Wicked Fix by Sarah Graves

never mind what he'd
    told Sam he was going to do about it; worrying about
    looking bad was one of Victor's main ways of not worrying
    about being bad.
     
    Typical Reuben Tate, too, from what I'd been hearing:
    playing into Victor's psychology that way. Sam got
    up, closed the Ouija box, and took it and the blue
    covered Morse code book with him.
     
    "Mom, how could they have arrested him? He's
    not guilty. He couldn't have done it. He's not ..."
     
    Sam paused, swallowed hard. "He's not violent.
    Anymore."
     
    "Right," I said, knowing that we were remembering
    the same incident. But that was from the really bad
    old days, and it was over. I put my hand on his arm,
    made my voice sound confident.
     
    "His talk about threatening Reuben, even if he did
    say that stuff, it was just talk. Don't worry about it too
    much. Things are going to be a little rough for a while,
    but I'm certain that this will all get straightened out
    just fine."
    Sam met my gaze, comforted for a moment. But
    then his face changed, as he realized that I was lying.
     
    That Victor was innocent of Tate's murder I was
    certain; I knew Victor too well. It was the getting
    things straightened out part I wasn't sure of, because
    what I couldn't come up with was the answer to one
    simple question:
     
    Neither Ellie nor I had said anything about Reuben
     
    Tate when we'd arrived home from the cemetery to
    find Victor sitting in my kitchen.
     
    Arnold hadn't mentioned Tate either when he'd
    called Victor earlier, because at that point he hadn't
    heard.
     
    So how had Victor known that Reuben was dead?
     
    The question of hauntedness was a recurring
    one in our old house: cold spots on the
    stairs, strange noises in the attic, doors that
    opened or closed with odd, mischievous regularity.
    Once I came down in the morning to find a set
    of steak knives, their blades all bent and twisted, inside
    the washing machine.
     
    So having a Ouija board around the place just
    seemed to me like begging for trouble, but Sam was
    enthralled with the thing. He took it into the dining
    room and sat brooding over it, as if it might reveal
    some hidden secret to him.
     
    "Sam," I said. "It's supposed to take at least two
    people to get any action out it."
     
    Live people, I meant, and not that I wanted any
    action; the reverse, in fact, unless the dratted thing decided
    to levitate itself into the trash. The astral plane
    had been pretty quiet on our part of Key Street in recent
    months, and I wished it would stay that way.
     
    "I know," he replied. "I'm just playing around
    with it."
     
    He'd finished stripping the radiator, put a coat of
    primer on it, and cleaned up, then spent some time on
    the phone and afterward just picked at his lunch. Behind
    him, early-afternoon sunlight slanted brilliantly
    through the dining-room windows.
     
    "Are you worried about your dad?"
     
    Sam frowned, moving the planchette a fraction
    toward the Yes corner of the board. "Daigle says lots
    of people wanted to kill Reuben Tate. He says there
    are, like, other possible suspects."
     
    Which wouldn't stop a prosecutor from doing his
    best to pin the deed on Victor. And until recently I'd
    have been happy to see Victor impaled on a pin the size
    of a railroad spike. But now that he was in trouble I
    had to admit that, over the months since he'd moved
    here, Victor had done the one thing I'd never expected
    of him: he had behaved.
     
    Oh, he was still about as easy to have around as a
    sprained ankle, and all the emotional baggage I had
    with him could have filled a boxcar. Still, he hadn't
    engaged in any scandalous dalliances with Eastport
    girls, or gotten into feuds with any of the town's leading
    citizens. He hadn't, as I had been so much fearing,
    made a public spectacle of himself.
     
    And then there was Sam, whose personal transformation
    over the past couple of years had been nearly
    miraculous. Now all he wanted was some semblance of
    a normal home life, or at any rate one