“I’d love me some coffee, sister mine,” Sam said.
“Comin’ up,” Esther said. I heard the pregger-shuffle as she moved toward the kitchen. She was getting big fast.
“Who’s watching the back?” I asked quietly, because I knew he’d have someone covering the house there too.
“Amos and Rufus,” he said, referring to our older half brothers. “Heavily armed and well hidden.” My brother rested his backside on the edge of the porch, his feet between the leafy fronds of bulbs my sister had planted when she first married. Totally without church inflections, Sam said, “I took Mud to school today. I took a yard of cut wood to your house yesterday. I did maintenance on your windmill while I was there.”
I smiled. “Thank you, brother mine. Looking after the widder-woman?”
“Until she marries a werecat, yes.”
I felt as if I’d been gut punched. In the church, when brothers talked about their sister’s marriage, it was usually with an interest to control said sister. “Ummm.”
Sam grinned and said, “You are mighty welcome, sister mine. Your fella says it’s up to you to propose or to ask him to be your concubine. A man as a concubine is a little modern, to my way of thinking, but I’ll support you if you decide to go the concubinage route. Though Mama might have kittens. She wants to see you in a wedding gown.”
Sam’s words said he, too, was leaving this decision in my hands. That was... unexpected? Shocking? “Ummm.”
Sam laughed, the tone kind, as if he was letting me off the hook, and tilted his head back to view me from the corner of his eye.
I snapped my mouth closed, made a face at him, and said, “You’un’s teasing me.”
“Only a little. Occam loves you. Don’t keep him waiting too long.”
I made a harrumphing sound, a lot like Mama made, and scowled at him. “I have a feeling we’ll be here a while. Mind if I get my laptop and do a little work?”
“I’m fine with a little peace and quiet.” He hesitated a breath and then asked, “You know you stink, right?”
“I know.” I went to my car, retrieved my laptop, and took the rocking chair Sam had left me. He was sitting on the porch, his back against the porch wall, legs outstretched. I discovered an update on the single-vehicle accident, posted by Occam an hour past. It was official to the case file, so it was coached in officialese, but it boiled down to: The para hazmat team had vacuumed and collected trace evidence from Cale Nowell’s car and fingerprinted everything inside. The vacuum cleaner had been placed into two interlocking null bags for hazardous waste and null magic transportation and messengered back to the military’s new joint armed forces crime lab. It would be at least forty-eight hours before the evidence was analyzed. The military crime scene techs were in the process of sealing the entire car in oversized hazmat drop cloths and pulling it onto a trailer to be taken to the same location. Evidence in this case was moving out of PsyLED’s hands. This case was getting away from us, just like the Blood Tarot case had. The body count had been unacceptably high then and the discussions to include military intervention at certain paranormal crimes had gone into high gear. Themilitary was entirely too involved. They had to be interested in howdeath and decayworked. An attempt to weaponize such energies couldn’t be far behind.
A second update had been posted while I was facing off with the churchmen. When Cale Nowell’s trunk was opened, it revealed a pile of junk two feet deep. Among it, the CSI hazmat team discovered duct tape, a shovel, heavy-duty plastic bags, lye, and rope.
That was all stuff used by serial killers to kidnap, transport, and bury bodies. Or maybe to cart graveyard dirt for making adeath and decayworking. It wasn’t likely happenstance. Once is chance, twice is coincidence, third time is enemy action. That was military canon.
JoJo had been tracking the car and the team had pulled an address out of the car’s GPS system. Cale Nowell had spent a lot of time in a trailer at the back of a farm halfway between Knoxville and Cookeville. Cale could be a suspect, or he could be a victim. Or both, if he’d messed up and magicked himself in some way, especially if my thoughts about a necromancer had any merit. My cell dinged with a GPS location and address. They wanted me there. ASAP.
I sat, staring at the request, the address, and the small map that popped up beside it. I was so tired I could hardly move. I wouldn’t be safe on the road.
The door to my side opened and Esther exited, backing onto the porch. She was dressed like a proper churchwoman, in a calf-length blue gingham dress with a white apron, her hair bunned up. She was wearing a pretty, purple scarf around her crown, adornment approved by the church, but I knew it was really worn to hide leaves. She was also wearing bright purple sneakers with lime green ties, which was not church approved, though I had seen other Nicholson women wearing brightly colored shoes and I approved. Esther turned around, revealing a wood tray with two coffee cups, a white porcelain coffee carafe, and an entire breakfast on a heavy white plate. She placed the tray in front of me, across the arms of the rocking chair. The smell of morning-fresh eggs and bacon and coffee woke me up fast.
“Holy moly, that smells good,” I breathed.
Esther smacked me on the shoulder. “You’un don’t be cussing at my house, and you’un best say a proper thanks.”
“Ow.” I rubbed my shoulder, saying, “Lord, I thank you for this amazing meal and my wonderful sister. And brother,” I amended. “Amen.” I dove in.
“Good enough,” Esther said and returned to her house. For all her recalcitrant ways, my sister could cook a mean breakfast and her coffee was strong enough to stand a fork up in it. I wolfed the meal down as I reread the reports and studied the map. The street view I wanted was nonexistent, the road too unimportant for Google to have driven down it, but from the satellite view, I spotted the address. It was an old farmhouse surrounded by oak trees, with a dirt drive and two trucks parked out front. Behind the house a good ways, maybe half a mile along that same dirt drive, was a trailer, and around a curving hill, an outbuilding smothered in kudzu. Back on the road in front of the address, I finger-leaped along the road back to Highway 62, spotting cleared fields, a postharvest view of farmland, farmland, and more farmland, with houses perched here and there, silos, barns, mobile homes. Near 62 I saw what looked like long, narrow foundation systems, probably the remains of an old chicken farm, with ancient farm vehicles and a house that was caving in. I knew where to turn in now, and I plugged the route into my phone system, wondering how I’d stay awake to reach the address.
As I was reading, a third update appeared on-screen with a soft notification ding. Sam looked over his shoulder at me. “Everything okay, Nellie?”
I grinned tiredly at him. “Except for exhaustion, I’m good. I got me a job, brother mine. The dings are case stuff.”
Sam shook his head and stretched out his legs, crossing his feet at the ankles. “That incessant dinging would drive me right into the loony bin.”
“Roosters crowing all night would drive me there.”
My brother grinned. “Different strokes.”
“For different folks,” I finished. And opened the new report.
