The Thirteen Bends

by Shannon Reber

  I could feel my eyes welling with tears again. “How did you find me at all? I do everything I can to keep myself out of sight. My algorithm hides all my online activity and I have a virus that deletes most mentions of me. Not all of them but most.”

  She rolled her eyes at me. “Madison, you declined a free ride to MIT. You are on the payroll at Safe*Zone security for the algorithm you wrote when you were eight. You’re not as invisible as you think you are. And working with TC Erkens makes you even more noteworthy. The people I work for take his name in vain twice a day.”

  “Who do you work for?” I queried, as confused by their apparent lack of love for Erkens as I was about my mom’s behavior.

  She leaned back in her chair and tapped the tabletop with her fingers. “I’m not supposed to tell people. What I will tell you, is that if you look up my name and the college I went to, you’ll find that the scholarship I received to go to that college was sponsored by the company I work for.” She smacked the table with a grin. “See? I didn’t say a word.”

  By the time she’d finished speaking, I had begun the search. It was easy enough to find her school records, then the college she’d attended. MIT. Wow. It made me wonder what other things we might have in common.

  I continued in my searching, only half listening as Quinn and Ian spoke. It only took me a few more seconds to find the scholarship information that was listed. Since I didn’t know what PSA stood for, I looked it up. And puzzle pieces began to click into place.

  The Preternatural Science Agency was in Dormont, ten minutes from Pittsburgh. Preternatural science. Holy blue screen of death.

  FIVE

  I kind of felt like I was about to pass out by the time we all got back to Erkens’ office. I did have a case to work and it looked like Quinn was working the same case . . . from a whole agency that studied preternatural science. My brain still hurt from trying to process it all.

  The moment I opened the door to the office, though, Twitter started weaving himself around my legs, yowling plaintively. He’d already been fed and had plenty of water, so I could only assume it was attention he was so desperate for.

  Quinn’s mouth fell open when she stepped in, seeing me hefting the gigantic cat into my arms. “Where did you find that kottr?” she asked, her eyes as wide as mine had been when she’d told me who she was.

  I looked at the cat who was purring loudly into my ear. “I don’t know what a kottr is.”

  Quinn let out a half cough, half huff sound. “The word is Norse for cat but a kottr is a prize, a reward given to a Valkyrie when they perform an act of heroism. It looks like you won the respect of one of the choosers of the slain,” she said in an awed tone.

  I rubbed Twitter’s chin as I thought about it. “The case I worked where I was missing for three months, there was a Valkyrie involved.” I looked at the cat and smiled. “He just showed up one day and adopted me. Did Aldora send you to me?” I asked him, baffled by why the Valkyrie would have done that.

  Ian let out a snort. “So that’s why he loves you so much more than us. It all comes clear,” he said, pouring himself a cup of coffee.

  “No,” I corrected. “It’s because I’m a much nicer person than you guys are,” I finished with a smile.

  “Agreed,” he said, lifting the pot in offering to Quinn.

  She glanced at him before shaking her head. “Uh, no thanks. I’m a one-cup-wonder. If I have any more, I’ll be bouncing off the walls,” she said, slowly turning her eyes around the office. “One of the guys in my office told me he’d been here before. He said the place was a disaster.”

  I laughed, setting the cat back on the floor as I took the mug Ian offered to me. “It WAS a disaster. After a break in a few months ago, we decided to make it more difficult for a burglar to read the files.” I motioned to the cabinets. “They’re all warded and locked, so if it doesn’t keep people out, it’ll at least slow them down.”

  “Good plan,” she said, walking to one of the chairs and sitting down. “Okay, so tell me what you know about the situation we’re dealing with.”

  I sat down behind the desk and opened my laptop. “What I know is the urban legend about that road. There’s a lot of different versions of the story but the two that fit our situation are either about thirteen girls from a Catholic school who were murdered or an orphanage that burned down, killing thirteen kids. There’s another form of the legend that says the school burned down just like the orphanage did. So far as I’ve been able to find, the names of the locations aren’t mentioned.”

  Quinn nodded. “What my friend told me is that--”

  I lifted a finger to stop her. “Hold on. You said your friend knows things most people don’t. What do you mean?” I questioned, eager to know everything she would share.

  Quinn leaned back in her chair and rested her elbows on the arms, steepling her fingers in front of her mouth. “It’s not my story to tell. All I can technically tell you is that she knows things most people don’t.”

  I tapped my fingers on the desk and tipped my head to the side. “Can you tell me her name?” I asked, looking for a loophole in the system.

  Quinn considered for a little bit before she shook her head. “I’m already skating around breach of contract by talking to you about any of this. Just let me tell you the little my friend told me and I’ll work on a way of telling you more without breaking the rules.”

  I leaned back in my chair and picked up the mug, taking a grateful drink of the perfectly sugared cup. Ian’s coffee was better than anyone else’s and I reveled in the goodness of it.

  Quinn went on in her story, her eyes fixed on the cat as he jumped up onto the desk and sat staring at her. “Uh, all she actually said is that death had come to Saint Perpetua School. You said you didn’t have a location, so there you go.”

  I smiled and set the coffee down, beginning to work my magic. “Do you know the approximate date of the deaths?” I pressed, sure there would be nothing in her contract that said she couldn’t tell me that.

  “Around 1900 according to her description of the clothes.”

  I raised my brows in question but she shook her head. Okaaaay. Mentioning the clothes was an odd thing to say but the whole situation was odd. What was one more oddness in a paranormal investigator’s world?

  “Here we go,” I said after a few seconds. “There was a newspaper article . . . holy 404,” I broke off, my mouth falling open in horror.

  “What?” Ian asked, walking around to read over my shoulder.

  “Thirteen girls really were murdered at that school and the nuns were accused of doing it. The girls’ bodies were impaled on the thirteen bends in the road.” A shiver worked its way up my spine. It was identical to the way Tanya had been killed. “But Gina confessed,” I breathed, confusion again filling me.

  Ian rested his hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “Think about it, Mads. You took the case this morning. What did you notice?”

  I sat back and closed my eyes, thinking over everything from that morning. “When Gina came in, she seemed out of it. I figured she was still drunk because she smelled so strongly of alcohol but there was no slurring of her words. She spoke clearly but she didn’t say much.”

  “How did she get to the office?”

  “I don’t know. Her car was at the scene, so she must have taken the bus.”

  “What else, Mads?”

  I thought it over, recalling as much detail as I could. “All she said was that she and her girlfriend wanted to check out the legend, so she put baby powder on the hood of the car and they took the drive. The way she spoke, it was like she wasn’t really here. The main thing I noticed about her was that she looked like she was in pain.” My eyes popped open as I spoke. “She was moving like she was in pain and she told me she blacked out and woke up in her bed.”

  “What does that mean, Maddie?”

  “It means that something happened to her. In the police interview room, she told me she remembered doing it but it fel
t like a dream. She thought that’s all it was.”

  I was at the Harmar Township Police mainframe within seconds. my eyes scanning every detail of Gina’s arrest report. My heart pounded as I read through it. I had missed something. I knew it. What had it been, though?

  “They did a blood test and a breathalyzer. Both were clean. No alcohol in her system.” I sat back, my mind whirring through possibilities.

  “Did they check her for injuries?” Ian asked, smirking at the cat as Twitter shot him an imperious look.

  I glanced at the file again. “It says she declined. Why would she do that?” I asked, confused by everything about the situation.

  “Maybe she’s in shock,” Ian offered, walking around to sit in the chair next to Quinn’s.

  “Have you considered the possibility that she did do it?” Quinn asked. “I mean, all my friend said was that death was coming. She didn’t say it was death by paranormal creature. Maybe Gina just snapped, murdered her girlfriend, and tried to tell the cops she thought it was a dream so she could go for an insanity plea. Maybe she went to you this morning just to throw the police off. I mean, she did ask to see you, a paranormal investigator, while she was in police custody. It’s weird that she would do that but it’s also weird that they’d let you into the interview room. Something is definitely strange here.”

  I thought about it, trying to see it from that point of view. It was such a horrible way for one person to kill another. First to club her in the head, then to impale her corpse to be found by some random person driving to work? It did not fit.

  Then again, psychopathy wasn’t supposed to seem right. People who came off as totally average sometimes did monstrous things. I had seen that for myself.

  I wasn’t convinced, though. I had spoken to Gina for maybe ten minutes that morning and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she loved her girlfriend. It had been the easiest thing to see.

  But maybe love wasn’t a factor. Maybe it was more of an obsession. I only had Gina’s word that they were a couple.

  I sat forward and again began to search. Gina Vaso was well known in the cultural district. Tanya was harder to find.

  There WERE pictures of the two together on several different social media sites, ones that did not look doctored in any way. That was how I found Tanya. She was listed as ‘in a relationship’ with Gina.

  She was also listed as a second-grade teacher at Hoover Elementary. From what I could see, she looked like she had been a well-loved teacher. There were testimonials written by parents about how Miss Primis guided their child in wonderful ways et cetera.

  My stomach clenched again. The idea of Tanya’s class coming in to find a substitute, then being told their teacher would never come back . . . it was heartbreaking. How much would parents tell their seven-year-old about such a brutal murder?

  I scrubbed my hands over my face and groaned. What had happened? Was it possible that Gina had made up the sight of the spirit on the first bend so she really could get an insanity plea?

  Most people weren’t willing to believe. The cops were living proof of that fact. They believed the fact that I worked for a paranormal investigator meant I was a fraud.

  “Maddie?”

  I didn’t look up at Ian. My heart hurt too much. The idea of him being hurt made panic rise inside me.

  And that settled the matter in my mind. I would do anything to keep Ian from being hurt. Anything at all. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Gina had felt that same way about Tanya. There was no way she would have done it. That was my answer. Gina was innocent. I just had to find a way to prove it.

  SIX

  My mouth went hard as I pulled into the driveway of my place that evening. I had thought that coming home would bring me a feeling of peace. What it brought me was annoyance.

  Keats Driscoll was the last person I wanted to see. Or that was true until I saw the guy with a bouquet of cheap flowers standing at the back door. Good grief. Keats was bad enough but if one more of Serena’s guys started hanging around, I was going to hurt someone.

  Serena had begun dating so many guys, it was hard to keep track of them. She never dated anyone long enough for me to bother learning their names. I understood her need to distract herself from all the crap that had happened but her taste in guys left much to be desired.

  Quinn got out of the passenger seat of my car and grinned at me. “Want some help knocking heads together or do you want to wait for your boyfriend?” she teased, her eyes going wide as Imogen opened the back door.

  Imogen’s fluorescent green hair was striking, her graphic tees and combat boots just adding to her rocker chick look. She was a musician through and through. It was as obvious as though ‘musician’ had been tattooed to her forehead. Her posture was stiff as she lifted her chin at both guys who stood there.

  I smiled. “Imogen and I are good at dealing with unwanted visitors.” I lifted a finger in a ‘hold on’ gesture. “We let Darlene handle them.”

  And my landlady who was all of five feet tall and more than seventy years old, cocked her fists on her hips and glowered. The fire in her eyes was purely the momma bear protecting one of her cubs. She stepped onto the back stoop and forcefully informed the cheap flower dude just how big a mistake he’d made by showing up when Serena had broken things off with him. She continued on for so long, I started to feel a little sorry for the guy. A little.

  Keats didn’t take the hint that visitors were not wanted. He walked over to me, smiling like we were the best of friends and motioned over his shoulder toward the spectacle there. “I’m glad that’s not me,” he said with a forced laugh.

  “It’s about to be,” I told him, folding my arms. “Why are you here, Keats?”

  He gave me one of those smiles that probably charmed most girls. On me, it didn’t work. He was nothing more than an annoyance.

  He raised his hands in a surrendering gesture. “The murder today, the news site I work for sent a guy over to get some interviews. He told me he saw you. So is this part of the paranormal outbreak or just a run of the mill murder like my guy told me it was?”

  I held my breath and counted to three, doing my best not to plant my fist in his nose. “Keats, I sent you the information for one story when I was desperate to get that story out to as many people as I could. The fact I was missing for three months after that did not give you the right to start using my name to make a name for yourself. I am not your source. I am not your friend. I will not give you any information,” I said in as calm a voice as I could manage.

  He shot me another cocky smile. “Oh, come on. You know you love me.”

  And my temper started to bubble up. It had been a very long, very difficult day and that error code had hit my last button. Reboot was about to take on a whole new meaning in his world.

  Before I could say anything at all, Quinn hooked her arm around my waist and smiled sweetly at Keats. “There is an old Chinese proverb about a man who doesn’t know when to shut up. Things don’t go too well for him,” she informed him, pulling me around him.

  Keats ignored her. “Madison, this stuff is important. Keeping people in the dark is cruel with so much paranormal activity in this city. Why can’t you see that?” he called after us, loud enough that cheap flower dude, Imogen, and Darlene all turned to stare at him. Like he’d wanted that audience, he straightened his shoulders and kept going. “How many people have to die before you take this seriously? Something is happening and--”

  And my temper boiled over. I pulled free of Quinn, whirled back, and planted myself in front of Keats. “You are not doing this out of the goodness of your heart. It’s all about you glorifying yourself. You’re still the nosey little boy writing stories in your notebook while people are hurt,” I shot out, too angry with him to care about using the story he’d told me about his past, against him.

  He cringed back a little but didn’t back down. “It has nothing to do with me, Madison. It’s about telling the truth.”

  “Yo
u’re not telling the truth. You’re telling a story with only the slightest basis in fact.”

  “Then help me, Madison. Tell me the whole story.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you, no?”

  “Until you see that you’re wrong!” he shouted, throwing his hands into the air.

  I turned away from him, too annoyed to even bother with him anymore.

  And Keats took his life into his own hands. He grabbed my arm and turned me back, his pretty face distorted by anger. “What is wrong with you? This is--” he broke off when I yanked my arm free and took a menacing step closer to him.

  “Do not ever touch me,” I growled, fury over everything that had happened recently just pouring out of my mouth. “I did my own research on you, Keats. The story you told me about seeing a guy smacking his wife around, I know it was your mom. You feel guilty that you didn’t call the cops when you saw your step-dad hurting her when you were a kid. I understand that. I do. What I don’t understand is how you think telling people about the paranormal world is going to make up for something that was not your fault.” I kept my voice quiet but made it as emphatic as I could.

  He blinked, his mouth working silently for a few seconds. “He . . . wasn’t human,” he half whispered, his breaths shaky as he continued on. “I wrote it down when I saw him shift. I wrote it and while I was writing, he was ripping my mom apart.” His eyes grew damp as he looked at the ground between us. “I told my dad but . . . no one believed me. They thought I was just a stupid kid making up more stories.”

  All of a sudden, the anger inside me eased back. I wasn’t happy with him but I no longer wanted to stick my boot up his poop-chute. I counted to three again to ease back the rest of my mad and finally sighed. “You’re proving my point, Keats. When bad things happen, people like to have a nice, quiet explanation for why. They don’t want to hear that it’s a ghost or a monster of some sort.”