Wickedly Dangerous (3 page)

One feathery eyebrow floated upward again as she gazed at him. “Are you asking me out, Sheriff?” Humor lurked in the depths of her clear amber eyes.

“Am I—what? No, uh, I mean, no, of course not. I just meant, uh, that you should go. By yourself. Or not.” Liam seriously considered taking his gun out of his holster and shooting himself. The woman was a suspect, for god's sake. Or suspicious anyway. And besides, he didn't date. Had he actually accidentally asked her out? Surely not.

As if things couldn't get any more mortifying, his stomach chose that moment to rumble loudly. Baba bit her lip, clearly trying not to laugh.

“Sorry,” he said. “I skipped breakfast. I guess this is my body's way of telling me to get back into town. Thank you for the water. Enjoy your visit to Clearwater County.” He tipped his hat at her, shoved his sunglasses back onto his face, and strode out the door with what was left of his dignity.

On the bright side, after this, those piles of paperwork were going to be a positive relief.

BABA WATCHED THE
tall lawman walk away, his back rigid and broad shoulders squared—standing at the window long past the time when the dust from the squad car's tires was just a memory. Outside, a small bird twittered until her glare sent it winging away to friendlier skies. Distant thunder growled over the hills.

“I think he likes you,” Chudo-Yudo said, laughter rumbling in his deep, white chest. He crunched on the bone again, slobbering a little because he knew it irritated her. It was boring guarding the Water of Life and Death day in and day out for centuries. It might be the stuff that gave the Babas their longevity and a boost to their magical abilities, but the rest of the time, it just sat there. A dragon had to find amusement somewhere.

“Don't be ridiculous,” Baba said, finally pulling herself away from the empty view. “He just thinks I'm hiding something, so he's poking around.” She twitched a finger and the bone turned into a butterfly and flew away. Chudo-Yudo's jaws snapped shut on nothingness and he let out an indignant
whuff
.

“Well, you
are
hiding something,” the dog pointed out. “Just not what he thinks you are hiding.” He scratched at an ear with his hind leg. “I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to eat him, before this is all done.”

“Maybe.”

“So, are you going to go see a movie?” Chudo-Yudo asked. “With the handsome sheriff, before I eat him?”

“He didn't ask me,” Baba said, feeling grumpy for no obvious reason. “And even if he had, he's too young for me.”

Chudo-Yudo snorted, sounding more dragon than dog for a moment. “You're eighty-two, Baba. Everyone is too young for you.”

“Not Koshei,” she argued.

“Koshei is a dragon. Even when he looks like a Human, he's still a dragon,” the dog said. “Wouldn't you like to spend time with one of your own kind occasionally?”

“Humans are hardly my own kind,” Baba said, flopping down on the couch. “Not anymore. Not since I came to live with the Baba Yaga, and grew up to be one. Besides, Koshei and I get along fine. He shows up, we have sex, he goes away. Why would I want anything more than that?”

Chudo-Yudo stared at her. “If you don't know, I suspect that answers the question.”

She jumped back up, skin too tight around her bones and the walls closing in like a narrowing tunnel under the earth. Or maybe the damned dragon-dog was just getting on her nerves.

“I'm going for a walk,” she said, thumping in her bare feet over to the wardrobe. A graceful woman, she could make an impressive amount of noise when she was in the mood. “Try not to break anything while I'm gone.”

She jiggled the wonky handle and pulled the door open. Glared at the clothes inside and shut it again. Slammed it with the palm of her hand, jiggled the handle again, and opened the door to see the Otherworld passageway. “Fucking door,” she muttered, and walked through, slamming it behind her. Crockery rattled in the kitchenette cupboards.

“Well, that was interesting,” Chudo-Yudo said to himself, hauling another bone out from underneath a couch that had no underneath. “Change is in the air. Babas hate change. This is going to be fun.” He settled down to take a nap, humming a little Russian lullaby he'd learned back in the Old Country long ago from a peasant woman. He couldn't remember if he'd eaten her or not, but he liked the song anyway.

*   *   *

AS LIAM HIT
town, emerging from scrubby fields back into an area with cell reception, his phone beeped insistently at him to let him know he had voicemail. A quick glance showed him three messages from Clive Matthews, president of the county board, and all-around pain in his ass.

Liam contemplated throwing the phone through the window and running it over with the squad car. He settled for shoving it back into its holder on his belt. He knew what the messages would be without listening to them anyway:
Why haven't you solved these crimes yet? Why don't you have any leads? Maybe we should consider replacing you with someone more competent. Call me when you have something to report. And you'd damned well better have something to report soon.
The man had had it in for Liam since he beat out Clive's son in-law for the sheriff position. Clive had already made it quite clear that if Liam couldn't solve these crimes, or god forbid, another child went missing, he could kiss his job good-bye.

Liam pulled up to a spot in front of Bertie's, got out, and plunked some change into the meter. A tattered pink poster with a gap-toothed youngster on it fluttered at him from a telephone pole, asking
Have you seen this girl?
Suzy Townsend, the first child to go missing, almost five months ago now. That had been late February, bitter cold and snowy with a wind that gnawed at the bones. Suzy had been visiting a friend's house; the two small children bundled into snowsuits, making angels in the front yard. And then her friend's mother went into the house to answer the phone, and suddenly, there was only one.

Suzy's poster had company now, a multicolored patchwork of proof that he was failing at his job. A woman he knew from the Methodist church's potluck dinners, passing him on the street, averted her eyes and scowled as she went by.

The bell over the door dinged as he entered, barely audible over the hum of voices and the clatter of dishes. As he stood, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dimmer light inside, he cast his glance over the room, scoping out the vicinity more out of habit than any expectation of trouble.

At a few minutes after noon on a Friday, the small restaurant was almost full. There was no décor to speak of, unless you counted Bertie's collection of license plates from all the states she'd lived in before she settled on upstate New York, and a lopsided bulletin board layered with announcements for the next library book sale, a yoga class for seniors, and the usual collection of kittens in need of a good home. Some of the fliers were so old, those kittens probably already had kittens of their own.

The mismatched tables were covered with cheerfully worn red-and-white gingham-checked plastic tablecloths, and the napkins were paper. But the customers usually sounded happy, and the place smelled like fresh apple pie and hot coffee.

Liam used to think Bertie's was heaven. Now the conversations were muted, and people shot sideways glances at their neighbors when they thought no one was looking. There were barely any children in evidence, despite it being the midst of summer vacation. Folks were keeping their kids close to home these days. Inside, behind locked doors. All the children who'd disappeared had been outside when they vanished; that knowledge turned the playgrounds into ghost towns of abandoned swings and vacant monkey bars, and emptied the swimming pools of their laughing, cannonball-jumping, Marco Polo–playing youthful summer crowds. Clive Matthews had a few choice words to say about that too.

A waitress came up to Liam, menu clenched in white-knuckled hands. “Any news?” she asked. Her son went to school with the missing boy, number two. Liam just shook his head.

Then he caught sight of Belinda Shields across the room, sitting with her elderly parents at a table full of barely eaten food, and he had the cowardly impulse to back out the door, get into the car, and go pick up something at the pizza place down the street. It was already too late, though, as their eyes met over the heads of the other diners, and she waved a hand for him to join them.

Damn.

Liam nodded at the people he knew—which was most of them—as he crossed the black-and-white squares of the old linoleum floor, avoiding the missing tile by table number six out of mindless habit.

“Hey, Belinda,” he said. “Hey, Mr. and Mrs. Ivanov. How are you all doing?” He knew how they were doing, of course. Belinda's parents looked liked they'd aged twenty years in the last six days. They doted on their late-in-life daughter, and even more on their only grandchild, especially after her drunken fool of a father took off and never looked back. Mrs. Ivanov's gentle face was pale and bewildered, her wrinkles falling in on themselves as though they'd given up trying to hold on to any expression other than sorrow.

Belinda was in her uniform; she'd insisting on working, but when she wasn't actually on the search, she spent most of her time giving out tickets to people who stepped the tiniest bit over the line. Masses of tickets were accumulating on his desk for people parking an inch into a crosswalk, jaywalking when there was no traffic, or walking their dogs without leashes. Hardly anyone complained. The locals all brought the tickets to him to deal with, and the few tourists just shrugged and paid the insignificant fines, figuring that's what they got for not knowing the rules. He didn't know what else to do, so he let her keep working. If that's what she needed to stay sane, who was he to take that away from her?

Of course, the county board didn't see it that way; four different members had called to question his judgment in the matter, although he could hear Clive's voice behind them all. He didn't care. Either they trusted him to do his job or they didn't. Unfortunately, it was starting to look like they didn't.

“Is there news?” Mariska Ivanov asked eagerly. Her hands knotted together under the tabletop as if weaving arcane symbols of hope.

“No, I'm sorry, nothing,” he said. “We've had a number of calls to the 800 number, but none of them have panned out so far.” He patted her on the shoulder. “I'm sure something will turn up soon.” He wished he felt as confident as he sounded. The truth was, there was such an absence of evidence, even the state police, who had shown up after the second disappearance, reluctantly concluded that there were no leads to follow up on. They showed up periodically, looking over his shoulder and criticizing his lack of progress, but didn't have the men to spare for a case with no suspects and nothing to definitively tie the three disappearances together.

“Sure, sure. Soon,” Mariska's husband said, not believing it any more than Liam did. “You sit with us, yes? Eat some lunch. I hear you were out searching all morning, you must be hungry.” Belinda's parents had Russian accents too, much stronger than the slight lilt he'd detected in the herbalist's voice. They'd defected during the cold war; scientists, both of them, although from what he'd gathered, they'd given up their life's work, rather than hand it over to any government, and taken up farming instead. After all they'd survived, he knew they would survive this too. But he wasn't sure they'd want to.

“I was out by Miller's Meadow, checking the river,” Liam said, pulling out a faded blue wobbly-legged chair and sitting down reluctantly. “I know it is really too far from the house; five miles or more, but kids love that stretch of water, so I thought I'd have a look. Anything to avoid the paperwork on my desk, you know.” He smiled at them and they all smiled back, none of them very convincingly.

“Did you find anything?” Belinda asked. She looked like she always did, mouse-brown hair in a short, tidy French braid, pale pink lipstick, tiny gold studs in her ears. Only her red and swollen eyes gave her away, and the dark circles underneath them. “At the river?”

Liam shook his head. “No, nothing. Sorry.”

Lucy, a comfortably middle-aged waitress whose plump form was a walking advertisement for Bertie's food, appeared at his shoulder to offer him the choice between meatloaf and fried chicken, and save him from apologizing again. Not that any amount of
I'm sorry
s could make up for his not finding Belinda's child. Or anyone's child.

“Any news, Sheriff?” Lucy asked, chewing on the end of her ballpoint pen. She drew a picture of a chicken on her pad, her idea of shorthand, and stuck the pen into her fluffy blond tornado of hair. “You know, I can't believe that a local would have anything to do with these disappearances. It must be one of them tourists. You just can't trust those people. They never shoulda opened that bed-and-breakfast in West Dunville.”

Behind her, a balding man in a Yankees tee shirt turned bright red, grabbed his female companion's hand, and left his table without a tip. Liam sighed.

Desperate to change the subject, he said, “Hey, you'll never guess what I found down at Miller's Meadow. One of those fancy silver Airstream trailers. Belongs to a woman from California, some herbalist professor type name Barbara Yager.” He added cheerfully, “She even has a bit of a Russian accent. Maybe she's a long-lost relative. She says people call her Baba.”

Belinda's mother dropped her coffee cup, spilling milky brown liquid everywhere. Her face turned two shades paler than it had been, and Lucy clucked at her as she mopped at the table with an already sticky cloth.

Mariska insisted she was fine, but Liam could see her hands shake as she asked him, “This herbalist, was she an old woman? Ugly, with a long nose and bad teeth?”

He blinked. “No. Not at all. Her license said she was thirty-two, although she didn't look nearly that old to me. Her nose might have been a little long, but her teeth were fine.”

Belinda laughed, a rusty sound. “You're hardly an expert on women. I'm surprised you even noticed she had teeth.”

“Hey,” he said, pretending to be wounded. “I'm a professional lawman. I notice everything. And I know plenty about women.”

Belinda's father came to Liam's defense in his usual well-meaning but clumsy fashion. “Sure he does, honey. He was married, you know.”

An uncomfortable silence flattened the air around the table. Lucy cleared her throat and said, “I'll go get that chicken for you, Sheriff,” and scuttled for the kitchen. Nobody mentioned Liam's wife. Ex-wife. Whatever she was.

Melissa had left town two years ago, after spending the year before that trashing what was left of their marriage and her reputation. Shared tragedy should have brought them closer together. Instead, it had torn them to shreds and left nothing behind but dust and tears and a few pieces of stale popcorn from the circus she'd run away with.