The Spearfish Lake Police Department and the Spearfish County Sheriff’s Department had very good relations, and Police Chief Charlie Wexler intended to keep them that way. Both were underbudgeted and understaffed, but each could help out the other from time to time when it was really needed.

One of the things that kept the coordination close was that most mornings, although not all, Charlie Wexler and Spearfish County Sheriff Steve Stoneslinger got together for coffee at one office or the other. There was no schedule to it; Charlie usually liked to check in at the sheriff’s office from time to time to catch up on the gossip over there, and occasionally check the booking sheets; he might run into Stoneslinger there, or others around the law enforcement community. For example, Judge Dieball liked to check the booking sheets himself to see what kind of problems he’d soon be facing.

If for some reason Charlie didn’t make it to the sheriff’s office fairly early, or the sheriff had been out somewhere and missed him, Stoneslinger usually managed to wander across the street to the police department to check out some of Charlie’s coffee. It was a small-town system, and it worked.

So it was no unusual thing for Charlie to be sitting at the big table in the break room at the sheriff’s office, leafing through the patrol reports and logs for the last several days. While Charlie didn’t begrudge having one of his patrol cars giving an assist to the deputies, that car really was supposed to be in Spearfish Lake, so Charlie liked to monitor the assists and be comfortable in his own mind that they were really needed. It was sometimes a little too easy for a dispatcher to call one of the city cars to some incident right outside the city when the sheriff’s patrol cars were halfway across the county, and Charlie didn’t want to let it get too far out of hand.

Right at the moment, Charlie was monitoring the incident on Saturday when the city car had been called to the body found in a car out on the Point. From what he saw, it looked like a normal 10-14, but there had been an awful big response. It made him more than a little curious. He took a sip from the Styrofoam cup that held his coffee and asked Stoneslinger, “So what’s the deal with this Ordway thing?”

“Oh, you mean Saturday afternoon?” Steve said, sipping at his own coffee. “A couple kids found the body, and when it was first called in it wasn’t clear what was going down. It sounded sort of like it might have been a murder, so we decided to make sure we had enough people. We didn’t realize just how far out on the point it was, back in the two-rut section. So we had a mess getting everyone out of there so we could get down to doing an investigation.”

“So what was it?” Charlie asked.

“Well, it’s still under investigation and will be until we get the report back from Camden, but it looks like a simple suicide. You think that way when the wrists have been slit and there’s a note. Apparently this Ordway guy had been having some problems with this Payne guy from over at the school, or at least that’s what the note said. We’ve been looking into it, but haven’t found anything substantive.”

That was interesting on several accounts, Charlie thought. Was it a homosexual thing gone bad? It wouldn’t be the first time something like that had happened around Spearfish Lake, although it was admittedly rare. But it had some extra potential, he thought. “You say he’d been dead for several days?”

“Smelled like it,” Stoneslinger said. “The fire department guys had to wear face masks to get him out of the car, and I don’t even want to think about what the car had to smell like.”

“There’s been no official report on it yet?” Charlie asked, letting a little idea take shape and form.

“Not yet. Maybe by the end of the week. I told the kid from the Record- Herald that it was still under investigation when he came in yesterday.”

“Um-hmmm,” Charlie said. “Hey, Steve, any chance I could ask a little favor of you?”

“Could be,” he replied. “Depends on what it is.”

“However the report comes back from Camden, can you sort of hide it on your desk for a couple of days, and if anyone asks you tell them the case is still under investigation?”

“Yeah, sure,” Stoneslinger smiled. “Are you up to something? ”

“Maybe,” Charlie grinned. “If this comes off, I’m going to need a little help, and maybe a few hands. I don’t quite have everything lined up yet, but this could be a part of it.”

“Yep, you’re up to something,” the Sheriff laughed. “I can read you pretty easy, Charlie. What you got in mind?”

Rowan Trevetheck was busy in the kitchen, as she usually was this time of day. Though she worked part time, she still thought of herself as a homemaker, and prided herself on scratch-made meals for her family. Since she worked in the afternoon, that usually meant that she had to get things started in the morning, and this morning she was working on a Dutch chocolate cake while she waited for her daughters to get up. Spring was working down in Camden, and staying with her cousin Sharon, so Rowan usually only saw her oldest daughter on the weekend.

Summer and Autumn were still home, though, and like typical teenagers they wanted to sleep till noon. Autumn might well do it, she thought, but she knew that Summer at least was trying to get used to the idea of getting up at school time, and weaning herself to it with her alarm clock. Rowan had just gotten the cake in the pan and was getting set to put it in the oven when she heard Summer’s alarm clock go off. She figured that there was at least a fifty-fifty chance that she’d shut it off and roll over for another hour or three.

The cake was in the oven, and Rowan was cleaning up the dishes she’d dirtied when she heard the toilet flush. That might mean that Summer is on her way, she thought, but then again, it might not. The pull of a bed in the morning was awfully hard for a teenager to resist.

She was just loading the dishwasher when Summer stumbled into the kitchen, barely awake from the looks of her, wearing the T-shirt and panties that she normally slept in. “My, don’t you look bright and cheery this morning,” she smiled, and received a look that might have killed in reply.

“I hate mornings,” Summer moaned. “Why can’t they be sensible and start school in the afternoons?”

“Then think of all that wonderful sunlight you’d be missing,” Rowan grinned, which mostly caused her middle daughter to renew her evil eye. “Pull yourself together, Summer. I’ll make you some tea.”

“I think coffee this morning, Mom,” Summer said a little thickly. “I need a stronger belt than tea.”

“Oh, one of those nights, huh?” Rowan teased. “Lying awake, thinking about Alan, I presume? Thinking about kissing and cuddling and all that fun stuff? ”

“Thinking about Alan, yes,” Summer admitted, “but not what you’re thinking. In fact, I’m not sure I believe it myself. I mean, I wonder if I wouldn’t have been happier if I’d been thinking about making out with Alan.”

“Oh, my!” Rowan smiled. “This must be serious!”

“Coffee first, Mom,” Summer said. “It’s very serious and I don’t want to get into it until I’m a little more awake.”

“Is a packet all right?” she asked, dropping the teasing routine and setting hot water to run in the sink. After Summer’s bad experience with the Frankovich boy the other night, she couldn’t help but wonder if something else had gone wrong. From what little she knew about Alan he seemed like a decent kid, but Summer was really acting weird about it.

Summer sat down at the table and said, “Fine, Mom.” To Rowan, Summer seemed a little dazed, staring off into midair like she had something else on her mind. Of course, she was still half asleep, or at least looked it, so that could account for it. She filled a cup with the hot water from the tap, set it in the microwave to warm further, and without thinking about it pulled out a frying pan to make something like a real breakfast for her daughter. There was something that was telling her that she was going to need it.

“So did you have a good time yesterday?” Rowan asked trying to make conversation. “You didn’t say much when you came home last night.”

“I had a great time,” Summer yawned. “Alan is really a neat guy. We started out working on character sheets for this vampire game, and spent most of the rest of the day writing up this game that Alan came up with. His mom made a great dinner, a ham casserole. We worked on the game more in the evening, but I decided I’d better not stay late.”

“Sounds perfectly reasonable,” Rowan smiled. “So you kissed him, then?”

“Yeah, we made out a little, Mom. It was nice, he was real gentle about it. I really like the guy. We’ve got a lot in common.”

The microwave dinged, and Rowan took the cup of hot water and set it down in front of her daughter, putting a coffee single bag in it. It seemed like a good idea, so she turned to making one for herself. “That’s nice,” she said. “It’s nice to have things in common.”

“Yeah, Mom,” Summer said, a little more awake now. “Alan and I have a lot in common. Mom, I don’t know how to say this, but I think he’s one of us.”

Rowan frowned, set the coffee cup in her hand on the counter, and turned to her daughter. “What do you mean, ‘one of us?’”'

“Just that, Mom,” Summer replied. “I don’t know for sure that he is, but he sounds like it sometimes. And he says that he has a grandmother and an aunt who are witches, and it goes a long way back in his family.”

“Oh, my,” Rowan said, taking a seat across from her daughter, with making her own coffee far from her mind. “Are you sure?”

“No, I’m not sure,” her daughter replied. “I didn’t want to pry too deeply, but I did what I could. From what he said, it sounds like his relatives are something like Old Way. Not the same thing, since the men know about it and they’re a little more open about it, but pretty close to our version of Old Way. Not Foundlings, either, it’s been passed down in his dad’s family for generations.”

“Oh, my,” Rowan said again. “Eloise has told us that there are other branches of the Old Way around, but that she didn’t know much about them since we’ve been so secretive. Even with all the Foundlings that have come along there still can’t be many of us. It seems incredible that he could be one. Do you think he’s a believer?”

“I don’t know,” Summer told her. “We talked about it a bit. What he said was that he’s undecided, that he takes it with quite a bit of salt, so to speak. But we talked about it in several different ways, since the game we’re working on involves a form of witchcraft, and he seems knowledgeable about it. I mean, like more than he says.” She let out a sigh and continued. “That’s one thing that worries me. Since we were talking about it, I’m sure I let on to him that I know more than I said I know.”

“There are a lot of people who have some Foundling knowledge of the Craft without being believers, you know that.”

“I keep telling myself that, Mom,” her daughter replied. “But Mom, he has an athame that his grandmother gave to him.”

“An athame, that a proclaimed witch gave to him?” Rowan frowned. “That almost has to mean, well, that he knows more than he’s letting on, that he’s an initiate himself.” The notion felt strange to her; in the version of the Old Way that her family had followed, men were not initiates. But who was to say that there weren’t other traditions in other families that weren’t just as valid? There were many male initiates among the Foundlings, who often seemed to know more about the Old Way than those who had it passed down to them. It was all very confusing.

“That’s just my point, Mom,” Summer said.

“Did you see this athame?”

“I did more than see it, Mom,” Summer smiled. “It’s the most amazing thing. A crystal athame, if you could believe it, with a pentacle set in the handle. It’s absolutely gorgeous. He let me hold it, and I presented it to the Goddess. Mom, I was shaking from the power I felt. It was strong, real strong. I mean, it was like she was right there. It was incredible.”

“Oh, my,” Rowan shook her head.

“I gave it back to him and made some comment like it had a powerful aura, and he said, ‘Yeah, it does, doesn’t it?’ Mom, that means he feels it, too.”

“Oh, My Goddess,” Rowan shook her head. “What’s more, he knows that you feel it, Summer. I don’t know what to tell you, but I think you handled it well. It may be that the Goddess has had more to do with this than we’d thought about.”

“I know,” Summer smiled, much more awake now that she had some coffee in her. “I know you’re just finding out about this, but I found it out yesterday afternoon, and that’s about all I’ve been able to think about since. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what I should be doing. I wanted to talk to you about it yesterday, but there was no way I could so I knew that I was going to have to do the best I could. Like I said, Mom, Alan and I have a lot in common, and there’s even more there than I dreamed. I really wanted to tell him about my feelings for the Old Way, but I know that I shouldn’t because it goes in the face of tradition. That’s why I didn’t try to find out more about what he really feels, because I knew I would be giving myself away in the process.”

“Honestly, I don’t know what to tell you,” Rowan shook her head. “That Venus Rite must have been more powerful than anyone expected. I think maybe we ought to talk to Eloise.”

“I’ve been thinking that since I put my hand on that athame of his yesterday,” Summer nodded. “I sure never expected this when I agreed to go with Jack and Vixen over to Alan’s Sunday.”

“The Goddess works in mysterious ways,” Rowan smiled. “Let me go call Eloise. I’m sure she’ll want to hear the whole story from you directly.”

Tuesday morning came slowly to Frenchy LeDroit. The pain in his knee had a lot to do with that, if indirectly. Last night, he’d felt like the bandage and the aspirin weren’t helping him much with the pain, so he’d gone through half a bottle of carefully stashed vodka to try to dull it. That had worked; the knee didn’t feel quite as bad this morning, but the headache the vodka had left him with more than made up for it.

Once he realized that there’d be no going back to sleep, he sat on the side of his bed trying to make the world stand still enough to dare to get up and go to the bathroom. The pressure on his bladder was almost painful as well, and finally he reached the realization that if he went and tapped a kidney he might feel a little better. He wandered down the hall in his underwear, bumping off the wall a couple times, stood in front of the stool and let it go. It kept coming and coming, but as things finally settled down he realized that he really did feel better. Well, alive, anyway.

The knee wasn’t hurting anywhere as bad as yesterday, so that seemed to be getting better. He was going to have to kick that young Erikson’s ass for that sooner or later; there was no call for the kid to be kicking him like that. If he’d wanted to fight, then why not just stand up and fight, rather than doing some lowlife thing like that? Fuck him, anyhow.

At least the car was back running again. Yesterday had been a bitch of a day, what with the knee and all, but Larry had really proved to be a good bud, and had done a lot of the dirty work when he hadn’t been able to. Gonna have to do something nice for him, Frenchy thought. Maybe slip him an extra twelve of brew or something.

“Oh, fuck,” he said out loud, if to himself. He still had to make that beer run that he’d planned to make Sunday morning. Christ, that had meant that they’d had to go a couple of days without beer, days that a cold one or two would have been real welcome. It would have been real nice to have been able to sit out on the porch with a cold brew after they’d gotten the tires back on the car, even if the fucking cops kept coming by every ten minutes.

What the fuck did the cops want anyway? Maybe it wasn’t every ten minutes, but last night every time he’d looked up it seemed like the cops were coming by. Except for the one time when that little shit hassled Larry they hadn’t stopped or said anything, but they were looking for something and he could tell it. They probably want to hassle us a little, it can’t be anything about that pussy Jahnke, he thought. He knew that someone had gone to the cops, maybe Jahnke’s folks, but hell, that was Friday, this was Tuesday, and if the cops were going to do anything he would have thought that they’d have done it by now. It didn’t seem likely that they’d do anything to him over that little shit, anyway. After all, he was just a little pussy wuss who deserved what he got, and for sure the cops weren’t going to get on a football player’s ass over it.

It was more likely that it was the brew, Frenchy thought. Maybe that pisser Frankovich blabbed all about it to the cops, that Frenchy was bringing beer in from someplace out of town. It’d be just like that jackoff to do something like that, he thought. He was still about two thirds convinced that Frankovich had been the one responsible for his tires getting fucked up, so if he did that he couldn’t put running to the cops past him.

Even if the cops were on to him about the beer, he still pretty well had to make a beer run today, he thought. Football practice starts next week, and if they were going to have the traditional preseason blowout it had to be the coming weekend. That meant beer, and that meant that he had to go get it. He’d wanted to keep the secret of the Lame Badger connection so his buds would feel loyal to him for providing them with beer, at a price of course, and that still held true. But today, it seemed like a real pain in the ass. It would have been nice to have just sent Matt or Larry to get the suds, but if he did the secret would go with them. Fucked if you do and fucked if you don’t, he thought. Best get it the fuck over with.

With that thought in mind, he got up, pulled on the pants he’d had on yesterday, and put on a fresh T-shirt. In a few minutes he stumbled down the stairs and to the refrigerator. There were some cold mashed potatoes left from supper last night, and that would do just fine for a breakfast, he thought. A real breakfast would have been better, but he didn’t want to take the time.

A few minutes later, he was in the Eagle, heading out of town. It felt good to have his wheels under him again! Those tires they bought yesterday seemed to be pretty good, and the car seemed to handle just fine. He was a little unsure about trusting the new tires for a run up to Lame Badger’s but it wasn’t like he had a real choice in the matter. If they made it, then good, he ought to be able to trust them after that.

The cops, though, had him on edge. He was pretty sure that he’d made it out of town without them spotting him, but if they suspected he was hauling beer and knew he’d been out of town, it seemed likely that he’d get stopped as soon as they spotted him when he came back. Besides, if that fucker Frankovich had ratted him out to the cops, that probably meant the old hiding place was blown. He sure didn’t want to take the beer home, and leaving it in the car was terminally stupid.

On the other hand, he had a couple other hiding places that he was sure that Frankovich didn’t know about; not even Larry or Matt knew about them. He’d only used them a couple times when he’d had more than he could put in the old hiding place, so one or the other of them seemed safer. Best of all, one of them he could get to without being in town much. It was right on the edge of town, and as far as he knew the cops didn’t go there that much. Maybe he could get to it before they spotted him. It seemed like the best answer to him.

If this shit was going to keep up, maybe he needed to look around for a new hiding place, somewhere out of town where the town clowns wouldn’t be looking for him. Of course, that didn’t mean that the county mounties couldn’t get looking for him, but they didn’t seem to fart around close to town much.

This damn beer shit was enough to drive him half crazy. He remembered his dad telling him how they used to be able to get beer at eighteen, right down at the Super Market, and to hear him tell it he and his buds had drank oceans of the stuff. But no more, and didn’t that fucking suck? Get the damn beer under control, he thought. First things first. Then you can concentrate on kicking some ass, getting a little respect back. Shit, people had to be laughing at him, especially after that little dipshit Erikson had hurt his knee Sunday and then his big brother had the balls to face him down yesterday. Couldn’t have people thinking he’d gotten soft, no way. After all, school wasn’t that far off and he and his buddies were going to fucking rule!

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