Sinners & Sorcerers: Four Urban Fantasy Thrillers (97 page)

“But those are the benefits. She was different in other ways, too, and I was beginning to get worried—I still am, in fact.”

“What do you mean?”

“True, I did notice a maturity in her that previously wasn’t there. Now when I say ‘maturity,’ I’m not saying someone who now pays her bills and can take care of herself. I’m talking about a maturity in personality, as if she had tapped into some deep wisdom of the ages. Gerda and I had gotten along fine in the past, and it was because of her innocent personality, her childlike wonder at new things. You should have seen her when she went to Las Vegas for the first time, for example. I had the greatest time just showing her all the wonderful casinos and shows and hotels. Maybe that’s why I was attracted to her to start with: I was able to be her guide through the world. It was very appealing and fun and I never got tired of showing her new things.

“And with the coming of the lost memories, that childlike wonder disappeared. She would ridicule me now for expressing interest in a coming movie, especially if it was a movie meant for younger audiences, an adventure or comedy. She was cold, removed. None of her old hobbies interested her anymore, and no longer did she express a desire to travel, which had proved in the past to be the most fun we would have together.

“Now she read voraciously. Not fiction. Books of religion and philosophy and metaphysics. And the occult, but as far as I could tell, nothing overtly Satanic, though some of the crap in my opinion was just as bad.”

“She was studying,” Tabby said. “Maybe she had the calling in her just because of her bloodline.”

“Well, you apparently grew up around witchcraft and you haven’t gone the way of toadskins and eye of newt.”

“Not yet,” Tabby said, and I couldn’t tell if she was joking.

“Gerda was growing dark and moody, and I knew that I wanted the divorce, but I just hated abandoning her in light of all that had happened to her. And then I met Amanda in the midst of all of this. Amanda was so wonderful and full of the life I’d been missing out on for the past couple of years. Needless to say, we hit it right off, and you probably know most of the story anyway.”

Tabby nodded, and then she asked out of the blue. “Did it bother Gerda that she was unable to bear children?”

“Dear God, did it ever! That’s what originally brought her to the brink of suicide.”

“What about now?”

“She’d mentioned adoption, but by then things had gone too far and, when Amanda dropped me, I went a little dark and moody myself. Gerda left me two weeks later and was gone.”

Tabby nodded toward my house. “Maybe we can find clues about where she might have taken Petey. Would there be evidence of your affair with Amanda at your home?”

I thought of all the celebrities who’d gotten in marital trouble because of cell-phone texts that they were too dumb to erase, and I’d always chuckled at their stupidity. I thought I’d run a smooth game. After all, the best cheaters are the ones nobody finds out about. But maybe I hadn’t been as smooth as I thought.

“I saved a few notes and letters and ticket stubs to a few of the plays we attended,” I said, annoyed at having to raise the issue of my morality again. “I loved your sister so much, I wanted every piece of her I could get.”

Tabby’s eyes went wide and I realized I’d made a poor choice of words. “I kept the letters hidden, of course. I never wanted to hurt Gerda or cause drama for Amanda.”

“Al, you’re almost actually convincing. But cops take all these psychology classes, see? And they teach us all about pathological liars. And what I’m thinking is you didn’t want any drama for
yourself
, and you wanted to play both sides as long as you could. You wanted to eat the cake and never brush your teeth.”

“Hey, I wasn’t a saint, but I sure as hell never put a goddamned curse on anyone,
Officer
Mead.”

“Plenty of people kill without leaving fingerprints. Amanda’s soul died a little when she had to break up with you, and it tore her up that she couldn’t tell you about Petey. And now it looks like you helped Gerda finish the job.”

Her words stabbed me straight through the heart. I wanted to protest and say “
But you don’t know for sure that Gerda was the cause
,” but words failed me. Mostly because I knew that Tabby was right. I had been the cause.

Oh, sweet Jesus.

And then it struck me. Hard. What the hell was the walking corpse of Max Richter doing at Tabby’s grandmother’s old folks home? And then it kept on hitting me. If
mice
are my worst fear, then...Gerda’s father must be her worst fucking nightmare. Hell, anyone’s worst nightmare. So what if Nana or some other Mead witch had turned
that
dead bastard loose as a sort of payback curse?

And now he’s out to get her. And Gerda has the baby, and who knows what might happen to the baby.
Shit
.

But first we had to know if Gerda killed Amanda. Or, in the very least,
find
Gerda.

Find her before he found her. “He” being, of course, the walking corpse of her serial killer father.

Of course, that was assuming I lived long enough to survive
my
curse—and that mice hadn’t taken over the house and were waiting inside with their twitching whiskers and creepy little buck-toothed grins.

How the hell did I get into this shit? All I’d been looking for was a warm heart or two.

The moon was now clearly up and over the rolling hills of the Santa Ana Mountains in the east, and the air was cold with a fine mist that shimmered in the gloaming. I was very alert for any signs of mice, but didn’t see any.

With the pieces pointing toward Gerda as the killer, and the fate of the child I never knew in question, I felt a little foolish worrying over the mice. However, the little shits still made my skin crawl, and to be attacked as I had been by hundreds of them in some supernatural effort to kill me, I deserved the right to be wary of them.

And it was even possible that these mice were all copies of that same mouse that had gotten Jimmy, a mouse summoned from the grave and cloned in some bizarre witchcraft.

“Let’s go,” I said, braver than I felt. Tabby had proven her toughness and I wasn’t about to act like a coward in front of her.

Together we made the way up to my house. My garage door was open—the only indication of my flight from my home the evening before. My mind went back once again to Gerda, even while my eyes searched crazily for signs of the mice.

Gerda had never before shown any violent tendencies, except for the one time she tried to kill me when she was half-crazy with depression, and on four different drugs, to boot. That was understandable and easily forgivable. Sure, I had had an affair with all intentions of leaving Gerda, and if Gerda had discovered the letters I had thought were so ingeniously hidden, did she have enough rage in her to kill? Had there been evil sleeping inside her that none of us had seen, not cops, not counselors, not even a loving husband?

To slit someone’s throat and steal her baby was an act of pure hatred. I would not have believed Gerda had such inclinations in her. True, her personality had changed a hundred and eighty degrees, but had it also changed enough for her to have it in herself to kill? Had she become her own greatest fear—to be like her father?

You know from newspapers and the nightly news that when someone fools around with someone else’s mate, unthinkable violence can occur from any members of the triangle. In high school I’d had a football coach killed in such a dispute: he was having an affair with someone else’s wife. When the husband found out, he marched right onto campus, found the coach in his office in the school’s weight room and promptly blew my coach’s brains out, with sixty of us high school football players looking on with utter shock.

Gerda probably lost it and killed Amanda. And Gerda might be bubbling up her own cauldron of wickedness and working up her own spell just for me. Maybe her father was indeed her greatest fear, but maybe she now somehow controlled him enough to put him on my trail.

If so, then why had he breezed past me fresh from a murder, barely even glancing my way?

Craziness. All of it.

“You’re worried about the mice?” Tabby said, and I realized I must have been standing there for half a minute, eyeing the approach to the house.

I said nothing, just made a firm beeline for the door.

We found a dozen mice in the driveway, squashed flat as a pancake under the tires of my bike. More were flattened in the garage. I hoped these little shits didn’t come back from the dead. That, I’m sure, would have given me a heart attack. I could see it now: attack of the zombie mice.

And then, to my utter horror, one of the mice moved.

Shit
.

My heart ramming in my chest like a hatching alien, I realized that the movement had been a cockroach roaming over the body of the mouse. Even after a day of bizarre revelations, there was still room to be shocked.

I stopped and caught my breath, Tabby nearly bumping into me from behind. “See?” I said. “I wasn’t lying.”

“For a change.” She looked at the mice scattered around, evidence of either an actual goddamned curse or else a testament to my sloppy housekeeping since Gerda had moved out. Too bad I was fairly neat for an alcoholic, cheating bum, which left “curse” as the only option.

“You okay?” asked Tabby.

“Who knows?”

“You can tell me where to look and I’ll check and see if I can find anything.”

Yeah, right
.

“No. Thanks, but I can do this. We need to know for sure if my wife killed your sister, and I need to be the one to check the letters, to see if they have been tampered with. And if the mice come...well, I’ve survived them before.”

Brave talk for someone whose heart was beating a mile a minute. But there was no way around it. I had to check my secret stash of love-struck memorabilia and find out if it had not been as secret as I’d hoped.

I unlocked the front door, bypassing the garage altogether. The house was chilly and silent. I had left a smattering of lights on from yesterday morning’s rush to work—a morning that seemed a lifetime ago. In my living room, the lamp was on. The house looked like someone late for work had swept through here.

Once I was sure there were no mice present, I made my way up to the second floor. Tabitha was right behind me.

+ + +

I stopped at the entrance to the attic.

“You want to join me?” I asked.

“In the attic?” she asked, hands on hips, face haggard from stress and exhaustion but still very beautiful. She had a brightness in her eyes and a resoluteness in her face. She wanted some answers, as did I, and I knew she would do whatever it would take to find them.

I had a profound sense of the creeps. Alarms were clanging deep in my brain, and I had to will myself from fleeing from the house. All the safety of electric lights and relative sanity would be deleted by the utter blackness of the attic, a blackness that made me want to puke with fear.

Calm down, Al
, I tried to console myself.
There’s no walking corpse up there, or even mice. The mice, for at least the time being, are gone, maybe even gone forever
.

That, of course, was wishful thinking. I was more under the impression that since my flight, the mice had time to reorganize for another assault, maybe fueled by whatever spell Nana had been mixing up when she’d been murdered by Max Richter. At least they didn’t just materialize out of thin air, because some of them had been living creatures—creatures that could also die.

Maybe the witch had used two different kinds of spells: one to organize all the mice of Orange County, like an evil fucking Pied Piper, and the other to raise the dead, or at least bring back the image of the dead. Obviously, Gerda’s father had been worm food long ago and could now be only bones. And if there was such a thing as God, then Max’s sorry ass was spit-skewered and slow-roasting over the high flames of hell.

“Either go up or get out of the way,” Tabby said, impatient.

I yanked down the ladder that would lead up unto the attic. A familiar odor of mildew and dust wafted down after the ladder. Tabby sneezed.

And just as I started up the ladder, something on the floor down the hall near the bedrooms caught my eye, but Tabby was right behind me, eager to find the answer to her sister’s death, and so I didn’t stop to analyze it or its significance until later; because I was now eager to see if my wife had discovered my letters, if my wife had killed my ex-lover, and if my wife had kidnapped my baby.

But that something on the floor down the hall had looked suspiciously like a mouse.

Watching me.