“I know you’re scared. You always turn into a control freak when you get scared.”
“Why aren’t you scared?” It was a good question. Why wasn’t she?
“I don’t know,” she admitted with a shrug. “I met her. You didn’t. What she did scares me. What she said scares me. But she doesn’t scare me.”
“She scares me enough for the both of us. Now go.” He opened the door and pointed in the direction of his house.
“I have to run an errand first.”
“It can wait.”
“I’ll take Gmork.”
“It can wait.”
“Until when?”
“Until I stop being terrified,” he said. He met her eyes again and she saw his fear. Kingsley was right about all of them being interlaced, but wrong about how. They weren’t knitted together like a blanket or sweater. If those unraveled, they could be fixed. They were more like a spiderweb, all of them, made of filaments so fragile and fine nothing could put them back together if one of them was torn away.
Which is why she had to do what she had to do.
She kissed his cheek. “It can’t wait that long.”
Nora whistled and Gmork followed her to her car and jumped into the backseat and lay down on his blanket. “Don’t tell on me, boy,” she said as she started her car and pulled out onto the street, “But we’re going to go have a little talk with our witch.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Cyrus was lucky with traffic and made it to Grand Isle in an hour and fifty minutes. He plugged in the address of Father Ike’s vacation home into Google maps first. It led him to a picturesque street a couple of blocks from the nearest beach. The houses were all painted in bright colors—sky blue and sunny yellow, pink and green—and stood on stilts to avoid the inevitable flooding from tropical storms and hurricanes. They had names like Slow M’Ocean and Shore Beats Work. The beach house was smack dab in the center of the street, a white A-frame with red shutters.
As he was canvassing that day and knew he’d have to talk to strangers, he’d put on his best suit before driving down. Cyrus had his story ready, too. Black or white, male or female, old or young—fact was, people were nosy as hell. If he gave up a little gossip, he was sure to get some in return. He climbed the stairs to the first house on the street and rang the bell. Nobody seemed to be home, and the people in the next house over were on Grand Isle for the first time. No help there.
He got a little luckier with the third house, the pink house. Pink, in Cyrus’s opinion, was an old lady color and sure enough, an older white woman opened the door.
“Sorry to bother you, ma’am,” he said, passing her his business card. “I’m a detective. Do you live here on Grand Isle?”
“Since my husband retired in 2008. Why do you ask? Should I call my husband?”
“I’m just looking for some information about someone who stayed next door to you this summer. This man,” Cyrus said and held up the photograph of Father Ike. She took it from and peered at it, nodding.
“Oh yes, I remember him. He stayed next door for a long time. Very nice man. Isaac, I think he said. Is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“We get so many tourists, they tend to be a blur after a while. But he was around a lot. I must have talked to him every day. But just to say hello and chat a little. Why? Did he do something?”
Cyrus decided now was the time to start answering her questions. He let her hold onto the photograph. Might help jog her memory.
“I’m afraid he’s dead,” Cyrus said. “His family hired me to look into it.”
“Dead? Was he killed?”
Cyrus nodded. He was killed. That was true. He didn’t mention that Ike himself pulled the trigger. The woman gasped and covered her mouth with her fingertips in shock.
“I just…he was so nice. I can’t imagine…was he mixed up in something?”
That was movie talk right there. Mixed up in something. Cyrus liked playing the part of the TV detective since that was what people expected of him.
“That’s what I’m trying to find out, ma’am. Did you see him with anyone at the house while he was here? A visitor? Someone who might have stayed with him? Overnight possibly?”
“You mean like a girlfriend? No, he didn’t have a girlfriend. Or, you know…” She lowered her voice. “A man friend.”
“I see,” Cyrus said, disappointed. There goes that theory. “Do you remember if he stayed at that house every night? Or maybe he stayed with someone else around here? Or somewhere else?”
“Oh, I think he was there every night,” she said. “Liked to walk every morning on the beach. By the time he got back, I was making breakfast. I could see him from the kitchen window climbing his steps.”
All right. So he didn’t have company at the house and Ike didn’t go to anyone else’s house at night.
“Did he…do you think he had a girlfriend,” the woman asked, “and she killed him?”
“It’s a theory I’m working on,” he said. Cyrus decided to shake up the woman a little, shake her and see what he could shake out. “Ma’am, were you aware that Isaac was a Catholic priest?”
Her eyes widened, big as the sand dollars painted on her mailbox.
“He was?” she said. “He never told us that. Why wouldn’t he tell us that? We’ve had several priests stay at that house. We’re not Catholic, but we don’t have any problem with priests.”
“Oh, a lot of reasons. Priests can make people feel uncomfortable. Or people immediately want to tell priests everything they did wrong or get into theological discussions. He may have just wanted his privacy while he was here.”
“A priest…that just doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“Louisiana is a very Catholic state,” he reminded her.
“I guess you’re right. He asked me about my grandchildren, and I think…well, I thought he had grandchildren, too, since he seemed to know a lot about children.”
“He worked in a school.”
“Ah,” she said, nodding. “Well, that explains that. I said something about it being paradise down here but that my grandson hated visiting, nothing to do. I remember him saying a lot of kids hate being away from their things and their friends. Not even a big beautiful beach makes up for it. It just sounded to me like he knew kids. But if you say he worked at a school, that makes sense. Although…I could have sworn—”
“What could you swear?”
“Oh, he asked what there was for kids to do around here. I thought for sure he had kids or grandkids of his own. Grandkids, at his age. I told him a few things and he wrote them down.”
“Maybe he was thinking about field trips or something.”
“Maybe so.”
She shook her head. “Murdered…I can’t even imagine…he was just so nice.”
“Yes, he was,” Cyrus said.
“You find out who did it to him, you hear,” the woman said.
“I plan on it, ma’am.”
She nodded, managed a smile. “I need to get lunch started. Is there anything else?”