The man sat down on the chair he had been using earlier. Reg stared at him, then stared at the place that the snake had been. She wished he hadn’t been quite so quick to notice her behavior and to address her. If she had been able to grasp the image of the snake, then she wouldn’t be in this state. She would have known exactly what to do.
Reg pressed her thumbs into her temples.
“Why do you want a snake?” the hairy man prompted. “You don’t want it for… dinner?” he looked displeased by this image.
Reg rolled her eyes. “No, I don’t want to eat it. I want…” The reason hovered on the tip of her tongue, but try as she might, Reg couldn’t access it. “I need that snake.”
The man looked down at the shoelace. The cat pawed at it for a moment before looking up at Reg and at the large hairy man. He put his ears back and sneezed.
“Get away,” Reg snapped, sweeping her arm at him threateningly so that he jumped up and ran several feet away before looking back at her in consternation. Reg picked up the shoelace. She wiggled it on the floor. Not for the tuxedo cat to chase, but to imitate the movement she had seen earlier, in the hopes that she could bring the memory to the surface.
“This is not like you,” the man reproved.
“I didn’t ask you.”
“What has changed? What happened?”
“Let me think. Just let me think!”
He was quiet, watching her warily. His nostrils flared, and she knew that he was scenting her, trying to detect the reason for the change in her mood. But he wasn’t going to find anything out, because nothing had actually changed.
Reg watched the movement of the shoelace, willing herself to slide back into the trance.
She didn’t see the snake in front of her again, but suddenly flashed to the dream.
She had been searching for something. She had seen the snake and had been hunting for it. And she knew where she had been.
“Why don’t you stay here and relax a while?” she suggested to the man. “I’m going out to get some things.”
“Oh, I will come with you. I can help to pick out victuals and help you to cook.”
“Cook? I’m not going to cook.”
His whiskers bristled. He was looking as unhappy as the cat was.
But they would go back to normal when she had what she wanted. They would see that she was happy and normal, and they would relax and forget all about it. Everyone went through moody periods. She was sleep deprived or tired out from the Spring Games. There was an easy explanation, and once she was back to normal, they would shrug it off.
“You stay here,” Reg told him firmly. “You can look through the cupboards and fridge if you want to make something. Or go up to the main house. The witch back there, she would be happy to help.”
“You won’t be long?”
“No. Just a few minutes.”
Just as long as it took to find the snake.
It took much longer than it should have to extricate herself from the cottage and get to her vehicle. Why couldn’t she just go out and run a few errands? They made it sound like she was trying to get away with something. She hadn’t done anything.
Yet.
She slid into her car and started the engine. It was starting to get dark outside. Twilight. The darkness fell quickly in Florida. She should probably have brought a flashlight with her. But she hoped to still be able to achieve her goal without one.
In a few minutes, she was at the cemetery. She remembered being there once before, not inside the graveyard itself, but outside the walls, detoured because of what the Witch Doctor had been doing. Only they hadn’t known yet that it had to do with the Witch Doctor. They had stopped and talked to the police, but the cops had been tight-lipped and hadn’t told Reg what was going on. Reg looked around for them. There didn’t seem to be any activity within the walls of the cemetery. She didn’t see any police cars or security vehicles. It was probably a pretty quiet place at night. They wouldn’t have much call for a big security presence.
Reg drove up to the entrance and found her way blocked by a tall gate, like something out of a Gothic horror movie. Big black bars stretching upward, the graying sky behind them as the sun went down.
There was a sign on the gate that was not so Gothic, clearly setting out the hours that the cemetery was open. A cemetery had hours? Who knew? She could try driving around to the other entrances, but suspected that they would be similarly barred. There might be another way in, an unobtrusive caretaker’s entrance that only someone who worked there would know about. But Reg didn’t have the patience to go looking for one. She turned off the car, got out, and scaled the fence without another moment’s consideration. She had things to do; she wasn’t going to let one little gate get in the way of her goals. Well, one big, tall gate. She imagined the hairy man would have been able to just toss her over. But she did reasonably well on her own, considering out how of shape she was. She resolved again to start a more vigorous diet and exercise program.
She dropped down on the other side of the gate, landing lightly on her feet like a cat.
Reg looked around the rows of graves and markers, trying to orient herself and figure out what course to take. She just needed to remember her dream. What had she seen in the dream? Where had she gone? If she followed the template of what she had seen in the dream, then she would find what she was looking for.
She walked up one of the rows, pausing at each aisle to reach out with all her senses. She waited for an instant to see if she felt a little tug and, when she didn’t, went on to the next one.
Reg felt compelled to go down an aisle with a cherub marker on the first row. Was this it? She kept walking, kept trying to feel whether she were in the right place. It was getting too dark to see. If there were still any snakes around, she wasn’t even going to be able to see them. She pulled out her phone and turned on the flashlight mode. She was going to run down her battery, but chances were, she was not going to be there long anyway. She would either find what she was looking for, or would go back home. She couldn’t leave a strange man in her cottage for that long.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Reg heard a rustling in the grass.
Was there someone else there with her in the cemetery after closing? Or was it the snake she was looking for? She knew it couldn’t be far away. She could feel it.
There was a presence, but it slipped away quickly. Just a small night creature. Nothing for her to worry about. More of a worry for the small night creature. The dark was full of predators.
She could see a shape in the grass ahead of her. Maybe a grave that had recently been dug, so it didn’t yet have sod laid over the top to match the carpeting over the rest of the graveyard. Reg crept closer, keeping her light low in case someone walking by the cemetery looked in through the bars of one of the gates and saw her. She had no idea how visible or hidden she was.
There was definitely something there on top of the grass. Not a freshly dug grave.
The shape looked vaguely human. But they wouldn’t have placed a body on top of the grass like that. It would be in a casket or an urn. People didn’t just throw bodies anywhere in a cemetery. There was an order to things. Reg leaned down as she got closer, so she was hunched low to the ground. Like it wouldn’t be a surprise to her when she finally saw what it was, if she was just close enough.
There was more rustling. More night creatures? Reg looked back and forth, and even took one quick glance behind her to show that she wasn’t afraid. Nothing was going to scare her there. She wasn’t afraid of the dark. The Witch Doctor wasn’t there reanimating corpses. There wasn’t anything for her to worry about in a cemetery closed after dark. It wasn’t some kids’ thriller movie.
Reg’s light fell on the corpse. It was a man. Little blood or violence. But there could be no doubt that he was dead and not just sleeping. Reg’s flash of light and quick look at the face and body of the man told her that much.
“Freeze! Police!”
; Reg stopped where she was, looking down at the body.
“Get your hands up,” the voice told her. Reg slowly raised both hands to shoulder level. “No, I want them way up. Get them up, up!”
Reg obeyed, raising her hands as far as they would go. She kept her cellphone in her hand, making it as visible as possible so no rookie would think that she was carrying a weapon. It was just a phone, obvious from that little rectangle of light in the rapidly-falling darkness. Clouds scudded across the moon, deepening the twilight even more quickly.
One of the police officers came around in front of Reg. A woman. Asian. Pretty features. Reg couldn’t see her name bar in the darkness.
“Reg?” the cop asked incredulously.
Squinting, Reg tried to access her memory banks to come up with a woman’s name and background. She obviously knew Reg and was surprised to find her there, which meant she didn’t think that Reg was someone who would normally wander around cemeteries stumbling across dead bodies.
Reg tried to smile in a friendly way. “Oh, hi…”
“What are you doing here?” the woman cop asked in a way that was not friendly at all.
And then her eyes dropped to the corpse in front of Reg.
And that was not good. Not good at all.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Reg cleared her throat and tried to come up with some line that would make the woman cop laugh. Or something that would make it plain that Reg hadn’t had anything to do with the killing of the man. She searched her brain for something that would work. Something light, and yet calm and composed. An excuse for being there. After dark. After closing.
With a fresh corpse.
She had nothing.
“We’ve got a body,” the woman yelled to her male counterpart, shining a powerful flashlight at the corpse.
“A what?” the man asked, stunned. But of course he had heard her correctly, and there wasn’t much that the cop could do that would clarify matters for him. Or that Reg could say that would make them both feel better disposed toward her.
“I just found him,” Reg said finally. Not her most brilliant response. “He was just lying there.”
“We got a grave robber?” the male cop asked, grasping for an explanation.
“No. Not a grave robber. This guy is fresh. Hasn’t been buried. Hasn’t even been embalmed.”
“I didn’t do it,” Reg told her. Another brilliant conversational gem. They would definitely be convinced by an explanation like that.
“Don’t move,” the woman cop commanded, as Reg started to lower her hands a little. Holding her arms up so high without moving hurt. Reg did her best to hold them steady. The three of them looked down at the corpse.
“What the heck happened here?” the male cop mused.
“I don’t know. I just… was going for a walk…”
In a graveyard. At night. After climbing over the fence.
“I’m going to pat you down,” the woman cop told Reg, handing her flashlight to the man. “Just hold still.”
Reg did what she was told, keeping her hands high above her head as the cop did a quick pat-down and turned Reg’s pockets inside out.
“No weapons,” she told her partner. “No drugs.”
“I didn’t do anything to him. He was dead when I got here.”
Neither of them responded to Reg’s protest.
“I’m putting you in handcuffs. That’s to keep us safe while we call for backup and get this sorted out. You’re not under arrest at this time, but we will want you to answer some questions.”
Reg felt numb as the cop took each of her arms and closed the bracelets around them, restraining her hands behind her back. The cop clicked her shoulder mike and started making reports and requests.
“What do you think happened to him?” Reg asked, looking down at the body.
With the bright flashlight on him, she could see that it was an older man, his scalp shiny and mottled with liver spots, his skin white or gray. His hands were strangely twisted. Not like he had arthritis, and they didn’t look like they had been recently broken. But maybe the result of some accident when he was a child, and they had never healed straight. He had a few tattoos, old and fading. It didn’t look like he had fallen and hit his head or been attacked. It looked like…
Reg resisted the thought, not letting her brain go down that path.
She didn’t know what had killed the man. It was probably natural causes. A heart attack. He had simply dropped while he had been there visiting a departed loved one. And now they were together again. It was a good thing. A happy thing for him.
Or not.
“I’m not going to speculate on cause of death,” the woman said. “We’ll leave that up to the medical examiner. Why don’t you tell me exactly why you’re here? You saw the signs saying that the cemetery is closed. What are you doing here?”
“It must have closed after I got here,” Reg offered. “I didn’t hear them closing the gates. And I guess they didn’t see me. Maybe it was while I was crouched down. Uh, kneeling. Praying. I guess that’s why they didn’t see me, and I didn’t see them.”
She hoped the lie was believable . She wasn’t sure what she was going to come up with if it didn’t.
“Your car is parked outside the gate,” the cop told her flatly. “You got here after it was closed.”
“Oh.”
“Why are you here? And how did you know what you were going to find?”
“I didn’t. I thought it would be… I didn’t know that there was a body here. I was looking for something else.” Reg looked for a reasonable explanation. What would she be looking for in a cemetery? A lost cat? Her eyes caught on one of the headstones. “An inscription,” she offered. “I wanted to see the verse on one of these headstones.”
“And you had to do that at night?”
“No… the client wanted me to hurry on it. And I didn’t realize that it would be closed already. I guess I should have waited until tomorrow, but I didn’t want it to be a wasted trip.”
“Yeah.” the cop shook her head. “That just doesn’t wash.”
Reg would have to come up with something better by the time they got around to asking her for an official statement. She looked at some of the headstones around the body to come up with something that sounded logical.
Before long, Reg could see flashing red and blue lights around the cemetery, even though the police cars were parked outside the walls and locked gates. Someone would have to wake up the caretaker to get him to open the gates and let the medical examiner’s and crime scene investigators’ vehicles in, but in the meantime, the cops were all getting in the same way as Reg had, by scaling the gates.
The female cop took Reg outside the perimeter they were setting up. She looked sideways at Reg a few times, as if expecting her to explain herself. Reg got the idea that they must be friends, and the woman was waiting to hear the inside scoop now that their conversation was more private. But Reg didn’t have her story fully-formed yet. It wouldn’t hurt her case to wait, and might prove beneficial as she gathered more information.
“Finally,” the cop grumbled, seeing the first van roll up to the crime scene. “That means the gates are open and I can take you in.”
Reg appreciated that they hadn’t made her try to climb over the gate with her hands cuffed. She didn’t need a broken ankle on top of everything else.
“Can I drive my car home?” she asked. “You said that I’m not under arrest, right?”
“You’ll have to pick your car up after they are done with the crime scene. Until then, it is staying right where it is.”
“I don’t want to get ticketed or towed.”
“I can’t promise anything. But they’re not going to let it go until they’re sure it isn’t evidence in a crime.”
“He didn’t look like I ran over him with my car,” Reg pointed out.
“Let’s walk.” The cop nudged Reg ahead of her, indicating that she should head for the open gate. “Nob
ody said that you ran over him with your car. But you could have had him in the trunk.”
“And I carried a dead body over the locked gate? So I could put him on the ground in the cemetery? I don’t think that one is going to fly.”
“You could have something else in your car that was used in the commission of a crime. I don’t know. A crowbar. Poison. Duct tape. Until we have the cause of death, I don’t know what we’re looking for.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with his death. I just happened to find him.”
“And why didn’t you call the police?”
“I didn’t have a chance. You showed up right after I tripped over him.”
“But you would have.”
“Of course.” It didn’t hurt Reg to say what she would have done. It was all speculation, since she hadn’t had the chance. Her reaction probably would have been to get as far away from the dead body as possible. But there was no way for anyone to know that now.
“Do you know the victim?”
Reg didn’t answer, thinking about it. She didn’t recognize the man, but should she? Was it someone she had been seen with? Had she had dealings with him in the past that others would know about?
“I didn’t get a good enough look at him,” she fudged. “I’m not sure. It was kind of a shock.”
“I’m sure it was,” the policewoman agreed dryly.
Reg wasn’t sure how to respond to that. They continued in silence, until they reached the gate and could see all the emergency vehicles gathered outside the cemetery fence.
“Here we go,” the cop offered, and opened the back seat for Reg.
“You said that I’m not under arrest.”
“That’s right.”
Without Foresight Page 12
