Strangetown Girl (Welcome To Witch County Book 1) Page 11

  Luna’s mind flashed back to the pictures she’d found in his house. The ones of herself over the years and of other women around town.

  “No. Not really.”

  ~*~

  GRAHAM MADE IT BACK TO his home base in New Jersey in record time. Had he been caught by a state trooper, he wouldn’t have tried to get out of the speeding ticket.

  He didn’t head home. He was a bachelor and hadn’t had pets in years due to the fact that his job sometimes required him to leave for several days at a time without enough warning to fuss with pet sitters or doggy daycares. His things would be safe in the trunk of his car for a bit longer. Instead, he drove past the exit for his house and headed straight to the office.

  Graham’s boss, a Mrs. Honey Gladwell, was six feet tall, dark-haired, and looked like a runway model most of the time. If she was drunk enough, she’d tell you how many agencies had tried to recruit her, but she’d never been interested in that industry. Her father had been NYPD, one of the good ones, and after being raised by him after the untimely death of her mother, she’d always wanted to be a cop. When her father had remarried while she was in high school to another cop, this one Jersey PD since he’d moved them out of the city, that had only cemented her determination. She had been raised and loved by two excellent, honest cops who showed her how to do the job right. And she had spent her entire adult life making sure that she did.

  “How fast were you driving, Graham?”

  He heard her before he saw her, turning away from his desk with a grin. It was always so odd to him that he and his boss were almost eye to eye. He was so used to being taller than everyone, though sometimes he’d still point out that he had her by an inch or two if she was giving him crap about something.

  “Fast enough to know I shouldn’t answer that question.”

  “I assume the reason that you flew home was because your favorite witness got something good?”

  “Not sure yet. I wanted to get out of there before that sheriff came looking for me, trying to snoop.”

  Honey sighed. “I can honestly say that the only reason he has that title is because he’s in a small town and the pickings are slim. Between what you’ve told me and what I’ve seen filed against him, I’m still shocked that no one has been recruited to move up there and go do the job.”

  “He’s got complaints? I’m not surprised after witnessing the way he harassed Luna and Asher. I’m just surprised the complaints got through.”

  “Yeah, they were filed by people who either were visiting and had unpleasant run-ins with him, or people who had moved away. There’d probably be more if he wasn’t blocking them somehow.”

  Graham sighed and shook his head. He regretted leaving Luna there more and more. “Luna gave me this.”

  Honey took the bag from Graham’s outstretched hand and unzipped the top, peering inside. “There is an entire camera in here.”

  “She didn’t unpack it, she said. It’s everything that she took with her.”

  “So we need to get the film developed,” Honey thought out loud before barking off someone’s name and handing them the camera with the instruction to get the film developed in an hour or less or she’d have his badge.

  “What’s this?” she asked, pulling out a plastic bag filled with what looked to be burnt chunks of something.

  “The sheriff was burning something the other night. His neighbor said that the fumes from it had been awful and were still affecting her a day later.”

  “Not burning leaves?” Honey said, putting the bag down and pulling out a blue spray bottle.

  “Burning leaves don’t leave behind solid burnings,” Graham replied. He motioned to the bottle that Honey eyed, “I’m pretty sure that’s luminol.”

  Honey turned the bottle around so that he could see that it was labeled. “It is. Where did she even get this?”

  Graham shrugged. It wasn’t a lie, he didn’t know where she’d gotten it. He had a good idea, but he didn’t know.

  “So you didn’t give it to her?”

  “Boss, I didn’t hop in my car with a forensic bag, I hopped in my car to get her out of jail. I didn’t have luminol with me.”

  “So she stole it?”

  Graham shrugged again.

  “How are we supposed to use this as evidence if she stole it?”

  “The luminol isn’t evidence,” Graham replied without missing a beat.

  Honey chuckled. “You are correct, it is not. But if there is something good on that camera, whoever got it got in without a warrant. That’s going to be a problem.”

  “One I’m sure that someone around here knows how to get around.”

  Honey smirked. “What’s this? Glasses and a note,” she said, absently turning the two items over in her hand. “Graham, these were at my house the day of the murder and don’t belong to me. I handed them to one of the cops on site and he took them as evidence, but I found them at Wesley’s house, tucked away. Seems a bit odd,” Honey read the note.

  “Sometimes I wonder if Luna missed her calling and should have been a cop,” Graham said, taking the bag from Honey’s hands.

  “Looks like there’s hair stuck in the hinge. See?” she said, leaning in and pointing. Graham had not seen. Good thing his boss was so good at her job.

  “How quickly can we get a follicle test, assuming we just got lucky?”

  “Depends on how hard we push. A few days at least, but we can make that timeline as short as possible,” Honey said, taking the bag that contained the glasses and handing them to a guy who seemed to have arrived just to run her errands for the moment.

  “Here’s hoping. We just have to figure out how to get past how we got the information,” Graham said, watching the evidence walk away from him, on its way to get tested for various things.

  “Let’s see what you brought back. We’ll worry about the hard part when we know that we need to.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Graham replied, following Honey towards the lab.

  25

  ~*~

  Luna tried to find a glimmer of light in the pitch black. Extending her arms, she touched… nothing. She had no idea where she was, why she couldn’t find anything solid.

  Then the shot rang out. It echoed through the darkness around her, and revealed trees and night sky as if its passage through the air was pulling away a curtain. Through the trees, she saw approaching lights, whipping wildly like they were being held by people running. Muffled yells told her there was no time, she had to run. Now.

  So she did. She ran.

  ~*~

  LUNA SAT ON THE EDGE of her bed, a hard frown on her face. Something was wrong with Calidity, with her, but she wasn’t sure what. It bothered her that she hadn’t noticed it before. She was usually pretty quick on the uptake, but for some reason, she hadn’t really noticed. Not until Valerie hadn’t remembered her eye balm. She had an active imagination, but her fantasies didn’t involve giving the local ice cream shop owner an allergy remedy.

  Why had her wards gone off when the police arrived, but not when the almost-dead body of her father stumbled through her front door? Sure, he’d been beaten all to hell, but that didn’t mean that he hadn’t meant her any harm. He had, there was no question. Why else would he have been there?

  And the door to the basement being permanently shut. Who in the world buys a house where one part of it is permanently shut off? It’s like the beginning of some horrible horror movie, and Luna knew she was most definitely more intelligent than the characters written into those stories. No, there was something going on. And no matter how she flipped it over in her mind, it wasn’t good.

  Years ago, when she was almost a child still, her father had asked her if she was able to make someone tell the truth. A bit of an odd question, she’d thought, and one she hadn’t considered. It had taken a few weeks of trial and error to get it right. Some mixtures had changed the person’s voice, some had made them babble like idiots, some had just tortured them with the truth until t
hey confessed willingly, which her father had admitted was close, but not what he needed. Finally, they had it: a mixture that, when ingested, would force the victim to speak the truth, no matter what.

  Now, Luna didn’t need to speak the truth, but she did need to see it. It couldn’t be that much different.

  She wrote down the five things that she decided on for this task. Two of them she had there in the house. The other three would require foraging. While she was aware that she could find them in the woods, she wasn’t so good at marking where she’d seen them before. She needed to get better at that.

  The day outside was warm and overcast from rain that had fallen overnight but not cleared out just yet. It looked and smelled like the sky could open up again at any moment, so Luna grabbed her umbrella.

  She trotted across the street, away from where she normally foraged considering the last time she’d been there, and hit a right at the corner. The large home there had been in the same family for years, and they rented it out to vacationers from time to time. For now, it looked empty, though it was always well kept. Luna gave the house a greeting nod as if it were alive and could see her before ducking around the back and pushing through the bushes that began the dense woods.

  She paused, breathing in the scent of the woods with eyes closed as she took in her surroundings, allowing the woods to show her where the plants she needed were growing. An unease spread through her. The woods were alarmed about something, and because Luna had allowed herself to connect to them so deeply, she was now alarmed about it too. Except she didn’t know what it was.

  She scaled a nearby tree like she’d been doing since she was eight. Her father had claimed she was going to fall and break her neck. He’d always hated that she had no problem putting herself in danger when she was younger. Not so much when she was older.

  The figure stepped softly through the trees, but still loud enough for the witch sitting in the tree to hear him coming from a mile away, figuratively speaking. She heard the footfalls that followed the movement of the foliage below her, but she couldn’t see more.

  It wasn’t until the man raised his head in frustration that she identified him as Wesley. Had he been following her? Why else would he have been out in the middle of the woods, trying and failing to be sneaky?

  Luna didn’t so much as twitch on her perch in the tree as she watched him round the tree’s trunk and head in one direction only to return and head in another a few minutes later, hissing curses under his breath. After his third pass, she waited until he was a good bit off, hopped down, and waited on the opposite side of the tree, where he wouldn’t see her on his approach.

  “I know I saw her come this way,” Wesley mumbled.

  “Who?” Luna asked, stepping out from behind the tree.

  Wesley looked like he was going to need a new pair of pants for a moment, but he recovered quickly.

  “Are you spying on me or something?” he snapped.

  “I’m not the one out in the woods wondering where a ‘she’ went, Sheriff. You are.”

  “I don’t owe you an explanation.”

  Wesley was usually much better at this. Luna must have really caught him off-guard. “Are you following me, Sheriff?”

  Wesley frowned.

  “Better yet, were you following me the night that someone attacked me a little ways from here?”

  “If you were attacked, you should have called the police,” Wesley responded.

  “You are the police. And I don’t trust you, so why would I call you when I need help, hm?”

  He didn’t like that answer, judging by the look on his face. Not that Luna cared. It was the truth, and if he wanted it to change, he needed to be the one to change it.

  “I didn’t attack you,” Wesley replied.

  “But you were following me today. Got it.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “Then why are you still here?”

  Luna made direct eye contact, crossed her arms, and waited. She waited while Wesley tried to think of a reason for him to be there before finally giving up.

  “You should be more careful out here in these woods. It’s dangerous,” he said as he finally turned and began walking away.

  “You’re the only thing I’ve seen out here that’s given me the heebie jeebies. But thanks for pretending that you care,” Luna said, pushing a wide smile onto her face and waving at Wesley’s retreating back.

  He scowled over his shoulder but kept going until he was out of sight. Luna didn’t move until the world around her told her there was no need for alarm anymore.

  Interesting that he set the woods off like that.

  ~*~

  IT TOOK THE BETTER PART of two hours, but Luna returned to the house with a handful of ferns, a few sprigs of mint, and some sage that had been planted behind the old house that she’d passed on her way into the woods. The owners had probably planted the sage before they’d left the home, lucky Luna. She’d grabbed a bit more than she’d needed with the intention of planting her own.

  From her personal stores in her secret closet compartment, she grabbed a bit of dill and a bit of rue. Those were the last two pieces that she needed. Or, she was pretty sure they were. She was never completely sure that something was going to work until she tried it, especially when it was something new.

  Luna pulled down her special stone bowl that had no magical significance, but that she used because she thought it was neat, and poured a bit of virgin olive oil into it. Olive oil was one of the few neutral substances that could be used as a carrier, but only if it was truly virgin. The process that most companies put their oils through changed it so much that it wasn’t useful anymore.

  The oil got a quick stir, and then the plants were added, one by one. Each ingredient was carefully crushed and mixed in using a small pestle. By the time everything had been added, Luna had an oily green mixture. There wasn’t a lot of it, but there didn’t need to be. Not for what she was going to use it as.

  “Show me what I can’t see. Show me the truth, the world around me,” she whispered into the bowl. The magic swirled from her to the bowl, and she prayed silently that it was going to do what she’d asked and not something unplanned. Especially since she was alone in the house.

  Luna took a deep breath. “Here goes nothing,” she whispered to herself.

  She dipped two fingers from each hand into the mixture. Then, she closed her eyes and rubbed her fingers along her eyelids.

  She opened her eyes to see a crack in the wall in front of her. Blinding light showed through it, but nothing more, even as Luna squinted and leaned in closer.

  “What the…”

  Pain in her temples rocketed her back and she found herself falling against the wall and a well-placed end table.

  “Oh no,” Luna whispered. She’d done something wrong.

  Stars exploded into her vision, and faintly, Luna could have sworn she heard someone say her name. Who, she couldn’t tell, but it didn’t matter. She didn’t get the chance to investigate or respond.

  Instead, she passed out.

  26

  WESLEY HAD BEEN PUTTING IN a lot of overtime. Legitimate overtime, but Georgia wasn’t happy about how much he wasn’t home. He’d told her that solving this murder was important, especially in a place like Calidity, where murder didn’t happen very often. She’d settled into a not happy but accepting phase, which was probably as good as it was going to get until he brought Luna in.

  Most of what he had was circumstantial at best, but it was all that existed. He had made a mistake rushing the scene, cleaning it up, and allowing her back into the house. That meant that if anyone wanted or needed to see for themselves what happened, they couldn’t. They had to rely on the photos and the word of the officers being called. That was shaky ground.

  But, luckily, it was all the ground that they had. There was no hard evidence to say that anyone else had done it. In fact, what little evidence there was pointed squarely to Luna, since she hadn�
��t had any guests in the house at the time. The last one, who might have been a suspect had she stayed longer, had checked out before the stiff had. And as far as they’d been able to tell, Asher hadn’t been there at the time. That only left one person. One person who turned out to be more of a mystery with every poke that Wesley made. He’d hoped to have been able to use that as leverage, but Luna didn’t seem to care about the pressure he was trying to apply.

  She’d always been that way, he’d noticed. It was one of the things that he hated and yet attracted him at the same time. She was tough, and he was determined to crack her, just to be able to say that he had. Well, not actually say very loud, as he didn’t want it to get back to anyone important. Maybe say it very quietly, to himself and a few close friends who he knew wouldn’t spill.

  Either way, the case had been built as much as was possible with what was left. All he had to do now was convince a judge that Luna had been released prematurely. Once he was able to get her locked up again, it would be easy to get her trial going. All the evidence he needed to convince everyone that the first murder in Calidity in years, a brutal, bloody murder, needed to be solved and put behind them was already there. Then everyone could take heart in the fact that they could return to their normal, small-town lives, where people left their doors unlocked all night and didn’t worry about purse-snatchers.

  That was where he was on his way to now: To get a warrant for Luna’s arrest re-issued. He’d called the station earlier and had the records from evidence sent over to the courthouse, saving himself the drive. He just needed someone to listen.

  Luckily, the judge with a secret was the one on the bench that morning. And since he knew that Wesley knew his secret, Wesley wasn’t anticipating much of a fight.

  ~*~

  LUNA WOKE UP IN SEMI-DARKNESS. It took her a moment to figure out that she was still on her bedroom floor, lying beside the small, overturned nightstand that she’d apparently taken down with her.