by Raven Snow
“Do you have the key?” Rowen demanded.
Tina raised an eyebrow, but shoved her hands into her pockets. After a moment, she handed a keychain over. “It’s the big one on the end… The front door shouldn’t be locked, though. I unlocked it on my way out.”
Rowen didn’t wait to sort that out. She ran for the front door of the library again, taking the steps two at a time. It took a couple of tries with the lock, but she got the door open.
“Shouldn’t we wait for the police?” Tina called.
“Where are the lights?” Rowen called back, not deterred from going inside.
Eric found the lights before Tina could answer. They flickered on. They only lit up half of the library, but that was enough to see by.
“Where is she?” Rowen called back, looking around for any sign of a body or a struggle.
“She’s right there!” Tina had ventured as far as the entryway. “She’s on the tables− not the computer tables, but the… Where did she go?”
Rowen walked around the tables and went behind the front desk. With Eric, she made a point to search every room. There was no sign of Jeana. Nothing looked out of the ordinary to Rowen.
“She was right here.” Tina was standing at the head of a table when Rowen and Eric got back to the main area. Willow had wandered off, peering down aisles of bookshelves. Peony stood next to Tina, a hand on her shoulder. “I don’t understand,” said Tina. “She was… She was right here.”
“Someone could have moved the body,” Peony offered.
“You’re sure you saw her dead?” asked Rowen, coming to a stop in front of Tina.
“Of course, I’m sure!” Tina snapped. “I’m not an idiot.”
“No one said you were an idiot,” Rowen said with a sigh. “I just… Well, I hope you’re wrong, honestly. The last thing Lainswich needs is another murder.”
There were flashing blue lights outside indicating the police had arrived. Rowen and her cousins went to the door to greet them.
Ben came from the nearest police cruiser. Rose was with him. Neither looked surprised to see that the alleged crime scene had already been disturbed. “None of us can find anything,” Rowen said, as they both hurried in from the rain.
“Who saw the murder?” asked Ben, scanning the library from the doorway.
“I didn’t see the murder,” said Tina. “I just saw a dead body. It was right there.” She pointed to the table again. “I ran for help, and by the time we all got back here… It was… It was just gone.”
Ben raised his eyebrows at that. A couple of policemen were entering behind him. They all looked unhappy to be out in this storm. “You ran for help?” Ben repeated, sounding skeptical.
Tina looked down at her feet. “I panicked. I don’t know… I just… I wanted to be around other people. I was scared. If I stopped to call the police, I was scared the murderer would get me next.”
“Did you see the murderer?” Ben asked, motioning for the policemen with him to go on ahead and search the area.
Tina shook her head again. “Just the body,” she said, still staring intently at the floor.
“Tell me what you saw,” said Ben.
“It was my coworker,” said Tina. “Her name was Jeana McCormick. I thought she had gone home. I was working late, but I wasn’t supposed to be really. I just wanted to finish organizing these books that I was supposed to shelve tomorrow. I needed to get them stickered, so that’s what I was doing tonight until… Well, I heard this scream. It was terrible. I heard Jeana screaming and shouting, and it went on for a while. I didn’t want to go look at first, but I figured I’d better. So, when the screaming stopped, I left the back room I was in and went to go check it out.”
“You didn’t think to call us while you were waiting in that room?” asked Ben.
“I panicked!” Tina snapped, glaring at him.
“It’s all right,” said Peony, resting a hand on her shoulder again. “We all react differently under pressure.”
Tina took a deep and shuddering breath. “Thank you, Peony.”
“Go on,” said Ben with a sigh. “Tell me what you saw.”
Tina pointed to the table again. “She was there,” she explained. “She was stretched out on the table, bloody and… and half naked.”
“Half naked?” Ben asked, picking up on that last part. “What happened to her clothes? Did you see?”
“Her skirt was up around her waist,” Tina explained, her face turning a bit red as she went into detail. “She was wearing hose today, I think. Those must have been taken off. She didn’t have shoes on. I remember she was wearing black pumps. They were cute.”
“Anything else?” asked Ben, pulling a pencil and pad from his pocket to jot some notes on.
Tina considered for a moment. “Her shirt was unbuttoned.”
Ben nodded, jotting that down as well. “Were the buttons actually unbuttoned?” he asked.
Tina gave him a puzzled look. “What else would they have been?”
Ben rephrased what he was getting at. “Did it look more like an assault, or could she have been consensually fooling around with someone at work?”
“Having fun on the clock doesn’t leave people dead,” Tina pointed out. That seemed to remind her of what she had seen tonight. She began to sob again.
Peony put an arm around Tina and looked up at Ben, like she was waiting for permission to take Tina away.
Ben gave them both a nod. “Go wait outside,” he said. “Sit in the police car so that you’re out of the rain. We’ll talk somewhere more comfortable than this, all right?”
Tina sniffled and nodded. She headed out with Peony toward the police car.
“We didn’t find anything,” said Rowen once Tina had gone. She looked back at the two policemen Ben had brought with him. “It doesn’t look like they found anything either, huh?”
“Looks that way,” said Ben. “We have the name of this supposed murder victim, though. A good first step would be to see if we can get in touch with her.” Ben looked around at Rowen and the others around her. “I’m not sure why I’m telling you guys all this like you deserve updates… I’m going to use the radio in my car now.”
Rowen watched Ben go, certain they would all get an update before they left to go home. He was an old boyfriend. They hadn’t parted on the best terms back in high school, and they had been through some turbulent times since. He was a good guy, though—more or less. He was the chief of police now, and a good one, at that. He tended to call Rowen in on cases of an extreme nature. The Greensmith girls had a way with contacting wronged spirits and the like.
“So, what do you think happened?” asked Eric once Rose, Rowen, and he all had some privacy. Willow was approaching, having been run off by actual policemen.
“She’s sort of a drama queen, isn’t she?” asked Rowen, thinking back on what she knew of Tina. That woman really did have a thing for attention.
“You think she would run through a storm like this just for attention?” Rose asked, sounding dubious of that. “Plus, the way she was crying… Tina might like attention, but I don’t remember her being a super skilled actress or anything.”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Eric. “Is it possible she might have thought she saw something? She overreacted and now she’s blowing it out of proportion, maybe?”
“Maybe,” said Rowen. “Still, I hope she didn’t see anything at all. Can you imagine? Another murder in Lainswich this soon? They’ll all be blaming us.”
“Hey,” said Willow, frowning. “We weren’t involved this time—not even a little bit.”
“We’re at the crime scene right now,” Rowen pointed out.
“Oh, yeah.” Willow groaned. “You’ve got a point there, I guess. They’re totally going to blame us.”
“I’m going to go see what Ben found out,” said Rose, heading for the door.
They all went with that. There wasn’t much for them to do, hanging around at the library. As it turned out, no one could
get in touch with Jeana. That wasn’t exactly saying much in the middle of the night, though. She could easily still be asleep. Still, it didn’t bode well. Rowen would have slept a lot easier knowing for a fact that Tina had overreacted.
In the end, they headed home without answers. Tina ended up tagging along with them. She lived alone and was certain that the killer was coming for her next. To use her own phrasing, she “knew too much.” Rowen tried to point out that was pointless. She had already told Ben everything she knew. No one was going to try to bump her off. She wouldn’t hear it, and Peony and Willow were already set on her just coming home with them.
Rowen couldn’t argue with them, but sharing a car with a sobbing Tina on the way home made her uncomfortable. The more time she spent around her, the more certain she was that Tina had seen something.
Chapter Three
At least this had taken focus off of Rowen’s recent engagement. The next morning, Aunt Lydia was too busy consoling Tina to begin on planning a wedding. Tina sat at the kitchen table, sipping at some coffee. She wasn’t as weepy as she had been the night before. Now, she seemed like she was enjoying the attention a bit more.
“I just… I don’t think I can go in today,” Tina said, stating the obvious. Of course she wasn’t going to go into work today. “I called Peter.”
Rowen listened from the kitchen where she was getting a mug of coffee for herself. She knew Peter vaguely but knew he worked at the library too. He must be Tina’s boss. She remembered him from her teenaged years. He had worked at the library even then.
“Apparently, he heard from the police already. They haven’t been able to get in touch with Jeana. They went by her house and she wasn’t there.” Tina took a deep breath while Aunt Lydia rubbed her back reassuringly.
“She could still turn up, Dear,” offered Lydia.
“She won’t,” insisted Tina. “She’s dead. I saw it.”
Rowen headed out of the room with her coffee. Rose was already at work. She had left Rowen a text message that she was heading up early to get something written on all the excitement from last night. At least this would make an interesting change from Fall Festival articles. Rowen just hoped that Rose didn’t feel obligated to work harder since she had sort of dropped the ball yesterday.
“Rowen,” called Tiffany. “Is that you?”
Rowen followed the sound of her mother’s voice into the den. “Hey,” she said, taking a seat on the comfy recliner adjacent to the sofa.
Tiffany was alone in the den. She had the news on and something that smelled like herbal tea in her hands. “Good morning,” she said.
“Morning,” said Rowen before taking a sip from her own mug.
Rowen and Tiffany had a spotty past. Tiffany hadn’t spent much time with her growing up. She had always been something of a free and wandering spirit, leaving Rowen’s grandmother to do much of the child rearing. Tiffany had been trying, though—Rowen would give her that. She knew that her mother loved her in her own way. She just wasn’t very good at mothering.
“That poor thing,” said Tiffany, nodding back in the direction of the kitchen and Tina. “Did she really see her friend murdered?”
“Who knows,” sighed Rowen. “She saw something.”
“How long will she be staying with us?” asked Tiffany.
“Don’t know that, either.” Rowen hoped it wouldn’t be for long. The Greensmith house was perpetually crowded as it was.
“This sort of took the steam out of your big announcement, didn’t it?” Tiffany’s eyes fell on the engagement ring Rowen wore. “I’m sorry, sweetheart.”
Rowen looked down at the ring herself. It was as breathtaking as ever. “It’s fine,” she assured her. “I’m glad I’m not the center of attention.”
Tiffany leaned in, taking a good look at the ring herself. “Are you happy?” she asked.
Rowen nodded. “I knew the proposal was coming. I was nervous, but… Yeah. Yeah, I think I’m happy.”
“That’s all that matters,” said Tiffany, though she said it in a tone of voice that implied it was hardly all that mattered.
“You don’t think it’s a good idea,” said Rowen. It wasn’t a question. She was just stating a fact. She could tell what her mother was thinking like she could tell what the rest of the family was thinking. Everyone but Aunt Lydia thought she was making a mistake.
“I think our family needs to be careful about this sort of thing. We need to be wary of our, you know, relationships.” Tiffany took a long sip of her tea. She didn’t have any room to talk, and she knew it. After her last boyfriend had turned out to be a serial murderer, she was the last person to comment on others choosing their mates poorly.
“I love him,” said Rowen. Maybe that really was all that mattered.
Tiffany nodded. She wasn’t going to argue with her, it seemed. “You need to go tell your Grammy,” she said. “Your Aunt Lydia didn’t call her, believe it or not. She wants you to give her the news.”
There was no time to visit Grammy just yet. After all that had happened the night before, Rowen had to get to work and help out Rose. Her cousins came too. Eric likely would have come along as well, but he had to head to the airport in a neighboring city. David was getting in early.
Ben was at the office sitting with Rose when they got there. The two were talking. They looked up when the door opened.
“I’m surprised to see you here,” said Rowen. “What’s up?”
“Just here to fill you guys in,” said Ben. “I don’t want any unnecessary panic when the story comes out. Besides, I feel like I owe you guys the scoop. You were there first, right?”
Rowen was still surprised he would bother. Normally, they didn’t hear from him unless he was calling them down to the station for more questions. He hardly ever came to them. “Well, we’re happy to have you,” said Rowen. She wasn’t going to complain about him coming to them with new information. Far be it for her to talk him out of that. “What did you find out?”
“Not much,” said Ben, standing as the others approached. “We haven’t been able to get in touch with Jeana. She doesn’t have much in the way of family in town. Her parents both died a while back. She has a sister, but they’re not close. The sister might actually contact you guys. I get the sense that she likes the drama. She came down to the station without us asking her to yet. She wanted to give a statement but didn’t really have anything to say.”
So, Rowen had that to look forward to. “It might make for a good story.” Still, she hoped nothing came of it. “Do you think Jeana was murdered?”
“Hard to say,” said Ben. “It’s a little early to come to any sort of conclusion.”
“Any suspects?” Rowen pressed.
Ben smirked. “If we had any, I wouldn’t share them with you yet.” He headed for the door. “I’ve got to get going. If you would, though, do me a favor and try to contact Jeana. Hopefully, there’s no answer. Hopefully, she’s still alive. But if her spirit is out there, maybe it will let us know that it got murdered… I can’t believe I’m asking that.”
Rowen agreed and watched him go. “I hope he keeps this up. I could get used to the news coming to us.”
“Let’s just get to work,” said Margo, dropping her bag onto her desk.
“Margo wants to get to work,” said Willow. She gave a low whistle. “That’s a surprise.”
Peony smiled knowingly. “She wants to get off early so that she can go see David.”
Margo rolled her eyes. “We’re not together anymore,” she pointed out.
Willow snorted. “Yeah, I’ve heard that before.”
“We’ll see how long that lasts,” said Peony.
Margo rolled her eyes a second time, but Rowen could see that she was smiling. No doubt she had big plans for David’s return. The more she thought about it, the more Rowen hoped it would work out between those two. They made a cute couple. She had had her doubts at first, but Rowen liked David a whole lot better than Margo’s ex-husband, T
erry. At least David treated her with respect.
“Who’s David?” The door to Rowen’s office opened, and a man stepped out.
It gave Rowen quite a start. She dropped her purse and took a couple of steps back. After a moment, she placed who it was. She recognized the lanky frame and winning smile. “Uncle Norman?”
“At your service,” said Norman, directing that pearly white smile right at her.
Rowen couldn’t believe it. It had been years since Norman had been in Lainswich. He was a slippery sort. The last Rowen had heard he was working in Europe as some sort of motivational speaker. Here in the US, he had run into some legal trouble when he started a one-man psychic hotline. There had been some tax evasion involved. It seemed bizarre that he would come back at all.
