Chapter 3
Chapter
When my phone rang a few days later, I was hauling the cover off my well, preparing to cast the weather spell.
There were four large pans of water placed around it to amplify my efforts.
A bigger body of water would’ve made it easier, but the well, with its long throat of shadow, was the most I could tolerate.
I straightened up, my back aching, and heaved the well cover into the grass to fish around in my pocket.
My resident doe, whom I’d dubbed Mac for her preference for McIntosh apples, grazed nearby in companionable closeness.
I finally got my phone out, grimacing slightly as I smeared flakes of rust across the screen. “Hello?”
“Tess, Chief Broder.”
I pulled the phone away from my ear briefly to check the number: not the one I had on file for Burrsville’s police chief. He always seemed to call me from a different one, as if he wanted to take me by surprise.
“Chief, what can I do for you?”
“Got a call about someone keeping a fawn in their house. Caller was an older lady; guess she couldn’t be bothered to track down the right number. Said her neighbor found a baby deer in her backyard three days ago and is trying to make it a pet.”
I frowned. “Is she possibly confused? This year’s fawns will be sixty, seventy pounds by now; if someone brought one in the house it would destroy it, unless it was on death’s door or something.”
“I mentioned that, but she was insistent that someone come check it out.”
“Better to be safe than sorry, I guess,” I said. “I’ll head over right now.”
Broder gave me the address and, with a deep sigh, I dragged the well cover back into place.
“Might have a job for you, Mac,” I told the doe as I left.
I’d picked up Mac several years ago after she was hit by a car.
She made me chase her for two miles before she went down, and when I got her back to the sanctuary, it was six months before her broken hip healed.
She still walked with a hitch and she rarely left the meadow, but thanks to the protection here in the sanctuary and the hay I put out during the winter, it hadn’t stopped her from raising her own fawns or the ones she’d adopted.
I rehabilitated a couple of fawns every spring, and as long as they weren’t injured, I could usually hand them off to Mac within a day or two.
Of course, those were actual nursing fawns, not adolescents perfectly capable of feeding themselves.
Determined to get back to my weather spell as soon as I could, I left the water bowls and other elements in place and hopped in the truck.
The sun was still climbing, and I cranked down my windows, allowing air sweet with the scent of third-cutting hay to drift in.
As I descended into the valley, I passed the hayfields that were mid-cut, the cornfields nearing harvest, and then the view through my windshield became stunted forest and wetland.
The grain silos and farmhouses became shabby prefabs, double-wides and trailers with peeling paint and plastic in the windows, or pioneer cemeteries overrun by brush.
The village itself was little better, full of run-down Victorians and mid-century builds poorly converted to multifamily housing.
The population of the whole town was less than three thousand, but every intersection with Main Street was anchored by a church.
Almost all of them were closed and boarded up; the only one that showed signs of life was the Pentecostal, the sign out front reading Welcome Pastor Zeke in mismatched vinyl letters.
Its rickety bell tower was the tallest structure in Burrsville now that the Catholic church was gone, although no one was allowed up in it.
The members of the church had been fundraising to restore the tower for what felt like my entire life.
Almost everything else on Main Street was a secondhand store, an antique shop, or a diner.
Burrsville had three secondhand stores; residents had been trading each other’s junk around for years.
If the junk got sufficiently old, it landed in one of the two antiques shops, where it would either be passed to another Burrsville resident or snatched up by an out-of-towner hoping to strike it rich with a prewar hay baler or wool comb.
Down the road a mile or two, outside the village proper and not convenient for anyone to walk to, were the big box stores and fast-food joints. Most of Burrsville’s residents were employed there, and despite Evelyn’s yearly attempt to resurrect the farmer’s market, most of them shopped there too.
The address Broder gave me was on the northeast edge of the village, an overgrown little ranch dwarfed by boxy multi-family units on either side.
Every place on the street had the vague, impersonal unkemptness of a rental—no names on the mailboxes, no flowers, no birdbaths, just ugly bushes and cracked sidewalks filled with weeds wilting in the heat.
The only signs of life were a half-finished hopscotch court drawn in chalk and Broder’s police cruiser parked in front of the ranch.
I schooled my expression into a bland, pleasant mask and got out of the truck. Once I did, I heard raised voices from the back of the house.
Hurrying down the driveway, I found Broder with his thumbs tucked into his belt, occasionally holding up a hand and saying, “Ma’am, ma’am,” and nothing else.
There was a woman standing on the porch huffing furiously on a vape pen between loud protests, her blue undercut tousled as if she’d been sleeping.
The one doing most of the talking—shouting, really—was an old woman whose housedress was slipping off the hump on her back, her visible ankles veined with blue.
“Excuse me!” I shouted, and the conversation ceased abruptly. I pointed at the older woman. “Ma’am, do you live in this house?”
“No, I’m her neighbor.”
“So you made the call?”
“Yes, and—”
“Your call has been answered, you can go home.”
The old woman sputtered, her drooping lips flapping. She looked at Broder to overrule me, but he knew he should’ve sent her home already. The folds of skin that spilled over his stiff collar were turning an unhappy red, but he said nothing.
“I pay my taxes, and it’s my right—”
“No,” I said. “It’s not. Thank you for your call. We’ll take it from here.”
“I’ll call…” she trailed off, realizing the person she would’ve called was already here. Finally, she spun on her heel and stomped across the unmown lawn to her own house.
Once she was gone, I turned to Broder. “Sorry you had to take time out of your day for this, Chief,” I said, though I neither wanted nor had asked for him to be there. “I can take it from here. I’m sure you have better things to do.”
His small, piggy eyes narrowed; he didn’t appreciate being dismissed. “That’s all right, just figured I’d give you some backup.”
I laughed as if he’d told a joke, but made no move toward the porch. For a moment we stood there, staring each other down and pretending the silence wasn’t growing brittle.
“No cops are getting in here without a warrant,” the woman on the porch said.
Broder bristled and swung to face her, a bull who’d caught a glimpse of red in his periphery. I closed my eyes briefly, snatched at the threads of magic that were present even here, and cast them around him like a noose.
I didn’t like to use such brute force. There was no subtlety to it, just domination.
When wielded this way, the magic had no nuance, and worst of all, no staying power; as soon as I relinquished my hold, he’d likely be back on the warpath again.
Broder was a difficult creature, and it was hard to know when cutting him off at the knees would arrest his progress or only make him furious. I had to hedge my bets.
“If you had nothing to hide, you wouldn’t…” He faded off in the middle of one of his favorite phrases, confusion flitting across his face. He sighed and, without another word, headed back down the driveway toward his cruiser. I turned my attention to the woman on the porch.
“I’m not a cop,” I said. “I’m the animal control officer; my name’s Tess. I’m guessing you know why I’m here.”
The woman was still looking down the driveway, and I took the opportunity to ascend the rickety porch steps, noting the peeling paint and exposed nails in the railing. “What’s with him?” she asked.
“Probably just realized it wasn’t worth the trouble,” I said, and favored her with a conspiratorial smile. “It’s really not worth the trouble, but you know how it is with nosy neighbors.”
“Yeah, that old bitch, always on my ass about something. Once she called the landlord because I didn’t bring my trash bins in for a day.”
I shook my head. “Honestly, it’s sad when they get like that—nothing better to do with their lives than nitpick.”
“You’re telling me.” She took another hit off the vape, and it was then I saw the Band-Aids wrapped around three of her fingers, the larger bandage on her wrist, another one on her opposite forearm.
“I’m Sarah,” she said finally.
“Sarah, nice to meet you. Have you lived here long?”
I drew her into small talk for a few minutes, keeping the magic in a chokehold on Broder as he sat and stewed in the cruiser; I wouldn’t be able to maintain it and hold a conversation for long, but I had to hold him at bay until Sarah let me in.
Eventually, she seemed to relax slightly, offering me the vape.
“Ah, no thanks, not for me. Is it all bullshit, then? You don’t have a deer in the house?”
She looked guilty. “What if I did?”
I shrugged, as if this were no big deal. “Why would you?”
“Well, let’s say a little baby fawn wandered into my yard a couple days ago, and I left it alone just like you’re supposed to, but the mother never came for it.”
“That would be pretty unusual, since fawns are born in the spring. Theoretically, how little of a baby are we talking about?”
“Baby-baby. Little spots and twig legs baby.”
I met her gaze and held it. She didn’t look away. “Pretty unusual,” I repeated.