by Mara Webb
“I’m not getting into that now,” he replied. “Look, thanks for the cakes Eff, I appreciate it.”
“Are you mad that I’m going out with your brother?” she said. He drew in air through his nose as if trying to meter his response.
“No,” he said curtly. “I would appreciate it if you didn’t discuss family issues on your date, if you don’t mind. Other than that, have a great night.”
Ryder stood up and made for the door. I followed, rubbing a hand on Effie’s shoulder as I walked by her. “I’m just going to see Cindy Saco’s exhibit, then I can come back and here all about what you’re planning to wear,” I whispered.
“Just you wait, his eyes are gonna pop out of his head,” she smiled back.
The exhibit space was larger than I anticipated. Ryder found a key under a fake rock by the front door, a questionable security measure. We let ourselves in and my eye was immediately drawn to the photographs she had taken of the mountains on one of the distant islands. Some effect she had used on the image tinted the trees with a strange shade of pink.
“These are amazing, are they all taken around Hallow Haven?” I asked.
“Yeah, she loves landscape stuff,” Ryder replied. “She has some wildlife photography over there too if you like birds. Have you seen anything you like?”
“Yeah, all of it,” I laughed. “She’s really good.” I walked slowly from one print to the next, reading the note stuck beside each one and reeling at the prices. On the end wall of the ‘L’ shaped room was a blank space with a caption note. “What’s this?” I asked.
“The exhibit doesn’t start for hours, maybe she just hasn’t finished putting her work up yet,” Ryder guessed. The note read, ‘my greatest discovery’. Curious.
Ryder walked to my side and leaned in to read the note for himself. Footsteps behind us made me flinch, and I turned to see the woman from The Bureau approaching.
“I don’t want to be a nag,” she began. “But I’ve been sent back here to ask why you haven’t addressed the dispute with the farmers on the far side of the island yet. Miller and Mabel went straight to Tivercana and have, honestly, been really efficient with their time. What have you both achieved so far today?”
“Err…” I stalled.
“We were on the way there now, a friend is selling her artwork, so I suggested we came in to look before heading to the farms,” Ryder replied.
“Oh, good,” she said, smoothing down the creases in her overly formal skirt suit and turning on her heels. She pretty much performed a pirouette as she spun three hundred and sixty degrees and faced us again. “Sadie, I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that you died.”
“I hadn’t forgotten,” I nodded.
“If giving over all of the peacekeeper responsibility to Mabel would work out best, then that is an option. I assume dealing with your own death, or near death, or mini-death experience is quite stressful and if the fallout from that is preventing you from doing your job, then—”
“We are on the way to the farms now,” Ryder insisted.
“If I have to come here again today, then—”
“Look, we’re leaving,” Ryder interrupted, walking toward the exit and gesturing for me to follow. She snapped her fingers and disappeared.
“I guess we are under surveillance, I don’t know how to feel about that,” I mumbled.
“It will ease off… probably,” Ryder said, locking the door behind us and sticking the key back under the fake rock. “This hasn’t happened before, having two peacekeepers, so they are just gonna keep an eye on us until we prove ourselves. We picked a bad morning to go art shopping,” he smirked.
“Yeah, I feel like we just got told off by the teacher for trying to skip class.”
“If she comes back, I don’t think detention is going to be one of the options,” he smiled. “We should do what we’re told for an hour at least.”
“You’re a bad influence,” I laughed.
“Me? Who was the one that suggested we— let’s just get to the farms. It’s going to be the same old nonsense that those two have been fighting about for years anyway, it won’t take long. Then we can hurry back and get one of the pictures you like, you did want one, right?”
“I like all of them, but I think my bank account will get the final say as to which one goes home with me,” I replied.
A taxi rolled to a stop in front of us and I knew who would be driving it before I even looked through the window.
“Good morning everybody,” Wes called. “Hop on in!”
“How did you know we needed a ride?” Ryder asked suspiciously.
“I heard that there has been some fighting up at the farm, punches thrown both ways if the rumors are true. There are now two peacekeepers, one has gone on a boat to Tivercana, a stupid island if you ask me, and you are here without a car!” Wes lived on Port Wayvern and was still indulging in some unhealthy hate of the island that his ancestors had disputes with. Everyone in Hallow Haven was bickering with someone, it seemed.
“How do you know we don’t have a car?” I asked.
“You don’t own one, I haven’t seen you driving in months either!” Wes pointed at Ryder. “I have to assume you’ve wrecked yours if you’re going about on foot everywhere. At least Miller could drive you about it a patrol car if needs be, but this guy doesn’t even have a skateboard.”
“I have a bike!” Ryder replied defensively.
“Let’s just get in the cab.” I rolled my eyes and opened the door to climb in. “We needed to get to the farms, and this is quicker than walking,” I said, sliding across the back seat to make space for Ryder to sit down. He did so, reluctantly. “Are you two gonna play nice in this taxi or what?”
“Yes, ma’am!” Wes grinned. “I’ve got my hands on a copy of the Rent soundtrack, so we are about to have us a time in this here taxi!”
“Oh brother,” Ryder mumbled to himself.
“I won’t hear a bad word about this musical,” I asserted. Ryder laughed then looked up at me, realized that I was not joking even slightly, then dropped the smile. He mimed zipping his mouth closed and throwing away the key. Smart move.
For some reason I’d thought I might actually get to hear some of the original cast performance, but Wes was singing so loudly that he drowned out every other voice. Some would argue that his voice projection was a monetizable skill, others – me – would say that a taxi driver singing so powerfully was not what most people wanted. Let’s put it this way, if Wes was on Uber his driver rating wouldn’t be five stars.
Ryder was pressing his forehead to the glass, presumably trying to pretend he was anywhere but in this taxi, and I decided to do the same, watching the island rush by in a blur until Wes started to slow down and pulled onto a poorly maintained dirt road. Through the windscreen I could see potholes that looked as though the car could plummet down into them, my teeth rattled in my mouth as we continued towards a giant hedge, at which point Wes stopped the car.
“Here you are,” Wes announced, reaching a hand back to take payment. I passed over a stack of dollar bills and we got out. “Call me when you’re done, you guys could be here a while and I ain’t waitin’,” he bellowed, barely letting Ryder shut the door before pulling away in reverse over the dirt road.
“He’s a weird guy,” Ryder said.
“You’re picking up on that?” I remarked sarcastically.
“Sadie!” a voice boomed. “What took so long?” A man in a pair of tattered overalls was marching toward us from one of the two giant wooden houses. We were stood facing a hedge that had to be at least seven feet tall and extended off into the distance. There was a house on the left of the hedge, and another on the right.
The man in overalls was coming to us from the house on the left, a building that seemed to border on one side with a sheer drop off a cliff. The house itself was several hundred feet away from the edge, but still, seemed like a risky place to live.
“What’s up, Wyatt?” Ryder replied.
“Oh nothing, just been fighting with a man that has no ethical compass again, the usual,” Wyatt said, brandishing a badly bruised cheek and split lip.
“Were you in a fight?” I asked.
“Yeah! This guy over there,” Wyatt pointed at the house on the other side of the hedge, “has been ‘pruning’ again.” The air quotes around the word ‘pruning’ seemed unnecessary. “I told him, I said that it’s my hedge, my momma planted it so we didn’t have to look at the likes of them folk next door and he thinks he can take a saw to chop down chunks of it. I don’t think so.”
“You were fighting over a bush?” I said, hoping not to sound too flippant.
“Yes, I was,” Wyatt answered proudly.
“Are you lying about that hedge, Wyatt?” another man shouted. Oh good, weirdo number two has entered the game.
“Get back in your house, Bill,” Wyatt yelled. “Nobody wants to hear your voice today.”
“Is that the man you were fighting?” I asked.
“No, I was fighting with his son. Although, I would like it on record that I was defending a hedge, not just throwing hands for no good reason,” Wyatt insisted.
“Sure,” I nodded. Why would you fight over a hedge? That seems crazy.
“What’s that?” Ryder asked, pointing at a large bird circling overhead.
“Buzzard,” Wyatt griped. “I’ve seen a couple of ‘em flying around today, probably hoping me and Drew will pull guns on each other and give ‘em an easy meal.”
“Yeah, buzzards circle if they are looking for a safe spot to land once they’ve found food. There must be something down there,” Ryder explained. Why did I get the feeling that this buzzard wasn’t hovering over a bit of corn?
We walked cautiously to the edge of the cliff, an area that had alarmingly few signs to warn of the sheer drop. Shouldn’t there be a fence or something? I knew we were up high because as I looked out across the edge of the cliff all I could see was sky, there should be an ocean around here somewhere. As we got closer to the edge, I could see the water come into view.
Ryder was more confident with heights, so was a few paces ahead of me. He looked over the edge first and then recoiled. Oh no. Did I even want to know what he’d seen? I stepped up to his side and peaked over nervously. Sure enough, there was something down there.
“Wh—” I began to ask, but I think I already knew. Someone had fallen off the cliff and was lying dead on the beach below. But who?
6
Have you ever seen someone after they’ve fallen over six hundred feet? From such a distance it had been hard to make out that it was even a human body down there, but in the interest of not jumping to conclusions, Ryder had insisted that we walk down the cliff path and get to the sand below. Upon closer inspection; majorly horrifying.
I retreated, happy to keep a large gap between me and the gory area on the beach. Ryder, clearly with a stronger stomach that I had, got close enough to confirm. Two arms, two legs; human. Unless there was a sasquatch on the loose, in which case we had bigger problems.
“Sadie, we should call it in,” Ryder said.
“Call it in? Am I supposed to know what that means?” I replied, notably flustered. “Miller usually makes calls and gets the right people here, I’m not trained to do anything useful.”
“Stay calm, just… I’ll call the station, they can send some police out here and, I guess a doctor,” he shrugged.
“I think they are beyond help at this point,” I remarked.
“Yeah, but won’t they need to identify them or something?” he said. I pulled a face that conveyed that it seemed near impossible to put a name to that body. Unless…
“Dental records. On TV they do dental record comparisons when the body gets, you know, not-body like. We don’t have forensics here, right? But we do have a dentist,” I smiled.
“Fitz?”
“Yeah, I know that my shifter familiar is the dentist, I am aware of that. Just pretend I’ve had a good idea for five seconds, so I feel like I’m helping,” I complained.
“Dentist! Great idea!” Ryder smirked. He turned back to the body and regarded the state of the beach. A glance back up at the cliff face caused him to squint, the sun lighting up the sky so much that facing upward was almost blinding. “Look,” he said, pointing at something hanging on a jagged area projecting out from the rock face.
“What is that?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he muttered.
“Here, take these,” Wyatt called out. He hadn’t come down the cliff path with us, he’d said he would have to wake his wife so that she could mind the hedge first. That darn hedge. It would appear that his wife was now in position like a sentry guard watching through the living room window, and he was free to join us on the sand. He was holding a pair of binoculars in an outstretched arm for Ryder to take.
“What do you think your neighbor will do if no one is watching the hedge?” I asked as Ryder held the binoculars to his face and focused them.
“Drew is a snake in the grass, a no-good son of a gun that would tear the roots of that hedge up first chance he gets. That man thinks the sun rises just to hear him crow,” Wyatt replied.
“Why does he want the hedge gone?” I asked.
“It ain’t even about that hedge,” Wyatt continued. “It’s borders and such, some issue regarding where my property is supposed to end and apparently that hedge is technically on his land, although I’ve asked him a dozen times to prove it and he won’t. My momma planted that hedge, so him saying that it’s growing six feet over the border is suggesting that my mom was trying to steal land and I won’t hear of it.”
“Is his annoyance with the hedge a new thing?” I pressed.
“He’s always griping about something. Petty little man, he doesn’t know how good he’s got it,” Wyatt grunted.
I looked back over at Ryder who was still staring up at the dangling object caught on the rocks. I saw the expression on his face change as he identified it, his forehead no longer crumpled as he squinted, but flat as shock washed over him.
“What is it?” I asked.
“A… it’s a camera,” he replied. “I think this is Cindy.”
“I don’t understand.” I said it quietly that only I could hear it, or so I thought.
“Probably she just dropped it off the edge when I spooked her,” Wyatt offered.
“What?” Ryder said, turning to face the plump man as he adjusted the buttons on his overalls to loosen them around the middle.
“She’s one of these artist types, don’t know if you’ve ever met her but she seems to think that the whole world is her personal playground,” Wyatt complained. “I caught her on my farm more than once, and I said to her, I said it plenty of times, I said this here is my land and you are trespassing lady!”
“She was on your land with her camera?” Ryder said.
“Sure was! The last time I yelled at her she tried telling me that I didn’t understand what I had hidden in these cliffs and that she had proof of some such, I don’t remember exactly what she said, but it sounded a lot like excuses to me. I’ve got enough trouble with Drew; I don’t need some random woman trampling over my soil with no regard for the law.”
I could see that Ryder was still trying to glance up at the camera, hoping that he’d made a mistake. Until we had dental records looked at, we couldn’t know anything for sure.
“Let me make the calls,” I offered. “You just, I don’t know, keep Wyatt away from there,” I suggested. I didn’t really think Wyatt would get any closer to the body than he absolutely had to. He seemed more than happy to keep his distance and I didn’t blame him.
I dialed the number for the police station and explained what had happened, the guy that had answered was convinced it was a prank call.
“Ma’am, I’m sure it’s just some seaweed or perhaps a seal. When a seal washes up and the birds get to it, well, it can make an awful mess,” he said, the patronizing tone thick in every word.
&
nbsp; “Someone has fallen off the cliff, would you like me to send you a photo? Give me your cell phone number and I’ll get one right to ya, because this is no seal,” I insisted.
“I’ll get hold of the Sheriff, but he has been off on official peacekeeper business for the past few hours, and I don’t know when he’ll be back.” As if I needed a reminder as to where Miller was.
“I am the peacekeeper,” I said, trying to resist the urge to shout. “I know there are two now and it’s confusing, but this is Sadie, can you just call him and let him know what’s happened?”
“Sadie? Oh, you should have opened with that!” he scrambled. “I’ll have someone right over!”
“Have Fitz come over with whoever you send,” I added.
“Fitz?”
“Dr. Barrow,” I clarified. It was so dumb that when my familiar was in human form, he worked in the medical profession. Sometimes he acted like he didn’t have two brain cells to rub together, but there were obviously some smarts hidden in there somewhere.
“Yes ma’am, I’ll go find him myself,” the officer insisted.
“Thanks,” I replied.
“You don’t think it’s Cindy there, do you?” Wyatt asked once I was off the phone.
“I have no idea,” I shrugged. In the corner of my eye, I saw Ryder furrow his brow; I think he was convinced off the back of the camera on the rocks that this was his photographer friend, but there had to be other people in Hallow Haven that had cameras. For starters, Oliver from the newspaper had one. Could it be Oliver? I’d seen him only an hour or two ago though, seemed unlikely.
For a small island, it was surprising how long we had to wait for the police to show up. I figured I would have heard sirens within ten minutes of calling them, but it had been almost forty-five minutes before a car approached.
Ryder had stayed down on the beach, while Wyatt and I hiked back up the cliff path to the top where the officers, plus Fitz in human form, were exiting their patrol vehicle.
“Sadie! Long time no see,” Fitz laughed, winking at me in a way that made me think that he thought he was being subtle. The fact that he was a shifter was not common knowledge, so very few people on the island knew that the pesky black cat they often saw wandering about town, and the local friendly dentist, were one and the same.