“Why did he need Winter’s help, if he’s such a powerful drùidh?”
“Besides being a drùidh, Matt is also a guardian, and guardians can’t actually interfere in our lives. They can only guard us from the magic.”
“He interfered in yours!”
“Aye, he did. And he so upset the continuum, we all nearly paid the price for it.” He squeezed her gently. “But thanks to your wise and very stubborn sister, everything has worked out. I am myself again, I shall die a natural death one final time, and together with Providence and a bit of help from Talking Tom, Matt and Winter now have an even more powerful tree of life.”
Megan suddenly scrambled off his lap, her face flushed as she turned on him. “Winter! She’s known all along!” she cried. “I’ve been so worried about Gesader this week, and she couldn’t even tell me you were him!”
Just as quickly as her anger had come, her face paled again. “I…I’ve been crying all over you for the last four months,” she whispered. She pointed an accusing finger at him. “You’ve been sleeping in my bed!”
Kenzie stood up, worried she’d back off the edge of the rise. “As a panther, Megan,” he said, moving toward her. “Not as a man.”
“I told you my deepest, darkest secrets.” She took another step back. “I—”
He lunged, reaching for her at the exact moment she realized her peril. But instead of grabbing him for support, Megan used his momentum to knock him off balance. She gave him a surprisingly forceful push in the chest and bolted away.
Kenzie fell over the rise instead, landing in a snowdrift as deep as he was tall. “Megan!” he shouted. “Don’t run, lass!”
She peered over the edge, saw that he hadn’t fallen far but was stuck, then disappeared.
“Megan!”
She didn’t return.
“Goose!” Kenzie called out, throwing his body back and forth to free himself from the snowdrift.
The horse’s head appeared over the edge of the rise, his hooves knocking more snow loose. “I’ll make my own way back. Go catch up with your mistress and take her home.”
The horse disappeared, and Kenzie gave a snort. So Matt had figured right: he really could talk to animals.
Jack surveyed the small kitchen of the Pine Lake Bakery & Bistro. “What’s that smell?” he asked the two people staring at him, apparently waiting for him to say something police-chief-like.
“I noticed it, too, the moment I stepped inside this morning,” Marge Wimple said. The petite, gray-haired bakery owner wrinkled her nose. “It smells sour.”
“Like rotting vegetation or something, only laced with sugar,” Simon Pratt added.
“You go arrest that brat Tommy Cleary this minute,” Marge said. “Everyone knows he’s their ringleader, and the Cleary place sits right next to a bog. That’s where this smell comes from.” She pointed to a brown spot on the floor. “Where else you gonna find mud in the middle of the winter?” She then pointed her finger at Jack. “You put the fear of God in Tommy, and make him tell you who his accomplices are. Just look at what they did to my shop!” Her tearful gaze moved over the mess. “It’ll take me a week to clean this place, and another week to restock all my supplies. That’s two weeks right out of the middle of my busiest season.”
Jack bent down and touched one of the brown spots. “I need a bit more than the fact that Tommy Cleary lives next to a bog to bring him in for questioning.” He sniffed the mud. “This is definitely out of a swamp, but that’s not the smell lingering in the air.” He spotted a slimy substance on the edge of the smashed doughnut display case and walked over to sniff it. “It’s coming from here,” he said, moving aside and motioning for Simon to take a whiff.
“Whew!” Simon said, jerking upright. “That’s rank. What is it?”
“The lab will have to tell us that.”
“What lab?” Simon asked.
Jack frowned at his deputy. “The state has a forensics lab we can use, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, yeah. Sure.” Simon rushed over to his evidence kit. “I’ll have Ethel give them a call to find out how we send them stuff.”
“It’s that Cleary boy and his brothers, I tell you,” Marge said. “Joan Cleary lets those boys run loose like a bunch of heathens. Everyone knows it was them who stole my sign last month, and took Rose Brewer’s moose antlers off the front of her store. We didn’t get our stuff back for a entire week. A fisherman found them hanging on his ice shanty two miles out on the lake.”
Marge stalked up to Jack. “We hired you to stop this foolishness, but it’s only getting worse.” She raised her finger again, clearly intending to poke him in the chest, but when her eyes met his she changed her mind. “What are you going to do about this, Chief Stone?”
“Deputy Pratt and I are going to fully investigate your break-in, Mrs. Wimple. We’ll gather fingerprints and evidence, take a look around outside, and talk to people in the hopes that somebody saw something. You can start cleaning up once we give you the okay, which should be sometime tomorrow morning.” He gave her what he hoped was a police-chief-like smile. “We’ll keep you apprised of what’s happening. Thank you for being so cooperative, Mrs. Wimple,” he finished, turning toward the back door of the bakery.
He stopped beside Simon, who was scraping some of the mud into a plastic bag. “Take some pictures with that fancy new digital camera.” He nodded toward the large evidence kit that would make one heck of a fishing tackle box. “Get some shots in here, then take some pictures of the grounds outside and the front and back of the store.”
“Sure thing, Chief.”
“My name is Jack,” he told Simon for the umpteenth time. “White men stopped calling us chief several decades age.”
Simon’s eyes widened. “Y-you’re an Indian?” he sputtered, his face turning a dull red.
“Half Canadian Cree,” Jack said. “So stop with the chief thing, will you?”
“Yes, sir.”
Jack gave a snort and walked outside, ducking under the crime scene tape before putting on his sunglasses. He stopped in the middle of the lane that ran between the stores and Pine Lake, and scanned the downtown business district. A lot of money had gone into the storefronts on the street side, but the backs of the buildings were even more impressive. No alley full of dumpsters and recycling bins here. The stores came within fifty yards of the shoreline, and the town had capitalized on that, building a park with benches, landscape trees, and strategically placed logging artifacts. The Pine Lake Bakery & Bistro was sided by a craft supply store, an art gallery, then an outfitter store, and finally a restaurant with huge windows facing the lake.
“Find out if that railing was already busted or if that break is new,” Jack told Simon when the deputy came outside with his camera. “Is the discoloring on the doorjamb more of that slime?”
Simon leaned in close to look, then immediately jerked back. “It’s the same stuff, all right.”
“Take a photo of it,” Jack instructed, turning to scan the snow. “What do you make of this?”
Simon walked up beside him and squinted at where Jack was pointing. “Those are tracks.”
“But what kind of tracks?” Jack asked, carefully stepping over the snowbank beside them, then following the tracks into the otherwise pristine layer of snow as he scanned the ground in a fifty-foot circle. “They simply begin here all of a sudden,” he said, pointing. “They come out of nowhere, like something flew in, landed here, and then walked to the bakery. Get a shot of this, too,” he said, hunching down over one of the holes. “I can’t make out the shape because something was dragged over the print.”
Simon snapped several pictures, then continued photographing the path the tracks made. “They’re too large to be from a bird. One of those para-skiing kites maybe?” he asked as he worked. “Or an ultralight airplane? A bunch of home-built ultralights fly around the lake on the weekends.”