by Madelyn Alt
She nodded. “Take your time, then. I have somewhere else I need to be tonight—arrangements to be made for Joel, you know—but . . . if you could give me a call when you’re ready to leave, I can have someone stop by to lock up the place?”
“Of course.”
“Thanks.” Tom paused again, and I braced myself, recognizing his technique. “One other thing, Mrs. Turner. What was your husband seeing a doctor for?”
“A doctor?”
“Mm. One Dr.”—Tom consulted another page in his flipbook—“Hiram Dorffman, three-two-two-seven Lincoln Boulevard, Fort Wayne.”
Libby cocked her head to one side, looking puzzled. “I’m afraid I don’t know a Dr. Dorffman.”
“He’s a psychotherapist—a hypnotherapist, actually—specializing in phobia resolution,” Tom said. “I have a call in to his office, but I thought I’d ask . . .”
Libby pulled her chin in and scoffed as though that was the most ridiculous suggestion in the world. “Joel was one of the strongest-willed men I knew. He didn’t have any phobias to speak of. None that I can name off the top of my head.”
“Ah. Any other reason he might have elected therapy?”
“I really think it’s a mistake. My husband wasn’t the type to go for such nonsense. He wasn’t a touchy-feely kind of guy, except with me. And he certainly wasn’t the type to believe in hypnotism. If he was, in fact, seeing Dr.—Dorffman, I think you said—it must have been for help in quitting smoking. He’d been trying to quit for years, with little success. Maybe he would have been willing to try hypnotism for that, considering everything else had failed.”
Frank cleared his throat and opened his mouth. “Well—”
“Pigs. In. Blankets!”
The outburst was so out of the blue and startling, everyone turned immediately around to see where it had come from. There could be only one answer, and he was sitting cross-legged on the ground, gathering loose limestone bits from the concrete into a small pile.
“I don’t like pigs in blankets, no, I don’t, no, I don’t,” Eddie muttered to himself.
Libby frowned at Frank, who was staring at his feet and avoiding her gaze entirely. “Frank. Perhaps you would like to take Eddie away somewhere.”
Eddie looked up suddenly. “Not the blood house, no, no, no. Eddie won’t go.”
“Frank! For heaven’s sake. There’s no way we can have an intelligent conversation with him here. Just take him away while we finish up with the officer.”
To appease Libby, Frank bent over and placed a gentling hand on Eddie’s shoulder. “Come on, Eddie. Let’s go find the cats, eh? I’ll bet you can root out old Tom.” He looked up and caught Tom’s eye. “Big old cat, part Siamese, I reckon. More like a gray ghost, for as much as he comes out during the day. No relation to you. Heh. Well, come on, Ed. I thought I saw a shadow, over by the office.”
When they’d wandered off a little ways, Libby said, “Eddie loves the animals, you see. The slaughterhouse, on the other hand . . . well, it offends his simple sensibilities. He knows what happens there. By the way, I’ve”—she cleared her throat delicately—“I’ve changed my mind about letting him stay on here after all, per Frank’s wishes. At least for a few days. Frank was right, you know—Eddie really doesn’t have anywhere else to go, and it wouldn’t be Christian to turn him out onto the streets in his unstable condition.”
Well, that was a switch. Hadn’t she just been reading Frank the riot act before Tom got there? Mercurial didn’t even cover it. I wondered what had changed her mind, when Eddie’s need and Frank’s wishes hadn’t seemed important enough factors before. And what about the insurance assessors she had been so concerned about?
“Decent of you,” Tom was saying. “If he becomes a problem, I’m sure there are several church-affiliated organizations that might be able to help you out. I could have someone dig up a few numbers for you, if you like.”
She gave him a grateful smile. “Thank you, that would be very helpful. Wouldn’t it, Noah?”
Noah nodded, ever the dutiful brother-in-law. I was beginning to recognize that Libby was right when she said she could be one tough cookie. If there had been any question about who would be running the show here, I think the answer had been found.
“What about the situation with Bart Cullins?” Libby posed the question to Tom almost as an afterthought. “If the examiner’s report comes back with a decision of homicide, it seems to me that he might be our best bet as a suspect. I mean, considering the harassment of me at my home, and the hanging of the dummy, and all of the break-ins here at the feed mill.”
“You know for a fact that Cullins was responsible for the hanging of the effigy and all the rest?” Tom asked.
“Well, no . . . not a fact as such . . . but he did have harsh words with my husband several times over the May price increases, and told Joel he could take a flying leap. Noah was there. He can tell you.”
Noah just nodded again.
“We’ve spoken with Mr. Cullins before, but he denied any involvement with the dummy, and his statement about where he was that night checked out. I’ll talk to him again.” Tom thumbed backward in time through his flipbook, and read his notes. “There was a note tacked to the front of the dummy. Hm, it did say something about ‘how the mighty would fall,’ ” he mused with a frown. “Mrs. Turner, I’d really like to see that dummy again. We didn’t take it as evidence that night because your husband had decided not to file an official complaint. We left it here with him. I don’t suppose you would know where it is now?”
“I’m afraid I do. Burned to bits. Joel burned it the very next day. In full sight of anyone who might come by the feed mill that day. My husband was a harsh man, Officer Fielding. He didn’t think much of the threats Cullins had been bandying about. Burning it was his way of telling Cullins where to stick his threats. It was also a way to dissuade anyone else who might have similar ideas.”
“Unfortunate. Ah, well. These things happen.”
“Not very often, I would hope,” Libby said wryly.
“Point taken. Listen, why don’t you let me get on with looking around a bit more, and I’ll let you get on with your evening.”
“And just to confirm, you will call me just as soon as you’re done, so that I can have someone come by and lock up?”
“Not a problem, ma’ am. You have a good evening.”
Libby led Noah away by the arm to the office, and stood speaking quietly with him just inside the door before grabbing her purse and keys. She flagged me down and beckoned me over.
“Hi, Maggie. Hey, listen, tonight is not really going to work out after all. It seems that the police want to do a little more poking around, and I don’t want them to think . . . I mean, you have to admit, the clearing probably would seem a little loopy to some . . . and . . . well . . . I think it would be better if you and your friend kind of made other arrangements.” She huffed out her breath in a sigh. “I’m not saying this very well, am I?”
I smiled, even though she had suggested it was up to Marcus and me to accommodate her. “It’s okay. Actually, I know Officer Fielding, and he’s fully aware of this sort of thing,” I said, holding up a faintly smoldering bundle of sage that I had just lit.
“He is?” Libby frowned. “I mean, are you sure?”
I nodded.
“Well . . . just how long do you think it’s going to take? Good Lord, that stuff stinks,” she said, wrinkling her nose and waving her hand rapidly in front of her face.
I raised my brows. How fast did she want it? And did she want it fast, or did she want it done right? “I suppose we can make it quick,” I said, doubting it, but after all, it was just Tom we were talking about.
“Ten minutes?”
She didn’t just want it quick, she wanted a miracle. But I knew it would be pointless to let her in on that little secret. “Sure.” Or not.
Libby beamed. “Good. Perfect, in fact. Thanks, Maggie. I appreciate this more than you could possibly know.”
She made a show of waving good-bye to Noah, who was watching from the office window, and sped off in her little green sportster.
“What did she want?” Marcus asked, appearing at my shoulder.
“For us to get our butts in gear and get this done for her in ten minutes’ time.”
“You’ve got to be joking.”
“ ’Fraid not. That was the extent of it. It was either agree to that, or come back at another time. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I much like Libby Turner,” I said, frowning as I realized how much that was true. I really, really didn’t like her. Almost as much as I didn’t like Margo, but in a completely different, almost childish way. The thought-emotion was bubbling up inside me, as though radiating inward from my fingers, my toes, my skin, and settling all in one pouting, petty mass in my belly.
“Nice car, though,” Marcus said. “Expensive as all get-out. Made my heart skip a beat or two, let me tell ya.”
Leave it to a guy to focus on the ride more than the rider. Then again, maybe Libby just wasn’t to his taste.
A few minutes later, Noah left the office with a folder full of papers in one hand, and headed for his F350. His other hand was holding his cell phone to his ear. “All right. Leaving now. Thanks, Frank. Yeah, she wants you to stay the night here with Eddie, just to make sure nothing happens. She would hate for him to hurt himself accidentally. All right. Later, bro.” He got into his big pickup and sped from the complex.
Behind us we both heard the crunch of heel on gravel on cement and turned at the same time to find Tom approaching us.
“So,” he said, his eyes shuttering his thoughts from me. I got the feeling they were hiding a lot.
I gave him a casual wave, trying to act as normal as possible. But inside, my stomach was still a mass of roiling emotion over Libby, and I didn’t even really know why. I’d never reacted to her so strongly before.
“What are the two of you doing here, if I might ask?” And underlying his words, I heard, Together again, I see . . .
“Libby asked me to come out and do a little bit of positive energy work here for her,” I told him. “She said the place has been a little off for a while, with all the bad feelings and bad blood that have been bandied about, and then with Joel’s death occurring here, too . . . she just wanted to be safe, rather than sorry.”
Tom took this information in, his thumbs tucked behind his utility belt, fingers overlapping its heavy leather surface, tap-tap-tapping inward in rapid procession. At last he said, “And what is he doing here?”
Ah. And therein lies the true rub. Again.
I felt my already overloaded emotional state flare with annoyance. “I asked him to come. Oh, for heaven’s sake, Tom. He’s here to help me. I’m not exactly an adept with all of these things, you know. Liss couldn’t come. I needed help. His help.”
His face remained as still, his expression as impenetrable, as before.
“And don’t you have better things to be worried about?” I snapped, tossing my head toward the feed mill’s surrounding buildings. “A pesky possible homicide to be investigating? Any number of elements that don’t add up?”
“I guess you overheard quite a bit of that just now.”
“Every last word,” I said, happy to be able to. “You’ve got your work cut out for you.”
“And you,” he said. “This place does have a weirdness to it. But you didn’t hear me say that.” And with that he started to walk away.
With an apologetic glance at Marcus, I ran after Tom. I caught up with him over by the cars. “Hey. Hey!” When he rounded back on me, his expression was carefully neutral, but I could sense that he was as irritated with me as I was with him. “What was all that about?”
“What do you want from me, Maggie? I mean, really, what do you want?”
The question took me by surprise. I foundered a moment, trying to find an answer that would be true, but one I would not regret. “I want—”
“Seriously, what? I’ve been asking myself that for a little while now. Every time we start to get close, something happens. Either my job gets in the way, or yours does, or you pull away from me when I have any kind of reservations at all about the kind of work you’re doing or the people you spend time with—”
“Like Liss, aka my boss. And like Marcus,” I filled in for him, still fuming.
His tone was as short as my temper. “Yeah. Quinn. Marcus Quinn.”
“I don’t see why you don’t like him.”
“Don’t see—every time I turn around, he’s sniffing around you, filling in any time you have available, usually when I have to work, as if that’s not suspicious . . .”
My eyebrows rose toward a sky that was growing darker by the minute. “Any time I have available! Like there’s been much of that lately, and you know it as well as I do! Between work and my family and everything—”
“But that’s the point, isn’t it? Neither one of us has any time. Neither one of us makes any time. And neither one of us wants to admit that.”
“What are you saying?”
“I don’t know, Maggie. Maybe it was just to say it. Maybe it was to get it out there in front of us, so that if we do decide this could be something, we can work on it before it becomes a real problem. I’ve already had one committed relationship that went wrong somehow. I don’t want or need another.”
All the fight went out of me. Wearily, I said, “And I want any relationship I’m in to be based on trust and respect and admiration. We’re both old enough to know that life isn’t just about one other person. I can’t give up my friends, Marcus included, or my family, just because you’re feeling like my time should be yours and yours alone. And”—because this had become a deal breaker for me—”I need for whoever I’m with to respect this part of me,” I said, touching my fingertips to my heart and then my forehead. “This sensing part of me. The part of me that knows what people are feeling and thinking sometimes. It’s not something that I can will away, Tom. It just is, and I don’t think I’d wish it away even if I could, now that I know what it is. I wouldn’t know how to live any other way. Would you willingly give up something that helped you deal with the world?”
He had gone very quiet. “No. No, I guess I wouldn’t.” He raised his gaze to mine. “Something to think about, eh?” he said quietly.
I didn’t want to think about it anymore. I wanted to curl up in a ball with Minnie and invite Steff over for a real down-and-dirty chat for the first time in forever. This morning hardly qualified, and there was something about man trouble that made a girl need all her best girlfriends around her.
Man trouble. I guess that’s what this was, all right. Funny how it could hit you out of nowhere. Unfortunately, Steff was as busy as I was between work and her hot doctor boyfriend, Dr. Danny, and who could blame her?
“I’d better get back to work,” Tom said. “Maybe I’ll see you later.”
It wasn’t the most promising send-off I’d ever had.
Chapter 16
I wandered back to Marcus to get going on the energy clearing, but my heart definitely wasn’t in it.
“You okay?” Marcus asked after a while, looking at me closely.
I nodded, but didn’t have enough energy to say anything. My attention kept being drawn away, toward where Tom was staring at the ground near the jumbo silo as he walked slowly in a zigzagging line away from it, squatting from time to time.
“You sure?”
What was he doing? Maybe taking a closer look at those spots of blood he was talking about. He seemed to be using a roll of yellow tape to mark the places he was looking at.
“Maggie.”
“Hm?”
Marcus closed his hands around mine, which I had been holding suspended in front of me, the sage smoldering and smoking away unheeded, while I watched Tom’s progress. I dragged my eyes away, only to have them snagged by Marcus’s azure blues.
He smiled down at me. “You’re a million miles away
.”
I cast my eyes down. “I know. I’m sorry. I was just thinking about everything, and Tom’s over there, and I keep wondering what he’s looking at. It’s got to be the spots of blood that aren’t where they should be, and if that’s where he was talking about, then I can’t believe there was any question that this wasn’t an accidental death,” I fussed. Something was haunting me, whispering from the edges of my consciousness. I had sensed it there, but I had been so distracted by Tom that I hadn’t let it in.
“What are you thinking?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
“Is it a nagging thought, or is it something more?” he asked, searching my eyes, his hands still soft and gentle around mine.
“I don’t know!” I said, feeling so urgent and befuddled and needing to know what was troubling me. “I keep feeling flashes of things, a sense of something, and then it’s gone. I know it’s important for me to realize it, and I can’t quite get it.”
He let me be for a moment. He just stayed with me, holding my hands and offering me his support while I thought and tested the strange mental nudges.
After a few moments of this, he said, “Come on,” and tugged me toward the low steps leading up to the office door. He’d brought Minnie with us. She was remarkably quiet and calm, staring up at me through the corded vents with her beautiful bicolor eyes as if to say, What next?
That was a good question.
Marcus sat me on the step and got down next to me, holding my hand in both of his. “Close your eyes,” he said. “Breathe deeply. In, and out. You know what to do. Just do it.”
Center, and ground, and investigate from within. The problem as I saw it was, I wasn’t a real psychic. Oh, I knew I was a sensitive, and I’d seen a ghost firsthand; felt them more than once. I knew that I experienced emotions from both people and spirits, and residual energy from places. I even occasionally received thoughts at times that were never intended for me to hear. But that wasn’t the same thing as being a real psychic. What I was able to do wasn’t anywhere near as important or impressive. It was just . . . a different way of experiencing the world. I could never do what Liss did, what Marcus did, and goodness knows I’d never have the power I’d seen in teenagers Evie and Tara.