Pumpkin Roll (33 page)

“Cryin’ shame,” Mr. Delecorte said.

“I don’t know how often you come into the city,” Sadie said, “but if you do, maybe you could look in on Delores. She’s at Massachusetts General right now, though I don’t know how long she’ll stay, and I don’t know where she’ll go when she leaves. I don’t think she’ll be coming back home, though; I’m not sure she can take care of herself anymore.”

“I’m not one for cities, but maybe my wife and I will look into it. I sure hate to think of somethin’ happenin’ to that gal. She done never hurt anyone herself, that be for sure.”

Sadie didn’t mention Bark’s untimely demise. She was beginning to get a dual view of Delores—who she was and who she’d been. And while she might never have been “normal,” Mr. Delecorte didn’t seem to think she was that weird either. And, Sadie noted, Mr. Delecorte had said nothing about her being a witch . . . cats notwithstanding.

“Delores has had some trouble up here—stealing mail from the neighbors and such. Did that ever happen when she lived in your rental?”

“Well, yes, it did happen some. She liked to collect things, like the cats, and she liked letters. Tim said that when Delores was little her mama would write letters to both girls and send them through the post so they would get their own mail. When things started going poorly, she seemed to hold on to that memory. When she didn’t find anything from her mother, she started going through other people’s things. Tim worried about that a whole lot, seein’ as how it’s a felony and all to tamper with another person’s mail. He’d keep a lookout and return the mail when he found it. A few of the neighbors had a real issue with it, but it didn’t bother me too much. She just wasn’t right, that’s all. She weren’t tryin’ to hurt nobody.”

“Did people file complaints?” Sadie said, tapping the line where she’d written “Three complaints in Lowell.”

“Some did, for sure, but not me. Like I said, it weren’t really her fault, and she never opened the mail or nothin’. Just took it home and left it on the counter for her daddy to find and return all apologetic-like.”

Sadie scribbled some notes and moved on to her next question. “Timothy wrote some articles back in the late seventies. Did he ever talk about that?”

“Tim had been a bus driver for the MBTA. He never wrote nothin’ that I ever knew about. What was they about?”

“Well, they were about ghosts.”

Mr. Delecorte went silent and Sadie felt herself cringe. “You’re sayin’ Tim wrote ghost stories?”

“Articles,” Sadie corrected. “I’d heard he was kind of . . . involved in that kind of thing.”

“Not here he wasn’t,” Mr. Delecorte said strongly. “I don’t take up with that kinda thing, and I’m sure glad Tim never mentioned it to me. I’m a man of faith, not fantasy.”

“I understand completely,” Sadie said, wanting to assure him that she wasn’t trying to make him uncomfortable.

“What was you needing this information for again?” Mr. Delecorte asked. “Who are you calling with?”

“Oh, I’m not calling for anyone,” Sadie said. “I’m just worried about Delores, is all, and wanted to be able to give the police and hospital a better history.”

“Ain’t her sister helpin’ out? I thought she was going to be takin’ care of Delores. That’s what Tim was sayin’ toward the end.”

“Um, she’s . . . involved, but seems to be a pretty busy woman.”

Mr. Delecorte harrumphed and Sadie agreed with him. It wasn’t a good enough reason in Sadie’s book either. She thanked him profusely and ended the call with a sigh of relief. She couldn’t type in the car, at least not comfortably, so she went inside the library and sat at one of the small study tables. The building was relatively plain, but it had character in its window frames and hardwood floor, making it easy to feel at home.

As soon as she was settled, Sadie typed up her notes from the phone call. She’d fleshed out some of Mrs. Wapple’s history, and that was good, but she hadn’t discovered anything earth-shattering. Perhaps the most important detail was that Delores had been on medication back in Lowell and wasn’t anymore. If she were schizophrenic, and unmedicated, her mental illness could be out of control, exacerbating her dislikes—dogs, kids, people in general—and rendering her incapable of rational thought—digging for potatoes, talking to people who weren’t there, muttering about angry birds.

Nothing Sadie had learned would explain who would attack Mrs. Wapple and why, but she seemed more sick than sinister now that Sadie had been able to talk to someone who had positive feelings toward her. It was a shame that Mr. Delecorte and his wife hadn’t been able to take over Mrs. Wapple’s care. Instead, Gabrielle had obviously taken on more than she was prepared to handle.

Nothing Mr. Delecorte had said pointed toward anything scandalous or horrible enough that Gabrielle would be trying to scare Sadie away from it, and Gabrielle hadn’t been any kind of villain in his report. She’d grown out of her family was how he put it, and it was an apt description. She was educated and had social status beyond what she’d been raised to. She wasn’t taking the right kind of care of her sister, but she’d moved her closer, and she did check in on her once a week. Very basic things, but . . . it was something.

Sadie’s thoughts circled around to motive again. Gabrielle was one of the few people connected to the weird things that had been happening, but she had no reason to do any of it. Additionally, she had many reasons
not
to. Presumably she was fine with her sister’s situation until Sadie started trying to tell her what she was doing wrong. All she had to do was wait out Sadie’s visit, not stage some big dramatic series of events meant to scare her off. Unless, as Sadie and Pete had discussed, she was a psychopath. Then her motives didn’t have to be reasonable.

Hmmm.

It was barely noon, which meant she had another hour left before she would be meeting Jane at the restaurant. Sadie tapped her pen against her notepad, contemplating her options. She was on track with Mr. Forsberk. By the time Jane finished her parts, she’d have a lot of information on which to base round two with him this afternoon. That left Sadie with Gabrielle to look into, but she felt as though she’d exhausted that resource.

She went back to the notes she’d taken about Gabrielle and spent twenty minutes going through them, trying to find more leads on information. She found Gabrielle on a couple of social network sites, but there wasn’t much personal information available. It seemed she’d worked hard to have a very professional online presence in place. Sadie tracked her job history and figured out when she’d graduated from school and when she and Bruce Handell had started dating, but there wasn’t any
dirt
for her to dig through.

Sadie had heard about companies you could hire to “clear your name” online, so to speak, so that those old college frat party pictures or the political protest you’d attended didn’t show up when the potential boss did a background check. Sadie wondered if Gabrielle had done the same thing or if she really had just lived a very professional, clean, good life—the perfect front for a psychopath. She also noted that Gabrielle hadn’t been publicly connected to her sister’s attack yet. When Sadie searched the news databases with Gabrielle’s name, the only hits she got were for articles about the gallery or Bruce Handell. Nothing came up about her mentally ill sister.

There was unfinished business with Gabrielle, Sadie could feel it, but she’d run out of places to look for information. Would Jane be able to find something more? Sadie bit her bottom lip and considered that. She already felt as though she’d given Jane a lot to do while Sadie had just made one silly phone call. Asking Jane to take on even more was presumptuous. Or did it just hurt Sadie’s pride to admit she couldn’t do this all by herself? She called Mrs. Wapple’s current landlord, but it went to voice mail. Worried that the police had made the same contact, Sadie chose not to leave a message, deciding to call back later instead.

Sadie decided to look up articles on Mrs. Wapple’s attack to see if there had been any updates and spent another fifteen minutes reading a couple dozen different versions. There was nothing that she didn’t already know and still no mention of Gabrielle.

Sadie was glad the story hadn’t been picked up by the Associated Press and was therefore relatively contained, although it had shown up in the
Denver Post
. She assumed the story would pick up steam when there was an arrest made, assuming there would be an arrest.

At 12:35 she got a text from Jane saying she needed another half an hour; her interview had gone long. Sadie replied that was fine, then rested her head on her hand and wondered what she was going to do for the next hour until she and Jane could compare notes. Sadie’s notes were rather pathetic—was there a way she could boost her results and use her time more constructively? Was there any lead she hadn’t squeezed every last drop from?

Her eyes rested on the Google search bar on the computer, and she contemplated it for several seconds before she went ahead and typed in the topic she’d been avoiding since the beginning.

Ghosts.

She took a breath and clicked the search button, trying not to feel as though she’d caved.

Chapter 29

It was a tongue-in-cheek search, to be sure. The sites were immature or Halloween-themed, impossible to take seriously. But Sadie kept reading, if only to convince herself of how ridiculous it was. Other than really poor grammar on most of the silly sites, there was little to interest her other than the profound belief these people had that spirits did exist. The more she read, the more her anxiety began to build. She was uncomfortable with this line of investigation and kept telling herself, “People can put anything online.” None of this could be for real.

Then she had a burst of inspiration. She was in Boston, twenty minutes from the site of the infamous Salem witch trials during which time nearly two dozen men and women were executed for practicing witchcraft that was proven by scientifically unsound means. It was a tragic and dark story, and yet the fact that she was so close to such a nucleus meant that she had resources other than silly websites full of stories she had no way to prove.

In-person research was always more effective than reading, and since she already had a prejudice against this information, it made even more sense to go to the source and get exactly what she needed. She went back to the Google search bar and typed in “metaphysical store Boston” and discovered there were dozens of stores in the Boston area. She waded through the links and repetitions until she found an address in Jamaica Plain. She let out a breath and tried to push her prejudice aside as she wrote down the address in her notebook. A good investigator didn’t ignore any options, regardless of how ridiculous they seemed. After packing up her things, she checked the time: 12:50. She had forty solid minutes, and she assured herself this was a worthy use of her time.

By the time she found the store, she was questioning herself all over again. She had to park almost a block away, but at least she didn’t have to pay for parking. The shop wasn’t part of the main downtown district in Jamaica Plain, filled with colonial and cottage-style buildings that housed antique shops, bookstores, and various cafés and delis. This block held square brick buildings with narrow doorways, cracked sidewalks, and heavy power lines draped between the rooftops. She speed-walked past a pawn shop and a bar with peeling vinyl stickers on the door saying they were open from 4: 0 to 2:0 , and pushed open a door painted bright green with the words
Wick’d Which
painted on a sign that hung perpendicular to the patched brick. Oh, boy.

The tinkle of a bell was the same one she heard every time she entered Marie’s Bakery back in Garrison. For an instant she missed her town—missed knowing her way around, knowing what to expect and who she would see when she ran her errands. It wasn’t the same for her at home anymore, but she missed what it once was.

The store smelled nothing like Marie’s Bakery, however, and the musty, incense-heavy scent in the air chased away any feelings of nostalgia the bell had signaled. Floor to ceiling was covered with either shelves or banners depicting all kinds of symbols and visions of the undead. Near the door was a set of shelves with a handwritten sign that said Pocket Altars to Go! Two women stood off to the side discussing different types of tarot cards; Sadie didn’t tune in. Quite frankly this kind of stuff gave her the creeps. There were some teenage kids in the back corner of the store, and Sadie wondered if their parents knew they were here. Right after she came in, another woman entered who seemed to know exactly where she was going. Sadie wondered if it was always this busy or if the Halloween season had something to do with the afternoon traffic.