"You"re shedding all over my heirloom tapestry." I waited for his retort but there wasn"t one. "Gunnar? Are you still here?"
Penny"s eyes were swiftly returning to their normal color.
"Gunnar! Don"t go!"
The gold in Penny"s eyes receded and Gunnar"s familiar blue returned.
It was like a bad cell phone connection. Any second the line could go dead.
"You said Karen was with you."
"Same room, different dimension."
I nodded as if I knew what that actually meant. "And she"s okay?"
"For the moment. Good thing Midge doesn"t know her b.u.t.t from a hole in the ground. They"re trying to erase Karen"s memory of Sugar Maple, and so far all they"ve done is make Bettina"s right eye twitch and give Verna hives."
I tried to wrap my brain around the fact that my friends had been plotting against me. I must have made a few pithy and unprintable comments because suddenly poor Penny was laughing so hard by proxy that she hacked up a Noro-sized hair ball.
"Calm down, Terminator," Gunnar said. "It"s not what you think."
"Oh, so now you can read minds. That Fae afterlife must be some special place."
"They"re trying to keep the peace."
It was my turn to laugh up a hair ball. "By kidnapping Luke"s ex-wife and stealing her memories? Somebody call the UN. Sounds like amba.s.sador material to me."
"They like things the way they are. They want to support you but the whole human thing is freaking them out. All they want is to keep the status quo, and the only way they can think of to do it is to send Karen back to Boston and maybe then they can pick up where they left off."
"I don"t see the connection."
"She came to town and my mother went nuts. She leaves and my mother settles back down. And as a bonus, maybe Luke goes after her. It"s win-win."
"Have they met your mother? Who in her right mind would ever believe Isadora would back away from a fight?"
"Solve the human problem and everything else will fall into place."
"Except it wouldn"t," I said. "She"s not giving up until she breaks through the banishment."
"They haven"t thought it through," he said with a shrug of cat shoulders.
"They should have," I snapped. "And what happens to Steffie if their idiotic plan succeeds? Are we supposed to just let her go?"
Another one of those long silences that made me crazy even when I wasn"t talking to a cat.
"It"s different for us," he said finally. "You die. We move on."
"Don"t play the semantics game, Gunnar. We"ve been friends too long."
"And don"t kill the messenger," he shot back. "You wanted to know what was going on and I told you."
"I"m not letting Steffie go."
"I didn"t think you would."
"And they have to stop s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g with Karen"s memory."
"Agreed."
"That"s it?" I asked. "You tell me all of these terrible things are going on but you don"t tell me how to stop them. You don"t tell me where Karen is being held or where your mother lives or where she gets her power. The only thing I know for sure is that there is no way in h.e.l.l I"m going to let your mother win."
"Good," he said. "Now let me show you how to fight her."
26.
KAREN.
They weren"t trying to help me reach Steffie.
They were trying to brainwash me.
Literally wash away all my memories of the last few days in Sugar Maple.
Which, considering the fact that I"d had a car wreck, been thrown into the mud, found myself trapped in a plastic bubble, flown across town in a four-wheel drive, and had a heart-to-heart with the world"s hunkiest ghost, was a whole lot of washing.
My spectral visitor promised me that Midge and Bettina and the others didn"t have the skill to manage brainwashing a flea, but they thought they did and I should play along.
"My daughter needs me," I told him, struggling to push back my bitter disappointment. "And I need to save her."
He said he understood but I wasn"t sure he really did. I wasn"t sure about much of anything. All I knew was that I was starting to feel like a bystander in my own life, unable to do anything more than watch as random fate made all the decisions for me.
I was a nurse. A trauma nurse, for G.o.d"s sake. I had skills, important ones. I knew what to do in an emergency. I was the one you wanted on your side when things went bad. I was clearheaded, not p.r.o.ne to panic. At the hospital I had been the alpha in the pack, the one everyone else turned to for guidance.
And now here I was, curled up in the fetal position in a darkened room, in a strange house, while I waited for a ghost-a ghost!-to tell me what to do next.
I had believed Midge and Bettina and the others when they told me they would help me reach Steffie. I had opened my heart to them, allowed myself to be vulnerable in a way I hadn"t since my baby died, and for what? For nothing. It had all been a lie, a trick to get my mind open so they could wipe away the last few days and protect their precious status quo.
Then again, how could I be sure that golden-haired ghost was telling the truth? I didn"t even know his name. For all I knew, he was some kind of illusion meant to keep me docile, conjured up by the merry little band of paranormals who had brought me to the Inn in the first place.
I wasn"t sure how long I"d been there, but judging by the light seeping through the closed blinds, it had to be at least a couple of hours. Where were Luke and Chloe? Why weren"t they looking for me? Sugar Maple was the size of a good sneeze. How hard could it be to find a skinny, freckled, red-haired human in a town filled with magical movie stars and supermodels?
I heard footsteps moving along the hallway, and I closed my eyes and leaned back against the pillows.
"All she does is sleep," Midge complained as they paused outside my room. "Is that one of the side effects?"
"Do I look like a scientist?" the one named Verna said.
"This quibbling isn"t doing us any good," Bettina said in a soothing tone. "We followed the instructions to the letter. There"s no reason it shouldn"t work. It just takes time."
The door squeaked open and they stepped inside. I willed myself to relax.
"She"s such a teensy little thing," Midge said. "I want to take her home and give her a good meal."
"Pack her a lunch to go," Verna said. "All I want is for her to forget any of this ever happened."
Soft hands touched my forehead and cheeks, and I felt a deep sense of peace flood through my body, followed by a series of quick sharp stings over my left temple.
And then I felt nothing.
LUKE.
The door to Sticks & Strings was wide-open. A half-empty cup of tea rested on the worktable next to one of Chloe"s hundreds of socks-in-progress. I tossed my stack of handwritten notes and printouts on the table.
I didn"t have a good feeling.
"Chloe!" I moved quickly toward the back of the store. "Are you in here?"
I flung open the door to the storeroom, looked behind six-foot-high stacks of boxes. This was one time when I was glad I didn"t find anything.
"Chloe!" I shouted, louder this time.
I banged on the closed door to the bathroom. Again there was no answer. I didn"t wait for an invitation. The door hit the wall and boomeranged back at me. No sign of Chloe.
I checked the alley behind the store. Everything was quiet.
Where the h.e.l.l was she?
Penny the cat meowed loudly, then suddenly appeared in front of me, back arched, tail twitching. I don"t know a whole lot about cats but that didn"t seem like a good thing to me.
"What"s wrong, Pen?" I bent down to scratch her behind the left ear but she backed away.
She emitted a series of noises that almost sounded like human speech. Coupled with the fact that she and Chloe shared the same amazing golden eyes, the effect was unsettling.
h.e.l.l, it was more than unsettling. The hackles on the back of my neck stood up straight.
Maybe I was missing something. I looked under the table, in the storage closets. I broke into a cold sweat. I told myself that she had probably gone searching through the Book of Spells for some help finding Karen but I wasn"t buying it.
I phoned Janice. She hadn"t seen Chloe since this morning at Fully Caffeinated. Lynette said the same thing. I stepped out onto the sidewalk and scanned the street. No sign of her anywhere. No sign of anyone.
I unleashed a stream of curses as I stepped back inside the shop. Penny gave me a "stupid human" look, then leaped back into her basket of unspun yarn. Nothing like being shot down by a fat black cat in need of portion control.
I"d been a homicide detective for a long time. I"d been a cop even longer. And if there was one thing I knew, it was that no crime got solved without a h.e.l.l of a lot of help from a h.e.l.l of a lot of people. All those rookie cops and beat reporters and ordinary citizens who went out there and gathered up the puzzle pieces for the lead detective to put together into a whole that was definitely more impressive than the sum of its parts.
I"d found the mother of all puzzle pieces over there in the library, but without Chloe"s input, I was still spinning my G.o.dd.a.m.n wheels. What good was it to know when something was going to happen if you didn"t know where?
I looked down at the notes scattered across the worktable. Charts on Saturn"s...o...b..t. Timelines cross-referenced with anecdotal evidence of Fae attempts to co-opt the town.
"d.a.m.n," I muttered. That slice of decorated birch from some three-hundred-year-old canoe had gotten mixed in with my notes. I"d better get that back to Lilith ASAP before Penny decided to use it as a scratching post.
I wasn"t a big fan of folk art, but there was something eye-catching about the simple drawings. Something familiar. Representations of the sun, the moon, a waterfall.
I pushed the pages of notes aside and took a long look at the rug or whatever it was Janice had used as a table covering last night. Lots of trees and leaves. The sun and moon. The waterfall surrounded by craggy rocks and sharp-angled cliffs. A squiggle in the center of the waterfall pulled me closer. It looked like a variation on the symbol for infinity.
I spread the piece of canoe bark down next to it.
Lots of trees and leaves. The sun and moon. An eagle with wings outstretched.
And the infinity symbol in the same position at the center of the waterfall.
A rush of adrenaline hit my bloodstream hard.
Symbols were important in Sugar Maple. The Sticks & Strings logo was the symbol of a beautiful woman holding aloft a glowing sun. Chloe"s parents" graves were marked by simple stones engraved with another glowing sun and a crescent moon. Isadora"s son Dane had burned a star into the bark of an ancient sugar maple near Snow Lake to commemorate the murder of my friend Suzanne.
I shot over to the library and caught Lilith as she was getting ready to close for the day.
"I took this by mistake." I carefully smoothed out the piece of bark.
"Oh, Luke, thank you but that could have waited until tomorrow." She caught herself and winced. "I guess none of us knows what tomorrow will bring, do we?"
"I need your help again." I pointed to the infinity symbol at the center of the waterfall. "Chloe has a piece of needlework with the same symbol."
"Her tapestry." Lilith nodded. "I"ve seen it. If you look closely, you"ll see the symbol for witches who fled Salem, were-clans-we"re all represented."
I was fixated on just one thing. "That symbol in the waterfall. Does it have any significance?"
The answer was on the tip of her tongue. "It"s the symbol for New England Fae."
The adrenaline rush escalated. This was it. This was the puzzle piece I needed. Had Chloe already figured it out and was on her way there or had she found Karen?
I didn"t know. Not knowing is h.e.l.l to a cop. We want the solid, the real, the concrete. The only surprises we liked were the ones that came gift-wrapped at Christmas and birthdays.
The time for thinking was over.
It was time to act.
27.