“I’m assuming nothing. Merely reading.”
“Stop imagining you can see my aura. That really is enraging.”
“Oh my!” Beatricia sipped coffee, still extending the pinky. “It is worse than I thought.
You really must tell me what’s going on.”
“And if I did,” said Rachel, looking away from her mother’s face, to where red and white pansies swayed in window boxes. “What good would it do? You can’t help. It would only worry you. But I’ll say something to put you at ease.” She patted her mother’s leg beneath the covers. “We do have a problem on the farm, but also plenty of help to deal with it. It’ll be over by tomorrow morning. I can promise you that.”
“Tell me about it, Rachel.”
“No.” She rubbed her forehead. “If I did, Dr. Pasquale would kill me. Really, Mom, think of your heart—and my head. I have to work with the man at SGH.” She motioned toward the kitchen. “So, is that enough breakfast? I could go get a second helping.”
“It’s plenty, Rachel.” Beatricia sighed. “When you’re young, they step on your fingers,” she murmured. “When you’re old, they step on your heart.”
Laughter surged up against Rachel’s diaphragm. She tried to swallow it back down, but it burst from her mouth.
Beatricia cursed and looked away.
Rachel picked up the breakfast tray from her mother’s bedside table. Eyes still tearing, but the laughter was gone.
“Come back if you change your mind,” Beatricia said. “I’ll just sit here in the dark, figuratively speaking. I remember Deputy Crockett. He’s on the right track with the Dalai Lama. But who are those two other deputies? The Haitian and the Hispanic woman?”
“They were both your students at Kingston Prep. They’re…”
“Don’t tell me. I need a real puzzle. I’m tired of Sudoku.”
“Good. Keep your brain active. And don’t believe everything you see.”
Ewe shrubs slapped the windowpanes in the breeze. Rachel got another whiff of burning leaves on salt-tinged air. A little like her grandmother’s hand-rolled cigarettes.
“Why don’t you get out of my room and leave me alone?” Beatricia snapped.
“All right, I will.” Rachel wiped off the folding tray, then tucked it beside the refrigerator. She flinched when a motorcycle engine roared down Burnt Chestnut, then trailed away.
“So, Mom? Have you felt cold today?”
“No, Rachel. I haven’t. The panes were frozen on the outside, yes. But of course it’s not coming here. Not so early.”
“What’re you talking about? What’s not coming here?”
“It’s looking for something, but won’t come until dark.” Beatricia folded her arms on top of the bedspread, and looked up at her Tree of Life tapestry. “It’s coming back by the power of animal magnetism.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You have a more immediate concern.” Beatricia tapped the bedspread with one finger. “There’s already something else inside your house.”
“Hmm. I see.” Rachel kissed her mother’s forehead. Beatricia’s intuition was powerful as Merlin’s wand, but she was always imagining things. She was positive that a killer, or killers, was coming.
Rachel pulled the cottage door shut behind her. The spring day had turned lush, summer-ripe. Near the bed of delicately blue vinca that Wolfie used as his private urinal, cup-shaped crocuses grew, their yellow and purple and white-striped leaves forming a city of tiny cradles. Long-armed forsythia undulated in a breeze that felt healing. Rachel’s spirits lifted. She felt the absence of immediate danger, at least for now. She dashed back across the clamshell driveway, sure her mother was wrong about something being in the house already. Wait—was there something flickering by an upstairs window? In an instant, the light was gone.
Nijinsky lay asleep just behind the tire of the sheriff’s patrol car. On his back, sweet gray face lifted to catch the sun.
“Come on, Jinksy, let’s eat.” Rachel leaned to pet him. “Kitty, Kitty!” When the cat didn’t move, “Jinks! Wake up. Catnip. Catnip time!” She froze, hand hovering over his head.
“Please, Jinks.” Her knees locked. She couldn’t touch him.
She closed her eyes and drew a breath. If she cried her face would become creased and fallen. No way could she hide that from Dave and the boys.
She touched Nijinsky’s side with the toe of her boot. Then knelt and stroked him. She couldn’t help crying, her chest throbbing hard. It felt like she was dying, sinking deep into the earth with a great weight tied to her ankles.
Nijinsky felt soft, so death had been recent. But he was colder than the ambient temperature. But how could that be? She sat cross-legged on the driveway and held him in her lap, and heaved a final sigh. She tilted his head, tears again blinding her, and cried out when blood suddenly gushed from his left ear.
“Dave,” she screamed.
The porch door slammed, footsteps pounded toward her—first Dave’s, then the heavier tread of the sheriff. Behind them, Lev stepped quickly.
Lev took Nijinsky from her arms, his steady gaze glassy. Sad, yet earnest. “He’ll lie down to pleasant dreams.” He set his jaw and wrapped the cat in an old horse blanket that’d been left on the porch.
“Jesus.” Dave was pale as a ghost in sunlight. He wrapped his arms around Rachel who sobbed into his shirt.
The cat nestled in Lev’s arms. Rachel broke away and stroked him. A small but monstrous injustice, on a day when all their lives were threatened. Or an omen? A first blow against her household.
She backed away. “Thanks, Lev. I…” She ought to ask about any disturbances at the barn, but just stood, mouth open, beside Dave. Lev turned away, his eyes red with anguish as he carried the cat away.
The horse blanket had belonged to Aristino, dead one year now. How she wanted him back.
The sheriff stepped in, mumbling condolences neither Rachel nor Dave heard.
I can see how it looks, but I didn’t kill your cat.” Phil Wise sat on the slatted porch swing, anchoring it with braced black engineer boots. The swing didn’t move.
Rachel perched on the edge of an adjacent glider, Dave beside her, motionless and silent. The side porch was paved with brick, half-screened to the north and east by blackberry vines. But today, its floor seemed to be sinking, following a gentle slope toward the steps. She wanted to speak, to say how much she loved Dave, but words lay trapped in her mind. She’d never felt this anxious before, except after one of her old, recurring night terrors. The wind chimes released shivers of notes, stopped, resumed.
Nine-year-old Leo was awake. Drum rolls rattled from his room upstairs, ghost notes filling the pauses, dead space punctuated by a crash of cymbals. The noise would wake his older brother. Then Zack would plug into his amp, skipping up and down chord progressions. Like any other normal, noisy day, Rachel thought. But not.
“Nijinsky died of head trauma.” She turned toward Wise. “He was lying beside the rear tire of your car. It probably delivered the fatal blow.”
Dave sighed heavily.
“If I’d run over the cat, the body’d be crushed,” the sheriff mumbled, looking up at the sky-blue ceiling of the porch as if concerned the swing’s chains would give way.
“We’ve got to consider everything,” Dave looked down at his hands, then over at the barn. Lev was leading one of the horses out.
Rachel frowned. “What does that mean?”
“When you got out of the car,” Dave said to Phil, “Nijinsky wasn’t there.”
“You could’ve missed seeing him,” said Rachel, fingers locking with such force she could crack a walnut.
“I don’t think so.” Dave looked at her hands, still clutched in her lap. “I don’t think the cat was near the car. So—”
“His head hit the bumper. He died by the back tire,” she insisted.
“I would’ve heard something,” said the sheriff. “Felt abump.”
“What
’re you saying? What are both of you saying?” Her face grew hot. She glared first at Wise, then Dave. “That someone killed the cat and set his body by the car, in broad daylight?”
“Why didn’t you notice him before, when you went out to Bea’s cottage?” asked Wise.
“I don’t know.” She forced her hands apart and looked into Wise’s eyes. “Find the assassin, arrest him. I’m not the sheriff. You are.”
And a miserable specimen at that, she thought. Look at him, sitting there like Jabba the Hutt, about to break our swing and get us all goddamn killed.
Over the waistband of her jeans she gave her flesh a little squeeze. Her first husband, Mike, had died in a missile strike on an Iraqi hospital. She’d ballooned up to over two hundred pounds, carrying Zack. Fat still scared her. A virus she’d once contracted, beaten, and survived. But it lay waiting to re-infect. She stood to go find chocolate, changed her mind and sat back down, then reached up under her shirt again, feeling reassured by the washboard strength of her abs under the small roll of fat. Still, a handful of M&M’s would feel good, the candy coating melting in her mouth…
She spied the rectangular bulge of a cigarette pack in the sheriff’s breast pocket. “Like one?” he said.
“Well...I would.” She chewed her lip. “But I quit a long time ago.”
“Believe I’ll quit as well. These things ain’t doin’ me a bit of good.” Wise took out the Marlborough lights, walked across the lawn to the trashcan set out by the driveway and tossed the pack in. By the time he’d climbed the porch steps, he was out of breath.
As the county medical examiner, she’d often accompanied him to the scene when there was a suspicious death. He always huffed and puffed and sweated walking around crime scenes, then usually sat on the nearest chair while she examined the bodies.
“Maybe you should check out the cat, too,” she said. “Look for, I don’t know—some sort of evidence.”
Phil Wise knew he hadn’t killed the damn cat. But maybe Rachel was on to something about its death. An open mind was important in every investigation. He sensed her disdain for him, even though he assumed they’d had a good working relationship up to now. She was always respectful. In fact, he liked her very much. Whenever called in to view corpses left by homicides, suicides, or accidents, she’d behaved professionally, with great compassion.
“Poor boy” or “poor girl” she always said, almost as a mantra, as she examined the bodies and called out her observations. “No blood in the heart; lungs filled with fluid; broken shoulder blade; torso twisted; ruptured globes.”
Sometimes she seemed close to tears; an endearing quality. Maybe she had a gift for them, like Padre Pio, who Rachel’d said had filled vases with tears of compassion.
The sheriff let his swing rock back and forth, set into motion by her prompt. “You’re right. I oughta try to determine how he died. We didn’t look all that close.”
“Check the side away from the bleeding ear,” Rachel said. “A blow knocks the brain to the opposite side of the skull.”
“Okey dokey,” said the sheriff. “I’ll call if I need any help.”
He heaved up from the swing and walked out to the barn to find Lev, fishing a cigarette from inside his pocket, and realizing he’d quit ten minutes ago.
He’d been a forensic hero in the past. He would be a hero again.
Two years before, Della Pruitt had used her husband’s deer rifle to shoot him. With a folding knife, Phil had dug out a bullet embedded in a tree in the couple’s backyard. “Target practice, months ago,” Mrs. Pruitt had explained.
He’d then located a bloodied chain in the corncrib.
“Sometimes I use a chainsaw to turn a buck into steaks,” she maintained. She’d attempted to clean it with soap and water. But he’d found a pasty brown residue, which he’d sent to the forensic DNA department in Richmond. Bingo. Later, a suitcase had floated to shore, discovered by a seventeen-year-old surfer at Virginia Beach.
The Samsonite had contained human remains. The blood sample from the chain saw matched the DNA in the shoe compartment. A bullet embedded in the decomposing spleen semi- preserved by salt water had matched the one he had dug out of the tree bark with his Swiss Army knife.
That case had made all the state newspapers. “Big time!” he whispered. This case would not defeat him either.
“Hope Lev hasn’t buried the cat yet.” Dave shook his head and looked down. “God, I hope it was the car that hit Jinx. I mean, so he didn’t suffer.”
Rachel took a hard look at her husband. The worry in his forehead, the stress in the knotty muscles of his shoulders. The circulatory waves of the prominent arteries of his neck.
She looked down at the Mr. Goodbar mini, tore it from its wrapper and tossed it into her mouth.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way,” he said.
They glanced at each other, then away, as if each was embarrassed to see fear in the other. A breeze was stirring. The chickens scratching in the barnyard were cackling, the roosters competing for the loudest crow. A guinea hen stared transfixed at its reflection in a hubcap of the cruiser. Zack was playing “Master of the Puppets” on his favorite Ibanez guitar, the distortion turned way up, notes leaking between the spaces of the upstairs windows, dripping like rain.
“The sheriff’s an idiot,” said Rachel. “He only believes we’re in danger because he had a fucking dream.”
“Well, we weren’t so smart, either,” he said. “Thinking the neighbors left only because they sensed danger. That’s not true.”
“Yeah,” she nodded. “Everyone’s being stupid.”
“They left because all the murders occurred at a full moon,” said Dave. “Death is coming straight down the street, people falling like dominoes. They were freaked out by all the funerals. A burial drives home the reality of death. The state police didn’t go to them.”
He turned away toward the quiet emptiness of Burnt Chestnut Road. Down the street a car backfired. Its engine roared. “It’s out there, Rachel. The murderer.”
“It? Murderer or murderers?” said Rachel.
Dave shrugged. “Natural or supernatural?”
“Goddamn it, don’t say things like that to me. I don’t want to hear another word.”
“I don’t like you cursing at me,” he said.
“Likewise.”
“I’m not cursing at you.”
“Let’s take a minute and pray for our family,” Rachel said. “For the children.”
“Okay. Good idea as any. Together or separate?”
Her hand groped for his. Their fingers wove together. “Let’s each say our own.” She whispered a silent prayer for protection, then opened her eyes, still holding his hand. His lips were still moving. She closed her eyes again and prayed the bad guys would just pass by. Her hands were cramping and Dave’s grew clammy. She let them slip apart.
“I’ll kill anyone who threatens us.” She remembered she’d left her rifle inside.
He nodded. “I used to wonder if I could ever do that. If it came right down to it. Now I know. I would.”
Through the blackberry vines she saw the sheriff walking back to the porch, red in the face, swinging his arms as if hiking up a deep slope. “Here comes our expert.”
Wise climbed up the steps, wiped sweat from his face with an impeccable white hankie initialed with green embroidery; dropped himself onto the swing. The hooks in the porch ceiling beam screeched and groaned.
“Well,” he said, after a pause. “Maybe you better take a look at the cat yourself.”
“Why?”
“There ain’t a mark on him. I went over every furry inch and couldn’t find a scratch, not a bump, not one. Even checked for poison, best I could. No foam in the mouth, no chemical smell. Nothing in the urine.”
“What toxin would make him bleed from the ear?” said Rachel. “Except Coumadin, maybe. Blood thinners. Don’t have any of those lying around. Besides, he’d be bleeding from everywhere.”
“Trauma,” said Rachel. “But…not your car.” She swallowed. “I’m sorry.”
Phil tipped his head. “I think I’ll set up a small camera in the house if you don’t mind.” He slapped his knees and stood. His pants were so perfectly starched; it looked like God had done the pressing. “Might record a disturbance we’d miss. Wish we had four hi-8s so we could set one up each side of the house.”
The rubber soles of his boots squeaked as he stepped off the porch on the way to the Crown Victoria.
“Suit yourself. But I think it’s silly,” Rachel called after him.
“I’m jes’ guessin’,” said the sheriff, turning around. “You might think it’s funny. But, if somethin’ attacks y’all here, it’s gonna come from the north pasture. Got Deputy Ruiz lookin’ over it, but somethin’ might happen that she can’t see.”
Rachel understood an investigator feeling his way through a case, but Sheriff Wise was pulling his guesses from dreams. “It’s going to come from the east.”
The sheriff shook his head. “The north. It’ll come the easiest way, and when it comes, we might as well record it. Some sort of disturbance, maybe.”
Dave shifted in the swing, causing it to wobble. The chain bolts creaked in the ceiling above them.
“A disturbance?” Rachel leaned forward. “Sheriff Wise, I can’t believe a man like you, a thinking man, believes in ghosts and vengeful spirits. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, Doc,” said Wise. “Thanks for askin’. I got nothin’ to say about it, right now. But I got this-here equipment in the car. Might as well use it.”
Rachel felt a catch in her side. She was suddenly breathless from a pain that shot through her left flank. “I’m bleeding,” she mumbled to Dave. “Guess I’m early.”
“Goddamn it.” Dave paced across the porch, wringing his hands. “I need to saddle a horse and take a good look at those woods, like you say. Need to look at the main trails, the back trails, and squeeze through those game trails. We’ll find something out there. It won’t take an hour. I’m that sure.”
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