A Witch In Time (26 page)

One of the police officers lifted his head as we approached. He squinted at me. “Hey, Maggie. Looking for Tom? He’s over there, up by the house. Why don’t you wait for him at the curb, though, huh? We’ve got a lot going on just now.”

“Ahem,” Marcus said into my ear. “Evidently someone didn’t get the memo.”

“Yeah. Handy, that. I mean . . .” I couldn’t tell if Marcus was annoyed or not. I glanced up at him. Oh, good. Humor still intact. I should have known it would be. “We have permission to go closer. Do you think we should?”

He considered this. “I don’t know any other way to hand the Watkinses’ property over to them, do you?”

“Uh-uh. We’ll just stay out of the way and . . . skulk a bit. In plain sight.”

“Sounds like a plan.” We stayed at the fringes of the Watkinses’ lawn, pausing where a full hedge that separated the yard from the neighbors touched upon the bordering sidewalk. Marcus leaned in just long enough to whisper, “Just remember the sympathy card, should we need it.”

“Good idea,” I whispered back. “What about that cute-ness factor?”

“Being cute won’t get you out of the kind of trouble this can bring on, sweetness. But playing dumb might help. I know, it goes against your preferred style, but now’s not the time to get picky.”

Hm.

We wandered up the sidewalk. Well, Marcus wandered, I hop-skipped-swung. I felt my stomach muscles get tighter and tighter in my abdomen, the sensation creeping up toward my chest. Something bad had happened here. Something very bad.

“I feel it, too,” Marcus muttered. He swiped his hand back over his hair. “It’s still here. Still happening. It’s not over yet.”

That would be why it felt unsettled and urgent. Oh boy. “Can you tell what it was?”

“Someone’s died. A man. His energy is still here. Like an imprint.”

Unsettled and urgent.

I could feel the spirit energy, too, swirling and buzzing around my head and shoulders like a swarm of angry bees. I shook my head, willing it away.
Not here. Not now.

Was this the death we—all right,
I
—had been afraid would happen? No, it couldn’t be. That wouldn’t make sense. The conversation in the elevator had suggested that whatever was intended to happen would be planned. Whatever happened here had to have been incidental.

I gazed up at the house. Number 111369—no question about it, this was the Watkins house. The front door was open, the storm door propped wide so that it couldn’t close. There was a white cardboard box on the porch, long and narrow with a cellophane view pane. The doughnuts that it had held had spilled out; some of them had been trampled. The rocking chairs on the front porch had been pushed down, out of the way, the space they usually possessed now claimed by tool chests full of what appeared to be evidence-gathering equipment administered by a fully outfitted crime scene technician in a plastic suit, booties, and medical gloves. One of the potted geraniums on the front step had been knocked over, spilling its dark red flowers to the ground like so much blood. There were two vehicles parked in the driveway, one a sedate and aging sedan like my mother drove, the other a high-profile, high-dollar pickup truck. The car’s passenger-side door stood open, as though someone had left it in a hurry and forgotten to shut it. Farther up the road I could see a few officers checking over a motorcycle that was parked in front of a neighboring house. More police officers were milling about on the Watkinses’ lawn, both front and back, and going back and forth from the house to a windowless conversion van that was license plated to the Indiana State Police.

Tom must have called out the big guns for this one. Either him or Chief Boggs.

Chief Boggs was the head of our small town’s illustrious police department. He was an interesting character—emphasis on “character”—who most often resembled a junk-yard bulldog, complete with burly chest, and who was known for his unholy addiction to Annie Miller’s apple fritters. People in Stony Mill loved him; he was personable, good-natured, didn’t talk down to them, and made time whenever possible to be visible to the business owners in town. To that end, he was a savvy man. He was not, however, a smart man. Probably the smartest thing that he had ever done was to appoint Tom Fielding as Special Task Force Investigator to act as a liaison between the SMPD and the county sheriff’s department, especially since the sheriff himself was a by-the-book stickler with little humor and even less patience for the more voluble police chief... or anyone else, for that matter, if the rumors commonly held were true.

I clutched the card in my hand, wondering what the right thing to do was.

Marcus approached the next-door neighbors, who were shamelessly watching the proceedings from their side of the well-clipped hedge, to ask what had happened. He came back just a few minutes later. Cupping my elbow, he murmured into my ear, “The Watkinses’ home was broken into sometime last night, and the intruder was shot on the premises. Some guy named Nunzio. There is some confusion as to why it took so long for them to report the incident.”

A break-in, a shooting. Good grief, what could possibly happen next? How utterly terrifying. Frannie Watkins must be beside herself.

No wonder no one had answered the phone when I called this morning.

“The police are questioning everyone right now. The neighbors have already given a statement. They didn’t see anything, they didn’t hear anything. Their dog slept through the night without a peep.”

Something about this was leaving me with a very bad feeling. Frowning, I surveyed the neighbor’s house, and then the Watkinses’ home, respectively. The houses in general were large on the plots of land that held them, claiming as much square footage, and hence open floor space, for the buck as possible. As with all the other homes in this subdivision, the space between houses was actually quite narrow. There was no way that a gunshot could have gone unheard, even in the middle of the night. Or should that be,
especially
in the middle of the night? Sleeping neighbors or not, when the rest of the world is quiet, sounds tend to echo and reverberate. Someone should have heard it. Everyone should have heard it.

“What do you want to do?” Marcus asked quietly.

“Tune in,” I replied without thinking. “Is there a place we can sit?”

Tuning in was a way of centering yourself within your own personal space, digging down deep to regather all wayward strands, feeling yourself utterly, and then allowing your Guides or the quiet of the world around you to give the answers you seek. For me it worked best to just let come what may. Marcus was a clearer channel; it might be possible for him to call to the energies and see what . . . or who . . . would respond.

At least, that’s what we were hoping.

He helped me across the strip of grass along the edge of the road and held my hands to carefully lower me to the concrete curb, where I attempted to keep my cast out of danger. We sat there together, quietly, as the chaos moved around us as though it were an actual entity, with an energy and thus a body and a being of its own. So many people, so many thoughts, so many concerns, so many distractions.

We sat together, holding hands, but that was the extent of the outward display. There was no chanting, no swaying, no ritual involved. There was just us, being fully present in the moment, deeply aware of our surroundings to the minutest fiber of our being.

To anyone else we would look like a normal, everyday couple doing a normal, everyday thing.

To Marcus and me, this was normal. An everyday but very important part of who we are . . . and for me, it was so nice to be able to share that side of myself with someone who understood.

I breathed deeply, letting the dappled shade and sunshine from the tree over our heads wash over me.

Next to me, Marcus quivered and jolted suddenly. His soft-focused eyes fluttered. I sat up, paying attention.

“Yeah, the energy’s still here,” he said. “More like an imprint, really,” he repeated, feeling his way through the details he was getting. Male, for sure. I am almost positive it’s our guy. I’m getting . . . dark. Young. Kind of... macho, strutting, in-your-face.”

“And he was shot.”

“Sudden passing. With an exclamation point.
Unh!
Like that.”

“Why did he break in?”

“He . . .” Marcus frowned. “I’m not getting it. It feels all confused. I don’t know.”

Baby
. . .

That one came to me, punctuating my thoughts unbidden. “Was it about the . . . about the baby?” I asked shyly, still working to not feel silly and inept about my intuition.

Marcus cocked his head as though listening. “And blood.”

Anthony Nunzio
. . . The name was reverberating through my thoughts, like a foam rubber ball bouncing softly off the invisible walls. Where did I know it from?

From the house emerged a squadron of uniformed personnel—police, medical, and who knows what else—preceding and flanking a stretcher being carried aloft by two EMTs. Marcus and I both craned our necks to watch the procession, not even bothering to disguise our inquisitive stares. The white sheet covering the lumpy figure was more to protect the sensibilities of curious onlookers than the dignity of the victim-slash-intruder himself . . . but ended up accomplishing neither when a stray gust of a breeze swished in out of nowhere, lifting the sheet aside and flipping a corner of it back. A collective gasp rose all around us, and for a moment, time stood still. From where we sat, I caught sight of a dark and contorted face that seemed oddly familiar . . . just like his name.

But familiar from where?

A sudden voice behind us intruded, distracting me utterly from my struggling memory. “Well. Look who it is. Welcome to the Freak Show.”

I turned around, but I didn’t need to in order to know who was standing there. The unfriendly epithet said it all. “Tom.”

“Maggie.” He didn’t acknowledge Marcus at all. Marcus returned the nonfavor. “I don’t suppose I ought to ask what you’re doing here. I would like to know how you knew . . . but I don’t suppose I ought to ask about that, either.”

I shrugged. “Just lucky, I guess.”

“Uh-huh. I can see that. Some might call it jinxed. Or cursed. Yeah, some might call it that.”

I shrugged and inclined my head toward the Watkins place. “Pretty shocking, huh?”

“Murder always is. I gotta go.” He turned on his heel.

“Wait.”

“Yeah?” he asked without looking around.

“Who was it?”

“No one. Just a regular guy, a hospital maintenance worker who liked to go to bars and hang out and ride his motorcycle. No priors, except years ago when he was a teenager, he had some trouble with drugs. He didn’t have any on him, but maybe he was still using. The autopsy will show that.” He did turn to look at me then, a hint of antagonism there for me. “And that’s all I’m going to say about that. You want anything else, you’ll have to use your”—he made the oogly-spooky motion with his hands—“powers.”

“But you said it was murder. How can that be? He broke in. Wouldn’t it be self-defense?”

He didn’t answer. He just stalked off toward the state police vehicle, the stark navy of his uniform making him seem thinner, taller, and somehow more reserved than he actually was.

Marcus’s jaw was set in stone.

“He doesn’t mean anything by it,” I assured him. “He’s still angry with me, but he’s moving on. I’m sure of it.” My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. I fished it out. “Uh-oh. It’s Melanie.”

At least I was in semishade. Who knew how long this conversation was going to take? Marcus was already indulgently shaking his head and getting up to go talk to the neighbors again.

“Hi, Mel. How are you holding up?”

“You heard? Of course you did. Mom told you, didn’t she.” It wasn’t a question; it didn’t need to be. We both were painfully aware of the way Mom operated. Mel had learned from the best. “Oh, Maggie. What am I going to do? I just really don’t know what I’m going to do.”

She started to talk about Greg and how she had known he wasn’t really focused on the family, but she really thought she could make up the difference, that even though he was working all those hours, she really thought if she kept things going with the house and the girls and managed the gardener and the cleaning service and the errands and making sure he and the girls were dressed properly, that she could keep him happy.

“How could he do this, Maggie? How could he just . . . leave, without a word?”

“Mel. Honey. Have you spoken with him?”

“He’s not answering his cell. He called in to the office and let them know he’d be out a few days. His phone calls are all being vetted by staff. His partners say they don’t know where he is. I know they’re lying, but I don’t understand why. What should I do?”

I snapped into action. My opinion of Greg had never been great—he was always a little too familiar when he had drunk too much at family parties—but I never thought he’d stoop to this. “This is what you’re going to do. You are going to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and you are going to take care of your little girls. You are not going to worry about what Greg is doing, or what Greg is thinking, or what Greg is feeling . . . because Greg is a grown man, Mel, and he needs to behave like one. You are going to worry about yourself, and you are going to worry about recovering from surgery, and you are going to worry about how to keep your girls from hearing about what’s going on between you and Greg for the time being. You are going to worry about preserving their happy little world.”

She sniffled. “I know you’re right.”

“Melanie, why did Greg not know you were going to have a C-section?” We might as well cover all the unguarded bases at once, while she was off balance and vulnerable. Fewer opportunities to keep up with the deception that way. “He didn’t know about the twins, either. Or if he did, then he’s a very, very good actor.”