Too late.
“Sure,” Hark said. “Come down whenever you’re ready.”
He hung up. The wind rustled through the grass and made the corn in the fields ripple and rustle to itself. It smelled like it had blown straight out of a slaughterhouse, thick with blood and shit and terror. Ledger gagged on it.
Meanwhile, Hark blithely disconnected the call and tucked the phone into his pants pocket. He didn’t seem to notice the reek. Most people didn’t. Ledger could count on one hand the people he’d met with his… little advantage. Two of them were him and Abigail.
From Hark’s confident smirk, he wasn’t part of the club.
“Who’s your client?” Ledger snapped. “Who’scoming?”
The smirk slipped a bit when he looked at Ledger and exposed a flicker of contempt.
“Look,” Hark said. “Either I drag this out through the courts, or you let me recoup any… expenses… I incurred coming out here. If you want to be sentimental about your dear old serial killer dad, I’m sure my clients will let you keep a sweater or something.”
The penny dropped. It did for Ledger, anyhow. The realization probably wouldn’t help him much, but it was still satisfying.
“You idiot,” Ledger said. “Bell wasn’t a serial killer. They just charged him with that because the statutes against trafficking with hellspawn were all outdated.”
It was like watching someone play the coin-pusher game at the fair. Hark’s confident expression slipped, and it looked like all the pieces were going to fall into place, but… nope. Not quite.
“He was a warlock?” he said. “Conroy isn’t one of the bloodlines.”
Ledger coughed out a humorless snort of laughter. “I’ll let you in on a little secret,” he said as he started to back away. “One that the warlock families don’t want you to know. Hell doesn’t ask for ID when you knock on its door. So, tell me something. How pissed do you think your client will be when they get here and find out I’ve already stripped the place? Because I bet he’s expecting a richer haul than an evil old man’s bedsheets.”
Andthereit was. The last penny fell into just the right spot, and Hark finally caught up. He blanched, his face gone the same mealy-brownish shade as his suit.
“I… There was no…,” Hark spluttered. He dragged his hand down his face and then grimaced. “You know what? You’re the heir, the owner. That’s your fucking problem.”
He turned back to the van and scrambled into the driver’s seat. The engine coughed as he turned the key too fast but spluttered to life on the second try. Ledger grabbed the door before Hark could slam it.
“Who is it?” he asked. “Who did you talk to?”
Hark yanked on the door and swore when it didn’t work. He pulled his sunglasses off and polished them with a jerky, absent-minded habit.
“Look, I don’t know them,” he said, the words rattled out quick and uneasy. “I just put the word out that I was managing the estate sale, and I’d take a loss to get it off my hands. This guy took the hook.”
Ledger tightened his grip on the door, his knuckles white. “Who?” he repeated the question through clenched teeth.
Hark put his glasses back on.
“I don’t know him,” he repeated as he threw the van into drive. “All I got was a name and a number. Earl. That’s it.”
He hit the gas, and the car lurched forward. Ledger had to let go and jump out of the way to avoid being dragged with it. Hark pulled a tight turn around the rental and took off down the drive.
Halfway down, he suddenly veered to the side, tires bumping off the asphalt and into the rutted grass to avoid something in the road.
Ledger took a shallow breath and tried to think through thehorror/disgust/fearkickstart the smell had given his flight instinct. It had his best instincts at heart, but it almost never helped to run. In the world he worked in, things that made you want to run liked the chase.
In the end, Ledger didn’t have time to do any of that.
Earl was at the door.
CHAPTER4
THE LAST TIMELedger had seen Earl, he—it—had been dangled from the old apple tree on the property line. Now the sloppily-made scarecrow—the old rags used as stuffing poked through tears in his clothes, the burlap head sunken and rotted on one side—shuffled painfully toward Ledger. Its head slumped on to the lumpy shoulder, the fabric creased over one Sharpie-drawn eye, its legs folded at the shin, and boots dragging limply behind it. The rope used to hang it was draped over the crook of one arm like a shawl.
Ledger might have found it pitiable… if he couldn’t stillsmellit.
