Crowbones

CHAPTER 28

Grimshaw

Thaisday, Novembros 1

It was afternoon when Grimshaw and Ilya arrived at the Mill Creek Cabins to talk to the men staying there. Since three of the academics looked like they wanted to say plenty of things, Grimshaw wondered why they weren’t voicing complaints about being detained. Then Aiden handed him a lump of melted metal that had been the keys to two of the vehicles.

“Where is he?” Grimshaw asked, meaning the professor who was staying in the cabin next to his.

“Edward Janse asked permission to see the water mill and walk along the creek path,” Aiden replied. “He couldn’t run away by walking in that direction, so I gave him permission.”

“Is it safe for him to be walking on his own?”

Aiden shrugged, then looked toward the creek. “He has returned, so it was safe enough.”

Grimshaw watched the man Fire had identified as Edward Janse moving toward them at a swift walk. Something off. Something odd. When Janse reached the cabin where he waited, he noticed the man was pale—and he noticed Janse was sweating, despite not wearing a coat.

“I heard . . .” Janse shuddered. “There’s something out there.”

Aiden laughed—a sure sign that nobody human would want to meet up with whatever was out there.

Since the Sanguinati owned the cabins and had rented three of them on short-term leases to various colleges in the Finger Lakes region, Ilya’s response was more diplomatic than Fire’s. “It is the wild country. Many beings are out there.”

Grimshaw would have bet a month’s pay that Janse was an Intuit, and whatever he had sensed hadn’t been the “friendlier” Others who usually studied the humans who came to study them.

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

Janse looked at him, then at the ID. “Maybe in the village yesterday or the day before? There were several young men around that age wandering Main Street.” He lowered his voice. “They were disturbing—unnatural aggression covered by boisterous behavior.”

That fit the four teenagers who had come to The Jumble on Trickster Night.

Janse might have lowered his voice, but not enough, because one of the other men muttered, “Pansy.”

As Grimshaw turned to the other three men, Ilya said, “Chief Grimshaw, I’m sure you remember Professor Rodney Roash, who expressed such interest in Crowbones last night. His colleague is Richard Cardosa, and the man who is so eager to share his questionable opinions about other humans is Peter Lynchfield.”

Ilya had already confirmed with the Sanguinati who took care of rental properties which colleges had rented which cabins. Fewks had attended the college where Roash taught. That was a connection—especially since Roash had been so insistent about interviewing the Crows last night after the Crowgard bogeyman’s appearance.

Grimshaw focused on Roash and held out Fewks’s student ID. “You know him.” It wasn’t a question.

“No.” Roash shook his head. “I don’t recognize him.”

Richard Cardosa frowned at the student ID. “Are you sure, Rodney? Isn’t Adam Fewks one of the students who takes your Folklore and Urban Legends class? I remember hearing him make some noise about a special project.”

He didn’t have time for lies, so Grimshaw opened the manila envelope he’d taken out of the cruiser, pulled out the photo of the severed head, and said, “How about now, Professor? Recognize your student now?”

Three men stared at the photo. Janse, who was standing behind Grimshaw and couldn’t see the image, said, “Could we go inside now? We should—”

“Monkey man,” a female voice sang out from somewhere nearby.

“Moooonkey man,” a second voice sang.

“Don’t matter if you caw,” a third voice sang.

“Don’t matter if you shout.” A fourth voice.

“Crowbones will gitcha if you don’t . . . watch . . . out!” The fifth voice.

Grimshaw shuddered.

Ilya opened the gate in the short wall that enclosed the cabin’s front yard and said, “The front yard is considered neutral ground under most circumstances. Let’s continue the discussion there.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to be inside?” Janse asked.

Aiden sat on the wall, swung his feet up, and wrapped his arms lightly around his legs. “Better for you if everyone can hear what is said.”

And you wouldn’t want them, whoever and whatever they are, inside the cabin with you, Grimshaw thought as he herded the men into the small yard.

“There’s no reason for everyone—” Roash began.

“Yes, there is,” Grimshaw said, overriding him. “You’ve put these men in jeopardy, so they’re entitled to know how this scheme of yours was supposed to work. Right now I’ve got a dead college boy and two dead Crows, and everything points to your research project being the trigger that set off this chain of killings. Now, you can tell me what the plan was, or I can force you to look at the photos of the rest of the body parts we recovered.”

Silence.

“Are you playing bad cop, Chief Grimshaw?” Aiden asked.

“I’m the pissed-off cop who’s working up to a righteous mad if I don’t get answers now and end up getting a call about another body,” Grimshaw snapped. Not diplomatic. Not even smart, considering Fire had asked the question.

“Ah,” Aiden said.

“Now, look here—” Roash blustered.

“Moooonkey man.”

Grimshaw had never seen someone still breathing look so much like a corpse. “Would you prefer explaining it to them?”

“All right, yes, it was a research project,” Roash said. “Adam Fewks is—was—a student in my Folklore and Urban Legends class. I had found an old book about early human settlements in the Northeast Region of Thaisia. It had a woodcut illustration of a creature called Crowbones—a skeletal figure about the size of a man, with a crow’s head and feet but the rest of the body looked humanlike, wearing a ragged cape made out of feathers. It held a gourd in one hand and a scythe in the other.” He wiped the sweat off his forehead with a shaking hand. “There was almost no information about the creature, just that a death rattle was heard when it was nearby. I figured the gourd was hollowed out and filled with stones or beans or something to make it rattle.”

“So you had this student dress up in a cape and put on a papier-mâché head, and knock on The Jumble’s door during Trickster Night to scare the feathers off the Crowgard who work for Vicki DeVine?”

“It was research. I wasn’t even sure if Crowbones was from human or terra indigene folklore. The more we understand—”

“Stop there,” Grimshaw said. “You’ve dug the hole deep enough.”

“What was the bleach for?” Ilya asked.

“Bleach?” Roash frowned. “What bleach?”

Maybe Fewks thought he would have time to wipe down the props? If that wasn’t part of Roash’s plan, it wasn’t likely that he and Ilya would ever get an answer. He still had to ask Pops Davies if he’d sold a bottle of bleach to a college boy.

Before Grimshaw could decide if Roash really didn’t know about the bleach or was a habitual liar, his mobile phone buzzed. There wasn’t any room in the small yard to move out of hearing, but he turned his back on the other men before answering the call. “Grimshaw.”

“Chief?”

He heard nerves stuffed under training and reminded himself that Osgood was barely out of the academy and had already seen more than most veteran cops had seen in their entire careers. “Did you find Tom Saulner?” The missing teen might be an aggressive ass, but there was something Janse had said about that aggression that bothered him.

“No, sir.” A long pause while Officer Osgood sucked in air. “There was a vehicular incident on the road heading east, not far beyond the village limits.”

In other words, in the wild country.

“A Fred and Wilma Cornley were heading home after spending a couple of nights at The Jumble when ice fog suddenly formed across the road and rapidly became thicker,” Osgood continued.

“Did they hit something with their car?” Grimshaw asked. Or someone?

“Not exactly.”

“Then what exactly?” He and Osgood were going to have a talk about giving succinct reports.

“Their car is now stuck in a glacier.”

Grimshaw rubbed a hand over his face, as if that would help his hearing. “Say that again.”

“There’s a small—well, smallish—glacier filling the road leading out of Sproing, and the Cornleys’ car is stuck inside it. Mostly inside it—one of the back windows was still visible when I got to the scene, and the fire department and I were able to extract the Cornleys from the car before the ice . . . swallowed the vehicle.”

Gods above and below. “Any way to get around the ice?”

“A couple of the firefighters did a walk around and said the ice is about two village blocks across and three blocks deep and half a block high. No vehicles are going to get in or out of the village from that direction.” A pause. “What should I do, Chief?”

“Take the Cornleys to Doc Wallace and have him check them out, make sure they don’t have frostbite or whatever. Then escort them to the station and take their statements.”

“Yes, sir.” Another pause. “Chief? Could you check the road heading west?”

Grimshaw felt a chill run down his spine. “Yeah. I’ll do that.”

When he ended the call, he glanced at Aiden, then focused on Ilya. “Seems there’s a problem on the road heading east. Could you ask your driver to check the road heading west for obstacles?”

“Of course,” Ilya replied. “Is he looking for something in particular?”

“He’ll know it when he sees it.” Grimshaw considered his options, then added, “I’d like you to come with me.”

“What about us?” Richard Cardosa demanded. “We’re supposed to leave today. I have classes to teach tomorrow.”

“I’ll let you know when you can leave,” Grimshaw said. “In the meantime, stay in your cabins.” And hope they don’t burn.

He didn’t think Aiden would burn down a structure that belonged to the Sanguinati on a whim, but you never could tell with the Elementals.

“Boris is leaving Silence Lodge now,” Ilya said when they were in the cruiser and heading back toward Sproing before Grimshaw turned at the crossroads and drove north. “May I know where we’re going?”

“There are two roads out of this area. One runs east–west and the other runs north–south. We’re checking out the north road. I don’t expect we’ll need to go far before we confirm that the road is blocked.”

“With what?”

“Well, the road heading east is blocked by a glacier. The Cornleys’ car is trapped inside it, so Osgood is bringing them to the station.”

Ilya stared at him. “I wasn’t aware of that.”

“Didn’t think you were. But what started as a prank or research has brought a shit storm down on top of us, and . . .” He slowed the cruiser and stopped well behind a handful of cars that were going nowhere. Then he pulled the cruiser across both lanes before he and Ilya got out to study the earth mound that blocked the north road.

He wasn’t sure what disturbed him more—that the Others were able to excavate that much dirt from either side of the road and pile it into a hill that quickly . . . or the smiley face made out of boulders that was pressed into this side of the mound.

Ilya’s mobile phone rang. He reached into the cruiser and pulled it out of his briefcase. “Boris?” He listened for a minute, then ended the call.

“The road heading west is blocked?” Grimshaw asked.

“Yes. Earth mound.”

He blew out a breath. “We’d better see what’s blocking the south road before figuring out what to do.”

“There is nothing to figure out,” Ilya said quietly when they were back in the cruiser and heading south. “We have to survive. That is what we have to do.”