Chapter Six
Trial and Error
"Lindsay!" Megan sighed with exasperation, stepping out the kitchen door. "Come on down, you know you're not supposed to be up there! You'd better not be picking at the shingles again!"
"But I'm not doing anything!" the five-year old protested from where she sat on the roof. "I'm just sitting!"
"Well, come sit in the kitchen then. It's time for dinner," Megan said. Lindsay pursed her lips, not moving at first. "Now, or I'm telling your father you were up there again."
Sighing, Lindsay got on the old broom beside her and hovered down, dragging it in behind her.
"Is Daddy coming home for dinner?" Lindsay asked, frowning suspiciously at the vegetables on her plate.
"Well, he hasn't called yet," Megan sighed, although she had been expecting him to. There hadn't been a night since the deaths of Auror Belle and Auror Moody that her husband hadn't worked late… in fact, it had been nearly a week since Lindsay had seen him for even a brief moment as he often got home long after her bedtime and left before she got up in the morning. "Eat your mashed pumpkin, Lindsay."
"I don't like pumpkin," Lindsay complained. "I want chips and catsup."
"Didn't you have fries for lunch?" Megan said.
"No, they're chips, Mum!" Lindsay said with a frown.
"Fine, you had chips for lunch, right?"
Lindsay thought about it and then nodded.
"And you had them for dinner yesterday, right?"
Lindsay nodded again.
"Don't you think it's time you tried something healthier for a change?"
"No," Lindsay said, poking at her chicken unhappily.
"Well, you're not getting up until you've had a least a bite of everything," Megan said, and knowing her daughter well, settled in for a long night at the table.
Lindsay was still poking at everything when the handle to the front door handle rattled, and she jumped up, ignoring her mother's warning as she ran into the door as Ederick Thurspire came in, immediately getting tackled by his daughter.
"Hullo! Hullo!" he chuckled, hugging her. "Have you eaten?"
"No," Lindsay said.
"Good, because I brought something," Ederick said cheerfully, handing her a bag with an "M" on it.
"Chips!" Lindsay said gleefully. Somehow Ederick was able to keenly hear the sigh of his exasperated wife over Lindsay's squeals…a defense mechanism he had learned early on in his marriage.
"Evening, Meg, something wrong?" Ederick asked.
"You could have called," Megan said.
"Why, I'm not all that late, am I?"
"No, but I cooked…"
"Wonderful! I'm starved! You want this?" Ederick said, immediately handing Megan the other bag in favor of the breaded chicken which he loaded up the mashed pumpkin on top of it. Sighing again, Megan resignedly took out the Big Mac.
"Lindsay, at least come sit and the table. And I still want you to take a bite out of all of that," Megan said firmly.
Gazing at her mother defiantly, Lindsay stomped back over to the table and sat down, pushing her plate aside in favor of the bag in front of her.
"Better go on and get it over with, Lindsay, I'd rather you not get stuck at the table all night," Ederick advised her. "God knows when I'll be able to have another one off."
"Did you have a bad day?" Lindsay asked thoughtfully, and he pointed her to her plate again. Reluctantly she nibbled at the chicken before turning back to the bag again.
"No, I had a good day because it allowed me to come home to see you," Ederick told her, scooping up some of the mashed pumpkin into a spoon and holding it out to her. "Now how about you appease your mother so we can play a game or something before bedtime?" Lindsay sighed and took the spoon glumly, missing the private smile between her parents before she finally ate it, looking a bit green afterwards. But her parents ignored her reaction, Ederick turning more enthusiastically to his own dinner. "I do have to admit, though, that there are some days when I envy Aurors…allowed to go about their jobs without crushing piles of paperwork and everything tainted with politics…it's good to be home, though! Lindsay, how about you go pick out a game if you're done?" The girl looked suspiciously at her father a moment before heading to the living room.
"That bad, eh?" Megan said the moment she was out of earshot.
"I should be out there," Ederick murmured with a sigh. "Out there helping them try to find some way to get that thing, not stuck in an office filing petty offenses and magic negligence cases. Every time a report crosses my desk, I see their corpses again…rewitness the shock from every wizard even casually known for any prophetic ability because they hadn't seen it coming…and watch as my agents and Aurors alike flounder about with no true direction except waiting for the next attack. There's something about this whole thing that keeps nagging me…and I do mean the whole thing…all hundred and some odd files on this creature. Yet all I can do is wait for everyone else to try and dig something up. Have I said recently how much I hate this job?"
"Nearly every day since you were promoted," Megan admitted with a nod, watching as he turned his attention to his plate again. "Ederick, why don't you just tell Draco the truth? We both know you'd be happier back in Investigations. Let someone else take the heat."
"That's just the trouble. There is no one else," Ederick said, looking up at her. "None that Draco would approve of, at any rate, you know how he can get. In the meantime, my men despise me. The Aurors hate me…"
"Oh, nonsense, not all of them do," Megan protested.
"All right, so Harry's had a good word now and then about my observation skills. But he's also quick to condemn me if I happen to even generally theorize that someone he knows might have been involved in something no matter how true it is," Ederick said.
"Well, I think it's less about the conjecture and more about…well, how you put things," Megan said, earning a baleful look from her husband. "You do sometimes come off as harsh."
"I have to do whatever it takes to get at the truth and you know it. And many times that is easier when people are on edge rather than when we're tip-toeing around questions in case it offends someone," Thurspire said firmly. "So what if it does rile people up and some of the best and most honorable wizards in the country hate me? So what if the press takes every advantage of smacking me every time I make a mistake. A lot of trial and error goes into any investigation…it's a part of the job, and I don't care what the devil anyone else thinks about me for doing whatever I can to get it solved, no matter who I offend. I'd just rather not be doing it from a chair."
As he got up to help his daughter set up her Candy Cauldron game, Megan straightened up the kitchen, lost in her own thoughts for a moment. Her daughter's impatient protests drew her out of it, and she dried off her hands and went to join them.
Heavy rain pelted down upon the roof of the Potter residence. Aurelius lay wide awake in the dark, listening to it intently, but besides the tap-tap-tapping he only heard the sound of Alicia snoring and the occasional murmur from Alex where they slept on the other side of the partitioned room.
There had been a time in his younger life when he truly enjoyed the sound of rain at night; easily lulled asleep by the peaceful sounds, nestled cozily in a warm room kissed by an occasional breeze drifting in from a cracked window. Now that he thought back, Aurelius realized just how much he missed that feeling of security. But the walls around him no longer seemed to give them any protection, and the rain outside seemed threatening instead of tranquil. He expected that at any instant that he would see a flash of light or hear a rumble…knowing that he wouldn't be able to keep himself from getting up to investigate in case it wasn't the storm…in case it was her.
He felt the bracelet that his father had given him before they had left; a silver bracelet charmed to detect unusual amounts of wild magic. It had been originally made, Aurelius knew, to detect the comings and goings of his cousins Zoë and Zack, but after making a few tweaks his father had hoped that it would give him some peace of mind considering what had happened. It had yet to go off, and Aurelius wasn't quite sure that they had gotten it right. Sighing with frustration, Aurelius closed his eyes even though his ears still strained to hear any foreign sound. In what seemed to be an eternity, he finally fell into a dreamless sleep.
It wasn't long after that that the bracelet started glowing bright and steady, but he didn't wake, and it had faded long before he woke for breakfast the next morning.
Despite the fact that Alexandria spent quite a bit of the two weeks in the Potter's downstairs closet with a Muggle telephone receiver attached to her ear, she still came out long enough for meals and to spend a few hours doing their reading assignments with her other siblings. At first Jamie seemed intrigued by the whole idea of daily study during the summer and decided to join them, but she soon got bored and spent the time practicing flying or help her brother gather rocks for his fossil collection. Andrew, who was a fast reader, received the unspoken duty of combing through the papers in case something was of general interest to them. But so little was still known about Ciardoth that there was often little if nothing at all to report except for the current Quidditch team standings and to see how badly the weather prediction was compared to the actual weather. Essie Brim, who had been long known for her accuracy, had been off the mark so many times over the summer that often she would just predict 'fog in the morning' and leave it at that. Somehow, the Oracle's predictions had stayed fairly accurate, giving them ample reason to jeer at the Daily Prophet's prophet problem.
A couple of days before school began, Andrew scanned the Prophet, once again looking for something interesting and found it near the back page.
"Ah, here's a note on the test inquiry…you know, the committee the governor's board put together on OWLS and NEWTS," Andrew explained.
"Right, go on," Alex nodded.
"It says here that after thoroughly going over the different aspects of the tests, they found them to be 'more than adequate' for judging the aptitude of magic students compared to similar tests around the world," Andrew said.
"I could have told them that," Aurelius said dryly.
"Good, I'm glad that's over with. Rather silly if you ask me. I thought it was rather difficult myself," Alex said.
"Yes, that's a good judge of a test," Aurelius said, earning a dirty look from his sister.
"Personally I'm a bit relieved, being that I have to take OWLS this year," Andrew said. "I admit I was a little afraid they were going to want to redo them all."
"Or worse, go back to the way they were before," Alex said. "Rose said they were absolute nightmares."
"Something wrong, Andrew?" Alicia asked. Andrew had put down the Daily Prophet and had picked up the Oracle and was staring fixedly at it.
"No, no, nothing, just the usual. Kindling starter, you know…" Andrew said quickly, folding it up. Alex and Aurelius gave each other knowing looks before turning to him again.
"All right, let's hear it," Aurelius said.
"Really, it's nothing but the normal Oracle trash, hardly anything to worry about," Andrew said fervently. "You know how they'd say anything for a rise."
"Yes we do, which is why we're so worried about the way you're acting about it," Alex said, holding her hand out. "We're going to find out sooner or later anyhow, so you might as well hand it over."
As Andrew hesitated gazing at it unsurely. Aurelius glanced at Alicia and they pounced, books flying as they tackled them. Alicia broke into a tickling spree as Aurelius tried to wrestle his hands back, giving Alex the opportunity to tweak the newspapers out of his hand. She stared at the headline, her jaw dropping.
"Why, this is absolutely outrageous!" Alex declared, the other two letting Andrew go and sitting up curiously while Andrew was still trying to recover from the attack. "The nerve of them to even imply it!"
"Stop being outraged and tell us what's going on," Aurelius snapped irritably. Alex gazed at him, then grimaced.
"All right, but try not to be upset, Aurelius, because we all know it isn't true," Alex said.
"It has to do with me?" Aurelius squinted, trying to read his sister. She sighed set it on the table so they could read the headline; Famous Hogwarts Professor Under Suspicion of Misconduct…Again.
"'Professor Severus Snape, a member of Hogwarts senior staff, has once again been put under the magnifying glass for his actions. This time it is for allegations made by several students and parents accusing him of coaching his son, Aurelius Snape, with particulars of the fifth-year OWLS aptitude test. The tests, recently found through a board committee to be sound, were known to have been revised by a team led by Professor Snape, who had access to all written materials in all subjects the students are tested under. Although the board would not comment on the specific investigation, the current Headmaster of Hogwarts, Albus Dumbledore, sent out a statement saying that the student in question is an honor student who has excelled in all subjects and the accusation is "preposterous." Also of note, the board of governors at Hogwarts has also informed the Oracle that their meetings will be closed to the public during the course of the next school year due to the need to "sort out certain issues." However, they encourage parents of students to contact them with any complains or suggestions.'"
"What rubbish!" Aurelius scowled. "They have to be blowing this out of proportion!"
"Of course they are, Rel, we all know you got that perfect score on your own merits. I'm sure nothing will come of it," Andrew said.
"What sort of trouble would Father be in if they thought it was true?" Alicia asked.
"That's no mystery. They'd have his job for it," Aurelius said. "But I didn't cheat, and you know he wouldn't."
"Of course not, Rel, it's simply ridiculous," Alex agreed. "Besides, maybe they are just making a silly deal out of it, bad press and all that. I mean, I'd think if the governors were concerned about you being coached, they'd have come and talk to you about it, wouldn't they?"
"True," Aurelius said, taking the paper to look at it. "I just hate the fact that just because I'm brilliant, Father's getting heat about it."
"Well, don't get a fat head about it," Alex said in annoyance. "We all have our strengths, you know."
"I suppose. What's yours again?" Aurelius jeered. It was Aurelius' turn to be tackled then, and Andrew and Alicia were quick to help hold him down as Alex tickled him, ignoring his howling. Just then they heard a loud, "AHEM" from behind them and they all looked up in surprise to see Harry standing there, trying to keep a straight face.
"Studying hard, I see?" Harry said.
"Just letting off some steam," Andrew said quickly as they got up, Aurelius brushing himself off and glaring at them.
"Harry, did you happen to see the Oracle today?" Alex asked.
"Yeah, I did," Harry sighed. "As a matter of fact, that's sort of what I want to talk to you about. Aurelius, Chairman Shea is coming here in a few minutes to have a quick chat with you, so you may think about making yourself presentable." Alicia frowned worriedly as Alex and Andrew exchanged a look of their own.
"I was not coached," Aurelius said flatly.
"Of course you weren't," Harry agreed. "He just needs to hear it from you, is all, for the record."
"For the record, I think this whole investigation sucks," Aurelius snapped. "With Ciardoth on the loose and him leading the Order of Merlin too, I'd think he'd be concentrating on that instead of this petty school crap."
"Rel, we all have different jobs to do, despite what evils there are in the world," Harry said. "And I really hope for your father's sake as well as your own that you don't talk like that in front of the chairman, even if you do have a reason to be frustrated. Please, conduct yourself like…well, better than normal…please?"
"I'll conduct myself like a Slytherin Prefect," Aurelius said, raising his chin. His other siblings glanced at each other knowingly.
"Well, if that's the best you can do, all right," Harry said seriously. Aurelius glowered at him as he walked away. Would Chairman Shea believe him? Or was this whole allegation just the beginning of one big headache?