Casting Spells by Barbara Bretton Read Free Book Online

We grew up loving the ice. We loved the smell, the sound, the way it sometimes kicked our asses.
    She understood the ice. She knew how to read a frozen lake better than I did. She knew you didn’t test the center alone in early December, not even up there in northern Vermont. I was glad she had been taken while doing something she loved and pissed as hell that she hadn’t been more careful.
    I’m a homicide detective. I’ve been trained to rein in my emotions and concentrate on the facts of a case. But I’ve seen drowning victims. I know what happens to the human body after exposure to icy water and no oxygen. It wasn’t something you would want to see twice.
    Fran was watching me closely. “You okay over there, MacKenzie?”
    I wasn’t but I grunted something meant to divert her attention from my struggle to pull it together.
    “Where’s the police report?” I asked when I trusted my voice again.
    “There isn’t one.”
    That got my attention. “They have a body and no police report?”
    “It’s a small town. Things are different up there.”
    “No town’s that small,” I said. And no town was that different. Even small-town cops generated enough paper to destroy a few forests. “Anything from the coroner?”
    “They sent the body to Montpelier but the autopsy was canceled and the body was rerouted to family in Connecticut.”
    “On whose orders?”
    She leaned forward and motioned me closer. “You didn’t hear it from me, but Dan Sieverts has been calling in favors all morning.”
    “The congressman with the hair? The one who—”
    Her eyes widened. “You didn’t know they were seeing each other?”
    I shook my head. “You sure?”
    “I’m sure,” Fran said. “I was in the room when the chief got the call.”
    Dan Sieverts was a very publicly married politician from Cambridge who was being prepped by the machine to make a run for governor next year.
    I had heard the buzz around Sieverts. One of those golden boys destined for bigger and better things, he had the pedigree, the résumé, and the connections needed to climb the ladder. He also had the arrogance that came with the package. Apparently for the last two years that package had also included Suzanne.
    Suzanne had been part of my life since grade school. We weren’t what you would call close friends. I didn’t tell her my secrets and she didn’t tell me hers. But we shared a time and a place and for a little while we even shared a family. She had been married to my ex’s brother for about five minutes, and looking back, the only surprise was that any of us had ever believed she and Andy had a chance in hell to make it work. They were over before they brushed the rice from their hair. Suzanne said good-bye to our small Massachusetts fishing village and set out to conquer the world.
    I last saw her around this time a year ago. She was running a major PR campaign for a chain of upscale hotels looking to gain a foothold in Boston, and she showed up at the station house with two pastramis on rye and some Guinness. I passed on the Guinness, but we shared the pastrami near the Swan Boats and spent a good three or four minutes catching up on the old days.
    “That’s it?” she had said, laughing as the trickle of nostalgia ran dry. “That’s all you’ve got?”
    The sky was blue. The sun was shining. It hadn’t snowed in at least four or five hours. I let her think my life was the equivalent of a fistful of Super Bowl rings. She let me think her life was the female equivalent.
    At the time I thought only one of us was lying but now I wondered.
    Suzanne was dead and the only thing I knew for sure was that it wasn’t from natural causes.
    I keyed back into what Frannie was saying. “... Sieverts was supposed to meet her at some inn last night but he didn’t show. The owner said she waited two hours, paid the bar tab, then took off alone. Next thing, some hardware store owner and his sons were pulling her out of the water by her