Annalise’s automatic garage door slides up. Her brake lights come on, two glowing red eyes piercing through the rain.
“Shit,” Mitch mutters. He puts the car in gear and backs down the driveway.
We pass streets named after tree species: Pine, Ash, Alder, and onto Main.
“We are not going to bother this poor kid’s family,” says Rita. “No way. He only died a few months ago. I mean, did George talk to them?”
“No, it had happened a week before we got here. The family had spoken with the Donnevilles. They wouldn’t talk to George.”
“And they’re not going to talk to us now,” she says, “so that’s a dead end on Garrety. Let’s head to the Throne.”
Jeremy grips my forearm, and I look over startled. His eyes are even more bloodshot than they were first thing this morning, the shadows beneath them deep purple.
“What is it?” I ask him.
“We could look at Randle Garrety’s truck,” he says. “Maybe it was tampered with.”
Mitch overhears. “His truck?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know where it is. That was months ago.”
“It was totaled,” says Jeremy. His eyes burn into mine. “Sold for scrap. It’s at my uncle’s auto salvage yard.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
At Jeremy’s directions, Mitch turns out of town. Rita doesn’t argue.
We speed along 199 as Jeremy rambles.
“Garrety’s mom had his truck towed there after the police finished with it. She didn’t know what else to do with it. It’s no big deal. My uncle bought junk cars every day, but he never went to the lot, not that I ever saw...”
He finally trails off.
“You think you could have mentioned this before?” asks Mitch. “That your uncle had Randle Garrety’s truck parked at his junk yard?”
“Everybody knows. I didn’t think to say. I told you, my uncle never goes out there. He’s been retired for…God, for as long as I’ve been alive, probably.”
A half-mile out of town on a deserted stretch of highway between Portico and the ghost-town of Blue Creek is Fisher Auto Salvage. The junkyard is visible from the highway, but we take a long, winding lane to the main building, an office with a garage attached.
The lane is muddy. A couple of times, the wheels spin, and I fear we’ll get stuck. The junkyard is creepy, all these hulking car skeletons lurking in tall, brown grass.
“Where is it?” asks Mitch.
“I don’t know. I just know it’s out here.”
“It was a Chevy,” I say. “I remember that. Older model, faded red.”
Mitch parks by the office and we get out to search. Old cars sit everywhere, some placed in a semblance of order, lined up next to each other, but others at odd angles. All are in various stages of decay.
“It can’t be too far in,” says Jeremy. “It’s probably one of the last cars to come out here. I don’t think anyone’s called about towing since the old man had his stroke.”
“There!” Rita points back toward the road. The truck is rust-red, almost the same color as the brown grass, and difficult to see in the gray, dreary afternoon. A decal in the back window says Go Ducks.
We push our way to it. My hiking boots squish through the mud. I stumble and Jeremy takes my elbow. We circle the truck. Its tires are gone. The hood is crumpled, the grill smashed.
“Looks like he went head-on into the barrier,” says Jeremy. “I can inspect at the brake line, see if it’s been cut.”
“You know what that looks like?” asks Rita.
He shrugs. “I took auto shop in high school.”
With effort and maximum grunting, Jeremy manages to open the damaged hood and leans over the engine.
“See, this is the line to the right front. I think. This is the left front. Might be the other way around.”
At least the rain has stopped. Still no sun, but we’re not getting soaked. I peel the hood back from my head and shake out my damp hair.
My phone rings. I freeze. I want to ignore it, but both Rita and Mitch have heard. I reach into my pocket and bring it out. My mother.
“Thea?” she says in a voice even higher and more brittle than usual. A muscle in my neck clenches tight, and pain shoots up into my head like pain fireworks.
“I’m in the middle of something right now, Mom. Is everything okay?”
“No, it’s not. You need to come home, Thea. Now.”
“Mom, I—”
“I’m taking the girls home with me.”
“Mom, no. They should be in their own home now.”
“Well, so should you, but you’re not, are you?”
“Listen, I’m trying to find—”
“No. Now, this is enough nonsense. I know you loved your husband. Of course you did. But he’s gone, Thea, and you have your own life to live…”
“Mom—”
“…two children who need you. It’s time to come home and move forward. We’ve been understanding for as long as w—”
I disconnect.
Mitch and Rita are both watching me. I know they’ve heard my mother’s voice on the phone, a voice that could carry across this entire junkyard. I shove the phone back in my pocket and turn to Jeremy. “Anything?” I ask him.
He steps back from the truck. His hands are smeared in black grease. He tosses his hair back from his eyes, shrugs. “Brake line isn’t cut. Steering wheel isn’t tied off. Throttle linkage looks fine to me.”
We all stare at the truck. The perfectly fine truck. The dead end.
“Now what?” Jeremy asks.
“We need to get back on track,” says Rita. “Focus. There’s only one death we’re here to investigate.” She touches my arm. “George’s.”
My phone rings, and we both stare at the display. My mother. I hit the decline button and nod to Rita. “Okay, let’s go.”
I walk back to the car. I hear the others follow. My phone rings again. I switch it to silent and keep walking. I don’t want to see if the call is from my mother or from George. I’m not answering either one.
Mitch catches up. “Are you okay?” he asks. “Do you want to go back to the Apple?”
He opens the car door for me. I wait until we’re all inside.
“Go to the Throne,” I say.
Mitch starts the engine and turns around in the lane. We’re back on the main road before he asks, “You sure about that?”
I nod.
“All right, we’re going to see the Donnevilles,” says Mitch. “We’re going to confront these assholes.”
“Finally,” Rita mutters
I steal glance at Jeremy who has stretched himself around to watch Fisher Auto Salvage disappear behind the trees.
JOURNAL OF THEA DRAKE | MAY 31
Damn, I didn’t think the Donnevilles would show up here. Mrs. Lowry told me as soon as the girls and I got back from Medford. It was that video you posted. You had to do it, didn’t you? And now you’ve attracted their attention, and they’re here. You got what you wanted, a confrontation.
I know you think it’s a good thing, a sign that they’re worried, that you’re on the right track, but my bad feeling is getting worse.
Anyway, here’s what I have on Randle Garrety, as promised. Most of it comes from the PorticoWitch.com website, with a few details I found out talking with Vera White at the museum.
2017 – Randle Garrety
Randle Garrety started a delivery business when he was nine years old. His mother, a single parent, didn’t have extra money for a Play Station 3. So, Randle delivered groceries on his bike every Saturday to anyone who would pay him three dollars, upping his price when he acquired a cart to pull behind the bike to carry more groceries.
By age fourteen, he’d made enough money to buy a motorcycle, and at age fifteen, bought a used truck before he had his driver’s license. He expanded his delivery business to Medford and beyond, carting yard waste, building materials, even livestock and lumber. But he remained committed to hi
s regular grocery deliveries, the original customers who had paid him three dollars when he was starting out.
Like Estelle Wells, for whom Randle had delivered groceries and library books every Monday evening for nine years. That’s why, even though a storm had set in, causing flooding and high winds, Randle still made her delivery.
“I begged him to stay,” said Estelle. “He’d done so before, back when he was on that motorcycle. It snowed a foot one early spring, and he stayed in the den. I begged him not to go back in that rain.”
But when the bridge cut off access to Portico, sometimes it took days for the water to go down, and Randle didn’t want to get stuck and miss the rest of his deliveries.
Randle Garrety was an excellent driver. He didn’t take chances. He needed his truck to make money. He took his business seriously, and he didn’t want to get injured and lose his scholarship. He was responsible. He was always the designated driver for his friends, and more than once he’d picked up his mother at the Corner.
“He was like the parent. He was going to go far in life, everyone knew that. He already had.”
Randle’s truck was found the next day, submerged at the Baytown Bridge thirty-three miles south of Portico. Randle had drowned. His death was a heartbreaking tragedy, but no more than that until his girlfriend, Megan Holder, began telling people in Portico that Randle had sat on the Witch’s Throne three days before his death.
She submitted her story to PorticoWitch.com the day of Randle’s funeral.
“We were celebrating graduation,” Megan wrote in her story for the website. “We had a bonfire in the field at Hardtack Creek, where it forks off from the river. We were there all night, most of our graduating class was there. We’d known each other since Kindergarten. At some point, we started telling ghost stories, and of course, the legend of the Witch’s Throne. And I don’t remember who it was. Honestly, we were drinking, and I don’t remember some details. But someone suggested we all go and sit on the Throne.
“No one would do it but Randle.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN | OCTOBER 28
The rain settles into a steady but light mist. We park along the road and walk toward the Throne, blending in with the crowd. I’m afraid at first someone might recognize me, but all eyes are forward, waiting for the Donnevilles to appear.
Rita pushes through to the front, garnering annoyed looks, and we all follow until at last we’re at the front edge of the crowd, and Rita pushes me forward to the very front row next to a woman with long, tangled hair, chestnut brown striped with gray. The woman glances at me, then returns her gaze to the Throne, worshiping it like an altar. She wears a long flowing skirt and a fringed shawl, and she’s clutching a pendant hanging from her neck. Her lips move in silent incantation, and her hands twist the chain of the pendant, running her fingers along it as if she were holding a rosary. She catches me staring, and I quickly look away.
“Shhh,” says Rita, “They’re starting.” Mitch and Jeremy, murmuring to each other behind me, fall silent with the rest of the crowd.
Two cameras are set up, and half a dozen men and women dressed in black and wearing headsets scuttle back and forth, communicating by mic, their lips moving as if talking to themselves. A three-panel privacy screen is set up to the far left of the area, and from behind, Beverly Donneville appears in her signature flowing garb.
Applause erupts.
Beside me, the praying woman emits an excited squeak, lifts a hand to her mouth. Her wide eyes are locked on Beverly as the psychic floats to her mark between the cameras. She squeaks again as Charles next appears from behind the screen, joining his wife.
Luck led us to the Donnevilles for the first time in 1999. That spring, the Gambel family of Evanston had appealed to the Donnevilles to exorcise what they felt was an evil presence in their home. By great coincidence, Evanston was George’s hometown. By greater coincidence, George knew Christopher Gambel. The two of them had attended the same high school. When George, who had been following the Donnevilles for years, found out they would be working in the Gambel family home, he called Chris and convinced him to let us be there.
We arrived before the Donnevilles that early spring morning at the Gambels’ brick townhome on Lake Michigan. Chris Gambel was the first person I met who made his fortune from the internet, having just sold his online business the year before. He turned out to be a friendly man who was even shorter than George. He was living alone in the house; his wife and kids had fled, terrified, weeks before. He had wispy, fine blonde hair that he combed back from his forehead and he wore a t-shirt and baggy shorts, either by fashion choice or because he could not find clothes to fit his small frame.
“Little one started sleepwalking,” he told us after he’d handed out beers, offered cigarettes, then lit his own off the stub of his first one. “Somehow, he got locked out of the house. We woke up to this loud banging on the patio doors.” He waved to the back of the house where the wide sliding doors looked out on a sparkling blue in-ground pool. “I wake up, didn’t know what the hell was happening, I mean it sounded like someone trying to break in. I come running downstairs with my gun.”
He paused, shook his head, exhaled forcefully. “And it was Jamie in his pajama bottoms, no shirt, I mean this was February in Chicago. Poor little guy...he’s four years old. Eyes were as big as saucers. He told Jane, ‘Mommy, I don’t want to live here anymore. Our house gives me bad dreams.’ That was it. Next day, they were on the way to Jane’s mom’s house in Washington.”
When the Donnevilles arrived, Chris introduced us. Beverly nodded politely and turned away to walk slowly around the first floor. Charles ignored us and asked Chris to step into the next room.
I watched Beverly drift around the Gambels’ living room. She stopped in front of the fireplace and contemplated the family photos lined up on the mantle. Then she passed by the windows, brushing her fingertips on the sheer curtains, and stopped at the stairway, at a small closet door set into the space below. She grasped the doorknob but did not turn it.
Chris returned, combing his hair as he came over to stand next to us.
“What did Charles want?” asked George.
“To confirm this was only the initial reading,” Chris explained. He lit another cigarette. “He said Mrs. Donneville will do a walk-through, read the place, tell me if she can help. Said it should only take a few minutes.”
Charles appeared next. He crossed the room to Beverly, who was still standing with her hand on the closet doorknob, and took her elbow, spoke softly in her ear. Beverly lifted her chin, smiled and nodded. She released the door and turned.
“Let us begin,” she said.
“Us?” I whispered to George. He nudged my shoulder with his and wrapped his arm around my waist.
A man in a headset approaches the Donnevilles, speaks to them briefly, then departs and announces to the crowd.
“Ladies and gentlemen, quiet please! We are about to begin.”
Beverly closes her eyes. Her chin rises, and her face lifts to the expanse of gray sky above.
She sways, unbalanced. Charles reaches out, and, with the lightest touch, supports her using only the tips of his fingers at her elbow.
It’s a performance in as much as their entire lives are a performance. They are never out of character. They act on their beliefs and in those actions, bring those beliefs to life for others.
Beverly recovers and resumes her stance.
“George?” she calls.
I physically recoil as if I’ve been struck. The movement is violent enough that both Mitch and Rita turn to me with concern. The woman who was praying watches us closely.
“Thea?” Mitch asks with urgency.
“I’m okay...I’m okay.”
He and Rita exchange a worried glance, and I feel a flash of annoyance at them. I straighten myself up, pull away from their grasp.
“I’m fine.”
They back off. No one pays us any attention. Beverly is still speaking in those hushed
half-words.
“So much...so much suffering at the...no wait…”
She steps back. Charles mirrors her movement. His hand lowers gently, and she turns to face the crowd. A smile illuminates Beverly’s face.
“There is a way,” she says to us, “to end this curse, to destroy the malicious power infused into this object of earth. No more fear...”
She walks towards us, and the camera swings to follow her. I shrink back, afraid of being caught on camera.
Beverly Donneville closed her eyes, tilted her head back. She was still standing in front of the door beneath the stairs.
“Where does that door go?” George whispered to Chris.
“The old cellar,” he said, “but it’s sealed shut. We don’t use it.”
“How old is this house?”
He squinted and took a deep drag on his cigarette. “Not sure. I know the original foundation is old, but it’s been remodeled and built up. The people we bought it from, some old-money family, they completely rebuilt most of it.”
“One hundred twenty-seven years,” I said. “It was built on the site of the Haverson farmstead after the original house burned down in the Chicago fire in 1871.”
“How the hell do you know that?” asked Chris.
“We do our research,” said George, watching Beverly.
Suddenly, the psychic’s eyes shot open. She began to speak rapidly, in a harsh whisper, a string of guttural syllables that I could not decipher. She sounded as though she was chanting, or praying.
Chris stepped back. We were standing in the archway to the front hall, and he leaned into the frame. “What’s she saying?”
I shook my head. I was unable to take my eyes from Beverly as she continued to chant, staring straight ahead into the large fireplace, or perhaps at the line of photos on the mantle. As she spoke, the words came out even faster. They seemed to come from deep within her chest, in a voice deeper than the one in which she’d spoken earlier, and her skin color faded. Before my eyes, the pink in her cheeks disappeared. She grew several shades paler until she stood there like a ghost herself.
The Witch's Throne (Thea Drake Mystery Book 1) (Thea Drake Mysteries) Page 17