by Leanne Leeds
“Well, I need to talk to those people over there.” I pointed. “And I may not have the power of prophecy like Ami, but I’m going to bet Meryl Hawkins is going to have a lot of questions regarding why we’re here.” I leveled my gaze at Althea. “So, I’m not going to tell you what to do, but here’s what you shouldn’t do. No matter what, never say anything in front of a reporter. Don’t give her anything to put in an article. Don’t give her any information. Nothing. If you can help it, don’t even speak when she’s within earshot.”
“I can do that,” Althea said. “I’m the quiet sister, remember?”
Quiet like a creeping panther trying to sneak up on a gazelle, maybe.
If someone asked me to line my sisters up from most exuberant to least exuberant, Ayla would be first in line, followed by Ami and then Althea. Ayla was all fire and excitement. Ami could get excited about something now and again, but for the most part, she held the center and was middle-of-the-road—and I don’t mean that in a bad way. Stable, balanced people are few and far between.
Don’t believe me? Think about it.
Althea was quiet, that was true—but there was a steady readiness to her. She watched things and people quietly, only speaking when she had something definitive to say. When I first returned home, I made a hasty judgment she was just shy.
Now I suspected she moved through life like a snake. Ready to strike if needed, conserving energy and movement if there was no reason to expend it.
Althea reached down into her bag and grabbed two bottles in each hand. Four colors of liquid sloshed around as she slipped each bottle into a separate pocket. Seconds later, I couldn’t even see where she hid them.
“Did you make that tunic especially for something like this?” I asked her, surprised.
“I can sew, too.” She tucked a strand of her raven black hair back into place. “You’re not the only one with a magic outfit, you know. I could fit twenty of these in here, and you’d never hear so much as a clink until I went to grab one. And you’d only hear that because I forgot to take off my ring.”
“I can’t sew. This is military issue. How did you get a magic outfit?” I asked with a half-smile. “The seamstresses at the ministry were rare—and prized.”
“Not a seamstress, though I can sew easy stuff. I’m a potion master, remember? Magic laundry detergent,” Althea answered and then reached for the door.
“Well, if it isn’t the police department’s very own pet psychic,” Meryl Hawkins said acidly upon seeing me. “What are you doing here?”
“Nice to see you again, Ms. Hawkins. I hope the day treated you well.” My tone was mild, and I didn’t bother to ramp up a temper at her snotty greeting, but I didn’t go out of my way to de-escalate her snit fit, either.
Someone that started ramped up needed no help getting higher, and amped-up people say things they’re trying to hide. I like amped-up people as long as they didn’t pull a gun. They were useful. Since that was the case with Meryl, I quickly decided to simply give the reporter enough runway to crash into me all on her own.
This approach must’ve thrown her off because her expression darkened with contempt.
“I suppose you’re here to talk to Gerald about the sabotage?” she asked.
“I got a call there was some vandalism on this job site. Emma’s busy with another case, but she wanted me to come out here and get an initial report.” I turned toward what I suspected was the construction foreman. “My name is Astra Arden. And you are?”
“Gerald Granger, ma’am,” he said politely. Mr. Granger stuck his rough, calloused hand out to shake. “My son has actually told me all about you. It’s an honor to meet you, Miss Arden.”
“Your son?” I mentally raced through the people I knew in Forkbridge—which, to be honest, wasn’t a long list yet. Suddenly, it clicked. “You must be Officer Adam Granger’s father.” He nodded happily. “I’m surprised I didn’t recognize you. The two of you look so much alike you’re practically twins.” He gave me a look that said he didn’t believe me but appreciated the statement.
Gerald Granger had nearly a hundred pounds on his son and the rough, grizzled look of someone who’d done physical labor all his life. In the shadows of his burly face, though, I could see the handsome young man he’d once been. “Adam said you were a smart one,” Mr. Granger told me.
“Well, let’s hope I’m smart enough to get this investigation started while Emma is otherwise occupied.” I tilted my head and raised an eyebrow. “The call was for vandalism, but Ms. Hawkins here said sabotage. Since reporters never engage in hyperbole, I have to ask—is the report I got wrong? What happened?”
Yes, I delivered the statement in a tone just as smooth and silky as a cup of fresh cream. And yes, the crack about reporters and hyperbole caused Meryl Hawkins to turn at least three shades of red.
Maybe four.
“Gerald here said the machines have had parts stolen out of them—” Meryl started angrily but stopped when I swiftly held up my hand.
“Ms. Hawkins, you’re aware that I need to get the information directly from the parties involved and not from the press, correct?” I made the statement sound as friendly and unassuming as possible. Even so, she gave me a look in return that would have melted lead in three seconds. “I’m sure you’re just excited about the information that you’ve already gotten, and I can absolutely appreciate that.”
“Can you now?” the reporter responded with a forced smile.
“But I do need the person in charge of the site to let me know what happened here, all right?”
“That might be true if you’re a police officer, but you’re not a police officer.”
“No, she’s a psychic. My son Adam says she’s an incredible psychic, too,” Mr. Granger told Meryl excitedly. “Closed all these cold cases the regular police could never figure out without her help. Did you hear about that, Ms. Hawkins? The police department must really be taking this seriously if they sent their only psychic out here to check out our complaint!” Gerald Granger turned and smiled widely. “This is the most exciting thing that’s happened to me in years!”
Bless his heart, as my Aunt Gwennie would say. This man was so good-natured he could sense none of the hostility bubbling all around him.
“What she does is completely unethical!” Hawkins exploded.
The foreman stared at Meryl Hawkins and looked confused.
I heard Althea’s bottles clink softly.
Oh, goodness.
I flashed my palm briefly toward her, and the sound of glass ceased.
The last thing I needed with Emma acting like a lovesick crazy person was having to explain to the chief why my fifteen-year-old sister put the uppity reporter in a coma with a bottle.
I took a deep breath. “I can understand why some people feel that way. Especially about telepaths. They can simply pluck an idea right out of your head as you’re walking by.” I slowly rolled down my gloves. Meryl’s eyes grew wide as she watched the slow exposure of my arm. “I, though, can’t do that. To get what I get, I have to touch an item or a person. So, you know, there’s not really a lot of ethical play in what I do.”
One glove off.
Meryl chewed her lower lip nervously.
“If I touch somebody without them wanting to be touched, that would be assault by contact. Did you know that?” I asked the reporter. “Florida is actually pretty tough regarding its assault charges. You can just threaten someone with a knife, and even if you didn’t touch them?” Second glove off. “It’s still assault. I’ve been learning so much since I been working with Emma.” I handed my gloves to Althea and turned back to Meryl. “It really has been absolutely fascinating.”
Gerald Granger, still oblivious to the tension, nodded happily. “Adam told me that very same thing! You really gotta wonder why there needed to be a ‘me, too’ movement if you could just throw a guy in jail for putting his finger on you, and you didn’t want him to have it there.”
“Because no
man would prosecute another man for doing something like that to a woman,” Althea interjected quietly. “Just because the laws were on the books didn’t mean they protected anybody. Least of all women.”
“Are we about to break out in a protest?” the reporter sneered.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I got distracted.” I extended my un-gloved hand toward her, ignoring her comment. “In any case, Ms. Hawkins, I really am sorry if I rubbed you the wrong way somehow.” I stared into her eyes, my expression extending a challenge my voice didn’t even hint at. “How about we let bygones be bygones and start over?” The reporter broke our locked gaze to look at my bare, pale extended hand. “Perhaps we can help each other on this case. Deal?”
Of course, she didn’t take it.
And with that confrontational handshake reaching for her, she quickly turned and stormed back toward the street.
I tried not to laugh as I put my gloves back on.
“That young lady certainly is a bit ill-tempered,” Mr. Granger told me cheerfully. It made me wonder if he really was oblivious or just chose to ignore her outbursts.
Either way, I’d spent only moments with the older man, but I already liked him. With his happy-go-lucky personality and upbeat charm, he was a light and refreshing contrast to Pistachio Waterflash, probable sleazeball. Give me a cheerful construction worker over a seven-inch wanna-be Lothario—or a snotty reporter with a chip on her shoulder, come to think of it—any day.
I nodded. “I don’t know her very well, but it certainly seems so. If you don’t mind me asking, how did she wind up here before the police? I just got the phone call less than an hour ago from the chief, and it sounded like he had just gotten the report himself.”
“Well, I don’t right know, Miss Arden,” he answered, again using that old-fashioned Southern way of addressing unmarried women.
Years ago, I probably would’ve gotten annoyed by it, but it seemed endearing coming from Gerald. And at least he didn’t call me Miss Astra.
“What time did she show up here?” I asked Gerald. “How soon was it after you called the police station to report what happened, do you think?”
“It was right quick, ma’am. Let’s see.” Gerald rubbed his scraggly five o’clock shadow and looked off toward the sky. “It was only about ten minutes after I called. And I called the police at”—Gerald looked at his cell phone—“6:32. So she must’ve been here at about quarter to seven?” He turned toward two men chatting about five feet behind him. “Joe Bob, that reporter woman showed up just before seven, yeah?”
Joe Bob stopped his in-depth talk about the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and turned. “I wasn’t paying all that much attention, but you can check the gate camera.” He pointed toward a temporary building just north of where we were standing. “That should have timestamps, and it catches everything coming or going.”
“You want to see that?” Gerald asked.
I nodded.
“Right now?”
“In just a second, Mr. Granger. Can you explain to me exactly why you called the police? The chief said vandalism; the reporter said sabotage first and then theft second. So, can you explain to me exactly what’s happening?”
“Well, sure I can—wouldn’t it be more fun, though, if you just walked around the job site and touched things and tried to guess?” The foreman looked at me eagerly. I could tell he was fighting hard to keep the excitement out of his voice.
“No,” I answered. “That would not be more fun. First, I don’t guess; I read objects. And second, that would take a lot more time.” And energy. “It’s much easier if you simply tell me what happened.”
“Oh.” His face fell. “It just sure would’ve been cool to see a psychic work. Yep. That sure would’ve been a thing to tell the grandkids.” He sighed. I waited. He sighed again.
“Mr. Granger?”
“Yes, Miss Arden?”
“Are you going to tell me what happened?”
“Oh, right, right, I just…Like I said, seeing a psychic at work, that would’ve been mighty exciting. Yes, mighty exciting.” Mr. Granger nodded.
“I can understand that, sir.”
He paused again and looked at me expectantly.
After about thirty seconds, Gerald seemed to realize I would not run around fondling his construction site for funzies. He finally answered.
“What happened wasn’t all that involved. At five o’clock we took a break to have some coffee. Shoot the breeze, check in with what had been done. You know. Take stock of where we were before we left for the day.”
Ah, yes, the creative practice of having casual meetings just when overtime kicked in. I was well familiar with the concept.
“Well, an hour later, we went back to store all the equipment, and nothing would start. The graders wouldn’t start, the bulldozers wouldn’t start, the excavators wouldn’t start. Turn the key and nothing.” Mr. Granger mimicked turning a key and made clicking sounds. “Now, Joe over there is a pretty good mechanic, but when he looked to find out what was going on?”
“The fuel injectors were all missing,” Joe Bob said loudly.
“The fuel injectors were all…missing?” I asked, frowning. “On everything?”
“Yep. Digger? No fuel injectors. Excavator? No fuel injectors. I checked every machine that wouldn’t move,” Joe Bob said, his voice still echoing with surprise. “Those fuel injectors are not exactly easy to remove. How someone got ’em all out in just one hour, I’ll never know.”
“Could it have been a group of people working together, then?” I asked.
Mr. Granger shook his head no. “We were standing right over there. We would’ve seen them. You couldn’t have ten people running around on this job site removing fuel injectors with no one seeing them and the camera not catching them.”
“Yeah, we could all see the whole place,” Joe agreed. The man next to him agreed with his two coworkers.
“No full-size man could have walked through here without being seen, much less the number needed to remove all those injectors that quick.”
“Well. No, not a full-size man,” I said under my breath.
Chapter Ten
“There.” Althea kept her voice low. Glancing behind her to ensure Gerald and Joe were on the other side of the office, she pointed to a small spot on the screen. “I know it’s hard to see, but something is moving on the ground. And it’s not moving like an animal would move. It’s deliberate, straight. It’s gotta be a pixie.”
I squinted.
Her younger eyes must work slightly better than mine. I took a few seconds and several replays of the security tape to spot what she caught instantly.
“You see it now?”
“You’re talking about that, right?” I pointed to the grainy image in the corner of the screen, dragged my finger in a line across toward the bulldozer, and then tapped again where the tiny thing disappeared. “The thing that just ran from there to there?”
“Yep. It’s gotta be a pixie,” Althea breathed.
With the low-end black and white recording, there was no way to tell for sure whether it was a pixie or not. Had the video been in color, it would have been easy to identify the shock of bright red hair.
As it stood, we could barely identify the moving shadow as a pixie, much less which pixie. If it was a pixie. Which I wasn’t sure of.
“It could be. But why would they disable all the engines?” I looked out the window and stared into the trees surrounding the site. “And why fuel injectors? Fuel injectors for these aren’t exactly difficult to get. Gerald will have them up and running as soon as the mechanic gets the parts.” I looked at my sister. “At the most, they delayed construction for a day. Maybe two.”
Althea bit her lip and pondered potential reasons. “Someone was just trying to make a point?” It was a good guess. An excellent guess for a fifteen-year-old. “You know, just to get their attention?”
“Okay, that’s an idea, but take it further. What point? And to who?”
&nbs
p; My sister’s face twisted as she racked her brain for some simple solution to the mystery of the missing fuel injectors. Still, a few minutes later, she shrugged. “I don’t think we have enough information. Do you?”
No, I didn’t think we had enough information.
It still felt like I was missing something.
It was far too incredible a coincidence the owner of Punktex followed Pistachio the pixie—and also was the wealthy owner of the grocery store being built. That much I was sure of. Add in Emma’s magical bewitchment the moment we came face-to-face with Pistachio Waterflash?
It was just too coincidental.
But why would the pixies sabotage construction machines? If Alice Windrow is mesmerized by Pistachio Waterflash, why wouldn’t he just ask her not to build the store here? From what I saw, she wouldn’t refuse him anything he asked of her. There was no reason I could see for the pixies to sneak onto Alice’s construction site to damage their machines.
“Something’s not adding up here,” I told Althea. “The thing I can’t get past is those machines are not crippled. Any mechanic could come in with the right parts and get everything back and running within, what…six hours, maybe?” I raised my eyebrow. “So why do it? Why cause such a temporary shut down?”
Althea shrugged. “The pixies must know something we don’t.”
“Great call, Captain Obvious. Clearly, they know something we don’t. The question is what. What is their true agenda here?”
She leaned closer and dropped her voice almost to a whisper. “You mean more than just Pistachio, then, I guess?”
“No.” I stopped and looked up at her. “Wait. Why, what do you mean?”
“Well, you keep saying they and not him. That ‘the pixies’ must have an agenda, or ‘the pixies’ know something we don’t. That implies to me you talked to more than just one pixie, but you didn’t say you did,” Althea pointed out. “If you only met Pistachio Waterflash, then you only know how he feels and what he thinks.” My sister tilted her head. “The rest of the pixies may not agree with him at all.”