Doyle Times Police Blotter, Monday, May 20th
Mirror, Mirror: Police responded to a report of a break-in at the 900 block of Stetson Avenue on May 19th at 8:33 PM. The homeowner reported he hit the male intruder in the face with a baseball bat and added that the man was “in his bedroom mirror.” No intruder was found.
Dazed, I stared at the night sky. Brayden and I lay tangled on the ground. The nearby oak smoldered, its trunk split in two. Flames licked its branches. Lights sped, wavering, across the bottoms of the clouds. I was floating, somewhere else, somewhere not of this world. I reached for his hand and it seemed to slip effortlessly into mine. Brayden. Brayden and I floating…
My brain snapped back to heart-stopping reality. Spotlights. Those were the spotlights from the circus. And Brayden…
He groaned, and my muscles slackened with relief. He was alive. “Brayden?” I shifted.
He didn’t respond.
I jolted to sitting and grabbed his arm. “Brayden?” The word was a shout.
“I’m… okay.” He rolled onto his side and sat up. Anxiously, he peered at me and ran his calloused hands over my arms. “Are you okay?” He struggled to standing and helped me up.
“I’ll live. Which is more than I can say for that oak.” Smoke spiraled from the glowing embers where the lightning had struck.
He grimaced. “That was a close one. I should have been paying more attention.”
My chest tightened. “Paid attention? How could we have avoided that?” I asked shakily. “The Wyrrd Systerrs did this.” They’d sent a freaking lightning bolt after us. It was magic way beyond anything my sisters and I had ever pulled off.
“A lightning strike is...” He trailed off. “They can do that?”
“Apparently.” My fists clenched. I stared at the tops of the tents, their flags limp in the still air. They’d nearly killed us both. What had I been thinking, coming here with Brayden? But not thinking had always been my problem.
“But that’s not possible is it?” he asked. “How can you be sure it was them?”
“I know,” I said hotly. “I felt it. I felt them.” And even if I’d come here with my sisters instead of Brayden, I don’t know how we could have stopped it. Could Mrs. Steinberg have? I hoped the old woman had hidden magical chops. In the meantime, I couldn’t let Karin and Lenore get anywhere near this circus.
Shadowy figures ran toward us across the dirt parking lot.
Brayden pulled his phone from the hip pocket of his jeans. “I’m calling the fire department.” He nodded toward the broken tree. “The grass here is pretty green, but a spark could blow into some dried tinder.”
My chest tightened. Fire was a constant threat in the Sierras. A memory of smoke pouring from Ground’s broken windows flashed into my mind. I briefly closed my eyes and swallowed.
Tom Tarrant jogged to us. Two of Ground’s regulars raced behind him.
Brayden cursed. “My phone’s fried. Yours?”
I rummaged in my purse and pulled it free. I touched its screen. The phone flashed to life. I handed it to Brayden.
“I saw an explosion,” Tom said. “What happened?”
“Lightning strike,” I told the reporter.
The regulars, an older couple, glanced knowingly at each other.
“Weird. There weren’t any predictions of lightning on tonight’s weather report.” Tom pulled his phone from the pocket of his jeans. He snapped a picture of the shattered oak. His football player’s shoulders shifted beneath his tan blazer. The reporter moved in for a better angle.
“You’re right, Tom,” the older man, Al, said. “There’s something strange about this. And look at those lights.” He pointed to the clouds.
“Those are searchlights,” I said, “from the circus.”
“They look like alien lights to me,” his wife, Sandra, said.
I started to laugh then realized she was serious. “But… You can see—”
“I’m just telling you my lived reality,” she said coldly.
The lights were eerie, zipping across the base of the clouds. But I didn’t see how she could think they were anything but circus lights. I tried again. “But that’s not—”
“There are other levels to reality,” her husband said.
“Exactly,” she said.
And yeah, I believed that was true. But sometimes, a spotlight on clouds is just a spotlight on clouds.
Brayden said something into his phone and moved toward his Jeep.
“Are you sure you’re okay, Jayce?” Sandra pulled her purse closer against her rounded body. She glanced skyward.
“I got a jolt,” I said, “but I’m fine.” How had my phone survived? More of my protective magic?
“A jolt?” Al asked. “Did you lose consciousness?”
“No. I mean, I don’t think so.” Had I?
“Don’t think so?” Al asked sharply.
“I guess. I mean...” It had been all so confused. One moment Brayden was carrying me, and then we were on the ground.
“Lost time,” Sandra muttered.
“What?” I asked, ill at ease.
Al tugged her away. “Let’s go. There could be residue.”
“Oh, the Navy!” she said.
The two hurried away.
“Residue? The Navy?” I asked, bemused. “What does the Navy have to do with anything?”
Tom pocketed his phone and came to stand beside me. “You should stay up-to-date on the latest UFO news.”
“What UFO news?”
His wholesome face creased in a grin. “The military’s been studying the effects of proximity to UFOs on their pilots.”
I blinked. “There are so many things wrong with that statement.”
“The effects of radiation,” he clarified. “Of course, the UFOs could be Russian and not from outer space. But it’s interesting, isn’t it?”
“It was a lightning strike,” I said slowly and motioned toward the oak. “There are no UFOs. The Navy doesn’t need to be involved.”
“Well,” Tom said, “they wouldn’t be, but there have been a lot of—”
“Tom.” Brayden nodded to the reporter and handed me my phone. “Get good pictures?”
“They won’t make the front page. Unless there’s more to this story?”
“The fire department’s on its way,” Brayden said. “If all goes well, there won’t be.”
I shook my head, because I had a feeling that wasn’t what Tom had meant.
Brayden put an arm around my shoulders. “And now I’m taking this lady to the hospital.”
“What?” I asked. “Why? I’m fine.” And I really didn’t like hospitals. Not as much as Lenore hated them, but still. They’re no fun, even if you can’t see ghosts.
“After a lightning strike?” Brayden said. “We’re both getting checked out.”
“Need a ride?” Tom asked.
“No, thanks,” Brayden said. “I’ve got this.”
And he did.
*****
We were both fine, of course. But in Ground the next morning, customers huddled close and spoke in low voices. Their glances darted to the door whenever someone walked inside. If the newcomer was a local, the talk continued. A stranger, and the conversation stalled, the discussion picking up in fits and starts.
I topped up cups and eavesdropped, my skin prickling with unease. One word kept floating through the coffee shop.
Aliens.
I wanted to laugh, but I couldn’t. Just like I couldn’t tell anyone that Doyle had a fairy problem. It wouldn’t make anyone feel better. People went missing. People died. And if the cause was aliens or fairies, the result was the same.
Returning behind the counter, I pretended to straighten jars of coffee lotion and hand scrub. I closed my eyes and centered myself. Energy built in my heart, and I shot it through the protective grid Karin and I had built around the coffee shop. The cords of harmony around the brick building heated in my mind, and I imagined the feel of their protective warmth on my skin. Karin had been resistant to the spell at first. She hated casting spells — even positive spells — on people without permission. But a true protective ward was impossible in a public place. And she’d agreed that this being Doyle, my customers and I needed a safeguard.
The red-paned door jangled open. My customers looked up, then resumed talking.
Deputy Ben Daley walked inside and to the counter.
I shifted behind the register. “Hi, Deputy Daley. Your usual?”
He nodded. “Coffee. Black. Large.”
We went through a variant of this conversation nearly every morning. I asked if he wanted his usual, and he agreed and told me what his usual was. Honestly, by now, I knew the order. Large. Coffee. Black. But I smiled and poured the coffee into the biggest cup we sold.
I passed it across the counter to the grizzled deputy, and the older man paid.
“You get your truck checked out?” he asked.
“Yes. I mean, I’m getting it back from the shop today.” Any minute now, in fact. Hermia had told me she was coming to Doyle to visit her sister and would bring the truck to me. My friend was a bit late, but she was doing me a favor, so I wasn’t going to complain.
“They say what was wrong with it?”
I hesitated. I still didn’t understand what combo of magic and mechanics had been at work. Not that Daley would believe the magical side of things. “Um, I haven’t had a chance to talk to the mechanic yet.” My gaze flicked toward the door. If only Hermia would walk through and explain for me. “I’ll find out later.”
He clutched the coffee cup and didn’t move. “I knew your aunt,” he said abruptly.
“My aunt?” An ache stabbed my chest. Our aunt had raised my sisters and me. She’d died over a year ago. It felt like yesterday.
His gaze sharpened. “She was a straight shooter. Wouldn’t put up with any nonsense.”
I swallowed. “No. She wouldn’t.” What was he getting at? That I wasn’t a straight shooter? But I was. Or at least I tried to be, even if nonsense, monkey business and shenanigans had once been right up my alley. It was all part of my quirky backstory.
“And she’d tell the police if she knew about any funny business,” he said.
“Funny business?”
“I’m talking about Marsh,” he said.
“Deputy Marsh?” Why would he think I’d know anything?
A coffee cup shattered, and I started. Darla bustled from behind the counter to clean up the mess.
“You said you were friends with his wife, Gertrude,” the deputy said. “You must have known Marsh.”
I needed to learn not to talk so much, especially to cops. And all these questions had zipped way past the Getting Weird exit. We were now at the borders of Downright Suspicious. “Well, we sometimes had dinner — the four of us, I mean. Dinner and game nights.”
“Game nights?” His bushy gray brows drew together.
“You know. Board games. I prefer beer pong, but I’ll play the occasional board game to be sociable.”
He stared at me.
I clamped my jaw shut. Why, why, why had I said that?
“He say anything about his work?” he asked.
“N—no.” He certainly hadn’t mentioned Ben Daley had lost a piece of evidence. “I mean, he worked in the evidence room. What was there to say?”
Daley’s eyes narrowed.
The bell over the front door jingled. Grateful for an excuse to talk to anyone but Ben Daley, I looked toward it.
Hermia, in all her garage pin-up glory, strolled into Ground.
Thank you, Universe!
She saw Ben Daley and stiffened. Hermia tucked a stray curl inside the blue handkerchief around her head and sauntered to the counter. “Hi, Jayce.”
“Hi, Hermia. Can I get you some coffee?” I asked.
“Thanks,” she said, pointedly ignoring the glowering deputy. “Black please.”
I turned my back on them to pour the coffee. When I returned to the counter, they were in the same positions. Hermia smiled like a python considering a tasty rabbit. Daley looked like he was chewing kale.
“You fixed her truck?” he asked her.
She sipped her coffee and didn’t look at him. “Mm. Good stuff Jayce.”
“Well?” he asked. “Did you fix her pickup or not?”
Deliberately she turned and eyed him over the rim of her cup. “What’s it to you?”
His nostrils flared. “Don’t make me ask you again.”
Her jaw set. “I’ll—”
“It’s fine,” I said quickly. “She fixed it. What was wrong with my truck?”
“You had a leak,” she said. “I replaced the hose and added new steering fluid.”
My shoulders relaxed.
“Would that make her truck go all over the road?” he asked.
“It depends on how low the steering fluid was. She told me someone refilled it before it got to me, so I can’t answer that question.”
“Huh.” Daley looked from her to me. His expression hardened. He strode from the café. The door banged shut, and a customer made a small cry. The woman clapped her hands over her mouth and colored.
Hermia’s shoulders sagged. “What a jerk. And you owe me one. There was nothing wrong with your truck, not even a slow leak. Were you texting and driving?”
“Do I look that dumb? Don’t answer that.” I edged the tip jar closer to the register. “You know Ben Daley, I take it?” They’d obviously pissed each other off. But when? Hermia lived all the way in Angels Camp. Or was this fallout from John Marsh getting Daley kicked out of the evidence room?
“He made John’s life hell.” She ducked her head and took another sip of her coffee. “At least, that’s what Gertrude told me.”
Ah. “How is Gertrude?”
“Awful.” She slapped my keys on the counter. “I’m headed to her house now.”
“Let me get you something for her to go. My treat.”
I made a double espresso for her sister, the copper machine whirring and hissing. The nice thing about running a coffeeshop was suspects did tend to wander in and out. But I was damned if I knew what incisive questions to ask my friend about Ben Daley.
And I didn’t like thinking of Hermia as a suspect. I didn’t like thinking of Ben as one either. I really hated it when customers turned out to be killers. Worse would be learning a friend was a murderer. But Hermia’s no killer.
I handed the drink across the counter. “Give Gertrude my best.”
She raised the espresso in a salute. “I think you just did. And I’ll send you my bill.”
“Thanks.”
Hermia turned and paused. “They know, don’t they?” she asked quietly, nodding toward the murmuring customers.
“Know?”
“That John’s death was no accident.”
I couldn’t tell her my customers were more concerned about an alien invasion. “He was well liked.”
She nodded, her chin quivering, and took another sip of her drink.
I studied her. Was the tension between Daley and Hermia because her brother-in-law had derailed his career? Or was there something more?
I shook myself. Hermia and Deputy Daley weren’t the problem. Three Systerrs in a circus were.
And I had no idea how to solve it on my own.