A Murder of Magpies (13 page)

“Nah, I’m not all that shy.” He grinned. “I’m better one-on-one.”

I slapped the laptop closed. Jonah knew how to lay on the charm. Chloe had worn that
same dim mask Heidi wore now. It was like observing a sculptor chiseling marble. A
dash of his hand pushing Heidi’s hair from her face, the polish of a flirty nudge,
every move plotted and executed.

Heidi blushed and stirred the pot again. “Jonah, you’re trouble. Parents should lock
up their daughters from you.”

This ended now. I shoved my chair away from the table and motioned him to follow me
outside onto the porch where I tied Bernadette to her leash. She scratched the snow,
her beard frosted. Jonah lagged behind and rummaged through his backpack. He handed
me a Grateful Dead vinyl like some kind of a peace offering.

“Here, take this,” he said. “It came in at Fire Sales, and I thought it’d be up your
alley. You’re so tense
I’m
getting a headache. Mellow out,
gadjo
.”

My teeth clenched as he used his sister’s word for me.

“What is this?” I asked, waving the album cover. “Peace, love, and smoke up? You do
know how Drake died, right?”

“I’m not trying to push your buttons,” he insisted.

“Funny, ’cause you had no problem pushing yourself on Heidi.”

He nudged my shoulder. “Relax. Flattery don’t mean no harm.”

“Tell that to your arm candy.”

He laughed, but the smile didn’t meet his eyes, so black and piercing that I felt
myself slip. I saw him and yet at the same time wandered inside a room with no doors
in the frames and a rickety, wooden floor. I didn’t know what was happening, but whatever
it was, I couldn’t fight it.

Then I was walking down the hall at St. Anthony’s. Except I wasn’t. Somehow I saw
myself pushing through the parade of other kids yelling and tussling to get to my
locker. Jonah stood near his locker with his hand on his forehead, like someone staving
off a monster headache. I reached for my combination lock, ignoring him.

He followed and waited as I stooped down to tie the laces on my boot. Always a few
steps behind, he regarded me with a curious intensity. I hadn’t had any idea. We came
to Sister Hillary Lauren’s class where he moved around me and whispered something
to a girl before taking a desk across the room. I wadded up a busted set of headphones,
no idea where to sit, until I spotted the girl he’d talked to, one with black hair
and sea-glass irises. She smiled and pointed to the desk in front of hers.

If it hadn’t been for him, the desk in front of Vayda’s wouldn’t have been open.

“You know,” he said. His voice brought me back from the strange view into my memory
to his serious face. “Vayda’s as closed off as you are. When people are that closed,
one of two things is at play: their attic’s empty—hardly your case—or they’re hurting
something fierce. They don’t want to be nudged, and you can’t push them. Did you mean
it when you told my sister you’re done with her?”

“I’m not talking about Vayda. Not with you,” I said. “What happens between her and
me is private.”

He cracked his knuckles and folded his hands behind his head. “You tell yourself it’s
private if it makes you feel better.”

I clomped down the steps and followed Bernadette’s tracks in the light snow. Dog had
gotten off her lead and wandered to the woods. Jonah whistled. A moment later, Bernadette
poked out her head from some dead underbrush and trotted toward him. I jerked my head
and gave him a what-the-hell look.

“What can I say? The dog likes me,” he answered as he picked up Bernadette, scratching
her head and handing her to me. “My sister’s a nice girl.”

“If she’s so nice, why’s she yanking my chain?” I asked.

He observed the clouds shifting across the night and took a long time exhaling. When
he spoke again, his usual arrogance was gone. “You’re
gadje
, but that doesn’t bother me. It’s not like we have a
vitsa
to answer to. It’s harder for Vayda. There’s a lot she hasn’t accepted.”

I scoffed and crossed my arms. “So it’s all because I’m not one of you?”

“It’s because you’re not like us.”

Something wasn’t being said, and I was ready to grab him by his shirt collar and give
him a good shake. If I was good enough to be their friend, then why wasn’t it okay
for me to be something more to Vayda? “Don’t make excuses for her. If you want to
meddle with my shit, do me a favor and tell your sister to make up her mind.”

“Will do.” Jonah stepped off the front porch, falling into the shadows away from the
lamplight. “I’m telling you now, if you hurt her, I won’t be so gentlemanly next time.”
The threat slipped from his mouth, and he laughed. “You have no idea what you’re in
for.”

I followed him with my eyes as he walked down the gravel driveway toward the woods.
Vayda, and, to a lesser extent, Jonah: I was drawn to them. They had something peculiar,
a magnetism I couldn’t ignore. No, I didn’t know what I was in for with them.

But it’d be a hell of a trip.

Vayda

There was a kinship between antiques dealers and dumpster divers, but I’d never admit
that to Dad. I combed through some papers, ruling out private auctions with no promise
of a jewel amid the boxes of Bing Crosby records, but not even the prospect of a treasure
hunt let me forget that this Saturday was two days after Thanksgiving. Two years ago,
Dad sent us home while he stayed late tallying receipts from the Black Friday sale.
He met Rain for drinks and darts while Mom, Jonah, and I wrapped the good china in
tissue paper and put it in a box set aside for the move to Vermont Dad was scheming.
Hours later, Mom died, and our lives were bits of char and a half-empty gas tank in
a Chevy borrowed from my godfather.

To give Dad a hand, Jonah and I worked at Fire Sales every Saturday, a routine we’d
practiced since we were small. Mom used to say she found Dad’s first gray hair after
he stammered to a Portuguese diplomat that the candleholders he’d paid an exorbitant
price for had been used as hockey sticks. Our choice for a puck fared much worse.

“Magpie, have you found that Sotheby’s preview guide?” Dad asked, sitting cross-legged
on the floor by the sales counter.

Scads of auction catalogs surrounded him. Researching projects or organizing the backlog
threatening to overtake the storeroom—wherever Dad was, catalogs were nearby. Instinct
drew me to a booklet with an Ansel Adams photograph. I handed him the catalog. “Landscapes?
Hardly your style.”

The shop was empty, and I sat beside him. Dad sighed and touched a page of Adams’
Montana shots, his grief palpable.

“I miss Mom, too,” I said.

“That obvious she’s on my mind?”

“I’m an empath, remember? Emotions are my vice, and even you can’t keep everything
from Jonah and me.”

He pushed up his glasses. “Your mother wanted one of Adams’ pieces. I’d negotiated
for a signed photograph for our twentieth anniversary. Obviously, that deal fell apart.”

I caught something, a memory of Dad as the man who draped his arm around Mom as she
topped off the wine glasses in the smoky kitchen. Four nights a week, Rain came by
with wine, playing cards, and a pack of cigarettes that lasted halfway to dawn. On
weekends, Dad and Rain were in the same bowling league. “Gentleman time,” Mom had
called it. Now, without his wife and closest friend, Dad spent all his time wiping
off the dust of other folks’ lives.

“Vayda, there’s a trinket box to go through.” He pointed to a package by the register.
“Came with a vanity. You might find something you like.”

I dragged over the box. Hand-mirrors, vintage medicine bottles, whiskey flasks. Nothing
for my scrapbook. I picked up a long string of faux pearls and felt the joy of dancing
and flapper dresses only for a second before I let it go. Sometimes it was nice to
bask in some tender waves of happiness no matter from how long ago and daydream about
who once owned these things.

“Were you scared of Mom’s Mind Games?” I asked.

He choked on his coffee. “That’s a hell of a question.”

“You’ve never told us. So what’d you think when you learned what she could do?”

He rolled his neck around and chuckled. “I thought my weed was laced with acid.”

Dad never kept it secret that he was a stoner when he spotted Mom with Rain at a showing
of his paintings. It wasn’t long after that the three of them were inseparable.

He stretched his arms and pulled out his nicotine gum. “Mind Games kept life with
Lorna interesting, I’ll tell you that much. What gives?”

“Curiosity.” I wrung my hands together. “Ward—”

“Say no more. I wish I had an answer. If Ward finds out what you can do, you can’t
predict how he’ll react.”

Words I didn’t want. “So why’d you stay with Mom?”

“Your granddaddy had a way of instilling the fear of God in me, but I stayed with
Lorna ’cause I loved her. Nothing more magical than that.” He paged through a few
catalogs. His thumb reached behind his pointer and middle fingers to twist the gold
band on his ring finger. “It wasn’t our choice to raise you and Jonah alone. Your
mother had problems with the
vitsa
and we were better off to take you both away.”

“What kind of problems?” I asked.

“Think about your mother. It’s not that hard to guess. She got herself into trouble
because she was impulsive. Her family really didn’t like impulsive.”

“And what about yours? There had to be somebody.”

“There was Rain. He and your mother became my family after I lost mine. We made terrible
mistakes when we were younger, and they followed us.”

Maybe that gave Jonah and me an awareness of kin and country that was much scarcer
in the north. After college, Dad worked with antiques dealers, learning restoration
and how to get a bargain. It wasn’t until we lived under Montana’s endless skies that
he opened a junk joint Mom named Baubles. What I remembered of Montana was sunsets
and fields. Trouble decided to come for Mom when I was eight, and to spare her, Dad
uprooted everything to Hemlock where he entered the antiques big leagues and became
something of a legend—and not only because of his trading. Then trouble came to Hemlock,
too.

The shop’s bell chimed as Jonah sauntered into the showroom. Ward traveled close behind.
He didn’t move his focus from his boots. Great, not only was I a human mood ring,
I was also invisible.

Dad called the boys to the storeroom, an area closed off from Fire Sales’ showroom.
Inventory from a buying trip to North Carolina had arrived. It meant Jonah and Ward
would wind up with sweaty, sore backs from lifting, while I handled any walk-ins,
not that we had many, at least no one from Black Orchard. Antiques tripped Dad’s trigger,
and Jonah and I both inherited his honed vision for value, but we each had our quirks.
Jonah liked old books. Sometimes I felt like I was still figuring out what I liked.
Never occurred to us we might one day help run his shop in Wisconsin of all places.

As I entered the storeroom, the phone rang. Dad answered the line at his desk. I lingered
behind an armoire and sharpened my hearing to catch what I could.

“Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying get a hold of you for days. I’ve got
a feeling something’s not right. Someone’s watching us. We’ve been here long enough
people are looking at us a little harder, and I don’t have answers. Maybe it’s time
we stop this charade. I don’t want to go to jail.” Dad listened, jotting notes. “I’m
tired of getting spooked…Rain, stop yapping and let me talk.”

He laughed, but my feelers didn’t detect humor. Anything he put out was frustration.

The logistics were sketchy. He and Rain had a deal where my godfather acquired Antiquaria
the night Mom died. Rain was also the ghost-owner of Fire Sales and our house. He
hooked Dad up with the retail space a few months after we left Hemlock, and I knew
from press clippings the business earned a reputation over the past two years as a
small but lucrative shop in the upper Midwest operated by the rarely seen E.J. Silver.
All this to keep Dad off the grid, but it was tricky—for both Dad and Rain if caught.
A person might not even risk that much for his blood family.

My father hung up the phone. “Come out, you little eavesdropper.”

I skulked out from the armoire. “Are we gonna stop hiding?”

“I don’t know, Magpie. We went into hiding to protect you and Jonah from the people
back in Hemlock. We can’t pop back up like, ‘Oh, hey, here we are!’”

A wave of relief slid under my skin. Guilt followed right behind.

“Is it wrong that I’m used to calling myself Vayda Silver?”

“Not if you don’t forget Vayda Murdock. Burying your past causes more harm than good.”

***

By four o’ clock, Jonah and Ward finished moving furniture. Playing hostess, I took
them some water. Jonah collapsed on an Art Deco fainting couch while Ward overlooked
the chairs and sat on the floor. Pinpointing someone unfamiliar with antiques was
a game I played. They treated old things as far more fragile than necessary. Dust
made sturdy chairs rickety and bone china as delicate as spun sugar. So they feared.

Jonah guzzled his water. “I’m heading outside to cool off. Coming, Ward?”

He watched Jonah stand but didn’t move.

Alone with him, I took the seat on the couch. Everything I imagined saying sounded
horrible in my head. I hadn’t been able to get things right so far.

Ward fumbled with some papers in his pockets. “Emory hired me to work some hours.”

I raised my brows. Dad never took outside employees. Not in Montana. Not in Georgia.
A family operation kept it simple. So why hire Ward?

Again, silence. He moved from picking at his pockets to a loose thread on his T-shirt.

“Pretty cold weather, huh?” I searched for conversation.

“Sometimes it’s so cold this fluffy shit called snow falls from the sky. Crazy, right?”