by Anne Bishop
He hadn’t expected to be required to reimburse Vicki for the capital improvements she’d made on the property. He’d figured he could mess with her head the way he used to do and intimidate her into fleeing, stripped of every asset he’d conceded in the divorce settlement. But that damned attorney had been right there, looking at the paperwork, handling things, not giving him a chance to talk to her alone. She wasn’t even at the bank this morning. Ilya Sanguinati had met them, verified the bank Yorick had used for the cashier’s check, and deposited the check before handing over the keys.
So that money was gone unless he could talk to Vicki and convince her she didn’t deserve to keep all of it. But that damn bloodsucking attorney wouldn’t tell him where she was staying, wouldn’t even give him her mobile phone number. There couldn’t be that many places where she could stay, since he’d deliberately not given her any time to make plans. Maybe one of the cabins down on Mill Creek? Swinn had taken a look around there early in his investigation. Only one cabin was being used, but he hadn’t been able to get close enough to find out who was living there. Or so he claimed. He never did explain why he couldn’t drive to the end of the lane to poke around that last cabin. Vaughn thought Swinn and Reynolds were too spooked to be much good anymore, but for now they were better than nothing.
When they reached the main house, Yorick heard crows cawing but didn’t see any of them around the house. Something else nearby yipped or howled. He shivered, anxious to get inside and put a stout door between himself and whatever was out there. Small shifters would be a nuisance, but something big had killed Franklin Cartwright and the detectives on Swinn’s team.
He unlocked the door and they all walked into the large hall. Big enough space for cocktails and nibbles and other kinds of informal gatherings.
Would have to hire a cook. Maybe that girl who worked at the boardinghouse. He’d float that idea with Vaughn, Darren, and Hershel.
“Son of a bitch,” Vaughn said, focusing Yorick’s attention on the house.
“What happened to the curtains?” Trina said.
“Where is all the furniture?” Constance demanded.
Yorick hurried into the office. The desk and an old carpet were still there but nothing else. Not so much as a paper clip.
“Son of a bitch!” Vaughn shouted, his voice coming from the back of the house.
Yorick flipped on the light switch in the office, then looked up when nothing happened. What the . . . ?
CHAPTER 55
Vicki
Windsday, Sumor 5
“Tell me again,” Ineke said when we took a milk-and-cookie break from unpacking my things and arranging them around the cabin.
“The terra indigene that Ilya assigned to clear out the main house and cabins took everything that hadn’t been in The Jumble when I arrived. They even took the light bulbs.”
Ineke’s eyes gleamed behind her black-framed glasses; she looked like a child being told the Best Story Ever. “That is so amazing.”
“I know! I couldn’t believe it when they carted in the boxes of bulbs.”
“No, not that.” Ineke waved a hand dismissively. “Your attorney is literally a bloodsucker, so I expected him to wring everything he could out of your idiot ex. What’s amazing is that you kept the receipts for light bulbs to prove you bought them.”
I blinked. That wasn’t quite the reaction I’d expected. “I thought I was supposed to keep the receipts for everything.”
The attorney who represented me during the divorce made a passing remark about me keeping receipts since I would be running a business, and I’d been so afraid of not keeping something that would have a serious impact on my depleted savings when I had to send in my tax forms that I had saved everything, all neatly labeled in file folders.
Ineke leaned forward. “You kept receipts for everything? Even the paper products?”
“Well, you’re the one who told me I should do that because I would need to buy in bulk. And things like paper towels and toilet paper aren’t cheap anymore.”
“The Others took those too? Even the partially used rolls of toilet paper?”
I looked at the box marked paypurr and wondered if all the rolls of TP had been riddled by Cougar’s claws. “If I had a receipt for it, they took it.”
Ineke laughed so hard she almost fell out of the chair. When she regained control of herself, she took off her glasses and wiped her eyes. “Want to bet on which woman is the first to sit down and make that discovery? Or how long it will take them to stop arguing about it so that someone makes an emergency run to Pops’s general store or the grocery store in Bristol?”
“No bets.” Personally I was hoping it would be the second Mrs. Dane who made that discovery.
“Spoilsport.” Ineke took her milk glass and dish to the sink. “In that case, let’s get the curtains on the rest of the windows and the dry goods into the kitchen cupboards. You want me to help you with the books?”
I shook my head and went outside, distracted by the sound of . . . bells? Ineke followed me out and we watched the goats for a minute. Well, we watched the goats that were grazing on the grass between Julian’s cabin and mine, and the donkeys that were grazing between the cabins on the other side. There were even a couple of those chubby ponies grazing nearby.
“If the ponies aren’t really ponies, what do you think the goats and donkeys are supposed to be?” I asked.
“Organic lawn mowers?” Ineke replied. “They cut the grass and fertilize it at the same time.” She gave me a one-armed hug. “Let’s tackle the rest of the ‘need this done today’ items. Then I have to get back to the boardinghouse, and you should sit outside with a book and catch your breath.”
Catch my breath. Get my blood pressure out of the red zone. I liked that plan.
Besides, tomorrow was soon enough to start thinking about what I was supposed to do with my life. Again.
CHAPTER 56
Them
Windsday, Sumor 5
“You need to send someone out to unplug a toilet,” Yorick said.
“Do you have a plunger? Have you tried to unblock the toilet yourself?”
“No, I don’t have a flipping plunger.” And he wasn’t about to put his hands in a bowl full of floating turds.
Damn Pamella. She just plunked her ass down and pooped before realizing there wasn’t a thing she could use to wipe her ass. So what did she do? She used the scarf she was wearing! Why was the woman wearing a long filmy scarf in this heat? But that’s what she had, and somehow the scarf went down before the turds—along with enough water that the turds didn’t end up floating on the bathroom floor. But now the only toilet downstairs was blocked, and none of the rest of the bathrooms in the main house had any flipping toilet paper either. So he needed the damn plumber to get off his ass and come out here to deal with it.
“Is that the only toilet in your house?”
“Doesn’t matter if it is or not, I want you out here pronto!” Gods, what a place. Couldn’t get service from anyone.
“We’ve got a full schedule for the next few days, but I’ll send someone out as soon as I can. Where are you located?”
“The Jumble.”
“Oh.”
Yorick waited.
“You’ll have to find someone else. Word around the village is someone stirred up the terra indigene in The Jumble, and I won’t send my son out there until things calm down.”
What the . . . ? He couldn’t believe it. “Do you know who you’re talking to?”
“A guy who plugged up his toilet.”
“I’m Yorick Dane, the owner of The Jumble. You’ve heard of my family?”
“Yeah, I have. You people have a reputation around here. We’re definitely not coming out.”
Yorick stared at his mobile phone for a full minute after the plumber hung up. How dare a sewer jockey speak
to him like that? Refuse to do the work?
And where was he supposed to find a new phone book that covered Crystalton and Bristol, the two closest human towns to this place? He’d been lucky to find a phone book for Sproing. The damn thing was years out of date, so he’d been lucky that the plumber hadn’t changed the number. Had been lucky that the plumber was still in business.
That was the biggest problem. A new phone book hadn’t been issued since last year, and with the number of people who vanished during those terrifying attacks last summer, there was no way of knowing if a business had gone under or the owners had died—or had run to some other place to escape.
Leaving the kitchen, Yorick went to the office, trying not to resent Vaughn’s appropriating the desk to make some calls. Vaughn might have the vision of what they could do with this place, but Yorick owned this place, and if someone had to be shuffled off to use the kitchen counter, it should have been Vaughn.
Hearing the fury in Vaughn’s voice, Yorick leaned against the wall near the open door and listened.
“I don’t give a flying fuck if all your trucks are making deliveries today, and I don’t want to hear any whining about having to drive all the way to fucking Sproing. If you want to remain a club member in good standing you will load the box springs, mattresses, and frames for four double beds, and you will get them to a place called The Jumble before the end of the workday.” A pause. “If you move your ass, your men can get here, get the beds set up, and get back home before dark. If you drag your feet, they’ll end up sleeping in the truck at a rest station.”
Yorick shivered. There was no mercy in the wild country, no safety in the dark. The rest stations were supposed to be a neutral place where humans could spend a night without being attacked or killed. But “supposed to be” wasn’t a guarantee.
The sun must have gone behind some clouds because the hall was suddenly darker than it had been a moment before. Gloomy. Forbidding. And Yorick had an uneasy thought: if The Jumble was considered wild country, were any of the people going to be safe here after the sun went down?
CHAPTER 57
Grimshaw
Windsday, Sumor 5
Sitting on Julian’s porch, working on his second beer, Grimshaw looked at the nearest cabin. Curtains in the windows; a chair and small table on the porch; the large pots of flowers placed along the walls that bordered the front yard. Vicki’s car was parked on the gravel rectangle that served as a driveway.
He’d eaten dinner at the boardinghouse, mainly to get a look at the new guests. A couple of salesmen who routinely stayed in Sproing to take orders from customers in the area. Two couples who wanted to get away for a few days and chose the village where they could see Sproingers and visit wineries. Nothing about any of those people made him think he needed to take a closer look, so he’d driven over to Julian’s cabin in order to sit back and have a beer—and to check on Vicki DeVine.
“She need any help?” he asked when Julian joined him on the porch.
Julian shook his head. “Yesterday afternoon, Cougar and Conan provided the muscle for setting up the bed and placing the heavier pieces of furniture, and Ineke came over today to help Vicki set up the kitchen and put up curtains, things like that. When I went over after work to see if she needed any help, she sounded shaky, which isn’t surprising, but she said she was okay.”
“I didn’t want to serve that eviction notice. It was bullshit.” Grimshaw took a couple of long swallows of beer. “Got to hand it to the terra indigene, though. They picked up on my warning and got a message to Ilya Sanguinati fast enough for him to arrive at The Jumble by the time Vicki opened the door to that dickhead Yorick Dane and his slimy friends or business partners or whatever they are.”
“You’re letting your ire surface, Wayne.” Julian sipped his beer. Then he sighed. “Truth is, I’m glad she’s out of there.”
“I had the impression that most of the people in the village were glad she had taken over The Jumble, including you.”
“We were all glad to see her doing something with the place. Having The Jumble up and running would be a shot in the arm for all our businesses. I mean, gods, have you seen the public beach on the weekends when everyone is looking to cool off or row out on the lake to fish?”
“I’ve been a little too busy to even think about fishing,” Grimshaw said.
Julian eyed him. “Do you fish?”
“Nope. But I’ve been too busy to even think about it.”
“You should come by some morning. We can walk down to the creek and throw in a couple of lines.”
“Why?”
“To look like we’re doing something in order to do nothing.”
“Ah. Best reason I’ve heard to go fishing.” He spent—or had spent—his workday with his ass planted in the cruiser, so he preferred physical activity during his downtime. In his mind, fishing wasn’t the same as lifting weights, or playing basketball during adults’ night at the school gym.
Did they do that here? Not that he would be around much longer.
Julian snapped upright, tense and alert, a moment before a gust of cold air hit them.
“Crap,” Grimshaw breathed. “I didn’t hear anything in the weather report that said we’d get a blast of air coming out of the north.”
“This isn’t cold air coming from the north,” Julian said quietly. “It’s getting too cold too fast. This isn’t natural. Something’s changed.”
Grimshaw touched the medal under his shirt. Most of the time, weather was just weather. But sometimes it was more—and it was devastating when it struck because there was something guiding it, shaping it. Creating it. “The Elementals?”
Julian nodded. Grimshaw’s mobile phone rang.
“Osgood?” he said, wishing he’d tossed a jacket in the car. “You’re on call tonight.”
“One of the women was attacked.” Osgood’s voice shook. “At The Jumble. They said a hand came out of the bathroom sink and tried to choke her.”
“Did anyone at The Jumble call the EMTs or Dr. Wallace?”
“Don’t think so. One of the men called the station. I’m not sure which one. He was shouting and hung up before I could get any more information.”
“You call Dr. Wallace and the EMTs, then stay at the station as a relay. I’ll head to The Jumble.”
“Yes, sir.”
Julian drained his bottle and picked up the empties. “You’re going to answer a call after having a couple of beers?”
“I’m not sending Osgood out there. Besides, it’s getting dark. I should have been on my way back to the boardinghouse before now.”
“I could make some coffee.”
“You could quit stalling.” He wouldn’t bring the baby cop with him, so why did he expect a man who quit the force years ago to back him up?
Because the man was Julian Farrow.
They stared at each other as the wind that swirled around them carried the sharp, cold bite of winter.
“I told you The Jumble wasn’t a safe place,” Julian said.
“Well, it looks like you were right.”
* * *
• • •
The EMT vehicle and Dr. Wallace’s car were parked on the side of the road near the entrance to The Jumble, waiting for him. Their unwillingness to answer a call for medical help without police backup confirmed what Julian had said—The Jumble wasn’t a safe place anymore.
The EMTs waited in their vehicle, ready to take someone to Dr. Wallace’s office or to the hospital in Bristol. Dr. Wallace went into the main house, sandwiched between Grimshaw and Julian.
“What took you so long?” Yorick Dane demanded.
“Where is the woman who was injured?” Dr. Wallace asked.
When Dane didn’t reply, Trina finally said, “She’s in the kitchen. I’ll show you.”
Grimshaw did a mental roll c
all. Vaughn and his wife, Trina. Darren and Pamella. No sign of Hershel and Heidi, but there were two other men in the hall. “Detectives Swinn and Reynolds.” He turned to Dane. “Since you have two members of a CIU team here, why did you bother to call the station? I’m sure the detectives could have sorted this out.”
“We’re not here in any official capacity,” Swinn snapped. “We’re on leave, visiting friends.”
Vaughn didn’t look pleased to be labeled a friend, but he didn’t contradict Swinn either.
“Where are your other friends?”
“They’re staying in their cabin,” Darren replied. “Not enough rooms in the main house.”
“But they called just before you arrived and said someone was outside their cabin, taunting them,” Vaughn added. “They wanted to come to the house instead of being out there by themselves, but they don’t want to walk over on their own. While you’re waiting for the doctor to finish his examination, you should go to the cabin and escort them here.”
“No,” Julian said. “If they stay where they are, if they stay inside until morning, they should be all right.” He looked at Grimshaw. “Going to the cabins in the dark would be a mistake.”
When they were rookies, how many potentially lethal calls had he survived because he’d listened to Julian?
Grimshaw focused on Vaughn. “Tell your friends to stay put until morning.”
“Coward,” Swinn muttered.
“You’re carrying, and you were here,” Julian said. “But I don’t see you going out there to help your friends. And doing that doesn’t require that you act in any official capacity.”
Swinn sneered at Grimshaw. “What’s he doing here anyway? He washed up as a cop, so was he your date tonight?”
