The Witch's Key (6 page)

On the drive back to my apartment, I found my head
swimming in conflicting thoughts. For sixty-four years I had
carried the name Anthony Marcella, never knowing what my namesake
was like. Did I look like him? Was he a kind and caring individual?
Did he really intend to drop me off on the doorstep of stranger’s
and never return, or was he grief-stricken, frustrated and angered
at the inadequacies of a post-war government bureaucracy? I heard a
big part of me say that none of that mattered, that six decades has
a way of reinventing people so that they are no longer who they
once were. I knew that to become sentimentally attached to Pops at
this stage could prove emotionally disastrous. Yet, a nostalgic
thread within me made me realize realized what a blessing it was to
have that chance.

I pulled into my parking spot at the apartment
feeling like I had driven across town in barely a blink. I do not
remember walking through the door, but I am sure I did, as I
learned later because I did not even shut it behind me. Lilith was
in the bedroom. She called to me the moment I walked in.
Finally
, I thought, she has come to her senses. I hurried to
her room, not wanting to keep her waiting, only to have her meet me
at the threshold, still fully clothed and smiling suspiciously. She
handed me an envelope, which had only my name on the outside of
it.

“What’s this?” I asked, my curiosity matched only by
my disappointment.

“It’s an envelope.”

“I see that. Where did it come from?”

“I found it in the door after you dropped me off from
the café. See.” She tapped the envelope. “It has your name on
it.”

“Yes, I see. Funny, but it looks like your
handwriting.”

“Does it? I hadn’t noticed.” She hit the envelope
again. “Well, go on. Open it.” I turned and started off down the
hall, when she grabbed me by the shirttail and pulled me back into
the room. “No, in here. The light’s better.”

I knew something was up, but I still had my mind so
wrapped around the events of that morning that I did not invest
much thought into worrying about it. I crossed the room, took a
seat on the foot of her bed and shredded the top of the envelope. I
held it to my lips and blew, drilling it open with a pop. I looked
inside, not knowing what to expect, but not expecting to find it
empty.

“There’s nothing in it,” I said.

She seemed less surprised. “Are you sure?”

“Lilith, I can tell when an envelope is empty. It’s
not like there’s a whole lot of places in there to look.”

“Hmm, pity.” She walked over to the dresser and ran
her hand along its leading edge, completing a sweep from
right-to-left. “So, did you get to see your dad?”

“Yes, I did.” I watched as she passed behind me,
raking her fingers along the wall, this time from
left-to-right.

“How’d he look?”

“Not good.” I got up and began sliding the dresser
across the room to the spot that Lilith had just marked. “He’s
dying of cancer. He can’t weigh but a hundred pounds.”

“That’s too bad,” she said, though I did not sense
any real empathy. As I stood there, catching my breath, she did it
again. First she ran her fingertips down the length of the dresser,
and then along the wall across the room. Without thinking, I
started the exercise all over, pushing the confounded piece of
furniture back to where I found it. I had almost fallen for it a
third time after she drew her fingertips along a wall in the
walk-in closet, when it hit me.

“Lilith! You conniving little—”

“What?”

“That envelope, it was another one of your whisper
boxes, wasn’t it?”

“What? That wasn’t a box.”

“Lilith?”

“Okay, so it was. But you promised me you would help
me rearrange my room.”

“And I will, just as soon as you decide how you want
it!”

She crossed her arms at her chest. “How am I supposed
to know how I want it if I can’t see it first?”

I threw my hands up and headed to the kitchen for a
beer. I expected that Lilith would follow me, but what I did not
expect was that she would actually apologize for anything. She
caught up with me just as I reached the fridge.

“Tony, wait. Listen.” She threw her arms around my
waist and hugged me from behind. “That was wrong of me. I’m
sorry.”

I turned around, careful not to break her hold. “You
mean it?” I looked into her eyes, those beautiful, rich dark ebony
eyes. What mysteries they veiled, I could but wonder. I had gazed
into their depths so many times, yet never reached the bottom to
gauge the person within. “Lilith,” I said, only, it came out a
little choked-up sounding. “I never know how to read you.” She
leaned in closer. Our noses touched. I felt her warm breath on my
lips and her fingers tightening around my waist. “Do you know what
you do to me?” I whispered.

Her lips thinned. She wet them lightly. “Yes.” Her
eyes began to flutter. I could feel her chest rise on a staggered
breath of air and fall like quilted fleece. My heart beat faster.
My peripheral vision began to blur. I had never known that side of
Lilith, a side she had managed to hide so skillfully from others,
and probably even herself.

I slid my hands into her back pockets, palming her
cheeks and pulling her in tighter. “Lilith?”

She teased the tip of my nose with hers. “Yes.”

“Do you want to...”

“Yes?”

“Do you want to—”

“Tony! Lilith! Anyone home?”

“Spinelli!” I said, and as I did, Lilith palmed my
chest and drove me into the fridge. She fell back against the sink
and immediately began fixing her hair, which, incidentally, still
looked as perfect as a picture. It always does.

“In here, Spinelli!”

Dominic rounded the corner into the kitchen, carrying
a large manila envelope. “Hey, the door was open. I let myself in.
I hope you don’t mind. I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

Lilith and I exchanged glances. I could see in her
eyes that that sensitive, vulnerable woman I had somehow reached
was now gone. But at least I knew she was in there, somewhere. And
she knew I knew, which, at the moment, I couldn’t decide if it was
a good thing or bad.

“No, Dominic, you’re not interrupting. Lilith and I
were just, ahm…”

“Feeling one another out,” she said, and she walked
past me, brushing my cheek with her hand. “Weren’t we, Tony?”

I watched her stroll into the living room, the
imprint of my fingertips still pressed into her back pockets. When
she sat down on the couch, she made it a point to look at me before
crossing her legs. In the short time that I had lived with Lilith,
I had come to learn that almost everything she says and does has an
underlining message or meaning. In the sport of relationship
decoding, it did not take a stretch of imagination to decipher the
meaning of that move.

I reached out and snatched the envelope from
Spinelli, caring little about the look of violation on his face.
“Whatcha got there, Dom?”

He pointed. “They’re photos of victims from the case
we’re working.”

I looked at him in disgust. “What, like coroner’s
pics?”

He grimaced. “No! Come on, that would be gross.
Besides, you wouldn’t recognize most of them anyway. There wasn’t
much left of some, but shredded dog meat.”

“Lunch, anyone?”

“Lilith!”

“The photos of at least four of the guys are from mug
shots,” Spinelli said. “The rest are blow-ups of driver’s
licenses.”

I spilled the photos out onto the counter top and
reviewed them. “So, what’s your take? Do these guys have anything
in common?”

“You mean, except age, race, sex and the fact they’re
all transients?”

“Yes.”

“Nope.”

“Nothing?”

“We’re at a loss.”

“What’s Carlos think?”

“He doesn’t know.”

“So, why didn’t he come with you?”

“He had a thing to do.”

“A thing.” I peered over Spinelli’s shoulder and
called out to the living room. “Did you hear that, Lilith. I told
you. He’s still angry with me.”

“No, he’s not,” she said.

“He is. You saw how he worked me at the café. He
looked me right in the eye and he did something. He reached down in
me and he stole something, like a piece of me. I don’t know. I
can’t explain it.”

I thought Lilith might rag me about being paranoid or
something. She knows I have a tendency to do that in the face of
witchcraft, especially when it concerns a body’s freewill. I guess
that’s why I resented her using the whisper box on me. But it’s
something I feel strongly about, and that I felt like Carlos had
somehow employed his own newfound version of witchcraft on me,
didn’t help matters any. I cranked in with more complaints about
Carlos, when I saw Lilith rise and start in my direction. Again,
and as always, that weird tingle in my stomach began to churn as
she neared me. It’s almost as if two magnets with oscillating
polarities were drawing together. I can feel her energy and mine
pulling and pushing simultaneously. It is actually pretty cool. It
fills me with both dread and anticipation, and the best thing of
all is I believe she feels it, too.

Spinelli, in his perceptive wisdom, stood back a bit,
giving berth for Lilith’s approach. It is not that she needed it,
but to err on the side of caution is a sign of good police
instincts. Lilith toed up to me almost as close as we were before
Spinelli interrupted us. Her eyes narrowed, searching mine, as they
had never done before. I knew she was not looking for me to kiss
her, sadly, I know that look all too well now. But she was looking
for something. I had almost pushed her away, fed up with her voodoo
manipulation, when she smiled and slapped me hard on the chest.

“Yup! I knew it. You son-of-a-bitch,” she said. “Look
at you. You got it! Don’t you?” Her smile grew wider now and
definitely contagious.

“What?” I said. “I don’t have anything.”

“Yes you do. You got it. I’ll be a monkey’s ass. What
do you think of that, Spinelli?”

Spinelli shrugged. “Think of what?”

Again, Lilith hit me on the chest. This time closed
fist. “You’re a witch! You little stinker! I see it in there. It’s
in your eyes. You can’t hide it.”

“I ain’t try`na hide it,” I said. “I didn’t even know
I had it.”

“Oh, you knew. You had to know. You had to feel it.
Don’t tell me you didn’t.”

“Feel what?”

“It!”

“You mean, like a tingle?”

“Yes. It could feel like a tingle.”

“I thought that was…”

Her smile locked in anticipation. “What?”

I shook my head. “No, it’s silly.”

“What’s silly?”

“Forget it. What made you think to look in my eyes,
anyway?”

“You did.”

“What did I do?”

“It’s what you said earlier. Honestly, I should have
suspected. That wasn’t Carlos taking from you down at the café.
That was you giving to Carlos. You opened your soul to him so that
he could see how sorry you were. You gave him quite a dose, too. If
I hadn’t taken your hand and squeezed it like I did, you might have
given up some very dark secrets.”

“I don’t have dark secrets.”

“Everyone has dark secrets.”

“Maybe every witch does.”

“You’re a witch.”

“Stop saying that!”

“Come on. It’s a good thing. Spinelli, tell him.”

“No, Spinelli. Don’t tell me.”

“Why are you fighting this?”

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

“All right, I am.”

“Then, why?”

“Because….”

“Because why?”

“Because I love you! That’s why. And I wanted to
think that these feelings I had were genuine, not some supernatural
manifestation of star alignment and witchcraft. And I guess also…I
wanted you to feel the same way.”

It is an awkward moment when you tell a woman that
you love her, and you are not sure that you are going to hear those
same words back. It is especially awkward when you are sure, as I
was when I looked into Lilith’s eyes and realized that’s exactly
what was happening. I did not blame her, though. I understood that
Lilith was a complicated woman. I knew that from the very beginning
when I first laid eyes on her in Doctor Lieberman’s psychic
workshop. She is a woman who knows what she wants and gets it when
she wants it. I also knew that she was not ready for me, and that I
would know when and if she decided she was. So, I drank down the
silence that followed our little exchange, showered in its humility
and pulled myself up by the bootstraps. I turned to Spinelli to
tell him I was sorry, but he waved me off, showing more
understanding for a man in my position than I gave him credit
for.

I went up to Lilith, took her hand in mine and
squeezed it gently. Then I leaned down and whispered to her softly,
“I’m sorry.”

She rocked her head back, Pressed her lips to my ear
and uttered back, “Me, too.”

What should have happened next, did not. In a
Hollywood ending, I would have carried Lilith over the bedroom
threshold and shut the door, leaving Spinelli out in the hall
feeling like the perfect fool. Instead, it was I who played the
fool. No graceful exit could save me from myself. So, I grabbed my
jacket off the back of the living room chair, hooked Spinelli by
the sleeve and walked out unceremoniously.

The justice center is an enormous complex downtown.
It not only houses the courthouse, jails and the entire New Castle
PD, but it also serves as satellite offices for all the police
departments in the county. From there, every essential agency from
first responders to code enforcement can access a database of
crucial information and, if necessary, link into vital state and
federal resources, as well. This is the place that opened the year
I retired, which did not hurt my feelings any, seeing that I am an
absolute moron when it comes to all things technical. But for
Carlos and Spinelli, it is seventh heaven.