Witch at Heart: A Jinx Hamilton Witch Mystery Book 1 (The Jinx Hamilton Mysteries) (16 page)

“
Y
ou didn’t tell
me there would be bugs out here,” Tori hissed, slapping at her neck. “You know I do not
do
bugs.”

“Tori, we’re
outside
,” I hissed back. “Bugs live outside. We are technically in their house. They have the
right
to bite us.”

“What are you, a lawyer for the Insect Civil Liberties Union?”

“Would you hush! This is supposed to be a stealth operation.”

“Are you sure you don’t have some magic insect-repelling power you haven’t discovered yet?”

“
Hush
!”

This back and forth had been going on for a quarter of a mile. The instant Tori stepped out of the car, which we parked at the rest area, the mosquitos targeted her as their blood bank du jour. I, on the other hand, was so slathered down with anti-bug chemicals I could have been a walking citronella candle.

We were both dressed in dark clothing and were carrying small LED flashlights, but so far we’d been able to stick to the shoulder of the road as our guide. We didn’t see a single car, which also helped and bolstered our confidence that we could pull this excursion off undetected.

On Saturday, the campground had been filled to near capacity, but this was a Thursday night and school wouldn’t be out for the summer for another 2 or 3 weeks. Plus, it was almost midnight. The only people likely to be in mobile residence were retirees, whom I hoped had already turned in for the night.

As we drew closer to the main entrance, Tori quieted down, either because the mosquitos had stopped torturing her or because she was too nervous to care anymore. I couldn’t make out any lights through the trees, which was a good sign, and no man-made sounds disturbed the night.

After Tori brought up the possibility of electronic surveillance equipment at the gate, we agreed to first look for telltale indicator lights, visible power cables, or any suspicious boxes mounted on the gate posts or nearby trees. When we found none of those things, Tori looked at me, pointed toward the gate and mimed going over with a questioning look on her face.

I nodded and climbed over first. If we were going to get nailed by a blinding spotlight or set off a warning claxon, the blame should fall squarely on me since this was my idea. For just a reluctant second I sat on the top rail, then lightly dropped to the ground and waited for the worst. Nothing happened.

Tori scrambled over the gate and joined me. We were now officially breaking the law, something neither one of us had done since were in high school, and back then firecrackers and a knot hole in a tree were involved.

The driveway leading into the campground was smooth enough that even in the dim moonlight, we could walk with a fair degree of confidence. Low clouds scudded overhead, making the limited illumination uneven at best. Still, we could see well enough to make slow but steady progress, and thankfully our eyes were completely adjusted to the darkness after the walk from the rest area.

When I could just make out the dim outline of the big building in the center of the compound, I put my hand on Tori’s arm to signal her to stop. Leaning in, I whispered, “We have to get off the road now. The tree is off to the left here. The ground is grassy, but I don’t know how smooth it is, so be careful. Stick close to me.”

“You don’t have to worry about that,” Tori whispered back. “I’m stuck to you like glue.”

Our pace slowed over the unpredictable terrain. In daylight, the walk might have taken 10 minutes, but at least half an hour passed before we came upon a massive hickory tree. I can’t tell you how I knew, but I was certain we’d reached our destination.

I stopped Tori again with my hand.

“This is it?” she asked softly.

“Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive,” I said.

“Now what?”

What did she mean, “now what?” We only came out here for one reason.

“I touch the tree,” I answered.

When I said it, I started forward, but this time Tori put a restraining hand on my arm. “You don’t know what’s going to happen, Jinksy. I don’t like this.”

Now was a heck of a time to be having second thoughts.

“If I get in trouble, pull me off the tree.”

“How will I know if you're in trouble?”

Just then, the moon broke through the clouds again. I looked at Tori, really looked at her, and said from the heart, “You’ll know. I trust you.”

In the dim light, Tori smiled at me lovingly. “Okay, kiddo,” she whispered. “Do your thing.”

For the record, I don’t just trust Tori with my life, I trust her with my
cats’
lives. That’s how close we are.

That night, I didn’t have to tell her that my heart was hammering in my chest or that I was sweating bullets.

She didn’t have to tell me that she was in pretty much the same condition.

We each knew the other was scared, but I was the one getting ready to use a barely controlled magical power to explore a potential murder site.

I don’t think I would have even considered trying that without Tori there.

Together we always have the courage to do what we don’t believe we can do alone.

That’s another kind of magic. It’s called friendship.

As I stepped forward, hands outstretched, I realized this was the first time I was intentionally going in search of a bad memory. That’s what I was thinking about -- to the complete exclusion of something so obvious to me now, I can’t believe how clueless I was in that critical moment.

Trees are alive.

The tree reached for me at the same time I reached for it.

The point where we met wasn’t exactly a joining of minds, but an ancient awareness did surge through me. It wasn’t just the life of
this
tree, rooted in this spot. There were other lives there with us; the tree that seeded this one, and all the trees that came before it. The line stretched back to a primordial world where this life form had no name, it just was.

With that flooding awareness came a deeply felt dignity that resonated with me like a flavor. With it came the taste of sadness and the residue of lingering anger. The spirit of the tree felt aggrieved and dishonored. The slow thrumming of its sap fused with my bloodstream and drove me to follow my instinct and dive deeper into this alien sentience.

Until this joining, my power had been nothing but a parlor trick pulling memories out of hats. Now my heart took a true leap of faith. With complete conviction, I knew the tree meant me no harm. Drawing my thoughts together, I sent a request deep into the life pulsating under my hands. “Tell me.”

I felt drawn into the tree’s protective embrace as a single word echoed in my mind. “Watch.”

Layers of time peeled away in the passing of seasons and the moods of the weather. There was the heat of lazy summer and the bite of icy winter, the wash of torrential rain and the tearing force of the wind. And then we arrived, on a night much like this one, under scudding clouds and transient moonlight, to a time when tight ropes cut into the hickory’s bark, telegraphing the frantic vibrations of a trapped girl’s struggles to free herself.

Without warning, a second awareness filled me. I was reliving the last moments of Beth’s life. The bindings cut into my own straining flesh. My lungs burned from the effort to escape until my head dropped to my chest in weary defeat. It was only then, as I watched shadows dancing on the ground, that I realized the flickering light wasn’t coming from the moon.

Summoning all my willpower, I looked up. There was a video camera mounted on a tripod and outfitted with some kind of night-vision light. Then I saw him; a young boy, barely a teenager, dressed in a native loincloth, and clutching a tomahawk.

“Please stop fighting it,” the boy said. “This will hurt, but not for long, and then I’ll bring you back.”

Sick panic and dread turned my stomach sour. I spoke, but the voice that escaped my dry lips and parched throat wasn’t my own. It was Beth.

“Please. You don't have to do this. Just let me go. I won’t tell anyone. I promise.”

The words seemed to puzzle the boy. “But I have to do this,” he said. “This is the only way I can bring her back.”

With that cryptic phrase, he raised the tomahawk and started forward.

A surge of adrenaline rushed through me as I strained one final time against the ropes. One of the knots gave way and I frantically struggled free of the cords. My limbs, numb from being bound so tightly, failed me, and I hit the ground hard, but I didn’t stay there.

A sharp rock cut into the palm of my right hand. The pain focused me, bringing me to my feet and propelling me away from my attacker. The boy struck out with the tomahawk, but I deflected the blow, careless of the hot blood now coursing down my arm from the weapon’s cutting edge.

The boy reacted wildly, grabbing for me to drag me back, tie me down, kill me. We knocked the video camera over, the camera itself shattering and falling away from the base. On instinct, the boy snatched up the tripod, swung it in a wide arc, and smashed it into my skull. The reverberation deafened me at the same time a sickening blackness drew me down into a gulf from which there was no return.

Beth’s voice was there, but so was Twenty-Five’s and Jane’s, and other voices I didn’t recognize, all howling in anguish. They’d all died right here on this spot.

No one had been there to save them from that black void, but I had Tori.

At that instant, she pulled me away from the tree. We both fell backwards, but Tori absorbed the impact with her body, holding me in a tight and protective embrace. As if from a very great distance, I heard her calling me.

“Jinx,” she commanded. “Wake up.”

When I didn’t respond, she resorted to using my mother’s voice. “Norma Jean Hamilton, you mind me.”

I woke up.

Looking up at her, I said weakly, “You don’t have to go all Kelly on me.”

Tears welled in her eyes. “And you don’t have to scare the living daylights out of me.”

My senses were still tied to the tree’s awareness of its world. I felt him before I heard him.

“Tori,” I said softly. “We’re not alone out here.”

“No, you’re not,” a man said.

Turning my head, I looked up into the face of WJ Evers -- and into the barrel of the pistol he was holding in his hand.

“It would appear we have a problem,” he said pleasantly. “You see, it’s almost time to try again, and I can’t let you tell anyone anything to call attention to this place.”

Tori’s hand tightened on mine. The message in her eyes was clear. “Take him.”

She knew I could protect us with my powers before I realized it myself.

I answered with my own eyes, “Not yet,” before turning my attention back to WJ. “You can’t get away with this.”

“Oh, but I can,” he said. “Now get up. Don’t try anything.”

As we stood up, WJ ordered us to move closer to the tree. I was careful not to touch the bark, but I could still feel the hickory’s presence in my mind.

“You don’t have to do this,” I said.

“That’s so interesting,” he said, sounding oddly academic. “Do you know that every single one of them has said those exact words?”

“How many of them have there been?” I asked.

“Six,” he said. “One every five years since the first. One of you will be the seventh.”

The next question was equal parts curiosity and a real desire to know.

“Why do you do it?” I asked.

“To bring her back, of course,” he said. “But if it works this time, you’ll come back, too. Try not to be too concerned. I think I understand how to do it correctly now.”

From the darkness to our right, another voice said, “No, boy, you don’t. This stops now.”

Woodrow Evers walked out of the night and faced his son holding a double-barreled shotgun in his hands.

“You don’t mean that, Dad,” WJ said, his voice taking on a childish note. “I can bring Mom back, just like the Seneca legend says.”

The moonlight carved deep ridges in the older man’s face. “I protected you when you killed the Barlow girl,” Woodrow said, his voice breaking. “You were just a boy, obsessed with made-up stories, grieving for your mama. I couldn’t lose you, too, so I protected you. Took you to doctors. Tried to find someone who could help you. I sent you to that boarding school and then off to college, but what did you do? You kept up this nonsense about Indians and raising the dead even after you failed time and time again. You spent my money to get a degree in the damned stuff and just kept on killing.”

WJ’s face took on a defiant arrogance. “I was studying, accessing the wisdom of my people, and finding my personal magic. I am a highly regarded expert in my field.”

Woodrow spat out his next words. “You’re a highly regarded lunatic,” he snapped. “There’s no such thing as magic in this sorry world. You’re born, you work your whole life, and you die. Your mama died, boy. She was just an ordinary woman and she died.”

A roar of rage rose from WJ’s throat. He raised the pistol and fired at his father. The bullet struck the old man in the shoulder, but not before his father could pull both triggers of the shotgun.

The blast echoed through the trees, lifting WJ’s feet off the ground and throwing him backwards. He landed sprawled on the ground, blood pouring from a gaping wound in his chest.

I don’t know why, but I went to him, kneeling on the ground and taking his hand.

As the pleading light died in his eyes, WJ Evers whispered, “It would have worked this time. Mama’s tree would have made it work.”

S
heriff John Johnson
scratched his chin and looked at me skeptically. “Tell me again what you two were doing out here in the middle of the night?”

Tori and I had opted to tell a hybridized version of the truth. “We got interested in the unsolved murder case when we found Elizabeth Barlow’s bones,” I said. “When I talked to WJ Evers, I thought he sounded suspicious. We were trying to get a better look at the things in his museum to see if any of them could have been the murder weapon.”

Under normal circumstances, no one would have bought a story that full of holes, but Woodrow Evers had already confessed to everything, so the Sheriff was fairly willing to let our role in the night’s events slide.

After Woodrow shot his son, the old man sat down on the ground and said simply, “One of you girls should call the police.”

When the Sheriff arrived, Evers waived his rights and refused medical attention. “Bullet went clean through,” he said. “I won’t bleed to death in the time it takes me to tell you this story. And here is the only place I’ll tell it. One time. Listen to me now, because I won’t say another word once you take me off this land. And I want those two young women to hear what I have to say, too. They earned that. They were idiots for coming out here, but doing it took guts, and I respect that.”

The Sheriff agreed that we could witness Evers statement, but only if we kept our mouths shut. The story the old man told proved to be so shocking; silence wasn’t a problem on our part.

“WJ never got over his mama’s death,” Woodrow said, speaking into the video camera a deputy set up in the campground office to record his statement. “He was in Boy Scouts and did a merit badge on Indian stuff. He got all obsessed with myths and legends. I never should have let him buy that damned tomahawk. It wasn’t even made around here. Next thing I know all WJ can talk about is Seneca Indians and how they thought people could be brought back from the dead. That’s what all this was about.”

The Seneca myth referred to the bones of the dead person. According to his father, WJ wanted to find out if the ritual would work before he dug his own mother up. “He got it in his head that he had to kill them right there at the tree,” Evers said. “You see, that’s where it happened. My wife had an aneurysm in her brain. We didn’t know about it. She and WJ were down there at the hickory when that thing burst. She dropped dead right in front of him.”

Woodrow described the night, three years after his wife’s death, when he came upon WJ dressed in native clothing standing over Beth Barlow’s body. “He was just a boy,” Evers explained. “It would have destroyed his life. Nothing was going to bring that girl back. I cleaned everything up and carried the body up to Weber’s Gap. WJ begged me to bury her at the base of a hickory tree. It was nonsense, but I did it for my son. I thought it was all over and done with.”

Then, five years later, when WJ was in college, he kidnapped a woman off the streets and brought her to the campground. “I don’t know who she was,” Evers said. “She looked like she might have been a runaway, maybe a call girl. WJ never told me if she had a name. I didn’t even know they were on the property until I heard her yelling at him. It was the off-season. No one was here. I carried the body farther away this time. Put her at the base of another damned hickory tree, just like the first one.”

By the third girl, the one the town knew as Jane Doe, the old man was covering for both WJ and himself. Woodrow knew he was completely complicit in the crimes, but he refused to turn his son over to the law. “Other than Elizabeth Barlow, none of those girls had any significance to me,” he said.

God. No wonder WJ turned out the way he did.

“I messed that third one up,” Woodrow said contemplatively. “I picked the wrong time to try to get rid of the body and almost got caught. I had to leave her out there on the trail in the open. That’s when the whole town took her on as some kind of cause. I had a talk with WJ and told him there couldn’t be any more body dumps, but that didn’t stop him.”

With the same dispassionate tone, Evers described three more murders. “He brought them all here and killed them down there at the hickory tree. It worked out better for me, and I thought doing it all here was actually good. It should have gotten the whole resurrection idea out of the boy’s head because I played along with that fourth one. If it was going to work, it would have worked then with me supervising everything so the idiot wouldn’t screw it up.”

Would have
worked
? Dear God. They were both crazy.

“We let some time pass,” Evers said, “and then dug up the bones so WJ could do his mumbo jumbo. He always insisted on videotaping everything. The tapes are all locked up in the safe there. I’ll give you the combination so you can watch them.”

We were
so
not going to that viewing party.

“Of course the damned spell, or whatever he called it, didn’t work,” Evers went on. “We reburied the girl, and then I will just be damned if WJ didn’t go off and get himself another degree in Indian lore. Next thing I know, he’s here with another girl, going on and on about how he’s finally figured out what he was doing wrong. We went through the whole thing again, and that one stayed just as dead as the others.”

Evers turned to me. “It was about that time that your aunt started to be a problem,” he snapped. “She was just as bad as the rest of the town about trying to figure out who that third girl was, the one they all called Jane Doe. There wasn’t one shred of proof linking that girl to us or to this place, but Fiona came snooping around anyway. She came right out and told me she felt evil on this land and warned me it was all going to come out one way or another. Even tried to help the electric company cut my tree down. Guess we showed her. The old bat dropped dead before we got caught.”

You have no idea how much I wanted to tell him that Aunt Fiona might be dead, but she’d just sent in the B team to get the job done anyway.

“After the last girl, five years ago, I told WJ it was time to give up. And he agreed,” Evers said. “She was one of his students up at the community college in Sparta. It was just getting too risky. I didn’t know he was planning on trying again until I heard him say it tonight. I didn’t go down there to kill my boy. I saw you two skulking around in the dark and was going to scare you off with my shotgun. Then I heard what WJ said and I just snapped. I’m an old man. I’m tired of digging graves.”

The
digging
made him snap. Really?

“I’ll show you where you can find the others,” he said. “The belongings we took off all of them are up in my attic. You can have all that, too. That’s it. I’m done talking.”

As we watched, deputies escorted the old man out in handcuffs.

“What will happen to him now?” I asked Sheriff Johnson.

“First, he’s going to the hospital whether he likes it or not,” the Sheriff answered. “Then he’s going to prison for whatever’s left of his miserable life.”

Johnson drove us back to my car and let us out with a stern admonition to stay out of trouble. Dawn was breaking as we drove into town and went into the shop. Beth was waiting for us.

“What happened?” she said. “I had the most awful dreams.”

Ghosts dream?

“About what?” I asked, but I knew the answer.

“The night that crazy boy in the Indian costume killed me,” she said. “He was the campground owner’s son, wasn’t he?”

“He was,” I said. “Do you want to know why he killed you?”

“Yes, please.”

We all went into the storeroom. Tori made coffee, and I told Beth the story. When I was done, she looked at me plaintively. “Now what do I do?”

“What do you want to do?” I asked.

Without hesitation, she said, “I want to go where my dad is.”

Just as I was starting to tell her I’d try to help her, a strange light filled the room. By the door, the form of a tall man came into focus. A look of joy came over Beth’s face as she flung herself into his arms. “Daddy!”

Don Barlow closed his eyes as he held his daughter close. When he opened them, he gave me a look of such gratitude, tears started to run down my cheeks. “Thank you for helping my baby girl,” he said, in a rich baritone voice. “I’ll take it from here.”

They started to fade, and then Beth said, “Wait!”

Turning to me, she said, “Thank you for letting me stay with you. It was fun. Will you tell the cats I’m going to miss them?”

“I’ll tell them, honey,” I said, my voice thick with emotion.

“I’m going to miss you, too,” Beth said. “You’re going to like having Tori here. And that nice man next door? He really likes you.”

“How do you know that?” I asked, smiling through my tears.

“Duh,” she said mischievously. “What’s the point of being able to walk through walls if you don’t do it sometimes? He talks to Festus about you.”

I laughed. “What does Festus say?”

“He likes you, too, and so do I. Can I come back and see you?”

“You can come back anytime,” I said, “but I think you’re going to be too happy where you’re going to be worried about what we’re doing.”

“Will you help Jane now?” Beth asked.

“I’m sure going to try,” I said. “Now go on with your dad, honey.”

As Tori and I watched, father and daughter faded away and the room returned to normal.

“Wow,” Tori said. “That’s all I’ve got. Just
wow
.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.