Witch at Heart: A Jinx Hamilton Witch Mystery Book 1 (The Jinx Hamilton Mysteries) (10 page)

The sound of voices from the other room made me rethink the wisdom of having this conversation where we might be overheard. Or rather where
I
might be overheard.

“Let’s go back to the store,” I suggested. “We can talk about it there.”

A
s we crossed the street
, it suddenly occurred to me that not everyone lived and died by cell phone the way Tori and I did. The shop still had a hardwired telephone, which meant there was probably a local phone book somewhere under the counter.

It didn’t even take a minute for me to produce a slender local directory printed on cheap paper and stuffed with advertisements. Thumbing to the “b” section, I ran my finger down the list: Barden, Barker, Barland, Barlow.

I looked up at the ghostly girl I now had to learn to think of as Beth. “Does the name Emily Barlow mean anything to you?”

Beth nodded. “Yes, that’s my mom. Can we go see her?”

It didn’t seem to occur to Beth that she didn’t need me to take her to see her mother. Asking permission and being polite were so ingrained in this girl even thirty years after her death, that striking out on her own was an alien concept.

And that, more than anything else, continued to bug me.

How does a girl like that wind up getting murdered? I found it really hard to believe that Beth’s story would turn out to be anything more than the classic “wrong place wrong time” storyline.

“I don’t know your mom,” I explained patiently. “I can’t just go over there and tell her that her daughter’s ghost is with me and wants to talk to her. She’ll think I’m nuts, Beth, or worse yet that I’m some kind of con artist trying to get money out of her or something. Besides, we don’t even know what happened to you yet.”

Beth took that in for a minute and then pointed at my laptop sitting on the counter by the cash register. “Won’t that tell us?” she asked. “My friend Joey had a Commodore 64, but I think your MacBook is a lot smarter.”

Uh, yeah. Steve Jobs just did a grave spin on that one. But Beth did have a point.

I opened the laptop, went to my browser, and searched Google for, “Beth Barlow Briar Hollow 1985.”

It was odd reading the accounts of a missing girl’s disappearance with the victim herself looking over my shoulder. In life, Beth didn’t just have fun, she was the most popular girl in the Briar Hollow High Class of 1985. She was head cheerleader and the senior class favorite, an accomplished pianist, and president of the school’s Future Homemakers of America chapter.

Beth went missing on a Friday night after the homecoming game -- still wearing the same corsage she’d remembered that morning when she stood looking at the florist’s shop. According to her grief-stricken mother, Beth asked for permission to attend a chaperoned, alcohol-free party after the game.

Witnesses at the party said that Beth went to her car to get her jacket a little before 11 o’clock. It was midnight before her classmates realized she hadn’t come back. Going to check on her, they found the car door open and her letter jacket lying on the front seat. There was no sign of a struggle, and Beth was never seen again.

“Do you remember any of this?” I asked, turning toward the girl.

She nodded. “It was cold that night,” she said. “The party was up at the Briar Hollow Family Campground in the big party room. When I went out to the car, someone came up behind me, I think. There was this rag over my nose and it smelled awful. All gross and sweet.”

I turned back to the computer and did another Google search. According to Wikipedia, chloroform is a “colorless, sweet-smelling, dense liquid.”

“Somebody knocked you out,” I said. “Do you remember anything after that?”

“I think I was in some kind of big, open space,” she said. “Someone was taking pictures of me.” Her form wavered in and out, a disruption I had learned meant she was agitated and afraid.

“I don’t want to talk about that,” she said, fading out again. “That’s a bad thing and I don’t want to talk about it.”

“That’s okay,” I said, quickly closing the laptop. “You don’t have to talk about it. I promise.”

My assurances seemed to help Beth to solidify herself, but her voice still quivered when she said plaintively. “I want to go see the cats now.”

“You go on, honey,” I said sympathetically. “They love it when you sit with them. Don’t be upset, Beth. Everything’s going to be okay.”

I didn’t even get the last words out before she was gone.

That evening when Tori called on Facetime, she frowned and leaned in toward the camera. “What are you doing in the storeroom?” she asked. Then she spotted our resident rat sitting on my shoulder. “Hi Rodney!”

I kid you not, Rodney picked up his little paw and waved at the screen.

“He’s going to talk one of these days,” I said, looking at Rodney and then turning my attention back to Tori. “I’m downstairs because I really don’t want Beth to hear all this again”

Tori frowned. “Who’s Beth?”

“Grace,” I answered. “Her real name is Elizabeth Barlow and she went missing after the homecoming game in 1985.”

I explained everything I’d learned that day to Tori, who listened without interrupting me until I got to the part about Beth’s memory of the chloroform.

“Bastard,” she muttered darkly.

“Agreed,” I said. “Beth got so upset at that point that she didn’t want to talk anymore, but she did say she thought she had been taken to a big, open place, and she remembered a camera.”

“Let me correct myself,” Tori said. “
Sick
bastard. So you think the killer is someone local?”

“Maybe,” I said, “but I am pretty certain that Beth is the only local
victim
. No other girls have gone missing in Briar Hollow since her disappearance.”

I had confirmed this fact after three hours of digging through the online files of the
Briar Hollow Banner
. Think “small town newspaper hell.”

“Of course no other girls have gone missing in town,” Tori said. “He couldn’t take any more locally. The risk of getting caught would be too high.”

You see? You don’t have to obsessively watch
CSI
and
Criminal Minds
to figure these things out.

“So why dump the bodies on the hiking trails?” I asked. “He could get caught just as easily doing that.”

The camera jiggled as Tori shifted on the couch. Beside me, Rodney bobbed his head in time with the screen until her image went still again. “I’ve been thinking about that,” she said. “He only dumped Jane. He buried Beth and the other girl.”

“You looked her up?” I asked.

“Better than that,” Tori said. “A couple of state troopers came in the cafe today. I told them I was one of the rule-breakers who found the skeleton up by Weber’s Gap and asked them if they thought there was a connection to the other body found near Sparta.”

I could just see the innocent-eyed performance she’d put on while no doubt keeping the troopers’ coffee cups filled to the rim.

“What did they say?”

“Those bones were found pretty much the same way we said we found Grace,” Tori explained. “A couple out bird watching crouched down by a old log to watch a bunch of turkeys. When the woman looked down, there was a skull by her foot.”

I frowned. “Another skull beside a tree that had fallen over? That’s no coincidence.”

“I said that to the trooper,” Tori told me. “He was the younger, better looking one, by the way.”

Of course he was.

“His partner was in the men’s room,” Tori went on. “He told me the official theory is that the killer buried the two girls at the base of those trees so he would have a marker. I think he planned to do the same thing with Jane’s body, but something interrupted him and he couldn’t go back and finish the job.”

“You mean the killer wanted a marker so he could go back to where he left the bodies?” I asked. “God. That is disgusting.”

“They say serial killers do that kind of thing all the time,” she observed solemnly.

“Who are ‘they?’”

“The people on the forums where I’ve been lurking,” she answered. “These nutjobs are completely obsessed with sicko serial killers. Do you know that some of the women on those message boards actually write letters to murderers in prison?”

I shuddered. “Thank God we can stop looking into this as soon as we find out Jane’s real name.”

Tori looked at me like I had two heads. “We have to catch this guy,” she said.

Note the once again dangerous usage of the word “we.”

“No
we
don’t,” I said sternly. “We promised a ghost we’d figure out her name. Finding Beth was just an accident. She wants to see her mother and then she can move on.”

“To where?” Tori asked seriously.

Okay. Unfair pop quiz if I ever heard one.

“I don’t know,” I stammered. “Into that light people are always talking about.”

Tori looked at me and then asked in her grown-up voice, “Jinx, have you even started trying to learn about all these things?”

“Of course I have,” I said defensively. “I told you about the psychometry.”

Tori shook her head. “That was so you could understand what’s happening to
you
. I mean have you started trying to understand what’s happening to
them
. Do you even have a clue why they’re still here?”

“Isn’t it because they don’t know who they are?” I said. “I mean, that’s pretty much what they’ve told us.”

“That’s what they’ve told us because that’s all they understand,” Tori said. “Jinx, I know you’ve had a lot of surprises these last few days what with the witch powers and the ghosts and everything, but you have to get up to speed here. From what I’m reading, the girls could still be here because their spirits want justice. For all we know, there’s another lonely ghost up on that trail in Sparta wanting the same thing.”

Oh no. No, no, no, no.

I didn’t realize I was shaking my head until Tori started laughing at me.

“You already know what I’m going to say, don’t you?” she asked.

“You’re fixing to tell me we’re going hiking next weekend, and I’m telling you we’re not,” I said.

Tori knew me well enough to understand I was nearing my limit. “Okay,” she said, “how about this? I’ll send you a bunch of links and some book titles. You do the reading. If you don’t come to the same conclusion, we won’t go up to the other hiking trail. We’ll just make sure Beth sees her mother and we’ll try to figure out Jane’s name and be done with it. Okay?”

I agreed, but I already suspected there was a catch. Tori does not give up that easily. Color me right.

T
he rest
of the week was normal -- or as normal as life was ever going to be in a self-aware store with a hyper-intelligent rat and a resident teenage ghost coming to terms with being murdered before her life even really began.

If it sounds like I was taking all of this in stride, I'm telling the story the wrong way. Honestly, I think I always believed in the possibility of ghosts, I just never expected to have one living with me. For the most part, Beth seemed extraordinarily normal. We had conversations. She asked questions. She wanted to understand how the world had changed without her. I did my best to offer explanations and to feed her obvious interest.

But then, without warning, she would lapse into foggy confusion. She didn’t always seem to get that death is basically an incurable condition. This was particularly evident when she asked to see her mother. Those were the times when my heart really ached for her. The kid just wanted to talk to her mom. I had no idea how to set something like that up, or even if I should try.

Just for the heck of it I watched a few episodes of
Ghost Whisperer
on Netflix. Come on! If Jennifer Love Hewitt couldn't always make people listen when she told them she was seeing dead folks, how was I supposed to do it?

The more I thought about the situation, the more troubled I became over exactly how I was supposed to help Beth and Jane. Was it my job to get them to some sort of portal? This “door” everyone seems to talk about? Was I supposed to be the one to show them “the light?” If so, man, were we in trouble. In the celestial lighting department, I’m not even a 40-watt bulb.

And what was the deal with Aunt Fiona? She seemed to be rocking the afterlife. Was that because she was a witch or because she died without any unfinished business weighing her down? Or was she really in the same situation as Beth and Jane and just didn’t want to tell me?

Tori and I talked every night about the wisdom of taking Beth to the cemetery to meet Jane. The longer we discussed it, the more we agreed that risky or not, it was a meeting that needed to happen. We had to find out if there was any common ground between the two girls. Maybe the fact that Beth now remembered parts of her life would help to trigger similar memories for Jane.

For the time being I settled on letting Beth do whatever seemed to give her the most comfort. That basically amounted to sitting on my couch with my cats watching TV. I did mention that Beth is a forever teenager, right?

All in all, I think she was handling the culture shock pretty well. She checked out in a
Dynasty
world and came back right in the middle of
Keeping up with the Kardashians
. Have you ever tried to explain to anyone that Kim is famous just for being famous?

Everyday things I took for granted left Beth wide-eyed with wonder. My cell phone fascinated her. When she died, the average cell phone had a battery life of 10 minutes and weighed 5 lbs.

I didn’t mind answering her questions, and there were plenty of them. It made me feel like her big sister, but get your head wrapped around this idea. I was born
after
Beth died.

She had a lot of catching up to do and I was her only source for information. It wasn’t like she could use Google herself, although she certainly had me consulting the search engine daily.

As for me, I would have been perfectly happy to sit on the couch with the cats, too. I don’t like disruption, and I was ready for that to be over. Not that I thought the end was in sight, but a girl can dream -- and get her comfortable, predictable ruts in place.

I do best when I have routines. Even with everything else that was going on, I quickly settled into the rhythm of store life. The local soap maker came into town on Wednesday with a wonderful selection of her products. We struck up an agreement on the spot. She had a friend who raised alpacas to harvest the fiber, which she then spun and dyed by hand to make luscious scarves and sweaters. By Thursday, a small assortment of those items was also on display downstairs.

Myrtle was helpful with all the changes I was making in a way I interpreted as support. When I was alone in the store, I continued the process of rearranging and sorting. Sometimes, without my asking, that strange disembodied spotlight would fall on a cabinet or drawer and I’d find more merchandise in keeping with my current organizational scheme.

Every morning I went out and swept off the front sidewalk, saying good morning first to Festus sunning on his bench, and then to Chase who began watching for me and coming out with a hot cup of coffee in each hand.

I enjoyed those few minutes of chat with him at the start of the day and twice accepted his invitation to have a sandwich in his shop over the noon hour. We were still in the process of getting to know one another, so there were lively discussions about everything from books and cats, to my future plans for the store.

The contractor, Mark Haskell, dropped by and took some measurements out back, promising to return Saturday morning when Tori was in town. He was enthusiastic about the project and his early price estimates were beyond reasonable given the quality of the work I saw at the pizzeria.

All in all, life began to take on a feeling of progress and accomplishment that was both satisfying and exciting. At some point in every day, I took a few minutes to practice my ability to manipulate objects, improving my focus and control. I also tried a couple of cautious psychometry experiments with objects in the store.

According to my visions, the silver-headed cane in the umbrella stand belonged to a World War I veteran who carried a fragment of shrapnel from the Somme in his leg for life. The vintage ladies’ hat, complete with feather and net veil, harbored the details of a somewhat torrid affair between a local society matron and the Methodist minister from the 1950s.

Frankly, that kind of thing was fun, but I also had serious metaphysical business that required my attention. Each day after I closed and locked the front door, I devoted the evening hours to research. That first morning when I levitated the figurine and had coffee with my dead aunt in the kitchen, “reality” became a multi-faceted concept for me.

If anyone else had come to me with that story, by the way, “reality” is not the word I would have used. I probably would have asked what they had been smoking.

It's hard to describe my mindset during those first days, because my thoughts were all over the place. I like a healthy dose of good fortune as well as the next person. Give me a rabbit’s foot I’ll carry it. But frankly I think you’ll cultivate better karma leaving it on the rabbit where it belongs.

Over the years, I’ve certainly thrown my fair share of coins into wishing wells. I don't risk walking under ladders. And Friday the 13th is not my favorite day in any month. In the magic / superstition category I’d say I’m pretty average -- or at least I was until life threw me a curveball.

Aunt Fiona’s wine bottle note said my powers were still sorting themselves out. That added an element of uncertainty to my daily life that I really wasn't ready to cope with. I needed to take charge.

Tori gave me a good suggestion when she said I should get to work learning about what it really means to be a witch and to be dealing with ghosts and powers, and God only knows what else.

Judging from the extensive list of web links and books Tori emailed to me, she was already several steps ahead of me in the “learning how to be a witch’s best friend” category.

I wasn't silly enough to think that a wart would suddenly appear on the end of my nose or that I needed to run out and buy a pointy black hat. I did wonder, however, if I needed to join a coven or try to meet others like myself. Was there a union? Or, for that matter,
were
there any others like me?

Aunt Fiona said she gifted me with my magical powers. Did that rule out the possibility that being a witch was hereditary? Suddenly, I was filled with questions and hungry for answers.

In my childhood, my mother dragged me to church just enough that I was now vaguely uneasy that I might be involved in something associated with devil worship. Getting my head wrapped around the notion of “white” witches versus “black” witches took up the better part of a day.

After reading several Wiccan websites, I was relieved to learn that the religion doesn’t divide the world into opposing camps of ultimate good and ultimate evil. Satan is pretty much a Christian construct and I was good with him getting the heck behind me and staying there. All the Wiccan pages talked about being in balance with nature, which I immediately liked. I mean seriously, isn’t that what the Golden Rule is all about?

But then I came to understand that modern Wicca is just the tip of the witch iceberg. There are many, many traditions of witchcraft spread out over centuries of folklore and mythology from all over the world. Something Joseph Campbell talked about in
The Power of Myth
just blew my mind. A myth isn’t necessarily false, it’s just somebody else’s explanation for what you call religion.

For the first time in my life, I wasn’t just thinking outside the proverbial box, I was building a different box altogether.

Please don’t get the idea that I just took a few days and figured everything out. It’s an ongoing process. Asking questions and learning new things is what my life is about now. Actually, I think it’s a major part of
being
alive. If my new identity as a witch has brought me anything, it's a reawakening of my native curiosity and a reopening of my heart to the potential for miracles.

That’s pretty happy stuff, people. In fact, it’s often downright joyous.

There’s more in the world we don't understand than what we do.

From my perspective, that’s pretty darn cool.

That single realization changed my thinking about going after the third ghost and trying to help them all move on. If potential was opening up before my eyes right and left, how could I deny a chance to access that same magic to girls whose spirits were trapped in an earthbound existence not of their own choosing?

I didn't completely understand why Jane and Beth were different from Aunt Fiona or Colonel Longworth and the others. All I really knew about ghostly social structure came from my initial conversation with the Colonel in the cemetery.

He told me Aunt Fiona believed all of them were trapped in the graveyard because they had unfinished business. That explanation held up just fine until Beth showed up. Her grave wasn’t in a cemetery and she had complete freedom of movement. To my way of thinking, not knowing the identity of your murderer qualified as “unfinished business,” but Jane seemed to care more about discovering her name than learning who killed her.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Every rule has an exception, which does nothing to make the exceptions less annoying.

There was one thing I did know for certain, however. Jane and Beth weren’t happy, or even content like the cemetery ghosts seemed to be. I might not be able to help any of these spirits find some light to walk into, but I
might
be able to help the murdered girls find some measure of peace.

When Tori arrived at the shop around 5 o’clock Friday afternoon, Myrtle started playing the tune from
Ghostbusters
the minute my BFF walked in the door.

“Way to steal a girl’s thunder, Myrtle,” I said, as the music died down.

As Tori hugged me hello, she asked, “Does that mean what I think it means?”

“Yeah,” I said, hugging her back. “We’re going looking for another ghost.”