Lily Potter and a Small Circle of Friends

On a clear but cold spring day, Lily Potter had gone to Diagon Alley to buy some potion ingredients. As she left the apothecary shop with her purchases in a string bag, she stopped and stared. Polydeuces Crabbe was walking along the street; she recognized him as the biggest and stupidest of Lucius Malfoy's hangers-on, but he appeared to have dressed in costume as some kind of foreign savage. His head was shaved and his right ear was pierced with not merely one gold hoop in the lobe but a solid row of gold hoops around the entire edge of his ear. His robe was boldly striped in chartreuse green and vivid purple, with a neckline open down to here to show a tangle of many gold chains, and it was sleeveless, the better to show that he was wearing shoulder-length gloves of black leather embellished with very many steel studs, buckles, and zippers. Lily wondered if the purpose of the gloves was to conceal his Dark Mark.

Unfortunately Crabbe caught sight of Lily and walked over to speak to her: "Hey, baby, I saw you looking at me. I know what you were thinking."

Lily didn't know what else to say, so she said: "Hello, Crabbe."

He had several diamond studs in his left earlobe, and was covered with Charms, from the Hair-No-More Charm on his scalp to a Charm on his boots causing them to do double the normal amount of damage to anyone he kicked.

"You were wondering what it'd be like to have it on with a real man, like me" he smirked, "and this is your chance to find out. Let's get ourselves an upstairs room at the Leaky Cauldron." He held out his gloved hand to her as if he actually expected her to hold hands with him.

Her good manners were too deeply engrained for Lily to say what she was really thinking, which was: "That is the most nauseating idea I've ever heard in my life, and if you get any closer to me, I'll vomit."

So instead she said "Crabbe! I'm a married woman!"

"Yeah," replied Crabbe. "Married to that little shrimp of a Chaser. If his dick is as scrawny as the rest of him, you don't even notice when he puts it in you—"

Lily slapped his face, hard, and, as Crabbe chortled: "Whenever a girl does that, I know she fancies me"; she did what she should have done in the first place: Disapparated.

* * *

Safely in her own kitchen, she was still flushed with anger and feeling an urge to kick the next person she encountered, or at least shout at them. So she thought it would be wise to take a deep breath, and another, and make herself a cup of tea, and calm down before putting away the potion ingredients.

Lily was sitting at the kitchen table with her tea, fighting the impulse to jump up and pace the floor with heavy, pounding, footsteps, when James and Sirius appeared in the room. One look at Lily and both men were asking her what was wrong, what had happened.

She started in to explain, and James started to pat her hands and mumble comfortingly at her, while Sirius proclaimed: "If I'd been there, I would have killed him." He paused momentarily for thought and added: "James, let's you and me go kill him now."

"Sirius", replied James. "We can't just kill a human being in cold blood, or we'd be no better than the Dark Side."

"I wasn't talking about a human being," said Sirius unrepentantly. "I was talking about Crabbe -- he's really more like some kind of ape."

Lily giggled at that statement, but James got preachy: "Dumbledore says it is necessary to call things by their proper names in order to think clearly about them. Dumbledore says it is incorrect to say that a person is not a human being when what you really mean is that he is a human being for whom you have absolutely no respect, or whom you think it's okay to kill without due process."

Sirius grinningly threw up his hands in surrender, saying: "I'd hit you, but Lily's in the way." Lily got out of the way, but Sirius did not hit James — they did not fight indoors since the first time, soon after James and Lily had moved into the sweet little house, James and Sirius had brawled in the kitchen and broken every piece of china that Lily owned. She'd gotten furious and, sounding like both their mothers put together, ordered them to sort out all the broken pieces and put every dish, cup, and bowl back together the way it had been before.

* * *

That night, James, already in bed, was appreciatively watching Lily change into her nightgown, when he said: "It's no surprise that he fancies you."

"What? Who fancies me? Oh, surely you don't mean that creep, Crabbe!"

"He's worse than a creep, but apparently he's not blind enough to miss noticing that you're the most beautiful woman in England."

Ordinarily that statement would have caused Lily to demand that he tell her about her rival in Scotland or else be tickled, but she held off this time because James looked like he'd been struck with a thought.

"We could use him," stated James. "He hangs with Lucius Malfoy, so if you put one of those Hearing Ears of yours on him, we'd probably get plenty of dirt on Malfoy. He's already so covered with Charms that he wouldn't notice another one, and he's too stupid to do an Inventory Charm to list all the Charms he's carrying." Hearing Ear is a difficult Charm which is cast on an amulet so that the person who cast the Charm can hear everything which is heard by the person on whose ear the amulet has been placed, and a few of his thoughts as well.

Lily suspected that she knew what this suggestion was leading up to, and she didn't like it one bit. "How am I supposed to put a Hearing Ear on his ear without him noticing? It's not as if everyone didn't know which side we're on!"

"We-e-ell, he's just demonstrated that he seriously thinks he can make time with you...."

"James Godric Merlin Potter! How can you even think such a thing! I am not Mata Hari, and even if I were a whore, I would never ... get intimate ... with anyone as disgusting as that!"

So James had to get busy persuading her that he hadn't been suggesting anything of the kind, but merely that she could meet Crabbe in a private place, instantly cast a Stunning Spell on him, place the Hearing Ear, and use a Memory Charm to leave him with a false memory of what had happened.

* * *

Which is why Lily found herself entering The Hog's Head, identity concealed under a hooded cloak. Recognizing Crabbe among the men standing at the bar, she metaphorically held her nose and literally brushed sensuously against him. He looked to see what had thus attracted his attention, and she opened the hood of her clock just enough that only he could see her face.

"Oh, baby!" he chortled. "I knew you wanted it, but I guess it took you a while to figure out that you couldn't resist." He grabbed her by the hand and led her out of the building and around the back to a sort of shed or stable. Where she instantly pointed her wand at him and intoned "Stupefy!" before he even had time to be surprised.

She'd made this Hearing Ear in the form of a small rock crystal quartz ear stud, which she figured he wouldn't notice among his other ear studs, randomly arranged as they were. She tapped it with her wand so that it went into a new but already well-healed piercing in his ear lobe, although she would have preferred to pierce it with a dirty sewing needle and hope it got infected. At least she felt gratified by the Memory Charm she was casting; she'd gone to some effort to plant a false memory that Crabbe would be sure not to tell anyone about. He now believed that the hooded woman had been his almost equally big and stupid friend Caligula Goyle's new wife, looking for her husband, and that he had dragged her forcibly, despite her squeaks of "Oh, dear! Please don't! What will Gully say?", to the shed, thrown her down on the straw, and flung himself on top of her, only to be suddenly stricken with impotence. So he had started drinking out of his hip flask, occasionally offering a hit to the woman he was still holding down, until he passed out, eventually to awaken with a hangover but no woman.

There was a rock crystal quartz sphere, almost six inches in diameter, resting in a black velvet stand, that Lily used to hear what the Hearing Ear was transmitting. Its way of calling her attention to important news was to show pictures of sparkles, flames, and conflagration. That night it was completely full of moving red and orange light. Lily dashed to sit in the chair beside the crystal ball, and stroked it gently with her fingertips. James listened alertly to hear her report.

"He's getting dressed to go kill someone! He thinks it will be fun.... Oh, dear, they're taking Francis Bones to kill his own parents and sister; he's laughing at the look on Skelton Bones' face when he sees that it's his own son killing him....

"James! If we get there before they do, we can stop them!"

James was already calling Sirius. He used a Talking Seashell, another of Lily's hard spells, which requires a special species of seashell, found dead of natural causes but unbroken on a Greek beach. Then it had to be marinated in a specific potion while the Hearing Ear Charm was cast on it. Then it could be sawed in half, and two people who each carry one half can speak with each other as if they were together, no matter how far apart they are. The wizarding community generally believes that Talking Seashells are debilitating to the health of the people carrying them, so they should be carried only by the most powerful witches and wizards, and even they should not carry more than one. Anyone who'd known that James and Sirius each carried two (one between James and Lily, one between James and Sirius, and one between Sirius and Remus) would have thought they were crazy.

James told Sirius "Murder-minded Death Eaters are on their way to Skelton Bones' house; let's get there before they do".

Sirius told Remus "It's time to kick some Death Eater ass; we'll ambush them at Skelton Bones' house."

Remus was in Sirius' parlor, at a table piled with books, both open and closed, and the remaining space covered by scattered parchments and a few quills. Having a quill already in his hand, he grabbed up a scrap of parchment to scribble a note: "S says DE on way to SB house, we try to stop them", addressed it "Dumbledore", summoned Sirius' owl Priapus with a soft whistle, and handed the note to the owl (tying it would have taken too much time) as he Disapparated away.

And arrived in the Bones' back garden only moments later than the other three. They knew their jobs too well to need to speak before fanning out around the house. James in his invisibility cloak was in the back garden, the most reasonable place for Apparation, Sirius and Remus on the two sides, and Lily in front, where she hunched into the shadows of a bush to avoid being visible in the light of Muggle streetlights. Lily's little owl flew up to perch on the chimney -- Birdie, although not much use for carrying mail, was a very good lookout.

Four cloaked and hooded figures popped into being in the front garden -- right there in the glow of the streetlights where any Muggle could see them. Two hulking and one normal-sized figure pointed their wands at the house, while the other normal-sized figure did something with a thing that looked disgustingly like a human thighbone and a mummified human head, perhaps trying to remove the protection spells on the house, so Lily pointed her wand at them and proclaimed: "Stupefy!"

It seemed as if a beam of golden light coming from Lily's wand collided with beams of reddish light coming from their three wands. Where they met, the beams exploded into a fountain of colored sparks, like a fireworks show. Well, that should wake up the people inside, Lily thought.

"What was that?!" demanded Crabbe's voice.

"Learn to recognize a counter spell when you see one, Deuce" drawled Lucius Malfoy's voice. "There's some Mudblood lover playing hero here," he added, as he waved his wand to cast a Detection Charm that would make any lurking human glow like a lighthouse when the spell touched him or her.

No time to waste. Lily tried to remember to breathe as she pulled all her witch power into the pit of her stomach to cast the most powerful possible Stunning Spell on Malfoy.

"Stupefy!" shouted three voices in unison -- Sirius and Remus had each silently crept to their corners of the house to get a clear shot at the Death Eaters.

Two big and one normal-sized cloaked wizards lay unconscious, but the one with Malfoy's voice had Disapparated before the charm hit.

A light came on in the Muggle house next door. Lily nodded at it and said "Back Garden" to Sirius and Remus. Each of the three put a hand on an unconscious person and Apparated to the back garden, where James was sulking about having missed the action.

"Never mind that," said Lily. "Can you cast some stronger protection spells around this house, in case Death Eaters come back?" James and Remus started discussing various protective spells and whether they'd need to go home to fetch ingredients, but Sirius asked "Can we levitate these sods over the ocean and just accidentally drop them in?"

Lily looked straight at him with an expression on her face that said: "I am ignoring you." And said: "We ought to turn them in to the Ministry for attempted murder, but I'm afraid it'll just be our word against theirs."

"Check their wands" said Sirius.

"Whatever that last spell was", explained Lily, "I think maybe it was to set the house on fire so that the family would run out; those incompetents in the Forensics Lab will say it isn't proof of any crime: they might just have lit a fire for a barbecue."

At that point, Dumbledore strolled out the back door of the house, followed by the Bones in their dressing gowns. Sirius nudged Remus and muttered something to him, and Remus whispered back: "I owled him."

* * *

"So Dumbledore took the prisoners away, but I don't think anything ever happened to them. They're still running around loose," Sirius concluded the exciting story he was telling.

After a pause, James said, "Dumbledore turned Crabbe and Goyle over to Department of Magical Law Enforcement. When the idiots there strip searched them and stripped all those charms off Crabbe, they took the Hearing Ear off him, so we don't know what happened after that."

All four Marauders were gathered in the Potters' parlor, drinking beer from the bottle and putting their feet on the furniture. Lily peeked in to see if they needed more popcorn and pretzels, and felt very grateful for magic when she saw that poor clumsy Peter had managed to knock over an entire full bottle of beer, thus baptizing her sofa and her carpet as well as himself. It was fortunate, thought Lily, that she knew a Cleaning Charm that would remove the beer without leaving a stain, even after it had sat all night.

"I wish I could work with you guys," mourned Peter, "instead of having to take care of my mother all the time except one night off a week. This caused an uncomfortable silence, while perhaps James remembered when Lily had told him that Mrs. Pettigrew was perfectly fine, in fact waiting on Peter hand and foot, and Peter only claimed to be caring for her as an excuse for not even trying to find a job.

Remus took up the story in his gentle, tentative voice. "Francis is at Hogwarts now." Encouraged by exclamations of surprise from his friends, he continued, "I was at Hogwarts yesterday, to use the library, and I ran into him.... He'd been enchanted by Malfoy, and Dumbledore removed the spell. Francis was very grateful to have been rescued, and he told Dumbledore everything he saw or heard or did while with the Death Eaters. He told me that Dumbledore had allowed him to stay at Hogwarts for a refresher course in Defense Against the Dark Arts, on condition that he get active about practicing his religion. The Bones have always been Anglican, of course, and Dumbledore told him to go High Church and get busy with fasts and vigils and contemplative prayer." There were murmurs of surprise about Dumbledore giving such unusual advice, so Remus added: "I think it's supposed to be a way for him to learn to control his will, so as to make it more difficult for some spell to control his will instead of him."

"What were you looking for in the library?" asked James.

"Oh, I still have this bee in my bonnet that if Malfoy had invented Voldemort, that would explain so many things.... Malfoy is always involved in everything Dark, and he seems to be Voldemort's right-hand man, but suppose he were Voldemort's puppeteer instead? I know his powers are stronger than Malfoy's, and I haven't been able to find any method by which a wizard could create an artificial being more powerful than himself, not even using human sacrifice." That much was all old news to Remus's friends, but he finally reached the new part. "So I started to wonder if he could have captured a demon into an artificial being, as a similar concept to capturing a demon into a demon sword. Of course, books telling how to make a demon sword are not widely available. It turns out that Hogwarts' library doesn't have them either."

Peter looked scared at all this talk of human sacrifice and demons, while Sirius made a face, saying, "Give it up, Moony. It doesn't matter whether Voldemort is a demon or a wizard; we have to fight him just the same."

Porphyry and Perpetua Prewett were on a mission from Dumbledore. "A mission against Voldemort," he would have corrected them. Dumbledore had somehow learned a lot about the protective spells on Malfoy Manor, and had chosen Furry and Petty as the team best able to get inside the manor and get out again. "Among the warding spells are some which prevent any clairvoyance of the estate from anywhere outside the estate. Even the Hearing Ear amulet will cease to transmit while it is within Malfoy Manor. Therefore, it is necessary to physically infiltrate the Manor twice, once to plant a listening and recording amulet and once again to retrieve it."

The first obstacle was the edge of the estate, defended physically by a tall, thick wall, which also extended underground several feet. A spell prevented anyone from Apparating from one side of the wall to the other, and another spell would kill any human who crossed the line of the wall other than at the gate. That one would be easy — Furry's Animagus form was a badger, well able to dig deep under the wall, and Petty's was a tiny spider who would hide in his ear as he tunneled.

The grounds and the house were full of magical traps that would kill any human not of Malfoy blood who strayed into them, so Furry had to wait in badger form just inside the wall, worrying about Petty and listening in case she called for help on their Talking Seashell. Petty returned to human form in order to travel more quickly to the house. She had two advantages: a Cloak of Invisibility and secret Malfoy blood... if being the child of rape could ever be considered an advantage. Don't think about that now. She bent down to kiss the top of the badger's head, whispering, "Love ya, Brock," then put on the Cloak. She Apparated into the house, into a cellar that no one entered from one year to the next, and wrinkled her nose at the quite disgusting layers of dust. The quantity of cobwebs suggested that she was far from the only spider there. Petty hoped that none of the others were bigger than her and cannibalistic, and switched into spider form. Climb up the wall to the ceiling. Walk in the corner where the ceiling meets the wall. Follow the map she had memorized to the room where Death Eaters held meetings. It was a long trip for such a little spider.

Oh, Medea's cauldron, just how far is it? Oh, Morgana's wand, spiders get tired, too. Brock used to swear by "Morgana's tits," and Petty had been terribly shocked the first time she'd heard that; she told him that he must never, ever use that phrase if women or children could hear. Dearest Brock, he'd been Hufflepuff's Keeper in Quidditch and now he was playing the same position in a much higher-stakes game. The Light Side's Keeper, guarding our lives. "My life," Petty reminded herself. Must stay alert. Must keep going, for Brock and baby Violette's sake. Baby Violette, at home safe with Brock's mother.

She finally reached the room — actually, it looked more like a natural cave, with jagged stone walls and dirt floor. Fortunately there was no one in it. The Malfoys must be overconfident, considering all the guards they hadn't posted. Petty didn't need to worry that guards might be present but invisible, as a spider's sense of air movements and vibrations is not affected by invisibility spells. She turned into human form just long enough to take the amulet out of her pocket. It was in a box inside a pouch inside another pouch and looked like a sesame seed. Back into spider form, and now it looked like a huge load. She fastened the seed-like amulet to her body with spider silk, and climbed the wall, looking for a convenient crack to hide it in. Found a narrow crack in the stone that seemed deep enough that a sesame seed attached with spider silk might go unnoticed.

Done! She turned back into human form and Apparated back to Brock, before she hit the floor, landing instead on the grass, on legs bent to take the impact, and took off the Cloak. "Okay, Brock," she said, and the badger stood up, head held high. She put her hand on the badger's head and switched back into a spider, hanging on to the badger's head by two of her eight legs. She pulled the other six aboard and scuttled to her safe place in his ear, so he could tunnel out.

Once outside the wall, Furry turned back into human, causing the spider to fall out of his ear and transform back into Petty in mid-air; they'd practiced that often enough that it had become habit. Furry looked at her, asking, "Okay, Cob?"

"Okay, Brock. We done good. Would ya mind filling in that tunnel, so they don't get a clue? I'm too knackered to do it myself — in fact, would you mind if I spidered in your pocket, because I don't think I'm up to Apparation?"

"Stay human," he told her, filling in the tunnel and replacing the disturbed lawn was a simple spell. Then he embraced her in strong arms, kissed her, and Apparated them both, like that, to their home.

* * *

Spring was turning into the hot days of summer earlier than usual but Francis Bones had been back at Hogwarts long enough to feel settled in. Dumbledore had given him a cozy room with a desk, two filing cabinets, four bookcases, and a cot shoved back into a corner that was almost big enough for it. Francis had two areas of study vying for his attention. One was Defense Against the Dark Arts. He met with Professor Killerman once a week, who assigned him an essay to be turned in at their next meeting, accepted the essay Francis was turning in at this meeting, and intellectually dismembered, chewed up, and spat out the essay Francis had turned in at last meeting. Francis knew he should be grateful to be getting private lessons from a professor with such a busy schedule of teaching and research, but he hated his meetings with Professor Killerman, and believed that he wouldn't have survived them if it weren't for his study coach.

Now that was a whole story right there. One day he'd been working in the library, when a stocky blonde girl walked up to him and said, "You're Francis Bones. I'm Soupy Longbottom, and I'm going to help you study Defense Against Dark Arts." Soupy was a seventh-year student from Hufflepuff and had been sent to him by Professor Killerman. Francis knew that he could have taken the opportunity to feel insulted about being taught by a girl four or five years his junior but decided that he was too busy being grateful for her help. So far, all his assigned essays had been on Curses, and Soupy, besides recommending helpful books for his assignments, was drilling him on Curses three times a week. She'd say the name of a Curse, and he had to instantly tell her the effect, its incantation, how it worked, how to recognize it, its countercurse and how to cast it, and how the countercurse worked. Sometimes, instead of the name of the Curse, she'd say the incantation or its effect or something about how to recognize it. Francis felt guilty about taking so much of her time when she should have been studying for NEWTs, but she laughed at him and said that showing off is much more fun than studying.

Today's lesson was on Cursed objects. Soupy had brought in some books, a carved wooden box, and a deck of cards, and demanded that Francis tell her what magic was on each object and what effect it would have on a person who tried to use the object. She was pleased to see that he didn't just point his wand and shout Ostendo! — she had enchanted one of the books so that it would respond to the Detect Magic Charm by shooting up a jack in the box that would spit water at him. Instead, he put the See Aura Charm on his own eyes and viewed the objects from a distance. The first to capture his interest was the jack-in-the-box book. It probably wasn't very entertaining for Soupy to watch him gently point his wand at the book, moving his head to sight along the wand, and finally closing his eyes to whisper a short syllable. But to Francis's charmed eyes, he was looking at the spell as if it were a thing of springs and gears, and figuring where a small push would put it out of alignment to disarm it. He figured correctly — the jack in the box didn't so much jump out of the book as sort of limply collapse sideways. A whispered "Finite Incantatem" cleared away the ruins of that spell, and a little further observation revealed no further traps. "The only magic left in this one is the movement in the pictures."

Francis turned his attention to the next book. Soupy watched patiently as he looked at the book for a while, turned up the charm on his eyes, looked at the book some more, tapped the book with his wand, looked at it again — by now, what had originally looked like it might be a smudge where a spell had once been but had been worn away now looked quite clearly like the remains of a Thorn Charm. Francis smiled and tapped the book with his wand once more, and suddenly it was visible to ordinary eyes that there were tiny but very sharp thorns all over the cover. "I suppose you must have put some deadly poison on them that kills by Muggle means," said Francis, "because if it were a potion or a charm, the magic would still be present. Is there a Muggle poison that can kill a person with that small a pinprick, that might not even go all the way through the skin?"

"They'll go through the skin," said Soupy confidently. "They're sharp enough. And you're really good at this."

"This is like my work," Francis smiled. "Finally something that I know how to do."

"Your work? You couldn't possibly be a curse breaker," Soupy exclaimed, then blushed and tried to say, "I'm sorry; I didn't mean that the way it sounded like."

But Francis waved her apologies away, saying, "I'm not a curse breaker. I read ancient inscriptions. My thesis was about the Wellingborough Stele."

"That's that big stone slab in the Museum of Magic? The one with the inscription that no one can read?"

"Yes, except anyone can read the inscription now. But there are pictures in the exhibit of how it used to look."'

The Wellingborough Stele was a stone slab with an indecipherable inscription and a reek of magic that had been found being re-used in the floor of an old Muggle church. The Wizards who'd found it replaced it with a simulacrum before spiriting it away and trying to sell it on Knockturn Alley. They were arrested for looting the wizarding patrimony, and the stone was confiscated and put into the Museum. Years later, Francis smiled his way through enough bureaucrats to get Ministry authorization to study the Stele, to remove it from its exhibit to one of the secure labs behind the Museum, and lay Charms on it. Thus he found that the crazy inscription was simply a well-wrought, non-obvious illusion covering the real, time-worn but readable and historically interesting carved inscription. Francis peeled off the illusion to read the real message: Written by Waendel Wanderer, it said that if his settlement was ever besieged by enemies and in terrible danger, any one of his descendents could stand at sunset on the place marked by the stele, read the incantation aloud, and the besieging army would vanish away overnight, but at a heavy cost. Unfortunately, no one knew where the stele had been placed before it was moved by the Muggle church.

"Why did he put an illusion on it?" Soupy asked.

Francis shrugged. "I can tell you that the illusion was constructed so that Waendel's descendents wouldn't even notice it.... I can tell you that I was disappointed to find that it was an illusion instead of a previously unknown ancient language."

A previously unknown ancient language (or perhaps an insane code, or maybe just a hallucination) was Francis's other subject of study. The only reason that the Death Eaters had gone to the trouble of lying in wait to put him under the Imperius Curse was that they wanted him to translate part of an ancient book from the Malfoy family's library. A hypnotically swirling illumination of an iridescent peacock posed against an excessively starry sky, the Malfoys believed that it was instructions on how a modern Dark Wizard could assume the powers, in addition to his own, of one of their famously evil ancestors who had been defeated by Merlin, but only with difficulty. Francis had a copy of the document, made from memory. As the copy had been made by one of Dumbledore's unexpected spells, "made from memory" did not mean inaccurate.

* * *

I swear they must have infiltrated DMLE," James said exasperatedly to Lily. "This is the second time that I know for a fact that they had the goods on Crabbe and Goyle, but they just let them go."

Muggle police had found the body of a young woman in a vacant lot, beaten, raped, and with her throat cut. While they were sure that the body had been moved there after death, she still had her purse (a small one on a shoulder strap) with all her money and identification. Thus, the Muggles knew to contact Marianne Wilson's parents to identify their daughter's body. Mr. and Mrs. Wilson, although heartbroken, knew how to inform their daughter's employer and her roommate: an outer envelope addressed to a certain accommodation address containing letters to be sent by Owl Post and money to pay for the owls.

Marianne's roommate, Juliana, had spent days telling the Department of Magical Law Enforcement that they must investigate Marianne's disappearance. Ministry officials kept pushing her off with the statement that no doubt her friend had simply gone off for a long weekend with a handsome man. Amidst her tears, she had a certain grim satisfaction in telling the Ministry that Marianne's disappearance had been solved, so now they needed to investigate her murder. Brushed off again, this time with the statement that she must have been murdered by Muggles so the DMLE had no jurisdiction, she had desperately owled Professor Dumbledore. "Please try to remember Marianne Wilson. The Muggle police found her raped and murdered. DMLE doesn't care. They say it must have been done by Muggles. I think it was done by four big wizards who had been harassing her in the Fool's Hat. I was supposed to meet her there, but when I arrived she was gone, but the other customers told me about the wizards who had been bothering her and left right after she did."

Dumbledore had no difficulty in persuading Marianne's parents to allow the corpse to be examined by a forensic wizard before the Muggle undertaker prepared it for burial, as after all they were eager to catch their daughter's murderer. With semen samples, Dumbledore's chosen expert had no difficulty conjuring up pictures of the rapists. With the knife that had cut her throat and been abandoned near the body (with clear fingerprints that were nowhere in police files), he had no trouble conjuring up a picture of the murderer. Not having been born yesterday, he had no trouble recognizing the murderer as Gully Goyle and one of the other assailants as Deuce Crabbe, well-known bullies and troublemakers. All the evidence was turned over to DMLE, along with affidavits. Some of the witnesses were regulars at the Fool's Hat.

Then no one was arrested, not even questioned, and a trustworthy Auror who had checked DMLE files as a favor found that the physical evidence and signed affidavits had disappeared, replaced by a report of vague rumors that had been dead ends. Surely some ally of the villains had tampered with the files in order to protect them. Surely no one would take the trouble to protect Crabbe and Goyle unless they were fellow members of some organization such as the Death Eaters.

Lily had attended the funeral, where she had felt strongly, guiltily, irrationally, that she really should apologize to the parents for what the wizarding world had done to their beautiful daughter, who could have been safe if only she'd stayed a Muggle. "I didn't make the wizarding world go bad," Lily told herself, "and these things happen in the Muggle world, too." But she hugged the bereaved parents and told them, "I know who did this awful thing to Marianne, and I will do everything I possibly can to see to it that they're caught and put away for a very long time."

So now she asked James, "Is anyone doing anything to find the bad guys within DMLE? No? Then we should try. I wish we could just put a Hearing Ear amulet on the evidence before turning it over, and hear who takes it away!"

"An amulet or spell to place on an inanimate object to always tell a distant observer where the object is and who is moving it. Also the amulet or spell should be undetectable to the people who move the object. That sounds like a tall order, but perhaps something like that has been published in a book somewhere... if only you could find the book, I'm sure you're such a good Artificer you could make the amulet no matter how difficult it is." James was thinking aloud. "I wonder what happened to the girl's wand. The Muggles didn't find it near her body. These guys were stupid enough to leave the knife; maybe they were stupid enough to keep the wand. Finding it in their possession would be evidence."