The Empty Cradle

by Jill Nojack

  Natalie nodded to Denton as she bustled by the truck toward the house. He boomed, “Taylor, stop where you are,” as he opened the driver’s door and jumped down to the pavement. He slammed the door and hustled after her.

  Gillian and Cassie, who had been following behind her, hurried forward. Gillian headed him off with, “We’re here legitimately, Karl. William called us to come get Jenny. Cassie and Tom are going to put her and the little ones up, and several members of the town choir are pitching in. Maureen was a member. And a friend.” Gillian had found it odd to refer to the coven as the “choir” in public places when she first moved to Giles, but now she didn’t give it a thought. They’d be in real trouble, however, if anyone ever expected them to sing.

  Denton said, “The last thing I need is that woman poking around in an investigation again.”

  “I understand your concerns, but you know Robert has a high opinion of her,” Gillian said, her voice soft, persuasive.

  Denton’s low, large voice came out as a growl, “Just keep her out of my way. And get her out of here quickly.”

  She laid a hand on his shoulder, saying, “I’ll do that, Karl. I’m sure Robert will appreciate your understanding in this. You know, he was just saying we need to have you over for dinner again soon. He knows what you do for this town.”

  Some of the strain left his face as he said, “Thanks,” before clambering back in the truck to bellow at Rogers, “Every inch of it, I said. Wrap up the bedding. Bill can process that for evidence, too.”

  Gillian smiled. The chief sounded much less cross now. He was back to his normal focus for the job at hand. It had probably been wrong of her to add the healing pulse with her touch to lower his stress. But she had little doubt that Natalie would someday do or say something to make the poor man’s head burst like a milkweed pod, and she didn’t want to be there when all of the good things Denton brought to the town floated away on the breeze.

  ***

  William stopped Natalie at the door. “Just wait there. Jenny and I will bring the babies out. I’m staying to go over the scene with a fine-tooth comb, and I don’t need anyone else tramping around in here.”

  “I’ll tramp where I like,” Natalie replied, stepping past him but stopping just beyond the threshold, saying, “Although I suppose I like it just fine right here. Go on, get what you’re getting. Cassie brought us in that old station wagon she inherited from her grandmother, so there’s plenty of space.”

  Her eyes scanned around the room as she talked. William could no longer see the dead now that he was firmly among the living, but as a witch who could harness the magic of the afterlife, Natalie wasn’t surprised that Maureen was still in the room even though her body had been removed. She guarded one of the cradles, her eyes wild, her hands flailing, still batting away an attacker, four red wounds gaping across her torn neck and shoulder. Natalie couldn’t look for long.

  She moved aside as William and Jenny approached, each of them holding one of the infants. He whispered, “Please just stay put so Denton doesn’t have my head. I’ll be back for the baby’s things in a minute,” as they passed.

  She nodded. She could get what she needed for now from the doorway anyway.

  Her hand moved to a small drawstring cotton bag in her pocket, where she’d placed a quickly prepared charm. She dipped her finger in the ash she’d charged with magic during the ride, then smeared it across her closed right eyelid, whispering, “the magic before be now,” and opened her eyes.

  It was a strange sensation with the trails and pockets of magic from her right eye stereoscopically overlaying the normal vision from her left. The room was busy with magical traces, but just seeing where the magic had been told her nothing. It could be weeks old; Maureen was an active witch, and Jenny had magic of her own, although Maureen had confided in Gillian that her daughter’s husband forbid her even talking about it. The babies, too, could be witches, but their magic wouldn’t become active until puberty. And that didn’t bode well, because the strongest swirl of magic centered on the cradle behind Maureen’s ghost.

  From the cradle, a strand of magic intertwined with a second source and trailed out through the arch into the kitchen. She couldn’t see how far beyond it went from where she stood, and she hoped she could move quickly across the room and get back before she was found out. But as she twitched forward for a better look, William’s hand touched her shoulder lightly, breaking the spell. The magical traces dissipated.

  “You said you’d stay put,” he reminded her as he walked past her to pick up two bags near the couch. Handing one to her, he asked, “Figure it out yet?”

  She rubbed at her eyelid with her handkerchief. “No. But I have very good reason to believe that there was magic involved. I just don’t know what its purpose was yet. And Maureen’s still here, protecting the children as far as she knows. Stuck.”

  “Oh.” His face fell. “Those are the tough ones. It’s so sad when someone gets trapped in such a terrible moment. You’ll come back when Denton releases the scene, won’t you? To help her pass if she doesn’t move to the portal on her own?”

  She nodded toward the right corner of the room, where the bright light of the Summerland shone through, hurting her eyes when she looked at it directly. “The portal is still strong and still trying to draw her. But I don’t think she knows it’s there. She’s blotting it out.” Natalie sighed. A spirit as fiercely determined to stay put as Maureen’s shade appeared to be wouldn’t be easy to move along. She realized that when she did come back, she’d better be well rested. She nodded. “But yes, I’ll take care of it.”

  She didn’t add that it might be a little sooner than William would like.

  ***

  Was a piece of lint evidence? William had no idea. He plucked it off the carpet and tucked it away in a plastic bag just in case. He didn’t want to miss anything. This was his first big crime scene, and he had to get it right or Denton might figure out that his concocted resume was exactly that. But what was more important was that the clue to finding the missing child could be in the room somewhere. If it was, he had to find it.

  He took pictures of the bloodstain, the locations of the cradles, the stuffed frog in its baby bonnet. Then he took pictures of the bedding, the walls, the floor. All of it. If he didn’t know what any of it meant, he’d record every inch of the place.

  He now deeply regretted Robert’s lie to Denton about his investigative skills. He’d been learning everything he could so that he could at least sound like he had knowledge, but “Forensics for Dummies” and the TV shows about crime scene investigation that he’d streamed from the internet didn’t make him an expert. What a terrible time for him to be a fraud.

  Being a djinn didn’t help him out much as a police officer, either. There were many things he could do: make people think he was someone he wasn’t, defy gravity, survive immersion in fire and water, transport himself instantly from place to place (as long as he didn’t leave the city limits of Giles), levitate objects or toss them around without touching them, and even influence people’s emotions with a brush of his fingertips against their skin. But none of that made him smarter or a better policeman. At least, it hadn’t made much of a difference to this point. And he couldn’t grant wishes, no matter how badly people wished the missing triplet would be found.

  He covered each of the rooms in turn, until his stomach started complaining that lunch hour was overdue. As an immortal, he didn’t need to eat to live, but he experienced hunger the same as any other creature with a stomach. He stopped working only long enough to pop back to his apartment for a sandwich and a bottle of soda from his own fridge, which he returned to the victim’s house to eat. The last thing he needed when he was already feeling incompetent was for Denton to walk in and find him gone. He liked the job, and he’d do everything he could to keep it, but he sure didn’t feel real competent right now.

  Of course, how could he? The only job he’d ever held was as the toy buyer for his family’s
department stores, and even that was decades ago, for crying out loud. He didn’t have the first qualification for the job Denton expected him to do.

  Once every corner was photographed, every piece of lint bagged and tagged, he stepped out to the back yard. He covered every inch of the lawn, looking for anything that had been dropped or buried. There was nothing except an old and thoroughly chewed dog bone.

  He traveled back to the patio door he’d left open a crack so he could get back in, and he noticed something he hadn’t seen on his way out—the faintest sliver of red in the eighth of an inch crack between the patio and the threshold the sliding door rested on. He pried the red oblong out of the seam in the cement. What in the heck was it? It was plastic, but he couldn’t figure out what it was meant to be. Something that had broken off of a child’s toy?

  Ah well, into a bag it goes. Maybe it would make sense to someone else.

  He ran a hand back through his hair and took one last look around the crime scene. Goll-ee. He might as well be Barney Fife, for all the good he was going to be to his chief.

  ***

  As he approached the hospital morgue, Dr. Don remembered just in time that he was still wearing his conference name tag and tore it off his chest, stuffing it into a pocket of his dark blue suit as he greeted the morgue attendant. They’d been swapping stories for at least five years over autopsies, but Dr. Don’s first name had gotten lost over the two and a half decades he’d served as coroner in Giles. That suited him just fine, because his parents, who had named him after his wealthy great uncle Wendell, hadn’t done him any favors. There hadn’t been anything in the old man’s will for him as they’d hoped, and if there had been, it wouldn’t have made up for the years of abuse he’d suffered at the hands of his school peers.

  So when everyone who met him assumed “Doc Don” was a casual way of greeting him, he encouraged them to believe that his first name was Don and hoped they wouldn’t ask for a last.

  It always hurt, though, when he was on a casual name basis with the person on his table. Because he’d known Maureen. She’d served him his lunch at the hospital cafeteria where his office was tucked into a corner near the morgue. She was a cheerful person, always ready with a kind word. Preternaturally optimistic, even, when it came right down to it.

  As he pulled the sheet back to expose her upper body, his first thought was that she didn’t deserve this. His second was that he had no idea what could have caused the four deep, equidistant gashes that started at the right side of her neck and ended just below her left shoulder. It wasn’t a knife unless the killer had come at her four times, meticulously carving a new slice next to the previous path each time. If so, she’d have been already dead, unconscious, or heavily restrained. Otherwise, the perfect lines would have been disrupted by her struggles. But he didn’t think much of that theory; there were no marks from ligatures. His immediate working thesis—which he was more than willing to adjust given any evidence to the contrary—was that the murder weapon was something sharp with four blades, but he couldn’t posit yet what that might be.

  If he didn’t know that it had happened in her own home, he’d think she’d been attacked by something wild—an especially large bobcat or even a bear cub; the wounds had the look of claw marks. Not that any dangerous species had been sighted near Giles for a while, but they were reported from time to time. But actually entering a house? Not likely. Bobcats are shy, and a bear cub isn’t going to be out there without it’s mother.

  The wounds were big—much bigger than a bobcat’s paws. Something to keep in mind, though, until he had a handle on exactly what had done the deed.

  There wasn’t much on the body in the way of evidence once he’d washed away the blood. He used tweezers to remove a few small pieces of particulate he found near the wounds. Afterward, he cleaned the wound carefully and was left with only the gashes.

  She’d never had a chance.

  Her external carotid artery was severed along with the jugular vein. She would have had only seconds before she lost consciousness, and a few minutes more before all brain function ceased.

  He’d get her stomach contents and test for poisons even though cause of death seemed clear. Better safe than sorry, he knew. He only had to think back to what happened to old Mrs. Grinnard, whose death had been presumed natural back—what was it? Twenty years ago? No one was surprised by the death due to her age and history of being in and out of the hospital with complications of diabetes. But in an unexpected twist, a live snake had slithered out of her mouth as he prepared to examine her. Not that he expected that to happen again. But this was Giles. Better to be prepared.

  “Well, Maureen,” he said, covering her face—and her open eyes—with the sheet, “I have to do some things to you neither of us is going to like, but you can bet if you keep looking at me like that, I’m going to like them even less.”

  6

  Marcus opened the door to William, then called back over his shoulder into the house, “It’s Bill.” He turned back to smile conspiratorially at the visitor before he called over his shoulder again, “Should I tell him to get lost?”

  “It doesn’t work when I tell him, so why should it be different for you? You might as well let him in,” came Natalie’s reply.

  Marcus stepped to the side, “She’s in her office.”

  That was as good a name as any for Natalie’s ritual space in what had been built to be a pantry, William thought as Marcus latched the door, then disappeared into the living room. Marcus’s girlfriend, Twink, smiled out at him as William glanced through the living room arch on his way to the back of the house.

  Natalie sat cross-legged on the floor surrounded by a pile of books, loose papers, and photographs. The books looked old, and the photographs were old-fashioned black and white prints. She acknowledged him with a nod, although she didn’t look up from her reading; one of her fingers trailed quickly down a page and her eyes behind the lenses of her reading glasses followed it.

  “Did Jenny get settled in okay?” he asked.

  Her finger stopped moving and she looked up. “Cassie and Gillian have her tucked up in the old servant’s quarters. With Tom and Cassie’s room in the other wing, they’ll have a buffer between them and crying infants. And the coven members who volunteered to help Jenny out with the girls will be able to visit easily through the apartment’s outside entrance. Apparently, they’ve drawn up a mother’s helper schedule for at least the next few days.”

  “Good use of those rooms, then. At least until Jenny can go home.” William had seldom been in the servant’s quarters of his old family home when he was alive, but he’d explored them thoroughly after death and discovered that his family had provided for its live-in butler and maid better than most. He was glad of that. It was a smallish apartment, but it had felt cozy and welcoming when the Bishops had lived there.

  “Yes, I suppose so, although Cassie is more distracted than ever with babies in the house. Gillian, too. It’s all ‘oh, they’re adorable,’ and ‘mmmmm, I love the way a baby smells’. Yes. Because babies come freshly washed and powdered by nature. Hmph.”

  “What’s all this?” William asked, indicating the books piled around her in disordered stacks.

  “Borrowed from Robert’s library. I’ve got the entire Egyptian section since that’s where Anat’s heart was magic-wise. Something didn’t feel right to me when I visited Maureen’s house. Let’s just say that I’m not letting go of the idea that this has something to do with a recently banished demon and her dangerous mind games until it’s been proven otherwise.”

  “Nat, I visit the slab out in the woods every week, just like you told me to, and the only thing that’s changed there is that the colony of daylilies toward the edge of the clearing is getting ready to bloom. It should be awful pretty out there soon. You could come with me some time this week and ease your mind about it. We could go on my lunch hour and tuck into a picnic hamper full of the choicest offerings from the diner’s menu.” He waggle
d his eyebrows at her. “I’d be happy to feed you grapes…”

  One of her eyebrows arched in response to his waggling ones as she ignored his suggestion. “I have no doubt she’s stuck right where I put her. The ward around the purse she’s trapped in was built by my grandmother, my mother, and me. Together, we were an even more powerful combination than when Gillian, Cassie, and I work together for a spell. I’m not worried Anat will escape. I’m worried about the fertility token she created for Maureen’s daughter when she was still with us. And I don’t have time for a frolic. Neither should you.” She picked up another book, her bowed head dismissing him.

  “Oh, by the way,” he said. “Marcus asked if I thought it would be okay for him to take Twink up to his bedroom to study, and I said I thought it would be fine.”

  He wouldn’t have thought a seventy-four year old woman could spring from a cross-legged position that fast.

  She sprinted down the hall and started up the stairs, calling, ‘Jumping gelatinous jujubes! Marcus, you…”

  “What’s up?” the teen’s voice sounded from the living room.

  When Natalie returned to William with fire in her eyes, he gave her his most charming grin. “Sometimes it’s hard to get your attention. Did you know that? But I’m learning. So…if you don’t want a picnic, I’m inviting myself to dinner as payment for not kicking you out of a crime scene today.”

  “Shouldn’t you be out there looking for that poor girl?”

  “There’s nothing else I can accomplish tonight with the evidence bagged and tagged and off to the lab. The night shift is working the interviews that didn’t get done earlier and keeping the phone staffed if anyone calls to report a sighting after watching the appeal on the news. I’m on call so I’m ready to go if something comes in, but I think you owe me. I could use a dinner with friends.”

  ***