Of course, she and Jozi and Eddie hadn’t gone hunting for snacks because the police were paying special attention to them, with different men coming over to the cabin to ask if they had seen anything when the Hershel human ended up in the water. Didn’t humans talk to each other? Was that why they all asked the same questions? Or were they trying to . . . confirm . . . the information? Clearly humans weren’t as good as Crows when it came to remembering things. And the police here worked sooooooo slowly compared to TV cops, but Miss Vicki had said stories on TV had to condense all the time it would take in the real world, glossing over the waiting and thinking time in order to keep the story interesting for the viewers. Having spent the day watching the police scour the beach for clues, Aggie approved of glossing over.
“What’s she still doing here?” The raised voice sounded rough. Must be the bruised-throat female. “Things are bad enough now, but as long as she stays around, being here will only get worse. You have to do something! Force her out!”
Aggie retreated, tugging Jozi to come with her.
“That’s so sad,” Jozi said as they walked back to the cabin. “The Heidi human lost her mate, and now they want to force her to leave. Do you think the other females are afraid she’ll try to steal one of their mates?”
“I don’t think she wants one of the other males,” Aggie said. But the Heidi human wasn’t being included in the Dane flock anymore, had stayed alone in her cabin yesterday, not even venturing out to find food. And none of the humans who were supposed to be her friends had brought any to her.
As Jozi said, it was sad that the human females were so determined to drive the Heidi human away when they had been her friends the day before. But as the Crows spent the rest of the day watching the humans wander around on the beach, Aggie had the uneasy feeling that she had missed an important clue.
CHAPTER 70
Vicki
Watersday, Sumor 8
“Are you having trouble figuring out where to shelve these?” Julian asked, eyeing the books on the top shelf of the cart.
“No, no trouble.”
“Then . . .” He reached for one of the books.
“If you didn’t want me to look at the books, you shouldn’t have asked me to dust the shelves.” Helping Julian in the store for the past couple of days showed me why I could never work in the bookstore on a regular basis. I’d buy all the stock. “That’s the first pass. I’ll shelve the ones I’m putting back.”
He considered the books. “Do you have a prejudice against authors whose names begin with . . .”
I raised my arm and stretched as far as I could without falling off the top step of the three-step stool, demonstrating that some books were not within the reach of a short person, which was why I hadn’t selected titles written by authors whose names began with the first few letters of the alphabet.
Did Julian offer to find a taller stool or even a ladder? No, he did not. He just grinned.
“I’m going to the bank,” he said. “It’s a little early for lunch, but I could pick up a pizza while I’m out and about. Does that have any appeal?”
“That sounds good. Thanks. Oh. Could you stop at the general store and pick up more carrots? I cut up the last ones for the Sproingers’ treat this morning.” I glanced at the books on the cart. “I’ll put some of them back. Promise.”
“No need. If I paid you for helping me these past couple of days, I think we’d end up even.”
I wasn’t sure about being even, but I didn’t argue because I really didn’t want to put any of them back. They were an escape from a shaky future. Maybe I should throw away all caution and look into going out west where you could apply to live in a town that was being repopulated. You had to be willing to work with the terra indigene, but I could do that. And leaving the Northeast should put enough distance between me and Yorick.
Of course, I had no idea how a human applied to live in one of those towns, but Ilya Sanguinati might know. I’d slipped my medical information under his office door, including the name of the physician in Hubbney. No reason I couldn’t stuff the query about those towns under the door as well.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can.” Julian hesitated and rubbed the back of his neck. “Something doesn’t feel right today.”
“In the village?”
“On Main Street. I’m not sensing anything stronger than that. Don’t always sense more than that until the trouble is almost at the door, so to speak.” He looked at me, his gray eyes dark with worry. “I’ll lock the back door when I leave. You have your mobile phone?”
“In my purse, which is in the break room.”
“Get it. Keep it closer.”
Now I was worried. “Should I warn Ineke to stay away from the shops today?”
Another hesitation. Then he offered a grim smile. “Better safe than sorry, right?”
Not really what I wanted to hear. “Right.”
I followed Julian to the back of the store and listened as he locked the back door. Then I dashed into the break room, fetched my mobile phone, and called Ineke. She couldn’t insist that her guests stay away from the shops on Main Street, but she assured me that she and Paige and Dominique would stay at the boardinghouse. After promising to call with regular updates—we made a lame joke about calling it the Julian Report— I ended the call and immediately made another one. This time I got an answering machine.
“This is Silence Lodge. Please leave your name and . . .” Yada yada ya.
I left a message for Ilya, then went back to dusting the shelves, setting my mobile phone on the book cart so that it was in easy reach.
I wasn’t sure how long Julian had been gone—I’d gotten a bit distracted reading the cover copy of a few books—when I heard someone fumbling with the lock on the back door. Figuring he had his hands full and that was the reason for the fumbling, I had just stepped off the stool, intending to help him, when I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. “That was fast.”
Except it wasn’t Julian.
Before I could grab the mobile phone and even try to call for help, Detective Swinn shoved me against the bookcase, one forearm pinning me while his other hand rested on his service weapon.
“You’re coming with me. You’re not going to make a fuss or call any attention to us. Say it. Say it.”
I couldn’t say anything at that moment.
“If you don’t say it, if you don’t promise not to make a fuss, we’ll wait right here, and when Julian Farrow returns I will shoot him in the face. Not through the brain. I won’t kill him. I’ll shoot his face off. You got that, fireplug? He’ll spend the rest of his life with no eyes, no nose, no mouth. He’ll be fed through a tube, and it will be your fault.”
Swinn would do it. He wanted to shoot Julian, whether I cooperated or not. The only way to keep Julian from getting hurt was to go with Swinn and hope I would find a way to escape before he . . . hurt me.
Coward. I didn’t even want to think the word “kill.” He wasn’t taking me somewhere to hurt me, and we weren’t going somewhere for a chat. Yorick and his pals had decided I was a problem that needed to go away, and Swinn had been sent to fetch me.
Shoot-out in Sproing. It sounded like a frontier story, but I could picture the reality just fine. Shots fired on Main Street. Grimshaw running out of the police station, not seeing Swinn, a fellow cop, as a threat until it was too late.
Was Swinn’s arrival the wrongness Julian had sensed, or was it something worse, something more like what I was imagining? Except I could prevent what I was imagining.