“What the hell do you think you’re doing here?” the captain’s voice rang out loudly in my ear.
“It’s not illegal to visit the town next to yours, is it?” Gavin answered.
“It is if you’re investigating a death that falls outside of your jurisdiction.”
“Who said I was investigating?”
“You’re following the woman who found the body.”
“Don’t you mean your primary suspect?” Something crinkled like plastic and I hear the flick of a lighter.
“What makes you think Ms. Iren is our primary suspect?”
Ms. Iren. I didn’t like the sound of that at all. You should have to be at least 30 before people stop using your first name.
“Murderers tend to return to the scene of the crime,” Gavin said.
“Don’t you walk away from me!”
He was walking away? Audio only left a lot to be desired. I poked my head around the corner and saw Captain Blue Eyes following Not-So-Secret Agent Man down the street.
“You aren’t my boss, Brian. I’m on my own time here.”
“Since when are local off-duty cops allowed to disrupt state run investigations?”
“Since I found my neighboring community was a radical feminist cult.”
“Radical feminist cult?” Captain Kavanagh said the words in disbelief as I was thinking them. “Don’t you think that’s taking it a little too far?”
“You tell me.”
I heard a car door open and slam shut as I watched Gavin pull a stack of manila folders from what I assumed was his car. I made a mental note to be wary of silver Honda civics until this blew over. The disgruntled local police officer took a final drag off his cigarette as the captain cracked open the first file.
“What the hell am I looking at?” the captain asked.
“The second most recent death of a young male in Dewdrop.”
“An accidental death.”
“You’ll find a lot of those around here. In fact, you’re holding a case file on all of them.”
“Where did you get these?”
“I put them together myself. They’re unofficial.”
“There sure are a lot of copies of official coroner’s reports that you’re probably not supposed to have,” Captain Kavanagh admonished him.
He just shrugged. “I know a guy.”
“I bet you do.” The rustling of papers quieted and I watched Captain Kavanagh push the stack of files back into Gavin’s hands.
“How can you just ignore that?” Gavin threw his cigarette butt on the street.
“Ignore what exactly? A pile of illegally obtained paperwork that has absolutely nothing to do with the case I’m investigating?”
“It’s a pattern.”
“Oh, I saw a pattern. A pattern of suicides, a pattern of reckless behavior, a—”
“They’re murders!”
“Not according to the county coroner. Any county’s coroner, of the dozens you just showed me. Who the heck do you know that has access to all this information? Someone in the NSA?”
Gavin ignored the question and tossed the folders back into his car. “Only one male born in Dewdrop has reached the age of 28 in the last hundred years. A hundred years, Brian. You don’t think that’s a little suspicious?”
“That guy looks to be about seventy,” the captain replied, nodding to the old couple walking down the sidewalk next to them.
“He’s not blood. They don’t kill their husbands.”
“Seems like husbands would be the first to go in a radical feminist cult.”
“Nope. Only their sons. I still can’t figure out why.”
“Stop figuring and start policing. In your own jurisdiction.”
“Most of them don’t die here. These women are too smart to draw suspicion on their precious town. But the boys die just the same, even when they run.”
“Are you hearing yourself?”
“I can’t just let this go.”
“Don’t make me call your superior, Gavin.”
“How can you ignore those deaths?”
“Because they’ve got nothing to do with the only death I care about. And that kid wasn’t even born here.”
“Care to guess who the only locally born male pushing 30 is?”
“Not really.”
“Wesley Iren. Your suspect’s brother.”
My heart stopped beating.
“She’s not our suspect,” the captain said.
That started it up again.
“The brother just got back from the Big Apple. And she… She must be protecting him somehow. I don’t think Gemma is like the rest of them.” How sweet. “It’s not as radical on her side of town and—”
“It’s not a town,” Captain Kavanagh huffed in exasperation. “Why does everyone keep calling it a town? The place isn’t even legally called Dewdrop.”
Dewdrop wasn’t really Dewdrop? Since when? I’d have to look that up.
“She might not be a feminazi, but she still has to kill for them. Doesn’t have much family, probably doesn’t want to see him gone. My guess is she’s sacrificing visitors to keep the harpies away from her brother.”
“Sacrificing?” Captain Kavanagh said skeptically.
“Yeah, sacrificing. To whatever creepy boy-eating pagan goddess these freaks worship. It’s been going on for centuries. Bet that out-of-towner probably wasn’t worth as much as one of their sons, but he was probably a distant relative and was good enough. She’ll probably have to kill again to appease Eliza, that’s who calls all the shots around here, and I’ll be damned if I just stand by and—”
“Jesus, Gavin! You sound like you’re locked up in a psych ward, ranting and raving in a padded room.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“Not yet.”
“I have dozens of unexplained deaths to back me up, Brian! And I’m looking into more now that someone put that family tree up online. So many boys. This is one for the history books.”
“You need to get some rest.”
“I can’t.”
Captain Kavanagh ran his hand through his hair. “I don’t suppose that your former partner was born in Dewdrop, was he?”
“No.”
“That’s a relief.”
“But his father was. Died right after Emmett was born. Only 23 years old. Same age as he was when he…”
“You really need to talk to someone, man. You’re still carrying this around after all these years and grasping at straws.”
“I know what I saw that night.”
“You know what your mind thinks it saw,” Brian said sympathetically. “To help protect you from that trauma of watching—”
“Don’t give me that psychobabble BS. These freaks are into some dark stuff. Otherworldly, unexplainable stuff.”
“Oh, I’ve read all about the magic of Dewdrop,” the captain laughed. “All I see is a small town, wait no, not a freaking town, but it’s like all the other little cloistered communities out in the middle of nowhere. Keeping to themselves, doing things the way they’ve always been done. Wanting to be left alone.”
“This place isn’t like that.”
“Okay, so maybe they’re not thumping Bibles, they’re thumping whatever the heck it is Wiccans thump. Scrolls of Isis or rocks from Stonehenge, I don’t know. And I haven’t looked it up yet because it isn’t relevant to the case, which is the only reason I’m here.”
“Oh, it’s relevant. And these aren’t Wiccans.”
“I’m not here to scrutinize the religious beliefs of American citizens. I’m here to find out who killed Thomas Madigan, who had never been here before and who didn’t know anyone that lives here. There’s no motive for anyone in Dewdrop. Not Gemma Iren, not Eliza Erda, no one.”
“Every woman in this place is pissed that outsiders are coming in for their secret ceremony.”
“It’s not all that secret, Gavin. People have been telling me ‘Happy Hettymoot’ all day long and I’m still not e
ven sure what a Hettymoot is.”
“It’s a—”
“I don’t care what a Hettymoot is!” Captain Kavanagh cut him off. “Except that it drew Thomas here, and his ex-girlfriend followed.”
“Ex-girlfriend?”
“Yeah. Not that I should be telling you this, but she is our primary suspect. It’s always a girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, or wife. Somebody that knew the victim, somebody that hated the victim, somebody that actually cared enough about the victim to kill him. And Kaitlynn Emerson fits that description to a T.”
“Is she from Dewdrop?” Gavin asked as the captain began walking away. “Was her name on that family tree site?”
“I can’t discuss this with you. Just pull your head out of your ass and get some help.”
“She’s not from Woodshade, is she?”
“Doesn’t matter where she’s from. She’s not there, she’s right here, right where I want her to be. Don’t go sniffing around.”
“You’ll see, Brian,” Not-So-Secret Agent man said knowingly as he climbed into his car. “Stick around here long enough and you’ll see something you can’t explain, something you can’t let go. Probably tonight. Then you’ll be the crazy one that nobody believes, just like me. Good luck climbing the ranks after that.”
I heard the engine start and the car door slam shut, then nothing except the birds chirping around me. The captain shook his head as Gavin sped away, then lit up a cigarette of his own. Peering into the jewelry box, I found the silver bead had reattached itself to the other earring, just like Ariadne had said it would.
A weight lifted off my shoulders as the clouds parted, a shaft of sunlight warming the porch where I stood. The actual investigator didn’t consider me a suspect, only the obsessive, off-duty cop from Woodshade did, and apparently no one took him seriously. Maybe if I just kept my head down, Thomas’s girlfriend would get arrested and this whole thing would be over.
Walking back to my car, I passed the cigarette butts that both men had rudely thrown on the street. One of them was longer than the other, so that had to be Captain Kavanagh’s because he’d left in a hurry. I couldn’t just leave them lying there, and not just because I was environmentally conscious. You never knew when you’d need something like that for a spell. I slipped them into two little vials I kept in my satchel, hoping that I’d never actually need them.
Chapter 11
“So what are you going to wear to Hettymoot?” I asked from the hallway outside Wesley’s room. He’d left the door open, so I didn’t feel like I was barging in.
“Nothing,” he replied, not looking up from his laptop.
“That will get you some attention.”
Wesley actually smiled for a change, just for a second. Then he told me, “I’m not going.”
“What?”
“I don’t want to go.”
“But you’ve always gone to Hettymoot, even when you lived in New York.”
“Now I live here.”
“Uh, that’s all the better reason to go. Shorter commute.” My heart started to beat faster as a hint of fear crept up from my belly into my throat. If Wesley didn’t get Hetty’s blessing… “Oh, come on. Maybe you’ll meet a girl. There are lots of out of towners around this year.”
“Did it ever occur to you that might be the reason I don’t want to go?”
“Because of the outsiders?”
He let out a beat of bitter laughter. “No, the idea of being breeding stock.”
“Oh.” That was a creepy, yet accurate way to put it. “Yeah, I guess it is a little weird.”
“A little? You’ve been living here too long, Gem. Time to get out in the real world.”
That made me jealous and defensive at the same time. “It’s a real world here. Just an itty bitty one.”
“If you want some cute little niece hanging around town to remember me by, you’re a few years too late.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that nobody really wants a Son’s Son to begin with, and they certainly don’t want anyone visibly cursed to be their baby daddy.” He ran his hand through his curiously streaked hair.
Wesley was wrong about that. In general, witches did indeed look for sons of Hetty’s Daughter’s daughters. However, my brother was the oldest son of the oldest son of the oldest son stretching all the way back to Merit and that made him far more appealing.
I wasn’t one to catch baby fever or push people to do something, but if he didn’t have any kids that line would end. Wesley had said on multiple occasions that he’d be happy to see it go. Why would he ever put another boy through this?
Dot insisted that wasn’t entirely true. He wanted to leave a piece of himself behind like most people did. I had my suspicions that my little nephew was already out there in the world somewhere and that’s why Wes wasn’t all that outwardly concerned with tradition.
“We don’t know that you’re cursed,” I reminded him.
“Hexed, spelled, infected, whatever. All synonyms for the same thing anyway. Doomed.”
Infected? That’s a strange word to throw into the mix. I tried to swallow my tongue, but instead I ended up saying, “Well, I’ll tell our aunts about your pity party for one then.”
“You do that.”
My brother sure could be a curmudgeon. Maybe he was turning into an old man. I was about to leave him to wallow in his own devices, but I suspected that he’d change his mind and I didn’t want him to hear about Thomas’s murder from someone other than me. “Well, if you decide to go at the last minute, avoid talking to the cops if you can.”
“The cops?” That sure piqued his interest.
“Yeah, um…” I stammered. “So I found a real dead body yesterday.”
He slapped his laptop shut. “You what?”
“He was hanging from the gallows. One of the tourists that came here to see the big show tonight.”
“Another lucky male descendant,” Wesley scoffed. “At least he didn’t know it was coming. What got him?”
“The noose around his neck, I’d imagine.”
“Well, yeah, but what do you think tied it? Pixies?”
Oh. My. Goddess. A little growl escaped my throat. “I don’t know. The state troopers are sniffing around and the gallows are still a crime scene, so Eliza’s minions haven’t been able to conjure the boy’s ghost and ask him.”
“Well, I’m not sure the secondhand posthumous testimony of the victim will be admissible in court.”
“The real investigators think it’s his ex-girlfriend who’s also in town. Hopefully it is.”
“In other words, some poor girl who came here for a fun time is going to walk away in handcuffs for something she didn’t do because a few hundred witches can’t be bothered to take care of their pests.”
“Actually, she probably did it,” I said. “I’m not supposed to tell anyone, but Thomas—”
“Who?”
“That’s the kid that died. He isn’t a distant cousin, err, he wasn’t.”
“You’re sure?”
“I cast the Cognata spell myself. You can’t tell anyone, not even Dot. Eliza’s orders.”
“I swear, this place is more hostile to men than a lesbian bar.” Wesley rubbed the back of his neck. “What bad luck.”
“For Dewdrop or for Thomas?” I asked.
“For you,” he replied. “Did you just find him swinging there?”
“Yeah. I talked to his ghost, too.”
“Are you okay?” My brother got up from his desk and looked me in the eye for a change.
“I guess so. It’s funny, I’ve seen so many ghosts, but never the freshly dead body they once inhabited. I walked right past it the first time because it didn’t seem out of place. Try explaining that to the cops.”
“How did you?”
“I told them that the gallows have always creeped me out and I always walk by without looking at it. The kid’s friends didn’t really like that answer, one of them grabbed me and sla
mmed my head against Dot’s bus.”
“What?”
Resting Witch Face Page 11