“Go on,” she said. “What do you see?”

“A river,” he said. “And there are things in the river. Answers to questions. Memories. Truths. I go there when I need to figure things out and sometimes I do and it’s eerie. Almost spooky. Solved a lot of cases down in that place, my feet in the water. Husband who disappeared three months earlier, I figured out where to find him. Missing kid? Found her, too, while I was in the water.”

“Our subconscious is a lot smarter than we are sometimes.”

“I get that, but it’s more than that. This is where it gets weird. The river feels real to me. Like it’s really out there somewhere, and anybody who finds it can dip their hands in it, stick their feet in, and get something out of the water. My therapist says I’m a Jungian. That the river is the collective unconscious. You heard of that?”

“I have,” she said. “Lot of writers believe in it.”

“You?”

She shrugged. “Never thought about it really. But I will say, sometimes when I’m writing a story, it feels like it exists independently of me, not like I’m creating it. More like I’m finding it.”

“That’s it,” he said. “That’s it exactly.”

She turned her head, smiled at him. “A Jungian private detective. I love it.”

“Now I can’t go around wading in imaginary rivers to solve cases and then get judgmental when a woman says she can cast spells and see the future. That’d be a little hypocritical, right?”

“Right.” Nora nodded, crossed her arms over her chest.

“You?” he asked. “You believe in it? Witches? Witchcraft?”

Nora turned her head, stared out the passenger window. “When she was leaving, I told her if she thought I was really dangerous, she should just go and cast a spell to make me do whatever it was she wanted me to do. She said something about how she could go to an altar at midnight, light a candle, say some magic words. Does that sound like casting a spell to you?”

“Kind of.”

“She was talking about me. I went to St. Mary’s chapel the other night to pray for Søren to come home. Altar at midnight. I lit a candle. I said magic words.”

“That’s not casting a spell. That’s praying.”

“Is it really that different? Never occurred to me that it was all the same thing.”

“It’s different.”

“How?”

Cyrus had to think about that, too. This was something he would have to meditate on.

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “Just feels different.”

“You don’t really think Catholics are the only people who get access to the spiritual forces in the universe, do you?”

“Well, no.”

“Jews and Muslims and Baptists and Methodists and Sikhs and Hindus and Buddhists do, too, right?”

“I think so. Not that I advertise it around my grandmother.”

Nora smiled. “Why not witches, then? If we think our prayers work, why don’t we think theirs do, too, just because they call them ‘spells’?”