Page 25 of Our Crooked Hearts
She had the right clothes, her mother still made sure of it. She wasn’tugly.Her voice sounded normal and she smelled fine and plenty of kids were way weirder and they had friends. Why, then, was she always alone?Why?
She was motoring up the main staircase, tripping over her high-tops, when she saw the bird. Felt it: a winged bullet that zipped past her shoulder, so close her hair moved. Then it was perched on the top step, watching her. A cardinal, of all things, bright and uncanny as an elf.
Marion swiped at her wet eyes. “Hi,” she said.
The bird took off. She followed it down the stairs, hoping to scoot it out the front door, but it went left, wheeling around the grape-leaf cornices and through the basement doorway.
Marion stopped. It was just a stupid bird. She could pretend she hadn’t seen it. Then she realized the only person she’d be pretending to was herself, and that thought was so pathetic she followed the creature into the dark.
Not that it wasdark.The staircase was murky and the lights too green, but it wasn’t like you couldn’t see. Marion shoved her hands into her jacket pockets, among the soft grit of old Kleenex and Nature Valley crumbs, and set out to find the bird.
It twittered showily up ahead. Resentfully she followed it through Medieval War History, Epic Poetry, past sub-subcategories that only occupied a fraction of shelf, scholarly tastes whittled down to unreadable pencil points. There was the little asshole, probably crapping on something valuable, and there, it was gone again. She saw a streak of red feathers swooping beneath a marble archway and hustled after it, eyes pointed up. No cardinal. When she turned her gaze down again, she sucked in a breath.
But she didn’t scream. And it didn’t take long for her heart to slow, her shock to cool into curiosity. She would wonder, later, whether this quick regaining of equilibrium was admirable or wicked. She never could decide.
There was a table in the room’s center, dark wood inlaid with a repeating design of paler wood fruit. In the table’s only chair was a scholar Marion had seen before, a fortyish woman with a Modernist bowl cut. She was slumped far over, forehead nearly touching the table’s surface. From the doorway Marion could see the dull glass of her open right eye.
The library was a place where you could, conceivably, lie dead and unlooked-for for days. But this woman hadn’t been dead long. For one thing, she didn’t smell. Or, she did, but it was of human things. Stale coffee and coconut shampoo and the cloying rasp of Swisher Sweets. Marion’s breath as she hovered over the woman displaced her satiny hair. The ripple made it seem, briefly, as if she might lift her head.
Her blackberry lipstick looked so fresh you could picture her sliding it on in one of the library’s wobbly antique mirrors. She would’ve looked like a ghost already. Her skin was neither warm nor cold. The tea in her thermos was still hot, though. Marion tasted it, scenting the cosmetic odor of lipstick on the mouthpiece.
There was a book pressed beneath the woman’s right arm.Howlett House: A History.That was the library’s name in its first life; now it was Howlett House Library. Marion frowned, because it seemed an unremarkable book to die on. But that was before she’d read the pages it was open to—and before she realized the woman’s left hand, hidden beneath the table, was curled around a second book. The book and the hand were stowed in the capacious black purse slouched in her lap, as if she were a kid in class trying to hide it from a teacher.
A book worth hiding is a book worth tugging from a dead woman’s cooling fingers, especially once you’ve seen that its rippled, no-color cover is enticingly blank, and too ancient-looking to be the woman’s own notebook.
From elsewhere in the basement, Marion heard voices. Not quite panicked, but quick and numerous enough that she knew she hadn’t been the first to find the body.
Swiftly she straightened. The volume of history and the unlabeled book went into her backpack. There was a gold lipstick tube glinting from the dead scholar’s purse. Marion took that, too.
Then she slipped from the room. She walked a circuitous path to the stairs, peering through shelves as two librarians and a pair of uniformed paramedics sped past. When they were gone she moved stealthily up the stairs.
The uncracked storm pressed its nose to every window, slippery dark and static-charged. But the tempest had gone out of her. Death was the only thing she’d ever seen that was big enough, hungry enough, to swallow all her anxieties and leave her quiet.
Up in her nook Marion read the chapter the dead scholar had been reading. It was a thumbnail history of the library’s first inhabitant—John Howlett, an eccentric munitions heir who built a dizzying chimera of a house, then died at thirty—and the female servant to whom he’d left everything. Her stint as mistress of the house was brief and ended with her murder, likely by the rich man’s nephew, who inherited once she was gone.
It was probable, the book conceded, that she deserved it: it was generally believed she’d killed her master and altered his will. His former servants claimed they were lovers, or, more shockingly, an occultist and his apprentice. The full truth, claimed the historian, was stranger: Howlett was the apprentice, she a fugitive occultist who’d fled the death penalty in Baltimore and worked from an infamous spell book bound in skin.
If that profane book ever existed—unlikely, per the historian—it would have been burned long ago. But some believed the occultist had hidden it in the house. Servants, other historians, guests of Howlett House, all had searched for it without luck.
Marion read in a state of rising fever. The sounds of voices below, heavy footsteps, the crackle of police radios, none of it reached her. When she was done she turned to the older book, pressing her fingers into its mottled cover. Vision speckling, lips bitten red and white, she opened it.
Outside the windows, the rain began.
She’d walked into the library a lonesome girl fleeing a storm. She walked out with the seeds of her new, true self planted, and an occultist’s skin-bound book tucked into her pack.
Marion clung jealously to its promise of a different kind of life. The thrift-store clothes and the musical taste and thehand-punched piercings running up her ears were expressions of who she’d become, between that day and this one, but they were more than that: they were a lure, baited and cocked. Because what fun was magic if you were alone?
Three years later she walked into her first shift at the fish shop, a job she took in secret to save up for the noncollegiate life her parents would never approve. And she knew as soon as she saw Dana. Just looking at her, she knew she was no longer alone.
“You found a dead body,” said Fee.
“Professor of occult studies,” Marion replied primly. “Aneurysm.”
“You’re awitch,” I said.
“An occultist. Practitioner. There are lots of names for it. I want to be. Iwillbe.” Her face was vivid. You could almost see the coal of her hungry heart.
“Show us,” I told her.
“Show you the book? Or show you magic?”
“Just… all of it. Fuckingallof it.”
“Yeah,” Fee said, grinning now. “Let us in.”
