A Witch In Time

by Madelyn Alt

  “You decided you’d let it be a surprise.”

  “Exactly!”

  “Oh, Melanie.”

  “I was hoping it would be a good surprise!” she defended herself.

  “Well, yeah. But . . .” I was trying to see this from Greg’s side, for the sake of fairness and equality. But then . . . “You know what? Who cares if he wasn’t happy with the pregnancy. Sometimes you get dealt a few unexpected cards in life. That doesn’t mean you don’t have to play the hands you’re dealt.”

  “Exactly!” she said again.

  “I’m not condoning you not telling him, mind you,” I told her, “but I have your back, sis. I’m here if you need me. You know that.” Even if she was a selfish, ridiculous, scandal-mongering, manipulative princess sometimes.

  “Thanks, Maggie. I mean it.” She sniffled. I think I got to her self-involved little heart. “I think he’s been seeing someone, you know. I don’t know who . . . but I’m ninety percent certain of it.”

  I wish I could reassure her, tell her that she was being silly, that it was the worry and the unknown talking her into it, but something about it rang true. “Don’t worry about that right now. Got me?”

  “Okay.”

  “You get some rest. We’ll deal with the Greg situation later.”

  We. Because we were family, and that’s what families do. Even when they don’t always get along.

  I sat there a moment with my phone in my lap and dug my hands into the grass, letting the energy tension from Melanie drain from me, returning it back to Mother Earth. It was the easiest and quickest way I had ever found of releasing external energies and emotions. I felt better in no time.

  Funny, how conversations carried sometimes, even amid all the chaos and activity in the area. Was it the wind that did it? A stray, unseen breeze? Because all of a sudden I could hear bits and pieces of what two officers were talking about up on the front porch.

  Scraps, really, but clearly audible.

  “. . . the address . . . his pocket . . .”

  “. . . said they don’t know him . . .”

  “. . . call put through to his number from theirs . . .”

  “. . . have been expected?”

  Before I could even think about what all of this might mean, my attention was drawn toward a small motorcycle putt-putting slowly up the road toward all the activity. Hm, on second glance, not a motorcycle. More like a moped but sleek, bullet-shaped, and silvery, like molten metal. It drove up in front of me and parked. A tall slim figure slid off and started unfastening the helmet’s chin strap.

  “Ooh. Nice Vespa,” Marcus murmured, appearing at my shoulder.

  The helmet came off, and slender fingers purposely tousled the dark brown pixie cut of Julie Fielding, who, I noticed, was not wearing cute heels and an airy blouse today, but was instead garbed in a fitted denim jacket to ward off road rash in the event of a spill, black skinny jeans, and ballet flats. Despite having just removed a helmet that would have turned my hair into something that resembled a second-grader’s papier-mâché art project, she somehow managed to look cute, cool, and casual-but-not. Still, she did at least acknowledge the heat of the day by slipping off her jacket and tossing it carelessly over the handlebars.

  Marcus had already turned away, evidently distracted by something behind us, when she saw me there on the curb. “Oh, hi. Not another spill, I hope?”

  I couldn’t tell if her concern was genuine or if there was an element of snark there. I decided to ignore it if it existed at all, and shook my head. “Just resting.”

  “Oh, good. Have you seen my husband?” She pulled a pair of Jackie O shades from the V-neck of her fitted T-shirt and put them on to survey the surroundings. I felt a whisper of near envy trickle through my veins. Somehow she managed to look Euro chic in an outfit that would have made me look dumpy and sad.

  “He was up at the house a few minutes ago. You might check there. Oh! Except I don’t think they want people wandering around. You might want to check with one of the officers and see if they can reach him for you.”

  She smiled. “Thanks, but I think I’ll take my chances.” And as my gaze followed, she slipped something out of her back pocket and slowly and purposely clipped it to her belt.

  It was a state police badge.

  I should have known. Not only was she impossibly well put together, but she was a cop, too. Tom had never mentioned that.

  It made sense. But as a part of an opposing police organization. The Staties and the local boys didn’t always see eye to eye, from what Tom had once told me. That, too, made sense.

  She flagged down the sheriffs deputy closest to us. “Hey, Johnson! Tell Chief Boggs I’m here, would you?”

  “You got it.”

  She headed off across the lawn with an easy stride.

  “Soooo,” Marcus drawled in my ear. “The wife is back in the picture, eh?”

  I didn’t need to look at him to know that he was grinning broadly. Happily, even. “Uh-huh.”

  “Good,” came his blunt response. “Maybe now he’ll call his goons off.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He shrugged. “I’m pretty sure that’s who’s been watching my house, that’s all. Or maybe it’s the man himself, just trying to keep track of your comings and goings.”

  “Tom?” I blinked, trying to deny it. “Oh, Tom wouldn’t . . . I mean, I don’t think . . .”

  Hm. He was kind of the suspicious type.

  Oh, hell.

  Julie Fielding stepped purposely over the dropped box of doughnuts, turning and glancing down as she paused, obviously taking note of the detail. It occurred to me then—who brought the doughnuts in the first place? Someone who didn’t know about the intruder lying dead on the floor, obviously. The way I figured it, the chain of events must have looked something like this: Intruder breaks in. Intruder meets untimely death by armed home owner. Attach to that scenario the bit of info that the neighbor had given us about there being an unexplained delay in the phone call to report the incident, and that pretty much covered it. So who had brought the doughnuts and dropped them in shock or dismay or horror or all of the above? I wondered if it had something to do with the owner of the sedan whose passenger door even now remained wide open.

  “... confession ...”

  My head came up as the word floated across the lawn. There was a confession? What sort of confession? A confession suggested Tom was right, that the intruder’s death was intentional. Who?

  I exchanged a glance with Marcus.

  The answer came sooner than I expected, when a few minutes later Harold Sr. walked out of the house with his grizzled, bearlike head held high and a grim expression on his face. Though he was flanked by an officer on each side from just behind him, he walked with dignity and without handcuffs to keep him contained. Instead, he was allowed to enter the back of the police cruiser of his own volition. One of the officers gave him a manly pat of encouragement on his shoulder.

  On the porch, a stoic Harry Jr. came out, his arms surrounding his mother Joyce, who was quietly weeping as they watched the proceedings. As the door of the cruiser closed behind her husband, Joyce turned and buried her face against her son’s denim button-down work shirt.

  “Wow,” I said to Marcus, suddenly deeply and intensely sad. Tears stung the corners of my eyes. Poor Joyce. She seemed like such a nice, pleasant lady, and had been so happy to be a grandmother. Her whole life must seem like it was falling apart right now. The whole family was at risk of it. “Just . . . wow.”

  Marcus grimaced, but seemed beyond words. It was beyond unexpected. It was outrageous. I tried to make sense of it. Why would Harold Sr., a sedate, respected member of the community, have shot an intruder in his son’s home who wasn’t an intruder because somehow he was expected? Did that mean that the victim had been invited to the house? And if so, by whom? According to the snippet of conversation that had drifted to me on the breezes, the Nunzio guy had their phone number in his pocket. W
hy? And why had Harold Sr. been at his son’s house in the middle of the night in the first place? Anyone? Anyone?

  Perhaps the victim and Harry Jr. had been friends and he’d called him over to discuss some matter, and somehow it had all gone horribly wrong. Oh, but didn’t one of the officers say that they (and by “they” I was assuming he’d meant Harry and Frannie) had said they didn’t know the man?

  Dark . . .

  The word Marcus had channeled suddenly brought to mind the darkness at the hospital. It had been pitch-black in the elevator that night, and then there had been the spirit activity, too. Nebulous. Unfocused. Random. Maybe the spirit activity had been a message from the other side whose purpose was solely to be sure that I. Was Paying. Attention. Now.

  That notion started to make more and more sense to me the longer I considered it.

  In a rational world of science and logic, a “normal” person would shrug off the timing of the hung-up elevator and the subsequent power outage that had affected only the elevator itself. Equipment malfunction, they might say. Just one of those things. Nothing to make a fuss over. But Stony Mill no longer seemed to exist within the framework of the rational world I had been led all along to believe was the norm. If the last nine months had shown me anything, it was that. So when spirit energy cropped up and tapped me on the shoulder, was I more inclined than most to sit up and take notice? You bet your sweet ass I was. The trick was in deciphering what the message was supposed to mean.

  I wasn’t always the best at that. But I was willing to try.

  Could the conversation I had overheard that night be related to this, since the OD that the woman from the morgue had told Steff about was a no-go? Could Harold Sr.’s voice have been one of the two I had heard? He was at the hospital that night. Maybe that’s what the spirit message was about. Could it possibly be that he had been planning Nunzio’s death all along? And if so, why?

  Oh, but wait. Again, it didn’t fit. Not at all. Because like I’d told Steff, the voices I’d overheard had been talking about a woman. “She” wouldn’t know what hit her.

  And that’s when a chill shivered through me. What if this Nunzio guy had been the other unseen someone? What if Frannie had been the intended victim all along? But if that was true, what was the connection? There would have to be a connection.

  Why on earth would Harold Sr. want to kill Frannie?

  I shook my head. Now I really was jumping to conclusions. First and foremost being the idea that the conversation I’d overheard belonged to the situation unfolding before us. But if not, that meant there was still another unidentifiable, unsuspecting female out there in the greater Stony Mill area, and somehow that possibility was even worse.

  She won’t know what hit her ...

  I shuddered, remembering.

  Maybe it really had been an accident. A girl could only hope.

  Anthony Nunzio . . .

  The name whispered through my head tantalizingly, full of promise. There was something about it. Just a regular, everyday kind of guy, Tom had said. Works—ahem, worked—for the hospital. Maybe that was it. Maybe that’s why it was familiar.

  Stupid painkillers. My mind was mush.

  Frannie came out of the house and stood there with the baby in her arms, standing separate from Harry Jr. and his mother. Harry barely registered her emergence, so focused was he on the image of his father raising a meaty, work-worn hand to him against the glass of the rear window in farewell. There was something so disturbingly poignant in that single gesture. My heart wrenched painfully.

  Frannie’s dark hair, so neatly brushed and contained when she’d left the hospital yesterday evening, was now draped in tangles around her shoulders, and her pale skin was marred by purple smudges beneath her eyes. That was understandable, considering all that she’d just been through. With her eyes locked on the man—her father-in-law, for heaven’s sake—in the backseat of the cruiser as well, she lifted the baby to her chest and stood with her lips pressed to his downy soft head, her arms holding him tightly to her. Protecting him. For all her seeming indifference at the hospital, for all her vague disquietude, today she seemed almost uberfocused, very much the lioness guarding her cub.

  That, too, was absolutely, wholly, and completely understandable.

  In the doorway behind her hovered Julie Fielding. She reached forward and put a gentle hand on her cousin’s shoulder. “Maybe we should go back inside, Frannie, huh?” she suggested quietly.

  But Frannie felt my gaze on her and raised her chin in my direction. I waved, then let my hand drop, feeling foolish. To my surprise, she wandered over in our direction.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, obviously bemused.

  “Uh, hi, Frannie.” I took a deep breath, knowing how odd it must seem to find us there in the midst of all ... this. I held up the bassinet card. “We were just hoping to return this to you. I knew it would be important to you. We ... we honestly didn’t mean to show up in the middle of all this, though. It just worked out that way. I did call, but . . .” I let my voice trail off.

  She stretched out a hand and snatched the card from me, clutching it against the baby’s swaddled back. “Where did you get this?”

  “It must have fallen somehow, or ... well, I’m not sure, actually,” I told her, realizing just how true that was. It had been on the floor in Mel’s room. I was just guessing that the card is what I had seen falling from the magazine. “Marcus found it. We knew you would be missing it.”

  “What is it, Frannie?”

  Harry Jr.’s voice came drifting over to us. Frannie started, tucking the card away before turning toward her approaching husband. “Nothing, Harry.”

  Harry had come to see what was up. “Oh. Hello,” he said, recognizing us.

  “We didn’t mean to interrupt,” I told him. “Especially in light of... everything.”

  He nodded, his brow furrowing slightly. “If you don’t mind my asking . . . why are you here?”

  I cleared my throat. “We just came to return something to your wife. Something you all dropped yesterday. We didn’t intend . . .” I shrugged, helplessly.

  The tension relaxed just a bit. “Well, that was kind of you. What was it, Frannie?”

  Her dark eyes darted to mine. “Nothing important, Harry. Just a ... something that the hospital had given us before we left. That’s all.”

  “Oh.” His brow furrowed a bit in obvious confusion and distracted consternation. “Well, isn’t that nice. Thanks, folks, for coming all the way out here like that. It was . . . Well,” he said again, obviously at a loss for words. He cleared his throat and took the baby from Frannie’s arms. “I don’t mean to be rude, but . . . well, I’m sure you can see we’re in the middle of something at the moment.”

  An understatement, surely. “Of course,” I said.

  “Take care of that leg, now,” he told me, masterfully turning Frannie around with a big hand on her shoulder and retreating to the house where his family would be momentarily safe from the prying eyes of the neighborhood watch.

  I watched them go, wondering at the change that fatherhood had wrought in Harry Jr. When I had first seen him, I thought him rather pale and bland. Nice, but somewhat uninspiring. Today, he seemed almost . . . a man. Taking charge with the best of them.

  “Did you see that?” Marcus asked, bending close to my ear.

  “Hm?” I hummed, distracted by my own musings.

  “Did you see that?”

  “What?” I turned my head this way and that, trying to figure out what he meant. Julie Fielding was still standing by the open door, watching me as I watched the Watkinses retreat, a probing look on her pretty face.

  “She crumpled it.”

  Julie? She had a clipboard in her hands, but as it was made of metal it was most definitely not crumple-able. She caught my eye and raised her brows. I turned away from her curious stare and lifted my mouth to Marcus’s ear. “What are you talking about?” I whispered.

  He laughed
indulgently. “Where are your thoughts running off to? Frannie, She crumpled the card you gave her.”

  “She . . . The bassinet card?” I frowned. “How odd. Why would she do that? After all the trouble we went to to get it back to her?”

  “Maybe she’s not the sentimental type,” Marcus said as he helped me back across the lawn to more level ground.

  “Maybe.”

  With our only excuse for being there behind us, there was nothing left to do but leave the investigation to the pros and make our exits.

  “Just a moment.”

  Before we could go anywhere, I saw Julie Fielding following us. Marcus stopped, politely waiting for her to catch up.

  She held up her clipboard. “If I could just have your names, addresses, phone numbers . . . I would really appreciate it. Just a formality, you understand,” she said when I opened my mouth to protest that we had just wandered on scene a short time before. “See? Chief’s guys are making the rounds with everyone in the neighborhood.”

  So they were. And that is how I found myself an official part of an honest-to-goodness homicide investigation.

  “Thank you,” she said matter-of-factly when we had both complied. There was a breath of a pause, and then with her gaze never lifting from the clipboard, she murmured, “Marcus Quinn. You probably don’t remember me, do you?”

  Marcus smiled; only someone who knew him as well as I did would notice that it didn’t reach his eyes. “I remember. How are you, Julie?”

  “Fine. Really. I am.” Another breath of a pause. “How is Ray?”

  “Surviving,” Marcus said, the nonsmile in a tight holding pattern.

  She nodded, looking for a moment as though she might say more, but in the end, she didn’t. She just flicked the button on her pen and tucked it up tight in her palm before turning back toward the house and its still-open front door.

  “Back to work she goes, I guess,” I whispered to Marcus. “Whatever that is. Interrogating and investigating, I guess.”

  “More like counseling and interrogating,” Marcus whispered back. “You know, psychologist-style. She up and moved down to Indy to work with the state police when her husband found out about her and Ray—our bass player. Tore Ray up pretty good. I imagine Fielding didn’t like it much, either.”