“I guess that sort of makes sense.” He nodded to himself and then rubbed his face. “Can we go to bed now?”
“You bet, tiger.” I slid my arm around his waist and leaned against his chest, reassured by the steady thump of his heart.
“Do you think Meredith is casting spells on Paul?” he asked as we swayed down the hallway to my room.
“No. I don’t think she has to. I think she’s got him all shook up without casting a single spell.” I thought it might be a whole lot easier for both of them if she couldn’t cast spells.
He stopped in front of my door and kissed me. First with tenderness and then with growing urgency. I sighed and melded my body into his, loving the feel of his taut muscles against me, of his arms around me.
He lifted his head, looking down at me, his eyes dark with desire. “That’s just you and me, right? No tricks.”
“No tricks,” I assured him. I slipped my T-shirt off over my head. “Look. Nothing up my sleeves.”
“That’s a relief.” He took my hand and led me into the bedroom to show me a few tricks of his own.
7
I WAS GOING TO HAVE TO GO BACK TO ELMVILLE. I SAT AND mulled over my morning coffee after Ted left and tried to figure out how to get around it. I couldn’t come up with anything.
I needed to snoop around Kurt Rawley’s place. I’d delivered a package to him. Had it had a little doll in it like Neil Bossard’s? I’d be willing to bet on it. I tried to remember the circumstances of Rawley’s death and came up blank except for something to do with fire.
I sighed and started up my computer. I’d be better off figuring out everything I could before I went down there again.
According to what I could find on the Internet, Kurt Rawley had died in a house fire. There was some speculation that Rawley had set the fire himself, but the newspaper articles didn’t make it clear whether they suspected Rawley had set the fire by accident or on purpose.
I wasn’t sure it mattered, although I did have the address. I glanced up at the clock. If I drove fast, I could be down to Elmville, have a few minutes to poke around in the daylight and be back in time to teach at the dojo by four thirty. There wasn’t time for more dawdling, though. I got dressed and headed out.
On my way into Elmville, I decided to drive past the place where Neil Bossard died. I parked the Buick in the lot in front of a Quik Stop on Highway 120 and walked toward the road. I’d been a little concerned that I wouldn’t be able to locate the exact place that Bossard died. Usually I’m aware of anything supernatural around me at the moment, in the here and now. Sometimes if a presence is strong enough, I can sense where something has been. Not always, which is something of a relief, otherwise I’d be bombarded constantly. Without some kind of power signature, I didn’t think I’d be able to find the exact spot where he died and somehow I felt it was important that I did.
It turned out not to be a problem. Someone had erected a
descanso
on the spot. They dot the highways and byways of the Southwest and California with sad regularity. Little white crosses twined around with plastic flowers, teddy bears and trinkets around the base. They mark the spot where someone has died, usually in a traffic accident, like miniature shrines to those that have passed. There can be several at really dangerous intersections. There was no doubt this one was for Bossard. Someone had stuck a photo of him to the cross.
Thing is, they’re not so much for Anglos, which Bossard definitely was.
Descansos
are more of a Latino tradition. I shrugged. One of the nice things about living in northern California is that everybody mixes and mingles. It’s easy to get exposed to other traditions and make them your own. Somebody who missed Bossard, and there were quite a few candidates based on what I saw at the memorial service, had erected a
descanso
for him. It was sweet in a sad way.
I crouched down next to it, closed my eyes and cast my senses wide. I tried to sense if there was anything supernatural here. I got nothing.
I waited, willing myself to relax and quiet my mind. I focused on my breathing. Still nothing.
I stood up. There was nothing here. It didn’t mean that nothing supernatural had been here. It could have either been here too long ago for me to sense it or not been powerful enough to leave an energy signature.
Or there really hadn’t been anything chasing Neil Bossard and the little voodoo doll under his bed had messed with his head so much that he had run into traffic and gotten himself killed.
All in all, it was a damn handy hands-off way to commit murder.
I FOUND MY WAY TO KURT RAWLEY’S HOUSE. OR WHAT WAS left of it. The fire had taken out most of the front of the house. The neighborhood wasn’t anywhere near as nice as Bossard’s. The houses were smaller and much more likely to have aluminum siding. The yards were small and the grass was not always all that green. There weren’t many of those fancy well-tended flowerbeds that I’d seen all over the place in Bossard’s hood.
Which isn’t to say that Rawley had lived in a slum. It was just a little more working class than upper middle class.
I was a little surprised that no one had done anything with the lot yet. There were danger signs posted on the edges of the property and someone had strung fencing around the perimeter of it, but a person wouldn’t need even the piddly powers of a Messenger to clear the fence.
I glanced up and down the street. Someone was pulling into a driveway in a beat-up brown station wagon a few houses down and I walked on past the Rawley place, trying to look nonchalant. I do nonchalant pretty well. I’m even better at indifferent. I consider it a specialty.
The neighbor went into her house, and I did a one-eighty and headed back to the Rawley house, clearing the fence with a quick leap before anyone else could show up and spot me.
The place smelled terrible. It had been weeks since the fire, but I could still smell smoke under the damp smell of mold and rot. I’d probably be smelling it all day. Sometimes it’s not a blessing to have extra-sharp senses.
I made my way around to the back of the house. Enough of the fence around the backyard still stood that I wouldn’t be visible from the neighboring houses on the street. Then I repeated what I’d done by Neil Bossard’s
descanso
. I closed my eyes, stilled my breath and opened all my senses.
At first I felt nothing. I’m a little prone to impatience, but I’ve learned that things don’t always speak on my timetable and I have to corral my own unruly tendencies. Mae used to say that the skills that come to us the least naturally are often the ones we end up being the best at because we have to work at them so hard. I focused on my breathing some more and tried to still my restless mind by listening to the steady drum of my heart.
I don’t know how long it was before I felt the first flicker. It could have been two minutes. It could have been ten. When I get into that state, time gets very relative. It can stand practically still or race past. But regardless of how long it took, I’d felt it. I could picture Mae smiling at me. It felt good.
I stayed calm, not wanting to break the connection until it was stronger. I was rewarded with another flicker, this one a bit longer. I risked opening my eyes and took a few steps toward the ruins of Kurt Rawley’s home.
The flicker grew stronger. I walked up what was left of the porch stairs, careful to watch my step. My reflexes were good, but I didn’t want to have to leap off a collapsing porch if I could avoid it.
The stairs held and I walked farther off what had been the back porch into what had clearly been the kitchen. I felt like I’d walked through a spiderweb. I brushed at my face, but the feeling stayed the same. I ignored it as best I could and kept walking, feeling the growing strength of the flicker like a divining rod.
I picked my way through the rubble of what had once been a home, careful to step over the remains of furniture and walls, guessing at what had been here before. The heap to my left looked like the remains of a sofa, with the lump of what could have been a chair at one time next to it. The living room, clearly. A hallway led off to the right toward the bedrooms. I stepped that way and the flicker grew into a flame. I kept going.
I could tell which room had been the bathroom. Tubs and toilets don’t burn that well. I was pretty sure the other rooms had been bedrooms, but the damage in this area was even worse. Floorboards creaked under me and I stepped as lightly as I could. The flame was strongest at the doorway to the second room on the left.
I did not want to go in there. The energy coming from the room was nasty. It wasn’t precisely evil, not like a demon or something like that, but more like that one little bit of sour in an otherwise good bunch of grapes that sticks to your tongue. I could taste it in the back of my mouth, like bile rising. I swallowed hard and walked into the room.
If there was any doubt about whether or not I was in the right place or if Kurt Rawley’s death was connected to Neil Bossard’s death, it was erased when I saw the
descanso
shoved into the sodden wreckage of the bed. It was nearly identical to the one erected on the site where Bossard died. It was white. Plastic flowers twined around it. The only difference was that Kurt Rawley’s photograph was stuck in the center of it rather than Bossard’s.
I picked up a piece of wood that might once have been from a dresser or a wardrobe—it was hard to tell—and poked at the pile of sodden ashes in the center of the room. Nothing leapt out at me, physically or metaphysically. I poked some more, trying to turn over some of the mess to see what was underneath.
Then I saw it. A little flash of something white. Or at least whitish. I dug around it with the stick. It was soaked and dirty, but it looked like one of the legs of the voodoo doll that had been under Neil Bossard’s bed. I fished it out, using my stick plus another one like a pair of giant chopsticks. It was definitely part of what had been another voodoo doll, but this one had little plastic bugs glued all over what was left of it.
I’D MANAGED TO GET THE DOLL CORPSE——I COULDN’T HELP but think of it that way, as if it had had a life of its own to lose—out of the nasty ashen mess of what had been Kurt Rawley’s bedroom without actually touching it. If anything ever had a severe case of cooties, it was this thing. I nudged it out of the mess with the sticks and then I wrapped it up in tissues and shoved it in the baggie that had held the sandwich I’d packed for myself to eat on the way down. Maybe a really good Ziploc could contain voodoo vibes, or whatever these things were. I sort of doubted it, though. I have it on the best authority that plastic is actually porous. I have no idea if voodoo molecules can sneak through Ziplocs, but it was all I had and I am all about trying to use whatever’s on hand. It’s part of my whole self-reliance thing.
I picked my way back through the house and out the back door with my nasty little bundle. My mission accomplished, I wasn’t being as careful about being spotted as I’d been on my way in and as I strolled out of the front yard and vaulted the fence, I saw a curtain twitch in a window across the street. Must there be a Gladys Kravitz on every block in America? I frowned. It was too late now and I figured the best plan was to simply hightail it out of there before someone called the cops on me. Again. Complacency does have repercussions, doesn’t it?
I did my best to stroll nonchalantly back to where I’d parked the Buick a few blocks away. It wasn’t easy. That curtain twitch in the window made me uneasy. Couple that with the feeling that I’d somehow walked through spiderwebs and I wanted to break into a hard healthy run and sweat all the bad feelings out. I fought it and managed to keep my pace to business brisk. I couldn’t slow it further than that.
I’d rounded the last corner and could see the Buick sitting solid and sure up ahead when a woman darted out from between two houses, planted herself in front of me and said, “What the hell were you doing in my house?”
I guess I should have run.
She didn’t look like a threat. She looked like someone’s mom and not one of those California yoga-toned sitcom moms on television or even one of those over-educated no-makeup university moms like mine. She did, however, look spitting mad.
“I’m sorry. Which house is yours?” I asked, as if I’d been in more than one.
“Don’t play stupid with me,” she spit.
It was a little bit of a relief to have stupid not work for once. I’d have to find a new fallback position, though. I cast around for another option.
I was pretty sure I could drop this lady in about ten seconds. She was easily twenty years older than me and obviously a bit out of shape. There was nothing supernatural about her and she didn’t hold any weapons, as far as I could see. It didn’t feel right, though. It felt, in fact, a little like I’d be being a bully, not a role I relish. Just because you can physically take another person doesn’t mean you should.
“Why can’t you people leave him alone? Haven’t you done enough?” Tears filled her eyes.
“Leave who alone?”
“He paid his dues. He went to jail. Wasn’t that enough? Now he’s dead. He’s gone. My baby’s gone.” The tears overflowed her eyes and she began to shake.
I moved to go around her. Her pain was so plain and so raw, it rushed through me like a knife. She wasn’t going to let me go so easily, though. She shifted to block me. “What more do you people want? What more can you take? My boy is gone. My house is gone. It’s all gone. Isn’t that enough? What more could you take from me?”
I put my hands up in front of me, as if I could shield myself from her hate and anger. “I don’t know who you think I am, but you’re mistaken. I was just in the neighborhood and I’m leaving now.” I looked around. What people was I a part of? Who was it that wanted to take everything from this woman? And why?
She moved out of my way now. “You’d better leave. Don’t think I won’t call the cops on you, though. They’ve got a word for what you’re doing. It’s called harassment. It’s illegal, too, you stupid spic.” She spit on the ground in front of me and then let me pass.