She pulled a jacket from her closet, reopened her case and threw it in. Then she zipped up her luggage and started to carry it to the front room.
“Let me,” Nick said. He deftly removed it from her grip. The gesture made Jenn’s chest feel warm, though she knew it was stupid. But, he really did care. His best friend was dead because of her, but instead of running he had decided to help.
“Thanks,” she said, and watched his back and shoulders as he rounded the corner and stooped to set the bag down near the front door. She liked watching him move.
He turned and caught her gaze. She felt her face flush, but he didn’t react to that. He just bent to kiss her and put his arms around her in a tight squeeze.
“You all right?” she whispered.
He nodded against her shoulder. “But I’ll be better after I hit the head,” he declared, and he broke the embrace, kissing her once on the forehead before he stepped off down the hall.
Jenn stood alone in her aunt’s front room, staring at the shelves of books on the occult. Somewhere in all of that there had to be an answer to what was happening here. But damned if she knew where to look.
She wished that Meredith were around to ask. She’d never really known her aunt. She hadn’t even gone to the funeral, since Holy Name was in the midst of finals at the time. She remembered meeting the woman long ago, and she remembered her aunt as a bit quirky and quiet. But she also remembered a sense of humor. A sense of compassion. If only she could go back in time and talk to her. Get to know her better. Maybe she’d understand some of this.
Jenn walked over to the fireplace. After a glance behind her to confirm that she was still alone in the room, she removed the stone, set it on the floor and slipped her hand into the darkness. From the hole she withdrew the Ouija board and its planchette; then she replaced the rock.
She stared at the simple graven alphabet and doubted herself for a moment. Could it really be this simple?
The sound of Jenn’s suitcase zipper closing cut the air just as Nick and Kirstin both reappeared. Nick was carrying Kirstin’s suitcase. Apparently he practiced equal opportunity chivalry.
“I wanted to be prepared and pack some pretzels and beer, but Nick promised he had plenty,” Kirstin said.
“It’s a bachelor pad,” he agreed. “Brian has a good stash of pornos, too.” Then he realized what he’d said and his face fell.
Jenn rolled her eyes, but for an instant her mind flashed on the stash of magazines she’d thrown away at her dad’s. Men really were all the same.
“Ready to go?” she asked.
“Just give the word,” Nick promised.
“Word,” she answered. If only it were that easy for everything.
Nick deftly removed the suitcase from her hand as soon as she picked it up and shouldered the door open with both hers and Kirstin’s cases in his hands. She stifled a laugh as he stumbled his way forward, determined to muscle all their luggage to the car at once. Kirstin didn’t leave home without three sets of shoes, a barrage of aerosols and a hair dryer that made stylists at her spa jealous.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
“It was supposed to end with her death,” the man grumbled. He’d just awoken after a deep sleep on his living room couch. The pale blue velour cushions were smeared with something dark. He knew what it was without looking. What he didn’t know was whose.
He twisted his legs off the couch and his foot landed on something hard yet yielding. Absently he bent down and picked it up: a smashed hunk of pumpkin. Without warning, he broke into a machine gun round of sneezing.
“Enough already!” he screamed, whipping the pumpkin piece against the brick wall north face of his old house. He’d had the drywall removed a few years earlier to enlarge the room, but the extra space had disappeared again as he slowly filled it with discarded furniture and other rescued junk. The pumpkin stuck momentarily to the brick, then peeled back and fell behind a magazine rack. Its flesh left a wet orange splotch.
He left the shard where it lay and walked to the bathroom. As soon as he flipped the light on, he wished he hadn’t. The flecks of blood on his cheeks looked like measles. His eyelids were clean, but the rest of his face was coated like he’d been painting a ceiling in dark red paint. Tiny trails of red crusted his earlobes and splotched the white seams of his undershirt. The blue button-up he wore atop the tee was mottled in stains; from his chest to his belly, you wouldn’t have been able to tell the shirt’s original color.
He stripped off both shirts, looking in the mirror to see if there was blood on his naked chest, but beneath his speckled face was simply the pale white skin of a man who didn’t get out much. His paunch bespoke a distinctly unhealthy diet, and his still unpleasantly wet and sticky jeans bespoke murder.
He angrily stripped off the pants, a tear escaping the corner of his eye and cutting a path through dried blood as it slid down his cheek. He piled the clothes in a small heap. As with so much of his wardrobe these days, he’d be burning them in the fire pit out back. He’d need to restock his fuel soon; at the rate he was going he’d be through his wood in no time. He’d had to get rid of a lot of evidence.
He stepped into the bathtub and turned on the water, as scalding hot as it would get. Then, with a rough bath brush, he scrubbed and scrubbed until his skin was as red as the blood he struggled to escape. With every stroke of the brush, he whispered to himself, but no matter how many times he said them, the words didn’t come true.
“It was supposed to be over. It was supposed to end with her death!”
Captain Harlan Jones closed the door to his office quietly, but firmly. He’d sent Scott with Jennica Murphy and her boyfriend back to the house, and Edie had stepped out for a bit, so for a little while, he had the station all to himself. His feet were heavy as he walked across the small office, and levered himself into the well-worn desk chair. He closed his eyes as he sank back, and tried to shake the events of the day, and the past few weeks, from his mind.
How could this be happening again? And what was he going to do to deal with it?
The what he needed to ponder. He knew the how. There was no question. There never had been, really.
Meredith.
Just the thought of her name made him shiver. He remembered her as she had been when she’d first arrived in River’s End, all those years ago. A young, fresh, pretty girl, not so different from her niece Jennica. But once she’d moved into the old Perenais place, she’d begun to change. It was subtle at first, but once the word got out that the “new girl” was practicing some of the “old” ways . . . well, it wasn’t long before people were walking up the hill at odd hours, sneaking about in the dark hoping to buy charms and spells from Meredith Perenais, without anyone knowing.
But everyone knew everything about one another in a small town like this. Say what you want about the modern age and enlightened thinking in twentieth-century society, but that was all just talk. Once they stripped off those fancy business suits, people at their heart remained superstitious savages, ready to dance around the campfire and sacrifice goats in the night to appease the invisible spirits that they’d scoff at during the daytime at the office.
Jones had just been a rookie back when people began to go to Meredith for magical aid, and for a long time, he had himself refused to believe in old wives’ tales. He’d laughed at the idea that Meredith Perenais was a witch. Until the night that he responded to an emergency call from the bartender at Casey’s. He remembered that night as if it were yesterday.