Grave Echoes: A Kate Waters Mystery (23 page)

“As you can see, this area suffered much more intense heat,” he explained. Ash streaked down his neck.

“Is that where the fire started?” Wells asked.

“Looks like it.” He pointed to black shards of glass on the floor. “Oil candle…God knows why the hell they still sell those things.”

“So, the oil candle knocked over and then caught the curtain on fire.”

Jerry pointed at the ceiling. “You can see the scorch marks there, and then the flames burst up, creating the classic starburst pattern.”

“Are you certain the fire started in this room?” Wells needed confirmation.

“I’m sure of it,” Jerry said. “None of the other units have damage to this extent.” He stood with effort, pushing himself up off his knee.

Donna Reynolds had suffered near fatal injuries having fallen from the top stairwell in her apartment complex, Wells contemplated. Accident or foul play? It seemed too coincidental to him. “Jerry, would you mind going over the evidence that shows signs of a struggle?”

He pointed to a broken wine bottle. “Fire doesn’t shatter the bottom of a wine glass where it is the thickest.” His charcoaled eyebrows jigged up. “That bottle was thrown or smashed.”

“Right.” Wells made a note in his tablet. He stepped back to get a good look at the scene, folding his arms in discouragement. It bothered him he hadn’t noticed these details sooner. The burnt and barely recognizable furniture clouded his instincts and disrupted his visualization of the crime scene.

Jerry walked over to an area of the floor with burnt debris. “Over here we found items with a waxy substance.” He picked up a piece with a gloved hand.

“Lipstick?” Wells guessed.

“Yup. Either she, or someone else dumped the belongings from her purse onto the ground,” Jerry said.

“Like someone was looking for something,” Wells added.

“My thoughts exactly.” More ash smeared around his nose and forehead and it looked to Wells like he had actually been in the fire.

Jerry walked back over to Wells. “Neighbors report she didn’t have any company last night, not that they saw or heard anyway.” He leaned closer to Wells and lowered his voice, “But I hear she has some unusual celebrations from time to time.” He motioned with his head to a mirror hanging on the opposite wall with four large pentacles etched into the corners of the glass.

“Wicca,” Wells said. “It is a recognized religion.”

Jerry arched his brow and snapped his suspenders against his belly. “Any hoot, it seems odd to me the living room would be disheveled, even if she had troubles escaping the fire, especially since she was found near dead at the bottom of the stairs. If she could make it out of the apartment, I can’t imagine she’d trip and fall down the stairs hard enough to put herself into a coma.”

“Not unless she was pushed,” Wells commented.

Jerry nodded in agreement. “We’ll let you know what we find today.” He extended his hand to Wells.

“I’d appreciate that. No telling when Donna’s going to wake.”

“Think she’ll make a full recovery?”

“If she wakes, she has a good chance. Doctors will know more when the swelling in her brain goes down.”

“Lucky girl, though,” Jerry said, shaking his head. “Looks like somebody wanted her dead.”

He was talking about Donna, but Wells couldn’t help thinking of Jev. Somebody had wanted her dead, and now Donna too. Somebody with ties to the occult. Jev and Donna, both witches, both in the occult. It seemed to be the obvious connection, and he had a feeling Thea was in the middle of it.

The sky darkened, paralleling the thoughts in Kate’s mind. Adrenaline hammered in her chest, squeezing breath from her lungs as she surrendered to the surreal spectacle before her. Like an omen of malevolence, Kate beheld the abnormally perfect ring of thirteen black ravens encircled around her.

The ravens perched at an equal distance from each other, some flapping their wings, others rocking their heads, but all were cognizant of her presence and gazed vigilantly at her from a distrustful angle. A frightening black-and-white image from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds came to her mind, the dreadful scene of the birds pecking out the blonde woman’s eyes and tearing bloody holes in her arms and face. Then, a worse horror came to her—the book Thea had pushed on her, titled The Protective Circle, had a circle of ravens on the front cover, exactly like the sphere of black birds she now stood in the middle of.

Kate spun around, examining the strange phenomenon. At all the same size and color, the birds resembled an army of compliant drones, intent on delivering her a message.

‘I believe there is a message in it for you,’ Thea had told her.

A soft touch brushed against Kate, like a spider’s web, the icy finger of something unnatural. She flinched. The crows started to squawk and flap their wings harder. In the distance, she heard someone calling.

“Kate!” Eric yelled.

She scanned the hillside, spotting him with his mask slightly lifted to shout for her. He pointed at his feet, but nothing was there. Then, with a sickening dread, Kate realized her mask lay at her feet—she’d left it off for too long. The breeze must have shifted direction and blown the gases down into the valley where she stood. Dizziness raided her vision as the invisible gases invaded her bloodstream. Having been consumed with the birds’ circular assembly, she’d neglected the small amount of time that it was safe to be without her mask.

The raucous of the ravens peaked into a shrill chorus of black flailing feathers as Eric ran toward Kate. They protested loudly and soared off like a menacing gang of frenzied warriors. Kate fell to her knees, struggling to get the mask over her face, knowing fresh air was her first priority. Eric came to her side to help her, stretching the sides of the mask over her head.

Once the mask was on, they both stood there, making sure she was all right. But Kate grappled with the strange behavior of the birds instead, the uncanny resemblance to Thea’s book containing a message for her. Kate suddenly felt weak and nauseous, but tried to focus on her breathing and Eric’s touch. His hands massaged her shoulders and back, gently. It seemed more than just consolation to Kate.

“We need to get to the top of the ridge,” he said, his voice muffled by the mask. “Can you walk?”

Kate nodded her head. Already, the filtered oxygen refreshed her mind, steadying her vision, though a tremendous headache would probably be on the way. She wondered what would have transpired between them, had they not been wearing the unsightly masks, maybe a caress of the cheek or a lingered graze of the lips. It was difficult to hide her attraction when his became more obvious. Guilt pained her when she thought of David and all that had happened to their relationship.

Off in the distance, someone shouted. Eric helped Kate stand up, and then linked her arm around his neck. He wrapped his around her waist. It felt good to lean on him, for it was exactly what she’d craved from David—for him to pick her up and carry her to safety, not to underestimate threats to her life with paranormal assertions. She’d wanted protection from someone who understood her. Eric consistently filled that role—on the mountain, at her cabin, and now in the meadow.

The two of them walked back to the wooded hill where someone from the team stood, hollering at them, Nicole. She gestured at something behind her on the ground. Eric and Kate caught up with her, ceasing their intimate moment together. He slowly released his grip around her waist and Kate removed her arm from around his neck.

“Thanks,” she said.

“You all right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine now.”

“Look,” Nicole said, motioning to a rock.

Still trying to cope with the bizarre incident with the ravens, Kate prepared herself for another. She and Eric walked up to the rock. Partly exposed between a fractured basalt rock were magnificent opal inclusions, glittering pink and turquoise, like enchanted jewels in a magical forest.

“Aren’t they gorgeous!” she beamed.

Veins and clusters of rainbow-colored rock contrasted with the dirty landscape around them. Just as the team’s presence, garbed in yellow protective overcoats, rubber boots, and black masks seemed unnatural, so did the precious stone, shimmering beneath the dirt and mountain snowberry like a diamond in the rough.

“These are amazing,” Eric said, bending down to run his fingers across them.

“I didn’t think opals formed in this region,” Nicole said.

“Even though the ideal conditions for opal formations are rare, Mt. Hood does have a history of fumarole activity, as we are witnessing now,” Eric replied.

“It’s unusual but I wouldn’t say impossible,” Kate added. Anymore, nothing seemed impossible to her. Even more unusual to her was the discovery of the opal from a personal perspective—opals were Jev’s favorite stone.

Kate stood in awe. For years, she’d denied superstitions and supernatural events, siding with scientific explanation over feeble magical reasoning, but it seemed increasingly difficult to form logical explanations lately, and for the first time, she wondered if it were possible that something otherworldly was trying to communicate with her. Coincidences mounted, physically surrounding her, and she struggled with what now seemed irrefutable.

For the remainder of the expedition, Kate kept to herself, attempting to sort her thoughts about the opals, the predictions on the mountain, the ravens, but most of all, Eric. Clouded emotions caused her to consider the possibility that David might not be “the one” as she and Sarah had discussed in the past. She knew that grief stirred emotions, especially when it came to love, but she didn’t want to keep making the same mistakes as she had in the past. It occurred to her then that maybe she was more alike Jev in her affairs of the heart than she ever considered, and wondered what Jev would tell her now. Even though she’d warned Kate of moving in too early with David, she had an uncanny feeling that Jev would be telling her to go back home.

***

Dusk glazed her kitchen walls with violet light and fractured bright rays of silver off the chrome appliances. Kate sat at the table, the book The Protective Circle in front of her. On the cover, ravens surrounded a girl on the beach in a perfect circle, just like the one around her today. All day, she’d been eager to know what potential message awaited her in the book. Now she carefully examined each page. Someone had marked several of the pages with turned corners, underlined phrases, and made notes in the margin. Then writing at the end of one chapter caught her attention. It was Jev’s handwriting, sloppy like she had been in a hurry…or in the dark, Kate considered. Written in the middle of the page was the name Tryon Creek Cemetery.

“Tryon Creek Cemetery,” Kate said aloud. “T…C…C.” The key belonged to Tryon Creek Cemetery. A graveyard. Kate felt the room chill. She rushed to the phone, not wanting to be alone in the house and dialed Thea’s cell phone. It rang continually. She looked at the book again. Below the cemetery name were seven three-digit numbers, all beginning with an alpha character.

A418, B520, C313, F512, G204, G409, G433.

She wondered if they were codes to the gates or the buildings. Then, she supposed they might not have anything to do with the cemetery. There was only one way to find out. She wrote David a note, telling him she would be home later that evening, purposely leaving out her whereabouts, and gathered her coat and keys. If she took the freeway, she could get to Tryon Creek Cemetery in less than half an hour, but if she went around part of the town, crossing the bridge where there was a particular houseboat nearby, she might not have to go alone.

***

“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” Sarah said, studying the iron-rod entrance, capped at both ends with 19th century gothic street lamps. The name Tryon Creek Cemetery was centered across the gate’s frame.

Kate thought it looked like the entrance to a horror movie. “Neither can I,” she replied. “I’m just glad your neighbor could watch Jonathan.”

“I suppose I’ll have to attend one of her home design parties now,” Sarah said.

“Could be worse—remember Tupperware?”

“Still trying to forget.” Sarah cupped her hands to trap her heated breath. “But why is it always foggy in cemeteries?”

“It’s called advection fog. It occurs when cold, wet ground from the day’s rain combines with warm, dry winds above and condenses into tiny water droplets that we see as fog.”

Sarah passed her a strange look. “I thought you were a geologist and not a meteorologist.” She looked back at the cemetery. “That still doesn’t answer my question—why cemeteries are always foggy.”

“Because they are usually on a hill,” Kate reiterated. Sarah frowned again. “Just c’mon!” Kate said, her interest drawn to the path beyond the spiked gate entrance of the cemetery.

Beyond the cold bars, rows of marbled and granite gravestones mottled the hillsides. She and Sarah meandered up the road, toward the mausoleum at the top of the hill.

“Why are we here again?”

“To find what the key and the numbers belong to.”

“My imagination couldn’t be worse.” Sarah said. “And why aren’t the police doing this?”

“How am I going to explain the key to them?” Kate patted her pocket to make sure it was still there. “I can’t tell Wells I had a vision about my sister’s death. They’ll think I’m nuts.”

“They’re not the only ones.”

Kate turned to Sarah. “You’re not scared, are you?”

“We’re in a cemetery, in the middle of the night,” Sarah replied. “Who wouldn’t be?”

“David,” Kate said. “He would find this exciting and adventurous.”

“That’s why I go to the movies.”

“You and me both. Let’s get this over with.”

Together, they crossed the cobbled road to the front of the mausoleum. The fog veiled the tomb-covered slopes with a ghostly breath, softening the cracked headstones and marbled pillars with deceptive beauty. Mighty limbs of oaks, maples, and dogwoods draped over the graves and roadways like a gentle embrace from the Mother Crone, nestling the deceased tenderly into afterlife.

Sharing Sarah’s unease, Kate couldn’t believe what she was doing either, prowling through a cemetery in the middle of the night, searching for answers buried in witchcraft. What would she find? Moreover, what about Mary Stephens…the woman who'd supposedly died in their house? What in the hell had Jev been doing,  Kate thought crossly, wishing her sister would have trusted her instead of turning to dangerous and risky adventures on her own. The ghostly presence haunting her now came not from the cemetery, but from Jev’s grave.

When they reached the steps of the mausoleum, Kate stopped, studying the building and the outdoor hallways lined with marbled grave bins. White double doors, etched with the name Tryon Creek Cemetery, framed the large entrance to the office inside. The hoary slate structure, built in 1879, stood tall, adorned with reptilian gargoyles in the corners and holy statues of saints near the doorway. She wondered if the statues were there to protect the dead or scare the living. Either way, it seemed to send one common message—enter at your own risk.

“Try the door,” Sarah whispered, pointing at the knob.

Kate pulled the key from her pocket and pushed it into the lock opening. It didn’t fit. She shook her head and then curved her hands around her eyes to peer inside. Large bouquets of imitation lilies, roses, and daisies surrounded the front parlor. Four wooden chairs, a coffee table, and an oak desk stacked with pamphlets welcomed the grieving. To the right were two oak doors, probably the entrance to the funeral hall, she guessed.

“We might as well check the outdoor halls,” Kate said, gesturing for Sarah to go ahead.

She shook her head no. “I’ll follow you.”

“You know the killer always comes from behind?”

Sarah’s eyes told Kate to cut it out. “All the more reason to follow you, right?”

Kate grinned and stepped forward, entering into the arched entrance of the main corridor. Marbled caskets were stacked down the hallways, top to bottom, with intersecting passageways connected to the central hall. Each grave bin had a metal loop fastened on the outside for holding bouquets of flowers, most of which contained plastic roses and lilies. A few were empty and probably had been for years, Kate thought. But there were no key holes.

“None of these caskets have locks on them,” Sarah pointed out too. “They must open from the back somewhere.”

“Yeah…,” Kate stopped. The casket bins…the numbers in the book were casket bins. “Jesus, Sarah.”

“What?” she gasped, moving closer to Kate.

“The numbers in Jev’s book are casket bins.”

They both studied the marbled headstones along the wall in silence. The names and dates of the deceased were engraved in black cursive and a bronze insignia of the cemetery’s name embellished the bottom.