TWENTY-SIX
Iris and Ellen both retreated to the places they felt most comfortable, Iris pulling on my grandmother’s sunhat and heading to the garden, Ellen opting for the darkened library and an open bottle. Now, however, didn’t seem like the appropriate moment for any kind of intervention.
Oliver sat deep in thought, staring down at nothing, wiping his hand down his mouth and chin. I could practically hear the wheels spinning in his head. He looked up at me. “I have an idea of how we might find out who is behind all this.”
He paused as if he were reconsidering. “I’m listening,” I said, prompting him to continue.
“I can’t read your mind like I used to, you know?” he asked. I had suspected as much, so I just nodded, even though the statement struck me as a non sequitur. “Non-witches, though, it’s a bit of a struggle not to read them.”
“So, what? Tucker, Emily, Ryder. There has to be a witch at the bottom of it.”
Oliver ignored me and grimaced. He was still wrapped up in his own train of thought, and his smooth forehead pinched into an uncharacteristic worry line. “We’d have to do it without telling Iris or Ellen. Iris would think it unseemly, even if it proved effective. And well, Ellen, she couldn’t know.”
Great, another secret, I thought. “Exactly what is it you are considering?”
“Going to the morgue and paying Tucker a visit.”
“What?!”
“No, listen. If you can channel enough energy into him to fire him back up, even for a few moments, I should be able to read his thoughts.”
I shook my head and felt a chill travel down my spine. Ellen would be devastated to know we were even considering it. “No, even if it were possible, Tucker had a huge hole punched through him. The only thought you are likely to pick up is ‘Ouch.’?”
Oliver shrugged. “Or we might just find out who killed him. We might just find out who took one more bit of love from your Aunt Ellen. Who has sent her back into the downward spiral I thought she’d finally shaken off. Who is trying to turn you against the family who loves you.”
“You say we should do this for Ellen and me, but we both know Ellen wouldn’t want us to disturb Tucker’s body. I’m not sure if I’m okay with it either. I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do. Meddling with the dead.”
“I don’t either, but I do know it’s wrong for me to sit here and do nothing while someone is attacking my family and those they love. Besides, I’m not suggesting a séance. It’s more like when you were in school, and the teacher had you touch a severed frog leg with a battery to make it contract. We won’t be disturbing Tucker. Just applying a little jolt to see if we can trigger a reflex. Come on. We go. We try. Either we get somewhere, or we don’t. Let’s do this. Tucker’s not getting any fresher.” He paused. “It could be Peter next, you know.” He was hitting me below the belt with that one. “Or Adam.” There lay his real concern.
“Oliver,” I said. The thought of Tucker’s decaying body made bile rise up in my throat. I lowered my head and took a deep breath, hoping the nausea would pass. “I’ll gladly help you set up charms to protect Adam,” and I’d toss in a few for Peter just in case, whether he was already protected by Fae magic or no. “But tinkering with Tucker’s corpse?” I hated the word corpse—the way it felt on my tongue, the way it sounded in my own ears.
“We both know there are many ways around charms.” I had learned that firsthand when Jackson moved me into a nearby dimension, just outside of the reach of the charms Emmet had set up to protect me. “They are good for fending off non-magical folk, maybe even magical small-timers, but someone with real mojo? Not so much.” He scanned my face. “What are you really afraid of?” I looked up to find Oliver’s eyes searching me the way they used to, when my thoughts were an open book to him.
“Mama said Tucker was killed because he had been helping her.”
“Listen, we don’t even know if that was Emily. And if it was, then we aren’t just looking for Tucker’s killer. We’re looking for whoever killed her too. This may be our best way, our only way, to really get to the bottom of things. How about it?”
A sigh escaped me. I caved. “All right. Let’s go before I change my mind.”
“That’s a girl,” my uncle said, striking me as just a tad too pleased to be visiting with the dead.
Oliver held his tongue during the drive to the morgue. Besides magic, one of his greatest strengths was that he knew when to stop selling. He wasn’t going to risk saying anything that might cause me to question the wisdom of what we were about to attempt. I found it disconcerting just how near to the coroner’s office Peter’s house sat. Growing up in Savannah, I had adjusted to the knowledge that bones were buried just about everywhere, but I still felt squeamish at the thought of newly minted corpses being autopsied just a few blocks away from Sackville. “Looks like an office,” I said as we parked.
“You were expecting Castle Frankenstein?” Oliver turned off the ignition and opened his door. “Let me do the talking,” he said, as if I’d been about to offer. In the time it took for that thought to cross my mind, he’d circled around and opened my door for me. He followed behind me a step or so as we walked toward the building, as if he were anticipating that I might turn at the last moment and run. The door opened, and climate-controlled air mercifully engulfed me. Only then did Oliver step around me to approach the man sitting at the reception desk.
The thought that a morgue would have a receptionist struck me as the setup for a bad joke, but Oliver had already started his delivery. “Hey, Don!” he said, sounding for all the world as if the man behind the desk were a long-lost friend. “How’s Jen doing?” Don was a bit taken aback. His eyebrows raised and his lips puckered as he tried to place Oliver’s face. They were total strangers to each other, but Oliver was using his mindreading skills to pluck random bits of information from the man’s consciousness. To my own surprise, I realized that Don was an easy read even for me. It felt a bit like going to a party and sneaking a peek in the host’s medicine cabinet.
“Um, she’s real good,” Don replied.
“Good, real good,” Oliver echoed. “So how’s life under the new regime?” It had been a teapot-sized scandal a few months ago when the longtime coroner had resigned under a shadow of alleged misuse of county funds. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss?”
I could feel Don’s mind landing on the name Taylor. A remembrance of a newspaper photo. Once again my family’s notoriety raised its head. “What can I do for you, Mr. Taylor?” he asked.
“Well, we were hoping to visit Tucker Perry.”
Don’s eyes narrowed and a smirk came to his lips. “This is the coroner’s office, Mr. Taylor. We don’t exactly have visiting hours.”
“Still, you can make it happen,” Oliver said, as if he were simply stating the obvious.
“Well, of course I could, but there are procedures. Rules. We can’t just let people come traipsing through here to see the bodies.”
Oliver mirrored Don’s expression. “Has there been a lot of that going on?”
“Well, no, but . . .”
“Don, take us back and show us Tucker’s body.” His tone was still reasonable, but this time it was unmistakably a command. Don wavered between his sudden need to do as Oliver wished and his long-ingrained fear of breaking the rules. “Come on, you know you want to.”
Oliver and his magical coercion. I knew he couldn’t read my mind as easily as before, but it did make me wonder whether he had convinced me to come with him the same way he was convincing Don to show us Tucker. Were anchors really immune to being charmed, or was that simply a bit of propaganda? I really had to wonder. Don got up from his desk and held the door to the morgue open for us.
“Doesn’t it bother you?” The words jumped out of me of their own volition. Oliver lowered his chin and tilted his head to the side, the very image of innocence. He had no idea what I was talking about. “This. Compelling people to do things.”
He shook his head. “No,” he said, and then, “should it?” I said nothing, just stared at him with my mouth open.
“Do you really want to do this here and now?” he asked. “I mean, it’s kind of rude to keep Don waiting.” He poked his head closer to me and raised his eyebrows. Sometimes I loved him so much, and other times I could just throttle him. It struck me that the interval between those times just kept getting shorter.
We stepped into the most thoroughly tiled room I had ever seen. Gray tiles on the walls, tan tiles on the floor, the ones on the floor slanting in slightly around drains. I shuddered at the thought of what had been washed away through those drains over the years. Several doors lined the beige wall of refrigerated units. I knew Peadar’s remains still lay sealed behind one of those doors. Jilo had tried her best to convince me that I shouldn’t feel guilty, but I was still awash in regret.
“Tucker?” Oliver asked, prompting Don to open first one door and then a second. He closed each in quick succession. Even though there’d been nothing in the news, it occurred to me that what was left of Birdy might be here as well. “Third time’s a charm, Don.”
The man smiled nervously and nodded, pulling open another door. He checked the toe-tag on the body and nodded again, pulling the body tray out of the refrigerator. Oliver assisted him in shifting the body to a gurney; then he pushed the tray back and shut the cooler’s door.
“You can return to your desk now. We’ll put him away when we’re through here.”
“Good. Real good,” Don said, practically bowing as he returned to the door without ever turning his back on us.
Oliver crossed over to the gurney that held Tucker’s body, but then called out, “Oh, Don?” The man stopped in his tracks. “Let’s keep this little visit between us, okay?”
“Sure thing. Of course,” Don said and left the room.
I joined Uncle Oliver near the body. I’d hoped to have a few more seconds to prepare myself. I’d expected that the sheet would have been pulled up over Tucker’s face, but it was turned down around his clavicle, leaving his neck and head exposed. His skin showed a light purplish-blue cast.
“Ah, Tucker, you bastard,” Oliver said, an odd affection for the deceased playing in his voice. “You were a total prick, but who would’ve wanted to hurt you like this?” His lack of respect for the dead made me uncomfortable. I looked at Oliver, and he read the distaste on my face. “You of all people are telling me you didn’t think of him as a jerk?”
“Well, yeah, but he’s dead now.”
“So he’s a dead jerk.”
“Ellen loved him,” I said. The regret I felt for the way I had acted about their engagement weighed heavily on me. Another stone of guilt pulling me down. Silently, I apologized to Tucker. Later, I’d do the same to Ellen, this time out loud.
“And we love Ellen, and that is a big part of the reason why we are standing here now. Shall we?” He stepped away from the tray so that I could position myself between him and the body.
“Are you sure we should do this? I mean, when Iris laid hands on Ginny, it opened a door for Grace’s spirit to come through.”
Oliver winced at the memory. “It isn’t quite the same thing, Gingersnap. Ginny was a powerful witch, an anchor. Tucker, he was just an ordinary guy. But you are right, we need to be mindful of what we are attempting here.” He pointed his finger at the floor, and a beam of blue light emanated from it. He paced around, drawing a glowing circle on the floor. “In case anything does slip through, this will contain it until we can send it back.” He guided me to the head of the table. I looked down at Tucker. His trademark gold curls, strong forehead, and full lips. Now that his eyes were closed and he wasn’t leering at me, I could take in the full effect of his features. “He was a handsome man.”
Oliver nodded. “Until he opened his mouth.” I shot him another warning glance. He shrugged an apology and moved on. “You’ll need to touch him. Probably best if you put your hands on his head. You okay with that?”
I nodded and reached forward to place my fingertips on his temples, but I couldn’t complete the action. I stopped with my hands hovering a few inches above Tucker. “What about . . .” I started, but then hesitated, feeling a little foolish.
“What about what?”
“What about his soul?”
A smile curved on Oliver’s lips. “You still believe in the soul, Gingersnap?”
I considered his question, feeling somehow unsophisticated, but then nodded. “Yes,” I began, my voice trembling, then said it again with the force of conviction. “Yes, I do.”
Oliver reached out and touched my cheek. “Yeah, I kind of do too. But we aren’t trying to pull his spirit back to his body. We are just going to hit it with a little juice, just enough to spark up his hard drive, get his synapses firing long enough for me to look around.”
I let my decision filter down from my head to my gut. I owed it to Ellen, even if she might not like what we were doing, to find out who’d done this to Tucker. And I owed it to myself to get some answers too. I nodded and breathed deeply, calming my mind, focusing on the few positive thoughts about Tucker I could mine from my heart. I touched his temples, and his body pulsed and lurched up into a sitting position. A guttural sound issued from his throat. It might have been a full scream if his trachea had not been destroyed. His back faced me, and I shuddered as I saw the light shining through the hole burned through his body. I saw Oliver’s eyes dart up to meet Tucker’s, and I felt grateful that I didn’t have to see his dead eyes myself, that I didn’t have to witness whatever was written in them. Tucker’s right hand shot up and clamped itself over mine. Cold. Dead. But still trembling. An image rose up in my thoughts. A large and terrifying dog. No, a wolf. My conscious mind rejected it as ridiculous. There were no wolves in Savannah. Perhaps we had waited too long to attempt our grisly task. Maybe the physical damage had been too great, or perhaps decay had closed off Tucker’s circuits. His body convulsed once, twice, and then went slack in my hands, his head banging down against the metal table. I was still holding my hands out before me. They felt soiled, and all I could think of for a moment was my desire to run them under hot water until the coldness of death had been washed away. Small sparks shot from the fingertips of one hand to the other. I clenched them into fists and brought them down to my sides, just as the door to the morgue banged opened.
Adam entered the room, shaking his head, his own fists clenched. “Just what in the hell are you two doing in here?”