“Last year. We’ve practically adopted her. She’s like family,” Tondra said.
Last year was the same general time frame that the security firm had been hired. I made a note about that and said slowly, as if thinking it through, “The FBI might consider her being an heir a possible motive.”
“No. Not Cattie. She’s had everything she wanted. She’s family,” Tondra said, tearing up, grief washing down her face, scalding her chapped skin. I wasn’t an empath, but I knew Tondra was speaking the truth as she knew it.
“And besides,” Sophee Anne said, “financially speaking, Stella was worth way more to us all alive than dead, even with the coffin-rider sales. No one had a reason to want her killed.”
“Coffin-rider sales?” I asked.
“Sales that come when a singer dies,” Sophee Anne said. “People download so much music it actually makes money. Sometimes a lot of money. But not enough to replace the take from touring and not enough to replaceher. Not enough to kill for.”
“Life insurance?”
“Life insurance is for poor people,” Josette scoffed.
I couldn’t help my eyebrows going up when I said, “Poor people?”
“To pay off outstanding bills and provide for the family,” Tondra said. “Stella done all that already. My girl always thought ahead. Planned ahead. She don’t owe a dime to nobody. The only insurance she has is on the property and the horses.”
I let that settle inside me, realizing that I needed life insurance to provide for Mud. And a will... “Okay. That makes sense,” I said, mostly talking to myself. I hated that I no longer lived off the grid, that I had to think like townies, like city folk. To them, I said, “What can you tell me about Stella’s romantic life?”
Tondra stiffened and shot a sharp glance at her daughters. I knew that look. It was a mama’s warning to keep their mouths shut and let her do the talking. “My girl’s a good girl.”
“I’m not saying she isn’t,” I said, softening into a smile.
“Stella ain’t been dating no one in particular,” Tondra said. “She takes a different singer to every event, like the CMAs, but she ain’t picked a man to settle down with.”
The sisters glanced at each other but didn’t comment.
“One of the gossip magazines—which I do not read, in case you’r’un wondering—says she’s been dating Clyde MacMahan again,” I said. “The race car driver? She dated him before?”
“Lies. Her’n Clyde’s been friends since they was in middle school,” Sophee Anne said, ignoring her mother’s glared warning. “They dated a couple years back, but there wasn’t no passion, you know? Stella said it was like dating her brother. ’Cept she ain’t got a brother. It was a joke a hers. ‘Like datin’ my brother, ’cept I ain’t got one, so wha’d I know?’”
At the shared memory, all three women teared up again. I waited while they passed tissues and wiped their eyes.
“She broke up with him?” I clarified.
“Yeah. But she took him to an award ceremony last spring and the press went nuts. Clyde’s datin’ that actress what’s in the new Disney movie. Don’t bother looking his way,” Sophee said. “He ain’t no witch. He’s a man through and through.” Most people didn’t know witches could be male. And that was our problem. Whoever our killer was, she—or he—either was anew kind of witch or had obtained a trigger from a witch to power unknown magical energies. We hadn’t released that. So far as I had been informed, the coven hadn’t let it slip either.
“Ain’t no special man in her life right now,” Tondra said. “But if you’un don’t mind, can we talk later? It’s jist so...” She burst into noisy weeping. Her daughters joined her and they all piled up like puppies. I said my thank-yous, told them they’d likely be asked questions by other agents, and to not take it personally if the same questions were picked at again. I wasn’t sure they had heard me until Tondra handed me a business card with the security firm name and contact info. She said, “Like I said. You’uns find the murderer who kilt my baby. That’s all we want.”
Stella’s sisters nodded.
I slipped outside the room and down the hallway, taking photos, looking for other people, and generally snooping. As I worked, I wondered how Tondra and her girls would fare in an interview with Tandy or Margot. Because I had a feeling they hadn’t been particularly honest with me about Stella Mae’s love life.
***
I was slumped at the kitchen bar, my laptop open and a pad and pen at my elbow, typing up my report when I felt a prickle on my skin, like a cold rush of wind followed by the stillness preceding a lightning strike. Wild magic. I knew it was my boss before FireWind blew toward the house. His emotions and magic were riding high, electric, contained but explosive, like a bomb, primed and ready but confined behind steel walls.
I sat up straight, going on guard, and was watching the door, meeting his eyes as he entered. My up-line boss was a Cherokee skinwalker, soft-spoken, controlled. The frozen gust of magic rolled back and vanished, leaving him just a man, but paler than his normal golden skin tones. Hungry looking.
“Ingram,” he murmured in his almost-a-whisper way. And as usual, that was all the greeting I got. He dove right into business. “Update. I understand you have spoken with the family.”
“I have food in my car if you want. And while someone stopped using the inside coffeemaker due todeath and decay, there’s coffee in the percolator on the camp stove outside,” Isaid, knowing he had to have seen the command center, as I scratched a note on the pad and passed it to him. It read,Security system. Family upstairs.Meaning they could listen in.
He paused the barest moment and gave me a single downward bob of his head, a gesture just like his sister used, economical and yet graceful. Jane Yellowrock was the most wild, untamed, yet decisive person I had ever met. She was the definition of scary. Her brother fell into a similar category, but while Jane trembled on the edge of violence at all times, FireWind was more constrained, reserved, a targeted weapon, which was scary all on its own. “I’d like something to eat,” he said. “Seven hours in the car, a discussion with the DOD and a para-hating, right-wing governor, and an interview with the local FBI senior special agent has left me unpleasantly hungry.”
I wasn’t sure how one could be pleasantly hungry, but I closed my laptop and led the way outside to the camp stove.
