Something Wicked Read online

  Mary started her brood of children in 1976, when she was eighteen. They are:

  1. 1976–Isad

  This is where the account ends, I’m afraid. We know the eldest daughter’s name is Isadora, but the rest of Herman Smythe’s book has been lost. Older members of the historical society remember there being a leather book with notes and letters, into which this smaller, laminated volume was tucked, but it, like many things associated with the women who live at Siren Song, has gone missing.

  If you have further questions, please drop by the Deception Bay Historical Society next time you’re in town. I would be happy to discuss the history of the Colony with you personally.

  Joyce Powell-Pritchett

  Savannah closed the book and looked across the room at Joyce, who was standing behind the desk, still watching her.

  “May I ask what your interest is in the Colony?” Joyce asked.

  “I’m just educating myself.”

  “Has something happened that’s involved the sheriff’s department?”

  Savannah assumed it was normal curiosity on the part of Joyce, but she wasn’t about to satisfy it. “Only that I’m the newest hire at the department and have the least information.”

  “Ah.”

  “So, no one knows what happened to the larger book that this smaller one was inside?”

  Joyce sighed. “There’s even a question of its existence. The members of the historical society I referred to in my comments have not been . . . as reliable as I’d first believed. It may be that it exists, or it may be that they have it confused with Mary Beeman’s journal.”

  “There’s a journal?”

  “Several of Mary’s acquaintances have said so.” She stressed the word acquaintances ever so slightly.

  “Thank you,” Savvy said, handing the book back and heading toward the door. She could see that she needed to put an interview with Herman Smythe on her to-do list.

  “Looks like you’ll be taking a leave soon,” Joyce remarked to Savannah’s back as she pushed open the door.

  “How right you are.” It was like having a neon sign that read PREGNANT flashing above her head all the time.

  A few more weeks, she told herself. Only a few more weeks.

  CHAPTER 8

  The garden and graveyard behind Siren Song held many secrets. Catherine’s ancestors had had a very checkered existence, and sometimes when she reviewed their decisions, she wondered how she’d ever been born to such a wild and infamous crowd, and then other times she believed her very survival was because she was so clinical and cool and able to make the hard choices—the ones required after whatever newest and latest debacle occurred.

  The wind was up, and she could barely hang on to her hood and cloak. She hurried along the garden pathways, then stepped gingerly into the small graveyard, bypassing slapping wet bare branches from the maples and shivering birches, which were starting to overgrow on the grounds. First, she walked to Mary’s grave, with its headstone that read MARY DURANT RUTLEDGE BEEMAN, BORN JUNE 21, 1958, DIED APRIL 13, 1995. More than one lie was mixed into that information. After staring down solemnly a moment or two, she moved down the path, glancing back toward the lodge, where the downstairs lights gleamed through the windows, piercing the afternoon’s gloom.

  Mary’s real grave was toward the back of the graveyard and had been covered by several transplanted Mrs. G. W. Leak rhododendrons, which would bloom in April or May, depending on when they got their first good weather and the lush pink flowers unfurled, tiny stamens and pistils waving from their red-throated trumpets. Catherine knew Mary must have died this past spring, and after Earl had brought her body back to Siren Song, she’d planted the rhododendrons above her for a dual purpose: to honor her sister and to hide the fact that the ground in the back of the graveyard had been recently disturbed.

  Currently, the rhododendrons were thick green bushes with flat, wet leaves. Catherine glanced their way but walked past them, not wanting anyone from the lodge to see her and wonder what she was doing. She knelt down at Nathaniel’s grave, kissed her fingers, and placed them to the flat headstone. He’d been a good boy. Slow, but sweet, and the victim of another’s evil intent, or so she’d always suspected. He, of the boy children born to her sister, was the only one who had been allowed to stay.

  She waited another few moments, glanced back once more toward the rhododendrons, then retraced her steps to the lodge. She couldn’t give Mary’s real grave any attention without inviting a lot of questions, and she didn’t give Mary’s believed grave much attention, either, as she knew the prevailing thought among Mary’s children was that she and Mary had suffered a parting of the ways, one that had never been resolved, one that Catherine couldn’t forgive. In truth, though, yes, she and her sister had definitely suffered a falling-out, she ignored her sister’s “grave” mainly because of who lay inside the coffin.

  Entering the lodge by the back door, she passed through the length of a long, narrow storeroom, and she hung her cloak upon a peg near the alcove that led to the kitchen. Row upon row of home-canned goods lined the walls: peaches, pears, green beans, tomatoes, corn. Opening the door, she entered the alcove, an anteroom that held their sewing machine and was where she and Ophelia and Isadora made their clothes. The alcove led directly to the kitchen, and when she passed through it, she found Cassandra sitting at one end of the oak trestle table, her hands folded on its smooth lacquered top.

  “Where is everyone?” Catherine asked.

  “Upstairs. Lillibeth is in her room. Ravinia is planning to leave sometime soon, you know.”

  Catherine sighed. “I was hoping she’d be over that by now.”

  They stared at each other. Catherine had her problems with Ravinia, but Cassandra was the one she could fathom the least. Catherine herself had a bit of Cassandra’s precognition, but she could not see into Cassandra’s mind the way she could sometimes see into the minds of others, and she was always amazed, grateful, and a tiny bit frightened at the strength of the girl’s ability.

  “You’re mad at me for talking to her,” Cassandra said. “The detective.”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “I’m concerned. There’s a difference. I gave Detective Dunbar something that, unfortunately, may shine a light on us here. A light I would prefer not to shine, but I need her to get me some information.”

  “What kind of information?”

  Catherine smiled faintly. If Cassandra didn’t know, she wasn’t about to tell her. “What did you tell Detective Dunbar?”

  “I told her he was coming.”

  “Ah, yes. He’s coming.” Catherine closed her eyes and pressed a finger to her temple, fighting a headache.

  “It really is like the Cassandra of mythology, isn’t it?” the girl said suddenly, with some bitterness. “You don’t believe me.”

  “Oh, I believe you, all right. That’s not it. I just wish you hadn’t said anything to Detective Dunbar.”

  Cassandra shook her head angrily. “You can talk to her, but I can’t?”

  “You know it’s wiser to keep your predictions inside these walls.”

  “I think I’d like to be Margaret again,” she stated flatly. “Call me Maggie from now on.”

  “Cassandra.” Catherine was deeply shocked.

  “Rebecca and Lorelei have lives outside of these gates. Happy lives. Normal lives. And after Justice died, I thought things would change. You said they would change.”

  “You said ‘He’s coming,’ and you didn’t mean Justice,” Catherine countered. “That should be reason enough to keep things as they are.”

  “No, I don’t mean Justice. . . .” Cassandra darted a glance to the back window suddenly, toward the graveyard. “The bones,” she whispered.

  “The bones?”

  They both stared silently for a moment, and then Cassandra drew in an unsteady breath. “You don’t see them?” she asked her.

  “Them?” Catherine slowly wagged her head,
even while her nerves jangled. Sometimes Catherine could see a trace of Cassandra’s vision. Not often, but sometimes.

  “He came from bones.”

  “We all have bones,” Catherine said, seeking to deflect Cassandra from this line of thought.

  “You don’t need to treat us like children, Aunt Catherine. You’ve got to let go of us. You do know that.”

  “I made a vow to myself to keep you all safe.”

  “It’s not going to work this time. Our world is about to fall apart.”

  Catherine’s heart seized. “What do you mean?”

  “This isn’t working. You know it’s not working, but you won’t change. And you’re keeping secrets that are dangerous to us,” she accused.

  “I’m not keeping secrets,” Catherine replied, surprised.

  Cassandra’s blue eyes looked toward Catherine, but they weren’t seeing anything in the room. “There’s something about Lillibeth. . . .”

  Catherine shut her brain down, focusing on a black wall inside her head. She didn’t want to go there. Not now. Not ever. And she couldn’t have Cassandra seeing things she shouldn’t. This was new and unsettling.

  “You blame Mary for what happened to her. . . .”

  “Who is he? Who’s coming?” Catherine demanded. “The one from the bones?” Then, “What did you tell Detective Dunbar?”

  Cassandra stared at her but didn’t answer.

  “Cassandra, I need to know.”

  “Call me Maggie,” she said, suddenly standing erect. With a cold look that Catherine had never seen before on her expressive face, she stalked out of the room and away.

  For a moment Catherine just stood there. She didn’t know how much of what Cassandra had predicted was the truth and how much was what she simply wanted Catherine to believe. Hearing the squeak of Lillibeth’s wheelchair, she turned her head, and moments later the girl appeared in the aperture between the kitchen and the great room.

  In a dark blue dress, her hair in a golden plait down her back, her blue eyes full of questions, Lillibeth asked, “What’s wrong?”

  Cassandra’s words echoed in Catherine’s mind. You blame Mary for what happened to her . . . . “Nothing’s wrong.”

  “What did Cassandra see?”

  “She said that Ravinia wants to leave.”

  Lillibeth gave her a look. “Everybody knows that. What else did she see?”

  “Nothing specific.”

  Feeling a rising despair, Catherine fled upstairs to her room, but once inside she turned around and reversed her steps, heading down the gallery and past the girls’ rooms to the steep, narrow stairs that led to the third floor. She held her skirts in one hand and the rail with the other, climbing the full flight and feeling a little out of breath at the upper hallway. At the far end of that hallway was a set of double doors that led to a suite that was never opened. Mary’s suite, directly over Catherine’s head. No one ever went inside; Catherine hadn’t allowed it since Mary’s last lover staggered out after learning of Mary’s death and half fell, half ran down the stairs and outside and Catherine had locked the gates after him.

  Now, however, she pulled a ring of keys from her dress pocket, unlocked the right-side door, and pushed it open. The shriek from its rusted hinges made Catherine jump in spite of herself. Quickly, she closed the door behind her and turned the lock from the inside. Then she faced the musty, unused room, leaning against the door she’d just locked for support.

  A shag area rug in bright orange lay on the fir plank floor. A four-poster bed with a gold lamé bedspread stood in the center of the room, while wisps of silvery netting feathered from the canopy, waving in the breeze that Catherine’s entrance had created. It all looked fragile and weak; it would probably go poof and disintegrate if she touched it. She could count the times she’d entered this room since she and Earl had drugged Mary and taken her to Echo Island. She never liked entering it even when her sister was alive, especially during the heyday of Mary’s sexual activity, though there had been that time she’d sneaked in and rolled like a cat in heat upon the bed with the only man she’d ever loved.

  Pressing her hands to her cheeks at the memory, Catherine walked quickly to the mirrored bureau, opening every drawer, searching inside and behind and beneath. Nothing. She then moved on to the vanity, with no success, and finally reached under armchairs and peered beneath the rug, though there was clearly nothing there. On her hands and knees she fumbled around under the bed, but all she disturbed were spiderwebs and dust bunnies, which made her sneeze six times in a row.

  On her feet again, she walked to the closet, which was fairly small given the dimensions of the oversize room. She dug through shelves and folded clothes and hatboxes and kicked through the shoes lying haphazardly on the floor. She knew what she was looking for. A box. The matching one to the tooled-leather one where she’d kept the knife. She and Mary had each been given a keepsake box by their mother, and Catherine had kept hers in pride of place on her bedroom vanity while she was growing up. But Mary had squirreled hers away, and Catherine knew there were secrets inside, secrets that she now wanted to know more than anything. All these years . . . all these years! . . . and it suddenly felt imperative that she find the box and learn as much about Mary as she could. Both she and her sister had kept journals, though most of Catherine’s were full of the mundane moments in her life, the dreams of an adolescent girl who was shy around boys; while Mary, whose gift had driven her down a different path, had kept her journal secret and hidden away, and long after Catherine had given up on hers, Mary had kept writing. Once Catherine had come upon her, and Mary had screamed at her to get out, but not before Catherine had seen the words sexual power, and she’d known her sister was writing about her own dark desires.

  For the first time ever Catherine wanted that journal. She was no longer afraid to see what it contained and felt with certainty—as if Cassandra had told her herself—that there would be something inside that would lead her to find out who had come to Mary at Echo Island. One of her lovers? One of her sons? One of her daughters . . . ? No, Mary’s only daughters outside of Becca and Lorelei were part of Siren Song, and none of them were capable of taking a boat through the treacherous waters to Echo Island.

  Some stranger, then? Someone who knew how to navigate about the island? It truly wasn’t all that hard if you knew what to do and you had the strength to do it. Both were a necessity to avoid having your craft thrown against the rocks. At least that was Earl’s contention, and Catherine believed it. The foolish who set off for Echo ended up in real trouble, their boats smashed to smithereens, their lives at risk. There had been enough deaths to keep most people from bothering with the island, but there were always a few who took a gamble. The last attempt had been made by young men fueled by alcohol and the desire to prove something to their friends—a bad combination. All of them had failed spectacularly.

  But someone had made it ashore. Despite what she’d told young Detective Dunbar, Catherine knew Mary had not committed suicide. Her narcissistic sister would never take her own life. It was just a question of who had.

  He came from bones.

  Shivering, she pushed that thought aside, even while she determined she was going to have to go through the adoption pages, which were undoubtedly with Mary’s journal, and find out what had happened to the boys.

  CHAPTER 9

  The rain slashed against his office window as the wind rattled the panes and whooshed around the corners of the building. Hale looked up and checked the clock. He’d done the same thing every minute for the last ten. It was almost two o’clock.

  As if she’d heard the thoughts crossing his mind, he heard voices in the outside mezzanine and knew Savannah had arrived. Pushing back from his desk, he rose to his feet and smoothed an imaginary tie, as he wore an open-throated gray shirt and darker gray Dockers, decent enough for the office but sturdy enough when he went to the construction sites.

  He opened his office door and saw Ella just finish
ing with his sister-in-law. Savvy was saying, “I’d like to talk to you later, if that’s all right.”

  Ella’s face was ashen; her eyes were huge. “All right.”

  “You’re scaring my employees,” Hale told her.

  Savvy sent him a faint smile as she came his way. She wore black pants and a tan shirt, and he saw that she’d hung her black jacket on an empty peg. “I’m dripping water all over your floor,” she said.

  “You and everybody else. It’s unavoidable. Come on in.”

  As a detective, she wasn’t required to wear the regulation uniform that the deputies sported, which, she’d told him, suited her just fine, because interviewees in the course of her work found it less intimidating—at least until she said something that gave her job away, as she apparently had with Ella.

  He held the door and watched her walk across the expanse of his office floor and ease herself into one of the two visitor’s chairs. Circling the desk, he retook his chair. He knew she was here to ask more questions about the Donatella murders, but he couldn’t help just staring at her. It boggled the mind that she was carrying his child. His and Kristina’s.

  “How’s it going?” he asked her.

  “Good. Dinner last night was just what the doctor ordered. Wonderful stuff. Thank you.”

  He waved that away. “What did you and Kristina talk about?” Then he heard himself and said, “Never mind. That’s not why you’re here.”

  “No, it’s fine. We talked about the baby a little. It’s getting close now. Could be any time, really, and I think Kristina’s feeling . . .” She hesitated a moment, then said, “Scared. A little.”

  Scared a lot, he thought but said, “What about you?”

  “Oh, I’m fine.” A shadow crossed her eyes.

  “What?”

  “I’m being treated like a leper at work. No, that’s not quite right. More like an alien. It’s difficult.”