司氏姐妹 第13章：收回魔力

第13章 – 收回魔力

摩根和玛丽伸出她们用来写字的手。法妈在排成一字的女儿们面前一一走过，在她们伸出的手上仔细地戴上了她从藏在阁楼上的青铜盒里拿出来的玉石手镯。摩根的手镯是珍贵的羊脂白玉，而玛丽的是翠绿色中透出一些涡状红色碎点。

孪生姐妹俩记得只戴过一次这些手镯。那是三，四年前，她们的魔力才开始初现，法妈把她们带到阁楼，打开了盒子。手镯在黑暗中发出光晕。盒子里总共有四个手镯，四姐妹们一人一个，法妈拿出了中间的两个。她把手镯悬浮在空气中，轻声而严肃地说。

“你们开始变得有魔力，”她说。 “这将很容易让事情失去控制，甚至可能产生炫耀的欲望，”在法妈讲话时，手镯在空气中慢慢地转动。摩根和玛丽全神贯注地倾听着，在一生中她们第一次如此完全投入，而不是无声地彼此通过感应沟通着。

“让你们可以有控制地发展你们的魔力是很重要的，你们要不断练习，使你们不想它们出来时就不出来，”法妈继续说着。“但是，更重要的是你们要知道除了我们家里人之外，不能让任何其他人见到它们。我相信你们－－”说到这里，法妈深深地看了看每个女儿的眼睛。“但是如果你们打破了我的信任，这些手镯将行使对你们的惩罚。只要你们戴上它们，你们的魔力就会被收回。只有我可以把它们戴上或摘下。”

她接着让女孩们试戴了一下手镯以证明其效果。玛丽顿时感到一阵热潮，从她的胸部升起，上升到她的脸，下降到她的脚趾，把她体内的水分蒸发得一干二净，而摩根感到一阵颤抖的寒意顺着她的脊椎传到全身，把她体内的火气灭尽。这种潮热和寒意传遍全身，然后逐渐平息下来，女孩们才感到变回正常。法妈让摩根去点燃蜡烛，让玛丽在它上面倒一杯水。女孩们努力尝试着，但她们都没有成功，并且当她们努力时，潮热和寒栗再次象她们第一次戴上手镯后一样袭击她们。在这次以后，她们还没有见过这些手镯。

到目前为止，玛丽是预期到这种结果的。摩根赌气地撅着她的嘴，但她知道她没什么可以做的。米娜站在她们旁边，眼睛睁的又大又怕。她以前从来没有见过这些手镯，老实说也不知道它们是什么。因为她的魔力还没有开始显示，她的母亲还没有给她那警告的谈话。她只能从摩根和玛丽脸上严峻的表情猜测手镯的性质。

姑娘们要与她们的母亲一起外出，但法妈不想冒任何险。这是格雷厄姆亨特的追悼会。司家有应尽的义务参加。

前一天晚上，市长再次访问了司家房子，告知姑娘们追悼会的事情。他强调，他相信参加追悼会对她们整个家庭的整体形象很有好处，他补充说，他和他的妻子会很感激她们的参与，这象征着她们的态度。亨特市长的访问是匆匆的，他几乎没好好地看一眼房间里的东西，就留下了他的邀请书，消失在门外。

市长的访问给姑娘们留下困惑，让她们感到相互矛盾。市长的行为在格雷厄姆遇害和玛拉被捕的一周以来显得非常奇怪。在报纸上发表评论和第一次访问司家后，他立即召开了新闻发布会，让他的妻子再次指责玛拉。亨特太太通常总是保持那种在她丈夫身边沉默微笑的形象，但是在过去的一周里，她似乎讲了比她一生中其他时间加起来更多的观点鲜明的话。虽然她的语气在婚礼那晚后开始平静下来，她还是强烈地富有感情地暗示，与她丈夫圆滑的外交辞令相左，叫喊着“这起谋杀是一个可以被避免的悲剧，”并呼吁乡亲们“要对已知的犯罪嫌疑人及其同伙采取谨慎措施。”

让姑娘们印象深刻的是——尤其是玛丽，她后来把她的想法告诉了姐妹们－－象新闻发布会一样奇怪，市长似乎在新闻发布会上比在她们家更伤心欲绝。在她们家拜访时，他只是显得疲惫和难过，但在新闻发布会上，他多次满含泪水，哽咽地说不出话来，甚至有一次痛心到不能自制，默默地把脑袋耷拉在讲台上有一分多钟，直到他恢复了镇静。他提到，如果他知道“某些事情”就好了，他“就可能对某些事情做出不同的考虑”，最后他热切呼吁市民们在这困难时期为亨特家庭提供精神上的支持。人们也注意到他说到，不允许如何人去拜访犯罪嫌疑人。

镇民们表示了他们的支持。在几个小时之内，人们开始来到格雷厄姆被谋害的花园里，带来了饰品，鲜花和字条来纪念他。在夜间，当姑娘们应该睡觉，但仍然清醒地在被子下悄悄地窃窃私语时，不知名的镇民们骑车来到司家住宅，在塔玛尼巷上那最脏，最小，最破的房子，把鸡蛋和腐烂的蔬菜扔到它的木墙上。对于这种小事，法妈可以很轻松地解决或避免，但由于某些原因，她拒绝去做，因此司家房子的外面显得更加霉烂和破旧。

格雷厄姆的尸体仍没被发现，但他已经去世足够长的时间，而公众的悲痛和同情性是如此强大，召开他的追悼会是很必要的。此外，玛拉婚服上的血迹已经由DNA实验室进行了分析，证实是他的。缺乏确凿的证据没能改变镇民们的观念，反而使他们更相信他的失踪是一些不正常的魔力的结果。

而因此，司家姐妹们又一次堆挤到她们的微型小车里，但这次没有玛拉，她们四个人都穿着白色的衣服。他们穿白色是因为法妈要这样，因为在中国，白色，而不是黑色是丧服的颜色。正是这类事情让玛拉觉得她的母亲虚假表面的地方，尽管她不愿意自己显得与众不同，害怕让人注意到被当作女巫，对于一些文化习俗的小问题，如在什么场合穿什么颜色，却是如此的固执。玛拉和法妈作了很大的争执才同意她穿一件白色的西式婚纱，而不是传统的红色旗袍。然而，具有讽刺意味的​​是，法妈的愿望在婚礼结束时诡异地实现了－－玛拉的婚纱被血染成了红色。

司家姐妹们在教堂前门停下，在这里全镇的人们似乎再次全部聚集，在这里就在一个星期前玛拉和格雷厄姆交换了他们的结婚誓言。但这一次，无论是新郎还是新娘都不在现场。

Chapter 13 – Powers Trapped

Morgan and Marie stuck out their writing arms. Fa walked down the line of her daughters and carefully squeezed their outstretched arms through jade bracelets that she had removed from a bronze box in the attic. Morgan’s bracelet was a precious white jade, while Marie’s was green with a swirl of red.

The twins could only remember one other time they had worn the bracelets. It was three or four years ago, when their powers had first started to show, that Fa had brought them to the attic and opened the box. The bracelets glowed in the darkness. There were four in total–one for each of the sisters–and Fa brought out the middle two. She levitated them in the air while speaking softly and severely.

“You are starting to become powerful,” she had said. “It will be easy to let things get out of control, it may be tempting to show off, even.” The bracelets spun in the air slowly as Fa talked. Morgan and Marie were rapt, listening fully for once in their lives rather than communicating silently to each other between the lines.

“It will be important for you to develop your powers so that you can control them, practice so that they don’t come out when you don’t want them to,” Fa had continued. “But it will be even more important for you to understand that no one outside of this house can ever see them. I trust you–” Here Fa looked deep into each of her daughters’ eyes. “But if you ever break my trust, these bracelets will serve as your punishment. They will trap your powers as long as you wear them. Only I can put them on and remove them.”

She had then asked the girls to try on the bracelets to prove their efficacy. Marie had felt a hot flush rise up from her chest to her face and down to her toes, a warmth to evaporate the water inside her, and Morgan a shuddering chill down her spine, extinguishing her fire. As soon as it arose, the flush and chill went down and the girls felt normal again. Fa ordered Morgan to try to light a candle, and Marie to pour a glass of water on top of it. The girls struggled but neither of them could, and when they tried, the same hot flush and chilling shudder they had felt when they first put on the bracelets swept through them. Since that first time, they had never seen them again.

Until now. Marie supposed she had expected it. Morgan pouted her lips, but she knew there was nothing she could do. Mina stood next to them, eyes big and scared. She had never seen the bracelets before, and frankly did not know what they were. Since she hadn’t begun to show any magical qualities, her mother had not yet given her the warning talk. Her only guess as to the nature of the bracelets were the grim look on Morgan and Marie’s faces.

The girls were going outside of the house–with their mother, but Fa could take no chances. It was a memorial service for Graham Hunter. The Switch family was obligated to make an appearance.

The night before, the mayor had made another visit to the Switch house to inform the girls of the memorial service. He had emphasized that he believed it would be good for the overall image of the family to attend the service, adding that he and his wife would appreciate it as a token of the family’s sentiments. The visit was hurried, with Mayor Hunter barely taking a glance around the apartment before he gave his invitation and disappeared out the door.

The girls were left confused and feeling conflicted. The mayor’s behavior had been more than a little odd in the week since Graham’s death and Mara’s arrest. After the comments in the newspaper and the initial visit to the Switch House, he had immediately convened a press conference in which he had allowed his wife to berate Mara once again. Ms. Hunter, normally a silent smiling figure at her husband’s arm, had spoken more opinionated sentences in the past week than she seemed to have spoken in all the rest of her life combined. Though her tone had quieted since the night of the wedding, she still hinted strongly at feelings that opposed her husband’s diplomatic visit, calling the murder a “tragedy that could have been avoided,” and urging the townspeople to “take caution against known suspects and their affiliates.”

What struck the girls–and especially Marie, who later conferred her observations to her sisters–as strange about the press conference was that the mayor appeared much more grief stricken than he had at their house. During the visit he had appeared weary and saddened, but at the press conference he teared up many times, choking on his words and once even breaking down to the extent that he hung his head silently over the podium for a minute while he regained his composure. He mentioned that if only he had known “certain things, he “might have considered things differently,” and closed the speech with an earnest plea for the support of townspeople for the Hunter family during these difficult times. It was also noted that the suspect in question was to have no visitors.

The town showed their support. Within hours, people started to arrive at the garden where Graham had been murdered, bringing trinkets, flowers, and small notes to memorialize him. During the night, when the girls should have been sleeping but stayed awake whispering quietly under their covers, anonymous citizens rode by the Switch House, the sootiest, smallest, and most rickety house on Tamany Lane, and threw eggs or rotten vegetables at its wooden sideboards. It was the sort of thing that Fa could easily fix or prevent, but for some reason she refused to, and the outside of the Switch House became even more moldy and decrepit.

Graham’s body had still not been found, but he had been gone long enough, and the outpouring of public grief and sympathy was so strong that it made sense to have a memorial service for him. Besides, the blood on Mara’s dress had been analyzed by a genetic lab and confirmed to be his. The lack of hard evidence did little to disuade the citizens–it only made them believe more strongly that his disappearance was the result of some abnormal foul play.

And so it was that the Switch sisters were piling into their tiny car again, this time without Mara, all four of them dressed in white. They wore white because Fa made them–in China, white instead of black was the color of mourning. This was precisely the kind of thing that Mara had found so hypocritical of her mother, that despite her desire not to stand out or call attention to themselves as witches, she was so stubborn on small  cultural issues such as what color to wear on a certain occasion. It had taken a fight for Fa to agree that Mara could have a white Western wedding gown, rather than the traditional red qipao. Ironically, however, Fa’s wish had been grotesquely met at the end of the night when Mara’s dress was stained red with blood.

The Switch sisters pulled up to the front doors of the church, where once again what seemed like the whole town had convened, where just one week ago Mara and Graham had exchanged their vows. Except this time, neither the bride nor groom were present.