The Amulet

by Joanna Wayne

  So he had at least read her notes. Which meant he knew she’d talked personally to both of those men and was reasonably sure they weren’t involved in the abduction. Ledlow was seventy years old and in poor health. He probably couldn’t have made the hike through the woods alone, much less dragging a woman. James Fox and his wife had argued that weekend and checked out of the hotel early. They’d been back in Portland by the time Elora Nicholas had been abducted. Besides, neither of their prior crimes made them suspects in a murder case.

  Rich walked to the door. “You going with me, or not?”

  “Partners usually discuss their day.”

  “I thought that’s what we just did.”

  He would. She started to point out that he was a jerk, then decided against it. Even if she argued and won her point, he was probably right. The killer was probably still here on the scene. Why else would they have received the note?

  So they’d do this his way today. She’d just take advantage of this opportunity to sit back and watch McFarland in action, see if he had anything on her when it came to questioning the locals.

  “Come on,” Rich said. “I’ll buy you breakfast.”

  “At the hotel?”

  “At ten dollars an egg? Dream on.”

  She stopped at her office to grab her parka and to stick the copies of old police records from the campground slaughter into a manila folder. They were another dead end. The transient who’d killed himself was the likely killer and there had been no similar crimes in the area since then.

  Rich was already running down the two flights of stairs to the ground floor by the time she reached the hallway. She took the elevator, hoping she’d beat him down. It was the principle of the thing. She didn’t. So much for principles.

  CARRIE HAD BEEN to the area many times since signing on as deputy two years ago. She’d never been to or even seen the wind-and-weather mangled sign that said Maizie’s Café. In fact, she’d never known this road existed. From the highway, it looked more like a dirt trail leading to someone’s barn.

  Turned out there were half a dozen or more houses and at least that many mobile homes tucked back in the trees along the dirt road that dead-ended at Maizie’s. The sign and the array of mud-encrusted pickup trucks parked in a square of gravel where the yard should have been were the only indication this wasn’t just another residence.

  The house was a one-story, wood cottage that needed a paint job. A big gray cat was perched in a squeaking porch swing.

  “How did you ever find this place?” Carrie asked, friendlier now that breakfast was beaconing.

  “The third house on the left after you leave the highway is where my grandparents lived.”

  “I didn’t notice. You’ll have to point it out as we leave.”

  “Not much to see. Just an old house, about like this one.”

  “Who lives there now?”

  “No one.” He put the patrol car in Park, then climbed from behind the wheel. She followed, enticed by mouthwatering odors wafting on the slight breeze. He waited until she reached the porch before opening the restaurant door.

  Once inside, she was hit with a new wave of the tantalizing odors she’d smelled from outside. She shrugged out of her parka and hung it over one of the hooks by the door while a chorus of gravelly voiced how-you-been’s greeted Rich.

  Okay, so he did know his way around the area. She’d give him that one. She looked for an empty table. There wasn’t one, so she waited while Rich stopped at a couple of tables to jaw.

  “You still looking for the guy who shot the cop and abducted that woman?” a man asked.

  “Still looking,” Rich admitted.

  “I knew there would be trouble when they rebuilt that fancy hotel,” another said. “Got strangers running these roads all hours of the day and night now.”

  Rich gave a noncommittal nod. A young waitress passed carrying a plate of bacon, eggs and biscuits.

  “There’re tables in the back room, Rich.”

  “Thanks, Jen.”

  “Obviously you’re a regular in here,” Carrie said as they found a table in the next room, one that was most likely the original dining room of the house. It was right off the kitchen and had a couple of windows that offered a great view of the mountains.

  “Not so often.”

  “You know the waitress by name.”

  “I’ve known Jen since she was in diapers. That’s Maizie’s granddaughter. She and her mother live in the mobile home next door.”

  A minute later, Jen stopped at their table with two glasses of water. “What can I get you?”

  “I haven’t seen a menu,” Carrie said.

  “No menus. We got all the usual. Pancakes, eggs, sausage, bacon, pork chops, biscuits, toast. Got some homemade blackberry jam, too.”

  “I’ll take two eggs, over easy, some sausage and biscuits,” Rich said. “And coffee.”

  “Same for me,” Carrie said, imagining her arteries hardening as she said it. But she hadn’t heard a lot of healthy choices among Jen’s offerings.

  A smiling woman who looked to be in her mid-forties served the coffee. “’Bout time you got in to see me,” she said, smiling at Rich. “How’s your grandmother? Is she adjusting any better?”

  “A little. She still misses being home. And she misses you. She said to tell you hello.”

  “You tell her hello right back. I been thinking about trying to get down there to see here, but I don’t like driving in Seattle. Too much traffic. Gets me all rattled.”

  “I’ll drive you down one day. She’d love to see you. Dad would, too.”

  “How’s his heart?”

  “Still beating.”

  “You tell him that darn dog of his still won’t sleep here. He comes down to eat, but then he goes right back up there. Sleeps on the front porch most of the day, right in front of the front door. He’s waiting for ’em to come back home.”

  Rich introduced Carrie to Maizie Henderson. Maizie merely nodded at her, then looked back at Rich. “I got to get back to the kitchen before Tom lets my sausages burn.”

  “How is Tom?”

  She shook her head, and the smile she’d been wearing caved into a frown. “He just ain’t the same anymore, Rich. It’s like his body’s here, but his mind’s still up there in the mountains somewhere. I just wish I knew what happened on that hunting trip.”

  “He’s still never said?”

  “No, but something happened up there. A man don’t just go hunting a normal man and come home a zombie unless he’s seen something.”

  The statement captured Carrie’s attention, but she waited until Maizie had returned to the kitchen before questioning Rich.

  “Is Tom Maizie’s husband?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What happened to him in the mountains?”

  “Had a stroke, I expect, but you’d never get Maizie to buy anything that rational.”

  “Why not?”

  “Easier to blame the mountains than his health, I guess.”

  Jen returned to the their table with the coffee and a couple of apple muffins on flowered saucers. “Just out of the oven,” she said, setting a muffin down in front of each of them. “I’ll bring some butter to go on them.”

  Carrie took one bite of the muffin and forgot everything else. The texture was light and fluffy and there was just enough nutmeg and cinnamon to make her taste buds sing.

  Before they finished the muffins, Jen had returned with their breakfasts and more coffee. Carrie was halfway through her eggs and sausage and her stomach was sliding past full when her mind when back to Maizie’s suspicions about what had happened to her husband.

  She waited until Rich was finished and excused himself to go to the men’s room before she walked back to the kitchen. Maizie was turning eggs on the grill. Jen was arranging biscuits on a plate. Tom was nowhere to be seen.

  Maizie looked up when Carrie approached. “How was your breakfast?”

  “Delicious. The muffins were t
o die for.”

  Maizie smiled. “Everybody seems to like them. It’s the fresh apples.”

  Carrie waited until Jen left with a tray of food. “It must be hard on you taking care of this place by yourself now that your husband’s ill.”

  “Hard enough. He helps some, when his mind is clicking in.”

  “It seems strange that he’d go off on a hunting trip and come back so…”

  “Out of it. Just plain out of it,” Maizie said, finishing her sentence when Carrie hesitated.

  “Does he know who you are?”

  “He knows. It just don’t seem to matter none. It’s like he’s somewhere else in his mind.”

  It did sound as if he might have had a stroke, or Alzheimer’s. “What do the doctors say?”

  “They say he’s had some minor strokes and that his heart’s wearing out. They use a lot of big words and keep wanting to try a lot of drugs, but they don’t know the mountains the way I do.”

  Maizie’s voice dropped a decibel or two and her hand shook as she lifted an egg from the grill and slid it onto a waiting plate.

  “What do you know about the mountains that frightens you so?” Carrie asked.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  The eeriness of the conversation was making the hairs on the back of Carrie’s neck raise, but she did want to know. Not that she was superstitious or actually believed the mountains were inhabited by ghosts, but she needed to understand these people the way Rich did. It was important to the investigation. “What could happen to a man in the mountains?”

  “Not just to a man. It can happen to anybody. Ask Selma Billings. She can tell you, ’cept she don’t like to talk about it.”

  “Doesn’t like to talk about what?”

  Finally Maizie looked up from the eggs and met Carrie’s gaze. Her wrinkled flesh had grown pale, and her eyes had taken on a guarded look, as if there were secrets behind them that she couldn’t let escape. “Just don’t get trapped up there when the mist is thick.”

  The temperature of Carrie’s blood seemed to drop a degree or two.

  “So this is where you got off to,” Rich said, joining them in the kitchen.

  For once, Carrie was glad to see him. “I just wanted to offer my compliments to the chef.”

  “It’s just breakfast,” Maizie said. “Anyone can cook an egg.” She cracked a couple more onto the hot grill.

  It was clear the discussion of the mist was over. Just as well. The whole idea of a man going hunting in the mountains and coming back a zombie was freaky. Really freaky.

  But like Rich said, there was probably a medical explanation for Tom’s condition, and it would have nothing to do with the mist.

  They said goodbye and left the back way. Carrie slid into the front seat of the car, but her mind was stuck on the conversation with Maizie. She reached to the backseat and picked up the list of names Rich had shown her earlier. Selma Billings was near the bottom.

  “I say we start the day’s questioning with Selma Billings,” she said.

  Rich scowled. “Exactly what did Maizie tell you when the two of you were alone in the kitchen?”

  “That I shouldn’t get trapped in the mist. What happened to Selma Billings that she won’t talk about?”

  “Don’t know. She doesn’t talk about it.”

  “Don’t brush me off, Rich. I don’t believe in ghost tales any more than you do, but I need to know what we’re up against with the locals.”

  “It’s an old Indian legend.” He pulled into the driveway of a gray clapboard house with a black mixed breed cur curled up on the front porch. The dog perked up, then uncurled and came loping toward them.

  Rich jumped out of the car and greeted the dog like they were old pals, scratching him behind the ears while the dog’s tail wagged like mad. The dog ate it up. Surprise. Who’d have thought dogs would like him?

  “Yeah. Good to see you, too, Jackson,” Rich said, still walking toward the house.

  She got out of the car and followed Rich and the dog up the narrow walkway. Obviously they were at his grandparents’ house. She wasn’t sure why they’d stopped, but before they left she planned to hear the details of the Indian legend and find out why Maizie was convinced the mountains had supernatural powers.

  Chapter Three

  Rich’s grandparents’ house possessed a warmth that seemed to seep from the painted walls and the worn rugs themselves. The furniture was heavy and over-stuffed, made for settling into with a good book or a mug of hot chocolate. The coffee and end tables were knotty pine, possibly homemade.

  It was different than the foster home where she’d grown up. Most of the furniture in the house had been off limits. She was pretty much ignored except when the social worker came to call. Then everything was rosy.

  Rich took off his jacket and tossed it on top of a stack of newspapers on the coffee table. “Make yourself comfortable. I won’t be but a few minutes. I need to check on a couple of things while I’m here.”

  “It looks as if your grandparents just stepped out for a few hours,” Carrie said, running her fingers across the carvings on the back of a wooden rocker before draping her own jacket across the beautiful wood.

  “In their mind they have,” Rich said. “They think they’re coming back as soon as Gramps gets his strength back from his last heart attack. It’s the only way they’d agree to leave the place.”

  “Hello, Jackson,” she said, bending to pet the dog who was nosing her leg and sniffing her fingertips. “You like the smell of Maizie’s cooking, don’t you, boy?”

  Jackson licked her hand in answer.

  “Don’t they allow pets in the home where your grandparents are?”

  “No, but even if pets were allowed, they wouldn’t have taken Jackson.”

  “They can’t just leave him out here by himself.”

  “He’s not by himself. He’s got the mountains and the neighbors.”

  “But he’s grieving for your grandparents.”

  “Missing someone doesn’t kill you. Being thrown into an environment where you can’t run free might.” He walked away, leaving her standing by the brick hearth and an enormous fireplace that still held the smell of wood smoke. On the opposite wall, three windows looked out on the mountains.

  Haunted mountains where a man could go hunting and come back without his mind. She stared into the distance for a while, trying to make sense of Maizie’s story. Finally, she gave up and went in search of Rich. She found him in the kitchen, replacing a bulb in the overhead light fixture.

  She started to question the need for replacing bulbs in a house where no one lived, but decided what Rich did in his grandparents’ house wasn’t her concern. She rested her hands on the back of a kitchen chair. “Tell me more about the Indian legend.”

  He finished changing the bulb and climbed down from the chair he’d been standing on. “It’s just a bunch of nonsense.”

  “Like what?”

  “It has variations. Which one do you want?”

  “Let’s start with the variation Maizie believes, the one she thinks robbed Tom of his reasoning abilities.”

  Rich opened the freezer section of the refrigerator, took out the old ice and dumped it in the sink. Once that was done, he straddled one of the kitchen chairs. “Basic legend is that the dead sometimes got trapped in the mist and their spirits can’t break away from the mountains.”

  “Why would it trap them?”

  “That’s the part that varies according to who’s telling the story. Some think it’s a form of punishment. Some say the undead are warriors left to guard the land. Some believe it was because they had some task that was still unfinished and they can’t be released until they fulfill their obligation.”

  “That’s downright creepy.” But she could see where they got that idea. The mist had seemed almost alive the other night when she and Rich had hiked to the ravine. “Do they believe all the ghosts are Indians?”

  He exhaled slowly, and she got
the distinct impression that it bothered him to talk about this. She didn’t know why. It wasn’t as if she was going to jump on the ghost bandwagon.

  “Some folks think that when the original Fernhaven Hotel burned to the ground that a large number of the guests were trapped in the mist.”

  “Why would they be trapped?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a ghost story. It doesn’t have to make sense.”

  “It could be that when the guests died so suddenly, many of them were in the prime of life,” she said.

  “Who cares? It’s fiction. Get it?”

  “Don’t patronize me.”

  “Then make sure you remember that wasn’t a ghost who abducted Elora Nicholas and shot Bart. It was a live, human killer that I plan to apprehend.”

  “That we plan to apprehend,” she corrected him.

  “Whatever.” Rich stood and scooted the chair back to the table, clearly ready to drop the conversation.

  She wondered if he really feared she was flaky enough to buy into the ghost story if he talked about it too much. If so, he had a lot to learn about her. Not that she gave a darn if he learned it or not. When this case was over, she hoped to be through working with him.

  Her mind went back to Bart. God, how she’d love to talk to him about this and get his take on the ghost gambit and how that might or might not hinder their chances of getting the locals to work with them on this.

  Bart’s insight in situations like this was always amazing. He wasn’t from around here, not even from the state of Washington, but he had a way of getting people to open up to him—the way he’d got her to talking about herself that night after she’d first had to pull her gun on a suspect.

  She’d spilled her guts, shed a few tears and then ended up laughing over a stale cream-filled donut in the middle of the night.

  Rich turned and walked toward the front door with the mixed-breed hound at his heels. He didn’t bother telling her he was ready to cut out anymore than he’d asked her if she wanted to stop at his grandparents’ house in the first place. He just did things. Maybe it was the mountain way, but she doubted it. It was more likely the Rich way.