He paused as if he were reconsidering. “I’m listening,” I said, prompting him to continue.
“I can’t read your mind like I used to, you know?” he asked. I had suspected as much, so I just nodded, even though the statement struck me as a non sequitur. “Non-witches, though, it’s a bit of a struggle not to read them.”
“So, what? Tucker, Emily, Ryder. There has to be a witch at the bottom of it.”
Oliver ignored me and grimaced. He was still wrapped up in his own train of thought, and his smooth forehead pinched into an uncharacteristic worry line. “We’d have to do it without telling Iris or Ellen. Iris would think it unseemly, even if it proved effective. And well, Ellen, she couldn’t know.”
Great, another secret, I thought. “Exactly what is it you are considering?”
“Going to the morgue and paying Tucker a visit.”
“What?!”
“No, listen. If you can channel enough energy into him to fire him back up, even for a few moments, I should be able to read his thoughts.”
I shook my head and felt a chill travel down my spine. Ellen would be devastated to know we were even considering it. “No, even if it were possible, Tucker had a huge hole punched through him. The only thought you are likely to pick up is ‘Ouch.’?”
Oliver shrugged. “Or we might just find out who killed him. We might just find out who took one more bit of love from your Aunt Ellen. Who has sent her back into the downward spiral I thought she’d finally shaken off. Who is trying to turn you against the family who loves you.”
“You say we should do this for Ellen and me, but we both know Ellen wouldn’t want us to disturb Tucker’s body. I’m not sure if I’m okay with it either. I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do. Meddling with the dead.”
“I don’t either, but I do know it’s wrong for me to sit here and do nothing while someone is attacking my family and those they love. Besides, I’m not suggesting a séance. It’s more like when you were in school, and the teacher had you touch a severed frog leg with a battery to make it contract. We won’t be disturbing Tucker. Just applying a little jolt to see if we can trigger a reflex. Come on. We go. We try. Either we get somewhere, or we don’t. Let’s do this. Tucker’s not getting any fresher.” He paused. “It could be Peter next, you know.” He was hitting me below the belt with that one. “Or Adam.” There lay his real concern.
“Oliver,” I said. The thought of Tucker’s decaying body made bile rise up in my throat. I lowered my head and took a deep breath, hoping the nausea would pass. “I’ll gladly help you set up charms to protect Adam,” and I’d toss in a few for Peter just in case, whether he was already protected by Fae magic or no. “But tinkering with Tucker’s corpse?” I hated the word corpse—the way it felt on my tongue, the way it sounded in my own ears.
“We both know there are many ways around charms.” I had learned that firsthand when Jackson moved me into a nearby dimension, just outside of the reach of the charms Emmet had set up to protect me. “They are good for fending off non-magical folk, maybe even magical small-timers, but someone with real mojo? Not so much.” He scanned my face. “What are you really afraid of?” I looked up to find Oliver’s eyes searching me the way they used to, when my thoughts were an open book to him.
“Mama said Tucker was killed because he had been helping her.”
“Listen, we don’t even know if that was Emily. And if it was, then we aren’t just looking for Tucker’s killer. We’re looking for whoever killed her too. This may be our best way, our only way, to really get to the bottom of things. How about it?”
A sigh escaped me. I caved. “All right. Let’s go before I change my mind.”
“That’s a girl,” my uncle said, striking me as just a tad too pleased to be visiting with the dead.
Oliver held his tongue during the drive to the morgue. Besides magic, one of his greatest strengths was that he knew when to stop selling. He wasn’t going to risk saying anything that might cause me to question the wisdom of what we were about to attempt. I found it disconcerting just how near to the coroner’s office Peter’s house sat. Growing up in Savannah, I had adjusted to the knowledge that bones were buried just about everywhere, but I still felt squeamish at the thought of newly minted corpses being autopsied just a few blocks away from Sackville. “Looks like an office,” I said as we parked.
“You were expecting Castle Frankenstein?” Oliver turned off the ignition and opened his door. “Let me do the talking,” he said, as if I’d been about to offer. In the time it took for that thought to cross my mind, he’d circled around and opened my door for me. He followed behind me a step or so as we walked toward the building, as if he were anticipating that I might turn at the last moment and run. The door opened, and climate-controlled air mercifully engulfed me. Only then did Oliver step around me to approach the man sitting at the reception desk.
The thought that a morgue would have a receptionist struck me as the setup for a bad joke, but Oliver had already started his delivery. “Hey, Don!” he said, sounding for all the world as if the man behind the desk were a long-lost friend. “How’s Jen doing?” Don was a bit taken aback. His eyebrows raised and his lips puckered as he tried to place Oliver’s face. They were total strangers to each other, but Oliver was using his mindreading skills to pluck random bits of information from the man’s consciousness. To my own surprise, I realized that Don was an easy read even for me. It felt a bit like going to a party and sneaking a peek in the host’s medicine cabinet.
“Um, she’s real good,” Don replied.
“Good, real good,” Oliver echoed. “So how’s life under the new regime?” It had been a teapot-sized scandal a few months ago when the longtime coroner had resigned under a shadow of alleged misuse of county funds. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss?”
I could feel Don’s mind landing on the name Taylor. A remembrance of a newspaper photo. Once again my family’s notoriety raised its head. “What can I do for you, Mr. Taylor?” he asked.
“Well, we were hoping to visit Tucker Perry.”
Don’s eyes narrowed and a smirk came to his lips. “This is the coroner’s office, Mr. Taylor. We don’t exactly have visiting hours.”
“Still, you can make it happen,” Oliver said, as if he were simply stating the obvious.
“Well, of course I could, but there are procedures. Rules. We can’t just let people come traipsing through here to see the bodies.”
Oliver mirrored Don’s expression. “Has there been a lot of that going on?”
“Well, no, but . . .”
“Don, take us back and show us Tucker’s body.” His tone was still reasonable, but this time it was unmistakably a command. Don wavered between his sudden need to do as Oliver wished and his long-ingrained fear of breaking the rules. “Come on, you know you want to.”
Oliver and his magical coercion. I knew he couldn’t read my mind as easily as before, but it did make me wonder whether he had convinced me to come with him the same way he was convincing Don to show us Tucker. Were anchors really immune to being charmed, or was that simply a bit of propaganda? I really had to wonder. Don got up from his desk and held the door to the morgue open for us.
