The Priest (The Original Sinners #9) - Tiffany Reisz Page 0,88
remove all the beads.
“No,” Nora said to him.
“What?” He told the person on the other end of the line to hold.
“My house. My tree. My beads. You can handle the security system, fine, but leave my tree alone.”
“A witch put them on your tree.”
“You don’t actually believe in witchcraft, do you?”
That got him. “Of course not.”
“Then no reason to have them removed, right?”
Kingsley hung up on the tree trimmer.
“Thank you,” she said although she didn’t mean it. The men in her life were getting a little overprotective for her taste. “Do I need to remind you that I am not a child? This is my house. I own it. You get an opinion,” she said, “but you do not get a vote.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay. I know you’re on edge, Edge.”
He smiled a little, but just a little.
“If anything happened you to,” he began, glancing away like he was wont to do when admitting feelings he didn’t like having. “We’re all knitted together so tightly…one thread unravels, we all fall apart.”
“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