The Witch's Throne (Thea Drake Mystery Book 1) (Thea Drake Mysteries) Read online

  No, that’s not possible, of course. Nothing like that is possible.

  I disconnect without saying anything else, like an idiot.

  I’m standing at the dining room window facing the front yard when headlights swing into our lane from the road. My stomach flips. I have interacted with way too many other human beings today. My limit was met hours ago.

  Who would be here on a Thursday evening?

  I watch the vehicle disappear into the timber, then pop out, circle the front drive, and park in the pool of light under the outdoor lamps. Two people step out, a man and a woman. They’re in the shadows before I can see their faces. I watch them climb the steps.

  The woman reaches the porch light, and I see her face. The man comes up behind her and rests a hand on her shoulder.

  I recognize them. I can’t believe it. As if I’ve summoned them from memory.

  Mitch and Rita.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Who’s here?” asks Juliet, who has appeared beside me at the door.

  My youngest daughter has supersonic hearing when it comes to tires crunching on our drive. We so rarely have visitors; the poor girl jumps up every time the water-meter reader or the UPS delivery truck shows up.

  The doorbell buzzes.

  Juliet presses the intercom and shouts, “Who is it?”

  “Thea?” It’s Rita. I hear Mitch cough in the background. “Thea, it’s us. Can we talk to you?”

  Before I can think, Juliet unlocks and swings open the heavy front door, and there they are. Stylish, polished, well-rested. Models of urban success. Well, urban compared to me. Success compared to anyone.

  Rita’s hair is straight and shiny, cut in an angled bob at her shoulders. She’s dressed in fitted jeans and boots, a cream-colored sweater, designer handbag. Makeup covers her freckles. Beside her, Mitch is in skinny jeans and a button-down with rolled up-sleeves, but his shoes are leather, his rings platinum. The snake tattoo is longer, the tail thick on his forearm where it disappears beneath his sleeve. His hair is still straw yellow, but it’s now styled in a smooth and high pompadour.

  They look so grown up.

  “Hi!” Juliet welcomes these strangers who know my name. She’s doesn’t remember them. She was only three years old when Mitch and George had their falling out.

  “Hi,” Rita says to Juliet. “We’re old friends of your dad’s. And your mom, too.”

  They enter the high-ceilinged foyer, the staircase winding away behind them. I close the door and lean against it for support.

  I can’t believe they’re here. I saw them in the crowd at George’s funeral, but I didn’t speak to them. I didn’t speak to many people that day.

  “We would have called,” says Mitch. “But we didn’t have your number. Only…George’s.” He glances at Juliet with a sad smile.

  “Jules, why don’t you go upstairs and watch TV with your sister.”

  “No! Are you going to talk about Daddy?”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “Then I want to hear.”

  “I’ll tell you after, I promise.”

  “Are you going to talk about ghosts?” Her eyebrows raise in interest. Ghosts are the always the reason friends of her father show up at our house. She knows this.

  “Maybe a little,” says Mitch.

  “Then I definitely want to hear.” Her arms cross her chest.

  Mitch and Rita slide their eyes back and forth, following the tennis match of our negotiations. My serve.

  “If you go upstairs with your sister now, I will tell you a ghost story tonight when you go to bed. A good one.”

  She scrunches her nose, considering this.

  “One you’ve never heard before.”

  A small set in her chin tells me she has decided the terms are acceptable. She nods once.

  “Okay. Bye,” she waves to Mitch and Rita. We all watch her run upstairs.

  I invite them into the TV room. They sit next to each other on the couch. Rita swipes the crocheted throw to the side and places herself at the edge of the cushion. Mitch sits next to her, leaning forward, elbows on knees, hands clasped.

  “I’ll get to the point,” says Rita. “We’re going to Portico.”

  I haven’t even sat down yet. I’m still holding the remote to turn off Cupcake Wars.

  “And we want you to come with us,” says Mitch.

  “To Portico? When?”

  “Tomorrow morning. We’re flying out of St. Louis. We wanted to drive down here first to tell you in person.”

  “Why?”

  Rita stands up. “To find out what happened to George.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She takes the remote from me, points and clicks the TV off, and drops it on the table. “You’ve seen the video, right? Beverly’s?”

  I nod.

  “We think there’s something she’s hiding about that night.” She’s standing close to me, face to face, except that she’s wearing heels making her about three inches taller. “We think she had something to do with George’s death.”

  “No.” I step back. “It was an accident.”

  She steps forward. “What if it wasn’t?”

  I back up until I hit the armchair behind me and sink into it, but she advances on me, standing over me now. I’ve always found Rita intimidating—her strength, her beauty, her capability—since the first moment I saw her in the woods. Her first words to me were a command, even as she rescued me.

  “You think this is all coincidence?” she says, her voice low and urgent. “George exposed that woman as a fraud, and he was going to do it again. Now he’s conveniently out of the way just in time for her husband’s new book release.”

  “And don’t forget she’s claiming that George has suddenly switched sides,” Mitch adds. “She’s putting words in his mouth, claiming he’s a believer now, that he was actually killed by this curse.”

  It’s true. Beverly Donneville is a liar, a fraud, and a terrible person. Still…murder?

  “No. I can’t believe it. No one would kill for book sales,” I say.

  Rita exhales with force and glares at me. Mitch gives me the same sad smile he gave Juliet.

  “No,” I repeat. “That would make her a monster. That would make her evil.”

  Rita arches an eyebrow.

  The Donnevilles had been famous since the seventies, so when they showed up in the small town of Red Rock in January of 2010, it was a big deal.

  George had published The Widow’s Revenge by then, and he was looking for his next project. At the top of his list: proving Beverly Donneville was a fraud. And since Red Rock was only a few hours’ drive from Homer, he couldn’t pass up the opportunity.

  George was still teaching at the time, so he traveled on weekends, watching Beverly Donneville conduct her “readings” in Red Rock, visiting Carol Merrit at her new home in rural Wisconsin. During the week, he shut himself in his office every evening, writing until early morning when he would catch a couple hours’ sleep, then teach all day.

  Essentially, I was alone with two young children for three months. During spring break in March, he stayed in Red Rock the entire week, and when he finally came home, he didn’t even tell me.

  I found him in his office, writing. He had arrived in the middle of the night, and when I was feeding the girls breakfast that morning and heard noises coming from his office, I carried Juliet upstairs, Lydia following, to find him typing on his laptop at his desk, smoking his pipe.

  He looked up when I entered and beamed at me.

  “Hello, Drake women!”

  Lydia ran to him and threw her arms around his neck. Juliet squirmed in my arms. I supposed she wanted to follow her sister, but when I put her down, she toddled to George’s desk and began to throw objects and papers to the floor.

  George stood, placed his pipe in the ashtray, and came around to me, Lydia hanging on to his waist.

  “I have news.”

  “Good news?”

  “Good and
bad.”

  I took away the lighter Juliet had snatched from George’s desk. “Give me the good.”

  He took my hand, squeezed it. “I did it. I proved she’s a fraud.”

  “Look, Daddy! Look!” Lydia jumped at his side, holding open her sketchpad for him to admire her work.

  “Really?” I squeezed back.

  He nodded. He released my hand and took the sketchpad from Lydia, scanning the page. “I love it!” he declared, tugging her ponytail.

  “It’s over?”

  “Well…”

  Juliet had the ashtray now. I took it away and picked her up again, and she immediately squealed, arched her back, magically became twenty pounds heavier.

  “Give me the bad news.”

  “The police will be here sometime this morning to arrest me.”

  I stood there stunned, Juliet thrashing in my arms until I lowered her to the floor and she returned to ransacking the desk.

  “Dad!” Lydia was tugging at his sleeve, wanting either more praise or the return of her sketchpad from her father who was standing there looking absolutely delighted with himself.

  Finally, my capacity for speech returned. “For…what?”

  He sucked in air through his teeth. “Obstruction of justice, withholding evidence, possibly identity theft.”

  “Identity theft?”

  “Daddy!”

  He handed Lydia the sketchpad and picked up Juliet, tossing her in the air, once, twice. She cackled, thrilled.

  Lydia crossed her arms, watching, annoyed that she was too big to be tossed in the air.

  “Stop, she just had oatmeal. You’ll make her puke.”

  George tucked Juliet into the crook of one arm, pulled Lydia into a hug, then me, holding all three of us close. “It was worth it, Thea. I did it. I proved that woman was a goddamn liar.”

  “George,” I hissed, “language.”

  He mocked chagrin, going wide-eyed and pouty-lipped, making Lydia giggle.

  “I don’t understand. Why are you being arrested? What happened?”

  Juliet tugged at his beard and kissed his nose. He beamed at me. “I turned myself in. I’m Thomas Cady.”

  “He called me,” says Mitch. “The night he died, George called me at, like, two in the morning.”

  “What?”

  “I think…I know he’d been drinking. He went on about you, the girls, the old days. He was all over the place. We hadn’t spoken in years, then he calls and rambles on for an hour. All of the sudden, he starts talking about Allerton.”

  My stomach flips. “About…”

  “Yeah,” says Rita. “Big coincidence, huh? Beverly knows all about it.”

  Mitch leans forward and places a gentle hand on my knee. “George said, ‘Promise me you’ll remember Allerton, and if something happens, if I’m in trouble, promise you’ll tell Thea about it. You’ll tell her to look for Allerton.’”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know what Allerton is.”

  Mitch and Rita exchange a look.

  “It was a Halloween prank our first year of college,” says Mitch, “a few weeks before we met you. But it doesn’t…” He’s shaking his head, frowning. “It doesn’t make sense. We thought you might know why he mentioned it.”

  “I’ve never heard of Allerton. What kind of prank?”

  “Allerton was one of the residence halls,” says Rita. “In the late 80s, it was closed and it sat empty for years. But there was no good reason. There was this huge empty residence hall on campus and no one knew why. So, our freshman year, George got this idea to start a rumor about it having a sordid, evil past.”

  “He started it the week before Halloween, telling everyone he knew that when Allerton had been open, a student had brought a talisman in from his trip to the Amazon.”

  “A talisman?”

  “A charm, an animal bone…I honestly don’t remember the whole story. It was twenty years ago.” She looks at Mitch for help.

  “I don’t remember, either. The story was far-fetched. He said the student wore this talisman and went insane, and then a bunch of other students—I think he said twelve?”

  Rita nods.

  Mitch continues. “Twelve other students went insane…I think he said they were hallucinating, speaking in tongues, I don’t remember what else. The gist was these students went crazy and eventually murderous, someone got killed, and Allerton was closed up and chained off, standing empty for years because no one was brave enough to go inside.”

  Mitch leans forward, rubs his hands together, getting into the story.

  “So, it’s was Halloween, right? People are eating it up, spreading it all over campus. So then George starts telling everyone that on Halloween night, he’s going inside Allerton to see how long he can last. Over two hundred people showed up at Allerton to watch him go in.”

  “How was he going to get inside if it was chained up?”

  “I don’t think he planned that far ahead. The whole point was the story, to see how far it could spread, to see how many people he could convince. And it worked. The crowd got so big that the police showed up and dispersed everyone. He never went inside Allerton.”

  “But…” I chew my thumbnail, thinking, “they did tear it down. The next year, right?”

  “Ninety-five, I think.”

  “So, why would he tell me to look for Allerton? It hasn’t been there for years.”

  “I don’t think he meant for you to go there. He never went inside. Allerton was all about the story,” Rita says.

  “Then what am I supposed to look for?”

  “I think he was speaking metaphorically,” says Mitch. “He told me to remember it. Not to actually go there.”

  “You said he wanted me to look for it, though.”

  “Like…look for the information, I think. Which means, the more important question is,” says Mitch, “how does Beverly know about it?”

  “That’s what we’re going to ask her,” says Rita. “What if George had planned to set her up again, like he did with The Demon Cabin? Giving her false info, letting her use it, then showing everyone how it was faked?”

  Not many people paid attention to Beverly Donneville’s readings at the Demon Cabin until she began replaying messages from the spirit of a man named Thomas Cady.

  Although The Demon Cabin Murders of Westerland County was still legend in the small town, no one had much desire to bring it back into focus Everyone wanted to forget what had happened to those two girls.

  On the morning of December 8, 1958, eleven-year-old twins Kay and Kathy Merrit went missing. They left the farmhouse with their sleds to venture out in the gorgeous five-inch layer of pure white snow that had fallen overnight. Their brother Robert, a boy described by locals in the vernacular of the time as “not quite right in the head” had stayed home with his mother Carol.

  When they girls did not return for the noon meal, Carol sent their father out to search for them.

  Walter Merrit found his daughters in the abandoned icehouse on neighboring land, an old, windowless, crumbling stone cabin by the creek that had not been used in forty years, except as a secret hideout for all sorts of activities, innocent and not.

  The girls had been dead for several hours. They were laid out on their backs, the soles of their feet pressed to each other, their arms splayed as though making snow angels. Blood soaked the floor of the cabin and the snow drifted at the door.

  Their eyes were wide open. Their throats had been cut.

  Only the girls’ footprints and the tracks of their sleds led up to the cabin. No other footprints were visible anywhere.

  Their killer was never found.

  People were quick to conjure evil theories—an abusive and deranged relative (usually the brother, though he’d been home with his mother the entire morning), a run-of-the-mill murderous drifter, the devil himself. Consensus settled on the general presence of demons—for what else could explain the purging of blood, the absence of footprints?—and a violent tra
gedy turned an abandoned building into a Demon Cabin, a place of Very Bad Things.

  Stories collected over the following decades, the spirits of the Merrit twins serving as demon gatekeepers who lured innocent souls to the entrance of the cabin. If you chose to enter, you faced the risk of being seized in payment to their master (the brother or the devil or the drifter, depending on the version) and left to torment on a nightmarish supernatural plane of torturous existence.

  Within a year of their daughters’ deaths, the Merrits moved to Wisconsin, taking Robert with them.

  Beverly Donneville claimed that her spirit guide led her to Red Rock to help free the tortured spirits trapped at the Demon Cabin.

  This spirit guide put focus again on the girls’ brother, relating through Beverly that there was really no evidence to show Robert was at home all morning, only his mother’s word.

  Beverly named her supposed spirit guide: Thomas Cady.

  Never before had Beverly Donneville given a name—let alone both first and last names—to her spiritual guides. Her followers, as well as skeptics, threw themselves into tracking this man down.

  Research on Thomas Cady revealed that he did exist. He was born in 1955, had a social security number, even owned property at one time. But all record of his existence ended in 1978. No family or friends came forward. He had disappeared.

  Through readings, Beverly related Cady’s story: when he was twenty-three years old, Cady was hitchhiking across the country with two friends when, after a heated argument between the three of them, he set off on his own.

  After walking for two days, he came across the cabin, took shelter for the night, and—according to Beverly—was possessed by a demon. Through this demon’s control, Cady was made to commit several murders (though Cady could not confirm the identities of his victims, claiming he never knew their names) while traveling back east through the country all the way to the coast, where he stole a fishing boat, navigated to open water, and threw himself overboard into the Atlantic.

  In 1978.

  Cady said the demon held his spirit prisoner, that he was trapped with the spirits of other victims, including Kay and Kathy Merrit, and that the spirits of the girls themselves had told him that their mother was lying.