Threshold

by King, R. L.

  “Hillerman’s?”

  “Department store,” Gough said, hooking a thumb back toward Main Street. “Miz Pearsall did all the holiday displays, so she’d go in at night and finish ’em up.”

  “So that was—when it happened?” Stone asked, keeping his tone carefully neutral.

  “Yeah. Few days ago, night before the big sale. ’Course they canceled it after that. Only right thing to do. Store’s been closed ever since.” Gough looked up as if he suddenly realized he’d said too much. “But listen, it ain’t right to be tellin’ tales like this about folks when they’re gone. It don’t matter how she died, just that she was a great lady around here for a long time, and we’re all gonna miss her.”

  “I quite understand,” Stone murmured, graciously accepting that they wouldn’t get any more details from Ralph Gough. “The rooms—?”

  “Oh. Yeah.” He aimed a suspicious look at Verity and Jason. “You three related?” Given Stone’s obvious British accent and Jason’s just as obvious American one, he looked like he doubted it.

  “She’s my sister,” Jason said, a little annoyed. “Why? Is there some problem?”

  “Nah, no problem,” the man said, refusing to be perturbed. “Just don’t want no funny business goin’ on in my rooms, is all.”

  Verity spoke for the first time, looking amazed. “We’re here for a funeral,” she reminded him, you old perv unstated, but heavily implied. “Remember?”

  Gough shrugged. “Don’t get your wind up, miss. I didn’t mean nothin’.” He reached around behind him, pulled two keys off a wooden pegboard, and handed them to Stone along with a slip of paper. “Sign here and leave a credit card number.”

  Stone, Jason, and Verity remained inside their rooms just long enough to drop their bags on the beds and freshen up a little after the drive. They reconvened near the car in a few minutes.

  “What now?” Jason asked.

  “Don’t know about you two, but I’m hungry,” said Verity. “Why don’t we grab something to eat and look around?”

  Once again Jason started to say something and decided against it. This time, though, Stone noticed. He tilted his head. “You look like you’ve got something on your mind, Jason. Out with it.”

  Jason shrugged. “I was just thinking what that old guy said made me curious about what happened. But that’s pretty tactless, since the lady was your friend.”

  “Let’s walk,” Stone said. “I could do with stretching my legs a bit after that drive, and it’s not too cold out.”

  As they started off, he addressed Jason again. “Not tactless at all. In fact, I was rather wondering the same thing. As I mentioned, Eleanor Pearsall was a mage. I don’t think a normal attacker would have been able to get the drop on her. And it does sound like whatever happened was quite unpleasant.”

  “The guy said it happened at the department store,” Verity reminded them. “Why don’t we have lunch and then walk by there? Might be somebody around who can tell us more.”

  Freed from fear of tactlessness by Stone’s mutual interest in the details of the crime, Jason put in, “He also said something about ‘them boys.’ It sounds like they’ve got whoever did it in custody already.”

  “Indeed,” Stone agreed. His eyes narrowed. “I’d like the opportunity to have a few words with these ‘boys,’ whoever they are, but I doubt that will be possible.”

  It was less than half a mile back to the downtown area; they decided on the sub shop for lunch and settled down at a table near the front window to eat. A few customers drifted in, ordered food to go, and drifted back out again, eyeing the strangers with a mix of curiosity and distrust. Nobody else dined inside the restaurant.

  “So,” Jason said around a mouthful of roast-beef sandwich, “You say that you don’t think your friend got jumped by somebody sneaking up on her?”

  Stone shrugged. “It could have happened,” he admitted. “Eleanor was in her mid-fifties, and the last time I saw her she didn’t seem like the sort who got herself into sticky situations often. But even white mages can defend themselves if the need arises, and I don’t doubt she could have dealt with an attacker if it were a self-defense situation.”

  Jason nodded. “So that means they either caught her completely by surprise and overpowered her—or maybe she knew them.”

  “Somebody she knew would do this to her?” Verity asked. “It sounds like people around here liked her. And I’m kinda thinking this isn’t a high crime area.”

  “You’d be surprised,” Jason said. “More people than you might think are killed by people they know. And little towns like this are almost never as squeaky-clean as they look. Could be a robbery gone bad, or drugs—” He spread his hands. “Lots of things.”

  “That doesn’t explain the ‘horrific’ part, though,” Stone reminded him. “You didn’t hear my friend on the phone yesterday. Whatever happened to Eleanor, it wasn’t your garden-variety murder.”

  “If you really want to investigate but you don’t want to ask people,” Verity said, “we could always check the papers. We’ve got the rest of the day, and we did see a library back there.”

  “Let’s take a look around first,” Stone said. “We can always check the papers later today. We’ve got some time to kill until tomorrow morning.”

  After finishing their lunch, they left the sub shop and headed up Main Street toward Hillerman’s Department Store. Like the other shops on the street, it was of an old fashioned design, with two large display windows flanking front doors set back from the street. The displays in the windows were elevated about three feet from street level, both covered with newspaper so there was no way to see inside. A hand-lettered sign on the front door read, “Hillerman’s will be closed until further notice. We are very sorry for any inconvenience.” In front of the doors what they had thought was a floral display as they drove by turned out to be a makeshift memorial of flowers, a large wreath, jars of potpourri, candles, several teddy bears and stuffed cats, and some handwritten signs proclaiming things like We Miss You, Ms. Pearsall, and RIP, Dear Friend. A photograph of a plump, cheerful-looking middle-aged woman with sparkling eyes accompanied one of the floral arrangements. Many of the flowers had already begun to wilt.

  The three of them stood there for a minute or two, taking in the scene. “Clearly she was well loved in this town,” Stone said.

  Jason nodded. “Are there—any other mages you know that live here? Maybe if there are, they might know something.”

  “No, not anywhere nearby, as far as I’m aware. The woman who called me lives about thirty miles away. She’ll be here tomorrow.”

  Verity looked around, her gaze roaming over the entire area as they spoke. Suddenly she stiffened and poked Stone, who was closest to her, in the arm.

  “Uh...guys?” she said in an odd voice.

  “What?” Jason looked around, but he didn’t see anything he hadn’t seen before.

  “Look.” She pointed down, near where the front wall of the department store met the sidewalk.

  Stone too looked. “I don’t—Bloody hell...”

  It was hard to see, written in white chalk on the side of the building and half-obscured by a light dusting of snow, but once they spotted it, it was unmistakable:

  Chapter Three

  Jason stared. “Holy shit.”

  They’d all seen plenty of symbols like this back in California—the hastily scrawled code the Forgotten used to communicate with each other. But to find an example in the middle of a tiny town on the other side of the country right after a murder—

  “It’s not quite the same,” Verity said. “See, there’s an extra line. Do you think it still means ‘bad place’?”

  “Well, this sure as hell is a bad place,” Jason said. “Question is, was it here before the murder, or did somebody put it here after?”

  “That’s one of the questions,�
� Stone agreed, sounding preoccupied. “There are many others. Such as: who put it here? Is there a Forgotten presence in this town? And more importantly, is the Evil here?” He snapped back to focus. “We need to do a bit more investigating, I think. Such as looking around to see if we can find any more of these symbols.”

  Jason was about to answer, but he looked up to see a man in a police uniform approaching them.

  “Can I help you folks with anything?” the man asked.

  Stone shook his head. “No, thank you, officer. We’re in town for Ms. Pearsall’s memorial tomorrow. She was a friend. We were merely—paying our respects.”

  The cop looked for a moment like he was deciding whether he should be suspicious, but finally nodded. “All right, then. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Stone nodded, looking suddenly more upset than he had a few moments ago. “I understand—you have the perpetrators in custody? The proprietor at the motel where we’re staying said something about ‘those boys’?”

  “Yes, sir. Well, one of them, at any rate. The other one is beyond any sort of punishment now except God’s, of course.”

  “He got away?” Jason asked.

  The cop gave him an odd look. “No. You must not know much about what happened. We aren’t releasing the details, but that much was in the papers. The killers were a couple of private security guards. We found one of them dead—apparent suicide—at the scene of the crime. The other one is in custody. We’re still investigating the case, so I can’t give you any further information.”

  “I understand. Thank you, officer.” Stone nodded to him and then motioned for Jason and Verity to follow him. Once they had verified that the cop had headed off in the other direction, he stopped again in front of one of the knick-knack shops and appeared to be examining the wares in the window. “Well, that got us a bit more information, anyway. Security guards.”

  “Why would security guards kill somebody?” Verity asked. “Seems like people would know pretty quick who did it, if she was killed inside the department store and they had access to buildings after hours.”

  “That adds another to our ever-growing store of good questions,” Stone said.

  “That cop was county,” Jason said. “I don’t think he’s from Woodwich.”

  “Is that relevant?” Stone asked.

  Jason shrugged. “Not really, except it probably means the town itself doesn’t have a police force. Lots of towns this small don’t, especially with all the funding cuts in the last few years. They end up having to consolidate with other nearby towns, or more often just let the county handle it. So it probably means he didn’t know your friend personally.”

  “Which might be the reason for the security guards,” Verity pointed out.

  “Well,” Stone said, “We’re not detectives, and it’s not our job to investigate the crime. All I want is to know a bit more about what happened, and figure out if there’s a Forgotten presence in Woodwich. If there is, I’d like to find them and have a chat with them if we can. There’s no reason to believe anything out of the ordinary is going on—as you pointed out, Jason, murders happen all the time, and my friend’s version of ‘horrific’ might be a lot tamer than we’re suspecting. It’s a terrible thing if Eleanor was murdered during a botched robbery attempt, but—” He shook his head ruefully. “—these things do happen, and we move on. Even mages sometimes die in perfectly random, normal ways that have nothing to do with magic.”

  Jason nodded. “Yeah, you’re probably right. I’ve seen and heard about plenty of pretty awful crimes that are nothing more than somebody getting scared and doing something they regret, or somebody letting their emotions get the better of them—and you also learn real quick when you hang around with cops that people don’t always tell their friends everything that’s going on in their lives. Let’s go look around some more, then hit the library and see what we can find.”

  They walked the three blocks of Main Street, up one side and down the other, and found no additional instances of anything that looked like Forgotten symbols. “Let’s check the backs of the buildings, especially on the side Hillerman’s is on,” Stone said when they finished.

  What they found there was a narrow alley, wide enough for a large truck to traverse if its driver was careful about minding the dumpsters and piled detritus behind some of the businesses. Its dinginess stood in contrast to the neat appearance of the little Colonial-style storefronts, with dirty drifts of snow melting against the buildings, piles of trash, and soggy, empty boxes.

  Again, sharp-eyed Verity spotted the symbols first. The first set was behind Hillerman’s, near the heavy metal back door. Three of the modified “bad place” symbols lined up at knee level, along with two others they didn’t recognize. Stone pulled out a small notebook and a pen from his overcoat pocket and jotted the two new ones down, along with the updated version of the one they knew.

  “Curiouser and curiouser...” he murmured. Jason covered his hand with his jacket sleeve and tried the door. It was locked tight.

  They found a second set scrawled behind one of the bars a few doors down from the department store. This time, they recognized the familiar triangle-and-rays “good place” sign, along with another collection of several others they didn’t know. Stone dutifully entered them in his book next to the first set, adding a note about where they’d found them and when.

  “The ones behind the store look fresher than these,” Jason observed, squatting down to examine the new batch. “These look like they’ve been here awhile. In fact, look—these two have been painted on, not drawn with chalk.”

  “Good catch,” Stone agreed. “Let’s nip in here for a moment then, shall we? Maybe we can find out why this is a ‘good place.’”

  The back door was open. They headed down a hallway with restroom doors on either side and old-style beer signs on the walls, and out into the bar proper. Unsurprisingly, for a mid-afternoon in a town where they hadn’t seen ten people since they arrived, the place was deserted except for a rangy, bored-looking fiftyish man behind the bar, who looked like he was doing a crossword puzzle in a magazine. He looked startled to see them and hastily stashed the magazine. “Afternoon, folks. Help you?”

  Stone sat down at the bar, and Jason and Verity joined him. “Guinness, please, if you have it.”

  “’Course I do,” the man said. Jason ordered a local microbrew and Verity got iced tea.

  “Not from around here,” the bartender said as he got their drinks together and placed them on the old but scrupulously clean surface in front of them. His voice was gravelly and easygoing: the voice of a man whom it would be very hard to get a rise out of. His words held no suspicion or animosity, simply an observation.

  “We’re here for the memorial tomorrow,” Stone said. “Eleanor Pearsall.”

  The man nodded, his craggy face clouding. “Yeah, I suspected so. Seen a few new folks in town today—figured that was why.” He shook his head. “Horrible, horrible thing, it was. I didn’t see anything, of course. Too early in the morning for me to be out and about, and the police had the place all covered up by the time I got down here. But those folks who did see—”

  Stone raised an eyebrow. “Saw—what?”

  He glanced up, surprised. “You didn’t hear, then.”

  “No. All we’ve heard is that she was—murdered inside the store. And that the police have a suspect in custody.”

  The bartender took a deep breath. “If you were friends of hers, I’m not sure you’ll want to hear this. It wasn’t pretty.”

  Jason’s voice was gentle. “I’m guessing if this was as bad as it sounds, we’ll hear about it anyway. Maybe we should just get it over with.”

  The bartender thought about that for several seconds, then finally nodded. “All right, then. Fair enough. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. Name’s Bill, by the way. Bill Miller.”

  Stone intr
oduced himself and the others. “You—knew Eleanor, then?”

  Miller nodded. “Everybody knew Eleanor. She was—kind of a local character. Eccentric, you know? But a lot of people in Woodwich are what you might call eccentric. This is an old town, and it attracts its share of interesting individuals. Odd, but harmless. People who kind of—march to their own drummer, let’s say. But the nice thing about the town is that everybody pretty much gets along. It’s like we all tolerate each other’s eccentricities. It’s one of the things the people around here are proud of.”

  Stone smiled a little. “Sounds like just my sort of place.”

  “The point is, we don’t have crime in Woodwich. Oh, sure, sometimes a few bored teenagers get together and raise a little hell, or somebody has too much to drink and runs their car into a light pole, but I can’t remember the last time we had a robbery or any kind of violent crime. I know for sure that what happened to Eleanor Pearsall was the first murder around here in—” He thought about it for a few moments. “—a good fifteen years.”

  “Indeed?” Stone asked with a raised eyebrow.

  Miller nodded. “I know that’s hard to believe—you folks are probably from somewhere a lot bigger, where you just expect you’re gonna see murders in the papers every now and then, especially with the world the way it is lately. But it’s true. That’s what makes this all the more shocking.”

  “So you’re saying it was—out of the ordinary?” Jason asked. “Not just a robbery gone wrong or something?”

  “Who knew what was in the minds of those boys?” Miller shook his head. “They’re local boys—I’ve known ’em since they were kids. I know their parents—they’re just sick about the whole thing. Dwight and Kurt weren’t saints—liked to smoke a little pot now and then and get drunk, but they were good boys overall, and they took their jobs seriously.” He looked up. “You sure you want to hear this? Last chance to back out.”