But he couldn’t finish.
Officer Drake looked at me expectantly and I said, “This is my father, Theodore Jones.”
“Daddy, this is Officer Drake. He’s here to find out what happened to that caroler.”
“I…” Daddy stumbled even though he had one hand on the wall.
I wanted to pretend that it wasn’t happening in front of Officer Drake, but I couldn’t. Daddy needed me. I crossed over and put my arm through his to support him. He squeezed my hand and wrapped his other arm around my shoulder.
I could see Officer Drake’s sharp gaze on my daddy, and I didn’t like it one bit. I wouldn’t have liked it without a murder in the other room, but now…sweet Hecate, bless my family.
“Would you tell me about what happened, Mr. Jones?”
“I…” Daddy started, and I sighed, realizing that I’d have to explain just what had happened to Daddy and why he would probably have a hard time explaining what had happened mere minutes before.
“Daddy,” I said. “Would you mind finding Bran for me?”
Daddy paused and said, “Well…I don’t…”
He glanced around, confused, and I could see how he wasn’t quite sure how he was here or where he was. I wanted to cry at that look on his face.
Instead, I bellowed, “Branka!”
She came in a second later, took in the situation in a glance, and took Daddy’s hand asking him to come help with something.
“This is my sister, Branka Jones,” I told Officer Drake.
She nodded once and then nearly cooed, “Come on, Daddy.”
I hadn’t realized she could be this type of person, but when it was Daddy, and he needed us, we were all different. It was as if we shed a bit of our inner-snake and found our hearts behind all that armor and barbed wire.
“So….” I started, looked Officer Drake over and then said. “It’s possible my father has been a long term…victim…of love potions.”
Officer Drake choked and started coughing.
I waited for him to finish and said, “And it is possible that he had a swift break from those love potions and he’s feeling…lost, broken, uncertain, befuddled, not himself, confused, essentially…he’s a mess and he probably can’t tell you what happened right now. Maybe a little later.”
“Uh…” Officer Drake said, cleared his throat, and then added, “Well.”
“So, perhaps,” I offered, pretending that scene hadn’t happened, “You could interview the people who knew Joni here.”
Officer Drake cleared his throat. I knew he liked me. I knew that he wanted to leave this sore sport alone, but he asked, “What is going on with your father, Rue?”
And because this was an investigation and he had every right to ask and because I would never get away with lying, I said, “He’s having some severe reactions to magic gone…askew. Maybe you could interview everyone else and then come back to my father when he’s not so…struggling. He comes in and out.”
I could see Officer Drake fight with my request. He was too kind, too quick to help me, too quick to offer advice and father students to just.…not care about the plea in my gaze. And I knew that he had zero doubt about me as the possible murderer. But, my daddy wasn’t me. And that was a dead person in the other room. Possibly someone’s mother. A wife. A best friend. A daughter. Someone was going to grieve long and hard over her. And it wasn’t going to be me, and my wants didn’t outweigh her needs—not when it was Officer Drake’s responsibility to discover what happened.
I helped to resolve the issue with a ghost that was attacking students. I had personally been involved in the correction of several long-term witch problems that crossed over into criminal problems. He well knew that… not that he owed me one, but perhaps that he did. I’d have done it without favors. Those things that I had done. But I also was going to cash in on whatever was available to me for my Daddy.
Officer Drake nodded once and said, “We’ll start with some of the others.”
* * * * *
“Rue,” Bran said as I started towards the library. Her voice was sweet and concerned. No one who knew her would have bought it, but these cops didn’t know my sister.
I glanced around, found a cop’s eyes on me, and shrugged crossing the hall to her. As I got closer, Bran burst into tears about Joni and what was happening.
One of the cops stepped towards us as I wrapped my arms around Bran and started patting her back.
“I know this is your home,” the cop said, “But we need you all to be in the library together.”
“Can I just have a minute,” I said sweetly, “To help my sister calm down? We’ll be right here.”
The cop hesitated, nodded, and then stepped back to give us a moment.
“Drake said we could be in here,” Bran said nodding towards the parlor where Daddy was sitting in front of the fire.
I looked at him, back to the cop, and then leaned in to rub her back and whisper, “How is he?”
“He’s still confused,” Bran said. “This is bad, Rue. They have their eyes on him cause he’s acting weird.”
“He doesn’t have a motive,” I said, but I wasn’t comforted. I thought Drake would look hard for someone else, but Daddy was being…too suspicious. Not to anyone who knew him, but to the outside. Did Daddy kill Joni? Even accidentally? No. But could I see how one might leap to that conclusion? Yes. And that made me furious.
“They could pin this on him,” Bran whispered. “Even without a motive.”
“They won’t,” I said, wishing I could believe it.
“Don’t placate me,” Bran said. “We need to pull an Ingrid and Emily and find the murderer ourselves.”
“They don’t find the murderer, they just interfere until the sheriff does,” I said and then sighed. Bran was right. It was up to us to help Daddy. But I wasn’t sure what we could do. They’re were going to find out that someone had poisoned Joni. We were dealing with witches and werewolves, not normal humans. We couldn’t just go around truth seruming everyone until we found the murderer.
“True,” Bran said, crying louder when the cop took a step nearer to us looking as if he regretted giving us this moment. Her wails were a bit too over-the-top, but the cop didn’t seem to realize what a lie they were and backed up, giving us a little bit of space.
“No one is going to talk to us, we don’t have the investigator bamboozled like Ingrid. We don’t have the island’s coven leader on our side, like Emily.”
“True, but this is your house, and we’re witches. I’m not letting Daddy go to jail for whoever killed that woman. Geez, these fools should have picked somewhere else to kill her. I will track each of them down and torture them until one confesses.”
I patted her a bit too hard and then said, “I trust the cop in charge. He’ll keep looking until there is good evidence. But…if he doesn't’ find anything and focuses on Daddy, “We’ll take care of it.”
That was a promise that was as dark as it sounded, and I didn’t care one little bit.
Bran pulled back and looked at me, examining my face. “You’re the princess knight. You’re the hero.”
“I’m no hero and regardless, I’m Daddy’s daughter first. And more importantly in this instance, I’m Mother’s daughter.”
Our gazes met and we knew that Mother would do anything to protect her family. Anything at all. Even stealing a man, making him her own, and keeping him for decades to break the chain of…whatever the Hallow family was.
* * * * *
I joined Gwennie, her cousin, and my mother in the corner of my library.
“This always was the favorite room of my own mother,” Mother said.
I wanted to slap her so hard and fast as she said that. Never. Never, ever had she once told me a thing about her parents and now she was talking about it? Now?
Gods. She was such a piece.
“You crackle with anger,” Gwennie said. “It’s like a warm fire.”
“Roast yourself hard then, little
Gwennie. Enjoy the fury.”
“Veruca, contain yourself,” Mother said idly, leaning back into the chair for all the world as if there wasn’t a body in the other room and the people surrounding us were just Mother’s minions rather than the friends and loves of that poor dead woman.
My eye twitched yet again, and I contained my need to shriek in anger at her only because I knew she’d make me regret it. She had played me like a fiddle since the day I was born and I had only recently decided to start disregarding whether or not I was doing what she wanted and just verifying that I was doing what I wanted. If they overlapped, they overlapped.
“Daddy is a suspect,” I told Mother. “Because of what you have done. Because he is walking around here confused as can be and he served the drinks with you.”
“He doesn’t have a motive,” she said coolly with a darting glance at Gwennie and her cousin, Heather. But I didn’t care what her cousin thought and Gwennie and I had a weird little relationship that would be unaffected by the fact that my mother was pure snake.
“He doesn’t need one when he’s as…destroyed as you’ve made him. This is your fault. Yet again. You don’t need a motive for accidental death.”
“That is enough, Veruca. This is the fault of the killer.”
“If you don’t like how I feel,” I told her just as coolly, “Feel free to pack and go.”
She snapped her mouth shut, and I knew she’d make me pay for daring to speak to her like that. But at this point, I really didn’t care. I took a deep breath, flopped myself into one of the overstuffed chairs, and let the breath out. In and out. In and out. In and out as I watched the police monitor us without taking one single person to question.
Finally I turned to Gwennie and said, “Who are these people?”
“My choir,” she said.
“You sing?”
“I did.”
Ah. That made so much more sense. I had no idea who Gwennie had been before she’d been kidnapped by a dark witch, tortured, and buried alive, but I suspect that kid had been very different from this one. Gwennie was nearly fourteen. But she’d lost a lot of weight when she’d been taken, and she didn’t seem to eat, ever. Maybe before-Gwennie was a sporty kid. Maybe she was a little princess who wore too much makeup. Maybe she was a spoiled brat. But after-Gwennie was silent, stark, careful, and very, very rigid.
I ignored all of those thoughts and asked casually, “They’re trying to get you back to your old life?”
She nodded and her cousin shifted. Heather’s expression said that she’d like to interfere and was biting her words back by sheer force of will. Was it because she didn’t want to pressure Gwennie or was she just surprised that Gwennie interacted with me at all? Maybe Heather didn’t realize that Markus dropped Gwennie by often? It didn’t matter what Heather thought. I didn’t have many friends and fewer people who gave me the benefit of the doubt. Heather was just one more of those people who only saw the eldest of the eldest of the Hallow and not a person with worries and weaknesses and baggage.
I glanced back and forth between them and then said, “I’m not sure you recover from being buried alive, but what do I know?”
“You got ran through by a haunt. Do you feel like you’re back to you?”
“I can’t even run yet.”
“Wimpy witch.”
“Brat.”
“Princess Knight.”
I snorted at that one and then said, “Temporarily. And little G for the win.”
“Gwennie,” she snapped.
“Oh,” I said. “I guess I won then, Gee.”
“Shut up. The only reason I tolerate you,” she said snidely, “Is because you don’t get all careful around me.”
“That’s only because my soul is cold and nasty. I probably don’t even like you.”
“But you found her and dug her up,” cousin, Heather, said. She seemed to be shocked at our interchange and I wondered how Gwennie’s pack of werewolves didn’t understand that they were smothering her. They had like special senses. Couldn’t they smell the changes in her emotions? Or was that just in romance novels? I got that what happened to Gwennie was like—unexplainably, impossible to understand awful. More than any of us could even imagine. But she’d survived. Gwennie was a fighter and needed to be treated like one.
All I told the cousin, however, was that digging Gwennie up was, “Temporary insanity.”
“So who are all these people,” I asked Gwennie. “Who was the chick who died? Tell me all the dirt.”
“I don’t think that’s appropriate,” Heather said. “Gwennie hasn’t stopped being a child. And Joni isn’t even cold yet.”
I pressed my lips together to stop my reply to that or my comment that cold or not her soul was well-through the thinning and out of my house.
Heather shifted again, so maybe she could smell emotions. But I could see that she wanted to move Gwennie away from me, but Cousin Heather wasn’t going to. I bet no one really bossed Gwennie around anymore. Not when they saw her ineffably fragile.
“What is your problem?” I asked it without much respect for who and what Heather was, and she growled a little at me. I let my power flow through me, and I knew the werewolf could probably sense it. I wasn’t a super-witch our anything which made being in a posturing match with a werewolf stupidly ill-advised. Being the Keeper of the St. Angelus Thinning just meant that the flavor of my magic matched the thinning. It didn’t mean that I was freaking all powerful or whatever. I was good at potions. I was well-trained. Excellently trained even. And I had been very, very lucky.
That being said, however, I was well-trained, and werewolves were no more all-powerful than witches. Plus this was my fighting ground and I had my house, Martha, on my side. The wards on my home would spring to life hard and fast should this werewolf attack me. Maybe this was just the place and time to challenge a werewolf.
“I wouldn’t take Heather on,” Gwennie said casually.
“Yes you would, brat,” I told her. “You survived and fought against the dark witch. Your cousin Heather is like a gnat in comparison.”
Heather growled again and I shot her a disgusted glance. “Please spare me your werewolf antics. Gwennie is tougher than you. Get over it.”
The growling was starting again, and I rolled my eyes which only increased the viciousness of the sound.
“Joni is the woman who died. She was a soprano,” Gwennie said in an attempt to stop the argument. She didn’t look uncomfortable, but she didn’t want the attention that my statement about her strength was bringing any more than she wanted a fight between her cousin and myself. Too many of the werewolves in the room were looking our way “She’s married to Tom. I guess the police took him somewhere else since he’s not in here.”
“Poor guy,” I said because I didn’t have anything else to say not because I felt sympathy or empathy or whatever you would call that. I was just…I wanted to be moved by his loss. Maybe I was to a degree, but I didn’t have it in me to internalize his pain right then, I had to set it aside. Joni’s death was wrong. I wasn’t pretending anything else. This wasn’t the death of a house fly or a spider or some rodent. She had been a person. And, we were probably sitting around casually with the person who had poisoned her, but mostly I just wanted to slap them all for bringing their trouble to my doorstep.
But it still wasn’t my death. Joni wasn’t someone I loved, knew, or cared about. I was already epically and horrifically aware of my mortality, so she hadn’t made me realize how close death could be. I had learned that lesson very well since I’d come to St. Angelus. Joni’s death…it was someone else’s grief. I didn’t have anything to give to it. I didn’t have anything left. That might make me a monster, but I was already aware of that reality as well.
That being said, I just didn’t care so much that one of the people around me was a murderer. For my safety, I mean. Surely whoever had murdered Joni had some agenda. I couldn’t possibly be on that agenda given that I hadn’t met any of them
before.
“Who’s that guy?” I asked Gwennie. It was a big dude. He looked like an actual lumberjack, all massive and muscular with a beard and a flannel, checked shirt.
“Leroy,” Gwennie said. “He’s a bass, and he eats all the cookies before I get one. Every single time. He never stops eating.”
“As if you eat,” I said, glancing Leroy over. He was a big man. I would guess he was hungry all the time given that physique.
“I did before though,” Gwennie said, shifting irritably. I was betting she wanted to snatch that statement right back.
“And that one?” I nodded towards an elfin little man with a pointed chin, wispy white hair, and enough wrinkles for two octogenarians.
“Miles,” Gwennie said. “He’s the conductor of the choir. He shouts a lot.”
“He’s very good,” Heather interjected.
“So who do you think did it?”
“Is your mom an offensive answer?” Gwennie said. “Because either way, I think she did it.”
I met Gwennie’s cold, little emotionless gaze, but there was a new spark there and we both laughed.
“That is in very poor taste,” my Mother stated. “I suppose that I better see if I can get some refreshments.”
“Better make sure they’re sealed,” I told her, “Given that the last round knocked off one of them.”
“What are you trying to insinuate, Veruca? That I killed that poor woman?”
“I am insinuating,” I said, “That they’d be fools to take further treats from us. And the fact that you decided to feed them the last time around is the reason we’re in this mess.”
I was snappish, I knew. One, because I was so angry with her I couldn’t even face her without wanting just to start screaming. And two, because I was worried. So very, very worried. Daddy had helped hand those drinks around. And Daddy was such an easy target. I could see she was worried too, and we were taking it out on each other. Instead of these fools who’d thought that harassing people with songs was the way to enjoy the holidays.
Yule Graves: A Rue Hallow Mystery (The Rue Hallow Mysteries Book 5) Page 4
