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After that, though, there wasn’t much to do except make another promise to let Boden know as soon as I found something, and then walk him to the door. Once there, he paused and gave me a searching look.
“I really appreciate you doing this,” he said, and his tone was a little too warm, too intimate, for my comfort.
“Pure self-interest,” I responded lightly. I needed to nip his intentions — whatever they were — right in the bud. “I have to live in this town. I don’t want everyone thinking I’m a murderer.”
“I know you’re not,” he said, still doing his best to hold my gaze.
“So do I — but I have a lot of work to do,” I told him. “Hang in there, and I’ll be in touch.”
To my infinite relief, he accepted the dismissal for what it was. He tilted his head at me, said a casual goodbye, and headed down the stairs.
I closed the door and leaned my head against it…and wondered if my life could get any more complicated.
Famous last words….
12
Pack Mentality
I hadn’t been lyingto Boden when I told him I had a lot of work to do. Although I realized that I’d probably have to end up in the clearing at one point or another, I needed to lay some groundwork first.
Well, first I actually had to respond to a series of texts from Hazel that I’d noticed when I unlocked my phone and entered Boden’s contact info. Obviously, she was worried that I was already locked up and awaiting trial or something.
I’m okay,I wrote back.Calvin asked me some questions, but I’m not under arrest or anything. Right now I’m just trying to figure out what really happened. I’ll be in touch.
She probably would have liked more details than that, but for the time being, it should be enough to let her know Calvin hadn’t shoved me in a jail cell and thrown away the key.
After that, I went into the office to get one of my Tarot decks. As I entered, Archie, who’d been sleeping in the little cubby under the desk, opened an annoyed golden eye and said, “Your boyfriend gone?”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” I replied. “He’s someone I know who needs help. You really need to stop seeing boyfriends in every tree.”
“Mixed metaphor,” he said crisply. Although he’d never told me much about his life before being turned into a cat, I sometimes wondered if Archie had been an English teacher or something back when he was human. He definitely had a pedantic streak that seemed guaranteed to pluck my last nerve.
“Whatever,” I muttered, ignoring the way Archie put his nose in the air and flounced from the room.
Good. I always worked better when I was alone.
I went over to the low bookcase on one wall and opened the carved wooden box that held my two favorite Tarot decks. Since this was about dark business, I opted for the Crow deck rather than the whimsical Everyday Witch one, since that particular deck was generally better suited for questions about love and prosperity, not trying to get clues as to who had murdered someone in your orbit.
Not that choosing the correct deck for the task at hand seemed to help much. I went over to my altar and did a simple three-card spread, and all I got was a muddle of minor arcana cards that didn’t seem to offer much in the way of illumination.
Well, sometimes it took a couple of tries to get a useful result.
However, after doing three more spreads and getting similar responses, I shuffled the Crow deck and put it back in the box, and got out my Everyday Witch cards.
No soap. The responses were even worse, if possible.
I suppose I could have gone through all fifteen of my decks — yes, I was a Tarot deck hoarder, sue me — but I already knew that if the universe wasn’t vibing to a particular means of divination, it was time to move on.
My pendulum and a bag of runes sat on my altar, and yet I decided there wasn’t much point in consulting them, either. No, it was obviously time to move on to the big guns.
I reached for the crystal ball on its heavy wooden stand and settled it closer to me. Thank the Goddess, it had survived being flung at Eugene Dershowitz without suffering any lasting damage except a couple of very small nicks. I had no reason to believe I’d have any trouble contacting Grandma Ellen with a new crystal ball, but frankly, enough of my life was still new and strange. I didn’t want to deal with breaking in a new crystal ball on top of everything else.
For a moment, I allowed myself to sit quietly, to put the tumult of the past twenty-four hours behind me so I could achieve the mental stillness necessary for spirit work. True, my grandmother tended to pop up in the crystal ball without a lot of effort on my part, and yet I still thought it was a good idea to keep up the routine, just so I wouldn’t lapse into any bad habits.
Then I focused on the image of my mother’s mother, a woman who would always remain perpetually pretty and in her early forties because of her untimely death from uterine cancer. Not that she ever seemed particularly troubled that her mortal life had been cut short; she appeared to be just fine with the afterlife she was currently living.
Her face appeared in the crystal ball, blue eyes a shade or two lighter than mine fixed on me, blonde hair waving around her oval face. “Selena,” she said. “It seems that tragedy has fallen on your little town yet again.”
