Chapter 11

DISTANT THUNDER

While we had a decent number of patrons that morning and through the lunch hour, I didn’t feel the slightest pang as Chloe set the “be back at” sign in the window and locked the front door a few minutes before two.

She, on the other hand, seemed to have some doubts. “I can always come back and open up for an hour or so later this afternoon,” she told me as she deposited the key in the cash register. “I don’t think the meeting with Mr. Scurlock is going to take much more than an hour.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “But it could go long, and you and your parents are probably going to have plenty to talk about even after the meeting’s over. It’s fine.”

Another hesitation, but then she seemed to guess from my expression that I wasn’t going to budge on that point.

And I wouldn’t. Going over strategies for defending yourself in a murder investigation was a lot more important than a couple of hundred bucks in sales, if that. While business was a bit more brisk than it would have been if I weren’t running a half-price sale this week, I’d noticed that it had begun to trail off as the week wore on, telling me the early bargain-hunters had already come and gone. Having the shop closed for a few extra hours wasn’t going to make much of a difference.

So Chloe got in her VW and drove off to the Best Western, where Leland Price, the manager, had offered her and her family the meeting room for their talk with Alec Scurlock, and I climbed into my Renegade and navigated the half-mile or so to the OB/GYN’s office.

This close to the big day, the check-up was mostly about discussing how I was feeling and taking a few readings to make sure the baby’s heart was still beating just fine and that I didn’t seem to be in any imminent danger of giving birth on the floor next to one of the bookcases in my shop.

“Everything sounds great,” Dr. Carlisle informed me. I’d been expecting exactly that evaluation, but even so, it felt good to hear it coming directly from her lips. “Looks like we’re right on schedule.”

It was good to know that all the recent hubbub didn’t seem to have affected the baby, but I also knew I needed to bring up that little episode the other day, when something that felt dangerously like a contraction had shuddered through my body.

After I described it, though, Dr. Carlisle only shook her head.

“That’s perfectly normal,” she said. “I know it can be scary, but it’s nothing to worry about, especially since it only happened one time.” She paused there, gaze sharpening a little. “Are you doing your best to keep off your feet?”

“Mostly,” I said with a wry smile, thinking of how long I’d been standing in the living room of the Airbnb while Chloe set her protection spell on the house.

“Well, try to make it more than ‘mostly,’” the doctor said. “And you’re still planning to close the shop after this week?”

“Not anymore,” I replied, then added quickly, “My younger sister is in town, and she’s going to keep an eye on things for me while I’m on leave.”

I knew all this would be news to Dr. Carlisle, because she was one of those “strictly business” types of people who tended to focus on patient care and not gossip. Very likely, she’d heard nothing about Jack Speros’s murder, or the way my long-lost half-sister had appeared in Globe only a few days before the tragedy. We had a local paper, but it only came out once a week, and wasn’t due to land on people’s doorsteps and driveways for a few more days.

The doctor’s expression brightened. “That’s good to hear. It’s wonderful when family can pitch in after the baby arrives. Then I won’t give you my speech about taking sufficient time off both before and after your due date.”

“No worries,” I assured her. “I’m already planning to be home for at least six months.”

“Perfect,” she said. “I know not everyone has the luxury to take so much time off work, but if you do, you should take advantage of it.”

We ended the appointment with her telling me I really shouldn’t drive after this week, and to call the second I had contractions around five minutes apart. Afterward, I went out to my Jeep and climbed in. It felt as though I had even less room between my belly and the steering wheel than I had the day before, even though I had the seat pushed as far back as I reasonably could and still reach the brake and gas pedal.

Well, that was probably why Dr. Carlisle wanted me to stop driving. And I would; after this week, Calvin would be off work, too, and he could play chauffeur while we waited for the baby to arrive.

As I was driving down Bridge Street, I spied Victoria’s red Mercedes SUV approaching from the other direction and lifted my hand to wave. We’d been sort of missing each other the past few days, with me zigging while she was zagging, so it was good to catch even a glimpse of her.

But you’ll see her Saturday at brunch, I reminded myself.

Thinking of that rapidly approaching event, I wondered if I should reach out to Heather to see if she might want to delay her and Jordan’s departure by a day so she could attend our girls’ get-together as well. My mother had already shown that she was fine with hosting Heather Fairfield at her house, and I knew she wouldn’t mind if I added another guest to the roster.

Or maybe that would be weird. I could tell things were still sort of awkward with my bio-dad and his wife, and asking her to a baby shower when she’d only met me a few days earlier might seem strange. Not that it was a true baby shower — I’d told everyone I didn’t want any gifts — but still.

No, probably better to let it go. It wasn’t as if Jordan had been in my life while I was growing up, and I barely knew Heather at all. The baby I was carrying was his grandchild, true, but I didn’t see the point in forcing things when we really didn’t have a relationship.

The steering wheel jerked in my hands, and I started from my reverie, wondering if a tire had just blown. But no, I wasn’t getting any tire-pressure warnings from the display on my dash. I clamped down on the steering wheel, feeling it shudder against my fingers, as though the tires it was steering were being directed by something other than my own will.

What the hell?

Then it was as if an invisible hand grasped the wheel, turning it hard to the right. I’d already lifted my foot from the gas the second the steering wheel started acting up, and now I frantically reached for the brake with my foot, straining to touch it, cursing myself for pushing the seat so far back. I really hadn’t had a choice, but —

The Jeep swerved across the road, straight for an old oak tree that had stood at the corner of Broad Street and Maple for at least fifty years. My foot finally found the brake and I slowed.

Not enough, though.

In the next second, the front end of the Renegade crashed into the tree, and everything turned white as the airbag exploded around me.

“I’m fine,” I said irritably, for what felt like the hundredth time.

All right, shaken up, and with some inevitable bruising where the seatbelt had held me in place during the crash, but I hadn’t gone into labor, hadn’t seemed to have suffered any real injury except the aforementioned bruises.

Standing next to me, Calvin shook his head. A tight line between his brows signaled his worry, and he looked paler than anyone with his dark-toned complexion ever should. “I knew you shouldn’t have been driving this late in the pregnancy.”

After the world stopped spinning, I’d dug my cell phone out of my purse and called 9-1-1. The EMTs arrived almost immediately to transport me to the emergency room at Cobre Valley Medical Center. Since Calvin was my contact, they’d called him as well — and Dr. Carlisle, since I’d retained enough presence of mind to let the paramedics know she was my OB/GYN.

Now, after a thorough check-up to ensure the crash hadn’t caused havoc with the baby, both the doctor and I were satisfied that I’d escaped relatively unscathed.

Calvin, on the other hand, didn’t seem nearly as convinced.

“I cleared her to drive,” Dr. Carlisle said crisply. “Yes, I said it was better if someone could be her chauffeur, but many pregnant women can drive right up to their due date. Luckily, Selena had her seat pushed fairly far back, and that was what helped lessen the impact on the baby from the airbags deploying.”

Thank the Goddess for that…well, except for the part where I might not have crashed at all if I’d been able to adequately reach the brake pedal.

And what the hell was going on with the steering wheel? Had the mechanism failed? The car was less than two years old, so that scenario didn’t seem very likely.

Then again, mechanical failures happened all the time, even on new or almost-new vehicles. We’d have our local mechanic check it out, and if he couldn’t find anything, then we’d have the Jeep towed to the dealership in Gilbert where we’d bought it.

“Well, she’s not driving anymore,” Calvin said, his tone flat.

I might have argued that it wasn’t his place to tell me what I could or couldn’t do, except I was in whole-hearted agreement with my husband on that point. Although I was fine except for a few bumps and bruises, my hands wouldn’t stop shaking, and I didn’t think I wanted to get behind the wheel of a car again for a long, long time.

Especially a wheel that had felt as if it was possessed.

An image flashed into my mind of Travis Cox’s car after its rollover, right after I came to Globe all those years ago. Someone had put a hex on it, causing him to crash the Subaru he used as the town’s single Uber/Lyft driver….

His words from the scene of the accident came back to me.

It’s, like, something just grabbed hold of the car and rolled it.

No, my car hadn’t rolled, but whatever had taken hold of the wheel had been doing its best to make me crash.

“What is it?” Calvin asked, his expression shifting to one of worry.

I wasn’t going to tell him I’d just seen a ghost, because I hadn’t. All the same, I couldn’t stop thinking about Athene Kappas, Lucien Dumond’s right-hand woman. She’d been killed in that rollover because she hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt, while Travis had managed to escape with only some bruises on his forehead and a nasty mark on his neck from the very seatbelt that had saved his life.

Because Dr. Carlisle was standing right there, I responded the only way I could.

“We can talk about it when we get home.”

A tow truck had already taken the Renegade to the local body shop, so inspecting it would have to wait. Besides, I knew Calvin would never agree to that kind of field trip without getting me home first so I could put my feet up for a while and drink some chamomile tea to calm my nerves.

“All right,” he said, once I was settled and he’d fetched me that much-needed cup of tea. “What was it you couldn’t talk to me about back at the emergency room?”

“I think someone might have put a hex on my car.”

At once, his eyes narrowed, but he knew better than to suggest that scenario was ridiculous, not when he knew such a thing was more than possible.

“Like what happened to Athene Kappas?”

I blew on my tea. Part of my brain didn’t want to acknowledge that someone would wish me ill in such a way, but the Renegade had been a perfectly reliable car from the second I bought it. There hadn’t been any warning signs that the steering mechanism was starting to go bad, no reason to think anything was wrong with it at all.

“I’m afraid so,” I said. “But I need to see the car and feel its vibes to know for sure.”

My husband’s jaw set almost imperceptibly. Looking at him, most people would have thought he appeared utterly calm, but I knew him better than that.

The merest hint that someone might have been magically gunning for his wife and his unborn child had awakened a quiet, deadly rage. Although I had no reason to love the person who’d placed that hex on the car, I couldn’t help thinking they had no idea what they’d started.

“The same person who killed Jack Speros?” Calvin asked after a long pause.

“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t have enough clues in hand to know one way or another. But getting a sense of that hex — if there really is one — might be one way to get started.”

“All right,” he said grimly. “Then drink that tea, and we’ll go check it out.”

No one at the body shop stopped us from going to look at the Jeep. It sat in a corner of the lot, looking forlorn, the front end completely smashed in.

That had been a very big tree.

“It’s all right,” Calvin said. He had his arm around my waist and had helped me walk from his Durango to the spot where the Renegade was parked. I hadn’t suffered any material hurt from the accident except a few bruises, but I had a feeling the shaky sensation in my legs was going to take a while to go away. “It doesn’t look like the frame was bent, so the insurance probably won’t total it.” A pause and a keen glance from under his straight black brows, and then he added, “Unless you find something here that makes you want to get a new car.”

On the surface, that might have been a good idea. However, something stubborn inside me balked at having to buy another vehicle just because some unscrupulous user of magic had meddled with this one. Once it was cleansed and protected, it should be good to go.

As long as Calvin was right and the insurance company didn’t declare it a total loss.

“We can worry about that later,” I replied, my free hand moving over my rounded belly. “I don’t think I’m going to be in any shape for car shopping for a while.”

He nodded. “Whatever you want to do.”

What I wanted to do was hit “rewind” so the events of the past couple of days had never occurred. All right, that wasn’t exactly true. I was very glad Chloe had come into my life, even if she seemed to have inadvertently brought a trail of destruction along with her.

Calvin’s steadying hand still on my arm, I went over to the Renegade. We’d told the manager of the body shop that I needed to get a few personal items out of the vehicle, which wasn’t even a lie. The EMTs had salvaged my purse from the wreck, but the bag of supplies from the home cleanse Chloe had performed was still sitting in the trunk, along with a few health and beauty odds and ends I’d bought at Walmart a while back and kept forgetting to bring into my house.

At any rate, fetching those items provided all the cover we needed for me to inspect the car and see whether I was merely the victim of bad luck…or a particularly nasty little curse.

I tried to tell myself it had to be the former, just a mechanical failure of some kind. Otherwise, shouldn’t I have sensed the hex the moment I approached the vehicle in Dr. Carlisle’s parking lot?

Maybe…maybe not. Although I’d felt much more on top of things psychically once I was past the first three or four months of my pregnancy, I couldn’t deny that I wasn’t operating at peak form, either. Many pregnant women experienced much the same sort of symptoms, except their occasional brain farts didn’t affect their psychic powers.

And I had to admit I hadn’t been paying much attention. Buoyed by the knowledge that the pregnancy was progressing completely normally and that my child would be here in only a little more than a week, I’d gotten into the car and started for the house, thinking of not much more than putting my feet up and relaxing until Calvin got home.

So it was very possible that I’d missed some warning signs.

However, when I went over to the Jeep and placed my hand on the hood, I didn’t feel a single thing. No warning twinges, no sense of something dark and twisted attached to the vehicle, the way I’d sensed that cloud of cold wrongness surrounding Travis Cox’s mangled Subaru all those years ago.

Calvin sent me a questioning look, and I gave him a very small shake of my head.

“Nothing.”

“Well, that’s only one spot,” he said. “Maybe the hex was placed somewhere else on the vehicle.”

I knew he was trying to be encouraging, but if someone had crawled under the Jeep and scrawled a dark sigil there, it wasn’t as if I could find it in my current shape. If I got down on my hands and knees right now, I kind of doubted I’d get back up again without a crane to assist me.

And although I knew Calvin would cheerfully get under there himself if he thought it would help, he wasn’t a witch. Even if someone had scratched a hex mark somewhere on the undercarriage or drivetrain, he wouldn’t have been able to detect it.

Rather than point that out, I moved toward the back of the Renegade. As soon as I got within about a foot of the license plate, creepy-crawly sensations began running up and down my back.

“I think there’s something here,” I told my husband. “Do you have a screwdriver with you?”

Basically a rhetorical question, since I knew the Swiss Army knife he carried on his belt had what felt like a gazillion different attachments. However, since I didn’t have them memorized, it wasn’t as if I could know for sure.

He pulled the knife out of his pocket and deployed the screwdriver gizmo. A minute or so later, he pried the license plate off the back of the car.

Underneath it, someone had scratched a symbol into the paint, something that looked vaguely like a dagger pointing downward with several loops and crosses near the top. Because I’d never studied dark magic, I had no idea exactly what it was, only that it hadn’t been put there to ensure happiness and long life.

“Is that…?” Calvin began, and I nodded.

“It’s a sigil of some sort. Clever of them to hide it under the license plate — that’s not the kind of place people would generally look unless they’re switching out their plates for some reason.” I paused there, eyes narrowed as I stared at the evil little symbol. “And I suppose I didn’t sense it when I got into the car because I didn’t detect anything now until I got pretty close. I just got right in the driver’s seat after my doctor’s appointment.”

My husband’s eyes had narrowed, a sure sign he was thinking of all the things he’d like to do to the person who placed that symbol there, if and when we eventually caught up with them. However, his voice sounded even enough as he said, “Who would do something like that to you?”

I shrugged. Not the most eloquent of responses, but I was just as flummoxed as he was. One might have said that I’d racked up my share of enemies over the years, thanks to the way I’d put nearly a dozen murderers behind bars, and yet I couldn’t say for sure whether that was what we were dealing with here. The few people who might have wanted revenge on me — for whatever reason — weren’t witches. They wouldn’t have even known anyone who could have created a sigil like this, let alone scratch it into my car themselves.

“Honestly?” I said. “I have no idea. There isn’t anyone in Globe who practices this kind of magic.”

Even as I spoke, however, I wondered whether I should be quite so confident on that point. True, there were others here who dabbled in Tarot or other kinds of minor magic, but they weren’t true practitioners, simply people who were interested in the occult and wanted to play with it a bit.

Whereas whoever had hidden that sigil under my Jeep’s license plate definitely knew what they were doing.

Calvin’s grim expression didn’t flicker. “From somewhere else, then.”

“Maybe,” I allowed. “But the only people I ever really knew who dealt in this kind of thing were members of GLANG, and it’s been disbanded for years.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Sure” might have been an overstatement. On the other hand, I’d kept in touch with Maisie Hoskins, an old friend of mine who was the proprietor of a witchy store in West L.A., and from what she’d told me, it sounded as if the Greater Los Angeles Necromancers’ Guild had completely fallen apart after Lucien Dumond’s death. Some of its members had tried to start their own little groups, but they didn’t seem to have lasted for very long.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose it’s remotely possible that a former member of GLANG might be gunning for me, but why now? They’ve had years to get their revenge, and yet everything has been completely quiet on that front.”

Calvin’s lips pressed together. He looked away from me to the mark on the tailgate, then asked, “Is there a way to remove that thing?”

Well, at least I had a ready answer to that question. “Oh, sure,” I said. “We just need to scratch it out, and then I can cleanse the spot with moon water and place a spell of protection on the car. It’ll be good as new.”

Assuming the insurance company didn’t total it after all. We’d paid a decent chunk for it, but even I knew vehicles depreciated like crazy almost the second you drove them off the lot.

My answer seemed to have relieved Calvin at least a little bit, because something in the tense set of his jaw eased. “Good to know,” he said. “All the same, I’m just glad this thing is going to be in the shop for a while.”

“Same,” I responded, doing my best to keep my tone light. “For now, though, let’s go home.”