Madelyn Alt_Bewitching Mystery 04_No Rest for the Wiccan Page 2

  It took only a split second from decision to execution. Holding my breath deep in my lungs, I drew myself in, making myself as small and inconsequential as possible, holding the I’m-not-here-don’t- mind-me-fading-into-the-background thought with as much intensity as I could manage. I was stunned when it actually appeared to have worked: Tom’s gaze skated past me without pause. The minute he identified Officer Jed as the reason for the sweeping beam of light, his shoulders relaxed visibly, and he lowered his handgun.

  “Glad to see you could make it, Jensen.”

  “Did you see—”

  “Anyone?” Tom finished for him. “Nah. I think whoever was snooping around is gone. I haven’t seen or heard a thing since—”

  Jensen cut him off by swinging the light up and jerking his head toward the hanging . . . thing. For an instant, Tom looked frozen, too, by the sight. Then he revved into action, reholstering his gun and fastening the snaps. “Do you want to take the ladder, or do I?”

  Jensen grimaced. “Ho, jeez. God, I hate heights. Why does it always have to be heights?”

  “I dunno. You want me to climb it?”

  “Nope, I’m on it. You’re not even supposed to be on duty, remember?” He girded his loins—well, his utility belt—shifting it around his meaty middle. Jensen did not seem to share Tom’s predilection for physical fitness. He cast a mischievous glance at Tom. “You gonna be ready to catch me if I fall?”

  “Hm.” Tom made a leery face. “You know, you’re not really my type. How about if I radio for backup instead, big guy?”

  The cop’s version of gallows humor. Even in tense situations, nothing much fazed them for long. I, on the other hand, was completely weirded out by the thing hanging above us. I didn’t envy Jensen much. That climb looked like a bitch and a half. Since I didn’t even manage to pass rope climbing in middle school gym class, I felt his pain.

  “What—or who—do you think it is?” Tom mused aloud, rubbing a hand over the jaw I had been nuzzling not so long ago.

  Jensen shrugged. “We’ll know when we get there, I guess. I don’t see why anyone would have climbed up there to off themselves, but stranger things have happened.” Surely the understatement of the year, I thought wryly as Jensen continued, “What I want to know is, why always on my watch?”

  Jensen made his way over to the silo and eyeballed his target as Tom called out helpful suggestions. As for me, I edged back on the fringes, as quiet as the proverbial mouse, watching the proceedings from my ringside seat with that heady mix of emotions that comes from rubber-necking at traffic accidents and file://C:Documents and SettingsLaura HowardMy DocumentsMy eBooksParanormal... 7/10/2009

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  funerals—half-revulsion, half-fascination, all guilt.

  The higher Jed Jensen climbed, the higher the anticipation grew. Behind us in the barns across the way, the hogs were restless. Their strange grunts and squeals rang out over the sounds of the fans and machinery, filling the air with an unease that pressed in on me. I hadn’t been expecting that. I took a deep, steadying breath and scuffed my feet against the pavement in an attempt to ground the nervous energy that the animals projected as strongly as any human.

  Jensen was at least halfway up when an F350 pickup truck skidded in off the road, spewing gravel in typical testosterone-charged fashion as it shuddered to a halt beside Tom’s much smaller version. The driver jumped out, leaving his door open as he pushed back his felt cowboy hat to stare up first at the spotlighted conveyer system high above, then the dark spot of the uniformed officer inching his way up the heights of the round-backed ladder. He stopped a moment with his hands on his hips and mouth open as though stunned by the scene unfolding before his eyes.

  The stillness of the moment didn’t last long.

  “What the hell is going on here?” The man’s dark eyes swept from Tom, to me, to the police cruiser, then back to the scene high above. “Can someone please tell me what in the blue blazes is going on?”

  Tom was digging in the back pocket of his jeans, withdrawing the flat wallet that contained his badge and identification. He flashed them at the newcomer. “May I ask you to state your business here, sir?”

  The man stared at him, his rugged face red beneath a tan that spoke of hours spent in the open air on a regular basis. “My business? Well, that’s just the point, Officer . . . Fielding, is it? This”—he swept his hand to indicate the widespread grouping of buildings and silos—“is my business. I’m Joel Turner. I own Turner Field and Grain Systems.”

  Even if I hadn’t been gifted with sensitivities from the Powers That Be, I would have known by the set of the shoulders beneath the button-down cotton shirt and the forceful slash of his hand that Mr. Joel Turner was a man of few words and even less patience.

  “Mr. Turner,” Tom said before the man could get himself even more worked up. “I take it Dispatch didn’t get ahold of you. I’m afraid there’s been a report of possible trespass here on your property. A driver passing by the place saw flashlight beams and suspicious movement, and called it in.”

  “No, they got ahold of me, all right. Trespass, huh?” Turner’s gaze roved over his widespread property, sharp as a hay fork. “So what are you standing around for? Shouldn’t you be out there looking? And while you’re at it, maybe you wouldn’t mind explaining the fool climbing up the side of Big Ben.” The silo, I assumed, not the clock tower. “What the hell is that thing up there?”

  “That fool,” Tom replied in a clipped manner that said he did not care much for Turner’s choice of words, “is a fellow police officer currently risking life and limb to investigate vandalism of your property. As for what is up there, we don’t have an answer to that yet.”

  As though he had heard the discussion below and sought to put an end to the speculation, Jensen gave a shout. As one, all eyes swiveled upward. Jensen hooked an arm around one of the ladder steps and pressed his back against the safety cage to brace himself. A second later we heard the crackling sputter of his voice coming from Tom’s radio.

  “False alarm. It’s just a dummy that some jackass decided to haul up here to make trouble.”

  “A dummy?” Tom responded into his own shoulder mike. “You mean, like a store mannequin?”

  “More like a scarecrow. Rough. It looks like someone put it together themselves.”

  “Hm.” Tom thought for a minute. “How about it, Jensen? Can you get to it to get it down?”

  There was a moment stretched long, rife with hesitation, and I knew Jensen must be surveying the distance between his body and the dummy itself. Twenty-five feet on solid ground was a cakewalk. Twenty-five feet of open air with a freefall of one hundred feet to a hard landing on a concrete slab was not a pretty prospect. The radio sputtered again. “Well . . . yeah, sure I can. I mean, maybe it would be better to wait until morning, since there’s no real urgency. I mean—”

  Without a word Turner turned on his heel and stalked off toward a low-slung building across the way. A utilitarian sign on the front minced no words to identify it as the OFFICE. Tom whipped his head around to watch him, then spoke into the radio’s mouthpiece again. “Hang on, Jensen.”

  “Copy that. But be quick about it, would ya? Can’t say as it’s all that fun up here.”

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  Tom stuffed his wallet back into his pocket and jogged after the feed mill owner, who was punching the buttons on a numerical keypad just outside the office door. Turner barely looked back at Tom as he came up behind him; instead, when the system made a high-pitched blip blip, he shoved his way inside without further ado. A light switched on, spilling carelessly across the yard. Turner stayed in the doorway, his bulk preventing Tom from following while he worked at something just inside the door. In the next moment, there was a loud clunk from above, a mechanical whirr, and the jingling of metal as the system of pulleys and conveyers lurched into moti
on, and the dummy right along with them. High above, Jensen gave a shout. The radio on Tom’s hip squawked again. “Well, why didn’t you do that sooner, son? That just made things a helluva lot easier.”

  Tom looked at Turner. Turner turned away beneath the weight of the attention, ducking his head down enough that the brim hid his eyes. He shrugged. “I don’t do . . . never mind.”

  Fifteen minutes of wrangling, adjusting, and reverse-climbing later, and Jensen had hauled the lumpy figure down in a fireman’s over-the-shoulder hold, letting himself down one careful step at a time—not an easy feat when you were a good thirty pounds overweight and a little doughy around the middle. Tom and Turner lifted the thing from him as soon as they could reach it, and between the two of them lugged it to the ground. For a scarecrow, this dummy appeared to be surprisingly heavy. Everyone gathered around. No one seemed to notice or care that I had inserted myself into the circle. The thought made me puff up with pride—my invisibility charm seemed to be working even better than I had hoped. This particular skill could prove useful.

  The thing that had been hanging from the conveyer system was not a mannequin, but as Jensen had described, it was distinctly man-shaped, and it was most definitely crafted by someone with a sick sense of humor. Its face was a burlap sack, just like any moldering scarecrow holding court over the crows and blackbirds in the veggie rows, but its eyes were big black X’s, its mouth a Frankenstein grimace of stitchery in red yarn. The thing had been suspended from the conveyers by a noose securely knotted—

  hangman-style, I noted, grimacing at the implied suggestion. It was dressed in an old button-down shirt, clean but worn blue jeans, and atop its “head,” a straw cowboy hat. One after another, three sets of eyes, mine included, lifted from the dummy to Mr. Turner standing at its feet and traveled from his boots up to his low-on-the-brow cowboy hat. He scowled suddenly—the meaning was not lost on him either.

  “You wouldn’t know who might be leaving this kind of thing for you, do you, Mr. Turner?” Tom asked, his voice neutral. “I mean, it’s a weird thing for anyone to do. Kinda eerie, you might say, hanging it up there for you to find.”

  “Shit.” Turner lit up a cigarette, cupping his hand around the tip until it burned Devil-red in the night. He took a long drag, then blew the smoke out, his stare dragon-cold and intense. “What makes you think the thing was meant for me?”

  Tom raised a brow and stared him down, just as cool. “What makes you think it wasn’t?”

  Turner just shrugged. “I didn’t say that. I just don’t think you can jump to that conclusion without cause.”

  A tic was making an appearance at Tom’s left temple—I knew how much he hated having his authority compromised, and he hated mind games even more—but he kept his cool. Jensen, as the officer in charge of the scene, rose from where he’d been kneeling beside the dummy and stepped in. “I think this might be enough cause even for you, Mr. Turner.” He handed him a piece of paper, wrinkled from handling. “I found this on the, er, the body when I was holding on for dear life a hundred feet up.”

  Turner accepted the paper, the briefest twitch of his fingers before taking it the only sign of uncertainty. His mouth turned down at the corner in a sneer. “Death threats for unfair business practices.” He made a sound of disgust. “I knew this was a load of hog shit. This isn’t a case of vandalism, Officers. This is nothing more than a simple case of sour grapes.”

  “How do you figure?”

  Turner shrugged. “We’ve had a lot of major expenses this last year—purchasing some of the other feed mills and co-ops in the county—”

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  “All of ’em, I heard,” Jensen provided helpfully.

  “I guess that’d be about right. In any case, with the economy in the crapper, we’ve had to make some modifications to our pricing scheme just to stay out of the red and pay our own creditors. You know how it is.”

  “And this is—”

  “Someone who isn’t happy about the effect on their own bottom line. It happens all the time. No big deal.”

  “Well, now.” Jensen looked him in the eyes. “That may be, but I’m not so sure that I would write this off so quickly. Death threats are no laughing matter.”

  I could see that the note was made out of letters cut from a magazine and pasted onto a piece of notebook paper. “ ‘The mighty will fall’?” Turner read. “Not very original, is it.”

  “All it takes is one crackpot without an imagination,” Tom replied. Turner shrugged. “I have a security system in place. Unfortunately my brother is often the last one here, and he sometimes forgets to activate it. Family. What can you do.” He clamped his lips tightly around his cigarette, a hard man with an even harder attitude. An old-style Hoosier if I’d ever met one. “Look. I know the people I deal with on a daily basis. They may be tight-fisted bastards, but as for a real threat? I think I’ll risk it.”

  I cringed inwardly. Old habits die hard—thanks to my upbringing, my hands downright itched to form the criss-crossed corners of the Holy Cross. There was nothing more arrogant than thumbing one’s nose at death, and if I were Joel Turner, I wouldn’t have chanced it for all the chocolate kisses in the world. For me, a self-affirmed chocaholic, that was saying something. In fact, the superstitious part of me—the part of me that had just spent the last eight months intimately associated with the darkness that had settled into the cracks and corners of my beloved hometown, and had only barely come out swinging—

  was a little worried that this new threat was an omen. A sign that things were not yet finished. I had been hoping that the trouble had left us in the way that it had come in: quietly and without fanfare. And maybe it had. Certainly nothing had happened since April, when Luc Metzger had met an untimely demise on a quiet county roadside with a Pennsylvania Dutch hex symbol to mark the spot forevermore. But to flaunt that hope in the face of reality? It was just not a good idea. Not a good idea at all.

  Chapter 2

  By the next morning, I had shaken off my fear-tinged mood of the night before. It was Sunday and I woke up early, no longer tense with worry but unable to sleep. I lay there in bed awhile longer, but even the air in my basement apartment was feeling clammy and close, so I thrust my feet out from under the damp sheet and rolled upright in the bed, wiggling my toes against the carpet as I contemplated the day stretching before me.

  What to do, what to do . . .

  Sundays in this small Hoosier town offered little in the way of entertainment for those poor slobs who woke up without significant others to occupy their time. Tom, I knew, would be putting in a twelve-hour shift today, so any kind of romantic fun was out of the question . . . and I most definitely would not allow my eye or thoughts to wander in other directions. Most especially not in the direction of a certain dark and dangerous hunk-o’-honey who seemed to be doing his level best to lead me down the garden path to temptation. Avoiding Marcus hadn’t been easy. As a key member of the N.I.G.H.T.S. and Liss’s partner in magick, he often appeared out of nowhere. I hated to admit it, but lately, just the sight of him set my pulse to racing. It scared me . . . especially since I had the distinct impression that the intrigue was mutual. Why? Gee, it might have been that kiss we’d shared, before either of us had known what hit us—and believe me, it had packed a wallop. And then there was the dancing around the Beltane fires, when I’d discovered the truth about the relationship between Marcus and Liss. As in, they weren’t an item. As in, that made my hands-off view of Marcus a moot point. Except for my relationship-or-not situation with Tom, my conscience, and those pesky little things called morals. file://C:Documents and SettingsLaura HowardMy DocumentsMy eBooksParanormal... 7/10/2009

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  Tricky, tricky.

  Heading into Enchantments might have been an option, except for the fact that it was Sunday, the store was closed, and I’d been devoting s
o much time to my duties there of late that Liss had pretty much ordered me to spend more time on myself.

  I thought for a moment about calling up Steff . . . except then I remembered that I had seen her boyfriend’s vintage Jag parked curbside when Tom dropped me off the night before, and I wasn’t about to be the person who pooped that party. Maybe later.

  My only other options were grocery shopping ( Wal-Mart on a weekend? Mass hysteria. Fun, fun . . . ), driving around aimlessly by myself ( yawn), or reading ( and I had just finished my latest library find and hadn’t yet found the time to seek out another). Which left me with either cleaning my apartment or visiting with my family.

  Guess which one I chose? I will admit I did check the Guide de TV for any reruns of Magnum P.I. before deciding, just in case, but even my beloved Thomas had abandoned me. I was on my own. One thing that families can always be counted on for is to fill up the unwanted nooks and crannies of any spare time that a girl might find on her hands . Idle hands are the Devil’s hands, my Grandma Cora used to say, and I still find those words echoing through my brain in just that way. My conscience, you know. It comes to me often using the not-so-dulcet tones of my late Grandma C, whispering to me from inside my head, chiding me to behave the way a good Catholic girl should. I don’t know why it has to be Grandma C—and I often wish it weren’t. There’s nothing like your grandmother inserting her judgments into a private moment to make you want to banish her from your thoughts forever. Why couldn’t the voice of my conscience be male and intriguing? You know, the Phantom to my Christine?