Chapter Ten

Constantine was gone the next morning when Maddy woke. She stepped softly from the guest bedroom toward her bedroom, feeling the house completely empty around her. Not a soul or a sigh. The shards of mirror still littered the bedroom floor. She cleaned them up with an ordinary dustbin and broom, but she took them out to the garbage can by the curb rather than keep them in a wastebasket in the house.

There were no dried forget-me-not petals mixed in the broken glass.

There was no evidence of fresh petals on the bed or on the floor.

But for the broken mirror, she could have pretended it had been a bad dream. All of it. Even the pin pricks of cuts all over Constantine’s hands and face.

Now she wasn’t only expected to believe in ghosts. She had to believe in spirits who could manifest physically and cause harm—possibly even death. Maddy held one particularly wicked shard up to the morning light streaming into the bedroom window. The razor’s edge of the glass winked with a seemingly evil intent in the sunlight.

She had never thought of Gracie’s job as dangerous. Crazy, reckless of her potential—meaningless sometimes—but never dangerous. She must now reevaluate it all. She did so as she showered, soaping and cleansing all the little places where glass had stung her skin.

Maddy left three voice mails for Amelia. She wanted to warn her about Mark Smith. The other woman didn’t return her calls. She didn’t try to tell her about the vanity, its mirror or the forget-me-nots. She couldn’t separate the supernatural elements of the tale from the decidedly natural elements.

Her body was still flushed and tender.

Even as she showered and pulled on jeans and a sweater—a hand knit lavender sweater—she remembered Constantine’s taste and touch. She didn’t know where he had gone or what he intended to do, but she did know now that he was definitely not under Evelyn Wilde’s thrall.

What that meant to any possible relationship between them, only time would tell.

They were both still very much haunted by what had come before in their lives even if no actual ghosts trailed them at all.

∗ ∗ ∗

It was Sunday—a day of rest for most of the town, but not for Maddy. She liked occasional moments of leisure as much as the next person, but she could usually only achieve them after a long day’s work.

With her cell phone in her pocket on vibrate and a pick in her gloved hands, Maddy began to break up a semicircle of lawn behind her house where she’d received permission from the landlord to install a water feature. She would build the fountain and surrounding garden beds during winter’s slow months so it would be ready for use come the spring.

She hadn’t been busting up grass and clods of dirt long before she was interrupted.

“Hi, Maddy,” Tom McCall said. She dropped the pick’s head to the ground and leaned on its long handle. Though she had much on her mind, she made the effort to smile at the sad-eyed deputy. She was rewarded by an answering smile that just missed reaching his mournful eyes. “Sheriff sent me to fetch you. He’s found something he thinks you need to see,” Tom said.

Maddy’s heartbeat quickened. Had Constantine thought of something concerning her sister’s murder and gone to pursue it before she woke this morning?

“Of course,” she said. She pulled off her gloves. “Let me stow these things.”

Quickly, she took the pick to her cart and left it and the gloves with her other tools. She kicked the dirt from the lug soles of her work boots and took them off inside her back door. Then she pulled off the coveralls she’d donned to protect her clothes. She switched to a pair of more stylish boots in fawn-colored leather.

While she hurriedly prepared to go with him, Tom waited patiently. He stood in the sun with his hands in his pockets, the soft smile still on his face, his eyes still ringed with circles and droopy.

She wondered about his sudden exit last night and the evidence of a sleepless night in the darkness under his eyes, but she didn’t ask.

She tried not to make him wait longer than necessary. She was ready to follow him to the squad car he’d left near the trash can at the curb in minutes. As she passed the large black receptacle, thinking of the shattered mirror and its shadows shut inside chilled her.

∗ ∗ ∗

They drove out of town and up the road leading to High Lake. Maddy recalled vividly her walk the day Gracie’s body was found and was glad for the blast of heat coming from the vents of the cold-natured deputy’s car. Especially when they passed the leaning fence post where the strange crow had perched that day with talons sunk into decayed wood. Impossibly, as they passed, a large crow sat there still.

It had to be a different bird. Or the same bird, possibly, returned to a favorite roost. But it looked for all the world like it had been waiting there all along for her to pass this way again. It seemed as if Tom let off the accelerator when they approached and the car slowed long enough for her to see the crow’s sharp beak open in a cry made soundless by engine noise and the rushing air from the vents.

She couldn’t be sure if he’d slowed on purpose to get a look at the large bird himself or if it had been only macabre imagination on her part. The car seemed to speed up again and they left the crow behind.

Relief filled her when they didn’t take the dirt and gravel road that led to her stepsister’s first grave. She hadn’t realized how much her tension had built until they passed the road and her whole body went limp. But then the relief drained away when Tom put on his signal and slowed to turn onto the road that led to Scarlet Falls.