by C. E. Murphy
A church bell rang, counting off the hour at ten o’clock, and the crowd fell back, making an open path to the grave. Planes droned overhead, and I could hear the distant sounds of traffic, engines revving and horns honking. Closer to me, people sniffled and cleared their throats and lifted their chins, but the silence, for a city morning, was nearly complete. Almost as one, heads turned to watch the six men who carried Cassandra’s coffin approach her grave. The young man at the right front held his jaw so tightly set that mine ached in sympathy.
A bewildered little girl wailed and flung herself at the men who walked by, solemnly carrying a coffin on their shoulders.
Deja vu hit me so hard I clutched at Morrison’s sleeve to keep myself upright. I’d been here before, not all that long ago. Only then it’d been in the desert of my mind, with the big coyote, not real.
The girl’s cry cut through the silence, sharp as knives. The young man in the lead flinched, eyes darting down to the little girl before he yanked his gaze forward again. Morrison murmured, “Siobhàn.”
“What?” My fingers refused to unwrap from Morrison’s sleeve as I stared up at him, the funeral forgotten. It was all I could do to keep my voice down. “What? How do you know that name?” It wasn’t anywhere on my paperwork, and the only person who’d ever used it was dead.
Morrison frowned at me. “The little girl. Cassandra’s daughter. Shevaun Tucker.”
Faye darted forward to scoop the girl up. Shevaun buried her face against Faye’s shoulder, sobbing with misery and confusion.
I stared across the grave at the little girl who shared my name, and wondered if the universe could get any less subtle.
CHAPTER 20
Shevaun Tucker was tired and bored with the ceremony long before it was over. She squirmed unhappily in Faye’s arms, toddling over to hide behind her grandmother’s skirt when Faye put her down. She watched all the solemn, sad faces with wide dark eyes, and put her thumb in her mouth in the fashion of a child who thought she was too old for that, but couldn’t find any other source of comfort. She caught me looking at her, and for a few moments we held each other’s gazes. The guilt came back, stronger than before, and I looked away. I heard her snuffle a protest, and when I looked back, I couldn’t see her anymore. Ruth Tucker’s skirt swung, though, as if a little girl might be hanging on to its far side.
It was over startlingly quickly, then. Someone laid a wreath of daisies on Cassandra’s coffin, and her mother, grim-faced, put a handful of pansies in the middle of that. She stepped back, and the coffin-bearers lowered the coffin into the ground on taut ropes. Ruth threw a handful of dirt onto it, then turned away, shoulders knotted, unable to watch any more. I could see Shevaun again, trailing after her grandmother with a fistful of the woman’s skirt in her hand. The crowd began to break up a little. Morrison touched my elbow. “Come on.” His voice was low and strained. “We should offer our condolences.”
“Didn’t know cops knew big words like condolences,” I said almost as quietly, hoping to get a smile out of him. The corner of his mouth turned up a little. It would do. We made our way to the back edge of the crowd and worked our way around it, toward where Mrs. Tucker stood with the young man who’d led the coffin-bearers. Shevaun was hanging on his pants leg now.
“Her brother?” I asked Morrison in as discreet a voice as I could manage. He shook his head.
“Shevaun’s father. Cassandra was an only child.”
God. Her poor mother. I dragged in a deep breath, trying to break apart the bands of aching sympathy around my heart. Then we were shaking hands with Mrs. Tucker, whose weary expression held none of the blame or anger that I’d expected. She accepted our condolences graciously, inviting us, with more quiet dignity than I imagined I’d be able to summon, to come back to her home with everyone else, for funeral meats. Morrison shook his head in apology; he had to get back to work. Mrs. Tucker nodded her head without surprise, and we broke away, heading for the car.
“Joanne! Officer Walker!”
I screwed up the side of my face that wasn’t facing Morrison. Faye’s voice wasn’t one I’d wanted to hear calling after me. Morrison lifted one eyebrow and we both turned back to the blond girl, who had somehow collected little Shevaun as she approached us. “I didn’t know you were going to be here,” Faye said as she came up to us. Shevaun stared at us both, round-eyed and suspicious as she sucked on her thumb. No, I realized after a moment: she was gnawing on it. Poor kid.
“I wanted to come. Faye, this is my boss, Captain Michael Morrison. Captain, this is Faye Kirkland. We met the day after Cassandra died.”
“Did you,” Morrison said, a perfect example of neutrality as he offered Faye his hand. She tried rearranging Shevaun so she could take it, and the little girl abruptly put her arms out to me. Taken aback, I lifted her out of Faye’s arms, and she gazed around, apparently pleased with the new height she could view the world from.
“Thanks.” Faye shook Morrison’s hand, then put her arms out for Shevaun again. “C’mon, Shevaun, honey. It’s almost time to go, and you’ve been awful good. I’ve got cookies for you back at the house.”
Shevaun studied her with much the same suspicion she’d examined Morrison and me with a moment earlier. Then she swung her head around and checked my expression. I smiled at her. “Shevaun’s a very pretty name,” I told her. “Why don’t you go with Faye and get some cookies now?”
Evidently it was a convincing argument. Shevaun put her arms out again and leaned toward Faye. I managed to not quite dump her into Faye’s arms, but it was a near miss. I wasn’t used to handling children. Morrison and I watched them walk away, and I waited for the storm.
“I didn’t know you were good with kids,” he said, taking me completely off guard. He turned without waiting for me, walking across the grounds to the car. I shook myself and caught up after a couple of steps.
“I’m not, really. I like Billy’s kids, but I don’t really know anything about them.”
“She didn’t scream when you held her. That’s something.”
I let out a breath of laughter. “We Shevauns have to sti—” My mouth was always surprising me with the things it said. I swallowed the words too late. Morrison’s eyebrows shot up.
“You what?”
I wondered if it was some kind of felony to be hired as a police officer under a name that wasn’t your own. “Nothing,” I said, and bit my tongue until we got back to the car. Not until I was inside with the doors closed and the windows rolled up, in exactly the same kind of physical shielding that I used mentally, did I dare speak again. Even then I had to put both hands on the dashboard and lean into it, like I was drawing strength from the car, before I could manage the words. “My name is actually Siobhàn. Hers is probably spelled differently, but it’s the same name.”
Morrison stared at me like I’d grown another head. I sucked on my upper teeth, leaned back in the seat so I could fold my arms around my ribs, and stared just as intently out the window. The car was hot, far too hot for comfort, even if I wasn’t making myself uncomfortable already. The bone-deep sunburn made itself noticeable again. Eventually it became clear Morrison wasn’t going to so much as start the car until I finished what I’d started. I pressed my lips together until it hurt and kept my focus out the window.
“I’ve been called Joanne my whole life. My mother spelled Siobhàn the Gaelic way, S-I-O-B-H-À-N, which is just impossible for an American to say.” Even I’d spent most of my life half-convinced it was pronounced See-oh-bawn, despite having looked it up dozens of times to correct myself. “My dad took one look at it and started calling me Joanne.” My toe tapped against the floor, rapid tattoo displaying my discomfort even if I didn’t want it to. With conscious effort, I stopped it from tapping.
My finger started tapping against my thigh. I gave it up as a bad job and let my toe go back to it.
“Siobhàn,” Morrison said carefully. He hadn’t had a problem with the name earlier, when it belonged to the little g
irl, but attaching it to me appeared to take some serious thought and consideration. “Siobhàn Walker?”
I tilted my head back, looking at the ceiling of the car. Black fuzzy mat, nondescript and able to hold in the summer heat.In for a lamb, I thought, and said, deliberately, “Siobhàn Grania MacNamarra Walkingstick.” That was the full name written out on my Irish birth certificate. I honestly had no recollection of ever saying it aloud before. Part of me wondered why Morrison got to be the Father Confessor. The rest of me didn’t want to know.
Morrison didn’t say anything else. He turned the key in the ignition, put the car in Drive, and drove me home in silence.
Monday, June 20, Noon
I felt as if I deserved the bawling out Morrison had failed to give me on the way home. That, perversely, was my excuse for going down to the station after changing out of my dress uniform. I was off-duty, so I wore shorts and a tank top, and wished my skin didn’t ache like it was sunburned.
The precinct building’s air-conditioning was out. It seemed like the whole city’s air-conditioning was out. The heat was oppressive, as if it was deliberately trying to crush the life out of anything that breathed. I wasn’t sure if it was compounded by the coven’s activities the night before, or if it was just my very own personal screwed up power loop. I was afraid it was me.
Morrison’s door was open and he stood by the windows in shirtsleeves, talking on the phone. I tapped on the door and he scowled, but gestured me in. I sat and took slow deep breaths of the still air, trying to shake off the feeling of suffocation.
“What do you want, Walker? It’s your day off.” Morrison came back to his desk and dropped the phone in its cradle.
“I know.” I leaned forward, putting my forearms on my thighs, and then wished I hadn’t. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to unstick from the position. “I just wanted to talk about Cassandra Tucker, Cap.”
Morrison folded his arms over his chest, leaning against his desk as he looked down at me. “What is this ‘Cap’ thing, Walker?”
My train of thought derailed and I frowned at him. “Sir?”
“Sir is fine,” he agreed. “Captain is fine. You used to call me Morrison, or boss, when you really wanted to rub it in. Now it’s Cap. What is that?”
“It’s an abbreviation for Captain,” I muttered, but that wasn’t what he wanted to know, and all things considered, I felt like I should tell the truth. The problem was I hadn’t noticed me calling him Cap until he pointed it out. I moved my gaze to his kneecaps, and talked to them. “Pretty much I feel like I’m kissing your ass if I call you Captain or sir.”
“They’re my job title and an honorific worthy of the position,” Morrison pointed out dryly. I looked up from his kneecaps.
“Yeah, but this is me…” I couldn’t help it. A little grin slid into place, and I finished the sentence with, “Cap.” He didn’t smile back and I looked away again. “You always look like you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop when I use Captain or sir,” I said with a shrug. “I guess I was just trying to find a way around that. Look, Morrison, about Cassandra Tucker…”
“The case is closed, Walker. It’s closed, and she’s buried. Leave her alone.”
“It’s just that I feel like there’s more to it.” My tongue and throat struggled over what to call him at the end of that statement, and couldn’t agree on an answer, leaving me feeling like I’d cut it off too abruptly. Christ. I was going to have to start calling him Michael, now that he’d made me self-conscious about all the other names I used for him.
I could not for the life of me imagine calling him Michael.
“There isn’t.” There was a flatness to Morrison’s tone, a lack of curiosity and a whole lot of barely controlled impatience. “The case is closed. Let her rest, and get out of my office. It’s your day off, and God knows I need it.”
I left feeling out of sorts, sticky, and a little confused. It was marginally cooler outdoors than inside, although I could feel heat radiating off the sides of buildings as I walked by. A bus rambled up in front of me and while I didn’t want to get on it, it made me notice the waiting bench it stopped at. I sat down, waving the vehicle on, and rubbed my eyes. My contacts were as sticky as I felt. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d taken them out. I wore the extrapermeable extended wear types just for that reason, but most days I remembered to take them out in the evenings. I was pretty sure I’d had them in for three days straight now. I wondered if I could manage to heal my own near-sightedness, then found myself rubbing the thin scar on my cheek. “Arright, yeah,” I muttered to myself. “Some things don’t need healing.”
A white-haired old woman on the far end of the bench looked at me nervously and scooted another scant inch or two away. “Sorry,” I said to her. “I’m not crazy. Of course, that’s what a crazy person would say, isn’t it?”
She got up and left.
Maybe I was crazy. It was possible. It was also possible Cassandra Tucker had had a heart attack brought on by too much use of magic, but the idea just made me itch. I’d been to the Dead Zone before. The bit with the snakes and the god-awful serpent monster was all new, and I didn’t believe Cassie’d died of something as ordinary as a heart attack. Not with that kind of welcoming committee on the other side. Even though Coyote told me my method of investigating the Dead Zone potentially opened me up to anybody who wanted to have a go at me, I still didn’t believe Cassandra’s death was natural.
I actually laughed out loud, looking up at the sky. “Satisfied?” I asked my invisible spirit animals. I couldn’t feel them with me, but I assumed they had to be around somewhere. “For once, I’m the believer. I’m the one who thinks something kooky’s going on when the perfectly mundane explanation makes everybody else happy. I’m getting good at this acceptance thing, huh?”
I was also getting worryingly good at talking to myself. Out loud, no less. A surly faced pair wearing black leather—which had to be really uncomfortable in this weather—took the long way around me, trying not to meet my eyes. I shrugged an apology and unstuck myself from the bench, heading back to Petite. I had two days off. I might as well see if I could prove myself right.
CHAPTER 21
“Hey, legs!”
I recognized Billy’s voice behind me, but it didn’t occur to me to turn around. He sprinted—for some value of “sprint;” the extra ten pounds made his solid footfalls sound heavy enough to shake the sidewalk—the few yards to catch up with me and dropped a hand on my shoulder. “Hey, legs. What, you’re not talking to me anymore?” He let out a puff of air and fell into step beside me as I wrinkled my forehead at him.
“You were talking to me?”
“You see anybody else with Julia-Roberts-inseam legs walking around here?” he demanded. I glanced down at my pale knees and my pair of really comfortable men’s sandals. Then I looked around at the passersby. Plenty of them were in shorts. Most of them weren’t women a smidgen under six feet tall.
“I guess not. You never said anything about my legs before.”
“Two reasons.” Billy steered me into the Missing O, where I hadn’t been planning to go. “One.” He lifted a finger. “Melinda’d kill me. Two.” Another finger. “It’s sexual harassment. Three.”
“You said two.” I got in line for a drink, Billy still directing me. It was blessedly cooler in the O, and the place was packed, everybody taking advantage of the functional air-conditioning.
“Shush your mouth. Three. I never saw your legs before.”
“Now that,” I said, offended, “is not true. I wore a dress at one of the Policeman’s Balls.” I was almost certain I had. Practically positive. At least once.
“You wore your uniform,” Billy corrected. “The midcalf dark blue skirt. Six inches of shin doesn’t count.”
“You have an amazing eye for detail, Billy.” I’d worn the same skirt to the funeral.
“That’s why they pay me the big bucks,” he said with a cheerful snort. “Frappucino and a bot
tle of water,” he said as we stepped up to the counter. “What’s your poison, Joanie?”
Joanie. The name made me smile a little. It was so much friendlier than Judy’s rigid Joanne or Morrison’s terminally exasperated Walker. A thump of loneliness chilled my blood. I hadn’t seen much of my friends the past few days, and it was making me feel isolated. Especially in face of Faye’s adamant comments about me being one of the coven now. It was like she was trying to surgically remove me from the life I already had, although I was pretty sure that was giving her golden retriever self way too much credit.
“Italian soda,” I said to the barrista, suddenly more cheery. “Orange, vanilla, cream, no whip.” That was my summertime drink, just like hot chocolate with mint was my winter drink. It was normal, it was me, and it wasn’t complicated by anybody’s magical ritual or their expectations of me. “Billy, I’m not supposed to be working.” I dug change from my pocket, counting out nickels and dimes to pay for my soda. Billy eyed me.
“Going broke?”
“Getting lopsided from carrying too many pennies in my pocket. Did you need something?” My vision was still playing havoc, and the edges of the coins kept fading into shadow, making them hard to pick up.
“Backup,” he said. I took a step back. He eyed me again, more maliciously this time.
“Oh,” I said, and stepped forward. “Sorry. I thought you were…never mind.”
