by Leanne Leeds
Chief Clutterbuck and I looked at one another. “We still don’t know who killed Conrad Noble,” he said.
“Or why,” I added.
“Or what any of this has to do with that piece of property the church wanted,” Pepper added.
“Actually, we don’t know that the church wanted it,” Clutterbuck added. “We just know it was deeded to the church for some reason.”
“I don’t know that you’re right about there being no possibility for violence, Ollie.” Gabe glanced toward the church building. “I know you grew up in this place, and it doesn’t seem threatening to you, but someone was shot in the face for that crystal ball. Not to mention the distillery that was deeded to the church—whether the church wanted it or not, it clearly has something to do with all this. These people killed someone over this stuff.”
“Well, we don’t know that, either,” I disagreed with Gabe. “We didn’t get very far with the investigation into Conrad Noble’s death. We don’t know if any of those things have to do with why he was killed.”
“All I’m saying is we may be here for a specific purpose, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that there might be a murderer in that building.” Gabe stepped closer to Dalida. “And that murderer? He—or she—might have a gun.”
Twenty
Everyone was tense.
Adults gathered in small groups around the darkened room, just a handful here and there. Some laughed nervously, others stared with tough-guy expressions, and one older woman in the corner cried quietly at the sight of us. A man next to her patted her hand. The crying woman nodded and pursed her lips together.
“They’re terrified,” I whispered. Maybe I was telling the others what I sensed. Perhaps I just wanted to give voice to their fear. Either way, my body flooded with tension I was sure was only partly my own.
“Be careful,” Chris murmured, his unblinking eyes scanning the room for threats. “Frightened people sometimes do unexpected things.”
The multipurpose room (which I hadn’t been in previously) was almost as large as the chapel on the other side of the building. Large windows lined it, but heavy drapes covered them to keep out the moonlight and prying eyes.
“Reverend,” Clutterbuck called out across the room.
Reverend Kane glanced over his shoulder, sighed, and stood up from one of the tables. He turned, slowly, to face us. “Chief, what brings you out here to the church so late at night?” His eyes swept over our group, and for a moment, the preacher’s face tensed upon spotting Ollie and Pepper. “And with so many faces I wouldn’t expect to see in your company.”
“They don’t belong here,” Beulah Conroe shrieked as she thrust herself up from a chair in the northwest corner of the large room. “None of you people belong here! You just go home now! Shoo!”
We didn’t move.
She continued to glare accusingly until she spotted her son, Beau. “Beau!” All conversations halted. Angry red splotches colored Beulah’s cheeks. “Beau Conroe, what are you doing with those devils? Come over here now, young man!”
The detective blushed in the face of his chastising mother as the soft, distant rumble of thunder soundtracked the bizarre confrontation. “Mama, I think you need to listen to these folks,” he answered smoothly—though he didn’t step toward her as she demanded.
“I don’t listen to devils!” Beulah spat back. She slapped the table in front of her with her hand. “Come over here, boy, and get away from them! Don’t make me tell you again!”
“Now, Beulah, some of these people are friends. That’s no way to treat kin, is it?” Reverend Kane told her. “Clearly, they’re all here for a reason, so perhaps we should listen to what they have to say.” Turning toward me, he raised an eyebrow. “I take it this witching-hour visit is your doing?”
He looked…hopeful.
Why would he look hopeful?
I tried to isolate Kane’s inner world from the fear and panic swirling around him.
Reverend Kane wasn’t sure of himself…and he was doubly unsure how he should react to us. On the one hand, he sensed the situation was not a good one for him—though the Reverend couldn’t quite put the finger on why. But he knew my mother, and he knew of Beulah’s passed-through demand. Had I visited Karen White, he wondered. Would the church funding flow back toward him? Perhaps I had been sent here on her behalf, he thought.
“Actually,” I responded, ignoring the fearful eyes from all corners of the room, “I think you’ll find by the end of the night this may be partially your doing, Reverend Kane. The crystal ball your men’s group is protecting? It’s more than it seems and far more than you’ve been told.” I paused and waited, expecting an argument or an outburst, but none came. Despite their fear, they were listening. “It’s not some religious object. It’s a prison.”
“It is not,” Beulah scoffed, but she hugged herself with her bare arms. “Don’t you listen to these people! They’re liars and devils! What have they ever done for this town besides cause trouble?”
“Besides,” Bond Noble said as he stood up and pointed at me, frightened by what I just said. My eyes widened when I read the same knowledge within him I was trying to tell the group. But how would he know? “It’s not a crystal ball! It’s an orby-culum! It’s a holy object that only the most pious and favored of men can safeguard, and—”
Pepper rolled her eyes. “That’s another name for a crystal ball, you dolt. Orbuculum is Latin. Orb, and…” Pepper looked around. “Actually, I don’t know a lot of Latin. What is culum? Doesn’t it meant butt?”
“I hardly think so!” Beulah shouted hotly. “How dare you!”
Chris met her gaze. “Culum is seen in English as -cula, or -cule. It’s a diminutive suffix roughly translated as ‘to make small’ or ‘somewhat smaller.’ Culum is also the masculine version. Cula would be the feminine.” The vampire paused and tilted his head. “Though it can also mean buttocks.”
“You people need to get out of here!” Beulah snarled.
Outside, the far-off storm grew closer, and it howled.
Inside, more silence. More glances across the room.
Footsteps whispered on the polished floor as the separate smaller groups gathered together into larger ones. I wasn’t sure whether it was for comfort or defense, but I figured it was probably both.
“Should we just expose the ghosts?” Dalida asked quietly. “Maybe that will help them understand.”
“Fortuna, that may be the quickest way to move this along,” Miss Bessie agreed.
Dalida reached into her bag and tossed out dozens of small crystals with a swift movement. The rocks tumbled across the floor and skittered across the large room.
“What are you doing?” Beulah shouted.
Dalida whispered amid a deafening clap of thunder—and with that, the descendants of the witches of Mystic shimmered into view of the townspeople that worked so hard to ensure their continued purgatory.
“Bessie,” Beulah choked, staring with horror at the only ghost she knew well. “Bessie Baker, you don’t look a day over fifty. How did you get so young?”
“I died.” Bessie swept her arms back toward the other ghosts. “It’s not an age-defying trick any of us would recommend, but there are a few benefits to moving into the next phase of existence.” Miss Bessie straightened her shoulders and looked back briefly toward the Reverend. “Now that you see we’re here, maybe someone should bring out that crystal ball so we can get on with this. We’re not the only ones.”
The gathered parishioners looked left, looked right, looked up and then down. Some were pale and shaking. A few seemed to mouth prayers. Others stood, shocked, their mouths open wide as if frozen in a scream. I observed (with some admiration) a calm Reverend Kane.
He was not pale, and he was not shocked.
But he also wasn’t speaking.
“The crystal ball needs to stay where it is! It’s the only thing that protects us from the likes of you!” Beulah said, flaring her nostrils in a fur
y. “We were warned that someday you would all come back, that you would come to destroy us!”
“My mother told you that,” I said quietly to the old woman. “Karen White gave birth to me, and then abandoned me. She did the same to Dalida.” I gestured toward my twin and then glanced at Angie, not wanting to divulge her secret.
I understood Pepper’s point about secrets being toxic, but I wasn’t ready to jump in the “never hold my tongue” boat with her. Angie clung to her father, Martin behind her. As our eyes met, she gave a quick nod as permission.
“Our younger sister Angie’s story is, in some ways, even worse than ours.”
Gasps from the crowd. Half looked at Angie while the other half scrambled for a better vantage from which to view her.
“Angie was adopted?” Hoyt Abernathy stepped out from behind a tall man. Angie’s face softened.
“This town has a lot of secrets,” Clutterbuck told Hoyt. “More than just Angie’s. It’s time for all that to stop now.”
“And in all the ways that are important, Hoyt Abernathy, I am Angie’s mother,” the shimmering Tara told Hoyt.
“Does any of this really matter?” Bond Noble asked with a patronizing toss of his head. I looked at him. Something within him had shifted rapidly. Too rapidly. “We were told what to do with these people if they showed up—just the way they have tonight. I don’t know why we are bothering to have a conversation with any of them. We all know what to do, don’t we?”
“Bond, wait—” Reverend Kane said, but it was too late.
The assembled church members reached into purses, grabbed jars from behind them, and pulled handfuls of something from their pockets. With a not-at-all unified shout of “Be gone!” they all flung something wet and foul-smelling in our direction. It all happened so fast that only Chris reacted quickly enough.
Like the vampire hero he was, he flew across the room, gathering those of us alive into his arms as he tried (best he could) to block whatever it was.
Which turned out to be garlic.
Well, not just garlic.
Apparently, when you tell many older women (and men), they should get as much garlic as possible to protect themselves? The best deal to be had on garlic was the gigantic jars of the minced stuff at Costco.
Because that’s what poor Chris was covered in.
Once the aerial attacks ceased, Chris released us from his grasp and stood up. The indescribably exasperated look on his face told me he had absorbed most of the attack. I wrinkled my nose as he came closer to see if I was all right. The stench of garlic was enough to make my eyes water, and I tried not to gag. “My apologies for the odor,” he said. He pulled his garlic soaked shirt off and attempted to shake the globs onto the floor.
“Oh my,” Mary, Gabe’s mother, said breathlessly, looking Chris up and down. Leaning toward Miss Bessie, she whispered loudly, “I’m beginning to understand what Fortuna sees in the vampire. His chest looks like it was chiseled out of marble.”
“They can all hear you, you know,” Miss Bessie told Mary.
Mary shrugged.
“That’s a vampire?” Reverend Kane choked out with a cringe. He grabbed wildly behind him as if looking for something. Whether it was a weapon or something to lean on because he was having trouble standing, I didn’t know. He was frozen to the spot and seemingly unable to move. Unable to think.
A witch walking into his church didn’t faze him. Ghosts appearing, the dead talking? No big deal. A vampire ten feet from him? That, apparently, got his attention.
“But we just covered you in garlic! Why aren’t you dead?” The big man suddenly looked gaunt; his eyes opened so wide they were the most prominent feature on his face. “Garlic kills—”
“Garlic doesn’t kill vampires. In fact, the traditional belief is that garlic’s odor deters vampires. However, even that’s not true in a metaphysical sense,” Chris told the Reverend, still shirtless. “We have hypersensitive noses, and so we have an aversion to anything that smells particularly pungent.” Chris rolled up his shirt and handed it to me, gesturing toward his back. I wiped off the last of the garlic as he continued. “Most of the rumored vampire repellents have a perfectly obvious—and non-lethal—origin.”
A man pulling thick silver-rope necklaces and bracelets from a pouch he was carrying stopped and stared at Chris. “Silver?” he asked nervously, holding up the jewelry.
Chris shook his head. “Like I said, most of the rumored ‘instant death’ mechanisms don’t work.”
“Oh yeah?” Bond Noble asked. Then, the unmistakable sound of a revolver being cocked. “How about a bullet, vampire? Is that a rumored instant death mechanism?”
The parishioners were suddenly more frightened of Bond Noble than they were of Chris.
Which, since he was a vampire and Bond Noble was a member of their church?
Well, that seemed odd.
“Bond, you need to put that gun away right now!” Prunella Noble, Conrad Noble’s widow, grabbed his arm and pulled, but he shook her off with a sneer. “Bond, that’s the chief of police over there, you idiot! And the detective! You’re going to get yourself arrested!”
“The chief of police is over there with witches and vampires,” the scruffy man told his sister-in-law contemptuously. With a mocking laugh, he shoved her away. “I told you that I was better at this than my brother. I should’ve been a member of the men’s group years ago!” Bond glared at Reverend Kane. “But no, you wouldn’t let me in until I got you that stupid land. Well, I’m in now, aren’t I, preacher?” He uttered a crazy laugh.
“Bond, this is a church—” Reverend Kane started, but Bond cut him off.
“This isn’t a church. This is your personal piggy bank, and I finally figured out how to make it mine.” Bond paced back and forth across the rec room, waving his gun wildly as he spoke. “You’ve been using Karen all these years, taking from the church coffers. I figured it out. I figured it out!” He paused and shrugged. “Well, I met someone from Las Vegas, and they told me all about it. Big biker dude that used to work for her. Anyway, I know what you were doing. Oh, I know more than any of you idiots!” Bond’s gun waved toward the terrified Holy Grove Church parishioners. “Maybe even you, Reverend!”
Chris met my eyes and tilted his head toward the gun, but I shook my head no. Pepper caught the exchange and murmured in surprise, but I surreptitiously pointed toward Bond then tapped my ear. Glancing at Clutterbuck, he nodded his agreement and then looked to Chris. “You’re fast enough, right?” he whispered.
Chris looked shocked at the chief’s implication and his trust. But he shifted into a slight crouch all the same. “I guess we’re going to find out,” the vampire whispered back. Turning to me, he muttered, “You get behind me.”
I did.
Just as my sister stepped in front of me.
“Tell me what you knew,” Dalida said, her voice low and her demeanor cool. She stepped toward Bond with steady steps, her arms wide. “You’re so smart; surely you want to tell me what you did.” She tilted her head coquettishly and sighed contentedly. “I mean, you’re smarter than any of them, right? Tell them. Tell them so they can appreciate your…your genius.”
“Yeah, I am a genius, right?” Bond replied proudly, his eyes glued to Dalida.
Pepper, startled, moved toward Dalida. “What the—”
I grabbed Pepper’s arm.
“Her powers are the exact opposite of Fortuna’s,” Miss Bessie told Pepper. Before she got two words into the sentence, Dalida flicked her wrist, and the shimmer surrounding the ghost dimmed.
“Where did she go?” Clutterbuck asked, frowning.
“Can you still see me, Pepper?” Pepper nodded. “Much better at her magic. Good girl, Dalida. Anyway, remember, Fortuna can go into someone’s mind and see what’s there, yes?” Miss Bessie told Pepper. The reporter nodded again. “Dalida can do the opposite. You can see me because Dalida has enabled your mind to perceive me on this plane. She’s not doing anything to me so y
ou can see me.” Miss Bessie extended her hand. “She’s doing it to you.”
Pepper looked surprised. “But I don’t—”
“Hush, child, Bond Noble can still hear you. I don’t know how strong her hold is over him.” The older woman glanced over her shoulder once again to check that Dalida was still the center of Bond’s rapt attention. “Dalida realized that Bond Noble had a plot of his own, and she’s appealing to the parts of him that want to confess. That wants people to know. She’s helping him, magically, to believe that everyone here will be in support of him. Now, let’s listen.”
“—so when Reverend Kane, here, told me that Conrad wouldn’t sell him the old distillery, I knew I had an in.” Bond was sitting casually on a table, swinging his feet. The revolver sat next to him on the table, still within inches of his hand. He looked pleased that Dalida was paying such close attention to his story and he was cheerfully animated. Like he was relating a trip to a favorite ice cream shop. “Joe Bob told me Karen was twisting this whole town up, and he told me all about the people she had imprisoned in the orby-culum. An orby she convinced these idiots was some kind of blessed protection thing!” He slapped his hand hard on his leg and laughed uproariously. “Can you believe that?”
“What are you talking about?” Reverend Kane asked fearfully.
“I ain’t talking to you, you idiot!” Bond shouted fiercely, his face twisting with rage. “I’m talking to her!”
The Reverend shrank back.
“Yes, Bond, you’re talking to me,” Dalida told him. She reached out and took him by the hand. The anger drained from his face, and he turned toward her with a smile. “Please, finish the story.”
“So, Joe Bob told me about Karen and that she was using this stupid town to power her magic. He mentioned someone here had taken her down. That’s how Joe Bob was able to get free. I knew she had been arrested, and I knew my brother and his stupid wife were all wrapped up in this church. Conrad was even one of the people that guarded the orby.” Bond frowned slightly. “I told him what Joe Bob told me, about Karen being super-wealthy and giving this church all this money—money that the Reverend just stole. I told him we could step in, we could help her, and then she would probably give us all the money after kicking Kane out.”