The Line (Witching Savannah, #1)(19)

“I’ve seen his truck. His is old.”

“Yeah, but his is real,” I said, regretting it instantly. He stood and kicked the truck away, causing it to roll into the far corner.

The door opened, and Ellen stuck her head in.

“Ellen!” Wren squeaked and ran toward her, totally deserting the toy truck that had captivated him only seconds before. She came into the room and knelt down next to him, kissing his forehead and pulling him to her.

Ginny had often complained that “it” should be dissolved and laid to rest. The family’s job was to maintain the line, not pluck at it like a guitar string. But after Ellen’s son Paul died, she had latched onto Wren. No one, not even Ginny, had had the heart to rip another child from Ellen’s arms, so in spite of Ginny’s churlishness, a tacit agreement seemed to exist in the family that Wren would be kept “alive.” I suspected it was the combination of booze and this need to hold onto an illusion that was siphoning off Ellen’s power. He had to be getting his juice from somewhere; I doubted that he was pulling much from Maisie, who had no need for him anymore, and I had none to give him.

“I can’t find my ball,” he said, addressing Ellen. His lower lip poked out comically, causing Ellen to laugh and hug him even more tightly. I was concerned about what he was doing to my aunt, and I knew it wasn’t natural for him to be here with us, but I couldn’t help it. My heart went out to him like it would to a real child.

“Don’t worry, baby,” she said. “If we don’t find it, I’ll set Connor on the case with his pendulum.” She looked up at me. “And you, young lady, don’t you worry about Adam. He’s going to realize he is barking up the wrong tree soon enough.”

“He thinks one of us did it for Ginny’s money,” I said.

“Aunt Ginny didn’t have any money of her own. She got her stipend from the trust just like the rest of the family does. Just like you and Maisie will, starting on your next birthday. Nobody’s going to gain financially from poor Ginny’s death. What she had to give wasn’t money. It was knowledge.”

She reached out and took my hand. “He’s wrong, you know, this detective. It wasn’t anyone from the family, close or extended, who hurt Ginny. If a witch with bad intentions had been approaching her, Ginny would’ve sensed the danger from a mile away.” Ellen weighed her words. “Someone born of the power, we have a signature, something like a vibration. When we get near someone like us”—she looked away from me, maybe feeling a bit guilty for excluding me—“that vibration either falls in sync and kind of hums along with ours or is like nails scraping against a chalkboard.” She let go of my hand and turned her attention back to Wren. “Ginny would have sensed it if a rage-filled witch was coming at her.”

“But if she could know when a witch was coming at her, why couldn’t she tell if a normal person was headed her way? Seems to be a hell of a blind spot,” I said and then regretted having used the word “normal” for non-witches.

“I would say ‘regular’ instead of ‘normal,’?” Ellen corrected me, but I could tell she wasn’t really upset. “Whoever hurt Ginny was regular. But they certainly weren’t normal. My feeling is that the person was probably deranged. You know how disturbed people tend to get more excitable during a full moon?”

“Sure, it’s why we have the term lunatic,” I said.

“Precisely. It’s kind of the same when a crazy person, pardon my lack of political correctness, approaches the line. The vibration causes them to become more unhinged than they might typically be. And Ginny was the focal point, the anchor for our portion of the line. So you end up taking crazy and turbocharging it.” She paused. “As far as Ginny not picking up on a threat, I suspect she thought she could control the situation. That she underestimated the strength or craziness of whoever attacked her. All the same, the killer is not one of the family.”

“Yeah, I know, but I don’t think I helped convince Detective Cook of it.”

“Don’t worry. He will chase his tail a bit, but he is keeping an open mind. And by open, I mean open enough for me to poke around in a little.” She placed her hand on Wren’s head.

“What did you see?” I asked.

She began to stroke Wren’s blond curls, the muscles in her forehead relaxing at the contact. She took a lot of comfort from him. “One of the neighbors spotted a young man in Ginny’s yard, the morning she was killed. African American, I gather. I couldn’t pick out the actual description, just Adam’s impression of that description. It looked like no one I knew.”

“My ball,” Wren was growing impatient.

Ellen patted his head and stood. “All right, little man,” she said, taking hold of his hand. “Let’s go find it. Where do you remember playing with it last?”

“Outside,” he replied.

“Then let’s start there,” Ellen said and led Wren from the room.

Seconds later, Teague Ryan, one of the cousins, popped his head into the room. “You done in here?” he commanded more than asked. Teague’s square jaw and high forehead landed him somewhere on the looks spectrum between high school prom king and newscaster. His sense of entitlement positioned him somewhere between a spoiled six-year-old and Louis XIV, the Sun King of France.