“Just like Mr. Allen said.” Felipe stared at the map more carefully. Most of the graves that had ended up in the woods were decades, if not centuries, old by the time their inhabitants were reanimated. “So it may be a Jarngren who is going into the woods to reanimate the dead.”
“Or it’s the woods itself,” Oliver said softly.
Felipe and Gwen turned to look at him as he chewed his lip thoughtfully.
“It’s only a theory, and one of them could be asking it to reanimate people. But it might also be a peculiar reaction between the Dysterwood’s magic and the bodies in the cemetery that causes passive enervation. The magic on Horace Ridder’s body felt bigger and stranger than what people can usually do.” Throwing up his hands, Oliver sighed. “Then again, it also felt somewhat sentient. I don’t know.”
“But if it is the Dysterwood acting passively, then why are onlysomeof the people buried in or near the trees coming back to life? And why are they attacking people? You reanimate people in the lab all the time, and I don’t remember anyone going after you,” Felipe replied.
“I’ve had a few become combative, especially those who died violent deaths and were freshly dead, but no, they’ve never done that.”
“Violent deaths,” Gwen whispered as she levitated their notes across the table. She spread them before her, her eyes rapidly shifting behind her glasses. “What if the people being reanimated are all victims of foul play? Not necessarily murder, but they died thinking their death was someone else’s fault.”
Oliver’s eyes brightened. “Annabelle was killed by her mother.”
“What?”
“I’ll catch you up in a little bit, Felipe, but yes, she was kept sick by her mother and died at her hand. That’s who she went after.”
“Ekland died having dinner with Hogarth during an argument. He might not have been poisoned, but he might have blamed him for making him angry enough to have a heart attack,” Gwen added.
“Fleming went after his supervisor at the mill after he was killed on the job,” Felipe said slowly. “The men there wouldn’t talk to me and the foremen closed ranks, so maybe something happened earlier that day between them, like he didn’t heed Fleming’s warning about the machine or there had been a near miss. Something had to happen that made him think the foreman was responsible.”
Nodding, Gwen flipped through her notes. “Mr. Allen and Dr. Miller don’t suspect foul play in Sarah Lindstrom’s death, but Oliver and I think otherwise. He noticed a wound on the back of her head, and her husband already remarried. That seems a little suspicious. Did you find anything that pointed to Sheriff Ridder’s death being foul play?”
“Beyond what Oliver discovered on his body, no. His desk was mostly filled with junk, and the only notes from Daphne Stills appear to be her acting as her husband’s secretary or adding his name to orders for legitimacy. If there was some feud going on between them, I doubt he kept a record of it in his desk.”
“I wonder if we can get into his house and look.”
Oliver opened his mouth but closed it. “Lucien didn’t know why Sheriff Ridder went after his mother, but Willard might. Lucien said himself that he isn’t very observant, yet Willard recognized Ridder and realized he was already dead. I know you said you need to think about whether we should go or not, but he might be able to answer some of our questions.”
Felipe silently sighed. Oliver wasn’t wrong. Willard Jarngren had been a witness to his aunt’s attempted murder, and his sister had been married to Horace Ridder. Depending on how close they were, she might have told him something, or he might have seen something inthe house. The note was ominous and more than a little suspicious, but if he was reaching out to them without planning to murder them, he might be the key to figuring out what happened to the sheriff and what his aunt had to do with it. Still, they would need to be cautious, especially sneaking around in the dark.
“We’ll see about meeting with Willard Jarngren.”
Putting his hand over Felipe’s, Oliver held his gaze. “Felipe, I want to meet with him. I think it’s the right thing to do.”
He wanted to protest that he needed to speak to Mr. Allen before deciding if it was safe, that he didn’t like the idea of being out after dark, that Turpin’s warning still haunted him, but Oliver so rarely pushed back when they worked together. Felipe swallowed hard. He could figure out a way to call it off if he had to after he gathered more information.
“All right. We— we can do that. Getting back to the case, my question is, why reanimate only people who have been murdered? Trees and magic don’t typically care about vengeance.”
“But the dead do,” Oliver replied with a roll of his eyes. “You wouldn’t believe how often the dead go on and on about their killers or the person they think did it. I hear far more about the people who wronged them than the people who loved them.”
Felipe didn’t doubt that. It still didn’t make sense though. Why revive only the wronged? For someone to reanimate only them, they would have to know they died under suspicious circumstances, and if they were reviving the long-buried dead in the old half of the cemetery, they would have to be fairly old themselves. Felipe ran a frustrated hand over his face. Either there was a necromancer taking requests or they had insider knowledge of the town’s goings on or the Dysterwood gave enough of a magical push to send the wrongfully killed out to find their murderers.
He had heard about or experienced a number of murder towns in his twenty years with the Paranormal Society, but he had never heard of a magical area being sentient enough to do something like that. If it was passive, then he wasn’t sure what they could do about it. It wasn’tas if they could prosecute or reason with the trees to make them stop siccing the dead on people. No, the passive magic idea didn’t make sense. Why only murder victims? Why start reanimating the dead now when there were surely plenty of dead people in the woods after so many disappearances? Something had to have changed for this to only start recently. The question was, what?
Eyeing the notes scattered across the table and floating around Gwen, Felipe pulled out his notepad. “Tell me everything you learned yesterday.”
***
Felipe stood in the kitchen, waiting for Mr. Allen to return. The moment he heard Argos stir and head for the back door, he left Oliver and Gwen to finish talking in the dining room. Oliver had been telling them about what he experienced in the Dysterwood, and while Felipe wanted to know as much as possible about the forest to get a handle on this whole situation, the idea of Oliver falling into another world alone still made him sick. The unending forest, the meandering trail, the tree person with the ring and knife, it was all too much. Argos gave Felipe a concerned glance before going back to pacing by the door. After this morning, he feared Mr. Allen would make himself invisible and sneak out of the house again before he could speak to him, so he waited. Felipe stood still as death in the corner as the back door opened, and Lewis Allen struggled to balance an overloaded crate of food in his arms while managing his cane and the door. Peeling away from the shadows, Felipe reached out to grab the box only to have the innkeeper jerk back in alarm.
“Criminy, you scared me, inspector. I didn’t see you there. You’d think by now I’d be used to strangers in the house,” he said as he let out a tense laugh and handed the crate over to Felipe. “Thank you. There’s more by the door if you’re willing. Usually, Mrs. Owens’s boyhelps, but he disappeared to look at the road before I could ask him to help me get them inside.”
“I’ll get them.” Hefting the other two boxes, Felipe said over his shoulder, “He isn’t the only one who disappeared.”
Mr. Allen held open the door for him with a frown. “Sorry about that. Listening to Luther try to flimflam us all into believing this was a regular occurrence was bad enough, but if I had to listen to Lucien’s empty prattle so early in the morning, I might not have been able to hold my tongue.”
