Embers
Hoyt Casey squints through the windshield of his Cadillac as he drives west on Highway 90 toward DeFuniak Springs. The mid-morning sun on his car hood glares in his eyes, but it’s the plume of smoke rising in the distance that truly catches his attention. His grip tightens on the steering wheel as an uneasy feeling settles in his gut.
That smoke is coming from the direction of the archive.
It could be anything, he tells himself. A burn pile on a farm between here and there. A campfire in a park.
He stomps on the accelerator. The Caddy’s engine roars in response. The box of legal documents sits on the passenger seat beside him, an unavoidable reminder of the strange phone conversation he’d had with Mrs. von Windlach just yesterday morning. Her words, cryptic and unsettling, echo in his mind.
What an amazing woman!
He’d gotten to know her through regular phone calls and packages through the mail over the last two weeks. He understood she was in poor health, but he’s hoped for many more conversations with her, especially after she mailed him Great-Aunt Gertrude’s family bible with the worn edges and the lists of births, deaths, and marriages—including his first marriage and his daughters’ births. How on earth did a stranger in a dusty private library find that family treasure?
He’s never met anyone like Maeve von Windlach, and she seems to know things that haven’t happened yet. Or things a stranger shouldn’t know. Like how he was moving to the elite Country Club estates a week before he and his family left their old house. He’d driven to Baton Rouge to pick up the girls and had, at Linda’s request, taken Ronan with him so she could get some packing done without the little monster underfoot. The old woman at the genealogy library couldn’t have known any of that.
The closer he gets to Defuniak, the larger the smoke plume above the tree line. At the sign advertising a hand-painted family tree, he veers sharply onto a road of gravel, dirt, and—as is common along the coast of Florida—broken seashells. As he nears the archive, the smoke thickens, and his heart beats wildly. Firetrucks line the road ahead, their red lights flashing silently in the morning light. A man steps from between two of the trucks to wave him down, but he snakes his way through the barricades without making eye contact.
“No,” he moans. “Oh, sweet lord, no.”
Hoyt pulls over at the edge of the archive drive, his hands shaking slightly as he puts the Cadillac in park. Where the stately three-story building once stood, there is now only a smoldering ruin. One corner is still on fire, the primary source of the smoke now, but the carriage house where Maeve and her husband slept stands untouched except for paint peeling from the blistering heat of the adjacent structure. The rose bushes and hedges, both in front of and behind the charred ruins, look crispy but still stand in patches.
Hoyt steps out of his car, his legs unsteady beneath him. He leaves the box of file folders and legal papers on the seat. The acrid smell of century-old wood and even older paper stings his nostrils. He coughs before the wind shifts direction again.
A fireman approaches, his face so smudged with soot that Hoyt can’t tell the man’s age, but guesses the man is twenty years younger and stronger. “Sir, you can’t be here. It’s not safe.”
Coughing again, then clearing his throat, Hoyt shoves a business card at the man. “I’m Hoyt Casey. I’m. . .I was the attorney for the couple who owned this place.” The words feel strange on his tongue, a role he’d only just assumed two weeks ago.
The fireman’s expression softens as he reads the card and then shoves it into his pants pocket. “I’m sorry, Mr. Casey. The fire started sometime in the wee hours of the morning.
We did our best, but. . .”
“The owners?” Hoyt asks, already dreading the answer. Had they been inside, he wonders silently, or in the safety of the carriage house?
The fireman removes his hat, revealing a pale dome of wispy blond hair not marred by smoke and a clean forehead above his dirty face. He clasps the hat to his chest, probably like his mama taught him to do to show respect for the dead. “I’m afraid they didn’t make it, sir. Natural causes, looks like, before the fire took hold. The coroner has already had the bodies taken to the morgue, but with the suspicious nature of the blaze, I have to wait on the arson investigator while the rest of the team catches that last corner of the building. No matter how many times they spray it down, it keeps reigniting.”
“Suspicious nature of the blaze?” Hoyt repeats.
Shrugging, the fireman clamps his hat back over his hair. “I don’t think it’s arson myself, but any time there’s a death, we’re going to be extra cautious we didn’t miss anything. If you ask me, I don’t think their deaths are related to the fire, but the fire might be related to their deaths.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, they liked to burn candles sometimes in the reception area. Nice ambiance, you know? I could always see ’em through the windows when I passed by here on my way home, and sometimes, you could see the old couple slow-dancing when they were alone. Must’ve died when the candles were burning and, you know, didn’t go back to make sure the candles were out. Talk about leaving your candle unattended!”
Hoyt nods numbly, his mind reeling. He glances toward the back of the property, where the carriage house still stands untouched beyond the roses, beyond a labyrinthine hedge, beyond a goldfish pool with three unscathed fish. The contrast is jarring—the archive reduced to ashes and charred lumber while the living quarters remain only lightly touched.
“You said you were their lawyer?”
Hoyt clears his throat, this time from the heartsick feeling in his chest and not the smoke in the air. “Yes. Yes, they signed some papers for me last week to handle their estate and asked me to bring them copies today.”
The fireman opens his palms to the sky as he shrugs again. “Well, you missed ‘em by a day. Too bad you didn’t come back sooner.”
“Yeah, too bad,” Hoyt murmurs as he walks with the man to the edge of the ruins. He kicks at the lowest of the stone steps leading up to a building that’s no longer there. The ground beneath his shoes is part ash and part water from a fireman’s hose.
He scans the smoldering blueprint from the steps to the courtyard beyond, to the outer boundaries. The archive had been large, but the foundation seems smaller than he remembered. He can barely make out where the main room was, especially with the upper floors collapsed on top of it. The main room was opened straight up to the third story, with staircases leading upstairs, but in all of the devastation, one tiny room is completely clear of any collapse. The room to the right, behind a hidden door. The room that had seemed cavernous.
But here in front of him, maybe thirty feet from where he and the fireman stand, that room is no larger than a janitor’s closet.
“You really shouldn’t stick around here,” his companion says. “I mean, you have business here, obviously, but pretty soon people will start showing up to snoop. Check in with the morgue to see what they need and then with the fire chief when he gets back, so you can do whatever kind of paperwork you lawyer types need to do.”
“I’ll. . .I’ll do that.”
“I know it’s soon, sir, but any idea what’ll happen to this place? All those books are gone, and now, so are the only people who ever took care of this place. I can’t imagine anyone building it back. Not like there’s much purpose around here for a house that size. You could build two or three houses on that foundation.”
Hoyt stares at the space the size of a closet. “No idea.”
“Oh! There’s a package,” the fireman says, breaking into Hoyt’s thoughts. “In the mailbox. It’s addressed to you. Normally, the mailman would’ve picked it up already, but we were detouring traffic until you got through. Neither rain nor sleet nor snow, but a fire, yeah, that’ll stop the mail. Anyway, since it’s addressed to you, I don’t think there’s any harm in your picking it up at the source. You might need what’s in it while you’re here taking care of this mess.”
Hoyt follows the man to the mailbox, which stands eerily unscathed at the edge of the property, far enough away that even the heat didn’t affect it or its contents. It’s probably the largest mailbox he’s ever seen on a rural route, but if they had books shipped to or from the archive, it makes sense.
Inside is a box, neatly taped and bearing his name and address in Wiregrass. Not his office address on his business card or the address she’d used to send him a family bible or a stack of legal documents.
He takes it with trembling hands, feeling the weight of its contents and the responsibility they represent. He needs to find a payphone in town and call Linda to let her know he’ll be here a few days and what’s happened. She’ll be suspicious as usual, but he’s already told her about the old woman named Maeve and her archive, and what he hasn’t told Linda, Ronan has. No need for her to be jealous, yet she always is, and for no reason.
After thanking the fireman for the information, Hoyt heads back to his Cadillac. He starts the car and, adjusting all the vents, turns the air on full blast on his face. Part of him wants to cry for the sweet old woman and the husband he never met, but he still hasn’t gotten used to the idea of her being gone. Even though he’d known that first day when she’d told him they were dying, none of it has sunk in yet. Not really. He hadn’t realized until now just how soon the end would come—and how desperate Maeve must have been for his help. All his clients had urgent requests, so one more urgent request had been nothing new and nothing he’d taken as seriously as Maeve had hoped. He should’ve taken her more seriously.
Picking at the box’s tape with his thumbnail, he barely notices a sleek black sedan that pulls up behind him or the one that glides in behind that one. Several people in dark clothing emerge, their expressions stern and purposeful, but they all carry an unmistakable air of authority. One woman, about his age, glances around but doesn’t seem to see him behind the steering wheel. Whoever she is, she’s important, but he’s not important to her. Not enough to even cast a single glance in his direction or at the out-of-state tag on his car.
The priesthood. Just as Maeve had warned. Not any kind of priesthood he had ever heard of but some kind of group she had been terrified of. Maybe some kind of cult? She’d likened them to the Illuminati, but those characters are fiction, aren’t they?
Again, he hadn’t taken her concerns seriously enough. Older people talked crazy shit all the time and were paranoid half the time, so he’d humored her like he does all his elderly clients. And yet, he didn’t understand until now that her stories were conspiracy facts, not theories.
He slides on his sunglasses and watches them, his hands still on the package Maeve had tried to mail him, but he stops picking at the tape. The car is in park, but he could still escape if he needs to, though from what, he isn’t sure. He doesn’t get “feelings” like Maeve said she does—did—but the hair on the back of his neck is standing straight up.
Without a word, Hoyt slips into his Cadillac, the package clutched tightly to his chest. In his rearview mirror, the newcomers begin to inspect the ruins, stomping through ash and water. Their hands move in strange patterns, as if feeling for something invisible in the air or on the ground. They pause near that weird empty closet area, five or six gathering there while the others trample what’s left of the rose gardens, arms extended and palms out. Several of the firemen stop fiddling with a hose and yell at them.
Hoyt rolls down his window enough to beckon to the fireman he’d talked with a few minutes ago.
“Yes, sir?” The man bends close to the window.
“Yeah, sorry about this, but I just realized I don’t have any more business cards on me, and I’m going to need to leave one with the coroner so I can start making arrangements.” At the fireman’s baffled look, Hoyt adds, “Unless you need it.”
“Um, no.” He digs it out of his pocket and hands it back to Hoyt.
His heart is thudding so hard, he’s sure that the man can tell he’s lying. “By the way, are those people supposed to be here? Because I saw one take something.”
“What?!” The fireman whirls and stomps away, yelling at them to get away from the property. Hoyt slams the gearshift into drive and lurches onto the dirt and gravel road. Deliberate in every move, he doesn’t spin away, screaming for attention. He just quietly drives away while, in his rearview mirror, several firemen line up opposite the figures in dark clothes. Through his half-open window, he can still hear the shouting after he’s out of sight.
Once safely down the road and back on Highway 90, Hoyt pulls over behind a gas station and drags the package back into his lap. Heart pounding, he keeps the car running in case he needs to leave quickly. Whoever those people were, there was something sinister about them, but at least they won’t get their hands on his business card.
He retrieves a pocket knife and opens the package with shaking hands. Inside, he finds a letter with his name on it, a folder of legal documents, and a smaller box. He unfolds the letter, Maeve’s elegant handwriting filling the page:
Dear Mr. Casey,
If you’re reading this, then our time has come to an end. I’m grateful that I’ve had these two weeks with you, and even more grateful for your help, both now and in the years to come. Thank you for everything you’ve done—not just these last few days, but years ago when you were a lifeline for a young woman and her baby. I was that young woman. Don’t ask me how. Just trust me.
I never got the chance to tell you everything you meant to me and how much I loved you for the father you were to me, so I’m telling you now. I wasn’t entirely truthful with you about the name of the man this archive was named for. It’s not Tim or Timothy Casey. It stands for ‘Thank You, Mr. Casey.’ The T.Y.M. Casey Archive was named in your honor, a tribute to the kindness you showed us. It would not have existed without your fatherly love and all the things you did to protect us.
I need you to do a few more things for me. In the smaller box, you’ll find items that must be kept safe until the foundation you’ve set up can deliver them to Dr. Drusilla St. Augustine at the Special Collections Library in the future. The instructions and date for delivery are included in the legal documents. If anyone comes looking for us, stay as far away from them as you can.
Please take care of our goldfish. They’ll be fine for a while, but eventually, I hope you’ll bring them to your new home in Country Club Estates. Ronan will love the goldfish pond you build for them. Maybe take some rose bushes for your front yard. But leave my beloved and me here, cremated and hidden away in this place we loved.
Lastly, keep an eye out for a young woman who looks like the photo in the box. One with a newborn and a mysterious past. Don’t ask her to explain because she won’t be able to. She’ll need your help one day, though she may not know how to ask for it.
Trust no one with what you know. The work we did here, the secrets we kept, our lives— they’re in your hands now.
Thank you, Mr. Casey. For everything.
Maeve
Hoyt lowers the letter, his vision blurring with unshed tears. He glances at the smaller box, resisting the urge to open it. Some secrets, he realizes, are best left undisturbed. For now.
With a deep breath, he guides the car from PARK to DRIVE. He has an estate to handle, a foundation to manage, and a future to help shape—all for a little girl he’s never met, but who Maeve clearly loved beyond measure, across time itself.
He still doesn’t fully believe in time travel, but he grew up believing in miracles that happened thousands of years ago, so why not a miracle now? No, he doesn’t understand it all, but he doesn’t have to. He understands unconditional love, and sacrifice, and that’s enough to be the man Maeve needed him to be.
Will need him to be.
As Hoyt pulls away from the gas station, he rests one hand on the box beside him. Whatever is to come, he knows his life will never be the same. And somehow, that thought doesn’t scare him as much as it probably should.
⁂
Somewhere in the future, Veronica is days away from meeting Shelby and her destiny as the greatest High Priestess of Daegan when an old enemy changes the future she remembers. Find out what happens when someone shifts Veronica’s timelines in Altered Destiny, in the following Witch Out of Time Mystery Thriller series.
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