Chapter 25
Copper
Brooke
They all had a key to the new lock on the attic door, but it was Maryanne who produced hers to open it. Fitting, Brooke supposed, since it was thanks to Maryanne that they weren’t shut out tonight. Thanks to her, they weren’t prevented from casting out.
God, that would have been all Brooke needed, on top of the slip-up today at the food court. They’d talked about it, of course, the three of them. To Brooke’s surprise, Alex was really nice about it, minimizing what she’d said. Though Brooke appreciated the kindness, she wound up coming clean with Maryanne. They were all in this together, which meant Maryanne had to know exactly what had been said. It had been worth it to see the surprise register on Alex’s face.
While Brooke and Alex had been off trolling the food court for gossip, Maryanne had made productive use of her day off by eavesdropping on a conversation between Old Lady Betts and Old Man Smith. Which is how she discovered their plan to slap a new lock on the attic door. But of course, nothing and no one was going to get between Maryanne and casting out. So Maryanne had waited until the deed was done, then snagged the shiny new key right off its peg in the caretaker’s key box almost before it had a chance to cool.
Brooke’s attention had perked when she heard ‘key box’; one never knew when that kind of knowledge would come in handy. But when she’d asked Maryanne where to find it, she’d just shuddered and said, “Nowhere you’d want to go.” Ordinarily, Brooke would have pressed until she got an answer, but that would hardly have been the way to show her gratitude. Because Maryanne—who knew she had such serious stones?—had snuck down to the hardware store with the key and had three copies made, then slipped back into the house in time to return the original before it was missed.
And all without detection.
Either Maryanne had the skills of a cat burglar, or Betts was in a serious funk again. Brooke was putting her money on the latter.
Once in the attic, there were no preliminaries for a change. No reading, no talking. The four candles were lit and placed in position. The cushions were carefully arranged. Then, after glancing at each other, they tapped on the stained glass window in turn and cast out. Alex first, followed by the ever-eager Maryanne, then finally Brooke.
Not that Brooke was any less eager to cast out than the others. Lord knew she was always up for that. Not quite so transparently as Maryanne, she hoped. But the point of tonight’s cast out was to spend some time with Connie, and Brooke just didn’t connect with Connie the way the others did. Especially Alex.
The girls peered in at their bodies, lying inside the attic in that strange repose, looking so misleadingly vacant. Then Brooke glanced around. She’d half expected Connie to be out here waiting for them, but she was nowhere to be seen.
“So, what now?” she asked. “Do we wait for Connie to find us?”
“No, she won’t come this close,” Alex said.
Well, duh. Of course. This was where Connie had been imprisoned. Or rather, where her original had been imprisoned.
Maryanne’s head swiveled as she searched the darkness. “Should we... I don’t know... yell or something?”
“She’ll find us,” Alex said. “But first, let’s retrieve those copper bracelets.”
A moment later, each of them wore one of the thin copper bands. Brooke examined hers closely. It appeared to be the same one she’d worn the other night, but who knew? Maybe they were all identical. Whatever the case, it made her feel good to slide it on, even though it didn’t flood her with energy as it had the other night.
Alex turned and soared off in the direction of the river. Brooke and Maryanne followed her lead. In under a minute, they were soaring over the black, glistening waters of the Saint John. The moon wasn’t quite full, but it was bright enough for another caster to plainly see them. Sure enough, within a few minutes, Connie joined them.
Strangely, it wasn’t Alex who spotted Connie first, despite her relentless side-to-side scanning. It was Maryanne, who spotted the fourth caster coming up behind them. But instead of greeting the newcomer herself, Maryanne put her heavy cast hand on Alex’s arm. Alex came to a stop and turned.
“Connie,” Alex said, softly. “There you are.”
“Yes.” Connie’s voice was gravelly with disuse. “Connie’s here.”
“I’m so glad you came,” Alex said. “We’ve been very anxious to talk to you.”
Connie pointed to Brooke and said, “Brooke.”
“Guilty as charged,” Brooke said.
Connie tilted her head.
“She means yes, her name is Brooke.” Alex said. “You must have heard us using it a lot while we yelled at her last night, huh?”
“Yes.” The voice was still a croak, but there was a smile in there.
“Very funny,” Brooke said.
Connie pointed to Alex. “Your name?”
“Oh, sorry! I’m Alex Robbins. Alexandra, actually, but everyone calls me Alex.” Alex touched Maryanne’s arm. “And this is Maryanne Hemlock. And Brooke’s last name is Saunders. We all go to Streep Academy and share a room at Harvell House.”
“Harvell,” Connie rasped. “My name.”
“We know,” Alex said gently. “I found your diary.”
Connie pulled back abruptly.
“It’s okay,” Alex said. “No one else has seen it. Actually, I’m the only one who’s read it, but I did share some of it with Maryanne and Brooke here. That’s how we learned to cast out through your window in the attic.”
“No... don’t talk about the attic!”
“Okay,” Alex said, holding out a soothing hand toward Connie, but Connie just pulled back further.
“I don’t think she wants to be touched,” Maryanne said.
Brooke snorted. Maryanne: Master of the Obvious. “Can you blame her? She probably can’t remember the last time someone touched her in kindness.”
“God, you people!” Alex said. “She’s right here. Stop talking about her as though she’s not.”
Crap. Alex was right. “Sorry, Connie,” Brooke said. “I’m not the most tactful person in the world, as you’re bound to discover soon enough.”
Connie tipped her head in acknowledgement of the apology. Or so Brooke thought. But with her next words, she thought maybe Connie was just trying to indicate direction.
“Come with me,” she said, moving slowly toward the southwest. “Show you something.” When she was satisfied that they were going to follow her, Connie picked up the pace.
“Is it far?” Brooke asked. “Because we don’t have a lot of stamina yet. We get tired pretty quickly.”
“Not anymore,” she said, pointing to Maryanne’s bracelet. “Copper.”
Brooke hoped she was right, because they were soaring at pretty much top speed and covering a lot of ground. She looked down at landmarks that were becoming increasingly less familiar. Make that a helluva lot of ground. If the copper didn’t come through by supplying energy, or at least slowing the depletion of it, they might find themselves too far from home to get back. Brooke was not normally hyper-cautious, but this seemed a good time to begin. They didn’t really know this caster, did they? Except through those diary entries. Maybe Connie was crazy and intended to imprison them all so she’d have company in her exile.
She was just about to announce this was madness and she was turning back when Connie abruptly started to descend. The other girls followed. Brooke did too, but not without some wariness.
Connie led them across a secondary highway and into the woods. Brooke was fuming about having to push through so many tightly planted young fir trees. Brush your hand through one branch and it felt cool to know the tree on a molecular level. Drag your ass through dozens of them, and it didn’t feel so good. Not to mention the tug she felt when the copper bracelet encountered leaves and branches, forcing them to flex and bend to its solidity.
But a moment later, they cleared the trees and Connie stopped. Thank God!
/> “Home,” she announced.
Home? Brooke looked around and saw nothing but trees, thickets and a tangle of weeds. “Um, where?”
Connie turned and disappeared into the densest, thorniest bit of thicket. She passed through it without a scratch, of course, but her bracelet caused the leaves and twigs to shiver ever so slightly. Alex, laughing, was the first to follow, and Maryanne hesitated only a second before joining her. Their passage through the thicket caused even more rippling of the branches. Clearly Connie knew every thorn, branch and leaf and was able to manipulate the bracelet through them more effectively.
Brooke hovered there, undecided. Could it be a trap?
Alex poked her head back out. “What’s wrong with you, Saunders? Connie just invited us into her home. Stop being so rude and get your ass in here.”
Okay, not a trap. Probably.
Heck with it, she decided. If it was a trap, they’d all rot in it together. Or more probably, their bodies would rot in that attic. She felt her original’s heart leap and pound, and grinned. Relax, she told it. I’ll come back.
“Brooke, come see this!” called Maryanne.
Brooke slid through the thicket and found herself in a small enclosure. Overhead, the branches of dozens of trees twisted and twined together, creating a bower of living limbs.
“Oh wow, you must be all but invisible in here, even in broad daylight!” Maryanne said.
“Yes,” Connie said.
“What about when the leaves fall off?” Alex asked worriedly.
“I stay in a cave on the cliff until snow comes. Snow makes a good roof.”
Brooke looked down. The grass beneath them seemed to be littered with junk. “What’s that on the ground?”
“Lay down!” Connie instructed.
Yeah, right. Sink into the earth so you can pull some kind of crap to trap me there? I don’t think so. Brooke lifted her chin. “Thanks, but I don’t feel like it.”
“It’s good,” Connie said. “Like this.”
Connie lowered herself to the ground and rested there.
Rested. Freakin’. There! Atop the ground, like a regular corporeal being.
“Omigod! How are you doing that?” Maryanne asked.
Before Connie could reply, Alex supplied the answer. “Copper! Oh, man! You made a floor of copper and you can actually rest on it. You don’t have to be in idling mode all the time, hovering and hovering.”
“Yes!” Connie said, obviously pleased that they understood. “Very good rest.”
Brooke lifted her gaze from the copper-strewn floor back up to the ceiling of tree branches. “Okay, the floor I get. But how did you get the branches to do that?”
“Copper,” Connie replied.
Brooke snorted. “What? You throw some copper on the ground and suddenly trees decide to braid their limbs to give you a roof?”
“No,” Connie said. “Like this.”
She picked up a pair of copper pipes, the ends of which had been bent into a crude hook, and levitated so she could reach the ceiling. There she demonstrated how she could use the two pipes to grasp a tender new branch and pull and push it into the intricate arrangement.
“Holy shit!” Brooke exclaimed. “Of course! You can manipulate your environment with copper, because you can pick it up. It’s solid to you, and solid to everything it touches.”
“This is great, Connie,” Alex said. “You’ve made yourself a home.”
“Please sit,” Connie invited.
They sat. And what an amazing feeling! So easy! Until Brooke rested on the copper, she hadn’t really thought about how much energy they expended with all that hovering.
“Wow, copper to rest on, copper to wear while you soar... You must never get tired,” Brooke marveled.
“Oh, but I am tired. Very tired. I can’t really go home. Connie... my other Connie—the real Connie—is gone.”
Crap. Of course. She’d been locked out of her body by those murdering sons-of-bitches. Getting out of body was nice. Better than nice. But Brooke wasn’t sure she’d like to be out here indefinitely, with no way back in.
“Do you know how long it’s been?” Alex asked softly. “I mean, how long you’ve been out here. How long since... you were whole?”
“Forty-nine years,” Connie answered. “Soon to be fifty. I keep track of every day.”
They were all silent a while, absorbing the magnitude of that.
“Where’d you get all this copper?” Brooke asked, looking around.
“Stole it,” Connie replied, and Brooke was pleased to hear the smile in her voice. “Copper piping from empty houses. Thousands of pennies. Lightning rods. Grounding bars. Electrical tubing. Cookware.”
“Jewelry,” Maryanne said, picking up a large brooch.
“Yes, jewelry,” Connie said. “If I can pick it up, it has enough copper in it.” She leaned closer, as though to confide something. “And those boxes people use? Like typewriters but with a TV screen they stare into all day? There’s copper, in them too.”
“Computers, you mean?” Alex asked.
“I guess.” Connie shrugged. “I reached into one once and felt it. That’s how I find copper,” she explained. “Some copper too tight.” She interlocked her fingers and tugged, demonstrating immovability. “But the copper in these boxes—I can lift it right out.”
The processor chips! Brooke laughed in delight. “Good for you, Connie. That’s about the best use of a motherboard I ever heard of.”
“Motherboard?”
“That’s what they call that piece you can pick up.”
Connie nodded. “Baby shoes work too,” she said, “but I never took them.”
Brooke frowned. “Baby shoes?”
“The bronze dipped ones,” Maryanne supplied. “You know, electrically plated.”
“Almost every house has them,” Connie went on, “but I couldn’t take them. Wrong.”
Brooke flashed back to her apartment in New York and the sweet pair of copper-plated booties that sat in her mother’s knick-knack cabinet. Unaccountably, she wanted to cry, but thank God, that wasn’t a possibility for a caster. Then—dammit!—she felt her original crying back in the attic.
Brooke felt around for an object on the floor to distract herself and came up with a bundle of wires. “I guess copper wires are in good supply,” she said. “There seem to be enough of them in this... ” What the hell was it? Oh, hell, a doll! A flipping doll! Her fingers flew over it, feeling its features. Copper tubing for limbs. Copper wire to bind the limbs together. Fine, fine copper wires for hair. Had Connie scratched a face onto it? Back in the attic, tears flowed out of her original like she’d sprung a damned leak. God, Brooke, grow a skin, why don’t you?
“Give her to me,” Connie said, holding out her hand.
Brooke was only too glad to pass the sad doll off.
“What is it?” Alex asked.
“My baby.”
“May I see it?” Alex asked gently.
Reluctantly, Connie passed it along.
Alex felt the dolls features much as Brooke had just done. “It’s beautiful,” she said. “Can I pass it to Maryanne?”
“No!”
For a split second, Brooke thought the protest came from Connie, but it was Maryanne herself who’d said it.
“I mean, that’s not necessary. Give it back to Connie, Alex.”
Alex handed the doll back to Connie, who cradled it tenderly and cooed to it as though it were a living child.
Brooke shivered.
Eventually Connie looked up and said, “It’s okay.”
“What’s okay, Connie?” Alex asked.
“That you read my diary. I’m glad you did. You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t.”
“That’s right,” Alex said. “We would never have tapped the window, never have said the words.”
“Did you want out too?” Connie asked.
Alex shuddered. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I did. Desperately.”
“Me
too,” said Maryanne.
“Me too,” Brooke agreed.
Again they were silent for a while. A long while.
Eventually, Alex sighed. “We need to get back. We all have school tomorrow.”
Immediately, Connie shot up from her resting spot. “Of course. I’ll take you back.”
The return trip was uneventful. Brooke spent her time searching out and committing to memory landmarks to help her find Connie’s... lair, if ever she had to again. From the way the other girls searched the landscape, she was sure they were doing the same.
When they were within a mile of Harvell House, Connie pulled back.
“You can find your way from here,” she said.
Alex turned and laid a hand on Connie’s shoulder, but Connie flinched back. Undaunted, Alex said, “Come in with us for a while.”
“No.” Connie shook her head. “Never go back!”
Brooke snorted. “Way to go, Alex. Invite her back to the scene of the crime. That’d be real pleasant for her.”
“Shut up, Brooke,” Maryanne said.
Brooke shrugged. “I’m just sayin’.”
Alex took Connie’s hand. Connie pulled back, but Alex gripped her hand tight. “That’s okay. We understand.”
“Will you... come out again?”
“Tomorrow,” Alex assured. “And every night we can. You don’t need to be alone anymore.”
Brooke could have sworn that Connie gave Alex’s hand a reciprocal squeeze before she pulled away.
“Tomorrow,” she echoed, then melted away into the night.