Free Death in the Cards by Sharon Short

head, turned so that we could see only the left side and the ghastly hole from a bullet. God only knew what the right side of her head, pressed against the ground, looked like, where the bullet had exited.
    My stomach roiled at the thought, and then I started shaking. “Owen?” His name came out in a thin mewl. But it was enough to draw him to me, and, although shaking himself, he hugged me to him, and I turned my face to his shoulder, away from the sight of poor dead Ginny Proffitt.

6
    After we found Ginny’s body, I immediately called 911 on my cell phone. Owen stayed by her body while I got Rebecca away from the ruckus at the front of the property. I left Hugh and Pastor Micah still arguing with Dru and his followers.
    At first, Rebecca thought I was trying to tell her I’d called the police because of the ruckus. She’d started shaking, tears streaming down her face as she said, “Josie, I wish you hadn’t called the police. We don’t need any more trouble from Dru Purcell. We can handle it.”
    Her comment struck me as odd. She made it sound as if Dru had given her family trouble before that night. I hadn’t heard talk of any trouble between the Crowleys and Dru. Now, I knew the Crowleys, like me, went to the Methodist church, avoiding Dru’s hard-line yet growing following, but as far as I knew they’d been friends with the Purcells a long time. Dru and Ed, in fact, had been star quarterback and running back, respectively, on the East Mason County High School football team, taking the school all the way to the state finals, where we lost against West Mason County HighSchool. That was back in the early 1970s—a few years before I was born—but still, I knew about it because everyone still talked about it, the biggest football victory East High had ever experienced. That kind of thing becomes town lore.
    So I was curious what Rebecca meant by her comment implying they’d had trouble with Dru in the past, but I didn’t get a chance to ask. I heard Owen saying, “Get back in the maze!”
    I grabbed Rebecca’s arm and pulled her after me. We got to the outside corner of the maze in time to hear a group of cheerleaders giggling as they walked on the other side of the corn stalks, and one saying, “I wonder what all the hollering is about out there?” and another giggling, “Who cares! Let’s go back to see Lenny!”
    I turned to tell Rebecca gently that she might not want to go forward and see what Owen had been keeping the kids from—but when I looked at her, I realized she had already trotted over to Owen, huffing with the effort. Rebecca’s fifty-plus and a bit on the heavy side. Her body went rigid as she stared down at Ginny. She turned and walked a few steps away, then crumpled to her knees and put her hands to her face and began sobbing.
    I went over to Rebecca, knelt down beside her, and put my arms around her. She remained stiff, at first, and then leaned back into me, letting me hold her as she kept crying. I reckoned that this was too much for her, what with having lost her husband Ed just two months before, and now worrying about Maureen and Ricky.
    Her family and the Methodist youth group had only wanted to raise money to help Maureen and Ricky, but it surely hadn’t gone well—the protest by Dru and his followers was bad enough, but finding one of the psychics dead at the maze . . . this was just too horrible for Rebecca.
    In the meantime, Dru and Hugh kept shouting at eachother, while Pastor Micah tried to calm them down, with Dru’s followers every now and then shouting a hearty “Amen!” in response to Dru’s rhetoric, unaware that a most unholy scene was just yards away.
    But when the first police car arrived, most of Dru’s followers silently wandered off. Dru, Micah, and Hugh stopped shouting as Chief John Worthy got out of his police car and started toward them. Then all