“A WITCH HUNT? Jacob, if this is some kind of Halloween prank, I swear I’ll-”

“It’s not! It’s not a prank!” he protested hotly. “And it has to do with real witches.”

Great, I thought. I’m sitting in a walk-in closet with the maniac son of one of the people I’m supposed to be covering. I took a deep breath and said, “Real witches?”

He calmed down. “Well, no. Just people who think they are witches.”

“Why don’t you try this from the beginning?”

“Monty Montgomery is about to put out a piece of campaign literature that says I’m involved in a satanic cult. He’s going to talk about it like there’s a bunch of murdering Satanists running around loose in Las Piernas, and that he’s going to put a stop to it. He’s going to say my dad can’t be expected to stop them because I’m one of them.”

“Are you a murdering Satanist?”

“No.”

“Then it’s libel.”

“You know how this works. It will take months or maybe years if my dad sues for libel. The damage will already be done. My dad will spend the next five days trying to deny I’m a member of the cult instead of campaigning on the issues, and Montgomery will win.”

“You seem to know a lot about campaigns.”

He looked at me like I was from Mars. “Well, why wouldn’t I? I’ve grown up with them.”

Since Henderson had only run once before, unsuccessfully against a then-popular incumbent, I didn’t see how twice in four years meant Jacob grew up with campaigning. But I supposed from the perspective of someone his age, it must have seemed constant, given the time his father would have devoted to it.

“If you’ve grown up with campaigns, you know your dad will know how to combat mudslinging. What is it that really bothers you about this?”

He was silent, seeming to be debating about what he should and shouldn’t tell me.

“Off the record?” he said.

A sixteen-year-old demanding to be off the record. He did know something about politics. “That depends. You came to see a reporter, after all.”

“But it’s about something that isn’t true. It’s not news, then, is it?”

And he had grown up with a lawyer. “Okay,” I said. “But if I find out otherwise, expect to see it in print.”

He mulled this over. “Okay. Montgomery has this photo. It’s supposed to show me participating in a witches’ coven.”

“A witches’ coven?”

“Yeah, you know, a group of witches.”

“I know what a coven is – but how did he get a photograph of you and a coven?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I do know, but I don’t know how.” He drew a breath. “What I mean is, I was there, but I wasn’t there as a witch or anything. And I didn’t see anyone with a camera, so I don’t know how.”

“Why were you there?”

“You’re not going to believe me.”

I waited.

He sighed. “I was trying to get a friend of mine to leave. She’s mixed up with the wrong crowd. I was trying to get her to come home.”

“Girlfriend?”

“She’s just a friend. Not my girlfriend.” He looked down at his hands. “We grew up together. I’ve known her since we were little kids. Sammy’s been our neighbor for years.”

“Sammy?”

“Gethsemane – yeah, I know. It’s worse than Sammy. Her parents are real religious types. I think that’s part of why she’s doing this crap with the witches. I don’t think she really believes in it. I think she’s just trying to rebel against her parents or something. Anyway, we’ve always talked, and been… I don’t know, we could always just talk to one another. She’s my friend. Understand?”

“I understand. Do her folks know about the witchcraft stuff?”

“Yeah. They kicked her out. They’re so busy going to church all the time, I don’t think they care about anything else.”

“So where is she living?”

“She was just spending the night with her witch friends, but I talked her into going down to Casa de Esperanza, the runaway shelter. You know about that?”

“Yes.” Casa de Esperanza was, in fact, one of the many gifts Frank’s neighbor, Mrs. Fremont, had given to Las Piernas. She had started it back in the 1970s, when I was in college. One semester I did volunteer work there for credit in a psychology class. She had founded the shelter, but she had since handed most of the administration of the facility to other people. She had kept some of it in the family; I remembered that she once told me her own grandson worked there. All the same, Mrs. Fremont still spent a lot of her time at the shelter, lending an ear to troubled teens. She seemed to be the town grandmother.

“Well, anyway,” Jacob went on, “I talked Sammy into going to the shelter. She didn’t put up much of an argument. I guess even the witch friends were tired of having her over all the time.”

“Who are these witches?”

“They’re not even really witches. It’s just a bunch of high school kids playing dress-up. They read all these weird books and try to do the rituals and all of that, but as far as I know the worst thing they’ve done is gone into the cemetery after closing.”

“Some people think there are occult groups murdering their pets, having strange sexual rituals, worshipping the devil,” I said. “Maybe getting into drugs, things like that. Trying to be evil, you might say.”

“I know what people think. But it isn’t true. Not with this group. I mean, I think Sammy would let me know if they did anything like that. She loves animals – she wouldn’t hang out with anyone that killed a pet. Maybe there’s some other group of witches out there. I don’t know. These people she hangs out with talk like they’re really evil, but I think they just like the showy stuff. I think they’re all talk.”

“All of them? Maybe Sammy’s fairly innocent, but when people get into this kind of thing, they sometimes attract people who are more serious about it all.”

He brooded over that for a moment. “That’s what I’m afraid of, I guess. That’s why I keep trying to get her to quit hanging around with them.”

He was holding something back, so I decided to wait it out. It was getting stuffy in the little room, but I figured there was more to the story than he had told me thus far.

“There is one guy…” he said, then paused, seeming reluctant to say more. “He’s older. Sammy told me about him. He’s sort of the leader. They never see his face. He wears some sort of goat mask or something. He wasn’t there the night I tried to get Sammy to leave. But she was really freaked out, you know, like if the guy found me there he would kill me.”

“Kill you?”

“I don’t know, maybe she was just being dramatic. She is sometimes. Lots of times, really. She just needs attention. But I think she really was scared of something.”

Something was bothering me about his story, and I finally figured out what it was. “If you didn’t see a photographer, how do you know there’s a photo? And how do you know about this hit piece of Montgomery’s?”

He turned beet red. If he was nervous before, he was frantic now. “I can’t tell you that.”

“You’re really testing my patience, you know that? There’s going to be a witch hunt, only there aren’t really any witches. You say you’ve been photographed at a gathering of these wanna-be witches, but you don’t know who took the photograph. You say there’s about to be a smear campaign that might cause your father to lose an election, but you can’t tell me how you know. And for toppers, you’ve asked me to keep all of this stuff that maybe happened and maybe will happen off the record. What the hell am I supposed to do with all this?”

“Please,” he said, bursting into tears, “I need your help.”

I felt like a bully. I hadn’t meant to make the kid cry. I leaned over and put a hand on his shoulder. “Sorry, Jacob, I didn’t mean to be so hard on you.” I reached into my purse and pulled out a packet of tissues.

He was embarrassed, but he took one.