5 Beewitched (33 page)

And read it again.

The first name, which had been carved on the gravestone, was as common as could be.
Jacob.
A nice biblical name. The surname is what threw me, because it wasn’t common at all. In fact, I’d only met one person with that particular last name, and she wasn’t even from Moraine.

I read it again.
Goodaller.

Jacob Goodaller.

Joan Goodaller.

What were the odds?

Thirty-eight

All kinds of bells went off. Literal ones, too.
When I converted the old Lutheran church into The Wild Clover, I’d left the bell tower intact. The community had missed hearing the bell rung and requested that it be brought back to life, so I had the automatic controller repaired and set to ring twice each day—once at noon, and again at five in the afternoon. The five-o’clock bell sounded now.

As I stood staring at the inscription on the headstone, all kinds of thoughts went through my muddled mind.

One random piece of trivia came through. What was another name for a bell tower? A belfry. What did it mean to have bats in the belfry? Insanity. It was insane what my mind was coming up with.

I glanced upward, half expecting a whole colony of bats to take to the air.

The other bells going off weren’t dinner bells or jingle bells.

They were internal warning bells.

Hell’s bells.

Sweet, grandmotherly Joan, always on the periphery of every little crisis, pitching in wherever she was needed, quickly becoming part of our community. Widow Joan, dating divorced Al Mason. My customers and I thought they were a good match.

Part of me reasoned that the names were just a big coincidence and that if I asked Joan about it she would have an acceptable explanation. Maybe that’s why she wanted to be part of our community, because she’d had ancestors living in Moraine long ago. In fact, she might even say she’d been named after one of them.

That was reasonable, right?

Yet, she’d never mentioned a local connection, and we’d had quite a few chats together. Remembering back, some of our topics had even included local history. Wouldn’t that have come up then? She’d have had a perfect opportunity to share that connection. She could have said, “My great grandfather is buried in the cemetery right next to your store and his name was Jacob Goodaller.”

That would have been a perfectly normal response.

If it had been true. Which intuition told me it wasn’t. Had she been walking through this very cemetery while considering a move to Moraine? Had the name on the gravestone caught her attention? And later, she’d remembered it when she’d chosen an alias, moved to town, and . . . what? Why would she do that? And another glitch in my theory—Joan had never mentioned children, especially not a dead son. Wouldn’t that have come up?

It wasn’t much of a leap for me to wonder if “Joan Goodaller” could possibly be Eleanor Marciniak, the woman with a vendetta against Claudene Mason. After a few brief calculations, I deduced that she was the right age to be Buddy Marciniak’s mother. Eleanor Marciniak, who had been instrumental in the inquiry into her son’s death. Perhaps she was also known as Nemesis. And/or witch number thirteen.

That was a whole lot of aliases for one woman to have. One innocent woman, at least. Was I crazy to even be thinking this? Perhaps I was barking up the wrong tree (as Grams would put it in her endearing way). This had to be a coincidence, right?

I rushed back inside the store, relieved that my sister had finished up and taken off. I did an online search for Joan Goodaller and refined it by adding the keywords Milwaukee and Waukesha County. Geography didn’t matter, because when I expanded the search out from Wisconsin, the only name even close was Jane Goodall, famous for her life’s work studying chimps.

Carrie Ann was checking out a customer when I pounded up to her. My heart raced when I noticed it was Officer Sally Maylor, off duty and out of her cop uniform. Both of them turned and stared at me.

“What?” I asked, working at breathing normally.

“You look spooked,” Carrie Ann said.

Really? I looked that bad? “No, I’m perfectly fine. Um, Sally, can Al have visitors yet?”

Sally shook her head. “Not yet. Why? You want to visit Al?”

I considered sharing my crazy hypothesis with Sally, but it was complicated and would take a lot of time to explain, and she’d get Johnny Jay involved, and what if I was wrong?

I went the evasive route. “I’m helping with his animals and have a few questions about feeding them.”

“Can’t you ask Greg or Joan?”

“Um, it’s okay, I’ll manage.” Now what? I needed to ask Al one quick question.

And with that thought, something magical happened.

Sally said, “I can get you two on the phone, but you’ll only get a minute.”

I grinned. “Can you do it now?”

Sally popped her cell phone from its case on her belt, dialed, explained the reason for her call, waited while the call made its way through the proper channels, then handed the phone over to me.

“Carrie Ann,” I said as I took it, “why don’t you help Sally pick out a jar of honey from the display.” Then to Sally, “It’s on the house.”

“Why thank you,” Sally said, and the two wandered off, leaving Al and me to talk in private.

“I only have a minute,” I told Al, “and I need to know one thing. And I don’t have time to explain why I’m asking. Not right now, anyway, but I promise I will as soon as we get you out of there.”

I heard a rush of air as Al exhaled. “I thought you all abandoned me. I haven’t talked to a single soul since they let me have that one call to Greg. He asked you for help, right?”

“Yes, that’s why I’m calling.”

Sally had her jar of honey and was turning back my way. So I took a leap and said, “What was Joan’s son’s name?”

I could have asked if she had any children and if so, was one a boy, and then if so, what was his name, but I didn’t have time for twenty questions.

There was a pause on the other end of the line. Sally reached out for the phone. I raised a finger in the air to let her know I needed a second longer.

Al started to say, “Joan wanted that kept a secret. I don’t know how you found out or why you’re asking, but—”

“Al?” I interrupted, with a little pleading in my voice, which wasn’t faked at all, and with growing excitement, too, because he’d already started to confirm my sneaky suspicion.

“Time’s up,” Sally said, ready to take the phone away. “Don’t get me in trouble.”

“Robert,” Al said.

“Gotta go.” Sally reached out and took the phone from my hand. I’d lost the opportunity to ask if her son went by a nickname and if it happened to be Buddy.

But I had confirmed she’d had a son. Joan could very well have been the vengeful mother. She could be Nemesis.

Had she been hunting for the woman whom she felt was responsible for her son’s death? Had she ingratiated herself with Al and then lay waiting in the weeds for the opportune moment?

Had the murderer been in our midst the entire time?

Thirty-nine

It was all speculation, of course. Circumstantial. Intuition.
A hunch. Instinct. I couldn’t go to Hunter and tell him, “I just have a feeling that she is our killer,” because then he would lecture me on gathering evidence versus making up stuff.

What did I have to support my hypothesis? Let’s see:

• someone with the unlikely name of Nemesis who had befriended the murder victim online and who turned out to be the MIA thirteenth witch
  
• two unidentified calls from the gas station to the murder victim’s phone
  
• the discovery of a grieving mother, who had blamed the woman her son had been dating for his death
  
• a gentle, aging widow who had exhibited a kind and generous heart and just happened to have the same surname as a dead man in the cemetery
  

What now?

I called Greg. “Are you out at the farm?” I asked him.

“Yes, why? Did you find something?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Why don’t you come over? We’ll talk about what you have so far.”

“Yes. It might help to get another opinion. Is Joan there?”

“She went home for the night. Tomorrow she’ll make arrangements to stay out here for a few days.”

With the comforting news that Joan wouldn’t be around, we disconnected, and I went back inside the store where Trent and Brent were holding down the fort to let them know I was leaving for the night. “I’m driving out to Al’s farm,” I told them, feeling that I needed to tell someone where I’d be.

I hopped in my truck and took off, wondering why I was so fixated on a sweet little grandmotherly woman like Joan. Did she even have the physical strength to stab someone to death?

Doubt set in. What about the witches, who were perfect candidates?

Lucinda gave me the creeps. Suddenly I remembered something she’d said to the coven the night Hunter found the pentacle inside Al’s house. The witches had expressed concern about cops arriving at the campsite. Lucinda had reassured them. How could she have known the search would end with the house? Of course, then I also had to ask myself how Aurora had perceived my distress when Johnny Jay had me trapped at the police station. And hadn’t I added Greg to the list of suspects, and here I was going to be alone with him out at the farm? But recently, I’d been relying on my intuition, and it was telling me that a boy born and bred in Moraine would never harm his own aunt. Nor would he frame his dad for her murder.

I had to trust my gut.

When I pulled into the long driveway and parked, I was still playing “what-if?”

A single light was on inside Al’s house, and after knocking several times without an answering greeting, I tried the door. It swung open.

I followed the light source through the living room into the kitchen, calling Greg’s name, a little annoyed with him, since he knew I was on my way. Then annoyance turned to concern and then horror.

Because Greg was on the floor on his back, blood pooling under him.

Oh! My! God!

I crouched down and tried to rouse him. He was breathing but didn’t respond. I had to call nine-one-one and get help!

As I rose to check my pockets for my phone, I felt a presence in the room. Joan Goodaller had been standing off to the side, watching.

Then my eyes locked on the handgun she was pointing at me.

“I apologize for not returning your phone call,” she said, “but your cover story was pretty silly. Family history! I thought you were smarter than that.”

“You did this? You shot Greg? Why? What has he ever done to you?”

Joan shook her head, seemingly in distress. “The boy would have been perfectly fine if you hadn’t insisted on interfering. I was outside, ready to leave for my home, when I remembered I’d left my house keys inside. That’s when Greg told me you were coming over with important information. And that’s the moment when I knew the gig was finally up.”

“He’s going to die if we don’t help him.”

“You’ve been such a busybody and now you’ve involved this innocent boy. Look what you’ve done.”

What
I’ve
done?

“Please toss your phone this way,” she ordered, and all the sweetness had evaporated. “We won’t be making any phone calls.”

“But I don’t understand,” I said, understanding perfectly.

“Sure you do. It’s no surprise to you how easy it is to find out anything you want to. Claudene could run, but she couldn’t hide. She killed Buddy, but no one would believe me. I came out here to bide my time, not realizing that she and Al were estranged. Then Greg let something slip. He’d been in contact with Claudene. It didn’t take much prompting to have him arrange for her to visit. It was all working out perfectly. If only you’d stayed out of it. Now toss me the phone.”

What choice did I have? I tossed it, but instead of taking her eyes away to catch it, which I’d hoped for, she let it fall beside her. I kept her talking.

“You were Nemesis, too,” I said. “And you made those calls from the gas station, one to cancel as number thirteen, and the other to suggest a meeting place later after the ritual.”