“It’s almost always something lame like pixies now.”
“Yeah, that figures.” Emmett leaned towards Wesley and closed his eyes. “What do you have?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, it’s not good,” Emmett said.
“Never is,” Wes replied quietly.
My heart sank and I tried to push it away, but my eyes still stung. Captain Kavanagh shook off his disbelief and took a long look at Wesley, who just shrugged at him.
“Anyway…” my brother trailed off, looking to me to change the subject.
“Sorry to drag it all up,” I said. “But another boy died and we wanted to know what happened to you.”
“Why me? There’s no shortage of us.”
“Well, not you so much as your partner Gavin.”
“Aw, geez,” Emmett laughed. “We were tight, I guess. Both rookies. But, man he’s kind of a pain in the neck. Like, let it go already.”
“It seems like he became a little obsessed with our, um…” I glanced at Brian and wished he wasn’t here. “Our way of life.”
“A little?” Emmett laughed. “Yeah, you could say that.”
Brian swallowed, the knot in his throat jumping. “I can’t believe these words are about to come out of my mouth, but… Do you haunt him?” he asked.
“Not willingly. I don’t really care. He’s the one that’s hung up on my death.” Emmett pointed at me. “She could probably explain it better.”
“Not really,” I protested. “I’m not dead.”
“So, when somebody thinks about you a lot, or talks about you, it’s like you can hear it. Sometimes. It’s hard to explain because when I come here, when I’m like this…” Emmett stared down at his hands. “I don’t exactly remember what I’m like or where I was when I’m over there. On the other side. But I know that when I’m over there, however I am, I can hear it. That’s how I showed up when Gavin and my sister were talking. I just popped in, confused. Like I did today.”
“Sorry about that.”
“Oh, don’t worry about it. It’s been a while. But, man, when I first died, I’d pop back over all the time. To Gavin. At his desk, usually. It would tick me off because I liked it better on the other side, a lot better, not that I could remember what it was. Is. Was? I dunno, sometimes it’s confusing being dead.”
“It can get confusing being alive, too,” Wes said.
“Yeah, for you? I bet. We didn’t live in Dewdrop so we weren’t in the loop. Gran had a couple distant cousins, but they didn’t really talk much. I knew my Dad died young because of who we came from and I heard her whispering that I’d do the same.” Emmett looked up at the sky. “She’d go on and on sometimes when money was tight. Something about a house she could have inherited if her grandmother wasn’t so stupid. But once you’re out, you’re out, I guess.”
“Yeah, something like that.” I didn’t want to get into legacy rights and our inheritance code at the moment, especially not with a ghost from a family that had got the short end of the stick. “But you never told Gavin any of this?”
“Heck, no. That was drilled into our head from birth,” Emmett informed us. “Never talk about the witches in Dewdrop. And don’t breathe a word about Hettymoot. I never had a problem following orders, maybe that’s why I became a cop, but man, when my sister was little? She got herself in trouble at school, it was so funny.”
“So everything Gavin knows about us, he found out on his own?”
“Yeah, I guess. He’d ask me questions, talking to himself like I could answer. And man did he come up with some strange answers on his own. I tried saying something. Even tried to write in the fog in the mirror, but I can’t touch anything or move anything. I’m not that kind of ghost.” His spirit flickered and he looked over his shoulder. “You don’t want to meet that kind of ghost, believe me.”
“Do you think Gavin ever did?” Wes asked.
“It’s possible. I kept popping in, he’d be a little older, a lot crazier, but sometimes it wasn’t just me. Once I found myself standing behind him with four other guys, well, dead guys, around my age. And we were all looking down at these files.”
I glanced over at the captain, whose jaw tensed. This was getting real.
“Files?” Wes inquired.
“Yeah, of us. Who we were, how we died. Guys that were related to us but hadn’t died. Yet,” he laughed. “I was used it, but those other ghosts were mad. Said he had no right to dig this up, to pull us back. I explained it to them, that I knew him in real life. Gavin was just trying to figure it out. But what’s to figure out? It’s just the way it is. They understood, blinked back over. But if he ever ran across somebody less chilled out? Who knows.”
“You don’t think he would ever, um, take matters into his own hands, do you?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. He’s a different person. Has to be. He’s older, I’m still the same. I’ll always be the same,” Emmett said, grinning. “And I haven’t got called over in a while, maybe he let it go. Although, if you’re here… Probably not, huh?”
Wesley and I shook our heads no, but Brian remained stoic as officers of the law are wont to be.
“Well, I gotta go,” Emmett said. “Good luck with Gavin. I’d say tell him I said hi, but that would probably just make it worse. But if it does come up, tell him to let it go.” He turned and began walking toward the stream, then shimmered away.
Captain Kavanagh let out a sigh and rubbed the back of his neck. “You two want to tell me what you’re doing out here?”
“It’s not illegal to visit a forest preserve,” Wesley replied.
“We were summoning a spirit,” I said.
“Gemma!” My brother shook his head at me.
“What? Magic is real. Isn’t it obvious at this point?” I went over and gathered up the little bird statue and placed in the protective box before anything else showed up.
“Fine,” Wesley snapped. “So the officer from Woodshade that you’ve been allowing to harass my sister—”
“I haven’t allowed that,” Brian cut him off.
“You haven’t reported it, either.”
“I haven’t reported a lot of what I’ve seen this weekend, Wes,” the captain chuckled. “I can’t.”
“Well, the freak has a bone with us. You just saw why.”
“Can you really blame him?”
My eyes narrowed. “Yeah. I can blame him. It’s not our fault that our family is cursed.” Okay, the prevailing theory claimed it wasn’t technically a curse because those can be broken, but I didn’t have time to explain that to him. “Gavin lost one friend. We lose our dads, our sons, our brothers…” My voice threatened to crack. “Everyone. Every single year, somebody we love dies. So he can take his pain and suffering.” I used air quotes. Very mature, I know. “And get over it.”
“Alright,” Captain Kavanagh conceded. “I’ll talk to him. You might have to file a formal complaint.”
“It’s too late for that,” my brother said. “I think it’s time to pull out the handcuffs, Brian.”
“Wesley…” I didn’t think we should tell him.
“What, Gem? We got nothing. We saw the sad story we expected, not a motive for murder.”
“A motive?” The captain looked at us skeptically.
“Your cop buddy is the killer,” I said.
“What?” Brian balked. “That’s insane.”
“It’s a bit of a long shot, I know. But think about it,” I said. “That guy thinks we’re some cult of killers that have been getting away with murder for years. Maybe he got desperate and decided to take matters into his own hands. Kill the kid, then pin it on one of us so the whole world will finally know what we’re doing.” That didn’t come out right. “Well, what he thinks we’re doing. Which we aren’t.”
The captain held his hand up for me to stop talking. “That is stretching it a bit, don’t you think? Besides, Gavin’s not the killer.”
“Because you know him so well,”
I scoffed.
“The decade long obsession that involved illegally obtaining death records came as a surprise, I admit. But honestly, not that much of a surprise. Especially now that I’ve seen what happened. And…” Brian tilted his head to the side and cracked his neck. “You know, I looked into whether or not there’s a federal agency I should call to investigate Dewdrop. Turns out there is no X-Files, not that I could find. If I dig any deeper, they’ll just end up looking into my own mental health.”
“Get to the point, Brian,” Wes said.
“I shouldn’t tell you this. I shouldn’t be involving civilians in an investigation at all.”
“Just spit it out.”
“Your theory…” The captain took a deep breath. “My mind already went there, the day after I found out just how much this has consumed Gavin. But he couldn’t have done it.”
“How do you know?” I asked
“Because he was in Chicago that night and the two days before. His plane landed in Albany after you found the body.”
“What?” My heart thumped erratically in my chest. “You’re sure?”
“Triple checked. That’s where he was.”
“But that means…” What did that mean? “So then Kaitlynn must have…”
The captain breathed out a dismissive laugh and shook his head. “It wasn’t her.”
“She had an alibi, too?”
“No, she did not,” Brian replied. “And they were in fact seen at the coffee house together that night, so I can’t technically rule her out, but there’s no motive. No animosity between them. And absolutely no evidence to bring charges.”
“Then who did it?” Wesley asked.
“At this point, honestly, I’m starting to think that Gavin is on to something.” Captain Kavanagh looked me directly in the eye. “Is there any particular reason it couldn’t have been a… Again, I cannot believe I’m saying this, but, how do you know it wasn’t a…”
“A witch?” my brother said for him.
“A witch,” Brian repeated, sighing. “Because murder is all about motive and opportunity. And it seems to me, if one of your many cousins assumed that tourist would have died anyway, then killing him early to chase away others might have been easy to justify.”
“No one would have…” I couldn’t honestly finish that sentence because one of those crazy witches totally might have felt that way. They didn’t know Thomas wasn’t related to us. If he would have inevitably died anyway, why not use his death for a good cause?
“So we have a town full of people with the same motive,” Brian said.
“Not everyone,” Wes corrected him. “Some witches like the attention, some like the extra business. Heck, some of them are probably excited for fresh Hetty-infused dating material.”
“Don’t get defensive, I was—”
“I’m not getting defensive,” my brother cut the captain off. “Quit lumping us all together.”
“What else am I supposed to do?” Brian shot back.
“Detective work, I’d imagine.” Dang. Not like Wesley to get so, well, defensive when it came to Dewdrop. And how the heck did they know each other? It was driving me nuts!
“Hey, you bailed on this place because of how isolated it is, Wes. Without inside intel, this is going nowhere.”
“So what, you just want a list of all our aunts and cousins in order of who’s the angriest?” Wesley said sarcastically.
“Or the most powerful,” Brian replied.
My brother threw his hands up in exasperation. “You know the term ‘witch hunt?’ We take that very literally around here because we can still smell the burning flesh.”
“Don’t be so dramatic.”
“Don’t be so insensitive.”
“Oh, I’m being insensitive,” Brian protested. “Unlike an entire community completely unfazed by a 21 year old visitor swaying in the breeze with a snapped neck.”
“Not unfazed. Accustomed and numbed to it,” Wes corrected him. “You couldn’t understand.”
Silently, I was still grappling with it all. A witch on human murder would explain why Hetty was furious enough to withhold The Blessing. That deck of cards kept spitting out Death. None of the human suspects seems plausible. It all added up. Except…
“But then why would Gavin plant evidence in our barn?” I blurted out, interrupting the heated argument that had continued between them.
“What?” the captain said, turning around red-faced and breathless.
“Yeah!” Wes yelled, continuing the volume of the previous conversation. He coughed and took a split second to settle himself. “Why would he do that?”
“When was this?”
“I caught him last night in our barn. And he was watching me earlier that day, too, because he dug up something I’d buried.”
“What were you burying?” Brian asked.
“She’s a farmer, she can bury whatever she wants,” my brother said, glaring at him.
“It was a rock,” I told them.
“So farmers bury rocks, now?”
“Yeah. They do. My Aunt Clea buries a—”
Wesley’s hand flew up to his mouth as he started choking on his words and I couldn’t help but let out a laugh. Brian’s anger dropped away immediately and he went over and started slapping his back
“He’s fine,” I said.
“I’m fine,” Wes croaked, shrugging him off.
“Aunt Clea spelled him over twenty years ago to never tell her secret ingredient.”
“Which involves burying rocks?” the captain cried. “What is wrong with you people?”
“It’s called magic,” Wes retorted. “Read a book.”
“I hope you never talk to other cops like this,” Brian admonished him.
“How do you two know each other again?” I asked casually.
The captain’s back stiffened even straighter than usual and he cleared his throat. My brother laughed and shook his head, then said, “I already told you. We were on the chess team together in high school.”
“You said it was football.”
“Brian’s a tri sport athlete,” Wes replied, crossing his arms.
“Chess isn’t a sport,” I shot back.
“Don’t be discriminatory, Gemma.”
“Back to the planted evidence,” Brian said through gritted teeth. “Gavin stole your magic rock and he left what behind, exactly?”
“Well, it was a regular rock and he just dug it up, he didn’t take it,” I clarified. The captain’s eyes bugged out. “Rope,” I answered quickly. “He left a small chunk of rope, too short to even tie a knot. That’s how I knew it wasn’t ours because we wouldn’t have kept it. And there was a plastic bag folded up in his back pocket as he walked away. I think it had ‘EVIDENCE’ printed on it.”
Brian inhaled sharply, his eyes fluttering closed as he rubbed his chin. “That’s just freaking great,” he whispered. And he didn’t actually say freaking. Swearing was another thing he had in common with my brother. “What did you do with it?”
“I set it on fire,” my brother answered before I could.
“You what?”
“Yup.” Wes cocked his head to the side and crossed his arms. “Nobody’s framing my sister for murder on my watch.”
“A sample of the rope was stolen from the evidence locker yesterday,” Brian said. “Bad move. We could have used that to help exonerate her if it ever came to that.”
“In that case, I didn’t set it on fire,” my brother replied, not skipping a beat.
The captain clenched his fist. “Wesley, I am going to—”
“He really didn’t set it on fire,” I said.
“Good.”
“We just gave it to some witches to cast a spell. Which, well actually, they might have to set it on fire to cast.”
“Oh, my God,” Brian groaned, looking up and pinching the bridge of his nose. I was starting to feel bad for the guy. “What’s the spell for?”
“Um, probably to figure o
ut who killed Thomas,” I replied. “They have his ghost trapped there.”
Brian’s eyes flicked open. “You mean to tell me we can just ask the victim who killed him?”
“Sort of,” Wes replied.
“Why on earth didn’t you lead with that part?”
My brother smirked at him. “I’ve always loved messing with your head.”
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