Witchy Dreams Read online

  “Don’t lie to me; I can see it written across your face.”

  “It’s dark; you can’t even see my face.”

  Landon reached down and helped me to my feet. I could put a little weight on my ankle, but I had a feeling I was going to be in a world of hurt tomorrow. Landon must have realized that, too.

  “Are you going to be able to drive home?”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said crossly.

  “Is there someone at home who can help you in the morning?” He asked the question innocently enough, but I noticed the slight edge to his voice when he uttered the words. He was hoping for a specific answer.

  “Yes, I live with someone.”

  “Your cousins,” Shane scoffed. “That’s not what he was asking, and you know it.”

  I ignored him.

  I saw Landon’s face fall slightly. He didn’t say anything, though. “Well, let me help you to your car anyway.”

  I wanted to tell him no, but I could feel my ankle starting to balloon. As it stood now, I was going to have to sit in the driveway at home and honk until Thistle and Clove came out to help me into the house. Thankfully, Twila was a master at making healing poultices, and I would probably actually be able to walk tomorrow (even if it was with a limp).

  It took Landon about ten minutes to maneuver me to my car. He opened the door and helped me slide in, but he didn’t shut the door even after he was sure I was settled inside comfortably.

  “Are you sure you’re going to be able to get home?”

  “I already told you. I’m fine.”

  “Are you sure the guy you live with will be able to help you?”

  I saw him grimace when he said the word guy and couldn’t help but smile to myself. “I don’t live with a guy,” I admitted. “I live with my cousins. It will be fine. They should be home by now.”

  “I’ll follow you to make sure you get there,” he said finally, although I did see him perk up when I admitted to living with my cousins.

  “I don’t need a babysitter,” I protested.

  “It will make me feel better,” he mock pleaded.

  “Fine,” I relented.

  I was surprised when he started moving away from me instead of toward the ditch. In other words, he was moving away from his motorcycle.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I parked my bike behind the maze,” he said. “It will just take a second for me to get it and then I’ll follow you home.”

  “I thought your motorcycle was in the ditch over there,” I faltered, pointing in the direction where I had found the motorcycle earlier.

  Landon’s eyes narrowed. “Why did you think that?”

  “That’s why I stopped,” I finally admitted. “I saw the bike in the ditch.”

  “Where?” Landon’s voice had taken on a hard edge.

  I made a move to get out of the car, but Landon stopped me. “Just point.”

  Landon jogged over to the area I had identified. I watched as he dropped to his knees and peered into the ditch, but I couldn’t see what he was looking at. After a few minutes, he jogged back over to me.

  “There’s nothing there,” he said. “It looks like something was there, the grass is flattened, but it’s not there anymore.”

  I bit my lower lip. “So someone else was here?”

  Landon nodded grimly. “And I have an idea who.”

  Neither one of us said it aloud, but we were both thinking the same thing – I could tell. Russ.

  Twenty

  There was good news and bad news the next morning. The good news was that I was right, the poultice I had put on my ankle the night before had done wonders. It was still a garish looking purple color – but I could put some weight on it. I would be limping for the next two days, but it was nowhere near as bad as it could have been.

  The bad news? I still had no idea who had committed these murders and I was now completely convinced that Landon’s friends – if not Landon himself – were tied up in something hinky. He had been out at the corn maze looking for something. I don’t know if he found it or not. Of course, he could have killed me. No one knew I was out there, after all. Still, he hadn’t even shown the slightest inclination that he was considering that.

  I stumbled out into the kitchen. Thistle looked up when she saw my very ungraceful entrance. “How are you feeling?”

  “Like I got caught in a corn maze when I shouldn’t have been there.”

  Thistle smirked. “I mean your ankle.”

  “Oh, it’s okay. It doesn’t feel great. It doesn’t feel like it’s going to fall off or anything either, though.”

  “Well that’s good,” Thistle said with fake enthusiasm. “It’s good to start out every day with something to be thankful for.”

  Smartass.

  I slid into one of the stools, being careful not to jostle my ankle against anything hard, and accepted the cup of coffee Thistle shoved toward me. It smelled like heaven in a cup – with cream.

  “So ….” Thistle started.

  “So what?”

  “You want to tell me who the guy on the motorcycle was last night?”

  “What guy?”

  “You know very well what guy. Long, black hair. Killer blue eyes. If I had to guess, a washboard stomach and some truly impressive shoulders are probably part of that package, too.”

  “He’s just a guy I know,” I averted my gaze from her, although I could feel the heat creeping up my neck.

  “Who are we talking about?” Clove was coming out of the bathroom and she looked interested in our conversation. “Mr. Hottie on the motorcycle last night? You said you weren’t going to ask her about him if I wasn’t here,” Clove said accusingly.

  “Well, you should have been faster. I couldn’t hold it in anymore.”

  “She’s been up for like two minutes,” Clove countered.

  “Well, you know I have zero impulse control. You should have planned accordingly.”

  Clove frowned. “You’re dead to me.”

  Well, it looked like we were both up to three deaths this month. I wondered who would get the tiebreaker.

  If I thought Thistle and Clove had forgotten what they were originally interested in – I was sadly mistaken.

  “So, who was he?” Clove asked. She was still shooting angry mental daggers in Thistle’s direction.

  “I told you, he’s a guy I met around town,” I said evasively.

  “Well, we have a store right on the main drag in town and we’ve never seen him,” Thistle argued. “Where did you meet him again?”

  “I met him at the corn maze the day we found Shane’s body,” I admitted.

  Thistle puzzled the answer over in her head for a few minutes. Then I saw a sudden flash of recognition register on her face. “He’s one of the people Chief Terry thinks is involved in the meth trade, isn’t he? He’s the guy Chief Terry warned you to stay away from?”

  Who told her that? Don’t freak out, I cautioned myself internally. If she smells blood in the water she’ll attack. She’s like Jaws that way. I mentally calmed myself and then shrugged calmly. “I have no idea what Chief Terry thinks of him.” I just know he hates him.

  “If Chief Terry thinks that you should stay away from him, maybe you should.” Clove bit her lower lip as she thought about it. “On the other hand, he’s really hot. Screw Chief Terry. There’s probably nothing wrong with him.”

  Sometimes I love the way Clove’s mind works.

  “At least have sex with him before you ask if he’s a drug dealer,” she added. “If you do it beforehand, that could make the sex really weird.”

  Sometimes Clove’s mind is a frightening place – like a house of mirrors at a carnival, or a bag full of really angry cats.

  “I don’t think he’s a drug dealer,” I said finally.

  “Why? Because he’s cute?” Thistle kept trying to catch Clove’s gaze so they could make up – but Clove was resisting the process. She didn’t even take the donut that Thistle kept t
rying to entice her with – and they were pumpkin donuts, Clove’s favorite.

  “No ….” I started. “There’s just something about him. If he was doing something illegal out there and he wanted to shut me up, he could have hurt me last night and no one would have known. Instead, he helped me.”

  “He didn’t know that for sure, though,” Clove reminded me. “For all he knew, someone else could have been with you.”

  “No, I don’t know. It’s just a feeling I have.”

  If anyone else would have made that statement, Thistle and Clove probably would have scoffed at them. The truth is, though, most of our ‘feelings’ were usually justified.

  “Then why do you think he was out there?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” I said. “He seemed genuinely surprised when I told him about seeing the other motorcycle.”

  “That could have been an act.” Thistle was still reluctant to the idea of Landon – even if he was hot.

  “It could have been,” I agreed. “It didn’t feel like an act, though.”

  “Most people are better liars than we are,” Clove reminded me.

  She had a point.

  Clove and Thistle offered to help me shower – but that was too weird for any of us to actually contemplate for more than a few seconds. I actually managed to get in and out on my own with very little difficulty.

  Instead of driving to the office, I rode with Clove and Thistle and they dropped me off at the front of The Whistler before heading over to Hypnotic. “We’ll bring you lunch and pick you up after work,” Thistle promised.

  I waved them both off. The last thing I needed was two more mother hens pecking at me. The four I already had were more than enough.

  When I made it to my office, I heard voices from the records room. Instead of sitting at my desk, I made my way toward the voices. I wasn’t surprised to see Edith. I wasn’t even surprised to see Sophie and Shane with her. I was surprised to see several files spread out on the countertop by the filing cabinets, though.

  “How … did you do this?” I looked at Edith incredulously.

  “Do what?”

  “Take out the files. You did do this, right?”

  “Yes. I remembered something and I couldn’t wait for you to come here and do it for me so I did it myself.”

  “You actually managed to move something ... something physically?” I was amazed.

  “You act like I cured cancer,” Edith said bitterly. “It’s not a big deal.”

  “You’ve never done it before.”

  “Of course I have,” she countered. “I change the channel on the television all the time.”

  I thought about this a second and then shook my head. “I don’t remember ever seeing you change the television channel.”

  “That’s because I always do it when you’re not looking,” Edith chided me.

  “Why would you do that?”

  Edith stopped flipping through the pages of the file she was looking at and fixed me with a cold stare. “Maybe I didn’t want you to know what I was watching. I am entitled to a little privacy.”

  “You weren’t watching porn or anything – we don’t have any pay channels here – so what was the big deal?”

  “She likes Nick at Nite,” Shane supplied.

  Nick at Nite? “You mean she likes reruns of old sitcoms?”

  “Basically.”

  Edith looked momentarily flummoxed. “They help me learn about all the things I’ve missed throughout the years,” she said finally.

  “It’s not a big deal. I like old sitcoms, too.”

  I couldn’t understand why she was so worked up.

  “She’s got a crush on the father on ‘Everybody Loves Raymond,’” Shane teased.

  “I do not. I think he’s just very charming.”

  “Frank?”

  “That’s his name, yes,” Edith said.

  “Isn’t he the gross one that walks around farting?”

  Edith changed the subject. “Anyway, I remembered something last night.”

  “What?”

  “About thirty years ago, there were a couple of similar murders,” Edith said triumphantly.

  The surprise must have blatantly registered across my face because Edith didn’t wait for me to respond before she plowed on.

  “I was obviously already a ghost by that point,” she explained. “No one could see me then, though, so I basically just sat around the office and listened to everyone. We had five workers at that point. One day I remember them talking about the body of a boy being found – and it was missing its heart.”

  “Was it in a corn maze?” I had trouble believing that I wouldn’t have heard about a brutal slaying like this. I had done research on the Internet, too, and hadn’t found anything about these other supposed murders.

  “That’s the thing. It wasn’t in a corn maze. And it technically wasn’t here either.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The body was found in a deserted barn,” Edith said. “And the barn was in Barker Creek.”

  “Barker Creek? That’s like forty miles away.”

  “Yeah. But it was big news at the time. That’s really not that far away when you think about it.”

  She was right. “A few days after the boy was found, a girl was found the same way. Her heart was missing and her body was abandoned in a barn. I think this one was in like Acme, but it was only a few miles away from the first body.”

  “Did they ever catch who did it?”

  “No,” Edith shook her head. “It was big news for a long time, but the police ran out of leads and eventually everyone forgot about it.”

  “I guess, since it didn’t happen right here in Hemlock Cove, that explains why I’ve never heard of it,” I said to myself.

  Edith nodded. I looked over her shoulder at the articles she was perusing. I asked if I could borrow them and then sat down heavily on the couch to read through them.

  I spent the next two hours wading through the extensive coverage. “It looks like they covered it really well,” I said when I was done.

  “I told you, it was the biggest thing to happen to this area in years,” Edith said.

  “They sound like similar cases,” I broke off, biting my lip.

  “What are you thinking?” Edith looked confused.

  “If it’s the same killer – or the same killers – then they would be kind of old right now,” I explained. “If you were that old, would you be confident enough to approach teenagers in a high-risk area? Would you be strong enough to carry their bodies?”

  Edith considered my question seriously. “Maybe it’s not the same killers. Maybe it’s someone who read about the previous killings and wanted to repeat it?”

  “Like a copycat?”

  Edith nodded.

  “Why do it now, though? Why not do it when people still remembered the old case? As far as I know, no one around here even talks about these cases.”

  “Maybe the killer is just crazy,” Edith clucked. “You can’t find reason in crazy.”

  “That’s a good point, too.”

  I gathered up all the articles and shoved them back into the envelope. “Are you done with them?” Edith looked at me quizzically.

  “No,” I said. “I have to focus on this week’s edition. I’m going to take this out to the inn later and see what my mom remembers.”

  “That’s probably a good idea,” Edith acknowledged. Then she brightened suddenly. “If I remember right, your Aunt Tillie was called in as a psychic in that first case.”

  Well, this was definitely the first time I heard of anything like that. As far as I knew, Aunt Tillie had a general disdain of law enforcement. “Who called her in?”

  “I can’t remember exactly,” Edith said. “One of the families hired a private investigator and they came out to talk with Tillie and to see if she could talk to the dead or something, if I remember right. Which I guess she can actually do, so I probably should stop making fun of her for that.
”

  “I don’t understand why I’ve never heard about any of this?”

  Edith seemed nonplussed. “I would wager there are a lot of things you don’t know about your family.”

  I’d give even odds that she was right.

  Twenty-One

  After my discussion with Edith, I couldn’t really focus on work. Instead, I did something I rarely do – I delegated. I called the paginator Lynn in early and told her I’d be willing to pay her overtime if she could handle a few of my duties. I explained that I was working on a banner story on the murders that would take up most of the edition – and that was essentially true.

  Despite the fact that my ankle was still tender, I managed to hobble downtown to Hypnotic. I had brought the files Edith had unearthed with me.

  “What are you doing? You’re not supposed to be walking!” Clove chided me when she saw me stumble inside the store.

  “It’s fine,” I waved her off. “Trust me. It could be a lot worse.”

  “What are you doing here? We were going to bring you lunch.”

  “I’ll just eat here with you guys.”

  “What about Friday’s paper?” Clove was like another mother sometimes, I swear.

  “I called Lynn in early.”

  Thistle and Clove exchanged wary glances.

  “What?” I asked in irritation.

  “You just seem a little obsessed,” Clove said gently.

  “Really? I seem obsessed? Why? Because we have ghosts living with us? Because we have murderers dropping bodies in cornfields? Because Aunt Tillie is still figuring out exactly how she’s going to get back at me for the Edith situation?” My voiced had taken on a decidedly shrill tone.

  Thistle took an involuntary step back. “Fine, you’re not obsessed. You’re acting totally normal.”

  I blew out a random sigh as I regarded them. “I know I’m a little …”

  “Nuts?”

  “Scary?”

  “I was going to say intense,” I corrected the two of them. “I just can’t help it.”

  “We know,” Thistle said. “You’re going to get hurt if you don’t watch it, though, and that’s what we don’t want to see. So, just chill.”

  I flopped onto the couch and watched them both as they continued to pretend they were actually doing work behind the counter. I knew better.