spike in murders.”

“Oh?”

“Sure, but you can almost guess that when you get a
high concentration of men together, all drinking and gambling
and—”

“And women, too,” Carlos interjected.

“Yes, and women, too, but mostly men. What goes on at
these jamborees is a lot like Woodstock without the rock bands. You
have your campfires, a little harmonica and folk guitar, old timers
sharing bottles, Flintstone punks and squatters sharing needles,
and then occasionally a knife fight breaks out and ends up with
somebody taking an early westbound.”

“A what?”

Lilith leaned over and whispered in my ear, “That’s a
euphemism for dying.”

I turned to her. “How do you know these things?”

Spinelli continued. “Although we have witnesses to
substantiate some of the suicides, others hint of suspicious
circumstances.”

“What do you mean?”

He gave a sort of shrug that told me what he really
had was nothing. Then he went on to say that in interviewing other
transients, he and Carlos learned that none of the victims seemed
at all depressed or suicidal. All were young White males, in good
health and spirits and with friends who would swear to their mental
competency.

“So, there are never any suicides?”

“No, I wouldn’t say never. But these folks travel
from all over the country to come to one of these things. It’s a
big deal for them. Suicides are just not on the itinerary.”

I looked to Carlos, who by now should have come up
with a theory similar to the one floating around in my head. After
all these years, I hoped I had taught him something. “Well,” I
said. “What’s your spin on this?”

“It’s an inside job,” he said. “Transients killing
transients.”

“A serial?”

“Looks like it.”

“Any profiles on the type?”

“No, but we have a source that we were told to check
out: an old timer from the hey-days of freight riding. He goes by
the moniker, Pops. Word is, he knows every transient in every
jungle from Portland to Miami and as far west as Missouri.”

“What do you mean, the Jungle?”

“Camping sites,” said Lilith. “You find them in the
woods along the outbound tracks closest to the train yards.”

“Seriously?”

“She’s right again,” Spinelli said. He pulled a small
map of New Castle from his pocket and circled an area south of
Miner’s Point where he and Carlos had interviewed several
transients already. I inspected the map closely. It had been a long
time, but I recalled vague memories of having played near there as
a small boy. I told this to Spinelli. He scoffed, and assured me
that these days a small boy would not fare well in such a hostile
environment. “When you see a young boy around there these days,” he
said, “he’s usually traveling with an older hobo for
protection.”

“The wolf and lamb,” Lilith uttered, almost under her
breath. Spinelli concurred.

I pushed the map back to Spinelli and finished my
coffee in a single gulp. There were things I wanted to say,
suggestions I wanted to make, but I knew those days were gone. How
could I pretend to play the role of Detective Marcella, a
sixty-four-year-old cop in the body of a twenty-four-year-old man?
I reached across the table to shake the men’s hands and wish them
well with their case.

“In another world, another age, Gentleman,” I said,
“I would love to help you with this one. And I’m sorry we had to
meet this way by chance, but—”

“Oh, it wasn’t chance,” Carlos interrupted.

“Excuse me?”

“Us coming here this morning, it wasn’t chance.”

I looked to Lilith. She seemed as perplexed as I.
“How do you mean?”

He reached into the lining pocket of his jacket and
removed a picture. “Here. Spinelli snapped this last week.”

I took it and stared at it with blinking eyes.
“That’s Lilith,” I said.

Lilith leaned over my shoulder to steal a peek. “Ah,
no, you caught me on a bad hair day. And look. I’m wearing sweats.
I never wear sweats outdoors. Not unless I’m—”