He shook his head. “I can’t tell you that. That has to come from her.”
Of course. And I knew that. And some day, when she finally decided to clue me in…..
But I had learned something new. I knew that my family was alive and in hiding somewhere. And that I was preparing to bring them back, a quest that was going to be dangerous, but so very important. That was something.
“What happens now, Shane?” I asked him softly. “What happens once we get a fix on where my family is hiding?” I turned to look into his eyes, wanting truth. No avoiding issues. No fairy tales.
“Do I go there? Does anyone go with me? Am I expected to…?”
He grabbed my hand and squeezed to quiet me. “We’ll have to see about that when the time comes,” he said, his eyes intense as they looked into mine. “And I’ll…I’ll do whatever I can to help you. You know that.”
His words were fine. They were just what I would have expected him to say. But suddenly I could read so much more into them. Yes, he would do what he could, but that might not be much. After all, we weren’t completely on the same side in this struggle. Hunters and witches….
It came to me in a flash. There would be emotional pulls in other directions for him. People he cared about who would expect him to be all in with them. When the final countdown came he would be risking a lot to help me, wouldn’t he? He would get fired at from all sides. He would be in great danger. I couldn’t let the happen. A wave of emotion filled my chest and I bit my lip trying to hold it back.
Oh Shane, I thought. Please don’t! Don’t care too much. Don’t make me have to push you away.
“Go on in,” he said, and kissed me.
I nodded and got out of the car without saying any more. But I knew with a sinking heart that I was going to have to prepare myself for a future without him. I couldn’t let him risk his own life to enhance mine. I was going to have to think about all this and begin to make my plans.
I gave him a sad smile and said goodbye and went into the bakery. Krissy had closed down for the night and she was gone, taking Gavin with her. Mandy was already asleep.
I went up to my bedroom and looked longingly at my bed. Did I dare lie down for a few minutes, just to rest? I slipped my hand into my pocket and touched the small disc Gran Ana had handed me as we left. I’d forgotten all about it. I pulled it out and looked at it. It seemed to be some sort of tablet, shaped a little like a Tums, with a few letters spelling out something I couldn’t read. I put it down on my bedside table, wondering if this was what she’d given Phyllis. A shudder went down my spine and I looked at my bed again.
What the heck? Just ten minutes couldn’t hurt. Once I’d rested, I would call Rennie right away. My head hit the pillow and the next thing I knew, it was an hour later and my cell was buzzing. It was Rennie.
“Where have you been? I’ve been calling and calling.”
“Sorry. I was out at my grandmother’s.”
“Oh Haley, I don’t know what to do. I’m at the Sheriff Station. I can’t leave Gordon. But I need someone to bring Chuck over. His knees are bad and I don’t dare let him drive. Can you go by the house and pick him up and bring him here? Oh please, Haley. I need him here. I think he can clear up this whole mess and…Haley? Are you there?”
“I’m here, Rennie. Of course I’ll go pick up Chuck.” Chuck was her husband and the mayor of our little haven town. He was also a scary, scary man. This was not a job I was looking forward to, but it was one I knew I had to do. After all, this was Rennie! “Uh…will he know I’m coming? Will you tell him…?”
“He’ll be ready. Oh thank you Haley. You are saving my life. I feel like I’m about to give up. But once Chuck is here….”
“I’ll bring him. Don’t worry.”
“Thank God. He’s got to come take care of this. Gordon is being charged and I don’t know what to do.”
“Rennie, what’s he being charged with? Stealing the memory cards?”
“Oh no. Not that. He’s being charged with….murder.”
Mayor Chuck was a little scary. No, that’s not quite true. He was a lot scary! I parked in front of Rennie’s house and walked up to the front door and rang the bell. Nothing happened. I rang again and there was a sort of roar coming from the back of the house. I gulped and took that as a sign that he’d heard me and would be coming—but on his own time. So I waited.
Sure enough, the door finally opened and a huge, shaggy man stepped out in tight jeans and cowboy boots.
“You’re Haley, right?” he said in a deep voice. He was handsome in a Country and Western sort of way, had piercing blue eyes made all the more startling by the full reddish-brown beard and thick reddish-blond hair. His chest was massive—perhaps evidence of a lot of lifting—but the lower part of his body and his legs looked almost slender in his worn blue jeans. Somehow you got the feeling that those jeans had many a tale to tell—if only jeans could talk.
“Yes,” I said, sounding squeaky in comparison. “I’m here to drive you to the Sheriff Station.”
“Let’s go,” he said.
To say I was nervous driving him would be an understatement. It was like driving the Lion King—if the Lion King was actually a real live man—and taking him somewhere he didn’t really want to go. And who could blame him? Gordon was a problem he’d married into.
I didn’t talk and neither did he. I was only glad that I had the presence of mind to recognize traffic lights and stop signs. It wasn’t easy.
I pulled into the parking lot at the Station. He got out.
“Thanks,” he said in his gruff voice and shuffled off toward the entry.
I took a deep breath and settled myself for a few minutes, watching until he was inside, then opened the driver’s door and got out. Once I entered the station house, Rennie ran up and threw her arms around me. Tears were pouring from her eyes.
“Oh Haley,” she wailed. “They are charging him with murder. He didn’t do it. I swear to God, he didn’t do it.”
I hugged her and looked around, but didn’t see Shane.
“Of course he didn’t,” I said to her. “What’s their evidence? What are they saying?”
She leaned close and whispered. “They came over and searched his room. They found a knife.” She put her finger to her lips. “Shh. I’m not supposed to talk about it.”
I shook my head, puzzled, and whispered back. “But the knife was in Kenny’s chest. What knife are you talking about?”
“It’s a dagger.” She just mouthed the word. “Gordon collects medieval weapons. They said…they said….”
Suddenly Shane was there and he took over from Rennie. “There were some changes while we were out at your grandmother’s. They’ve revised some of their conclusions.”
“What conclusions?” I said.
He looked around the room, then motioned for us both to follow him into a private cubicle, shutting the door once we were in.
“The cause of death, for one.”
“Oh. So it wasn’t tumbling down the stairs?”
“No. That injured him alright. But the cause of death was a stabbing. Only it wasn’t from the kitchen butcher knife. It was a smaller knife, more like a Medieval dagger. Someone then took away the dagger and replaced it with the butcher knife.”
This all sounded whacked out to me. “How could they tell that?”
He shrugged. “Fibers. Tiny particles. Patterns of rendering of muscle tissue. All those things. Forensics knows what they’re doing. But they’re not done yet and this only indicates a preliminary report. Things might change again.”
“I see.” I looked at Rennie. She seemed to be in a daze. I looked back at Shane. “Well, that’s interesting. What do you think?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. Too soon to tell.”
Okay, that meant he didn’t think Gordon did it. At least that was what I was surmising.
“Hard to know for sure until all the facts are in,” he added. “I keep going over possible sce
narios. How about you?”
“Oh yeah. Exactly that.” I glanced at Rennie again. She’d seen Chuck come out of the holding cell area and she turned to Shane, obviously begging to be set free so that she could join her husband. Shane opened the door, but not before he reminded her again not to talk to anyone about the latest information she’d been privy to. She left and he closed the door again, looking at me. I looked back wondering how much he could tell me.
“But what does Gordon say?” I asked him. “What happened? Why did he run off?”
Shane made an expression of uncertainty that wasn’t like him. “Gordon is a good kid generally, but he’s really stepped in it this time. It seems he was hanging around, waiting for Kenny to give him the time of day—or night as the case was—and then he fell asleep on the bed in the empty bedroom at the back of the second story landing.”
“I know the one.” I was pretty sure that was where I’d first talked to my Aunt Tina.
“Yes. Well, he woke up sometime after midnight and realized everyone seemed to be asleep, so he might as well head for home. He got up and went out on the landing, only to find Kenny out there, still fooling with cameras and arguing with Clarissa. He tried to talk to him, but Kenny blew him off, making him angry.”
“Another case of anger management deprived carelessness.”
He looked at me oddly for that one.
“Anyway, he was a little groggy from the sleep and that helped cloud his judgment. He looked around for some way to get back at Kenny, and then he remembered that he knew where they put the memory cards and other things from the shoot every day. He’d seen where Mario was staying. He could hear Mario and Derek still playing cards in a different room, so he headed into the empty bedroom and pulled the zipper on Mario’s bag, took the cards and headed out. Instead of going home, he went on out to the Box Canyon where his pals produce renegade videos and other films and put them out on the MyVid channel. To them, he was the hero of the night, and that was cool. So he let them use everything he’d brought out--almost three full days of shooting. And he reveled in the adulation. End of story.”
“Plausible?”
“Sure. Only he left out one little thing. That is, he left it out if he was the one who murdered Kenny. But until forensics decided the man was killed by a dagger to the chest, there was no real way to link Gordon to the actual crime. Now, there is.”
I shook my head. “Do you buy it?”
He hesitated. “Not yet. I want to see more evidence. And a nice full throated confession is what would really make me happy.”
“Good luck with that,” I said. “What about all the stuff Kenny shot that night? Has anyone looked through it for evidence?”
“We’ve got someone doing that right now.”
“Let me know what they find.”
He looked at me oddly. “And why should I do that?” he said, and I almost thought he was teasing. “Where’s your badge, woman? Where’s your authorization?”
“You’re my authorization,” I teased back. “I’m your sounding board. You can run theories by me any time. But I need a bit of background first. Good thing you trust me.”
He grinned and tweaked my ear. “Good thing,” he agreed softly. “But listen, the murder weapon info is classified right now. Okay? Not common knowledge and it might be best we keep it that way for the time being.”
“Aye aye, sir,” I said, reaching up to touch his cheek, thinking about how much I wanted to kiss him. But my cell buzzed at the same time Deputy Tommy came to the door and gestured toward Shane. “We need you out here,” he mouthed, and Shane nodded, then winked at me and left the room.
I answered my phone.
“Hey Clarissa,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Me, and I really need my beauty sleep.”
I yawned. “Yeah, I’m about at the end of my rope as well.”
“You’re young. You’ll recover quickly.”
“Your faith in my recovery powers are on the optimistic side of things.”
“You’ll be fine. But I know other ways of refreshing my appearance. How about you? Do you know any good magic to take care of those pesky beauty problems?”
Huh? What the heck was she talking about? “No. I’m pretty new at all this,” I muttered.
“I’ll have to teach you some of my tricks.”
I grunted, not sure what to say to that. She was acting like we were on the verge of becoming best buds. Were there slumber parties and long phone calls in the offing? I wasn’t sure how I felt about that one.
“But listen, I called you to ask a favor. Could you come over and meet me at the Haunted House?”
“Right now?” I glanced at my watch.
“You see, what’s happened is, I found Hector, and then I lost him again. I need help. There is no way I can control that big galoot on my own.”
“Oh wow,” I said, guilty pangs already assailing me. After all, we’d set off to capture the missing ghosts together. And now that there was only one of them, I was going to have to back out for a while.
“Clarissa, I’m really sorry, but I can’t leave Rennie in the lurch here. She’s falling apart.” I gave her a quick rundown of the problems Gordon was going through, leaving out the dagger weapon info. “I need to support her all I can. If you can just wait until tomorrow…”
“Oooh.” She gave her long-suffering groan. “I just can’t handle this without you, Haley. I’m afraid it’s a two person job.”
“Tomorrow,” I said firmly. “I swear I’ll be there tomorrow. Just hold off until then and I’ll be there to help.”
She sighed. “Okay. I’ll see what I can do on my own.”
“Clarissa, wait! Be careful. Don’t try to do this alone. Wait for me to come tomorrow.”
“Okay, okay. Unless I can find someone I can trust tonight. Okay, I’ll see you. First thing in the morning!”
“I promise.”
I regretted leaving her high and dry like this, but what could I do? I had Rennie to consider. And from the looks of things, it was going to be a long night.
Chapter 18
It was after two in the morning when I finally got home again. Krissy and Gavin were back, but sound asleep. I went upstairs as quietly as I could and began to pull off my clothes. Then my gaze fell on the tablet, still sitting there on my bedside table, waiting for me like a malevolent spider, crouched down, ready to do…what? I didn’t know.
I picked it up and weighed it in my hand, then tried to read the writing that had been cut into the surface. It was very faint but once I got it into the lamplight, I could see what it said.
“Eat Me”.
Oh brother. Right out of Alice in Wonderland again, wasn’t it? One to make you larger and one to make you small. Which one did I have here? Oh well, it didn’t matter, because I wasn’t going to….
But wait. Gran Ana gave it to me for a reason. I owed my very existence to her. Why would she do anything to hurt me?
I stared at it for a moment.
I’d rather have cake.
But this was what I had. So I popped it into my mouth, crunched twice, and swallowed. Then I waited for something to happen, but nothing did.
With a shrug, I got into bed and fell asleep almost immediately. It must have been a few hours later when the effects of the tablet began to show themselves.
A new dream. I remember thinking, “Oh good, this is something different.”
And then I was too absorbed by the scene that played out in front of me to think at all.
It seemed like I was looking into the kitchen of the Haunted House—which means it was my house from before. A tall, pretty woman with her golden brown hair tied back in a pony tail was stuffing clothing into a bag.
“Hurry, Michael,” she called, her voice strained with anxiety. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
A teenager came into the room, a cute, fresh face with wide eyes and thick brown hair. “Mom, I really want to take my Encore system but it won’t fit…”<
br />
The woman swung around to face him, her face tense with worry. “No, Michael. Come on. Get with the program here. We can only take what we can each fit into our own backpack. We’re probably going to have to ditch the car at some point and we’ll be depending on what we can carry.”
Michael looked mutinous. “Why can’t we just stay and fight back?” he said.
“Because we can’t. We have to go. Your father has a plan…”
“You two ready?” A handsome man with dark curly hair came into the room, his arm in a sling and dried blood on his face.
“Michael, stay away from the window!” the woman cried out, and the teenager ducked away just as a flaming missile of some sort hit the window and shattered the glass.
“Let’s go.” The man called to them. “Down the stairs into the basement. We’re going to try to get out the tunnel.”
“Wait.” The boy looked back into the kitchen just before he went out of sight. “Can’t we call Haley first?”
“No.”
“But…”
“Michael. We can’t use the phones.” For some reason, her voice broke. “You know that. Now let’s go.”
They started down the basement stairs and I watched them go. And as I watched, my heart broke. Suddenly I was trembling. That was my family out there. I didn’t really recognize them, but the emotion of the situation hit me like a tidal wave. My family, packing up and running for their lives. Leaving without me. Or had I already died at that point? Maybe they just hadn’t told my brother yet. There had been a tragic look on my mother’s face.
My mother’s face. My heart suddenly felt too large for my chest to contain it. I had a mother. I had a real father. And a brother. They were out there somewhere. I needed them so badly. I had to find them.
My mind went back over what I’d just seen, feverishly trying to make sense of it. They’d been taking the tunnel. Wait a minute. What tunnel? I hadn’t seen or heard of any tunnel.
But there was no time to mull over what I’d seen. Suddenly the scene changed and I was in more familiar territory. The usual dream was back again. Same old-same old—except—Hector now seemed to be a regular on our crew.
Witches in Wonderland Page 18
