Shepherd's Warning

by Cailyn Lloyd

  The simplest solution was most often the correct solution—and the most logical. An accident was the obvious answer. Perhaps his body remained hidden in the woods or at the bottom of the lake. According to Sally, he had no enemies, so murder seemed unlikely. Suicide was another possibility. Regardless, death was the most likely end for the missing man. These things happened often enough, and a ‘haunted’ house had nothing to do with it.

  Haunted houses might scare people, but they didn’t kill people. She was almost certain of that truth.

  Except for a fragment of doubt.

  If only she could remember the thought or image that accompanied, I know what really happened.

  The vague feeling a woman was involved?

  It was all she had, and it was useless.

  She needed to brave a trip to the cemetery. Part of her dreaded the prospect, driven by an irrational fear of cemeteries. Despite that, part of her felt compelled to go.

  Why? Because of a few words from a woman she barely knew? It was illogical.

  Still, she was going.

  A quick hot shower and she felt better still. She jumped into a pair of jeans and a white sweater and dressed Leah for the day.

  She needed a sitter and wondered how Brenda felt after last night, but decided she had nothing to lose in calling. Laura punched the number into her phone and chewed on a nail until Brenda answered.

  “Brenda? This is Laura MacKenzie.”

  “Hi, Laura. How are you doing?” Brenda’s voice betrayed no hint of misgivings.

  “Fine, just fine. Uh, I was wondering if you could watch Leah for a few hours today?”

  “No problem. Bring the little doll over. She’s so cute.”

  “Great, I appreciate it.” Laura paused a moment. “About last night, I was wondering…”

  “You’re wondering what I thought, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I felt kinda lucky to be there. You don’t know Sally like we do. She’s different. She has a gift—I guess that’s what you’d call it. She just knows things, always has, and people around here feel she’s special, respect her for it. Then you come along, sit down, and you two hit it off like that, saying all that weird stuff. It was like a séance or something, so I figure you got it too. Makes you special too, you know?”

  Laura wasn’t sure she felt special.

  “I guess so. Okay if I bring Leah over in about half an hour?”

  “Sure, see you then.”

  “Oh, and Brenda? Thanks.”

  “Laura, Janice Foster is going to call you. She asked for your number.”

  “That’s fine. Thanks!”

  Laura was halfway down the stairs when her phone rang. Grumbling, she turned and trudged back up the stairs. She didn’t immediately recognize the number.

  “Laura.” The voice was rushed and breathless. “This is Janice Foster. I have to talk to you. I heard what happened at Brenda’s. I’d like to help.”

  Laura made a slight clucking sound with her tongue, frowning. So Janice Foster had heard about her meeting with Sally, and now she wanted to help? She’d called Janice three times months ago and the woman never returned her calls. Now she wanted to talk.

  Laura suspected that Janice Foster might be an attention-seeking busybody.

  “Janice, I called you three times, and you never returned my calls.”

  “I know and I’m sorry, Laura. Before now, I didn’t feel I had much to offer.”

  “I’m really busy right now—”

  “Laura, this is very important. It was in the cards.”

  The cards? Jesus, Laura thought, she deals Tarot cards. Superstitious nonsense. The thought nudged something loose. Something about Tarot cards. She couldn’t remember. Darn!

  “Tarot cards?”

  “Yes. I think you ought to see them.” Janice said.

  “I was just going out. Can I call you later?”

  A moment of silence. Laura wondered if her phone dropped the call. Then Janice said, “This can’t wait too long, Laura. Please call me back as soon as possible.”

  “Sure.”

  Maybe, maybe not, she thought.

  Laura stabbed the red phone icon on her screen and went to fetch Leah.

  Thirty-Seven

  Laura dropped Leah at Brenda’s, then stayed and chatted for twenty minutes over coffee about the children, Sally, Carol, and life in general. She liked Brenda, more so now they’d had a chance to talk one-on-one. She felt comfortable leaving Leah there.

  Laura swung the car around and drove back to the church. Sat for five minutes, her hand on the ignition key, nervously eyeing the cemetery. To the right of the church, the plots swept over a slight rise to a decrepit picket fence snaking around the outer perimeter. Ancient trees rose tall around the graves, forming a dense canopy of interwoven branches. Now, in November, they were bare and skeletal and patches of snow dotted the grass. A tall arborvitae hedge in need of a manicure lined the rear boundary of the church yard.

  Enough procrastination.

  Laura stepped out of the car and walked slowly across the highway, the main street of Lost Arrow, to a small gate at the side of the church. She stopped and stared, steeling her nerve. The place looked harmless, but memories of her nightmare lingered and piled on top of her irrational fears about cemeteries. She felt uncomfortable in cemeteries and struggled through funerals. Most often, she found reasons not to go.

  Laura finally pushed on the gate and nearly choked with fright when the rotting wood holding the hinges let loose, the gate falling to the ground with a dull thud. She clasped her chest, then looked around. Apparently unnoticed, she picked up the gate nonchalantly, set it against the church wall, and decided God had a sick sense of humor. Her stomach fluttering with apprehension, Laura stepped into the churchyard.

  The oldest stones sat next to the church. Laura walked cautiously, looking for MacKenzies, and found three in the first row. She snapped a pic of each stone with her phone and continued searching, checking each stone, snapping pictures of any tombstones she deemed relevant. She soon realized the limitations of this haphazard process. She had a bunch of MacKenzies and no system to organize them. She’d lost faith in Ancestry. If the names hadn’t turned up there, how would she know where to place these people in her meager MacKenzie family tree?

  Sally had a hunch, and she hardly knew Sally. Why had she taken her so seriously?

  The task was tiresome by the time Laura reached the newer section at the side of the church. She walked faster, her concentration waning. Laura would have missed the small marker—it was partially buried under a crusty drift of snow—had she not tripped over it. She fell without grace, grazing her head on the rough marble edge of a nearby tombstone as she did so.

  The world spun crazily for a moment.

  Laura sat up and touched her fingers to a rising bruise on her forehead. It was bleeding slightly. She wiped the bruise with a handkerchief and looked around nervously, but the cemetery remained still and quiet, the sun shining weakly through a cirrostratus haze.

  She laughed uneasily, assured herself the fall was a coincidence, nothing more. Laura stood, shook snow and dead grass from her clothes, and retrieved her phone. She kicked the snow from the small angled marker irreverently, feeling tired and cold, then stopped abruptly.

  The name was familiar. She knelt, wiped the remainder of the snow away, and stared at the stone. There were no dates:

  Anna Flecher

  The name didn’t resonate at first. She started to stand, then dropped and sat hard, remembering the connection—the woman in the hallway, the glowing tombstone in her nightmare. The hair at the back of her neck stood up. Who was Anna Flecher? Why did her name keep appearing?

  She stood and snapped two photos of it, feeling off-balance, weary.

  The grave of Alan MacKenzie stood nearby followed by a long stretch of nothing. Her head hurt so Laura moved quickly from stone to stone, anxious to be done and out of the cemetery. An uneasy feeling was stealing
over her. The time spent here had been a waste of time. She had a bunch of photos but nothing that looked like an answer nor a magical resolution.

  Turning down the last row of plots, Laura found a stone with a familiar name in newly polished granite:

  ELIZABETH MACKENZIE

  She stopped and gazed thoughtfully for a moment. The stone was neither attractive nor ugly, just a bleak chunk of gray marble, an inadequate tribute to a woman who once was uniquely alive and vital. Seeing it opened tender wounds. For a moment, she saw her face, heard her voice, her laugh. Laura broke the spell of her reverie before becoming too deeply mired in sorrow. A damp breeze had sprung up, and the sun disappeared behind a dark wedge of clouds. A few snowflakes were falling, driven by the wind.

  Laura, happy the job was finished, ran for the car. She decided to run home first, to treat the bruise on her forehead before running to Brenda’s. It wasn’t until she turned off County B and onto Firelane Eight that the thought struck, and struck with such force Laura slammed on the brakes, sliding and skidding to a stop on the gravel just short of the ditch.

  Elizabeth had been buried in Illinois!

  Laura pulled her phone out and flipped through the photos until she found the photo of Elizabeth’s stone and checked the dates. They matched. It was Elizabeth.

  What was she doing here?

  Thirty-Eight

  Kenric Shepherd stared at the MacKenzie house in awe, the house of his dreams.

  The heavy wooden structural timbers were authentic, not simply dark planks nailed to the house to emulate the Tudor style—a common practice in the States. The roof lines, the stucco exterior, the heavy oaken door and leaded windows? A reproduction? Nonsense. This was the genuine article, no doubt in his mind even though finding an English Tudor house here was almost as improbable as stumbling across an Egyptian pyramid. Adding to the illusion, the house was situated in beautiful surroundings that reminded him of the countryside north of London.

  This was B F E? The acronym was misguided, the property quite the opposite. Idyllic really.

  He considered. There were two reasonable explanations for the presence of this house in Wisconsin. One, some family had brought their home from England to Wisconsin. Disassembled the house, board by board, and reassembled it here, board by board. Possible, but why would anyone go to such lengths? The move would have been a huge, costly endeavor and nigh impossible before the advent of motorized transportation.

  Two, an English master carpenter had settled here and built this home as a nostalgic turn to his homeland. Why not? If he had sufficient money and manpower, it was remotely plausible.

  He then entertained a third possibility: that the mere presence of this house in Wisconsin implied preternatural forces at work, that the building had not arrived by conventional means. Like the book, the house aroused some buried association, but he couldn’t retrieve the memory. He had seen something like it before but then thought, of course he had. There were dozens of Tudor houses just like this all over England.

  A faint but steady energy emanated from the building. An ultra-low frequency hum—energy vibrating in the planes and wavelengths of his old life. He felt it probing him, seeking answers as he sought answers. He fingered an amulet in his pocket and used it to project an invisible field to counter the negative energy. It arose from a hidden entity within, but he could discern nothing beyond that. One thing was clear. He was in the right place even if he wasn’t yet sure why.

  Shepherd imagined the room layout as best he could ascertain from the exterior and snapped several photos with his iPhone. This piece of technology amazed him; a camera, a communication device, a compass and mapping tool, a library with access to a world of knowledge, instant source of news and current events, and a storage device for music, pictures, and ideas. Long ago, people would have seen this device as magical or the work of the devil. Now children owned them.

  The front door opened, and an attractive blonde woman holding a small child stepped outside and walked to the Honda CR-V in the drive. She was the blonde woman from his dreams. Another confirmation.

  Every clue had come together, yet he felt only vaguely enlightened.

  She put the child into a car seat, buckled herself in, and drove away. He scurried to the entry and surreptitiously scraped some wood slivers from a beam near the door into a small envelope.

  Touching the house, he felt a strong a sense of déjà vu, a feeling he had seen this house somewhere long ago. The energy waves were stronger, insistent, trying to bore into his skull like a titanium bit.

  Time to leave.

  He hurried to the Range Rover, floored the accelerator, and raced down the fire lane, pursuing the woman.

  She was important in some way he didn’t yet understand. Her connection seemed the most tenuous of all. The book and the house fit together in a meaningful way. A book of Old English, an old Tudor manse—an obvious association. Still, the woman was connected.

  A hunch.

  It sounded so unscientific, so implausible.

  Hunches for most people were random ideas that popped into their heads that they then called intuition.

  In his case, the hunches—his intuitions—were prescient and almost always on target. He couldn’t explain why. It wasn’t a subject amenable to rigorous scientific study. He was truly psychic and even he couldn’t deliver reproducible results for a study. Further, he had no intention of submitting to testing or ridicule when most scientists considered the subject on par with divining and carnival magic, unfit for serious study. Contrary to his scientific training, he knew there were things in the world that couldn’t be explained empirically, couldn’t be measured, couldn’t be controlled with technology. His precognition was one of them.

  Slowing as he approached the highway, he looked at the corner street sign, blinked, and screeched to a halt. Reflective green with white lettering, the signs marked the intersection of two roads:

  County B — Firelane Eight

  He slapped the steering wheel.

  Bloody hell!

  This was B F E!

  He had been directed here all along. Why had he never considered that the letters might point to a specific geographic location? It wasn’t a metaphor, it was a map point!

  He sighed.

  So much for his fabulous intuition.

  * * *

  Shepherd parked fifty feet behind the Honda. He sat, watching the woman stumble about like a klutz. What was she doing? What did she hope to find in the cemetery? A family tree? Had she never heard of Ancestry or any of the other genealogical sites?

  He sat there almost thirty minutes as she wandered around the cemetery. Now she had fallen. The woman was no study in grace. He thought about helping her but she seemed okay and he didn’t want to give himself away. Not just yet.

  Her name was Laura. Intuition again.

  He had left this world of magic and omens long ago and was surprised to find himself drawn back to it, almost against his will. He couldn’t always summon answers on a schedule. Three hundred years ago when the world moved at a glacial pace, if the answers came in a week or a month, it rarely mattered.

  Now it mattered and he felt frustrated and perplexed—by the book, the house and the source of energy within, and the compulsion to follow this woman.

  He felt compelled to drive here to see the house, hoping to satisfy his curiosity about the place where the book had been found. Instead, it had created a whole set of questions. How did it get here? Who built it? Were they the authors of the book? Why was this situation commanding so much of his attention? Why had he been unable to intuit the proper significance of B F E?

  Damn! He was missing something important and he worried people would die if he didn’t figure it out. The energy source within was the most puzzling of all. Beyond sensing a presence, he could discern nothing about it. Felt baffled by his inability to solve that mystery.

  He watched Laura climb into the CR-V. For a moment, he felt a vague attraction to her, th
en realized she reminded him of Laila. Laila was his first wife, and remained, even after all these years, his one true love, his soulmate. She had also possessed great longevity, but died of the plague in the fourteenth century. There had been women and wives since, but none had possessed her grace, her charm, her intelligence. Moreover, he was afraid to fall in love again, always fated to watch his partner grow old and die. He might be able to slow the inevitable, but he could not stop it. Alas, it had been some time since he’d been with a woman. He had almost forgotten what it was like. Such was the curse of his solitary existence. Feeling blue, he turned a half circle and pointed the Range Rover down the highway to Milwaukee and home.

  He continued to translate Lucas MacKenzie’s book, but progress had been glacial. Still, more than halfway through the book, a darker thread had crept into the narrative. The woman was evolving from healer to dark sorceress, the first hints that the revealing passages were near.

  When he arrived home, he prepared a light dinner and carried the plate and a glass of Cabernet up to the office. He looked to his computers and felt his pulse quicken. Adventure awaited him there. He then looked at the book page displayed on the other monitor and the translation in progress. Important but not fun.

  He sighed and sat, reaching for the keyboard and mouse, laying them next to his dinner plate, seeking the elusive words that would justify his presence here and explain his rising anxiety about the situation.

  Thirty-Nine

  At the house, Laura walked up to the bathroom and, in an absent frame of mind, washed the dried blood from the bruise on her head. There was no logical explanation for Elizabeth to be here. She had watched the casket disappear into the ground in Illinois. Several illogical reasons came to mind. Lucas and Nate, for reasons known only to themselves, had moved her, tombstone and all. A hidden clause in the will? Another aspect of Elizabeth’s arcane life? Why wasn’t she buried next to Alan? None of it made sense.