Chapter 33

When Mrs Antonov called that lunch was ready, we trooped to the dining room to find Kat was already there. She glared daggers at us, as if daring us to raise the issue of my sexuality.

“Hey Kat, how’s the course going?” I asked, as an olive branch.

While we consumed the soup and sandwiches, although mainly just soup in my case, Kat regaled us with details of what she’d been learning on her physics degree course. Michael, Dimitri and I found it riveting, Mrs Antonov and Dennis less so.

“Kevin, aren’t you hungry?” asked Mrs Antonov, noticing my feeble contribution to towards demolishing the mountain of sandwiches she had prepared.

“I’m still stuffed from dinner last night,” I lied, not wanting to mention the huge breakfast I’d had at the hotel.

“All the more for me,” said Dimitri and Kat, virtually in sync, as they reached out for more sandwiches.

Mrs Antonov clucked her disapproval at me. “So skinny,” she said. “You need to put more meat on your bones.”

At least she didn’t direct that remark at Michael, who really was very slender for his height.

After lunch we returned to the server room. I could sense that everyone’s enthusiasm was flagging.

“What do you think?” Michael asked me, indicating his spreadsheet.

“As far as I can see, your math is fine. I would have analysed the data the same way. But the results are inconclusive, they don’t really prove anything.”

“That’s what I thought too,” said Michael, looking downcast.

“I know it initially seemed unthinkable but I suspect there’s only one witch,” I said. “She was described as old in the first report and old in every subsequent report. She shouldn’t have still been alive after all that time, but it’s even less likely that she was continually replaced by a nearly identical looking relative.”

The others all nodded their heads in agreement.

“Even though there are no more mentions of the witch, girls continued to go missing up until the last scheduled appearance,” I continued, “and now she’s back, completely out of sync with her routine. I don’t understand why.”

More head nodding. It seemed that unless we could spot her in the mall, we’d run out of tangible leads.”

“Anyone like to take a break and play a game?” asked Dimitri. “It might help stimulate our little grey cells.”

Nobody was against, so we spent a couple of hours playing several rounds of a competitive shoot’em up. Dimitri, our resident gaming expert, won more games than the rest of us despite us informally ganging up on him.

Midway through the afternoon we stopped to empty our bladders and drink a round of chilled sodas from the fridge, despite the manufacturer’s use of subliminal advertising. While I was drinking mine, I read the articles mentioning the witch, looking for clues as to where she might live, even though my friends had already done the same. It was a futile exercise: the only clue was that she lived on the mountain.

“Hey guys,” called out Dennis. “Take a look at this and see whether it means something or it’s just a coincidence.”

“There is no such thing as a coincidence,” said Michael, parodying a TV series detective.

We jockeyed for position to look over Dennis’s shoulder at the article he was reading. It was a new update to the the local newpaper’s website. Dennis summarised the article as we read. “A farmer on the lower mountain slopes found an entire flock of sheep dead in their field. He called the vet, who said that they seemed to be in perfect health apart from being dead. The vet called in the CDC in case it was an unknown infection. The CDC investigated further and found the carcasses of several dead rabbits and birds higher up the mountainside. The CDC’s provisional conclusion was that the likely cause was some sort of chemical spill, probably from a plane, and declared a quarantine zone pending examination of samples they had taken back to their lab for analysis.”

“Chemtrails,” said Dimitri and Michael, virtually simultaneously.

We exchanged fist bumps, but Dennis looked puzzled.

“You know the vapour trails that planes sometimes leave in the sky,” I said.

Dennis nodded.

“Well conspiracy theorists like Dimitri here believe the planes are secretly dosing us with chemicals on the government’s behalf, hence chemtrails,” I explained.

Dimitri swatted my arm in mock outrage.

“Why would a witch kill animals?” asked Michael.

“I don’t know,” said Dimitri, “but it’s easy enough to run a search of the town newspaper’s text-converted archives for other occurrences. I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have done line drawings of the dead animals and captioned them in a fancy script.”

“Can you broaden the search to look for dead livestock and dead wildlife as well as dead animals?” asked Dennis.

“Piece of cake,” said Dimitri, who set it running on the server. “It will alert us when it’s finished.”