“Well, sir, I won’t take up any more of our time. Please give my condolences to your wife and save some for yourself.”
Win shook his hand one last time and turned to leave while a million questions swirled in my head.
But that all came to a halt when Arkady gasped sharply and grabbed my arm and held it up.
“Malutka!” Arkady shouted with a panicked voice.
I gave him a strange look. “What?”
“Look at hand!” He held my arm up by my wrist, forcing my eyes to focus on it.
I fought a gasp. Quite successfully, I might add.
“What? What’s happening?” Win demanded, stopping in the middle of the dirt parking lot.
“Stevie. She is disappearing, Zero!”
“Come again, mate?”
Yeah. He was right. My right hand had become transparent.
Eep!
The hits just kept on comin’.
Chapter 14
Win held up his phone for verification while I tried to focus on the picture he was showing me of Mellie Carter without looking at my disappearing hand. “Is this our horse lady, Dove?” he asked, using the code name we’d chosen as Gooch exited the highway at another rest area.
“That’s her, for sure.” My answer was distracted, but it was only because I had eleventy-billion thoughts at once about everything we’d learned at Jeb Rainier’s.
Win scrolled the article, one of many now that the news of her affair with Seattle tech legend Malcolm Royce was out, and there were plenty of pictures to go with it.
Mellie Carter, twenty-eight to Malcolm’s fifty, a high school music teacher and amateur equestrian, had died in a tragic horse-riding accident. It went on to list some of her equestrian accolades, and there were several pictures of her and Sally, but mostly it focused on the scandal and the millions of dollars Malcolm Royce’s wife, Rose Royce (hah!), was sure to garner.
Rubbing the fingers of my still visible hand over my eyes, I tried to put together a question that made sense and didn’t end with me screaming my terror aloud.
What if we couldn’t find my body? What if this really was it?
Belfry, who’d voiced his concerns about just that before Win got back in the car, still had me a little freaked out. He’d been adamant that this meant my physical body, the vessel for my soul, was in dire straits.
That information made Win even more anxious to figure this out, which of course left me feeling like I could crawl out of my skin.
“Okay,” I finally said. “So let’s not panic yet. Belfry could be right. Sure. My body could be dying, but we don’t know for sure that’s what this transparent thing means. Take that off the table for the moment.”
“I most assuredly will not, Stephania. I can’t spare a moment to think of anything else.”
“Well, we have to try because it might help us with the rest of this mess. Another thing to think about is, if we do find my body, how do I get back into it? How did you do it, Win?”
The thought sent shivers up my spine, but I truly didn’t have an answer and without any of the old spell books we once had access to, I couldn’t even begin to guess.
He looked upward, his eyes pained. “I plane-hopped, Stephania. I don’t know if it’s the same thing.”
I gulped. “Okay, let’s wait on that and deal with the most immediate issue.”
“Mellie,” Win said.
“Mellie, right. She’s definitely the ghost who I saw and you heard, but seeing what she looks like and hearing Jeb’s story about her clears up nothing. Unless this Malcolm had something to do with our deaths. Now, I can tell you for sure, I haven’t been cavorting in forever, and I especially haven’t been cavorting with a tech giant. I have almost nothing in common with this woman other than she clearly loves animals, but if her Facebook page is an indication, she doesn’t have any pets at home. So when she said we have to help ‘her,’ she must not have meant there was a helpless animal left in her house, and I doubt she meant Sally, because Sally’s at Jeb’s, but I could be wrong. Maybe she doesn’t know Sally’s all right.
“Now, on to the broken neck. Jeb saw it happen, so murder’s almost definitely off the table. However, there’s still the obvious question. Why does she have a hole the size of the great state of Texas in her chest?”
Win sighed as Gooch pulled into a rest area and parked. “I’m going to stretch my legs, Gooch. Give me a few?”
He nodded his head and saluted Win. “I’ll check in with my mother while you do. Take your time.”
Win got out of the car and shut the door, walking toward a soaked picnic table under a big, winter-bare maple. The weather had turned chilly, the rain splattering against the ground with hard slaps.
During the drive here, Win had called the Seattle police, but the detective investigating GG’s death, a Detective Gabel, wasn’t in, so he’d left her a message without leaving his name, but first he’d spoken to an officer who said there’d been no unidentified bodies in the last two days.
He’d also called Seattle General again and gotten the same answer. No unidentified bodies needing identifying and if they had one by the name of Stephania Cartwright, that was confidential information. If they were telling the truth, it left us with a lot of dead ends.
Win climbed the small hill leading to the picnic tables and leaned against one. Cracking his knuckles, he propped open the pocket of the purse still around his neck so Belfry could hear us talk this out.
“The hole in her chest,” he mumbled and shook his head. “I don’t understand the hole in her chest either, if she broke her neck, and as you said, Jeb saw the accident. But maybe Malcolm Royce put something under the saddle, or signaled Sally in a way that would distress her but Jeb couldn’t hear it? Jeb’s not a young man, that’s for certain. So surely he might not have heard something that would have spooked Sally. Still, I don’t see the connection to you.”
“Neither do I. What could I possibly have to do with Mellie Carter’s death? I’m only allegedly dead, she’s for sure dead, but my body wasn’t in the morgue, to our knowledge. Though, Mellie Carter’s was. Jeb said as much. And if we assume Egan Joseph wrote that note about me, everything almost always leads back to the morgue. That’s the only thing we have.”
“The morgue…” Win muttered with a clenched jaw. “There’s something about that bloody morgue, Stephania. I’d bet you were there at some point. I’d bet when we showed up, Mellie turned up because she figured we’d find you, not that piece of paper. So the morgue is the hot spot here.”
“So where the frack is she?” Belfry chirped. “And who brought her to the morgue? There’s no report of an unidentified body anywhere. The police would have a record of it, and even if they wouldn’t give specifics, like it was some big case they were afraid to give details about, they would have asked Win to come in for questioning. So no one, no one official anyway, has reported an unidentified body.”
Win sucked in his cheeks, driving a hand into his shorts. “No sighting of Mellie’s ghost anywhere, Dove—or even that passel of ghosts from GG’s store? I’d take that lot showing up and screeching like the banshees they are, all day, every day, if it led us to something useful.”
Looking down at my feet, I shook my head as Arkady rubbed circles along my shoulders with his broad palm to soothe my rising panic. “No. Nothing.”
Win dropped his fist on the picnic table. “Egan Joseph is eyeball deep in this. The business card we found by your car, the note, the pawnshop car chase, the morgue. He’s the thread. I feel it.”
“Well, it’s sure a thread I can’t figure out and I don’t know why. Did you scour their social media to see if Egan knew Mellie? Maybe he was an old boyfriend or related to her somehow.”
But Win gave a curt twist of his head. “I found absolutely nothing that connects them in any way. You do know what we have to do now, don’t you, Stephania? We’re going to that viewing for Mellie tonight. There are two. The first is at five p.m., and I’m going to be
there, and I’m going to stay there if I have to. This has to do with something Egan Joseph is up to his thick neck in. Something that has to do with Mellie Carter.”
Clenching my fists, I fought tears. “Boy, we sure could use some divine intervention here, afterlife people!” I shouted out, only to have all of Plane Limbo quickly avert their gazes again.
“Easy, Dove,” Win soothed, his voice warm and comforting, but I heard the worry in his tone. “We’ll get to the bottom of this if it’s the last thing I do.”
No sooner did he say that than I heard Arkady gulp—hard. My eyes flew to his and he pointed to my leg.
It was all I could do not to gasp out loud when I looked, but Win was already under the gun. I didn’t want him to stress any more than he already was.
I raised a shaky finger to my mouth to signal Arkady should keep this quiet. He frowned, but I gave him the sternest look I could summon. So stern, he huffed his discord.
I knew he didn’t like it, but that was too bad. We needed Win to focus. He was the only one who could find my body.
Which, by the by, was rapidly disappearing.
I wasn’t just missing a right hand anymore. I had a see-through leg, foot and two left fingers.
We sat across the street from Vera Brothers Funeral Home, watching the people arrive for Mellie’s viewing, but no sign of Egan Joseph yet.
“Are you really going to walk into that funeral home in that getup, Win?”
“My choices are few. We didn’t have time to figure out my clothing for this evening because we were so engrossed in scouring the Internet for anything we could find on this cast of characters.”
Okay, that was true. We’d spent an entire afternoon going over and over this mess, only to come up empty-handed. “Well, I’m here to tell you, I don’t think the practical joke spiel is going to work this time. It’s a funeral, Win.”
“Oh, I’m not going to mingle with the people attending, Stephania. Do give me some credit. I’m going to do what we in the business like to call fringe.”
“Fringe?”
Arkady laughed and nodded his head in understanding. “Dah, my sweet juniper. That is when you make yourself invisible and open ears.”
“Do you really think invisibility is a goal easily achieved in that kooky sweater, Double Oh Seven” I asked.
“As I continue to remind you, I am quite good at this. Fear not. I shall blend.”
“Okay, and in blending, how do you intend to get a glimpse of Mellie’s body? You can’t just walk up to her casket and start fussing with her body, Win.”
The hope was, if he could see the wound I’d seen, he might be able to better understand what had really happened to her. She’d said the hole “hurt,” but if her cause of death was a snapped neck, a hole in her chest made zero sense.
I thought the idea was crazy, but Win had seen a lot in his time as a spy. I’m sure wounds and other such maladies were familiar to him.
“I’ll figure it out when the time comes. For now, trust I know what I’m doing, Dove.”
That was a good thing, considering now my other leg and the right side of my body had disappeared. My physical body was out there dying somewhere.
Arkady frowned at me when I stretched my newly transparent leg. Then he mouthed the words “forgive me” before he clamped his hand over my mouth, and said, “Zero, this is getting bad. Badder and badder. My malutka, she is disappearing!”
Win’s head snapped up, his eyes sharp. “Is this true, Stephania?”
I waffled as my palms, even transparent, began to sweat. I shot Arkady a sour look when I pulled his big hand from my mouth, but I was quick to defend my position.
“Listen, define ‘disappearing.’ I mean, I’m still here. You can still hear me, right? So I’m a little milky-white. Big frackin’ deal. Arkady’s a worry-wart. You know he leans toward dramatic when it comes to me.”
“This is not true, Zero! She is making light. Stevie is disappearing right in front of me. She is,” he harrumphed.
Win clenched his jaw and tightened his grip around the purse’s strap. “How long has this been going on, Stephania?”
“All afternoon!” Arkady belted out before I had the chance.
“And you thought it wise to keep this from me?”
Oooo. He was angry. The vein throbbing in his temple just beneath the rim of his ridiculous hat said so. “What could you have done? We spent all afternoon going around in circles. How would that have been any different if you knew?”
Win looked at the time on the dashboard, but he didn’t answer me because he knew I was right. “Gooch, good man? You stay right where you are. Do not leave this car. Understood? If you don’t see me within the next two hours, go home.”
Gooch adopted a stubborn expression. “I think I told you, I’m invested, sir. I’m not leaving until I know you’re okay and whatever this thing is about is over.”
Win’s eyes met his in the rearview mirror, somber and dark blue. “I’m going to ask you, as my new friend, to respect my wishes, Gooch. Please. Make this promise to me before I leave this car. It’s imperative you do as I wish.”
Gooch sighed, and it was definitely with resignation. “Okay. I promise, but don’t you want me to call the police or something? Look, I know something weird is going on here. I don’t know what, and I’m givin’ it all I got to mind my business, but all this talk of this lady who’s dead and another one you can’t find, plus the one you’re on the phone with, well…I know whatever you’re doing is dangerous. So at least let me call the police,” he pleaded, breaking my heart in two.
Win felt it. Whatever this was, this urgent ache, aside from the fact that we needed to find my body, he felt something horrible was just around the corner. I felt it, too. I’d felt it all day.
“Sir?” Gooch said again.
But Win shook his head. “No, Gooch. You simply go home. Besides, if I’m not back in two hours, I’m likely not coming back anyway.”
With that, Win popped open the door of the car and stepped out into the rain-soaked night.
“Win?”
“Dove?”
“Before you go inside, I’d like to say something.”
I’d wandered over to a private spot on Plane Limbo so I might speak to Win alone. I didn’t really need to, because everyone scattered when I showed up anyway, but I had to tell him something, and I wanted to do it in privacy.
“Of course, Dove, he whispered, his hand on the headset as he crossed the street, darting cars, his limp even more pronounced than it had been since this began.
“I’m going to keep this short and sweet, or I’ll turn into a big fat crying mess of a red face and snotty nose.” I felt my chest tighten and my words begin to hitch.
“Talk to me, Stevie.”
Win’s voice soothed me as I cleared my throat. “If…if something happens to me, or has happened to me or whatever, and we lose communication, I need you to know the best day of my life was the day you came into it. Second only to your return. You’re one of the best parts of my world, and I’m so grateful we had at least a little time to spend together.”
“Even though I’ve been a grumpy, insolent cur?” he said with a smile.
“Okay, could have lived without all the griping about how your new body is making you crazy, but I get it. You had the body of a champion and you were a little bitter about this one refusing to cooperate. But remember, it took time and training for your old body to get as fit as it was; this one is damaged. That will take time to get fit, too.”
“I won’t hear this from you, Dove. Nothing’s going to happen to you. There’s nothing—nothing I won’t do to find you, Stevie. There’s nothing I wouldn’t sacrifice to keep you from harm. There’s no one I wouldn’t plow through to see to your safety. Nothing and no one.”
My throat became so tight I almost couldn’t breathe, but I managed to whisper, “I know. I really, truly know that, and I love you, Win. Please don’t ever forget that.”
; He looked down at his fingers, and I know Win almost as well as I know myself, and what I know is, he was fighting his own raw emotions.
When he finally said, “I love you, too, my dove,” his voice tight, I knew he meant it.
Scraping a thumb under my eye to wipe away my tears, I blew out a breath. “Oh, and one more thing?”
“Anything. Always.”
“Don’t forget to feed Belfry. I know he can be a real PITA, but he loves you—looks up to you even. When he first met you, before you talked to me, he couldn’t stop talking about how cool he thought you were. So in light of the fact that you’re his secret Double Oh Seven idol, he doesn’t deserve to starve to death.”
Win looked up at the wet sky in that all-too-familiar way I once had, and he laughed that deep, delicious laugh I’d always looked forward to hearing in my ear.
And that would help tide me over if we were forced to part.
Win stood at the front entry of the funeral home in a corner by the coatroom. He’d said he knew how to fringe, and he wasn’t lying. Not a single person who’d entered Vera Brothers even glanced his way—which was a good thing, considering his sweater had been ugly before.
But now? Now it was a soggy mess of an ugly Christmas sweater and his slippers looked as though he’d rolled them in mud.
Still, he stood quietly, watching and waiting, which in turn was beginning to make me antsy.
Naturally, with our luck, there was nothing to see, but he waited with the patience of a saint anyway. People drifted in and out, traipsing their wet feet along the parquet flooring, their dripping coats leaving a trail of water behind them.
The viewing room played soft music, Rachmaninoff if I was hearing correctly. A much-loved composer of Mellie’s, according to her Facebook page. There were white roses in tall standing vases and black and white pictures of Mellie and Sally on the end of her casket in matte black frames.
The funeral directors, the Vera brothers themselves, I presumed, stood by the casket, their hands crossed in front of them, fingers around their wrists, solemnly looking out at the crowd of people coming and going.
Witches Get Stitches Page 16