BURY THE WITCH: Book 10 (Detective Marcella Witch's Series)

by Dana E. Donovan

  Fifteen minutes after talking with Lilith, I pulled the car over on a lonely stretch of road, the same spot I stopped at the day before. The portal lay just beyond trees there. I knew that. The only difference was that this time, Jerome knew it, too.

  I got out and started into the woods, following a beaten path defined by smaller animals like opossums, coons and skunks. The surroundings had changed in the past twenty-four hours. Tree density seemed thicker, yet the trees themselves appeared less foliated. Ground cover appeared different, as well, drier and less spongy. As more brittle pieces of twigs and branches snapped underfoot, I found myself instinctively stepping lighter, walking on the balls of my feet rather than flatfooted.

  A bit further, the woods grew surprisingly dark. I looked up into the canopy. The sky turned black and starless, a canvas void of color. Phantom lights like phosphorous nymphs frolicked in random steps among the trees.

  I continued. Deviant shadows conspired through whispered commands, moving with stealth from tree-to-tree in staggered shifts. The deeper into the woods I traversed, the darker it got and the closer the shadows followed. They ran when I ran, stopped when I stopped. I’d start in a false step and some of them would flinch, realize their mistake and then zip off into the darkness. Others slid in silently to take their places.

  I had entered familiar territory, the realm of the Eighth Sphere, only I knew that I was still on Earth. Jerome had constructed his own home away from home, down to the smallest detail. I stood motionless and took it all in, breathing deep, inhaling traces of sulfur, rotten malodytes, moss mite excrement and treklapod dander; fragrances of a lost dimension.

  Ahead and to my left, a sudden break in the topsoil revealed a burrowing Hercules scorpion. A lifelong loner and fiercely territorial, the cat-sized arachnid arms itself with enough poisonous venom to take down a hundred grown men. I almost wanted to poke it with a stick, just for old times’ sake.

  Overhead, the sound of scraping tree bark signaled the presence of a bearded polychaete, a six-foot long tree worm with fleshy legs and razor sharp teeth able to cut through branches as thick as my leg. Fortunately, they don’t eat meat, they’re not very quick and they taste like frog when cooked in their own oils.

  I waited for a shift in the wind to direct me toward Jerome. All things in the Eighth Sphere influence atmospheric behavior. In Jerome’s case, I expected his incredible powers would serve as a focal point for wind direction. Where north winds met south winds, and east winds met west, there I would find him, in the epicenter of mergence.

  The glow of firelight winking on a raised plateau guided me the last half mile to his campsite. At a point where the four winds converged, an upturned column of air spiraled in ghostly swirls of milky white vapors, funneling through an open portal just above the treetops.

  I spotted Jerome sitting by a campfire ringed with stones, his back toward me, his tail coiled around his body the way it does sometimes when he’s cold or scared, or both.

  I came up quietly behind him and cleared my throat. He turned with a start. I smiled. “I like what you’ve done with the place,” I said.

  “Bossman!”

  He jumped up and ran to me on all fours, using his tail for additional thrust as he leapt into my arms. Our bodies collided. His forward momentum took us both to the ground. We were still locked in an embrace as we barrel-rolled down the hill and came to rest under a jagged overhanging rock.

  I wanted to cry for the pain, but I was laughing so hard, I couldn’t. Jerome was doing his thing, this chit-chit-chit like chatter he makes with his teeth when he’s excited. I hadn’t heard him do that since he pulled me off the cliff face and up into the portal using that strand of spider silk.

  “Jerome, please,” I begged. “Let me up.”

  “Bossman come! Bossman save me!”

  “I came for you, yes. I was worried about you. Are you okay?”

  He bounced to his feet with the resilience of a super ball. “Jerome good, Bossman. We go home now?” He pointed up the hill and beyond to the portal.

  I got up slowly and brushed the twigs and leaves off my clothes. “I see that, Jerome. I see what you’ve done, but—”

  “Come!” He took me by the hand and began towing me up the hill behind him. “Jerome wait for Bossman, all the time wait. Jerome know Bossman come save him.”

  Once on the plateau, he continued marching me toward the spiraling jet stream shooting through the portal. I snapped my hand away from him and took a step back. “Wait.”

  He turned and looked at me as though he had done something wrong. He glanced back over his shoulder at the column of air and followed it up to the portal. Seeing nothing wrong with it, he returned to me with a hollow stare. “Jerome do bad thing?”

  “No, you didn’t do a bad thing. It’s just that…” I pointed to the fire he had burning in the stone-ringed pit. “Let’s sit down a minute and talk, okay?”

  He padded over to the rocks and reclaimed the seat he was in when I first arrived. I hiked my pant legs up at the knees and sat down next to him.

  “Hey, nice fire you built there,” I said.

  He looked up at me and flashed that damned pointy-toothed smiled of his. I used to think it was scary and disgusting, especially when we first met. Later, after we became best friends, I grew to love it. Perhaps because I realized it was genuine, something he only did when he was happy. Humans could learn from that, I thought, smile when they’re happy, not when they’re about to stab you in the back.

  “Bossman like fire?”

  “Yes, I do, very much so. It reminds me of home.”

  He faced the flames and regarded them with pride. “Jerome make fire for Bossman,” he said, and by merely pointing at it, caused the flames to leap a hundred feet into the air.

  “Jerome, no!” I yelled, just before the scorching heat drove me off the rock and onto my back. Yet, I no sooner spoke, when he literally reached out, grabbed the flames and squelched them in a balled up fist.

  I could hardly believe my eyes. I sat up in the dirt, my legs stilled draped over the rocks. Jerome seemed unfazed. He showed me his fist. It glowed red from the fire burning within. Snapping bits of firelight shot from the cracks between his fingers like solar flares.

  I nodded. “You gonna get rid of that thing?”

  He put his thumb under his chin and blew into his fist. A plume of black smoke shot out the back. He then held his hand out and opened it slowly, shaking his wrist as if shedding the flames through his fingertips. I watched a pale red ball of light float away like a dandelion in the wind. It meandered in lazy spirals, caught itself in the updraft of the jet stream and shot through the portal to another dimension.

  Jerome turned to me, his lower lip curled and shaking, his face begging forgiveness. What could I do? I shook my head lightly and smiled. “Nice,” is all I said.

  I reclaimed my seat, convinced more than ever that Jerome had no future in this world, especially now that he held the powers of the universe in his hands.

  “Jerome?”

  “Yes, Bossman.”

  “You really want to go home, don’t you?”

  “Yes, yes. We go now?”

  He jumped up and tried nudging me to my feet again. I held his hand tightly and pulled him back down.

  “Not yet. Sit down. We still need to talk.”

  He did as I said, sitting down and leaning against me with his arm around mine.

  “I’ve got a problem,” I said.

  “Problem? Bossman want help? Jerome help.”

  “Well, that’s just it. I don’t know quite how to put this, little buddy, but you are my problem. See, we’ve just spent the last five years together, looking out for one another, helping each other get out of tough fixes and all, but—”

  “Jerome and Bossman, good team.” He laid his head against my arm. “Good team. Jerome no have friend before Bossman.”

  A full five minutes passed before I could swallow the lump in my throat that kept me fro
m saying more. I spent that time gazing into the fire, remembering all the dark days and darker nights that started and ended with the two of us sitting around such a fire. I would stare into the flames and dream of Lilith. Sometimes, I swear I could almost see her face staring back at me. One instance, in particular, I remembered seeing her calling for me from our back yard. It was nighttime there, as well. I imagined she built a bonfire and cast a spell so that I might read her lips and hear the words she loved me. It was all I lived for, all I could do to stay alive and make it back to her. Then I did it. I returned. I just never counted on things turning out the way they did.

  “Jerome?”

  I shook him awake, as I thought he’d fallen asleep on my arm, perhaps living his own dream of us returning to the Eighth Sphere together.

  “Jerome, listen to me.”

  He raised his head and looked around as if seeing the campsite for the first time. “We home?”

  “No, I’m sorry. We’re not home yet. Listen, I have to go. I still have work to do. Will you be all right here until I come back?”

  “Bossman go?”

  “Yes, I told you, I have to go, but I’ll return.”

  “Then we go home?”

  I reached over and patted his head. “We’ll see. In the meantime, what you did here, this Disneyland Eighth Sphere of yours, you can’t make it any bigger. Do you understand me?”

  “No bigger, Bossman.”

  “I mean it. I want you to figure out some sort of force field to keep all your little creatures locked in. Put a big glass dome over the entire area or something.”

  “Dome?”

  “No. Don’t do that. Better yet, just keep it in your mind that you don’t want anything within the dark woods here to get out, except me, of course. Can you do that?”

  “I do dat, Bossman.”

  “I mean it. Nothing gets out.”

  “Nothing out. All the where, creatures stay.”

  “That goes for you, too. No more mudslides. No more flying around town, and definitely no more raining squirrels.”

  “Squirrels!”

  “Oh, great. I’ll come back to see you as soon as I can.”

  I got up and left without looking over my shoulder. I knew if I did, I’d see him standing there, his tail coiled around his body, his big eyes welling. I knew if I saw that, then two minutes later, he and I would be zipping through time and space, compliments of a fickle portal that could easily close forever, stranding us on one side of the universe or another. The only question was which side of the universe was the right one for us.

  Chapter 20

  Oscar Shaul lived in a modest ranch house nestled in the thick of several wooded acres straddling the city line. I rolled up the graveled driveway and angled the car to a stop under a towering white pine along the side of the house. The air was deathly quiet, and though a bed of pine needles cushioned my footsteps, I imagined the grinding tires on gravel and the slam of my car door gave Shaul a heads up I was coming.

  I knocked on his door and waited. It seemed a full minute passed before the clicking of deadbolts and clatter of safety chains acknowledged my arrival.

  Shaul opened the door, but only by degrees. “Yes?”

  He peered out through a space just wide enough for both his eyes to see me.

  “Hello, Mister Shaul?” I smiled pleasantly, hoping to defuse his mistrust. “I’m Detective Marcella. From the jewelry store yesterday?” I showed him my badge.

  He seemed cautiously relieved. “Yes, of course. How may I help you?”

  I gestured behind him. “May I come in? I’d like to talk to you.”

  He hesitated, but only for a moment. The door opened wide, flooding an otherwise dark room with the tired rays of a late afternoon sun. I crossed the threshold and waited for him to direct my point of travel.

  “Sit, won’t you?” He offered me one of two high-back leather chairs bookending each side of a stone fireplace. Between them, perpendicular to the hearthstone was a coffee table made of planked knotty pine, complimenting the mantle and the general rustic décor throughout the rest of the house.

  Shaul circled the room clockwise, turning on lamps and drawing back window shades to vanquish the dark that had cast a dreary gloom about the place. I could see by the glowing embers and smoldering ash in the fireplace that Shaul had recently tended a fire there, likely explaining why there were no lights on in the room to begin with.

  “Did I catch you napping?” I asked, once he sat down in the chair opposite me.

  He turned a bashful cheek ever slightly. “You did, as a matter of fact. That’s good detective work, Detective.”

  Rachel Marx told me that Oscar Shaul was a timid mouse, or something to that effect. I didn’t get the chance to talk to him at the jewelry story the day before, but just in the few words we exchanged then, I could see that was true.

  “Mister Shaul, I wanted to—”

  “Please, call me Oscar.”

  “Oscar.”

  He settled back in his chair and smiled contently.

  “I just left Rachel Marx and Eric Feldon a little bit ago, and I wanted to ask you a few of the same questions I asked them. Is that all right?”

  “By all means, please, don’t hesitate.”

  “First off, I have to tell you that because of the nature of this case, my department is looking strongly at you four as suspects in the theft of your own diamonds.”

  “Of course, that’s reasonable. I understand.”

  “You do?”

  “Naturally, Detective. After all, we are the only ones with access to the safe. I mean, I have to tell you, when I walked into that office yesterday and saw the safe open, I knew it hadn’t been broken into. Nobody’s ever broken into a Chubb Sovereign. Nobody.”

  “That’s interesting. Am I to infer then that you suspected one or more of your partners?”

  “I did, at first.”

  “You don’t now?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t think any of them are that stupid.”

  I fell back in my chair, floored by Shaul’s apparent openness. All along, I had put most of my suspicions on him, assuming he conspired with Allen Brinkman. In my years of interviewing suspects, I’ve developed a keen instinct for knowing when somebody’s lying. That same instinct kicked in several times just an hour before while interviewing Feldon and Marx. But with Shaul, I wasn’t feeling it. Then again, I hadn’t yet accused him of anything he had to deny.

  “Oscar, I have to ask you about your gambling, specifically about your borrowing to support it. Have you ever borrowed money from Allen Brinkman?”

  “Yes I have, and I’ll answer your next question before you ask. He loaned me forty-eight thousand dollars. And now you see that as motive for me robbing my own store, don’t you?”

  “I’m sorry, but yes.”

  “And so you should. What sort of detective would you be if you didn’t?”

  “Not a good one, I suppose.”

  He shook his head slowly. “I’m going to tell you that I had nothing to do with the burglary, Detective, and you’re going to weigh it for what it’s worth. Yet, if there’s one thing you should know about me, it’s that I’m a coward. I have no balls, if you’ll excuse the expression. I don’t know for sure if Rachel, Eric or Dan had anything to do with it, but I know I didn’t.”

  I came forward in my chair again and pressed my elbows to my knees. “Oscar, did you know that Allen Brinkman had a key and the safe combination filed away in his office?”

  “Yes.”

  “You did?”

  “Sure, Sheldon told me.”

  “Mister Marx told you that?”

  “That’s right. He told me the day he delivered it to the law firm. Of course, back then he had given it to Mister Petruzelli. He felt I should know that in case something ever happened to Rachel.”

  “So then it’s true that none of the others knew about it?”

  Shaul tossed
his gaze to the smoldering ashes and feathered a shrug. “While Sheldon was alive, no one else knew. It’s been many years, though. Rachel and Eric have had close contact with Brinkman since, and Dan, too, to some degree. I suppose it’s possible Brinkman confided in one or all of them.”

  “Do you think Rachel knows the entire combination to the safe?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, first of all because she’s shagging Eric.”

  “Yes, I figured as much.”

  “So think about it. I have the first number. Eric has the second. Therefore, Eric knows my number and his.”

  “I know where you’re going with this. Dan has the third number, and so by process of entry, Rachel knows Dan’s number plus hers.”

  “Correct, so if Eric and Rachel get together and compare notes, what do they have?”

  “They have all four numbers.”

  “Plus the key,”

  “Right.”

  “So you think they did it.”

  “No, I’m just saying they could have done it, but I don’t believe they did.”

  “Then that just leaves Brinkman, who would still need to know some inside information, like where the alarm panel was.”

  “And because I borrowed money from Brinkman, you think I provided him that information.”

  “I don’t know, Oscar. It’s looking like either you and Brinkman or Feldon and Marx.”

  He smiled at that. “Pick your poison, eh?”

  I plopped back in my chair and folded my hands on my lap. “Oscar, do you know anything about a certain diamond ring that Allen Brinkman’s been sporting around town these days?”

  “Ring?”

  “A fancy blue. Two and a half carats, no inclusions, no blemishes.”

  “Sounds like one of ours, but Dan would know better. He’s the expert.”

  “Right.”

  Something about my interview with Oscar Shaul had me feeling sorry for the man. He seemed lonely and harmless. I didn’t make him out to be a jewel thief, but then the best cons are the ones that know how to push all the right buttons. I couldn’t tell if Oscar was telling me enough truths to prove his innocence, or mixing them with just enough lies to make me think so?