Casting Spells (15 page)

He turned off Wilde Way onto Osborne and I found myself wishing I lived on the other side of the galaxy. My eyes were getting all teary and I pinched myself on the inside of my arm. What was wrong with me? I never cried. But suddenly I was overflowing with feelings that had no place to go but out in a maudlin display of tearful self-pity.

I felt dizzy, disoriented. This wasn’t like me at all. I wasn’t used to emotional turmoil. It gave me the same queasy, white-knuckled feeling I got the one time I tried ice skating. That was exactly how I felt right now. Out of control, skidding helplessly across the ice toward a giant tree with my name on it that—

I blinked and the haze of wine and brandy cleared long enough for me to realize it wasn’t my imagination. We were spinning across Osborne like an amusement park ride gone bad, heading straight toward a stand of maples.

11

LUKE

 

“Hang on!” I yelled and I swear we went airborne there for a second. Black ice stretched from one side of the roadway to the other. We couldn’t break free of it. I steered into the skid and managed to turn the wheel to the left just before we would have slammed head-on into one of the maples. Instead the right front fender hit the nearest tree with a sick thud, spun us around, and sent us careening off in the other direction. I hung on to the wheel, and every prayer I had ever known came rushing back to me as I eased down the brake and brought us to a shuddering stop inches away from disaster.

For a second the world went silent. The sound of my heart pounding in my ears drowned out everything but the squeak of the back wheels as they spun crazily in the ice-encrusted snow.

I turned to Chloe. Her face was ashen, her hands braced against the dashboard. “Are you okay?”

“I don’t know ... I think so ...” She met my eyes. “W-what happened?”

“Black ice,” I said. “By the time I realized it, we were already fishtailing.” I leaned closer. “Are you sure you’re okay? You don’t look so good.”

“Story of my life,” she muttered. “Just give me a minute to get myself together.”

“No problem.” I got out and spent a few moments inspecting the damage to the Jeep while she did whatever it was she had to do.

I was leaning against the back of the truck when she joined me a few minutes later. She looked a little shaky on her pins but more like herself.

“Much damage?” she asked.

“Mostly cosmetic. Another couple inches and it would have been a different story. I couldn’t seem to steer clear of the ice.” I gestured toward the back wheels, which were mired in snow. “Right now our biggest problem is digging our way out.”

“You did a great job back there.”

“I grew up in Massachusetts,” I reminded her. “I’m not a stranger to winter driving.” I was still riding a wave of adrenaline that had me feeling euphoric.

She looked anything but.

“That’s how my parents died,” she said quietly. “A patch of black ice near the bridge.”

“Jesus,” I whispered, reaching out to her. “I’m sorry.”

Her voice was clear and steady. She told her parents’ story without embellishment or self-pity. The six year old who had been left orphaned by the tragic accident was standing there with us too, and I realized it was the first time in years that I had listened as a man and not as a cop.

“Who took you in?” I asked. “Family?” I imagined a large and loving extended network of grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins who opened their collective arms to her and held her tight.

“I have no family,” she said. “A friend of my mother’s took me in and raised me as her own.”

“In Sugar Maple?”

She smiled. “You know how they say it takes a village to raise a child? In my case it was true.”

Her mother-lioness defense of the town suddenly made sense. So did the deep affection everyone seemed to have for her. These people were her family.

When you’re a cop, you learn early on to compartmentalize. You need a hell of a lot more than a bulletproof vest to protect you on the street: you need to find a way to bulletproof your emotions as well.

I was pretty good at that. During my years in Boston I had acquired a reputation as a clearheaded cop who didn’t get sidetracked by emotion. I dealt with facts. My world was filled with brokenhearted children, lonely widows, hollow-eyed men who had lost everything that mattered. They could take you down with them if you let them, but I never did. I got tougher. My heart grew harder. After a while I forgot where the cop ended and the man began.

Until tonight.

And it scared me more than that stretch of black ice.

“So how long did you live in Boston?” she asked, breaking the growing silence between us.

“A little over eleven years.” I was usually the one asking the questions. It felt strange to be on the other side of the process.

She gestured toward the line of trees and the open fields beyond them and the mountains beyond that. “I lived in Boston for a little while. Country life must be a big adjustment for you.”

“I was a small-town kid,” I reminded her. “I like the pace.”

I didn’t tell her that I had been looking for a town exactly like this where I could disappear. I didn’t tell her anything. We stood there next to each other, leaning against the truck, while the night unfolded around us. Dark skies. Brilliant stars. Waxing moon. The same sounds that had freaked me out last night seemed familiar tonight.

“I’m okay,” she said. “You probably want to get back to the motel.”

Her words had barely faded when the sound rose up from nowhere and everywhere, a high, keening wail that made my hackles rise.

“What the hell was that?” I asked.

“I’m not sure.” Her voice was low, her words almost inaudible.

The wail split the air again, longer and louder this time.

“That’s straight out of a horror movie.” I glanced over at her. “A wolf?”

“It’s not a wolf.” She wrapped her arms around her midsection and shook her head. I noticed that she had started to tremble. “It’s probably a fisher over a kill. They’re repopulating. Proctor Park gives way to protected forest acreage.”

The sound was primeval. It sank its claws deep into some kind of tribal memory buried under centuries of civilized behavior and drew blood. She had lived here all her life, and if she couldn’t stop her visceral reaction to the fisher’s call, what chance did I have?

“If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was a banshee wail.”

She spun around to face me. “Banshee?”

“My mother was first-generation Irish. She said they heard the banshee wail whenever a family member died.”

“Do you believe that?”

“If you’d asked me an hour ago, I would have laughed. Now I’m not so sure.”

Her expression was impossible to read even for a cop who made his living doing exactly that.

“You’re going to hear a lot of strange sounds living in Sugar Maple and I can promise you they’re not banshees wailing.”

“Banshees keen.” What the hell was wrong with me? I couldn’t let it go. “That sounded like keening.”

“And you sound like you’ve done your banshee homework.”

Which was probably a polite way of asking if I had slipped a gear. Maybe I had.

“I grew up near Salem, where everyone believes in things that go bump in the night.” I couldn’t tell if she was amused or pissed off. “I take it you don’t.”

“Believe in banshees? I’m afraid not.”

Which begged the question: What did she believe in? God. Ghosts. Santa Claus. Love at first sight. I might have asked if a car hadn’t rolled to a stop and flashed its lights. I instinctively stepped in front of Chloe to shield her until the driver’s identity could be ascertained.

“It’s okay,” she said, stepping forward. “That’s Midge Stallworth’s car.”

“Stallworth?” The name sounded familiar.

“Funeral home.”

I was beginning to wonder if I was on a Stephen King tour of New England.

A round little woman in a bright red down jacket bounced her way across the snowy divide toward us.

“Oh my! Oh my!” She sounded like she had been sucking helium. “What happened here?”

“Black ice,” Chloe said, giving her a hug. “Detective MacKenzie managed to keep us from getting into real trouble.”

Midge Stallworth frowned and glanced back toward the road. “Black ice? There’s no black ice on Osborne.”

“That’s the point, Midge. You can’t see black ice until it’s too late.”

“Honey, I just drove that same road. I’m telling you there’s no black ice, white ice, or anything else ice. The road’s dryer than a lizard’s skin.”

“You must have drifted out of your lane and missed it,” Chloe said to the merry mortician. “Trust me, there was black ice.”

Midge opened her mouth to say something else then shut it just as quickly. “I have kitty litter in my trunk,” she told me with a cherubic smile. “Best thing ever invented and I don’t even own a cat.”

I followed her across the snow drifts to her car and found myself wondering if the woman was part mountain goat. She practically floated over the top of the same drifts I was slogging my way through. Talk about aerobic conditioning.

Midge unlocked her trunk and I whistled out loud.

“You have a better selection than they have at Griggs Hardware,” I said as she started rooting through her trunk.

“I was a Girl Scout, honey,” she said with a wink. “I always come prepared.”

Midge was Barbie doll’s slightly dirty grandma, a cross between Mae West and Betty Crocker.

I borrowed a shovel and a five-pound sack of kitty litter and a handful of minutes later had the truck back on the street. It was a little worse for the wear but everything was in working order.

“Don’t be a stranger,” Midge said as I dried off the shovel and placed it back in her trunk. “We can always use new blood around here.”

I could hear her laughing as she drove off down the street.

 

CHLOE

 

It was a good thing Midge was already dead because I could have killed her for that last stupid remark.
New blood?
Was she out of her mind? The last thing we needed was vampire jokes. Factor in her maniacal laughter and the banshee wail and I wouldn’t be surprised if Luke aimed his truck for the state line.

Strangely, I had to admit he didn’t seem particularly unnerved. I wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad thing. I had lied to Luke when I said the strange keening wail was the sound of a fisher over a kill. The truth was I had never heard a sound like that before and hoped I never would again.

The sound seemed to carry all the sorrow in the world within it. I had no idea what animal produced the keening wail but it was easy to see how it had come to be associated with death. No wonder Gunnar had been so shaken last night. I totally got it now.

“Midge is something else,” Luke said as we climbed back into the truck and snapped on our seat belts. “That must be one rockin’ funeral home.”

“You don’t know the half of it. Her husband thinks he’s Elvis.”

I made him laugh with a few carefully censored anecdotes about Midge, and we drove the rest of the way to my house without incident. No flying wineglasses. No more patches of black ice. No banshee wails. No middle-aged undead rescue squad. For six minutes and thirty-two seconds, it was all good.

He pulled into my driveway and stopped behind my Buick.

“An ’eighty-five?”

“Good eye.”

“It’s in great shape.”

“It should be,” I said. “It only has twenty-two thousand miles on it.” Most of those had been clocked by the first owner, one of Archie’s troll friends who lived in the subdivision beneath the bridge.

“Well,” I said as I gathered up my things. “Thanks for dinner.”

“Thanks for joining me,” he said. “I had a good time.”

I didn’t mean to laugh. “Sure you did. Black ice, banshees, a bawdy mortician. What’s not to like.”

“You forgot the flying brandy.” He flashed me a smile. “Someday you’ll have to tell me how you managed that trick.”

I gave what I hoped was an enigmatic smile while I made a mental note to give Gunnar a piece of my mind for that stunt. Harrier jets and helicopters hover in place. Stemware, not so much.

There was a long awkward pause where, if we had been on a first date and not a business dinner, the good night kiss would have happened. You know the kind of kiss I mean: long and slow and filled with heat and promise.

Yeah. That kind.

“Good night.” I hesitated then extended my right hand.

He smiled and enclosed my gloved hand in his. “No sparks this time.”

Maybe not, but I felt like I was floating ten feet off the ground just the same.

“You sound disappointed,” I said.

“A little.” His smile widened. “But this is good too.”

This was better than good, better than Barolo and probably more dangerous. The warmth of his skin, his solid male strength. He wasn’t going to vanish in a burst of golden glitter or a puff of scarlet smoke. He was as real as I was, just as earthbound and mortal and alone—