“Wait. What?” I asked.
Mrs. Roberts applied more lipstick.
“Oh.” She smacked her lips. “He had bullies. They played some mean trick on him and his little friend Alfred. Mousy littleboy. I’ll always remember—I had come in Girl Meets Fig late that night, and Marius was there. He was so angry; he was washing off in the mop sink. I asked him what was doing there so late at night. He just looked at me and said, ‘I’m going to kill him one day.’ Then walked out, and I never saw him again. Heard he went to that boarding school.”
That sobered me up.
“Kill who?”
But Mrs. Roberts was already drifting out the door. “I’m off to a séance, girls. We’re communing with the Lady Alice’s ghost that lives in the community theater.”
Séance…
“Lilith. She said Marius killed Brooks.”
“Grandma, wait—we’re coming too!” Zoe yelled.
“Hurry along, girls. The spirit realm waits for no mortal.”
“Marius couldn’t have killed Brooks,” I said as Zoe and I tugged on boots and coats. “He’s not a killer, right?”
“The cards said you would return.”
The seniors were pregaming with holiday sangria in the foyer of the community theater.
Lilith drifted like a ghost past us, face obscured in the dim candlelight.
We followed her into the dark theater. The doors thudded behind us.
“Now they want to know the secrets of the doll,” Lilith whispered in the dark.
“Voodoo isn’t real,” I said.
“Then dig up your husband’s corpse and remind him.”
“Marius didn’t kill Brooks,” I said without much conviction.
“The will of a man with a thirst for revenge is unstoppable,” Lilith said in a whisper. “It can topple nations. Surely it can snuff out the light of someone as weak as your deceased husband.”
“Marius isn’t a killer,” I repeated, but I wasn’t sure if I believed it.
“Anyone is a killer when they’re pushed far enough.” Lilith went silent.
I was suffocating in her dark eyes.
Like a snake, her hand whipped out, and she grabbed my wrist and pressed something cold and hard into my hand.
I looked down to see a little black stone cat.
“A talisman against evil men.”
He doesn’t looklike a killer,I thought when I returned, shaken, to the senior living center.
Lady Alice did appear at the séance. She asked that the pigeons that were roosting in the bell tower be removed and said she didn’t like the new neighbors—at least, according to Lilith and her Ouija board.
Marius capped his pen when I sat down across from him.
Though I’d been on a roll, confronting the potential murderer, this was the only time I’d felt nervous or afraid. I was very aware that we were alone in the room.
