Phoebe used the same tack she had in the earlier class—a newsroom-style discussion about the campus situation and how it should be covered, followed by assignments for everyone. This group of students seemed equally engaged by the process. It’s taken a series of tragedies for me to figure out how to connect with them, she thought, but at least I’ve done it.
“All right, lunch beckons,” she said when class was over. “Writers need to eat, too.”
Phoebe packed up her things quickly and put her coat on. Was Jen purposely avoiding her? she wondered. Or was she off in a panic someplace because of Blair and Gwen’s arrest?
Phoebe hurried to her car. She’d been anxious to find the spot along the road where Hutch’s killer had parked, and this was finally a good opportunity. Alec’s words were still weighing on her, railroading her attention, but she needed to stay focused. Something was continuing to gnaw at her about Hutch’s death, and she needed to figure out what it was. Seeing the spot where the killer parked might provide a clue, she thought, or spark an idea.
She knew it would be tough for her to drive by Hutch’s place, but as she neared his driveway, the force of her reaction took her by surprise. A sob caught in her throat, and she choked back tears.
It didn’t take long to find the spot she was looking for—or where the police suspected the car had been parked. That was because of yellow police tape. The cordoned-off area was a deep dirt shoulder of the road about half a mile past Hutch’s driveway. Phoebe parked just beyond it, under two evergreen trees, and climbed out of her car. Michelson had better not drive by in the next five minutes, she told herself, or he might drop her in a vat of boiling oil.
After reaching the spot, she sidled up to the tape and searched with her eyes. There was room inside the tape for a car to park and be safely off the road, and though the car wouldn’t have been hidden from sight, anyone driving by at night would have only seen the dark hulk of its shape.
She lowered her eyes to the ground. There were no tire tracks, but the ground had been disturbed—almost as if someone had swept the dirt. At first glance it seemed that after returning to their car, the girls had driven it up the road a bit, returned on foot to the shoulder, and quickly swept the ground here. Pretty clever. But was that really something Blair and Gwen would have been smart enough to do?
Phoebe raised her eyes and let them roam the woods beyond the shoulder. She realized she must be standing fairly close to where she had fallen and passed out. She shuddered, remembering her desperate scramble in the dark.
She returned to her car and slipped into the passenger seat, trying not to jar her elbow. There was one more stop she wanted to make.
She headed back into town, rounded the college, and then drove north to the antique store, the Big Red Barn. There were just a few customers this afternoon. As she climbed from her car, Phoebe noticed that most of the Halloween decorations had been taken down, but some tired corn stalks were still leaning against the building.
Traffic whizzed by on the highway, and after waiting for an opening, Phoebe hurried across to the river side of the road and turned right, in the direction of the spot she’d stood in last week. It was deserted today, except for a red cardinal bobbing along a tree branch that had been stripped of its leaves. This, she realized, was the last place she’d seen Hutch alive.
She had planned to fight her way through the trees and underbrush to secure a closer look at the spot where Trevor Harris’s body had been found, but as she approached the woody area directly in front of the river, she saw that there was still yellow police tape looped through the trees. At the rate things were going, Phoebe thought, the cops were about to go through the county’s entire supply of it.
She returned to the area across from the Big Red Barn and perched on one of the gray weathered picnic tables. There was police tape here, too, blocking off an area farther ahead along the riverbank. The muddy Winamac chugged along quietly, clearly oblivious to all the misery it had caused.
Phoebe glanced around at the other tables and the two blackened stand-up grills. She wondered how long it had been since one of the grills had been fired up. And yet it was clear from the scuffed ground that the area was used frequently by picnickers and nature lovers. And someone else—there was a very good chance, she realized, that this was where Trevor had gone into the river. The access to the water was so much better here than by the wooded area. His body would have drifted away briefly and then been snatched by the tree roots farther down.
And Lily, too, Phoebe realized. Her body might have been snagged close to where Trevor’s body lay, reuniting the two briefly in death before it was dislodged several days later and made its way downstream.
If you were going to toss someone into the river, this would be a perfect place to do it, Phoebe thought. It was totally isolated. No one would hear any screams or the sounds of a struggle. Rows of trees lined the road, so that the bike path and the picnic area were blocked from the view of passing motorists. If Lily and Trevor had been murdered, it meant a car had been involved, just as with Hutch—and that the killer was pretty familiar with the area. And yet, she realized,
Once again, she wondered if the deaths were really the work of the Sixes. She couldn’t imagine what the motive would have been, or how it linked back to the last two circles of membership.
A light drizzle had begun, and Phoebe scooted off the picnic table. It would be even trickier to drive in this weather, and she wanted to head home now. Once she was in the car, she e-mailed Glenda, asking her to find out what dorm Jen was in. She would just head over there and nab the girl coming or going. As Phoebe started to drop her phone into her purse, it rang in her hands.
“Ms. Hall?” the person asked when she answered. It was a male voice she didn’t recognize.
“Yes.”
“Dan Hutchinson here. Ed Hutchinson’s nephew.”
“Oh Dan, thanks for calling back,” she said. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“I appreciate your call. My uncle even mentioned you to us. He was hurrying back on Sunday to chat with you.”
“I know. I just feel horrible about what happened. Will there be a service of some kind?”
“Yeah, definitely. It’s been delayed because the coroner held on to the body for a while. I’ll e-mail you the details when I have them.”
“Thank you,” she said and gave him the address. “By the way, is Ginger okay? Do you have her?”
“Yup, we’ve got her—though she seems awfully freaked out. Wish we could keep her, but my wife is allergic. We’re asking around to see if any friends can take her while we look for a permanent home.”
“Well, wait,” Phoebe said, almost without thinking. “Why don’t
The last thing she needed was a dog, but she wanted to do it for Hutch.
“Gosh, that would be a lifesaver,” Dan said. “I’m going into Lyle to sign some paperwork tomorrow. I could even drop her off for you.”
They agreed on noon, and she gave him her address.
It was after two when she let herself into the house, and just like yesterday, she felt a mid-afternoon fatigue beginning to ambush her. But she couldn’t take a nap, she told herself, she had too much to do. She made a double espresso and carried it with her into the study.
She opened her laptop and checked a few Web sites to see if any break in the case was being reported. She found nothing. Then she made notes about where she should take her class next. She had plenty of time before next Monday, but she’d loved the way things had gone today, and she wanted to be sure to build on that. Maybe she’d keep up the newsroom approach.
Finally she turned her attention to the files she had dumped on her desk after returning from Duncan’s. As she sorted out several folders, her eyes drifted toward the back of the table. They found the piece of cardboard, the one that had been around the six spoons, and she realized that in her muddled state the other day, she’d neglected to mention it to the police. She’d have to give Michelson a call.
Grimacing, she picked up the cardboard, smoothed it out, and stared at it. When she’d studied it previously, she’d assumed it had come from some type of packaging, probably from the spoons themselves. But now she wasn’t so sure. She peered more closely at it. At each of the upper corners there was a bit of faded yellow with short strokes of black over it. From the size and the thickness, she realized that it might be an oversize playing card. And then suddenly she knew. It was a tarot card. She took a deep breath. So maybe there had been a message intended for her after all.
There was probably enough color left, she decided, to figure out which tarot card it was. She opened her laptop again and Googled “tarot cards,” then began running her eyes over the images.
