Not that the town selectmen would ever fire the Haskell Witch's lover. All of them came from old Stonefort families. They knew. And even without that, "foreigners" like the DA could go to hell. If it came to a vote, more than half the town would decide to blow up the Salt Hay Bridge and ignore Sunrise County, ignore Maine, ignore the rest of the Boston States.
Kate limped away, over to the clump of uniforms hovering next to the stone circle. Alice winced, sighed, and shook her head. Those wounds lingered. It seemed almost like Jackie had rubbed poison on the slugs before she fired. The kid had sucked life from her mother since before she was born, and now she continued from beyond the grave.
If she had a grave.
Wescott intercepted Kate, fancy folding aluminum clipboard in hand, got to get those forms filled in. She settled herself on one of the boulders, moving carefully, shoulders slumping. She still didn't bend very well. Then her back stiffened and her shoulders drew back as the land fed strength to her, free gift. That girl didn't believe in magic?
Alice rubbed her eyes, shuddered, and opened them again, hoping the scene had changed. It hadn't. She'd seen this stone circle in a nightmare the House had brought her more than once. A nightmare of Kate standing behind that stone altar with a bronze knife in her hand, Kate dressed in some Medieval get-up of baggy handwoven wool trousers and pullover wadmal top and a garland of mistletoe around her straw blonde hair, and the sacrifice lying naked on the stone was also Kate.
The House remembered things. The ghosts that haunted the House remembered things. Alice had never stood on this ridge before, but some ancestor had. Had seen sacrifices here, had seen blood soaking into that stone.
And that scene was Kate. If Kate thought she had to do something, she did it. Whatever it cost her. You'd get farther trying to talk gravity into giving up.
Another uniform split from the group by the stones and headed across the field, brown and tan instead of blue-gray, a sheriff's deputy. Questions for Alice. She made a show of gathering up her gear and repacking the crash bag, slow, precise, setting things so she wouldn't have to search the next time she needed nanoseconds. Stripped off her gloves. Tucked them away for bio-waste disposal. Tobacco stink invaded her space, another smoker, cigars this time. Cheap cigars, rum-soaked crooks. Alice looked up.
Andy Page, she knew him from the ambulance and crash scenes, a boy from Winter Cove on the mainland. Not "local" but not "from away." The clipboard hung loose in his left hand, backside up. Not open for business.
"Kate going to be okay?"
"Yeah. She really thought that was Jackie. Just saw the blonde hair through the plastic, saw how long the body was. Freaked."
"Still no word on her kid?"
"Nada."
He glanced around, as if checking the distance to other ears. "Look, off the record, most of the force thinks the DA is full of shit. We know Kate. If she'd found out about the dope, she'd have busted her own kid. Cuffed her and stuffed her and dumped her at the jail. She's that kind of cop. Tell her that."
"Thanks. I will." The District Attorney thought she was a native because she'd been born in Portland. That tended to get the locals' backs up. Hell, that was barely in the same galaxy as Stonefort.
The deputy muttered something that could have been "Boston bitch." Then he lifted his clipboard. Back on duty. "When did you arrive at the scene?"
"Best I can say is, less than five minutes after I got her call. I was already headed down through Grants' Corners, coming home from work."
"Did you see anything unusual, any tracks or other evidence?"
Alice rolled her eyes. "Unusual, like a body dumped in the middle of the field? Sorry. Not unless you count the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
Page blinked, then seemed to get the Sherlock Holmes reference.
Alice nodded. "I didn't see any wheel tracks in the field. Checked before I pulled over to the side, to make sure I didn't mess up evidence. I saw Kate's foot trail through the dry grass and blueberries. One trail going in, none coming out. She'd left the grass bent in the direction she walked. Nothing else."
He frowned at that. "Can you give me the exact time you got here?"
She waved down at the bottom of the field, at her rusted-out Subaru wagon parked on a patch of ledge. "My car clock hasn't worked in maybe five years, and I left my watch at Sunrise. Got blood all over it, that wreck up on Connors' Hill." All true statements. She had about a dozen watches, identical fifteen-buck Casios, including two more in the bag. But he didn't need to know that.
He made a note, then the clipboard dropped again. Semaphore signals. "The Collins kid going to make it?"
Alice made a face. "Yeah. But taking five seconds to buckle her seat belt could have saved her a year of surgery and rehab. And her left eye."
He winced and then shook his head with a wry smile. Cops and EMTs spent too much time at crash scenes. They really got tired of people who sat on their seat belts.
God, I'm tired. Just got off two eight-hour shifts, back to back and snatching naps on a gurney in the corner, and now this. She opened her eyes again and looked up.
The deputy shook his head in sympathy, the bond of combat vets crouching in the same foxhole. His clipboard came up again, and the pen waited.
"Any idea why she called you in?"
As if he didn't know. "We share a house. She moved in with me after we both got shot. We take care of each other. She can't bend over, I can't lift either arm above my shoulders.
