by Madelyn Alt
“Or even the Fae. Though if so, this one I would have to say existed on the darker side of the faery realm.”
I had an image of a teensy, tiny little flickering light the size of a hummingbird, complete with glitter and sparkles. “You mean, like Tinkerbell?”
Liss laughed. “Hardly. I rather meant the feral kind.”
This was not sounding any better. “Anything else it might have been?” I said as I pulled from the subdivision entrance out onto the main drag.
“Hmm. Shadow men are, I believe, considered interdimensional,” she mused. “As are vampires and werewolves, though I don’t think we really have to worry about those,” she said with a twinkle.
I didn’t understand how she could be twinkling at a time like this.
“If your sister wishes to be rid of it—”
“She does. Trust me on this.”
“—then let me consult with Marcus, and we’ll see what we can come up with. No promises, however. Sometimes these things can be very sticky. They don’t always want to leave. Oh . . . I wonder what that is just ahead.”
The “just ahead” turned out to be a train that, for some inexplicable reason, was stopped on the tracks, barring the street. Quite a number of cars had lined up on the road ahead of us, trapped by their bumper-to-bumper proximity. Some of the drivers had thrown their vehicles into “Park” and were actually standing on the road outside of their cars, discussing the situation in particular and shooting the breeze in general. Nothing was moving.
I made a last-minute decision and turned off onto a side road before it was too late. “Let’s see if we can find a way around that mess.”
The only possible way around that I knew of, without going several miles out of our way, was cutting across the tracks that ran beneath the largest spill chute at the feed mill, assuming that the stopped train did not venture out that far, so that’s the way I headed.
That decision would prove the last straw in a haystack already prepared to tumble.
Chapter 7
At first I thought my quick thinking had saved the day. We left the town limits and circled around via bumpy and narrow country roads whose edges were already choked with weeds. Hitting Mainline Road, I zipped toward the feed mill, whose towering silos, conveyer systems, and chutes loomed like a cityscape in miniature on the horizon ahead with a dazzling array of security lights bright enough to light up the writhing mists high above. Almost there . . .
Success was nigh.
And that was when I came around a bend and saw the rotating series of red and blue police strobes lighting up the road ahead, determined to spoil my brilliant plan. “What’s this?” Liss mused, staring off into the distance.
“An accident maybe?” I slowed Christine to a crawl. The choke-up seemed to be right at the tracks. Phooey! Foiled again. Only this time there was no turnoff, the road was blocked with both barricades and flares, and like most county roads, it was far too narrow to manage a three-point turn. So much for brilliance. It appeared our only option was to wait for someone to approach and hope that they would allow us to turn around in the feed mill’s parking lot.
A patrol car was stopped across the roadway behind the barricades. I couldn’t see past it or the cars just beyond in order to figure out what the holdup might be. A lone officer stood with a large flashlight in front of the cruiser, the popping red and blues silhouetting him from behind with an unearthly glow. He walked toward us as we crept near and motioned for me to roll down the window. I recognized him from my few times visiting the department to see Tom. Johnson, I thought. Something Johnson.
“Ma’am, if you could just—” he began in the usual clipped tones of policespeak in the moments before recognition struck. “Oh, hey there, Maggie. Sorry you had to happen upon all this. Your bad luck, I guess. We’ll be here awhile. There are some things that are gonna have to happen before I can show you where to go to get outta here.”
Mike, I remembered suddenly with relief. “Hey, Mike. Good to see you. What happened? Someone run off the road?”
“Nah. Nothing that easy. Just a freak-ass accident, I guess. One of the owners fell down from the top of that silo there”—he indicated the largest, tallest, most impressive of the bunch—“and crushed his skull in. Broke a lotta bones in the rest of him, too, but I don’t guess he felt anything by then. Already gone.”
I blinked at him, my stomach wobbling around queasily. “One of the owners, you say?”
“Yeah. One of the Turners. He’s lucky, too—well, at least his family is lucky. He bounced off the hopper that was lined up there for pickup by this here train, and fell right onto the main tracks. Coulda been chopped into bits by the wheels of the train if his brother hadn’t come across him lying there.”
One of the Turners, dead.
“You wanna just pull over as far to the right as you can, Maggie, and I’ll let you know as soon as I can get you outta here.”
“Yes, of course.”
I switched the engine off and turned on my four-way hazard lights. Liss was surveying the action ahead of us, not saying a word. An ambulance had arrived through the main feed mill entrance and had wended its way back around through the maze of silos and tractor trailers and waiting semis.
“It’s happening again, isn’t it?” I murmured.
“What is, ducks?”
“All the weird deaths we’ve had in town.” One of which had been Liss’s own sister.
“The officer said it was an accident.”
“Maybe.” I turned to look at her. “Is that what your instincts are telling you?”
Her enigmatic half-smile answered my question quickly enough. “Perhaps. Perhaps not.”
That’s what I was afraid of.
Damn.
I opened Christine’s door and let myself out. It was too hot inside the car to stay there for long anyway. Outside it wasn’t much cooler, but at least there was the pretense of a breeze teasing us on occasion. I leaned back against my closed car door, watching the scene unfold. One of the Turners, Mike Johnson had said. One of them. I took that to mean that Joel Turner had brothers or sisters. Which Turner was lying out there, about to be scraped off the ground by the trusty boys in blue and tan? And was it just me, or did this whole thing feel just a little surreal?
I saw a uniformed officer coming toward me. Good—maybe he was going to share with us how to get out of there. But as he drew near, I realized I was about to be shared with, all right. Big time. Just not in the way I’d hoped.
“Maggie. I should have known. I don’t suppose you can explain to me how it is I continually find you smack in the middle of yet another . . . incident?”
There was no mistaking the voice, just as I’d recognized the walk. I held up my hand and gave a weak little wave. “Hi, Tom.”
“Well?”
“Well, what?”
“How did you come to be here this time?”
There was no explanation, really. Instinct had guided me away from the logjam of cars on the main road through town. “Just lucky? I guess?”
“Luck. Hm.” He was in full cop mode, but I’d have expected nothing less from him at a time like this. Actually I was feeling a little guilty for the intrusion, even though it had been completely unintentional on my part.
“Liss is here with me,” I said as a small measure of defense.
“Oh, that makes me feel so much better,” he muttered under his breath. I shot him a dirty look, to which he responded by leaning down and waving at her through the windshield. Liss gave him a gay wave in return, one that was far more sincere than his own mocking version. “Is she the only one, or do you have more of your friends hidden away in there?”
I got the impression that he meant one friend in particular—a friend of the male persuasion, in fact—more than any other. “No, it’s just the two of us.”
He nodded, satisfied for the moment.
I indicated the scene ahead of us with my chin. “Who is it, then? I heard it was one of the Turners themselve
s.”
He pressed his lips together. “Johnson has a loose tongue. Yeah, it’s the owner, actually. Joel Turner. His brother found him. Accident. These things happen.”
Joel Turner himself. Libby’s husband. Only the other day he’d been stalking around the feed mill like an angry lion protecting his pride. And maybe he had been, at that. I shook my head, wondering at the ways of a world where synchronicities and coincidence reigned supreme. How else could you explain the strange incident at the feed mill the other day, followed by the odd coincidence of meeting Libby herself, followed by . . . this? Was it prudent to write it all off as being in the wrong place at the right time? Was that even possible?
I no longer could know that for sure. Something sure seemed to be affecting the natural order of things in Stony Mill. I just wish we knew what that something was. At least then, maybe, we could confront it head on before it could do more damage.
“What?” Tom said, seeing my face.
I frowned at him. “Don’t you see? First the dummy, and now this . . . accident? Doesn’t it all seem a tad bit coincidental to you?”
“Well, I admit that the Turners have had a run of bad luck lately—”
“In light of what has happened here tonight, that’s a huge understatement, wouldn’t you say?”
“—but there’s no reason to leap from that into full-blown suspicion of there being more to this than meets the eye. Come on, Maggie. Sometimes an accident is just an accident.”
Maybe.
The silo caught my eye, lit up in all its newly sinister glory. “So he fell from up there?”
He nodded. “From the maintenance walkway.”
I gathered he was referring to the half-caged-in ladder and catwalk that spiraled steeply up the silo until it reached the uppermost level. From there the conveyer connected in from what looked to be an extremely complicated system of moving grains and whatnot around the complex. I looked up at it, wondering where he might have fallen from.
“Quite the drop, eh?” Tom said quietly.
“I’ll say. You think he fell from all the way up?” Yikes. A shiver crept up my spine, despite the trickle of sweat creeping down it.
“He’d have to have, with the amount of damage there is to his head and body. He’s pretty beat up. Of course, this is off the record. The county medical examiner will want to have his say, I’m sure.”
“I’m sure.” Secretly I hoped he was right about the whole coincidence thing. Maybe the notion that it all seemed a bit too happenstance was just fear and suspicion having its way with me. My sensitivity to all matters mysterious was, shall we say, cranked up to High—with good reason, granted—but maybe that was part of the problem. Lately anytime anything out of the ordinary happened, my mind immediately leapt to the esoteric. Tom was right; there was a real chance that this was an accident. Best to leave well enough alone unless there was a reason to suspect. The Turner family would have enough hardships to deal with in the coming days without rumors adding to the mix.
Tom gave me a halfhearted salute and went back to the scene. Liss got out of the vehicle and joined me in my vigil.
“Tom said it was an accident.”
She nodded. “I heard.”
“But you don’t think so either.”
Liss gave a great sigh. “It’s a feeling, more than anything. Who knows. Maybe we’ve both had a bit too much happen over the last several months, eh? Such closeness to death—it’s enough to affect anyone’s perception. I hope”—she paused, reflecting—“I hope that Tom is right. It would be lovely to have this part of the town’s history over and done with.”
Her choice of words spoke volumes. This part. Not that part. Semantics? Or Freudian slip?
The roar of an engine to our left drew our attention in that direction. A sporty green car peeled into the feed mill’s main driveway, sliding sideways across gravel as it came to a sudden stop. The driver, a woman, left the car at a run, narrowly missing coming into the path of the F350 pickup that had been following on her bumper. It didn’t even faze her. She kept up her flailing headlong trajectory toward the collection of emergency vehicles situated around the base of the giant silo. Even from here I could hear her wild sobbing.
It was Libby.
The driver of the F350 caught up to her before she managed to reach the accident scene, catching her by the elbow and spinning her back into his arms. Holding her there when she would have pulled away. Turning her face away when she would have looked. She beat on his chest with her fists, but he held her fast, protecting her from her own desperate need to see her husband.
I found myself leaving the relative anonymity of the sidelines and walking toward the two of them. Someone else had left the circle of officials around the body and was also on an intercept path with the crying woman and her erstwhile protector. He reached them before I did.
“Libby,” the second man said, his face shadowed beneath the brim of a white straw cowboy hat, “what are you doing here, girl? You should go home.”
Libby leaned back within the circle of the first man’s arms, her hands and a thick sheaf of mussed hair covering her pretty face. “I c-can’t!” she wailed. “That’s Joel lying out there, Frank! I—I can’t believe it. I can’t believe this is happening!”
The second man—Frank, she’d called him—stood to one side and reached out a big, work-calloused hand to pat her roughly on the shoulder. He resembled Joel Turner quite a bit, from what I had seen of the man the other day, though he was perhaps a little older and significantly less polished. With his sleeves rolled up to the knotted muscles above his elbows and his baggy overalls, he looked as though he was used to hard work and manual labor. Libby’s protector, too, had the family resemblance, but he was dressed more like an accountant, and though he drove the enormous F350 truck, not a cowboy hat was in evidence. Brothers of Joel, both of them, that was my guess.
The younger of the two caught sight of me as I stood there, watching them. He lifted his chin in acknowledgment of my presence. “I think there’s someone here to see you,” he said, putting his hands on Libby’s shoulders to turn her in my direction.
Sniffling back her grief, she wiped her cheeks with the palms of her hands, then looked over at me. For a full ten seconds, I thought for sure she didn’t recognize me. Then her face crumpled again and she launched herself at me, throwing her arms around my neck and burying her face against my shoulder. I was a little taken aback by the familiarity—I’d been wanting to offer her my sympathies, but never once did I expect this. As I would have comforted one of my nieces, I rubbed her shoulder while she sobbed and sobbed and the men watched on in obvious discomfort. Ordinarily, when faced with someone in so much emotional pain, I would be overwhelmed myself; so much that I would be choking on it. I hoped that meant I was getting better at shielding, because at the moment mine seemed to be holding.
Gently, I extricated myself from her grasp and set her back on her own two feet. “Here, now. Why don’t we go into the office over there and make you some coffee? You don’t need to be here to see all of this, Libby.”
“I think that’s a great idea,” Frank said. I saw his relief in the set of his big shoulders. “I’ll stay out here and wait to hear—”
Libby turned to him, almost desperate. “No. No, come with us, Frank, please. I need to have you both with me. Please.”
Frank hesitated, but the pleading in beautiful, young Libby’s eyes worked magic on the man. “All right.”
The younger brother put his arm around Libby’s shoulders. “Come on, Lib,” he said in a gentle-gruff voice. “We can’t do any good out here anyway.”
He guided her toward the freestanding office building, leaving me to follow along in their wake like some sad kind of third wheel. With the brothers taking charge of the situation, there was really no reason for my presence . . . and yet I felt myself being pulled along with them by some internal guidance I didn’t understand and couldn’t explain. Confused, I glanced over to where I could
see Liss standing beside Christine at the side of the road. I held up my hand and waved to her, glad now that I’d left my keys there with her.
I followed them into the office, wondering how I could extract myself and give them their privacy.
They had flipped on the lights before I stepped over the threshold into the icy cold of the office. It was like stepping from the shower into a meat locker. A shudder started at the base of my spine and worked its way up.
“Who left the AC turned down so low?” Frank said. “Noah, check that, would you?”
The younger brother, Noah, went over to the thermostat on the wall. “Nope. Everything looks okay. It’s set on seventy-eight, just like it always is. You know how Joel hated waste like that.”
“Well, it’s sure as hell not seventy-eight in here right now. We’ll have to arrange to have someone come out and take a look at it in the mor . . . when we reopen,” he revised quickly, stricken by his unintentional gaffe.
I crossed my arms and rubbed at the goose bumps that were raised there. The hairs were lifting at the nape of my neck. Criminey, it was cold. More than cold. It felt like it was getting colder by the minute—I put out a hand, testing the air, waving it back and forth slowly—yes, right here. I looked up. No ceiling register blowing down on me. The floor? There was nothing that broke the tile surface that I could see. Worse yet was the feeling that crawled over my skin the longer I stood there. Strange. Uncomfortable. As though I was an intruder in the space. Just my discomfort at being a part of their private moment, I told myself.
“Brr. It’s freezing in here! Leave the door open, would you, Frank?” Libby said.
I cleared my throat and indicated the coffee bar over against the far wall. “I’ll just make some coffee.”
Libby sat down with a sigh on the only sofa in the sparsely furnished lobby. “Thank you, Maggie. Thank you for being here. I appreciate having another woman present to balance things out. Frank and Noah are a blessing, but . . .” She sighed again and clasped her hands in her lap. “I—I just can’t believe that he’s gone. What’s going to happen to the feed mill without him? It was his baby. He wouldn’t let anyone else near it. Well,” she said, glancing over at Frank, “not really. I mean, Frank worked with him here, of course, but Joel was the one in control, wasn’t he. Always.” She sighed. “I just don’t know what’s going to happen to it. I just don’t know.”
