Angel puts Amy’s picture up on the whiteboard, next to Hazel’s. “Amethyst Whitmore, aged twenty-four,” they say, turning back to look at the rest of the team. “She lived on Ilton with her parents but worked at a souvenir shop at Valkaria Bay Boardwalk. She would take the ferry to work every day.”
Amy and Hazel’s smiles are nearly identical, wide and genuine. Yet, Hazel is all warmth and gold, with cinnamon eyes and a light dusting of freckles across a button nose and round cheeks. Her strawberry blond hair looks far more like copper against the whiteboard.
Amy, on the other hand, is pale with cool undertones, her heart-shaped face and blue eyes framed by ashy blonde hair. She looks smaller than Hazel, too, with a prominent collarbone and bony shoulders.
She reminds Angel of a delicate bird, like a sparrow. The picture was sent over by her parents after one of the Bureau’s Ilton Liaisons made contact to break the news.
It is a slim compilation of facts, and Angel finds it hard not to interject some sort of personality into them. Angel keeps these assumptions to themself, though they can’t stop imagining Amy on the ferry, nose buried in her phone, the view of the ocean rendered mundane by frequency.
Or Amy taking her lunch break at the deli around the corner, munching on a turkey sandwich, no mayo.
Or Amy, closing up the shop as the sun sets, making her way to a bar to hang out with her friends, drink one too many beers, and pass out on a friend’s couch.
Funny how these assumptions about Amy’s life look so much like theirs when they were Amy’s age. Angel is thirty-eight now. Twenty-four is a lifetime ago.
“Her parents have been notified, and we confirmed the identity of the victim via video link. They were quite distraught, as you can imagine. They hadn’t even considered that Amy was in any kind of trouble. It wasn’t unusual for her to stay on the mainland if she had an opening shift the next morning.”
Quinn sits on the edge of Harvest’s desk, a spare table that’s been shoved unceremoniously against the other three so that it juts out into the walkway. They haven’t been able to find her a computer yet, but her notebook, assortment of pens, and the open case file take up almost the entirety of the table anyway.
It’s unorganized and surprisingly chaotic for someone who seems so prim and proper. It’s hard to believe that the same woman who refused to work on the case until the paperwork was finalized, the same woman who wears neutral colors in vaguely conservative cuts, is the same woman who isn’t bothered by uneven stacks of paper and pencils rolling around the desk.
Quinn frowned at the desk when they started the meeting, though he didn’t comment. Yet as he speaks, he glances down and absentmindedly straightens a stack of papers. “Do we know who she would have stayed with here?”
“No, the parents weren’t really forthcoming about Amy’s friends,” interjects Wild, clicking a pen as he leans back in his chair, narrow-backed to allow for his wings.
“Hiding something?”
“It seemed more like they just didn’t know. They didn’t keep close tabs on her. She was an adult, after all.”
“What about co-workers?”
“We interviewed the owner of the store, Sam Goodwin. Amy didn’t show up for her shift this morning. He tried calling her, but her phone went to voicemail. He was annoyed, but once we told him about Amy and showed him a photograph, his face went pale. He seemed genuinely upset.” Wild points the pen toward Quinn. “No illegal gambling either, as far as we could tell.”
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The shared look between Quinn and Harvest does not go unnoticed, and Angel almost smirks at Quinn’s annoyance. Quinn hates being wrong.
Though to be fair, he so rarely is wrong about something. Not that Angel would ever tell him that. He’d be far too smug.
“He said she was his only full-time employee at the moment. He did give us the name of another employee he had a few months ago who quit kind of suddenly, a guy named Lucas. He thought Lucas and Amy had a thing outside of work but didn’t know for certain. The only contact he had was for is parents. I’ve left a message..”
“There’s something else,” says Harvest, spreading out the stack of papers on her desk. “When we saw Amy at the boardwalk yesterday, she didn’t have any magic in her aura. The blood sample confirms this. But the spell-burn and the illusion make it look like she did magic recently. It doesn’t make sense.”
Angel writes “spell-burn?” under the photograph of Amy.
“Have we found anything to suggest a connection with Hazel?” Quinn looks over at Harvest.
Harvest shakes her head. “I wouldn’t know if they knew each other, to be honest. Ronan didn’t recognize the name either.”
“Would Ezra know?” asks Angel.
“Possibly.”
“I’ll follow up. We’re still waiting for the full postmortem, too,” continues Angel. “Dr. Burrows said the report might not be available until tomorrow.” They narrow their eyes suspiciously at Quinn.
He shrugs their scrutiny away easily and instead focuses on gathering the pens on Harvest’s desk into a pile. Yet, when Quinn turns to look at the whiteboard, Harvest frowns and scatters them again.
“If we can find her phone, that’ll help with a timeline. She left work around four, and she was found around six. What did she do in between?” says Wild.
“We could check with the other businesses on the boardwalk,” says Harvest. “If she worked there, she probably spent a lot of time in the area. It might be worth checking to see if anyone knew her or even saw her the day she died.”
“Would you be able to track her movements from the other day?” Quinn asks Harvest, as he frowns at the once again unorganized desk.
“Maybe. Some people are traceable for days. Others, just a few hours.”
Quinn nods and swipes his jacket from the back of his chair. “Right, then. We should get going.”
Angel watches them depart until they feel Wild’s gaze on the back of their head. “What?” they ask, glancing over their shoulder.
“You seem to have changed your mind about her.”
Angel shrugs and turns back to the whiteboard. “I’m just relieved she knows her stuff, that’s all.”
----------------------------------------
Valkaria Bay Boardwalk is slightly busier than the last time Harvest was there with Quinn. They start at Sandy Shores Souvenirs, but the amount of customers coming and going soon begins to hamper their progress. As soon as Harvest blinks into her second-sight, it seems that Quinn is already telling her to blink out of it again (“Better put those windshield wipers on”), for fear of having to answer some annoyingly time-consuming questions from passers-by.
After the fourth time, she scowls and motions for him to follow her away from the shop, to a small alcove, just off the main thoroughfare. She leans against the concrete wall and closes her eyes for a moment.
“What’s wrong?” he asks. She can feel him shift closer to her as he too, leans against the wall, his shadow undoing the sun’s paltry attempts at warming the day.
“I can’t concentrate with you interrupting me every few seconds.”
Quinn nods and waits quietly, with his hands in his pockets. He’s wearing a white shirt underneath a gray waistcoat. He’s left his jacket in the car and rolled his sleeves up once so that his wrists are just visible.
She nods, grateful for his understanding, and lets her eyes fall close again.
His presence seems to recede. He doesn’t need to breathe, and he doesn’t fidget. She could be standing next to a statue and she is reminded of her memory of his voice when he compelled Amy.
Sun-warmed stone in a desert. A forgotten monument to a nameless deity.
She tells herself that she can do this, that this is why she was gifted her second-sight. This is why some nameless strands of mischief were woven just right, to make sure she could do this. To make a difference. To use it for good.
She releases a breath and opens her eyes, letting the world flood back into her senses. “I want to walk the entire boardwalk, starting here, all the way down until the Lighthouse.” She motions toward the tower in the distance, bright against the pale gray sky. “I should apologize to Dominic, anyway” she mumbles.
“For what?”
She shrugs. “Bleeding all over him.”
Quinn smirks. “I think Dominic can handle a little bit of blood.” He pushes away from the wall and takes a step in the direction of the Lighthouse. “Come on then, sniffer dog.”
She scowls. “I think I prefer ‘little witch.’”