Rafferty walked back to Towner.
“It’s going to be okay,” she said, reading his frustration.
“I wish that were true.” He was no longer certain that Leah Kormos was the killer. He’d already told Callie that, but now he was even more doubtful. Leah Kormos had been gone a long time, and whoever took the bodies had done so fairly recently, definitely before the first snow fell. Even so, something told him that, if he could find Leah, he’d find the key to unlock the whole mystery.
Tell me what you want, and I’ll tell you who you think you are. Tell me what you fear, and I’ll tell you who you really are.
—ROSE’S Book of Trees
The day after the exhumation, they surprised Rafferty with an anniversary cake. The cake thing was a relatively new AA phenomenon, something someone who’d been in the program in L.A. had suggested. That’s what they did out west, he said. But the Salem meeting was full of newbies, and they hadn’t had a cake for so long Rafferty had forgotten it was even a possibility. What he hadn’t forgotten for a moment was what day it was or, rather, what day it should have been but wasn’t.
When the moderator brought it in, twenty-five candles blazing, Rafferty bolted. Ignoring their protests and looks of surprise, he walked out the back door and down the steps, leaving Jay-Jay without a word of explanation, not even looking back.
He hadn’t taken a chip since the night he picked up, and he hadn’t had another drink since then either, but he had never spoken about his slip in any meeting, or even told his sponsor, which he knew was wrong on so many levels. He rationalized his silence: He was chief of police; he couldn’t have people knowing he’d broken his sobriety. That’s what he told himself, but it wasn’t true. If this had happened to someone he’d been sponsoring, he would have called bullshit on the guy.
“Hey, boss, wait up!” Jay-Jay said, snapping Rafferty back into the present. Jay-Jay was out of breath as he caught up with him. “What the heck was that about? You don’t like cake or something? Who doesn’t like cake?”
Rafferty grunted.
“HALT!” Jay-Jay commanded, and Rafferty stopped, annoyed.
“Hungry, angry, lonely, tired,” Jay-Jay intoned, plunging his hands into the pockets of his pants, which were a size too big, and falling into step beside Rafferty. “We’re not supposed to let ourselves feel any of those things, and you’re all four. If you’d had the cake, you could have at least eliminated one of them.”
Jay-Jay had taken to AA with an enthusiasm that was so strong it was almost overpowering. It was the last thing Rafferty would have expected.
“I’m not lonely.”
“If you think I’m leaving you in this condition, you don’t know me very well.”
The truth was, Rafferty knew Jay-Jay LaLibertie a lot better than he’d ever wanted to. “Go back to the meeting.”
“You’re only as sick as your secrets, you know,” Jay-Jay said, quoting another AA mantra.
If you only knew the secret I was hiding, Rafferty thought. He felt sicker about it with each passing day.
His slip had lasted only one day. One night, actually. It had started at a restaurant down on Pickering Wharf at a fund-raiser for Salem’s Witches Educational Council, the antidefamation league meant to educate the public about the Wiccan religion and the good works witches do for the community. As chief, Rafferty always had public relations things he had to do, events he was required to attend. He pretty much hated this part of his job. “Just make an appearance,” the mayor had told him. “After that, you can sneak away.”
It had been the last place he should have gone. But he’d been so distraught after he and Towner had made their separation legally official earlier that day that he wasn’t thinking straight. As if it weren’t enough that he’d already moved out, she’d felt the need to leave town, relocating to Yellow Dog Island, as if putting the water between them would somehow make the separation final. That night he was expected, and, not knowing what else to do with himself, he’d shown up, realizing the minute he walked in that it had been a huge mistake.
Ann had known something was wrong the minute she saw his face. “What’s ailing you?” she’d asked.
“Nothing,” he’d said. He couldn’t talk about it with Ann. Not without losing it altogether. He walked to the other side of the restaurant, away from the one person he knew could see through him.
When Finn had handed him the green liquid, he’d thought it was punch. Ann was always serving some witchy thing with herbs and something she called fairy dust. He’d questioned her about it the first time she tried to serve it to him.
“It’s powdered sugar, for God’s sake,” she’d told him, laughing. “I know enough not to give you anything stronger.”
He’d never told her he was a drunk; she’d always just known. It was one of the many things she knew without ever being told; that ability had freaked him out more than a few times.
“It shouldn’t surprise you,” Towner had said to him, early in their relationship. “Ann’s not only a witch, she’s a reader.”
“A mind reader?”
“Minds, lace, palms, the bumps on your head. There isn’t much that gets by her.”
The closest Rafferty had ever come to believing anything paranormal had been the day his mother died, that time he’d heard and seen the banshee. He did believe that some people had intuitive gifts, and Ann was definitely one of them, as was Towner. But he preferred to think of such gifts as scientific, the product of some as yet unmapped part of the brain. Or maybe the nonlinear time theory Ann was always espousing as science. But he’d always flatly rejected the existence of ghosts and specters, though that day he couldn’t imagine a time when he wouldn’t be haunted by Towner.
He hadn’t wanted to think about Towner that night. He’d fall apart if he did. He’d tried to push her from his mind, knowing what a ridiculous task that was. She’d been in his head since the day he met her, and he had no idea what he was going to do now.
He’d taken the drink from Finn and raised it to his mouth. It tasted like licorice only a little bitter.
“What the hell?” He’d realized it was absinthe the moment he tasted it. The Green Fairy. He shoved the glass back at Finn.
“Drink it, for God’s sake,” Finn said. “She’s not worth your pain.”
Later, he’d think he’d been staring into the face of the devil himself. He’d taken the drink.
That night Marta had waved to Rafferty from a far corner of the restaurant. He’d nodded but hadn’t approached.
“What’s Marta doing here?” he’d asked Finn.