The Crimson Brand (35 page)

“Thank you,” Katie said, still wheezing, but finally able to speak.  “We would have died down there if you hadn’t come for us.”

“Ronan?”  Zoe turned her streaming eyes to the still form in Penny’s arm, and Penny made herself look too.

Ronan was not breathing, not stirring.

Penny was suddenly unable to stand.  She dropped to her knees and laid Ronan down in the grass before her.

He was still warm, but the blood had quit flowing from his wounds. 

Penny laid her hand down on his chest, felt the heart inside it beat … beat ... beat … then stop.

A voice in the wind seemed to come down to them, and they all looked up into the green canopy, searching.

Thank you for coming for me
.

When they looked down again, Ronan was gone.

The next few days were calm, if not restful.  Zoe mourned her grandmother and they all mourned Ronan.  Katie and Ellen became more or less permanent fixtures of the big house on Clover Hill, spending nearly as much time there as Penny and Zoe themselves, and Susan ran herself frantic playing mother hen to the whole brood.  She had been hysterical with worry after their return from the landfill; she had awakened to an empty house and no notes of explanation, but Penny and Katie had been able to pass off their minor injuries as a fall down by the creek while looking for Zoe.

Susan, who had seen examples of Penny’s grace first hand, accepted the fabrication without question, but they still had to convince her that Penny was in fact not bleeding to death.  While Ronan’s body had vanished after his heart stilled, his spilled blood had not.

At the end of the second day, Zoe received the phone call she’d been expecting.  Her mom and dad would be there by the end of the week to attend the funeral.  The arrangements had been left to local friends, the Town Elders, but they promised they would be there.  What would happen to Zoe remained uncertain, an unspoken source of anxiety for Penny who couldn’t imagine life in Dogwood without her best friend.

Zoe and Penny had not returned to town since the day of the fire, but they got a steady stream of news from Michael, who came by regularly to keep Susan up-to-date on the local drama involving Ernest Price and Morgan Duke. 

The two had been out of town on shared business, a ruse to keep Ernest out of the way while Joseph Duke, who short of actual torture seemed unlikely to talk, did his dirty work.  At least that was the sheriff’s story, Michael said.  Whether or not Michael believed the story was another source of speculation for the girls.

Ernest’s story—or confession, depending on how you looked at it—was that Morgan Duke had been employing him for the better part of a decade to buy land in and around Dogwood, with the eventual goal of transforming the small town into an upscale tourist town, and that Susan’s refusal to sell a key piece of property had finally prompted Duke’s visit.

The name Price, which had once been synonymous with God in Dogwood, was now mud.  Michael had mentioned as an aside on his last visit that Sharon Price, Rooster’s mother, had broken down in hysterics while grocery shopping and had been escorted out by management. 

“I didn’t even know Rooster had a mom,” Penny said in an attempt to tease a smile out of Zoe.  “I thought his
papa
just found him under a rock somewhere and brought him home.”

Mrs. Price and her boys were now ‘vacationing’ somewhere on the coast, but Ernest had had to stay in town for continued questioning from state authorities.

“Not looking good for Avery Price,” they overheard Susan saying over the phone.  “A few more months and he may have to find honest work again.”

Zoe had asked Katie if Michael would run for sheriff, to which Katie had replied “Nawww … he wouldn’t,” as if the prospect was nothing short of ludicrous.

Penny thought differently—he was something of a local celebrity after his heroics the night of the fire—but kept her opinion to herself.  Prolonged Michael-talk tended to make Zoe go red about the cheeks and find another room to hide in.

Zoe seemed to be doing better.  She’d stopped blaming herself, at least.  She vacillated between dread of the coming funeral and the possibility of having to leave Dogwood where she finally had some good friends, and excitement over seeing her mom and dad again.

Penny kept her opinion of Zoe’s mom and dad to herself. 

She understood that her instant dislike of them was mostly selfish, since they were coming to town and she was afraid they would take Zoe with them when they left, but some of it was not.  They had missed many important things in Zoe’s life, her birthday being the least of them.

What kind of parents just left their kids and ran away
?

That line of thinking always brought her mother and aunt to mind—their identical appearances and dissimilar personalities, and awakened a dreaded certainty in Penny that she had never even known her mother, that it had been her aunt who died in the plane crash, that her mother was still out there, somewhere.

It was Susan’s words—“you remind me a lot of your aunt Nancy … Di was the outgoing one”—and the tattoo on her mother’s wrist in those pictures.  The tattoo Penny had never seen.

Of Morgan Duke, there was not a trace.  Somehow he’d gotten the news of his son’s arrest before Ernest, and had flown.  When Ernest escorted his brother and a contingent of state police to the secluded spot where Morgan had set up camp, the truck and camper were gone.  Gone south toward Mexico, was Sheriff Price’s assessment.  A man with his connections and wealth would find a way to cross the border and set himself up like a king.

The girls had their doubts but didn’t share them.  They were just little girls … who would take anything they had to say seriously?

“I don’t think King Cobra is finished here yet,” Penny said during a discussion of the topic in her bedroom, where the four girls spent most of their time when away from the hollow.

“It wasn’t a cobra,” Ellen informed her.  “It was a sidewinder … I’ve seen pictures.”

“Have you ever seen pictures of one with arms?”  Penny asked, a little grumpily.  All of the waiting, waiting for Zoe’s parents to come and take her away, waiting for the newest monster in her life to come back and try to finish them all off, waiting out spring break closeted in her room while half of her classmates were looking at the ocean only an hour west of here, was playing a jagged symphony on her nerves. 

Ellen only shrugged in response.

Penny later Googled “sidewinder” on her new laptop and had to admit, at least to herself, that Ellen was right.

What they all agreed on, even Ellen, to whom all of this was new, was that the monster sidewinder was still close, and if it was, so was Morgan Duke.

They didn’t think they’d seen the last of him.

*   *   *

The first official news regarding Morgan Duke arrived via televised press conference that Monday evening.  Sheriff Price stood on the steps of the town building that housed the courthouse and jail, Michael on his left and the state Fire Marshal on his right.  The sheriff had never been particularly cherubic, but that night he positively glowered down at the gathered reporters and television cameras.

He waited for the smattering of unwelcome questions to die out before beginning.

“The fire of last Friday night has now been positively identified as an act of arson.  The perpetrator, Joseph Duke of Miami, Florida, is in custody but refuses to cooperate in the ongoing investigation.  Authorities are now seeking Morgan Duke as a material witness and possible accomplice.”

A barrage of new questions flew at him and he stoically ignored them all until silence fell.

“I would urge Morgan Duke to turn himself in and cooperate with both state and local authorities ....”

“Joseph Duke is known to have been employed at the Dogwood landfill,” a particularly bold reporter shouted from the crush of people crowding the courthouse steps.  “Is there any connection between the Friday night fire and the reported disturbance at the landfill the following morning?”

Sheriff Price seemed taken aback by the question, his startled expression suggesting he hadn’t thought the events at the landfill were public knowledge.  He quickly arranged his face into a passable imitation of his previous composure.

“As Mr. Duke was already in our custody at the time we have no reason to suspect that the
disturbance
was anything but an accident.”

“Ernest Price is a known business associate of Morgan Duke’s,” another shouted, emboldened by the last question’s unexpected success.   “Will there be an investigation into what some people are calling very shady business or Ernest Price’s possible complicity in the arson, which some people speculate ....”

“
This press conference is finished
,” the sheriff bellowed, turning his back on the shocked crowd below him and stalking into the building.

From the seat of her recliner, Susan aimed her remote control at the television, looking almost pleased, and turned it off. 

“He should put in his application at the landfill now,” Susan said. 

Penny and Zoe sat at opposite ends of the couch facing her, Penny with
The Aikido Student Handbook
  open on her lap, Zoe with her head lolling on her left shoulder, eyes mostly closed, on the verge of total collapse.  They had spent part of the previous night and most of that day at the hollow, trying to prepare for the fight they were sure was still coming, but mostly just moping.  Penny had never fully realized how much they had counted on Ronan’s counsel and encouragement.  Without him there to guide them, if even only in spirit, everything seemed hopeless. 

Ellen was learning the basics quickly enough—having her own wand was a bonus in that regard—but wasn’t yet ready to join the circle.  They all learned the spell that Penny and Katie had used in the tunnel beneath the landfill to break open the homunculi’s heads, and Katie had given Zoe an unused bike to replace the one crushed in their retreat, slightly older than Katie’s but much newer than Zoe’s old one.  Katie had also attempted to translate the passage from their book that allowed them to fly.  It was very close to Latin but not, and they could only guess that it was an invocation to some natural force or another.  The one word she
had
positively identified was
Besom
, an Old English word that referred to a witch’s broom. 

“Penny?”  Susan stood in front of her, snapping her fingers.  “Earth to Penny!”

“Huh?”  Penny flinched, startled out of her reverie.  She hadn’t seen Susan rise.  She suspected she’d been on the edge of sleep too.

“Do you have any thoughts about dinner?”

Penny shrugged and looked to Zoe for ideas, but Zoe was currently flopped on her end of the couch and snoring lightly.

“Frozen burritos it is,” Susan said, and marched to the kitchen.

Penny checked the clock above the television, a charmingly antique thing that she suspected had been with the house for a long time, and saw it was just past seven.  They were meeting Katie and Ellen back at the hollow that evening around eleven.  She would rather have had a full night’s sleep for once but knew the evening practice was more important than ever now.

At least let Zoe sleep for a while
, she thought. 
She needs it more than I do
.

Penny followed Susan into the kitchen to help.  If she was very lucky, she might be able to talk Susan into letting her brew a half-pot of coffee to wash their burritos down. 

*   *   *

Penny and Zoe arrived at the hollow before Katie and Ellen, Penny slightly revitalized by the one cup of nasty reheated coffee that Susan allowed her, Zoe still dragging despite the extra sleep she’d stolen before and after dinner.  As always, Penny scanned the lower limbs of the old ash for Ronan and, as always, felt a stab of grief when she remembered that he wouldn’t be there.

The captured homunculus was still there, however, dangling from the tightly wound willow limbs and totally immobile, turned into a statue.  Penny supposed that meant he was asleep.  She envied him a little.

Katie had wanted to kill the thing outright, had been aiming her wand right between its eyes, but Penny had convinced her not to.  She just didn’t feel right attacking something helpless. 

Penny started a fire in the pit and sat while Zoe busied herself with the book.  She was watching the door expectantly when an unanswered and forgotten question recurred to her.

“Hey, Zoe, did you ever find out who Janet is?” 

The mystery girl from her old photo album had slipped her mind in the wake of last weekend’s events, but now that Penny had remembered her, the curiosity burned as strongly as before. 

Zoe shrugged without turning to acknowledge her.  “Never got a chance to ask.”

“Ask what?”  Katie popped through the door and into the hollow, Ellen on her heels.  They both looked a little livelier than on the previous nights, almost optimistic, in fact.

“Nothing important,” Penny said, wanting to steer the conversation away from the topic of things Zoe had never had a chance to ask her grandma.  The woman may not have appreciated Zoe’s company, or anything else about her for that matter, but Zoe still mourned her.  “What are you so happy about?”

“Snakes are reptiles,” Katie said, apropos of nothing it seemed.

“Yesssss,” Penny said, hoping Katie would reveal the relevance of her statement without too much of a windup.  “So are iguanas and geckos.”

“And what do all reptiles have in common,” Ellen asked, bobbing up and down with excitement.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Zoe said, clearly more interested in a bit of lint on the knee of her jeans, which she picked off and examined before casting aside.  “They’re green and slimy?”

“They’re cold-blooded,” Katie said, a certain deadly triumph in her voice.