Something wicked, p.21
Something Wicked, page 21
But I had business to attend to, and I didn’t think the lawyers would appreciate Bob tagging along.
Chapter Forty-Three
Outside, I briefly considered driving, but the lawyer’s office was only a few streets south on Beagle, and it felt overindulgent to take the car such a short distance. It wasn’t raining right now, and I was hoping I’d only need to fill the car’s tank every two or three weeks. In the summer I might even get one of the old bicycles in Eudora’s basement tuned up and leave the car at home most weekdays.
For now, it was worth it to drive to and from the shop, especially when I had things to bring in or had to get groceries on the way home. But for a quick trip to the lawyer’s office, I suspected I could survive a few blocks, even in such a frigid breeze. I tightened my coat around me and hugged my purse to my chest, imagining a sharp breeze catching hold of the envelope and taking it off down the block. Talk about a nightmare.
Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I spotted a figure in a familiar trench coat, but when I turned my head, there was nothing. Bob’s antics earlier had me on high alert looking for unsavory characters in rain gear.
Squeezing the deeds, wondering if I was starting to get paranoid, I picked up my pace. Maybe I should invest in a safe deposit box or something. These papers felt much too important and valuable to keep lying around Eudora’s house. Just having them with me right now felt dangerous. It was too much anxiety, thank you very much.
I got to the lawyer’s office a few chilly minutes later but almost immediately realized the door was locked.
“No, no, no,” I muttered under my breath, pulling the door handle a few times as if it might change its mind and suddenly decide to be open for me.
I stepped back, my hair whipping around my face, and spotted a sign with the hours. The sign said five o’clock, but there was a sheet of paper taped inside the glass door that read, Internet down, closed for the day. Back Monday. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Of course.
Imogen had warned me they were closed early on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but obviously she hadn’t known they’d have a mid-Friday internet outage. This was truly just my luck.
Then, as I quietly cursed the note, I spotted something else. Since I’d never been to their office in person before, it made sense I would never have seen it, but all the same it felt like something I should have known.
Underneath the firm’s name on the door was a second logo, this one reading “Mountain View Management” and indicating the upper floor office of the same building. They didn’t have hours listed or a buzz code.
Everything I could see indicated they were part of the same office as the law firm.
Curiouser and curiouser.
Now I had something else to ask the lawyers about, because they couldn’t claim to be ignorant of what was going on with Eudora’s business dealings if they happened to be in the very same office as those dealings.
Logically, it seemed most likely that the lawyers were also responsible for the property management business, or were at least overseeing it, which was unusual to say the very least.
There wasn’t much I could do about it now. I’d make an appointment for Monday and come back then. Hopefully, nothing too disastrous would happen between now and Monday. That might be asking for a lot, though.
I decided to take a shortcut back to the store, hoping to cut down on my wind exposure. The sky had gotten incredibly dark, again with heavy black clouds looming overhead and the earthy smell of rain lingering in the air. Tiny droplets spit down, and I had no doubt I was going to get poured on any moment.
In spite of it only being midafternoon, it was dark enough the streetlights came on automatically.
I tucked my purse inside my coat and headed down a narrow lane between the streets. Soon I was back in the alley that led to the shop, surprised by how dark and empty it was. There was absolutely no activity here, and I immediately regretted not sticking to the main streets.
As I crossed the vacant lot behind the store, all the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. Despite the howling wind, I heard the distinct sound of footsteps hammering behind me.
I was being chased.
At first I wondered if it was my paranoia acting up again, or if the dark atmosphere and low lights had reminded me of that terrible dream I’d had about being on the streets with the sound of footfalls, but not being able to see who was coming for me.
As the sound grew closer, I decided I didn’t care if it was paranoia or my overactive imagination—I just wanted to get back inside. Immediately.
The lot was big, but the shop was so close I could see the back light and the distinct shape of my car. I didn’t need to get far—I was almost there.
Run, I thought.
It didn’t matter if I was imagining it, I just needed to get moving.
But whoever was chasing me was very real, and much faster than I was. One moment I was running, and the next I was hitting the ground hard. Because I was holding onto my purse inside my coat, I didn’t have an opportunity to brace my fall. I landed on my elbows first, then slumped onto my face, the rough pavement scraping my skin.
As I rolled over to see who had knocked me down, the sky let loose and began to pour.
Chapter Forty-Four
Fierce drops of rain assaulted me, blocking out my vision and stinging the fresh scrapes on my skin. A dark figure loomed over me, black hood obscuring their face, and while I didn’t see any sign of a weapon, that didn’t mean there wasn’t one.
“I don’t have any money,” I squeaked. Under normal circumstances I’d just hand over my purse, but with the deeds inside, I was pretty willing to put up at least some kind of fight against a mugger.
“That certainly isn’t true,” the masculine voice scoffed. I immediately recognized it as belonging to the man who’d been speaking to Dierdre last night, and also knew for certain it couldn’t possibly be Leo. Not only was the figure much too lean to be him, but the voice was also too high and didn’t have his rumbly tenor.
Even as I was scared to my bones, I was relieved to know it hadn’t been Leo conspiring with Dierdre. Likewise, the voice was all wrong to be Rich’s.
The man didn’t leave me guessing for long. He pulled the hood back and revealed his face, a bright flash of lightning illuminating the whole lot briefly before plunging us back into darkness.
Owen.
I had thought of a lot of people as potential suspects, but even though Owen and I hadn’t exactly gotten along swimmingly, I had never even once thought he might be the one who had been talking to Dierdre about breaking into my home—or the one who had killed Ox.
When we’d first met, he’d been less than friendly, but now he looked downright mean, his face twisted into a snarl, his fists balled at his sides. “Why did you have to make this so difficult for us, Phoebe? If you’d just sold Dierdre the house and left town with the buyout, you wouldn’t have been any the wiser, and all this risk would have been unnecessary. Now it’s too late.”
I pushed myself backward across the sidewalk, hoping to put some distance between us. He had one hand in his pocket, leading me to believe there was something in there, and I didn’t want to find out what it was.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I lied. While the shape of the whole story wasn’t exactly clear, I knew enough at this point. He and Dierdre wanted the deeds, and they’d been willing to do almost anything to get them from me, including breaking into my home tonight to steal them.
Now, it appeared, Owen might be willing to kill for them.
“Don’t play dumb with me.”
I managed to get into a sitting position, where I tried to avoid the rain getting in my eyes. I could see how angry he was. The rage was pulsing off him so visibly it looked like he was shaking. Fine, he didn’t want me to play dumb—then I wanted some answers too.
“You can’t just kill me, Owen. People will figure it out.”
“Will they? The cops here haven’t even been able to figure out that I killed Carl, and that was nearly a week ago. If they can’t figure that out, do you think they’re going to put two and two together for you?”
And there it was, his confession. It had seemed obvious as soon as he knocked me down that he might be willing to resort to violence, but I hadn’t been convinced he was capable of murder until he outright admitted it.
Owen seemed like the kind of person who would write a bad Yelp review for a parking lot, but he had never struck me as someone remotely capable of committing murder. Maybe I needed to reassess my willingness to trust people. I obviously had bad judgment.
For now, I just needed to find a way to avoid becoming his next victim. “I’m sure they’ll start asking questions when you suddenly have the deeds for a whole block of real estate. Not to mention, if you kill me now, you’ll never know where they are.” I hoped this might buy me a little time. I tried to wipe the rain off my face but only succeeded in pushing hair into my eyes. He continued to edge closer to me. The back of my store was so tantalizingly close, I wondered if I could make a break for it, or if he’d catch me again and I’d just end up as another chalk outline behind my own shop.
Then I remembered the back door was locked. Even if I could get there, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get it open before he did whatever it was he planned to do.
“Your aunt went decades without anyone knowing what she owned. You think I can’t keep a secret? And I just followed you to the lawyer’s office, I saw how you were holding your bag the whole time, precious as a little baby. I’m no fool, Phoebe.”
So much for that idea.
“Why did you kill Ox? What did he have to do with all this?” If I could keep him talking long enough, I might be able to figure out how to get myself out of this. But I had to admit, part of me was just curious to know why he’d done it.
“He was the one who came to me. He’d known all along that Eudora had bought the properties from his father, and I guess after his old man died, she was sending Carl money in the slammer. She even helped him get on his feet when he was released.” He shook his head, either to get the rain out of his eyes or because he couldn’t believe that Eudora would help an ex-con. “He said he waited until after she died because she’d been good to him, but he wanted his dad’s property back. Said it should have gone to him. I disagreed.”
So did I, but I also didn’t think it should go to Owen, who I suspected didn’t have the most altruistic purposes for wanting all that rental income.
“But why kill him?”
“He wasn’t being patient. We were sure the paperwork was at Eudora’s house—no way she’d keep it in the shop—but he insisted, said if we weren’t going to help him, he’d go look on his own. I decided he put us at too much risk, and if he was going to act like that, we couldn’t trust him to share when we got the documents.”
“We.” He kept saying we, and logically I knew he meant Diedre, but I wanted to hear him say it, to confirm everything I’d believed this whole time.
“Dierdre doesn’t know what I did to Carl. I don’t think she’s even convinced it’s connected. She didn’t know George had a son, but my family knew the Bullocks. I knew George had a son, so I wasn’t surprised when Carl showed up this week, sniffing around. Dierdre just thought he was some stranger who knew Eudora, and I let her think that. If I didn’t need her connections to the real estate market, I wouldn’t have bothered to include her in the first place, but she already knew about the deeds and wanted her cut. She’s not a smart woman, but she’s persistent. A lot like you.”
For one thing, I was insulted to be compared to Dierdre Miller in any capacity. For another, everything he was telling me helped fit in the remaining puzzle pieces of the mystery. It explained how, after eating my scone, Dierdre could be telling the truth, but not the whole truth, because she didn’t actually know the whole truth.
“People are going to notice when I don’t come back, Owen.”
“It’s a shame there’s a killer on the loose in Raven Creek, isn’t it? Poor Phoebe Winchester, gone before we ever had a chance to know her. In a week you’ll just be a cautionary tale, and when I close that stupid bookstore, no one will remember you or your family at all.”
Of all the things he’d said in the last minute, that one was the turning point. It was the thing that took me from being scared to angry.
“No one will forget my aunt.” I pushed myself up to my feet, every inch of my body protesting, my elbows and knees screaming from their fresh scrapes.
“I guess we’ll find out. Too bad you won’t be around to see what happens.” He pulled his hand from his pocket, and as lightning streaked across the sky, I could see that he was holding a gun, and it was aimed right at me.
Chapter Forty-Five
I panicked.
I’d never had a gun pointed at me before, and while I’d generally like to consider myself a smart person who avoided danger, I did just about the stupidest thing imaginable in that moment: I lunged for Owen.
He must have assumed I would shrink back, huddle in fear, cry, and beg for mercy. He probably assumed a lot of things about how people would react to seeing a gun, but there was no way to account for my brain’s harrowing misjudgment of fight versus flight.
It chose flail.
I slammed myself into Owen with the precision of a football linebacker, sending him staggering backward a few steps and knocking the gun from his hand.
For a long moment, blinking through sheets of rain, he and I stared at each other stupidly, as if neither of us knew precisely what to do next, since this wasn’t exactly going according to his plan.
We both scrambled for the gun.
I was at a disadvantage since I was still clinging tightly to my purse. The only thing he wanted was the deeds, and if I dropped those, I would lose everything. I had no idea what the official sale had looked like between George Bullock and Eudora, or if there was any other documentation besides the deeds that would keep Owen from getting what he wanted. I knew alarmingly little about any of this, which was why I’d been on my way to talk to the lawyers. But I knew he wanted what I had very badly. Once he got his hands on it, he’d have no reason to keep me alive, and I’d lose the one thing Eudora had left me that was so valuable she’d needed to keep it a complete secret.
Not to mention, I’d lose my life.
Owen and I reached the gun at the same time, and as he scrabbled across the ground to pick it up, I kicked it. I hit his fingers with the toe of my brand new shiny black loafers, and he yowled in unexpected pain. The gun skittered across the asphalt, stopping near a big green dumpster.
As he raced after it, I realized this might be my only chance to get away from him and get to the bookstore, where I could call for help. While Owen dropped to his knees on the ground, I bolted. There were only a few hundred yards between me and safety. If I could just get to that narrow alley between my building and The Green Thumb, I would be okay.
The rain pelted down on me blinding me as I sprinted, turning all the scenery around me into a smeared blur of gray and black. I could barely tell what direction I was running, but I had to believe I was going the right way.
“Stop!” he screamed.
Run! I told myself.
If this was what had been waiting for me in the dark recesses of my dream, I was glad I’d woken up before seeing how it would end.
A crack echoed over the parking lot, and at first I thought it was thunder, but then a searing pain fanned out over my left shoulder. I stumbled, dropping to one knee, only a hundred yards to go from the shop. I touched my arm and my fingers came away bloody.
He had shot me.
I looked back over my shoulder to see Owen running toward me, and this time when he raised the gun, there was no hint of hesitation in his eyes. He pulled the trigger just as lightning darted over the pitch-black sky.
Probability.
That’s what Honey had called my power. She’d said I had the ability to control probability, and that while it was unlikely I could summon the power at will, it would come to me when I needed it most.
The sky was lit up bright white, such a blinding amount of light it obliterated the flash from the gun’s nozzle.
All around me, the rain had stopped, droplets hanging in midair. Reflections from the gun and the lightning illuminated Owen’s eyes, and his face locked in a twisted snarl. The bullet was frozen in place, halfway between him and where I was kneeling on the ground.
I sucked in a deep breath, my heart hammering, my shoulder screaming in agony, and staggered to my feet, stepping out of the line of fire. I wasn’t sure how long I could control this, or if I had any control over it. The only time it had happened, I’d been able to catch a falling glass, and then everything had snapped back to reality when I put the glass back on the table. If I only had a few seconds of frozen time, at least I’d be able to dodge a moving bullet.
I had already been shot once, and that was more than enough for me, thanks.
There was a very high probability that when Owen fired his gun at me for the second time, I would die. I was standing right in the path of the bullet, at a close range, and no normal human being could just dodge a bullet. That isn’t how science works.
Except in this case, science couldn’t surmount or account for magic.
I approached the bullet from the side, staring at it carefully. The rain, where it was touching the small metal object, sizzled. The bullet was hot. I don’t know why it had never occurred to me before that a bullet would be hot. I guess I’d never been in a position to wonder. The first time I’d done this, I hadn’t known what I was capable of. Now I at least understood that this was magic, and it was my magic, which had to mean I was able to work my will, to some extent. I tapped the bullet with my finger, remembering Honey’s words to me about intention.
Fall, I thought, and as if it had understood my instruction, the bullet fell to the ground, like it had been struck dead on the spot.
