Autumn Bones

Thirty-eight

The flagstone walk leading to Clancy Brannigan’s, aka Boo Radley’s, rambling old Tudor house showed years of neglect. The moss-covered stones were cracked and crumbling, weeds growing between them. Warped shutters covered the windows of the gazebo where he got his groceries delivered and the breezeway that connected it to the house was boarded over with gray plywood. Behind a film of dirt on the garage window there was the vague silhouette of an antique truck that looked like it dated back to the 1960s and probably hadn’t been driven since. On the old Tudor house itself, a tide of green mold was creeping up the white stucco walls.

All of which made it rather surprising that the place had a state-of-the-art two-way video monitor for a doorbell.

There was a long wait after Cody rang the buzzer, and I was starting to think maybe Boo Radley was an urban myth after all when a voice came over the intercom. “Yes?” It was a man’s voice, wary, but not as old and feeble as I would have imagined. “What is it, Officer?”

“Clancy Brannigan?” Cody inquired.

“Yes.”

“Can we come inside and have a word with you?”

A screen on the monitor blinked to life to reveal one owlish eye, magnified behind a thick lens. “Do you need to come inside?”

“Um . . . no, I suppose not. Would you prefer to step outside?”

“I’d prefer neither.”

Cody glanced at me. I shrugged. I had no idea what the departmental protocol was for notifying crazy shut-ins that their ancestor’s corpse had been stolen. “That’s fine, sir. I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. It seems that Talman Brannigan’s tomb has been vandalized.”

“Again?” He had a point. If you were talking about a little graffiti, that was something that happened on a regular basis.

“This time it’s serious, sir,” Cody said politely. “I’m afraid the mausoleum was broken into and the remains are missing. I want you to know that we’re making every effort to find the perpetrators and restore the remains.”

The screen went dark, although we could hear faint scuffling sounds inside.

“Sir?” Cody called. “Mr. Brannigan?”

The screen lit up again, the magnified eye looming. I wondered why he bothered with a two-way monitor. Maybe just to demonstrate to the outside world that he was alive and capable in case someone called Social Services on him. Or maybe he just thought it was nifty. If the stories were true, he’d been some sort of inventor before he became acutely agoraphobic. While I was pondering, he spat out a name. “Cavannaughs!”

“Excuse me?” Cody said.

“Cavannaughs!” Clancy Brannigan repeated with disgust. “You want to find your grave robber, look for a Cavannaugh. You won’t find the body, though. Bet they’ve chopped it to bits and thrown it in the river. They’re afraid of the curse.”

“What curse?”

“Ask the Cavannaughs. I don’t believe in curses. I’m a man of science.” The screen went dark again. “Good day, Officer,” his disembodied voice said over the intercom.

Ohhh-kay, then.

Cody made a few more attempts at communicating with him, then gave up. “I guess we’ve done our duty,” he said dubiously.

“I guess.” If you ask me, some of the freakiest people in town are the ordinary human beings. “So what now?”

“I guess we talk to one of the Cavannaughs,” he said. Oh, great. The nearest descendants of the Cavannaugh family I knew of were Pemkowet Visitors Bureau ballbuster Amanda Brooks and her daughter, Stacey. And by the amused look on Cody’s face, that’s exactly who he had in mind. “You’ll live. It’s probably for the best that we give Amanda a heads-up anyway.”

Once we were back in the truck, the awkwardness returned in the form of silence. Apparently, violently intense sexual encounters aren’t entirely conducive to a professional working relationship. Who knew? The silence made me fidgety, and fidgeting rekindled that pleasant tingling. Talk about your vicious circle.

“So . . . Clancy Brannigan was supposed to be some kind of inventor, right?” It seemed like a safe topic. “What did he invent?”

Cody answered without taking his eyes off the road. “I think it was the Flowbee.”

“What? The vacuum-cleaner haircut thing? Seriously?” I asked. Cody shot me a sidelong glance, the corner of his mouth twitching. I laughed and cuffed him on the shoulder. “Jerk!”

“I don’t know for sure,” he admitted. “I don’t think he invented something that’s a household name. More like he’s the guy who figured out how to make a better widget.”

I was suspicious. “Is there really such a thing as a widget?”

He smiled again. “No. It’s just shorthand for a mechanical I-don’t-know-what. Sounds better than thingamabob.”

I contemplated his profile. “You know, we’re pretty good together, you and I.” I hadn’t meant to say it; it was one of those things that just slips out. Like after a violently intense sexual encounter with someone you’ve had a crush on for ages.

Cody pulled into the PVB parking lot and cut the engine. “Daisy—”

“I know, I know! Sorry. Later, when we’re not on the verge of a zombie apocalypse, okay?”

His expression was serious. “It’s just . . . we’ve talked about this. And you know the bottom line.”

I did. “I’m not a suitable mate. And you care about me too much to mislead me.”

“Right.”

I sighed. “All I’m saying is that we’re good together. I don’t even know if that’s what I want, Cody. I’m just saying we are. Or at least we could be, if you weren’t on the down-low, and I wasn’t . . . not a werewolf.”

Cody took a moment to parse the double negative in my last sentence, then broke into an unexpected grin, rakish and charming. “Well, I’ll say one thing, Daise. For a demon’s daughter, you sure as hell fuck like a werewolf.”

“I can’t believe you just said that.” I paused. “That was a compliment, right?”

His grin widened, getting toothier, and green shimmered behind his topaz eyes. “What do you think?”

“I think it was a compliment.” I opened the passenger door. “Come on, let’s go talk to Amanda Brooks.”

Inside, we had to wait a few minutes while Amanda finished up some important business on the phone. Thanks to Cody’s presence, Stacey was on good behavior at first, but as soon as he wasn’t looking, she pointed at me and then at her own neck, mouthing the word “Classy!” in an exaggerated fashion, upon which I realized that the collar of my jacket had fallen down to reveal those spectacular love bites.

Great.

I flipped my collar back up and returned her gaze with what I hoped was perfect equanimity. I figured if I was going to take “fuck like a werewolf” as a compliment, I might as well own it.

It wasn’t long before Amanda ushered us into her office and got right down to business. She didn’t even bother asking why we were there. “Officer Fairfax. Daisy. Do you have any leads?”

Cody took a seat opposite her desk. “What can you tell us about the Cavannaugh curse, Mrs. Brooks?”

She stared at him for a few seconds, her perfectly lipsticked lips parted. “You can’t be serious.”

“Why not?” he asked reasonably.

Unaccountably, she shivered. “It used to give me nightmares as a little girl. But it’s just a ghost story. You can’t possibly think it had anything to do with Talman Brannigan’s remains being stolen.”

“Clancy Brannigan does,” Cody said.

She blinked. “You actually spoke to him?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know he’s out of his mind,” Amanda said dismissively. “You can’t give any credence to a word he says.”

“Actually, he seemed pretty lucid,” I offered. “Agoraphobic, but lucid. So what’s the curse?”

Her lips compressed. “My great-great-grandfather, Andrew Cavannaugh, was Talman Brannigan’s partner in the lumber business. According to what I’ve always been told, he was the one who discovered the massacre in progress and shot Talman in the back. Before Talman died, he accused my great-great-grandfather of betraying him and vowed to take vengeance on his family even if he had to rise from the grave to do it.”

Yeah, I could see where that would give you nightmares.

“Huh.” Cody rubbed his chin. “I’ve heard about Andrew Cavannaugh shooting the Tall Man. But I never heard about the curse.”

“No.” Amanda removed her stylish glasses and polished them with a cloth she removed from a desk drawer. “That’s been kept within the family.”

He gave her an apologetic look. “Which, when you think about it, does give the Cavannaughs a plausible motive for wanting to ensure that the Tall Man’s remains were destroyed.”

She put her glasses back on and regarded him coolly. “After a hundred and thirty years?”

Cody shrugged. “You did say the curse gave you nightmares. And ‘betrayed’ is an interesting choice of word for a man in the middle of slaughtering his own family.”

Amanda Brooks fiddled with a letter opener. “My great-great-grandfather saw the writing on the wall, Officer. When it was obvious to him that the lumber industry in Singapore was doomed in the long run, he sold his interest in the company to Talman Brannigan, who subsequently lost everything, including his mind. So, yes, in that sense, he betrayed him.”

“Interesting.”

She put down the letter opener. “I do believe that he felt a measure of guilt. It was my great-great-grandfather who arranged for Talman Brannigan’s remains to be interred in the Pemkowet cemetery.”

“If that’s true, he spent a lot of money on that mausoleum,” I murmured. “How come the Tall Man’s the only one in it?”

“Talman’s wife had family in Chicago,” Amanda said. “They didn’t want her and the children buried with him.”

“But there was a survivor, right?”

She nodded. “Clancy Brannigan’s grandfather, I believe. He was the youngest, only seven years old. If I remember correctly, he was raised by his aunt, Talman’s sister. You can’t blame them for not wanting to share his final resting place, either.”

“True,” I said.

“Just to rule out the possibility, can you tell us where you were between the hours of eleven o’clock last night and six a.m. this morning?” Cody asked her.

“Home in bed,” Amanda replied flatly.

“Alone?”

Her lips thinned again. At this rate, she was going to smudge her lipstick. “Yes. But I assure you, I had nothing to do with this. No one in the Cavannaugh family did. You’re welcome to talk to anyone you like.”

“Oh, we will.” Cody glanced at me. “On a related note, there’s another matter that you should be aware of, Mrs. Brooks.”

Taking his cue, I politely notified her that a spirit had been unleashed, Pemkowet’s dead were restless, and the entire town was very likely going to be haunted in the near future. She took the news better than I expected. In fact, we left her in the process of brainstorming ways to tie our forthcoming haunted status in with the annual Halloween promotion.

I’ll admit, I was looking forward to Cody asking Stacey about her alibi—after all, she was a Cavannaugh descendant, too—just for the malicious pleasure of having to hear her admit that she, too, spent the night alone, because I knew for a fact that she wasn’t dating anyone at the moment, but Cody headed for the door without questioning her.

“What’s up?” I asked him in the truck.

“I had an idea.” He turned on the ignition. “There are a lot of Cavannaughs to question, and they stick together. I wouldn’t put it past Amanda to warn them to get their stories straight just in case. Back in the summer, your favorite ghoul said he could tell when people are lying as long as they’re not sociopaths.”

“You want to recruit Stefan?” The notion gave me an unsettled feeling in the pit of my belly. Or maybe it was just the venison sausage.

“He owes me.” That was true. Stefan credited me with saving his life, but it was Cody who’d done the actual saving. I’d just created the opportunity. “What’s the matter?” There was an edge to his tone. “I thought you’d gotten pretty cozy with him.”

I wagged my finger at him. “Ah-ah! You’re not allowed to get jealous over an unsuitable mate.”

He shrugged. “I just think you’re playing with fire when it comes to ghouls in general, and Ludovic in particular.”

“As opposed to whatever we’re doing here?” I said.

Cody smiled wryly. “You have a point.”