Trail of Evidence

1.

Evidence Ryan had narrowed herself down to three weaknesses in life. Most people had so many more, so she figured that was exceptionally good going, and knowing what they were -- well, that much, too, was a step towards controlling them. The three, in order of potency, were Duke Crocker, excellent whiskey, and men of God.

They weren't all weaknesses that operated in quite the same way, of course. Especially in light of how some of the things she felt about the first might edge into the territory of uncomfortable blasphemy if applied to the last.

Duke Crocker's soulful eyes and devillish smile could make her follow him anywhere, although she might take a while and get there by the scenic route, because although it was a weakness, it didn't make her a total pushover. She had even married him, when marriage was something she'd sworn she'd never do, and though that was a situation with its ups and downs, every down naturally segued back into an up eventually.

The whiskey was something she never could resist; hypnotic once she caught the smell. Not in the bad way, but fine things called to her soul, and most of them she had some control over, reducing them down to numbers and gain, practicalities, while she rolled over like a kitten once she got a whiff of the good stuff.

Men of God... she'd been raised to respect a preacher, and that was all. Even one so very mesmerised by the whiskey he'd brought her as a lure to sit and listen to his schemes. She was well aware of how his hungry eyes followed the glass up to her lips, and the craving with which his tongue flicked out to whet his own. Evi, tempted despite her ingrained respect, swayed the glass from side to side in her hand as she spoke, watching his eyes follow, and was so very entertained that he didn't even realise what he was doing. Preacher liked the whiskey in the bad way. Maybe she could hypnotise him like this and learn all his twisty secrets.

She said, "So you bring me news of my darling husband. You bring me whiskey. And you..." She waggled her finger at his collar, amused how he'd dressed the part even though he was a long way from home and couldn't possibly travel everywhere dressed like that. "Why, it's like you know me."

"Don't begrudge a man preparation and research," Driscoll said hoarsely. A smalltown preacher from Duke's small hometown, and so very charmingly crooked. He jerked his neck, pulling his eyes aside with an effort. His hands gripped and smoothed out reflexively upon the edge of the table, drawing her attention to long, thin fingers, worn with hardship and age. "Especially in pursuit of the Lord's work. It wasn't easy to find you."

"No. It wouldn't be," Evi agreed silkily. "And your interest in me is... Duke." She dipped her finger in the glass and licked it off. Driscoll scowled. "I could ask for another glass. We could share."

The bar they were in was all dark corners and old wood, like some rogues' bar from a movie. It was, honest to God, one of the few times she'd actually hung around in anyplace quite like it, though it suited something about the tone of their meet so very well. There were probably hidey-holes and secret passages behind these panels, and Driscoll was about to tell her that Duke was some lost heir, or about the immense fortune that he had waiting for him at home if he could only beat his evil brother to the prize. It was quiet this early in the day, so didn't quite have the smugglers' ambience of danger and imminent bar fights. Perhaps she should suggest they come back later?

He'd found her, somehow, in Egypt. She'd been playing Lara Croft with an archaeological expedition, paid handsomely to infiltrate the team by a French gentleman who had a yearning to procure some finds that these days honest money just couldn't buy. But half the camp had come down sick with some desert bug, and she'd cut her losses and settled for spending a few weeks searching the local markets for anything she could sell at inflated costs back in the States.

"Not today," Driscoll replied, after his drawn-out hesitation, shaking his head with stirrings of anger. "I won't deny that I endure a constant struggle with that bottle, but I didn't come here to be tempted."

"...But you did come here to tempt. Tell me--" She smiled wryly and set her glass aside, wrapping her hands together on the table in front. "What is Mr Crocker doing with himself these days?"

She was shocked to be told how Duke had gone home and gone straight. Less so that he was running a bar and restaurant, because she could see that if he was going to go straight at all, that was one way he'd do it. But that alone was every reason to go and dig him out of there, tooth and nail. Her man was clearly in need of rescue. The dull, insipid strings of muggle life had got ahold of him. In the past, they'd talked about just this sort of scenario happening to either of them, and had made a pact, leaving each other strict instruction. Pulling him out of this wasn't a matter of option. It was a duty.

"It must be one hell of a bar, to pin Duke Crocker in one place," she said, knocking back the whiskey left in her glass. "Or... one hell of a woman, maybe?" She broached the subject cautiously, not wanting to offend the Reverend (exclusivity: they'd dabbled in it, once or twice, but it had never been either of their scene).

Driscoll grimaced. "One very hell of a woman, a blonde hellion who is the work of the devil himself. I'm sorry to say, Mrs Crocker, that I was startled to discover the man was married. There's no sign he's been honouring your vows." He reached across the table and bestowed a gentle pat on her hand. Sweet, manipulative old goat. Evi managed to turn her automatic impulse to a shrug into a dismayed pout.

"'Evi' is fine." She'd meant to set the whiskey aside and stay sharp throughout whatever double-dealings the man of God had to offer, but the thought of Duke mixed with the smell of it curled into her, warming her inside, and she poured again, sighing as she raised the glass to her lips. "So tell me, what's so important about the new, smalltown Duke Crocker, who runs a bar and pays his taxes, that brings you all the way out here to see little old me?"

"'Important'," Driscoll caught and echoed. "Now there is, indeed, the rub. Although--" His expression flattened in doubt "--I'm not sure about the taxes."

Reassuring, thought Evi. A sign that he hadn't fallen so far, after all. She nodded the twisty Reverend encouragement to carry on.

"Duke Crocker is chosen by the Lord," Driscoll shared, leaning in, though he didn't lower his voice, and if anything it grew stronger as he framed the words, its timbre rich with the tones and power accustomed to filling a church. Evi's heart, which was usually on a very tight rein, fluttered a little at his intensity, too fierce and full for those words to be anything but what he believed was the truth. "In a town of the damned and the cursed, Mr Crocker may be the only man who can bring salvation, but he does not know his very special destiny. A destiny which I fear he might refuse to shoulder, swayed by ignorance and irreverence, unless brought to it in the proper manner. Shepherded, you might say, by the subtle hands of those who are passionate to ensure he fulfil his true potential. Such as myself and... you, Evidence, if I may take the liberty to suggest."

Evi almost laughed aloud. No bones about it, he was a Preacher all right. And that little sermon to the Church of Duke Crocker... well, Mr Crocker himself would have been creased up on the floor by now. But there was something... something else, too. Something that made it easy to stop herself from laughing. Because she'd felt it herself, from the very beginning.

Duke was special. Duke was magic. How else could he keep her coming back, trapped in his orbit -- at some times closer than others, but always there.

She leaned in to the centre of the small table, almost touching foreheads with the Reverend. "Tell me more."

2.

She'd been all over the world with him, and Duke's crazy hometown was one of the prettiest places she'd ever seen. There were things she was tempted to say to him about disclosure, except honesty had never been a big thing between them. Next to everything else that they'd lied about, failing to admit that his so-claimed 'boring' hometown was a picture-postcard ideal to rival anything they'd seen in the Mediterranean was fairly trivial.

It was pretty interesting too, and he hadn't told her that part, either. Though they'd once stayed in a haunted house in Nepal and there had been a definite aura of not this crap again in his eyerolling reaction when the ornaments started rattling and that noise rolled up through the floor and chilled her to the bone.

Evi had stayed up all night with a camera and a tape recorder, and a whole lot of coffee laced with liquid courage. Duke went to bed, and grumblingly told her in the morning after a disappointingly uneventful night that she must have scared the poltergeist off. He'd also tapped her camera and her empty pot of coffee, and then tapped her nose with his fingertip and said, "This is not healthy." It had seemed a peculiarly pragmatic attitude towards overt displays of the supernatural.

"But it's interesting," she'd said, and then got more coffee and got wired for a day of thieving, which was what they were actually in Nepal to do.

Duke made them move into a hotel later that day, though she was all up for buying more equipment and making ghost-busting the sideline of the week. Evi had teased him about being scared, knowing full well that he wasn't. He simply had no patience for it.

"It reminds me too much of home," he told her, and never explained.

Well, now she knew. Pretty, pretty Haven. Where she would have made him bring her years ago, had she known about all of this. About all the rest, too. The magic, the intrigue, the crazy old men who ran the town. As it was, it had to take a crooked preacher with an agenda full of conspiracies to get her there.

Oh, she knew Driscoll was an angry, bitter, twisted schemer. She had no illusions there. Like to like, after all -- twisted and a schemer, anyway, because Evi didn't do anger; she had given it up at age seventeen with so many more fascinating things to feel. Generally she avoided anything that pissed her off by the inspired and convenient technique of walking away from it. It was a skill more people needed to learn. She did, however, understand the Reverend better than any of the rest of these people. They were all characters from another world. The clench-jawed cop, the perky and helpful Audrey, the quirky, charming and so very obtuse townsfolk. Ironic with him being a man of God and all, but Driscoll was so much more familiar.

Now, Evi stood gazing out across the sea at islands that were soft and hazy against the backdrop of the morning sky. She breathed in Haven's soft colours and sighed, allowing her eyes to close a moment, thinking perhaps later that day she'd charter a boat and go out to explore all the green, hidden coves and crannies of Haven. She had always wondered where Duke was from. Now she'd seen it, everything made so much more sense.

"Hey!" She opened her eyes at the accusing shout, which seemed a little... hostile. She pouted. There he was, padding across the deck of his big boat in bare feet, shirt hanging off his shoulders, his hair a morning tussle that brought back so many memories. "This is turning into a thing. Tell me, do I have to file a stalking complaint with Nathan? You're hanging around here again?"

"I like the view," Evi called down to him. He looked down at his chest. She shook her head and rolled her eyes and laughed at him, pointing firmly out to the sea. "You've a big opinion of yourself, Mr Crocker."

Duke had a coffee cup in his hand. He stood looking up at her and sipped from it, gaze drifting thoughtfully. Actually, she thought it might be a bit too early in the morning for him. Would have been for her, usually, but newsflash -- archaeologists got up early. Just one of the reasons her patience had run out so quick, and her inner timing hadn't readjusted yet.

"So tell me," she said, sitting down on the edge of the dockside, kicking her legs out in the gulf between it and Duke's boat. "What does a girl have to do to sample the fare at her own husband's restaurant?"

"Book a table and pay?" Duke suggested, half crunching his eyes shut and shading his face against the morning sun.

Evi did pout then. "Harsh. So harsh." Inwardly, she smiled at his resistance. It had been a while, and they'd had chance to grow further apart this time, but they both still knew how this went. She'd wear him down. It probably wouldn't even take very long.

"No? Ah, go on then. I can be generous, for old times' sake. On the house. I'll write you out a voucher, you hand it in to Janine at the bar, and I promise you she'll honour it. Me, though? I'm busy tonight."

"Well, aren't you assuming a lot," Evi shot back at him, shaping the words on her lips with robust glee. "I'll take that offer. I've gotten into the habit of dining alone. Taking my time. Not having to share the wine. The wine's included, right?"

"You're kidding. You'd bankrupt me."

They both laughed. It was another crack in the wall.

"So what is the restauranteur doing tonight?"

"None of your business." He toasted her with the coffee mug and returned inside his boat. A few minutes later he came back and handed her a scruffily hand-written scrap of paper.

"Nice to see your handwriting hasn't improved." She rolled it up and touched it in a salute against her forehead.

Duke said, "Have a good day," and disappeared inside his boat, and didn't re-emerge this time. Evi perched on the edge of Haven, legs kicking out over the sea, and theorised happily about escape hatches just above the waterline, emergency wetsuits... mm, Duke in a wetsuit... and her clever, slippery husband employing his bagful of tricks to comprehensively give her the slip. But probably he'd just gone back to bed.

She waved to a few fishermen heading out. Grizzled old men stared back at her like she had two heads. Maine, she thought, and clacked her heels together.

It didn't work, even with magic in the air and Biblical plagues coming to life, but then, she didn't really think there was no place like home, and besides, she was nowhere near ready to leave.

3.

In Hong Kong once, long ago -- they'd only just met, barely been wed, had been babies really -- she'd picked up an old Chinese vase that was cursed. At least, the creepy old herbalist she'd gone to, actually to try and get a cure for the headaches she'd been getting, said it was cursed. She'd nodded and smiled and thought, bullshit, but as soon as she did finally manage to sell the vase, the headaches cleared. She'd heard the collector died of a brain tumour about a year later. All of that could be a coincidence, but it had still made her wonder if curses could be real.

In Haven, curses were real. And she was a little bit annoyed with Duke, for all those years making like he was humouring her and letting her think he considered her interest in this and that to be silly or superstitious, when he knew damned well that curses were real.

Curses: from the man who felt nothing -- boring -- to the families that made trees kill people -- terrifying -- to the guy who... that really fabulous guy, who she couldn't begin to describe in adequate terms with mere clunky words, and of course had no criticism for. The mermen were definitely something else. Like, what the hell, really? Mermen. What the hell?

Thirty-odd years of people asking "how can you believe that crap?" could stick that in their pipe and smoke it. Vindication was a gleeful feeling and Haven didn't scare her, except when it did (trees. Killing people. Seriously). Duke's warnings didn't scare her, either, although she'd been increasingly annoyed by the feeling he'd be so much happier if he could persuade her to go. She'd even started to think, and fear, that this time wasn't working by their same old rules.

But then it had, and things were good. It all clicked together smoothly, and she had the secret of the box, even if she didn't know what it meant, and she had Duke, wrapped around her and wrapped around her finger again, right where he belonged. The Reverend was pleased with her and they'd flawlessly pulled off one of the best double-bluffs she could remember. How that had amused them both, talking out their plans in private, putting on their play in public, and poor, poor Duke, oblivious to it all, to the point where she might even have felt guilty, had it not been all for his benefit.

Evi delighted in revisiting their old game of double-crossing and one-upmanship, but maybe she had begun to feel a little guilt, a little doubt in her heart, because it seemed Duke didn't even realise they were still playing it. She'd been right about too much time in his hometown dulling his spark. Once this destiny business was out of the way, she'd have to drag him off to play at pirates together somewhere, and light him up again properly.

"I know you think he has some task to accomplish against the people who killed his father," Evi said to Driscoll up behind the church the evening Nathan Wuornos was demoted. "But even so, he's going to be mad when he finds out. The cop's a cop, but the cop's his friend." Which, okay, she really, really didn't get. Especially the part where that friendship seemed to have been going on for years, and even if he hadn't been a cop when he was eight, Nathan had still apparently been the son of another cop. After all those times Duke had mouthed off about his hatred of the police, what the hell was that? But just because she didn't understand it didn't make it not so. Reality. Deal.

Driscoll gave her an eyeroll and a faintly disapproving look, which Evi didn't feel he had a right to. Considering he'd just manipulated the removal of the Chief of Police, a bit of low-level disrespect for the law was just pfffft, after all.

"I'm just saying, maybe we're at risk of drifting too far off-message," she said, treading carefully around the twitchy Reverend, who seemed steadily more twitchy now as the days edged on. "Maybe it's time we actually try talking to him." Driscoll had taken the events with the mermen badly, and she still didn't know all the personal ins and outs of what had been going on there, but wasn't his wife not being dead a, you know, happy thing? Surely the fact she was with someone else paled next to the fact she was alive?

Rev Driscoll, though, lost something in that affair. She sensed the difference in him afterward, and knew he was no longer the same man she'd first met in that Egyptian bar. She felt a gulf widening between them. He'd stopped being a welcome splash of the familiar amid all the crazy, and the crazy had swallowed him up whole. Meanwhile, Nathan and Audrey and the rest didn't strike Evi as any less alien beings than before, and what Duke had turned into seemed jarringly more akin to them now than her, leaving her no-one to hold onto amid Haven's madness. She reasoned, more forcefully, "You want his cooperation in your big, secret, long-term 'God's plan'. At some point that does mean you have to talk to him."

"Nathan Wuornos was a necessary sacrifice to the cause," Driscoll said, disappointingly veering from topic. "I've tried with that young man time and again. Mr Crocker will see it the same way in time. Follow the path and keep the faith." He looked at her stonily and nodded, to himself more than her, lost in his own world of mutterings and, Evi was starting to suspect, ever more blinkered faith.

It didn't feel like a good moment, right then, so she left it and figured she would push it later, some time when he was in a better mood. Maybe right after he'd let off some steam railing hellfire down on his Sunday churchgoers. That always seemed to relax him.

Because she increasingly didn't get his thing about the Cursed, who it seemed to her were just people with shit for luck, and Driscoll's idea of helping them increasingly more like persecution, and maybe she was even starting to think that whatever it was Duke could 'do' for them... might not be a good thing. Those doubts she shoved aside because any thought of Duke's specialness turning out to be some dark, twisted thing, after all this effort and hope, was just beyond contemplating.

In the end, she wished that she'd pushed the matter back then. It probably wouldn't have gotten through to the Reverend, but it was the last chance she had to make an impression, and by the time later came around, it was already far too late. Evi might have ducked the clutching hands of ill fate with a cursed vase in Hong Kong all those years ago, but now she was trapped in a police station under siege with her extremities rotting and dying before her eyes. And Duke--

He knew. He knew and he coughed it up to Nathan before he told her. After all their years together and apart, she couldn't believe he chose the cop.

He thought she'd betrayed him.

He didn't see what she'd tried to do.

He didn't understand that it had all been about him, and about realising something special.

If it starts to piss you off, then walk away. Enough was enough. Her stomach was churning, and that might be the infection but she didn't think that was all it was. She wanted to leave -- leave Haven, leave the unhinged Rev and his crazy, freakish followers -- but she couldn't leave Duke. Not this way, with all the pieces falling around them in such a fucked-up pattern that she didn't know, if she ran now, if they'd ever be able to pull it back together. First she had to do something to make this right. Driscoll would listen to her, surely, because it was their plan and Duke the crux of it, and any fool could see they were losing him. So while he and she didn't do honesty, if all signs pointed clear as a bunch of neon arrows that a thing was the salvaging of a situation, then for God's sake, break a habit.

She swiped the keycard and cast it aside, and left the police station yelling it to the rooftops.

END

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