She shook her head again. “As I told you, I knew the moment I touched her that she was no longer there. Come with me to the kitchen. We can have some tea.” She turned and left the bedroom. Savich and Griffin followed her through the lavender-scented hallway to the kitchen.
Savich and Griffin remained silent, watching her prepare the tea, giving it all her focus and attention.
When at last she sat at the table with them, spooning sugar into her tea, she said, “Looking back, I realize she’d been hovering on the edge of madness for a long time, or maybe she always was and I simply refused to see it. After Arthur and I were married, she liked to mock me for being a Wiccan, for my foolish and meaningless rituals, she called them, but never when Arthur could hear her. He held her in check. You see, my husband knew what she was, knew what powers she had, knew she had no compunction about using them. She was his mother, after all. Then a car accident put her in the wheelchair a few years ago. Arthur was driving when a drunk slammed into the passenger side at an intersection. That man died a month later. He killed himself. We didn’t know if she was responsible, but sometimes I would look at her and she would look very pleased with herself. But when her injuries healed, she changed. She was angry all the time. Arthur was worried he couldn’t control her. When he realized he had no choice, he bound her. Binding is a powerful spell that holds a witch’s power in check. After that, she didn’t harm anyone for several years.”
“Or perhaps, Mrs. Alcott,” Savich said, “she respected him enough to listen to him?”
Deliah rolled her eyes. “Believe that if you like, but I strongly doubt that. It is true that she loved Arthur more than anyone in the world, more than her two dead husbands, more than any of us. She admired his strength, you see, probably envied it, continually begged him to free her. She thought he was weak not to use his power, and she blamed me.
“When he died six months ago, she said she was free to do as she wished. That’s when her madness surfaced for all of us to see, and the chaos began.” Tears sheened her eyes. “Arthur was a fine man, a good man. He didn’t expect to die and leave us in her hands.
“After he died, I tried everything I knew to control her. I tried cajoling her, making her feel a central part of the family. I tried ritual prayers, even repeated the binding spell Arthur had worked to control her, but none of it was enough. I wasn’t strong enough, not like Arthur was.”
Deliah looked down at her tea cup. “I confronted her one night after I overheard her speaking to Liggert, encouraging him to punish his wife because she thought Marly had insulted her.”
“What did she do?” Griffin asked her.
“She laughed at me. She did that a lot, said I was a silly weakling, a sham who couldn’t stop her from doing anything she liked. She started threatening my children, making them do bizarre and dangerous things to amuse herself and frighten me. She told me if I didn’t behave—her word—she’d make Tanny, Liggert’s daughter, sorry she’d ever been born. I believed her. I think now that if I’d had a knife in my hand I’d have tried to use it, I was that afraid for my children.
“When Liggert told her about Sparky Carroll’s damaged Mustang, she didn’t scream and yell and curse him, she went silent, didn’t say a word for hours. Then she made Walter murder Sparky because she thought they both deserved it. She picked Brakey, her own grandson, to kill Deputy Lewis. In her mind he was as guilty as Sparky—he’d buried the truth. I believe it’s my fault she used Brakey. She was punishing me for trying to control her. She wanted me to see how powerful she was—she could make Brakey murder someone, and her silent threat was that she could make me kill someone, too.
“It’s been a reign of terror, and she’s held us all prisoner. Until you came, Agent Savich. What will happen to Brakey now?”
Savich said, “Brakey will be fine. As for Walter, that will be more difficult. He stabbed Sparky Carroll in front of dozens of witnesses, but I hope I’ll be able to convince the federal prosecutor to send him for psychiatric evaluation and, I hope, a stint in a federal sanitarium, not jail.”
“When you left that first time, do you know she sat rocking in her chair, and she laughed, knitted and knitted and laughed and laughed. She said she was going to have some fun tormenting you, teaching you what was what, she said. We all thought she would kill you.
“Thank you for what you did,” she said simply. “Last night you and Agent Hammersmith ended six months of terror for us.”
She smiled. “Most of us Wiccans are cremated when we die and return our life force to the Goddess. I think I’ll have her cremated when she takes her last breath. She would have hated that, you know.”
EPILOGUE
SAVICH HOUSE
GEORGETOWN
One week later
You can be sure I’ve given it a lot of thought,” Cal said. “My boss, Marvin Conifer, told me this morning my transfer’s gone through. I’ll be starting in New York in two weeks.”
Sherlock looked from Special Agent Kelly Giusti to Special Agent Cal McLain. Kelly looked pleased. Sherlock knew she and Cal had discussed his relocating to New York, but now Kelly was shaking her head sadly. “You won’t be reporting to me, or I’d already know about it. Too bad—I could whip you into shape in a week, two on the outside.” She turned to Sherlock. “Actually, I’m glad he’ll be in New York, part of the team. He now knows that’s where the action is, where boots hit the ground, not like down here in nerdland, analyzing everything to death. When all’s said and done, I’ve got to admit, he was pretty useful.” She smiled at him. “We’ll have to try to keep you from driving like a maniac race-car driver in Manhattan. Hey, if you’re nice, I’ll let you stay at my place until you find your own digs.”
Cal took another bite of Dizzy Dan’s pepperoni pizza, chewed, and looked thoughtfully at Kelly. Maybe if things worked out between them, he wouldn’t need his own digs. He wondered how she would react to his real news. He patted her knee and dove in. “Ah, Kelly, I’m real glad to be coming to New York, and I know I’m really going to like staying with you at your apartment, but I gotta tell you something first.”
That got her attention. “You already told me everything. What something?”
“Well, not quite everything.” He took a drink of his beer, swiped a napkin over his mouth, and prayed.
“What? You’re going to try to snag that last piece of pizza?”
“Maybe, but I think Sherlock’s going to nab it. Okay, here’s the thing. I did get the transfer to the New York Field Office like I told you. But there’s more. I also got a promotion. Director Comey said something about being impressed with my part in bringing Basara down. He, ah, seemed impressed by my driving, particularly in that FBI SUV. Good advertising, I guess.”
Kelly looked surprised again and blinked at him. “A promotion for that? You didn’t really do anything,” she sputtered. “Well, yeah, your driving was okay, well, amazing, really, but it was Sherlock who brought Basara down. I’ll even admit you have a good brain, yeah, maybe they should promote you for that.” She cocked her head to one side, studied his face, drilled him with a look. “What kind of promotion?”
“It turns out,” he said, eyeing her, “that your boss, Vince Talbot, is transferring here to Washington and I’ll be taking his place in New York.” He sat back, folded his hands over his belly, and gave her a big smile. “You know what that means, Giusti. I’m going to be your boss.”
“No,” she said, waving her pizza slice at him, shaking her head. “I don’t believe it.” She looked at the slice, looked at him, and threw it, hitting him in the face. Cheese dripped off Cal’s chin. He wiped off the cheese, grinned at her, picked her slice of pizza off his lap, and took a bite. He turned to Savich. “I hope you’ll give me advice on how to handle the potholes. I mean, you’re Sherlock’s boss. Given what a tiger she is, there’s lots of potholes, right?”
Savich threw back his head and l
aughed. Sean, who’d been positioning pepperoni slices up in a straight line across his paper plate, raised his head. “Papa, what’s so funny? Is it a joke? Why did Kelly throw her pizza at Uncle Cal?”
Savich said, “It’s what you’d maybe call a cosmic joke. My first piece of advice, Cal, is to know when to stop talking. Raise your glass so Sherlock and I can congratulate you.”
Sean clicked his iced-tea glass to Cal’s beer can. “Maybe you should have a reward, Uncle Cal. I’ll play Flying Monks with you after dinner. Kelly said she didn’t know how, but you’re a guy, you have to know.”
Cal, who’d never heard of Flying Monks, high-fived Sean. “Prepare to go against the master, Sean. Maybe you’d better play with your parents first; they can get you warmed up for me. Maybe you should call me Special Agent Doom.”
Sean cocked his head to one side, the picture of his father, and blinked. “I think you’d have to warm up to play with my dad. My mom, too.”
Sherlock ruffled Sean’s black hair. “You’re right, Sean, no matter what he calls himself, your uncle Cal is a distant second to us.”
“What does distant second mean?”
Kelly said, “It means Cal thinks too highly of himself, Sean. He won’t be able to compete with the big kahunas in New York, either, no matter how great he thinks he is.”
Cal scooped up the last slice of pizza, sat back against the seat cushion, and looked pleased with himself and the world. “At least I won’t have to do anything by myself. I’ve got you to pave the way, Kelly, whip those cowboys in line, and get them to admire me.”
Kelly looked from Cal to her coffee and back again, picturing how a big coffee stain might look on his white shirt, but she saw his big smile and something else in his eyes, something warm and filled with promise. She smiled back and threw up her hands. “Oh, all right, I’ll have your back if you have mine, Cal.”
Sean looked at each of the adults. “You’re smiling, Kelly, so I guess it’s true, what Mama says.”
“What does Mama say, Sean?” Cal asked.
“When the queen is happy, there’s peace in the kingdom.”
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