Triple Toil and Trouble Read online

  Leshy was still an awkward smelly sexist, even if he did have ram’s horns, hooves, and a covering of wool. “Can I show you some pictures? I’m guessing some of these people were friends of his.”

  “Ah, yes, I recall this little clique. Henri Dardompre, originally from Haiti, was a very nice man, and a very good psychiatrist. I had the feeling he was too nice to tell Alan to go away. Dr. Smith was also highly competent, a pleasant enough woman. She was a visiting psychiatrist from England. The nurses I can’t recall.” Pye shrugged one shoulder.

  “Did they work together?”

  “Oh, no. No, Alan had his own gig. He was already here when I arrived. The Department of Health, Education and Welfare gave him a grant to pursue his singular treatment plan. Today, I suppose we’d call it TMS, Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, although Alan’s version was probably closer to the God Helmet or Koren Octopus. Surprisingly, it had a very positive effect on people we used to diagnose as paranoid.”

  This tracked with what McGooby boasted about. Still. “If it worked, why did he get fired?”

  “Frankly, the man was performing experiments outside of the hospital, unmonitored. He had a lab in Fishburn, and when it was discovered, the HEW yanked his funding. We offered him a position in the electro convulsive therapy unit, but he refused. Admittedly, that procedure was barbaric compared to the light stimulus of McGooby’s equipment. Now, of course, the lab is somewhere under the reservoir. I lost track of the man, until the police began calling. No one knows what happened to him, including his wife and daughter.”

  “So I hear.” Maybe this wouldn’t turn into a lead after all.

  “You can ask Dr. Dardompre, I suppose. I still visit him in the care facility up town. I don’t think he’ll have more answers than he already gave the police.”

  So there was a person still living from the photographs. It churned an idea from her thoughts. “You mentioned a clique. Can you expand on that?”

  “I’m sure it will sound old-fashioned to you, but at that time, there was an interest in the paranormal. It wasn’t like the current popular interest, but an academic one, a scientific interest. There was talk of Soviet Russian programs that investigated psychic abilities, and, as this was at the same time as the Space Race, the United States didn’t want to fall behind. As far as I know, it wasn’t official, but McGooby’s little group delved into a haunted house or two, and conducted a few sessions of extrasensory perception testing.”

  Interesting, she thought. “What about witchcraft?”

  Pye smiled. “I have no idea. Frankly, I thought it was a bunch of hooey, that’s a medical term. Time has proven me right, I’m afraid. There’s no such thing as witches, ESP or ghosts. Henri will have a better idea. The man was fascinated by the unknown almost as much as the human mind. I’m sure he’d appreciate a visit from a pretty young woman.”

  AS QUINN EASED OUT of the driveway, she spotted Cora’s car in the parking lot of the Chandlery. After hesitating a moment, she decided putting off talking to her would only make things worse. She turned left instead of right and parked beside Cora’s car. The Grams’ business wasn’t open yet, but Cora bustled around inside the retail area with a feather duster. She waved as Quinn approached.

  “You’re here early.”

  Cora nodded. “I have to get up early to bring Zuri to summer camp, so I figured, what the heck. What’s up, Quinn, is something wrong?”

  “Wrong...” How much weight could one syllable hold?

  The woman’s smile faded. “Oh. I guess you heard from Nick, too.”

  “Yeah.” Her words surprised Quinn so much, she couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  Cora stowed the duster in a low cabinet behind the counter. “Nick O’Broin. He was probably the biggest mistake in my life. But Zuri is my greatest joy. I guess that balances out. Or, at least, it did. There’s nothing I can do to stop him, is there?”

  “I talked to our lawyer. The only thing you could do is try to prove willful abandonment. I don’t think it would go your way.”

  Her eyes went hard. “You’re taking Nick’s side?”

  “Ideally, given my line of work, I would take Zuri’s side.” Quinn shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know my uncle that well. A girl needs a father figure in her life. That’s on the one hand. On the other, I don’t know what kind of father Nick would be. He’s not very...” It took a long moment for her to come up with a word. “...Present.”

  Cora’s features took on a sorrowful cast. “That’s pretty apt. I met him on the University of Pittsburgh campus. He was, of course, surrounded by girls. You know that old Carpenters song, ‘Close to You?’”

  She went still, and Quinn could almost hear the song playing in Cora’s head. Why do birds...?

  “Despite all the women on campus following him around, Nick was interested in me. And I don’t know. I’d dated guys before, a couple relationships lasted a while. But Nick is so... I’d never met a man so confident. I would say his confidence bordered on arrogance, but whatever he said, he followed through on, so.”

  Quinn shifted her feet. The aromas of the candles on display hung like memories in the cool morning air. It didn’t seem like Cora would go on, and then she did.

  “At the time, I was still in a kind of funk. My mother passed when I was a sophomore. In her papers was an adoption certificate. I’d always kinda known. Had a feeling. Knowledge, the truth of it, hit me pretty hard. I was adrift. Probably more vulnerable than I knew. And then here came Nick. He’s your uncle, I know, but the man is, well, beautiful.”

  “So my Aunt Mary keeps reminding us.”

  Cora flashed a smile, but it was gone in an instant. “It was a whirlwind relationship. I think of it as being longer than it actually lasted. It couldn’t have been more than a month, really. I broke it off. For some stupid reason, I built up Nick in my head. I thought he was on the faculty, and then, I thought he was a visiting professor. Nothing I could pin down, of course, because I’d just applied for grad school at Pitt before the winter break.

  “I started asking questions, and as I did, I realized I knew him less and less. Being so crazy in love, I let it slide at first. His place didn’t look lived in, and he never had any food on hand. He didn’t have a phone, not even a cell phone. And it just got weirder.”

  Not even a year had passed since Quinn had learned she was a witch, her mother a creature of another dimension, her father on a quest to bring his wife back to this reality, that Quinn and her sisters were identical triplets, and they had magical abilities. She was well aware how things could get weirder in a hurry.

  “No driver’s license or car, I never saw him on a bus, yet he always managed to show up, no matter where I wanted to meet. One day, I found a bunch of lottery tickets in his coat pocket. They were just the pick three, pick four daily tickets. But they were all winners. A couple hundred, some a couple thousand dollars each. How was that even possible? I wondered if he was a criminal at first, a forger maybe, except I saw him purchase winning tickets myself. A few times, I went to meet him at the little house he rented, and he wasn’t home. And then, he was. I looked in all the rooms, the house was empty. Yet I’d turn around, and he’d be in the kitchen. The front door hadn’t opened. But he was right there...”

  Quinn saw a tremor start in her hands. Her features looked on the verge of collapse.

  “I thought I was going crazy. Maybe learning that I was adopted was catching up with me, the stress, the—the betrayal, feeling so unanchored, so unsure of who I was. Was I actually in a relationship with this movie-star-handsome man who seemed to know exactly what I needed all. The. Freakin. Time. But no, my friends always said how lucky I was. They were jealous. Ha! I was circling the drain, sanity-wise, and my besties are rooting me on. And then, it got very real.”

  “Zuri,” Quinn guessed. “How did Nick react?”

  She shook her head, quick, tight little motions. “I don’t know. I kinda freaked out. My plans to pursue pure mathematics in aca
demia suddenly seemed foolish, given my situation. What I needed was a job, and right away. Since I had a BS in math, I applied for a teaching internship, a sort of fast track to an education career. I was out of Pittsburgh the day after I learned I was pregnant. I was substituting Algebra I, Calculus and Trig in Altoona a few days after the new year, for, get this, a woman on maternity leave. Now I have a precocious eleven-year-old, teach fourth grade full time, have a mortgage on a tiny home in the middle of the woods, a pretty steady life, and a generally happy one. But now?”

  Cora took a breath.

  Quinn reached over the counter and took her hands. “I get it. I lived my whole life with absentee parents. It makes a hole. Not a constant hole, but more like a tiger trap. You go on living your life, and when you’re not paying attention, you fall in. You hurt, you wallow, you ask yourself painful questions, try to assign blame.”

  The look on Cora’s face was unreadable. After a moment, she smiled. “That’s... Apt, I think. But it isn’t what I thought you were going to say.”

  She shook her head. “What, then?”

  “All the things Zuri’s been through, the nightmares that turn real, the prophetic dreams, knowing things she couldn’t possibly know...” Cora pulled her hands free. “Never mind.”

  Chapter 8

  ECHO WATCHED THE TRUCK back the dive boat down the ramp and into the reservoir. The class consisted of six students, an instructor, now driving the truck, and an assistant instructor who powered on the boat’s engines. Ryker Novak. Mr. Scott, the instructor and dive shop owner, leaped out and detached the boat from the trailer. Rapidly, he turned the winch, and the boat glided on calm water. Ryker piloted a few feet to the end of the dock, and Mr. Scott secured the boat while he moved the truck.

  It was a busy day, the parking lot nearly full. Boats bobbed on the water, or putted off toward secret fishing spots. Families lined up their trucks and trailers, prepping their craft for launch. A few clouds scudded across the depthless blue sky. Echo only had eyes for Ryker.

  He sat at the wheel, already clad in a form-fitting wetsuit, eyes moving across the greenish water, searching. Emotion tangled his features, a mix of hope, sorrow, perhaps shame. He’d lost his brother here. Ryker was back, no doubt trying to find his body. She felt an ache in her heart for him.

  “C’mon, Echo, daylight’s wasting.” She nearly jumped out of her skin. Mr. Scott came down the dock behind her, a gentle hand directing her onto the boat where the rest of the class already waited.

  Even though the dive boat was probably the biggest on the river, it was still cramped quarters for eight people. “I’ve got a bigger boat on Lake Erie that we’ll use for a dive on a wreck.” Jim Scott was a retired firefighter, a search-and-rescue diver, something Ryker aspired to.

  “Let’s do our safety checks. Ryker, take us upstream.” Mr. Scott brought in the fenders and cast off. Ryker throttled up, circling around. The class checked the tanks and regulators, went over the dive plan. The late morning sun warmed them, sending blinding shards from the water. When they dropped anchor, Echo saw the place where they’d contacted Leshy near the tumbled shack. Not far beyond was her house, out of view in the woods.

  “Surface temperature is about sixty-four degrees here, but it gets a lot colder toward the bottom. Probably not cold enough to require drysuits. But unless any of you are polar bears, we are going with wetsuits. Let’s get ready to get wet.” Mr. Scott leaned against the gunwale, pulling his suit up one leg and smoothing it out.

  Others in the class were already clad in wetsuits, but Echo didn’t have one of her own. She took a rented suit from a rack over the tanks and took it to the bench beneath the canopy. Kicking off her flipflops, she put her right foot into the snug neoprene. Once she had both legs smoothed out, she pulled her sweatshirt over her head. Out of the corner of her eye, she was sure she caught Ryker staring.

  Stretching and yawning, arms overhead, she gave him a few more moments of the new swimsuit. When she pulled the upper part on, she saw that Ryker was back to staring mournfully at the surface of the water. So much for Aunt Mary’s words of wisdom.

  “You minding the boat while we dive?” Scott asked Ryker.

  Ryker dragged his eyes from the horizon. “I was planning on diving.”

  “Didn’t you already dive earlier?”

  His chin jutted out, hazel eyes narrowing. “I was planning on diving,” Ryker repeated.

  Mr. Scott opened his mouth to say something, but closed it and simply nodded. He faced the class. “Let’s not stray too far upstream. The ruins of Fishburn are mostly gone, but there are a few dangerous structures. Buddy up and let’s dive.”

  Ryker spoke up. “If anyone sees anything on the bottom, report it to me. Echo, you wanna be my dive buddy?”

  Her breath caught in her throat, heart pumping harder, head light. Is this what a swoon was? “Ee,” was all she managed to say, but nodded her head.

  A few minutes later, she rolled backward off the gunwale and into an olive-colored world. Yards below her, Ryker turned on his flashlight and gestured for her to follow. Silver flashed around him, a school of fish swerving out of sight. Echo listened to the steady sound of her regulator, the reverberating noise of underwater sounds, bubbles, distant boat motors, the plunk of other divers entering the water.

  The bottom came up quickly, revealed in her light. Her suit was warm enough, but her hands and ankles were freezing cold. A few rocks littered the landscape, dead trees, garbage. Railroad tracks ran over a ridge at her same depth. Ryker followed them, heading north despite Mr. Scott’s warning. To her surprise, his flashlight went out.

  A shock of anger and fear ran through her. Was he ditching her in the middle of a dive? Then she saw his silhouette. Which was weird. How could she see his silhouette without his flashlight beam?

  With numb fingers, she switched off her own light. Distantly, a bright shape wavered. What could possibly be glowing under a river? Ryker made straight for it, and she swam hard to catch up.

  She felt a charge against her breastbone. When her hand patted the wetsuit, she could barely feel the amulet her father gave her pressed against the rubber. The crawly feeling intensified. What could it mean? The pendant had been her mother’s, a talisman to keep animals at bay around her. Animals were sensitive to the supernatural, and not often friendly around it. While it gave Echo a kind of control over animals, the necklace had never behaved like this.

  Twisting in the water, she glanced around, trying to penetrate the dark green gloom. A darker shape rose from the bottom, creating a cloud of mud. As Echo stared, a large form writhed through the water, heading directly for her and Ryker.

  OLD FOLKS HOMES GAVE Harvest the creeps. Despite the cheery entrance, light streaming through windows, the waiting room and front desk all sparkling clean, the staff smiling and helpful, she was overcome by a feeling of abandonment. That sense had dogged Harvest all her life, and here it was, placed in a structure near up town, a monument to desertion, a temple to those left behind. She considered hightailing it out of there when an attendant approached.

  Now, she felt trapped. “I’m hoping to speak with Dr. Dardompre.”

  Short, chubby, dark-haired and bubbly, the staffer shook her head. “We don’t have any Dr. Dardompre on staff.”

  “He’s not on staff. He’s a patient.”

  “We say ‘guest.’” The young woman smiled. Her face then opened up. “Oh, you must mean Henry. Such a nice man. I love his accent. Are you family?”

  “No, I just need to speak with him about his work. Is that okay?” Harvest, already edging toward the door, hoped it was not.

  “He’s usually in his room, reading. Let’s go see if he’s up to a visit.” The attendant walked down a hall, shooting a look over her shoulder to see if Harvest followed. Resigned, Harvest fell in step. They walked a corridor past patients’ rooms. Harvest kept her eyes on the woman in front of her. Near the end of the hall, she ducked her head in a doorway.

  “Go
od morning, Henry. You have a visitor.”

  Henri Dardompre sat reading in a recliner under a light despite the brightness of the room. Large dark eyes rose over the lenses of his reading glasses. Marking his place, he set the book aside. “All right. Come in.”

  Over his dark scalp, close-cut white hair resembled a knitted cap. He wore a starched white dress shirt, corduroys and slippers. From the mass of wrinkles that formed his face, dark eyes sharply took her measure. Harvest was surprised to see the attendant had already left. She stepped into the room.

  With a quick motion, Dardompre brought a medallion out from under his shirt. “I may be old, but I’m not afraid of you, witch.”

  Harvest saw the pendant was jade, the one thing that made their magic go wonky. “I’m not here to hurt you, Dr. Dardompre. I just wanted to ask you about Alan McGooby.”

  At the words Dr. Dardompre, the man sat a little straighter. He let the necklace fall on his chest. “No one calls me Doctor in here. They can’t even be bothered to call me by my given name, Henri. No, it’s Henry, Old Henry all day long. Come, sit, but understand I know the tricks of a Twih-witch.”

  Harvest held up her hands. “No tricks here. Just talk.”

  “I’ve talked to several investigators, over the years. None of them heard what I was saying to them. Perhaps you might understand. If you want to know what happened to Alan, I’m afraid I don’t know. What I can tell you is the circumstances of his disappearance were far stranger than anyone might believe.”

  Dardompre’s words were slightly colored by a sing-song accent, a hint of French. Despite the jade jewelry, and the surroundings, she found his pleasant voice relaxing. “You were in the Jade Coven together.”

  He smiled, showing huge bright dentures, and put his index finger over his mouth. “Yes, you might well understand. You strike me as a Hutchinson, but from the hairs standing on the back of my neck, you are no simple country witch.”