Fury’s Kiss

by Nicola R. White

  “I don’t know yet. Hang on a second.” I crept silently to the living room window and peered out through a crack in the curtains. There was a police car parked at the curb. I craned my neck to see who was pounding on the front door and recognized one of the two men standing there. “It’s Dewey Randolph, with some other guy. Looks like they’re here on official business.”

  Dewey had gone to school with us, a senior when we were freshmen. Popular and good at sports, he’d been a gentle giant, though not terribly academic. He’d gone to college on a football scholarship, but had dropped out and gone to the police academy after tearing a ligament in his knee. Despite reconstructive surgery, Dewey’s once-bright football career ended before it even got off the ground. To his credit, he hadn’t sunken into despair at the unexpected turn his life had taken, but seemed to take genuine pleasure in serving the town as a deputy to his uncle, the chief.

  Rachel groaned. “What’s he doing here? I thought Nora said she and Jackson didn’t tell the police anything. And who’s the guy with Dewey?”

  “She didn’t tell them anything. And I’ve never seen the other guy before. Come see for yourself.”

  Rachel joined me at the window and we both gave the guy the once-over. He was good looking in a conservative kind of way, wearing what looked like an expensive suit, though Alex would have known better than I did. Tall and athletically built, he was a quarterback to Dewey’s linebacker, and his immaculate haircut, polished shoes and upright posture screamed authority figure.

  “What should we do?” I asked Rachel.

  “We could answer the door. It’s not like they don’t know we’re in here.” She had a point. My car was right there in the driveway.

  Not to mention Dewey had noticed us skulking behind the curtains. He gestured at me to open the door and I signaled just-a-second at him, then stepped away from the window and let the curtain fall back into place. Rachel and I raced to tear the duct tape and towels from the door and window frames visible from the entryway, and stuffed them under the couch as Dewey knocked again.

  “Everything OK in there, Tara? I need you to open up—police business.”

  “Uh, just a second,” I yelled back. “We’re…” I thought quickly. “We’re not decent.”

  “Not decent?” Rachel glared at me. “What do you want him to think we’re doing in here?”

  Rachel was always especially careful to avoid saying or doing anything that might encourage Dewey’s years-long infatuation with her. Although he was always a perfect gentleman, he pursued her doggedly.

  “He’ll never give up if he thinks I’m into…naked yoga or something,” she complained.

  Grinning at her, I swung the door wide as she gave voice to the words naked yoga. Dewey swallowed audibly, blushing to the tips of his ears, and the man standing next to him grinned back at me and raised his eyebrows.

  Interesting. A suit with a sense of humor.

  “So that’s like regular yoga?” Dewey started to ask, “But without—”

  “No,” Rachel cut him off. “Absolutely not. We are not going there.”

  “What can we do for you, Dewey?” I asked before he had a chance to say anything more.

  “We’ve got a few questions for you. And some bad news.” He looked apologetic.

  My palms started to sweat and I wiped them on my maxi dress. He was on to me, I knew it. Only Dewey would look apologetic when questioning you for murder. But who had tipped him off? Had the curse I put on Priest failed somehow?

  Calm yourself, Alecto growled, sizing Dewey up. He knows nothing. His questions are… She searched for the right word. His questions are routine.

  I took a deep breath and surreptitiously wiped my hands on the side of my dress again, now wrinkled and rumpled from having been slept in all night. I hoped Dewey and his friend would attribute my breathlessness to the yoga Rachel and I had supposedly been doing.

  “Questions?” Rachel asked. “About what?” She was impressively poised, considering we’d woken up to a police interrogation. Then again, she wasn’t the one who had killed a guy.

  “I guess you probably heard that a man died at Spyder’s on Friday night,” Dewey said. “Clinton Miller, a construction worker.”

  We nodded.

  “Well, Nora Katsaros mentioned you were in earlier that night, so I have to ask you a few questions.”

  The man beside him cleared his throat pointedly.

  “Oh, yeah,” Dewey remembered his manners with a start. “Tara, Rachel, this is Special Agent Ethan Graves. He’s with the FBI, out of Boston. Ethan has a few questions for you, too.”

  Graves shot Dewey an irritated, sidelong glance and I got the feeling he preferred not to be on first name terms with Dewey.

  “I’m afraid I can’t help you with your investigation,” I said. “There was no one else there when I left the bar.”

  “That may be,” Graves put in, “but you could have seen something important and not even realize it. Maybe someone outside, or driving past. If we could have just a few minutes of your time, we’ll be out of here before you know it.” He took a half-step forward, inviting himself in, but Rachel refused to give any ground.

  “Tara said she didn’t see anything.”

  “You said you had bad news?” I wasn’t eager to hear it, but I needed to distract them. Besides, it would be better to just get it over with.

  Dewey took off his hat and looked down as he turned it around in his hands. “I’m sorry to tell you that your neighbor, Vera Hadley, passed away last night. Since we had to come out here anyway, I thought it might be easier to hear it from me instead of through the grapevine.”

  My hand rose to my throat and I stumbled back a step, floored by guilt. Our neighbor had sacrificed herself to save us, and I hadn’t given a thought to her since being startled out of my exhausted, fitful sleep by Dewey’s knock at our door. It all came back in a rush—Mrs. Hadley’s revelation that she was a witch, her warning about ambrosia.

  And that awful blackness.

  I looked at Rachel. My thoughts reflected in her eyes. “What happened?” I asked Dewey.

  “It was a heart attack as best as we can tell, though the autopsy will confirm it. She managed to call 911, but it was too late by the time we got there.”

  “I think I need to sit down.” I turned to make my way back to the living room sofa.

  It could have been me. Despite my strength, my speed, my new abilities, Ruby had been right. There were things darker than me.

  And I had met one of them last night.

  “At least she didn’t suffer long,” I murmured to Rachel, remembering the pleasant, relaxed state the creeping darkness had induced in me. It was a small consolation.

  “I’m sorry for the loss,” Dewey said, looking from Rachel to me. “I didn’t realize you were so close.”

  “Thank you, Dewey,” Rachel said. “She was a very interesting lady, and a good neighbor.”

  Agent Graves cleared his throat tactfully and I got the sense this wasn’t the first time he’d had this type of conversation. “I’m sorry to interrupt at a time like this, but I do have a few questions I need to ask you ladies.”

  “I think this can probably wait, can’t it?” Dewey asked. “After all, the guy’s buddy already confessed.”

  Graves shot Dewey another look. Despite Rachel’s long-suffering attempts to dissuade Dewey’s pursuit over the years, there were some definite advantages to his infatuation. Like his willingness to override police procedure to save Rachel any distress.

  “I wasn’t aware that the Hawthorne police department had brought in help from the mainland,” Rachel said to Dewey, fishing for more information. “Is there some reason this case is of particular interest?”

  “Ethan’s been working on the New England Slasher case. It may be that there’s some connection between that and what happened at Spyder’s.”

  “Thank you, Deputy Randolph,” Graves ground out, all tact gone now. “I’ll take it from here.
” He gave Dewey a shut-up-or-else look, then went on. “As the deputy says, there has been a confession in the death that took place at Spyder’s on Friday night, but there are some questions that remain to be answered. Anything you can recall, no matter how irrelevant it seems, may provide some context.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I really don’t think I have anything helpful to add.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Tara,” Dewey reassured me. “I know you’ll call if you think of anything.”

  A muscle flexed in Graves’ jaw. “Deputy,” he said, his voice carefully controlled, “a word?”

  Standing up, he nodded at us politely, then grabbed Dewey by the elbow and hauled him out into the hallway.

  “I thought you fixed it so Priest would confess and everyone would believe him,” Rachel whispered fiercely while Graves conferred with Dewey. “Why is this guy asking so many questions?”

  “I don’t know!” I whispered back. “That is the way it was supposed to work. I’m still figuring all this out, you know.”

  “Well, ask Alecto what’s up!”

  There is something different about this Agent Graves, Alecto told me. He is uncommonly strong of will.

  I passed the message on to Rachel. “Alecto says this Graves guy is just hard to brainwash.”

  We cut our discussion short when Dewey and Graves rejoined us in the living room.

  “Sorry about that,” Graves said. “Just a little jurisdictional issue to sort out.”

  Dewey had a hangdog expression on his face and I felt a twinge of embarrassment on his behalf.

  “Can I ask how Clinton Miller died?” Rachel asked, as much to clear the air as to get more detail about what I’d done to him. “The newspaper didn’t say much about it.”

  “Anoxia,” Graves told her. “Complete hypoxia of the entire body.”

  “Meaning…what?” I asked. Rachel had already figured out that much, but maybe he would spill something new if we kept him talking.

  Graves answered my question with one of his own. “Do either of you know what lack of oxygen does to the body?”

  “Hypoxia occurs when the body is deprived of oxygen, often due to poor circulation,” Rachel answered. “It’s sometimes induced on purpose to train athletes at high altitudes. Anoxia, on the other hand, refers to total deprivation of oxygen and can lead to tissue death.”

  Surprise flickered across Graves’s even, handsome features and I closed my eyes momentarily, wishing Rachel hadn’t just given away how much we knew about Miller’s cause of death. But it was too late. She was a walking, talking encyclopedia and answering Graves’s question was second nature to her.

  “The guy was basically vacuumed out,” Dewey offered helpfully.

  “But that’s impossible,” Rachel pointed out. “Complete anoxia of the entire body just can’t happen. Not outside of outer space, anyway. Or, I don’t know, a vacuum chamber used to train astronauts.”

  Yes, exactly. There was no way we nude yoga enthusiasts could have had anything to do with it. Now go away.

  “If Deputy Randolph hadn’t vouched for you,” Graves said, watching Rachel intently, “I’d swear you knew something about what happened to that man.”

  “Oh, please.” Rachel rolled her eyes. “Spending too much time on Wikipedia is hardly a crime.”

  Dewey opened his mouth to stick up for his ladylove but I put a hand on his arm to restrain him. His help was the last thing we needed right now.

  “Now if you’ll excuse us,” Rachel said, getting to her feet, “we should see about poor Mrs. Hadley. Dewey, thank you for telling us personally. We appreciate it.”

  She showed them to the door and Dewey filed out obediently. Graves followed, then paused on the threshold.

  “You might be comforted to know we found a partial fingerprint on the body. And it doesn’t belong to the accused.” He smiled a toothy, shark-like smile at us as he turned to go. “Whoever else was there that night, we’ll get them soon enough.”

  I felt far from comforted.

  Chapter 15

  As soon as Dewey and Agent Graves were on their way, Rachel put her hands on her hips and started to pace. I got out of her way, ready to take orders. When she got into full-on planning mode, there was no point in arguing. It was better to just buckle up and do what you were told.

  “OK.” Rachel whirled to face me as she reached the end of the room. “Here’s the plan. We need to know why you’re being stalked, what happened to Mrs. Hadley, and what exactly is up with Alecto and Ruby. I’ll go online and find out as much as I can about DeVille. You go next door and see if there are any clues at Mrs. Hadley’s. Oh, and tell Nora to meet us at the track tonight instead of tomorrow—there’s no time to waste.”

  She resumed her pacing. “The fingerprint issue will still need to be resolved,” she muttered, “but you’re not on record, so that will buy us some time until I think of something.”

  Still talking to herself, she wandered off to set up her laptop while I called Nora. I didn’t know whether I was relieved or disappointed that Jackson didn’t answer the phone, and I restrained myself from asking whether he would be meeting us at the track later, too. When Alex got home from her friend Jayda’s house, where she’d spent the night, I filled her in on everything that had happened and we headed next door to Mrs. Hadley’s house.

  The yard was as pristine as always, with just a few trampled flowers to tell the tale of what had happened the night before. The inside looked like any other old lady’s home, with doilies, photos and knickknacks scattered throughout. All signs of Mrs. Hadley’s double identity had disappeared, and there was nothing to suggest that the house had been filled with a mysterious black ooze just twelve hours before. Or that Mrs. Hadley had fed me ambrosia at the kitchen table.

  Reminded of the recipe card she’d pushed on me, we returned to our place to ask Rachel if she needed any ingredients for the potion. Since our investigation of Mrs. Hadley’s property had turned up exactly nothing, Alex and I could kill some time before our meet-up at the track by picking up whatever was needed.

  “Find anything?” I asked Rachel, sprawling into a chair across from her in the kitchen. Alex leaned against the counter and tossed me an apple from the fruit bowl. My hand shot out and snatched it from the air.

  “Man, I cannot get used to that,” Alex commented on my reflexes around a mouth full of fruit.

  “I didn’t find much,” Rachel answered me, tearing her gaze away from the screen. “Aside from the usual public relations stuff, there isn’t really anything here.”

  “Is that bad?”

  Rachel shrugged. “With a corporation this size, you’d expect to find something. It’s unusual for a company this high-profile to have almost no negative commentary written about it.”

  “So who owns DeVille? Priest said my stalker seemed like he was pretty high up in the organization.”

  Rachel summarized her research. “DeVille Developments is a construction and development company owned and operated by the Perris family. It started out small, back in the 1920s, when the founder, Spiro Perris, came to America from Greece by way of Ellis Island. He built the company from the ground up, starting in New York, before becoming one of the largest commercial contractors in the business. Today, the company is worth billions. Spiro died in the 50s and his son took over, and it’s been passed down through the men in the family ever since. They prefer to focus on community interest type projects where possible—community centers, universities, green technology, that sort of thing.”

  “And hospitals,” I added.

  “Mm-hmm,” Rachel nodded. “Very into doing the right thing. Or the politically correct thing, anyway. The company is now run by Spiro’s great-grandson, Christos. There’s a great-granddaughter, too—Christos’s twin sister, Elena. She takes care of fundraising, hostessing, that sort of thing.”

  “They sound like real do-gooders,” Alex observed.

  “Get this,” Rachel added. “They even took in
the orphaned son of an employee last year. Nikos, age twelve. Gave him their last name, the best education money can buy, the whole nine yards.” She tapped at the keyboard. “Home schooled, naturally, so he doesn’t have to mix with the riffraff.”

  “What’s with the name?” Alex wanted to know. “Is it DeVille as in Coupe DeVille, Cruella DeVille, or what?”

  “Hmm.” Rachel scanned the computer screen. “This is the only really juicy thing about the Perris family. The company was named after Spiro’s first wife, Hélène DeVille. She was French, from a rich family. They weren’t impressed that she married a penniless Greek immigrant, so they cut her off and Spiro named the company to spite them. When Hélène passed away a few years later, he married Chloris Theodori—a nice Greek heiress this time—but he kept the company name.”

  “Any clues as to what one of them might want with me?” I asked.

  “Nothing. The only dirt I can dig up is that the men in the family tend to be pretty accident-prone. Plane crashes, expensive car wrecks, that sort of thing.” She shrugged. “I guess that’s the risk you take when your hobbies all involve high-speed engines.”

  She switched from a news site to celebrity gossip. “Looks like Christos is something of a playboy. His parents died when he was barely out of his teens, so he’s had lots of power and freedom from a young age. There are photos of him with models and actresses, and he was in a fraternity, but there’s nothing like what Priest told you about. He’s never been accused of anything illegal, much less stalking or attacking a woman.”

  “How about his sister? What do you know about her?”

  Rachel shook her head. “There’s even less on her. Thirty years old and she doesn’t even date. The press calls her the Virgin Heiress.”

  “Keep digging,” I suggested. “Whoever’s after me is linked to DeVille. There must be something there that will give us a clue who it is—a sexual harassment charge, something. In the meantime, Alex and I’ll go pick up whatever you need to mix up a big batch of purple. Got that list of ingredients handy?”

  “That’s another problem,” Rachel said, holding up the index card. “These aren’t exactly things you can pick up at the corner store.”