Grave Robber for Hire
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Authors: Cassandra L. Shaw
Grave Robber for Hire
By
Cassandra L Shaw
Grave Robber for Hire: Reasonable rates
Do Family legends hint at lost family treasures?
Have writing from ancestors I can use to jump-time? Call me: Angel Meyers. No psychic readings or ghost exorcisms (that’s not my gig)
Angel Meyers loves cheesecake and hot men, possesses I-catch-cute-guys cleavage, and is the only person she knows with her gift. Her talent for touching handwritten documents and connecting with the mind of the writer, dead or alive, lets her delve into the past and locate lost family treasure for her clients.
When she’s hired to locate a Rembrandt lost one hundred and fifty years ago, Angel sees a whole bundle of dollar signs. If she finds the painting, her fee would be enough to buy her much dreamed of animal rescue farm.
There’s just one tricky bit, when she touches the writing of Clyde Owen Jones, the last man to know the painting’s whereabouts, Angel feels a malevolence coming off the pages and realizes Clyde was pure evil.
But the evil doesn’t remain with the dead, it’s here now, and it wants the same thing Angel does—the Rembrandt and maybe her soul. Can Tyreal the Private Investigator Angel found too hot not to hire and Viggo her guardian angel, protect her from herself and Hell’s evil?
By Cassandra L Shaw
First published in 2014
Copyright © Cassandra L Shaw 2014
Published by Twysted Publishing for Cassandra L Shaw
The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. Except for the use in any review no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person, entity, including internet search engine or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Twysted Publishing or the author Cassandra L Shaw
.
Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.
Grave Robber for Hire is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover designer Marya Heiman with Strong Image Editing
http://www.StrongImageEditing.com
Images by: George Mayer @fotolia.com & Anyka @fotolia.com
Edited by Kimberley Rieckmann of
http://www.onceuponatimeediting.com/
My husband Scott who has supported me as I stumble along in this life.
My children who make me laugh and cry and fill my heart with amazement.
My parents
Rhelma and Keith who always said I should try anything I wanted.
And to my pets: how you fill my life with love and my office with warm furry bodies.
Dedication
To Tina and Tit
Tit:
This book is dedicated to the real Tina and Tit Tit. Tina was not like her fictional character in this series. Tina was a sweet loving horse that came to us at 21 half-starved. We loved and cared for her until she passed away last year while I was writing the first draft of Grave Robber for Hire. She was 28. I miss her rumblings as she talked to me, and her gentle nature and heart. May the pastures in heaven be sweet and full of creeks for you to play in my old friend. We miss you.
And Tit Tit, you were only two my big marmalade puss when you suddenly died. You’ll always remembered and live in our hearts.
Acknowledgements:
To my critique partner Marie Dry I thank fate that you were brought into my life. We may live oceans apart but we will meet in person one day. To Maria my beta reader and Jeanine my other critique partner in this story –huge hugs and thanks.
To my writing group on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland; Writers Not Waiters, thanks for the support and laughs.
I wouldn’t have a job if the dead didn’t die with secrets. And this dead guy’s secret might just buy me my dream animal rescue farm, and a few great outfits.
Bound in faded blue leather that still flashed some original gilding, Clyde Owen Jones’ journal lay open on the coffee table. My right hand rested on the one hundred and fifty year old elaborate cursive as I readied myself to jump dimensional time.
Clyde had lost a Rembrandt three days before his death in 1877, and I’d been hired to try and locate the missing painting. My fee if I find a lost item is set at twenty percent of the item’s value. Rembrandts are worth squillions, and my share would be … umm … a fifth of a squillion more than I have now. With such a reward at stake, I wanted to locate Clyde’s Rembrandt as badly as his descendants did.
I’m Hayyel Angelina Meyers, but I prefer Angel. I have a fetish for cheesecake and hot men and possess I-hook-cute-guys cleavage. I also have a couple of extra senses I use to hunt for people’s misplaced ancestral wealth.
When I touch handwriting, my psychic gift lets me mentally jump dimensional time to view the thoughts and emotions in the writer’s mind as they write. It’s a bit like watching the past on 3D television, only the outfits are more authentic.
Metaphorically, I’m a grave robber. I don’t actually
dig
up graves. Well, okay, sometimes. But only when all evidence points to the family’s lost treasure being in the casket. Hell, when that happens, the deceased’s family throws a bring-your-own-shovel-party.
My other sense allows me to connect with a spirit through their grave but grave groveling takes longer, is not as focused, and is harder on clothes and manicures.
Seated on Claudia Reese Jones’ restored Genoa couch, I breathed in the fresh orange oil tang of her antique furniture’s polish. Viggo, my guardian angel, whom only I can see, stood eyeing Claudia’s laptop. I gave him my fiercest don’t you dare touch it look and he backed away. He relishes pulling electrical equipment apart and peering inside but can never put Humpty back together again.
Hand resting on Clyde’s writing, I let my mind go blank. The mental door to my inherited psychic gift opened. The dimensions of time and space collided in their own miniature big bang. Guiding my spiritual hand, I sorted through dates on the journal pages until the one I was looking for eased across my mind. Swirls of light and ether spun as I melded the dimensions of today and the day of the page. I pulled the portal down like a blind.
An opaque membrane of time past overlaid the now.
The OCD neat room of yesteryear appeared to be a study. Cut out newspaper articles lay stacked on the side of a large ornate oak desk. The top article headlined the story of two young brothers missing for two days who were thought to have drowned in the Brisbane River.
Behind an ornate desk sat an elegantly handsome man. Clyde Owen Jones wrote, March 12, 1876 in beautiful calligraphic script. He stiffened in his seat and his fingers clenched around his gold pen as if something disturbed or annoyed him. He shook his head and continued writing.
The thought of a roast dinner drifted into his mind.
Well that’s exciting. Time to move on.
I took a breath and opened the next page and the next. Most pages were separate days and in each time shift Clyde’s clothes and seating position changed, but he wrote mostly in the room where I first saw him.
My fingers caressed each page as I waited for him to think,
Rembrandt,
to confirm the painting had once really existed.
Didn’t matter what the client thought, I needed proof. A lot of family legends were more fantasy than fact. Diamonds morph from one carat to bigger than the Hope Diamond. A handful of gold coins suddenly filled a pirate’s chest.
At every page turn, out of the paper, a smear, a pervasive oiliness, unseen by the naked eye, stained my fingers.
Crap,
I frigging hate that stuff. The further into the journal I dove, the thicker the oil oozed until it became sludge.
I’ve experienced sludge before on other readings and I know it means an evil spirit. In one instance I discovered a man who’d enjoyed raping and beating his wife. Another time, a woman who’d killed her six babies at birth. And so many more horrors.
But Clyde’s stain wasn’t normal, it felt more viscous. Like unrefined oil, it was sticky and filthy and vile. Vile enough that it reminded me of touching my twin brother Sasha after he’d turned ten and developed psychopathic tendencies. Sasha spent five years trying to kill me. That was before he was imprisoned for butchering a few families.
I scowled, and my mouth filled with moisture that was hard to swallow. To stain Clyde’s spirit with such evil, he must have committed a truly heinous act. A heinous act I hoped I didn’t see while viewing chunks of his life.
Weeks into the journal, dressed in a formal coat with a high starched collar, Clyde’s dimensional ghost turned. His gaze met mine in a narrow stare. He curled his top lip.
My body stilled. I blinked owlishly.
Did he know I played voyeur
?
His already cut jaw took a sharper edge and his full mouth pressed into a tight line.
My heart, full and heavy in my chest, tripped in its rhythm. Fuck-a-doodle-doo,
he could see me. No. No. Angel, you’re being paranoid
, he’s looking at the wall behind you. I gave myself a mental eye roll and kept turning pages. No one in time past could see me when I time jumped.
Still, feeling a little wary, I read faster.
At last,
in the middle of the journal I came upon a page with an entry about a painting. I rubbed my evil oil-slicked digit over the word
Rembrandt
and “
Susana Dressing 1636.”
As he wrote the words, he snorted, and the feeling of ownership and pride washed through me. I didn’t catch onto his snort’s meaning, but I did an inner woo-hoo at my discovery.
I continued time reading, hoping for further details, such as whe
re the painting was hung or hidden. As I read forward, on each time shift Clyde became more and more agitated, clenching and unclenching his hands, cracking his knuckles, shifting in his seat. And he kept turning in his chair and glaring—glaring at me.
I doubted this was good.
Had I slipped up in my evoking time process and made a dimensional two-way mirror? I’d used all the usual techniques. I stopped and mentally rechecked my process. In finding no skipped steps, I read forward until I hit a page of him remembering violent sex with a woman. I blushed. Clyde spun, eyes squinted he bared his teeth at me.
Icy fingers wove a cage that encased my heart, chilling it, trapping it, entombing it.
Body stiff, hands fisted, he lurched out of his chair and lunged. The cage shattered; ice shards filled my veins causing the blood flow to freeze.
Oh Hell.
A fast hard object impacted the back of my head, cracking my nose onto the journal. Blood suddenly thawed and caused a flash-flood that roared in my ears.
My nose stung. I blinked tears away and looked over the table for what the hell hit me. The dimensional plane morphed, slid to the now, and the doorway in my mind sprang shut. Nothing lay on the table but Clyde’s journal and our teacups.
Shit, what happened?
Claudia, elegantly dressed in crisp linen blouse and navy trousers, half stood from her seat, mouth open, eyes wide. “
Wha …?”
Guess she didn’t see people smash face-first into books every day. I checked my nose for blood.
None. Good
, and put my hand on the journal to steady myself.
Viggo slapped my hand like a domineering schoolmistress.
I gave him my best hairy-eye-ball stare and slapped my hand back onto the journal. Vig flashed into my life nineteen years ago. With his taste in striped red-and-blue tunics and blue linen trousers, I estimate he died in Scandinavia about a thousand years ago.
He pushed it off again. “
Ferking idiot,” he snarled and started to garble a pile of gobbly gook I assumed to be words a pissed off ancient man would spout.
Shit.
He’d slapped me and tried to break my pretty nose to halt my time jump. Talk about getting his linen tights in a wad. We’d be having words about this later.
Rude words.
It wasn’t as if anyone in another time could touch me. Even if they could see me—
I think
.
Arms crossed, the scar bisecting his cheek whitened under the tension of his jaw. Deep and numerous scars also scored his heavily muscled arms and chest. They’d put most people in the used and abused category.
He reflected my glare tenfold.
I broke eye contact. Okay, maybe
not
rude words.
To avoid all further
schoolmarmish reprimands, I snorted to make sure my throbbing hooter still worked. My hand shaking, I picked up the tea Claudia had made for me when I first arrived and took a huge swallow. After that lot, I needed a caffeine belt.
Claudia’s perfect posture made me straighten mine. “Did you find the painting?”
Oh, please, show no concern for my pain. I sipped my tea and felt sorry for myself.
Someone
had to.
“So?”
Nothing like eagerness for vast riches to make people forget other’s needs. “Your journal tells me Clyde owned a painting he
believed
to be a Rembrandt.”
Her nostrils flared, and a tight smile tugged at her lips. I’m sure she’d have squealed if she’d been less afraid of appearing common.
“Remember a lot of believes-to-be-real turns out to be forged. Other than that, I gleaned little else from the journal. Certainly not what happened to the painting, or where Clyde could have hidden it. Do you have anything else written by him? Letters? Accounts? Other journals? Especially writing from closer to the date the painting was reported as missing.”
Claudia’s discreetly blond foiled hair shifted on her shoulders as she leaned forward and pursed her lips in a classic moue. A pale pink manicured nail tapped the journal. “You didn’t finish reading this one.”
“I’ll finish reading it at home.” When I could deal with Clyde again.
Claudia tipped her head at the ceiling. “There could be more in the loft. It has a ladder that pulls down. We’ve several tea-chests of old books stored up there.”
She looked at me, and waited—but waited for what? Ah, Claudia wanted
me
to retrieve the books.
Vig looked upward and grimaced. A loft space in Queensland’s high summer would be hotter than Hades. This morning when I viewed my wardrobe and all its themes, Goth had felt appropriate for the day. Dressed in leatherette jeans and a studded vest that displayed my cleavage to perfection, I’d melt and so would my fake tats and piercing
s. Full fake. I don’t like permanent—anything.
If my gear melted or bits fell off, my outfit’s theme would be ruined and I hate ruining a theme.
Besides, by touching the evil sludge journal I’d almost been in Hades already today.
Hell? Evil sludge? Oh shit. Shit with shit topping and a bit more shit on the side. My throat shriveled, its sides gluing together like a deflated balloon.
Evil Clyde was the one.
Yesterday, eager for the day’s first caffeine hit, I put my favorite mug under my coffee maker’s spout and hit
on
. The machine gurgled, spurt black sludge into my mug, and then exploded into a ball of blue fire and black smoke.
Smoke that morphed into the face of Satan.
Which appeared to be the dark dude’s dramatic way of warning me I’d soon face a creepy dead person in one of my cases. Like Satan, cases involving the evil departed are best avoided. The problem was, with several new cases on my books I’d had no idea which case.
I don’t understand
Satan’s Angel fascination. We’ve never met. Something I consider beneficial as I doubt it’s socially advantageous to be on the Dark Lord’s friends list.
It could be how I make my living, or it could be my great outfits and cleavage.
But after that feel up of Clyde’s journal, I was positive the Rembrandt was the case he’d murdered my coffee machine over. Thinking of Clyde’s sludge shot my eek-o-meter straight up to chicken-shit red.
Oooo
, fate’s a callous whore. Of course, it had to be the Rembrandt case. Not some
find my aunt’s wedding ring
case I’d make little money from so I could declare I found nothing and run. The universe and its perverse sense of humor knew I wouldn’t give up the chance for a bigger rescue farm and to save more animals’ lives.
Well, at least I didn’t need to speculate which new case my coffee machine had exploded for anymore. You know, cup half full, no pun intended, and all that positive crap.
Thinking life sucks, I finished my tea and pretended I didn’t understand Claudia’s hint that I go into the Hades-loft. “Not to worry, I’ll return on Wednesday if that suits you and check what you uncovered in your ceiling space.” I picked up the journal I needed to finish reading off the table. “I’ll take this with me, and finish it tonight. If you find nothing else of Clyde’s in the loft, call me.”