The air seemed to lighten around us. At last, he’d said something that sounded like truth.
“Whose was it? I’m not out for revenge, Marks. I just want to know why.”
“We wanted you to leave. We’re a quiet community. We didn’t want any trouble.”
“I wasn’t going to bring any trouble! I just wanted to be left alone.”
“But you brought trouble. That’s trouble.” He pointed out to the backhoe across the pasture.
I shouted. I didn’t mean to. It just came out. “You pinned rabbits to my porch before any of those cows died! You assumed I’d do something before anything even happened! You heard what he said about a curse coming back to smack you—you brought this on yourself! And then you had the gall to pretend to investigate, when you knew all along who was doing it—”
“Kitty, maybe a little more calm,” Ben said softly. I must have been really worked up if Ben was having to settle me down. My whole back and shoulders felt tight as springs.
When Marks spoke, his voice had changed. He sounded suddenly tired, defeated. “We—we knew it wasn’t working right. You should have just left. Quietly, without a word.
We wanted it to be quiet.”
“Well, you screwed up big time, didn’t you?” I said.
“Can you blame us for trying?” he said roughly.
“Uh, yeah. Hello, I am blaming you.”
“We all know what you are! A—a monster! We don’t want that in our town! Nobody would!”
“You know, I don’t think I’m the monster here, really.”
Thankfully, Tony interceded. “Sheriff, I think I can help clean this all up. We can remove the curse, and remove the consequences of it.” He pointed a thumb over his shoulder at the site of the slaughter. “But the person who planned it, who worked the spell, needs to agree to it.”
He nodded. “All right. Okay. It’s Alice. She planned it.”
“Alice?” My jaw dropped, truly astonished. “But she’s always been so nice to me. Why—”
“Because she’s nice to everybody, at least in person,” Marks said. “I don’t think she could be mean to somebody to their face if you held a gun to her head.”
Tony looked at me. “Should we go talk to Alice, then?”
I still couldn’t believe it. Sweet, friendly Alice. Alice who kept healing crystals on her cash register and hung good luck charms on her front door.
Then again, maybe she did know something about planting curses.
“Right, then. Off we go.” To Marks I said, “You want to come along? Back us up?”
“To break this thing right, everyone involved should be there,” Tony said. He had an authority about him, from the gentle way he spoke to the way he’d grabbed Marks’s arrowhead charm. Marks had let it go; it lay on top of his uniform shirt now, exposed.
The sheriff hesitated, then said, curtly, “I’ll meet you there.” He turned to yank open his car door. He revved the engine when he started it, and barely gave us time to get out of the way before he lurched the car into reverse, then spun in a U-turn, kicking up gravel all the way.
“I don’t believe it,” I said, on general principle.
“She didn’t really seem the type,” Ben said.
Tony said, “Those are the ones you really have to watch out for. The real mean brujas? Always the little old lady down the street. The one who feeds cats off her back porch.”
“Every neighborhood has one of those,” I said.
“Makes you wonder, don’t it?” Tony grinned.
Sighing, I marched to the driver’s side of my car. “Let’s go and get this over with.”