Witch at Heart: A Jinx Hamilton Witch Mystery Book 1 (The Jinx Hamilton Mysteries) (11 page)

L
ooking back now
, that Saturday was a big day all the way around. Mark Haskell dropped by the store around 9:30 with Chase in tow. My next-door neighbor and potential boyfriend was a man of many interests. He explained that he enjoyed doing carpentry work and sometimes helped Mark out on his jobs.

Since this project was going to be done right next door to his own shop, it made perfect sense for him to lend a hand, didn’t it?

The whole thing sounded like an excuse for Chase to spend more time in my near vicinity, which pretty much left me floating on cloud nine.

Tori and Mark hit it off immediately. His initial designs were very close to what she had in mind for her new quarters. They worked together for about an hour to refine the overall concept while Chase and I offered suggestions from the sidelines. Chase seemed to have a good sense of space, and I was intrigued by some of his creative solutions for storage options.

After Mark left, Chase asked if Tori and I would join him for supper that night. I was genuinely disappointed to have to tell him that we had another obligation. He accepted the news with graceful flexibility and suggested instead that we all have Sunday dinner at the pizzeria so Tori could meet Pete.

That option suited all concerned perfectly, and we made firm plans to convene out in front of the store at 11 o’clock the next morning in order to beat the church crowd. Chase said he’d give Pete the heads up so Tori would be able to see his living space.

As Tori watched Chase exit the store, she said, “Oh. My. God. Jinx. He's an absolute dream.”

Feigning innocence I said, “Which one? Mark or Chase?”

She gave me a mock punch in the arm. “Chase. Mark was wearing a wedding ring.”

I sighed happily. “Yeah,” I agreed. “He’s pretty dreamy, but so is Pete. I’m glad you’re going to have a chance to meet him tomorrow.”

“I could do with some dreamy," Tori said ruefully. "It would be a nice change of pace from ‘nightmare.’”

She wasn't going to get any argument from me. There was nothing I would like better than to see Tori dating a nice man who truly appreciated her. Actually, it was about time we both drew some good numbers in the romance lottery.

With our social life in order and the renovation jumpstarted, Tori and I were now free to drive up to the hiking trail where the other girl was found. If we were successful in locating the victim’s spirit, and if she agreed to come back with us, we would all go to the cemetery that evening for a ghostly summit conference.

I didn't think it was fair to ask Beth to go to the graveyard without explaining the potential consequences to her, however. The night before, Tori and I described the invisible barrier that kept the spirits confined in the burying ground and asked Beth how she felt about coming with us to meet Jane.

I wasn’t surprised when the girl’s first reaction was resistance. “If I get trapped in there,” she said in a worried voice, “then I can’t be with the cats.”

Nothing gave Beth more sense of stability than my four furry hooligans. I quietly blessed them for being so attentive to her and rewarded them with extra helpings from the small, expensive cans of chow they favored. But honestly, the bribe wasn’t necessary. The cats seem to understand that Beth truly needed them and they responded to her with loving devotion.

In the end, we settled on a compromise. Beth would come with us, but she would stay outside the cemetery fence. Tori could see her consistently now, even when I was not present, so she would stand at the gate and relay anything Beth said to me. I would be inside the graveyard talking to Jane. The arrangement would be cumbersome, a little bit like an otherworldly version of translating a United Nations’ session, but it was the best we could work out.

As Tori and I prepared to leave for the hiking trail Saturday morning, she asked me, yet again, "Should we tell Beth where we’re going?"

We’d gone back and forth on the issue of full disclosure for good reason.

"I still think the idea of asking another ghost to the party will freak her out completely,” I said. “Just talking about introducing her to Jane upset her enough. If we do get the other girl to come home with us, we’ll just have to wing it when we tell Beth."

Initially we had planned to tell Beth everything, but silently agreed to abandon the idea the evening before when the girl started doing that fading in / fading out thing during our conversation.

"I really don't blame her for getting stressed out," Tori said. "You get a few more spirits in here and this place is going to turn into a ghostly sorority house.”

How’s that for a terrifying image?

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m really not wanting to see that happen. The idea isn’t to adopt the ghosts, it’s to get them to move on.”

Do I even need to point out that being the crazy ghost lady is way worse than being the crazy cat lady?

Since it would take us at least an hour to reach the hiking trail, and another 45 minutes to get up to the spot where the skeleton was found, we packed a picnic lunch. Spring gifted us with another gorgeous day. We both enjoyed the drive, talking non-stop the whole way.

Tori filled me in at greater length about the new waitresses currently on probation at Tom’s, but changed the subject when I asked if she’d talked to her mom about the impending move.

“You can’t put it off forever,” I warned.

Giving her studious attention to the passing landscape, Tori said, “Oh, look. Trees.”

“Nice try, kiddo,” I said. “Seriously, how mad can Gemma be?”

“I don’t know,” Tori said. “How mad was your mom?”

She had me there. We let the subject drop.

The map application on Tori’s phone led us directly to the trailhead. I’m glad we used it, because we might have missed the sign otherwise.

“People have to really know about this place to find it,” I said as I climbed out of the Prius and pulled my daypack out of the backseat.

“Maybe that’s why the killer thought it would be a good place to dump a body,” Tori said, shouldering her own pack.

The ghoulish tone of our conversation seemed odd in a place filled with such natural beauty and peaceful stillness. Did you notice how I didn’t say silence? That’s because there are plenty of sounds in nature. As I locked the car, a squirrel chattered a greeting to us from high up in a tree and nearby a woodpecker hammered out an industrious rhythm.

Sounds. Not noise. Hence “stillness.”

Even though we were there to locate the ghost of a murdered girl, I felt tension I didn’t even know I was carrying start to drain out of my system.

As we started up the gentle incline into the mountains no one would have thought we were anything other than a couple of hikers out to enjoy the day.

This excursion was a little more difficult than the one we’d taken to Weber’s Gap. No memorial stone marked the place where the remains of the girl were discovered, whom were now referring to as “Twenty-Five.”

I know. Calling her a number seemed cold to us, too, but this naming thing was getting complicated. “Twenty-Five” worked because her disappearance fit the pattern chronologically between Beth and Jane.

A downtrodden strip of grass leading off to one side of the trail signaled that we had reached our destination. The temporary path led to a dug-up area at the base of a massive hickory tree. There were also a few telltale pieces of yellow crime scene tape still clinging to the underbrush.

"This looks like the place," I said. "Now what?”

"I guess you do your thing," Tori said, making a little “go on” motion with her hand.

My
thing
? Oh, yeah. That helped.

"Oh, really,” I said in exasperation. “My thing? What is that exactly?”

“Whatever you did with the other two?” Tori offered weakly.

"The other two just came to me. I have no idea how to summon a ghost."

“Why don’t you just try asking?” an angry, sarcastic voice said from behind me. “Or is that too polite for you high-and-mighty living people?”

I almost jumped out of my skin.

Why the heck do they always have to do that?

I whirled around, which was a pretty good clue to Tori that we were no longer alone.

“Do we have incoming?” she asked.

“We have contact,” I answered.

Tori looked over my left shoulder and gasped. It was a third ghost, alright, but this one was nothing like Jane and Beth.

The other girls looked much as I imagined they had in life. This spirit, however, bore the marks of the cruel abuses that took her life away. She’d been hit in the head with such force that the entire left side of her skull sagged inward. A frozen river of dried blood ran down her neck and into her filthy, torn blouse. I didn’t have to be a doctor to know that no one could have survived a blow like that.

She glared at us with red-rimmed eyes and demanded sharply, "What the hell are you looking at?"

Not exactly the reception we had in mind.

“Uh, hi,” I said lamely. “I’m Jinx and this is Tori.”

“What did you do with my body?” the girl said furiously. “I want it back. Now.”

“We didn’t have anything to do with your body being taken away,” I said. “We came up here to try to help you.”

“Help me by giving me my body back!” the girl screamed.

Even though the sun was still shining brightly, the air around us turned cold and clammy, and I felt a prickly, electric sensation pulsing up my arms. The girl took a menacing step toward us. Instinctively, I put my hand up. When I did, an arc of blue light shot out from my fingertips and spread into a shield-like field that held the spirit at bay.

“Whoa!” Tori said. “Good one.”

The ghost was no longer coming toward us, but sheer fury rolled off her in palpable waves. “I want my body back” she said again. “You had no right to take it away.”

Okay. Let’s try this again.

“The police took your body away,” I said. “We aren’t the police and we don’t want to hurt you.”

“You can’t hurt me,” the girl said. “I’ve already been hurt.” As she spoke, she raised her hand and pushed her long, tangled hair aside to reveal the true devastation to her ruined head. Hurt was an understatement.

“Who did that to you?” I asked.

“He did it,” the ghost said. “He told me I was beautiful and then he turned me into this.”

“Who was he?” I pressed. “We think he hurt others like you. We want him to be punished.”

The ghost threw her head back and screamed again. “I don’t care about the others! He took everything from
me
. Doesn’t anybody care about
me
?”

“Narcissistic much?” Tori muttered.

“We care about you,” I said, lowering my hand. As I did, the blue light dimmed and the shield grew smaller. “See? I don’t want to hurt you. If I make the light go away completely will you talk to us?”

I was trying to sound like I knew what I was doing, which I didn’t, at all.

“What do you want?” The words came out in a snarl, but the spirit didn’t try to charge us again.

“I just want to know anything you remember about the person who did this to you,” I said.

“He asked me why I couldn’t be good and do as I was told like the first one,” she said.

“Do you know who the first one was?”

“Little Miss Rah Rah,” she sneered. “He showed me the pictures.”

Beth. She was a cheerleader and she remembered a camera.

“Do you know your own name?” I asked. “Can you tell us who you are?

A look of painful confusion washed over her features. “I was
someone
,” she said, her voice rising again. “He took me because he thought I was nobody. But I was
somebody
. I was!”

The wind howled as she surged forward. I brought my hand up again and this time she collided with the blue light. There was a blinding flash, and then we were alone again.

“Holy unhappy haunting, Batman,” Tori said. “That is one seriously pissed off ghost.”

S
o much for
the theory that all ghosts have a fairly benign afterlife and for the idea I can’t work magic outside of the shop. Tori and I came about halfway back down the trail before we stopped to eat lunch just to put some distance between us and that less-than-blithe spirit.

“At least we know that we have the order of the killings right,” Tori said, unwrapping her turkey sandwich. “First Beth, then Anger Management Girl, and then Jane.”

“Those are the killings we know of,” I pointed out as I opened a bag of chips. “There could have been others.”

“You know what I think?” Tori asked, taking two chips and munching contemplatively.

“What?”

“I think Twenty-Five was a runaway. That could be why she said she was taken because the killer thought she was a nobody. She might not have even been from this part of the country.”

That would explain a lot. Even street-smart runaways could get desperate enough for help and fall in with the wrong person.

“Maybe Jane was a runaway, too,” I suggested. “Which kind of makes it pointless to take Beth to the cemetery tonight.”

“No,” Tori said, “it doesn’t.”

“Why not?”

“They both saw the killer,” she said. “All we need is for one of them to remember something."

"You know," I answered uneasily, "I realize we’ve already talked this to death, but I’m still not so sure about that part. I mean, I know we want to solve this and help them move on, whatever that means, but is it right to ask the girls to relive what happened to them?"

Tori considered that for a minute. "Are you thinking they both went through something like what happened to Twenty-Five?”

"According to the authorities, both Beth and Jane died of blunt force trauma to the head," I said. "They must have been hurt the same way. We only saw Beth’s skull from the front. We have no idea what the damage to her head really looked like.”

"True,” Tori conceded. “But if she and Jane were both killed like that, why do they look so normal now? I mean ‘normal’ as in dead, but not gross dead like Twenty-Five.”

I shook my head. "I don't know, maybe because they were happier people in real life? Regardless, I'm just not sure it's right of us to ask them to relive the last horrible minutes of their lives.”

"They do both seem to be pretty fragile," Tori admitted. "According to the other ghosts at the cemetery, Jane is sad all the time and she cries a lot, and Beth winks on and off like Christmas lights."

"She just does that when she's nervous," I said defensively.

I sounded like an overprotective parent making excuses for her nervous child.

"I know," Tori said placatingly. "I wasn't criticizing her. She kind of grows on you, doesn't she?”

"Yes, she does," I said. "I mean, would it really be so bad for her to just stay with us at the store?"

There it was. I finally said it. I wanted to adopt a ghost.

"No," Tori said contemplatively, "it wouldn't be so bad. All she wants to do is sit on the couch with the cats and watch TV. It's not like she's a problem for anybody, but don't you think the choice has to be up to her? Isn't it up to us to give her options?”

That was a point I hadn't considered at all.

Beth wasn't making any choices on her own. She was just going along with whatever we said. I was the one who thought of death as an incurable condition, and yet the ghosts at the cemetery seemed to have accepted their existence, confined or not, and Aunt Fiona would probably be on the cover of the next afterlife edition of
People
.

Who did we think we were with all this talk of sending Beth and Jane ‘on’?

We needed to empower them to go wherever they wanted to go. Our real purpose in all this was to give them options, even in death. Now that was a goal I
could
get my head wrapped around.

“You know," I said, looking at Tori fondly, "sometimes you're pretty smart."

She gave me a look of doe-eyed innocence. "Who, me?"

Tori excelled at helping me work through my problems. It was one of the great blessings of our friendship. She was extending the same quality of friendship to the two dead girls, whereas I had been seeing them both as stray cats to be adopted, or worse yet, projects to be completed.

“Okay,” I said, “the cemetery it is.”

I started to bag up the remains of my lunch. The first rule of being a good steward of nature? Leave nothing but footprints.

Before I could finish, Tori put her hand on my arm. I looked up questioningly.

“Uh, Jinksy,” she said. “We’re kind of not done with this conversation. What the heck did you just do up there anyway?”

Oh. That blue light cosmic ghost-repelling shield thing? Yeah, I guess that was conversation worthy.

“I honestly don’t know,” I admitted. “I think it was just the opposite of how I bring things toward me, but I really thought I could only do that inside the store with Myrtle’s help.”

“Were you trying to stop Twenty-Five?”

“Not really,” I said. “It just happened. I was afraid she was going to hurt us and I wanted to push her away. Putting my hand up was a reflex, and the next thing I know, I’m all Miss Laser Light Show.”

“It was pretty impressive,” Tori said. “And the automatic reverse thing makes sense.”

“Huh?”

“Well, if you can pull something, you ought to be able to push it, too. Isn’t that like a rule we learned in science class junior year? Something the apple guy said?”

She was talking about Sir Isaac Newton, not Steve Jobs.

Yeah, I might not have gone to college, but I read -- a lot.

It’s one of the laws of motion. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Loose translation, if I can pull, I can also push. Did that mean all my powers had a reverse mode?

That was just too much for me to think about at the moment and I said so. “TMI, Tori,” I declared. “Let’s just be glad the Push-Me / Pull-Me thing worked and that Twenty-Five left us alone.”

“Trust me,” Tori said shuddering, “this is me being glad, very glad.”

We finished packing up the remains of our lunch and walked back to the car pretty much in silence, letting the peaceful landscape take the edge off our encounter with Twenty-Five. I was fairly sure we could help Beth and Jane, but I wasn’t sure about this latest ghost. What level of justice could possibly make up for what she had gone through?

File that question away for future reference. We’re not done with it.

On the way back home, I spotted a sign for the Briar Hollow Family Campground. “Hey! That’s where Beth was the night she disappeared,” I said. “Let’s have a look around.”

Pulling off the back-country road, I guided the Prius down a dirt lane for about a mile and a half. The campground was exactly what I would have expected to find; a temporary community of recreational vehicles of varying sizes, interspersed with tents, all occupying assigned and numbered spaces. In the center, however, stood a massive building that had been constructed to resemble a vintage barn.

"That must be where the party was held," I said.

Just then, an older man wearing an beat up, disheveled hat waved us to a stop.

When I rolled the window down, he barked, “Campers only. No Lookie Loos.Turn around and get out.”

“I am so sorry, sir,” I said, putting on my best manners. “I’m new in town and my friend and I were just exploring the countryside. We didn’t mean to break the rules.”

He regarded me with keenly suspicious eyes. “New in town?” he rasped. “Doing what?”

“My aunt, Fiona Ryan, ran a store on the courthouse square,” I said. “She left it to me.”

To my utter astonishment, the old coot threw his head back and let out a cackling rattle of laughter. “Fiona Ryan’s niece. Now that’s rich.”

“Excuse me?” I said, a little ice creeping into my tone of voice.

“There was no love lost between me and that crazy aunt of yours,” he snapped. “Now get the hell off my land and don’t come back.”

“Not a problem,” I said, rolling the window up and putting the car in reverse. I spun the tires a little, which is not easy to do in a Prius, because the exit called for a display of attitude.

“What the heck was his problem?” Tori asked, peering in the rearview mirror.

“I have no idea,” I said. “But if Aunt Fiona didn’t like him, neither do I.”

Maybe not the most mature statement I made that day, but true all the same.