Strings of Fate (Mistresses of Fate) (16 page)

“Why did you call the FBI about Ms. Pascal?” he asked them, though he still didn’t sound as though he believed they’d been the ones to make the call to the hotline.

Yarrow took a small bite of her pie and closed her eyes briefly. She swallowed before she spoke, seeming to savor the flavor. “We realized the man on the blog was talking about her.”

“The man on the blog?”

“The
Mysteries of Fate
blog. We like reading it.”

The two other girls nodded in sync; Chris could tell it was unnerving Helmer a little and put a comforting hand on his shoulder. His head jerked in her direction.
Okay, maybe not so comforting.
She removed it, but not before she’d gotten a good feel of the hard muscle beneath her hand.
He must lift weights,
she thought, feeling a little dreamy.

“But how did you connect the writing on that blog to Ms. Pascal?”

The girls looked at him like he was stupid. “Of course she’s the Creator. She’s been making up people since she was little; our aunt told us.” She paused. “Well, she wasn’t very nice about it, but she says Chris would make up stories about people in the woods. And then in high school she made up a boyfriend, even fooled her best friends, at least until prom.”

“Why would you have to make up a boyfriend?” He sounded genuinely confounded, which she couldn’t help but appreciate. Chris blinked and tried to look demure. In high school she’d been a tall, gangly girl with no bosom to speak of, while Raquel had been reed-slender and delicate, like a fairy, and Tavey had been stylish and confident. Chris had felt a little left behind when her two best friends had dates to the prom and she didn’t, so she’d made up a boyfriend on the wrestling team of another high school. It would have worked, actually; she’d been asked out by the wrestling champ of Calhoun High School after meeting him at a track meet two days before prom, but she’d decided to stop lying to her friends instead.

“I was a late bloomer.” She shrugged, though she’d been pretty embarrassed at the time.

“So everyone in town knows you as the
Creator
?”

Chris snorted. “Are you kidding? The Baptists would have my head if I went around calling myself the Creator. I had no idea anyone called me that. No one does call me that, except I guess these three. Mostly people just remind me of what an idiot I was in high school. Less charitable folks call me a liar.”

For some reason that seemed to bother him. He looked away from her, turning back to the girls. “Well, thank you for sending us the tip. We appreciate it.”

The three of them nodded.

Ryan stood, though he’d only taken a few bites of his pie. Chris looked down and realized that she’d eaten her entire slice.
When did that happen?

“You should stay with Ms. Pascal,” Yarrow declared suddenly. “He’s going after her next.”

The agent paused; his voice, when he spoke, was very careful. “Why do you say that?”

For the first time since Chris and Ryan had arrived, the girls seemed uncomfortable, their eyes sliding away, and Chris knew they weren’t going to tell him anything else.

“Just a feeling,” Yarrow said truculently, and sealed her mouth shut.

Ryan must have recognized a lost cause when he saw one, because he held a hand out for Chris. “Come on, I need to check in with my team.”

“Sorry,” Yarrow added. She seemed sensitive to disappointing the federal agent. Chris was rather inured to it at this point, but the girls had a pretty thin skin.

“You can’t tell me anything more?”

She shook her head. “You wouldn’t believe me even if I could, but trust me, we don’t know him, and we don’t have any connection to him.”

“Fine.” He seemed to shake off his irritation or frustration or whatever it was that had been bothering him. Chris doubted he was letting it go; he would probably just have them investigated. “I appreciate the help, ladies, and the pie. It was delicious.”

The girls giggled and blushed. Yarrow nodded. “You’re welcome.”

He led the way out of the house, scanning the area as he left, his body alert for any threat.

Chris did much the same thing, only she knew who she was looking out for—Jane. The last time Chris had run into the nutty woman, she’d thrown a chicken at Chris’s face. A taxidermied chicken, but nevertheless.

Ryan opened the door of the SUV for her, but didn’t wait for her to get in before walking around the car to the driver’s seat.

“Are they always so strange?” he asked once they were off the Havens’ property and back on the road to Fate. Clouds had rolled in while they’d been talking to the girls, and now the late-afternoon light was shadowed by the deep bank of gray.

“Yep,” Chris confirmed. “But they were extra strange today, if that’s any consolation.”

He slid a sideways glance in her direction. She wasn’t sure what the glance meant, but she really wished the girls hadn’t told him that she’d invented a boyfriend in high school; he’d seemed to be warming up to her after she’d helped with the victim identification earlier today. Or at least he’d seemed to let go of some of his resistance to her help—probably because she had helped; she knew she had.

“You were a little strange as well.”

“Was I?” Chris’s voice cracked a little, so she repeated in a much calmer tone, “Was I?”

“Yeah.”

Chris looked at his profile, admiring it in the greenish gray light of the storm.

“Where are you from?” she tossed out.

He looked at her skeptically, and Chris was amused; she could almost imagine his internal debate:
Do I talk to her about personal things or not? She’s connected to a case—she’s a head case—she lives her life through invented people online.

But then, miracle of miracles, he answered. Grudgingly, but he did answer, his voice taking on a bit of a drawl when he said, “Houston. Texas.”

“Really?” Chris tried to act surprised.

“And no, I’m not a cowboy.”

Chris pursed her lips. “Have you ever ridden a horse?”

He didn’t want to answer that one; she could tell by the way his body stiffened. “Yes.”

“Have you ever worked with cows?”

He didn’t even bother to respond to that.

“I know you shoot a gun, so . . . do you hunt?”

“Sometimes,” he bit off.

Christina smiled with satisfaction. He was a cowboy. Or at least cowboy enough for her to call him one. She moved the seat back and put her feet up on his dash.

“Put your feet down,” he ordered.

She did, but only because she wanted him to keep answering her questions.

“So how’d you end up in the Rome resident office?”

His jaw clenched and Chris could tell she’d hit a nerve.

“I asked to be transferred. My grandmother lives in Atlanta.”

He was close to his grandmother. Damn. She liked that about him. Honestly, she liked a lot about him. He was a challenge for sure. Too bad he was so uptight. Still, she didn’t think his grandmother was the whole story, or even most of the story.

“You get in a fight with someone?”

“I already told you why.”

“Hmm.” Chris turned a little in her seat so she was facing him more fully. “You told me part of the truth. Trust me, I’m an expert at it.”

“Really?” He looked almost triumphant. “Then what aren’t you telling me about the girls?”

Chris sighed. She really should have known better. “Not much. Just that they warned me about this guy the day you showed up at my door. They’re in my Tuesday yoga class.”

“Warned you how?”

Chris snorted. “How else? Cryptically. I think they’re crazy most of the time.”

“So, they make predictions. Am I supposed to believe they’re psychics?” He sounded more than a little scornful, but hey, he was an FBI agent. She was pretty sure scorn and disbelief were job requirements.

“I don’t know what to call them, or to tell you, beyond what I know, which is that the girls told me someone was trying to kill me and that I should avoid my boyfriend.” She paused, it hitting her suddenly. “Which . . . which must have meant ‘the Boyfriend’ because . . . well, I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“What about exes?”

Chris nodded reluctantly. “I have one of those, Chad Barber, but I haven’t talked to him in a year. I heard he has a girlfriend in another town.”

“I’ll need his name and number.”

“Fine.” Chris sighed, wincing at the idea of Ryan—he was officially Ryan now, at least in her head—meeting Chad. Chad was . . . well, part of the habitually unemployed and perennially lazy. Chad liked to smoke weed, lots of it, which Chris didn’t have a moral problem with, but she didn’t think it had done much in the way of helping Chad set any productive life goals, though she supposed she wasn’t really one to talk.

“So what was the other reason you ended up in Rome?” she persisted. Stubbornness was one of her more charming qualities.

Just when she thought he was going to answer, his phone rang. “Helmer. . . . When? . . . All right. I’ll be right there. Be advised, I have a civilian with me. Have one of the county deputies ready to escort her home. . . . Yes, it’s Ms. Pascal. . . . I don’t think that’s a good idea, sir.”

He finished with, “Yes, sir,” and hung up, looking mightily pissed off.

“What’s wrong?”

“They’ve found another body.” He didn’t turn the SUV around, but he did turn on his lights, which, under any other circumstances, Chris would have thought was pretty cool.

“Where?”

“In the Zoe River, downstream from the bridge we crossed earlier.”

“Man or woman?”

“Man.”

“Killed the same—?”

“Yes,” he bit off.

“Ryan, we’re going to catch him.”

He shook his head and tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “
We
are not going to do anything. You are going to get a ride home with a deputy and stay put in your apartment.”

“I think I’ve helped so far.”

“You have,” he agreed grudgingly, “but that’s not the point.”

“Then what is—?”

“He could come after you. That is the point,” he said very precisely, enunciating each word.

Chris hated to break it to him, but that only made her want to catch the bastard more. She was not a wait-around-and-see-what-happens kind of girl. She’d been powerless when Summer disappeared, she’d been frozen, unable to move. And so she refused to do nothing now.

He pulled off onto the shoulder just before the bridge and plugged a location into his GPS. It directed them to take a dirt side road that curved down to the river and ran alongside it for several miles. Chris knew the locals used it to get to their favorite fishing holes and the teenagers used it to get to the good make-out spots. It tended to flood in a heavy rain like the one it was looking like they were about to have. Chris glanced up at the sky—it didn’t look promising, but she kept her mouth shut for the moment.

A mile down the road, two cop cars and an ambulance were gathered together in a serious-looking powwow; the only car that wasn’t an official vehicle of some kind was the shiny new truck that probably belonged to the pale teenage boy wearing a letterman’s jacket and jeans. His apparent girlfriend was wrapped in a blanket nearby, equally pale, and probably traumatized.

The rhythmic thumps of a helicopter circling overhead and the flash of the lights against the gathering storm gave the scene a surreal quality. Over the years, dozens of people had drowned in this river during storms. Chris half expected their ghosts to materialize, paper-white with dark eyes, their bodies misshapen and bloated. She’d helped find a body once, with Tavey and the dogs. It was not an experience she cared to repeat, but based on the way everyone was rushing around and looking down at the bank, it appeared she wasn’t going to be able to avoid it.

When Chris and Ryan approached, Agent Midaugh had already taken charge of the scene and everyone was wearing ponchos with the names of their respective agencies in anticipation of the rain. Chris shivered a little in the damp wind and wished she’d put on the jacket she’d left in Helmer’s car; the temperature was dropping with the advent of the storm.

“Helmer, the locals say the river will flood this area,” Midaugh called out as Ryan and Chris approached.

“Yeah,” Ryan agreed.

“The kids who found it didn’t recognize the body.”

“All right. Let’s get them and Ms. Pascal home, then. Do we have a couple deputies who can take them back to Fate?”

Agent Midaugh gave him a look that said,
You know what I want, asshole.

“If you want, I’ll take a look,” Chris offered, ignoring the glare that Ryan sent her way.

“You will not,” Ryan said firmly.

Christina felt her chin jut out. That was all it took most of the time, someone telling her she shouldn’t do something.

“I said I’ll look,” she snapped at Midaugh, who held his hands up.

“Fine. They should be bringing up the body in a few minutes.”

Chris wrapped her arms around herself and waited, stamping her feet a little to keep warm.

“Where’s your jacket?” Ryan asked.

“In your truck.”

“So go get it.”

He pressed a button to unlock the car and she fetched her jacket. When she came back to the group, three emergency workers were climbing carefully up the short slope carrying a gurney with the body strapped to it. Officers were waiting at the top to help once they got within grabbing distance.

It was a tense moment; the red clay earth of the bank was slippery during the best of times, the water in the river below deep and murky, with a tricky undertow.

Chris did not, however, think that the river’s threats were what had happened to the man whose body they carried.

Finally, they reached the top, leveling out and straightening the gurney. Chris followed them to the back of the ambulance, Ryan at her side. Once out of the line of sight of the reporters, the emergency workers unzipped the part of the bag near the victim’s head.

Chris shuddered at the sight of the pale face of the young man, the filmy eyes, but she had to look. Because that’s what she did: she always looked, even if she knew she wouldn’t like what she saw.

“I don’t know him, but he could be one of the college students.”