Julian coughs, his water bottle midway in the air.
Faye looks around the table. “I assume they mean people like you.” She smiles when I raise an eyebrow. No one at this table is exactly normal society. “What about you?”
“Nothing much to tell. Nineteen. Wilmington.” Just the basics.
“Oh, so you’re near the beach.”
Her grin is contagious, and she of all people might consider a detention center yard surrounded by a chain link fence and barbed-wire ‘ocean-side.’ “Yeah, we had some sand.”
“Anything else?” Memory prods. I rest my elbows on the table, and shake my head. “Well,” she says. “That was enlightening, or not, but I guess we should get started.”
Faye jumps in again. “Last night I did a little research. Not only can we use the standard crow-raven folklore, but there might be an interesting tie-in with the history of the school.”
“How does the school have anything to do with crows?” Julian asks. “That seems a little old world for a college with a conservative Christian background.”
“From what I’ve read this folklore precedes the Moravians. Before they settled here there was an established tribe of Native Americans in this area who had some crow legends in their mythos. And apparently, there was a sacred spring somewhere here on campus, where they held coming of age and transformation rituals. And
when the settlers came, the natives did not take kindly to the desecration of their holy ground, so a church was built to keep it as a sanctified location, to pacify them.”
“The well,” I blurt, forgetting my rule of non-contribution. Every eye in the room shifts toward me. “The well. Under the chapel. Danielle said it’s been there for ages and has some kind of historic value and crap.”
Memory rolls her eyes.
“She’s right,” Faye says, flipping through a thick library book on the table. “There is a bit about a well in here.”
“What about it?” Julian tries to take the book from her but she holds tight.
“Not a lot. It just mentions that mythology of the area includes stories about a well on campus grounds.”
“The chapel is really old.” I pull out my camera, thumb over the display to the images from last night. “It’s much older than anything else on campus.”
I show it to Faye, and Julian leans over the table to see.
“That arched door is pretty unusual in American architecture,” she says. “Can you email that to me?”
“Not from the camera,” I say.
“Show it to Mems, she can draw it,” Julian says, gesturing from the camera to his sister.
She glances at the picture of Danielle, framed by the low doorway, and her face settles into a hard smile. “Nice architecture.” Memory is snide, which makes me itchy, sitting three feet away, and I’m pissed, because it’s a good shot, the girl out of focus, almost blurred by the shadows, the old entrance behind her dark and ominous. “I thought so,” I say, keeping my voice mild, hardening my belly muscles as the rage flares up redder than her lipstick.
“Very revealing,” she says, but there’s very little of Danielle actually showing in this picture, and I think she’s trying to say something about me, and I grind my teeth. I shove my hand in my pocket, looking for something sharp to test my temper, but I’ve put the blade in my backpack, and I’m left empty-handed and edgy. “Any more?”
“Cut it out,” Julian elbows his sister away from the camera as I shake my head, because there are more, but they reveal more of Danielle, not the architecture.
“I’ve seen similar things,” Faye says. I don’t really pay attention to her, until the tiny hand not holding the book reaches for mine under the table, and she presses something small and hard into my palm. Metal? It’s smooth, and round, flat on one side, with grooves in it, and I rub my thumb over it, and my irritation fades into my curiosity. I stow it in my pocket until I can examine it later. “Usually in tribal ritual and some animism, which includes the transformation of human to bird—crows, or ravens specifically,” the odd girl continues.
“Like witchcraft?” Julian asks her.
Faye flips a couple pages. “It’s unclear, but it seems early inhabitants of this area may have used the well for human sacrifice. If a person was a true shaman they could transform into one of these birds, which gave them the ability to cross over into different worlds, and have visions, and even communicate with the dead.”
“If they weren’t a true shaman, then they died at the bottom? Like the witch trials where they tied girls to chairs and if she drowns then ‘Oops! She wasn’t a witch after all?’” Julian is eyeing her book like it is candy he’s been denied.
Faye shrugs.
“So is this what we want to focus on? This well? These legends?” Memory asks, looking from Faye to her brother.
“Why not?” I ask, forcing her to include me. “We could at least tie it in. Give it a local angle. The scholarship is sponsored by the school, right? They’d like that.”