Chapter 42 #7
“Not alleged,” Wozniak said. “Naylor ran with a rough crowd for a while. Not the actual crime bosses that had been in some of the towns around the Fate River, but men who worked for those bosses. Then he made some bad decisions, acquired serious enemies, and disappeared without a trace. The people on the list Naylor gave Ted Ocampo? They’re all deceased except for one, and he’s in a facility that cares for Alzheimer patients. ”
“That’s what he meant when he said Ted was a lucky piece,” Fahey murmured.
“Detective?” Forrester asked.
“I read the letter Naylor wrote to his wife.” Her shrug might have been an apology for opening private correspondence.
“He went to Wyrd and made a bargain, saying he wanted to get on a ship and disappear until all his enemies were gone. Technically, one is still alive, even if the man can’t remember Naylor.
But Ted Ocampo was in the dinghy with him when the ship caught up to Naylor.
I think the captain of that ship let Naylor go because he saved the boy from drowning—and because it wasn’t Ted’s fate to be on that ship. ”
Wozniak frowned. “No one on the river reported seeing a tall ship with sails. A couple of sailboats, but nothing like Ocampo described in his interview.”
“One of the ghost ships,” Forrester said quietly.
Wozniak gave him an uneasy look. “There is more than one?”
“There’s more than one.” Some of them were almost accidents, more like a careless intention that turned into a haunting. But if that ship was being seen on the Fate River again? Not good. “Anything on Emma Naylor’s whereabouts?”
Castelletti lifted one hand. “Emma Naylor currently resides in an assisted living community in Barker. The impression I got from the eldest son, Alan Jr., is that certain people kept an eye on his family for a few years, but no one made a move against them. After the seven-year waiting period, Emma Naylor had her husband declared dead. Alan Jr. still lives in Barker. The younger son is out West somewhere. He’s not big on communicating with his brother and mother, but he does send money every few months to help with his mother’s expenses.
” He blew out a breath. “The man in the dinghy is definitely Alan Naylor, but Ted Ocampo identified a man who was in his late thirties. The man who was pulled ashore looked like this.”
They looked at the photo Castelletti dropped on the table. An old man with a worn, lined face; scraggly hair, what there was left of it; threadbare clothes. Not a man who looked healthy enough to row a dinghy across the Fate River.
“Maybe he knew what would happen to him once he touched the shore,” Kuhn said.
“Maybe,” Forrester agreed. “Either way, Alan Naylor finally got home, and his family has some closure.”
“What about Darren Palmer’s family?” Castelletti asked.
“Anyone who goes to the Isle of Wyrd is taking a risk, and there is always a price. For most people, the price is nothing more than a few coins. For some, if they are careless…” Forrester sighed.
“You really believe a teenage boy turned into a rat-faced chicken?” Wozniak asked. “According to Ocampo’s testimony, Palmer was a bully, and Ocampo was often on the receiving end of that bullying. Maybe Ocampo snapped but can’t face that he killed another boy.”
Fahey shook her head. “Ted told me what he and Darren Palmer did, what they saw, what Palmer said when he walked through the moon gate. I believe him.”
“I’ll call Darren Palmer’s father and let him know his son went over to Wyrd and hasn’t returned yet,” Forrester said. “For now, that’s all we can do.”
11
After a lackluster dinner, Beth pulled out the banker’s file box that held her fantasy art—the prints and sketches she had picked up at genre conventions during her teenage years, before Bonnie’s strident opinion that the pictures were the devil’s work and should be banned put an end to indulgences of any kind.
Personally, Beth found the “religious” pictures that covered Bonnie’s walls, with their graphic illustrations of the torments of the damned or the equally brutal—and bloody—depictions of the suffering of the righteous, more disturbing than strange creatures living in meadows or woodlands.
For a while after she’d gone out on her own, Beth had felt some obligation to stay in touch with the woman who had let Beth live in her house after Beth’s parents disappeared.
But any attempt at conversation with the woman was full of complaints about Beth’s stinginess and remarks shaped to wound because there was never anything else from Bonnie.
The last time Beth refused to send money to pay off the woman’s gambling debts, Bonnie tried to wreck Beth’s career as a cop with a vindictive letter-writing campaign that claimed Beth was unbalanced and mentally defective because of her attraction to “obscene artwork.” Beth stopped calling Bonnie after that—and stopped answering the phone when Bonnie’s number appeared.
“Let it go,” Beth muttered as she removed the lid on the banker’s box and set it aside. “Bonnie didn’t succeed, so let it go.”
Easy to tell herself that, but despite what she knew rationally, the fear of what other people would think and say remained, because it was always possible that Bonnie would find someone in authority who would agree with her—or agree just enough to cause some trouble.
As one of Beth’s classmates at the academy had pointed out, just because an idea was wackadoodle didn’t mean there wouldn’t be people who agreed with it—especially if it provided an excuse to demean, hurt, or control another group of people.
And Bonnie saw Beth as a cash cow she wanted to control.
As she lifted most of the prints and set them aside, it occurred to her that she could put anything she wanted on the walls of her own place.
It wasn’t like she was planning to have parties, and it was doubtful colleagues would drop by, see the artwork, and submit a “the girl is wacko” memo to the captain or someone higher up.
Doubtful but not a certainty. She didn’t know the men on the team well enough to feel certain of anything where they were concerned, and she wasn’t willing to take that chance.
At the bottom of the box was an old sketchbook—the thing that Bonnie claimed was the reason for her attraction to perverted pictures.
Beth didn’t know where the sketchbook had come from, but she couldn’t remember a time when she didn’t have it.
She hadn’t looked at the drawings in years, not after the day Bonnie caught her looking at the sketches and threatened to burn the sketchbook.
Where had her parents been? Why couldn’t she remember them?
She had stayed with Bonnie for weeks, sometimes months, at a time while her parents went away to “work things out.” At least, according to Bonnie.
But that meant she had lived with them at times.
Then came the day when she was sent to visit Bonnie and never left the woman’s house until she turned eighteen and graduated from high school—and received a substantial amount of money that had been held in trust. Bonnie claimed the money should be hers for taking care of Beth all those years, but Beth knew Bonnie had received sufficient money every month to cover any expenses connected to Beth.
Beth gave Bonnie a third of the funds from the trust as a kind of thank-you instead of letting the woman have control of all of it.
Another bone of contention, but the money gave Beth a way to leave Bonnie’s house for good and attend university before going into the police academy, after which she became a police officer and then studied for a detective’s shield.
Beth sighed and focused on the present. The sketchbook.
She opened the cover and stared at the two words on the first page. She must have seen them before, but until a few days ago, they had had no context.
The Arcana.
She turned the pages, looking at each sketch with a different understanding.
Could this be what the Arcana really looked like?
A human-animal blend like a centaur, except this was a man’s torso and arms blended with a stag’s body and a stag’s head.
An emaciated female that looked like preserved skin and bones rising out of a lake and, touched by moonlight, changing into an alluring woman.
Men and women that almost looked human except for the variety of horns on their heads.
Delicate antlers on a male. Curved ram’s horns on another.
Spiraling horns that angled straight back over a female’s head.
Not all of them had pointed elfin ears, but many did.
Beth turned a page and stared at the bird woman that matched Ted Ocampo’s description of the creature that had killed the transformed Darren Palmer.
A bird’s body about the size and shape of a harpy eagle, but the face was a woman’s, despite the tiny feathers and the beak that could easily rend the creature’s prey.
Was this creature the basis of the harpy in folklore?
Except harpies were supposed to have ugly female faces, and there was nothing ugly about the female in the sketch.
She looked at the rest of the sketches. Whoever had drawn these had spent time on Wyrd—or another place like it. She doubted one island was the source of strange for the whole world, but these sketches…
The last sketch was of three women. Not human, but their features indicated they were closely related.
Behind them, sketched in so faintly the images looked like nothing more than a pattern on the wall, were a deck of cards fanned out around the first woman’s head, a pair of scales above the middle woman, and a sketchbook and pencil floating near the third woman.