Perfect Trust: A Rowan Gant Investigation (28 page)

“The Yule log represents the cycle of birth,
death, and rebirth.” Felicity continued her recitation of the
ritual. “Tonight, this pyre will light our way through the
darkness; give us warmth to stave off the cold; and remind us of
our good fortune past, present, and future as we welcome the
rebirth of the Sun God. Blessed be!”

“So mote it be!” we answered her.

Felicity looked solemnly around the circle as
a cloud of smoke billowed outward from the fire pit and lofted
upward on the cold breeze. The sappy pine boughs had begun to burn
now, and their pungent odor was filling the air, riding on the back
of the blue-white smoke.

“Well, let’s make this thing safe, so we can
leave it alone for a while,” she stated. “I don’t know about the
rest of you, but I’m ready to eat. It’s going to be a very long
night.”

I gave R.J. a friendly nudge and told him
with a grin, “I’m appointing you fire tender. I’m getting too old
for this all night stuff.”

* * * * *

After we’d placed the lid on the portable
fireplace and closed the screens, we all started back inside for
the feast. I had eventually become so caught up in the ritual that
it was my sole focus for the last several minutes. Until now I’d
almost completely dismissed the fact that my shoulder was flaring
up. I was suddenly reminded of it in no uncertain terms by a sharp
twinge that drove inward and then hung a quick right to shoot down
my arm, ending with momentary numbness in my fingers. I decided
then and there that I was going to need something to take it down a
few notches if I was going to make it through the rest of the
night.

Something else I’d forgotten was that Ben was
already in the house making a phone call. He had apparently just
finished as we all filtered into the living room and began hanging
up our coats. I heard the door to our bedroom open as everyone was
heading back into the kitchen and dining room to help get
everything set out for dinner. I hung back a moment and waited.

“Hey, Tonto,” I greeted my friend as he came
around the corner and up the short hallway. “You missed all the
fun.”

“What? Oh, yeah, sorry ‘bout that,” he
answered me, voice thick and betraying a noticeable sense of
distance to his thoughts. He looked pale, which considering his
dusky complexion was alarming in and of itself.

“Something wrong?” I queried, feeling the
hairs on my neck snap to attention once again.

“No. Nothin’. No big deal.” He shook his
head.

I was unconvinced. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.” He shook his head a little
too vigorously. “It’s nothin’.”

“Ben…”

He shot me a hard look and half whispered,
“Not right now, Row. Drop it. It’s nothin’”

“Okay.” I shrugged and held up a hand to let
him know I got the message. “No problem. Sorry.”

I stood looking at him for a moment and could
almost visibly see the wheels turning. Something was up, but for
some unknown reason he was going to keep me in the dark about it. I
didn’t like this situation at all because something deep down told
me that whatever it was that Ben was laboring over, it definitely
had something to do with me.

The earlier rampant fear that I had perhaps
killed Paige Lawson myself now returned to the forefront with
extreme prejudice. Everything Helen had said to convince me
otherwise went instantly out the window, and I became my own prime
suspect once again.

I couldn’t take it.

“Am I a suspect?” I blurted.

“Do what?” Ben shook his head as if he’d
misheard the question and stared back at me with a look of
incredulity.

“You heard me, Ben,” I rushed the words out
before my brain could convince me to shut up. “Am I a suspect in
Paige Lawson’s death?”

“Hell no.” He stared at me and screwed up his
face in confusion. “Where the fuck’d’ya get that idea?”

“I don’t know,” I shook my head as I sighed.
“I was there… All the stuff that’s been happening… Now you’ve
obviously got something bothering you—presumably because of that
phone call—and you’re keeping whatever it is from me…”

“Gimme a break, white man,” he said. “Hell, I
don’t even tell my wife everything about work, okay?”

“Yeah, maybe so, but I’ve got a feeling that
whatever that phone call was about, my name got mentioned in there
somewhere.”

“Listen…” he sent a hand up to massage his
neck and gestured at me with the other. “You’re just gonna hafta
trust me on this. That call is prob’ly gonna turn out to be
nothin’, but even if it doesn’t, I just can’t discuss it with ya’
right now. Okay?”

“Probably going to turn out to be nothing,” I
repeated his words. “So it does have something to do with me
then?”

“I told ya’, I’m not goin’ there.”

“But if it has something to do with me…”

“Row, drop it.”

“Ben…”

“Now
,
Row.”

I wasn’t going to get anywhere with him, that
much was obvious. I was also breaking the cardinal rule of not
pushing Ben Storm into a corner, and I knew better. I decided I’d
better heed his advice.

“Yeah. Okay. Sorry. You know how I am…”

“Yeah,” he harrumphed. “No shit.”

I cocked my head in the direction of the
dining room and changed the subject. “So everyone’s getting ready
to eat.”

“Great,” he nodded. “I’m starvin’. You gonna
tell me what we’re having yet? It smells good.”

“I think you’ll like it.”

“Okay, but what is it?”

“Food, Ben. Trust me, you’ll like it.”

“Well, if I don’t, at least I’m covered.”

“You didn’t really bring a sack of
belly-bombers, did you?” I asked.

“No, but I got a coupl’a frozen pizzas out in
the van. All I gotta do is borrow your oven and I’m good ta’
go.”

I shook my head and grinned at him, “I can’t
believe you did that.”

“Hey, a man’s gotta eat.” He jerked a thumb
over his shoulder toward the back of the house. “By the way, did
you say your deal was over with out there?”

“We’ll officially cast circle a bit later,
but that’s not for a while yet. So except for tending the fire
through the night and clearing the towers later, yeah, it’s pretty
much done. Why?”

“So it’s all clear for alcohol?”

“In moderation, yeah, sure. Since you aren’t
participating, you’ve pretty much been clear all along.”

“Shit, wish I’d known that, ‘cause I need a
Scotch like right now.”

“Yeah, me too. Do me a favor and pour me one
while you’re at it,” I said as I stepped past him. “I’ve just got
to hit the restroom first.”

“You sure you wanna drink? I thought ya’ said
alcohol wasn’t allowed in the circle thing, and if y’a still gotta
do that later...”

“I’ve got awhile yet. Besides, in this
particular case I don’t think the God will mind if I relax a little
bit.”

“Okay. You’re the Witch.”

“Yeah. Don’t remind me.”

The hairs along the back of my neck were
still on end by the time I returned to the dining room. It was
becoming more obvious by the second that something very bad was
waiting in the wings for its chance to overturn my world.

And I hated not knowing what it was.

The sun was riding a southern arc in the
cloudless sky, casting its brightness across the cityscape as I
hooked my truck onto Clark Avenue and then a couple of blocks later
found myself a parking space directly in front of City Police
Headquarters. After easing between the diagonal lines, I levered
the vehicle into park and paused a moment. Finally, I took off my
sunglasses and tucked them between the headliner and passenger side
visor then switched off the engine.

December
24
^th
had stealthily arrived as
a follow-up to our celebration of the winter’s solstice; sneaking
into the fold as it always did each year, no matter how prepared
you thought yourself to be. Two entire days had passed since the
party, each of them an almost indiscernible fraction of time longer
in lighted hours than was the day before. The Sun God had been
reborn, but the new solar year had still brought with it the issues
left unresolved during the previous turn of the wheel.

However, as if in honor of a secretly
declared cease-fire, the 48 hours had passed with nothing blatantly
out of the ordinary happening to me. No dreams, no uninvited
visions, no sleepwalking. Not even the barest twinge of a waking
nightmare. In Felicity’s estimation, and that of others around me,
this all appeared to be a display of my progress; an outward
indication that my psyche was on the mend. I wished that I could
agree with them, but I’d had a similar experience before, and the
outcome had been less than pleasant.

To me, this period of supernormal silence was
more frightening than anything that had occurred to date; very
simply because I could feel the foreboding that they could not.
Still, as I said, it was nothing horrific; nothing that was overtly
driving me as had the events of recent past. This was merely an
indefinable aggravation that would tickle and itch, doing all that
it could to irritate me, asleep or awake. Each time I would think
it had finally gone away, it would pop up in a different corner of
my brain, tempting me with shaded emotions that hinted at a future
it had no intention of actually revealing in advance.

The sense had been with me ever since Yule,
bolstered in part by Ben’s cryptic attitude following his secretive
phone call. Deep down inside I knew this was a harbinger of things
to come and these fleeting days were merely the calm before the
storm. What I feared the most, however, was that if this level of
calm turned out to be directly proportionate to the intensity of
the coming squall, then I could never be prepared for what I would
have to face. I was truly afraid that in the grand scheme of
things, everything up until now had been the metaphorical
equivalent of nothing more than a spring shower.

For a time, I made an almost hourly ritual of
mutely begging the Lord and Lady to reassure me that I was wrong.
When it became obvious that my pleas were to be left unanswered, I
gave up.

Truth be told, what I really needed to be
doing right now was forgetting about it all and taking some time to
relax. Whatever it was that was coming was still an unknown, and
there was simply nothing I could do to stop it. Not at this stage
of the game anyway. I was just going to have to ride it out. On top
of that, a new calendar year was almost upon us, and the more
mundane tasks in my life would soon multiply. January tended to be
one of the busier months for my consulting business, for with a
simple turn of the year, annual budgets magically refreshed and
people started renewing support contracts and planning system
changes. With that being only a week away, the lull in my
day-to-day grind had already started to dissipate and would soon be
coming to an end. Once that happened, if I was still dealing with a
plague of ethereal horrors, I was going to be a complete wreck—as
if I wasn’t one already.

For the moment, I had no place to be and
nothing much to do. I really needed to take advantage of the
situation. It would be a perfect day for some quiet meditation and
grounding exercises, especially considering that I could have the
whole house to myself with no distractions.

Today being Christmas Eve, Felicity—fully
decked out as one of Santa’s helpers—was visiting a local
children’s home with her nature photography club. And I do mean she
was fully decked out. In fact, I was actually finding it hard not
to think about how she’d looked when she left the house. To the
kids I’m sure she simply appeared to be a rather perky elf, but to
your average red-blooded adult male… Well, let’s just say her
costume wasn’t “standard issue” for the North Pole, and she did it
justice in ways Father Christmas hadn’t originally imagined, if you
know what I mean.

The visit was something that her group did
every year at this time—handing out donated toys, clothing, and
coats. Every holiday season the event managed to garner more and
more press, which in turn created more demand from various
charitable organizations. Thankfully, the added press also brought
more donations. So as word got around, what had originally started
a few years back as a small party for some underprivileged kids had
now grown into a huge affair, encompassing not only the children’s
home but visits to local hospitals, retirement homes, and shelters
as well. It was a great cause, and even though it was hard work,
they loved every minute of it.

Considering the list I’d seen of this year’s
scheduled visits, Felicity definitely wouldn’t be back for the rest
of the day, so I had plenty of time to just vegetate. In the end, I
think it was that volatile combination of idleness and nervous
energy that had finally set me in motion. In short, she hadn’t even
been gone for two hours before I went in search of trouble.

And now, here I was, parked in front of City
Police Headquarters and staring out my windshield in a
semi-catatonic stupor. Considering my original intentions though,
this might very well be a good thing.

I had actually started out from the
house with the plan of revisiting the wooded area on Route 367
where Debbie Schaeffer’s body had been found. Subconsciously, I
suppose that like most, I found some comfort in the daylight. I
really don’t know why because time of day really had no bearing on
the unique curse of visionary abilities that had been terrorizing
me for the past two years. Truth was, I had no idea what had any
bearing on them because they certainly weren’t under my control. In
any event, my automatic pilot had engaged almost as soon as I
backed out of the driveway, and I was three quarters of the way
here before it dawned on me that
here
wasn’t where I’d originally planned to
go.