My stomach rolled. “If whoever killed her did that much damage to her mind then it had to be…” I shuddered. “A death like that would leave evidence on the ghost's body, a wound, something.”
“Unless it was magic,” Peasblossom pointed out. “Or poison.”
“True.” I sighed and ran a hand through my hair. “I wanted to believe she was just missing.”
“Nothing like jumping into the deep end with your first case.” Peasblossom’s wings fanned against her back, stirring my hair. “Are you going to tell her husband?”
I shivered, remembering the moan that had driven Mr. Miller from the room in a blind panic. “He already knows. Somewhere deep inside, he already knows.”
“If he’s been living with her like this since she disappeared, then yes, I suppose he does.” She scooted closer to my neck, pressing against me. “Whatever they did to her is driving her mad. I can’t imagine what he’s heard. What he feels.”
I backed away from the ghost, not ready to give her my back despite my sympathy for her. The grave dirt wouldn’t anchor her for long, not out here, where the wind would soon sweep it away. Helen stared out at the water, a ghostly statue. I didn’t think she noticed when I left.
“I heard a shout,” I said. “I think he hurt himself trying to get away.”
I found Mr. Miller just in front of the porch. He’d fallen in his haste to escape, and from the way he was cradling his ankle, I was guessing he’d tripped down the steps and landed wrong. He sat there, staring back at the house, his face pale and sweat beading at his temples.
I knelt beside him and unzipped the pouch at my waist. “I’m sorry about your wife.”
“She’s not dead.”
My chest tightened. “Let me see your ankle.”
I didn’t know if it was trust or shock, but he sat there silently and let me raise his pant leg. I pushed his sock down, noting the bulge around his ankle. I touched it gently, but he didn’t make a sound. I pressed a little harder, noting the stiff ligaments. It didn’t feel broken. “Just a sprain.” I dug around in the pouch, searching for one of the healing potions I always kept on hand. The pouch was enchanted, capable of holding more than I’d ever need. But even if space were limited, I’d always keep a healing potion on hand. Never a bad choice, healing.
“It must have been hard for you these past months.” I pulled a thin string of purple energy from the well inside me and tied it around my voice, once again using a charm to put him at ease, lower his defenses. “I’m going to help you. I can help you, and I will help you. In order for me to do that, you have to trust me. I will not laugh. I will not judge. You have nothing to fear from me. If you tell me what happened, if you share with me everything you know, everything you feel, I will do my best to find out what happened to your wife. I will help both of you move on. Here. Drink this.”
Power pulsed into the air with every breath, every syllable. The deep creases around Mr. Miller’s eyes lessened, but didn’t disappear, and the hard line of his jaw eased as he bowed his head. I held out the small bottle with the potion inside and he stared at it for a moment before accepting it. I waited while he drank it, letting the charm and the healing potion sink in before I spoke again.
“Why don’t we go somewhere else and talk?” I suggested.
The last of his resistance broke, and his shoulders drooped. He put the potion bottle on the ground and nodded. “Yes,” he whispered. “All right.”
He levered himself to his feet. The fact that his healed ankle didn’t surprise him probably spoke more to his shock than any belief in the Otherworld, but I made a mental note regardless. Peasblossom remained tucked out of sight as I led him to my car.
“Do you have any friends that live nearby?”
I passed him the GPS, letting the blinking cursor urge him to enter an address. He stared at the screen for a full minute before punching in the information. With the destination set, I followed the machine’s initial instructions, giving my passenger a moment to collect himself before I spoke.
“Tell me about your wife’s disappearance.”
Mr. Miller melted a little farther into his seat, his gaze locked on the horizon. “The week before she disappeared, Helen kept getting these phone calls. From a woman.” He shrugged. “It was nothing unusual, she got a lot of business calls at home. But something felt off. When she called, she’d speak with Helen for less than a minute, and then Helen would leave.”
“Did she tell you who was calling her or why?”
“She said it was a client, and I didn’t ask for any more detail than that.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “I know this might sound strange to you, but I tried to give Helen her privacy where work was concerned. She specialized in secret rooms and such, so a lot of her clients demanded confidentiality. It didn’t bother me, though. I trusted her.”
The way he said the last sentence made me tilt my head in his direction. The power I’d called still filled the air between us, and I spoke into that power. “We all want to trust the people we love. But sometimes we doubt, and that’s all right.”
His mouth tightened at the corners. “I answered several calls that week from the same woman. She was always formal, asked for Helen Miller. Usually after she starts a job, Helen makes a schedule with the person who hired her, sets out what days she’ll come in and what time. With this job, they called as if they had to hire her for a different job every day. It didn’t make sense. And when I mentioned it to her, she looked at me like I was crazy.”
“Do you remember the name of the hotel?”
“Suite Dreams. S-u-i-t-e. It’s near Progressive Field.”
“Do you remember anything else? Strange behavior, visitors who seemed out of place?”
“No.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Everything else was normal. Then one day, a car came to pick her up. It wasn’t unusual, a lot of her clients provided transportation. She kissed me goodbye in the morning and left. That was the last time I saw her.”
“The sketchbook on the table. You said that was hers and she didn’t like people touching it. Did she always leave it out there?”
“No, she usually took it with her.”
“Did she take it with her that day?”
“Yes.” His jaw clenched. “I know what you’re thinking. Yes, the police looked at me. They tore my place apart, looking for secret rooms, blood, anything to suggest I killed her.” His eyes hardened and he stared at me. “I didn’t kill her. I would never hurt Helen. I don’t know how her sketchbook ended up on that table.”
My magic still hung in the air, still entered his body with every breath he took. I would have been impressed if he could lie to me with that charm so thick around us. So either he was fighting my spell…or whoever had killed Helen had put that sketchbook on the table. Possibly to make it seem as if she’d come home? Was someone setting up Mr. Miller?
“Did your wife have any enemies?” I asked.
“You mean because she supposedly worked for the mob?” He laughed, a short, humorless sound. “Helen worked for whoever hired her. She didn’t judge and she didn’t ask for a fuckin’ résumé . It was all about the challenge for her, the art.” His face softened. “When she was a kid, she loved mysteries. Anything that involved something hidden, something secret. She said secret rooms gave buildings a layer of mystique. She loved looking around the city, seeing different houses and different buildings and knowing that there was more to them than met the eye. There was something about them only a handful of people knew about, and she was one of them.” He stared at me. “If she built a secret room for someone and they used it for something bad, that doesn’t make Helen bad. She’s not responsible for what they use it for.”
I held my tongue. The truth was that I did think Helen bore a little responsibility. I’d had people come to me over the years, wanting a love spell, or a curse. I could have made them, could have lost myself in the art of creating the magic objects, reveled in the challenge of it. But I didn’t.
I turned them away. She didn’t just design secret rooms. She designed traps to protect them. Some of those traps had burned evidence, drugs. What had others done? Had it just been contraband that was destroyed?
“You have arrived.”
His friend, as it turned out, only lived a few blocks from the Miller residence. I pulled into another massive driveway that could have doubled as a parking lot. The gold front door would have looked gaudy on any other house, but on the sprawling gray stone mansion, it fit. A man sat on the porch drinking a beer, his muscular body cradled by a chair that looked like it cost more than all my furniture put together. He stood when he noticed Mr. Miller in my passenger seat.
“All right.” I put my hand on his and concentrated on feeding the magic between us. “Thank you for trusting me. You’ve been very helpful. I’m leaving now, but I’ll be in touch.” I reached into the tactical pouch fastened around my waist, groping in one of the side pockets for a card. My fingers found a nest of twisty ties, and I frowned. That’s not right. I groped in the pocket next to it, then the next. Four pockets later, I found a card and made yet another mental note to reorganize the stupid bag.
“Take this.” I put the card in his cold palm. “If you think of anything else”—I looked into his eyes, concentrating on the lingering magic—“anything else, call me, day or night.”
He nodded. I watched him walk up the driveway, noting with satisfaction that the man holding the beer came to meet him. Beer man gave Mr. Miller a pat on the shoulder in the usual “there, there” motion most men seemed to associate with comfort. I got the impression that whoever the man was, he was a friend, and he’d noticed Mr. Miller’s pain. The widower was in good hands.
Peasblossom crawled out from under my hair and sat on my shoulder. “Well, that settles that. She’s not missing, she’s dead. Time to call Bryan and go home.”
I grabbed the GPS and searched for nearby hotels, scrolling down the list until I spotted Suite Dreams. “Not yet.”
Peasblossom groaned. “Bryan wanted to know if Andy’s case was Other. He didn’t say anything about poking our nose into a murder. This is your first case—let’s call it a win and pass it on!”
“First of all, that’s not a win. That’s an assist. Second of all, I’m not comfortable passing on this information knowing the person I’m passing it on to isn’t equipped to deal with it.” The GPS considered my request, then reluctantly spat out the directions. “We’re just going to take a quick peek and make sure we’re not sending Agent Bradford into anything dangerous.”
“You mean you want to get to the danger first. Sort of like stomping through a field you think is laced with land mines to keep your friend from getting blown up.”
“This isn’t just a missing person case, or even just a murder case. There’s a ghost involved, and a mad ghost at that. Even if I wasn’t a private investigator, this is solidly in witch territory. I need to lay Helen Miller to rest, for her sake and for the sake of her husband’s sanity. And laying her to rest will be much easier if her killer is brought to justice.” I bit my lip. “Her ghost is tied to the house. Either she was killed there, or something near her when she was killed was brought there afterward.”
“You think it was the sketchbook.”
I nodded. “It was a prized possession. If it was near her at the time of death, she could have bonded to it.”
Peasblossom looked out the rear windshield. “So you think her husband killed her?”
I bit my lip. “He is the most obvious suspect. But…”
“But?”
“He’s human. He shouldn’t have been able to lie to me so easily under that charm. And he genuinely seemed to believe she was still alive. The way only a person who loves someone can.”
“So either he’s not human…”
“Or someone set him up,” I said grimly. “Someone could have met Helen somewhere else, then returned her sketchbook to make it look like she came home.”
“And you think they met her at the hotel? Suite Dreams?”
“Her husband said she acted strange while she was working there. I think it’s worth taking a look around.”
I paused before backing out of the driveway. “You know what would be helpful? If I had a spy. Someone fast enough—someone clever enough—to discover if anything strange is going on in that hotel.”
Peasblossom sniffed. “I know you’re manipulating me.” She beamed. “But I don’t care. It’s been ages since I’ve been nosy.”
That wasn’t even a little true, as poor Mary Kate and her formerly secret lover Steven would attest to, but I didn’t comment. If Peasblossom was excited at the prospect of doing what I’d asked her to do, I wouldn't question it.
With my GPS settled, and my seatbelt secure, I pulled out of the long driveway. The route took me past the Miller house, and even though I couldn’t see it, I couldn’t shake the eerie feeling that Helen watched me go.
Chapter 4
“More construction?”
I gaped out the windshield, not wanting to believe my eyes. Twenty minutes. Twenty minutes was how long my GPS had informed me it would take to get from the Millers’ house to the Suite Dreams hotel.
It had been forty minutes. And we still weren’t there.
Peasblossom mumbled against my shoulder, then flopped over and went back to sleep. The steering wheel groaned in my hands as I tightened my grip, resisting the urge to bang my head against it. Orange cones lined the road on one side, and temporary cement walls lined the other. The semitruck in front of me blocked my view, but it didn’t matter. If the last forty minutes were anything to go by, up ahead was more of the same. Cars, cones, and cement.
“I can see the hotel,” I said, swiping a hand toward the passenger window where the towering glass and white stone form of Suite Dreams stretched skyward. “I’ve been able to see it for the last ten minutes. And I’ll probably watch it for another ten before I get there. I could walk anywhere in Dresden in less time than this.” I leaned my head back against the headrest and closed my eyes. “I’m regretting the two cups of coffee.”
“And the two Cokes,” Peasblossom murmured sleepily.
“Thanks for that, Judgy MacJudgerson.” My bladder tingled in a way that warned me this was not a drill. I should have used the bathroom at the Millers’ house. I should have known better than to drive through a major metropolitan city with a full bladder.
“If you’d studied harder, perhaps you’d be able to teleport the car to the nearest gas station.”
I opened my eyes, unsurprised to find the truck in front of me hadn’t moved. “That’s not true, and you know it. Name one person who can teleport something with that much mass.” I angled my head to glare at her, but tucked against my neck as she was, she remained out of my line of vision. “Besides, I don’t think teleporting a car would go unnoticed.”
“Mysterious gas leak caused by construction. Lots of hallucinations, very strange.”
I snorted, but she was right. Finally—finally—the semitruck moved. I gave up on getting to Suite Dreams and pulled into the nearest gas station. If I was dancing a little by the time I opened the bathroom stall, I had no one to blame but myself.
“That was a close one,” Peasblossom observed on our way back to the car.
I pulled my black fleece wrap tighter around me. It was warm for February, almost sixty degrees, but the wind remembered it was winter. “You didn’t have to come into the restroom with me, you know.”
“You say that like you gave me time to get off before you bolted from the car. It was all I could do to hold on and not be left behind to get stepped on!”
“You fly,” I pointed out, exasperation thick in my tone. “I don’t understand why you have to hitch a ride on me all the time anyway.”
Peasblossom sniffed. “Downright ungrateful is what you are. Here I am serving as your familiar, and all I get is guff. Guff, guff, guff.”
“And free food, and free lodging,” I added.
An
other sniff. “If you can call it food and lodging. When was the last time I had a pot of honey?”
“Tuesday, December twenty-first. You opened the pot I gave you for winter solstice and you spilled it all over the recliner.”
“Still not over that, I see.”
I sat down in the driver’s seat, staring out the windshield as I remember my ruined furniture. “I loved that chair.”
“You don’t pay for lodging either.” Peasblossom tugged at a length of my hair, running the dark strands through her fingers. “Mrs. Potter lets you live there free ’cause you’re a witch.”
“And don’t think for a second she doesn’t claim that house as a religious site for a tax write-off. Not that she needs the money.”
I started the car, waiting for my GPS to reacclimate itself before I ventured back into traffic. With my bladder blessedly empty, I was able to concentrate more on my surroundings.
Cities fascinated me. Mother Hazel had always been of the opinion that witches belong in villages and rural areas. “Leave the cities to the wizards,” that was what she said. Which was probably why I’d spent any free time I had immersed in cities like this.
Cleveland was a favorite of mine. In the 1950s, a music store owner named Leo Mintz had successfully talked a local DJ by the name of Alan Freed to play “race music” on his radio station, WJW, in Cleveland. To slide under the disapproving radar of older generations and reach the more open-minded youth of the time, they’d repurposed an old blues term to describe said music: rock ‘n’ roll. I’d come here a lot over the years, using the enchanted door in my mentor’s home to get into concerts and bear witness to the burgeoning careers of such artists as Elvis Presley, David Bowie, and Bruce Springsteen. Treasured memories all.
Everywhere around me, skyscrapers lived up to their name, stretching into the gray February clouds like sentinels, dark windows like wide-open eyes surveying the endless parade of traffic. In a place like this, when there weren’t just hundreds of people around you, but hundreds of people above you, it was hard not to feel like your every movement was being watched. I glanced at a pair of security cameras over an ATM, and another scattering of electronic eyes surreptitiously guarding the entrance of an upscale restaurant. Humans watched, recorded, and uploaded everything that happened every minute of every day.
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