A Good Offense
Is a Good Defense
Before the girls could react, the door opened again. Matt Noble entered the room and addressed the three women grouped around the table. “I’m so sorry. It’s quite late and we’re going to have to continue this another day.” He looked plaintively at Ingrid but she refused to acknowledge him.
“So we’re free to go now?” Freya asked.
“Even me?” Joanna asked tentatively.
“Yes, even you, Mrs. Beauchamp.” Matt nodded. “Again, I apologize for the inconvenience. We’re hoping you can come back tomorrow and answer our questions then.”
Freya nodded curtly. “Come on, Ingrid, Mother,” she said, leading her sister and mother out of the room. Ingrid looked as if she had gone catatonic, and Joanna appeared exhausted beyond reason.
“We’re not coming back tomorrow,” Ingrid said, finding her voice and looking straight at the detective. “Not without our lawyer.”
One good thing about lawyers, Ingrid thought, was that they were always punctual. Attorneys and their bills always arrived right on time. Antonio Forseti was a defense lawyer with a sterling reputation. He was also a warlock and an old friend of the family. Like the Beauchamps, he had been unable to practice magic since the restriction had been imposed on all of their kind. Instead he had used his natural talents at negotiating, striking balances, and using mediation to build one of the largest and most successful legal firms in New York City. He arrived the next afternoon armed with news.
“So I talked to the DA down here,” he said, taking a seat at the head of the formal dining room. Forseti was a large man with a powerful barrel chest and a full head of dark hair, and his handshake had left Ingrid feeling a bit bruised.
“What did he say?” Joanna asked, her voice rising a few octaves. “Am I to be arrested?”
The girls had spent the evening calming down their mother, who had been on the verge of hysterics all night. Joanna had argued for leaving town as soon as possible, and only when Ingrid reminded her that leaving forever meant never seeing Tyler did she stop pressing them to run away.
“Not yet. Right now, it’s just Maura Thatcher’s word against yours, and she just got out of a coma. They don’t have anything to prove it’s true, nothing that’ll hold up in court at least. Not yet.”
“What about us? What do they want to ask us about?” Freya wanted to know.
Forseti gazed at them intently. “They want to ask about your potions and Ingrid about her knots.” He took a long sip from his coffee cup. “They found Molly Lancaster’s body buried a few miles away from the beach. She was beaten to death. The Adams boy’s confessed, said it was him, that he killed her that evening.”
Freya put her hands to her mouth, horrified to think of the terrible fate that had befallen the girl. Until Forseti spoke she had been hoping that Molly had somehow skipped town on her own, had merely run away.
“So, Derek confessed. But what about Freya? What does it have to do with her?” Ingrid demanded.
“His lawyer is arguing that Derek was a victim. That he had no control of his actions, they were a reaction to Molly taking one of Freya’s magical potions,” he said. “If they prove he was a victim of your witchcraft, then his charge gets bumped down to third degree. No intent, just misdemeanor; with a first-time offender, he might do a year.”
“What about me? Is that what they think, too? That I killed the mayor?” Ingrid asked.
The bulky lawyer nodded. “Yes, they think they can prove your charm drove the mayor to take his own life.”
“This whole thing is preposterous!” Freya laughed. “Dark magic? Are they insane? They’re going to argue that in a court of law? What century are we living in?”
He sighed and held up his hands to signal that he wasn’t finished. “Corky Hutchinson’s father is a retired judge with some pull with the DA’s office, and the Adams boy’s parents have hired a real expensive sleazebag, bringing up case law that hasn’t been invoked in centuries. But just because it hasn’t been used doesn’t mean it doesn’t stand. There’re a lot of antiquated laws on the books. And don’t forget, in Salem, they hanged nineteen of us without cause.”
That took the fight out of Freya for a moment, while Joanna began to sniff and Ingrid clasped her hands together. It was just as it was before. The only difference was that Forseti was wearing a more expensive suit. This was Salem all over again. A small town in hysterics. Accusations from high-ranking families in a tight-knit community. Witches on trial. Magic the root of all evil. What humans did not understand they were always afraid of. The Beauchamps had believed that the people of North Hampton might be different; they were wrong.
“What’s the worst they can do?”
“If they prove their case, which I’m not saying they’ll be able to, you’ll both be convicted of being accessories to murder, which is a felony, and, depending on what they can prove, could carry a sentence of life in prison.”
“What about Mother? Is Maura’s testimony going to hold up?”
“Possibly, if they can find more evidence to build their case. Right now we could argue that she’s confused, that she’s not a reliable witness. According to Mrs. Thatcher, they bumped into Joanna that evening, and when they turned around to walk away Joanna attacked them. On a good note, they’re not accusing you of being a witch, so your case is pretty straightforward. If Maura Thatcher’s all they’ve got, it’s not much; so for now, I’m not too worried.”
“But I wasn’t even anywhere near the shore that night! It was January. I was in bed by then! And why would I possibly hurt them?” Joanna asked, fanning herself.
“Can you prove it?”
“I’m not sure. I’ll have to check my calendar, see where the girls were that night and what they remember.”
Freya frowned. “I’m pretty sure I was working that night.”
“And I would have been asleep.” Ingrid sighed. “This is hopeless.”
“All right, fine. So they think Mom’s a murderess who goes around knocking old folks on the head, and that Ingrid and I are big bad witches. What do we do now?” Freya asked.
Forseti took a big gulp of his coffee. “You want my advice? And I know you do, otherwise Joanna here wouldn’t have called my office at two in the morning. It’s an easy out. You ready?”
The girls nodded.
“You answer their questions, you tell them what you know but you hammer home the point. Magic. Does. Not. Exist. What, are they crazy? Your potions were just cute little cocktails and Ingrid’s a kook, you know, one of those ladies from the library who’ve read too much Zoroastrianism.” Forseti shrugged. “This isn’t Salem. It’s a different time. A secular time.”
“That sounds reasonable enough.” Joanna nodded. “What do you girls think?”
Freya shrugged. “I guess. I mean, I’m with you, Mr. Forseti, I don’t see how their accusations could get very far in court, but . . .”
“But?”
“I’m worried.”
“Of course you’re worried, sweetheart. Being questioned by the police is not a laughing matter. I’m not laughing. But trust me, I’ve got this one in the bag.”
Ingrid frowned. Forseti certainly looked different from the last time they had seen him, but otherwise everything else, including his absurd confidence in the legal system’s ability to give them a fair trial, was exactly the same. “With all due respect, Mr. Forseti, the last time you advised us, you also argued that magic was not real and we were hanged anyway,” Ingrid said.
“So, what are you saying?” the lawyer asked, looking offended.
Ingrid looked at her family. Her mother had aged a hundred years in one night, and Freya looked as if she were about to faint. “We tell the truth this time. Our magic is real. We are witches. But we had nothing to do with this. We don’t practice black magic and we didn’t cause Molly’s murder or the mayor’s suicide.”
Freya nodded slowly and the color returned to her cheeks.
Mr. Forseti shook his head. “Dicey, dicey, dicey.”
“Are you sure, Ingrid?” Joanna asked. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“I’m sure.” Ingrid nodded. She remembered Salem all too well, sitting in that small prison cell for eight months, subsisting on stale bread and water. She had watched her fellow witches carted off down the hill never to return. She had sat in the courtroom and listened as a succession of her dearest friends had called her names, had blamed her for every disease and run of bad luck they experienced, had turned her helpful advice into a twisted tale of black magic and devilish sorcery. Every day she had waited for the sound of the carriages that would take her to her death. She had not been afraid of death, but she had been deathly afraid of pain. A round of questioning was only the beginning; soon there would be an arrest, a trial, a conviction if they were not careful. The hanging trees were gone now, but one could still live out the rest of this lifetime in a prison cell. Life imprisonment meant something else for the immortal.
Maybe her mother was right: their only chance was to run, to hide in the shadows and disappear. But this was her home. She thought of her friends, and of Matt, who had whispered in her ear as she was led away: “I believe you.”
She looked at her family. “It’s time to own up to the truth. When they ask us what we did, we’ll tell them. We’ll admit to who and what we are. Freya?”
Her sister nodded. “I don’t see any other way. And Ingrid’s right. I don’t want to live a lie anymore. What can we lose?”
Everything, Ingrid thought. But she was willing to take that chance.