From Herring to Eternity (26 page)

I walked into Sally’s cottage, which was apparently one large room with a kitchen and bedroom, front and back, respectively. The smell of hickory was strong. It was coming from a smoking, woklike affair in the center of the room. The ladies were seated in a circle around it, on a red rug with a white pentagram stitched in the center. The smoke got into one’s nostrils but the open windows kept it from becoming suffocating.

The “us” was everyone. Mad was there along with Ginnifer Boone, the palm reader from New Orleans; Dalila Odinga, the voodoo gal from Kenya; and the four others, to whom I hadn’t been introduced when they showed up at my home the night Reynold Sterne was there. Sally told me the names of the other women but I promptly forgot them. My heart was tap dancing again and I needed to calm myself.

I couldn’t read the other women. I felt as if I’d interrupted something and they were simply on pause. At a gesture from Sally, they tightened the circle to make room for me.

“You saved us the bother of summoning you,” Sally said amiably. It didn’t sound as friendly as she made it seem.

“You could have just phoned,” I said, taking my place between Mad and Ginnifer. Sally sat across from us.

“A compulsion spell is different,” the coven leader said.

“What is it, like an astral kidnapping?”

“Oh, it’s hardly that. An abduction would be barbaric.” Her smile, which had been constant, faded a little at the edges. “You do understand that there’s a difference between barbarism and Druidism.”

“If you say so,” I said. “But there’s something that interests me more than that.”

“What would that be?” Sally asked.

“First, this thing about the earth not being happy.” I looked at Mad. “My, uh—my sister said that several times at the deli. I assumed it meant that the digging up of the campsite on my property, disturbing any old bones, was what she was referring to. Why else tell me? Nothing else I was doing could have upset the earth, as far as I know.”

“The earth is happy now,” Mad said distantly, like a chant, to no one in particular.

“Right,” I said. “But not because the temple or the order from the bench stopped the university from digging there. That had nothing at all to do with me, did it?”

“It did not,” Sally acknowledged.

I hadn’t had to pry that from her. She didn’t try to change the subject. She just waited. I didn’t think that boded well for me.

“It had to do with an anniversary,” I went on. “According to the calendar on Facebook, first, fifth, tenth, and twenty-fifth are the big ones.”

“We describe those as the ‘perfect years,’” Sally explained. “Astrological alignments recur, allowing a direct connection to what is called the spawning day.”

“The day something happened, either good or bad,” I said. “The day you can draw on or dispel the good or bad energies an event caused. Since the earth wasn’t happy, I have to assume the anniversary was something not-so-good.”

“Again, you’re correct,” Sally said. She seemed almost proud that her newly minted sister was so quick on the uptake.

“I thought back to something one of my workers told me last week,” I said. I looked at Mad. “About a Cherokee jeweler named Jim Pinegoose you were going to marry in 2003. Ten years ago. Making this one of the ‘perfect years.’”

Mad was staring ahead in silence, her eyes on the rising smoke of the smoldering hickory.

“Jim suffered heart failure during a tribal competition dance. Last week you tried to get in touch with him through some kind of tribal ceremony.”

“
Atskili
,” Sally said.

“Right. In the woods behind Barbara Mandrell’s home. That was where you held the tribal dance, wasn’t it?”

Sally was positively beaming. “It was. So . . . you understand!”

I smiled. “Completely. It was the dancing that killed him, but not really. His heart had been weakened by a natural drug that someone had been giving him. Potassium, I’m guessing, since enough of that can lead to a heart attack during unusual exertion. Since he was Cherokee, the medical examiner would have accepted the finding of the tribal doctor, who wouldn’t have bothered to look for a chemical imbalance in a man who died while dancing wildly.”

Mad’s breathing had gone shallow. Her tattooed teeth were rolling as she ground her real teeth.

I turned to the older woman. “Jim Pinegoose was having an affair, wasn’t he?”

“No!” Mad snapped without looking at me.

I smiled. “I looked up the newspaper coverage of your powwow. All kinds of wares were sold there, including his jewelry. Someone had bought his jewelry from a boutique in California. For a movie. She came to see the jeweler in person when she was here. He was smitten with her because, let’s face it, the gal oozed sex appeal. She and Jim worked out an arrangement. More jewelry for sex. It wasn’t really an affair, it was a business transaction.”

“She was evil—”

“She was a kid who was doing the best she could in the only way she knew how,” I said. “That ‘barter’ arrangement was consummated a few days before Jim’s death—sometime between September third, when the powwow began, and September tenth, when he died during the closing ceremony. Enough time for him to be toxified. How did you find out?”

“He told me,” Mad said. “He felt
possessed
.”

“He felt guilty,” I said.

The room was silent for a long moment. The only sound was the faint pop and crackle of the flame-heated hickory. Sally seemed delighted, the other women remained respectfully on alert, but Mad was practically hyperventilating.

I swiveled slightly toward Mad and inched closer. “You poisoned Lippy with mercury, at the deli, because it was the only way you knew to guarantee that his sister would come here the next day—September tenth,” I went on. “You weren’t even sure where she was, only that she had to be there on that day, the spawning day.” I looked at Sally. “What would killing Tippi Montgomery on that day have done, spiritually speaking?”

“It would have cleansed Jim Pinegoose’s soul,” Sally said.

“It was not his fault!” Mad hissed. “It was that succubus! She lured him to a sinful union, brought bad energy into our lives!”

“And that cloud stayed with you until you killed her,” I said.

“It hovered over the very earth on which we moved,” Sally said. “It poisoned all of the sisters of the coven.”

I looked around the circle. “So you all knew?”

“We all played parts,” Sally confessed openly. “One obtained the elements, two watched the individuals, another helped to transport Mad, our offended sister, to and from the unhallowed spirit.”

“You mean Tippi Montgomery? Your victim?”

“Call her by any name you like,” Sally said. “The deed remains the deed.”

“As does yours,” I said. “Murder. That’s a helluva lot more serious than what she may have done.”

I made a move as if to get up, only to have Dalila grab my right arm. I turned to her—and from the corner of my eye I saw Sally lunge forward. I thought she was going to attack me but all I saw was an explosion of yellow smoke. It smelled like burnt spinach pie and it coated my mouth and nostrils in the single breath I took before I could stop myself—something the Wiccans had been prepared for. My head didn’t swim, it flew, as though I’d taken a mega-hit of nitrous oxide. I was aware of a second burst, of green smoke—the counteragent, no doubt—as my body was maneuvered onto its back. Other than move my arms like weak turtle flippers, there was nothing I could do to fight back. I was on the rug looking up through tearing eyes at a purplish haze. I didn’t know whether they were going to poison me or cut my heart out or feed me to the cat. All I knew was that I was glad I’d anticipated something like this.

K-Two charged through the front door as if she were entering a steel cage. I knew that because I heard her cry. I sucked in the rush of fresh air that came in with her. I felt myself pulled aside by the shoulders as legs and forearms and elbows and even a head protected the area above and around me. I heard grunts and cries. I heard the cat yowl as if it had been stepped on. I felt my lips move, though only my brain spoke:
How ya feelin’ now, earth?

I was yanked again, dropped, there were more shouts and smacks, and then I was hefted upwards. My hazy mind pictured it like that scene in
Camelot
, when Lancelot rescues Guinevere from the burning stake . . . only without the girlish longing in my loins for Franco Nero. My head bobbled up and down as we rushed from the cabin into the darkness.

“Gwen, you okay?”

I said something that was intended to be “yes” but sounded to me like “whuuu.”

“I got water in the truck,” she said. “You’ll be better in a sec.”

I was bounced around a little more as she knocked down the tailgate of her pickup with an elbow and laid me down. The next thing I knew, bottled water was being dribbled into my mouth and rubbed on my face. It felt good, but mostly it was the fresh air that did it.

“You’re lucky,” K-Two was saying. “I just got here seconds before that juju exploded.”

I didn’t ask how she spelled that. I think I knew what she meant.

“You could’ve given me more notice,” she went on. “I had to drive like crazy.”

“Witches,” I said. “What—what—”

“They ain’t coming after us, if that’s what you’re asking. I knocked ’em around pretty good.”

“Cell picture, phone in my pocket,” I said. “Smoke.”

It took a second before K-Two got what I meant. “Good idea. Evidence.”

She left me, I heard her door slam, I saw her run toward the house, and then I lost her. When she came back, my head had cleared considerably.

“Got it,” she said.

“I also used my cell to record what they said while I was in there,” I said.

“Those crazies are toast,” she said admiringly.

I did hope so. I would hate it if my savior got into trouble for pulling my
tuchas
from the fire.

By the time other residents of the block had noticed the fumes, I was well enough to get behind the wheel of my car and drive out with K-Two covering my retreat. No one stopped us and no one called the police. What happened on Cherokee land stayed on Cherokee land.

Happily, one of those happenings was not my demise.

It was eleven p.m. by the time I got home, loaded the recording and photographs onto my computer, and paid K-Two the two hundred bucks I had offered her to come out and play bodyguard.

She initially declined the fee, since she was pleased to be able to use her skills to actually help someone. But I insisted.

“You saved my life,” I reminded her. “That’s worth at least a pair of c-notes.”

K-Two stayed to continue earning her money, just in case “those loony lucys,” as she called them, returned—and also to back up my story for the police.

When I had showered and made some licorice tea—I needed an aroma in my nasal passages other than rotten vegetables—I called Grant at home. It sounded, from his initial
fumfitting
, like I’d interrupted something that wasn’t a movie.

“I found out who killed Lippy and Tippi,” I said, “because they almost just killed me.”

He sounded skeptical. I told him what had transpired since I met with Fly Saucer the day before.

He told me he would be over to take a statement in a half-hour. I asked him to collect Detective Egan on the way so there wouldn’t be any hurt feelings.

It was nearly midnight when the two detectives arrived in separate cars, although Egan was also accompanied by a squad car. We sat in my living room as I told them what had happened, and played them the recording.

Egan was dazzled. Grant was annoyed. I was tired.

Early in the meeting, Grant called and asked a couple of cars to go to Whites Creek Annex and check out the story. When we were nearly finished, they reported that the only one there was Sally Biglake, but that the neighbors had seen the others go.

I gave Grant the names of the Wiccans I remembered so they could be found and interviewed.

“Interviewed
,
”
I thought as he said the word.
It sounded so much gentler than “questioned” or “interrogated.”
It was much more than a bunch of killers and their accomplices deserved.

Detective Egan talked to K-Two alone in the kitchen while Grant finished with me in the living room.

“I’m not happy with what you did,” he said. “Withholding information and confronting a person of interest on your own.”

“Would you have gone in and pinned their ears back?” I asked. “
Could
you have?”

“Eventually, yes,” he said. “But the stuff about Fly . . . about the students. You could have told me.”

“Promised I wouldn’t,” I said. “Not until I wrapped this up and they weren’t in any real danger.”

“For theft and assault,” he said.

“A cover-your-rump miscalculation and a rookie error,” I said. “I’ve made mistakes in my life, too.”

“And paid for them.”

We sat there without speaking. I was waiting. It wouldn’t make any difference in our relationship, but what I wanted to hear would make all the difference in whether I talked to him again, ever.

“What you did was impressive, I do have to give you that,” he said. “I had Fly in the crosshairs from the goatee hair, but not the students and certainly not Sally and her gang.”

I smiled as I rolled the semi-validation over in my mind. “Thanks.”

“You sure you don’t want to go to the hospital for a once-over?” he asked. “You took a direct hit of what the officers think was hillbilly knockout gas—what moonshiners used to use against the Feds.”

“And that is?”

“Baked, powdered manure and urine.”

As soon as he said that, I knew that I would never eat spinach again.

“‘Manurine,’” I said. “Well, at least it was organic.”

He looked at me, unsure whether or not I was joking. I wanted him to go home.

“I’m fine,” I added. “What I need to do now is sleep until about Thursday.”

“Well, I’ll leave the cops behind until we’ve talked to the Wiccans, determined who might be a threat,” Grant said. He shook his head. “That was crazy, you know that? Just—what’s your word?”