“Go for it, little brother.”
Jeremy left Zach downstairs and went upstairs to find Rowenna already asleep.
She curled into his arms when he got in bed, and that night, he just held her. And when he fell asleep, he slept like a log.
And so did Rowenna.
She had always liked Zach, Rowenna reflected as they drove out toward the MacElroy house. He looked a lot like Jeremy, though where Jeremy had storm-gray eyes, Zach’s were more like a Caribbean lagoon, and he had more red in his hair than either of his brothers.
Like Jeremy, Zach liked to escape into music. As a sideline while he’d worked forensics for the Miami PD, he’d invested in several recording studios, so he could produce some of the local acts he found in coffeehouses and bars. He’d decided to quit the force and join his older siblings in their investigation agency when he had been called into a crack house where a father had gotten angry that his baby was crying and decided to put him in the microwave. He had always been friendly and easy to talk to, a complete contrast to Jeremy’s original standoffish attitude.
Now she found herself telling him things she hadn’t mentioned to Jeremy, because she’d been too afraid of him treating her dreams—and anything else that hinted at the paranormal—with disdain.
Zach listened gravely and without judgment when she told him how she had started dreaming about the cornfields—and the corpses. She even confided about being in the cemetery and her certainty that whoever was guilty had some knowledge of hypnotism or mind control.
“That may be true,” Zach pointed out, “but how could he have controlled your mind when you were in New Orleans?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he couldn’t have. I don’t understand any of it,” she told him.
They drove in silence for a few minutes, and then she asked if he would mind going by her house first, because she wanted to check something on her bookshelf. He agreed, got her permission to use her computer to go online and followed her directions to her place.
She felt cold and sick with worry about Eve. But she wasn’t sure what she could do; the police were looking for her everywhere. And Jeremy was at the station, talking to Adam, who kept repeating that he didn’t know where she was. A psychiatrist had even been brought in, so she couldn’t do anything that wasn’t already being done.
Except go to the cemetery. Because she was convinced that the answer somehow lay in the cemetery.
When she walked into her house, she remembered how surprised she had been that the light had been out when she had first returned. Ginny was normally so careful, but apparently she was starting to slip. Then again, she reminded herself dryly, Dr. MacElroy was still on the suspect list.
She went over to her bookcase and started going through it. She owned a book on funerary art, and she wanted to grab it and ask Brad if it was the same book Mary had been reading.
It wasn’t there.
She frowned. She wasn’t compulsive, but she loved books, and she was careful with them. It should have been there. She went through the whole shelf, looked through the titles again, and still didn’t see it. It was gone. On the heels of that realization, she felt deeply uncomfortable. She couldn’t imagine that Ginny would have borrowed it.
Which meant that someone else had been in her house.
She hadn’t thought about the book in a long time, she reminded herself. Maybe her memory was faulty. Maybe she had loaned the book to someone.
But she knew she hadn’t…
She went to find Zach, who looked up at her excitedly. He pointed at the computer screen. “Take a look at this,” he told her. “It’s a complete record of Brisbin’s speech on the gallows. He claimed that he was Damien, the Devil’s servant, and said he would return in the flesh to wreak vengeance on the heirs of his killers when he completed the seven and ruled the world.”
“Damien,” Rowenna breathed. “Like the fortune-teller.”
“I know,” Zach said.
“Adam was reading some pretty creepy stuff, so he could have found this and decided to take the name Damien,” she said and hesitated. “Eve did say that he left the shop for a while that day.”
“But apparently Damien’s setup was pretty elaborate,” Zach said. “It would have taken time to pull it together, more time than a guy running a store with his wife would have.”
“True,” she agreed.
“Let’s get over to the MacElroys’,” Zach said. “I’ll call Jeremy and see if anyone’s been able to track down the current ownership of Brisbin’s land. Something’s missing in the online records, so someone’s got to go through the actual paperwork. We should know by tonight.”
“Tonight.” Rowenna sighed. “And tomorrow the Harvest Festival starts.”
“Isn’t this kind of early?”
“It runs till Thanksgiving. Not that I’m feeling very thankful this year.”