“Traitor,” I muttered, then called aloud, “You hear me, Rebecca Nurse? You’re both traitors!”
My friend came from the kitchen carrying two steaming mugs. On her face she had what I took as a wistful smile. “You know,” she said, “it was actually fun, sort of, being bad today.”
“We weren’t bad. We were trying to stay alive.”
“Still—” she handed me a mug. “Here, drink this.”
“What’s in it, sleeping pills?”
“No, rosemary and lavender. This will calm you.”
“I don’t need to be calm,” I shouted. “I need to do something!”
“I know,” she said. “But we won’t be able to figure out what with our minds beating a tattoo because of the excitement. So, we drink this tea and relax.”
“Then what? We take a nap?”
“No. Then we sit quietly and listen. The earth and wind will tell us what to do.”
I took a few breaths—what my yoga instructor called calming breaths. In a few moments I had calmed enough to realize Rebecca was right. It seemed as though she always was—well, at least most of the time. I raised my mug. “Here’s to the earth and the wind.”
As we sipped the rosemary and lavender brew, the windows on the French doors rattled. Apparently the wind agreed with my friend.
We sat with our backs straight against the cushions, me on the sofa, Rebecca in the wingback chair below the railroad station clock. Through deep and relaxing breaths, I visualized the wind and how it swept across the earth. How it caressed the branches of trees. How it swirled upward to the heavens. The wind was free, moved with its own will.
My eyes fell on Sarah Goode’s Book of Shadows. When I lifted it, the book fell open. I scanned the page. It seemed as though my ancient relative spoke to me from the distant past.
4 March, in the year of our Lord, 1692.
It has happened. Those foolish children, Elizabeth Parris and Abigail Williams, have denounced me as a witch, a Devil worshiper. Why? I did naught but seek them comfort from the brain fever that causes them to twitch and moan, and run among the wheat stalks unclad. So today I have a roof above me, and I sleep on cold straw. Bars on the door keep me from bringing low other weak-minded children with my potion that is naught but lavender and rosemary.
The black slave, Tituba, lies here also, for the crime of obeying her superstitious mistress’s demand for a devil cake. And though fed to those children the cake cured their brain fever, Magistrates Hathorne and Corwin say it was the Evil One’s work.
Is there no end to this madness?
And, oh, the shame! Two days ago the Magistrates entered my cell, tore from me my blouse, and examined my bare breasts, seeking, they said, for a mark to show I have suckled the Devil’s familiars. And my youngest daughter, my Dorothy, only four, is held in custody until she swears an oath against me, and says the Devil’s milk nourished her at my breast.
I must flee this place. I must do as some in this Salem town now swear they have seen me do, and soar on the wind across the night sky. This is a real and true gift, even if it is only in my mind. Without my herbs and spices I can do this. The good God has seen fit to give me this gift by which, with breaths and concentration, I might fly from here to confront those who would do me evil…
I shut the book and looked over at the wingback chair. Rebecca’s eyes were closed. Her breaths came at an easy, steady rate. Elvira was curled on her lap, snoring.
I placed the book gently on the table. I tiptoed to the basement door. Strange, I didn’t think to take my crutches. Yet I didn’t limp. I felt no pain in my foot and leg.
The door didn’t squeak when I opened it.
Roger must have oiled the door when he fixed my window, I thought. I glanced at the window. No plywood covered it now. When was Fred Silbert here? I didn’t dwell on the question. The sun had set. An east wind whipped though the birch branches. The trees danced to a manic rhythm.
Elizabeth Parris and Abigail Williams must have behaved like those tree limbs, hands flashing this way and that as if they were bewitched.
In the basement, I opened the door to the closet in which I stored my candles, athame, and other tools of my new craft. In a corner was a besom, an old fashioned broom made of twigs. The kind Sarah Goode would have used. Where had it come from? I had no time to consider that.
I clutched the broom in my arms and climbed the stairs, then another flight to the second floor of my cottage. In the upper hall, I yanked the string to drop the trap door. I pulled down the ladder-like steps and climbed to the attic. Even with insulation tacked between the joists, the beating of the wind on the roof sounded like thunder. I didn’t feel the bitter cold, though. I knew why: the wind could not touch me while my complete concentration rested on the flight I was about to take.
Carefully, I stepped from beam to beam until I reached the round portal at the far end of the house. The back end. If I flew out this way, the officers in the patrol car parked out front wouldn’t see me leave. They wouldn’t call Roger and tell him to come over and pull me back.
With my shoulder, I shoved the round window open. The chill wind blew through my hair and caressed my face. I felt as though I were one with the wind, one with the air. I could do this. I knew I could.
I took a step back. The broom between my legs, I bent over and launched myself into the dark universe.
In moments, I soared over Niagara Falls and hovered above the Hyde Park Road precinct. Looking down, I saw Roger’s Trailblazer parked in the lot. He stood beside it, earnestly speaking with two men. I tilted my body like a plane dipping its wings and veered toward the Woodwards’ house. Again I looked down—
Pounding. Where did that pounding come from? Was it the wind beating against my ear drums?
“Emlyn.”
The wind shook me.
“Emlyn!”
Now it called my name.
“Wake up, Emlyn.”
I began to twist, like in a whirlwind. No, like in a whirlpool. A gust of wind must have blown me over the Niagara River just before it flows into Lake Ontario. I tilted downward, drawn toward the eddying frigid water—
“C’mon, wake up.”
“Huh?” My eyes shot open. “What…what happened?”
“You fell asleep.”
My head sprung forward. My mouth as wide as my eyes, I looked down. My grandmother’s knitted afghan was spread across my lap. Sarah’s book was open in my hands.
I heard more pounding. This wasn’t the wind. I shifted left, right.
The raps grew louder, more insistent.
Rebecca had a death-grip on my arm. Her face taught, her nails dug into my flesh. “Someone’s at the French doors.”
“Who?”
“How would I know?” she said. “Probably those men. They came back! They’re trying to break in. We have to call Roger.”
“There’s no time for a phone call. Quick. Outside. The cops watching the house—get them!”
While I sat, stunned by my abrupt awakening, Rebecca ran for the front door. She threw it open. Within minutes I heard running in my backyard and frantic voices.
“Stop! Now!”
“Over there! He’s there by the tree.”
“I see him.”
“He’s climbing. Gonna swing over the fence.”
“Got his leg. Help me!”
I heard a thud and the sound of a struggle.
The wawawa of a siren broke the silence on River Road.
“Got him!” someone shouted.
Another voice said, “Stop fighting, dammit!”
My storm door flew open. Roger ran in. In a few long strides, he crossed the living room and unlatched the French doors. He dashed out.
Rebecca came in from the front. She closed, locked the door and stood in the hallway, her arms crossed, slapping her shoulders. “Brrr.”
I threw off the cover and hobbled to her. “What’s happening?”
“I don’t know,” she said. Her ribbed tur
tleneck was so stiff it might have frozen when she ran from my door to the patrol car.
Holding tight to each other’s hands, using my friend as a crutch, in half-steps we approached the French doors. We leaned out.
To the left of the azalea bushes, beneath the birch tree a pile of heavy blue uniforms rolled in the snow. It looked as though it were a gang of children at play. Roger stood over them. With his pistol drawn, he leaned down.
“Knock it off,” he said. “Or would you rather get a bullet in that pea-sized thing you call your brain.”
The struggle ended. One cop put his knee on the spine of the man he’d tackled, the other cop pulled out his handcuffs. Looking very much the way I imagine Wyatt Earp appeared on the streets of Dodge City, Roger tossed back the skirt of his overcoat and holstered his weapon. Only then did the man beneath the pile sit up.
It was Kevin.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Roger said. “Do you have a death wish? Get inside!”
Two rather large officers, one young and dark, the other blond and considerably older than Roger, pushed the much shorter Kevin through the French doors. Their coats were matted with snow.
Roger followed them in. “Park yourself,” he told Kevin.
One of the officers roughly turned my ex around and shoved him down on one of the wooden stools at the kitchen counter.
“Sorry ’bout the snow and mud on your carpet, ma’am,” the other cop said.
I stared at their tracks, then at where the carpet had been burned. With a sigh, I said, “It needs to be replaced anyway.”
Rebecca took the policemen’s coats. “Come with me,” she told them, “I’ll make you some hot tea.”
For a moment, I wondered what my friend might mix into the tea, and whether the men would turn green and come hopping out of the kitchen. Silly thought, I know. But the sudden eruption of activity, the fear, then the relief when I saw my ex finally captured, had cooked my brain well past the point of done.
Roger hovered over Kevin. “You led us on quite a chase.”
“Sorry,” he mumbled. His hands cuffed behind his back, he dropped his head.
Kevin’s blond hair seemed stringier, dirtier than it had been when he cowered on my sofa a few days before. He had a three- or four-day growth on his round face. Though his face was pale, his cheeks were florid. His gray coat was torn at the elbows. Red lines radiated from his pupils, which told me it had been a while since he slept.
“Not sorry enough,” Roger said. “Do you know what you’ve put this woman through?” He pointed at me, as if there were several women in my living room to choose from.
Balanced now on my crutches with my right leg raised behind, I glared at Kevin. “How could you do this—” I pointed to my bandaged leg “—try to kill me?”
He let out a low groan. His eyes misting, he said, “It wasn’t me, I swear it. I’d never hurt you, Emmy.”
Roger’s face set, his eyes on fire, he asked, “Who is it, then? Who’s trying to hurt her?”
“I…I don’t know.”
“You know, dammit!” Roger took a half-step back and flipped his coat. With a hand on his holster, in a low, menacing tone, he said. “Tell me who, or I swear something to you, you little shit—I’ll put a bullet in your forehead, and say you were trying to escape—”
“Roger!” I shouted.
Chairs clattered. The two uniformed officers ran from the kitchen.
His eyes locked on Kevin, Roger raised his left hand as though he were directing traffic. “It’s okay, Matt, Ed.” He moved his hand from his gun. “The perp and I were just having a quiet conversation.”
My ex glanced from the cops, to Roger, to me, with a wide-eyed look of terror on his face. “I never…I couldn’t… Tell ’em, Em!”
I shook my head in disgust. “He might be a lot of nasty things, but he hasn’t got the gumption to kill. He nearly cried when I made him destroy a nest of wasps in the backyard.”
Roger dropped his face close to his prisoner. “Maybe, maybe not. Cowards do all kinds of things we never thought they could. Like blackmail?” He let the accusation hang.
Kevin averted his eyes.
“You were trying to blackmail Amy Woodward,” Roger said.
Kevin clamped his jaw.
“I’ll take that as an admission. Then what? She wouldn’t pay or couldn’t pay, so you killed her and ransacked her house?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Same reason you tried to get money out of Emlyn—to get out of town before the DEA caught up with you.”
My breath caught in my throat. “Kevin didn’t kill Amy,” I whispered.
Roger’s head swung in my direction.
I pointed with my crutch. “I know it wasn’t him.”
“How?”
I couldn’t tell Roger that while I flew in an out-of-body state above Niagara Falls, I’d seen a car drive up to the Woodwards’ house, seen the person who got out of the car and knocked on the back door. No, I couldn’t tell Roger without sounding like an escapee from an asylum. I especially couldn’t let the two cops in my house hear about my flight (at the moment I would have argued with anyone who told me I’d dreamt the episode).
With an impatient, “Uh-huh,” Roger dismissed what I said. Again he focused on Kevin. “And Detective Osborn—did you kill him, too? Were you trying to blackmail him?”
The two officers closed in. With Roger, they formed a tight circle around the prisoner. Jimmy had been one of their own.
The older cop elbowed Kevin in the ribs. “Did you?”
“Might as well give it up, Reinhart,” Roger said. “An hour ago the Feds raided the barn your playmates used as a drugstore. They reeled three of ’em in. Quite a crew you’re running with. Right now they’re probably singing the score from a Broadway musical, and guess who they’re gonna claim wrote lyrics?”
His head spinning from one accuser to the other, Kevin whined, “You…you’ve got it all wrong. I wasn’t blackmailing Osborn. He was bleeding me.”
Kevin’s words rang in my ears. My mind rotated like an out-of-control carousel. Ira Smith had told us a detective came to his office. Looking for Kevin, he said. Was the detective Jimmy Osborn? If it was, had Jimmy known it was both Ira and Kevin who supplied drugs to their clients? Was he the dangerous character Ira had suggested to Rebecca? Again, I thought of the Corvette in the Osborns’ driveway. Was blackmail how Jimmy got the money to buy it? Then there was the car I saw pull to the curb across the street from the Woodwards’ house—
It didn’t matter that I’d dreamed my flight; my mind struggled to make connections. Patches of a crazy quilt began to slide into place. They formed a pattern. I could almost see how everything on it would fit together. But, the quilt had a few patches missing. Critical patches. Like a motive for killing Jimmy then Amy. A motive for coming after me. Could it be there was a real motive for just one of the murders? Agatha Christie wrote a story about a man who slew three people to keep anyone from noticing the motive for the one murder he wanted to commit. Was that what happened here?
While I leaned on my crutches wondering what to do next and trying hard to conjure how I might find those last critical pieces of the pattern, Kevin leaned back and said, “Is…is there a deal here someplace?”
A slight smile danced on Roger’s lips. “What have you got to trade?”
Before my ex could answer, someone pounded on my front door.
Chapter Twenty-One
The Short Drop
Since the Molotov cocktail crashed through the window at Main Street Books and lit my leg like a Roman candle, a sudden noise had made me jump so far I might have qualified for the Olympics. This time I didn’t jump or even flinch. Elvira did. I was so lost in visions of patches sliding over my imaginary quilt, which when finished would reveal the entire picture of drugs, blackmail, and murder in my small city, I hardly heard knuckles beat a tattoo on my door.
Kevin heard the pounding, though. As if he guessed w
ho was outside, he whined like a child about to be spanked.
“I’ll see who it is,” Rebecca said.
“No. Please!” Kevin cried.
Clearly annoyed at the interruption, Roger grumbled.
“Stay where you are,” the younger, dark uniform instructed. “I’ll get it.”
His service revolver held at his side, the officer moved to the door and opened it the length of the chain.
“Is Detective Frey in there?” a harsh voice demanded from outside. The words were so loud, the entire neighborhood could have heard.
The officer at the door glanced over his shoulder.
Still hunched threateningly over Kevin, Roger shook his head.
“No, he ain’t here,” the dark officer said.
“Don’t give me that crap,” the voice shouted. “Open the damn door!”
Again the uniform looked over his shoulder.
Roger snapped his tongue. Then he gave an almost imperceptible nod.
The officer closed the door and slid off the chain. When he opened the door again, two men burst in, tracking more snow and mud across my floor. They pushed past the officer, past Rebecca, past me.
Elvira swished her tail out of the way a nanosecond before one of the men stomped on it. With a screech, she leaped onto the kitchen counter and ducked behind a group of canisters where she became almost invisible in my white kitchen.
The man who had growled like a hungry wolf at my door, moved tight against Roger’s side, and so close to me I smelled stale smoke from the pipe shoved into the breast pocket of his overcoat. The man reached for Kevin’s lapel. “This him?” he said.
Both invaders of my home were similarly clad in dark gray coats, with trousers of the same color. On their feet were the same highly polished heavy black brogans. The five o’clock stubble on their faces gave the appearance they’d recently dug through a trash bin. The only difference between the two was that the man who clearly was in charge had very short black hair, while his colleague’s military cut was light brown.
The Magic of Murder Page 19
