8 #2
“She was part of his gaming crew. It wasn’t a physical affair,” she added, almost as an afterthought. “It was an emotional one. I think those are worse.”
Ofelia didn’t know which type of affair was worse. She hoped to never deal with either. Of course, cheating simply wasn’t in Sully’s wheelhouse. Of all the things she worried about, that was never on the list.
“Did you confront him?” Sully asked.
“No.” Cathy shook her head. “I was still deciding what to do about it when he died. I know this is going to sound weird — I was really mad at him — but losing him before I got the answers I needed is somehow worse than anything else that could have happened. I don’t know how to explain it. ” Her shoulders slumped.
“I get it,” Ofelia assured her. “I would feel the same way. I have another hard question.”
Cathy waited her out.
“Have you been approached by a woman, maybe even in your dreams, asking you to embrace your anger regarding your husband?”
Now Cathy looked completely confused. “What?”
“It’s a thing,” Ofelia replied. “Has anybody approached you — in life or your dreams — telling you to take your revenge on your husband? It’s important you tell the truth here.”
Cathy shifted on her chair, clearly uncomfortable.
Finally, she let loose a sigh. “I had a dream two days before he died.” She took a breath, then plunged forward.
“I’m not sure it was a woman who approached me.
It sounded like one, but I couldn’t make her out.
She offered to help me make my husband pay. ”
“Did you take her up on that?”
“Of course not!” Anger flushed Cathy’s cheeks. “I loved Roger. I just didn’t know what to do to fix our marriage. I didn’t want him dead.”
“So, you told her no,” Ofelia guessed.
“I did. She was mad and said that I was being a walking doormat. I told her I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to give in to the anger and hurt him. I was convinced we were going to work it out, and look back on this time in our lives when we were old and laugh.”
“What about Roger?” Ofelia pressed. “When he heard the screams, was he called to them?”
“No.” Cathy wrinkled her nose. “Is that a thing? What is going on?”
“We’re not sure,” Sully replied when Ofelia went silent. He knew she was thinking hard. “The marks that were on Roger’s body match the marks from two other attacks that I’ve found, all spaced apart, and another victim who survived an attack at a party last night.”
“And you think it’s some sort of revenge monster or something?” Cathy pressed.
“We think it’s a banshee,” Ofelia replied. There was no reason to hold back the information. “We believe that it’s more than one banshee, actually. They’re recruiting.”
“Why?”
Ofelia held out her hands. “I don’t know.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“Find them.” Ofelia’s smile was flat. She’d finished the dishes, and they were on a towel on the counter drying. “You need to hold firm in your refusal to join with the banshee if she approaches you in your dream again.”
“Do you think she’ll do that? She did it three times and then stopped visiting. I assumed she was gone for good and that she was just a figment of my imagination because I was mad with Roger. I became so consumed with what happened to Roger that I didn’t even think about her.”
“I think it’s unlikely,” Ofelia replied. “I don’t know that it’s impossible, though.”
Cathy nodded, resignation taking over her features.
“Don’t go outside if you hear the screams,” Sully ordered as he stood. “Call me if you hear them again or have a dream. This isn’t a joke. Make sure you do it.”
Cathy took the card and clutched it tight. “Did Roger suffer? At least tell me that. Nobody else will.”
“No,” Ofelia replied, even though she had no idea if it was the truth. She said the one thing she knew that Cathy needed to hear, regardless. “It was instantaneous. He wouldn’t have even known what happened.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. We’re more worried about you right now.”
“Well, I have no compulsion to join them. I can promise you that.” Cathy’s expression turned dark. “All of my anger is pointed at them now.”
Ofelia considered it. Was that the key? Had Cathy’s anger, moving from her husband to the banshee, tilted things so she couldn’t become a banshee? She needed to think on it. “We’re going to figure it out,” is what she said rather than ask another question. “You have my word.”
“What if you don’t, though?”
Ofelia merely shook her head. “That isn’t an option.”
NEXT ON THEIR LIST WAS Veronica Largo. She was a dim bulb. Ofelia figured that out right away. She had the dreams, just like Cathy, and her husband died the next day. She was never approached again, however. Ofelia had a sneaking suspicion she knew why.
“She’s a rampant narcissist,” Ofelia explained as they walked up the pathway to the final house, which was in Treme.
“All she thinks about is herself. She’s incapable of getting angry enough about what happened to her husband because all that matters is that it affects her, and he apparently had a hefty life insurance policy. ”
“There are a lot of working parts to this stuff,” Sully mused as he knocked.
Ofelia nodded. It was late in the afternoon now, and this was their last stop of the day.
They had a family dinner on the books, and they both knew better than trying to miss it.
Their mothers would melt down and cause more trouble than taking an hour out of their busy schedules would. They were both resigned to their fates.
They waited for somebody to answer the door, but nobody came.
Sully knocked again. And again. The curtains didn’t move. No lights came on. The house appeared empty.
Something felt off about the house, and Ofelia found herself looking closely as she walked near the windows. There was no movement inside, however, and from what she could see, there was nothing out of the ordinary about the house.
“What do you think?” she asked, her eyes moving to Sully. “Should we break in?”
He gave her a dark look. “Absolutely not. You can’t ask that of a police detective.”
Ofelia rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”
“We’re not doing that.” He was firm as he pulled a business card out of his back pocket and tucked it in the screen door frame. “We’ll come back tomorrow.”
Ofelia expected him to say that, so she merely nodded. “Okay. I guess we can do that. I would have been fine breaking in, too.”
Sully slung an arm around her shoulders and pulled her in tight at his side. “I do like that you have a bad girl thing going,” he whispered in his sultriest voice. “That was the thing that attracted me to you right out of the gate.”
“I thought it was my perky boobs.”
He snorted, then caught himself. “Yes, well, they were a tantalizing factor as well.”
“I figured.” Ofelia only separated from him when they got back to his truck. Before she climbed into the passenger seat, she sent one long look over her shoulder back at the house.
There was nobody there. They had no reason to believe there was. Yet something felt off about the entire thing.
“What was her name again?” Ofelia asked when she was fastening her seatbelt.
“Shirley Castle. Do you know her?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Is there something wrong?” Sully pinned his fiancée with a serious look. “Do you sense something?”
“I sense unease,” Ofelia replied.
“From somebody in the house?”
“From myself.”
“And you don’t know if it’s Shirley or Angelique,” he guessed.
“That’s it in a nutshell,” she conceded.
“We’ll check on Angelique as soon as we’re done with dinner. I promise.”
Since that was the best she was going to get, Ofelia nodded. “That sounds like a plan.”