CHAPTER FORTY

The pressure of the sheriff ’s forearm made it hard to breathe and impossible to scream. He grabbed my hands in one palm and shoved me down the hall.

He wasn’t going to throw me over the railing into the atrium, was he? I kicked, but he lifted me as if I weighed no more than a kindergartner and forged ahead. My flailing legs couldn’t reach the walls, and my thwarted screams were too dull to draw attention against the party roaring below.

We passed the entrance to the service stairwell. There was only one place we could be going. The tower. My mother’s vision. It was coming true. Fear ripped through my body. The sheriff planned to push me off the tower.

At the end of the hall, he pinned me against the wall, my throat still wedged against his arm. With his other hand, he felt above the doorway and drew down a skeleton key.

“Still there, after all these years.” He pushed me in and bolted the door behind us.

I hit the floor and scrambled to a seated position to catch my breath. The tower clearly hadn’t been used in years. Dust carpeted the floor, and mouse droppings scented the air. My birthmark seared my shoulder.

“You killed her,” I said. “It was you.”

The sheriff towered over me. Moonlight through the dirt-streaked windows half-lit his face. “You’re right. It was me.”

He didn’t bother to hide it. He didn’t mean for me to leave the tower alive.

“It was a mistake, wasn’t it?” I said. “You thought she was someone else.”

The sheriff ripped a filmy curtain from the window and tore it down the center. “A mistake. One you should be glad for.” He snorted, as if laughing at a joke. “Funny how it all comes full circle.”

Bert Dolby couldn’t have known about the fixer ahead of time. No one knew, except the FBI. He’d told everyone he was at the speed trap. He wasn’t. The sheriff had been at the library for a different reason.

Craig Burdock had been there, too—or he’d been intending to come, but Lalena had waylaid him. “You couldn’t have confused the fixer with Craig,” I said. I backed to the wall. Bert was between me and the exit, but I had to try.

He didn’t reply. He twisted the curtain into a rope and tested it between his hands.

“What did Craig Burdock have on you?” I asked when I could finally speak. “He had something on you, something he thought you’d pay for. You thought the fixer was your blackmailer and killed her instead.”

I made a dash for the door and flipped up the bolt. My hand had dropped to the doorknob when I was knocked to the ground. The sheriff pushed me toward the opposite wall and tied my ankles with the twisted curtain. I scratched and pounded, but my efforts might have been flies pestering him for all the difference they made. With the other half of the curtain, he tied my hands behind my back.

He raised an eyebrow at my screams. “I’m not going to bother gagging you. No one can hear you up here.”

He was right. We could barely make out the sounds of the party below. I could yell myself hoarse with no effect.

“Why?” I asked. “Why did you do it?”

“Listen, I’m sorry, but it’s got to be this way. The Dolbys have been Wilfred’s backbone since there was a Wilfred. I won’t have anyone blacken us.”

“You’re talking about your father, aren’t you?”

“You’re like everyone else and want to simplify it. Life isn’t black and white, Josie. It isn’t good guys and bad guys. My father didn’t have a choice.”

My brain whirred. There had to be a way out of here. But how? With my hands and feet tied, I couldn’t attack the sheriff. The room held nothing but crates of rotting books, long forgotten.

“Does this have to do with the old mill?” I said.

“You think it’s cut and dried. Not so. Unionizing the mill would have brought its end for sure. Mills were shutting down all around here. Add labor demands, and it would have been a matter of months, tops, Wilfred could have survived. All Dad did was help end it without violence. The Wilfreds aren’t innocent, either.”

Now it became clear. Someone died when the mill burned down and the Wilfreds skipped town. The sheriff was complicit. Somehow Craig Burdock had found out about it and had been blackmailing the sheriff.

“Murder is violence,” I said.

“So is destroying the futures of generations of mill workers.”

Sam and Bert were doubles, in a way. Yet Sam had taken a different route. Bert Dolby had cited honor as his reason to cover up his father’s misdeeds. Sam didn’t bother with that. He simply lived an honorable life.

“So, you’re letting Sam take the rap,” I said in a low voice.

“No. He won’t be around to take the rap. Not after tonight’s trout dinner.”

The sheriff threw open the tower window, and my every muscle tensed. The sound of a few beer-loosened voices drifted up. He shut the window.

“We’ll wait. I’ll be back when the party’s over. Too bad you’ll have an accident.”

The bolt thunked into place behind him.

* * *

I didn’t think twice.

I closed my eyes and let my lips recite the words, “. . . and the King and Queen and the whole court waked up, and gazed on each other with great eyes of wonderment. And the horses in the yard got up and shook themselves, the hounds sprang up and wagged their tails, the pigeons on the roof drew their heads from under their wings . . .”

I couldn’t remember the rest, but it didn’t matter. Something inside me ripped open. The spell lifted. I choked in a breath as my every cell contracted and released.

In that moment, the world was enriched tenfold. The night sky deepened into a moist charcoal gray with ribbons of moonlight through the tower windows. The scent of old wood and mildewed pages suffused the room. My fear was sharper, too, and my throat filled with the taste of metal.

I was magic again. “Sam,” I said involuntarily.

The sheriff was framing him for January Stephens’s murder and planned to make sure he’d never be able to prove otherwise. I imagined Sam’s shadow moving against the lit shade in Big House’s kitchen like a puppet in a Kabuki show. He would be leaning over the stove, chopping parsley and tossing it with a spatula. He was making a dinner that would kill him. I could do nothing to save him. Or . . .

Rodney. I remembered how I’d slipped into his body accidentally. Could I do it now? Could Rodney feel that I’d reawakened my power? As if he’d read my mind, I heard Rodney’s mew from beyond the tower door. I choked back a sob of relief.

I had to try. I closed my eyes and imagined Rodney’s silky fur and stiff whiskers. I imagined what he would see and smell.

All at once, I was low, low to the floor like a cat. I raced down the service staircase, threaded my way through the crowd and through the kitchen’s cat door with Darla calling after me. I raced across the wet lawn, my belly dampening and the smells of a thousand things I couldn’t name filling my nose. A garter snake slithered through fallen leaves, drawing my attention, but I forced my thoughts toward Big House. I leapt through the cat door, its flap smoothing my ears.

The kitchen was warm and smelled of something good. Fish. Sam looked down at me and smiled and told me a shred of yesterday’s roast chicken was in my bowl.

My vision blurred up close, but every movement in the distance was crisp. I absently noted a spoon under the refrigerator, probably forgotten long ago.

In the delicious wash of fishy fragrance, something smelled wrong. Very wrong. Rodney backed up, and I felt myself easing from his body. No, I urged him. We’re going forward.

My muscles tensed, then released as I leapt onto the counter and landed as lightly as if a fly. The poison was in a cast-iron skillet, woven with the scent of trout, butter, and lemon. I recoiled from the toxin.

“That’s hot, Rodster,” Sam said. “Get down.” He lifted me to the floor. As I watched from the linoleum, he scooped the trout to a plate and carried it to the table. And he sneezed.

That was it. I jumped to the table, then to Sam’s shoulders. He reached for me, but I held tight and rubbed against his ears and neck, maximizing exposure between fur and skin.

It worked. He sneezed again, hard, and stretched an arm to the table for a tissue. I took this pause to shove my nose under the plate’s edge and flip it to the floor. It felt only natural to raise a paw and knock the wineglass off the table next, mixing glass shards with Sam’s dinner.

* * *

I sucked in air. I was back in my body on the tower floor and surprisingly calm. Below me, the party continued, its noise muffled by two floors of books and someone with a banjo and a microphone.

Magical energy pulsed through my system. The last time I’d used this energy, I’d nearly killed myself and destroyed the library. Now the library was full of people I could accidentally injure—or worse.

As the moon rose, light shifted, casting streaks on the dusty floor. Wooden crates of old books and magazines were pushed against the wall. Some moaned in low tones, as if they’d been sleeping and hadn’t used their voices for decades. Old copies of women’s magazines chattered like housewives. Outdated phone books recited numbers in a robotic tone.

I had little idea of what my magic could do. Could it unlock the tower door? I could roll into the hall and try to get someone to notice me. I closed my eyes and focused. “Bolt, unfasten yourself.” The door was still.

At some point, cheers arose from the atrium, followed by “Happy Days Are Here Again” pounded out on the organ. Something joyous had happened. I couldn’t imagine what it might be. Did anyone even miss me down there? Probably the sheriff had told them I had a headache and wanted to stick to my apartment.

My legs cramped, and my shoulders ached from being tied. My magic couldn’t help that, either.

Eventually, voices filtered onto the library’s grounds. The party was moving to Darla’s. Then all was quiet.

This is when it would happen. When my mother’s vision would become reality. I shivered, and not from the October night.

Footsteps sounded in the hall outside. The bolt creaked and the tower door opened, the hall light framing the sheriff’s bulk. Before he had the chance to speak, I said, “Do you really want to do this? The Dolbys are about honor. This is not honorable.”

He didn’t speak, at least not with words. His eyes told about his shame, about how this would be the last time, this would finish it. Then he would go on being Bert Dolby, Wilfred’s hero. He crossed the tower room in two steps and yanked me to my feet. He thrust open the window. Cold air rushed around us.

I opened my mouth to shout, but the sheriff covered it with his sweaty palm. “Silence,” he hissed. “I locked up downstairs. No one is here. No one can hear you.”

Within seconds, he’d untied my ankles and wrists. With one motion, he pushed me halfway over the sill of the old wood-frame windows, face-first. Far below stretched the porch’s overhang, trimmed in jagged wooden gingerbread. If that didn’t kill me, the gravel walkway below would.

The books screamed. My body heated with their energy. Books, I thought, help me. No—adrenaline fanned my energy into too broad of a cloud. God only knew what might happen. I had to tell them exactly what I wanted.

The sheriff heaved me further over the window. Only the crook of my hips held me in.

Books, I amended, trap him.

“What the—?” the sheriff said and loosened his grip.

Crates of books rocked side to side, creaking. One wooden strip peeled off a crate with a snap, then another. Dizzy, I pulled myself upright and watched in breathless wonder.

A book shot out of a crate and hit the sheriff in the Adam’s apple. He backed toward the far wall as another book, then three, then a dozen whirled toward him with the velocity of boomerangs. The half-dozen crates splintered with the force of books seeking release.

My ears roared with energy. I’d done this. I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry.

The sheriff shouted and turned his back. Books rapidly stacked on top of each other like leaden dominos, bricking him into a corner. He thrashed and pushed with his football player’s body, but the steel energy of the books held him. My body churned hotter than lava.

“Josie,” Sam yelled. “Are you up there? Say something.”

Sam! “I’m here, in the tower,” I yelled, keeping my vision and my magic focused on Bert Dolby.

Sam rushed through the open door. He halted a few feet from me. “Josie?” His voice was strange, quiet and unsure. “Are you okay?”

All at once, I went cold and let out a shuddering breath. A layer of books fell to the floor as the sheriff began to pound his way out.

“Sheriff Dolby,” I said. “He killed Bondwell’s operative, and he tried to kill me, too.”

Another layer of books hit the floor. The sheriff ’s head and chest appeared as he punched a stack of magazines. Each thrust of his fist came with a grunt powered by anger.

Sam smiled, belying his anger. With one hand, he calmly leveled a handgun at the sheriff. His other hand slipped handcuffs from his coat pocket.

“Bert Dolby, you’re under arrest.”

The books let out an exhausted breath. I sighed with them.