The Witch’s Grave (20 page)

Hours later we were still being held in the basement. Antonio and I sat with out backs to the wall. A rope led from our hands, tied behind our backs, to our necks. I’d squirmed at first, when Chuck and Enrico tied us up, but any movement seemed to tighten the noose. I stopped struggling after a couple of tugs on the rope around my throat.

So I sat, trussed up, on the hard-packed floor and watched the light shining down the steps fade to nothing. The kerosene in the old lantern had long ago run out, and the only light now came from Enrico’s flashlight. I still wasn’t afraid yet—I’d come too far, learned too much, to have it all end now in some dark, smelly cellar. And after my dreams of Madeleine, there was a certain amount of peace in knowing death wasn’t the end. But that knowledge didn’t mean I intended to face death today.

I wanted to ask Antonio if he had known of Chuck Krause’s involvement with the smuggling ring, but speaking made the rope chafe against my skin. Right now all I could do was wait.

Finally, we heard Chuck call out from the top of the stairs in Spanish. Enrico answered him, then motioned for Antonio and me to stand. I inched my way up the wall to my feet, trying to keep as much slack in the rope as I could. Rattling off something else at Antonio, Enrico jerked his head at me.

“He wants us to turn around,” Antonio said.

Facing the wall, I didn’t want to anticipate what might be coming next, but part of me expected to feel the cold steel of a gun barrel pressed up against the back of my skull at any second.

Now I was scared.

Instead of feeling the gun, however, I felt the bindings around my wrists fall away. The noose around my neck tightened as my hands were freed, and I twisted away from the wall, choking.

Enrico stood in front of us, his gun in one hand and his other holding our ropes taut. With a wave of the gun, he indicated we were to climb the stairs.

Antonio and I trudged up the stone steps into the night air, away from the dank cellar. Chuck Krause waited for us, holding a gun of his own.

The moon had set, but the stars strewn across the sky winked and blinked as Enrico led us like a couple of dogs past the tombstones. The beam from his flashlight caused the writing on the headstones to appear then disappear while we walked by. He stopped abruptly at the far corner of the cemetery, his light reflecting off two shovels propped up against the trunk of one of the pine trees. Stepping away from us, he let the rope play out of his hands as he joined Chuck. He pointed his light at the shovels, then moved it to the ground at our feet.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I croaked. “We’re supposed to dig our own graves?”

“Just one, Ms. Jensen. Two would take too much time,” Chuck said. “Now please pick up your shovel, and don’t try anything or we will shoot you.”

Antonio and I grabbed the shovels and started digging. Or made an attempt to—every time I shoved the point into the hard ground, the rope around my neck got in the way.

I let the shovel fall to the ground. “Look, I can’t dig with
this around my neck. Take it off. You have guns…we’re not going anywhere.”

Chuck and Enrico exchanged a look, and Chuck nodded. Reaching up, I loosened the slip knot and tore the thing over my head. Antonio did the same. Rubbing my chapped skin, I thought about making a break for it. We were close to the trees, we might make it, but recalling what happened to Madeleine when she ran from Vogel, I thought better of it.

All of a sudden Chuck felt chatty. “I’m curious, Ophelia, how much did you figure out?”

Picking up the shovel, I rammed the tip into the ground and stepped on the top with my foot. “It’s pretty obvious…you were using the church as a place to stash the immigrants you were transporting across the country.” I threw the dirt to the side. “But the last group were killed in that car accident.” I paused, resting my arms on top of the handle. “Stephen Larsen and Ben Jessup knew, so you shot them.”

“Cavar,”
Enrico hissed, waving his gun at me.

“He wants you to keep digging,” Chuck translated.

The blade of my shovel hit the ground again, and picking up a scoop of dirt, I calculated how far I could fling it. Nope, they weren’t standing close enough for me to hit them.
If I could lure them closer…

“I thought you were just a smarmy politician.” I tossed the dirt to my other side and inched a step closer to Chuck and Enrico. “I didn’t know you were running the show.”

“I’m not,” he declared hotly, and stepped forward. “I’m just as much as a victim as you are.”

I stopped digging and stared at him. “I doubt that, Chuck. You’re not the one holding the shovel.”

He took another step. “They’re blackmailing me.”

“Why?”

“My father’s landscaping business in California—”

“Let me guess, he uses undocumented workers.”

In the glow of his flashlight, I saw him sneer. “No need to be politically correct, let’s call them what they are.” He pointed his beam in Antonio’s face.

Antonio raised his arm to shield his eyes, and I sensed Chuck’s intolerance and hatred swell to pour out of him like a fury.

“They’re illegal immigrants,” he jeered. “And I never hired them—my father did fifteen years ago.”

“If it wasn’t you and it happened that long ago, why worry about it now?”

“Don’t you know the past has a way to come back and haunt you?”

Boy, did I!

“If the party found out, they’d drop me like a stone, my career would be ruined. I had no choice,” he declared in a vehement voice, and took a half step forward.

Abruptly, Enrico reached out and pulled Chuck back toward him. Enrico was quiet, but he wasn’t stupid. He had no intention of letting Chuck get close to me. I glanced at Antonio. His hole was a lot bigger than mine. He needed to slow down—
we
needed to take as much time as possible.

“Please, just show me a way out of this,” I muttered to myself.

“What did you say?” Chuck leaned forward.

“Nothing.” I pressed the blade of the shovel into the ground and felt it strike something. “You could’ve admitted you were wrong.”

“I couldn’t do that—”

“A better choice is to have your aide killed and Stephen shot?”

“I had nothing to do with that,” he answered sanctimoniously. “When I told Enrico that Ben had learned about the blackmail, I had no idea they’d kill him.”

“So you’re not responsible for anything, are you, Chuck?” My temper shot up as I wiggled the blade into the dirt to pry
out whatever lay beneath the topsoil. Suddenly, the thing I’d been digging at burst out of the ground and landed on the other side of me.

“What’s that?” Chuck asked, trying to hit it with his light.

“Nothing, just a root,” I lied.

It wasn’t a root. Grinning up at me in the shadow of Chuck’s flashlight was a human skull. I nudged it back into the darkness with the toe of my tennis shoe. Glancing over my shoulder at Chuck, I stared past him into the cemetery.

Around the headstones a mist seemed to be gathering. Wispy at first, but before my eyes it coalesced into a heavy vapor that began to roll and tumble across the ground. Even at this distance, I felt the energy as the fog shimmered with a ghostly blue light. In my head once again, I heard women crying and could smell the smoke.

The cloud headed right for Enrico and Chuck.

Enrico must have read the expression on my face. He whirled around to face the fog.
“Dios mio!”
he cried out.

Antonio seized the moment and launched himself toward Enrico, swinging his shovel high above his head. He struck Enrico in the center of his back, and Enrico tumbled forward.

Chuck looked at the fog then at me and seemed to freeze for an instant. I grabbed the skull, its teeth cutting into the palm of my hand, and hurled it with all my strength, aiming straight for his head.

My aim was true. The skull caught him in the chin and snapped his head back.

As his gun went off harmlessly in the air, I heard a voice cry out from the other side of the old graveyard.

“See, Lucy, I told you this place was haunted!”

Four days later I sat at Stephen’s bedside telling him the rest of the story. He’d lost weight and his eyes had a hollow look around them, but he was off the respirator and in a private room.

“Wow, you threw a skull at Krause?” he said with surprise.

“No, she didn’t,” Bill said as he walked into the room. “It was a rock. We found it lying near the hole she dug.” He paused long enough to give me a hard look.

I simply shrugged. I knew what I’d picked up, and it wasn’t a rock. Rocks don’t have teeth.

Crossing to the bed, Bill placed a laptop and cases of disks on Stephen’s tray. “I thought you might want these. The disks are copies. We had to keep the originals for evidence.”

Stephen ran a hand over his laptop. “Thanks.”

“And you,” Bill said in a stern voice, “you’re lucky Ron Mark had sent up a hue and cry when he discovered that those two little old ladies had slipped away from the winery. Otherwise you might not be sitting here now.”

Stephen peered at me around Bill’s large frame. “You must have been scared to death.”

I sat back in the chair and crossed my legs. “It’s funny, I really wasn’t,” I answered honestly. “I was desperate but not terrified…” I paused. “And I was ticked off that they were making me dig.”

Stephen smiled. Bill frowned.

“When’s Tink coming home?” Bill asked, changing the subject.

“Abby and I are picking her up later this afternoon.”

“You’ll be glad to have her home,” he stated. Extending his hand, he shook Stephen’s. “Glad you’re going to make it, Larsen, and thanks for your cooperation.”

“Not a problem, Sheriff, I only wish I would’ve been able to answer your questions sooner.”

Bill turned and looked at me. “Do me a favor, Ophelia. Don’t run into me for a while.”

I clicked my tongue. “You got it, Bill.”

He strode out of the room rubbing his head.

“He could’ve at least thanked you,” Stephen grumbled when Bill was out of earshot.

I laughed. “I don’t think gratitude is the emotion Bill associates with me.”

“Hey, would you mind plugging this in for me?” Stephen asked as he handed me the electrical cord from his laptop.

I did as he requested while he opened it and booted it up.

“I have a question for you,” I said, sitting back down in the chair. “Did you ever meet with Ben Jessup?”

“No,” he replied, his eyes never leaving the computer screen. “We were going to meet Monday.”

I leaned forward in the chair. “What about Karen? Do you think she’s okay?”

Stephen’s eyes stayed on his computer. “She’s fine. I called her last night. She’s staying at her sister’s in Idaho.”

“Good.” I clasped my hands around my knees. “I was afraid something else had happened when I couldn’t reach her.”

“Left her cell phone in St. Louis,” he murmured as he began to type on the keyboard. “She didn’t want to risk being tracked. She’ll be back to work next week.”

I was shocked. “She’s still working for you?”

“Yeah, we’ve always known something like this could happen.” He typed faster. “She waited around too long to leave St. Louis. Next time we’ll know better.”

We sat not speaking, the only sound in the room Stephen’s fingers flying across the keyboard.

“Well,” I said slapping my legs. “I’d better go—it’s my first day back at work.”

“Hey, wait a minute,” he said, finally looking at me. “I’d like to see you again. Our first meeting didn’t go so well.” He smiled ruefully. “But I promise the next one will be better.”

As I returned his smile, I thought about Madeleine and Henrick. Although he’d loved her and avenged her death by sacrificing his own life, he was unwilling to make room in his life for her. She’d been “on the side.” Watching Stephen, I knew he would be the same way. Anyone in his life would only be needed between books. They would never be let into the life that existed for him in the room that overlooked the river.

No, the wheel of fate had turned. Madeleine and Henrick’s circle was closed. And I didn’t want to be a part of whatever new challenges, new circles, Stephen faced in this lifetime. I had my own to face.

Standing, I stepped close to the bed and laid a hand on his arm. He stopped typing and looked up at me.

“Thank you, but I don’t think there’s room in your life for a small-town librarian like me.”

His eyes widened in surprise. “But—”

“I’m glad you’re going to be okay, Stephen.” I gave his arm a little squeeze. “And you can bet I’ll be anxiously waiting to read the next Stephen Larsen book, but for now, I want to get back to my own little world.”

Before I left the room, I paused at the door and glanced over my shoulder. Stephen’s face wrinkled in a frown as he read something on his laptop, and then his fingers once again flew across the keyboard.

With a smile, I turned and walked down the hall.

I skipped up the steps to the library. It felt good to be back where I belonged. It was a feeling tinged with a sense of sadness whenever I thought of the Gaspards, but tonight Tink would be home and all would be right with the world.

I stopped just inside the door and let my eyes travel the room. Darci stood hanging over the counter, gossiping with Georgia. An elderly woman, dressed in linen pants and a summer weight cardigan, browsed the history section. I didn’t recognize her.
Hmm, she must be new to Summerset
.

My gaze landed on someone I did know. Evita stood looking over the latest young adult books.

Striding over to the counter, I scooped up a handful of candy and strolled up behind her.

Bending close, I whispered in her ear, “Finding any books about smiling dogs?”

With a squeal, she twirled around and clasped my waist. “Miss Jensen, you’re back!” she exclaimed.

“So are you,” I said, patting her head with my empty hand. “Here, hold out your hands.”

When she did, I dropped the candy into them.

“So many,” she whispered, wide-eyed.

“They’re for all the books you
would have
returned over the past couple of weeks,” I said, chuckling.

“Thank you.”

I crouched down in front of her. “Are you doing okay?”

She nodded, her black curls bobbing up and down. “Papa had to talk to the police,” she answered in a low voice.

“I know.”

Before Bill arrived that night, I’d insisted that Antonio say nothing about why he had come to the church. He hadn’t shot anyone, and in the end he helped save us by tackling Enrico. Why bring any more trouble to his house?

“Papa is sad about his sister,” Evita continued, “but he said to give you a message from him.”

“He did?” I asked, smiling at her.

Again she nodded and leaned close to whisper in my ear. “He said to tell you you’re a pretty good
bruja.
”

My laughter rang out. “Tell him thank you, okay?” I said, straightening.

“I will…Mama’s waiting,” she said, dancing around me and toward the door. When she was at the doorway she turned back and called out, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Yes, you will,” I replied in a confident voice.

I took a step toward the counter when the elderly woman wearing the sweater approached me.

“Yes? May I help you?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” she replied in a heavily accented voice. “I’m just looking around while my son and daughter-in-law shop at the antiques store.”

“Well, we’re very proud of our library,” I said with a grin. “Are you just passing through?”

“Yes, we’re from St. Louis and on our way to Minnesota.”

“To one of the lakes?”

“Yes, I hope it’ll remind me of Sweden, where I spent most of my childhood with my parents,” she said, her dark eyes watching me intently.

I shifted a bit uncomfortably under her close scrutiny.

She noticed and chuckled softly. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to stare, but you remind me of someone.”

“That’s okay—I’ve got one of those average faces. People always think they know me from somewhere,” I replied with a nervous little laugh as I crossed to the reading table and picked up a pile of magazines.

“No, this is someone I knew long ago, but I think of her often. In fact, you really don’t resemble her.” She pointed back toward the young adult section. “I couldn’t help eavesdropping on your conversation with that little girl, and the way you spoke to her reminded me of the woman I once knew.”

“Oh, that was Evita.” I grinned and fanned the magazines out on the table. “She’s a real charmer.”

“You gave her sweets. The woman I knew gave me candy, too. It was the best I’ve ever tasted,” she said as her eyes took on a faraway look. “And the last time I saw her…I was so cold that night and she gave me her stocking c—”

She didn’t finish. A woman came rushing in the door and over to her. “There you are—we were worried.”

The woman’s eyes refocused, and she looked at the younger woman with a frown. “I told Jack where I was going.”

“Oh,” the younger woman replied with a flap of her hand, “you know how he is—he never listens. Are you ready? He’s waiting in the car.”

“Yes.” The elderly woman turned to me and took both of my hands in hers. “Thank you for listening to an old woman’s reminiscing.”

“My pleasure,” I said, squeezing her hands. “Stop by again.”

I watched as the two women headed for the door. The younger woman suddenly halted. “Rosey, aren’t you hot in that sweater?”

With a roll of her dark eyes, she allowed her daughter-in-law to help her out of the cardigan. She turned and looked at me from across the room. “Thank you again,” she called as her daughter-in-law took her arm and escorted her out the door.

My mouth went dry and I couldn’t speak. My legs felt like lead. All I could do was lift a numb hand in good-bye as the door closed behind them.

My eyes filled with tears as I stood staring at the closed door.

When Rosey had turned, I saw the amulet that had been hidden by her sweater, hanging from her neck. It gleamed in the light with a fire all its own.

Four petals surrounded by a golden circle.