She pulled her hand away, lifted her cup, and drained it.
“My best friend ever since I was six was Daphne. We went through grade school together, high school, everything. She’s divorced now. Her ex is a creep, but she had the most wonderful little girl. She was bold and adventurous-she drove Daph crazy. Daphne couldn’t keep up with her, but I loved that little girl, and I knew she’d grow up to be someone wonderful.
“One day I met Daphne for lunch, and she didn’t have her little girl with her. I asked if she’d found a sitter, and Daphne said her dogs could play in the backyard just fine. Her dogs. I asked who was looking after her daughter, and she said, ‘Who?’ Just like that. ‘Who?’ As if her little girl had never existed.
“Then she started talking about leaving Hammer Bay. What did she have to keep her here, besides a best friend? She had no roots, no family. She was gonna pursue her dreams while she was young enough to do it.
“Eventually, we got into a fight about it. Believe me, that little girl was worth more than any dream anyone has ever had. It was an ugly fight, and some of the people in the diner who knew us butted in. They kept telling me that Daphne didn’t have a daughter, that she’d never had one.”
Cynthia’s hands were trembling. She pressed them against the table. “Daphne started worrying about me. She thought I was having a psychotic break or something. She brought me to her apartment to convince me that she’d never had a kid. She walked me through the rooms, saying, ‘See? No one lives here but me.’ And all I could see were these little toys on the floor and Golden Books on the shelves.”
Her voice caught in her throat. She took a deep, quavering breath. “Daphne left town a couple weeks later. I should have gone, too, but I couldn’t. By then, I’d seen it with my own eyes.” She stopped talking. She looked down at her empty cup. “There was a baby in a baby carriage…”
She stopped again. She had said enough.
I stood and refilled our cups. I brought the sugar to the table. She scooped and stirred but didn’t look at me. After a few minutes, I asked: “What did you do about it?”
“I hired a private investigator. I told him that something strange was happening to the children in town. He thought I was crazy, but he was happy to take my money. He searched around, interviewed people, the whole thing. Emmett scared him away after a week. All I got out of it was a bill and a useless report.”
“Why do you think you can remember and no one else can?”
“My tattoo. Isn’t that what you already said?”
“I’m just making sure we’re having the same conversation. Cabot said you got it from your grandfather.”
“Why do you think he would put it there? So that we would know when something went wrong? If that’s so, I don’t think I’ve been much use-“
“I don’t think that’s why. I think it’s there to protect you and the rest of the family from that fire. Your grandfather was playing with dangerous magic, and he took pains to protect his own in case things got out of control.”
“I…” She couldn’t finish that sentence, and she couldn’t look me in the eye. “I don’t want to believe that.”
“But you do.”
“Yeah, I guess I do. I don’t have a choice anymore, do I?”
An idea occurred to me. “You’re the one who gave the boarding school scholarship to Bill Terril’s grandson, aren’t you?”
She shrugged. “I started the scholarship after the private investigator flopped. Well, after the relocation assistance flopped, too.”
“Hold on. Start over for me, please.”
She sighed and sipped her coffee. “The investigator was a waste of time. I didn’t know what to do. I knew people had to get their kids out of Hammer Bay, but how was I supposed to convince them to go? The truth sure as hell wasn’t going to do it.
“I started a relocation fund. I offered ten grand to any family with kids who wanted to move out of town. Only fourteen families signed on. This was right as Charlie’s toy company was taking off, and people thought I was trying to sabotage him. I got a lot of nasty looks, not to mention gentle lectures from concerned townspeople.
“It wasn’t enough, though. The kids… it was still happening. So I started a scholarship fund for boarding schools across the country. I wasn’t prepared for how popular that one was. I wrote checks for eighty-seven kids to go to Oregon, Massachusetts, even Canada. It’s not easy to find spots for that many kids.”
I remembered the empty house just next door to this one. “That sounds expensive.”
She still wouldn’t look up at me. “Not all of my assets are liquid. I had to scramble for some of that money, sure, but I could do more, if people were willing or if I knew what to do. I wish…”
“What? Tell me.”
“Before Daphne left town, I convinced her… actually, I paid her to get one of these.” She pointed to the iron gate on her shoulder. “I paid extra to have it copied exactly.
I knew where this was heading. “But it didn’t work.”
“No.”
There was more to casting a spell than tracing a couple of lines. If she didn’t know that, she didn’t have the spell book Annalise and I wanted to find. Hell, she might not even know it existed.
I was glad of that.
“What else could I do?” she asked. “I stay here because my family built this town. I own a good chunk of it. These families only stay because the toy factory gives them jobs. I’d firebomb the factory-hell, the whole town, if I had to-but Charlie…” She let her voice trail off.
