Chapter 9: Loose Ends

"Rose," said Al, who, by his tone, was clearly trying to be reasonable, "You really, really cannot continue to stalk Melisenda Wilkes for the rest of the year."

Rose put aside the letter she'd received from her mother and rolled her eyes at Al. "Who said anything about the rest of the year? I just have to follow her until I catch her at something."

Al rolled his eyes right back. Scorpius pinched the bridge of his nose and shut his eyes, sighing. Rose slammed her book shut with the letter inside – earning a tsk tsk from Ms. Clearwater – and stared the both of them down, daring them to say anything else.

In fairness to Al's point, though, Rose had been trying to surreptitiously follow Melisenda for almost three weeks now – ever since that conversation by the lake with Wendy – and had caught her doing exactly nothing so far except being exceedingly obnoxious.

Melisenda had breakfast with the second-year girls at the Slytherin table. There were five of them, whose names Rose was now sure were named Valissa MacNamara, Roma Rowle, Azalea Selwyn, Beatrice Twycross, and Fiona Edgecombe. Of the five, Rose had only ever really talked to Azalea, and that was only if you considered being alternately cried at or viciously snubbed "talking." Azalea and Scorpius may have patched up their friendship after a rocky first year at Hogwarts, but Azalea and Rose would never be friends, as far as Rose was concerned. It seemed Azalea felt the same, as every time she had caught Rose looking over at the Slytherin table, she made a show of leaning over to one of the other girls and ostentatiously whispering, rolling her eyes back in Rose's direction. Recently, Roma Rowle had taken to calling back across the room, "Can I help you, Weasley?" or some other creative variant thereof.

After breakfast, Melisenda went to classes. As she and Rose shared all the same classes – a situation Rose was fervently looking forward to remedying in third year, when they would hopefully choose different electives – it was easy to track her whereabouts during class. Her whereabouts were usually about three rows back from wherever Rose sat, but Rose never once caught her leaving the classroom.

Then there was lunch, and then there were more classes. In the afternoons, like today, Melisenda sometimes went to the library, where Rose had no problem following her. She thought that Al and Scorpius might not much like being dragged along and having to furtively find a table where Melisenda could be easily in sight, but they had been charged with "keeping an eye out" for Melisenda same as Rose, so they could very well deal with it.

The only place it was impossible to follow Melisenda was, unsurprisingly, the Slytherin common room. Or at least, that's where Rose assumed she was going when she'd leave the Great Hall arm in arm with one of the other Slytherin second years.

Rose and Al had tried to follow the first time she'd seen Valissa and Melisenda walk towards the dungeons, taking a circuitous route through parts of the castle with which Rose was only superficially familiar. Even the suits of armor looked older and more forbidding down here, with obvious scorch marks and spell damage on most of them. The halls grew colder and darker, and the carpet was thinner and threadbare, so that Rose and Al had a harder time walking behind the two girls without being heard. They kept having to let them get ahead down the empty corridor, then dash quickly once they'd turned a corner to keep them in sight. When Melisenda and Valissa had stopped in front of a blank stretch of wall and started talking to it, Rose and Al had quickly backed away. Rose had no desire to sneak into the Slytherin common room; at least not yet.

It had been nearly three weeks of this, and Rose had learned nothing new. And Al and Scorpius were growing less helpful. Al had Quidditch practice several nights a week now; the team was gearing up for their first game against Ravenclaw, and it wasn't uncommon for Al to trudge back into the common room well past ten o'clock on practice nights. Rose was, for the umpteenth time, glad she had no desire to join the team, though her father had made a couple of pointed comments over the summer to suggest that not trying out would be quite un-Weasley-ish.

Perhaps another year.

And Scorpius seemed to think he could learn more about what Melisenda was up to by talking to Azalea, which he had been doing rather a lot of late. The nasty voice in the back of Rose's mind whispered, not that it's getting us anywhere, but that didn't account for the sourness in the back of her throat whenever Scorpius left their table in the library to go pal around with Azalea, like he'd done just now. Rose watched them together, Scorpius's white-blond head tilted close to Azalea's neat black ponytail. They seemed to be comparing notes about something. Azalea twirled the end of her long, straight ponytail around a finger, tittering or giggling every five to six seconds. Ms. Clearwater was shooting the pair of them nasty looks.

Rose slammed her books shut again, earning herself a glare from Ms. Clearwater.

"Right," she said, "I think I'm done with the library for the night. Al?"

"But," Al began, then lowered his voice considerably, "Melisenda's still here."

"You were right. I can't stalk her forever. I'm going back to the common room, where it's warm and there's a fire and Louis or James has probably stolen food."

Rose swept by the table where Scorpius and Azalea sat. If she had bothered to look, Rose would have seen that Scorpius was trying to catch her eye. But she didn't bother.

In fact, she swept in a huff most of the way back to Gryffindor Tower, with Al almost jogging to keep up with her. He didn't complain, though. Merlin knew Rose would have bit his head off if he had. She wasn't mad at Scorpius – she wasn't! And it wasn't that she had anything against his friendship with Azalea, per se. But she was ready to bite just about anyone's head off at this point, and the only thing that could have jolted her out of her mood was –

"Rosie!"

Rose turned. She knew that voice. Surely it couldn't possibly be –

"Dad?" A large figure with red hair loomed over her, and then Rose's father swept her up into a hug, with her mum right behind him. It was a strangely incongruous sight for Rose – her parents in the Hogwarts halls. It was as though Headmistress Sprout had come round to Christmas at the Burrow.

"Mum? Dad?" Rose heard Al say as his own parents rounded a corner.

There was a lot of hugging.

"But what are you doing here?" Al asked as Ron ruffled his hair.

"We-ell," Uncle Harry answered, "I'm supposedly here to give a guest lecture in Defense Against the Dark Arts."

"And I tagged along to pep up the Gryffindor Quidditch team before the big game," Aunt Ginny added.

"Is that even allowed?" Al asked.

"Probably not, but no one stopped me," Aunt Ginny said with a mischievous twinkle in her eye.

"And your mum and I are here to attend, er –"

"Sir Nicolas de Mimsy-Porpington's five hundred and twenty-eighth Deathday Party," Hermione supplied promptly, "We get invited every year, and decided we'd turn up this time."

"Right," said Rose, "But why are you really here?"

The adults all smiled. "Can't put one over on my Rosie," Ron said proudly.

"Harry did give the game away a bit," Hermione said. They all looked at Uncle Harry.

"It's not like we weren't going to tell them anyway!" he said in joking defense. "C'mon, you lot, we'll find a better place to talk."

"A better place" as it turned out was just an empty classroom this time. Rose had been hoping to get to go back to the Room of Requirement (she hadn't been able to successfully find it since she had been blindfolded on the way in last year, and practically in a food coma on the way out), but apparently this wasn't so sensitive that it warranted such secrecy. Uncle Harry perched on the professor's lectern at the front of the room and everyone else claimed a desk.

"Practicing, Harry?" Rose's father asked, grinning.

"You're a git, Ron," Uncle Harry said calmly.

Rose's mum shut the door to the classroom, then thought the better of it, likely remembering that closed doors at night were irresistible bait to Peeves, Hogwarts' resident poltergeist. They were actually less likely to be interrupted if the door was left slightly ajar.

Uncle Harry sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "Actually, do you want to take this one, Hermione? The arrest was down to you, really."

Rose and Al looked at each other. Arrest?

Rose's mum smiled a strained smile and nodded, knitting her hands together on the desk. Her hair, as unmanageable as Rose's, was somewhat tamed in a knot at the back of her head, but she pushed back a few wayward tendrils and met her daughter's gaze. She wasted no words. "We've caught the person who was helping Peter Marduin get into Hogwarts last year," she said.

"What?" said Al, at the same time as Rose said, "Who?" fully expecting the answer to be Melisenda Wilkes.

"Someone named Jeremy Davies," Hermione said, and then paused. Rose choked down a surprised gasp. "He was a seventh-year last year. Did you know him?"

Rose and Al both shook their heads. For her part, Rose felt as though her world had just tilted slightly on its axis, such was her surprise that it hadn't been Callister or Wilkes who'd been responsible. They had been through so much last year, with the Hey Diddle Diddle letters, and the rabbit and other magical flotsam . . . not to mention what had happened in the Shrieking Shack. All that, and the person ultimately responsible hadn't even been someone she'd known. She'd probably passed him in the hall every day. How could it be just . . . just some random student?

In the silence of the empty classroom, Hermione went on. Jeremy Davies did not, on the face of it, fit the profile for the kind of person Rose's and Al's parents had been looking for, she said first. He had displayed no previous penchant for rule-breaking or crime (he was a Hufflepuff, for goodness' sake), he was not a member of any of the known underground Wizarding groups that dabbled in the Dark Arts, and after his time at Hogwarts ended, he found himself a very pleasant job working in an Owlery in Wales. Jeremy Davies was good with animals.

Hermione had tracked him down solely based on one very tenuous link: Jeremy was Muggleborn, and his family was from the same town in Wales as Peter Marduin. And he had happened to be at Hogwarts the previous year. After exhausting any other possible lead, Hermione and Ron had tracked Davies down and found a young man, trembling with guilt, who had spent the last year violating one of the most basic tenets of Wizarding law, having no idea of the consequences of his actions. He'd practically begged them to arrest him and let him tell them everything.

"Everything" had not been much, but what was there was tantalizing. In addition to being Muggles, the Davies family were not well-off, and money had been a prime concern for young Jeremy.

So it was simple. Jeremy had received a letter – supposedly from his parents – telling him that an old neighbor, name of Marduin, had paid them a visit and asked to be put in touch with Jeremy. A subsequent visit to Jeremy's parents revealed that they had been Obliviated at least once and had no memory of the deaths of Marduin's children, his subsequent commitment to a psychiatric hospital, or even of sending such a letter to their son (Rose's mum had her doubts that it had even been Mr. and Mrs. Davies who had sent the letter in the first place). Upon speaking with Jeremy, Marduin had revealed some degree of knowledge about the Wizarding world, and had offered Jeremy exorbitant sums of money to get him into Hogwarts castle at various times throughout the school year . . . and then to get him into Gryffindor tower. Jeremy Davies knew what he was doing was wrong – but money at home was tight and the payment was just too good to pass up. And Jeremy Davies was resourceful, and happened to be dating a girl in Gryffindor, making it easy enough for him to access the tower.

Jeremy had spent most of the past year, and certainly the entire summer, waiting for his actions to come round and bite him. He had no idea what Marduin had been getting up to inside the castle, and had grown increasingly uncomfortable letting someone who was pretty clearly unbalanced into and out of what was basically his home. By the end of the school year, he had vowed to report himself to Headmistress Sprout, only to lose courage at the last. Not every seventeen-year-old boy was a Harry Potter or a Ron Weasley or a Neville Longbottom. Jeremy was, in truth, a bit of a coward, though that in and of itself was not a crime. But letting Marduin into the castle – in point of fact, sneaking him in and out through one of the passageways to Hogsmeade – was, and this had weighed heavily on Jeremy.

"But," Rose broke in, trying desperately to keep up, "How could he even have gotten into Hogsmeade?"

"That's an excellent question, Rosie," her mum said, flashing her a tight smile. "We think – and I don't know that we'll ever really know – but we think it's possible that if someone had already told him where Hogsmeade was, because of his . . . erm . . . mental state, he might have been less susceptible to the Muggle-repelling Charms on the village." Seeing Al's look of confusion, she elaborated. "Muggle-repelling Charms work beautifully because they cause Muggles to remember other important things they have to do, somewhere far away, when they come near a magically protected structure. It's not actually a physical repulsion or a barrier. For a Muggle who already expects the structure to be there and whose mind is already . . . scattered . . . it's possible the Charm wouldn't act as a deterrent because they're already used to having and ignoring intrusive thoughts."

"Of course, that means that someone must have told him where it was in the first place," Rose's father grumbled. Hermione nodded tightly and changed the subject back to Jeremy Davies.

When they found him, Jeremy had no idea that Marduin had died, or that he'd been involved in the destruction of the Shrieking Shack. Since the Shack hadn't come down until after the last Hogsmeade visit of the year, not many students would have even known about it before school let out for the holidays. So Jeremy had spent much of the summer waiting for another call, trying desperately to figure out how to extricate himself from the situation he'd put himself in. Should he turn himself in to the authorities? Should he tell Marduin that their deal was off, and damn the consequences? It was a true relief, in some ways, when Ron and Hermione Weasley came calling. At least the decision was out of his hands now.

Jeremy Davies was in custody.

"So we're really here to talk to Headmistress Sprout," Hermione said in closing, "Now that it's clear how the security of the castle was breached, she needs to be informed."

"Which means," Uncle Harry broke in, "That she's going to find out what was happening with the two of you last year."

Al and Rose exchanged glances, and Al gulped.

"She can't really get you in trouble for something that happened last year?" Aunt Ginny said, voice rising at the end of her sentence in a way that was not completely reassuring.

"Well, probably," Rose's father said cheerfully.

Author's Note: Hope you enjoyed this week's update! It is possible that I will be out of internet range for all of next weekend - I'm not sure. If I'm able to get service, I will post the next update. If not, I will post it when I am back in WiFi. In the meantime, have a lovely week/week+!

Thanks for reading, and, as usual, all forms of feedback are welcome!

Love always, bbh