The mention of Chessa’s name made the hairs stand up on my arms. Or maybe it was learning that her lawn ornaments were roadkill.
I thanked her for the oh-so-generous offer. After checking that our privacy sound bubble was still in place, I got back to the main point of our discussion.
“Let me see if my overtired brain is getting all of this,” I said. “The fang belongs to one of Tansy’s dogs. Specifically, Jasper. You know this only because you happened to have the DNA of Jasper’s littermate on file due to a dispute between two of the department’s agents over whose pet was leaving droppings in a common area.”
Charlize nodded. “Even the results of unauthorized use of the department’s resources become property of the department.”
“And because the fang of Tansy’s dog was found inside my father’s wound, that means he lied to my face about the bird attack. I suppose Knox will be relieved. But that does make him a suspect in Tansy Wick’s disappearance.”
“A suspect in her death,” she corrected.
I winced. “My father has many flaws, but he’s no killer. I’m sure that once the agents question him, he’ll turn on this accomplice of his. The one who wears boots like mine. He or she is the one you’ve got to arrest.”
“And that’s my dilemma,” Charlize said. “How do I put this delicately?” She looked into her teacup and casually turned it from porcelain to granite then back again. When she looked back up at me, her blue eyes were bright and ringed in red. “The department doesn’t exactly follow the same rules as a municipal police department.”
I stopped breathing. “They’ll torture my father,” I said. “But they don’t need to do that. He’ll cooperate with the investigation, I promise. Let me talk to him. As soon as he’s well enough to shift into human form, I’ll convince him.”
“You won’t get the chance,” she said. “You saw what happened to Dr. Bob, as soon as the truth came out. He didn’t get a fair trial. He didn’t get a trial at all.” The red around her eyes grew brighter. “Except trial by bloodshed.”
I started breathing again, and it came in a ragged sob. I had thought I was too tired to feel anything, but I was wrong. The ache started in my chest and went all the way up to my ears. I hated Rhys Quarry, but I also loved him. I didn’t want him to die.
Charlize took my hand in hers. She stroked my palm with icy-cool fingertips.
“Shush,” she hissed. “It’s going to be okay, Zara.”
I bit back my emotions, pushing them into the dark basement. I had to be strong for my daughter. I had to keep my head above the water. I had to get help from someone more powerful than me.
“The department doesn’t know about the fang yet,” she said. “And they also don’t know where Rhys Quarry was when he got shocked by Vincent Wick.”
“They don’t know?”
“I changed the details in the report the medics opened last night,” she said with a soft hiss. “And I filed the fang request under the code for a different case.”
I forced myself to stare into her eyes, even though the red rims looked like seeping blood. “Thank you,” I said. “I owe you.”
“All I did was buy you a bit of time. It’s up to you and your father to save his furry hide. You need to find out who’s responsible for Tansy’s death so I can unleash the full fury of the DWM on them.”
“Are you sure they won’t just question him and let him go?”
“It’s complicated. Once upon a time, Tansy was one of us. She was an agent. The department treats the death of one of their own very seriously.”
“I’ll talk to my father. Let’s get him out of there so I can take care of this myself.”
She blinked. The redness around her eyes only got more vivid, yet I could also see that her eyes were a healthy white and her eyelids were a soft, fleshy pink. The blood-hued redness was similar to the snakes in her hair. The redness was either a glamour, or the truth beneath the glamour. It was both things. Charlize was both things. Monster and friend.
Charlize let go of my hand and reached again for her tea. “It sounds like you two don’t have the most honest relationship with each other, but it’s time for honesty now. Don’t make the mistake my sister Chloe made by not telling anyone about Chessa’s gift. The only way to save your father is for all your family secrets to be revealed.”
Familiar words echoed in my head. Secrets revealed are trouble unsealed.
“I’ll do my best,” I promised.
Chapter 32
TUESDAY
I woke before the alarm clock went off, and lay still for a moment, staring up at the bottom of Zoey’s bunk.
Since my father hadn’t been there the night before, and the cat hardly needed her own room, I could have slept in the guest room. But I hadn’t wanted my persnickety house to get annoyed and brick me in like some victim in an Edgar Allan Poe story. That particular method of murder was, incidentally, a fate so popular at one time that it earned its own name. Immurement.
When I’d climbed into bed the night before, I’d tried not to think about immurement. Or my father being tortured for information by DWM agents. Torturing him for information was my job. Charlize had promised she would get my father out, smuggling him under her sweater if she had to.
Zoey and I didn’t have our slumber party giggles on Monday night. With nobody to be annoyed, what was the point?
Boa jumped on the lower bunk, gave me a whiskery kiss goodnight, and then used her spectacular leaping skills to get up to Zoey’s level. That was where she remained. Boa was Zoey’s cat, that was clear.
I slept, though my dreams were so vivid, I might as well have stayed awake watching David Lynch films.
I was watching dirt, waiting for something to grow, when a tiny pointed leaf of pale green emerged. The loamy soil shifted. Another point came up from the dirt. This one was a bird’s beak. The blue jay dug itself out of its grave and shook the dirt from its wings.
Be careful, the blue jay spoke without opening its beak. Watch yourself, Zara. Watch yourself.
The blue jay stretched out its wings and took to the air. But the bird couldn’t fly away. No matter how hard he beat his wings, something held him down. A swirl of wire was wrapped around his legs, connecting him to the ground. More shoots of wire—barbed wire—pushed up through the dirt and lunged at the struggling bird.
The bird flapped harder and cried out in horror.
More wires shot up, looping around the bird’s head and wings, dragging it down.
The ground rumbled, and then something a hundred times larger than the blue jay shot up from the ground and swallowed the bird whole.
When I awoke on Tuesday morning, the image of my nightmare lingered so vividly that I got out of bed early rather than risk returning to the same dream.
Zoey stirred in the upper bunk and made a contented noise.
Boa slept beside her head, with her fluffy tail draped across Zoey’s upper lip like a comically large white mustache.
Frank handed me a book about the interpretation of dreams, plus a book about Freud, and a third one about medieval legends.
“Maybe these will help,” he said.
We were upstairs, in the library’s storybook corner. Frank was working on a display, and I was jokingly “supervising.”
I’d planned to keep my latest worries to myself, but the storybook area reminded me of the previous day’s sneaky visitor. I told Frank about that incident, plus the strange dreams that had plagued my sleep.
I checked that no patrons were watching then used my page-finding spell to query the books about blue jays and monsters from the grave springing up to eat them midair. The pages riffled with magic. Franked whistled his admiration of my nifty spellwork.
Alas, there was nothing under that search. I checked the word immurement next. And then I wished I hadn’t.
“People used to enclose a lot of weird things inside their walls for good luck,” I said to Frank. “The sort of things people nowadays would pay goo
d money to have removed from their walls, like nasty old bottles with waste and bent nails.” I chuckled. “Good luck keeping witches out with that.”
I read a little more while Frank worked on his display.
After a while, he asked, “Anything good?”
“More like the opposite of good. All these old stories about superstitious builders sacrificing children to entomb inside foundation walls...” I shook my head and glanced over at a display of the latest teen novels. “All those young adult dystopian books, with all their kid-on-kid battles, don’t seem so far-fetched in light of history.” I sighed and closed the book. “Nothing in here about blue jays or their connection to creatures of the grave, whatever those are.”
Frank clapped me on the shoulder. “We all have weird dreams. They don’t always mean something.”
“But you used to dream about flying every night before you finally found out what you are.”
“Good point.” He rubbed his chin. “How big would you say was this bird-snatching monster from your nightmares? Big enough to eat, say, a flamingo?”
“Of course not,” I lied. The blue jay had been a speck inside the thing’s large jaws. The hungry beast had been all mouth.
Changing the topic, I asked, “How’s the flying club?” He’d been meeting with Rob and Knox for flights in the mountains, away from curious eyes.
Frank waggled his eyebrows. “The first rule about Flight Club is you don’t talk about Flight Club.”
I groaned. “How long have you been waiting to use that line?”
“Too long,” he said with a smile.
Frank returned to putting up summer decorations. We’d chosen a bird theme for the children’s summer reading program, much to Frank’s delight. There were pink flamingos everywhere.
I picked up a pair of plastic martini glasses. “I’m not sure these are appropriate for children.” They had flamingos on the bases, but they were still martini glasses.
He put a hand on his hip and gave me a sassy look. “Zara Riddle, I never took you for a prude.” He plucked the glasses from my hands and returned them to the display. The centerpiece was a lamp with a shade covered in white feathers. It was an art piece by a local artist, titled Scenes From a Pillow Fight.
Frank flicked at the white feathers. “And how is the new member of the Riddle family?”
“My father? He’s in big trouble as soon as I get him alone in human form.”
“I meant the cat,” Frank said. “Is the Divine Miss Boa settling into her new fashionable digs?”
“She’s already better adjusted than the humans who live there. She walks across everything like she owns it. Furniture, countertops, even people. I wonder if she might be possessed.”
Frank frowned at me. “Zara, you do realize that’s normal cat behavior, don’t you?”
“I’ve never had a pet before.”
“It shows,” he said. “Cat-mom newbie.”
I chucked a pillow at him.
He caught it and prepared to lob it back at me but stopped when he noticed a man approaching the story-time area.
“Busted,” Frank said in a singsong voice.
To the man, he said, “Detective, it was self-defense, I swear.” He pointed at me. “She started it.” He chucked the pillow at my head.
Detective Bentley gave me a steely look. “I believe you,” he said to Frank without taking his eyes off me. “Mind if I borrow your coworker for a moment?”
Frank picked up his toolbox of crafting supplies. “Sure. I need a refill on glitter anyway.”
Bentley walked over to the display of birds and picked up a blue jay holding a sprig of holly. It was a Christmas ornament, and half the size of the blue jay who’d visited us. He put the bird back without comment.
He turned to me. “I’m here with your update on the Tansy Wick case.” My aunt’s spell was still working.
“Have a seat.” I waved to the story-time pillows on the floor.
“Those aren’t chairs,” he said.
“You are really good at detecting things.”
He frowned and took an awkward cross-legged seat on a gray velvet pillow.
According to his research, the property development company who’d been pressuring Tansy Wick to sell her land had also been involved in other recent cases. Their crimes were mostly trespassing and aggressive phone calls, but it showed a pattern of bullying. The company had at least a dozen employees involved in closed or current investigations.
I asked, “Do you have a list of names I can look over?”
He didn’t even find this odd. That was some powerful spell my aunt had cast. He pulled his phone out and showed me a column of names listed alphabetically.
One of the named jumped out at me immediately.
“This one,” I said excitedly. “Reyna Drinkwater.” Her first name was so similar to Reynard that it had to mean something. “What does this MM next to her name mean?”
“Malicious mischief,” he said.
“Did she toilet paper someone’s tree?”
He gave me a wait-for-it look. “Reyna Drinkwater, with the help of an accomplice, released several wild animals inside a property while the owners were on holidays. The Pendersons, a law-abiding retired couple, returned home from vacation to find their residence infested with wildlife. There was a scurry of squirrels, a surfeit of skunks, and a passel of possums.”
“That’s it?” It was a far cry from murder. The infestation sounded both mischievous and adorable—but then, it hadn’t happened inside my house.
“And a donkey,” he said.
“You’re making this up.”
“I assure you I am not.” He went on to show me photographs of the damage to the residence.
He explained that whoever had released the animals inside the house must have known that damage done by those specific animals was excluded from the couple’s insurance coverage. The elderly couple decided to take the predatory offer from Akorn Development and use the funds to retire elsewhere.
“Reyna Drinkwater,” I said, letting the name roll around in my head. Tansy’s spirit had been quiet all day, and even now she didn’t react. Tansy Wick, were you being harassed by someone named Reynard? Or Reyna Drinkwater? No response. And what’s Project Buttercup all about, anyway?
Silence from the ghost in the peanut gallery.
I asked Bentley, “Do you know of something called Project Buttercup?”
He looked around at the bright-colored children’s books surrounding us. “Should I?”
“Never mind.”
He regarded me with suspicion. “You know something,” he said. “You’re keeping secrets.”
“Tansy Wick was working on a Project Buttercup,” I said. “I can’t explain it, but I have a hunch that this Reyna Drinkwater might be involved.”
“Does this come from that thing you do? Where you use empathy or psychic powers or whatever you call it?”
He remembered that after all. “That sounds silly,” I said. “Bentley, I was just teasing you that day.”
He rubbed his forehead. “This isn’t right. Something’s wrong. I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be talking to you.” He got up from his pillow and looked down his nose at me. “This is inappropriate.”
“Probably,” I said. “Before you go, do you have any photos of Reyna?”
He clutched his phone protectively. “No.”
“Does she have pale skin and long black hair?” If I could connect her to the woman who’d paid the veterinary bill, we would almost certainly have our suspect.
“No,” he said.
I made a disappointed noise.
“Her hair is dark auburn,” he said.
I made a hopeful noise.
It wasn’t much, but we had another lead.
Reyna Drinkwater, what have you been up to?
Chapter 33
Charlize breezed into the library five minutes before the end of my shift. She looked ready for the gym in a baggy sweatshirt, tight l
eggings, and athletic shoes.
She caught my eye and puffed out the bottom of her sweatshirt, where she had presumably stuffed a fox earlier that day to smuggle him out of the DWM.
I asked in a whisper, “Is he in there now?”
She flattened the sweatshirt again to show her trim figure. “He’s waiting in Bugsy, wagging his tail because he’s so happy to be up above ground,” she said.
I didn’t want to see his tail wagging. I wanted to hear him answer my questions. “He hasn’t shifted?”
“Not yet. He can understand us, but he can’t talk.”
“How convenient,” I grumbled.
But even if he couldn’t talk, I would mention the name Reyna Drinkwater and try to bluff a reaction out of him.
I said goodbye to my coworkers and punched out my timecard with a noisy KERCHUNK. Charlize teased me about making noise in the library, and we joked around for a minute. On the way out, I caught the head librarian staring after us wistfully. I pulled away from my new blond friend guiltily.
From the expression on Kathy Carmichael’s face, I could read her emotions like the synopsis of a book. I, too, had looked longingly after girlfriends joking around without me. For the past sixteen years, I’d gone without. I’d been too young to fit in with Zoey’s schoolmates’ parents, who were all easily a decade older, but too tied down to socialize with people my own age.
When Kathy had offered me the job, she’d offered to introduce me to her favorite crafts. She had expected that we’d be friends outside of work. I had expected the same, yet months later, it hadn’t worked out.
I smiled at my boss and gave her a cheerful wave, holding eye contact longer than necessary. I haven’t forgotten about you, I beamed in her direction. She turned away quickly.
My father’s ears pointed up when he saw me. He stood on the passenger seat with his white-tipped tail whipping from side to side. The windows were down, so I heard his high-pitched yipping noises. It was the first time I’d been around the fox since learning he was my father. He was so cute. I wanted to hug him. But I wouldn’t hug him. No way. Not after all the trouble he’d caused.
Watchful Wisteria (Wisteria Witches Mysteries Book 4) Page 24
