by Nova Nelson
Tanner continued to do an impressive job of showing no emotions as he inquired into the murder of his parents who he’d spoken to only a few hours before. I knew how this would work. It would take its toll, but he wouldn’t be paying for it until later. Maybe much later.
“No outward signs of trauma?” he asked.
I refrained from grabbing his hand to comfort him. Now wasn’t the time, and that little gesture of sympathy might put a crack in the armor he was working so hard to preserve.
Manchester was dressed in a solid hunter green button-down and tan slacks. It was always weird seeing him out of uniform. Regular clothes looked a bit like a costume on him, as if he were playing an obligatory game of dress-up to appease societal expectations that he should have a personal life. His civilian clothes seemed to say, See? I’m not at work all the time, now back off and let me get back to work.
Stu ran a hand over his face before standing and crossing the room to the coffee maker that had just finished brewing. As he poured himself a cup, he finally answered Tanner’s question. “No. Nothing. They just looked like they were sleeping. If Mr. and Mrs. Lark next door hadn’t reported a man and woman shouting… Well, when they didn’t answer, I had to let myself in, and I found them in bed, just like they had decided to take a nap, only… Well, you know.”
“So someone put them there,” Tanner said. Not a question.
“Yeah, that’s what I figure.” He took a sip of his coffee and scowled at his mug. “Twenty tines! I don’t know how you do it,” he said, addressing me now. “I’ve tried everything these last few days, and this doesn’t hold a candle to yours. What’s the trick? Is it magic?”
“Nope,” I said. “Just old equipment, as far as I know.” I turned to Tanner, who confirmed with a nod. “And lots and lots of grounds. You’re probably not adding enough.”
Stu nodded, glaring at his coffee. “It’ll have to do, I guess. But you two better get that place up and running again, if for no other reason than to spite the folks who want to see it stay shut.
“Anyway,” he said, grunting as he settled back into his chair. “Your parents just looked like they were sleeping. Nice and peaceful. Bloom suspects they didn’t feel a thing when it happened, for what it’s worth.”
Did Tanner actually buy that? I scanned his face for a clue but found none. There was no telling if Stu was being truthful, I supposed. No matter how it went down, the only merciful thing you could tell the victims’ son this far after the fact was that they didn’t feel a thing.
I was putting together the pieces, though, and a picture was beginning to form. Someone had swung by the Culpeppers’ house that evening and a dispute had broken out. Was it physical as well as verbal? Who knew? But the Culpeppers didn’t survive it, and whoever had killed them had tried to disguise it, like they had simply gone to bed early and never awoken. Or was the killer trying to make it look like suicide?
“Was there anything in their system?” I asked. “Any signs of poisoning?”
Stu sighed heavily. “None that the tests reported, but… well, you have to understand that Eastwind can’t get out of the way of itself sometimes. Back then, our medical examiner was only a year away from retirement, though everyone knew he’d checked out of the job a few years before. But no matter how much Bloom protested to the High Council about keeping him in an important position while he continued delivering shoddy work, they wouldn’t give him the ax before retirement. I think he was related to Quinn. Or maybe I’m just making that assumption because he was a leprechaun.” He leaned forward and mumbled, “Don’t mention that to anyone. I don’t want to come off as anti-leprechaun and lose credibility.” He took another sip of his drink, grimacing less with each one, and said, “George McInerny was his name. Pretty sure I remember hearing about him passing.”
“Which means there’s no way to confirm they weren’t poisoned,” I concluded.
“Right. That was certainly the story that got around, though. Less disturbing than the other option.”
“Which is?”
He shrugged a shoulder. “Magical assassination.”
While the idea set in for me, Tanner asked, “What about the magical examiner? Didn’t he or she take a look?”
Stu’s usual expression of gruff defiance and calloused indifference, which went so nicely with his bristly mustache, drooped a little. He looked tired. And when he spoke, I understood why. “She did. And her conclusion was that there was no magic involved in their deaths. At least, that’s what she put in the report. I have my doubts that she was being entirely truthful.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because, later on, once the dust settled and we learned more about the events leading up to that night, she moved to the top of our list of suspects.”
The air in my chest solidified, and I was hardly able to squeak, “You’re not telling me the magical examiner was… Serenity Springsong?”
Tanner’s head whipped around to look at me before whipping right back to stare at Stu.
Manchester nodded only once. “Yes. I’m afraid so.”
“Why didn’t you arrest her?” I asked. “The Stringfellows said she was let off.”
“Well, for one, we had no evidence against her. And for another, she had a strong alibi for that night.”
“Which was?” I prompted. I couldn’t imagine an alibi strong enough to contradict the evidence mounting against her.
Stu cleared his throat. “She was at the Elk’s Lodge. I was there. I saw her.”
“What was she doing at the Elk’s Lodge?” I’d never heard of anyone but were-elks going there. I wasn’t entirely sure what they did at that place.
“You may not believe this, but she was trying to foster a sense of cooperation between witches and weres. It just made sense to start with were-elks, I suppose, since we can be a little easier to talk with than the werewolves, especially when it comes to our leadership.”
“So, she left Sheehan’s Pub where she’d met with the Culpeppers and headed straight to the lodge?”
“The timelines match up for that.”
“And you’re sure she was at the lodge during the entire window of opportunity for the killer?”
He nodded. “Definitely, and while I can’t be entirely certain about this next bit, I’m pretty sure she was at the lodge until the next morning. At the time, she and Edgar Shallows, the Grand Bull of the were-elks, had an on-again-off-again romance. But she didn’t need to stay all night to have a solid alibi, because I was called over to the disturbance that night. Granted, it was late that night, but we were all still gathered, and she was there. I headed straight over, and those who I left claim she didn’t leave even for a few minutes. So she couldn’t have been the one who did it.”
Tanner rubbed a hand over his face. “For fang’s sake,” he said. “I can see why this was never resolved.”
“I tried,” Stu said, his voice unusually airy. “I promise I tried my best. Aria was one of a kind, and Dean was one of the best men I’ve ever known. I still lose sleep over the whole thing, but what can you do? No one in law enforcement has a perfect record.”
It was silent for a moment. I had the mental advantage since my emotions weren’t getting in the way like they appeared to be for Tanner and Stu. “Go back to that bit about how it was a strange scene. You said they were in bed like they were sleeping, but that doesn’t seem especially strange. Was there something else?”
Manchester seemed grateful for the mental diversion. “Sure was,” he said, perking up. “Mostly downstairs. Whoever did it clearly wanted to get it done and head out of there. If they were looking for something, they didn’t look hard. Everything was just where you’d expect it to be except in the dining room.”
“What was it like in there?”
“Tidy except for the table. All sorts of strange things were lying on it. I couldn’t make sense of a single one of them.”
I exchanged a glance with Tanner before saying, “Any chance you still have
those objects somewhere?”
Stu set his half-full mug on the desk and seemed to be glad to be rid of it. “Yep. All down in the evidence dungeon. Care for a tour?”
Chapter Thirteen
Eastwind sure wasn’t afraid to build underground. Maybe in an attempt to remain walkable and with the desire not to surround itself with towering buildings that would block out the sun or ruin the ambiance, the town had opted for plenty of underground networks. The Parchment Catacombs, where Landon Hawker worked, was one such place, and then there was the library.
And now the evidence dungeons.
We entered through a narrow set of spiraling stone stairs that led down through an opening in the very back of the Sheriff’s Office. The subterraneous space stretched past where the meager torches along the walls were much use. As Stu led us down the long corridor, we passed heavy-looking stone doors on either side of us every dozen paces.
Tanner had been down here, of course, and his amazement at yet another underground expanse had clearly waned. However, after a few minutes of walking, he remarked, “This is quite far down here, isn’t it?”
Stu said, “I didn’t want anyone tampering with it, did I? Not when the whole thing is still unsolved. Figured I’d keep it nice and safe until someone smarter than me came along. I guess you two will have to do.”
He shuffled through the large key ring he’d brought down with us and stuck one in the door’s lock. The heavy slab swung open, and immediately torches around the inside of the space flared to life.
It was a small space, not much more than a deep storage closet, and shelves had been carved into the stone along each wall. Along each shelf were stacks of wooden crates, each one large enough to hold a half-dozen bowling balls.
It was a lot of evidence to sort through, but Stu headed straight to a box in the back and pulled it off the shelf. It wasn’t labeled, but he’d obviously committed the shape and placement to memory.
“This is the weirdest of it. I can’t figure what this junk is or what it’s for.”
He pulled the top off and set it aside, and when he leaned the container toward me, I swore loudly.
“What?” Tanner asked, his hand flying instinctively toward his wand at his waistband.
“Nothing, nothing,” I said, trying to calm him as well as myself. Because what I was looking at wasn’t dangerous. It was just…
Impossible?
“Can I touch it?” I asked.
Stu shrugged then nodded. “Sure, if you’re sure it’s not dangerous. You know what any of this is, Ms. Ashcroft?”
I reached in and grabbed the first object that stood out to me. It was black with white buttons, fit right in my hand, and had a thick and stubby antenna sticking out of the top. “I sure do, Deputy.”
Holding it only a few inches away from my face, I hardly believed my eyes.
It was an old Nokia cell phone. From my old world.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Tanner breathed. “What does it do?”
“It… it makes calls.” I jabbed at a few of the buttons and felt them give stiffly and reluctantly under the pressure. “You put in a number, and whoever has that number gets a call on their phone.”
Stu and Tanner looked a bit worried about my sanity, so I explained. “This is from my world. Well, not my world as I left it—this thing is practically a dinosaur in tech terms.” I set the phone back in the box and grabbed the next item. It was a Cabbage Patch doll. I’d had one just like it when I was younger. I’d lost track of her sometime in my early teens, though, along with most of my childhood toys that I’d outgrown. This one even had the same red hair and freckles as mine.
Eastwind had dolls, of course, but they were much more lifelike than this. I’d seen children carrying them around, and they tended to have a fleshier look to them, and the hair wasn’t just yarn, but actually looked like hair. Some of the Eastwind dolls even talked, and not in the tinny distant sounds of an electrical voice box programmed to spout out the same phrases over and over again.
To Stu and Tanner, the Cabbage Patch doll must look like a completely useless relic, like the carcass of something.
I placed the doll back in the box and fought off the urge to keep rifling through all the Earth nostalgia. That was a bunny trail I could wander down forever.
“This is all stuff from my old world. All of it.”
“I can’t even imagine the use of most of this,” Stu replied, shutting the box and replacing it on the shelf.
“To be honest, most of the stuff in my world wasn’t incredibly useful. Lots of junk. You found all this in their dining room?”
He nodded. “That and lots more, scattered around their table.”
Tanner had begun peeking in other boxes around the room. “They were probably trying to figure out what it did,” he said. He opened the lid to one box and jerked his head back right away, crinkling his nose. “Oh, come on. Did you take everything as evidence?”
I watched as Tanner leaned toward the box again before reaching in and pulling out a boot, dangling it on a single finger as he held it on display for Stu. “This is my dad’s old shoe, not evidence. Unless you needed evidence that he stepped in something foul.”
The smell finally wafted through the small space and hit me in the face. I coughed. “Sweet baby jackalope!”
“Twenty tines!” Stu swore. “Stop waving that thing around, Culpepper.”
He plopped it back into the box and shut the lid. “Sorry.”
But as he moved onto the next box, cracking the lid and inspecting the contents, the shock of the unpleasant smell that had been preserved in a veritable sarcophagus for well over a decade wore off, and I had a realization that would have made Grim proud.
I recognized that specific nasty smell. As much as I hated to admit it, the particular aroma had lodged itself in my brain after so many months with Grim.
The muck on the bottom of Dean Culpepper’s shoe wasn’t just any animal waste.
It was hellhound poop.
The smell of it was so pungent that no one would just leave it on their shoe. He must have stepped in it soon before he was killed and simply not had a chance to clean it off yet.
Which meant only one thing.
Dean had been in the Deadwoods shortly before his death.
The pieces were starting to converge toward the center of gravity that was the truth, but I still couldn’t see how they all came together.
I did know one thing, though.
The ghosts of Dean and Aria were keeping way too much from me. If they wanted my help, I needed the full story. Why did they have objects from my old world? Where did they get them? And why was Dean, if not also Aria, in the Deadwoods the day they died?
A little voice whispered the answer to me, but I didn’t want to hear it. It was too strange, and I couldn’t yet grasp the implications of it.
I needed a follow-up conversation, and if I wanted the full truth from them, I needed to make sure Tanner wasn’t around for it.
I followed Tanner back to his house, and he didn’t question it, which was lucky.
I had no plans to stay long, though. The Hallow’s Faire was only a few hours away, and I had some serious sorting out to do before I could bother with that mess.
As soon as he opened the front door, his parents were there to greet us.
“Nora,” said Dean warmly. “Great to see you under better circumstances.”
Even Aria seemed slightly more relaxed. “I would have started some tea, but I didn’t know when you’d be back. Also, I can’t seem to grip anything.”
Tanner grinned. “Don’t worry about it. We got some coffee while we were out. What time is it?”
“Just after noon,” Dean replied. “Although, you know, time is sort of a meaningless scale.”
“Maybe for you,” Tanner said, “but I don’t want Nora to miss her first Hallow’s Faire.”
“Ah yes,” Aria said, addressing me, “I suppose you’ll be a bit of a celebri
ty there.”
“We’ll see,” I said, smiling pleasantly.
I was trying not to think too hard about what I was going to have to do in just a minute when Tanner went upstairs.
“I’m gonna clean up,” he said, his hand grabbing the stair railing as he nodded at me. “You coming?”
His father had a single eyebrow arched at the invitation and a slight smirk turned the corner of his mouth. His mother didn’t seem super pleased at him inviting me upstairs, however.
“Um, I think I’m going to go back to Ruby’s and get fixed up. I need to go get Grim anyway. Maybe just have a little time to myself beforehand, too.”
If Tanner found anything suspicious about that, he showed no signs. Good. “All right. Meet you there?”
“Yep.” I grinned and waited till he was out of sight, then I tiptoed to the kitchen where the anchor bowl was, grabbed it carefully so as not to spill any of the contents, and told the Culpeppers, “I think we have some things to talk about… in private.”
With the bowl tucked under my arm, I hurried out the door and back to Ruby’s, hoping everyone I passed on the street was too distracted with their fair share of ghosts to notice the Fifth Wind witch kidnapping her boyfriend’s dead parents.
Chapter Fourteen
Ruby was humming when I entered through the front door.
Not only was she humming, but she was sitting on the floor in front of the fire, rather than where she usually parked it in her comfy chair curled up with a blanket and a book.
“What’s going—” But I couldn’t finish.
When Ruby turned and scooted to the side, I caught sight of Grim’s head, which had been hidden behind her initially. I nearly dropped the anchor bowl.
His matted fur had been brushed into a puffy mane, and the tuft between his ears was pulled back into an orange bow.
“Kill me,” he begged.
I set the bowl down on the parlor table before allowing myself the laugh I so desperately needed.