"What's he done?" Spence demanded, stiffening in his seat, ready to charge out and do battle with his duplicitous, unsavory rival. Gask smiled inwardly.
"I'd prefer not to discuss that aspect of the case with you, Mr. Spence." Let him use his imagination, Gask thought. "What should be of concern to you, as it is to us, is not so much what he's done elsewhere, but what he may do once he comes here."
"He's coming to Hopewell?" Spence swallowed. "So you think he'll look up Nest?"
Gask nodded, pleased that the deputy was doing all the work for him. "There is every reason to believe he will try to contact her. When he does, he will ask her to keep his presence a secret. He will lay low for the duration of his visit. He will not show himself readily. That's where you come in."
Larry Spence leaned forward, his hands knotted. "What do you want me to do?"
Findo Gask wished everything in life were this easy. "Miss Freemark is your friend. She knows of your interest in her, and she will not be suspicious if you find an excuse to visit her. Do so. Do so at least once every day. Get inside her house any way you can and look around. You may not see Ross, but you may see some sign of his presence. If you do, don't do anything foolish. Just call this number immediately."
Gask drew out a white business card and handed it to Larry Spence. It bore his fake identity and rank and a local number to which an answer phone would respond.
"I don't have to tell you how grateful the bureau is for your cooperation, Mr. Spence," Gask announced, rising to his feet. "I won't take up any more of your time today, but I'll stay in touch."
He shook the deputy's hand, leaving a final imprint of his presence so that the other would not be quick to forget what he had been told. "Penny!" he called down the hallway.
Penny Dreadful emerged on cue, smiling demurely, trying to hide the hungry look in her eyes. She was like this every time she got around children. Gask took her by the arm and steered her out the front door, nodding in the direction of Larry Spence as they departed.
"I was just starting to have fun," she pouted. "I had some of my toys out, and I was showing him how to cut things. I took off one of my fingers with a razor." She giggled and held up the severed digit, then stuck it back in place, ligaments and flesh knitting seamlessly.
"Penny, Penny, Penny," he sighed wearily.
"Don't get your underwear in a bundle, Gramps. I made sure he won't remember any of it until tonight, after he's asleep, when he'll wake up screaming. Deputy daddy will think it's just a bad dream."
They climbed back into the car, clicking their seat belts into place. Findo Gask wondered how much longer he was going to be able to keep her in line. It was bad enough with Twitch, but to have Penny pushing the envelope as well was a bit much. He rolled down the window and breathed in the winter air. The temperature had risen to almost forty, and the day felt warm and crisp against his skin. Odd, he thought, that he could still feel things like that, even in a body that wasn't his.
He thought for a moment about the enormity of the struggle between the Word and the Void. It had been going on since the dawn of time, a hard-fought, bitter struggle for control of the human race. Sometimes one gained the upper hand, sometimes the other. But the Void always gained a little more ground in these exchanges because the Word relied on the strengths of humans to keep in balance the magic that held the world together and the Void relied on their weaknesses to knock it askew. It was a foregone conclusion as to which would ultimately prevail. The weaknesses of humans would always erode their strengths. There might be more humans than demons, but numbers alone were insufficient to win this battle.
And while it was true that demons were prone to self-destruct, humans were likely to get there much quicker.
"Home, Penny," he instructed, realizing she was waiting for him to tell her what to do.
She pulled out into the street, swerving suddenly toward a cat that just barely managed to get out of the way. "I was listening to you in there," she declared suddenly.
He nodded. "Good for you."
"So what's the point of having this dork hang around Miss Olympic Big Bore to find out if this Ross guy is staying with her?"
"What's the matter, Penny? Don't you believe in cooperating with your local law enforcement officers?"
She was staring at the road intently. "Like that matters to you, Gramps. We could find out easy enough if Ross is out there without help from Deputy Dawg. I don't get it."
He stretched his lanky frame and shrugged. "You don't have to get it, Penny. You just have to do what you're told."
She pouted in silence a moment, then said, "He'll just get in the way, Gramps. You'll see."
Findo Gask smiled. Right you are, Penny, he thought. That's just exactly what he'll do. I'm counting on it.
CHAPTER 4
Driving home from church, Nest Freemark brooded some more about John Ross. It was a futile exercise, one that darkened her mood considerably more than she intended. Ross was a flashpoint for all the things about her life that troubled her. Even though he wasn't directly responsible for any of them, he was the common link. By the time she parked the car in her driveway and climbed out, she was ready to get back in again and start driving to some other time zone.
She went inside resignedly, knowing there was nothing she could do to stop him from coming to see her if that's what he intended to do, nothing she could do to prevent yet another upheaval in her life. She changed into jeans and a sweatshirt and pulled on heavy walking shoes, then went into the kitchen to fix herself some lunch. She sat alone at the worn, wooden table she had shared with Gran for so many years, wondering what advice the old lady would give her about John Ross. She could just imagine. Gran had been a no-nonsense sort, the kind who took life's challenges as they came and dealt with them as best she could. She hadn't been the sort to fantasize about possibilities and what-ifs. It was a lesson that hadn't been lost on her granddaughter.
Polishing off a glass of milk and a sandwich of leftover chicken, she pulled on her winter parka and walked out the back door. Tomorrow was the winter solstice, and the days had shortened to barely more than eight hours. Already the sun was dropping westward, marking the passing of the early afternoon. By four-thirty, it would be dark. Even so, the air felt warm this winter day, and she left her parka open, striding across her backyard toward the hedgerow and the park. Her old sandbox and tire swing were gone, crumbled with age and lack of use years ago. The trees and bushes were a tangle of bare, skeletal limbs, webbing across the blue sky, casting odd shadows on the wintry gray-green grass. It was a time of sleep, of the old year and its seasons passing into the new, of waiting patiently for rebirth. Nest Freemark wondered if her own life was keeping pace or just standing still.
She pushed through a gap in the bare branches of the hedge and crossed the service road that ran behind her house. Sinnissippi Park stretched away before her, barren and empty in the winter light. The crossbar at the entrance was down. Residents living in the houses that crowded up against its edges walked their dogs and themselves and played with their kids in the snow when there was snow to be played in, but there was no one about at the moment. In the evenings, weather permitting, the park opened from six to ten at night for tobogganing on the park slide and ice skating on the bayou.
If the temperature dropped and the forecast for snow proved out, both would be open by tomorrow night.
She hiked deliberately toward the cliffs, passing through a familiar stand of spruce clustered just beyond the backstop of the nearest baseball diamond, and Pick dropped from its branches onto her shoulder.