Cyrus couldn’t blame her for that. “Hotel? Søren’s place?”
“Yeah, no. When he finds out what happened, I’ll be off the case. I’ll just go sleep at my dungeon,” she said. “The building is alarmed and monitored.”
“Fine, but I’ll drive you,” Cyrus said. “She might still be watching your front door, so I’ll pick you up in front of Edge’s. You can head out back, through the alley into his gated yard. I’ll pull around front of his place and pick you up. Then we’ll hang at your—” and Cyrus could not believe he was saying this, “—dungeon until morning.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Gonna do it anyway. I got you into this. I’ll change clothes and be right there. Don’t leave your house until I text you I’m in front of Edge’s place, okay?”
“Got it. See you soon.” She paused. Then, “Cyrus?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
“Hey, no problem.”
Cyrus changed into jeans and a black t-shirt. He didn’t want to wake—or scare—Paulina with a text or a call. She always kept her phone on and by her bed in case of emergencies. Instead, he sent her a short email telling her the basics—that Nora had been threatened by a possible witness, and he was going to keep an eye on her tonight.
That late, Cyrus encountered no traffic. He pulled up in front of Edge’s house ten minutes after leaving his own. He texted Nora, and a minute later she came to the the front gate with her dog. She’d changed clothes, too. Jeans, white shirt, leather jacket, and boots.
Cyrus kept an eye on the street as the gate yawned opened and then closed behind her. He unlocked the car doors. Nora let her dog hop into the backseat, and then she slid into the front passenger seat next to Cyrus.
“Hi,” she said.
“Ready?”
“Definitely.”
He peeled away from the curb and headed in the direction of Nora’s Piety Street place. They drove for a few minutes in silence until Cyrus felt calm enough to talk.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I can’t tell if I’m over-reacting or under-reacting. Or in shock.”
“Same.” Cyrus glanced at her. “Town this size, you get a lot of kooks. Most are harmless. I’d say ninety-eight percent are harmless. The question is…is she in that ninety-eight?”
“Or the two,” Nora said, then sighed.
“Come on. Tell me everything she said.”
Cyrus listened to her story, then said, “She thinks you’re the dangerous one.”
Nora raised her hands, also baffled. “I admit, I’m no angel. I’ve broken laws and broken hearts.”
“And feet.”
“Broken feet. Noses. No, just one nose. Ribs. Two ribs, if I remember correctly. Busted my fair share of balls. Consensually and non. Though he was asking for it. And so was he. And him, too.”
“I get it.” Enough with the ball-busting talk already.
“But dangerous? And it wasn’t just, ‘You’re scary, and I don’t like you.’ She got specific. She said I was going to hurt innocent people. Kids, maybe.”
“I saw you with Edge’s little girl. You’re not dangerous to kids. This woman sounds nuts.” Cyrus shook his head again. “And could she be a little more specific? Like, help us out here, Gwenda.”
“Gwenda?”
“Wasn’t that the witch in Wizard of Oz?”
“Glinda.”
“Who the hell’s Gwenda then?”
“Ex-girlfriend?” Nora asked.
He shrugged. “Good guess with me.”
Nora laughed. Good to hear her laugh. Been a rough night for the lady.
“Can I ask you something weird?” Nora asked.
“Shoot.”
“You don’t believe in it, do you? Witchcraft and fortune-telling and stuff?”
Cyrus had to think about that, really think about it. “I don’t want to believe in it, but it scares me. Why would it scare me if I didn’t believe in it a little?”
“Good point.”
“Plus, ah…” he began.
“What?”
“Don’t laugh, but I meditate.” Cyrus glanced at her to see what kind of face she made. She didn’t make one. “The therapist Paulina sent me to suggested it, made me promise to try it. I did and it kind of surprised me how much it worked for me. It got me down into deep places in my head,” he said, tapping his temple. “When I’m down there, I see things sometimes. I figure things out. It’s hard to explain.”
“Go on,” she said. “What do you see?”
“A river,” he said. “And there are things in the river. Answers to questions. Memories. Truths. I go there when I need to figure things out and sometimes I do and it’s eerie. Almost spooky. Solved a lot of cases down in that place, my feet in the water. Husband who disappeared three months earlier, I figured out where to find him. Missing kid? Found her, too, while I was in the water.”
“Our subconscious is a lot smarter than we are sometimes.”
“I get that, but it’s more than that. This is where it gets weird. The river feels real to me. Like it’s really out there somewhere, and anybody who finds it can dip their hands in it, stick their feet in, and get something out of the water. My therapist says I’m a Jungian. That the river is the collective unconscious. You heard of that?”
“I have,” she said. “Lot of writers believe in it.”
“You?”
She shrugged. “Never thought about it really. But I will say, sometimes when I’m writing a story, it feels like it exists independently of me, not like I’m creating it. More like I’m finding it.”
“That’s it,” he said. “That’s it exactly.”
She turned her head, smiled at him. “A Jungian private detective. I love it.”
“Now I can’t go around wading in imaginary rivers to solve cases and then get judgmental when a woman says she can cast spells and see the future. That’d be a little hypocritical, right?”
“Right.” Nora nodded, crossed her arms over her chest.
“You?” he asked. “You believe in it? Witches? Witchcraft?”
Nora turned her head, stared out the passenger window. “When she was leaving, I told her if she thought I was really dangerous, she should just go and cast a spell to make me do whatever it was she wanted me to do. She said something about how she could go to an altar at midnight, light a candle, say some magic words. Does that sound like casting a spell to you?”
“Kind of.”
“She was talking about me. I went to St. Mary’s chapel the other night to pray for Søren to come home. Altar at midnight. I lit a candle. I said magic words.”
“That’s not casting a spell. That’s praying.”
“Is it really that different? Never occurred to me that it was all the same thing.”
“It’s different.”
“How?”
Cyrus had to think about that, too. This was something he would have to meditate on.
“I don’t know,” he said finally. “Just feels different.”