Making Magic (32 page)

“Up to the Woodruffs. The crazy witch said they were getting back something the Woodruffs stole from Old Annie,” Aaron said.

Jake smiled grimly as he felt the strip pull out of the ratchet. He spread his legs and the strip pulled all the way out. He couldn’t see his wrists, though. Could he affect something he couldn’t see?

“Whoa. How did… Did you do that?” Aaron stared at him wide-eyed, a pair of wire cutters in his hand.

“Yeah, but it would be faster if you cut the ones on my wrists,” Jake rolled and held out his hands.

Aaron made quick work of them and Jake sat up, then grabbed onto the table leg beside him until the room steadied.

“Okay. Slow and easy,” he said as he got to his feet. He rubbed at the side of his head and his hand came away sticky and red. It was the goose egg on top of his head that was more substantial and painful. “I owe you one, Sarah Rae.”

There was a strange buzzing in the room. He thought it was his head until he remembered the sound. He scanned the room and found Thea’s tote sitting on the floor.

“Get me that.” He pointed and Aaron raced over to grab the ringing bag. Jake wasn’t quite ready for moving around yet.

He fished the phone out of the tote. It was Daniel. Yeah, that made sense.

“This is Jake,” he answered.

“Uh, hey. I’m trying to find Thea,” Daniel replied. His voice was shaking. “Or Grace, either one. No one at the house is answer—”

“You saw something,” Jake said.

“Jake, this is going to sound—”

“Does it involve my mom and Sarah Rae Scott holding a gun on your sister?”

There was a sharp inhale and a moment of silence. “And a few others, including Grace and Nick and my newborn niece.”

“Well, they’re headed up the mountain to get something you guys supposedly stole from Old Annie. Ring any bells?” Jake recited.

“Not the Old Annie part, but yes, the rest does,” Daniel’s voice was still unsteady. “We started home yesterday. I kept…seeing odd things about what was going on up there and… Well, we decided to come home.”

“Things?”

“It’s complicated. But just a while ago what I was seeing escalated. I was hearing about gunfire and—”

“The gun they have is my Dad’s and I had the striker tip filed down. It won’t fire,” Jake interrupted. “Although that idiot Sarah can still bludgeon people with the damn thing.” He felt for the lump.

There were sounds of relief in the background. Mel was listening in.

“When I couldn’t get Nick, I tried Thea. I was going to call you next,” Daniel said, still sounding unconvinced. “I’m pretty sure the baby is coming in the middle of all this. What’re you going to do?”

Jake remembered Emmy insisting, “
My baby’s coming
”.

“I’m going up there to dissuade those two from causing any more trouble. You see anything else that would be of any help?” Jake asked.

“Don’t call any law enforcement types in on this. I mean, besides you,” Daniel said in a rush. “I saw… I mean… Don’t call
anyone
who might bring a gun that actually works.”

Jake nodded to himself. “I was leaning that way myself. Anything more specific than that?”

“Your…your deputies tell me who they
think
is in the house. Shots have been fired, but they weren’t…aren’t clear on who’s doing the shooting.
And
they’ve heard a baby crying. There’s an ambulance sitting there waiting. I tried to get more, but…” Daniel cleared his throat. “That’s the way this…thing works, I’m afraid.”

“We’ll head this off before it gets to that point.” Jake grabbed the wire cutters Aaron had left on the table, dropped them into Thea’s tote and nodded at the door. Aaron, his eyes round and huge, walked backwards toward it, watching Jake intently.

“Good. Good.” Daniel’s tone was a little less tense. “We’re not too far out.”

“Well, take it easy. Don’t add a wreck to this situation,” Jake said, even though he planned to speed up that mountain himself.

There was another thoughtful silence. “You take care, Jake. Your deputies didn’t mention you at all. But there are a lot of possible paths and they keep changing,” Daniel said.

Not my deputies any longer.
“Point taken. You two do the same.” Jake disconnected. “My truck,” he said to Aaron, motioning at the door.

The boy stayed quiet until they had settled in and started the drive up Woodruff Mountain.

“That gun she has won’t work?” the boy asked.

“Nope,” Jake said. There were some assumptions being made, but the odds of Sarah getting her hands on a Glock exactly like his dad’s were slim to none, and the county had changed the zip ties they used a few years back. The ones in his dad’s gun safe were the old style. When his mom had started drinking again after his dad’s death, he had disabled the gun without telling her.

“And you’re not calling no deputies to come help you?”

“Nope,” Jake said.

“Because they won’t know that Sarah’s gun don’t work,” Aaron stated. “Even if you told ’em?”

“They couldn’t take that chance,” Jake said, surprised at the boy’s grasp of the situation. “And we really don’t want any official types to know about what you can do, do we?”

There was a stifled noise and the boy edged away.

He had figured it out when he saw Aaron walk into his living room without opening the door.

Back when five-year-old Aaron had disappeared, deputies and neighbors had combed the countryside, but they’d found the boy in the closed and locked confectionary shop, getting sick on candy. And shop owners up and down Patton Street had complained over the years of this small toy or that candy disappearing from their locked store or back room.

Jake held up a hand. “It’s okay, Aaron. I’m not telling anyone.”

“But you’re…you’re the sheriff. And…and I don’t want… I just wanted to fix Emmy. And I… Will they put me on drugs like they did with her?”

“You can go through walls and doors?”

“And floors. But that’s harder ’cause you gotta brace yourself for the fall. Put the brakes on so you won’t sink into the ground—or go right on to China most like.” Aaron explained. “Takes it out of you.”

The kid said it so matter-of-factly that Jake almost smiled. He’d wondered how the boy got away from Sarah. Smart kid went right through the floor.

“I bet,” he said. “Were you taking the babies for Emmy?”

Aaron’s head drooped and he stared at the floorboard. Jake hoped he wasn’t considering falling through the bottom of the truck or sliding out the door. He might be able to pass through solid matter, but who knew what would happen at this speed?

“Yeah,” he finally mumbled.

“To fix her?”

The boy nodded. “Yeah.”

“How?”

“I watched for ’em—the right age you know—watched where they went to. If it was a place I could get in and out without ’em seeing me, I just stepped in and took ’em and stepped out and put ’em in a nice clean box. They was the kind of boxes I carry all the time to move pieces to the kiln and back, so no one took note of it. Then I snuck ’em to Emmy.” It all came out in a rush. “I was real careful of ’em. I know how to handle babies—like the pieces at the shop.”

That wasn’t the answer he had been after, but Jake was good at letting interrogations go where they needed to go. “And what did Emmy do with them?”

“Nothin’. She didn’t like me doin’ it. She’s been getting more and more upset about it. Real mad.” Aaron shrugged. “I can’t seem to find the right one.”

Jake turned up Woodruff Mountain Road.

“What will the right one do when you find it?” Jake asked.

“It’s a her. I know that much. But it’s awful hard to tell if a baby is a boy or a girl baby,” Aaron explained.

Jake shook his head, then winced when it throbbed. He tried again. “So what will
she
do for Emmy?”

“Fix her,” he said.

Jake remembered Emmy’s disorder. “You mean heal her.”

“Yeah. Fix her. Get rid of what those stupid drugs did to her,” Aaron said, enthused.

“How could a baby—that girl baby—fix what the drugs did?”

“I dunno. Emmy said she would,” he acted as if that explained it all.

Thankful that his vision seemed unaffected as he navigated the winding mountain road, Jake willed the headache to ease off, rubbing the back of his neck. “How did Emmy know?”

Aaron hunched over in his seat. Jake could see the sullen, closed-down look and knew the signs. The kid was his sister’s protector—her knight, her superhero— determined to shield her from harm and nosy adults.

“Aaron, I want to help her too. But I need to know what she might do up here, so I can protect her.”

“The baby’s special. She—Emmy, I mean—she heard ’em talking about her. That the baby might be a healer—a real one. Not like in a story.” He was talking in low tones, as if someone would overhear. “She thought it was tourists or hikers at first, just passin’ through. But then she heard ’em again and she figured they was around here, because they mentioned the healing thing again—kind of joking like, but still—”

“Did she recognize the voices? Were they in the store?”

Aaron looked over at him with big blue eyes like his sister’s. “They ain’t voices, exactly.”

Jake waited. When nothing more was forthcoming, he tried again. “What are they, exactly?”

Aaron sighed. “Emmy hears things. She hears people talking who aren’t there. She won’t talk about it now, because of all the tests and the medicine.” He was still talking softly. “She’s always heard them, inside her head. She hears music too. She loves that part. She can tune it now, like a radio, she says. But that was just here recently. She won’t talk to me about it anymore.” His voice sounded sullen. “She’s mad at me because of the babies.”

So, Emmy was gifted too. And they had mistaken her gift for mental illness—probably assumed it was schizophrenia. She’d had those spasms and facial tics ever since they had come to live with the Croates. Had the medicine had caused them?

“You take the babies and do what? Have them touch her?”

“No. I make her touch ’em. It’s the only way I can do it, ’cause she’s so mad about it. I won’t put ’em back until she touches ’em,” Aaron said. “We messed up though. Her baby ain’t born yet. She told me her baby’s coming right now.”

Lily. Somehow Emmy had overheard someone—Grace and Nick, probably—talking about Lily. Perhaps they had been wondering out loud if she would have the same gift as her mother.

Jake pulled up to the gate and entered the code. There were cabin guests coming in and out all the time so Sarah and his mom wouldn’t know who was approaching. To be sure, he would park the truck out of sight down at the greenhouses and walk up.

As they drove through the woods and emerged out onto the meadow, Jake glanced over in the direction of the cemetery and remembered Thea and her flute.

“What about the music? Were you playing music for the babies?” he asked.

Aaron smiled. “That was my idea. One of ’em started crying on me so I used Emmy’s phone. She plays songs sometimes, when she’s feeling pretty good, and she records them on her phone. I played one of those songs and the baby stopped crying. It worked on all of ’em, that song.”

And Emmy had “heard” that song, he suspected, when Thea played it on the mountain.

He glanced over at the house as they wove down the hillside past the greenhouses. He didn’t see any guests lounging in the sunroom, but most of the cabin guests were probably down at the festival enjoying the music. That was a good thing—the fewer people up here tonight, the better.

As he parked the truck where it couldn’t be seen from the house, he thought of his service pistol again, locked in the glove box. No. The only gun up here should be the useless one Sarah was waving around, unless Nick had hung on to his service weapon. And, of course, Grace’s shotgun. The fewer weapons introduced to this mess, the better. But…

He opened the glove box and fished around for the zip ties he kept on hand.

Aaron hopped out of the truck.

“Wait a minute, Aaron.”

The boy’s face was pale and tense as he turned back to face Jake.

“You know what you did with those babies was wrong.” Jake held up a hand before Aaron could object. “No matter what the reason. You terrified their parents and, no matter how careful you were, something could have happened while you had one of them, or once you left them alone after. You know that, don’t you?”

After a long moment, the boy looked down at his feet and nodded.

“Whatever happens tonight, you and your parents and I are going to have a long talk about what you need to do to make up for those bad choices. We’ll talk about you not ever doing anything like that again. Agreed?”

The boy nodded again.

“Okay. Grab that bag.” He smiled at Aaron’s baffled expression as the boy picked up Thea’s battered tote. “We’ll return it to the lady while we are here. Always remember, being a hero includes big things and small things.”