THE WITCH'S KEY (Detective Marcella Witch's Series. Book 3)

by Dana Donovan

  Carlos looked at me as though I were a genius. “Right,” he said, nodding to let me know that he got it. He followed my lead by taking a swig and spitting it out as I had done. But then he took it a step further, splashing tequila down the front of his coat and on his pants. He even went so far as to dab a little behind each ear. I’m sure he thought it was a good idea. I could tell that from the way he capped the bottle and awaited my reaction with a proud smile. I smiled back, not wanting to burst his bubble.

  “Nice touch,” I said. “Now let’s go.”

  We continued down the path, which emptied out into a natural clearing some twenty yards in diameter. In the center, a robust campfire burned with flames crackling three to four feet above a mound of roughly harvested tree limbs and kindling.

  Around the fire sat seven men and a teenage boy that looked as though he hadn’t showered in weeks. An old man sitting on a pine log spotted us first. He nudged the guy beside him to get his attention and pointed at us as we emerged from the shadows. That got the rest of the heads in the group looking our way. I didn’t know what to expect, but I didn’t want to startle anyone either. So, I waved my hand and called out to make my intentions known.

  “Evenin`, gents,” I said, wishing I had checked with Spinelli for some secret hobo greeting. “Might we join you?”

  “Don’t worry. We’re not cops,” Carlos shouted. Oh, how I could have killed him.

  The younger men and the boy looked to the old man. I saw him give a nod to the group before calling us into their circle. We thanked him for the invite and then picked a spot on an empty log to sit down.

  The first thing Carlos did was pull the tequila bottle out from under his coat and offered it around. One particularly skinny fellow sitting beside him took the bottle, but not before commenting on the way Carlos smelled.

  “Whatcha do, bathe in it?” he said, and he laughed. Carlos thinned his lips but never smiled.

  “They call me, Bulldog,” I said, addressing the group in general. “And this here,” I pointed at Carlos, “is Havana Joe. It’s sure nice of you all to let us join you.”

  The group eyed me suspiciously. I didn’t suspect for a minute that they bought my line. Although none of them fit the stereotype of what I imagined a typical hobo might look like, it seemed obvious that Carlos and I didn’t fit in at all. It’s not that our dress wasn’t convincing enough. It was. And in a line-up, I doubt if any working stiff could have picked us out as imposters. But something else, something less tangible stood out, even to me. I could see in their faces, a certain leer of wariness. Even the boy had it: that hardened look that separates a street dog from a housedog. Carlos and I may have nailed the dress, and in Carlos’ case, even the smell, but we could not fake the look of the experienced rail traveler. My only hope was that they might accept us as newbies and open the door for us just a little. My relief came when the old man opened that door.

  “They call me, Thatch,” he said, and then he went around the circle. “That there is, Skeet, he’s from the bayou country; Milwaukee Mike, Dogfish Denny, Tumbleweed, we just call him Weeds though; Buffalo Bobby, he ain’t from Buffalo, he just looks like one; Rags is the fella sitting next to your friend, and the boy yonder is Oliver.”

  “Oliver?”

  “Yeah, on account of he looks like that kid in the Dickens story.”

  “Oliver Twist?”

  “That’s him.”

  “I see. Well, nice to meet you all.” I pointed to Carlos. “I hope you don’t mind us intruding like this, but we’re kind of new to the whole rail-riding business.”

  That spawned an outburst of spontaneous laughter around the circle. The skinny guy, the one Thatch called Rags, even blew a stream of tequila out his nose, having been caught off guard by my comment while taking a swig. Carlos and I exchanged uncomfortable glances, but neither of us felt particularly threatened. The old man pulled himself together first, and after taking the bottle from Rags and belting back one, he said, “You’re kinda new, huh? Well, don’t that beat all?”

  I looked at him, confused. “What do you mean?”

  “Means we knew you were a couple of Aunties the minute you walked in.”

  “Aunties?” said Carlos.

  “Sure, old angellinas. Whatcha do, hear `bout the jamboree and figure you’d try to get in on the fun?”

  I immediately saw that the door old Thatch opened was not only a way in, but also a way out. I slapped my knee and shook my head in defeat. “Yeah, you got us.” I poked Carlos with my elbow. “Ain’t he got us, Joe?”

  Carlos followed suit right away. “Damn if he don’t. I told you we wouldn’t get away with it.”

  “What tipped you off?” I asked.

  The old man pointed at our shoes. “Thems for one,” he said. “Both your clothes are old and soiled, but your shoes are clean and new.”

  “And yer hands,” said Rags. “Ya got no dirt un`er yer nails or in the creases of yer skin. Ya ought know that train dirt sticks to ya sum`um aweful.”

  “Hair, too,” the boy said. “You messed it up to look dirty, but it’s still clean and shinny.”

  “I guess we wouldn’t have fooled nobody,” I said.

  “Not even the bulls,” said Thatch. “But don’t worry. We’ll letchas hang out. Ya seem like good eggs.

  Right about then, the bottle of tequila came around to me. It seemed like a good idea to take a swig and this time swallow, which I did. I handed the booze to Carlos and he wasted no time in putting his dent in the bottle as well. We sat there a while longer, shooting the bull and watching the fire. I told them that Carlos and I were father and son, looking to rekindle a lost connection by engaging in an adventure that we had talked about for years. I said we had always wanted to ride the rails and that attending the jamboree together would mean the world to us. For our candid admission, Thatch and the guys rewarded us with wonderful tales of life on the rails. We learned about hobo traditions and about the misconceptions that all hobos are bums.

  “We’re free spirits,” said Skeet. “It’s not that we don’t want to work. We just don’t need much.”

  “It’s about open sky and enjoying the great outdoors,” another said. I think it was Buffalo Bobby, but to tell the truth, I kept getting him and Milwaukee Mike mixed up.

  “No,” said Weeds. “It’s more `bout getting out of your dead end job and not getting chained to a desk your whole life.” To that, Dogfish agreed.

  The only one that never said much was the boy, Oliver. I didn’t make him out to be one of them lambs that Spinelli talked about. If so, then he was a lamb without a wolf. His closest friend appeared to be Rags, but he seemed more of the brotherly type to him than anything else. In any case, I imagined that whatever pushed the kid out of his home and into the arms of transients was probably something he’d rather not discuss. I waited until the tequila was almost gone before broaching the subject that I really wanted to talk about.

  “Let me ask you,” I said, addressing my question to Thatch. “What do you make about all these suicides lately?”

  “Suicides?”

  “Yeah. You’ve heard about them, haven’t you?”

  “I heard about hobos getting killed.”

  “But you don’t believe they were suicides?”

  “Don’t seem likely.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “`Cause I knew some of them men. They weren’t no more suicidal than you or me.”

  “So, what do you think? Did people from Gitana kill them?”

  He reached for the bottle of tequila and someone, Weeds, I think, handed it to him. Thatch pitched the bottle back and killed the last of it in one long swig. Then after tossing the empty onto the fire and wiping his mouth on his sleeve, he said coldly, “Oh, it was Gitana, all right. But it weren’t no people.”

  I gave Carlos a curious glance. He shrugged discreetly, but at least a couple of the guys, including the boy, saw it.

  “I don’t understand,” I said to Thatch. “If Gi
tana employees aren’t behind it, then how—”

  “It’s Gypsy!” he snapped. “Don’t you get it?”

  I reeled back, nearly knocking Carlos right off the stump. I almost asked him what he knew about Gypsy, but then caught myself, realizing that he could not possibly mean my Gypsy. “Excuse me,” I said. “but I don’t understand.”

  He looked at me forgivingly. “`Course you don’t. How could you? You weren’t even born then.”

  “When?”

  “Way back, a long time `go, the last time that Gypsy rode the freights.”

  I swallowed back the lump in my throat. It was my Gypsy. I just knew it. “Are you talking about Jersey Jake’s Gypsy?” I asked.

  The old man’s face grew white as ash. His eyes came down on me in a crush of suspicion. “What do you know about Jake?”

  “I don’t…I mean, not much. I’ve heard stories. That’s all. We both have.”

  “I haven’t,” said Carlos. I elbowed him again. “Oh, wait a minute. Maybe I have.”

  “Forget it,” I said. “Look, Thatch, I don’t mean to get anyone excited. I’m just curious. I’ve heard about this Jake guy and his companion, Gypsy. All I wanted was to know a little more.”

  “Really? Well then, if you heard about Gypsy, then you know about the autumn of 42. That’s when it all started.”

  “What started?”

  “The serial killings. For five years, she rode the freight lines, choosing her victims carefully and then killing them in the most despicable ways.”

  “How do you know it was Gypsy?”

  He scoffed. “Because she always left her sign. Sometimes she would sketch it out in chalk or coal dust, other times she would draw it using the blood of her victims.”

  At that point, my heart was racing too quickly for me to catch my breath. If I wasn’t already sitting, I believe I would have dropped from hyperventilation. I just could not believe that the woman I thought was my mother was also a cold-blooded murderer. I closed my eyes and concentrated on breathing normally.

  In the back of my mind I had created an image of this woman, based mainly on the story Pops told me back at the hospice center. His earlier description of her had me painting a picture of someone that looked a lot like Lilith. And after he told me of her hotshot attitude and her hair-trigger temper, I had to really work at convincing myself that it wasn’t. But the signs were all there. I considered the intimate knowledge of railroad terms and hobo jargon that Lilith displayed back at the Cyber Café; the axle grease on her jeans and the slip up she made in mentioning Jersey Jake’s name.

  Of course, I could forgive all of that as coincidence if not for her role in the murders of Doctor Lieberman and the Kayo twins. It’s something I could never prove, and though extenuating circumstances may have existed, the truth remained that I had no idea what really goes on in the mind of a witch.

  I had all but gotten my thoughts around that when it dawned on me that one broad assumption could explain my inclusion in Lilith’s rite of passage ceremony and her subsequent refusal to allow intimacy into our relationship. One broad assumption, supported by a string of circumstantial observations, and yet, call me a hopeless romantic, I was unwilling to make that final leap.

  After catching my breath and calming my pulse, I asked Thatch about the signs that Gypsy left behind. What he described was a crude skull and crossbones symbol with the letter ‘G’ over the skull.

  “How do you know the ‘G’ stood for Gypsy?” I asked.

  He looked me in the eye and answered, “`Cause Jersey Jake said so.”

  He said it with such conviction that I just had to ask him, “Thatch. Are you Jersey Jake?”

  He laughed, though I noticed he didn’t say no. I wanted to press him further, and I suppose I should have, but the tequila was gone and I felt that our welcome was wearing thin. So I drove the conversation back to the topic of dead transients and worked on trying to understand the connections between the cases then and now.

  “I’m still in the dark about this,” I said to Thatch. “You had these murders way back in the 40’s. What makes you think that Gypsy could possibly come back now and murder again? If she’s still alive, then she has got to be a very old woman now.”

  “Who said she’s alive?”

  “You think she’s a ghost?”

  A nervous laugh rolled throughout the circle. “How else would you explain it?”

  “Explain what?”

  “Come on. Gitana Freight Lines? You think that’s coincidental?”

  “I still don’t follow.”

  “Gitana,” said Carlos. “It means Gypsy in Spanish.”

  I turned to him. “What?”

  “You didn’t know that?”

  “No! Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I don’t know. You didn’t ask.”

  He was right. I hadn’t asked. Neither had I told him that my mother was a smokin` hot hobo who could hop a freight on the fly with both hands tied behind her back. If I had, I would have also had to mention that dad was a sniveling coward who knocked her up and then caught out on a hotshot the next day to skirt his parental responsibilities. All in all, though, I’m not bitter about it. I don’t think.

  I turned again to Thatch and said, “Okay. Let’s say it’s no coincidence. Over sixty years ago some woman named Gypsy went around killing transients, and now transients are turning up dead around a railroad company named Gypsy. How does that make her ghost responsible?”

  “It doesn’t,” he said.

  “All right, then.”

  “But when you find Gypsy’s mark by the bodies of the victims, then you can’t deny it.”

  “You mean the recent victims?”

  Thatch nodded. “Uh-huh.”

  I looked to Carlos. He gave me another empty shrug. Neither of us had heard of any signs left at the sites of the alleged suicides. But then, by the very nature of the circumstances, the sites of apparent suicides are not generally combed over so well for evidence of a suspicious nature.

  “How do you know that the signs were there this time?” I asked.

  “I seen`em,” Thatch answered. “We all seen`em.”

  As I surveyed the men, I could see them all nodding in agreement. Even Oliver acknowledged as much.

  I said, “I understand that there are witnesses to a few of the suicides. They reported seeing the victims succumb to no external forces as they placed themselves in harm’s way.”

  “None external,” Thatch repeated, bolstering his argument. “That’s `cause you can’t see a ghost.”

  I rocked forward on the log to adjust a pinch in my butt. “So, you’re convinced?”

  He nodded. “We’re all convinced.”

  As I rocked back into my original position, Carlos shifted his weight unexpectedly. Our momentum rolled the log some and continued carrying us backwards, beyond the point of balance until we both spilled from our seat and landed flat on our backs in the dirt. The boy, Oliver, who had barely said boo all evening, spotted Carlos’ Glock in his shoulder holster. He sprang to his feet, pointed and shouted in his girly prepubescent voice, “He’s got a gun! Look. He’s got a gun!”

  By the time we pulled ourselves up, the circle of hobos had scattered into the woods like roaches. I said to Carlos, “Okay, I’d say that went about as well as one might expect. Didn’t it?”

  He smiled back. “Yes. I believe it did.”

  Ten

  Carlos and I stopped at The Brewer’s Mug for a couple of beers after leaving the jungle. We talked about what we had just learned, the railroad related murders of the 1940s and the mysterious calling sign that the killer, supposedly Gypsy, left behind at each. I also filled Carlos in on what Pops told me about Gypsy and about Jersey Jake being my biological father.

  “And something else,” I said. If it wasn’t Carlos I doubt I would have shared the thought. “I don’t want to believe it, but I have this nagging hunch that Lilith isn’t telling me everything she knows about this Jake fellow.
”

  “You mean your dad?”

  “Yes. No. Jake’s not my dad. He’s just some deadbeat sperm donor with no sense of pride or responsibility. As far as I’m concerned, that poor old bastard back at the hospice center, dying of cancer, he’s my real dad. He may have left me on the doorstep of an orphanage, but at least he gave me five of the best years my childhood had ever known.”

  Carlos shrank back. “Ooh, sorry. Didn’t mean to hit a nerve there.”

  I waved it off. “Forget it.”

  “So, what makes you think she’s holding out?”

  “Lilith?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m not sure, but she’s being more secretive than usual since this case broke. You know she’s been going out at night till all hours of the morning?”

  “Doing what?”

  I shook my head. “Don’t know. She says she’s hanging out at the Internet Café, but….”

  “You don’t believe her.”

  “I’m sorry to say, I don’t. Did I tell you that last night she came home with axle grease on her pants?”

  “On her ass?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Hey, maybe she had car trouble.”

  I looked at him seriously. “Carlos, we’re talking about Lilith here. Her idea of working on a car is figuring out how to stop the intermittent sweep on the wiper switch.”

  He chuckled. “You still doing that to her?”

  I shrugged with guilty pleasure. “Yeah, I leave the volume on the radio turned up all the way, too, sometimes.”

  “You’re cruel, Tony. You know that?”

  “Leave me alone. It’s all I’ve got.”

  “Still.”

  “Forget it. Hey, there’s something else you should know. The first time I mentioned Jake’s name in front of her, she blurted out, ‘Jersey Jake’. I mean, come on! What’s with that?”

  Carlos waved his finger at me. “Wait a minute. You don’t think that Lilith is really Gypsy, do you?”

  “Well…” In my hesitation to answer, Carlos went ahead and took a sip of beer. “That thought has crossed my mind,” I said. “You know back when Mister Marcella first told me about Gypsy, he did slip and called her a witch.”