RAVEN'S HOLLOW

by Jenna Ryan

  “Are you teasing me?”

  “Yes, and I’m sorry. Really. I know you like Ty. It’s good. I like him, too, just not the way a potential life mate should.”

  Molly’s cheeks went pink. “Everyone likes Ty. I didn’t mean—I don’t have a thing for him.”

  “No? Weird,” Sadie repeated. She grinned. “Bye, Molly.”

  “Bye, Sadie.”

  With a quick—and she had to admit—somewhat guilty glance at the station house, Sadie started off again.

  The fact that it took her fifteen minutes to make what should have been a two-minute walk no longer surprised her. Ten people stopped her on the sidewalk to jab fingers at the clear blue sky. Thankfully, only three of the ten inquired about the source of the Chronicle’s forecast.

  She didn’t think any of those three actually believed in witches of the warts-and-pointed-hats variety, but more than a few of them probably subscribed to the notion that Hezekiah Blume, founder and first citizen of nearby Raven’s Cove, had, upon marrying Nola Bellam, in reality wed a witch.

  According to Cove legend, the union had led to a fatal fallout between Hezekiah and his younger brother, Ezekiel. Ezekiel had tried to kill Nola, Hezekiah had ultimately killed Ezekiel, and the entire tragedy had ended with the gates of hell blasting open between the two towns—in the literal sense back then and still in a figurative one today.

  Taking her right back, Sadie thought with a sigh, to the beginning of last night’s dream.

  Resisting an urge to swallow more pills, she pushed through the doors of the wood and stone building that housed the Chronicle.

  She’d inherited the newspaper from her uncle two years ago. Next to the techno-sleek environs she’d known in Boston and D.C., it was a New England dinosaur, complete with antique wiring, fifty-year-old basement presses and fourteen employees for whom the word change had little or no meaning.

  It had taken her the better part of a year to nudge the place past the millennium mark in terms of equipment. The employees continued to be a work in progress. But she considered it a major step forward that several of them had gone from calling her Ms. Bellam to Sadie over the past year.

  She spent the remainder of the afternoon reviewing advertising layouts with her copy editor. At seven o’clock precisely, the man creaked to his feet. “My knees have been acting up all day, Sadie. Figure you could be right about that storm after all.”

  “The weather center in Bangor could be right,” she countered. “I’m only the messenger.”

  “Said Tituba to her inquisitor.” With a wink and a grin, he limped off down the hall.

  “I give up.” Rising from her desk, Sadie rocked her head from side to side. “Call me a witch. Call everyone with the same last name as me a witch. Make the nightmares I’ve been having go away, and I’ll accept pretty much any label at this point.”

  She knew she’d be putting in at least another hour before packing up her laptop and heading home. With luck, a little overtime would help her sleep better. Unless the predicted storm arrived with thunder and wound up sparking another dream.

  “Well, Jesus, Sadie,” she laughed, and forced herself to buckle down.

  She had the ad layouts sorted, two columns edited and was endeavoring to make sense of a third when the phone rang.

  With her mind still on the article—who used Tabasco sauce as an emergency replacement for molasses in oatmeal cookies?—she picked up.

  “Raven’s Hollow Chronicle, Sadie Bellam speaking.”

  For a moment there was nothing, then a mechanical whisper reached her. “Look at your computer, Sadie.”

  The darkest aspects of the nightmare rushed back in to ice her skin. Her fingers tightened on the handset. “Who is this?”

  “Look at your in-box. See the card I’ve sent you.”

  Her eyes slid to the monitor. She wanted to brush it off as a bad joke. Wanted to, but couldn’t. Using a breathing technique to bolster her courage, she complied.

  “Do you see it?”

  Her heart tripped as the image formed. The “card” showed two animated ravens. One was locked inside a cage. The other was out. The free bird used a talon to scratch a word in what looked to be blood. It said simply:

  MINE!

  Chapter Three

  “You about done changing that tire, Elijah?” Despite the pouring rain, Rooney Blume stuck his head out the window of his great-grandson’s truck. He squinted skyward as thunder rattled the ground. “Someone upstairs must be working off one big mad.”

  “Someone out here definitely is,” Eli said, giving the lug nuts he’d just put on the tire a hard cinch to tighten them. “What were you thinking riding your bike to the Cove in this weather?”

  “DMV lifted my license last year, and the sun was shining when I started out. Probably good you came along when you did, though. My balance tends to fail me in the wet.”

  As Eli recalled, his great-grandfather’s balance wasn’t a whole lot better in the dry. There’d also been a thermos of heavily spiked tea tucked in the bike’s carrier, and likely close to half of what he’d started out with inside the old man by the time their paths had crossed.

  Right now Rooney was pushing a metal cup through the window. Giving the last nut a tug, Eli accepted the cup, considered briefly, then tossed the contents back in a single fiery shot.

  Some things, he realized, when the flames in his throat subsided, never changed. He gave the cup back to Rooney.

  His great-grandfather pointed a knobby finger at a line of trees bent low by the wind. “Gonna be a bitch of a night.”

  Soaked to the skin, with his dark hair dripping in his eyes and rainwater running down his neck, Eli climbed back inside and started the truck’s engine. “You think?” But he grinned as he spoke, and flicked a hand at the thermos. “I’m surprised that tea of yours hasn’t eaten through the aluminum casing by now.”

  “You sound like my great-grandson.”

  “I am your great-grandson.”

  “I mean the other one. The one who’s wearing a police chief’s badge and sporting a big dose of attitude over in the Hollow.”

  “Only a town of fools would give a badge to someone who prefers carrot juice to whiskey.” Eli squinted through the streaming windshield. “Self-denial that unswerving upsets the balance of the universe.”

  “Spoken like a cop after my own heart. And while we’re on the subject of badges and balances, did you know your carrot-loving cousin’s not gonna be putting a wedding ring on Sadie Bellam’s finger?”

  “Heard about it.” Eli kept his tone casual and swept his gaze across the mud-slick road. “I also heard it was Sadie who ended the engagement.”

  Rooney’s expression grew canny. “You got awful good hearing for a man who spends most of his time hunting down killers in New York City.”

  “It’s not so far from there to here. As the raven flies.”

  The old man chortled and offered him another cup of “tea.” “I won’t say you’re a jackass, Elijah, only that among other more valuable things—and for ‘things,’ read ‘Sadie’—the badge on Ty’s chest could’ve been yours if you’d wanted it.”

  “And an executive position at the New York Times could’ve been Sadie’s if she’d wanted it. We do what we do, Rooney, and live with the consequences.”

  His great-grandfather made a rude sound. “You’re as stubborn as twenty mules, the pair of you. You knew each other as kids, connection was already there. Life’ll take you down different paths because that’s how it goes sometimes. But it goes in circles other times, and you and Sadie came to the end of a doozy when you met up last April in Boston.”

  “Rooney—” Eli began.

  “I was there, Eli. I saw you. And let me tell you, there wasn’t a soul at that wedding reception who even noticed the
bride and groom with the fireworks you two set off. Suddenly, next thing I know, Sadie’s back at the Chronicle, and you’re tracking a serial killer through the underbelly of Manhattan. Me, the universe and pretty much everyone at the reception are still scratching our heads over that turn of events.”

  Eli sighed. “You, the universe and pretty much everyone at the reception read too much into a time-and-place chemical reaction. Sadie was engaged in April.”

  “Only until she got back from Boston. Two days later, your cousin Ty was drowning his sorrows in goat milk and a double dose of wheat germ.”

  “Sadie’s not ready to be married, and my life’s good the way it is. Cops and relationships don’t mix.”

  Rooney snorted. “If you expect me to buy that load of bull, you’re no kind of cop. And no kin of mine.”

  “In that case, happy hundred and first in advance, and I’ll be heading back to New York right after I drop you off at Joe’s bar.”

  “I need a favor before you go.”

  “Yeah?” Eli raised a mildly amused brow. “I could say I don’t do favors for people who claim to have disowned me.”

  “But that would make you unworthy of any badge, and we both know that’s as far from the truth as it gets.”

  The vague humor lingered despite the fact that Eli could no longer see either the road or the dense woods next to it that stretched from the Cove to the Hollow and beyond. The rain fell in blinding sheets now. “What do you need?”

  “Ty’s on duty tonight. I want you to go by his office in the Hollow. He’s got a bulldog there named Chopper. Family in town’s heading south and can’t take him, so I said I’d think about it.”

  “You want a dog?”

  “Don’t give me that look, Eli. If I die before Chopper does, I’ll leave him to you.”

  “Still a cop here. I can’t have pets.”

  “No pets, no women. You’re not a cop, you’re a monk.”

  “Who said anything about no women?”

  “No women of consequence, then. Now, you take my last serious relationship versus the last woman I had sex with.”

  “Jesus, Rooney.”

  The old man drank from his thermos before offering back a mostly toothless smile. “You think because I’m old I don’t have sex?”

  “Yes—no. Dammit, I don’t think about it one way or the other.” Ever.

  “Why not? I’m human.”

  “You’re also my great-grandfather, and I do my level best to keep thoughts of sex, parents and grandparents out of my head.”

  “You’re a prude, Elijah. Doesn’t bother me to picture you with a woman.”

  The first bolt of lightning shot down deep in the hollow. “Are we actually having this conversation?”

  “I am.” Rooney peered into his thermos. “Seems to me you’re doing more avoiding than conversing.”

  Eli swerved around a barely visible pothole. “What I’m doing is trying to figure out how anybody’s sex life, mine included, relates to me checking out a bulldog.”

  “So you’ll do it?”

  “What, have sex or check out the dog?”

  “In a perfect world, both, but I’ll settle for the dog and enjoy thinking about you and Ty firing daggers at each other while you picture, but deliberately don’t talk about, the lovely Sadie Bellam.”

  “You have a wide streak of mean in you, old man.” But a slow grin removed the sting of Eli’s remark. In any case, glaring down his resentful cousin would be hell-and-gone preferable to visualizing Rooney naked with a woman.

  As the wind picked up, and the truck began to buck, even his garrulous great-grandfather stopped talking. The road, such as it was, became a river, complete with currents, broken branches and sinkholes that could rip out the undercarriage should Eli happen to hit one. That he didn’t was more of a miracle in his opinion than a testament to his driving skills.

  Twenty minutes later, he pulled up outside his second cousin’s shabby dockside bar, Two Toes Joe’s. He saw Rooney safely through the door, turned down a mug of coppery green beer—old Joe really should have his lines changed—and jogged back to his still-running truck.

  The dashboard clock read 9:30, which surprised him since it seemed to have been dark for hours. If he’d believed in omens, as at least three-quarters of his relatives in the area did, he’d check out the dog—couldn’t not do that—then say screw an early arrival for Rooney’s birthday and return to New York. Return to sanity, and more important, the safety of a no-Sadie zone.

  What had flared between them last April had been unexpected and intense. Sadie had been a kid the last time he’d seen her. Seven years old and shocked speechless over the murder of her cousin Laura, who’d also happened to be his stepsister.

  Although the residents of both Raven’s Cove and Raven’s Hollow had been horrified, few had been as badly shaken as he and Sadie. How could anyone who’d never had the misfortune to do so possibly understand what it felt like to discover the body of someone you loved? And not merely discover, but, in Sadie’s case, literally stumble over.

  Her family had left Raven’s Hollow six months later. His had stuck it out for another six years, searching for a closure they’d never received.

  To this day, Laura’s killer remained at large. A handful of suspects and numerous persons of interest had been questioned and released. Over time—two decades at this point—what had started as a countywide manhunt had been reduced to a dusty homicide report in the back of the sheriff’s filing cabinet. Clues gathered at the scene had resulted in nothing, and, as they so often did in situations like these, the case had gone cold.

  For Eli, the memory of Laura’s murder had dimmed but never disappeared. Not completely. Every similar crime he worked to solve these days took him back to her death. When that happened, the raw pain and guilt would slam through him as hard as it had done the evening he and Sadie had met in the hollow.

  On a less grisly note, Eli couldn’t deny that, even at seven years of age, Sadie Bellam had been a beauty. Fast-forward twenty years, slide her into a clingy silver dress, and she’d quite literally stripped the breath from his lungs. He’d prowled around the edges of that Boston reception hall, watching but not approaching her for thirty wary minutes, until one of her aunts had swept in and sealed the deal by insisting they dance.

  The idea of taking the memory deeper tempted, but unfortunately, a gust of wind upward of forty miles an hour had other ideas. It grabbed his four-by-four and sent it sliding toward a deep gully. Eli rode the wave, felt the kick of wind abate and urged the truck back onto the road.

  It had been a sunny seventy-eight degrees when he’d left New York City. The clear skies had held to Bangor. Then, less than ten miles from the Cove, a mass of boiling black clouds had rolled in and let go.

  He glanced left as thunder rumbled up and out of the hollow. Jagged forks of lightning split the sky overhead. His truck, three years old and heavy as hell, shuddered through another blast of wind.

  Only a seriously disturbed person would stay out in this. Would be out in this. The dog could have waited while he went head-to-head with a glass of Joe’s toxic beer.

  Without warning, twin beams of light appeared directly ahead. They slashed through the murk, momentarily blinding him. Swearing, Eli jerked the steering wheel hard, felt the truck’s back end fishtail and had to compensate to keep the entire vehicle from tumbling into the ravine.

  He might have won the battle if something—tree, car or possibly both—hadn’t become a sudden and solid roadblock in front of him.

  Using his forward momentum, together with muscle and brakes, he went for a one-eighty turn. But the mass was too close and the road too slick for him to gain the traction necessary to execute it.

  The collision sent his head and shoulder into the side window. A clap of thunder undersc
ored the hit, but the sound was nothing more than a murmur in Eli’s mind. By the time the truck stopped moving, the storm, the night and the hollow had faded to black around him.

  Chapter Four

  “Eli, can you hear me?”

  A woman’s voice reached him. Possibly Sadie’s, possibly not. She was far away but definitely calling his name. Did that mean he was alive? Because if not, he’d gone someplace dark, wet and incredibly uncomfortable.

  “Eli, damn it, open the door!”

  Someplace where the angels—at worst, he hoped, angels—shouted orders, and every thought was coated in a bloodred haze.

  The haze pulsed for several seconds before subsiding to a repetitive and annoying thud.

  He cracked his eyes open to a different kind of darkness. This one was loud and it moved. Both sound and motion jabbed at him like dull knives. He was tempted to sink back under until it stopped.

  “Wake up, Eli, and open the door.”

  Sadie’s voice—he was sure of it now—sounded impatient, yet held the barest hint of a tremor. He let the memory of her face draw him to the surface and most of the way through it to consciousness.

  Levering himself upright, he swore. And kept swearing because it helped him clear out the last of the haze. Once it was gone, he located and hit the lock release.

  The door shot open. It very nearly flew off its hinges judging from the screech of metal and the ferocious howl of the wind that grabbed it. Eli managed to clamp a hand on to Sadie’s arm before the unexpected backward motion sent her into the ravine.

  He’d forgotten she had the balance of a mountain goat. Without missing a beat, she bunched his wet T-shirt and gave him a hard shake. “Are you hurt?”

  He almost smiled. “Been better. Need a minute for my brain to settle.”