Page 40 of The Magic We Made

“The Bridles have been great at keeping their daughter’s story in the press,” Ash is explaining, his gaze on his laptop screen. “But they clearly need help if they’re ever going to find Emma. So Guy asked me to see what I can do, since—”

“They’re related, and lost things find you.”

If he hears the sarcasm in my voice, he doesn’t pay any attention to it.

“Yeah. So I started by checking Emma’s social media.” He hits a button on his keyboard, and up pops Emma Bridle’s page from a popular video-sharing service. I recognize her from the photo I’d seen in the paper. “I’ve looked at this so many times, I feel as if I know all her posts by heart.”

“Pretty girl,” I say, admiring the thumbnails of the videos and photos Emma’s posted. She seems to favor selfies, sunsets, flowers, and synchronized dances with her friends. In each one, Emma looks doe-eyed, happy, and almost heartbreakingly young.

“Yeah,” Ash agrees. “She is. If she weren’t so pretty, the presswouldn’t have stayed as interested in the story for as long as they have.”

“That’s very true. Unfortunately.” I’m impressed that he knows this.

Sitting as close to him as I am, I can smell his deodorant. He doesn’t seem to wear cologne—or hasn’t had time yet this morning to put any on—which is a relief. Men’s cologne tends to cover up their natural scent, the same one that’s so crucial to developing attraction and chemistry.

“So what do you think happened to her?” I ask, steering my mind with effort away from the surprisingly good-smelling man sitting beside me. “And why do you think Meg was too scared to tell you where she is?”

“Because of this girl.” He hits a button, and a photo of another girl appears on the screen. This one is every bit as pretty as Meg and Emma, but she looks a little older. She’s blonde, too, like Meg, but her hair is long and curly. “Emma made friends with her and a bunch of other witchy girls this past year—”

“Witchy girls?”

“Yeah.” He turns his head to look down at me, his expression carefully neutral. “You know, they’re into witchcraft?”

“Oh.” I keep my expression carefully neutral as well. I’m not going to mention my mom’s belief instregheria, or Dina’s conviction she saw the souls of dead witches that night at the courthouse, or that Angie changed the name of her salon to Hairitic...

Or that my close proximity to Ash’s well-formed, really quite sensitive-looking mouth is causing my nipples to go hard inside my bra. None of these things are relevant, particularly the last one.

Thankfully, he turns his head back to the computer screen. “Idon’t have anything against witches. Most of them seem like solid citizens who genuinely want to make the world a better place—”

I say nothing. I’m worried if I open my mouth, something about Devorah Rainbow might come out.

“But there’s one particular witch in this coven that Emma’s joined who concerns me,” Ash goes on, and hits another button. The photo of the curly-haired blonde disappears, and a video begins to play.

My new besties!someone has captioned it. In the video, Emma and five or six other girls sit laughing around a table in a coffee shop. Emma looks happy and healthy, enjoying the company of her new friends.

One of those friends seems to be the center of the videographer’s attention—that same pretty blonde from before, the one with the tousled curls of a cherub.

Only now the cherub is wearing a T-shirt with the wordsVegan: Evolve or Die.

“How long ago was this posted?” I ask. I’ve spotted Meg Boucher sitting beside the cherub. Meg looks like an almost entirely different person from the girl who was just taken away by ambulance. Her hair is long and carefully straightened, her cheeks healthily full, her skin clear, and her clothes stylish, well-fitting, and spotlessly clean.

“Emma posted this in April. Seems normal, right? Just friends having fun?” Ash clicks another button. “But check this out from a few weeks later.”

Another video, this one of the same girls as they merrily build a bonfire on what I recognize as a popular beach outside of Greenwich.

Green witchy girlies do it best!reads the caption, along with a series of—to me, anyway—incomprehensible emojis.

This doesn’t seem particularly alarming. Sure, bonfires are strictly prohibited on that particular beach in tony Greenwich, a fact of which I’m all too aware, since Troy has been lobbying for some time for a similar rule for West Harbor’s beaches.

But kids do lots of crazy things. Building an illegal bonfire is one of the least of them.

It’s the next post that causes my eyebrows to rise. The blonde cherub—tagged as HecateHaley—is lounging on a mattress in a pretty nice-looking tent.

The tent has a mini fridge and a microwave inside, powered by a generator I can hear off in the distance. Dark has fallen outside the tent, but the blonde is well-lit by the warm glow of a string of fairy lights along the tent’s ceiling.

“Green witches,” she’s explaining to the camera, “draw their power from the elements of the earth, its plants, and all of the natural world. They seek to rejuvenate the planet’s health by taking care not to use fossil fuels, and to avoid consumerism and waste. That’s why—”

HecateHaley leans forward and playfully plucks the phone from the filmmaker’s fingers—Emma’s fingers, we see when the girl turns the camera around to show a surprised-looking Emma sitting on the ground outside the tent amongst a now larger circle of girls—ten or twelve of them.