“Can I see her, Dan?” Vera said.
“I don’t know, Vera,” he replied. “I’m not sure what’s going on back there.”
“Well, it’s just Mama,” she said and smiled.
“I think it would be okay for you to go back, Vera. Go ahead. It’s the second door on the left. I’ll let them know you’re coming,” he said and turned to the phone.
“I’m sending Beatrice’s daughter in to see her,” Vera heard him say as she walked through the door and into the office area, where there many other doors off to the side. She remembered being brought in and questioned here, and it was most unpleasant. She grimaced and lifted her bag to her shoulder, then opened the door to see her mother, with chocolate smeared on her cheek, sitting next to Bill.
“Hello there. Come to see your dangerous mother?” Beatrice said and smiled.
“You’ve got chocolate on your face,” Vera said and handed her a tissue from her bag. “Right there. So what’s the deal, Bill? Mama?”
“We’re waiting on Bryant,” Bill said. “Where’s Lizzie?”
“With Sheila,” she replied, sitting down. “So is anybody going to tell me what’s going on?”
“They are just questioning your mom about Cookie’s disappearance.”
“They have no proof of anything,” Beatrice said, folding her arms across her chest. “I’m innocent.”
“Well,” Vera smirked, “I’m not even sure I believe you. I’m sure they don’t.”
“Now, ain’t that something? Even my daughter—”
“Spare me the diatribe,” Vera said. “If you know where Cookie is, you need to tell them. Tell us.” She lowered her voice. “She could be in trouble.”
“Of course she’s in trouble,” Bill snorted.
“I’m really worried about her,” Vera said.
“If Cookie Crandall has gotten this far in her life, I’m sure she is going to be just fine,” Beatrice said, then changed gears. “Have you ever been able to remember how you met Cookie?”
No. Vera was sure of their first meeting. Cookie had a shirt on that said NAMASTE across the chest, and Vera asked her what that meant, and the next thing she knew, she had hired Cookie to teach yoga at the studio. Cookie made a person feel at ease right away, and she had a kind of calming charisma.
“I remember Annie telling me about her,” Beatrice said, before giving Vera a chance to answer.
“Annie?” Vera said.
“Yes. Annie said she met her at the library and she was reading an interesting book. They struck up a conversation,” Beatrice said.
“Yes!” Vera said. “I think it was Annie who brought her to the first crop. But what does that have to do with this, Mama?”
Beatrice’s face went blank.
Vera could see that her mother wasn’t budging. Call it intuition or years of dealing with the old coot. She leaned back in her chair and thought a moment.
“What were you doing up on the mountain, anyway?” she asked Beatrice.
“I told Bill this story already. Cookie asked me to take her scrapbook up there.”
“And do what with it?”
“Put it on a rock.”
“Why? Whatever for?”
“That’s what she asked me to do,” Beatrice said. “And so I did it. Jon, Rose, and I took the scrapbook and placed it where she asked me to.”
“Where was that?” Detective Bryant said, entering the room.
Beatrice sighed. “It was in one of the caves.”
“But what does that have to do with anything?” Vera said. “Really? Why would that help Cookie to escape?”
“I don’t know, but it must have something to do with it,” Bryant said. “Did she say if someone would be picking it up there?”
“No,” Beatrice said.
“I guess I should send someone to have a look around. Which cave is it? The big one?”
“No, it’s the smaller one,” Beatrice said. “But you won’t find a thing. So save yourself the trouble.”
The detective squinted. “What do you mean?”
“The book is gone. It must have fallen into the crevice there.”
“Pretty deep?” he asked.
“Yes,” Beatrice said.
“What happened, Mama? Did you drop it?”
“Not that I can recall,” Beatrice said after a moment.
“What kind of answer is that?” Bryant said, exasperated.
“It’s an honest one. You see, I looked away from it. We all did. The calcite and the lights were glowing. You know how they sometimes do? We sat and watched. And when it was over, it was just gone.”
“Just like that?” Vera said after a few minutes.
Beatrice nodded. “None of us saw it slip. But we did hear noises. I thought it was an animal or something.”
Detective Bryant leaned across the table, getting in Beatrice’s face. “Am I supposed to believe this? How gullible do you think I am?”
“Whoa,” Bill said, standing up. “You need to charge her or let her go. Right now your case is looking pretty flimsy.”
“I ought to throw her in jail and get rid of the key. She knows something, and she’s not telling us. She’s lying,” Bryant barked.
“Are you calling me a liar?” Beatrice said, her voice raised.
“Bea—” Bill began.
“Yes, I am,” the detective said.
“Sit down, fool, and I’ll tell you the truth,” Beatrice said.
“Mama!” Vera said.
“Hush, girl!” Beatrice said. Now she would give them all something to think about. “Cookie is a witch. You know that. Evidently, she’s more than that. She’s learned how to travel through space and time, kind of like a time traveler. I took the book up on the mountain because the coordinates are exactly right. She reached out to me because of my research into quantum physics. Told me all about it.”
“Humph. She’s a time traveler? What she is is an escaped mental patient. We’ve had doctors here looking for her,” Bryant said.
“Oh my,” Vera said. “But she always seemed so together. I don’t get it.”
“It doesn’t surprise me,” Beatrice said. “She told me she had been here before and it was unpleasant.”
“Ms. Matthews, if you believe she is a time traveler, you are sitting in the wrong kind of institution,” Bryant said with a sly grin on his face.
Beatrice folded her arms and set her jaw firmly. “When can I go home?”
That damned Cookie.
Chapter 62
“So, as I was sitting there, another officer walked in the room and announced a break in the case, and they just let us go,” Beatrice said after she sipped her tea.
Annie’s heart skipped a beat. “What happened?” She sat up a little more in the hospital bed.
“There was a confession,” Beatrice said. “Evidently, the police were getting ready to make an arrest, and this other person—not the man they were going to arrest—steps forward and confesses. Do you remember Luther? The man who helped us with our tire?”
Annie shivered. “Yes. The man with the rune earring.”
“It was him,” Beatrice said.
“I need to get out of this bed,” Annie said. “Can you hand me my laptop and my cell phone?”
Beatrice handed her the items. Annie clicked on the computer and saw the story was breaking all over the Web. Damn. Here she was, scooped. This guy had been under her nose all along. She’d missed it.
Luther Vandergrift walked into Cumberland Creek Police Station, Tuesday, November 12, and confessed to the murders of Sarah Carpenter and Rebecca Collins, along with the attempted murder of Sarah’s infant child, now in the custody of Sarah’s parents.
According to the police report, twenty-eight-year-old Vandergrift has been a drifter since the loss of both of his parents eight years ago. A onetime medical student, Vandergrift relocated to Jenkins Mountain from Ambridge, Pennsylvania, after connecting online with a group called the New Mountain Order, led by Zeb McC
lain.
“We get together, hike, and meditate,” Zeb said offhandedly during a phone interview.
But according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), members of the group have records for various crimes. “We’ve not been able to find any concrete evidence that these folks, as a group, are up to no good. But you have to ask yourself why a young man would come all the way from Ambridge, Pennsylvania, to hike and meditate,” said federal agent Roger Delvechio.
Indeed.
“Vandergrift has a record of violence,” Detective Bryant of the Cumberland Creek Police Department added. “He spent some time in jail for assault. And one crime involved sexual assault. That’s all I am at liberty to say.”
I wonder if she had red hair, Annie thought.
Other than Vandergrift’s history of violence, his brief stint as a medical student at the University of Pittsburgh, and the loss of his parents in an accident, there doesn’t seem to be anything else on record about him.
“Ah, well,” Beatrice said. “There’s still more reporting to be done, I’d say.”
“Well, sure. And I’ve been on the case this whole time.”
“When are they going to spring you?”
“I don’t know. I still have a bit of a fever, and the doctors are afraid there’s an infection somewhere.”
“How do you feel?”
“Seriously? I feel, like, awful.” She couldn’t keep a clear enough head to piece one sentence together on her laptop.
Beatrice took another long drink of her tea. “You need to take care of yourself. I’m all for women following their passions, dear, but your health needs to be a priority. They have a confession. There’s nothing you need to do right now. And it turns out that we were right about Cookie. She wasn’t a killer, after all.”
“But you said that they were getting close to arraigning her.”
“What? Oh no, that wasn’t Cookie. It was someone else. I’m not sure who it was. Oh, wait. I think it was Zeb. I guess it doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me. I mean, just because this guy confessed doesn’t mean he actually did it.”
“Why else would he confess?”
“A lot of people have confessed in the past and were completely innocent.”
“I heard they even had DNA evidence on this guy. They found one of his hairs somewhere or something. Sounds like a pretty tight case.”
“I’ll have to check all that out,” Annie said, mentally listing the interviews she wanted to line up. Hannah. Zeb. Luther. Roger Delvechio. Detective Bryant. If she could stomach that.
Chapter 63
Jon’s dark eyes lit up as he looked at Beatrice over a breakfast of eggs, biscuits, and gravy.
“I didn’t invite you,” she said.
“Beatrice,” he said, “we are both too old to worry about invitations, yes?” He smiled. “And we are both too old to worry about what other people think of us. Surely.”
“I never did,” she said and laughed. “But there will be questions.”
“Life is full of questions. We’ll answer them on our own, eh?”
“Yes,” she said after a moment, feeling her heart give way. “I suppose you’re right.”
But here she was, soon to be eighty-two, feeling like a teenager or a newlywed. One moment she felt like a ridiculous old fool. The next, she allowed the feelings to wash over her and reveled in them. She had never imagined another man would come into her life. She and Ed were so well suited, and she had loved him completely.
She’d known many women who had lost their husbands, and all of them had remarried. Most of them lost their second husbands, too. Tootie buried three of them before she whispered to Beatrice as she hugged her at the funeral, “Never again. I can’t take any more.” And she herself died four months later.
It was a risk always to get close to anybody at any time in your life—a careful line to walk between being open enough to allow the good in and to recognize the bad. But at her age, the risk felt sharper. She had found her place in the world as a widow and had occupied it for years. The other side of that sharpness was the sweetness of finding love again.
Here he was. Sitting in her house. At her kitchen table. Eating biscuits and gravy. Drinking from her coffee cups.
Cups that Cookie adored. They were purple, her favorite color.
Funny, Beatrice should think of her now. Beatrice was caught between hating and loving her. Maybe feeling sorry for her. Was she an escaped mental patient? She would have thought so at one time during their brief time of knowing one another. She’d always thought there was something not quite right, sort of out of time about her. Or was Cookie Crandall exactly who she claimed to be? A magician–time traveler sort of person from the future who had come back to set something right? Or maybe that was not what she had said to Beatrice at all. She’d said it was like time travel or some such thing. But Beatrice liked to think of her that way. Of course, it almost vindicated her life’s work. But perhaps she was as delusional as Detective Bryant thought she was.
She laughed at that. Nah. She was not delusional. She looked across the table and saw Jon plainly, clearly, just as she saw Cookie that day, leaning across the table in the jail, spilling her secrets.
Life was getting even more interesting in her town. There were murders and weird religious cults. According to the FBI, they had been watching that group for a while—and still were. They claimed it was for tax evasion. The group had been trying to set up a nonprofit religious organization that was full of ex-convicts. Turned out Rose was right about shenanigans on the mountain.
Blissfully unaware until Rose had filled her in. Beatrice realized that even then, it was just a blip on her radar screen. Land sakes, she couldn’t keep track of everybody. There were people moving into Cumberland Creek all the time. There was a new person sitting across the table from her.
And as she thought about Cookie and Jon, their appearance in her life, it just confirmed her belief, which sharpened as she had gotten older: Science could accurately predict some events, but the most meaningful things in a life often held no prediction, no explanation. The universe could be completely, delightfully random.
She started to get up from the table, reaching for the spent breakfast plates.
“Let me get that, ma chérie,” Jon said, beating her to it.
“Well, now,” she said, sitting back in her chair, “I could get used to this.”
Chapter 64
Vera’s train ride stretched in front of her as she looked out the window at the snowy landscape. Snow in November, the week before Thanksgiving. Could it be that she hadn’t seen Tony in two months? During this time, so much had happened to steal her time away—she’d even been in jail. And then there was Annie, who still was in the hospital, now being treated for pneumonia.
Vera hated to go away—even now. Even though they had the murderer in custody, it still felt unfinished to Vera. Just a nag she felt pricking away at her.
And then there was her mother’s romance with Jon. Why, before Vera even knew it, he was moving in without any explanation from either of them. Good God, didn’t he have a home in France? Vera didn’t like it. They should have at least consulted her about it.
“Why should they consult you?” Tony had said during a phone conversation. “They are grown-ups.”
“She is my mother,” Vera had said. “Why has she been so secretive?”
“But do you need her permission to come and visit with me?”
“No. That’s different. I’m not eighty-one years old. What if he’s after her money?”
Tony chuckled. “You’re a mess, Vera.”
“Okay,” she admitted. “I’m a mess.”
She saw his face immediately when she stepped onto the train platform. The eyes. The grin. The dimples. All heading her way. His arms encircling her, then reaching for her bags. He led her to the cab he had waiting for them.
“You’re a little late. I was starting to worry,” he said, handing her
bags to the cabbie, who placed them in the trunk.
“You know how these trains are sometimes. And we have a little weather,” she said, trying to get her bearing. It always took awhile to get used to the speed of things when she first got into the city.
They entered the cab. It would be a short ride, but with her baggage, it was easier to take a cab to Tony’s place. They sat quietly for several blocks, holding hands, as she watched the buildings and people on the busy streets.
“I’m coming for a visit to Cumberland Creek. I want to meet your daughter, your mother, and yes, even Bill. Maybe those scrapbooking friends of yours, too. I want to come for Christmas,” he said, after a while.
Vera didn’t know what to say. She felt as if all the breath had been knocked right out of her. He didn’t ask her if it was okay. He just told her he was coming. This felt a little forced. She felt like a cat being back into a corner—almost felt her back hunch over in a protective stance. She breathed, counted to ten.
“I don’t know why that’s so important to you.”
He looked at her, astounded.
“We’re here, folks,” the cabbie interrupted. Tony took out some cash and gave it to the cabbie.
His apartment building loomed in front of her. A man came out of the building and smiled. He recognized her. Why did she feel like running the other way? She stopped in her tracks.
“Vera? What’s wrong?”
“Listen to me, Tony. Don’t push me. Do you hear me? I’ve been pushed around my whole life. Felt like I was living someone else’s life for the first half of it. I’m not ready to commit to you. I’m not ready to bring you into my daughter’s life.”
“God, Vera, we’ve been seeing each other for over a year like this. When are you going to be ready?”
Vera suddenly realized that they were still standing on the sidewalk outside his apartment building. The man was politely looking away. Who ever said that New Yorkers were impolite?
“Do we need to talk about this here?” she said quietly.
“No, let’s go upstairs.”
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