Casting Spells (6 page)

Ten minutes later I was standing near the window in the chief’s office, trying to focus in on the printout from Stallworth Funeral Home in Sugar Maple, Vermont.

According to the statement from the guy who had found her body, Suzanne had apparently fallen through the ice and been unable to pull herself out of the semifrozen pond. She had left her car parked at the curb about fifty feet away. Her purse was on the passenger’s seat. Skis were strapped to the roof and they found an overnight bag in the trunk. There was no sign of a struggle.

A pair of pricey heels were found on a bench at the edge of the lake, along with a pack of cigarettes and a gold lighter.

I could almost hear her laugh as she kicked off her shoes and laced up her skates to take the ice. We grew up loving the ice. We loved the smell, the sound, the way it sometimes kicked our asses.

She understood the ice. She knew how to read a frozen lake better than I did. She knew you didn’t test the center alone in early December, not even up there in northern Vermont. I was glad she had been taken while doing something she loved and pissed as hell that she hadn’t been more careful.

I’m a homicide detective. I’ve been trained to rein in my emotions and concentrate on the facts of a case. But I’ve seen drowning victims. I know what happens to the human body after exposure to icy water and no oxygen. It wasn’t something you would want to see twice.

Fran was watching me closely. “You okay over there, MacKenzie?”

I wasn’t but I grunted something meant to divert her attention from my struggle to pull it together.

“Where’s the police report?” I asked when I trusted my voice again.

“There isn’t one.”

That got my attention. “They have a body and no police report?”

“It’s a small town. Things are different up there.”

“No town’s that small,” I said. And no town was that different. Even small-town cops generated enough paper to destroy a few forests. “Anything from the coroner?”

“They sent the body to Montpelier but the autopsy was canceled and the body was rerouted to family in Connecticut.”

“On whose orders?”

She leaned forward and motioned me closer. “You didn’t hear it from me, but Dan Sieverts has been calling in favors all morning.”

“The congressman with the hair? The one who—”

Her eyes widened. “You didn’t know they were seeing each other?”

I shook my head. “You sure?”

“I’m sure,” Fran said. “I was in the room when the chief got the call.”

Dan Sieverts was a very publicly married politician from Cambridge who was being prepped by the machine to make a run for governor next year.

I had heard the buzz around Sieverts. One of those golden boys destined for bigger and better things, he had the pedigree, the résumé, and the connections needed to climb the ladder. He also had the arrogance that came with the package. Apparently for the last two years that package had also included Suzanne.

Suzanne had been part of my life since grade school. We weren’t what you would call close friends. I didn’t tell her my secrets and she didn’t tell me hers. But we shared a time and a place and for a little while we even shared a family. She had been married to my ex’s brother for about five minutes, and looking back, the only surprise was that any of us had ever believed she and Andy had a chance in hell to make it work. They were over before they brushed the rice from their hair. Suzanne said good-bye to our small Massachusetts fishing village and set out to conquer the world.

I last saw her around this time a year ago. She was running a major PR campaign for a chain of upscale hotels looking to gain a foothold in Boston, and she showed up at the station house with two pastramis on rye and some Guinness. I passed on the Guinness, but we shared the pastrami near the Swan Boats and spent a good three or four minutes catching up on the old days.

“That’s it?” she had said, laughing as the trickle of nostalgia ran dry. “That’s all you’ve got?”

The sky was blue. The sun was shining. It hadn’t snowed in at least four or five hours. I let her think my life was the equivalent of a fistful of Super Bowl rings. She let me think her life was the female equivalent.

At the time I thought only one of us was lying but now I wondered.

Suzanne was dead and the only thing I knew for sure was that it wasn’t from natural causes.

I keyed back into what Frannie was saying. “... Sieverts was supposed to meet her at some inn last night but he didn’t show. The owner said she waited two hours, paid the bar tab, then took off alone. Next thing, some hardware store owner and his sons were pulling her out of the water by her scarf.”

I pushed back the image. “CPR?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Did they call 911?”

“All I know is what they told me on the phone.”

“Have them fax you a police report.”

“No cops, no police report.”

“You mean no cops on the scene?”

“I mean no cops at all. Sugar Maple doesn’t have a police force.”

“They have to have some kind of police presence.”

“Why?” She glanced at her computer screen. “According to this, they don’t have any crime. No burglaries. No shoplifting. No fender benders. Their kids don’t even TP the trees on Devil’s Night. This drowning is the first incident of any kind reported within town limits for over eighty years.”

“Bullshit. Even the Amish have their problems.”

She spun her monitor around to face me. “Look for yourself.”

I scanned the Chamber of Commerce web page she had pulled up. I skimmed the history of maple sugar and its importance in breaking down the nation’s reliance on the West Indian slave trade and scrolled past postcard-perfect photos of a tiny Vermont town nestled in the Green Mountains. Skiing. Shopping. Picturesque views. A four-star restaurant in the middle of nowhere. Great-looking people straight out of central casting. Sugar Maple pretty much had it all.

Except crime.

“They probably cheat on their taxes,” I said, spinning the monitor back into position. “Where’s this going, Franny?”

“Sieverts’s people are leaning on Montpelier to tie up all the loose ends about your friend’s death before it has a chance to hit the media, and Montpelier’s red-faced about letting a town slip between their sticky bureaucratic fingers.” Both sides needed someone on the ground in Sugar Maple to put an official stamp on things. Go in, snoop around, make sure there was no foul play, no nasty surprises to come back later and bite Sieverts on the ass. Once things were wrapped up to everyone’s satisfaction, the boys in Montpelier would install one of their own and I’d be out.

“It’s not permanent,” Fran said, watching me. “I want to make sure you know that. You’ll be cutting ties with us for something that isn’t going to last.”

“Nothing lasts forever, Franny.”

I said yes.

4

CHLOE
SUGAR MAPLE, VERMONT

 

As it turned out, we didn’t have to go looking for trouble. Two days later it found us and the whole town seemed to go crazy at once.

“It is what it is,” Joe Randazzo from the County Clerk’s Office said when he broke the news to me over the phone. “That pet shop next door to you is vacant. We’ll put him there.”

“You can’t,” I said, trying not to let him know I was on the verge of a total meltdown. “I was thinking of expanding my business into that space.”

I heard him take a long drag on a cigarette. “Like I said, Ms. Hobbs, it is what—hold on.”

I said something entirely inappropriate.

Janice, who had stuck with me through my morning of ugly phone calls, looked up from the Baby Surprise Jacket she was knitting, “What’s going on? You’ve been talking to him forever.”

“You’re the one with the powers,” I said, a tad snappishly. “You tell me.”

Janice shot me a look over her bamboo needles. “I’m a witch, not a fortune-teller.”

Which made me laugh, something I didn’t think I would be doing again for a very long time. Janice was descended from a long line of women who revered Mother Earth and understood her ways. She was also understandably proud of her lineage and ready to do battle with anyone who didn’t show it the proper respect.

“Don’t blame me,” I said as Muzak’d Barry Manilow assaulted my eardrums. “I’m only human.”

It was Janice’s turn to laugh. “That’s okay, honey. I like you anyway.”

“They’re sending a cop to Sugar Maple.”

“To ask questions? That makes sense. They have all those forms to fill out up there in Montpelier.” She paused for a second but started up again before I could jump in. “I’ll have to wax the Griggs boys and give them pedicures. Did you see them last night? The shock stopped Transformation just before the finish line.” She pretended to shudder. “It wasn’t a pretty sight.”

All I had noticed were the bristly hairs piercing their skin and the tips of their pearly claws. Janice was acting like it was a scene from
An American Werewolf in London.
We never used to sweat the small stuff in Sugar Maple. Aerynn’s spell would have taken care of everything, smoothing strangers’ perceptions and creating the illusion of the expected even when the expected was nowhere to be found. Now we had no way of knowing when or where the protective charm might let us down. More and more, we were on our own.

I took a deep breath. “They’re not sending a cop just to ask questions, Janice. They want to open a police station in the shop next door.”

Despite our tourist town popularity we had managed to fly below the scan of bureaucratic radar. We followed the letter of the law. We sent our kids to school. We voted. We paid our taxes on time. We were an asset to the state, and in true Yankee fashion, they had let us do our thing without interference. But I was afraid we were about to find out how much of that laissez-faire attitude was the New Englander’s love of freedom and how much was courtesy of Aerynn.

The Muzak’d Manilow stopped abruptly and I motioned for Janice to be quiet.

“Got a pencil?” Joe Randazzo barked and then started rattling off a to-do list that made my head spin. “And one more thing,” he said over a noisy slurp of liquid. “Pull together town records from 1946 to the present and make sure to include death certificates.”

Uh-oh.

“Death certificates?” I asked in my best who-me-worry tone. “What do you want with death certificates?”

“I’m telling you what they’re asking for.” He took another loud swallow of either coffee or single malt. With Joe you never knew for sure. “They haven’t been able to find anything up there in Montpelier since they decided to digitize the archives. They’ll probably want birth and marriage, too, but right now death is all they’re asking for.”

The only death certificate we had that I knew of was my father’s. This was going to be a problem.

“What’s the rush?” I asked. “I mean, we’ve been doing fine without help for a long time.” Almost three hundred years, but who was counting.

“Get the paperwork lined up,” Joe repeated. “They want it, and between us, you’d be smart to provide it. In fact, maybe you should knit the new guy one of those fancy sweaters of yours while you’re at it.” He laughed. Joe Randazzo was a fan of his own humor. “You want to make both of our lives easy? Do what they want and don’t ask questions.”

“Don’t ask questions?” A bead of perspiration slid down into my hairline over my right ear. “What does that mean?”

“It means what it means. This isn’t my idea. I’ve got enough on my plate right now without opening another precinct up there in the mountains. Don’t fight it because this goes all the way to the top.”

“The top?” I asked but I was too late. Joe had already hung up.

“What’s going on?” Janice demanded when I turned to her. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed until I cried.

News travels fast in a small town. By lunchtime everyone in Sugar Maple knew about the police station and they were up in arms. I was flooded with so many phone calls and anxious visits that I finally had to shut down the shop and call an emergency meeting at the Town Hall for 8 P.M.

Gunnar came by the cottage around seven thirty to drive with me over to the abandoned church we used as our central meeting place. The girls loved Gunnar and they converged at his ankles like a furry Welcome Wagon. You could barely hear yourself think over the roar of purrs.

“Tell the truth,” I demanded as I offered him one of my precious Chips Ahoy. “You rub catnip on your ankles before you come over here.”

He laughed but it was clear his heart wasn’t in it. I suddenly realized my friend looked tired and more than a little distracted.

“Are you okay?” I asked as I grabbed a cookie for myself. I had never seen him look so drained, not even the time Dane found himself stranded beyond the mist and needed to access Gunnar’s powers in order to return to this dimension.