back crest of a hill, a large two-story, white-painted clapboard home with tall windows, dark shutters, porches at front and sides, and multiple dormers on each side of the tall, four-sided mansard roof. The house—like the four hundred acres of land—was big, even by church standards, and I came from a background where four wives and as many as forty children lived in one house. Big, I knew. This place was huge and extravagant and elegant. The front grounds were landscaped with mixed ornamental grasses and native landscape plants still holding on to summer green. An orchard of fruit trees, yellow-leaved with the season and some still bearing ripe apples, were planted beside the house; a nut tree orchard was in the background; hundreds of maple trees were farther back, bursting with colorful leaves from the short but deep chill that had taken over the region last week before the return of the unexpectedly warm Indian summer. Round bales of hay dotted a recently cut field nearby, and closer to the house, deep beds of well-worked soil were planted with ornamental kales and fall mums.
My fingers itched to dig into the soil, to feel the life in it, explore it with my nature magic, and let my own roots grow. But unless I wanted to be a tree again and perhaps forever, that wouldn’t be smart.
The side door opened and a woman wearing a P3E pulled a stretcher across the narrow porch and lifted one end down the three steps to the ground as if it weighed nothing. On the stretcher was a biohazard cadaver pouch (also called a human remains pouch, or HRP). The other end of the stretcher was lifted down the steps by the woman’s coworker before they wheeled it to a coroner’s transport van. Weirdly, the HRP seemed to hold something boxy, rectangular, not body shaped. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but then, I wasn’t sure about much of anything. The gag order on this case was already in place.
The only particulars I knew about the crime scene had been told to me by JoJo Jones at HQ before I left. “Three dead, bodies going to UTMC for full forensic workup. Don’t touch the bodies. I’ve sent you the timeline. Be careful.”
There were a whole lotta possibilities in the little I knew. JoJo’s “Be careful” implied the scene was still potentially dangerous. More significant was that the dead on-site would be transported to the University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville, which had one of only a handful of forensic pathologists in the United States who also had a secondary certification in paranormal medicine. Para med was a rare specialty, and Nashville, which was much closer to the crime scene, had no such pathologist and no paranormal unit for patients. So, dead bodies, danger, paranormal, all sounded bad, but the bucolic setting was peaceful and the calm, measured body language of the first responders said everything was under control.
Maybe all the bodies were gone by now. That would suit me just fine. Having grown up at a church that practiced a form of communal farm living, I’d seen plenty of dead things, and even knew how to butcher animals for meat if necessary.
Didn’t mean I liked seeing dead people.
My phone vibrated and I looked at the screen. It was my sister Mud, and I let the call go to voice mail, knowing it was trouble I didn’t have time to deal with right now. She’d text me if it was something really urgent, but it had to involve spurting blood, active flames, or dead bodies to fall under that category. Arguments between sisters didn’t count no matter how bad they got. We had tried it the other way around, calling only when urgent, but I used texts for work, and the constant dinging of family texts was distracting, so they were used for true emergencies, calls for minor things. If my sisters killed each other, well, I’d deal with the mess and the cleanup when I got home. I ignored the voice mail too, though I wanted to bang my head on the steering wheel in frustration.
The coroner’s van trundled behind my vehicle, so I got out, made sure my weapon was securely seated in its Kydex shoulder holster, put on a casual jacket, and smoothed the driving wrinkles from my work pants. Opening the trunk, I retrieved my handheld psy-meter 1.0 and did a quick scan of the grounds and the house. Psy-meters picked