Two feet with a pair of black shiny shoes and a copper buckle on the side of them.
Just like the ones Chester had described at the movie theater.
I gulped seconds before those two feet, apparently attached to a body and a really big, really strong hand, grabbed the back of my hair and yanked me upward, forcing my neck to arch backward.
“You?” I whispered in disbelief, and then it all clicked into place—every last piece of the jigsaw puzzle.
Welp, that solved the gender of the person Wade was having an affair with at the club because holy bad guy.
“You nosy, meddling, hippie-dippy quack!” my perpetrator hollered in my face, and then he began to drag me backward, away from the parking lot and into the woods surrounding the hospital.
Oh, and guess what? Did I ever get around to putting my beach shoes on? Nope. I still had on my heels, and as I tried to thwart my perp’s efforts, I ended up doing nothing more than tearing them to shreds as my calves screamed for mercy.
“Let me go!” I screamed, fighting the strong grip on my hair tooth and nail, but it wasn’t long before I got my wish.
My perp deposited me right into a pile of pine needles as he hurled me across the ground.
Like a sack of potatoes, I landed with a crack right on my side, and as I scrambled to right myself, I found it almost impossible to bend forward in my tight dress.
“Arkady!” I whispered in desperation as I pushed my way upward on the heels of my hands, my hair lashing at my face from the heavy wind and the rain, making it hard to see. “Arkady, are you there?”
But there was nothing but silence from above, meaning he must be with Win because as you all know, he can’t be with both of us at the same time.
And for the first time since I’d begun sticking my nose where it didn’t belong because I couldn’t resist a good mystery, I was totally alone.
Alone.
And that meant I had to figure this out on my own.
Talk about being in a pickle.
But if I was going out, I wasn’t going out without a fight.
Then with no warning at all, there was a gun pointed at me, making my heart throb harder and my mouth go dry.
“Wait!” I yelled, holding up a hand in front of my face. “Just wait! You’re going to get caught. You know that, don’t you? Someone will hear you shoot me, and I wouldn’t want to be you if the person who hears it is my boyfriend!”
As the wind roared, and the trees bent and leaves flew upward in swirls of dried clumps, Harris Endicott sneered down at me and moved in closer, his big body lumbering toward me with heavy steps as the barrel of the gun eyeballed me.
“I don’t care who hears me, you nosy, useless woman! I’ll probably get a standing ovation from everyone in Ebenezer when they hear I took you out! And I don’t care, as long as it’s you dead in the end!”
I don’t know why I bothered, but still, I scrambled backward and tried to rise to my feet on my torn heels. “You’ll care when they lock you up forever, Harris! You’ll care when they take away your cigars and your booze and your playthings! You’ll care then!” I screamed as loud as I could in the hopes someone would hear me.
But the deeper we backed into the woods, as the lights from the parking lot began to dim in the distance, the less I held out hope, and I had no idea how I was going to get out of this mess.
“It’ll be worth it,” he sneered, his face that familiar bloated red. “Why couldn’t you just mind your business? Why didn’t you just shut up and go home and make your fancy boyfriend a sandwich instead of sticking your stuck-up nose into my private affairs?”
As I tried to keep myself from taking his misogynistic bait, I remembered all the awful acts he’d committed.
Misogyny, adultery, murder, more adultery—with his son’s husband.
“It was you, Harris!” I raged, wishing I had a gun of my own because I can’t promise I wouldn’t have shot him on the spot for the horror he’d brought to his son’s life. “It was you who frequented Divinia’s, wasn’t it? It was you in The Scarlet Room—it was you Santini was talking about when he said Wade left the club because of a messy affair. It was you!”
Harris’s nostrils flared under the weak moonlight, his hand shaking as he pointed the gun at me. “Yes, it was meee!” he howled as though he were in agonizing pain. “I killed that stupid, stupid boy because he wouldn’t leave well enough alone! He wouldn’t stop crying about how he was going to tell Kirkland! He said he couldn’t take another second of all the lies. When he asked me to meet him that night at the nursery, he taunted me. He showed up with the collar I used to wear at Divinia’s and he said he’d show everyone he had proof. He said he was going to show everyone who I really was! He knew all my secrets. How could I let him live?”
The wet ground seeped into my hands and right through my dress, but my horror, my anger wouldn’t allow me to stop baiting him.
For all the pain he’d put Kirkland through, for all the suffering and teasing, I wanted this pig to pay.
“You strangled your own lover so he wouldn’t blow up your world! You mocked your son all of his life, knowing all the while you were gay, too, Harris! You’re gay!” I bellowed, bending my knees in the hopes I could spring upward and take him by surprise. “You mocked him because you hated that you were gay, didn’t you? You hated yourself, Harris! All those affairs with other women, your affair with Lida—all to prove what a real man you were and all along, you hated yourself, didn’t you, Harris? Hated the skin you were born in—hated that you were no different than Kirkland!”
Harris’s eyes glittered in the dark night as he purged himself, spittle flying from his mouth when he seethed, “If Wade had just shut up about how much he hated lying. If he’d just talked Kirkland into moving back to Seattle and stopped tempting me! I hated seeing him with Kirkand. I hated it!”
“Tempting you?” I squealed as my stomach turned. Only Harris could look at Wade’s existence as a temptation to his sham of a life.
“He was everywhere. Everywhere! I couldn’t get away from him. I couldn’t get away from the reminders of our affair—of the things we did at the club! If he’d have just stopped whining about how guilty he felt about what we’d done to Kirkland—if he’d just stopped calling my whole life a lie!”
My arms began to shake as I hurled accusations at him, my fingers digging into the still semi-hard ground. “But your life is a lie, Harris! It’s all one big, fat lie, and Lida was going to tell me, wasn’t she? She found out about your sordid misdeeds and she was going to tell me so you tried to kill her, too!”
Now he straightened, his linebacker shoulders squaring as he appeared to almost sober, the misery on his face clear. “She’s another meddler! She must have found the club card when she did my laundry. I don’t know how she found out, but she had to go!”
I was almost there—I was almost at the point where I felt secure enough to know I could nail this landing if I just bided my time. So I kept him talking while I tried to think about everything Win and Arkady had taught me.
“But she didn’t go anywhere, Harris!” I accused as the wind and rain pummeled my face. “What’s going to happen to the great Harris Endicott if she lives? What if Kirkland’s blood donation saves her? What’s going to happen when he finds out you didn’t just sleep with your maid who’s his biological mother, but you slept with his husband?” I growled, my teeth clenched, my jaw aching.
But Harris shook his head vehemently, his jowls quaking. “He wasn’t married to Kirkland when we had our affair. I swear it! He never even knew my real name—not even when we met outside the club!” he screamed as though he deserved some kind of trophy because he’d kept his homelife separate from his sordid infidelities. “That they met at all was by coincidence. I swear it! Imagine my surprise when Kirkland brought him home!”
“Hah! Fat lot of good that’s going to do you when your son finds out you didn’t bother to tell him before he married Wade! If you can’t trust you
r father, who can you trust, Harris? And what about Rosemary? Why has she let this go on for so long, knowing you slept with Lida? Why did she allow her in your house for all these years? Did she know she was your beard, Harris? Did she?” I hollered so loud, water flew from my mouth and I thought my chest would burst open.
Now he made a face of utter disgust, pure distaste lining every wrinkle. “That woman doesn’t care about anything but my money and her pills! She’s so stoned most of the time, she doesn’t know what’s going on around her.”
Poising on my fingertips, my legs in position, I dug my heels in and taunted, “But she will, Harris,” I singsonged. “She’ll know soon enough! She’ll know what kind of fool you made of her! All these years. For all these years, she’s going to find out she married a man who could never love her!”
“Shut. Up!” he screeched, the words echoing in a gust of more cold wind—and that’s when I took my shot at freedom.
When Harris became so infuriated, he began to rush forward, his big body barreling at me full speed.
I sprang upward, and man, I gotta tell you, it felt pretty solid until I realized my heels were jammed in the dirt and, instead of putting my head down and steamrolling him, I only jolted forward, straining the muscles in my thighs.
It was in that moment, as I was sure I was sunk like the Titanic, when I feared I’d never see the people I loved again, when desperation tapped my soul and my head was empty of anything but my will to live, that it happened.
As I reached out to stop my inevitable crumble to the ground, my fingertips crackled with life before they zapped out a stream of staticky bolts of light directly at Harris’s chest.
I was as surprised as Harris, I guess, and sure, I wanted to scream in delight, but my dress was too tight and Harris was no longer charging me—he was holding his chest and falling, letting the gun crash to the ground.
For a brief second, I blinked and held up my hands in wonder, watching the rain drain from my fingertips, until I realized Harris looked like he was having a heart attack.
In a split second, I unstuck my heels and ran to him, kicking the gun away with my shredded shoe and dropping down beside him.
Harris howled in pain, holding his chest, his eyes wide with fear when he saw me loosening his shirt.
“Stephania!” I heard Win call, his voice carrying on the wind.
When I looked up to see Win running toward me with Dana behind him, I pointed back at the hospital and screamed to him, “Get someone from the ER! I think he’s having a heart attack!”
Everything from that moment on became a little blurry. Several people from the ER came rushing in and loaded Harris’s significant frame onto a gurney and rushed him off.
Win threw his suit jacket around me and scooped me up, carrying me back to the lobby waiting room like the noble knight he is.
After Win barked orders at the nursing staff, and I was settled in an ER room for a complete checkup, Dana did what Dana does—questioned me until my eyeballs crossed. I explained everything Harris had confessed to me while Rosemary howled about how I’d killed her husband ( I didn’t, but it was a close call), and Win fussed around me, bringing me a blanket and some hot coffee.
As the chaos continued swirling around us outside my room, he pulled me to him and said, “What did I say about going nowhere without me?”
I snorted against his chest. “Oh, for cripe’s sake. I just went to get a change of shoes. I’d like to see you strut around for five minutes in these, let alone six or seven hours. They were killing me. Though, note to self, when being held hostage by a madman, wear comfortable shoes.”
Win’s lips went thin, his face grim. “You’re going to be the death of me, Dove.”
I chuckled and shifted positions on my narrow hospital bed. “Oh, big deal. Haven’t we already defied death? What’s once more going to do?”
Now Win laughed, a deep sound from his throat. “We have indeed, and I absolutely won’t stand for another round with the grim reaper. Enough is enough.”
Leaning into his warm embrace and letting myself relax, I smiled. “Hey, is Kirkland okay?”
Win’s sigh was forlorn when he rested his chin atop my head. “As okay as one can be when they find out their father had an affair with their husband. I feel positively gobsmacked by this turn of events, so I can’t even begin to fathom how awful Kirkland must feel.”
My heart clenched in sympathy. My parents had done a lot of things, but they hadn’t done the kind of things like have an affair with my husband and strangle him to keep him quiet.
“Neither can I. So I guess we’ll just have to be supportive friends and help him through it.”
We were silent for a few minutes, listening to the sounds of the ER, the beat of rushed footsteps on the floor, the ping of heart monitors, and then Win said, “Hey, you thumped Harris without any help at all. Neither ghostly nor human. Way to go, Mini-Spy!” He held up his fist for me to bump.
I sure did. “Well, I did have a little help from magic, which I’ll tell you about later,” I whispered. “But I’m here to tell you, Big Spy, I’d rather not do that again. It’s not the same without you two yahoos, yelling orders in my ears. Speaking of, where the heck was Arkady anyway?”
“I was with Win, Creamsicle. I cannot be in two places at once. This you know. But I offer a thousand apologies. There will never be a time I do not regret I wasn’t there for you.”
I smiled hearing his voice. “Rehashing old spy missions while I was with a crazed killer, fighting for my life, I gather?” I teased.
Win and Arkady mock-gasped their indignation. “We were not. I was mulling over our Divinia experience and bouncing theories off him while I waited for Kirkland to have his blood drawn. We were working, Stephania Louise. I’m appalled you would even suggest such.”
But Arkady laughed, his hearty chuckle resonating in my ears. “You are bad liar, Zero. So bad.”
Then I laughed, too, because I couldn’t help myself. They were like two high school football players, recalling their glory days every chance they had.
“Lemme guess. You were reliving the one where you met up with each other in Tortuga, quite by accident, of course, and that pack of snarling dogs chased you smack into the middle of some important ceremony or other?”
“Dah, my malutka! The fire ceremony! Almost burned my britches right off!” he said on another vigorous laugh, in which Win joined with enthusiasm.
“Do you remember it, my good man? All that fire and us screaming like schoolgirls as those beasts nipped at…”
I tuned them out then and let them reminisce as I reminded myself once more how weird my life is. It’s very weird.
Wonderfully, fabulously, amazingly weird.
How many women can say they have a ghost who talks to them from the afterlife who’s an ex-Russian spy, a reincarnated ex-British spy who hopped into his brother’s body, and a talking bat?
No one, that’s who.
And yes, it’s bananapants weird.
But it’s my weird, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Epilogue
Two weeks later…
The sun shined warm and bright on us as Win, Bel, Arkady, Whiskey, Strike and I finished up the last of our spring planting and were enjoying a cold glass of lemonade on the front steps while admiring our work.
“It looks beautiful, Win,” I said as I praised his efforts to add more color to the gardens with the flowers Kirkland had brought to us as a way of saying thank you for helping with the case.
He clinked his glass with mine and smiled with a sigh. “I especially like the creeping phlox. It will add brilliant color without a great deal of work.”
I smiled at him as though he were speaking Greek to me and blinked. “If you say so, 007, I have to believe.” Then I turned to him and smiled. “So, how are you feeling after helping Wade cross?”
Three nights ago, when we’d been sitting in the living room, have a glass of after dinner wine, Wade had ap
peared, and he’d been in much better spirits—if you’ll pardon the pun.
His soul was calm and no longer tortured and that was when Win took the opportunity to guide him over to the other side, leaving us all at great peace.
He hadn’t spoken, but when Win told him about Lida and Kirkland, and how we’d caught Harris, he’d waved good bye with a smile on his face. Though, not before he’d taken one last snap of his flogger—an act that left us both astounded.
But that was the mystery of the afterlife, right? Nothing was black and white upstairs.
Grabbing my hand, he kissed my palm. “I feel a deep sense of satisfaction. Now, Dove, when is Dana arriving? Shall I change and possibly break out my referee whistle to keep the two of you from fisticuffs on the front lawn? We don’t want the neighbors to talk.”
I poked his arm in a playful gesture. “Who’s cheeky now? But no, I don’t think you need to referee. He said he wanted to talk, and I guess I’m finally ready to talk rationally rather than poke at him.” My feelings still hurt a little, but Win had helped me realize how much I was asking of Dana.
Likely, everything he’d believed in before he met Belfry and heard our story had suddenly changed, and that could take time to come to grips with. Win reminded me I wasn’t the most patient, and while I didn’t know if Dana was terribly religious, in some circles of faith, witches weren’t viewed kindly.
Just take the Salem Witch Trials, for example.
He’d given me a different point of view, and it had helped me see the broader picture.
“I’d like it very much if you’d keep an open mind, Dove.”
I leaned into him, his skin warm from the sun, and giggled. “Is that so you can continue to hang out with your bourbon buddy?”
Dana and Win had a boys’ night out only last week, and Win had come home quite jovial and relaxed, and it was nice to see.
“That might have a little something to do with it, Dove. Most importantly, I wish for you to have your friend back. Just because Dana struggled to accept your abilities and your talking bat, doesn’t mean he’s struggling with the kind, warm, wonderful woman you are. Besides, now he has no choice but to believe. He saw what I saw that night, too.”
Witch Perfect (Witchless in Seattle Mysteries Book 11) Page 17
