by Madelyn Alt
“Let’s go fast, please?” I begged.
Now that Eddie was okay with the plan, we sped through faster than I had thought possible. Frank found the ladder on the opposite wall. While the rest of us half climbed, half slipped clumsily down it, Tom brought up the rear while keeping up a steady chatter over the radio. After crawling so far, it felt strange to stand upright, but we all managed.
“You’ve got Minnie?” I asked Marcus worriedly.
“Right here.”
The door at the bottom of the ladder we found to be locked from outside as well, but we could already hear voices shouting at us to stand back, then the clank of a metal axe striking the door. The room was spinning around me, a red haze of energy and blood and fear.
“Pigs in blankets,” Eddie was whimpering again, rocking back and forth with his arms folded tightly, protectively, over his chest. “Pigs in blankets.” I went to him while they bashed at the door and put my arm around his narrow shoulders. Narrow as a boy’s. That’s what he was, a child locked away in a man’s body.
And as I comforted him, I noticed something hanging from a peg on the wall beside the door. Eddie seemed to be staring straight at it, too, shrinking away from it, shrinking in on himself.
Finally the door slammed inward with a rush of air that blissfully did not resonate with hog or blood, and for once I didn’t even care about the humidity. Gloved hands reached for us, pulling us all to safety, one by one. My left hand brushed the hanging thing as I passed through the demolished doorway. Rough fabric registered briefly. Canvas, maybe. A tarp of some sort?
Pigs in blankets.
They led us to safety, to where the medical team had set up to await us, and I was so happy that tonight, at least, their services were needed. We’d all made it out, unsinged, unscathed. Dirty, oh yes. Smoky. But safe. So was Minnie, who had risen up on all fours the moment I’d unzipped her soft-sided carrier, wide-eyed and bright and rested from a very long sleep. I was so relieved, I couldn’t stop kissing her. Then Eddie came and started to whisper to her, working his animal magick, his special gift from the universe. She played with his fingers for a while, then tucked herself up against my chest and began to purr. My girl.
Even the hogs were safe. Terrorized, oh yes. Smoked before their time. But safe. For now. I couldn’t help hoping that some kind soul would change their status from “meant for slaughter” to “meant for transport.” The poor things had been through enough as it was.
Tom refused to sit with the rest of us, preferring instead to prowl about from one cop to the next to gather every ounce of information that he could. He would never change; I knew that. His job was such a huge part of his life that it had become a part of him. But when you stripped that away, did you still have a whole man? Was there even an answer to that question?
My head hurt even thinking about it.
I had expected to see the glow of flames licking the buildings, but I was surprised to see nothing of the sort. Some brilliant soul had found the breaker box, and the complex was bathed with white light awash with the red-blue flashes from the emergency vehicles, but while there was smoke hanging like a low cloud above the roofline, whatever fire had threatened us had already been put out. I crossed myself and said a quick prayer of thanks to Mother Mary, following it up with a whisper of gratitude to the Goddess and all the powers that ran the universe as we knew it. Whoever wanted to claim responsibility for our safety could have at it. I was just grateful for their watchful eye.
There was a flurry of activity all around me, but I couldn’t bring myself to get involved too deeply. It had been a long day, an even longer evening, and I was weary to the bone. And I didn’t know if it was because Eddie was still sitting so close to me or not, but I still had his thoughts and emotions running through my head and body from time to time.
Mean girl. Bad things.
Bad things with pigs in blankets.
I let the thoughts swim ’round and ’round as I leaned my head back and watched the scene about me unfold through half-closed eyes. Marcus came to sit next to me and handed me a damp cloth. I smoothed it over my face to wipe away the grime. It left behind a sense of coolness that was surprisingly revitalizing. I was thankful for that, too. Even if the cloth was slightly rough. Still, not as rough as that canvas . . .
Pigs in blankets.
The thought reverberated through my head, relentless, insistent. Meaningful.
A canvas blanket?
Not a blanket. A canvas tarp, heavy duty, with metal grommets, meant to withstand a heavy load. Everyone had at least one of them around, they were ever so useful, they could even stand up to . . .
I tilted my head back, leaning it against Marcus’s shoulder as I gazed up at the vast system of conveyers over our heads. We were situated quite near where Joel Turner had been found. Another near tragedy at Turner Field and Grain Systems. Bad things with pigs in blankets.
“It was Joel,” I whispered in awe and in amazement as the realization clicked into place. “Not a pig at all.”
That’s why there had been a widespread trail of blood droplets. That’s why Eddie had said that pigs in blankets don’t move. Somehow, Joel Turner must have been incapacitated elsewhere—and my guess was that it was in the slaughterhouse. A place where blood was always present, even when it is rinsed away by careful hands. It would explain the presence of animal blood found on Joel’s clothing, wouldn’t it? And anything that might have been missed was easily explained away. And then he was—what? Wrapped in a tarp, dragged over the ground, and then lifted aloft with the pulley doing the job? Raised to the highest of the high, and then released, without remorse, to fall to the cement below? The tarp would have been easy to dispose of, with no one the wiser. A regrettable accident at Turner Field and Grain Systems. So tragic. Poor Joel.
Who would have thought his wife would have done something like that?
Mean, mean, jelly bean, kissed a toad, thinks she’s a queen . . .
“It was Libby and Noah,” I said, mostly to myself. And then wearily, lazily, I lifted my gaze to find Tom standing at my feet, staring at me.
“How do you do that?” he demanded, half-exasperated, half-admiring.
“Do what?”
“Put everything together like that without knowing all the details?”
I smiled up at him. “I have my connections.”
Libby and Noah hadn’t expected a police witness to their exploits that night. They hadn’t expected a police escort from the property either, especially not in the back of two squad cars. But life has a way of surprising a person in even the most well-planned moments. Going with the flow, sometimes that was the only answer. Too bad for Libby and Noah, going with the flow was going to mean a very long trip up the river.
Tom had no way of knowing when he called in our situation that the perpetrators were still on-site. He might have had his suspicions by then, but at the time his only concern was to get us all out alive. Had he not been there with a direct link to Dispatch and fire crews, would Libby and Noah have had the time to ensure the fires would do the job intended? Locked away deep within the extensive building complex as we had been, without a cell phone among us (from now on, I would have it on my body at all times!), they would have had a hard time finding us, assuming they would have deduced by our cars that there were still people present on-site. Would it have been too late?
I really didn’t think they knew that Tom, Marcus, and I were in the building with Frank and Eddie. At least, I hoped they didn’t . . . but that didn’t make them any less of a threat to our health. Petite, lovely, dark-haired Libby was willing to take not only the life of her husband, but the lives of at least two others, without regret, without any sense of humanity or compassion or remorse. And for what? That was the part I didn’t understand.
Tom explained it all to me quietly later. Oh, the two had denied any wrongdoing at first, but when it was made clear to Noah that Libby planned to use him as her scapegoat, he spoke readily enough. He t
old Tom how he and Libby had been lovers all along. How they had met in college and had a passionate affair that ended badly when she turned him aside for his older, steady, and suddenly quite wealthy older brother, a brother he’d always been jealous of. He spoke of how Joel had returned from their honeymoon changed from something that had happened on the wonderland ski trip holiday, something that had scared him to death. He told how Libby had confessed to him one heated night that she’d made a mistake. That she’d known it from the moment the judge said “man and wife,” and that she’d tried to settle it herself, but that it hadn’t worked out quite the way she’d planned. Noah knew then that she must have tried something and failed. But he didn’t warn Joel. Instead he’d let himself be sweet-talked and played and coaxed and convinced that they were the two who were meant to be together, forever. Add to that the illicit sex and the escalating value of the Turner Field and Grain Systems, and you had a heady hormonal cocktail guaranteed to tempt a weak-minded person to be very bad indeed. Libby came up with the plan; Noah provided the action. Joel never saw them coming.
Frank had mentioned that cash flow was tight at the feed mill, with all the buyouts and closings and upgrades . . . but Libby wasn’t planning to be in it for the long haul. Even before Joel was dead, she had secretly been in contact with potential buyers and assessors, looking for just the right number that would set her up for the rest of her life—and Noah, too, if he played his cards right—without the hassle of day-to-day business management.
It was too bad for Libby that Joel had underplayed the seriousness of his phobia. Had she realized, her plan might have been played out differently. Her inattention cost her everything. By the time Dr. Dorffman’s eventual confirmation of the purpose for Joel’s therapy came in, it seemed almost an afterthought.
Libby denied everything. She was the victim here. Why couldn’t they see that?
I felt sorriest for Frank. He’d lost one brother; could he somehow find it in his heart to forgive the younger his selfishness and stupidity?
And so the wheel of the year turned another notch as the days swelled to their longest at the summer solstice barely a week later. Litha, Liss called it. A fire festival. How fitting, that. Liss had invited me and Marcus and all of the N.I.G.H.T.S. to a celebration of the event as a part of a communal effort by Keepers of the Old Ways throughout the area. I was a little afraid that the Reverend Baxter Martin might catch wind of the plans, but apparently the festivities went off without a single fundamentalist hitch. I had the feeling, though, that we hadn’t seen the last of him yet. As for me, I had gotten close enough to the fire at the feed mill to want to avoid that element entirely. Instead I spent the longest day with Mel, my own personalized version of the pregnant Goddess incarnate, and the two little faeries who danced at her feet, feeding my soul with family things. Healing it with love.
Once the more threatening spirit had been evacuated from her home, Mel seemed to kind of enjoy the remaining spirits. She asked the girls often what they were saying, what they were doing, and it would be a big topic of conversation whenever Mel had company over for months to come. Personally I think she liked having house ghosts almost as much as she liked having house guests.
The sun was setting when I made my way home. I stood quietly in the yard, watching its final descent in a resplendent glory of pinks and reds and golds. My own personal version of the Sun God joined me there without a word—Marcus, dressed casually in a pair of pale wash jeans and a simple cotton tunic in a woodsy shade of green that made his hair seem even darker where it curled down his back, his eyes even bluer, his teeth whiter. He slid into place behind me, looping his arms around my waist and touching his chin to the top of my head as we silently witnessed the last flare of red, the last glimmer of pink, the enveloping indigo blanket of dusk, while all around us the lightning bugs twinkled and sparked.
I didn’t ask how he’d come to be there. I didn’t ask why. I simply accepted the gift from the Goddess for what it was.
Questions, you see, often brought answers.
I didn’t know if I was ready for that.
I didn’t know if I was ready for that at all.
