Any Witch Way You Can (9 page)

Shane nodded sympathetically. “I guess not. They’d probably lock you up in a mental house or something.”

“Probably.”

“I’ll find out what else they know on the case, too. If he knows anything new, I’ll call Thistle. Since you’ll be at the shop with her all day, she’ll be able to tell you what I find out.”

“Thanks,” Shane said sincerely. “You’ve all been really nice to me.”

After Clove showered, I left Thistle and Shane so I could be the next one in the bathroom. Despite her grumpy attitude, Thistle was listening to whatever Shane told her with legitimate interest.

“You can’t haunt the popular girl at school,” she admonished him after a few minutes. “No matter how much of a crush you have on her.”

“Why not?”

“She probably won’t be able to see you – or hear you for that matter – so it would be a waste of time.”

“You can hear me . . . and Bay can see me.”

“We’re . . . different.”

“Different how?”

Thistle avoided the question. “Plus, haunting a girl just because she didn’t notice you when you were alive is petty and mean.”

“She wasn’t that nice,” Shane offered. “She used to make fun of everyone that wasn’t popular.”

“Well, in that case, haunt the shit out of her.”

I snickered to myself as I closed the bathroom door behind me.

Thistle was still in the bathroom getting ready when I left for work. Clove had taken advantage of Shane’s fascination with our cousin to get dressed and was now waiting impatiently in the living room.

“We need another bathroom,” she complained.

We did. “Tell the aunts.”

“They’ll turn it into a big thing,” she argued.

“Well, we can’t magically make one appear – no matter what the townspeople think.”

Clove rolled her eyes dramatically. “Why do you care what the townspeople think?”

“I don’t,” I shot back quickly.

“You’re such a liar. You’ve always been so worried about what they think. It doesn’t matter. They’re going to think what they want to think. Stop being so insecure.”

I left the house without answering Clove. She had a point – but I didn’t want to acknowledge that. I hate it when she or Thistle is right and I’m wrong. That doesn’t happen very often, mind you. When it does, though, it tilts my whole world sideways.

When I made it downtown, I stopped at the police station before I made my way to the newspaper offices for the day. I went in through the backdoor, like I usually did, and paused in the municipal parking lot when I saw an expensive motorcycle parked at the back door.

“I wonder who that belongs to?”

I shook my head and pulled away from the bike, entering the building. It still wasn’t 9 a.m. yet, so I knew the office wasn’t open for regular business. I was surprised when I saw Landon exit Chief Terry’s office. I couldn’t hear what his parting words to the chief had been, but when he saw me he looked surprised.

“Someone is up early,” he said with a warm smile. I noticed he was wearing the exact same outfit he’d been clad in the day before.

“What are you doing here?” And why hadn’t he gone home to change his clothes?

Landon didn’t miss a beat. “The chief had a few questions for me.”

I looked down at my watch for a second and then met his eyes again. “At 8:30 a.m.?”

“That’s when I was free, so we made a special appointment,” Landon said.

He was lying. I could tell. I just couldn’t figure out why he was lying – or about what.

“That makes perfect sense,” I told him sarcastically.

“You still don’t trust me?”

“Nope.”

I moved away from him. I was eager to put as much distance between him and the feelings he was roiling up inside of me as possible. I could not have a crush on the new town thug. My mother would have an absolute fit.

Landon watched me as I angled past him and towards the chief’s office door. “You’ll grow to appreciate me,” he said.

I turned to him and saw the knowing look on his face. I found it infuriating, not cute. Okay, maybe it was both. “You have a pretty high opinion of yourself.”

“You will, too. I promise.”

With those words, Landon turned and left the building. I watched him leave. A few seconds after the door closed, I heard the motorcycle outside fire up and take off out of the parking lot. The bike clearly belonged to him.

Great. Hot man. Hot ride. This wasn’t going to end well. I could just feel it.

I sighed as I pushed into Chief Terry’s office and tried to force thoughts of Landon and his ridiculously shiny motorcycle out of my head. He didn’t seem surprised to see me.

“I figured you would stop here on your way to work,” he said.

“I ran into Landon in the hallway.”

Chief Terry dismissed the statement with a wave of his hand. “I just needed him to clarify something from yesterday.”

Under normal circumstances, I would never suspect Chief Terry of lying. The fact that he averted his gaze from mine, though, made me suspicious.

“What did you need him to clarify?”

“Nothing important.”

“Why are you being evasive?”

“Why are you butting your nose into things that don’t involve you?”

We were in a stand-off. I decided to move on from the Landon debate and broach the Shane subject.

“Have you identified the boy in the field?”

“Yeah. His name is Shane Haskell. He’s from Beula.”

Good. I wouldn’t have to try and lead Chief Terry to the truth. “How did you find out?”

“Dental records.”

“How did he get here? Beula is like an hour away.”

“We don’t know. The state police are interviewing his mom right now.”

I paused, unsure how to ask the next question. “How did she take the news?”

If Chief Terry was suspicious of my motivations for asking the question, he didn’t acknowledge it. “Not well. The boy was her only child. Her husband died a few years ago. She’s devastated.”

“Did you tell her how he died?”

“We had to.”

Well, that had to be ten kinds of awful. “Do you have any other leads?”

“Not yet. The crime lab is still testing results. The problem we have is that fifty people were probably legitimately in that area of the corn maze – and we have no idea what is evidence and what is accidental.”

“So, what’s the next step?”

“The state boys have practically taken over the investigation,” Chief Terry said bitterly. “They’re not letting me do much. They’re keeping me in the loop as much as they can, I think, but I don’t think they’re telling me everything.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I don’t know, just a gut feeling.”

My mind flashed to Landon for a second, but I quickly returned to the conversation at hand. “Do you think it’s someone from the town?”

“God, I hope not,” Chief Terry replied truthfully. “The problem is, how would a tourist know the area well enough to do what he did?”

That was a good point.

“Maybe they scouted the area beforehand?”

“Maybe. That still doesn’t explain why they picked this kid – and why he went missing from Traverse City two days ago and was taken over here to dump the body yesterday. We have more questions than answers.”

I sat quietly for a few moments, unsure of what to say next. Finally, I got to my feet and moved to leave the office.

“Keep me informed with anything you find out.”

“I’m not exactly at the center of the investigation,” Chief Terry said. “But I’ll do what I can. I always do.”

I thanked Chief Terry and exited his office. My thoughts were decidedly dark as I made my way outside. So Shane had been in Traverse City when he’d gone missing. Somehow, he ended up forty-five minutes away, and dumped in a corn maze. That didn’t make any sense. Of course, he was also missing his heart when he was dumped. Maybe finding rational answers in an irrational crime was something that simply wasn’t possible. Maybe I would drive myself crazy before all of this was said and done.

I called Thistle quickly on my cell phone and told her what I’d found out. I could hear her relaying the story to Shane, who seemed relieved that his mother had been notified of his death.

“At least she’s not worried about me being late coming home now,” I heard him say sadly. “She knows now that I’m never coming home. Never. That’s got to be better than worrying, right?”

“Right,” I heard Thistle respond to him. There wasn’t much conviction in her voice, though. I figured she was thinking the exact same thing as I was. At least when he was missing there was still hope. What hope did this woman have now? And where was Shane’s heart?

Nine

After I left the chief’s office, I headed to the newspaper. I knew I would have to write something up on Shane’s death, but since the deadline for the next edition was still five days away I figured I had time before I had to file a story.

Instead, I logged my computer on, and sat down at my desk. I pulled up my Internet browser and Googled Shane’s name.

I was surprised to find that the first link that came up was an online memorial for him on Facebook. I clicked on the link and entered the site. I was stunned to see there were already fifty memorial messages. That was quick.

I scanned the messages with vague interest. Somehow I doubted that whoever had killed Shane was now posting on Facebook about it. It never hurt to look, though.

Most of the messages were the generic ruminations of empty-headed teenagers.

“I didn’t know Shane that well, but he’ll be really missed at school.”

“I wish I’d gotten to know him better.”

“He was a really sweet guy.”

“He was a really smart guy.”

“He was a really funny guy.”

After sifting through all of the messages, I realized that not one person that actually knew Shane really well had posted. That actually didn’t surprise me. In the dramatic world of teenagers, they often create high profile ways to make themselves feel more important when tragedy strikes those amongst them. Teenagers are an example of narcissism at its finest.

Edith had wandered into the office and was now looking over my shoulder as I read.

“Doesn’t seem very genuine, does it?” I looked to her expectantly.

She was enthralled by the page, though. “That’s really wonderful that all these people are mourning that poor boy.”

I guess she didn’t see what I saw. “You don’t think it seems a little fake? None of these people actually seem to know Shane.”

“I think that maybe you’re a little too cynical,” she pointed out.

She had a point. I reread some of the messages. No. I was right, after all. “Not one of these messages actually conveys a genuine feeling for the person Shane was – or the mother he left behind.”

“These people have the right to grieve, too,” Edith said. “They’re teenagers. When something like this happens it makes them question their own mortality. This is how they do it.”

“I think they’re just looking for attention.”

“That’s your cynicism again.”

After leaving the Facebook page again, I checked out a few other links that had come up when I’d typed in Shane’s name. None of them were of interest, though. One was from a small paper in Beula that had a picture of Shane from a robotics tournament. The other had nothing to do with Shane at all. When I was done, I closed out of the Internet browser and ran the case through my head.

We knew that Shane went missing from Traverse City two days ago. We knew that he had been found in Hemlock Cove yesterday. Even though we didn’t have an exact time of death yet, he probably hadn’t been in the field all that long. That meant that whoever had killed Shane had kept him alive – for at least several hours. What had they done to him during that time? Why had they cut out his heart? And where was his heart?

I was jarred from my thoughts when my cellphone rang. I dug it out of my purse and grimaced when I recognized the number from The Overlook on the screen. Great. I knew better than not answering it, though. My mom would take that as a personal affront and either start calling me non-stop or actually show up at the office. Neither of those alternatives was acceptable to me, so I braced myself and answered the phone.

“You have to come over here right now!” It was my mom – and she sounded excitable.

“Why? What’s going on?” I was naturally suspicious. What my mom considered an emergency was often just an inconvenience in my world.

“There’s about to be a catastrophe here.” I couldn’t quite make out the ruckus in the background, but I could hear my Marnie yelling at someone.

“What’s the catastrophe?”

“Just get over here, young lady,” my mother snapped.

“I’m a little busy right now. Maybe . . . “ The phone had went dead. She’d hung up on me. “I hate it when she does that.”

I’d walked to work again, so it took me almost a half an hour to get back out to the inn. When I entered through the back door, I found the living quarters empty. It also didn’t look as if anything was on fire and there wasn’t a police presence – so it couldn’t be a real catastrophe, at least not where my family was concerned.

I heard raised voices in the dining room and followed them to see what was going on.

Twila and mom were standing defiantly in front of Aunt Tillie – who was making little jumping movements in the direction of Emily, the girl who had discovered Shane’s body with me. She looked like a hacked off – and deranged – rabbit. She was the
Monty Python
rabbit, I thought to myself. The thought made me smile.

I noticed that Marnie was trying to grab Aunt Tillie from behind, but Aunt Tillie kept slipping away from her.

“Grab a hold of her,” my mom ordered.

“She’s slippery,” Marnie shot back.

“She’s eighty-five years old. How slippery can she be?”

I noticed that my mom and Marnie were doing all the work. Twila was merely feigning interest in the situation.

“What’s going on?” I stepped into the room and regarded the four of them suspiciously. Emily, who kept moving around the dining room table and pulling chairs out to put between her and Aunt Tillie, looked relieved to see me.

“Your Aunt Tillie is a little . . . disgruntled,” my mom finally said.