“Well, I’m in no hurry to find that out.”
“No doubt. I hear you’ll be having a visitor.”
“You mean Aunt Eliza?”
“Yes.” Grandma’s face took on a pinched look. “My youngest. She was a surprise, you know. Always so headstrong. I never forgave myself for the falling out we had. She took off and that was the last I saw of her.”
“I’m sorry. I never thought about it that way.” Celeste felt a pang of sorrow for both her grandmother and her aunt. “She never contacted you or my father over all those years?”
“No, but don’t let that color your perception of her. You’ll like her. You have a lot in common.”
“You mean she sees ghosts?”
Grandma laughed. “No. You’re the only Blackmoore whose gifts manifest themselves in that way, as far as I know. I just think you girls will get along with her and I’m glad you’re inviting her to stay here.”
“Well, it is her house, too, I guess.”
“That’s the spirit! Oh, and one last thing … the key is in the locket.”
“Key? What key?” Celeste narrowed her eyes at her grandmother.
“Well, that’s enough chit chat … I really must be going.” Grandma’s ghost waved her hand dismissively, the charms on her bracelet swaying to and fro as she evaporated, leaving Celeste staring at an errant swirl of condensation drifting to the floor.
Leave it to Grandma to be so vague, Celeste shrugged, then turned back to the pile. Like her sisters, Celeste had been blessed with paranormal abilities. Her ‘gift’ was that she saw ghosts. She was used to her grandmother and sometimes other ghosts appearing and talking in vague terms, so she couldn’t put too much stock in what her grandmother had said. But she did have empathy for the way the woman was obviously sad about what happened between her and Eliza.
Celeste felt a pang of sadness for Eliza, too. She didn’t know what had happened to drive her from the family, but she imagined the woman must have been lonely all these years. Maybe Celeste and her sisters could make up for some of that.
Slipping on her yoga pants, Celeste ruffled her blonde hair so it spiked up on her head and headed down to the kitchen, vowing to do her best to make Eliza feel like a welcome part of the family.
***
Jolene stared into the mug of black coffee while she waited for the caffeine to wake up her brain.
“Morning, sleepyhead!” Celeste’s chipper voice grated on her from the kitchen door.
“Mornin’,” Jolene grumbled.
She watched as Celeste practically skipped over to the fridge, taking out some spinach, an avocado and coconut milk, then trotting it over to the counter where some green grass was growing in a container. Snipping off a large section of the grass, she threw everything enthusiastically into the blender.
Jolene took another sip of coffee and tried not to gag at the sight of the thick green goo swirling around in the blender. She hoped Celeste didn’t spill any on the white marble counters—marble was porous and that goop would leave a stain.
“I talked to grandma this morning,” Celeste chirped.
“Oh, really?” Jolene never knew what to say to that. Should she ask how their grandmother was, or was that inappropriate when it came to ghosts?
Celeste switched off the blender and poured the goo into a glass. “It seemed like she was really sad about the way things ended with Eliza and I got to thinking how lonely things must have been for our aunt … you know, not seeing the family and all.”
Jolene took another sip of coffee. She hadn’t thought about it, but Celeste had a point.
“So I was thinking we should do our best to make her feel like family,” Celeste continued.
“Okay. Sure. I mean I guess we would do that anyway, right?” Jolene asked.
“Yeah, but I was just thinking we could all make an extra effort.” Celeste gulped down the juice. “Where is everyone else?”
“Morgan’s out in the herb garden,” Jolene thrust her chin in the direction of the window where Morgan could be seen bent over a row of seedlings she’d planted a few weeks ago. “Fiona must still be asleep. I haven’t seen her yet this morning.”
“Late night out with Jake?” Celeste wiggled her eyebrows up and down.
Jolene laughed—a sure sign the caffeine was kicking in. “Probably. Which reminds me. I’d better get going and work on that case before he fires me.”
She sucked down the rest of her coffee, then slipped off the stool and put the coffee mug in the dishwasher before heading out the front door.
***
Jolene and Jake’s office was a stuffy two-room suite on the second floor of a one-hundred-and-fifty year-old house that had been converted for commercial use. The first floor held the Bagel Cafe. As usual, the smell of fresh baked bagels made Jolene’s stomach grumble, so she stopped there first.
Then, armed with a bag of bagels and two coffees, she climbed the creaky narrow stairs to the second floor. At the top, an oak door announced their office. ‘Cooper Investigations’ was stenciled on the frosted glass window in old fashioned gold and black lettering. She balanced the coffees, bagels and her large tote as she pushed the door open.
The outer room was empty. Jake was optimistic that a receptionist might sit out there one day. Jolene had a sneaking suspicion he had originally planned for her to do the receptionist tasks, but she had nipped that in the bud early on. She was a good investigator and her talents were better put to use in the field.
There were two desks in the inner room, which, thankfully, was quite large. Jake sat behind one of them, a large antique mahogany piece they’d liberated from Jolene’s attic.
He looked up at her, his face freshly shaven and a twinkle in his gray eyes. Probably put there by Fiona, Jolene thought. He made a show of glancing at his watch.
“Thanks for coming to work today,” he teased. They had a great relationship and even though Jake had only been her sister’s boyfriend for a couple of years, he was like a big brother to her.
Jolene put one of the coffees on his desk and slid it toward him.
“Looks like you just got in yourself. Late night with my sister?” she teased him back, stifling a giggle when she saw a blush creep up his neck. Jake was a good guy. Fiona could do a lot worse.
She smiled, remembering how he had helped the sisters out when he first came to town. Morgan had been accused of murder, and Jake, who had just joined the Noquitt Police force after a career as a detective in Boston, had gone against Sheriff Overton to help them prove her innocence.
Going against Overton hadn’t helped his standing down at the police station and Jake had eventually resigned from the force to start the private investigation business and taken Jolene under his wing.
The two of them had been pretty successful at it, too. Of course, her photographic memory and special gift of reading people’s auras didn’t hurt.
Jake peeled back the plastic tab on his coffee and took a sip.
“Did you bring me breakfast?” he asked, eyeing the Bagel Cafe bag.
“Yep. Your favorite.” She opened the bag and angled it toward him, revealing a plump pumpernickel bagel on top.
Jake grabbed the bagel along with one of the small cream cheese containers. “Thanks.”
“Welcome. Jeez, it’s stuffy in here.” That was one thing about the second floor of an old house; it got mighty hot, especially in summer. Jolene pushed open the old wooden window to let in some air.
From the second floor, she could see a tiny sliver of the ocean a quarter of a mile away. A cool breeze, fresh with salty sea air, wafted in through the window. Jolene could hear the cry of seagulls as she slid behind the green metal teacher’s desk they’d gotten for free after the school renovation.
“So, what’s up for today?” She bit into her poppy seed bagel.
“I was hoping you could follow Gail Flint this morning.”
Jolene’s brows shot up. “Steve Flint’s wife?”
Jake nodded
while he spread cream cheese on his bagel.
“Why?” Jolene felt her heart tug. Steve Flint had grown up in Noquitt and had been a close friend of her sister, Celeste. He’d been over to the house many times and Jolene knew him well. He was a good guy. Jolene remembered when he and Gail had met—the two of them had been head over heels for each other and gotten married within six months. Surely, they weren’t having trouble already? Steve had been so in love with her it was almost sickening.
“He thinks she has something going with a professor at the junior college and she meets him around ten. I guess he doesn’t have classes then.” Jake gestured to the top of her desk. “I put some pictures of her in that folder for you.”
“Okay,” Jolene glanced at the clock. Plenty of time to get to the college by ten. She flipped open the folder. Inside were a few shots of the beautiful blonde. “I already know what she looks like. Steve is a friend of the family.”
“Oh? I hope she won’t recognize you tailing her.”
Jolene shrugged. “We don’t know each other that well, but if she spots me I’ll just pretend we’ve run into each other by coincidence. It’s understandable in a small town like this.”
“We also need to figure out how to get evidence for the Powers case.”
“Oh, right,” Jolene licked some cream cheese off the side of her bagel. “The feud.”
Jake laughed. “I know it seems silly, but Jeb was pretty mad about those lobster pots. It’s his livelihood.”
“Oh, I know. You never screw with a lobsterman’s traps.” Jolene scrunched up the empty bagel bag and tossed it into the trash barrel beside her desk. “But do you really think Gordy did something to them? I mean, I know they’ve had that feud going on for a while, but messing with someone’s traps is hitting below the belt.”
Jake pursed his lips together. “I thought that, too, but Jeb is pretty sure something happened, so I guess we’d better dig into it.”
“Okay, I’ll check out the satellite pictures later on. Maybe one of them caught someone messing around with the lobster traps.”
“Maybe you can go down to the cove and check out the boats to see if you can see anything. I doubt Gordy will let you on his, but you can see a lot from the dock.” Jake glanced out the window at the ocean. “In the meantime, I’ll hit the streets and ask around. You know how quickly rumors spread through the fishermen grapevine around here.”
Jolene nodded. The fishermen were worse than the blue-haired old ladies under the hair-dryers down at Mavis’ Cut-N-Curl when it came to gossip.
“Oh, and Luke called,” Jake continued, “sounded like he might have something for us, too.”
Jolene cocked an eyebrow at Jake. “Oh? Another mysterious assignment?”
Luke Hunter was Morgan’s high school sweetheart who had left her to join the military, then suddenly appeared in town again two summers ago. He now worked for some secret agency that he refused to give them details about.
The odd thing was that the agency seemed to know all about Jolene and her sisters and their special ‘gifts’ and was keen to hire them to help out on cases. They’d already completed one assignment that involved digging up an old treasure out West and it had proven to be interesting work. Jolene still had no idea what this had to do with the government—or even if it did—but she wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Jake shrugged. “He didn’t say exactly, just that he’d heard rumblings about something being up.”
“Well, I can’t wait to see what that’s all about.” Jolene slid out from behind the desk and made her way to the door, stopping with her hand on the knob. “Are you gonna be over for supper tonight? My long lost aunt is coming to visit.”
Jake looked up from his laptop screen, his lips cocked in a crooked smile. “I heard. Wouldn’t miss meeting another Blackmoore woman for anything. The rest of you have all been so fascinating.”
Jolene pulled the door open, shoved her oversized sunglasses on her face and looked back at Jake over the top of them.
“You can say that again,” she said, then disappeared out into the hall.
Chapter Three
“Do you remember much about Aunt Eliza?” Morgan looked across the cottage at Fiona who was bent over a gold and amethyst necklace laid out on her worktable.
Fiona glanced up, her ice-blue eyes narrowing slightly. “Gosh, we were just kids when she went away. I don’t remember much about her.”
Morgan pressed her lips together. She didn’t remember much about Eliza either—she’d been too preoccupied with teenage things to pay much attention to an adult aunt, even if Eliza was only ten years older than she was.
She turned toward the tall, rustic shelf that housed her selection of dried herbs in old-fashioned glass apothecary jars. She loved the look of the jars, which she’d acquired at yard sales and auctions, all lined up on the wooden shelves that were accented with layers of chipped paint.
The cottage that housed Sticks and Stones had been in the family for generations and sat on a large parcel of land about two miles from their home. Their ancestor, Isaiah Blackmoore, a sailing merchant, had settled the town. Rumor had it that he originally owned all the land from their house on the point to the cottage, but most of it had been sold off over the generations.
For some reason, the family had always kept this cottage and Morgan was glad. The one story cottage was small, but she loved it here.
They hadn’t done much to it in order to convert it into a store. It was already one big room. They split the main room with Morgan and her herbs on the left and Fiona and her crystals on the right. Behind the main room were a small bedroom and a bathroom. What had once been the kitchen area was on Morgan’s side and she’d removed cabinets and appliances, then rearranged it a bit to fit in her herb displays. The sink came in handy for making her remedies, which, she realized, she should be doing now.
She glanced out the window over the sink. The rose bushes that matched the ones growing along the front porch were starting to bloom. Birds chirped and twittered as they flitted between the branches of the trees in the woods behind the cottage. If she squinted and looked directly to the back of the woods, she could make out a faint line of sparkling blue ocean a half-mile away.
She turned her attention back to the shelves, the old pine floorboards sighing as she reached up to pull down the jars of lemon verbena and oregano. Laying out some mesh tea bags, she took a pinch out of each jar and placed them in the middle of the bags, touching the herbs gently with her fingertips so as to infuse them with as much healing energy as possible.
“Do you think Eliza has any unusual, umm … gifts … you know, like us?” Morgan asked.
Fiona squinted down at the necklace. The amethyst stone glowed slightly when her fingers brushed against it. She answered without looking up. “I hadn’t thought about it. You’d think we would have heard if she did. I never heard of anyone else in the family having them.”
“Me either, but just because we haven’t heard about it doesn’t mean no one else has them.”
“Still, I don’t think we should let on that we do. I mean, we all agreed the less people that know the better.”
“Yep, that’s true.” The girls had discovered early on that it wasn’t a good idea to let too many people know about their paranormal powers. People tended to react strangely and it was better to keep that kind of thing to themselves.
“I wonder if she’ll want to poke around in the attic,” Fiona said.
Morgan began the process of folding the mesh tea bags over the herbs to secure them. “That’s a good question. That stuff is hers as much as it is ours. Some of it may even have more sentimental value for her, especially if she remembers it from her childhood.”
Fiona glanced up. “We haven’t even seen everything up there ourselves.”
“I know. There might be other important historical items like that journal,” Morgan said, referring to an old book they’d discovered in the attic. The book had been
written three hundred years earlier by Isaiah Blackmoore and contained coded clues about a mysterious family legacy. The girls had discovered the meaning of the journal along with an attic full of treasure already, but the attic was so large they hadn’t explored the whole thing. Morgan had a gut feeling there could be more family mysteries up in the attic, and her gut feelings were usually right.
“… and the crystals,” Fiona added, referring to a mysterious burlap sack they’d found with crystals inside like the ones Fiona used in her healing jewelry. Apparently, a long-ago ancestor had the same affinity for stones. But had they also possessed Fiona’s healing powers?
“Well, if she needs money, we have plenty now. We should be sharing it with her anyway, since it came from her ancestors, too. Just because Dad inherited the house doesn’t mean he should have everything in it, too.”
“I agree.” Fiona said. “They probably didn’t even realize anything of value was up in the attic. Everyone thought it was just cast-offs and junk. It’s an awkward subject, though. It’s not like we can just come out and ask her if she needs money.”
“Right. I guess we’ll just play it by ear.”
The girls were interrupted by the cheerful tinkle of the bells on front door. That sound always made Morgan feel happy—it signaled the arrival of a paying customer.
Two little old ladies came through the door, their heavy orthopedic shoes clomping on the wooden flooring.
“Morning Beatrice.” Morgan nodded at the woman on the left, then nodded to the one on the right. “Harriet.”
“Morning girls,” the two women chorused.
“I’ve come for my herbal teas.” Beatrice marched over to the counter that separated Morgan’s half of the shop from the main area.
“I’m just finishing them up now,” Morgan said as she tied the last teabag and then placed all the tea bags into a white paper shopping bag that sat on the counter.
Deadly Intentions Page 2