“Interview every sept member? You know how long that will take?” Mary Hill demanded. “We’ll all be dead before you get anywhere. I say we round up a posse the way we used to do it—”
“And what? Ride through the nearby human towns on horseback, or maybe in our pickups, in the middle of the night, setting houses on fire?” It was Fin who had spoken up. “Is that what you want, Uncle Jim? You want to go back to those days? Innocent people dragged from their homes, left to die in puddles of their own blood?”
A thick, frightened silence fell over the circle of council members.
“No. That’s not what we want,” Fin said, quietly but firmly. “We’re here on these shores because we have been given a second chance to redeem ourselves before God. We’re here to protect innocent humans, not kill them. So we’ll do this the right way. We’ll do it Fia’s way.” His gaze met hers across the room. “Because Fia will find him. Fia will stop him. I know she will. I would bet my life on it. I would bet hers…”
Chapter 20
The dining room of the B and B, which had become Fia’s and Glen’s makeshift office, was blessedly quiet as Fia logged on to her laptop to check her e-mail. It was the first week of October, and while her mother still had a few guests on weekends, the place was dead on a Wednesday afternoon. Pun unintended.
Fia could hear Glen chatting with Mary Kay in the kitchen. Somehow, over the weekend, they had become best buddies. Glen was complimenting Mary Kay’s children, her cooking, and her choice of décor, and Fia’s mother was baking cookies, brownies, and muffins left and right. If Glen continued to eat the home cooking the Seahorse advertised in trade and travel magazines, he’d need a double membership to the local gym when he returned to Philadelphia.
As Fia waited on the slow wireless Internet connection one of her younger brothers had rigged, her cell phone rang. Recognizing the number, she snatched the phone off the dining room table, knocking a stack of manila folders off the table onto the polished hardwood floor in the process.
“Shit,” she muttered. Then into the phone, “What do you want? I’m at work.” She had no intention of telling Joseph where she was. If he showed up in Clare Point right now, she had a feeling there would be a lynching and it would be her own neck in the noose. Her family members couldn’t kill her by stringing her up, but they could certainly make her uncomfortable for a couple of weeks.
As she got out of the chair, squatting to retrieve the mess she made, she glanced in the direction of the kitchen. She could still hear her mother talking.
“You’re always so pleasant, Fee,” Joseph said in her ear. “Always such a pleasure to talk with.”
“What do you want?”
In the kitchen, Glen clasped the tray Mary Kay had made up and, for a moment, he thought he’d have to engage in a tug-of-war with her. He was just trying to be nice. Trying to get Fia a cup of tea and a couple of cookies, or a muffin or something. He hadn’t intended to stand here and shoot the breeze with her mother for half an hour.
He was worried about Fia. She wasn’t eating. Wasn’t sleeping. She was leaving her room late at night to go God knew where and she was acting oddly, even for Fia. There was something going on in this creepy town of hers besides the obvious, but he couldn’t put his finger on what it was or how she was involved. And he was beginning to wonder if his attraction to her was clouding his judgment.
The whole case was just weird. From the fact that Senator Malley’s office had assigned her to the case, despite her relationship to the town and lack of jurisdiction, to the fact that the people of the town didn’t really seem that upset that someone was beheading their friends and neighbors. Glen had been interviewing cops, and neighbors and friends of Shannon’s for days, and everyone was cooperative and pleasant. Too cooperative. Too pleasant. Their interviews almost seemed…rehearsed.
What was also interesting, actually amazing, was that no one in the town would speak to the press. Not a word. Usually, especially in small towns like Clare Point, citizens were fighting for their one minute of fame. Typically in these cases, old school photos of the victims were plastered in newspapers and on the evening news. Everyone wanted to talk about what a good man or woman the victim had been or what good grades he or she had gotten in spelling in the third grade. But Clare Point had been so tight-lipped after the previous murders that local TV stations hadn’t even bothered to send a crew when Shannon was killed. There had been nothing more than an inch of column space in the state’s largest paper.
And the good citizens of Clare Point weren’t the only ones keeping their mouths shut. Fia was remaining very closemouthed about how her interviews were going. She was the one making the calls in the case, deciding each day who would interview which people. He couldn’t help getting the idea that she was trying to keep him away from certain members of the town; her uncle the police chief, an old codger named Victor Simpson, and Jim Kahill, her father, of all people.
“Thanks for the tea and brownies.” Glen smiled at Mary Kay as he made a beeline for the swinging kitchen door, captured tray in his hands. As he entered the dining
