Chapter 21
Beatrix leaned against the door for several minutes, outside the unblinking gaze of the camera mounted above her head.
She’d passed the point of tears. She just felt numb.
Where could he go? What work could he do?
He would surely need to disguise himself as a typic—cut his hair, spell it brown.
He’d have to hide his ability to use magic.
He would, in a sense, be living her life. And her life would narrow to a cell.
Her chest twinged with each beat of her heart. Every part of her he’d touched before he left—her hand, her lips, her right thigh—prickled as if she’d been stung. She had to collect herself and figure out what, if anything, needed to be done before she lost the chance.
Then she finally noticed what should have struck her the moment she came downstairs.
“Ella?” she called. “Rosemarie?”
No one answered.
“Ella?” She ran to the sitting room. Nobody there.
She tried downstairs. “Rosemarie?”
She rushed upstairs, looking in every bedroom. No one—not Miss Massey, of course, out of town visiting relatives—but also not Ella, Rosemarie or even Lydia.
Everyone was gone.
Neither Ella nor Rosemarie knew what she intended to do. Had they run off to create a distraction to aid escape? Lydia did know her plan. Was she trying to stop it somehow?
She rushed out the back and into the woods, determined to get to Garrett before someone made the mess they were in even worse. But when she reached the other end of the forest, legs and lungs burning, she’d seen no one.
“Theo?” she whispered.
She thought she heard the rustling sound of disturbed leaves in the distance, but seconds ticked by with no answer.
She tried again, more loudly this time. He had to still be in town somewhere—her charm hadn’t burned again since he jumped from her yard. She walked around, calling for him over and over. Next she tried the house, thinking Garrett had decided that was the better place to wait. But no.
It struck her as she came out: Peter’s car was still at the Sederey farm. What if Garrett knew that? If he was lying in wait there …
She sprinted to the forest, using the overgrown footpath that led toward the farms on the outskirts of town.
She saw a tripping hazard of a root just in time and leapt over it, only to stumble as she struck something a good few inches above the ground just beyond—something that appeared to be nothing at all.
She caught herself on a tree and turned around.
All that lay between her and the root were snow-brushed leaves.
A jagged rock sat nearby, but not where she’d touched down, and besides—what she’d hit had some give.
She took one step back the way she’d come, then a second, uneasiness rising like acid up her throat.
On the third step, her boot hit something solid that looked no more substantial than air.
She leaned down and reached out with trembling fingers. Skin. A hand.
Cool to the touch. Not moving.
“No,” she whispered, trying to find a pulse and failing. “No, no …”
She felt a coat, a long wizard-like coat. She felt hair, a long queue of wizard-like hair. Peter—Peter had doubled back—Garrett had killed him—
She screamed. But as the agonized sound echoed back at her through the trees, the other possibility occurred to her. Leaves—she needed leaves, she had to know! In a frenzy, she ran her hands over the unseen coat until she found a pocket with what she was looking for.
She cast the counter to invisibility. On the ground, glassy eyes staring back at her, was Theo Garrett.
“Oh,” she gasped, falling to her knees, and sobbed in overwhelming relief that the dead man was not Peter.
Other emotions crept in—shock and dread chief among them. Had Garrett been murdered?
She could see no obvious injury, no sign of blood, though in the fading light, it would be hard to pick out anything that wasn’t obvious.
She slipped on her gloves, felt in his pockets again until she found demarcation stones, set them up in a tight rectangle around him and whispered, “Lang rēad lēoht.” He lit up bright white—telling her exactly nothing, since she’d just cast a revealing spell on him. It was hard to think straight.
She dropped the spell and put the stones back, eyes burning as she looked at his face, his mouth open in mild surprise.
He was not who she’d thought he was during their whirlwind romance, this man who wouldn’t listen to what she wanted, made her think her sister might be killed at any time and tried to force her into marriage.
But she thought of the blow this would be to his family and murmured the prayer that Rev.
Hattington had intoned so many times: “Know that you are forgiven, and be at peace.”
The very next moment, still kneeling by his side, she noticed it—the blood she’d missed before, on the underside of his skull, congealing into his hair.
His head lay on the rock, the one she’d seen but had forgotten in the presence of a dead body.
She turned and saw that his left foot was under the half-circle of the root.
He’d caught his foot, fallen backward and died, just like that?
She stared at him, disbelieving this simple explanation. It seemed all too convenient—from the point of view that her troubles, Peter’s and Lydia’s would disappear if he could not report what he’d witnessed. Someone else could have come to the same conclusion she had, but followed through.
She shuddered. Peter, Rosemarie, Ella, even Lydia—all of them had the motive, means and opportunity.
Peter got roughly halfway to the Sederey farm before a thought stopped him dead.
When Garrett strung him up on his basement wall with a spell last month, he’d thought the man might kill him.
There was something wrong with Garrett. What would the wizard do if Beatrix said she preferred prison to marrying him?
He turned and dashed back, praying he would get there first. But this time when he slipped into the house, he found no one inside.
He stumbled out the back, trying to keep his concern from exploding into full-out fear. Garrett was obviously still in town—he’d cast no other spells. Think. Where could Beatrix have gone?
He heard it then, the muffled crunching of someone walking through snow-topped leaves. As he rushed toward the forest’s edge, the dark figure resolved itself into Rosemarie Dane, face grim. He was about to announce himself when she stared right at him and said, “Who’s there? Who are you?”
“It’s me,” he said, marveling again at her ability to sense something off about the air around a person under an invisibility spell. In the near-dark, no less. “There’s no one in the house—where’s the elder Miss Harper?”
Her eyes widened. “Everyone’s gone?”
“Yes.”
“They must have driven somewhere.”
But the car was in the garage. As they retraced their steps, he said, “Do you have any idea where they might be?”
Miss Dane shook her head. But she looked back at the forest.
“Let’s go,” he said, heading in. “I don’t like this at all.”
Every few steps, Miss Dane called out for Beatrix. Soon, they heard rushed footsteps behind them—his heart leapt—but it was her sister barreling toward them.
“Beatrix is missing?” Lydia said.
“We presume she’s in here,” Miss Dane said, gesturing at the expansive forest. “Where did you go?”
“Out,” Lydia said.
“Obviously, but where?”
“We can discuss that later,” Peter whispered, giving Lydia a start. She did not have Miss Dane’s peculiar talent. No one else did, as far as he knew.
Miss Dane pushed onward, bellowing Beatrix’s name. A few minutes later they were again met by the wrong woman coming from behind. As Miss Knight ran up the path, he glared at her purely because she was not Beatrix.
“What’s going on?” she said, completely out of breath.
“Where were you?” Miss Dane demanded.
“Where was I? Where were you? I wanted to strategize with you, and you were nowhere in the house!”
“Bee!”
He turned and saw what Lydia had noticed first—Beatrix, thank God, unharmed and making her way toward them. Her sister closed the gap at a run. “Listen, you must plead not guilty—”
“Garrett is dead,” Beatrix said, her voice flat.
They all stared at her. It was Lydia who finally broke the silence with a shocked, “What?”
“I need to find the omnimancer,” Beatrix said, stepping around her sister.
“I’m here,” he said, and canceled the invisibility spell on himself. “What happened?”
Beatrix turned back. “I’ll show you.”
Wizard Garrett lay within sight of the sloping lawn beyond the forest, though not where Peter had originally found him with Beatrix.
She explained how she’d discovered him, pointed to the head injury, the rock, the root.
She looked so guarded—eyes watchful, voice nearly monotone—that he immediately thought of Plan B. She was holding something back.
Had she killed Garrett?
No. No. But the question ate at him as they hastened to his house.
He met them in the receiving room after securing and checking the interior. Beatrix spoke first: “I think we all need to explain our whereabouts.”
Lydia gave a start. “What do you mean?”
“His death is suspicious,” Peter said.
Miss Knight nodded—probably the first time she’d ever agreed with him. Miss Dane frowned.
“After Ella and Rosemarie went downstairs,” Beatrix said, “I stayed in the top-floor room with Lydia for perhaps fifteen minutes before Omnimancer Blackwell arrived. I explained that I intended to let Garrett arrest me. Lydia left, and—and the omnimancer left soon after.” Beatrix glanced at him, just for a fraction of a second, and his face went hot with the memory of what she’d skipped over.
“I realized there was no one in the house. I was afraid one or more of you had gone to confront Garrett, create a distraction or do something else that could make this worse, so I went back into the forest. I didn’t see anyone.
I called for Garrett and got no answer. Then I tripped over him. ”