“It was you,” I said and backed toward the door.
“What?” Burt looked confused, and at the same time, he took a step back toward the doorway he’d come from before.
“That book,” I said and pointed at the same book I’d found the library receipt for in Alicia’s sketchbook. “Alicia checked that book out from the library, and the next person never returned it. Were you…. Were you stalking her?”
I couldn’t quite put the pieces together in my head, but I knew it meant something. I just knew it couldn’t be a coincidence.
“This book?” Burt asked as he picked up the one.
I was already to the door. My hands were behind my back and ready to push my way out into the open if he lunged at me.
“Yes,” I said. “Were you obsessed with her or something?”
“It wasn’t anything like that,” he said. “Look.” Burt opened the book and showed me the inside of the cover. “It’s not a library copy. This is my book. Alicia borrowed it from me, and I let her keep it. Eventually, she went into town and checked it out from the library. When she did, she brought mine back.”
“Why would she do that?” I asked. “Why would she get it from the library if you let her borrow it for as long as she wanted? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I don’t know,” Burt said. “It’s just a book. I don’t remember…”
Was he lying? I didn’t entirely trust him, but I hadn’t run out the door either. When he spoke again, I was glad I didn’t.
“Wait, I remember now. There was another camper who wanted to read the book. She checked it out from the library so her friend could borrow mine. Alicia brought it back to me and said another friend was interested in the book, but she didn’t want to give my copy away without my permission.”
“So, did someone else come in and borrow it?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Burt answered. “Local guy who was living in the campground because he was having problems at home. He came in with his rent and asked to borrow it. Said Alicia recommended it.”
“Do you know his name?” I asked.
Burt scratched his head. “He paid his rent in cash. Give me a second. I can figure it out. He worked for one of the local construction companies… Some sort of foreman… Oh, right. His name was David Watkins.”
“Is he still living here?” I asked.
“No, he and his wife made up a few months back. He’s been gone for a while,” Burt said.
“Do you know if he’s still living in Coventry?” I asked.
“Lady, I don’t know what people do after they leave here. Why? Do you think he had anything to do with Alicia’s death? I can’t see it. He was such a charming and sweet man. Never made sense that he was having such bad marital problems. Always figured the wife was a witch.”
For a moment, I couldn’t believe Burt was taking a stab at witches in front of me. Then I realized he had no idea what I was and was just using the term to demean David Watkins’ wife.
I figured I had all of the information I was going to get out of Burt, so I left. When I got out to my car, I called Nora.
“Hey, Kinsley. What’s going on? I didn’t expect to hear from you again,” Nora said. There was an edge to her tone. I knew the press hadn’t left her alone since a body was found in her basement, and by the tone of her voice, it almost sounded like she blamed me for that. How, though? She’d asked me to come investigate the ghost that had attacked her.
“I’m sorry about how things have turned out,” I said.
“Well, you couldn’t have known,” Nora said and followed it up with a huge sigh. “I suppose I’m the one that dragged you into all of this. Have you figured out the connection between the ghost that attacked me and Alicia?”
I hadn’t because I hadn’t really thought about it…
“No, but I mean, we may never figure that out. Ghosts are weird. It could have been Alicia manifesting herself as… as someone she knew or someone she saw in a movie. It could have been some random ghost who hung around your house and decided it didn’t like the skeleton being in the basement. They don’t like things that remind them of death,” I said.
“You mean that ghost could still be here happily hanging around because we got rid of the skeleton?” Nora asked.
“Could be, but has she bothered you?” I asked.
“No,” Nora admitted. “Everything has been completely fine since the skeleton was removed.”
“I think that’s the best outcome we could have hoped for,” I said. “At least it wasn’t a demon.”
“You’re right,” Nora said. “So, how can I help you? Or did you just call to check on me?”
“Well, I did want to know how you were doing, but I called to find out the name of the construction company that built your house,” I said.
“Oh, yeah, sure. It was Acclaim Homes,” she said.
After a few more minutes of polite chat, Nora and I ended the call. At that point, I put my car in gear and headed off for the Acclaim Homes office over on the new side of Coventry.
The construction office was a bust. The woman working at the front desk was a complete professional and wouldn’t tell me anything about David Watkins. She wouldn’t even tell me if he was still working there. I got the whole speech about coming back with a warrant again. It was always so much easier when I found a gossip or someone who hated their job or boss.
As I was getting back into my car to go home, a man approached me. I’d planned on going home and watching a movie. Thorn and the FBI could handle Alicia’s death. What was I doing anyway? For the first time that day, it occurred to me that I could be making other people sick. I’d let my parents keep Laney because I was still contagious, and yet I was running around town breathing on people. Ugh, I felt dumb.
I had that same dumb, self-depreciating feeling when the man walked up to me. “I’ve had strep throat,” I said. “You probably shouldn’t get too close.”
“Oh,” he said with an endearing, nervous chuckle. “I think I’ll be okay. I do really want to talk to you if you have a moment.”
“All right,” I said. “What about?”
“I was just in the office dropping off some paperwork for my boss, and I heard you talking about him,” the man said.
“David Watkins is your boss?” I asked.
“He is, but, um… can we walk across the street over there? I don’t want him to see me talking to you. It’s just that he makes me sort of nervous, and I don’t want it to get back to him that you were in the office asking about him and then I was talking about you,” the man said and looked around nervously. “My name’s Bryan. The house, you can see, it’s totally open. You can’t get trapped in there or anything. I just want to make it look like I’m still working.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll walk over there with you, but I’m staying close to the street.”
“I totally get it,” Bryan said and started walking across to the house he’d pointed out. I followed along quickly. “I just wanted to know why you’re here about David. I mean… let me explain. I’ve had problems with him too. Not just here at work either. I think he’s been having an inappropriate friendship with my teenage daughter.”
That made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. “Why do you think that? Have you seen them together?” I asked.
“I think so, but I can’t prove it. I can’t get her to tell me anything either. And sometimes, when I go into her room to tell her goodnight, it’s like someone was just there. I know that sounds weird, but sometimes you can just tell someone was in a room?”
“I do know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“And a couple of times her window was still open just a bit,” Bryan said. “I don’t know what to do, but if you know something… maybe you can help. Do you think he had something to do with that skeleton?”
The hair on the back of my neck had settled down, but when Bryan asked that, it stood up again. That had been a huge leap, and when I looked around,
I realized I’d followed Bryan into the house. We were standing in a spot where it was difficult to see the street.
That meant it was difficult to see us too…
I looked at Bryan again, and the mask of sweetness and earnest concern had slipped away. Staring back at me were the cold eyes of a predator.
“You’re David,” I said, and my voice was barely above a whisper. I should have screamed, but all the air seemed to be stuck in my stupid sore throat.
“And you’re not as smart as you think you are,” he said. “It’s always so easy with you people. A smile and a sad story, and you completely forgot that you were going to stay close to the road. You wanted the details so badly that you walked right into this spot. You know that because of the houses on either side of this one, it’s nearly impossible to see us from outside. You’d basically have to be in the front of the house to even know we’re here.”
“What do you want?” I asked as I began backing up the way I came.
“I don’t want anything from you except for you to go away,” David said. “On second thought, why don’t you tell me why you’re involved in this? How did you come to be wrapped up in it? I’ve heard the stories about you being there when they found her bones in my little hiding place. So, was it you? Are you the reason I would’ve gotten caught?”
“Would’ve?” I asked. “You are caught. I know who you are, and I guess we both know now that you did it.”
“Ah, yes, but you’re not going to be around to tell anyone,” a sinister smile spread across David’s face.
I knew then that we were done talking. I’d only managed to put a few feet between the two of us as I’d slowly inched away from him. So, when I turned to scream and run, he was on me like a cat pouncing.
As one of his hands covered my mouth and nose, the other wrapped around my throat. I tried to kick backward but missed him.
The pressure his hand put on the outside of my neck made my throat burn like fire. Tears filled my eyes and made it hard for me to see. Without magic and drained from strength because of my illness, I was done. I’d finally been too stupid to live.
And then David let go. As he fell to the floor, he nearly dragged me down with me.
“Come on,” a voice said, and a man grabbed my hand.
He hoisted me from kneeling back to my feet and dragged me out of the house. I wiped the tears away from my eyes with my free hand and gasped for breath.
“Who are you?” I wheezed out as we stopped in the middle of the road.
Well, I stopped. I’d followed one man to my doom moments before, and I didn’t care if this one had just rescued me. I wasn’t going anywhere with anybody but my husband.
I pulled out my phone and called 911, but I couldn’t speak above a breathy whisper. So, I shoved the phone into the man’s hands.
While I stood there trying to breathe, he talked to the dispatcher and kept an eye on the house he’d just pulled me from moments before. Given the chaos, a few more construction workers appeared from the houses in progress around us.
So even when David, bleeding from the head, appeared from the house and began to stagger toward us, a group of men and women stood protectively around me. “It’s over,” the man who had my phone said as he handed it back to me.
David tried to make a run for it, but the small crowd who had been protecting me lunged at him and held him until Thorn and his deputies arrived. Right behind them was the FBI.
“Who are you?” I asked the man again.
“I’m Bryan,” he said and stuck his hand out to me. “The actual Bryan, and I’ve had my suspicions about that creep for a while. When I saw you follow him into the house, I hurried over. Sorry I didn’t get to you fast enough.”
“Oh, you got to me plenty fast enough,” I said. “Thank you.”
Epilogue
So, David wasn’t just a creepy dude who had a thing for teenage girls. He also got himself involved in the drug trade.
Hence the RV Alicia had been living in when she died. Alicia had escaped from her parents in a car she’d stolen from an old woman who’d recently been put in a nursing home.
No one had reported it stolen because no one realized it was missing. Alicia was living out of that car when David spotted her at a roadside diner on a trip back from south of the border.
A trip in an RV stuffed full of drugs and cash. But the drugs and cash were inside the panels of the RV, so unless you knew they were there, you wouldn’t know they were there.
Anyway, David spotted Alicia at a roadside diner. She looked depressed and was anxiously pressing the waitress for a meal that cost less than five dollars. While the waitress kindly tried to help Alicia figure something out, David saw an opportunity.
She was just the kind of girl he liked. Young and easy to manipulate because of desperation.
Or so he thought. You see, David thought he could kill two birds with one stone. He could offer this young woman the RV to live in, so he’d have someone to watch it until the cartel wanted what was stuffed inside of it, and he’d have his next victim.
Little did he know that while Alicia would accept the RV and even drive it to the campground so he could avoid that risk, she was never going to be interested in any kind of relationship with him… even if he left his wife and moved into the campground to be closer to her.
Alicia was naïve. She genuinely thought that she and David were friends. She really believed that he’d wanted to help her, and she was so starved for genuine affection that she fell for his trap.
Until the day he tried to force himself on her, and she revealed that she just wasn’t into men. At all. Ever. For any reason.
What David suffered was known as a narcissistic injury. He flew into a rage and, as anyone who has ever dealt with a narcissist knows, they are most dangerous when their egos are injured.
He killed her. David snuffed out Alicia’s life because she rejected him, and he felt entitled to her.
And he confessed to all of it in front of Thorn and the FBI in exchange for a plea deal that took the death penalty off the table.
But there would be no trial, and David would spend the rest of his miserable life in prison. Bryan’s daughter was safe.
I finally got some rest and recovered from the strep throat.
“I also got something else,” I said. “I got my green eyes back.”
The black streaks in my hair faded to a funky purple. I kinda liked it.
“You’re different,” Thorn said one night as we sat on the sofa watching a movie.
“Different how?” I asked.
“I don’t know… lighter?” Thorn said.
“Are you saying I’ve lost weight?” I asked with a chuckle before elbowing him in the gut playfully.
“No, I mean like you’re glowing. Well, maybe not glowing. It’s just something about the way the light hits you is different. You remind me of you except when you first got here,” he said. “Before the stress of everything you’ve taken on here weighed you down.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment then,” I said.
“Speaking of lights, I think we should turn them off. This zombie clown movie you picked for our date night is a little dark. It’s hard to see,” Thorn said.
“No problem,” I said and without thinking about it, I lifted my hand and snapped my fingers.
And the lights went out…
“Kinsley, you just turned the lights out with magic,” Thorn said.
“I did,” I said and sat up straight. “I did it.”
“Is your magic coming back?” he asked.
“It might be,” I said. “Oh, man, that would be amazing.”
At that moment, Meri came trotting down the stairs. I was pretty sure it was Meri anyway. Same face, but he’d grown at least three inches since the last time I’d seen him.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
“For what are we thankful?” Thorn asked.
“Well, not like you guys noticed, but I’ve been up in
the attic library studying my butt off, and I figured out what was wrong with magic. I fixed it.”
“If you fixed what was wrong with magic, then how are you getting so much bigger?” I asked.
“Because what was wrong with magic was you,” Meri said. “You decided to focus your energy on Laney and being a Mom. You’re so freaking powerful that you somehow managed to shut it all down. So, since I’m your familiar, I figured out a way to protect you from yourself. Magic’s coming back, and I undid the wish spell.”
“For real?” I asked. “That’s all it took.”
Black Arts & Bones (Familiar Kitten Mysteries Book 11) Page 11
