by Alyssa Day
“A lot nuts.”
“A lot nuts, but they’re your family and you were Jeremiah’s family. So that’s all there is to it.” He started back to the house, just expecting that I’d follow him, I guess.
“Really?” I stuck my tongue out at his back. “That’s all there is to it? Does everybody just sit and roll over when you give orders?”
He laughed—a low, sinfully delicious laugh—and nodded, never looking back at me. “You’re getting your canines and felines mixed up, but basically, yeah. Everybody except you and Quinn. I guess I’m just drawn to difficult females.”
I couldn’t help smiling, just a little. Quinn was the fierce (and human!) warrior woman who’d run the North American rebellion against the vampire takeover with Jack before he got sick of fighting the same fight over and over, and before she married some scary-dangerous Atlantean high priest guy.
I was pretty sure Jack had been in love with Quinn, but he seemed to be getting past that, considering the way he’d been sorta, kinda flirting with me.
I didn’t know what to do with any of it, so I pushed it into the cluttered box in my mind labeled “Deal with This Later” and followed Jack into the house.
Leona was huddled in a chair, her hands clutching a mug of coffee, and she wouldn’t look at us.
Ruby glared at me and Jack as if it were our fault. “Don’t you two blame her. She can’t help it.”
Jack held up his hands in silent protest, and I rolled my eyes.
“Aunt Ruby, nobody is blaming anybody. We need to know what’s going on, though. Who is Brenda? How did she die? What should we do?”
“We need to head to the RV park,” Leona said, barely above a whisper. “I’ll explain on the way.”
I nodded and grabbed my bag.
The house phone rang, and Aunt Ruby grabbed it. “Hello?”
I didn’t catch much from her end of the call, but when she hung up, she was frowning.
“That was Martha. I completely forgot that I’d promised to pick her up from the hospital. She’s getting released from her hip surgery this afternoon, and Mike and I were supposed to drive her home and get her settled, and I’m staying with her until tomorrow morning when her son gets into town. I can try to find somebody else—”
“No,” Uncle Mike said. “You know how she is. She’d be hysterical if plans changed at this late hour. Tess, Jack, are you okay to go with Leona on your own?”
He’d said “Tess” first, but my uncle was looking at Jack. I didn’t waste time being annoyed. When an overprotective uncle finds a shapeshifting ex-soldier to watch out for his trouble-prone niece, there’s not much doubt he’d take advantage of it.
“Men,” I muttered.
Aunt Ruby smiled a little and gave me a quick hug, and then Jack and I gathered up a still-stunned Leona, and in minutes we were on the way to the Black Cypress RV Park.
Nobody asked me, but if they had, I would have told them that the last place to build an RV park was at the edge of a swamp.
Jack pulled into the drive between two carelessly planted hedges of Azaleas, which were already blooming in a riot of early color and flowery perfume. But the faint scent of rotting vegetation was competing for dominance, and the combination of the two was slightly nauseating.
Rows of shiny RVs and rusty old camper trailers shared the park, and I didn’t see any empty spaces. Oddly enough, the place seemed to be full.
I was surprised. “Who knew that camping in Dead End would be so popular?”
“Looks like some people live here full-time,” Jack said, nodding toward one of the RVs that had a built-on deck.
“We’re in the back on the right, the silver-and-black American Allegiance,” Leona said.
“The one with all the flashing lights around it, I’m guessing,” Jack said dryly, but Leona just nodded.
My friend Susan Gonzalez, former deputy and now sheriff, was already there, which made sense, since murder was a major crime. She was a few inches shorter than me and a few years older, and at only a couple of months into the job, she was the best sheriff Dead End had ever had. I could see Deputy Kelly, too, climbing out of his car. He was a slender guy with red hair even more vivid than mine, a boatload of freckles, and the overall look of a kid playing dress up in his dad’s uniform. I’d seen him in action though, and I wouldn’t underestimate him again.
A swarm of people in all varieties of sunburns and flip-flops were crowded around, talking and gesturing excitedly at each other. A dozen paces away from the crowd, as if protected by some invisible barrier, Susan was talking to a tall, well-dressed man with silver hair. Leona caught sight of them and started trying to open the truck door.
“Wait till we stop,” Jack said, pulling over to the side of the road and parking.
Before I could even get my seatbelt off, Leona was out the door and running toward the man.
“I bet that’s Ned,” Jack said.
“She seems pretty attached to Ned, seeing as how her husband just died,” I said slowly, trying not to sound judgmental but not sure how I felt about a possibly adulterous grandmother.
“From the sound of things, I hope she had a dozen Neds,” Jack growled.
We got out of the truck and headed for Susan, her deputy, and my…Leona.
Susan’s dark brows drew together when she saw us approach. “Tess? What are you doing here? Don’t tell me you’re caught up in this, too.”
I didn’t take offense at that, because Susan had been a huge help to me when black magic practitioners had been trying to kill me recently.
“I’m not always in the middle of the bad stuff,” I told her, reaching out to shake her hand.
“Shepherd,” Susan said calmly, nodding at Jack.
“Gonzalez,” Jack said, inclining his head in turn.
I rolled my eyes. “Come on. Somebody tell me what’s going on. My…Leona, Leona Carstairs, got a call and she said ‘they killed Brenda’ and then she went kind of crazy.”
I didn’t see a need to mention the banshee thing. I had enough notoriety in Dead End already without that.
Susan held up a hand, and then told Deputy Kelly to get all the looky-loos to disperse before turning back to us.
“Your Mrs. Carstairs is friends with the deceased, then?” Susan’s face was grim. “I’m going to have to interview her, too.”
Jack frowned. “This damn town sure gets more than its share of dead bodies, doesn’t it?”
For an instant, Susan’s shoulders sagged, but then she took a deep breath and snapped back into perfect law enforcement posture.
“Too many,” she agreed, and then Doc Ike walked out from between the two nearest RVs toward us.
Doc Ike was the county coroner and only doctor in Dead End. He had a giant beak of a nose and a tiny, receding chin, plus he was bald and liked to wear colorful ball caps. The whole effect was Angry Toucan.
He claimed to be in his sixties, didn’t look a day over eighty, and he was mean. Aunt Ruby and I had been driving into Orlando to see a female doctor since forever.
Ike stomped over to us, glared up at Jack from his five-foot-nothing height, and snorted. “Damn civilians at my crime scene.”
Jack looked down at him and said nothing.
“Well?” Susan asked him. “What do you think?”
“She’s dead, all right,” Ike said, shifting his old, black medical bag from one hand to the other.
Susan’s lips tightened, but she didn’t punch him, so at least some of the women in my life were showing some restraint today.
“And?” she asked instead, with admirable patience.
“And she’s dead, what do you want? Back of her head smashed in, blood and hair on the trailer hitch next to her,” he snarled.
So maybe it was an accident. Not that it still wouldn’t be sad and awful that she died, but the idea that there was another killer in Dead End wasn’t making me happy at all.
“Do you think she fell?”
The words had barely
left my lips when Doc Ike transferred his scowl to me. “Not that it’s any of your business, young lady, since pawn shop owner isn’t a law enforcement job, but what the hell. No, I don’t think a fall killed her. The injury is far too severe for that. She may have fallen and hit the trailer hitch after somebody took a baseball bat to the back of her skull.”
I flinched, and Jack started to make a very low growling sound, which still raised the hairs on the back of my neck, even though I knew he wasn’t going to kill and eat me.
Doc Ike reacted like somebody had shoved a gun in his face. His beady little eyes widened as much as they could, and he stumbled back a couple of paces.
“Jack,” I warned him, putting a hand on his arm. “Quit scaring people.”
“Damned shifters,” the doctor snapped, glaring at both of us. “Can’t trust them as far as you can throw them, and who the hell can throw a shifter? The government should lock up the whole lot of you.”
Oh no, he did not.
I got right up in his stupid toucan face. “Look, you bigot, Dead End is not going to put up with your—”
Loud shouting interrupted whatever fine speech I’d been about to make, and we all looked around. Deputy Kelly was headed toward us, dragging a skinny guy with a face like a ferret over to us. The man was wearing old, ripped-out-knees jeans, a wife-beater shirt, and boots. He had a scraggly beard and greasy hair, and he looked like he’d last seen a dentist when Nixon was president.
“You found him,” Susan said. “Excellent.”
“Yep,” Kelly said. “Meet Chet DeKalb.”
Leona and the guy who must be Ned rushed over when they saw Chet.
“That’s him,” Leona said, pointing one trembling finger at the man.
“No, I’m not,” Chet shouted, making no sense at all.
Ned put a comforting arm around Leona, and she turned and started sobbing into his chest. I felt my heart squeeze uncomfortably in my chest, but I didn’t know how to comfort a woman I didn’t really know over the death of another woman I really didn’t know, so I stayed where I was.
“I told Deputy Freckles here that I don’t have no idea what happened to that chick,” Chet slurred, clearly more than three sheets to the swampy wind. “Barbara.”
“Brenda,” Kelly said, shaking Chet a little, probably for the freckles remark. “Brenda Norris.”
“He was making unwanted advances on Brenda last night,” Leona’s companion said sternly to the sheriff, and then he looked at me and smiled a little. “Ned Pendergast. Delighted to meet you. Any granddaughter of Leona’s is, well, family to me.”
“Granddaughter?” Kelly said, eyeing me.
“We just need to take your statement, Mr. DeKalb,” Susan said crisply. “Perhaps you might start with why you have blood on your shirt?”
Chapter 6
Susan and Deputy Kelly took Chet off to jail to test the blood, or whatever they did at jails, and Leona, Ned, Jack, and I headed over to her RV, for lack of anything better to do. I texted Mike and Ruby, and then we sat in lawn chairs outside and Ned opened a very nice bottle of wine.
That’s what he called it—a “very nice bottle of wine,” then he told me it was five o’clock somewhere (it was actually almost five o’clock in Dead End, too, so I was fine with that). I wasn’t exactly a wine expert, but my taste buds were very happy with it, so I was inclined to believe him.
“That is one nice rig,” Jack said, checking out the giant silver-and-black behemoth of an RV.
“Yes, I got it for under three-hundred grand, if you can believe that,” Ned said, with the fervor of a true enthusiast.
“And then Everett thought I bought it, and threatened me,” Leona said in a shaky voice.
“Everett?” I didn’t even know Everett and I wanted to punch him. Aunt Ruby must be rubbing off on me.
“Everett is Carstairs’ illegitimate son who thinks Leona cheated him out of his inheritance. He’s quite a nasty piece of work,” Ned said, his elegant face hardening. “I set him straight on the RV issue.”
“But he called me some very bad names,” Leona whispered. “They weren’t true. I was never unfaithful to Trey, although he cheated on me all the time, including with Everett’s mother.”
“I’m so sorry,” I told her. “Nobody deserves that.”
Jack stood up and started pacing with such intensity I could almost hear the swish of his tiger tail. “Nasty enough to kill banshees to get back at you?”
Leona’s mouth opened into a perfect O. “That’s—no. No. I never thought of that, but what would it gain him? He wants to break Trey’s will and get all of his money, even though I offered to split the estate with him right down the middle.”
“What would his motivation be for killing other banshees, Jack?” I asked.
“Maybe to shake Leona up so much that she didn’t have the nerve for a legal fight?” Jack abruptly shrugged and sat down next to me. “I don’t know. But I don’t believe in coincidence. Especially when murder is involved.”
Ned looked like he was trying the idea on for size, but he finally shook his head. “Maybe. But he lives in California, trying to be a movie star, and the attacks have been on this side of the country.”
I stretched out my legs, took a deep breath, and asked the questions I really didn’t want to ask.
“So let’s put Everett aside for now. Brenda. How did you know her?”
Leona looked at Ned, who leaned forward in his chair and answered. “Well, I knew her first, of course, since I’ve been with NABR longer.”
Jack glanced at me.
“The North American organization for Banshee Rights,” I told him.
He shoved a hand through his hair and slouched down in his chair. “Of course.”
Ned continued. “Leona is new to the group, since her husband wouldn’t let her join, officially—”
“But now I’m president,” Leona interjected, a little of her perky spirit returning, in spite of the dead woman.
Ned patted her knee. “And a very fine president, too,” he replied warmly.
“Anyway…” I prompted, thinking this was going to be a long story, at this rate.
“Anyway, the banshee disappearances started about a year ago. Six that we know of, over the course of the past year. A few banshees have gone missing before, but we always assumed it was the usual thing—”
This time, Jack, ex-rebel commander and newly minted private eye, interrupted. “The usual thing?”
“Sometimes it is just too hard to keep on going,” Leona said, her quiet voice filled with sadness. “Always seeing deaths, having people hate you for a curse that you can’t control…sometimes it’s too much.”
“They shouldn’t hate you for that,” I said, not really knowing if I meant her curse—or my own.
“But they do. Everybody hates banshees. We cry out the hour of their deaths,” she said, staring off into space.
Jack didn’t look at me. But he reached over and took my hand, and I tightened my fingers around his.
“So Brenda was helping us investigate a lead,” Ned said, and then he drained his glass of wine.
Jack and I looked at each other in mutual frustration.
“What lead?”
Leona blinked. “Oh. I’m sorry. It’s been an…eventful…day. Even before Brenda.”
“We were talking on the NABR email loop earlier this year and realized that the disappearances all circled around the southeast United States. But when we tried to talk to the police or P-Ops, nobody wanted to hear it,” Ned said, pouring us all more wine.
“And then we had our first real clue,” Leona said. “Perrin Jones went missing, and his mother had a find-a-phone app, because Perrin is a college student with a penchant for getting into trouble.”
Jack tilted his head. “There are male banshees?”
“Yes. Not many, but yes,” Leona said.
“We traced his phone here,” Ned added.
Jack put his glass down on the little metal table a
nd leaned forward. “Okay, I have a few more questions. First, you have an email loop?”
Ned frowned at him, so Jack shook his head and rattled off his remaining questions. “Two, it was here here? In the RV park? Did you tell the police?”
“Here in the swamp,” Leona said, waving an arm in the direction of Black Cypress. “The last ping showed it right smack in the middle of the swamp, and then the phone signal shut down, probably destroyed or out of power.”
Ned chimed in. “And no, we didn’t bother with the authorities, because they’d never believed us before. We heard you were here, and of course we know about you, so—”
“So seeing me was just a lucky coincidence,” I finished, shocking myself with how bitter I sounded.
Leona stood up and took a step toward me, but she stopped when I shook my head.
“Oh, Tess, it wasn’t like that at all. I’d always planned to come visit you as soon as I could, and get to know you again,” she said, almost pleading.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t in the mood for pleading. “Sure. Fine. But Brenda? She was helping with all of this why, exactly?”
Leona sat down hard, as if the muscles in her legs had quit working. “But we told you. Brenda is—was—a banshee, too.”
Jack and I drove across town to my house in complete silence. I didn’t know how to process everything that had happened to me, and Jack was keeping his thoughts to himself.
When he stopped in the small gravel-covered space that served as my parking lot, I was more than ready to go inside and cuddle my cat alone. But he turned off the truck.
“Here we go again. But this time it’s dead bodies and banshees,” he said, staring out the windshield. “Is it me? Is it Dead End?”
“How can you even say that? This is my family,” I told him, clenching my hands into fists.
“And Jeremiah was mine.” Jack’s uncle had been murdered—literally—by an evil witch, and it was the first case Jack had solved, with my help, when he came back to Dead End.
“Jeremiah was my family, too,” I said quietly. I’d worked for him for ten years and loved him like another uncle.