A Witch's Tale (22 page)

“Thank you for your advice, Sheriff Whitaker, but I’ll not be hiding out.
I’ll be spending the rest of this night on my knees before t
he
blessed sacrament
on the alta
r of my church, praying for Myra Adams
’
eternal soul.
I’ll be mentioning you in my prayers too, Sheriff Whitaker.
I’m thinking you’ll
be needing
all the help you can get.”

The sheriff’s face turned such a deep shade of red Cassie feared he might explode right there in front of them.

“Keep your prayers to yourself, Padre.
I want no part of them.”

Something about Mac suddenly caught Cassie’s attention.
Positioned next to the priest, he faced Cassie, looking down the hall in the direction of the room Myra had so recently occupied.
Though he stood in a nonchalant pose, there was
something in his stance that alerted Cassie’s senses.
Reaching out to him with her mind, she felt a quickening of excitement race through him.
There was but a slight communicating flicker in his eyes, but she was certain she had seen it.

“Sir, don’t you think we should set up a watch on the church tonight?
After all, the Father here and Reverend Hicks are the only two clergymen in town still alive.
Don’t you figure Mrs. Adams might go after one of them now that she’s on the loose?” one of the plainclothes officers suggested.

The Sheriff turned angry eyes on the young officer.
“Why don’t you set that up, Officer Gordon?
That is, if the good Father
is afraid his faith isn’t strong enough to protect him from Myra Adams
’
tender mercies.”

For one split second Mac was in danger of giving it all away.
Thankfully everyone’s attention was riveted on the quarreling priest and sheriff and not on him, or they would surely have turned to see what it was that had caught his attention.
Thank God, he had caught himself in time and managed to slip back into his casual pose before anyone had noticed his response to the cleaning woman who had just exited the room next to Myra’s.
He breathed a sigh of relief as he saw that only Cassie had noticed his brief lapse.

He returned his full attention to Father Mike, dragging his eyes away from the woman as she opened the door to the storage room and entered it, closing the door behind her.
The last thing he noted before bringing his gaze back to the priest was the key that stayed poised in the lock.

“I’d rather take my chances with Myra than with one of your men,” the priest stated angrily.
“Who’s to say the guard would be safer than the witch?”

“You go too far, old man,” the S
heriff replied in a low, barely-
controlled voice.
“If you want to take y
our chances on your own,
so be it.
I wash my hands of you.
I only hope that
Samuel
Hicks has better sense than you.
Now, get the heck out of here.
My men have too much to do to stand around talking to you.”

With that, the Sheriff turned on his heel and strode purposefully down the hall,
entering
the room that had recently been occupied by Myra Adams.
One by one the officers who had been questioning the priest turned to follow their leader, a couple of them sending reluctant glances in the priest’s direction.
Clearly they were not
happy with the Sheriff’s orders
but none of them were in a position to disobey.

“They can search the room ‘till they’re blue in the face, but they’ll not be finding your mother,” Father Mike spoke softly to Cassie as soon as the officers were out of earshot.
 

“Not now, Father Mike.
Can you meet us at Cassie’s later?”

“Be there in one hour,” was the priest’s cryptic reply.

For a moment Mac’s confidence in the priest’s ability to maintain the secrecy that was so urgent to the success of their plan was shaken, but he was quickly reassured as he noted how easily the old man managed to turn the key to the closet door that Myra had just entered, slip it out of the lock and drop it in the pocket of his jacket.
The sly old fox managed the maneuver so smoothly no one but Mac even noticed that he had paused at the door as the three of them walked down the hall toward the hospital’s exit.

“Okay, what have you done with my mother?” Cassie asked before Father Sullivan had had a chance to take two steps through the door.

“Not to worry, not to worry.
There’s not a safer place on earth than where she is this very minute.”

“Safe?
What do you mean safe?
Safe from discovery o
r safe from being able to do any harm to others?
You know how the people in this town are about her.
If she’s not in a place where she’s securely locked up they might try to hang us all before this is over.”

“Well,
” Mac turned to the priest, a slightly
crooked smile touching his lips,
“how safe is that closet
anyway?”

“
You saw?”

Mac silently nodded his response.

The priest reached into his p
ocket and extracted a large old-
fashioned key.
Bouncing it confidently in the palm of his hand, he answered, “There’s no way she can get out of that closet and
,
without this key,
no
one can get in.”

“What are you two talking about?
What closet?”

“Your mother, Cassie
m’dear
, is safely locked away in a linen closet directly across
the hall from her hospital room,
a
nd that’s where she’ll be staying until after all this mess is taken care of.
I can assure you of that because I happen to know for a fact that this is the only key to that door.”
He dangled the key directly in front of Cassie’s face, obviously extremely proud of his treasure.

“But how
...?”

“How did she get there o
r how do I happen to know so much about the hospital’s keys?”
The old man’s eyes twinkled with amusement.
No one loved being the center of attention more than he.
“Actually, the answer to
the
one question is much the same as the answer to the other.
You see, I probably know more about that old hospital than anyone else in Port
Bellmont
.
I was very much involved in the reconstruction of the old building when the diocese bought it some forty years ago.
At that time it was to be run by the good Sisters of Mercy and I was to be the hospital’s chaplain.
I was a young man then, with probably way too much energy, so I made it my business to know every square inch of the place.
And one of the things I learned was that the old building had consisted mostly of long w
ards which were
no longer popular with
either the
patients or their doctors.
So, as a way of remedying that situation, each ward was cut up into two or three separate rooms.
Money was tight, naturally, so the contractor cut corners wherever he could.
One of the ways he did it was to make one closet between two rooms, putting in a thin partition to separate them.
One day I was puttering around, checking up on the progress of the reconstruction, and found that a slim person could slip
behind the partitions and come out in the room on the other side of the closet.
So, you see, all I had to do was to sneak a wig and a maid’s uniform into Myra, wait a couple of minutes while she slipped into the closet in the room next to hers, then go set off the alarm that she was not in her room.
Which, as I might add, was the God’s own truth.
She wasn’
t there at all, don’t you know.”

“
I thought I’d choke when I saw her come out of that room and walk, bold as brass, across the hallway and into that closet,” Mac added, breaking into laughter.

“I’ll be telling you, I was that happy to have the good Sheriff bawling me out at that very minute.
With him ranting and raving as he was, no one was of a mind to pay a bit of
attention to a little old gray-
haired maid going about her business.”
Father Sullivan joined Mac in good natured laughter.

“Not that I want to spoil all the fun you two seem to be having, but may I remind you that we still have a long way to go to prove mother’s innocence?
Somewhere out there is a monster and he’s more than likely planning his next murder at this very minute.
Now, unless you don’t mind being his
next victim, Father Mike, I suggest we get back to the business at hand.”

“Right you are, Cassie girl, right you are.
It’s time to get our heads together and figure out how we’re going to let our murderer make me his next victim, without me truly being the victim, right?”

“Right,” Mac replied, his expression completely devoid of humor. “Let’s see if we can’t make him the victim for a change, shall we?”

Chapter 12

“He’s in,” Mac said
as he replaced the phone on it
s cradle.
“Alan said he’d meet us here in half an hour so we can fill him in on our plan for tonight.”

Though the kitchen where they stood was not large, Cassie suddenly felt the need to be closer to Mac, to feel his arms surround her.
She couldn’t remember when she’d felt the need for his warmth, his protection, more than at this moment.
As she approached him, his arms encircled her, pulling him close to his chest.

“Sometimes I feel
as if this is all a crazy dream, t
hat any moment I’ll wake up and everything will be the way it was before.
Why can’t I just be dreaming, Mac?” her voice pleaded.

His arms tightened around her, giving her comfort in the only way he could.
Words of reassurance sprang to his mind, yet he remained silent.
He cared too deeply for her to offer her false hope.

Father Sullivan’s plan was a
long shot, and they all knew it - a
desperate, possibly impossible, scheme.
And yet it was all they had.
That and the love they shared for each other.

“At least one beautiful thing has come out of all this ugliness,” Cassie whispered, apparently reading his thoughts once again.
“If none of this had happened
,
I would never have met you.”

“I can’t think of anything sadder than the thought of us never meeting,” Mac’s voice cracked with emotion.
His arms tightened around her even more as he allowed himself to consider for a moment just how very much the young witch had come to mean to him.

And with that realization
came
an almost
paralyzing fear of losing her.
What had he been thinking of,
his agonized brain taunted him.
How could he even consider allowing her to get involved in Father Mike’s crazy scheme?
He must have been insane.

“Don’t even think it.”
Cassie’s voice, low yet firm, broke into his thoughts.

“Don’t even think what?”
But without asking
,
Mac knew what she would say.

“Don’t even think of trying to get me to sta
y home tonight while you three men
are out there
saving my mother and the world.
”

“Were you doing your mind reading thing again?
No, don’t tell me
, I should be used to it by now.” H
e smiled down into her eyes.
“But like it or not, it would make me feel a whole lot better if I knew you were safely tucked away here.”

“And what makes you think I’d be safe here?
If our murderer changed his habit of killing preachers and decided to turn to me instead, wouldn’t it be better if I were near you?”

She was right and he knew it.
No, what he really knew
was that no matter where she was tonigh
t, she would still be in danger a
nd there was absolutely no way he could prevent it.
Damn!
He’d be
crazy before this was finished.

“Don’t worry, my darling,” she whispered as she stretched up on her tiptoes to reach for a kiss.
“The Goddess hasn’t given us to e
ach other just to tear us apart, a
t least not so soon.
She’s a good and loving Goddess and I trust her to see us through this.”