The Witch Is Dead

by Shirley Damsgaard

  “She has a point—” Darci began, then paused, catching the look on my face. “Maybe not about the fairies…sorry, Aunt Dot, I don’t know much about them. You’ll have to explain them to me sometime,” she said, trying to placate her. “But she is right about Silas. I don’t know him well, but he’s always seemed a little odd, and it’s hard for me to imagine he’d be clever enough to carry out this scheme.”

  “What about that young man, Kevin?” Aunt Dot asked. “Might he be involved?” She clearly didn’t suspect Silas.

  “He’s just a kid—only a few years older than Tink.” I shoved my hands in my pockets. “With Buchanan’s murder, he might be out of a job soon. From what Christopher said, that would put him in a financial bind.”

  “All right,” Aunt Dot said, smacking the table. “It’s the doctor and the widow. Dr. Mason’s smart enough. And on Law and Order, it’s always the wife and the boyfriend.”

  I rolled my eyes. I swear…that show must have been all she ever watched. Taking my hands out of my pockets, I paced the room again. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t make sense of what was happening. At every turn, all I found were more questions—not answers.

  “We’re no closer to finding Tink than we were yesterday.” I hugged myself. “Every day that goes by, the chances get less and less. We need answers.”

  “We need to take a peek at Silas Green’s records,” Darci pointed out with a sly expression.

  I halted my steps and gave an exasperated sigh. “You know, your mind definitely has a criminal bent, Darci. I’ve got a feeling you’d make a great second story man.”

  She tossed her head. “Do we need answers or not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does Silas Green keep popping up, in your visions and in real life?”

  “Yes.”

  She crossed her legs and leaned back. “Then I say we do a little more snooping and check out the crematorium.”

  Aunt Dot’s pout faded and she watched us with bright eyes. “Can I go?”

  “No,” Darci and I said simultaneously.

  Twenty-Six

  It wouldn’t do to leave Darci’s car along the gravel road, where passing vehicles would be bound to notice it. We parked it at an abandoned farmstead near the road leading into Green’s Crematorium instead and hiked the rest of the way.

  We were dressed in black sweatpants and sweatshirts, and Darci wore her hood pulled closely over her blond hair, which would’ve shone like a beacon in the night if left uncovered. She’d wanted to camouflage our faces, too, but I’d drawn the line at rubbing dirt across my cheeks and forehead.

  As we walked down the road leading to the crematorium, the beams from our flashlights danced over the gravel at our feet. The heat and humidity made the dark fleece cling to my arms and legs, and I felt perspiration run down my spine, dampening the waistband of my sweatpants. It felt like walking through a sauna.

  Nerves fluttered in my stomach. Would we be able to find an unlocked door or window? Or would we truly have to bust a window to get inside the crematorium? Darci and I had done a lot of snooping in the past, but we’d never actually broken into a building. This would be a first.

  We had no choice. I knew Silas Green was the key to finding Tink, but Bill couldn’t execute a search warrant based on my hunch. We had to find proof first, then we could go to Bill. I snorted softly. That would be a fun conversation—I knew he’d object to our methods. Oh well, I’d worry about talking to Bill once we had something more concrete than just my feelings.

  Darci and I rounded a corner and saw a low brick building ahead. Its smokestack loomed high in the night sky. The path we’d traveled widened and led around to the side of the building. Stopping, I took a deep breath of the heavy air and exhaled slowly.

  We’d lucked out. We were alone.

  “Okay, what’s next?” My voice seemed to echo in the still night.

  Darci pointed to her left. “Let’s see if there’s a door,” she said as she made her way closer to the crematorium.

  I followed in her footsteps until we reached the side of the building. Two large bay doors faced us, each wide enough for a hearse to enter. An entrance door was to the right. Silently, I motioned to it with my flashlight.

  Darci crept over to the door and slowly turned the knob. It was unlocked. She smiled at me over her shoulder and disappeared through the dark doorway. I hurried after her.

  Inside, we stood in a large room with concrete floors. To our right was a door leading to the rest of the facility. Opening it, we found ourselves in a hallway with another door to our left and one at the end. We picked the first door.

  As I shone my flashlight around the room, my beam bounced back and hit me in the eyes.

  “What’s that?” I asked, keeping the light pointed down.

  A huge metal box with stainless steel doors sat in the middle of the room. Attached to its side appeared to be some kind of control panel.

  “It’s the oven.” The whites of Darci’s eyes shone in the darkness. “I think they call it an oven…I don’t know…I’ve never thought about it…”

  I clasped my hand over her mouth. “Shh, you’re babbling.”

  She blinked twice and nodded. I moved my hand away.

  Shining my light around the room, I spotted another door. “Let’s see what’s in there.”

  Our tennis shoes squeaked on the concrete floor as we made our way to the door. It was unlocked, too.

  “Silas isn’t real big on security, is he?” I said as I swung the door open.

  Our flashlights played around the room, revealing a stainless steel table along one wall. Next to the table, laid out with precision, were various instruments such as saws, knives, and forceps.

  My stomach pitched. It was obvious the room was used for harvesting body parts. Yuck.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said, turning to Darci, to discover that she wasn’t there. She was standing in front of two large upright freezers.

  “What’s in here?” she asked, grasping one of the handles.

  “No!” I exclaimed rushing to her. “Don’t open—”

  Too late. Her scream reverberated off the walls of the cavernous room.

  Her knees started to bend as she made a retching sound deep in her throat.

  I grabbed her around the waist with one arm. “Don’t you dare faint, and don’t you dare puke.”

  “There’s…there’s…” She pointed a shaking hand at the opened freezer.

  On the shelf, neatly wrapped in a plastic bag, were two severed hands and a detached foot.

  “I know, body parts,” I said, firmly shutting the door with my other hand. “Now snap out of it.” I gave her body a quick shake. “We knew what Silas was doing.”

  “But…but…I didn’t expect to see them.” Her voice quivered.

  “Me, either, but finding them is proof of Tink’s dreams and my vision. In both cases, the spirits were missing parts of their bodies. It shows we must be on the right track.” I pulled her away from the freezer. “Come on, we need to find Silas’s office.”

  Holding fast to Darci’s hand, I led her back to the hallway and down to the last door. Behind the door was a large waiting room, and to our left a room marked PRIVATE.

  “In here,” I said, tugging her toward Silas’s office.

  A desk sat in the middle of the room, its top covered with papers. Wow, I thought, worse than mine at the library.

  Bookcases and filing cabinets lined the walls. They, too, were stacked full of “stuff.” A bird’s nest balanced precariously on a stack of old newspapers. An old-fashioned pop bottle lay on its side at the corner of the desk. An orange hunting cap that had seen better days perched on top of a pile of magazines. Shiny shell casings littered Silas’s desk.

  Between the desk, bookcases, and filing cabinets, there was a path around the piles and piles of junk.

  I was amazed.

  Darci gave a soft sigh. “Gosh, Silas is quite a collector, isn’t he?”

&n
bsp; “Humph,” I snorted, “more of a scavenger, I’d say. He must comb the woods around here and pick up whatever crap he finds.” I shone my light around the room in disgust. “We’re going to be lucky to find anything in this mess.”

  Darci motioned with her flashlight to one of the overflowing file cabinets. “You start there, and I’ll look through this one,” she said, pointing at another cabinet.

  Holding my flashlight under my chin, I riffled through the files. Dust tickled my nose, and I sneezed, almost dropping my flashlight.

  “Hey, I think I’ve found something,” Darci said in a loud whisper. She pulled a folder out of the cabinet. “It’s death certificates…and what looks like family consent forms.”

  She had my attention. “Really?” I joined her at the desk and took half of the forms from her, quickly skimming the pages. “I don’t know any of these people, do you?”

  “Hmm, I know this lady,” she said, holding a certificate to the light. “My mother used to visit her in the nursing home. Gee, I’m surprised she wanted to be cremated.” She shrugged. “She didn’t have a family—I suppose that’s why.”

  She picked up another. “I know this one, too. Myrtle Benson. She was a regular at the library until she became bedridden and her daughter had to take care of her.” She paused as she read the paper. “That’s funny. This has her age at time of death listed as sixty-nine—she had to be at least ninety when she died.”

  “Let me see that.” I took the death certificate from Darci’s hand.

  Sure enough. Sixty-nine when she died on the second of May, 2005. I held the certificate close to the beam of my flashlight. “They whited out the age and wrote over it.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Here’s another one,” Darci said. “Allen Tilton. Says here he was forty-eight. Well, that would be about right.” The faint light revealed her frown. “But it has the cause of death listed as ‘pneumonia.’ He didn’t die of pneumonia, he died of hepatitis. He’d picked it up years ago in the military. At the time, everyone was talking about his death.”

  I had a thought. “Hand me the death certificate of the woman your mother visited.” I flipped the page over and found a family consent form granting the harvesting of the woman’s tissues. “I thought you said she didn’t have a family?”

  “She didn’t.”

  “This says she did,” I said, waving the papers in front of Darci’s face. “The consent form was signed by her ‘daughter.’”

  “But—”

  She stopped, interrupted by the sound of metal doors rolling open from deep inside the building.

  “Crap, someone’s here,” I said. “They’re coming in through the bay doors.” I shut off my flashlight as Darci did the same.

  “Come on.” She clutched my arm and pulled me toward the office door. “We can go out through the waiting room.”

  The sound of another door opening and shutting stopped us.

  I heard footsteps coming down the hallway.

  “This way.” Not letting go of my arm, she tugged me over to the window located on the opposite side of the room.

  I stumbled over a pile of old papers in my haste.

  Darci released me and cranked the window open. Throwing one leg over the sill, she held out a hand to me. “Hurry up.”

  Grasping my hand, she shinnied out, pulling me closer to the window.

  I followed suit, and had almost cleared the window when the seat of my pants caught on something protruding from the frame.

  “Hurry up,” she hissed from outside the building.

  “My pants are snagged,” I whispered back.

  Darci clutched both my shoulders and yanked hard. I felt the fabric give way and tumble to the ground just as the office door opened.

  “Run!” Darci exclaimed, hauling me to my feet.

  We darted into the woods as a voice called out from the open window.

  “Hey, get back here!”

  Twenty-Seven

  I woke up to a silent house. Abby and Aunt Dot were still asleep in the guest room. After almost getting caught going through Silas Green’s files, sleep hadn’t come easy. At least now we knew Silas was illegally providing Christopher Mason’s biomedical company with tissue. The question was, did Christopher know? And how did the illegal scam play into Tink’s disappearance?

  I needed to clear my brain. Slipping on a T-shirt, shorts, and tennis shoes, I wrote a note for Abby and quietly left the house. Too early for my neighbors to be up on a Sunday morning, I took off at a brisk pace down the silent streets of Summerset.

  My shoes slapped the sidewalk while blue jays chattered at me from the trees. Squirrels scampered in the dewy grass, searching for nuts to bury. In front of me, the sun hung over the eastern horizon like a big orange ball. I wiped the perspiration from my brow. Already the day promised to be hot and sticky.

  I pumped my arms, increasing my speed, and soon felt the familiar burn in my thigh muscles. I concentrated on pulling fresh air into my lungs, hoping the influx of oxygen would still my troubled mind.

  What did I do now? Talk to Bill, of course. It might be a slight problem when it came to explaining how I acquired my information about Silas Green, but I’d worry about that later. Cornering Christopher Mason might be a good idea, too. Maybe another trip to Aiken to question Kevin was in order? He’d seemed very willing to talk about his former employer the night he joined us for dinner at Abby’s house.

  I slowed my steps. Bill wouldn’t approve of these plans racing through my head, but I didn’t care. Somebody had to find Tink, and soon.

  A horn beeping caught my attention. I stopped, and turning my head, saw a car slowly pulling up to the curb next to me. The driver’s window came down and Ethan motioned me over to his car.

  “You’re up early,” he commented as I approached the driver’s side.

  “So are you. What are you doing?”

  “Just driving around, trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together.”

  “Yeah, me, too. That’s why I went for a walk,” I said, leaning down.

  He jerked his head to the passenger’s side. “Why don’t you get in and we can work on it together.”

  “Okay.” I walked around the car and slid into the passenger’s side.

  “Does Bill have any leads on Tink?” I asked as Ethan eased away from the curb.

  “No, I’m sorry, Ophelia, he doesn’t.” He shook his head. “The sheriff’s office hasn’t even received one single call.”

  I traced a line on the seat next to me. “That’s not good, is it?”

  “No, usually in cases like this, they at least get crank calls.” His eyes slid my way in a quick glance. “What have you turned up?”

  I folded my hands primly in my lap. “Me? What do you mean?”

  He made a sound in the back of his throat. “Come on, Ophelia, I’ve seen you in action before, remember? When you suspected me of threatening Tink, you came after me with your baseball bat. I can’t imagine what you’re prepared to do to whoever snatched her.”

  “Okay.” I sighed loudly. “So maybe I have checked out a few things.”

  “What things?”

  I unfolded my hands and turned to face him. “I’d planned on calling Bill later anyway. Silas Green is harvesting tissue from cadavers illegally and selling them to Dr. Christopher Mason’s biomedical supply company.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “We kind of went through his files—”

  “‘Kind of?’” He raised an eyebrow. “And who’s ‘we’?”

  “Darci and me. Last night, at Green’s Crematorium—”

  He held up a hand, stopping me. “No, I don’t want to know.”

  “You asked,” I replied indignantly.

  “Even though I’m on my own time, I’m still an officer of the court and bound to report a break-in.”

  “For the record, we didn’t break anything.”

  “Trespassing, then.”

  He had me there.
>
  “Look, I’m going to tell Bill about Silas. Once he gets a search warrant, he’ll learn the truth.”

  “No, he won’t.”

  My forehead puckered in a frown. “Of course he will.”

  “Not without probable cause.”

  I turned away from him. “I’m giving him probable cause.”

  “No, you’re not. Unless you tell him the whole story, you’re only relaying a ‘hunch,’ a ‘rumor.’ That’s not enough for a warrant.”

  “What will he do, then?”

  “Pull Silas in for questioning—”

  “Silas will lie,” I said. “Then go right back to his office and get rid of the files.”

  “Yup, that’d be my guess. Without a confession from you, he’s got nothing on Silas.”

  “So you’re telling me if we uncovered illegal activities because we were hypothetically trespassing and told Bill, I’d be the one in trouble.”

  “Right—”

  “Yet Silas, who’s violating the dead, would skate?”

  He nodded.

  “That sucks,” I huffed. “Can’t you guys sweat a confession out of him?”

  A smirk played at the corner of his mouth. “You mean with bright lights and billy clubs?”

  “Yeah.” I bobbed my head righteously.

  “It’s called ‘police brutality’ and the courts frown on it.”

  I slapped the seat. “How do we prove what Silas is doing?”

  “Slowly, carefully, building the case, one piece of evidence at a time.”

  “My daughter’s missing!” I cried. “I don’t have the luxury of moving slowly and carefully. The longer she’s gone, the less chance we have of finding her. She—”

  Ethan stretched out a hand, silencing me. “Ophelia, if we don’t build an airtight case, the guilty walk free.”

  I shoved my body against the seat in frustration. “What do you suggest I do?”

  “Let me ask you a question…Why are you so interested in Silas Green?”

  “All the dreams, all the visions, seem to lead back to him. I can’t help but believe he’s the key.” I took a deep breath. “Tink’s dreams began the night before we ran into Buchanan at the airport…”