72 St. Margaret’s Way Chapter 2
The case was a bit of a nothing, which, while frustrating because it brought them out into the woods on a cold evening, was also kind of a relief. It was over faster than it took for them to get there. And by the time they got back to headquarters, James’s shift was wrapping up.
“At least it killed some time,” James said as they were pulling onto St. Margaret’s Way around nine.
“Yeah, sure,” Bradley muttered. “Not like I had a whole lot of other shit to do.”
That was a lie, or possibly sarcasm. Bradley, like James, had a ridiculous amount of tasks piled up and waiting for him at all times. Even now, a few months later, James still felt a pang of guilt at how he’d unintentionally dismissed that more than once. Amelia had called him out on it and she’d been correct. Not that either of them had been innocent in that fight, but James had struck a low, untrue blow with that. And with most of the rest of what he’d said in a flash of anger and exhaustion.
But this had been a task on both their to-do lists tonight and now it was done, so it counted. “Hey, Mads, we’re pulling up now,” James said into the comms. “How about you head on out?”
“Got it,” she said. “Good night if I don’t see you on my way out.”
She was headed to her car when they got to the house a few minutes later, ducking against the rain that was starting to fall. James gave her a wave, but didn’t try to do more than that. It was late, she needed to go home and rest. So did he, but Bradley had gotten sprayed with wet dirt and yard waste while they were investigating, so James stuck around while he took a quick shower. He glanced over the plans for tomorrow while he waited. Busy, but manageable as long as things stayed exactly like they were right now.
“You need anything from me?” he asked Bradley as he pulled on his jacket for the walk home ten minutes later.
“No?”
“I’ll just be at home, so call or text, I can be here in five minutes.”
“I just said I don’t need you.”
“I know. Just if anything comes up.”
“It won’t.”
Bradley was sitting on the couch with his laptop, backpack, and what looked like the public library’s entire collection on the history of Atlantic fishing industries stacked on the coffee table beside him. “What’s this?” James asked, picking up one of the books and flipping through to a detailed chart about lobstermen.
“Nothing.”
They all knew he was in school and none of them cared. So why wouldn’t he just accept that someone might be genuinely interested in what he was doing? “So, you think Amelia’s date is going well?” James asked.
Bradley looked up at him. “Yeah.”
Did he know or was it just him trying to get James to shut up? “What do you do on dance nights?” he asked, glancing out the rain spattered window at the dark street beyond.
“What do you fucking think?” Bradley demanded. “Will you just let me get my work done? This is due on Friday and I’ve barely started. And I know stupid shit is going to come up tonight.”
“Fine,” James said.
“Thank you.”
“Call me when the stupid shit starts.”
“It’s happening right now.”
Bradley opened a binder, then turned and scowled at his laptop. It hadn’t occurred to James before, but he was wearing an enormous sweatshirt with CORNELL written across it. “Did you go to Cornell?” he asked without thinking.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Bradley muttered. “Go home.”
“Alright, fine, I’m going,” James said. It was raining hard now and he hadn’t brought an umbrella. Did he have one anywhere in the house? “I’m just going to check if-”
“Take mine,” Bradley said, nodding toward an umbrella leaning against the wall beside the supply closet. “Just leave me the fuck alone.”
***
James had planned to go to work a little early the next morning, but ended up falling back to sleep and not waking up until his fourth alarm went off. So he arrived exactly at eight. Amelia was still off, but everyone else was there.
“Good morning!” he called cheerfully as he came into the living room. “Bradley, go take a fucking break. Everyone else, what’s up?”
Bradley didn’t move from his computer and James weighed fighting with him. It could wait a few minutes if it had to. “Nothing new this morning,” Graham said. “So far, at least.”
“We’ve got one new case to start today and a handful that can either be today or later in the week,” James said. “Give me like twenty minutes and I’ll go see what’s the best approach. The scheduling software was a little vague about it.”
“Because it’s shit,” Bradley muttered.
“Break. Now.”
James jabbed a finger down the hallway, making unblinking eye contact with Bradley, who seemed inclined to ignore him for a few seconds, then relented. He stood up and walked toward the bedrooms without a word.
“Anyway,” James said to the rest of the group. “I will be in my office for a few minutes.”
The software was shit, he had to give Bradley that. While James waited for it to load, he opened his water bottle and scanned through his email. Another fifty messages since last night, even with the captains’ listserv arriving twice a day. There was nothing new and, like usual, he considered just deleting everything in one go.
But there was an additional email about that wellness fair thing he was starting today. They were really pushing this one.
Captain McManus –
Attached find further information from the Foundation for the Orson Center Wellness Fair. Our sources believe that the chemical found in the victims’ blood was consumed via food or drink. Begin your investigation there.
This case is priority and we expect to see results in the next couple days. As the Foundation reallocates funding and resources, we need to know that they are being used most efficiently as we plan for the future. Thank you for your understanding in this matter.
Gabriella had been concerned for James’s heart a few months ago while investigating the Sixteen Roses case. He’d dismissed her concerns then, but if he kept getting emails like this, he might not be so confident. If they were talking about resource reallocation…
He’d wait to worry about that until he had a chance to talk to Bradley. Maybe they’d been throwing their weight around with the admins too. But that suddenly made this case and whatever might be in the food or water high priority if he didn’t want anyone on his team getting laid off.
Finally the program opened. The wellness fair was front and center, with a big red frame over it to signify that it was, in fact, top priority. James refreshed the page, sending another circle twirling over the faded homepage that might or might not ever come back.
He leaned his head back for a second and closed his eyes. He was playing a dangerous game. But even going home for a refreshing eleven hours hadn’t been enough. He’d gotten home, showered, and fallen asleep on the couch watching a movie. He’d been alone the whole time, since Graham had spent the night over at Madelyn’s house while Amelia was gone. And while the peace was nice, it had been too quiet. If he hadn’t been sure that Bradley would lock him out, he’d have been tempted to go back to work, bang out a few things, and fall asleep on his office couch for a few hours before starting everything over again.
James jerked awake as the page finished reloading with a sweet little dinging bell sound. Shit, he was taking risks here. But he hadn’t stayed asleep all night. He’d woken up about two hours later to the home screen of the movie, then brushed his teeth and gone to bed, where he’d laid awake for the next three hours before finally falling asleep for another three. So five hours total, with a twelve-hour day yesterday and an assigned eight hours that were likely to turn into much more today.
There were two new cases on the schedule now to go with the wellness fair. Two of them would have to go to another house in the woods in Townsend, while one would interview a woman about a…time slip? That was interesting, but none of the team were going to that house alone. James was going to take the wellness fair, though he’d definitely need at least one or two of the others to work some parts of it with him. Just glancing through the information they’d sent over was enough to show him that this was going to take them time they didn’t have. Thankfully the other two were not as intense.
When he came back out of his office a few minutes later, only Madelyn and Fang were in the living room. “Hey,” Madelyn said from where she was now at the computer.
“How’s the morning going?” James asked, taking the seat beside Fang.
Madelyn shrugged, clearly picking up on the fact that he was asking more about her health than the events of the morning at the Foundation. “Not bad,” she said with a slight smile. “I think I’m up for more than comms today though.”
Fuck, he’d been busted. “Good,” James said. “Because I have you down to go look at a house in the woods with Graham.”
“So romantic.”
He laughed and took a long sip from his water bottle. “It’s just an initial visit,” he said. “Not like the one me and Bradley had last night, but nothing intense either. Gabriella is taking an initial interview and I’m dragging Bradley to the wellness fair with me later.”
“He’s going to be pissed.”
James snorted. “What else is fucking new?” he muttered as he stood up and went into the kitchen. “Coffee?”
“Yes, please.”
He threw on a pot of coffee, then took a moment to clean up. The kitchen wasn’t in as awful shape as usual, so someone had clearly needed a few minutes away from a computer screen in the recent past. Amelia might have done it before she left yesterday. “Is Amelia still in Rhode Island?” James asked Madelyn, leaning around the counter to talk to her.
“Yeah,” Madelyn said. “She said she’ll be home around five or so.”
“She’s not on til eight, so I can stick around.”
“It’s me and Gabriella tonight,” she said. “It’s fine, we’ll both be here until then.”
Right, he forgot. He needed to have some coffee and get focused.
***
The meeting started about twenty minutes later. Graham, Madelyn, and Gabriella all sat in the living room as James tried to get the jammed projection screen to come down. He’d made up a quick Powerpoint, but apparently it wasn’t going to get used today.
“Fine,” he muttered, then sat down facing the others. “Alright, so here’s where we stand. Gabs, you’re interviewing Carolina Domingo about what appears to be a time anomaly in her cellar.
“Fantastic,” she said with a grim smile and he wanted to take back the assignment when he remembered the time bends she’d dealt with on the Wildwood case. But then her slightly gnarled smile smoothed into something a little more enthusiastic.
“Great,” he said. “Don’t go into the basement. In fact, don’t go on the property at all. She’s going to meet you at Town Square Coffee, just do everything there. Hang onto your receipt, the Foundation is going to cover your coffee and a pastry.”
“The Foundation or you?”
James shrugged. “Depends on if they approve the expense.”
She scowled at him, but he wasn’t concerned. If the Foundation didn’t, then he or Bradley would just continue to submit it. And if they had to, he’d temporarily take it out of petty cash. It wouldn’t be the first time.
“Alright, you and you,” he said, turning to Madelyn and Graham. “Cozy little cabin in the woods. Because nothing ever goes wrong with those.”
Graham laughed. “So there’s some detail here,” James said, looking down at his notes. “I think it’ll be a straightforward one. Go take some readings, get some observations down. If you do a daytime visit today, you can do a night time one tomorrow and pick up the cameras. Then we can figure out the cleansing. No real history to the place, no one on record having died horribly there.”
“Small favors,” Graham said.
“Exactly. Alright, that’s all for you guys. But the other case is this wellness fair. So, okay,” James flipped to that page in his notebook. “This is current and apparently urgent enough that they pushed it through and marked it priority. I’m going to take lead on this one, but I’ll probably have a few of you assisting as you can, since the Foundation wants it done so quickly and I’m not interrupting anyone’s days off.”
“Including yours?” Gabriella asked.
James waved her off as he pulled out the case information he’d barely been able to scan before now. “I just had three days off in a row,” he said. “Okay, backing up, there’s been some weird reports in the area. So, one of the big ones is that there was a mass…okay, it’s going to sound dismissive, but I’m going based on what the Foundation says here. There were reports of ghosts in the shopping plaza nearby.”
“Like the mall?” Graham asked.
“No, you know where the Orson Center is?” James asked. “Me and Madelyn took a case up near there a few months ago.”
“Vaguely.”
“There’s a little plaza near there with like, Chipotle and a phone store, and I think a toy store? Just a little place. Oh, where Sakura Grille is.”
“Right, got it.”
“And there were reports of ghosts there, like storming through the plaza and the parking lot. People said they were going through windshields, fucking up the bar in one of the restaurants, screaming and laughing. But the thing is that all the reports contradict each other. Some said they were silent, some said they were screaming. One woman insisted her grandfather was there as a ghost, but other people said they were almost invisible or had no faces.”
“Wow, I hate that last one,” Gabriella said.
“So they think that it wasn’t ghosts at all. It was a mass hallucination.”
Madelyn frowned at him. “We don’t normally get those,” she said. “Why is the Foundation on it?”
“Because the ones that went to the hospital had a chemical in their blood that the labs couldn’t identify and could barely even track. And everyone had been at the wellness fair hours earlier. They think it came from something there.”
“Like a toxin?”
“Yeah,” James said, looking back down at the case file. “But there’s more. There’s some reports about strange behaviors beyond the ghosts, but it all ties back to this wellness fair somehow. There’s four specific instances in here. Two of them are weddings.”
“Oh?” Gabriella asked.
“Yeah,” James said, his stomach twisting just a little as he looked at the notes they’d sent over. He had been planning to discuss this one-on-one with Bradley before they left, so he hadn’t actually set up a slideshow for this case. But now he was wishing he had done some prep work beyond reading that email and quickly scanning the case file. “Um, there’s a woman saying she got married a few days ago, but doesn’t quite remember how it happened. A guy is saying the same thing. They were happy, infatuated with someone they’d just met, and then got married and it faded. He remembers his wedding, but she doesn’t remember hers.”
“Love potion?” Madelyn asked.
Both Gabriella and Graham looked at her. “That’s a real thing?” Gabriella asked.
“Sure,” Madelyn said. “It’s kind of a combination of magic and chemistry. I don’t know much about it. Amelia told me a little about it, it’s like the substance gets into your body and the magical elements allow for the link between the poisoner and the victim. And there are devices that can alter that link. It’s the same kind of magic and tech blend from those time photos James still hasn’t stolen for me. I guess it came up in a workshop she did a few years ago.”
Not surprising, Amelia spent a lot of time taking different courses and workshops over the years. But the idea of love potions made James’s skin crawl. The thought that someone would take hold of another person’s mind like that, make them obsess over them and fall in what felt like true love? And all the while it was someone manipulating their brain with magic and chemicals? God, it was the stuff of nightmares.
But it was his job, so he looked down at the list again. “Um, two others here,” he said. “Just like, anger and emotions beyond the rational limit. There was a road rage incident a couple streets away, and the instigator had come from the fair an hour earlier. So the Foundation is eyeing the wellness fair for all of it. Specifically any station selling food or drink.”
That seemed like a little too narrow of a focus, but the thought of layoffs crept back into James’s mind before he could verbally share that thought.
“There was a fight there a few days ago,” he continued. “That’s the last incident in the file. The fair has been an ongoing thing over the last few months, but it’s going from weekends only to daily for the next few weeks until it’s over. And I guess that’s why they’re pushing it through, because once it’s going daily, then things might escalate. And after it ends, there’s no way to continue investigating. But yeah, there was a brawl. I don’t know the details, but I’ll dig them out before we go. Bradley’s on a split double, so once he’s back, he and I will head over. It’s all observation, so we shouldn’t need anyone on backup for it. But I wanted you all briefed just in case.”
The rest of the meeting took about thirty seconds, since there wasn’t much else to brief them on without the other two there. Gabriella took off as soon as they were done, Graham and Madelyn headed out shortly after, and James was left at headquarters on comms. Though they were going to be a little while, so there was no need for him to be actively on comms while they were driving over to the site. Leaving him alone in headquarters for a while.
Well, mostly alone. Fang was asleep on the couch under the window and Bradley was either sleeping or studying in the back bedroom. Though if he was studying, James was going to kick his ass and he wouldn’t feel bad as he signed the incident report.
