Page 47 of The Book of Magic

“Well, whoever he is, get her away from him. He’s the one filling her head with dark magic.”

Everyone in the family had heard stories concerning Maria Owens’s daughter, Faith. She was said to have practiced left-handed, and had then forfeited her magical abilities until her seventieth birthday when the sight revisited her after she’d lived a life of helping others. On the day her powers returned, she went out and found a little girl who had been missing, held against her will so that her parents would pay a ransom. She went on to do so time and time again and this way she became a finder. There were those in the Owens family who were finders and she was one, rescuing scores of missing daughters. People said she baked an apple pie every week, set out on her windowsill to cool, and that those children she hadn’t managed to locate found their own way home, often in the middle of the night, knocking at their own doors and crying out for their mothers. In the second Essex County, in the town where she’d lived, one out of every ten girls who were born was still called Faith.

“Kylie is confused.” Antonia gazed at the photograph of her sister as cars raced past on the highway. The baby was moving inside of her and she felt so comforted whenever that happened. “Let her know where you are so she can find you,” Antonia told her mother. “Bake an apple pie and put it in the window.”

“Here? We’re at an inn. Why a pie?”

“It’s Jet’s advice. The Reverend told me. I made one myself, and she phoned me less than an hour later.”

“You’re seeing the Reverend?”

It was ridiculous for Antonia to have such affection for the old man who had caused so much trouble for Jet long ago. Why, she’d heard that long before Jet and Franny and Vincent ever came to the house on Magnolia Street, the Reverend had started a petition to keep members of the Owens family out of town. That didn’t at all seem like the benevolent geezer she visited, but then again, Antonia barely knew him. All the same, she hoped his pulse rate had gone down. “Jet told him about a Lost Daughter spell. Make the pie.”

When they hung up, Sally went down the hall and told her sister they had to bake a pie. Gillian slipped on her shoes and said, “What are we waiting for?”

No questions were asked. That was one of the many things Sally had come to appreciate about her sister, she didn’t have to know every detail before she jumped in to help. They went down to the kitchen in their nightgowns. There was a bin of apples, and a canister of flour in the cabinet, and pie plates in the bureau. Sally could make quite a good crust, she liked to add rosemary, and although the pub’s kitchen was basic, she found a good amount of that fragrant herb in a tin on the counter, along with cinnamon and nutmeg. When they cut up the apples, the flesh of the fruit turned from white to red, just as some roses do, with pale buds turning scarlet once fully opened. It was not an ordinary pie. It was baked with love to call a daughter home. They had tea while the pie baked, Courage, which Franny had brought along. When the cook came at daybreak, a fellow named Lester, he would be surprised to find them sitting there in their nightgowns, sharing a plate of buttered toast, with the pie already cooling on the windowsill so that people in the village awoke thinking they were young again, and many came outside in their nightclothes to stand in their gardens and watch the morning sky lighten, for it was a beautiful day, without a sign of the rain to come.

PART FIVE The Book of Dreams

I.

Ian found an account of Hannah Owens’s trial in a cardboard box stored in Cat’s Library, a dismissive report sentencing her to jail for witchery. It was not yet six a.m. when he made his discovery, for he hadn’t waited for the library to officially open. He might have broken in, he knew it was easy enough to go through the bathroom window, accomplished as a teenaged thief when he snatched cash from the drawer beneath the circulation desk. Fortunately, there was no need to break in. The librarian, Mrs. Philips, a longtime acquaintance of his mother, had been phoned and politely asked if Ian could do a bit of research. Everyone in town knew he was constantly working on his book, not that anyone thought he would finish it, and it had come as quite a surprise to one and all when Margaret Wright announced that his book was to be published the following spring by Bradbury Press, a small American publisher in a town called Waukegan, Illinois, a place no one had ever heard of and that some people guessed was a figment of Margaret’s imagination, since she’d been through so much with that son of hers, who had turned out perfectly fine after all.

Since the librarian usually awoke at four a.m. anyway, to read in bed, she met Ian at the library with a coat thrown over her nightgown, unlocked the door, patted him on the shoulder and went back to bed with a pile of books, as per usual, allowing him to have the stacks to himself. In the town records, stored in the attic, Ian found what he wanted. Hannah Owens had been accused of all manner of evildoings by a witness who had testified that she spoke with Satan and had a tail like a common beast. She was a healer, unmarried, with no issue, all marks against her from the start. Her crimes were imaginary, but her punishment was not. And there was one aspect about Hannah that was quite unusual. Ian brought this information to the inn later in the morning for the Owens family to see. The air smelled sweet and reminded him of picking apples when he was a boy, the sweet-tasting variety called Witchery, a fruit that only grew out by Lockland Manor.

When Ian arrived at the inn with the files, Vincent was the only one present in the lobby, holding a cup-to-go filled with lukewarm tea.

“Take a look,” Ian said, handing over a copy of the records. “This Owens woman clearly wasn’t your average village resident.” In a world where more than ninety percent of the women were illiterate, Hannah had signed her name, and not with an X, but with a lovely flourish of letters, all well formed and quite readable. Those women who could read were usually members of the court where they might have access to tutors and libraries, but Hannah was clearly living in poverty. Before the time of her trial, she had resided in the cottage where the library now stood, but it had been taken from her by the town council to repay her victims for the witchery they had allegedly suffered at her hands.

Ian had been ridiculously eager to show off his findings to Sally, and felt disappointment rising within him. “Aren’t we missing some people?” He meant Sally of course, but he didn’t want to show his hand, although in all likelihood the old man had the sight and was one of those individuals who could always recognize a lie.

“Oh, they’re already gone. I’ve been left to meet you and let you know we don’t need you.”

Flustered, Ian blurted, “I’m here because Sally needs me.”

“Apparently not. It turns out Kylie is with that Lockland fellow. They’ve gone in search of her. They’ve got the address of a house he’s been renting on the High Street, number twenty-three.”

“Fuck.” Ian stormed out of the inn, with Vincent following. “They should have waited. I know that little prick, and he’s more dangerous than you’d think.”

“You try stopping my sister. And just so you know, he doesn’t stand a chance up against her,” Vincent responded, but Ian was no longer listening. He’d noticed Matt Poole parked in the lot, dozing in his van.

“I’ve got to have this, Matt.” Ian was already opening the driver’s door so that Matt awoke with a start.

“Have what?” For a moment Matt thought he was being robbed, and fortunately he recognized Ian before he reached for the hammer he kept under the seat just in case some drunken tourist got the idea to skip out before paying his fare. Ian’s mother, Margaret, had brought Matt’s sister, Lisa, back to health after things had gone wrong with her first pregnancy. Nowadays, Matt’s sister had two grown boys, and on the first of May, the day she might have lost her child if not for Margaret, she always brought Margaret Wright a Sticky Fingers Cake, made of fudge and rose truffle.

“Hand over your keys. There’s nobody in need of a cab now anyway. Come on,” Ian urged when Matt stared, wide-eyed. “It’s important.”

“This cab’s my bread and butter,” Matt complained. “You were always a wild driver.”

“That was years ago, Matt. Come on.”

“I don’t know why I do these things,” Matt grumbled as he gave over the keys. But the truth was there were no customers, and Matt could now sit out on the porch of the inn and take a nap, hoping Ian was a better driver than he was when he was young and there had been several accidents that had involved drink and trees.

Ian was still a fast driver, and Vincent twice suggested slowing down. They pulled over once they reached the dodgy end of the High Street, where the houses were in ill repair. The thickets were so deep around the house, with thorny vines climbing over the porch and the roof, that it took a moment before Sally and Gillian could be seen at the door. There had been no answer to their knocking, and Sally was doing her best to open the lock with a hairpin, to no avail. Franny had made her way into the tiny, neglected yard, where a single lilac bush grew. She was peering through the window into the parlor, her hands up to the dusty windowpanes as she attempted to look inside. The glass was too cloudy to see through, but she could sense the ill will within the house, the darkly flickering remnants of left-handed magic. Vincent came up beside her. “This doesn’t look good.” He took note of two dead little house sparrows in the grass wrapped in twine.

When he was young, Vincent had wandered through Lower Manhattan to places where left-handed magic could be found. He’d tried most of it, sympathetic magic in which wax figures were used along with blood magic in order to get what he wanted, which mostly was his freedom. He’d made his way downtown on dark streets at a time when he didn’t truly know who he was, only that he wasn’t the person his parents expected him to be. Whatever rules their mother laid down, he balked at; he went the other way, into the darkness, staying out all night at his favorite bar, called the Jester, drinking himself into a stupor, performing silly magic tricks, lighting fires with a snap of his fingers, turning off the lights with a puff of breath, hoping to impress people. Franny had been there with the cure for drunkenness, a mixture of cayenne, caffeine, St.-John’s-wort, and tomato juice, which she dispensed along with a tirade on his irresponsible acts. If Franny hadn’t pulled him back, anything might have happened. Back then, only she had known the truth about his sexuality; she knew without him saying a word, before he admitted it to himself. Young people were easily lost, they took chances, certainly he had, and he had compassion for those who fumbled around on the left side.

“She’s just a girl,” he said of Kylie. “She doesn’t know what she’s doing.”