Casting Spells (25 page)

“And we don’t have one to give you.” She patted my hand. “I’m truly sorry, Detective, but our rooms are booked years in advance.”

I could have pursued the booked-but-still-unoccupied argument, but I had the feeling it wouldn’t get me anywhere.

She offered me a cup of coffee and a freshly baked pumpkin donut. I hated playing into the whole cop/donut stereotype, but what the hell. I really do have a jones for donuts. I asked Renate a few questions about the night Suzanne died, but she didn’t offer anything new. Suzanne waited. She drank. She waited some more. She paid her check. She left. Nothing much there to go on.

I polished off the coffee and donut and thanked her for her time.

“If you have any more questions, you know where to find me,” she said with a sunny smile.

The storm had blown itself out overnight, leaving behind bright sunshine and a winter blue sky. I walked the perimeter of the Inn, taking in the familiar architectural details. The structure was a perfect replica of Salem’s House of Seven Gables, right down to the weathered shingles and slightly crooked first-floor windows.

It was always good to get confirmation that you weren’t crazy.

One of the businessmen who had been dining at the Inn the night Suzanne died returned my call while I was trying to charm Renate Weaver into letting me have a room. No surprise when he said he remembered Suzanne clearly. Most men, straight or gay, would. It was what he said next that surprised me.

“We were driving from the parking lot to that little bridge that leads to the highway and I saw her—Suzanne, you said her name was?—walking along with a guy.”

“Could you see his face?”

“It’s winter in Vermont,” he said with a short laugh. “He could’ve been Sasquatch for all I could see of him.” The man in question wore a long black coat and a few yards of scarf wrapped around him.

“Hair color?” I asked.

“Silver, I think. Or maybe one of those white blonds. Sorry. That’s the best I can do.”

Suzanne had been looking up at the guy and laughing. That much the businessman was sure of.

I liked knowing there had been laughter near the end.

Sieverts was a short, stocky guy with a wrestler’s body. Suzanne was easily six feet in heels. The guy she had been walking with couldn’t have been the politician.

So who the hell was he? Goober and his cross-country brother both had that kind of silvery-gold hair, and Goober had been working at the Inn that night. I was still waiting for return calls from four other men who had been in the dining room that night. It could be any one of them.

Life was messy. Accidents left loose ends that took a long time to tie up. Suzanne’s trajectory from the moment she walked into Sticks & Strings until Paul Griggs and his sons pulled her from the frozen lake had been arrow-straight.

I caught myself midthought. There was nothing wrong with a straight line investigation. I was applying a big-city mind-set to a small-town way of life. This was the town without crime, right? The odds of suddenly finding one were maybe ten million to one.

“Morning!” A group of day-trippers breezed by me, faces bright with that special Christmas consumer glow.

The streets bustled with activity. Cars, pedestrians, a horse-drawn carriage driven by the Santa Claus clone I’d met at the parking lot my first day in town. The place looked like the mall on Christmas Eve.

The pet shop was out. The Griggs boys were busy painting the newly washed and primed walls while rap music pounded at a decibel level that was probably illegal in some states. No wonder Paul was staying away until afternoon. I could always go back to Sticks & Strings and set up my laptop in the storeroom but I wasn’t ready to be that close to Chloe. Last night’s dream was still too real for comfort.

I knew the softness of her skin. The sweet smell of her hair. The way her breasts felt against my chest.

Hell, why didn’t I admit it? It might have been a dream, but for a little while I had been happy. I had been given a glimpse into the kind of future I didn’t believe existed for me. A future where a man woke up in the morning happier than when he went to bed the night before.

I had stopped believing in soul mates a long time ago. Things didn’t always work out the way you hoped they would when you took those vows. Shit happened. Life happened. And sometimes the only thing you could do was keep moving.

The dream would fade. By the end of the day I wouldn’t remember how she had felt in my arms.

But that didn’t change the fact that if I saw her in Goober’s arms again, I would probably knock his perfect teeth down his throat and singlehandedly bring crime back to Sugar Maple.

Okay. So maybe I wasn’t ready to go back to the store yet. The morning was sunny and bright. The streets and sidewalks were dry and clear. The cemetery was just up the road. Nothing like a walk among crumbling tombstones and grave markers to take a man’s mind off a woman.

The road crew was gone and the gates were wide open.

The cemetery was as perfect as everything else in Sugar Maple. The pathways were shoveled free of snow. No patches of ice to send an unsuspecting visitor sprawling. The graves were all well kept and decorated with sprigs of holly and frozen poinsettia plants. I was almost surprised they didn’t have a tour guide with a thermos of hot chocolate.

There were a few stones from the early days, the inscriptions worn almost unreadable by time and the elements. There might have been some unmarked graves beneath the snow cover but I doubted it. Someone had taken care to make sure each grave was marked and that the markers were visible.

The two flat markers that rested beneath a gnarled elm at the southwest corner were a perfect example. The snow had been carefully cleared away and only a thin layer of ice remained. I bent down and brushed it away. There were no names on the markers, only symbols: a sun and a crescent moon.

“Chloe’s parents.”

The woman’s voice seemed to come from nowhere. Low, musical, the kind of voice that got a woman noticed.

She was standing behind me, backlit by the sun, one of those women who could have been anywhere from twenty-five to fifty. Medium height. Fair skin. Eyes the color of turquoise. She was probably slim but I couldn’t be sure because most of her was hidden inside a huge furry coat that had cost three or four animals their lives.

She was also drop-dead gorgeous, but hey, this was Sugar Maple. That seemed to come with the territory.

“Excuse me?” I asked.

She gestured toward the markers. “Chloe’s parents are buried there.”

“You knew them?”

“Very well.” She moved closer. She wore dark green leather boots with wicked high heels. “You’re our new police chief.”

“Luke MacKenzie.” I stuck out my right hand.

“Isadora.”

I didn’t catch her last name but at the moment that didn’t matter. I was too busy wondering why she didn’t shake my hand.

“I have a cold,” she said, reading my mind. “Hand-to-hand contact is the easiest way to spread disease. Unless you carry around a bottle of Purell ...”

I didn’t. I thanked her for keeping her cold germs to herself and she laughed.

I don’t want to say it was a weird laugh but there was definitely something off. I couldn’t say if it was the pitch or the volume or maybe the duration. All I knew was that it lifted the hairs on the back of my neck the same way the sound of the not-really-a-banshee had the other night.

“Our little village must seem dull to you after Boston.”

“I’m a small-town kid,” I said. “I’m comfortable here.”

“In the cemetery or our little village?”

The bright sun had rendered me snow blind and I couldn’t make out the expression in her eyes. I was searching for a suitably witty and evasive answer when my cell rang.

“Go ahead,” the woman said. “You’re working. Take your call.”

I was surprised to see my former brother-in-law Jack’s name on the display screen. I turned and stepped a few feet away. He and Suzanne had married straight out of high school and divorced not long after, but they had also managed to stay close. Jack and some of the old crowd were throwing a mass and a memorial service for Suzanne tomorrow and wanted me to attend.

I wasn’t big on wakes, funerals, or memorial services, but the old crowd had been there for us when we needed them and I was going to return the favor. It would mean leaving this afternoon but this was Suzanne we were talking about. I told him I would be there.

“Sorry I took so long,” I said, turning around, “but—”

The woman was gone.

Some ominous clouds moved across the sun. I glanced around the small cemetery but it was as empty of visitors now as it had been when I first arrived. I had been on the phone less than three minutes. How far could a woman in high-heeled boots get in less than one hundred eighty seconds?

Still there was no sign that she had ever been there.

I walked the perimeter of the cemetery, moving systematically from stone to stone: 1654, 1682, 1701, 1703, 1753, and then nothing until Chloe’s parents had been laid to rest here approximately twenty-five years ago. A gap of almost two hundred fifty years would catch anybody’s interest.

Like many things in Sugar Maple, it was weird but not criminally weird. There was probably another cemetery somewhere on the outskirts of town that I hadn’t seen. Or maybe they outsourced their dead, and all of their death records were on file in another town.

There was no hospital in Sugar Maple. No wellness clinic or emergency care center. Unless a woman chose to have her baby at home, the record of birth would be filed with the hospital in whatever town the hospital was incorporated.

That didn’t answer the question about death certificates since death didn’t always come with a warning, but it was reasonable to assume that many of Sugar Maple’s citizens had died in a hospital or away from home. Which meant outside the village’s jurisdiction and therefore not documented in the records.

Either way it wasn’t my problem. Let Chloe and Joe Randazzo work it out. The Sugar Maple Graveyard Tour was now officially over.

The clouds were growing thicker, and it looked like we were in for more snow. When you had a three-hour drive ahead of you, snow wasn’t exactly something you looked forward to. I had figured on leaving around six in the morning and hitting Bradford in time for breakfast before the services began, but I hadn’t factored in another storm. I decided to leave early that evening, crash with Jack and his family, then drive back tomorrow after it was over.

A low rumble sounded close by. Thundersnow didn’t happen often, but when it did, it grabbed your full attention. It ran counter to the natural order of things, crawled under your skin, and moved along your nerve endings like the electricity it was looking to discharge.

I was a few feet away from the gate when I stumbled over an uneven paver and hit the dirt as lightning struck the tree not two feet away from me.

The crack as the bolt hit the dense wood was deafening. The air was filled with the smell of ozone and charred wood. I was about to lift my head to make sure things were all clear when another bolt of lightning zoomed past the other way and hit a different tree.

I heard another sharp crack and looked up in time to see the top part of the second tree separate from the trunk. I barely managed to roll out of the way a split second before it crashed to the ground right where I had fallen.

I could have powered three cities on the adrenaline rush surging through my veins.

Live wires.

Bolts of lightning.

Falling trees.

I hadn’t had this many near misses when I walked a beat in the worst part of Boston.

If I didn’t know better, I would think the town was trying to tell me something.

19

CHLOE

 

I looked out the front window at the darkening sky. There was something freakish about thundersnow, like Mother Nature had a little surprise up her sleeve that she couldn’t wait to share.

Penny had abandoned the basket of roving at the first clap of thunder, and from the looks of the basket, I didn’t blame her one bit. The roving was looking sadly depleted today. She cautiously peered out at me from her hiding spot beneath the sofa, and I dropped a few discarded mohair swatches into the basket and a sample shawl I was planning to frog any day now in an attempt to plump things up a bit for her aged bones. It still didn’t look particularly inviting but Penny circled the basket, looked up at me with her amazing yellow eyes, then leaped in.

Two and a half hours later I was ready to reconsider my opinion of thundersnow. Apparently it brought out every knitter, spinner, and crocheter in New England, all of whom had money to burn. My stock of Kureyon sock yarn was sold out, half my inventory of Lorna’s Laces, and six bags of hand-dyed alpaca that I was almost sorry to see go.