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Without thinking, I stepped forward and placed a hand on the Subaru’s mangled bumper. A shock of cold went up my arm, and I gasped and jumped back.
Immediately, Calvin looked over at me, phone idle in his hand. “You okay, Selena?”
I shook my head. “No,” I said, then hurriedly added as he began to frown, “I mean,I’mfine. But there’s something very wrong here. I don’t practice this kind of thing, so I don’t know exactly what went down with the car, but it definitely feels as if it was tampered with somehow.”
“‘Tampered with’?” he repeated. “You mean like cutting the brake lines or something?”
“Worse than that,” I told him. “Dark magic…a hex, I guess.”
Although his expression didn’t change, I could almost feel the way his body stiffened. He might have said he was willing to believe in all sorts of things, but when I came right out and started talking about hexes and dark magic, that was a whole other story.
To my relief, though, he didn’t try to contradict me. “You’re sure?”
“‘Sure’ is a strong word,” I said. “Magic isn’t science. It’s kind of the antithesis of science. All I can do is tell you how it feels to me.”
“Your instincts have been pretty good so far.”
Maybe. If they’d been really good, I would have sensed a dark cloud hanging over Athene…I would have had the foresight to tell her that driving off with Travis was a really bad idea.
Except if there actually was a hex on his car, that meant someone had been determined to get her no matter what the collateral damage. And if that was really the case, then it probably didn’t matter which way she’d tried to get out of town…any attempt at leaving would have been doomed to failure.
The chill that went over me right then didn’t have much to do with the dark magic I’d sensed on Travis’s Subaru…or the cold night air. The days had started to warm, but Globe still got downright chilly overnight.
Who would want Athene Kappas dead so badly, it didn’t matter who else got in the way?
Some people might have argued that because she worked so closely with Lucien, his enemies were her enemies. For all I knew, that was the simple truth. But….
Calvin stepped closer to me as he slipped his phone back into his pocket. His voice was calm as he said, “You don’t have to try to solve this tonight. We need to get Travis home.”
“What if the killer is already moving on to his next victim?” I asked. “What if that next victim is me?”
For a moment, he didn’t reply, only stared at the crumpled Subaru with unreadable dark eyes. Then he replied, “I don’t think that’s too likely. Athene was very closely connected to Lucien Dumond. Horrible as her death is, it at least makes some sense when you look at the situation that way. You’ve made it pretty clear you didn’t want anything to do with him, so I don’t know why someone would target you.”
I wanted to believe him. He sounded so calm, so plausible. I told myself that I was understandably freaked out. After all, I’d never been connected to a murder before, let alone multiple murders. And I’d talked to Athene earlier that day. She’d seemed shaken but otherwise all right. It was hard to believe she was gone.
And yes, I believed — well, actually, Iknew,thanks to communicating with my departed grandmother — that death on this plane, in this life, wasn’t the end. Athene had moved on.Trulymoved on, I thought, since I hadn’t felt a hint of her presence at the accident scene. No lingering dregs of fear and pain like there had been down by the San Ramon River. Her end might have been a violent one, but it hadn’t consigned her to an eternity of haunting this lonely stretch of Highway 60.
“You’re probably right,” I said. “Let’s take Travis home.”
Travis lived in a shabby little bungalow on one of Globe’s hillier streets, in a neighborhood that reminded me somehow of San Francisco — probably because of the steep hillsides and the collection of last turn-of-the-century homes that clustered there. Of course, in San Francisco, even Travis’s tiny house would have been worth more than a million, while I doubted in Globe it would go for a tenth of that.
He got out of the Durango’s back seat, thanked Calvin, and headed up the front walk, looking pretty spry for someone whose car had just flipped a few times. Then again, he was probably hurrying so he could get inside and smoke a bowl for his aches and pains. If I’d been in his shoes, I would’ve been thinking the same thing.
Calvin pointed the SUV back toward downtown so he could take me home. As he pulled up next to my Volkswagen at the back of the store, he said, “You sure you’re going to be all right?”
Part of me wanted to say no, I wouldn’t, just to see whether he’d offer to sleep on my couch and keep watch all night. But I held my tongue. I didn’t want to make him think I couldn’t look after myself…even as I wondered whether I would be up to the task.
He walked me to the back door and watched as I let myself in, but his manner seemed almost oddly formal. Most likely, he’d realized it was the wine talking earlier and nothing more, and was now probably grateful for the phone call that had interrupted him before he did something really stupid.
“Call me if you see or hear anything that seems off,” he said.
“It’ll be fine,” I replied, even as I wondered if it really would be. Two people dead in the span of forty-eight hours. Who else would be next?
His mouth tightened. “I hope so. But I mean it. Don’t hesitate — just call if you feel even a little weird about something.”
I wanted to tell him that I was already feeling pretty weird. But hinkiness wasn’t enough of an excuse to ask him to stay and babysit me, so I just nodded. However, I couldn’t quite keep myself from slanting a sideways glance up at him as I asked, “Shouldn’t I be calling Globe P.D. if something really does go down? This isn’t even your jurisdiction.”
If anything, his lips compressed even further. “I’m not sure the Barney Fifes are up to this sort of thing.”
