My heartbeat picked up. Sheriff Locumb could be a nice guy…in a diner. But I didn’t want to be on the other end of his questioning. Not again. Not ever.
Trying to appear calm, I removed my apron and gently placed it on the counter.
“Okay,” I said. “Let me get my stuff.”
After promising Jack I would make up my shift over the weekend, I headed to my Jeep and pulled up behind Sheriff Locumb’s cruiser.
I spent the drive to the sheriff’s office in a cold sweat. No handcuffs, no reading of my rights. At least this time I wasn’t under arrest. He was even allowing me to follow him to the station.
That whole thing with Mr. Petrenko—that was long over with, right? I’d only found his body.
I hadn’t killed the man. No matter what anyone thought.
***
SHERIFF LOCUMB AND I sat in a small room with a table and two chairs and a cheap light embedded into the suspended ceiling overhead. I wiped my palms on my pants, but the sweat kept coming.
He pulled up a picture on his cell phone. “Look familiar?”
Maybe he should’ve gotten an eight-by-twelve print. What was the picture of? Wood? A reddish-orange figure eight and a cross? I frowned and shook my head. “Should this look familiar?”
“Someone spray-painted this on the abandoned grain elevator,” he said coolly. “Why don’t you tell me what you know?”
“What I know about spray-paint?”
“Look.” He leveled his gaze at me. “Mrs. Franklin said one of the women in her congregation—well, her daughter got sick. They think you had something to do with it.”
“Mrs. Franklin thinks I have something to do with everything.”
“Well?” he asked.
“Well, what? I didn’t get anyone sick.”
He puffed his cheeks and blew out a breath. “I’m not saying you got anyone sick, Sophia. They think you hexed their child by spray-painting this satanic symbol.”
“You think I hexed someone? You’re kidding.”
Belle Meadow might be a small town, but surely it wasn’t so dull that they needed to call me down to the station for this.
“You’re here because Mrs. Franklin suggested you might be the one who vandalized the abandoned grain elevator, not because you ‘cursed’ someone.”
“And?” I asked.
“Well, did you?”
“I’m Wiccan.”
He stared blankly. “What’s that have to do with the case?”
“Wiccans don’t believe in Satan.”
“Listen, lady. I don’t care what you believe in. Why don’t you just tell me where you were when the offense took place?”
“Which was when?”
“May tenth.”
“At Colorado State, taking my senior year finals.” Something a few minutes of research would have told him without dragging me down here. Besides, how did Mrs. Franklin know the date? Did she take daily drives around town with her calendar and journal, looking for signs of demonic worship?
Sheriff Locumb leaned back in his chair, slapping his hands against his knees before standing. “I’m sure you wouldn’t mind waiting here while I check with the school?”
I gestured toward the door. “Go ahead.”
I would like to say I enjoyed the silence while he was gone, but the constant hushing in my brain made that impossible.
Sheriff Locumb returned with a cup of coffee and an apology. I didn’t drink the coffee, but I did ask him about the sick kid, and he told me it’d just been a case of chicken pox. Not a demonic plague or anything like that.
After squaring everything away, I returned outside to my Jeep and gripped the steering wheel. I couldn’t deal with Mrs. Franklin’s crazy accusations and the damn hissing. Something had to give.
Taking three deep breaths, I pushed the hissing as far into the back of my skull as possible. I wasn’t about to go back to work. Someone was bound to interrupt my relaxation efforts with a request for a drink refill or a complaint that their jalapeno loaf was too spicy or their ginger-lime chicken wasn’t chickeny enough.
As I drove home, I concentrated on the road—on one mailbox after another, on the way tree branches laced overhead, even on the glare of traffic lights, counting the seconds until they turned green. Anything to distract me from the noise.
My Jeep shushed along the pavement, but the roll of the road didn’t do me any good. The quieter the world around me, the louder the buzzing in my brain. Coping was no longer a viable option.
At the last major cross street before my neighborhood, the noise in my head roared. I slammed my palm against the steering wheel, gritting my teeth.
Enough was enough. I flicked my turn signal in the other direction and veered onto the highway before my courage fled. It was time to turn away from caution and toward Sparrow’s Grotto. Toward something that might silence the hissing forever.
***