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No surprise there given his pride and joy was a manual. The last thing he’d want was to scratch or—heaven forbid—dent the thing. “Did you dump him at home or at the ranger station?”
“Neither. He wanted to go straight to the morgue to examine the remains.”
I grimaced. “Whatever’s responsible for these murders didn’t leave a whole lot behind to examine.”
“I think he wanted to do some sort of magical examination. I don’t think he trusted Ashworth’s declaration there were no detectable spells or magic layered onto the remains.”
“I’m gathering he had the good sense not to say that to Ashworth.”
My voice was dry, and her lips twitched. “It appears the slap over the ear he received the last time he said something about our favorite witch’s abilities did do the trick.” She rested a hip against the bench. “I get the feeling those remains are not the reason for the vague uneasiness I was sporadically receiving before you went to sleep last night.”
“No. Sorry, I thought I had everything locked down.”
“You did—if it had been anything more substantial, I would have contacted you. So, give.”
I quickly told her about the woman in white and the unsettling visions I’d had before Aiden had so delightfully woken me. “There was no threat in her presence, but those images suggest that might not remain the case.”
Belle frowned. “A ghostly woman in white is a common occurrence throughout many cultures, but they’re usually associated with some sort of tragic event—such as the loss of a husband or child. They’re known for seeking vengeance.”
“She carried the body of what I think was her child in the vision.”
“But not when she was following you, which is odd. It suggests there’s some other reason for her presence here.”
“Could she be the mother of one of the victims?”
“The current victims? Unlikely, as her appearance happened too soon after the deaths.”
“We haven’t got a time of death for the first victim, though.”
“It’s still unlikely.” She took a sip of coffee, her expression thoughtful. “But I guess it’s possible there are more victims out there than the two we’ve found. Maybe you should mention it to Aiden and see if there’ve been any recent suicides.”
“I actually don’t think it was recent—she felt far older than that.”
“It’s still worth asking, especially if the suicide happened soon after a child had been killed.”
I nodded. “In the meantime, we can hit your gran’s books and see if she has anything on white ladies or flesh-stripping, bone-stacking demons.”
“She likely has—it’s just finding which books
they’re in that’ll be the problem.”
Her grandmother’s handwritten indexing system tended to be somewhat haphazard, which made it hard to find anything quickly. But recent events had made us realize we needed an easier means of quickly accessing the information within the vast number of books—most of which were secured off-site, as we simply didn’t have the room here to store even a quarter of them.
To that end, Belle had asked a techie friend of hers to help catalog and then convert them over to an easily accessible electronic format. One that would not only provide a backup in case the High Witch Council ever discovered we had Nell’s library—which should, for all intents and purposes, have been gifted to the National Library on her death—but also protect us against a natural disaster destroying part or all of the library. Castle Rock might not get much in the way of floods, but it was in an extremely high-risk fire zone. And while I’d recently added a fire protection spell to the multiple layers protecting them, there was no guarantee that what worked against unnatural flames would work against real.
“How much of the library have you and the lovely Kash managed to convert?”
“About a third, I think. It’s slow going thanks to the age of some of the volumes.”
“I’m thinking you’re not overly worried about the length of time it takes.”
My voice was again dry, and she grinned. “Indeed no. I am, in fact, due over there this afternoon for another session.”
Amusement twitched my lips. “And will this ‘session’ actually include any scanning or text conversion?”
Her grin grew. “Once we’ve satisfied other hungers, quite possibly.”
I chuckled softly. “Then you’d better go get ready. I’ll go through your gran’s index and see what I can find.”
