Pieces of Ivy (8 page)

Hank’s cool was melting fast. As a woman, Vicki’s dwindling restraint was herculean in Hank’s opinion.

The priest’s pious calm was the most unnerving. “Transgressions against God come full circle, my child—whether we like them or not. I’m not here to judge how, or through whom, He administers His punishments.”

“This wasn’t punishment,” she insisted. “It was murder—violent and ugly. No one deserves a fate like that—no one. You should be doing everything in your power to help us find her killer.”

His smirk feigned remorse. “Hardly
my
mission, Agent Starr. I’m a preacher—a teacher for the Lord.”

She leaped to her feet but Dashel grabbed her, requiring more strength than Hank had anticipated to hold her as he coaxed her toward the door.

Father Reilly remained seated in his position of power, never flinching. His face stretched with a sanctimonious smile. “Give my regards to your mother,
Agent Dashel
.”

“Fuck you.” Hank slammed the door behind them.

“Motherfucker,” Vicki growled back at Father Reilly’s church as his words churned through her marrow, and her professional restraint let go. Her knuckles began bleeding away the small chips of skin, bark and sap from the fat oak she had just punched.

Hank smiled. “I have to admit, I’m impressed.”

She cursed under her breath as she waved her throbbing hand through the air. “What?”

“Not your most professional display but I half expected you to pull your gun.”

“He would’ve deserved it.” She sucked a biting splinter from her bloody knuckle.

“You’d get no argument from me.” He handed her a wet wipe.

She opened her car door but then stood for a long moment staring at the church with
that man
inside. Her guts churned like the stirring of hot coals, and her throat burned to scream.

Hank waited patiently in the passenger seat. He allowed her a few quiet moments while she squeezed the life out of her steering wheel and her eyes burned holes through the windshield.

“Is he still on the list?” he asked.

“He’s so on the fucking list.” She turned the key and narrowly missed a passing car as she whipped back out of the driveway, leaving an angry patch of black rubber in front of the man’s blessed church.

† †
†

Cole backed into the bushes as she peeled away. Though he had seen tempers like hers before, he winced when she had punched bark off that tree.

Obviously the church meeting had upset her. Calling a priest a
motherfucker
had gained her points in his book, which might have mattered had they been friends.

He quietly watched the final wisps of blue tire smoke thin to nothing. An elderly couple was taking a painfully long time to round the far corner. The moment they disappeared, he stepped from the shadow and climbed into his car to follow her.

† †
†

They drove for a full minute before Vicki broke the silence. “I can’t believe that just happened. I mean he’s a Catholic priest—aren’t Catholics supposed to be kind, loving and understanding?”

“Believe me, I know a lot of Catholics. Don’t let the collar fool you—he’s not one of them.”

“No shit.” She signaled left as she scanned the street signs. “It scares me to think people listen to that man.”

“Rabid imams aren’t limited to Muslims—we have a few of our own special blend.”

“They’re all cut from the same insane cloth—each hiding behind their own religious front.”

“Amen, sister.”

She snickered, whipping out the piece of paper harder than she intended. “The next name is a doctor. That should provide some reprieve.”

She hammered her Vette into second then threw it into third as Hank snatched the list from the dash. He found the doctor’s name and shook his head in disbelief.

“I wouldn’t count on it,” he mumbled to himself.

† †
†

“We’re here to see Dr. Collins.”

The industrial-style office smothered them with the incompatible smells of dust and bleach. A limp fern on the long gray counter hung in desperate need of medical intervention. Too many florescent bulbs hummed like bees in angry plastic hives above their heads, ridding the entire space of contrasting shadow or curving contour.

“He’s in with a patient, has one more waiting, and then he’s off for lunch—you can speak to him then.” The hoary woman continued to squint at their outstretched badges as if her solemn duty was to weed out fake cops.

They took the two open seats in the waiting room next to a woman and her young son.

“How old is he?” Vicki asked.

“Four.”

“He’s so cute.”

“Thanks. He is—when he’s not stirring up trouble.”

Vicki laughed, pretending to know all about it. She didn’t. Kids were fun to watch, not to have. Her own upbringing had seen to that.

“Everything okay?” Vicki asked, nodding to the squat little boy incessantly smashing two Hot Wheels together in a game that she could never comprehend.

“He’s got a rash on his back. Thought I’d have Doc Collins take a look.”

“He’s a good doctor?”

“The best. I’ve seen him my whole life—my family too.” She looked at them both, shying away from a glance at Vicki’s fitted attire. “Are you the agents Sheriff Roscoe introduced last night?”

Vicki nodded. “Were you there?”

“Of course.” Her gaze sunk. “That poor woman. Miss Turner was a wonderful teacher. My niece had her last year—raved about her. I wanted to know as much as I could. My husband said it wasn’t our business—going—but I’m glad I did. Thankfully I had to take Tommy home before that wretched woman showed up. He had an accident, and I didn’t bring a spare pair of pants.”

“You mean the woman who was shot at?”

“I mean,
the witch
.”

Vicki feigned ignorance. “
Witch
?”

“That’s right. You probably don’t believe it, but it’s true. She's a witch—and a blight on this community.”

Blight?
Vicki decided to ignore it. This woman had obviously formed her own opinion.

A spent voice cracked across the room. “Lisa, the doctor will see you now.”

“Come, Tommy—up.” She stood, holding her hands out to her son who leaped into her arms with remarkable dexterity. She turned to Vicki and Hank. “Hope you find who did this soon.”

They both nodded, and she stepped around the corner with her son.

“I should probably give you the heads-up,” Hank said. “Doc Collins isn’t the prize she made him out to be.”

Vicki waited.

“Stereotype a crotchety old Brit and then add sixty pounds. He knows a lot, but it’s dated—and not nearly half of what he thinks he knows.”

Her mind was elsewhere. “There sure is a lot of resentment toward this … witch.”

He shrugged. “People hate what they fear and fear what they don’t understand. She’s probably just some cantankerous old crone who’s a little nuttier than a Reese’s, that’s all.”

“
Cantankerous
? Mighty big word, Mr. Dashel.”

“I read.”

“I’ll bet.” She was smirking. “I hear the articles between pictorials are quite thought provoking.”

Affronted, he asked, “Where did that—” but he was cut off.

The old woman stood at her desk. “He’s ready for you now. The office is to the right.”

Dr. Collins’s office was on the far side of the examination room. Vicki caught a glint in her eye that instantly immobilized her—the scalpel on the table. Her body shuddered as she thought of the long cuts carved deep into Ivy’s breasts.

Hank touched her hand, and she jumped. His voice was low and sincere. “You okay?”

She shook her sight away from the tool tray and took a breath. “Yeah.”

Stepping into the doctor’s office, they were greeted with a sour vinegar smell. The older man, pushing seventy, motioned to the chairs across his desk. “Have a seat,” he grumbled, setting a semitranslucent Tupperware container on top of his splayed mess of important papers. He peeled back the lid and pulled out a mayonnaise-soaked egg mess spilling from between two slices of sterling-white Wonder Bread, sans the crust.

Definitely a poster-child for healthy eating,
she thought as she held back the growing gag in her throat. With his failed attempt at greasing back his stringy gray hair, he looked more like a wheezing, obese mad scientist than a medical physician.

Fallen globs of the sour egg-pudding smeared across the medical files as he swept the spillage off his desk and onto the floor. He mumbled with a heavy British accent, “This is about that Turner business, I’d imagine.” His hands quivered as he pushed a corner of the sandwich to his mouth, taking a too-large bite.

Vicki was revolted by the remnants of sticky white that thinned in the crooked corners of his smacking mouth. “Yes, Dr. Collins, it is.”

“Well, you’re wasting your time here.” His tone would have been as pompous without the accent. “She didn’t come to see me—not at all. She saw that ridiculous Voxel woman.” The annoyance was plain.

“The witch?”

“No, not that blasted witch! Voxel claims to be a doctor, but she’s nothing more than some bloody voodoo practitioner—” He cleared a wad of phlegm with a cough. “Damned irregular.” He pulled a hurried guzzle, backwashing white bits of egg and trailing strings of mayo into his bottle of Diet Coke.

† †
†

Hank turned away, nauseated by the thicket of steel-gray hairs blossoming atop this man’s nose rather than sprouting from his nostrils—not that there was a vacancy up the packed openings. Like weeds, they found another way. The thick silver bushes packed in his waxy ears matched the heavy, overgrown thatch up his nose, whose bulbous end divulged his penchant for drink.

Hank wondered if there was a little extra something in the man’s Diet Coke. He decided no. He would have smelled it a mile away. His own cravings crawled beneath his flesh at the thought of downing a burning swallow.

“Actually Voxel’s just as bad as that bleedin’ witch, I say.” He scanned them both, leaning his belly against his desk, spreading more egg-surprise on the delicate files. “I warrant the two of ’em are in league somehow. I’d be after the both of them if you had any brains between you.”

Vicki shot an incredulous scowl. “For an attack against a woman?”

“No telling what a witch might do—either one of ’em.”

He obviously had no notion of how sexually brutal the attack was or he wouldn’t be so quick to judge. More shocking was how an educated man—a doctor, a man of science—could put stock into stories of witchcraft.

Vicki recalled the lethal response to the other woman’s assembly entrance and wanted to know why. “So what are your concerns about this
witch
then?”

“The witch?” Though jarred by the shift away from Voxel, he was all too happy to oblige. “Well, her presence is inflicting obvious harm on the young people of this town. They are intrigued with her—and her dark craft—though most are intelligent enough to fear her to the extent that she is avoided. But that doesn’t put a stopper in their curiosity. God forbid they come across her demonic rituals in the forest. I shudder to imagine the damage such a witness would bring upon a child or this town.”

“Rituals? What kind of rituals?”

“The worst kind,” he insisted. He retreated a little when he saw they expected more. “Well, I guess I can’t say for certain, exactly, what they are. But I can assure you, it is of the most corrupt nature imaginable. She is, after all,
a witch
.” While his tenor lessened, his adamant objection to the woman and her craft remained stalwart.

Vicki scanned the man’s cluttered desk, catching sight of a hand-drawn sketch on his notepad. Even upside down, the mythical creature was recognizable. Surprising, because most grown men didn’t draw these—only his representation had a strange deformity. Before she could distinguish the abnormality, the doctor’s sticky hand slapped down on the paper, crushing it into a ball. He stared at her with revulsion.

Vicki responded to his contempt. “So you believe this woman everyone talks about is an actual witch.”

“Don’t you dare take me for a fool,” he said. “If you’re asking if I subscribe to the stories of magic, I don’t. But that doesn’t stop wrong-minded people from trying to pretend to practice their dark arts, now does it? It’s no different than that Voxel woman and her arcane practices—I’m sure she helps the witch. I know it in my bones.” He scoffed. “Giving her those herbs and such—absolutely ludicrous and illegitimate if you ask me.”

Hank grinned. “Hasn’t New Brighton already met its one-witch quota?”

“Yes.” He huffed. “But this one’s licensed by our ridiculous government … sanctioned witchcraft—intolerable!”

Licensed?
Vicki surveyed the petulant man more closely. “What kind of
voodoo
does Ms. Voxel practice?”

He scowled with extreme condescension. “She calls herself a
naturopathic
doctor.”

Vicki fell back into her chair, her eyebrows raised. “She’s a naturopath? That’s not voodoo, Doctor—I see one all the time.”

His astonishment burst to offense. “Well, you’re as daft as she is then! You’re wrong, dead wrong, to follow the advice of any woman like that. She’s no doctor, I can assure you. She’s as nutty as those bone-crackers.”

Vicki looked at Hank, who tilted his head, in an I-told-you-so pose. “You mean chiropractors?”

He threw up his arms in frustration. “I suppose you see them too.” He looked at them both as if praying for an amendment—none came. “Ugh! And they give you badges and guns? This civilization is going straight to Hell!”

“Do you know anything about this witch that
doesn’t
have to do with witchcraft?”

“She lives alone in Cherrybrook Forest.”

“
Cherrybrook
.” Vicki let the name soften off her tongue. “I like that.”