The Curse of Tenth Grave

by Darynda Jones

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Lyle Fiske is about to go to prison for your murder.”

  Both hands flew to her face and covered it.

  “And since you’re still alive and all, I thought we might try to get the charges dropped.”

  “No,” she said from behind her hands. She sat on the chair, but kept her hands over her face as though to block out the news I’d brought. “No. He was out of town. Why would they suspect him?”

  “Because he never left town.”

  She looked at me at last. “Yes, he did.” Her disbelief was palpable. “He was at the airport. I saw him there.”

  “The app?” I asked, picking my way through the brush to get closer. When she nodded, I said, “He went to the airport. Started to check in. But he felt like something was wrong, so he changed his mind and went back to town.”

  Her fingers curled into fists over her mouth. “No.”

  I kneeled beside her. “If you don’t come back with me, he could go to prison for the rest of his life.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut. “I never wanted this. I never wanted to hurt him.”

  “So, you didn’t think your murder would hurt him? Maybe just a little?”

  “I mean, I never wanted him involved in this.” She locked her gaze with mine. “I tried to just break up with him, but I couldn’t.”

  There was so much wrong with that statement, but I decided to drop it.

  “He had nothing to do with this. This is all on my father.”

  I figured as much. “If it helps, he’s riddled with guilt. He’s even contemplating suicide.”

  Her chin rose in defiance, refusing to feel anything for the man. But I could feel the pain well up inside her. She was only fooling one of us, and it wasn’t me.

  “He wouldn’t have gone through with it. Suicide. He doesn’t have the spine.”

  “He’s heartbroken either way.”

  “In his eyes he’s guilty of murder. I wanted him to feel what I felt when he placed that bet.”

  “You overheard the conversation between your father and Fernando.”

  She nodded. “They told him. They said that if he lost and couldn’t pay up this time, they wouldn’t bother coming after him. They’d kill me. They told him point-blank. And do you know what he did?”

  I lowered my head, knowing all too well.

  “He placed the bet.” Her breath hitched in her chest. “He bet my life on a fucking game.”

  “I’m sorry, Emery.”

  She curled into herself and sobbed until the night was cold enough to freeze the tears on her cheeks. I led her inside the cabin and made some coffee old school.

  After taking her a cup, I said, “It was pretty ingenious, how you did all this.”

  “Clearly not ingenious enough. You figured it out.” She shook her head. Wiped her brow with the back of a hand. “I can’t believe they think Lyle killed me.”

  “When he couldn’t get ahold of you, he used the app to find you, but that was your backup plan, wasn’t it?”

  She nodded and wrapped her hands tighter around the cup. “I didn’t know if anyone would find my car out there, so I had a plan for him to tell the police that he had an app to find me. I thought they would find the car. Not him. And certainly not on the same day I did it.” She glanced up at me. “How did you know?”

  “There were several clues. Your phone was in the charger in your car, for one. Lyle mentioned that it was the kind that kept charging even if the car was off. And he said it was your idea to get the apps. It took me a while, but I realized you did that on purpose.”

  Embarrassed, she lowered her head.

  “The blood part was what threw me initially, until I realized where you were caught crying at the hospital. In the lab. You’d had a blood test two days earlier. A lab tech mentioned it in an interview, so why would you have been in there again? You weren’t pregnant. Your white blood cell count was way high, but you didn’t have an infection. You’d been seen almost fainting more than once, and you were taking iron.”

  She didn’t refute anything I said.

  “And if you were just crying, why was there blood on your skirt? Little clues like that. How long did you save your blood?” I knew she’d been saving her blood. The white blood cell count gave it away. When someone gives blood, they lose red blood cells that must be replaced. The blood. The fainting. The iron. It added up to only one conclusion.

  “Two weeks. I knew exactly how much I’d need to make it look like I couldn’t possibly have survived the attack. I didn’t have quite enough, but I supplemented and made sure that blood was soaked deep in the seat cushions.”

  “So, you came up with this plan—”

  “That night. When he made that bet, something inside me died. But that still doesn’t explain how you got onto my scent in the first place. What gave me away?”

  “It started with a conversation I had with Fernando. He said he’d made that threat two weeks before you disappeared. And before that, all your friends and family said you’d started behaving strangely at around the same time. I put two and two together. Also, there was no tissue in the car. No skin or hair or gray matter.”

  She closed her eyes. “I thought of that, but short of cutting pieces of flesh off my body or chunks of brain out of my head, I couldn’t leave any behind. Even if I got some from the morgue, they would’ve known it wasn’t mine eventually.”

  “By the way, you’re going to want to sell that car.”

  “Oh, my god, I can’t believe they arrested Lyle.” She dropped her face into her palms. “He’s going to hate me. I’ve ruined … everything. All for that man. That man wins again. Somehow he wins every time.” Her chin quivered as she thought back. “There was this one time he got me a really nice CD player. I was maybe twelve. I knew I wouldn’t have it for long. He’d lose money at the track or at the bar, and come to hock it. But I loved it. I wanted to keep it so bad, so I hid it in the crawlspace under our house.

  “It’s so stupid. I mean, I couldn’t even listen to it. But I just wanted it, so I told him it was stolen. That someone broke into our house while he was at work and took it. I came home from school two days later, and it was gone.”

  When she looked at me again, the fury she felt deep inside her billowed in the depths of her irises. “He never even mentioned it. Neither of us did. We just went about our lives like I’d never had it. A CD player is one thing, but my life.” Her voice cracked. “He bet my life like it was an object. Like it was disposable. Like I was disposable. He deserves all the pain he’s experiencing right now.”

  I certainly couldn’t argue that. I made bacon and eggs as she packed her things. She’d even thought that far ahead. She took nothing from her house. She bought all new toiletries and clothes. We ate in relative silence, both of us miserable.

  “I ruined my life. I ruined my life for that man.”

  “Maybe not,” I said, putting my thinking cap on.

  “What do you mean? I’ll be arrested. I’ll definitely lose my job. Forget having any future with Lyle.” She shook her head. “He was the greatest thing since sliced bread.”

  “So, when you tried to break up with him?”

  “I was trying to keep him as far away from this as possible.”

  “I figured as much. What if we go about this whole thing a little differently? How good are you at lying? And how high is your tolerance for pain?”

  * * *

  Two hours later, the stage was set. I nodded to her. She nodded back. And I picked up my phone. “Parker,” I said, panting and swallowing hard like I’d been running. “I was right. Get down here. Hurry! And bring an ambulance with you. She’s alive.”

  I gave him a description of the general area and hung up. We waited in the dark.

  “You’re sure they couldn’t really know if every single drop of that blood was yours?”

  “They don’t have the time or the resources to check every strand of DNA in that car
. It would take a lot of work to figure out if it were really enough blood loss to kill me.” She reached out her hand, her roped wrist scraping across the warehouse floor. “I don’t know how to thank you, Charley.”

  “You can thank me by giving your dad another chance.”

  “Then I won’t be thanking you anytime soon.”

  “I understand,” I said sadly.

  “But maybe someday. I’m going to tell Lyle, though. Not about you. I’ll tell him I set up the whole thing and called you or something. But he needs to know what he’s getting into.”

  “How do you think he’ll take it?”

  “I don’t know. Not well, I’m sure.”

  We heard sirens in the distance.

  “Just make sure he knows you did everything you could to make sure he wasn’t implicated.”

  “I will.”

  We waited as cars slid to a stop in front of the warehouse. “Hey,” I said before they burst through the doors with guns blazing, “want to grab a coffee sometime?”

  “Hell, yeah.”

  We fist-bumped, then I hooked my arms under hers and stumbled, falling to the floor with her just as the first flashlight landed on us.

  “Over here!” I called, praying this worked. Orange may have been the new black, but what it did for my complexion was barbaric.

  * * *

  Uncle Bob showed up on scene, and I knew he could sense something awry, but he disliked Joplin just enough to not give a shit. They whisked Emery away in an ambulance immediately, but they detained and questioned me for years.

  If this worked, I promised to straighten my act up. To do good things and stop making fun of other people’s choices in accessories. The one thing that could tip the scale in our favor was the fact that Emery had fallen down a ravine the day she got to the cabin. She’d already been sporting some nasty bruises and scratches and one rather garish gash across her leg where she’d been impaled by a broken branch. That would work in our favor magnificently.

  I still had to rough her up a bit. Or I tried. She called me a wuss and did most of it herself.

  “Tell me again,” Joplin said, “how you just happened to stumble upon my missing person?”

  We’d gone over it a gazillion times, but smelling something off as well, he wanted to trip me up. To give him a reason to arrest me. Wasn’t gonna happen.

  “I got a tip from a source that a lady was being held here against her will for her father’s gambling debts.”

  Emery threw that last part in. She wanted to drive that nail home. And since Mr. Adams apparently had gambling debts at several locations, who was to say which bookie it was that abducted her?

  “They wanted to freak out the father, so they threw her blood, along with someone else’s they’d stolen from a blood bank, all over her car. I got here, scoured the area, and finally heard a soft cry coming from inside this warehouse. I broke in and found her. It’s not rocket science, Joplin.”

  “You just keep that shit up, Davidson, and—”

  “Are you actually threatening my niece?” While Uncle Bob’s voice was smooth and even, his temper had busted through the roof. He was furious. “She did what you couldn’t, Joplin. She found your missing person. And you’re going to give her shit about it? Why? Because she did your job for you?” He stepped closer until they were toe-to-toe. “If you even talk to her like that again—”

  “You’ll what?” he asked.

  Man, that guy hated us. I wondered what I did.

  The captain strode up then, his anger spiking a bit, too. “Joplin,” he barked.

  Joplin practically jumped.

  “Get over here,” he said from between clenched teeth, sounding a lot like Clint Eastwood. It was quite manly.

  While Joplin received a thorough ass whipping, I wrapped an arm around Uncle Bob’s.

  “You gonna tell me what really happened?” he asked.

  How did he know? “I solve cases all the time. What makes you think this isn’t legit?”

  “Because I figured out what she did, too.”

  “Damn it.” I gazed up at him.

  “Not all of it, but I had my suspicions.”

  “Uncle Bob, she had a very good reason.”

  He nodded. “I know, hon. I have complete faith in you.”

  “Really? You’re not going to rat me out?”

  “What the hell kind of uncle do you think I am? Also, Cook would divorce me.”

  Laughter bubbled out of me. “You have complete faith in me? For reals?”

  “Yes. Well, not your cooking. Other than that, absolutely.”

  I gasped. “I’ve cooked for you, like, twice.”

  “Two times too many, pumpkin. Two times too many.”

  They finally released me just as Parker pulled up. He’d been in some really big meeting, but when he got there I didn’t know how he would react.

  He didn’t say a thing. Just gave me a questioning thumbs-up. I nodded, and he scraped his fingers through his hair in relief. Lyle Fiske should be out of jail within the hour. I did not envy that conversation Emery was going to have with him.

  I climbed into Misery and started out of the maze of empty warehouses I’d come across during another case a little over a year prior, having no idea they’d come in so handy someday. As I turned right, my headlights caught the reflection of a big black truck. I drove slowly. Another vehicle pulled up behind it, and the truck roared to life, did a U-turn, and drove off. It was Garrett, and the person taking over was Javier, one of his colleagues. It was time to get to the bottom of this.

  I followed Garrett all the way to his house, my blood boiling. Not literally, ’cause that would hurt. He pulled into his drive, and I pulled in behind him.

  “Charles,” he said, offering me his signature grin.

  “Don’t Charles me.” I stalked up to him and poked his chest. “Why are you tailing Uncle Bob?”

  “Whaaaaat?”

  He turned and walked into his house with an angry woman hot on his heels. “Don’t play dumb, Swopes. Why are you tailing him?”

  “It’s a job. I can’t tell you. My client has asked to be kept confidential.”

  “Bullshit. If I were tailing your uncle, I’d tell you who hired me.”

  “Now who’s bullshitting who?”

  He was right. Damn it. Unless he was brought in on the case, I would never reveal my clients’ names.

  “This is Uncle Bob we’re talking about.”

  “No, you’re talking about him. I’m getting a beer.”

  Just then, Osh spoke out like an omniscient presence. “Grab me one, too,” he said.

  I walked around to Garrett’s living room and spotted him playing video games. “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you watching my daughter?”

  “I check in every hour.”

  “Do you know how much could happen in an hour?”

  “I had to get some things in order and go over the plans with Swopes here and your husband.”

  “But not me.”

  “Yes, you. You were on a case. We didn’t want to bother you.” He killed another bad guy. At least I hoped he was a bad guy. Osh was a demon, technically a Daeva, so he could be killing the good guys for all I knew.

  “I’m not even going to argue with you.” I ripped the band out of my hair and scrubbed my scalp. “I have had the longest day ever.”

  Garrett brought Osh a beer and offered to make coffee. These two men had been with us through so much, and the only person on this plane who might know about Reyes and his creation was Osh. They were two of my best friends. And they knew how to keep a secret.

  I waved the coffee idea away—unusual, I admit—and sat on the coffee table, which tasted nothing like actual coffee, between Osh and the TV.

  “I will suck the soul from your body,” he threatened.

  “Whatever. I have something very serious to talk to you about. Like, the-annihilation-of-the-world kind of serious.”

  “The world is going to be annihil
ated? Again?” He turned off the game and tossed the controller on the table beside me. “We just stopped one annihilation. Can’t this wait?”

  I pursed my lips.

  “Oh, you are serious.”

  “I never joke about the annihilation of the world.”

  He took a long swig, as did Garrett, who’d unbuttoned his shirt and let it hang open while he sat, his legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles.

  Such pretty boys.

  I closed my eyes and dug deep for courage. “Okay,” I said, opening them again. “I need to know everything you know about Reyes’s creation.”

  He frowned. “You mean in hell?”

  “Yes.”

  He sat back, his youthful appearance making him totally look like a gamer. “I guess I don’t know that much. Lucifer created him from the energies of hell and the fires of sin. Or that’s the rumor.”

  “And how does that work, exactly?”

  “Not a clue. Why?”

  I sat beside him and looked from one to the other. “I am about to tell you the biggest secret I’ve ever had in my life, and I’ve only had it for ten days. But there is so much I don’t understand, and I don’t know what to do and who to tell. I mean, I told Cookie, but I tell her everything. I need help.”

  “They have facilities for that,” Garrett said. “And medication.”

  Osh laughed, and I let my brows slowly cinch together. “I don’t get it.”

  “You’re punking us,” Osh said.

  “Saw it from a mile away,” Garrett agreed.

  “No, I’m not.”

  Garrett rubbed his face with his free hand. “Okay, so what is this big secret that is going to annihilate the world?”

  “Well, it’s kind of a three-parter.”

  “Want another beer?” Garrett asked.

  “I’m good, but do we still have chips?”

  Oh, my god. They weren’t taking me seriously at all. Maybe all those times I didn’t take them seriously were coming back to bite my ass.

  Nah.

  “Guys!” I said, holding up my hands. “Quit with the beer and the chips shit.”

  “Isn’t there a game tonight?” Osh said.

  And I lost it. I grabbed Osh, put him in a headlock, and gave him just enough oxygen so he wouldn’t lose consciousness.