by Mara Webb
More blood drops were dotted across the floor and led to an older man that was slumped against a wooden table, groaning quietly.
“Jeff!” Miller shouted.
10
Miller had called the station for help and it had taken several tries before he got hold of anybody. Apparently, they were all still busy looking for the vandal that had damaged all the roses, but Miller had been quite stern that it was now much less of a priority than the medical emergency we were dealing with.
Jeff was injured, but alive. That was the important thing. He had blood on his face and was feeling a little woozy but had managed to speak to us briefly to say that he was okay. I sat with him as Miller went outside to navigate some sort of extraction.
“Sadie,” Jeff mumbled. I didn’t need to question how he knew my name, everyone on the main island seemed to know who I was.
I found a cloth and soaked it under some warm water to clean away some of the blood on his face. When I found the injury, I was surprised by how small it was given how much blood was on his skin. It reminded me of when I’d nicked my legs when shaving them in the shower and it looked like I’d cut through an artery but was barely noticeable once I’d cleaned it up.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Did they take it all?” he mumbled.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It looks like someone has been through every hiding place in the house though.”
“Good job I keep some money in the safe at work... could I have some water?” he asked. I jumped up and poured him a glass, placed it on the kitchen table and helped to pull him up onto his feet so he could sit down on a chair. He took small sips and seemed to be perking up. I was so grateful that he was okay, the last thing we needed was another killer on the loose today.
“Okay,” Miller said as he burst back into the room. “I’ve managed to secure a helicopter lift out of here. Don’t ask me how, I had to call in a lot of favors, but we will have to wait maybe forty minutes and—”
“No need,” Jeff laughed. “Can’t you just call Wes? He has a taxi that can come almost all the way to the door you know. He could take us to the doctor, or have the doctor come to us!”
“That’s a… that’s a good point,” Miller said, shaking his head. “Okay, that makes way more sense than what I was just suggesting. Let me make some more calls.” He disappeared back out of the kitchen and left Jeff and I alone again.
“He tries his hardest,” Jeff wheezed.
“I know,” I smiled back. “Do you remember anything that happened? Did you recognize your attacker?”
“I didn’t see a face…” he sighed. “But at least I’ve been able to finally meet you! I’ve heard all this buzz around the island about the new peacekeeper and how much you look like your mother. All those rumors were true!”
My mother? The words caught me off guard and I tried to reorganize my thoughts so that I could respond appropriately, but Miller was suddenly back in the room talking very quickly.
“Wes is picking up the doctor, picking up one raspberry lemonade, then coming here,” Miller said. “I tried to fight the need for the lemonade but—”
“That is for me,” Jeff laughed. “Wes is a lovely young man. He often brings raspberry lemonades to the post office and hands them out to us all. It can get very hot in the sorting room and we don’t have any air conditioning in there anymore. The darn thing broke a few months back and we haven’t had the money to fix it. I was saving up to pay for it myself, but I guess all that money is gone.”
“I’ll have a look at it, Jeff,” Miller said. “Anyone on this island would repair that thing for free, you know that!”
“I pay people for their work. Always have, always will. It’s not an easy world to live in, I won’t shortchange anybody in Hallow Haven,” Jeff replied, proudly.
“That’s very noble and everything, but we can hardly let our favorite mailman spend his days in a furnace, can we? Let me help you,” Miller insisted.
“Let’s get my head looked at first,” Jeff said. “If you get a few minutes to look at the AC unit this week then I’ll find a way to repay you. That’s on top of what I owe you both for coming here in the nick of time to find me. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t shown up.”
“You owe us nothing,” I grinned. It was hard to keep in mind that we had come in the first place because we were investigating the passport-payment scam that he seemed to be running. A sweet old man could still be a manipulative con-artist, right?
I heard the bizarre sound of harmonizing over kazoo music that could only mean one thing; Wes was back. The song stopped and then I heard two loud splashes, followed by a few seconds of silence, then heavy footsteps climbing up the stairs to the house. Wes and an unknown woman were both dripping wet and bickering in the living room.
“Doc, he’s through here,” Miller called out.
A woman walked through the door and I immediately thought she was a relative of Effie and Kates. Her hair was twisted up into a bun but was a vibrant pink color. I only know two people in Hallow Haven that were so passionate about hair dye, she had to be another sister or something.
“Jeff, can you tell me what happened?” she said, crouching by his side.
She had a bag with her that seemed to somehow be completely dry and when she opened it, she began to pull out gauze, gloves and ointments. I hadn’t even met a doctor with hair like that before. She was so beautiful, and I couldn’t help but look over to see if Miller was watching her. He seemed too busy talking to Wes about something.
“What’s this I hear about lemonade?” Jeff chuckled from his chair.
“Oh!” Wes called, jogging across the room with the drink in his hand. “Sorry, man. I thought I’d let the Doc take care of things first. You know I’d never deprive J-man of his favorite beverage!”
Jeff thanked him, then started to slurp the pink liquid up through the straw so fast that the cup was empty in seconds. “Ahhh,” Jeff sighed. “I needed that. Just what the doctor ordered,” he smiled.
“Actually, I’d rather you didn’t drink so much of that stuff, Jeff,” the doctor said, but then a grin cracked the stern expression and she seemed instantly more approachable. Dang, her smile made her even more attractive than she had been moments earlier.
“You’ve not met Brielle, have you?” Miller asked. I shook my head.
“Hi, I’ve heard so much about you and I would have come over to introduce myself already but…” Brielle said, trailing off.
“Brielle is actually another one of the cousins,” Miller smiled. “Effie and Kate’s cousin from the other side of the family. Which I guess means we are related, but not by blood and I don’t know what the name is for what we are to each other.”
Miller was Effie and Kate’s second cousin. I have never understood the relationship tree in general, but in Hallow Haven it was a real headache. That whole ‘first cousin once removed’ thing, I just don’t get it. What does it mean?
“Yes, one of the cousins. Their great-grandfather was a werewolf… I’m not from that blood line,” she smiled. “Anyway, Jeff, I’ve given you a few stitches and your pupils are responding nicely, so I think you’ve been very lucky. I would like you to be observed for twenty-four hours just to check for any signs of concussion, and obviously because I just adore your wonderful company.”
“Alright! Party in the Wes-mobile!” Wes hollered. “Let’s go, J-dog. I’ll get you to the doctor’s surgery like a champ!”
“I don’t doubt it,” Jeff grinned. “Shame I’ll be soaking wet when I get there.”
“I know a little magic that can dry us all off when we get there,” Brielle said. So, she was a witch too. Of course she was, everyone on this island had something going on. “Are you guys coming?”
Miller and I looked at each other. “We need to get back to Green Holt,” Miller answered. “I’ll have a team come over and assess the crime scene here and we can look into some witnesses, see if anyone saw some
one swimming to or from the house.”
Didn’t I see something swimming away earlier? Maybe it hadn’t been a water snake after all.
“Green Holt?” Jeff said, suddenly sounding very serious. “Wh— what are you doing over on Green Holt?” he asked.
“We found a body and… well actually we had a few questions that we wanted to ask you, so perhaps we can visit you tomorrow when you are feeling better and speak to you then,” Miller replied.
Jeff had been helped to his feet by Brielle but was now slumping backwards into the chair again. His face had turned pale, and his hands were trembling.
“Jeff?” Brielle said. “How are you doing? Can you tell me what’s going on?” She crouched down and pulled out her pen light to inspect his pupils again.
“I… it’s not safe there,” Jeff stuttered. “You need to be careful. Please, promise me you won’t stay there a moment longer than you need to.”
“I need to get him to the surgery, now,” Brielle said. “He seems to be going into a form of shock, not uncommon after a traumatic incident like this. Come back tomorrow if you have questions, by all means, but now is not a good time.”
Brielle and Wes propped Jeff up between them both and escorted him out of the house while Miller and I stood out of the way. I followed them to the front door and watched as they reached the part of the stairs where the flood waters began. Brielle snapped her fingers and a bright yellow backboard appeared, like the ones used by paramedics that are carrying someone away from a car accident with a neck brace on.
Wes and Brielle helped Jeff to lay down on the backboard and strap him in securely. Brielle then cast some sort of charm over it to allow it to float gently above their heads as they walked through the flood waters to Wes’s taxi. I wanted to see how they planned to get Jeff into the car like that, or how they were planning to get into the car. I can barely pull myself out of a swimming pool when my feet can reach the bottom.
Miller called me back into the house and I turned to see what he wanted.
“I need you to come in here for a moment,” he said. By the time I looked back at the taxi, all three of them were somehow inside and it was driving away. Dang. I missed the interesting bit. I bet Brielle used magic, that had to be it, right?
I walked back into the house and wished I could remember exactly how I’d used my magic to change my clothes the last time. Miller and I had been caught out in a rainstorm before, back on one of the smaller islands, and my magic had taken over and dried us off and given us a dry outfit each. I still felt as if I had no control over my powers, they just sort of worked whenever I needed them.
“What do you make of all this then?” Miller asked as I stepped back into the living room. He was gesturing at the chaos that the attacker had caused.
“Maybe they didn’t know Jeff would be home, they were just trying to steal some stuff and he surprised them by coming back early,” I guessed.
“Jeff is a predictable man, Sadie. His route is always the same, the time he takes is always the same. You could set your watch by this guy,” Miller explained. “He does large parcel drop offs once a week, and the mail sorting he does in the late afternoon to early evening. You could ask anyone in all of Hallow Haven where Jeff would be at this time of day and they would know. He goes home after his deliveries to watch a few soaps, drink coffee and eat an egg salad sandwich.”
“So whoever broke in here knew he would be here?” I said.
“Exactly. It can’t be a coincidence that we have found a possible link between the dead man on Green Holt and Jeff, then Jeff is attacked.”
“They needed him to be here. They weren’t just randomly robbing his house, they were looking for something specific, they wanted him to tell them where it is,” I said. “Right?”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Miller nodded. “The question is, what were they looking for, and did they find it?”
11
“It’s complicated,” Effie huffed. This was the only response I had gotten from her and Kate since I mentioned Brielle. Miller was steering the powerboat towards Green Holt and I was wedged between a pile of suitcases and backpacks that the sisters had insisted on bringing. Fitz was sat beside Miller trying to give him tips on flossing and I was trying to stay out of it.
I had sensed that Brielle didn’t want to talk about her cousins, but she had obviously been busy dealing with an injured mailman. I had hoped that I was just reading too much into it, but Kate and Effie were being equally short with me about it.
“Well, now I’m involved,” Fitz meowed, leaping over the bags and nestling himself between our feet. “You’ve both tried to dodge Sadie’s questions, which has officially made it interesting.”
“Stay out of it, fuzz face,” Kate replied.
“Hey, be nice to him,” I smiled.
“You know what happens when you try to keep secrets from me…” Fitz teased.
“Oh no, please don’t start—” Effie protested. It was already too late.
“The importance of flossing cannot be understated, so I won’t. Over the next forty minutes I will outline the—” he began.
“No! Please. We’ll tell you,” Kate pleaded.
Fitz, when he was in his human form, was a dentist. It makes as little sense now as it did the day I found out. He had also been Greta’s familiar, when she was alive, and she had told me many times how she never got used to the idea of her cat companion performing root canals.
It seemed that his ‘party trick’ was to try and bore you to death with oral hygiene information until you caved and gave him whatever he wanted. It was ridiculous, but in his defense it never failed.
“You are such a push over,” Effie groaned. “I’ll tell you; Kate will forget bits and you guys need the whole story.”
The boat engine was loud enough that we were almost shouting in order to be heard. Effie was sat opposite me and Fitz was trying to climb onto her lap so that he had the front row seat for the story.
“She’s older than us,” Effie began. “She’s the wonder child, the golden girl. She did the med-school thing and she volunteered abroad and did all the goody-two-shoes stuff that makes the rest of us look bad. We tried to point out that she has healing magic and that it just made sense for her to be a doctor, but still it was as if nothing we ever did was good enough.”
“So you guys don’t speak because…?” I said, still unsure.
“Our whole family pooled their cash and paid for her studies,” Kate interrupted. “When it came down to it, there was no money left for me and Eff, and we couldn’t get loans due to some incidents with missed cell phone payments that I won’t go into.”
“You wanted to go to college, but you couldn’t afford it?” I asked. We were approaching the island now and Miller reduced the speed of the boat, meaning that the engine quietened, and we could hear each other without shouting.
“Pretty much,” Effie sighed. “I could have been an astronaut, Sadie. If I could have afforded college, had even the smallest interest in physics and wasn’t so scared of aliens, I could have been in space right now.”
“Yeah,” Kate cheered in agreement. “I could have been a journalist for some big-time newspaper or hosted my own show about nature or something.”
“Can’t you host a show without a college degree?” I asked.
“Well, yeah… but— I can’t remember why I didn’t go for that then…” she trailed off.
“It isn’t Brielle’s fault that all those things happened though, is it? You shouldn’t blame her for the decisions your family made,” I explained.
“I know, but we were really bitter teenagers when it all happened and now too much time has passed to do anything about it,” Effie said.
“That doesn’t make any sense, you both know that, right?” I said, raising an eyebrow at both of them.
“Yeah, I’m with Sadie,” Fitz nodded. “It’s no way to live your life, hanging on to old grudges out of habit. You are denying yourself the hap
piness of hanging out with your cousin. I am pretty sure that one of my cousins accidentally turned himself into a tree and we can’t figure out which one he is.”
We were almost at the Green Holt dock and Fitz was trying to recreate a sea-shanty that he’d seen online, but Miller cut him off. Thankfully.
“Okay, who’s getting off here?” Miller called out. “I think Sadie and I are going over to Skerry briefly first.”
“Huh?” I said.
“I’ve just seen someone on the Skerry beach rolling a cannon along the sand and it’s aiming right at this island so the quicker we move the better,” Miller explained.
Fitz, Effie and Kate leapt off the boat onto the dock and Effie wiggled her fingers at the bags and they floated up through the air and landed on the dock beside her.
“Could you use your magic to just send those bags up to the guest house?” I asked.
“Well yeah, I can do pretty much anything,” Effie laughed. “But then I would miss out on the fun of dragging luggage around a humid island, up hills and between palm trees.”
“Are you joking?” I laughed.
“No, she’s not,” Kate sulked. The two of them began to pull back packs over their shoulders, extend the handles on wheely suitcases and struggle up the dock dragging their stuff behind them. Fitz was trotting alongside them both happily and continuing his sea-shanty.
“She’d not been two weeks from shore, when down on her a right whale bore…” he sang.
Miller was already turning the boat around and zooming away, but I had no doubt Fitz would give me another performance later on.
“How do people on both of these islands have cannons?” I asked. “Where can you even buy a cannon?”
“I’ve asked,” Miller sighed. “I don’t get answers, or at least I don’t get answers that make any sense.”