City of the Dead
Lunar Awards Honorable Mention - A magical realism murder mystery
Some of you may have read this story a few weeks ago when I submitted it to the Lunar Awards, but for those who have not yet read it, here is “City of the Dead”, a magical realism murder mystery! I was so excited when this story received an honorable mention. For more information about the Lunar Awards or to read the other fantastic stories included in this season, I’ve included a link at the bottom of this post.
“Are you willing to swear to police detectives that the runes aren’t yours?” I leaned toward Bastien’s pockmarked face and lowered my voice until it was barely audible over the hum of the cafeteria. “I bet you didn’t know that Detective Broussard is Gifted. And you know what his Gift is? He can sense when someone is lying.”
“I’m not lying!” A bead of sweat trickled from Bastien’s hairline, down his cheek and into his ear.
I glanced around the university cafeteria, bursting with bright-eyed students. Yet within the eager chatter of teenagers giddy over the first day of their shiny new adulthood, there were pockets of whispered conversation, faces lit with morbid curiosity.
Did you hear –
– crushed by a huge stone gargoyle –
– she’s still alive, I think.
I can’t believe it just fell like that!
– first year grad student.
On the first day of school –
I hope she pulls through.
“Acadia doesn’t care about you,” I said. She doesn’t care about anyone.
Bastien scowled but didn’t argue.
“Is that why you did it?” My eyes leapt to a university administrator strolling through the crowded room, and I ducked my head, hoping I could still blend in, that I could look just young enough to pass for an undergrad. A few more minutes, that’s all I needed. “You couldn’t take it, could you? The way she asked you for a ride home or for help with studying, then ignored you once she didn’t need you anymore.”
“No!”
“Is that why you snuck up to the roof and etched those runes? So you could lie in wait and watch the gargoyle fall as soon as she walked beneath it?”
“I would never hurt her!”
I tensed as heads turned our way and some of the chatter quieted. From across the room, the administrator cocked his head, and I averted my eyes. He hadn’t recognized me. Not yet, anyway.
Straightening my shoulders, I fixed my eyes on Bastien. I moved my fingers in a gentle motion, and my fingertips began to tingle with sharp little pinpricks as though awakening from sleep. Swirling, like stirring soup – muddying the waters, straining out the unwanted, obscuring that which could lead back to me.
My Gift, not flashy or lauded, but potent and dangerous and more powerful than anyone knew.
Bastien would remember none of this.
Acadia’s apartment was picture-perfect despite the wet rot eating away at the building’s soupy foundations. That Gift for changing appearances – a veneer of perfection, decay dressed up with glamor.
That was Acadia, all right.
With her roommates gone amid the bustle and busyness of their first day of school, only the distant voices and creaking floorboards of neighbors disturbed the silence.
I opened a door – bed perfectly made, throw pillows aligned just so. Yes, this was her room.
Her diary wasn’t hard to find, but bile swelled as I held it in my hands.
How much venom did it hold, this little book, one of a series I’d seen her scribbling in every night, recounting grievances and skewed tales of my selfishness, my guilt. It was always my fault, everything. Her mother had agreed on that front, back when she cared enough to take sides. And my father – our father – he bought it, hook, line, and sinker.
My fault, always.
Suddenly my hands were shaking, my stomach clenching.
That final meeting just weeks ago, my last day foolishly believing I would finish my PhD, stabbed into my mind. The day a foolhardy, short-lived romance ended my aspirations, my hopes, my future.
An anonymous source – As if I didn’t know. Who had been ruining my life with lies and half-truths since she was old enough to talk?
An inappropriate relationship – Only a few years difference in age. It was a moment of weakness, the collision of a cocky, smiling student with my pathetic desperation for anything that smelled like affection. Please –
And just like that, it was over. I was gone, fired from my assistantship, my years of study and research tossed aside, just in time for her to sail in and be the shining golden girl in my graduate program, topple my every achievement with a better one of her own.
With a halting breath, I steadied my hands and tucked the diary into my bag.
I had to know who did this to her.
It was ripping me apart, the memory of her body crushed and broken beneath shattered stone. Barely breathing, clinging to life.
Eating away at me, gnawing at my bones. Because I’d wanted her gone.
I’d fantasized about her death.
If I could find the person who’d etched those simple little markings into the stone, who’d poised the trap to topple, then maybe, maybe –
Maybe this guilt that dug into my very being would dissipate. If I could find her would-be murderer, then maybe I could be forgiven for having wished her dead.
Spanish moss hung in wispy shrouds from the twisted branches of an ancient oak tree, its limbs sagging toward the ground. The quiet, hidden shade of this tree at the edge of Holt Cemetery was my thinking spot, my little respite from the world.
This haunting, lovely place, stitched together by the grief and love of generations of New Orleans’ poor, the ones who couldn’t afford the mausoleums that protected human remains from being washed away by heavy rain. In Holt Cemetery, when the storms came, water flooded the graves, dragging skulls and femurs from their resting places.
I pushed through a curtain of moss and sat on a low-bending branch. Pulling my feet up, I glanced into the deep knot within the tree’s trunk, where my leatherbound notebook sat undisturbed, and rested my shoulders against the oak’s rough bark.
I tugged Acadia’s diary from my bag, opened it, and began to read.
Bastien’s name was a fixture. Acadia must have relished having a stalker, how it gave her an air of beauty, mystery, desirability. She lapped it up, basking in the attention.
But there was little substance about what he’d done. He’d made himself a nuisance, talked to her more than she liked, followed her home once or twice. But no threats of violence, nothing more sinister than an awkward, lovestruck boy.
And neither did she chronicle my accomplishments and her plots to overshadow them. My name, Sabine, appeared occasionally, scrawled with hateful, spiky letters that recounted my bitter words at Christmas or my barbed comments about her Gift for superficiality.
I closed the diary with a frustrated groan and reached to slip it back into my bag. But a yellowed, folded piece of paper slipped from its pages and fluttered down, landing on the branch beside me.
I picked it up, unfolded it, and the distant rumble of the city faded to silence.
Deep in my bones, I knew what it was. She recorded everything. But still it caught me by surprise.
I’d been away at boarding school when Acadia’s mom left, dumping full custody of Acadia on our father. It had made barely a blip in my life.
Acadia was whiny, spoiled – she hated me. Why would I have checked on her? Why would I have called to see how she was doing?
But here, on a creased sheet of notebook paper, wrinkled with drops of salty water, was an echo, a transcribed memory. The story of twelve-year-old Acadia, how she clung to her mother’s leg, how her mother kicked her off like a misbehaving dog and slammed the front door. How our father disappeared into work, hiding from the loss of a second wife, this time by choice rather than death.
I never asked her how she was feeling, never called, never texted. Her older half-sister, hiding away at boarding school, festering in resentment.
Her mother disappeared, and I moved on with a shrug.
She’d never stopped trying to ruin my life, and I’d never stopped to ask why.
I dug my palms into my eyes to wipe away the wetness and exhaustion. I needed to think. To poke and prod and turn this over from every angle until a clue tumbled out like coins from a pocket.
Who would want to kill Acadia? Surely I couldn’t have been the only one burned by her manipulations, her clawing need to be adored at the expense of others.
Someone with a Gift. That narrowed it down significantly. Someone like us, who understood runes and how to use them, how to lay a trap.
Who?
Bastien could be hiding the mind of a psychopath beneath his nervous, innocuous stare.
Perhaps her mother had reappeared, unstable and murderous.
Maybe she’d broken the wrong boy’s heart or made an enemy of a vengeful sorority girl. There were too many options, and I wasn’t the police. I had already snuck onto the campus from which I was banned and broken into my half-sister’s house. What was I doing, digging into a crime like this just to assuage my own guilt for despising her, hating her with a seething, gnashing fury?
Who was I to think I could solve this?
I let out a huff and reached into the deep knot in the tree trunk to pull out my notebook, then paused. There was something else inside the hole.
A little thing, small and light, covered with rough fabric.
I tugged it out, sudden cold prickling my skin.
A head, arms, legs. A small figure stitched from rags.
A Voodoo doll.
On its chest, smeared in red, were runes.
The same runes etched into the base of the fallen gargoyle.
The muffled world turned sideways as I fell from the tree, landing in the squelching ground of the cemetery.
My hand brushed something hard, and I looked down at a broken human jawbone, teeth sticking up like swollen tumors.
I scrambled backward, away from the bone, the crude doll, the paint red as blood, the murderous runes.
No –
I wouldn’t have.
I couldn’t have.
My life collided with the force of a wrecking ball – two parts, split by what was intended to be Acadia’s death.
Her death at my hands.
The years of hearing her petty lies, of going without the affection and attention that Acadia claimed for herself; years of having every adulation, every achievement, snatched away by her. Then the crowning moment: that wretched day when I’d lost everything – the caricature of love abruptly yanked from beneath me, costing me all my years of work and striving. All of it, gone because my half-sister dumped my stupid mistake in front of the people who could make me pay.
My planning, my plotting. Sketching the runes, practicing the shapes to make sure nothing went awry. Selecting the gargoyle, perfectly positioned above the famous archway where every student walked.
Using my Gift on myself.
Erasing it all from my memory, protecting my lies from Detective Broussard. Because I wouldn’t have been lying about what I didn’t remember.
I had thought of everything except the guilt.
But my body had kept it, buried deep within me, clawing to escape.
The beeping was faint, reassuring. Still alive, she was still alive.
The nurses glanced with wan, sympathetic smiles as I slipped, envelope in hand, into Acadia’s hospital room.
Broken and battered, swathed in casts and bandages – but alive.
I leaned the envelope against an overflowing bouquet, where she would see it when she opened her eyes.
A pale, fruitless jumble of words, all to say –
Please forgive me.
For what I did today, and what I didn’t do all those years ago.
Just before I walked through the doors of the police station, I turned to face the streets once more: the trees weeping with moss, the buildings standing firm despite the creeping water damage, the people who carried joy and festivity deep in their bones.
My thoughts spun through what I once might have done. Made the right people forget the right things, buried Acadia’s near-death under a pile of unfollowed leads. I could do it still.
But I wouldn’t.
Not this time.
When I reached Detective Broussard, my voice was calm. “I’m here to turn myself in for the attempted murder of Acadia Landry.”
Thank you so much for reading! If you enjoyed this story, please feel free to let me know with a like, comment, or restack (or all of the above, if you’re really feeling it)!
“City of the Dead” was originally written as part of a prompt-based short story competition in which I was tasked with writing a short story in 2000 words or less (I may be slightly over 2000 words now, as I have since made some edits for clarity) in 48 hours. The story had to be a mystery focused around “the first day of school” and include the character of a half-sister.
I wound up with this magical realism tale set in New Orleans which very much leans into the vibe of a Spanish-moss-dripping city that hosts cemetery tours as a huge tourist attraction.
I hope you enjoyed!
This is one of those stories where the first person sucks you in and you can't look away. Great job. I loved the transition to the realisation.
What a twist! Fantastic story!