A Witch In Time (25 page)

“Just breathe.”

“I am.”

“And don’t worry.”

“I’m trying.” She sniffled again, and I heard the liberal use of a tissue brushing against the mouthpiece of her phone. I smiled, shaking my head. She really, really had it bad. I’d never seen her so head over heels for a guy in my life. Maybe that was why she felt so lost now when faced with the potential of a relationship gone sour before its time . . . or maybe it was just
this particular
relationship.

My money was on the latter.

Marcus had stopped the truck in front of the Java Hut and was gesturing broadly to let me know he would be right back. I waved him on.

“What were you going to tell me?” Steff asked just then, reminding me.

“Well, first of all, I was going to
ask
you whether you’d throw some of my clothes in a bag and bring them to Marcus’s house.”

“Of course. You know that.”

“Thank you, love you, owe you. And secondly: it’s Mel.”

“Is something wrong? Something with the babies?”

“No, no, nothing like that. It’s—” I laughed, but in truth it was a mirthless sound because the problem was affecting so many people in my life. “It seems as though the time has come for relationship issues, and I don’t mean just yours. Maybe it’s something in the water.”

“Ha-ha.”

I told her about the voice message from my mom. “I wouldn’t be so worried about it if it wasn’t for the timing,” I said. “Mel is in the hospital. She just had twins. Even if they were having problems, how often does a man just up and leave his wife, the mother of his children, when she is at such a vulnerable state in her life? What would it take for that to happen? How much has gone wrong in order to lead up to that level of dissatisfaction?”

“And you’re certain that something didn’t happen to him? That he is ... missing . . . on his own accord?”

“Honestly? Yeah. I think there’s something going on. I don’t think there’s anything mysterious or sinister about it . . . except as it relates to his marriage to Mel.”

“But what if you’re wrong? Maggie . . . what if Greg’s disappearance is directly related to your overheard elevator conversation?”

It might have been a viable option, if . . . “The voices I overheard were referring to a woman, Steff. So Greg wouldn’t fit.”

“Oh. I see. I guess I didn’t realize that.”

“That’s probably because I just realized it myself,” I told her, sighing. Strange, how memory worked. Or didn’t, as the case may be.

“Well, then, hm. Has anyone called the police about him being missing?”

“I don’t know. If they have, no one has told me. But I’m pretty sure as an adult he would have to be missing for twenty-four hours before the police will even fill out a report.”

Jordan Ever
—

I sighed. All right. All right, already!

“Steff? Can I ask you a question? The kid who died in the ER—”
Boy . . .
“Was that by any chance Jordan Everett?”

The pause on the other end of the line told me Steff’s jaw had just dropped open. “How did you . . . I didn’t tell you that. I wouldn’t have—”

“No, it wasn’t you. Don’t worry, you didn’t divulge. But it was, wasn’t it?”

“In the interest of keeping the peace with my Danny, I can neither confirm nor deny . . . but does the word ‘es-yay’ answer that for you?”

So it was him. Which meant that his death was completely out of the picture for certain, too. Because even if I had misheard the men as saying “she” for “he,” he had died
before
I even left for the hospital. Tara had mentioned it at Annie’s Thursday night when we stopped for coffee.

“Thanks, Steff. For everything. Listen, I have to go. I need to talk to Melanie about Greg. I just know there is something she isn’t telling that might shed some light on her situation with him.”

“All right. I’ll talk to you later.”

“And Steff?”

“Yeah?”

“Hang in there.”

“I will.”

I folded my phone and sat for a moment with it in my hands, thinking. Next to me, Marcus cleared his throat, bringing me out of my reverie. “Trouble?”

I looked up, a little disconcerted to realize Marcus had gone into the Hut and had returned with two jumbo coffees without me realizing he was back. I reached for the cup he held out to me, grateful for it. “When is there not?”

“Steff?”

“And Mel. And . . .” I reached in my bag and withdrew the baby bassinet card. “You know, I tried calling the Watkinses’ place earlier, but I couldn’t get an answer. Since Liss insists that I shouldn’t come in and we’re already out and about, maybe we should knock another thing off the To Do list and try to deliver this to Frannie and Harry Jr. before Frannie realizes it has gone missing.”

Marcus shrugged. “Sure. Where do they live?”

I gave him the address, hoping he knew where it was, because I had no idea where Mount Holyoke Road was. Luckily Marcus had the gift for road names and directions that I was sadly lacking. He headed over in the direction of the Buckingham West subdivision, turning off two subdivisions ahead into one named Sherwood Forest. Of course.

Sherwood Forest was far larger than Buckingham West, which was fairly sizable to begin with, with homes built in what appeared to be the mid-eighties. The houses were starting to show a little bit of age here and there, but all of them appeared to be nicely maintained and updated, so the subdivision itself was not at risk of fading into real estate oblivion anytime soon. The property owners had money, good middle-class money. Nothing too flashy, nothing too modern, but always present.

We wended our way around a dizzying number of curving, winding, twisting, turning streets seemingly typical of all midwestern subdivisions. Thank goodness Marcus knew what he was doing, because I would have been lost in there forever. At last we turned onto Mount Holyoke, which again twisted, turned, curved, wound, and wended, until the house numbers began to approach the sequence of digits we were searching for.

Ahead of us, the road seemed to be blocked by a number of vehicles and people. If the house number we were searching for didn’t come up soon, it looked as though we might need to find an alternate way around the hubbub.

“Uh-oh,” Marcus said.

He had his sunglasses on; I was shade free and had been squinting against a glare on the windshield. “What is it?” I asked him.

“Trouble.”

 

 

 

 

Marcus pulled over to the side of the road, parking against the curb in the nearest available space. People were milling about all around, standing in their yards and staring up the road with their hands shading their eyes against the sun’s brightness.

He reached across me and rolled down my window. “Excuse me,” he called to a young woman with a baby in a front carrier strapped around her waist, who was currently standing on the sidewalk, taking it all in.

The woman drew nearer, relaxing a bit when she spotted me in the passenger seat. “Can I help?”

“We were just wondering what was going on up ahead. We have something to deliver to a house up the road, and it doesn’t look like we’ll be getting through anytime soon.”

“Oh, so you haven’t heard?” Excitement gleamed in her eyes; she fairly vibrated with it. Whatever it was had snapped her out of the same-old same-old of her life as a stay-at-home mom, and she was enjoying it from that aspect at least.

“Someone found a body this morning at one of the houses up there. An intruder, so they say. Right here. Can you imagine?”

“Thank you,” I told her. She wandered back over and stood in the grass, swapping information with an older woman who had just come out of her house to take a gander.

My God. Another unexpected death, so soon after Jordan’s. What was happening in this town?

“Well?” Marcus queried. “What do you think we should do?”

I tried to look proper and respectable and not the type of girl who would allow her curiosity and—yes, fine, all right already—a little bad luck to get her into trouble. Given the elevator conversation and my recent history with death and destruction in Stony Mill proper, was there really any question about whether I wanted to know what was going on? Felt the need to know what was going on? I folded my hands primly in my lap, even as I arched a brow at him and said, “Well, obviously I think we should go see if we can find out what happened.”

“I think
we’ve
forgotten something.” He directed a glance toward my cast, in all its sunshiny glory.

“We
haven’t forgotten anything.
We
have crutches.”

“You can’t possibly be considering going down there on crutches, Hopalong.”

“Oh, but I can,” I said with confidence. And I opened the truck door to prove it.

Shaking his head (I preferred to think in admiration, rather than with long-suffering duress), he switched off the truck and hurriedly came around to my side before I could slip down from the tall bench seat. I was eager to show him that I had attained a stately level of elegance and grace already on the underarm stilts, but Marcus was just as eager to stay by my side, helping me along like a granny with a walker on wheels.

“You could just stay here in the truck while I run down and see what I can find,” he suggested.

“It’s eighty-eight degrees outside. Already.”

“There’s a breeze.”

“It feels like ninety-eight in the truck.”

“You could keep the A/C blowing.”

I made a wry pout. “You’re just afraid I’ll fall.”

“Or get tired. You did just break your ankle, Maggie.”

“But I’m not an invalid. Besides,” I told him with a wink, “I suspect I’ll get farther playing the sympathy card than you’ll get playing the tall-dark-and-handsome card.”

“Well . . . you might have a point there. Although I think winking and pouting like that might win you a few, too.”

“Hm. Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind.”

Grandma Cora’s voice crackled in my ear again . . . only this time it was once too often.

I stopped short. “I’ve about had enough of that, Grandma C. In my head is one thing, in my ear is quite another,” I said before I realized I had in fact uttered the words out loud. And then I frowned. “Wait . . . What?”

Did the voice just say my hem was unraveling? I glanced down at my foot. My nonplastered foot. And what did I see? A thread dangling down toward my foot from where the hem on my pants had begun to work loose.

Marcus had stopped and was looking at me strangely. “Maggie? Are you . . . okay?”

“Shh!” I said, harking an ear and listening intently. But it was no use. I couldn’t force the voice. It happened when it wanted to, and only when it wanted to. And that was just like Grandma Cora, too. She was a strong woman with strong opinions and equally strong convictions, and if she set her mind to something, it was unlikely she would be swayed. Grandma Cora was not one to be forced to do anything.

“Maggie. Hey.” Marcus stuck his face in mine, waiting patiently until I acknowledged him. “What’s going on?”

I hated to admit it to him. I mean, it just didn’t sound like a good thing to say. “I’ve been hearing voices. Well, a voice. One in particular, I mean. And it sounds like my Grandma Cora.”

“And Grandma Cora has . . . passed.”

I nodded. “Years ago. I’ve always heard her as the voice of my conscience. Even when she was alive, I would hear her voice in my head, telling me to ‘be a good Catholic girl, Margaret,’ or ‘Say your prayers, Margaret,’ or ‘Margaret Mary-Catherine O’Neill, listen to your mother, because you don’t know when God will take her from you and you will wish you had her still to tell you what’s what.’” A sheepish glance was all I could manage. “Grandma was big on sayings. And she was big on being a good Catholic.”

“But you’re not just hearing her as the voice of your conscience anymore, are you?” Marcus guessed.

I shook my head. “I’m hearing her in my ear. Just like I’m hearing you. I guess that officially makes me the newest resident of Crazytown.”

“Not necessarily. Have you ever heard of clairaudience?”

I shrugged. “Sure. But you have to be a psychic to have it. And I’m not one.”

He smiled. “Maybe. Maybe not. You did say that your abilities have been a little wonky lately and sometimes seem stronger, or even seem to be expanding sometimes.”

“Yes, but ... a psychic has visions. Third-eye stuff. And they’re precognitive.”

“And you have dreams.”

I opened my mouth to protest again, but all of a sudden I couldn’t. Because what he had said sparked a thought, one I wasn’t quite ready or able to put a finger on.

Instead, I ducked my head away and said, “Let’s go see if we can’t make it up to the Watkinses’ house on foot.” The house number we were parked in front of was 111357. It couldn’t be far. From the looks of it, it was situated right in the thick of things.

Marcus shrugged. “We can talk about it later.”

And he would make sure we would, too. That was just the way he rolled.

We made our way slowly up the road, keeping to the sidewalk rather than the road, where the goings-on resembled a block party more than an emergency scene. The closer we got to the house number we were searching for, the closer we came to the police cruisers and milling police officers blocking the thoroughfare, until it became obvious that they were stopped right in front of the Watkins residence.

“Uh-oh.”

“Yeah. Trouble.”

I stopped long enough to take the card out of my purse. Whatever the trouble was, it seemed that it was big enough to be a thorn in the side of anyone and everyone involved. And I was most definitely not. Involved, I mean.