Pawsitively Secretive

by Melissa Erin Jackson

  “So when I got a phone call from Sean one night and he said he wanted more hush money, I agreed. I picked up another job and got help from neighbors to look after Chloe. After months of payments, the harassing phone calls stopped. No rocks through my windows. The moment it felt like I was safe as long as the payments went out like clockwork, I packed up Chloe in the middle of the night and just … drove. I didn’t even know where we were going. After a couple of weeks, we ended up in Edgehill. Payments kept going out, so Sean has left us alone.”

  “Until now,” the chief said. “What’s the significance of Chloe turning eighteen?”

  “That part I don’t know,” Frank said. “Lilith told me that she put plans in place to make sure Chloe was taken care of if anything should happen to her—it’s something a woman does when she’s been involved with scum like Sean Merrill. My guess is, she squirreled away money when she was with me, just as she had with Sean. There could be some hidden account somewhere for Chloe that only becomes available when Chloe turns eighteen. He’s never wanted to be her father; all he’s ever wanted is money.” Frank let out a sound akin to a wounded animal. “I should have told her about him and the adoption. I’ve spent so long trying to protect her and he found her anyway. I just wish I knew how. I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out where I screwed up.”

  Amber had a feeling she knew how he’d found her. “Do you know anything about the Scuttle app?”

  The chief and Frank both looked at her with cocked heads—the chief because he likely didn’t know why such a question was relevant at the moment, and Frank because he’d likely never heard of it. Amber relayed what she’d learned of the app, the hack, and the fact that Bethany and Ben Lydon both suspected that “Johnny” wasn’t a teenage boy at all.

  “You mean it’s possible that Sean was talking to her on this app while he pretended to be … interested in her?” Frank asked, his face screwed up in disgust.

  “That’s one of the theories, yes,” the chief said, seamlessly following the flow of the conversation even though she hadn’t yet shared with him the list of potential “Johnny” handles she’d gotten from Ben. “It’s not as uncommon as you’d hope that men join sites popular with young people with the desire of luring them out into the real world. She was already planning to meet this Johnny person the night she disappeared. It’s possible his plan had always been to meet her so he could snatch her for whatever purpose. Maybe her flat tire was planned on his part; maybe it was luck on his part and provided the perfect scenario for him to grab her. If he was aware of any tension between you and Chloe—whether this was Sean or someone else who preys on young girls—he absolutely would have exploited that to get her trust to shift away from you and onto him.”

  Frank’s eyes slipped closed. “I screwed this all up.”

  “You were trying to do right by your girl,” the chief said. “No one can fault you for that. What we need from you is anything you can tell us about Sean and where he might have taken her. Old addresses, phone numbers, makes and models of cars he might have owned, the names of anyone he may be in contact with.”

  “We’ll also take any prized possession or a photograph of Lilith’s,” Amber quickly added.

  Both men stared at her.

  “I believe I might be able to gain some insight into what happened to her the night of the accident, but I need something that may still hold her energy. An object from the site of a traumatic event works best, though those are harder to come by.”

  “I actually have two of those things,” Frank said. “A photograph of her when she was pregnant with Chloe, and a rock I took from the shore of Lirkaldy Lake where her car went into the water. I went to the site a few days after they’d pulled her body out.”

  Amber tried not to let loose an excited squeak. Inanimate objects from places of highly emotional events were the perfect vessels for stored energy her magic could tap into. “Would you allow me to take both of them with me? I need to be in a location that’s been cleansed in a very specific manner for something like this, and I have a location nearby that would suit me well.”

  He pursed his lips. “Sure. I’ll see if I can find anything related to Sean, too. I’ll be right back.”

  When he left the room, the chief angled his head around the open doorway that led into the entryway, presumably watching Frank walk down the hallway, and then the chief was on his feet and hurrying over to her. “Your eyes and the ends of your hair are turning brown,” he hissed.

  “Oh crap,” she muttered, then fished in her bag for her compact. She uttered her glamour spells as quickly as she could, keeping an eye on herself as she worked. The chief stood in front of her with his hands on his hips, shielding her from view.

  By the time Frank returned twenty minutes later, Cassie was firmly back in place, and the chief was perusing the spines of the hardback books lining the shelves.

  Frank handed the chief a sheet of paper with a few random things scrawled on it, promising to contact him if he thought of anything else. To Amber, he handed a photograph of a beautiful dark-haired woman in a flowy dress and a floppy yellow hat, standing in front of a hedge covered in giant pink flowers. One hand protectively rested on her very pregnant belly, while the other held down her hat. The woman bore such a striking resemblance to Chloe, it made Amber’s chest ache. The rock was smooth and heavy in Amber’s hand.

  They both thanked Frank for talking to them, and Amber followed the chief out the front door and down the pathway to his cruiser waiting at the curb.

  As she sat in the passenger seat of the chief’s car, she stared down at the rock in her hand, turning it end over end in her palm. She wondered if she’d need to buy Edgar a dozen pizzas to get him to leave his house twice in one day.

  Chapter 18

  Edgar’s pizza of choice this time was olive and anchovy. Amber honestly wasn’t sure if he was doing this to mess with her, if his tastes were really that terrible, or if this was his really lazy way of getting Tom and Alley a treat. While they sat on the couch to eat and discuss the Chloe situation, Edgar would sneak little pieces of anchovy to the cats who were sitting under the coffee table. Amber pretended she didn’t notice.

  “Do you think the same spell I used on Alan’s business card will work on these?” Amber asked, pointing to the photograph of Lilith and the rock pinning the picture’s corner to the table.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Just because the rock is from the shore of the lake where her car plunged into the water, it doesn’t mean that the energy in it is Lilith’s. Any number of traumatic things could have happened there—things even more powerful, energy-wise, than what happened to her. But maybe a memory spell isn’t what we need at all.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, wiping her greasy fingers on a napkin she then swiped across her mouth.

  “Remember: time magic is part of your birthright as a Henbane, too,” Edgar said.

  “Aren’t they kind of the same thing?”

  “Memory spells are all about the specifics,” Edgar said, casually dropping a small piece of anchovy on the floor. Tom pounced on it. “Reliving a memory isn’t really about time itself, as a memory is something specific to a person. When you’re experiencing a memory through a spell, you’re tapping into that particular person’s energy to see a snapshot of the past from their perspective. If you had relived the night of the fire through Belle’s energy, rather than Theo’s, the majority of the details would be the same, but they’d feel and look different because you’d be seeing it through a different lens. That’s why you need personal objects from a person to experience their memory, because you need their energy in order to see through that lens.”

  Amber nodded. “Okay. So what makes time spells different?”

  “You’ll still end up seeing a snapshot of the past—or future or present—with time spells, but the lens is a bit of a free-for-all,” Edgar said. “With time spells, you’re transporting your consciousness to a specific time and then yo
u just … see what you see. I think the energy we need to grab hold of is Lake Lirkaldy’s. We need to get your magic to sync with the energy of the place, give it a certain time to take you to, and then cross our fingers that you’re shown something helpful.”

  “And that I don’t get stuck there,” she joked.

  “And that,” he said without a hint of humor.

  Amber swallowed.

  “It’s relatively safe,” he said. “Whereas you need specifics for memory spells, you need to go a bit broader with time spells. So the fact that we don’t know the exact time of the accident is actually a good thing.”

  Amber’s stomach churned.

  Apparently sensing that, Edgar awkwardly patted her shoulder. “I won’t let anything happen to you, cousin. Who would be there to annoy the crap out of me and buy me pizza?”

  “No one,” she said, “because you’re very grumpy.”

  He grinned at her. “All right,” he said, clapping once and then rubbing his hands together. “We need a picture of the lake for you to focus on in addition to the one of Lilith.”

  Amber closed the lid of Edgar’s horrible pizza, fetched her laptop, and then placed it on top of the box. She did an image search of the lake in January, and pulled up one that featured snow-covered pines, a snowy shore, and a pristine blue-gray lake stretching out beyond the trees, the weak sunlight reflecting off the surface as if it were made of glass. Amber tried not to think about how cold that water must have been when Lilith plunged into it.

  While Amber had been searching for a suitable picture of the lake, Edgar had been flipping through a grimoire. Once he found a spell for revealing a truth, Amber set to work crafting something that better suited her needs. Edgar told her to let instinct aid her—that her affinity for time magic would act like a guide. It took nearly two hours, but eventually the words written before her burned a faint orange before returning to black, signifying that the spell was complete.

  Amber sat back on the couch with a huff; she was already exhausted and the real work hadn’t even begun yet. Without needing to discuss it, they layered her studio apartment in cloaking spells.

  “So this one is likely going to knock you on your butt,” said Edgar once they were done. “I recommend reciting the spell, then lying down. You’ll sort of semi-pass out anyway if this works.”

  “You’re supposed to tell me these things sooner!”

  “Why? It’s not like it would make you change your mind,” he said.

  She shrugged; he wasn’t wrong.

  Armed with the spell, her laptop, the photo of Lilith, and the rock, Amber climbed onto her bed, her back against the wall at the head of her bed. With her computer perched on her lap and the screen still open to the icy picture of Lake Lirkaldy, she crossed her feet at the ankles. She laid out the spell on her keyboard and then held the Lilith photograph in one hand and grasped the rock in the other.

  Edgar stood beside the bed, arms crossed, as he stared down at her. “Instead of keeping the image of a person in your mind like you’re used to, focus on the location and the date. I’m right here if things get iffy.”

  Blowing out a steadying breath, Amber recited the spell, speaking slowly and enunciating each word with care. Her magic thrummed and she clutched the rock a little tighter, her palm growing clammy against the smooth surface. She tried to imagine the biting, icy air stinging her nose and cheeks; her boots sinking into freezing-cold slush; the creak of branches under the heavy weight of snow. Was the stone in her hand growing warmer, or was her own body heat just seeping into it?

  As Amber’s eyes slipped closed, she thought of Lilith Reed, of little Chloe in her womb, and of the date January 12th. She could have sworn she heard wind whistling through the trees, the freezing air pulling goose pumps up on her skin. She wanted to rub a warm palm over the pebbled flesh, but her hands were occupied. A drowsiness even more powerful than the one that came after the consumption of a premonition tincture pressed her body into the bed. Her head felt like a bowling ball balanced on a toothpick. She couldn’t possibly stay awake.

  Her magic, on the other hand, was frenzied. It coursed beneath her skin like a river, a flood, a torrent. Amber felt as if her body was the rock in her hand, and her magic was water rushing around it. It would drown her. It would rush up over her head like a tsunami and she would be swallowed up and carried away.

  And then she was there.

  She stood on a slight hill, surrounded by snow and the occasional pine tree. Given the waning light, she guessed it to be near dusk. Wind occasionally whispered though the branches, but otherwise it was silent. The lake stretched out before her. On the other side, she could see a road that wove between the trees. Around a bend came a pair of headlights. They were there and not there as the car passed behind the trees, like a stucco flash of a strobe light. It was hard to tell how fast the car was going given the distance from her to the other side of the lake. But then a second car came around the bend, this one moving much faster. The first car accelerated.

  Amber watched as the cars drove faster and faster, following the shore of the lake. She lost sight of them for a moment given her vantage point on the hill, but she turned and looked up the short incline behind her. She could just make out the edge of the road a few hundred feet away. The cars were zipping up the road near her now. There was a bang—metal on metal. Engines revved. Another bang. A screech. Bang. Amber flinched, then charged up the short incline, her boots slipping and crunching in the snow. She stopped at the edge of the road. From her right, she saw a pair of headlights barreling toward her.

  Bang.

  The car swerved left, then right.

  Bang.

  Bang.

  The car fishtailed, tires squealing.

  It was feet away from Amber now, and she could see the whites of Lilith’s eyes as they flicked up to her rearview mirror. The second car slammed into Lilith’s car again and she screamed, the sound silent to Amber’s ears. Her head jerked forward and smacked into the steering wheel. Lilith’s head lolled.

  Bang.

  The car spun and spun and slipped off the road and down the snowy hill and into the water below with a deafening crash. The driver of the second car slammed on its brakes and threw open the driver’s side door.

  Amber swallowed hard, her heart racing as the large man stalked down the slight slope. He was bald and barrel-chested. Amber wouldn’t have been surprised to learn the man had played football in high school. Even though she knew this giant, burly man couldn’t see her, she pulled her head toward her shoulders anyway.

  The man stalked past her without so much as a glance. He wore a thick red flannel jacket, heavy pants, and black boots. He crunched his way to the shore. Amber slowly followed, telling herself that she needed to commit his face to memory. When she was close enough to study his profile, what stood out to her more than anything was the complete lack of emotion on his face. He lit a cigarette and savored it, taking his time, as he watched Lilith’s car slowly fill with water, and then sink. When the vehicle made its last gurgle and released an explosion of bubbles, he said, “Good riddance, Lilith. You will not be missed.” He took a long draw on his cigarette, letting the smoke out slowly. “Thanks in advance for the half-million, though. It’ll come in handy. Looks like I’m going to need a new car.” He laughed and tossed his unfinished cigarette into the snow, the lit end going out instantly with a little hiss.

  Amber darted ahead, her boots slipping on the snow. She committed his license plate to memory just before he drove away. She stood on the side of the road, watching the red of his taillights as they grew smaller and smaller before disappearing and leaving her alone in the quiet once more. She wished she could run to the water’s edge, dive in, and swim her way to Lilith’s car—to pull her body from the vehicle and wrap her in a blanket and bring her back to Chloe and Frank. But she couldn’t do anything other than wait for this vision to end.

  When it did, it was so abrupt, she gasped as if waking from a dre
am. Her apartment and her bed were so warm in contrast to that snowy scene from seventeen years ago, it almost hurt. As if she’d been the one frozen and was now rapidly thawing.

  Edgar’s face swam into view before her face and she stifled a gasp. “Did it work?” he asked. “You were shaking really hard at one point, but I couldn’t tell if it was a bad reaction to the spell or if you were cold—I wasn’t sure if I should snap you out of it.”

  “It worked,” she breathed. “And I think I know why Sean took Chloe.”

  It took Amber an hour to recover from the spell. The first twenty minutes had been spent guzzling the glasses of water Edgar brought her. Then he encouraged her to eat two more slices of pizza. After a very long shower and a few more glasses of water, Amber sat down on the bed again and then went into her vision in detail.

  “All right,” Edgar said, from his seated position on the floor, once she was done. Tom lay before him on his back, his paws flopped onto his chest while Edgar scratched under his chin. “It’s been a long time since I’ve needed to work multiple jobs, but if Lilith really was taking under-the-table gigs as a way to keep a low profile, I’m thinking it’s pretty impossible that she’d stashed away half a million dollars in a sock drawer just from scrubbing toilets and washing dishes, right? So where does a small-town girl get that much money?”

  “Sean very clearly ran her off the road with the intention of killing her,” Amber said, shuddering a little at the memory. “What if her death needed to happen in order for him to get the money?”