Chapter Eighteen
Foul Play
Felipe’s heart pounded uncomfortably as he ushered Oliver inside. He didn’t like this. He didn’t like this at all. Someone knew who Oliver was. Someone they had never even met. And if he knew, who else did?
“Gwen!” he called.
“In the dining room.”
Gently nudging Oliver toward the hall, Felipe winced at a flare of pain in his head followed by a gnawing hunger so intense it bordered on nausea. As they crossed the entry way, he averted his gaze from the mirror hanging near the front door. He didn’t want to know how bad he looked. When he spoke to some of the men from the mill before the mayor arrived, he had seen the way a few of them did a doubletake when they saw him. A handful of jerky and cheese had done little to lessen the dark bruises deepening under his eyes or the grey pallor of his skin. The previous day’s emotional turmoil on top of his piss-poor sleep after that dream had done a number on him. He felt wrung out and run over, though he did his best not to let the hand tremors or the pain in his joints show. Oliver still knew. As they walked into the hall, he felt his lover’s eyes linger on his face in concern. Oliver looked like he wanted to say something, but it had to wait. They needed to figure out how they would deal with this, but to do that, he needed to speak to Mr. Allen. Unfortunately, the innkeeper had used his invisibility to slip away when Lucien spotted them, and he had yet to return.
Felipe had expected to find Gwen reading the paper or nibbling on breakfast in the dining room. Instead, they found her at the head of the table with a forest of paper spread before her. Carefully organized in a way only obvious to her were her notes; Felipe’s notes, which he assumed she took from their room; something with Oliver’s handwriting; the cemetery records; and what looked like several other ledgers of town records.
“Since the road is blocked, I assume we’re staying for a while, so I unpacked my trunk and took the liberty of getting our notes ready for another meeting to discuss what we found yesterday since somebody derailed those plans.” As she took a sip of tea, Gwen finally raised her gaze and nearly dropped her cup. “What happened? You two look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Lucien Stills delivered a note to Oliver from their cousin, Willard Jarngren. Take a look,” Felipe replied as Oliver handed over the note.
Gwen pushed up her glasses and raised a brow at the envelope. “What’s with all the wax?”
“He’s paranoid.”
“Apparently.” Gwen read the note twice before turning to Oliver with a thoughtful frown. “Ol, do you think he’s the one who pushed you?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t see who did it. It felt like a branch hit me. Did you see anyone in the cemetery after it happened?”
“No, but I was a little distracted at the time.” Handing the card back to Oliver, Gwen asked Felipe, “What do you think we should do about this? Should we go?”
Running a hand over his cheeks, Felipe sighed and leaned against the table. “I don’t know. I need to speak to Mr. Allen before I decide. He seemed keen to get us out of town, but I’m not sure what the Jarngrens could do with Oliver as an adult.”
“Yeah, Oliver, thankfully, you aren’t exactly cooperative on a good day,” Gwen murmured into her drink.
Oliver narrowed his eyes at her but said nothing. “Isn’t it a good sign that the invitation is for all of us? If he meant to shove me into the woods again, it would be far easier to do so without witnesses.”
“Or he wants to kill us all in one shot. We still don’t know if the other investigators walked into the woods willingly.”
“And he obviously hasn’t told Lucien Stills that he knows you’re related to them.” When Oliver gave him a queer look, Felipe added, “The man has no poker face. He didn’t approach you with any more familiarity than he did before. The fact that the whole envelope was basically encased in wax to keep someone else from opening it makes me think Willard Jarngren is planning to keep this information to himself at least.”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“I’m not sure. Either he pushed you in, or he knows who did. I know we were outside before, but I think you need to lay low for the rest of the day, Oliver. At least until I speak to Mr. Allen.”
Sinking into the chair beside Gwen, Oliver nodded glumly. “So much for the soda.”
“We’ll be stuck here for at least a few more days if the road doesn’t open. We can get it then,” Felipe said, giving his lover’s shoulders a squeeze. “Gwen, is there more tea?”
“Yeah, it’s on the stove with a cozy over it. Unfortunately, there’s no breakfast, but there are some rolls on the counter. I think they were intended to be part of breakfast.”
“Can you please grab one for me, Felipe?” Oliver asked as he turned his attention to Gwen’s papers.
Nodding, Felipe slipped into the kitchen. Argos jumped up from the rug near the back door when he came in and stood half a step behind him, breathing heavily on his leg until Felipe gave him a scratch behind the ears. Felipe would have fed him, but he wasn’t sure if Mr. Allen had done so before he left. Pastel and Kuchen had snookered him into giving them second breakfasts more times than he would care to admit. Ignoring Argos’s pitiful stares, Felipe piled several of the round, glossy rolls onto a plate. While they smelled good, they wouldn’t do much to take away the cramping pain in his gut. Cheese or butter would at least add something that could take the edge off. Felipe opened the cabinets looking for the butter crock when his gaze snagged on the larder.
Standing with his hand on the knob, he hesitated. The smell of salted meat wafted through the door, pulling an agonizing growl from his stomach. Guilt warred with need as he opened the cabinet and stared at the hunk of half-eaten ham wrapped in cheesecloth sitting forlornly on the shelf beside the butter. Felipe swallowed the saliva pooling in his mouth. He shouldn’t take it. It was someone else’s, but knowing it was there and that it could soothe the pain inflaming every nerve and calm his shaking hands wasn’t something he could ignore. He needed to be well enough to protect Oliver and Gwen, and meat was the only thing that could make it better for a time. Before he could stop himself, Felipe unwrapped the ham and took a bite. Suppressing a moan at the salty, smoky meat, Felipe shut his eyes. When they got back to Manhattan, he was going to eat his weight in rare steaks, but for now, this would do. He sank his teeth into the flesh and gave into the bliss of it. By the time he came up for air, his fingers and lips were slick with meat juice and most of the ham was gone. Leaning back against the door, Felipe had never been so glad that the only witness to his desperate feasting was a dog. Argos stared up at him hopefully, his tail thumping on the floor.
“I could still blame this on you, you know,” Felipe said with a mouthful, tossing the dog a hunk of ham and half a roll before cleaning the rest of the meat off the bone with his teeth. “Don’t tell Oliver or your father.”
As he swallowed the last strip of salty meat, the stabbing in his gut eased, and the pounding headache behind his eyes fizzled to a twinge. For a long moment, Felipe merely stared at the place where the ham had been. He couldn’t keep doing this. The majority of his life had been spent being the person who could keep going when no one else could. He had taken pride in his ability to stay awake, to keep going, to not feel, but he couldn’t do that anymore, not without paying a price. Felipe tossed the bone into the rubbish heap and washed the evidence of his crime from his face and hands. He knew he should be upset. The Felipe Galvan he had been raised to be would have been devastated, but when he reached for those emotions, he felt nothing. At least, he could still stave off his emotions. Eventually, they would crash over him like a tidal wave, but if he felt nothing until they got back home, that was all right with him. He had a job to do.
Fishing a handful of money from his pocket, Felipe counted out more than enough to pay for the missing ham and left it in its place. Quickly grabbing the crock of butter, the teapot, and two cups, Felipe returned to the dining room as if nothing had happened to find Gwen and Oliver pouring over the graveyard map with their heads together. Felipe tried not to let his relief show when Oliver sniffed the air as he leaned down to put the rolls on the table but said nothing.
“Did you give the dog ham?” Oliver asked offhandedly.
“Just a little. He looked hungry.” It wasn’t exactly a lie, and Oliver nodded without looking up from the page. Felipe filled, drained, and refilled his teacup to wash away the salt coating his mouth. “Find anything interesting?”
“Gwen was showing me the graves of the other reanimated dead. I was only able to see these two yesterday before all hell broke loose.”
“What’s different about them?”
Waving Felipe closer, Gwen pointed to the graves. “So these people are now in the church. See how they’re all in generally the same area? Well, I was curious about the other reanimated dead, the ones Mr. Allen said never got past the cemetery gates. According to Mr. Allen’s notes in the cemetery ledger, they couldn’t identify all the bodies of the first reanimated people. Some were just bones, but there were a few that were recognizable enough. Those they could identify were all buried in this area,” Gwen said, pointing to a swathe of graves at the far edge of the cemetery schematic. “Do you notice anything?”
“They’ve been swallowed by the Dysterwood.”
“Exactly. We couldn’t see them at all when Oliver and I were there yesterday. Sarah Lindstrom’s grave is nearly in the woods, and so is Ekland’s. The other three look to be very close to the tree line as well. I don’t know exactly when this map was drawn, probably by Mr. Allen’s father, but it’s either incredibly inaccurate or the Dysterwood is encroaching on the town.”
“Just like Mr. Allen said.” Felipe stared at the map more carefully. Most of the graves that had ended up in the woods were decades, if not centuries, old by the time their inhabitants were reanimated. “So it may be a Jarngren who is going into the woods to reanimate the dead.”
“Or it’s the woods itself,” Oliver said softly.
Felipe and Gwen turned to look at him as he chewed his lip thoughtfully.
“It’s only a theory, and one of them could be asking it to reanimate people. But it might also be a peculiar reaction between the Dysterwood’s magic and the bodies in the cemetery that causes passive enervation. The magic on Horace Ridder’s body felt bigger and stranger than what people can usually do.” Throwing up his hands, Oliver sighed. “Then again, it also felt somewhat sentient. I don’t know.”
“But if it is the Dysterwood acting passively, then why are only some of the people buried in or near the trees coming back to life? And why are they attacking people? You reanimate people in the lab all the time, and I don’t remember anyone going after you,” Felipe replied.
“I’ve had a few become combative, especially those who died violent deaths and were freshly dead, but no, they’ve never done that.”
“Violent deaths,” Gwen whispered as she levitated their notes across the table. She spread them before her, her eyes rapidly shifting behind her glasses. “What if the people being reanimated are all victims of foul play? Not necessarily murder, but they died thinking their death was someone else’s fault.”
Oliver’s eyes brightened. “Annabelle was killed by her mother. ”
“What?”
“I’ll catch you up in a little bit, Felipe, but yes, she was kept sick by her mother and died at her hand. That’s who she went after.”
“Ekland died having dinner with Hogarth during an argument. He might not have been poisoned, but he might have blamed him for making him angry enough to have a heart attack,” Gwen added.
“Fleming went after his supervisor at the mill after he was killed on the job,” Felipe said slowly. “The men there wouldn’t talk to me and the foremen closed ranks, so maybe something happened earlier that day between them, like he didn’t heed Fleming’s warning about the machine or there had been a near miss. Something had to happen that made him think the foreman was responsible.”
Nodding, Gwen flipped through her notes. “Mr. Allen and Dr. Miller don’t suspect foul play in Sarah Lindstrom’s death, but Oliver and I think otherwise. He noticed a wound on the back of her head, and her husband already remarried. That seems a little suspicious. Did you find anything that pointed to Sheriff Ridder’s death being foul play?”
“Beyond what Oliver discovered on his body, no. His desk was mostly filled with junk, and the only notes from Daphne Stills appear to be her acting as her husband’s secretary or adding his name to orders for legitimacy. If there was some feud going on between them, I doubt he kept a record of it in his desk.”
“I wonder if we can get into his house and look.”
Oliver opened his mouth but closed it. “Lucien didn’t know why Sheriff Ridder went after his mother, but Willard might. Lucien said himself that he isn’t very observant, yet Willard recognized Ridder and realized he was already dead. I know you said you need to think about whether we should go or not, but he might be able to answer some of our questions.”
Felipe silently sighed. Oliver wasn’t wrong. Willard Jarngren had been a witness to his aunt’s attempted murder, and his sister had been married to Horace Ridder. Depending on how close they were, she might have told him something, or he might have seen something in the house. The note was ominous and more than a little suspicious, but if he was reaching out to them without planning to murder them, he might be the key to figuring out what happened to the sheriff and what his aunt had to do with it. Still, they would need to be cautious, especially sneaking around in the dark.
“We’ll see about meeting with Willard Jarngren.”
Putting his hand over Felipe’s, Oliver held his gaze. “ Felipe , I want to meet with him. I think it’s the right thing to do.”
He wanted to protest that he needed to speak to Mr. Allen before deciding if it was safe, that he didn’t like the idea of being out after dark, that Turpin’s warning still haunted him, but Oliver so rarely pushed back when they worked together. Felipe swallowed hard. He could figure out a way to call it off if he had to after he gathered more information.
“All right. We— we can do that. Getting back to the case, my question is, why reanimate only people who have been murdered? Trees and magic don’t typically care about vengeance.”
“But the dead do,” Oliver replied with a roll of his eyes. “You wouldn’t believe how often the dead go on and on about their killers or the person they think did it. I hear far more about the people who wronged them than the people who loved them.”
Felipe didn’t doubt that. It still didn’t make sense though. Why revive only the wronged? For someone to reanimate only them, they would have to know they died under suspicious circumstances, and if they were reviving the long-buried dead in the old half of the cemetery, they would have to be fairly old themselves. Felipe ran a frustrated hand over his face. Either there was a necromancer taking requests or they had insider knowledge of the town’s goings on or the Dysterwood gave enough of a magical push to send the wrongfully killed out to find their murderers.
He had heard about or experienced a number of murder towns in his twenty years with the Paranormal Society, but he had never heard of a magical area being sentient enough to do something like that. If it was passive, then he wasn’t sure what they could do about it. It wasn’t as if they could prosecute or reason with the trees to make them stop siccing the dead on people. No, the passive magic idea didn’t make sense. Why only murder victims? Why start reanimating the dead now when there were surely plenty of dead people in the woods after so many disappearances? Something had to have changed for this to only start recently. The question was, what?
Eyeing the notes scattered across the table and floating around Gwen, Felipe pulled out his notepad. “Tell me everything you learned yesterday.”
***
Felipe stood in the kitchen, waiting for Mr. Allen to return. The moment he heard Argos stir and head for the back door, he left Oliver and Gwen to finish talking in the dining room. Oliver had been telling them about what he experienced in the Dysterwood, and while Felipe wanted to know as much as possible about the forest to get a handle on this whole situation, the idea of Oliver falling into another world alone still made him sick. The unending forest, the meandering trail, the tree person with the ring and knife, it was all too much. Argos gave Felipe a concerned glance before going back to pacing by the door. After this morning, he feared Mr. Allen would make himself invisible and sneak out of the house again before he could speak to him, so he waited. Felipe stood still as death in the corner as the back door opened, and Lewis Allen struggled to balance an overloaded crate of food in his arms while managing his cane and the door. Peeling away from the shadows, Felipe reached out to grab the box only to have the innkeeper jerk back in alarm.
“Criminy, you scared me, inspector. I didn’t see you there. You’d think by now I’d be used to strangers in the house,” he said as he let out a tense laugh and handed the crate over to Felipe. “Thank you. There’s more by the door if you’re willing. Usually, Mrs. Owens’s boy helps, but he disappeared to look at the road before I could ask him to help me get them inside.”
“I’ll get them.” Hefting the other two boxes, Felipe said over his shoulder, “He isn’t the only one who disappeared.”
Mr. Allen held open the door for him with a frown. “Sorry about that. Listening to Luther try to flimflam us all into believing this was a regular occurrence was bad enough, but if I had to listen to Lucien’s empty prattle so early in the morning, I might not have been able to hold my tongue.”
“Understandable,” Felipe replied, setting the boxes of vegetables, meat, and eggs on the counter. “Argos was far more upset that you weren’t here.”
The innkeeper playfully glared at the dog as his tail thumped against the floor. “Did you act like you were starving while I was gone? I fed you before I left. Oh shoot, I hope you all helped yourself to something in the pantry. In all the hubbub, I completely forgot about breakfast. I don’t get many guests anymore, and I’ve lived alone so long that I revert back to my bachelor ways.”
“We made do.”
“Good. I’ll make it up to you and whip up something for lunch.”
A smile crossed the other man’s lips as he pulled the vegetables out of the crates and stacked them on the counter. While it wasn’t as strong as it had been that morning, the gnawing in Felipe’s gut had returned, and the smell of the wrapped parcels of meat from the butcher was going straight to his head. He didn’t want to be in the room when he started cooking them or when he found the money in the larder where the ham had been. Fleeing seemed the safest option, but he needed to speak to Mr. Allen before he decided their next move.
“Before you start cooking, may I have a word with you?”
“About?” the innkeeper asked without looking up from the crate of cans.
“The Jarngrens.” Mr. Allen’s hands stilled a moment too long. “You seemed very keen to get us out of town last night to keep them from realizing Oliver is Stephen’s son. I would like to know why now that, that ship has sailed.”
“What do you mean?”
“Willard Jarngren sent this.”
Putting the glass to his eye, Mr. Allen read the note and shook his head. “That one is too smart for his own good. It’s no wonder they don’t let him out in public unsupervised.”
“Do you think he could have shoved Oliver into the woods? I need to know if we can trust him.”
A laugh escaped Mr. Allen’s lips as he shook his head and piled fresh eggs into a bowl on the counter. “Will is a wily one. He might have pushed Oliver to prove a theory, or he might have overheard something or realized it on his own. Either way, I wouldn’t trust any of them. The Jarngrens are trouble.”
“You keep saying that, but what does that mean? Is it their money and influence over the town or something more? Oliver’s life is at stake, and we’re stuck in this godforsaken place until the boat comes in.” If it comes in. He didn’t want to think about what that might mean for them. Felipe’s chest tightened as the tether pulled taut beneath his heart. “Mr. Allen, I nearly lost Oliver yesterday, and I can’t risk having anything like that happen again. If there’s something you aren’t telling us, now isn’t the time for secrets.”
Sighing, Mr. Allen turned and leaned back against the counter, suddenly looking far older than his fifty-odd years. As he rubbed the scar near his eye, Argos butted his wide head against his leg until his owner pet him and let out a tight breath.
“Inspector Galvan, I’m not trying to keep secrets. I just didn’t want to speak ill of the boy’s family any more than I had to.”
“The boy is a grown man.”
“I know, but family’s a funny thing. Learning all that stuff about Joanna and Stephen was a lot to take in or believe, and after the way he reacted to the horse quilt, I wasn’t ready to give him more to be upset about.” Mr. Allen shook his head and plunked the cans into the cabinet next to the stove. “There are things I learned about my father after his death that I wish I never knew. I was only trying to protect him if I could. It wasn’t as if he needed to know any of that if he was leaving. That’s how Joanna would have wanted it.”
“Joanna’s probably long dead, and Oliver doesn’t need protecting.”
“Yet you’re the one asking, not him,” Mr. Allen replied, giving Felipe a hard look.
He held the man’s gaze for a long moment and hated how clearly he saw him. The truth was he did want to soften the blow for Oliver if the Jarngrens were horrible people. No one had been able to shelter him, but he had made certain to do it for Teresa. And he would do it for Oliver if he could. While his family had believed lessons needed to be learned through pain, he disagreed. Pain might be a good teacher, but it left scars that made everything else harder. Joy came with guilt. Comfort came with the fear that it could all be taken away in an instant. Living came with the constant awareness that he deserved to be punished for mistakes he would never fault others for. Felipe had decided years ago that he would do everything in his power to keep those he cared about from experiencing that kind of pain. If that meant keeping things from Oliver that might deeply hurt him, then so be it.
“You’re right, and if you want to protect him as you promised his mother, you need to help me do that. Tell me what it is about the Jarngrens that makes them so untrustworthy.”
Mr. Allen nodded as he grabbed a handful of potatoes from the bag near the door and plopped them onto the table along with a knife. “Peel these while I talk, inspector.”
Settling at the table, Felipe palmed the potato and turned the small, dull knife over in his hand. It had been quite a few years since he had peeled vegetables in someone’s kitchen, but a knife was a knife. As he slipped the blade beneath the potato’s skin, he nodded for Mr. Allen to continue.
“You already know about the Jarngrens’ ties to the mayor and the sheriff. Daphne Stills has a head for business and manipulation, but even if she didn’t, the Jarngrens founded Aldorhaven, their house looms large over all of us. The Eklands and Hogarths might want to overshadow them, but they can’t as they rely upon the Jarngrens for their business’s success. The Stills and Jarngrens don’t advertise it, but they have a large stake in the mill as well. More importantly, they deal with the Dysterwood, and any raw materials that come out of it can only be collected with Daphne Stills’s permission now that she is the matriarch of the Jarngren family. The ore and lumber coming out of the Dysterwood is supposedly a reward from the Lady for their tending of the land. If the Eklands or Hogarths cross them or someone interferes with the Jarngrens, they could withhold the wood and iron. If they did, the mill and forge would close, and the rest of the town would collapse. As you might have noticed, we have no farms in town, and our only major exports are iron and paper. We’re all reliant upon them.”
“Didn’t someone say the iron and logs aren’t coming as often?” Felipe asked as Mr. Allen sliced celery directly into a pot.
The other man nodded with a sigh. “There’s been a lot of talk lately about the iron slowing, though the foremen try to shut that kind of thing down. Some people think the Jarngrens are cursed, though they’ll never say it to their faces, and the lack of iron and wood is because of them.”
“Apparently, the younger Mr. Hughes said as much to Oliver and Miss Jones.”
“John Jr. would, and he isn’t wrong. I came back to town not long before Lars Jarngren, Stephen’s father and Oliver’s grandfather, died, and ever since, the Jarngrens have been dying right and left.”
“Families can have a rash of bad luck.”
“Not like this. According to my father’s records, the Jarngrens started dying off before that, but it got much worse. For a few years, a Jarngren would die every season. Reverend Douglas used to joke that every third Sunday should be reserved for a Jarngren funeral. The strange thing was that it wasn’t just the old or the young. Aunts, uncles, cousins, anyone and everyone died. The extended family tree was picked clean, but not all at once. It wasn’t as if typhus or yellow fever ripped through the family. No, it would just be one person. Fine one day, dead the next. Eventually, the deaths slowed to one or two Jarngrens a year, but it was still a lot of deaths, even for a big family.”
When Mr. Allen fell silent and the last spiral of peel fell away, the knife shook in Felipe’s hand. He needed to keep moving. “Do you want me to cut these into cubes?”
“Please.” Mr. Allen threw chicken bones into the pot along with a handful of herbs before picking up a carrot. “Most people weren’t too concerned because the core family had been untouched. Lars Jarngren had been able to maintain stability, despite all the deaths, and the town was prospering as far as I know. When death came for him, no one was particularly surprised. He had been nearly eighty years old after all, but once he passed, it was the beginning of the end for the family. That’s when people started calling it a curse, when it hit the younger Jarngren brothers and the grandchildren.
“First, the brothers’ wives died. They were both distant Jarngren cousins, or as distant as you can be in this town. Then, Edmund died, followed by his younger son and Daphne’s daughter less than a year later. Francis and his three children died within a few seasons of each other. I thought maybe the curse had fizzled out until Silvia and Horace Ridder’s son died suddenly. Silvia died not long after, though many chalked that up to heartbreak rather than the curse. The only Jarngrens left that I know of are Daphne, Lucien, Oliver, and Willard, and I’m pretty sure the only reason Daphne has escaped the curse is because even the devil doesn’t want her.”
Felipe’s heart beat loudly in his ears as he jerked the knife away from his other hand and set it flat on the table out of reach. For a long moment, the only sounds in the kitchen were the crackle of the fire in the stove and the bubbling pot. Argos leaned heavily against Felipe’s legs, but he didn’t dare move. Mr. Allen shook his head as he stirred the pot.
“For that many people in one family to die in such a short space of time, there must be a reason. Depending on what you believe, the Jarngrens either angered god or the gods of the woods and had to pay with their lives. ”
Felipe swallowed hard and fought to keep his voice flat. “What does that have to do with the iron or Oliver?”
“Every time the supply slows, a Jarngren dies.” Taking the knife and potatoes from Felipe, Mr. Allen added, “That’s why I wanted you all to leave. Because there aren’t many Jarngrens left for the woods to pick from, and now, the Lady of the Dysterwood knows Oliver is here.”