Crowbones

CHAPTER 25

Grimshaw

Thaisday, Novembros 1

Grimshaw gave everyone a five-minute breathing break. Before Vicki could untangle herself from the stressed-out Crows, who had feathers popping out everywhere, he strode to the library, where a long folding table had been set up for Julian’s auxiliary bookstore. He wanted to ask Julian about the duplicity-and-honey-trap message, but mainly he wanted to block the doorway before Vicki and the Crows could engage in book delirium as a way to quiet anxiety. If they reached the books, he’d never get them focused on the information he needed from them.

“If your store is called Lettuce Reed, what are you going to call this? Mini Munch?”

“Stop being helpful, Michael,” Julian said.

A bit of a bite to Julian’s reply, but also . . . an old understanding?

Grimshaw remembered the man’s face from last night’s party but hadn’t been introduced. Then again, he hadn’t done much socializing last night, between the prophecy sent via the Lakeside police; Tom Saulner—aka Hatchet Head—and the other teenage boys giving Vicki’s anxiety a kick; and the very dead body of Adam Fewks, the faux Crowgard bogeyman. “Need to talk to both of you.”

“Are you going to come in or just block the doorway?” Julian asked.

“Block the doorway.”

Julian gave him a sharp look. So did the other man.

Julian made the introductions when they joined him in the doorway. “Michael, this is Wayne Grimshaw, Sproing’s chief of police. Wayne, this is Michael Stern and Margaret Shaw, depending on which genre you’re reading. If the name is familiar, it’s probably because you’ve read one of his books and not because you’ve seen the name on a police report.”

“Good to know.” He studied Michael Stern. “Where are you from?”

Stern hesitated. “Ravendell. It’s a town on Senneca Lake.”

Grimshaw nodded. “You sent the message about duplicity and honey trap?”

Another hesitation.

“You can trust him,” Julian said, looking at Stern. “He understands about our kind.”

“Just sensing emotions that didn’t weigh up right,” Stern finally said quietly. “Everyone’s emotions were a bit skewed last night. Socializing with the terra indigene wasn’t quite what my cousin and I expected. It was . . . wow.” He lowered his voice even more. “Did Ms. DeVine really leap off the end of the dock and meet the lake’s Elders when she tried to swim to Silence Lodge to escape from a man with a gun? The young Sanguinati who told me and Ian the story said he wasn’t embellishing, but . . .”

“Met the Elders, knows the Lady of the Lake and Fire, and has a pony named Whirlpool show up in the kitchen once in a while looking for a carrot,” Julian said dryly. “And that’s not touching on the employees and other residents of The Jumble, or the fact that her attorney and her CPA have fangs.”

Stern blinked, then swallowed hard.

“Can we focus on my investigation?” Grimshaw asked.

“Sorry,” Julian said. “What do you need?”

“Duplicity. Honey trap.”

“The feeling of duplicity was here last night but not after the party broke up,” Stern said. “Or, to be exact, felt superficial after the party broke up. Honey trap?” He shrugged. “Could be cultural differences and we were reading more into it than was intended. Just . . . the Sanguinati girl is a bit of a flirt with a mean undercurrent, which surprised Ian and me since she comes across as shy and demure—at least when the Sanguinati adults are around. She’s a contradiction that makes us uneasy. But that could just be what Sanguinati girls are like at that age.”

Grimshaw caught Julian’s look. Yeah. He’d have to talk to Ilya about that later. Right now . . . “You didn’t get a feel for the almost newlyweds who weren’t married to each other?”

Julian swore softly.

“That’s what I meant by ‘superficial.’ A small deceit in comparison,” Stern replied. He looked at them. “That’s a problem?”

“For Vicki it is,” Julian said. “Does she know?”

Grimshaw nodded. “I need to talk to you later, after I finish with Vicki and the Crows.” He started to turn away, then added, “Mini Munch. I think you should keep the name.”

Not waiting to hear Julian’s reply, he rounded up Vicki and the Crows before they managed to reach the library. Ignoring their grumbles, he herded them back to the dining room.

Ilya resumed his seat and said quietly, “Boris will let me know if Clara Crowgard shows up.”

Grimshaw took his seat and considered how to continue. Vicki and her employees did better with providing information when real police work could be referenced from the cop and crime shows they watched each week. He also figured he’d have the best chance of getting information from them if he started with the least scary and worked up to the most terrifying. He just hoped he’d guessed the correct order.

He took Adam Fewks’s student ID out of his shirt pocket and set it on the table. “Have you ever seen this man?”

“Is this where we say we haven’t even though we didn’t look at the picture and the police have to ask again?” Jozi asked Vicki.

“Those people don’t want to be helpful,” Vicki replied. “We do want to be helpful, so we’ll all take a careful look at the picture.”

They all leaned toward the student ID and stared.

Grimshaw counted off the seconds.

“I’m not sure,” Vicki said. “I might have seen him coming out of Pops Davies’s store the other day, but there wasn’t any reason to pay attention to him. I just remember seeing a young man who wasn’t familiar come out of Pops’s store at the same time I came out of the post office.”

He’d have to ask Pops if Fewks bought the bleach at the general store.

Aggie and Jozi gave him sorrowful looks and apologized for not recognizing the human.

Eddie said, “I recognize him. He was the younger human talking to Civil and Serious Crowgard.”

Score, Grimshaw thought. “Do you remember anything about the other human?”

Eddie shook his head. “I didn’t see his face. We’re good at remembering faces.”

“Yes, you are.” He thought for a moment. “There are other ways police can describe a human and narrow down a suspect list. Tall or short. Skinny or heavy. Hair color. What clothes he was wearing.”

“Clothes change,” Aggie said. “You can’t depend on recognizing an unfriendly human by the clothes.”

“That’s true, but we can ask if other people saw a human wearing that particular outfit, and someone might have heard a name or where he’s staying.” He waited while the Crows conferred among themselves and Vicki frowned at the table.

He looked at Ilya, who had been too quiet. “Your thoughts?”

Ilya didn’t reply before Eddie said, “A muddy green coat with the collar turned up. Hands in the coat’s pockets, so I couldn’t see if he wore any shinies. Brown . . . cap.”

“Muddy green is the color?” Ilya asked. “Not mud on a green coat?”

“Color.” Eddie sounded certain.

“It was a chilly night,” Vicki said slowly. “The humans who came to the party all wore coats. I piled up the outerwear on the dining room chairs so it would be out of the way but still accessible.”

“You saw that coat?” Grimshaw asked. “The other person talking to the Crows might have been an adult who was at the party?”

Vicki nodded. “I saw more than one coat of that particular color green. I thought the coat must be practical, because the color wasn’t appealing. A muddy green, like Eddie said. But other people were being helpful and carrying coats into the room, so I don’t know which coat belonged to which person.”

“It still gives us something to work with.” And narrowed their suspect pool to the people renting the Mill Creek Cabins and the guests at The Jumble. It was possible it had been an earth native who had hidden face and hands because they didn’t look sufficiently human, but he didn’t think a Crow would mistake one of the terra indigene for a human, regardless of form.

Grimshaw rested his forearms on the table. He wasn’t sure what was going on with Ilya, who was unnaturally still. “Now we’re getting to the scary part. Tell us about Crowbones.”

Feathers popped out everywhere.

“Maybe there is a Crowgard storyteller who could tell you?” Vicki suggested.

“No,” Aggie said, clinging to Vicki’s hand. “I can tell. I can.”

Grimshaw waited while Aggie, who looked like a human teenager, gathered herself—and wondered how much time it took for a Crow to reach that equivalent stage of maturity. Months? Years? He knew terra indigene aged differently than the animals whose form they had absorbed, so he had no idea what her chronological age might be.

“Crowbones wears a cape made out of the feathers of the fallen and carries a gourd filled with the bones of the taken,” Aggie said. “If you hear the rattle, rattle of the gourd, it’s a warning that Crowbones is coming to get you because you’ve been a bad Crow. Or you’re an enemy of the Crowgard.”

“Has anyone seen this being? Any idea what Crowbones looks like?”

Aggie’s mouth twisted in a smile. “Plenty have seen. None have lived.”

“Are feet used as a token of some kind?”

That was too much for Jozi, who shifted to her Crow form and hid under her clothes.

“Warning,” Eddie said, trembling. He looked at Aggie. “And . . . ?”

“Signature?” Vicki suggested when Aggie just shivered and sprouted more feathers.

“Connection,” Aggie whispered.

That’s what he’d been afraid of. Between Fewks being seen with Civil and Serious and this physical connection between the two mutilated bodies . . . Whatever was out there was telling him and the Sanguinati that the body in the compost bin and the remains that had been left outside the police station were connected.

Ilya finally stirred and reached into his briefcase. “This is a crime scene photo. It will frighten you. Chief Grimshaw needs you to be brave long enough to look at the photo and tell him if you know this Crow.”

“A Crow?” Aggie’s voice was whispered terror. “You found one of us?”

“Be brave long enough, and then there will be no more questions today.”

Grimshaw looked at Ilya but didn’t point out it wasn’t the Sanguinati’s place to decide if there would or wouldn’t be more questions. Of course, Ilya was the unofficial—or perhaps the official—attorney for the terra indigene around Lake Silence and could, therefore, make that call.

Ilya laid one photo on the table.

“Gods above and below,” Vicki breathed. “Was that . . .” She looked at Grimshaw and mouthed, at Ineke’s?

He nodded.

“That was one of the Crows talking to the humans,” Eddie finally said. “I don’t know if it’s Civil or Serious.”

He bolted out of the dining room.

Ilya put the photo back in his briefcase. Grimshaw slipped Fewks’s student ID into his own shirt pocket.

Vicki pushed back from the table. “I’ll . . . We’ll . . .” She gathered up Jozi and the bundle of clothes and staggered out of the room, Aggie still clinging to one of her arms.

Grimshaw pulled out his mobile phone. Ilya laid a hand on his arm before he could make a call.

“I’ve told Natasha that Victoria is having . . . difficulty . . . right now. She’ll alert Mr. Farrow.” Ilya gave him an assessing look. “Unless you were calling someone else?”

“No.”

“Feathers of the fallen. Bones of the taken. There is a distinction. Last night Aggie mentioned that the fallen are the innocent, and the taken are the ones who prey on the innocent.”

Grimshaw thought for a moment. “And feet left with a body tells everyone there is a connection between two deaths? Is this a Crowgard vigilante meting out a savage brand of justice?”

“Perhaps.”

“But no description of Crowbones. So why did Adam Fewks make up a mask that looked so skeletal? Because it was Trickster Night? Or because someone else had more information about this piece of Crowgard folklore?”

“Right now, fallen or taken is the question that needs to be answered,” Ilya said quietly. “Clara Crowgard has been found.”