And they obey, of course they do, scooting together, arms entwined, their sweet perfumes co-mingling. Someone hands her flip phone to her husband. “Honey, take it, won’t you?” And they toss their hair and fix their bangs and throw their shoulders back and stick out their chins and smile—the most beaming, beautiful, wicked fucking smiles you’d ever see, so dazzling you can’t sense the poison behind them.

“Say boo,” the husband says, that charmer.

“Here’s to 2005,” shouts another husband, holding up his plastic cup and sloshing it on himself.

And they all say boo. The Ivy Five.

Five witches, lined up in a row. Five witches, with little kids, with babies, with almost-babies. With high mortgage payments, with fears, with the kind of confidence that guarantees a fall.

Kendra McCaul. Alice Swanson. Bettina Price. Pia Burman.

And on the end, nearly dwarfed by them all, is the last one. Her witch cape billows open, exposing the cleavage underneath. She isn’t smiling quite as hard. She is still panicked she knocked the phone into the fire. She is still distracted by so many things.

Her eyes shift at the last second, as the camera flashes.

The fifth mother.

Jacqueline Hendricks.

Eighteen Days Until Halloween

EIGHTEEN DAYS UNTIL HALLOWEEN

TWENTY-ONE

Kendra

Whenever we were in Pia’s walk-out basement, I made sure to sit as far away as possible from the doors. It was my aunt Patty’s fucking fault. My father’s sister had enjoyed scaring the shit out of my sister and me when we were kids. Don’t get me wrong, I loved spooky things and horror movies, but I despised practical jokes. They were Aunt Patty’s specialty—the mean kind. Running out of the kitchen with ketchup dripping from her hand, pretending she’d cut herself with a knife. Leaving fake spiders in our beds. And once, when we’d been in her basement playing Monopoly, she’d snuck outside and gone around to the back wearing a rubber dog mask, pounding on the glass doors and howling.

No wonder she had died alone.

We were here to stuff the bags for the trick-or-treaters, since my online order had finally arrived. Pia was making drinks upstairs, and Bettina and Alice sat around the coffee table, which was covered with a Ouija board tablecloth. I huddled next to the fireplace. It was a gray afternoon, making it seem later, and the glint of the thick black candles on the mantel reflected in the cold glass of the doors like the bright eyes of an animal.

Watching.

If Pia had had drapes, I’d have pulled them tight.

Alice turned on her Halloween playlist and skipped around, adorning us each with glow-in-the-dark skeleton necklaces.