Chapter Twenty
I wanted to speak, but couldn’t. Words frenzied in my head like a cyclone of hornets, but none would come to my throat.
Sam made no move to handcuff me, and he didn’t have backup. This was a courtesy to me, I knew. Somehow it only lasered more attention on the incredulous predicament in which I found myself: I had been arrested for murder.
At last, a few words came. “You found Ian Penclosa’s body?”
“The medical examiner will confirm it.” Sam’s gaze was impossible to read. He might have been a statue for all the emotion he showed.
“You don’t know, then.”
“Lalena tells me Ian is missing. His car is in the drive way, but he hasn’t shown up at the This-N-That, and he doesn’t answer his phone. You know this.”
“Yes.”
“You claimed to have seen his body. Inside.” Sam nodded toward the atrium. “Then you put on a charade, asking about him around town.”
“It wasn’t a charade.” When he didn’t reply, I added, “You think I set this up. You think I was covering up a murder?” The words might have been stuck in my throat a moment ago, but now they couldn’t escape quickly enough. “Why? Why would I do it?”
“It doesn’t matter. You were seen going to the woods, and you were out the night he disappeared, the night you said you found him in the atrium.”
“No,” I said quickly. “No, I wasn’t out that night. I was home.”
“Josie, people saw you. I have their statements. Besides, you just admitted going to the woods.”
“I mean, other than the woods.”
Behind Sam, a sheriff’s SUV rolled into the driveway, its lights flashing, but no siren. It was really happening. I was really under arrest.
“I’m sorry,” Sam whispered, his only display of emotion. “Go upstairs and get dressed.”
Then they took me away.
I sat on a hard plastic chair in an interview room in the detention center and waited.
I didn’t know what I’d expected of jail—iron bars and drunks sleeping off benders?
—but this was more like waiting for a meeting in a dingy county building than finding myself in the tank in a film noir.
A window with a mirrorlike surface covered one wall.
Whether or not an officer watched from the other side was anyone’s guess.
As in the movies, however, I did have the chance to call an attorney.
It was the middle of the night. I wouldn’t be able to reach anyone until morning.
Even then, I didn’t know who to call. Lalena, my best friend in Wilfred, might suspect I’d killed her boyfriend.
I doubted she’d be eager to set me up with a criminal defense attorney.
My family was all the way across the country.
I hoped the county’s public defender was good.
“Josephine Way?”
A uniformed officer stood in the doorway. She handed me a paper cup of weak coffee. “That’s me,” I said.
“I’ll take you to a cell. You’ll be questioned in the morning.”
She led me to a stuffy windowless room with a toilet bolted to the wall, and she locked me in with a clank of a thrown bolt.
I would have a lot of time to think that night, because I certainly wouldn’t be sleeping. The hum of the jail’s ventilation system and the faraway moans of some other poor arrestee didn’t help.
Yes, I had been at the witch’s circle in the woods, and it was true I’d built a fire. However, I’d burned linens, not a body. I wasn’t sure how I was going to explain that I was destroying a spell set by another witch, but I’d have to think of some excuse.
I shifted on the hard mattress.
Even if I’d wanted to burn a body, how could I have hauled a man’s corpse through the woods? Unless they thought I’d somehow brought him there alive, then killed him.
And what about seeing Ian in the library’s atrium? Was that dream-addled sleep or something more real? Like magic? More specifically, Beata?
No matter what angle I took in thinking over the situation, I arrived at the same conclusion: it was impossible.
It was impossible that I was out the night I’d found Ian’s body.
In fact, finding Ian’s body in the atrium— then having it vanish—was also impossible.
It was certainly impossible that I’d killed him, then attempted to burn his body.
I’d been a fool to underestimate Beata. In whatever form she took—Babe Hamilton or Lise Bloom or whomever—she wasn’t finished with me.
Lise had known about the witch’s circle.
She’d pointed it out when I’d met her on the trail.
With Beata’s glamour, even in its current weaker form, she might have been able to make me see what she wanted me to see, including an innocent woman with whom I felt an unusual kinship.
I was being set up, and there was only one person who could have done it. A witch. And that witch had to be Aunt Beata.