World Tree Girl

by Kerry Schafer

  He already knows the answer.

  “We’ll have to update Matt and Sophie.”

  Jake’s jaw tightens. “I’ve already broken all the rules by bringing you in. I know, I know. When it comes to paranormal investigations, the rules do not apply. Let’s call a meeting at the Manor, then, as soon as I get the body squared away.”

  “I’ll set it up.”

  We drive in silence the rest of the way, each of us busy with our own deductions and considerations. Neither one of us is big on trust, but if we’re going to solve this case, we’re going to have to work together.

  When Jake drops me at the Manor, I stand outside to watch him drive away, shivering in a cold November wind. The air smells like snow, and a few random flakes sift down from a leaden sky. They melt as soon as they touch the ground, but my aching bones and the metal plate in my leg tell me it won’t be long before winter comes to stay.

  Still, I pull out a cigarette and light it, letting the clean air wash away the stink of that house while I scope out the parking lot. Sophronia’s van, with its lurid depiction of a cremation urn, is parked next to Matt’s nondescript Ford pickup. My Jag sits where I left it, off to the far edge where it’s unlikely to get dinged by a careless driver. There’s the usual scattering of cars belonging to Manor residents who still drive, and a few afternoon visitors.

  One car looks out of place among the pickups, Subarus, and other vehicles appropriate for navigating Shadow Valley roads. It’s a small black sedan, recently washed. No dealer frame around the license plate, which is otherwise standard Washington State. No bumper stickers. Nothing hanging from the rearview mirror.

  I walk over for a closer look. A set of high-end luggage—one medium suitcase and a carry-on—in the back seat. A Starbucks cup in the holder. That’s it. No clutter of receipts or mail or snack wrappers. No loose change. And then I see the bar code sticker on the driver’s side window that marks it as a rental car. Could be somebody flew into Spokane and drove up to visit mom or dad. Could be a sales rep.

  Or, it could be trouble.

  In my experience, trouble tends to be the most likely option.

  Energized by the promise of action, I snuff out my smoke, unfinished, and enter Shadow Valley Manor Retirement Home. Inside, everything appears normal. Voices drift down the hallway from the games room. Somebody’s TV blares from behind a closed door. A warm smell of roasting beef winds down the corridor from the kitchen and sets my mouth to watering. I’m suddenly ravenous, even though there are still a couple of hours left before dinner.

  Matt, the Manor cook, does exquisite things with roast beef. He’s also ex-special forces and the guy my former Unit hired to kill me.

  In his defense, they’d fed him a string of propaganda that made him believe he was doing the world a favor by eliminating me. In the end, he helped to save my life when he could have taken it. He’s now a double agent, working with me at the Manor, while the FBI still thinks he’s their man, planted here to keep an eye on me.

  It seems like years ago that I first traversed this hallway with no real idea of what I was getting into. A small undercover assignment, I was told. Nothing complicated. All I had to do was rest and recover from the paranormal encounter that almost killed me while keeping my eyes and ears open and reporting to my long-ago partner, Phil Evers.

  Phil’s involvement was my first clue that the Manor might prove to be more exciting—and dangerous—than the average retirement home. When I knew him, Phil was a legend in his own time, the 007 of the paranormal world. He’d dropped out of sight years ago but suddenly surfaced, buying Shadow Valley Manor and asking my FBI contact to bring me in on an unsanctioned operation. He got himself killed before he had a chance to brief me, leaving me walking blind into a web of dangerous secrets stretching far back into my past.

  Phil foresaw the possibility of his own death and bequeathed Shadow Valley Manor to my care and keeping. Owning and operating a retirement home is about the last thing in the world I want to do, but this one comes with certain compensations, including a secret laboratory, and a propensity for paranormal activity.

  As usual, I avoid the elevator and take the stairs. Riding in elevators is stupid, like volunteering to be a fish in a barrel when you know damn well somebody is standing by with a shotgun. Thanks to the paranormal slug that gnawed a hole in my belly and the bullet that blew through my right thigh, climbing two flights of stairs to the third floor is now my personal Mount Everest, but I do it anyway. I’m not one for mollycoddling an injury, and I figure stairs are a form of physical therapy. Today I’m on high alert for trouble, but everything seems to be in order until I reach the hallway leading to my new suite.

  The Manor offers a variety of rooms, priced according to size and amenities. When I first moved in, I commandeered one of two large suites situated at the end of the third-floor hallway. It was empty at the time, and I figured it was kept that way on purpose to prevent discovery of a secret passage leading out of the closet and down into the basement. As it turns out, secret passages can lead to boring places. All that’s at the end of the seemingly mysterious stairway is storage for the residents and a boiler room for the hot water. A perfectly ordinary stairway accesses the same space.

  The real secret passage is hidden in the suite that used to belong to an old vampire named Gerry Vermeer. For obvious reasons, I’ve claimed his suite, too, but the process of moving has been slow and gradual, and I’m still in a state of disarray. Tomorrow a moving company is slated to bring the personal belongings that my soon-to-be ex-husband moved into storage for me.

  Right now, the door to my former suite is open and it shouldn’t be.

  Drawing my .38 from the small of the back holster where I keep it, I move as silently as I can, cursing my slowness and the hitch in my gait. When I peer around the doorframe into the suite, it appears to be empty of everything but the furnishings. Bed, chairs, table. The drapes are drawn, the way I left them.

  I come around the corner with the gun out and ready, but nothing moves in the main living space. Bathroom, clear. Closet, clear. To be sure, I make my way down the secret staircase into the basement and clear that, too, cursing my damaged leg all the way. Nobody hiding in the storage area or the boiler room, nothing out of order. By the time I drag myself back up the steep and narrow staircase, I’m tired, sweaty, and buzzing with irritation like a nest full of wasps on a hot afternoon.

  I’d pay for a fight just now. I need an outlet. And when I cross the hall to my new suite, behind the closed door I left locked with six sets of deadbolts, I hear voices.

  Chapter Four

  Adrenaline zings through my body. It feels good, familiar, the return of an old friend. The last month, spent mostly behind a desk, stretches behind me like a long desert of boredom.

  The door is unlocked. Nudging it open just a crack, I peer in.

  The suite is chaos. Furniture and packing boxes are all mixed up together as if they’ve been dropped through a coal chute. A wave of perfume assaults my nostrils, expensive and overpowering. I press the back of my hand against my nose to block a sneeze.

  Sophronia stands in the middle of the mess, face to face with a stranger. The unknown woman’s back is to me. It’s an exquisitely tailored back, a fitted suit coat over a skirt that smoothes lean hips and ends at the knee. Her dark hair is twisted up into a chignon. Diamonds dangle from her ears. Stiletto heels make long, elegant legs look even longer.

  The two of them are engaged in a tug-of-war over some object, hidden from me by the woman’s body.

  “Give it to me,” Sophronia demands. Her eyes glow like a cat’s in the dark, and her hair swirls in a weather system all its own. The stranger would be wise to be frightened, but she hangs on.

  “Let go. You’ve got no right—”

  “More right than you have, you—”

  “You are going to call me names? You? An insolent little Goth girl—”

  Time to put a stop to this before Sophie does.

&nb
sp; Gun at the ready, I burst into the room. “Drop it. Both of you.”

  Both heads swivel in my direction. Two sets of hands go up in the air. The item of contention falls, bounces once on the carpet, cracks against the edge of the kitchenette counter, and spills sand all over my floor.

  The strange woman kneels, hands hovering over the mess, but not touching. “Oh mon Dieu, how horrible,” she wails. “Look what you’ve done.”

  “I knew you weren’t to be trusted.” Sophronia grabs my coffee pot, the only ready container in my kitchen, and begins scooping sand into it.

  The broken object is reasonably intact, and the large pieces, if reassembled, would be about the size and shape of a funerary urn. As the instant of shock passes, I realize that the mess strewn all over the floor isn’t sand, and although we’ve met only once and that was thirty years ago, this woman isn’t really a stranger.

  She’s still kneeling on the floor, one hand covering her mouth, exuding enough drama for a daytime soap. I train the gun on her. “Get up, Jill,” I order. “But first, take off those shoes. Nice and slow.”

  “I believe the usual greeting under the circumstances would be, ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’”

  “The shoes. Sophronia, step back.”

  “One sec. I need to get Phil contained and—”

  “Now.”

  Sophie’s stubborn, but not stupid. Clutching the coffee pot to her breast, she scoots back and away.

  Jill is also stubborn, but the gun is persuasive. She slips off one shoe and slides it across the floor and out of my reach.

  “Hand the other one to me. Hold it by the heel.”

  She complies. I give the shoe a quick inspection. No hidden triggers, no hairline cracks that would indicate it’s packed with explosives or contains a switchblade. It is, of course, a lethal weapon all on its own. I throw it across the room to join its mate.

  “Now, get up. Nice and slow. Sophronia is going to check you for weapons.”

  As the daughter of an undertaker, Sophie is well versed in caring for the dead but not so much in frisking for guns. She’s slow and awkward and comes up empty. I’m not convinced.

  “What’s with the welcoming committee?” Jill says. “I came for my father.”

  “Took you long enough to get around to it.” Sophie retrieves the broom and dustpan from the storage cupboard and starts sweeping up the remaining ashes. “Can’t believe Craig signed Phil’s ashes over to you. You don’t deserve to have them.”

  “I was in France,” Jill protests. “I had many affairs to put in order before I could come.”

  Sophie sniffs and dumps the ashes into my coffee pot.

  “That doesn’t explain what you’re doing, here,” I say. “In my apartment.”

  “We need to talk,” Jill says.

  “I can’t imagine what we have to talk about.”

  “Him,” she says, simply. “Look, do you mind if I sit? It’s been a hellishly long flight and then that drive here from Spokane through absolutely nowhere…I’m exhausted.”

  “Make yourself at home.”

  Not that there are a lot of seating options available—two high-backed wooden chairs, antiques that I fell in love with at a secondhand store but Ed always hated. One armchair, almost as old as I am, and losing stuffing out of one arm. A rocking chair that I’ve never seen before which has somehow gotten mixed in with my belongings.

  “The movers came early?” I ask Sophronia.

  She’s got a smudge on her forehead that makes her look like she’s been to mass on Ash Wednesday. Combined with her usual black clothing, nose piercing, and Cleopatra-style eyeliner, she looks anything but a dutiful Catholic.

  “I hope you don’t mind that I let them in. I tried to call.”

  Our eyes meet and hold. She knows, and I know, that if she has keys to my suite, it’s not because I gave them to her. We’ll discuss that later. Solidarity in front of the interloper is more important.

  “Another thing.” Sophie fidgets and twists a strand of hair around her fingers. “It wasn’t a moving company, exactly.”

  Jill takes advantage of my distraction to settle down into my favorite armchair, which may be old, but is damned comfortable and the one I want for myself. My leg aches. I need coffee and a long, hot shower. But I don’t trust Jill as far as I can spit, and Phil is now resting peacefully in my coffee pot, which is a problem on so many levels I can’t begin to encompass them all. The sudden advent of my belongings isn’t helping.

  “Skip the riddles, Soph. Spit it out.”

  “An old guy brought your stuff in a U-Haul. Your husband, he said. Well, ex, to be precise.”

  “Ed came here?”

  “He had a woman with him. Said they decided to drive the stuff here themselves.”

  I can’t picture Ed and Glenda here at Shadow Valley. And I certainly don’t see either of them carting boxes and furniture around.

  “They’d hired a couple of boys from the high school to move the stuff up from the truck,” Sophie says. “Don’t worry, though. I was here the whole time. I supervised everything.” Her eyes move expressively to my closet door and back, signaling that secrets have been kept.

  Jill looks like a cat who has managed to snag a whole cage full of canaries. “I’m sorry I missed your husband. Does he know about you and Phil?”

  “Oh, he’s not gone,” Sophie volunteers. “Wants to talk to you, Maureen. They’re staying at a hotel.”

  The room temperature drops like a stone into a well. Goose bumps run up and down my spine. At first I think it’s just my reaction to the idea of talking to Ed, but then Phil’s big orange cat, perched atop a stack of boxes to watch the proceedings, hisses and moans, his ears flattening against his skull. Sophie clutches the coffee pot and its contents in one hand, the broom in the other, and stares at something I can’t see.

  Perfect. We’ve got a ghost.

  “What’s wrong with your cat?” Jill’s carefully painted eyebrows arch up in a question.

  My eyes gravitate to the coffee pot and the cold settles into my belly. “Sophie, maybe you could take Phil back to the funeral parlor and find him a better container? I’m sure Jill would prefer something more—tasteful—to carry him around in.”

  Sophie’s lips press together in a stubborn line. “Craig signed him out to Jill. She’s in possession. They can’t go back to the funeral home now.”

  “Oh, for pity’s sake. Sophronia—”

  “There are rules.” She looks fierce enough to make me wonder whether they are rules of this planet or another and I’m not asking in present mixed company.

  “It’s fine,” Jill interjects. “I’ll buy an urn or something tomorrow.”

  I don’t like this word “tomorrow.”

  “Surely you don’t want to drive around with your father in a coffee pot. And they won’t let you back on the plane without a proper container.”

  “Oh, I’m not going anywhere. Not for a while. I’m staying here.”

  “Define here. Hotel? Rental property?”

  “No,” she says, cool and sleek and dangerous. “Here. At the Manor.”

  Sophie looks from me to Jill and back again. Her expression has gone remote and priestessy, never a good sign. “I’ll ask Matt. Maybe he has a jar or something in the kitchen.” She stalks out, still clutching the pot, slamming the door so hard something rattles in the box beside it.

  Careful to never turn my back on Jill, I open the door to the balcony and light up a smoke. Despite the open door and the freezing temperature outside, the room warms. The cat stops his unearthly staring and jumps into Jill’s designer lap, where he sets to kneading and purring. When she tries to pick him up, he digs in with all his claws, snagging the fabric and scratching her in his ensuing panic to get free. A line of blood wells up on her hand.

  “Pleasant creature,” she says.

  “That is Anubis. He belonged to your father.”

  “My dad named a cat Anubis?”

  “No. Soph
ie named him.”

  “Whatever his name is, I really don’t care for cats.”

  This is one thing the two of us have in common, but I stay the course of saying as little as possible. Time drags out like a desert crossing without camels or water.

  I light another smoke and move to the kitchenette, leaning back against the counter to take as much weight as I can off the thrice-damned leg. Just when I think I’m going to have to give in and sit down, she sighs and breaks the silence.

  “Can I have one?”

  “No.”

  “Look, I know we’ve not been on the best of terms—”

  I snort. “That, my dear, is an understatement.”

  “But I have questions only you can answer,” she says, as if she hasn’t heard me, as if questions make for a good enough reason to traipse across the globe and insert herself into my day.

  “Here’s what I’m wondering,” she continues, as if I’ve told her to go ahead. “What would induce my father to buy a retirement home in a tiny little town? Why on earth would a small-town coroner murder him? And above all, why would he leave the Manor to somebody he hasn’t spoken to in thirty years?”

  “Since the person in question hasn’t spoken to him in thirty years, you’d be much more likely to know the answers to that one.”

  “We’ve not exactly been close.”

  “The picture of you on his nightstand was pretty damn recent.”

  She blinks at that, her gaze dropping away, and picks cat hair from her skirt. When she looks up again, her face looks younger, almost vulnerable. “I suppose it’s a mystery that he left me anything at all. The hostility between you and me complicated our relationship.”

  “A problem he got past, apparently.”

  She lifts a slim shoulder in a half shrug. “So, answers?” Her eyes are exactly like Phil’s, and I feel a traitorous softening of my heart.

  Her father is currently occupying my coffee pot, and her mother died years ago. Maybe I’m being too hard on her.

  “It seems your father and the coroner were lovers. She’s not the first woman to lose her mind over him and do something stupid.” A tactless remark, given that Jill’s mother killed herself because of Phil’s tendency to wander, but Jill gives no sign that I’ve struck a nerve.