Bone by Bone by Carol O'Connell Page B

sheriff steered the jeep through a turnout to avoid a large cavity in the dirt road. He gave his passenger a wary glance. “I understand how you feel, son. If I’d known that Hannah and the judge were sucked in, I would’ve kept tabs on the séances. But I still say Alice Friday’s harmless.”
    “Psychics are never harmless.” Oren Hobbs had already made it clear that psychics were the precursors to blowflies lighting on a fresh corpse, and their favorite prey was the parent of a murdered child.
    “This one’s different. I learned a lot about the psychic trade when your brother disappeared. All the pros turned out. I must’ve talked to twenty con artists. Alice was the only one with a Ouija board. Now that’s one way to separate hustlers from amateurs. Pros won’t use ’em. There’s no money in a board game that anybody can play at home.”
    “What about Evelyn Straub’s connection?”
    “When Alice Friday moved into the Straub Hotel, the other guests really liked the nightly Ouija board sessions on the verandah. So Evelyn cut a deal with the woman—free room and board and some walking-around money.” The closer Cable got to the cabin, the thicker the trees and ferns—almost there. “It’s just a gimmick to fill the hotel off-season. Now some people got hooked on the séances, but there was no charge. As long as nobody got fleeced, I never saw the harm.” He had never foreseen a day when rock-solid people like Hannah and the judge would go looking for Josh in a witchboard.
    As the jeep approached the cabin, Cable began a preamble to his worst fears. “It’s been quite a while since I was up here,” he lied. “The land changes as years go by. You think you know a place, and then you find out you don’t. I wouldn’t want to be up here when it gets dark. There’ll be a full moon, but you can’t count on it—not tonight.” He leaned forward to look up through the windshield. “The clouds are already rolling in.”
    Searching the woods for a teenage Oren Hobbs had once been the pastime of an entire town. After a while, they had ceased to hunt for Josh, giving him up for dead, but young Oren had spent all his days in the forest, hunting for his brother. No matter how many times the boy lost his way, townsfolk would stop what they were doing, shops would close, and people would walk into the deep woods to find Judge Hobbs’s only surviving child and bring him home again—and again. They never failed that good old man or the boy. Too often, Oren was found dehydrated and disoriented. So many times the boy could have died, but Coventry would not allow it.
    Oren Hobbs nodded his understanding that he should not get lost one more time. “Why did Evelyn Straub move her psychic from the hotel to the woods?”
    “That was actually pretty smart. Evelyn gets a tax write-off by using the cabin for business purposes.” The sheriff turned onto a private road of hard-packed dirt, slowing to a roll when the roof of the log house came into view. While he still had trees for partial cover, he stopped his vehicle, cut the lights and let the engine idle. “I’m not supposed to be here. Evelyn’s got an injunction to keep me off her property. She says police harassment ruins the ambiance. So I’ve got to get this jeep out of here real fast.”
    Yet his passenger remained in his seat, patiently waiting for more, and of course more was owed to him.
    “Swahn was right,” said Cable. “Evelyn’s the one who gave you that alibi. She told me you spent the day in the cabin with her. She said Josh went deeper into the woods by himself.”
    “Who was the other one? Swahn said two women came forward.”
    “Well, what does it matter now? And son?—just how many women were you sleeping with? You weren’t too talkative as a teenager.”
    Silent then, and silent now, Oren opened the passenger door and stepped out.
    “Hold on.” The sheriff rummaged through his glove compartment and pulled out a flashlight.