Cursed

by J. R. Rain

  “I’m too drained to hang on a bike right now.”

  She gave me a look, tossed a key ring in the air, and snatched it with a dramatic flourish. “Dada said we could borrow his Jag.”

  “Wow. He’s a nice guy for a creepy old soul stealer.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  While I wheeled out of the driveway and away from the mansion where I’d left God-only-knew-how-many years of my life, she rummaged in her mystery sack. I was relieved when she came out with a couple of sandwiches. She unwrapped one and handed it to me.

  “Here,” she said. “You need to get your strength back. We don’t know what we’ll run into up there.”

  Keeping one eye on the street, I peered suspiciously at the sandwich. “Is it earthly?”

  “Peanut butter and jelly,” she said.

  “Heavenly,” I said, taking a big bite.

  We drove in silence for a while, chewing and ruminating. The Jag was smooth and powerful and a little out of my league, but I held it steady. When we got to the main road, she gave me directions back onto the freeway. Now we were heading north on the 57 freeway.

  “So where are we going?” I asked.

  “Crestline. In the mountains.”

  “You really think this ‘Louise Sanderson’ is Gerda?”

  “It’s all we’ve got right now.”

  “Can’t you dial up some of that Mead magic and read some tea leaves or something?”

  “Don’t be a child, Al. You didn’t lose that many years. And why do you sound funny?”

  “My tongue is stuck to the roof of my mouth. Shouldn’t we alert the airports and train stations in case she’s trying to flee?”

  “Ideally. But to do that, I would have to convince my commander that we have enough evidence to warrant that scale of search. And that would open us up to a number of questions, such as why we fled from Nana’s death scene and why we didn’t report a crime.”

  “The nurse saw Max Richter. She can back us up.”

  “You think the night nurse of a home for retired witches hasn’t learned the risks of breaching confidentiality?”

  “Yeah, right. Her tongue might get turned into a possum or something.”

  “Besides that, all we have are all those squashed mice at your place, assuming they haven’t turned to dust. That’s hardly cause to alert every airport and train station and taxi service and bus service in Southern California.”

  “But the golem—”

  “Yes, the golem,” she said, reaching into the bag and pulling out a banana. “Another thing we can’t explain to the police. Along with real proof that your wife was involved in the murder of my sister.”

  “But your grandmother must surely have some proof. How else would she have known that Louise and Gerda were the same person, and linked it all back to me?”

  “We’ll never know, but she obviously figured it out. If they were playing paranormal paddycakes together, who knows?”

  “If she had some proof, why didn’t she go to the police?”

  “Why go to the police when you can handle things your own way?”

  I shuddered again. “But why?”

  “Tradition. To exact her own justice.”

  “Then why would she involve me if she knew Gerda was the killer?”

  Tabby looked at me sideways, munching her sandwich and smacking her lips as she talked. “Think about it. You can’t really be this dense.”

  “I’m having a hard time thinking, let alone thinking logically. I just had my mind read and I’m not sure if I’m all the way back yet.”

  “You had an affair with Amanda. You cheated on your wife. You cheated on a serial killer waiting to happen. You took a frail, barren woman and hit her right where it hurt the most—in her ovaries.”

  “But—”

  “Keep your ‘but’ out of my face, Shipway. That’s the facts. It doesn’t matter that your wife is a crazy psycho. Thanks to your uncanny inability to hide simple letters, Gerda discovered the depth of your affair. You told her it had been a one-time deal. Wrong. She saw in those letters your true feelings for my sister, and it put her over the edge. You put a serial killer-in-waiting over the edge. Do you get it? She no doubt stalked Amanda for some time, watched her closely, became increasingly interested in her life, and did the whole ‘fake identity’ thing. And the jealousy had time to build while she must have been playing with the black magic she’d learned from her father and Nana. All those recovered memories must have come in handy for that.

  “And then little Petey slides out into the world and looks exactly like you. That must have been what pushed her fully over the edge. She killed my sister, kidnapped the baby she could never have, and now we have no idea what games she’s playing. Had you kept your own mouse zipped and taken care of your failing marriage responsibly, then you would have been divorced and you and Amanda could have had a healthy relationship.”

  We were silent for a while as I digested all of this. The freeway was busy, but not yet crowded enough to keep us from going at a decent clip.

  “Okay,” I said. “I made a lot of mistakes. But Gerda was just crazy enough to make a run at either me or Amanda and the baby, even had I done everything right.”

  “Chances are good that your wife was crazy enough to stalk you after the divorce no matter what, true. But, at least the pregnancy would have been legit and most likely everyone would have lived happily ever after.”

  “Okay, we established why your grandmother cursed me, established that I single-handedly doomed your sister to a heinous death, and that I had a hand in the kidnapping of my own child. Not to mention, some of these actions led to the death of your grandmother and the actual loss of some of my own life. I can pretty well say that I am one royal fuck-up.” I turned to Tabby, who was stuffing the rest of her sandwich into her mouth. “Why don’t you just put a gun to my head and blow my brains out? That would solve pretty much everybody’s problem.”

  “Okay, Martyr Boy. On some level, I do hate the fact that you ever came into our lives. You have caused so much harm. But...”

  “But what?”

  “Amanda loved you. She loved you with all her heart. You were very good to her, except for that one big lie, and even though it broke her heart to give you up, she was blessed with a beautiful baby. A baby that gave her love and joy every single day.” She paused. “You’re just a human. Just a man.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry you lost your sister. I loved her very much.”

  “I know you did.”

  “And if I had any magic within my power, I would have surrounded her with a protective spell or something. I would have given my soul to save her and our baby.”

  The traffic was thinning. Soon we were on the 210, which would eventually take us up to the San Bernardino Mountains. And Crestline.

  “We can’t go to the police and we can’t rely solely on magic,” Tabby said. “Sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands.”

  “We know Gerda is unstable. So how do we make sure things don’t get out of control?”

  Tabitha reached into her purse and showed me her pistol. I wasn’t up on guns but this one looked mean enough to punch a hole in a tank. “Top shooting marks the last four years.”

  The peanut butter went as solid as stone in my belly. “Please don’t kill her.”

  “I don’t plan on it.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “She killed my sister. Slit her throat and watched her bleed. Of course I want to blow her brains out. But I pledged to uphold the law, and that runs deeper than my craving for revenge.”

  I believed her. I believed she would be a police officer first and a distraught sister second. But much of that would depend on Gerda. And whether or not she was in the cabin. And what she had done to Petey. And whether she really was dabbling in witchcraft. And whether there were any residual curses flying around. And whether Max Richter showed up. And—

  “We have to be ready for anythi
ng,” she said.

  That could have been in the running for “Understatement of the Year,” along with “I’m a little bit thirsty.” I was tempted to turn the wheel and go back to the relative safety of my normal life, where the worst I had to worry about was a stray rodent or two. Or two thousand. But I kept driving. “If she’s up there, what do you think she’s doing?”

  “If she’d been planning the murder and kidnapping for some time, she probably has quite an elaborate plan worked out. More than likely she has fake passports, for both her and Petey. She’s probably going to cut and dye his hair, and she’s smart enough to ditch the Louise Sanderson identity, too.”

  The craving for a drink kited out of the blue as the cognac wore off. The sun was sinking in the west now, and it threw gorgeous streaks of purple and pink across the high clouds. The view was so vivid that it deserved a toast. A whole evening’s worth of toasts.

  “Remember,” said Tabitha. “Our goal here is to get Petey safely away from Gerda. Once we confirm she has the child, then we can call for back-ups. Deal?”

  “Deal,” I said. “What happens when your commander finds out you’ve been moonlighting on this case?”

  “Let me worry about that,” she said. “Let’s go get our boy.”

  Our boy.

  Chapter Thirty

  It was something I’d been putting off, and my excuse was that I was too busy staying alive to ask. But the truth is that I’d been afraid, because seeing him would make it all real.

  We were still on the 210 freeway. Traffic was picking up, and we were moving at an agonizingly slow pace. I checked the speedometer. Thirty-three miles per hour, slow enough that I could see the faces of oncoming motorists peering at the tinted window, wondering what sort of rich asshole was driving the Jag while they were stuck inside Hyundais.

  I cleared my throat and pretended it was the peanut butter. “So, do you have a picture of him?”

  “I wondered when you would ask.”

  Tabby brightened and plunged her hand into her purse. Instead of coming up with a .38, this time she pulled out a cracked leather wallet that had seen better days. She deftly flipped through it, as she had no doubt done thousands of times before. She could probably have worked her way through that wallet blindfolded.

  She extracted two wallet-sized pictures from within its depths and handed them to me. I glanced sideways long enough to orient my swaying hand to meet her swaying hand and pluck the picture from her fingers. I did my best not to smear my oily prints on them, but it was really a challenge holding two pictures with one hand and driving with the other.

  The first picture showed a chubby infant with pitch-black eyes, precociously cuddling a teddy bear that wore a Los Angeles Angels baseball cap. A saggy-looking cloth baseball was clutched in his other hand. The little guy had my eyes, but the rest of his face was Amanda’s, angelic and rounded.

  My boy....

  A dozen emotions struggled for dominance—pride and fear were slugging it out at the top of the list.

  The second picture showed Amanda and Tabitha both planting raspberries on either side of his chubby cheeks. He seemed to be laughing hard enough to pee, completely helpless against the two women determined to smother him with wet kisses.

  Amanda looked so happy. That’s how I remembered her. Always smiling, laughing endlessly, never a harsh word. We had been beautiful together. Perhaps we had been too perfect. Maybe we had been too polite. Maybe a few cross words were necessary to maintain some balance in a relationship.

  Or maybe just one of the two not being a cheating, lying scumbag.

  “You’re crying,” Tabby said.

  I handed the pictures back. “Must be my allergies.”

  Tabby snorted and snatched the pictures from my fingertips. “It’s okay to cry. You loved her, and this is the first time you’ve seen your boy. Did you see his chubby cheeks?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I love those cheeks, godammit. That’s my guy.”

  We were now heading up the mountain route that would eventually lead us into Crestline. The traffic had thinned a little and the Jag had room to flex its muscles. “How much farther?” I asked.

  “Ten miles or so.”

  “Ten minutes, then,” I said, punching the accelerator.

  “Make it seven or I shoot you.” She held open her purse so that I could see the black handle of the pistol. She wasn’t smiling.

  “Check your watch,” I said, and proceeded to drive even more recklessly, whipping dangerously around cars and sharp mountainous turns. The tires squealed like cheerleaders on a roller coaster. I left behind a wake of flashing headlights and middle fingers and a cacophony of honking horns.

  We got there in eight minutes.

  Tabby didn’t look pleased, but she let me live. For the moment.

  * * *

  We parked down the street from Bluejay Way, a crumbling, narrow road that matched the address Tabby had received from the deeds office. I eased the Jag into the scrub vegetation, taking a little satisfaction as branches scraped the paint job on the fenders.

  A little payback, Dada. File a claim on THAT, you old bastard.

  We squeezed out of the car and headed up the road, staying in the underbrush as best we could. Appropriately enough, a colorful blue jay swept low over the street and pecked at a lurking tomcat. The bird then elevated rapidly into the upper branches of the surrounding pines.

  Startled shitless, the orange tom flipped backwards, landing on all four paws. A ten-point-oh, in my book. A second blue jay appeared, but the cat saw this one coming. Wanting to keep its eyeballs, the cat darted away into some low scrub. The blue jay squawked triumphantly, or perhaps in frustration.

  Bluejay Way. Like it was their way and nobody else’s. I couldn’t help but wonder if Gerda had put some sort of hex on the birds and if they were about to become my new greatest fear.

  There were perhaps half a dozen homes on Bluejay Way. Some were far back from the road, and some were right on top of it. Others were almost completely hidden behind the forest of pines. The San Bernardino Mountains were home to some of Southern California’s few mountain communities, location of the biggest fire in United States history. Gerda must have bought one of the cabins that had survived.

  Now, the fires were just a distant memory. A breeze awakened the branches overhead. The cat was gone, and so were the birds. The street was quiet and peaceful. It was hard to believe that a crazy killer was hiding out up there. Even harder to believe I was about to meet my son for the first time, and that a woman I had once loved might be cooking up a pot of boiling water to play “Hansel and Gretel” with him.

  “What do you think?” I said.

  “It’s number 105. That’ll make it the fifth house down.”

  “Yes.”

  “Looks empty,” she said.

  As much as I dreaded the confrontation, I knew this was our best chance to save Petey. If Gerda was already on the run, the chances of Petey getting out of it without a hostage situation or a shoot-out were slim.

  I looked at Tabby. She was straining her neck forward, searching through the rows of pine trunks. “Are we going to break in?”

  “Of course. But we should do a full reconnaissance mission first.”

  “Guess we don’t have to do this by the book, huh?”

  She pulled her cannon from her purse. “Nobody’s ever written a book for this.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  We crossed through a soft matting of pine needles. From the angle of our approach, we could see only the closed garage door and a bedroom window. The blinds were shut at the bedroom window. The cabin looked much like many of the other homes in the area: a lot of rough, dark wood paneling. The house was built on a slope, with two stories.

  I doubted very much that we were being watched. It was a good angle to sneak up on the house, although I had never dreamed that I would be sneaking up on my wife to peek in the windows. And if I had, it would have been because I suspecte
d her of cheating, not that she might be conjuring up demons and curses while playing “This little piggie” with my baby.

  Still, there was no sign that Gerda was here and I was beginning to think we were wasting our time, that she was already on the run under another false identity.

  “Do you hear that?” Tabby asked in a dry whisper. We were still hunched behind the bole of a thick pine.

  I heard the beating of my own heart in my ears, and my stomach gurgled from the peanut oil, but I doubted that’s what she was referring to. I strained past my bodily noises and thought I could hear something.

  “Sounds like scraping,” Tabby said.

  I heard it then. Snick, snick, snick. A faint, rhythmic scratching from somewhere.

  “Or digging,” I suggested, remembering the hours Gerda and I had spent landscaping our house back in happier days.

  She nodded. “But I can’t tell where it’s coming from.”

  Acoustics here were thrown off. Bluejay Way was actually a fairly steep street, with many of the homes below us, and the hills and trees alternately muffled and amplified sound. Sometimes I could hear laughter and loud music coming from somewhere below, but I couldn’t tell if they were a backyard away or across the valley.

  I noticed Tabby was carrying her gun loosely in her palm. Her entire hand surrounded the gun, perhaps in an attempt to conceal it if from anyone watching from surrounding homes. Then again, I would suspect that the sight of us crouching in front of the cabin, looking as suspicious as hell, would have already alerted nosy neighbors. Luckily, many of the cabins in these mountains were vacation homes, abandoned for much of the year.

  “Okay. Let’s take a look,” she said. “Follow me, and keep quiet.”

  I grabbed her shoulder as she started moving, halting her. “Are you sure it’s a good idea that I follow you? I mean, this is police work. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.”

  “Don’t be such a pussy, Albert. She’s your wife. If she’s in there and she’s doing something stupid, perhaps you can talk some sense into her.”