Arthur eyed the action as warily as he had with Minnie, which
was a disappointment. He was always watching Cora, their mother,
and Minnie. She sometimes caught him lurking about, prowling
around the boardinghouse at night. She’d been secretly catching
him at it since the day he arrived. Arthur was a mystery, her very
own mystery, both the best and worst part of every day.
His eyes were like the ocean. Sometimes they were blue, some-
times they were green, and sometimes they were so dark they were
no color at all. Minnie always tried to guess what color they would
be at a given moment; she was almost never right.
He was forever trying not to be seen, but she saw him.
She wound a circular path, cutting through backyards and
private property, tramping across the town as though she owned it,
which, at night, she did. In the daylight, order ruled, fences stood,
how-do-you-do’s and polite nods were the recipe. But at night,
darkness rendered everything still and hush and secret. Minnie
was a curator of secrets.
Finally they came round a bend in the lane and their destina-
tion appeared. A two-storied house, steep-roofed and turreted,
stood sentinel on top of a small hill. Around it, scarred through
with the two dirt lines of the lane, the yard dropped into a sea of
night-black trees. Much as she feared it, like all the other children
who grew up here, she also loved the house, and sometimes day-
dreamed it was hers.
The group had never agreed what they were expecting to find
once they got here, but it certainly wasn’t this much light dripping
from the windows on the first story.
“So, about this witch,” Thomas said, fingers tapping on his
leg. “What’s the story there?”
“Why don’t you tell them, Cora?” Minnie’s voice dripped with