“She’s a witch! She did it! She made this happen! With her black magic and those stupid knots!” Corky screamed.
“I’m so sorry . . . but it doesn’t work that way,” Ingrid said, backing away and shaking her head. Every part of her body was shaking as well, but she tried to project a sense of calm.
Matt looked questioningly at Ingrid. “Hold on . . . what do you mean? What’s all this about magic?”
“He hung himself! With a knot! It looks just like this one!” the woman hissed, holding up the little brown knot that Ingrid had given her a month ago.
“What’s going on?” Ingrid looked to Hudson for help. People were beginning to stare and congregate, looking at Ingrid with curiosity and fear. Ingrid had a flash back to her past, when the crowd had first gathered around her at the square that fine morning. They had circled her, just as the patrons of the library were doing now.
“As if you didn’t know! They found his body this morning! Todd hung himself! At some skeezy motel on Route 27!” Corky cried.
Ingrid gasped. “Is that true?” she asked Matt.
The detective nodded. “We answered a 911 call from the motel this morning. The police are still there. Corky, calm down. Let’s get you to the station.” He gave Ingrid a long, searching look and led the newswoman out the door.
“Christ . . . what a crazy bitch!” Hudson said, walking out of the office. Ingrid noticed that everyone in the library was looking at her skeptically, some with outright hostility. “Are you okay?”
Ingrid nodded even though she wasn’t. First the blueprints went missing, and she had stopped receiving texts or instant messages from her source, and now she was being accused of what . . . she wasn’t even sure . . . but she couldn’t shake off Corky’s hateful words and accusations.
Tabitha gave Ingrid a pat on the back. “Don’t worry, no one will listen to her. You had nothing to do with this,” she said stoutly. “She’s lost her husband and she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”
There were only a handful of women waiting to consult with her that day, which made Ingrid feel even worse. She tried not to think too much of it, but she couldn’t help but think it had something to do with those terrible things Corky had said that morning. What was it that awful woman had said? Black magic? That she was a witch—a hag—a false medicine woman?
Ingrid thought of what Freya was going through: Sal had told her to stop making potions and had, effectively, fired her. From now on, the town would keep its eyes on them. Ingrid felt a chill up her spine. She had lived through this once before; she knew how the story ended.
Once upon a time in Massachusetts, Ingrid had a thriving practice, a clinic just like this one, but then the whispers had begun, and the accusations had started to fly. But this was not back then, Ingrid tried to tell herself. Maybe no one needed her help because everything was peachy-keen. Right. And if Ingrid believed that, she had a bridge she could sell to herself. Gallows Hill might be gone, but its shadow lingered, and Ingrid was not foolish enough to think that what happened once could never happen again.
And the day was still not over. Before the library closed, she received another visitor. Emily Foster walked in, pale and trembling. “Ingrid. Do you have a second? I need to talk to you.”
chapter thirty-one
Marooned
Freya watched Killian put the phone gently back in its cradle, admiring his profile and the arc of muscles on his broad back. She placed the palm of her hand on his skin; she could never stop touching him. They had spent the entire evening pleasuring each other, trying new and exciting variations of the same dance, and for a moment there she had been worried he would never tire, he had been that insatiable. . . . She had never met a man who could keep up with her, but she had found her match in him. They would finish only to start again a few minutes later, an innocent hand on a leg, or a brush against a cheek leading back to where they began, and Freya discovered she was getting turned on just thinking about all the things he had made her feel last night. His skin was smooth to the touch and, like everything about him, physically perfect, no nubby ridges or dryness or scars, evenly bronzed all over.
They were in his cabin on the Dragon, and through the portholes she could see it was daylight, probably just after noon since the sun was casting no shadows. What day was it? She wasn’t sure. Where did time go when she was with him? She never noticed, it was an elusive quality, and she could never remember what they did—when they weren’t in bed, that is—and it seemed as if they were always in bed whenever they were together. There should have been a hermetic, somewhat stale quality to the room, since they had not left it in a few days, and Freya had made all their meals on the small galley stove with whatever she found in the fridge. But instead of smelling like sex and sweat and cooking oil, the room was bright and clean, and when she closed her eyes she inhaled the fresh scent of pine and flowers. She wondered why he preferred to live on the boat rather than in Fair Haven, which definitely had enough bedrooms, but ever since the beginning Killian had made the fishing boat his home.
“Who was that on the phone?” she asked, releasing her hold.
“Your sister,” he said, lying back down on the pillow and folding his arms behind his head, a thoughtful look on his face. His dark bangs covered one eye and he brushed them off impatiently.
“Ingrid? What did she want?” Freya propped herself on an elbow.
“I lent her some blueprints of the house a while back for her art show. It sounds like they’re missing,” Killian explained. “She didn’t say so, but I could sort of tell.”
“What is it about those blueprints? Bran asked about them the other day,” Freya said, picking at the lint on the sheets. “Ingrid told him she found something cool in the design keys in those blueprints. There’s some kind of code that she’s almost figured out, which has some historical significance.” She was babbling and trying to change the subject, as she was talking about Bran in Killian’s bed.
Killian raised his eyebrows. “You spoke to Bran?”
“Yesterday.” She leaned back and pulled the covers over her face.
“Hey,” he said, gently drawing down the covers.
“I don’t know what I’m doing here.” She shook her head and couldn’t look at him.
“Yes, you do.”
“Listen, I gotta go,” Freya said, pulling away so that she could put her clothes back on.
“Don’t go.” He began to kiss her neck, soft butterfly kisses that electrified every sense in her body. “You just got here.”
Freya had a déjà vu feeling—hadn’t she been in this same situation with Bran not too long ago? And now she was in a different bed, with a different brother. “Killian, come on. I got here four days ago.” She pushed his arms away gently.
“I love you,” he whispered. He was leaning forward so that his head rested on her shoulder and his hands cupped her breasts gently, making her feel warm all over.
“You’re not allowed to say that,” she said. “I told you. Nothing’s going to change. I’m still going to marry Bran in September.” She bit her lip.
“Don’t do this to us,” Killian warned, gripping her shoulder tightly.
“There is no us, Killian. There never was.”
“Don’t say that,” he said desperately.
“Stop it, you’re hurting me,” she said. Her heart was breaking, as well as his. She loved him so much. It was love she felt for him, deep and abiding and entrenched, a fierce white fire, and yet it was wrong. She knew it was wrong, that being with him was wrong. If only she had met him first. If only . . . But it was too late now. She and Bran had found each other and she had promised Bran she would marry him, and marry him she would. It was the right thing to do, it was what she was meant to do. She couldn’t change her destiny.