A Witch In Time

by Madelyn Alt

  Or was it more likely that he recognized the true depths of her guilt?

  Why else would he have stepped up to the plate?

  Or maybe he thought his son was guilty. Harry would have told him the truth ... but what if he couldn’t be sure?

  What exactly happened that night?

  What should we do? Marcus wrote.

  One thing was for sure. There was no way I was going to be finding myself in the middle of this situation. No way, no how. I was more than willing to let the police do their jobs. Except ... what if no one told Tom and his team about Frannie’s relationship with Nunzio? What if no one put those clues together? Would Harold Sr. live out his days in the county jail, waiting for a trial that would send him to prison? Was that fair to him? To Harry Jr. and Joyce? And was it any more fair that Frannie pay the piper for what she had done, thereby stripping Harry Jr. of his wife and Little Harry of his mother?

  Sometimes I wished the world was just a little more black and white. It would make decision-making that much easier, wouldn’t it?

  “I think,” I said out loud to Marcus, “we have to make sure someone knows about this.”

  “Make sure who knows about what?”

  Mel had sat up on the sofa with a stretch that made her grimace. I jumped; I’d almost forgotten she was sitting there. There was no way I could tell her what we’d been talking about. No way, no how.

  Grabbing the manila folder, I set it safely aside and stuffed the rest of the Watkins folder into Marcus’s hands for refiling. “Nothing, Mel,” I told her as I started grabbing Greg’s personal files by the handful, pulling them out and making a neat pile on the desk. “We’re just getting things together for you. I realized after I started looking at this stuff that I just don’t feel comfortable knowing what I’m looking for. You’d definitely have a much better idea. Best to just grab the files and get you back to your room at the hospital safe and sound where you can sort through things in peace and still get your rest.”

  “Back to the hospital! Oh, but—”

  I put up my hand. “No; for once, Mel, I insist. You need to get your strength back. Look at you, you’re exhausted. You’re emotionally at odds. You have a belly full of stitches, for God’s sake. And you have four little girls who need you at your best. You need to give yourself time to heal.”

  She had opened her mouth halfway through my lecture, but by the end of it, she’d closed it, her expression contrite. “I guess you’re right. Fine, then.” She waved a hand at me, a shadow glimpse of the real Mel. “Gather the files into a box or a bag or something and we’ll take them with us.”

  I was itching to speak with Marcus again, alone, but family always must come first. We made our way back to the hospital and took care of business, returning Mel to her room and checking in with the nurses, who promptly came to scold Mel for leaving. While they made her comfortable, I set Liss’s gift for the babies down by her handbag, just a little something for her to discover later. I spoke with the nurses quietly afterward, a word or two to let them know the situation Mel found herself in, just so they would know her emotional state was stretched a bit taut at present. As we were leaving, I caught sight of the babies being wheeled down to her room. Good. Mel needed the distraction just now. Anything to take her mind off Greg.

  Marcus and I were silent as we rode the elevator down to the main floor, and I couldn’t help thinking, this is where it all began. Had it really been only a couple of days? So much had happened. Life—it could be surprisingly eventful.

  What should we do? I asked my Guides and the universe at large. The envelope was still tucked safely away in my bag. Had I been led to it for a reason? To ensure that justice was done?

  The answer came, magically enough, the moment we stepped out of the elevator.

  Coming through the revolving front doors of the hospital? Frannie Watkins.

  Supported between Harry Jr. and Julie Fielding, surprisingly enough, with a distraught-looking Joyce picking up the rear with the baby in her arms, Frannie did not look well. She looked ... catatonic. Her face appeared almost paralyzed into a mask of neutrality, frighteningly vacant. Her dark hair was a tousled mess around her shoulders. Her clothes hung loose from her body as though she had lost fifty pounds, and I don’t mean baby weight. Dark shadows haunted dark, unfocused eyes.

  Marcus and I stopped in our tracks, transfixed by the scene unfolding before us. A word from Julie at the front desk, and a wheelchair was whisked up for Frannie, steered by a male orderly and a nurse in cheery, flower-covered scrubs in bright, happy colors.

  “Let’s just get you to sit down here, hon,” the nurse was saying to Frannie, “and we’ll get everything taken care of.”

  Frannie sat obediently but looked up at the nurse with a question in her eyes. “My baby can come with me?”

  “No, dear,” the nurse said patiently, “it will be much better for him to stay with your husband. He’ll take good care of him, just like we’ll be taking good care of y—”

  “No. No, he can’t!” Frannie said vehemently, trying to wriggle free. “He has to come with me. I’m his mother. He—”

  “Help me out here, George, would you?” the nurse spoke over her. Together the two held Frannie down while they fastened her into the chair with soft straps. All the while the nurse spoke soothingly. “There we go, no harm done, dear. We’ll just get you taken to a nice room, and we’ll get you settled in, snug as a bug in a rug—”

  “No, I don’t want to be here. My baby has to come with me. He has to!”

  With a quiet word from the nurse, George the orderly began to push the wheelchair toward the long hallway to the rear of the hospital. The nurse stayed behind a moment to speak with Harry.

  “We’ll get her processed in and get her comfortable. Don’t worry, you did the right thing, bringing her in. Postpartum depression happens. Extreme cases are of course more rare, but we’ll take good care of her and keep her from trying to hurt herself. Once we get her settled in, you can come back and sit with her until she falls asleep, if you like.”

  Harry and Joyce sat down woodenly in a matching pair of the kind of meagerly padded modern chairs found most often in hospitals and office lobbies. They looked shell-shocked. Joyce clung to the sleeping baby like a lifeline... and maybe he was.

  Julie Fielding caught sight of us watching from our out-of-the-way corner and raised a hand in greeting. With a quiet word for Harry, she came over to say hello.

  “More trauma for the Watkins family,” she said with a rueful shake of her head. “My cousin Frannie is having a hard time dealing with everything. Harry thought it best to bring her in.”

  “Now,” the voice of Grandma Cora intoned in my ear.

  Now? I asked back, my eyebrows raised. Here? Her?!

  “Now, Margaret . . .”

  I put my hand on Marcus’s arm. He glanced down at me, but I had the feeling he already knew what I needed to tell him.

  “Julie,” he said, “do you have a minute where we could go someplace quiet and talk? The three of us?”

  Surprised, she hesitated only a moment before she said, “Um, sure. Just give me a sec while I let them know I’m going to get a cup of coffee.”

  With the everyday bustling noises of the cafeteria surrounding us and keeping our conversation safe, Marcus and I explained everything to Julie over cups of really bad coffee. Everything I had overheard, everything I had experienced, everything I had witnessed, and as a final bit of information I slid the sealed report across the table.

  “I see. And what’s this?” she asked, her eyes neutral in a way that completely hid her thoughts or emotions from being given away.

  “A private investigator’s report relating to Frannie.”

  “Ah. Hm. And you came across this... how?”

  “We’d rather not say,” Marcus interjected. “But we think you should have it nonetheless. It may be important to the Nunzio guy’s death.”

  Between the two of us, we managed to convey the
main ideas of our “case” based on hearsay, speculation, and intuition, the evil banes of police investigations the world over.

  “You know this is all speculation, right? An arrest cannot be made with only speculation to back it up.”

  “We are fully aware of that. But speculation can lead to thinking in the right direction, which can then, in turn, lead to the discovery of the truth. And that is why we think you should have this.”

  Julie looked at us. “And why me?”

  Marcus allowed the first hint of a smile to quirk at the corner of his mouth. “Providence chose you for us. Consider it being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Lucky you.”

  If Tom was a known stickler for playing by the rules, his ex Julie proved far less driven by such stringent personal convictions. My Guides had been right to lead our paths to cross again in the way that they did.

  Frannie’s arrest, and Harold Sr.’s subsequent release, was quietly reported in the Stony Mill Gazette less than a week later. A very beneficial “anonymous tip” led to the discovery of the truth of the matter, as stated by Special Task Force Investigator Tom Fielding. Further details of the investigation were still pending, but the sheriff’s department and the prosecutor’s office were certain they had the right man. Or woman, as this case had proven out.

  Not that Frannie would be going to jail. Her spring, already tightly wound, had seemingly sprung as her psyche seemed incapable of dealing with the enormity of what she had done. Temporary insanity in the throes of postpartum depression might be her best defense... assuming she ever snapped out of it.

  Sometimes, telling the truth can be freeing. I wondered if that was what Harry Jr. felt as he described what had happened leading up to that night at the Watkins residence.

  Tony Nunzio had been carrying on an affair with Frannie during a time when the Watkinses’ marriage had been going through difficulties. Harry Jr. found out about the affair in the course of pursuing divorce proceedings—without the private investigator’s report, which he knew nothing about—but he’d never let on to anyone but his father. But when Frannie came to him and told him she was pregnant, Harry chose there and then to look the other way. He was getting what he’d wanted after all—a family—and the baby could have been his, he reasoned.

  Nunzio had other plans. Not that he’d wanted the child, not at the beginning at least. Frannie had actually approached him about the baby once she had found herself pregnant. No, Nunzio had wanted to be paid off to leave the little family to themselves. Harry had agreed, because he wanted desperately to keep the illusion alive. No man likes to appear the cuckolded husband. Especially not in a small town. That should have been the end of it, and maybe it would have been, if Jordan Everett hadn’t died as a result of the drugs Nunzio had been supplying to him. Nunzio knew he needed to leave town and hole up for a while, until things blew over. Who knew how long that would take? Suddenly the cash Harry had paid him didn’t seem like near enough to last. Nunzio was a businessman. He needed to keep his options open.

  But Nunzio had what for him was likely a rare attack of conscience or a change of heart when he went to the hospital to warn Frannie that her husband knew about her little indiscretion. Or was he just trying to make trouble on both ends? It didn’t seem to matter; at the time, she didn’t believe him. But Harry had seen Nunzio skulking around the Labor and Delivery floor that night. He had seen him, and he was afraid of what it meant for his little family.

  That night Harry called Nunzio to have it out with him one last time. He knew Frannie would be sleeping, and he knew he himself wouldn’t, not with this threat hanging over his head. He’d intended to scare Nunzio, to threaten him, to let him know in no uncertain terms that he wouldn’t see another dime. That if he exposed the family secret—because after seeing the baby Harry had been certain that he was in fact Nunzio’s child—Harry would in turn see to it that Nunzio went to jail for extortion. The two men argued. Nunzio took off; Harry followed, pursuing on foot even as Nunzio tore off on his motorcycle. Eventually he gave up and just kept walking to cool his temper and try to come up with a plan to keep his world from falling apart.

  And that was it.

  He didn’t know how long he had walked, or how far, but in the end he had to call his father to come pick him up in his pickup truck.

  When they got to the house, Frannie was hiding under the covers in bed, the baby was sleeping... and Nunzio was lying dead on the floor in the living room.

  The two of them hauled Frannie out of bed, whereupon she tearfully claimed that she had been awakened by a noise downstairs and couldn’t find Harry. Taking his gun out of his nightstand drawer, she had gone downstairs to investigate and saw Nunzio as only a dark threatening shadow in the living room. She told them she knew it wasn’t Harry Jr. because he was far taller and broader, and she was so terrified that she had shot first and asked questions later.

  And by that time it was far too late. The bullet had buried itself deep in Nunzio’s chest. He was dead before she could reach him.

  She was so afraid that she didn’t know what to do. So she went back to bed and pretended to herself that it had never happened and simply... waited for Harry to come home.

  It was Harold who decided that he should take the fall. Harold who loved his son so much that he couldn’t bear seeing his whole world torn apart after finally having the family he so desperately wanted. Harold who made them all promise to go along with his confession. The two men summoned Joyce, who brought doughnuts, blissfully unaware of the serious nature of the situation. When Harold met her at the porch with the news, she dropped the box as she rushed to see the truth for herself. Joyce didn’t want to go through with the false confession, but Harold was adamant that their new grandchild would need both a mother and a father, so finally she tearfully agreed to do as he asked.

  But in the end, the enormity of what she had done had been too much for Frannie to assimilate. Her emotional and mental retreat had been abrupt and sharp and... complete. Harry had called Julie for help. Julie had recommended re-admitting her to the hospital, this time as a guest of the mental health facility.

  No one really knew if Frannie had been telling the truth about coming upon Nunzio in the dark, but everyone was willing to accept it, because truth was subjective after all. Did it matter, really? Either way, the man was dead.

  The odd truth of another matter came out later. The baby was actually the child of Harry Jr. and Frannie. The intricacies of blood typing and blood markers had proven too much for her to understand that just because the baby did not have Harry Jr.’s blood type did not mean that the baby was not his. Her worry to that end had been for naught.

  Marcus had been right about one thing. A psychic—and I barely considered myself one in the first place—is never one hundred percent infallible. A case in point would be the elevator conversation I had overheard. As it turns out, it had nothing to do with Frannie Watkins or Anthony Nunzio at all. It was merely a synchronicity that worked on various levels of my consciousness and was a mental heads-up to me to start paying attention. That’s my story at least.

  So what was the real story behind the sinister elevator conversation, and how did it connect to me and to this particular turn of Stony Mill bad luck?

  I’m getting to that...

  Epilogue

  Time.

  For some it was a great healer, the ultimate fixer of bad break-ups, shake-ups, and heartache. Here in Stony Mill we’d had plenty of those, and among the N.I.G.H.T.S. the general consensus was that it had only just begun. How could it ever be over, when we didn’t understand what had started it?

  For others, Time was an insidious stealer of all the things they want most in life, stripping it away from them by sneakily changing the rules of obtaining it. Unconscionable and completely without sympathy, like a Vegas strip dealer who gave everyone their cards, let them feel like they were in control of their hand, while secretly waiting for just the right moment to take their last dollar. For all t
he joyful wishes and hopeful desires held near and dear to our hearts, Time was the one element most likely to keep it from our reach.

  To me, Time was all of these, and none. Time simply is.

  It’s the framework in which we play out the games of our lives, but the secret is not to control it. It is not to master it. It is simply to learn to exist fully within the moment, to be aware of every facet of our being, and to wring every ounce of joy from it. Perhaps we were our own thieves, lamenting the absence of even a spare moment to enjoy life, when all it really takes is to stop the complaints, take the moment firmly in hand, and make it our own. Because the secret is that Time passes, and if you let it, it will leave you in its wake, aching with every beat of your heart and in every fiber of your being for what you have missed.

  It was with all of that in mind that Marcus and I planned a backyard get-together two weeks later. Well, Marcus did the planning—it was to celebrate my thirtieth birthday, an event I could probably have lived without calling an over-abundance of attention to, were it up to me. But when he sweetly proposed a gathering of our friends, how could I say no? The summer had been a long one. Celebrating the end of it meant giving thanks that we had made it through unscathed.

  Well, I thought as I gazed ruefully down at my plaster-laden ankle, relatively unscathed.

  Marcus took care of everything, stringing the backyard with white Christmas bulbs that stretched from house to tree to old carriage barn and back again, hanging paper Japanese lanterns from the tree at varying heights, and covering the picnic tables with green and white gingham tablecloths. The gas grill stood at the ready with a selection of steaks and chicken marinating in the fridge, mouthwatering summer veggies on kebab skewers awaited attention on the counter, and homemade strawberry ice cream was electrically churning in the garage. But best of all was the piece de resistance: a chocolate ganache triple-layer cake, the ganache a delectably shiny drizzle over the top and sides, while in between peeked layers of cream cheese and raspberry preserves... all compliments of Annie Miller, kitchen goddess extraordinaire. My mouth watered every time I looked in that direction.