Jace gave a small, miserable nod. It was true, but it didn’t make him feel any better about things.
“Tell you what, I’ll call Sheriff Reid right now, okay? I’ll ask him to pay a quick visit to the guy.”
“What are you going to tell him?” Jace asked, feeling fresh panic rising in his chest.
“I’ll tell him that you and Lilah went to visit him earlier today, but when you looked through the window to see if anyone was home, you noticed someone lying on the ground… Hey – don’t worry. It’ll be alright.” Stanley’s voice sounded much more confident than he felt, and as he picked up the CB radio on his dash, it took a good amount of effort to keep his hand from shaking. He didn’t want to upset the kid any more than he already was, but Stanley was bewildered – and more than a little uneasy. Why didn’t the guy wake up? And what would happen if Reid traced the death back to Lilah? A part of him – a big part of him – didn’t want to make that call – but he had a sworn civic duty to do something.
“Hey Dave, it’s Stan,” he said, turning to the frequency he and the sheriff shared. “I’m hoping to request a welfare check at a residence just outside of Bozeman, wondering if you might be able to contact the local sheriff there, over.”
A few moments later, the radio crackled. “Hey Stan, I just got off the phone with Harry O’Toole about ten minutes ago – what’s up? Over.”
Stanley’s heart skipped a beat. “Oh yeah? What’d good ol’ Harry have to say? Over.” Though he tried to keep his voice casual, it rose a full octave as he uttered the last syllable. The thought of Lilah going to prison for murder made feigning nonchalance rather difficult. What would the charge be for accidentally turning a man into a shish kabob? Second-degree murder? Involuntary manslaughter?
“He got a call about a body at Ashbury Lane—”
“That’s where the shaman lives!” Jace hissed, his eyes wide. Stanley’s grip on the steering wheel tightened.
“—found a middle-aged male—” crackle “—indicate foul play. They were hoping we might be able to lend them our toxicologist for the evening. Anyway, what’s this about a welfare check? Over.”
Stanley and Jace exchanged wide-eyed looks. “Oh, actually, never mind about the welfare check. Someone just told me that they got it all sorted out.” Stanley coughed to try to clear the panic from his voice. “Hey, out of curiosity, did you say that Harry does or does not suspect foul play? Over.”
Crackle. “—says the guy was found—” crackle “—mushrooms.”
“Mushrooms?” Jace mouthed. Stanley gave him a helpless shrug.
“Sorry, Dave, I didn’t copy. Please repeat? Over.”
“—said, they found a bag of mushrooms on the guy—” crackle “—including possible amanitin-laced specimens. We gotta get Riley out there to confirm and then perform an autopsy.” Crackle. “—had a dollar for every idiot who ate a bad truffle… Alright, Stan, I gotta run. Over.”
“Copy that,” Stanley muttered, setting the radio back on its cradle. “You don’t think…?”
“I saw jars of mushrooms on his shelves!” Jace said, trying to keep the excitement out of his voice. A man was dead, after all. “He had all of these concoctions boiling on the stove. Herbs and weird-looking plants all over the house. To be honest, I was worried that the tea he was pushing on us was laced with LSD or something—”
“You idiots had tea with this man?”
“We only pretended to drink it,” Jace added hastily. “But how could he have been poisoned? He didn’t seem sick when we were talking to him… A little loopy, maybe, but he wasn’t staggering around like he was on the brink of death.”
Stanley leaned back in his seat, gripping the steering wheel with one hand like a Nascar driver. The other hand was rubbing his forehead in consternation. “I led a first-aid course earlier this year and I’m trying to remember the details of amatoxins. We get mushroom deaths in these parts more than you’d think.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yeah. Bored, small-town folk do all sorts of idiot things to keep themselves entertained. Just a few months ago, Sheriff Reid was telling me about a guy who picked some mushrooms from his front yard and fried them up with dinner. He had some nasty side effects for about a day – told his wife he thought it was a stomach bug. The following day, he felt totally fine. Went to play poker with the boys and everything. Came home and watched football. Then, the next morning, his wife found him dead on the toilet. Total organ failure. Tox report showed it was the mushrooms he put on his burger. Lucky his wife hated the taste of ‘em or she’d be dead too.”
Jace was silent as he absorbed all of this. “So that means… it might not have been Lilah’s fault after all?”
Stanley’s eyes were far away as he scanned both sides of the highway for any sign of Lilah’s blue jacket and tie-dyed backpack. “She bends time around her… but in my experience, everything always returns to normal when the episode passes.”
“Then what about the cat…?”
“Cat?” Stanley shot him a look. “She killed a cat too?”
“Slow down,” Jace replied, momentarily ignoring the question. “Just ahead, on the other side of the highway – that’s where Lilah got out of the truck.”
Stanley turned onto the next emergency pullout, hardly pausing for oncoming traffic as he flipped a fast U-turn to the other side of the highway. “Where? Here?” he asked, pointing.
“Right up there, where the shoulder widens.”
Stanley pulled the truck onto the shoulder and flipped on his hazards. “Stay here,” he instructed Jace. “I’m going to go look for her. If I’m not back in an hour, take the truck back to the station and go home.”
“Not a chance,” Jace said, jumping out of the truck. “Lilah’s my friend and I want to help.”
Stanley rolled his eyes as he grabbed his coat from the back seat. “Oh, sure, of course, and when an evergreen shoots through you, I’ll just call good ol’ Frank Wainwright up to let him know his son—”
“Stepson,” Jace corrected.
“—to let him know his stepson is taking the term ‘tree-hugger’ to a whole new level. Yeah, that’ll go over real well.”
“You said yourself that it might have been amatoxins, not Lilah, that killed Mike. And besides, Frank couldn’t give a shit whether I was alive or dead,” he retorted, doing his best to look Stanley in the eye as he did. “Lilah is important to me. More than you know.”
Stanley looked at the kid grimly, and not for the first time that week, he caught a glimpse of himself at that age – head-strong, obstinate, and far too old for his years. And a pretty big pain in the ass, to boot.
He loves her, Marie’s voice whispered in his ear.
“Yeah, I know,” Stanley muttered, heaving a heavy sigh.
Jace’s eyebrow raised slightly.
“Alright, kid, let’s go. But mark me – it might have been mushrooms that took Mike Hastings’ life – and we can’t say that for certain – but I can tell you for a fact that I have no idea what’ll happen to you if you blink out of existence. And you only have, what? Seventeen years to work with? So watch yourself. If she goes too far in any one direction, neither one of us is going home for dinner tonight.”