“I’m fine,” she said a little more firmly. “I’m a nocturnal creature, if you’ll remember. I can drive a few miles home.”
“I’d feel safer—” Gabriel began.
“My van, my rules.”
He sighed. Arthur gave him a sympathetic look as if to say, “See what I have to deal with?”
Fine. Screw them both. If that’s what they were going to be like, Gabriel could walk.
Chapter Eight
“This thing is ancient,” Gabriel sniffed. “Don’t you have anything better to drive? You’re going to end up stranded on the edge of the road someday in this beat-up hunk of metal.”
“Don’t insult my car,” she said. “It’s a classic.”
“In age only. This thing will not go over well at car shows.”
He was probably right, but she didn’t want to admit it. Eventually she’d have to replace the old van with a shinier, newer model. But hopefully that wouldn’t be for a few more years.
“Should it matter so much what a suspected killer is driving?” she snapped waspishly. “You still haven’t dropped your case against me, I presume?”
“It could be very useful information to have,” he said, just as sharply. “If I need to put out an ABP on a rusted-out hulk of metal containing a dangerous felon.”
“She isn’t rusted out.”
“There is rust on the undercarriage,” he said.
“You try getting through a winter without driving over some rock salt. It’s not nice to cars. Not that I’d expect a native Californian to know.”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “How do you know I’m a California resident?”
“Your license plate. Unless you drove a rental car with California plates all the way here, I’m guessing that you’re from the state or somewhere close.”
His eyes narrowed. “You’re very astute for a baker.”
“And you’re being very trivial for an FBI agent. Don’t you have better things to do than pick on innocent vehicles?”
“Innocent,” he snorted. “This thing deserves to be in a scrapyard.”
Priscilla patted the dashboard. “Shh. He doesn’t mean it.”
The banter felt light and natural, after all the serious accusations he’d made earlier in the week. She wondered what had changed in recent days to make him likable. Or perhaps tolerable was a better word. Had it been the food? The help he’d given her? Or maybe she was just too tired to care about all his misbehavior up to this point.
“Arthur said you hated driving,” Gabriel said.
She raised an eyebrow. “Did he now? What else did he tell you about me?”
“That you’re abominable with new technology.”
“Abominable is a strong word.”
“Resistant?”
“Better,” she agreed. “And yes, I can’t figure it out on the best of days. I thought that having a young person in my house would allow me to learn, but I hardly see him at all.”
He made a speculative noise, and she immediately regretted letting the words slip out. What if he took it to mean that he had no alibi? What if he decided that meant Dean was the guilty party? Didn’t she have some obligation to protect him?
And what if he was guilty? What did that mean for her?
Did she have an obligation as his so-called mother figure to defend him? Or did her duties as a police consultant compel her to reveal his involvement in the death?
Maybe it had been self-defense, she reasoned. Maybe there was a reason besides revenge. Absalom had gotten in her face in an effort to make her attack him. It was a standard practice in anti-vampire religious groups. Most of them would provoke until attacked, then sue their attacker, dragging their name through the mud as they did so. Maybe he’d pushed Dean too far. It didn’t seem to take too much to set the volatile kid off.
And maybe she was acting just like Gabriel, presuming guilt without sufficient proof. She gripped the steering wheel harder and took a turn quickly. She wasn’t going to do that. She’d ask Dean for his side of the story when she got home. He’d probably be reading comic books in his room, and she could drag the story out of him before dawn.
When she pulled up to the bakery, she parked next to Gabriel’s much sleeker Hummer. Parked side to side, the differences were pretty glaring. It was like comparing an old, worn-out Shetland pony to a stallion in its prime. It just wasn’t a fair comparison. They were in two entirely different leagues.
She was too busy ruminating to notice the third car parked across from her bakery until she actually exited the car. It was a familiar car, though she couldn’t remember where she’d seen the powder-blue Volkswagen bug. She squinted at it.
“Is something the matter?” Gabriel asked, rounding her van to find her staring at the Volkswagen.
“No,” she decided. “It’s nothing. Why don’t you take off? It’s going to be light soon.”
“Gentlemen walk ladies to the door,” he said primly. His accent thickened on the word lady. It might have been endearing if she weren’t so tired.
“Chivalry isn’t dead, I see.”
“On the contrary, it’s been dead for five hundred and thirty-seven years.”
She fought the urge to whistle. Yes, he was quite a bit older than she was. No wonder he was so stiff. It had to be hard living for that long with a stick up his behind. They walked in silence up to her door and he held it open for her. To her surprise, someone was waiting in the lobby for her.
It took her a second to place the face. The spiky brown hair, the earnest blue eyes, and rather pointy chin were all familiar, though she’d only ever seen them once. Matilda Reid had insisted on showing her a picture of her son after they’d first met. This boy was a little older, but largely unchanged but for a few new lines on his forehead and around his eyes.
“Miss Pratt,” he said nervously. Sweat gleamed on his brow and, paired with his too-fast heartbeat, she was pretty sure it wasn’t caused by the heat. “I needed to talk to you.”
“What about?” she said, setting down her bag on a nearby table. Gabriel closed the door behind them and leaned against a wall.
Zachary glanced back at Gabriel. Priscilla could empathize with the look of fear that flitted across his face. Gabriel wasn’t the most friendly-looking man in Bellmare. He looked like what he was. A dangerous vampire.
“My mom said that you’d be able to help if I ever got into trouble,” he explained.
Priscilla raised an eyebrow at that. What exactly had she done to earn the confidence of a woman like Matilda Reid? It wasn’t as if they were destined to be bosom pals. The Historical Society hated her.
“What seems to be the trouble, Mr. Reid?” she asked. What she really wanted to ask him was why he was up at this early hour. It was well past the time a human should have been up. Did he have a job to get to in the morning? Or more accurately, in only a few hours. The schedule of day and night could be confusing for vampires.
He glanced around the place. Maddison was in the back, cleaning up from the sounds of it. Anna was probably at home by now. Priscilla generally tried not to keep the human girl too long. Sleeping less had more detrimental effects on the human psyche than it did on a vampire’s.
“You have to promise me that you won’t take this information and run with it, okay?” he said, keeping his voice low. The precaution really wasn’t worth much with three vampires in the building, but he didn’t need to know that.
“What information might that be, Mr. Reid?”
He gave the bakery another nervous glance. It didn’t look particularly threatening to Priscilla. What, did he think there were speakers hidden in between the jars of cookies, or a microphone slotted between the ice-cream cakes in her display freezers?
“It’s about my fiancée, Tilly,” he said haltingly. He looked awful. The circles beneath his eyes were dark and bruise-like. His shoulders sagged, as though he’d been weighed down by the weight of whatever he was about to confess.
“What about her?”
Priscilla was intensely aware of the way Gabriel had leaned forward. She wasn’t sure if he knew the stance he’d adopted was predatory, or if, after so many years of being Parliament’s attack dog, he didn’t notice anymore. Either way, it made Zachary lapse into silence. She shot him a dirty look over her shoulder.
“Don’t pay any attention to my friend,” she said in her best imitation of Olivia’s soothing, motherly tones. “He’s harmless.”
Zachary took a few deep breaths, and his heartrate slowed down.
“Tilly,” Priscilla prompted. “You said you wanted to tell me something about your fiancée.”
“Right. Tilly,” he swallowed hard. “She’s really scared of those Sons of Adonai.”
“Aren’t we all? They’re a menace.”
“They’re worse than that. Tilly’s told me stories.”
“Tilly has told you stories? Did she have a bad encounter with them?”
Behind her, she heard a scratching of a pencil. Gabriel wasn’t going to quit, apparently. He was as bad as Arthur sometimes. Stubborn to a fault and not particularly tactful when it came to dealing with people. She couldn’t say that tact or human interaction were her forte either, but she swore that sometimes these men made her look like a genius in the field.
“You could say that. If you want to call the first eighteen years of her life a bad encounter.”
“Eighteen years?” Priscilla echoed.
“Yes,” he said, rubbing his arms free of the goose bumps popping up along his skin. “They’re horrible. You have no idea.”
“Enlighten us,” Gabriel drawled. “What was it like? How does your fiancée know?”
Zachary took another shaking breath. “Because she was on the inside. Her real name is Joella Stokes, and she’s Absalom’s cousin.”
Silence met that pronouncement, so he continued.
“He came here for her,” he clarified. “They came here to get her back. She told me she’d rather die. That she’d rather kill than go back. I think she might have killed him.”
Chapter Nine
“They came to Bellmare to get Tilly back?” Priscilla asked, rephrasing the question to get a clearer answer.
Zachary nodded, scrubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. He looked like he was going to pass out at any second.
Priscilla rubbed her temples. “You know that’s crazy, right? Why would they go to all the trouble to build a compound, bring nearly fifty people into the middle of nowhere, and start a campaign of terror against this town, just to grab one girl?”
“Because Absalom is a nutcase,” Zachary said, slamming his palms down onto the table. “He was set to marry her when she was fifteen. Fifteen. Do you know how wrong that is?”
“I’m not sure it’s even legal,” Priscilla muttered.
“It is in the state of Kansas, if you have the approval of your parent or legal guardian,” Zachary said in a tone of utter disgust. “Tilly’s parents just loved Absalom.”
“You said they were cousins,” Gabriel interjected. “I may not be familiar with the age of consent by state, by I am fairly sure most states have outlawed marriages between first cousins.”
“They’re not first cousins,” Zachary said with a frown. “Kansas will allow you to marry your second cousin, and that’s what they are to each other.”
“Did they marry?” Priscilla asked.
Zachary shook his head. “She met me first. She was with them when they picketed outside the university I attended. I was eighteen and stupid, but I got in her face and asked what she thought she was doing. I thought I was prepared for anything. I knew the Sons had a reputation for starting fights. But I didn’t expect her to cry.”
His face twisted into that helpless expression that so many men seemed to wear when they saw a woman’s tears. Priscilla had to wonder if that had been an intentional design on the behalf of the Almighty. Nothing could quite undo a man like watching a woman cry, even a woman he didn’t know well.
He sighed and ran a hand through his hair, flattening a few of the brown spikes. “I wasn’t sure what to do. So I took her away from there before one of the big Amish-looking guys could beat my face in for upsetting her. I got her some food and she told me the whole story.”
“And what might that be?” Gabriel asked.
Priscilla shot a look over her shoulder at him. “If you’re determined to join the conversation, why don’t you stop looming and join us at the table?”
Gabriel considered that for a moment. Priscilla thought he might stay where he was, just to annoy her. But after a few seconds he pushed away from the wall and strode over to the table. He folded his long, lean body into one of her handle-back chairs. His legs brushed hers underneath the table. She tried to ignore it. The table was small and he was a tall man. She’d put up with it.
“Please continue,” she said, reaching out to pat Zachary’s hand.
He took a shaky breath. “We kept in touch. It was difficult at first, because they really hate modern innovations. I didn’t have a phone number to call or an email address to send things to. I had to give her notes whenever she was picketing.”
“Skip to the part that’s important,” Gabriel said, leaning over Zachary. He still managed to tower over the young man, even while sitting. So much for not looming.
“I’m getting there.” She didn’t miss the slight tremor in Zachary’s voice. “She was getting set to marry him in June. She was scared of him, even then. He had a temper. And he was pushy too. He wanted to get physical. She was only fifteen years old and she wasn’t very well-educated. She let him go further than she should have. I knew I had to get her out of there.”
“And yet somehow you’re engaged to this woman,” Gabriel mused. “You’re about the same age as the deceased. Exactly how are you different from Mr. Nicholson?”
Zachary’s face turned red and his hands balled into fists on the tabletop. “It wasn’t like that at first. I wanted to help her. I took her to my mom’s, and she helped us get it all sorted out. We changed her name and we got her emancipated as soon as she turned seventeen.”
“And until that time, you were guilty of kidnapping,” Gabriel said coolly. “You kept her from her legal guardians, and I’m presuming you didn’t go through the proper channels to change that. If you’d been able to prove some sort of negligence, she’d have ended up in the foster care.”
Zachary glared at Gabriel. “What were we supposed to do? Let her marry him? The Sons’ legal team is a nightmare. If we’d tried to take it to court they would have crushed us flat, and she’d be Joella Nicholson right now. Like hell I was going to let that happen.”
“I’m sure your motives were completely altruistic,” Gabriel said dryly.
“That isn’t the point, Mr. Winthrop,” Priscilla said. “What’s past is past, and she’s here now. Why do you think she killed Absalom, Zachary?”
Zachary didn’t take his eyes off of Gabriel, but he did eventually answer her.
“She came back really upset the night that she went to confront him with Pastor Jameson. There was blood on her clothes.”
“You’re sure it was blood?” Priscilla asked.
“Pretty sure. She broke out the peroxide. My mom always did that when I skinned my knees and got blood all over my jeans.”
“How long ago was that?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Same day as the murder, I think. So … I dunno three days ago? It seems longer, doesn’t it?”
Priscilla glanced over at Gabriel. “What do we do with this?”
“We need to alert Arthur,” he said. “It sounds as if the evidence may already be beyond salvaging, but we at least need to let him know what’s going on.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Zachary said, pushing up from the table. “I told you not to be hasty. It doesn’t necessarily mean that.”
“You are the one who came to us,” Gabriel pointed out. “You are the one who is concerned your fiancée has murdered a man.”
&nbs
p; “I didn’t say it was murder.” Zachary’s eyes were wide and earnest. “I think Absalom probably forced her hand. Self-defense isn’t the same thing as murder.”
“Your fiancée has means and motive,” Gabriel said.
“Motive, maybe, but I heard his throat was ripped out. She couldn’t have done that!” Zachary’s eyes wheeled to where Priscilla sat with her back to the window. She was glad she’d drawn the blinds. To an outsider it would have looked like Gabriel was carrying out the interrogation. “Tell him! She’s pregnant. She couldn’t have done something like this even if she was desperate.”
“But Edward Jameson’s dog could have,” Gabriel shot back. “And we have been informed that she was speaking with the pastor the night Absalom was killed. Where is your fiancée now?”
Zachary’s jaw set stubbornly. “I’m not going to help you execute a witch hunt.”
Gabriel shrugged. “Fine, don’t assist us. Bellmare is a small town. There are only so many places she could be hiding.”
Priscilla had to disagree with him on that front. Yes, Bellmare had a set population of a little over three thousand people, but that meant nothing. There were hundreds of tourists moving through Bellmare on any given week. Some of them came on tour buses. It wouldn’t be difficult for one small woman to take advantage of the chaos and slip away on one. There were also a number of historical sites that were closed to the public except for the set times that ghost tours went through. Tilly knew the schedules and could avoid prying eyes if she wanted to.
Priscilla put a hand on Gabriel’s arm. “Thank you for telling us, Zachary. We’ll take it from here.”
“You can’t send the police after her,” Zachary begged. “I think she might be in serious trouble. They won’t leave us be. Absalom and his lackeys know where we live. They’ve been harassing us every day. I’m afraid that they might come for her if they think she did it.”
“We’ll be discreet,” Priscilla promised. “For now, I think you need to go to bed, Mr. Reid. You’ve got to be exhausted.”
Zachary barely stifled a yawn at her words. “No cops,” he insisted.
Holy Crepes Page 9
