Sapphire: A Paranormal Romance (36 page)

They reached the
spot where Champ was still circling and whining.  Ned gave Champ a treat and
they backed away.  Tabitha immediately stuck her shovel into the muddy bank and
tossed a shovelful over her shoulder.  Jimmy stuck his shovel in and did the
same.

The hours flew
by.  Once he started, Jimmy felt a kind of determination overcome him and the
dirt flew over his shoulder at a rapid rate.  The hole got bigger, deeper, and
then wider.  Dirt and mud was all that they found for what seemed like an
eternity. Then, suddenly, as Tabitha pushed her shovel into the mud again,
there was a strange clanking sound.  Tabitha's eyes went wide and she looked up
at Jimmy.

"Found
something," Tabitha whispered.

Jimmy acknowledged
that he had heard her with a bob of his head, but his stomach was
flip-flopping.  It was one thing to see a reconstituted spirit, but another to
have potentially found the bones of the girl he was in love with.  It was as if
finding them would be the final proof that she was really dead.  That would
ruin the illusion he had managed to create for himself that they were, somehow,
normal in some way, despite being able to bend reality and speak
telepathically.  It was amazing what the human mind could do and then convince
you of at the same time.

Tabitha got down
on her knees and began removing clumps of mud from the hole with her hands. 
Jimmy helped clear the mud as she dug.  His breath was labored and his heart
was pounding in a mixture of anxiety and excitement.

Tabitha reached in
and her eyes went wide again.  She gasped.  She dug her fingers deep into the
mud and then pulled.  She grunted with the effort, and then there was a weird
sucking sound as the mud attempted to retain its hold on the object she had
found.  Then Tabitha leaned back on her heels, nearly falling over into the
mud, and in her hands was an object covered in mud and rot, but with sections
and segments of white peeking through.

She held up the
object and smearing the mud caked to it, bits of it dropping off onto the
ground beneath them. More and more white began to show.  Jimmy felt his stomach
do more loop-de-loops as what the object was became clearer.  The dark, empty
circles near the top of it became visible.  More and more white showed, and
then rows of neat white rectangular objects began to appear towards the bottom.

It was a skull.

They had found
Sapphire's skull.

Jimmy felt his
breath catch in his chest.  The world seemed to tip on its axis.  They had no
proof other than they had found a skull.  There was nothing on it that
indicated it belonged to Sapphire.  However, Jimmy knew that it was hers.  He
knew it as certainly as he knew that he was actually sitting there on the banks
of that river and that the wind was cold and that his pants were wet from
kneeling in the mud.

Jimmy felt his
heart sink.  Somehow seeing her skull and knowing, in his heart of hearts, that
it was hers made it all more real than anything else.  He was so used to seeing
her in the flesh and feeling her warmth whenever they touched, and now here she
was, in the way she had been when she was murdered and her skull was cold and
empty and lifeless.

Then, suddenly,
his head exploded with static.  He could feel the outright panic in Sapphire's
mind.  She had seen what was in front of Jimmy's eyes and she was now screaming
inside his mind.  It wasn’t words or anything that Jimmy could decipher, but a
kind of inhuman scream of pure despair and terror.  Jimmy felt his heart break
all over again.

"I think we
need to talk to Devlin," Jimmy whispered through gritted teeth.

"What?"
Tabitha asked.

"You heard
me," Jimmy said.

"I don't know
if that's such a good idea," she said.  "And I don't think the
sheriff will like it much, either."

Jimmy glared at
Tabitha and she froze. 

"I don't care
what anyone thinks," he said.  "Sapphire is screaming inside my head
right now.  And I want to confront the man who did this to her.  I want her to
see it and I want her to remember what happened."

Jimmy turned and
trudged through the mud and the water.  He could feel Tabitha's eyes burning
into his back, but he didn't care.  She would follow.  It was too good of a story
for her to back out now.  She was in this until the end.

There
was something about the sheriff in Knorr.  Although it was rumored
that he was from Pennsylvania, not born and raised in the area, there was
something about him that seemed southern.  Maybe it was the hat that resembled
a cowboy hat, or the fact that he usually wore cowboy boots.  Maybe it was the
fact that he was tall and carried himself the way you would imagine a southern
sheriff would in a movie.  Or maybe it was the fact that he spoke in a deep,
slow voice that almost had a kind of drawl to it.  Whatever the reason,
something about him just came across as if you were no longer standing in western
Pennsylvania, but staring at a sheriff in Birmingham, Alabama.

When Tabitha and
Jimmy entered the sheriff's office, Tabitha held the skull in a plastic bag. 
She wore a determined look on her face, but it was nothing compared to the
intensity on Jimmy's face.  Jimmy had never been less scared of the rather
intimidating sheriff and more determined to get what he wanted.

As soon as they
walked in, the sheriff removed his feet from on top of his desk and stood up. 
Tabitha and Jimmy walked past the receptionist and dispatcher—a woman with
blonde curls and a high voice that always gave Jimmy the shivers when she
spoke.  She immediately tried to call them back; it was against the rules for
them to go back there and talk to the sheriff.  A wave of the hand from the
sheriff, however, put her back in her chair in a huff.

"We need to
talk to Devlin Little," Tabitha said.

"What?"
the sheriff replied in his deep voice.

"You heard
me."

"Tabitha,
what the hell are you doing bringing a child here?  And a child that is in the
middle of all of the ruckus.  You know I like my town to be quiet.  And every
time I see you, you are doing everything in your power to make sure that this
town is not quiet.  Why is that?"

He turned his head
slightly and seemed to spot the object in the plastic bag for the first time. 
He sighed, hitched his pants up, and then adjusted the big gray cowboy hat on
top of his head.

"Damn,"
he whispered.  "Please tell me that is not what I think it is."

"We need to
get it tested, but we found this beside the river by the bridge," Tabitha
said.  "We’re pretty sure that this is all that remains of Sapphire Lumire."

The sheriff shook
his head, his jaw working back and forth strangely.

"I really was
hoping that you weren’t going to say that," he said.  "What will you
talking to Devlin Little do, despite potentially screwing up the case against him? 
He can’t lawyer up when he talks to you, and anything he says could not be used
against him in a court of law or anywhere else."

"I need to
talk to him," Jimmy said.

The sheriff turned
his head toward Jimmy.  Normally the man's piercing blue eyes would have sent
Jimmy cringing.  However, the sheriff didn’t have Sapphire's screams echoing in
his brain.  The sheriff hadn’t had his best friend gunned down in front of
him.  The sheriff hadn’t found himself in the middle of a reality-twisting
ghost story.

"I can’t let
you back there," the sheriff said.  "Sorry."

Jimmy snarled.  He
could feel the buzzing in his head growing again.  He stomped his foot on the
ground.  The lamp near the desk to his right suddenly exploded into a shower of
glass shards.  The receptionist and dispatcher let out screams.  Even the
sheriff jumped.

"Let me see
him," Jimmy said.  "One way or another, I am going back there to talk
to him."

The sheriff looked
from the broken shards of glass on the desk and the floor and then into Jimmy's
eyes.  Jimmy did not waver.  The sheriff's eyes went wide at the sight.  Jimmy
was never entirely sure what the man saw in his eyes—perhaps he saw Sapphire
staring right back at him—but the man seemed to shrink just a bit.

"Things
happen in this town," he said, and he turned his attention back to
Tabitha.  "You and I know that better than most, Tabitha.  I have no idea
what is happening here, but I’ll keep an ear out and I hear the rumors. I
believe you, Jimmy, that you could find a way to get back there one way or
another."

He sighed and put
his hands on his hips.  The entire room seemed to be crackling with invisible
energy.  Jimmy knew that, in just a moment, he could make the room light up
with real energy.  Then things would start flying off desks and walls, and the
walls themselves might just fly off into space.  Jimmy felt that the sheriff
could sense that, as well.

"Fine,"
he said.  "Just remember what I said to you both.  Nothing he says to you
can be used against him.  You come away from there and he may confess the
entire thing, but not a damn bit of it will be admissible.  And let me add
this: more than likely all the two of you will do is give him and his lawyer
the ammunition that they need to get all of the charges dropped and to let him
walk right of here."

He paused and made
sure that his cold blue eyes penetrated both of them.  He held each of their
gazes for a full ten seconds.  Then he stepped aside.

"Get a broom
and clean this up," he said to the receptionist, and then returned to his
office.  He closed the door behind him, and Jimmy could see him through the
window as he sat down in the chair behind the desk and put his feet back up. 
Then he brought the cowboy hat low on his head and covered his eyes.

Jimmy
took the lead.  Tabitha seemed to sense that it was not time to interfere and
just followed him.  Jimmy didn’t hesitate.  He walked past the sheriff's office
and down a hallway.  Then he took a right and through a heavy metal door at the
end of it.  Once he pushed past there, he paused.  Along the hall to their
right were the cells, each of them nearly blindingly white inside and blocked
by gray bars. 

The first two
cells were empty.  The next cell held one of the men who had been with Devlin
that night.  He was snoring away on a cot that, to Jimmy, did not look remotely
comfortable.  The cell after that was empty, as was the one after that.  When
they were near the end of the hallway, Jimmy saw someone crouched in the corner
of the last cell.  Somehow this cell seemed dimmer than the other ones. 

"What do you
want?" came a voice from inside the cell.  The voice was filled with both
anger and a heavy amount of fear.

Jimmy turned to
the right and stared Devlin Little full in the face.  He did not look like the
handsome, confident businessman that he had been just a few days ago.  He
looked like a broken, vacant man.  His eyes had black circles around them, and
his eyes rolled in their sockets.  His face was covered with whiskers, as if he
had decided to stop shaving.  A smell came from him, as well, as if bathing and
showering were not something that he was into anymore, either.  His face was
pale beneath the whiskers, and his cheeks looked sunken. 

"I want to
talk to you," Jimmy said.

Devlin cringed
back against the wall.  He was curled up on the cot, dressed in an orange
jumpsuit.  He grabbed his knees.

"Just bend
the bars," Devlin said.  "You're some kind of wizard or something,
right?  Some kind of demon sent from Hell to destroy my sanity and my family,
right?  What for?"

Jimmy reached out
and Tabitha put the plastic bag in his hand.  Jimmy held it up and placed it on
one of the cross bars of the cell.  Devlin stared at the bag for a moment and
then cocked his head to the side.

"Is
that—?" Devlin said.

Jimmy nodded. 
"Sapphire's skull.  The girl you killed.  It's only a matter of time
before it all comes out and it all comes together."

Devlin shook his
head and somehow managed to cringe closer to the wall.

"I didn't
kill her," Devlin said.  His voice was pleading.  "Please, you have to
understand.  You have to believe me.  Please.  I didn't do it."

"Stop
lying!" Jimmy screamed.

Energy suddenly
bloomed within the hallway.  There was a bright flash of blue light, and the
bars let out a hideous groan.  For an instant the bars seemed to twist and turn
as if they were water, and then they snapped back into shape.  Devlin let out a
mewling kind of cry and actually got down on the cell floor and crawled into a
corner near a stainless steel sink.

"Please don't
hurt me!" he said.  "You were sent here to punish me, weren't
you?"

"I want you
to tell me what happened that night!" Jimmy screamed.  "Why did you
kill her?"

Devlin held up his
hands as if pleading or praying to Jimmy.

"I'm
sorry," Devlin said, his voice getting higher.  His eyes were wide and his
mouth was twitching along with a twitch in his right eye.  "Please,
forgive me.  Forgive me for whatever I did.  Leave my son alone.  Leave my
family alone. Punish me if you must, but leave them alone."