Date: Monday, September 4th, 1922
Time: 13:20
Location: Ms. Maisy’s Marvelous Wonders
By now, everyone knows of Ms. Maisy’s fate. Someone finally went to check on her (which Angela thinks is silly that they had waited so long) and found her body in the bed. The paper’s declared the cause of death as a heart attack.
Apparently, Ms. Maisy does have family, but according to Henry, they never spoke and her living members want nothing to do with the circus. And Ms. Maisy didn’t have a will.
Which means they have to shut it down.
Angela mopes in bed, a leg behind her ear. She should be packing, not stretching, but her heart’s not into it and being in a pretzel comforts her. Makes her feel like things are normal when they’re so obviously not.
Wendy’s been avoiding packing too, probably to delay their fateful separation. Foster care is going to take one look at her face and recognize her as Carson Smalls daughter. And everything they did to run away and build a life together, it’ll all be gone.
Angela’s ear twitches as she hears rumbling in the next room. She carefully untwists herself before going to peek her head next door.
“What are you doing?” she asks as Jason and Tammy work together moving their beds to the middle of the room.
“Casting a blessing on the circus,” Jason answers. “Keep it free from the torment that was in Maisy’s soul.”
“Ms. Maisy had no torment. She was happy.”
“Often, the happiest seeming people are the most hurt.” Tammy walks to her trunk and pulls out a thin blanket of sorts, black and covered in what these two called “stardust”. “And even if they’re not, they gain it when they die young and suddenly and grisly. They force others to suffer for all the wishes they never got to see fulfilled.”
“We don’t know if it was grisly,” Angela says as Jason and Tammy both place the blanket on the bed neatly. “It was just a heart attack.”
Jason and Tammy look up, their eyes meeting Angela’s. They stare at her for a good minute, maybe more. Angela doesn’t know why she even came in here. These two are always doing something weird and creepy.
After a while, they break eye contact and go back to straightening the blanket. Angela quickly slips away and sneaks back to her room.
Young. Suddenly. Grisly.
Angela wants to dismiss the words. It’s just their creepy act, as always. But…Jason’s an occultist, just like Wendy, and Tammy just played the flute, but she seemed to dabble in dark arts as well. If they say that Ms. Maisy was tormented and that she died in a horrific away, couldn’t there be some truth to those words?
She glances to her messenger bag in the corner of the room. The book is still in there. It’s been forgotten the last couple days, much to Wendy’s relief, likely.
But it’s time to pull it out.
Ms. Maisy’s funeral is this Saturday. The orphanage was kind enough to let Angela stay this long to attend. The day after, though, she’s off to Cleveland to rot until she’s put on the streets to rot some more.
She has to solve Ms. Maisy’s death before then.