The Witches’ Bane

by Edward Ahern

Table of Contents

Chapter 3: Finding Judy

Judy’s arms and legs sprawled like the half-open blades of a pocket knife. Her death rictus had eyes and mouth gaping. The body’s throat and chest had been repeatedly stabbed and sliced. Blood and spittle were frozen onto her face, and she’d voided herself as she died. A military issue Kabar knife lay next to the body on a skin of bloodless ice.

Gordon gagged, then moaned. He lunged toward Judy, but stopped himself and looked around. Cottages were densely clotted around the lakeshore, but smoke rose from only a few of them. No one was out on the lake, not even ice fishermen. The wind had swept the ice clean in front of the cottage, and there were no footprints or scrape marks from a skidoo.

He began to cry, the tears chilling into slush by the time they reached his chin. He knelt near the body, still crying, and soundlessly prayed for her. The last rites were no longer his to give.

The cold settled onto him, hardening over his grief. Gordon studied the body, paying close attention to the stabs and cuts. Then he stood up and walked back into the cottage. He prowled through every room, touching nothing except her purse, which was in the kitchen. Money, IDs, credit cards were all there, but no cell phone. He continued the search, but found no laptop; Judy’s electronic context was missing.

The furnishings of the house were undisturbed under a faint film of dust. So, no struggle, he thought, no fight. No signs of a break-in but, in places like this, they never lock their doors.

Gordon tried to call out on the land line at the cottage, but the phone was dead. He had to get close enough to civilization for his cell phone to pick up a signal. He climbed back up the wooden stairs, got into the Xterra, and retraced his routing. There’d been a general store about a half-mile back.

His cell phone beeped just as the store came into view. Gordon parked in front and went in.

“Hello? HELLO?”

“Just a minute.”

A man came out from a doorway behind the cash register counter, wrinkled and painfully thin. His white hair sprayed out from his skull in a tangled bouffant. “Can I help you?”

Gordon forced himself to speak slowly. “There’s been a murder in a cabin on Deep Eddy. I need to call the cops.”

“A murder! Goddamn. Who is it?”

“A woman named Judy Bentley. Can I call 911 from here?”

“We don’t have a police force; the state cops handle crimes for us. Better that we call them directly. Here, I’ll dial.” The man picked up his land line phone, dialed, and handed the phone to Gordon.

“Vermont State Police, Quiet Kingdom barracks.”

“There’s been a woman murdered at Big Eddy.”

The cop’s voice got excited, then training took over. “Your name please?” The trooper dispatched a squad car and continued to ask questions. Gordon agreed to wait at the store so he could direct the Statie to the cabin location.

The gaunt man stared expressionlessly at Gordon while he talked. The only ample thing about him was his hair, bigger around than a bowling ball. Gordon thought of a stemmed dandelion gone to milky seeds.

The man kept staring after Gordon hung up, then asked, “Did you know this Judy?”

Gordon looked around before answering. The store stocked the kind of staples that would tide the locals over between trips to Walmart. Small post-office boxes lined the wall near the entrance. Big Eddy’s nerve center, Gordon thought. Anything he told this man would spread through the settlement in minutes.

“She was an old friend of mine and had asked me to come up.” Gordon rephrased what he’d already told the state cop, knowing that whitey would be broadcasting soon.

The shopkeeper stuck out his hand. “I’m Horace Wittson. There’s a folding chair in the produce section if you need to sit down.” His clipped phrasing defined him as brought up in the northeastern corner of Vermont, the quiet kingdom.

“No thanks. Did you know Judy?”

“She’d come into the store once in a while. Never did buy much though. Surprised when she stayed on into the winter. Figured her for a seasonal.”

“Seasonal?”

“A summer resident, here when the lake’s liquid, gone before it turns hard. Big Eddy quintuples in population during the summer, and the money those folk throw at us during the season keeps us going through the winter. That, and unemployment insurance.”

“How many people live in the lake cottages during the winter?”

“Less than a hundred... another fifty here in the village.”

The state police cruiser pulled up in front of the store fifteen minutes after the call

“Mr. Gordon Lormor?”

“Yes.”

“Trooper Clifton Harrowgate. Get into the cruiser, please, so you can direct me to the cabin. The front seat is fine.”

The trooper had the same close-cropped inflections as the shopkeeper. Apparently a local boy made good.

The questions started as soon as soon as the cruiser was put into gear. “How is it you know this Judy Bentley?”

“We were good friends when she was living in New Jersey.”

“Ever been up here to visit her?”

“Not before this.”

The question and answer session continued until Harrowgate stopped his car on the trail, blocking anyone else from getting by. Gordon threw a quizzical expression at him.

“Nobody’ll be coming by, and if anybody does, they’ll honk.”

Dark had fallen, and Harrowgate took out a flashlight and led the way down toward the cabin. They circled around outside the cottage to the deck. The temperature was in the low twenties and the wind had picked up. Neither man was adequately dressed for the cold, and within a minute they were both shivering.

Harrowgate crouched over the body and stared down the beam of the flashlight. “Looks like the knife that did it is next to her. Blood on the blade.”

“Don’t think so.”

Harrowgate tensed. “You an expert?”

“No, but the handle of the combat knife is bloodless, and hasn’t been rinsed recently — no frost on it. And all the cuts look like they were made by a thinner and sharper blade — almost surgical. I’ll bet you don’t find any rust or oil from the Kabar in the wounds.”

“You seem to know an awful lot about how she died for not having been around when it happened.”

Gordon sensed Harrowgate’s animosity but kept on. “Notice how the throat has been deeply slit to allow the body to exsanguinate. The other cuts are sloppier, curved and shallower, maybe just to downplay the slit throat.”

“You’re pretty casual about your dead ex-girlfriend.”

Gordon’s stoicism crumbled. “And then,” he said, too quickly and loudly, “make sure you check the dock around the body for foreign substances. I think there was a design that got rinsed off, and residues of the powder should be under the ice slick. And the phone was dead. My guess is someone cut the line.”

The trooper had puffed up with irritation. “You’d better wait in the car.”

So much for my people skills, Gordon thought. He wanted to stay and recheck the house with the trooper, but knew he’d just been voted out. “All right.”

Harrowgate climbed back up the steps with Gordon. Neither man spoke. Once they’d gotten into the cruiser, Harrowgate was able to raise the barracks on his police radio, verify that an ambulance was on its way, and ask for the local doctor who served as coroner. Then he went back down the stairs. The residual heat inside the car leached out, and Gordon sat alone in the dark and cold. It was an appropriate setting for his thoughts.

Within twenty minutes, the trail was packed with another police cruiser, the ambulance, and the doctor’s sedan. Gordon repeated his story to the second trooper and eventually watched as the body bag was heaved up the stairs and into the ambulance. Trooper Harrowgate brought him back to the general store, still open and lit up long after its usual closing time.

Everything had seemed to proceed more slowly than it should, and Gordon realized how abnormal violent death was here, even for the state cops. Harrowgate interrupted his thoughts.

“We’ll need to interview you tomorrow. Where will you be staying?”

“No idea. I was going to stay with Judy, but that’s out.”

The silver powder puff had been hovering nearby and interjected, “There’s a cabin here that workmen use. The heat and water are still on. It’s a little rough, but it would do for a night or two. It’s cheap.”

Gordon quickly accepted; he wanted to stay close. Fifteen minutes later, he was looking at his choice of two lumpy camp cots and year-old hunting and fishing magazines. He’d purchased survival food at the store, and at 10:00 p.m. fed himself gorp, two apples, and bottled water.

The store and cabin backed onto an inlet that fed into Big Eddy. Before he stripped down for the night, he put his coat back on and went down to the ice. There was a clear sky and a new moon. The stars were sharply beautiful, but the clarity came with a frigid curse. Gordon punched the temperature function on his watch ... — 10F. Gordon looked across the inlet and guessed that a runner or skater could probably make it across the ice to Judy’s cabin in less than twenty minutes.

Once back inside Gordon stood next to the radiator and called AJ. Rap music poured into his ear.

“Hello, Gordon? Sorry for all the noise: I’m at a club.”

“No fooling. Any luck?”

“Not yet, but I’ve got a strong possibility. How’s the long-lost love?”

“She’s dead, AJ. Murdered.”

“Damn. Wait a second, let me get away from these sweaty bodies. There. Can you hear me okay? What happened?”

“She’d been murdered just before I got up here, had her throat slit. It was set up like a ritual killing. She was knifed before we had a chance to talk, leaving me as the fall guy.”

“What can I do?”

“I came up here without any computerized horsepower. Could you please do some research for me?”

“Of course. And quit being polite, it’s a sign that you’re still in shock.”

Gordon laughed despite himself. “All right, you butch bitch. Her name was Judy Bentley. For the past several months she’s been living in Big Eddy, Vermont. Before that New York City, and before that with me. Undergraduate degree from Dartmouth, graduate degree from Yale in the New England witches—"

“So she’s milking the mystic, like us?”

“Nah. She was a believer, a veggie Wiccan who started getting involved in the dark stuff a little before she met me. Need to have you dig up everything you can, focusing on the last three years. Her Gmail address used to be hexette4. Any way we could peek into her email traffic and phone records?”

“Doubt it, but we can put David on the clock and let him hack away.”

“Do it. Also, run a check on the Big Eddy area crimes, three-headed chickens, whatever. This kind of stagnant back water usually has ugly things crawling on the underside of the rocks. Then grab my laptop and ship it up to the post office in Big Eddy.”

“Sure. You need help? Protection?”

“Don’t think so. As the ex-boyfriend who found the body, the state cops are going to be on me like Spandex.”

“Spandex? Bet you look fetching in tights.”

“Go get laid, AJ. Good night.”

Gordon stripped down to his underwear and crawled under a threadbare sheet and coarse wool blankets. The cot’s springs had given up decades ago, and he sagged irresistibly into its middle.

Two hours after daybreak trooper Harrowgate returned. He brought a friend.

To be continued...

Copyright © 2018 by Edward Ahern