Spirits in the Material World

by Lisa Shea

  Marc nodded. “At least until after we talk with the Captain. I know we should be able to trust Gertie and Prudence, but something about this entire situation is off. I think we need to play things close to the vest for now.”

  I nodded, glancing down at Sarah. I knew I’d do whatever it took to keep her safe.

  Marc walked up toward the desk sergeant. “Good afternoon. I’m –”

  The desk sergeant smiled. “You’ve gotta be Marc. Wyoming was it? The Captain’s waiting for you. Right down that hall.”

  I didn’t ask how the sergeant knew Marc was a fellow cop. There was just something about the way Marc held himself. I was sure cops could tell that about each other.

  We went down until we reached the Chief’s door. It was open, and she waved us in.

  Chief Karen Moynahan was an inspiration to me. I was well aware that across the US only 12% of our police force was female – and only a tiny handful of those women had reached the upper levels of the system. Chief Moynahan had proven herself time and time again as having the moral, mental, and emotional strength necessary to care for our diverse community.

  She smiled as we came in. “Detective Courtright, it’s a pleasure to have you here. Welcome to Salem.”

  Marc shook her hand. “Please, call me Marc. And this here is –”

  Moynahan laughed. “Oh, Amber and I know each other well.”

  Marc raised an eyebrow.

  Moynahan’s grin grew. “Nothing official, I assure you. Amber is as trustworthy as they come. It’s just that I’m an avid reader. I’m in her shop fairly often.”

  I nodded. Moynahan loved of science fiction – and not the light-hearted space romp stories, either. She went for the extremely fact-driven storylines full of technical details and attention to minutiae. I’d seen her leave scathing reviews for authors who hadn’t done their research.

  Moynahan waved a hand. “Please, have a seat.”

  Marc and I took the two wooden chairs before her large desk. Sarah roamed about the room, gazing in curiosity at the shelves of books, the awards on the walls, and the small statue of a witch on Moynahan’s desk.

  Moynahan settled back down into her sturdy leather chair. “Enjoying Salem so far, Marc?”

  Marc nodded. “Very much so. It’s a lovely city. I can see why my mother was so happy here.”

  “And a sister. That must be interesting. Had you two ever met before?”

  Marc shook his head. “I didn’t even know I had one. It’s been a lot to take in.”

  “Indeed.”

  There was a pause.

  Sarah glanced over from where she was reading one of the awards on the wall.

  Marc drew in a breath. “I know this is irregular. But I was just wondering –”

  Moynahan put her hand on a thick brown folder sitting on her desk.

  She slid it forward toward Marc.

  “This is what you’re looking for.”

  Marc glanced at me.

  Moynahan smiled. “Amber hasn’t said a word. She didn’t have to. A cop’s parent dies? Any cop worth their salt would want to see the files. Understand just what happened.”

  Marc’s cheeks tinted. “It’s not that I doubt your department at all –”

  Moynahan waved a hand. “No need to explain. It’s the way we are, isn’t it? Curious. Always wanting to see for ourselves.”

  She tapped a hand on the brown folder. “The moment I found out she had a cop son, coming in for the funeral, I had them make paper copies of any records we processed. They’re all right here.”

  She rose to standing. “I’m just going to check on a few things. It’ll probably be twenty minutes or so. You need me before then, just call out to my assistant. She’ll track me down. But take your time. No need to rush.”

  She nodded at Marc, then at me. She walked out of the room and gently closed the door behind her.

  Marc stared at the folder as if it held the very secrets of the universe.

  I gave him his time. I had a sense of what he was going through. I’d gotten a hold of my own parents’ records as soon as I turned eighteen – and I’d pored over them countless times in the intervening years. I had always hoped that just one more reading – just one more examination – could answer all of my questions.

  Could finally tell me why.

  Marc opened the folder.

  Time slipped away, Sarah came over to read over our shoulders, and Marc passed the pages to me when he finished with them. There were coroner’s notes, photos from the study, interviews with various family and friends, and the usual legalese involved with transporting a body from place to place. Marc read every line with close attention. I imagined he’d seen hundreds of these types of reports in his chosen profession – but none which were as close to him.

  We read … read …

  I sorted through the pile and drew out two large photos. They showed two different close-ups of the shelves. One was to the left of the desk and another was further back.

  I stared at them.

  Marc turned his gaze toward me, watching, but not saying anything.

  Something was off.

  I let my mind go. Relax. I’d learned over the years that to try to narrow in on something was often to shake it loose. Instead, I gave my mind space. I breathed in, long and deep. I released my breath. I let my eyes go across the row of books, the titles, the authors –

  I pointed with a finger. “There.”

  He nodded. “I saw that, too.”

  Sarah crowded in between us. “What? What do you see?”

  I indicated the second shelf. “See that row? Many might think that Josephine’s collections weren’t well organized, but she had her own system. She didn’t put her books on the shelves by title or author name. She grouped them by topic area. So all of these books, here, are about herbs and plants. See them? Alchemy of Herbs. Rosemary Gladstar’s Medicinal Herbs. Encyclopedia of Herbal Medicine. She’s got a good mix of new and classics.”

  I nudged with a fingernail. “But see that one? An Essay on Mineral, Animal, and Vegetable Poisons? That’s from 1824. It’s a first edition. It doesn’t belong there. The color of the cover seems to match the others but the topic doesn’t.”

  I pulled over the other photo. “This section here, this is where she keeps the more dangerous content. Here’s Poison, Medicine, and Disease in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Here we’ve got It All Depends on the Dose: Poisons and Medicines in European History. She had to order a number of these special through my shop to get them in. I used to joke with her that she’d need to make a locking case in her study, so that someone didn’t get her hands on these and cause trouble.”

  I looked down at the photos, my breath stilling.

  Had someone found the convenience just a bit too alluring? The solution to a problem just a page-turn away?

  I pointed. “There. It’s Herbs and Herbalism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Someone in a rush might think the book belonged with all the others. But it doesn’t. It would go over with the herbal stuff. So someone got confused when putting those books back. They put them into each other’s places. I know Josephine would never have made a mistake like that.”

  Marc nodded. “But more than that. When you and I were in the room today, everything was in its right spot. Those books were where they belonged. I know the police wouldn’t have touched evidence like that. So someone else did it.”

  “Maybe Alex was in there and realized they were out of place. She moved them back to where they should be.”

  Marc raised a brow at me.

  I sighed. “All right, you’re right. Alex wants to toss everything in that room into a dumpster and replace it all with carefully curated color-matched Mason jars, each exactly 2/3rds-full of imported herbs from Indonesia. She wouldn’t care one whit about what order these books were in.”

  Sarah perked up. “So we can just dust those two books for fingerprints and we know who did it!”

  I had a sense that
Sarah might have been reading a few too many Nancy Drew stories. “Fingerprints don’t always stay on books like that,” I warned her. “We could try, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.”

  Marc’s gaze went again to the photo. “This gives us a clue, though. All of the toxicology reports came up clean. The forensics had not even the tiniest idea that something unnatural happened to my mother. But now we have a direction to look in. If those two books were taken down, it would seem that someone was referring to them. So if we get a sense of which particular herbs are in there …”

  I nodded. “We can see which ones act without leaving a trace. We can at least get a sense of the how. That could then lead us to the who and the why.”

  Sarah smiled. “Then let’s get reading!”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Marc and I were relaxing side by side on my living room sofa, him with my tablet, me with my laptop. Sarah was lying on the ground with my cellphone. Felix was sprawled alongside her, his tail gently flicking through her arm.

  We were all reading through copies of An Essay on Mineral, Animal, and Vegetable Poisons. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, we’d found an illustrated version online for only 99 cents. A few clicks of a button, and we had copies on each device for us to explore at leisure.

  Marc took another sip of his cabernet. “Did you know if you ingest too much copper in food that the food has a coppery taste? Who would have known?”

  I chuckled. “Thank you again for cooking tonight, speaking of that. Your chicken saag was absolutely delicious.”

  “You’re the one who had the ingredients,” he pointed out. “I just did the concocting.”

  “I try to do something new every week. It’s not always a success, but it at least gets me out of my comfort zone.” I breathed in the rich fragrance he’d caused to fill the small apartment. “I think I could get a candle scented like this. It’s delightful.”

  Sarah looked up. “Lead is dangerous? But we had all sorts of lead items all around our house. All our plates and bowls were made of pewter and my father boasted about how much lead they had in them. Our glassware was the finest lead crystal.”

  I gave her a gentle smile. “There’s a lot we’ve learned about health issues over the years. The dangers of lead. Mercury. Asbestos. But we’re still not very wise. Heck, we deluge our plants with pesticides – poisons meant to kill bugs and germs growing on them. Somehow we decide that we’ll be just fine eating those plants.”

  She shook her head and went back to reading.

  Evening came on, the shadows lengthened, and I slipped off my shoes. I rubbed at the arch of my left foot.

  Marc patted the space beside him. “Sit sideways and put your feet up here. I’ll give you a foot massage.”

  “Are you sure? They’re probably all stinky. I haven’t had a shower since –”

  “Feet. Up.”

  I turned in place and shuffled myself back into the corner of the couch, so my feet were stretched out to him. He somehow managed to prop my tablet against the far arm so that he could read while his right hand lowered to my foot.

  Bliss. Absolute bliss.

  I tried to continue reading, something about potassium, but the sensations coming from my foot were just too wondrous. I’d certainly appreciated my feet before, of course. They were dutiful body parts which moved me around my day. But now they were more than that. They were glorious, radiating beacons of joy, and my eyes fluttered closed.

  It was wonderful … wonderful …

  * * *

  Marc and I were on my parents’ boat. He was steering us through Salem harbor, wearing a white t-shirt and jeans. I was in a royal-blue one-piece swimsuit. I moved next to him and his arm came around my waist as if we belonged together.

  I leaned against him.

  He pressed a kiss against my forehead. “You know, I could get used to this.”

  “What, owning a boat?”

  He took his hand off the wheel for a moment to motion at the ocean before us. “Living on the coast. Being out on the water.”

  His head came down to press his lips against my forehead again. He murmured, “You.”

  My entire body glowed. It was right. Everything was just right.

  A pain grew in my right leg, and I reached down to massage it. “Darn leg cramp.” I kneaded at the muscle.

  “Leg cramps come from too little potassium,” he said.

  “Yeah, I know. I should get a banana.”

  “Gets too bad, they have to do an injection,” he told me. “But that’s risky, you know. Inject too much potassium, and wham. It triggers a heart attack. And how would anybody ever know? Your body goes into rigor mortis when you die. It naturally releases potassium. Seems just like natural causes. No one would ever know.”

  The words echoed around in my mind.

  No one would ever know.

  No one would ever know.

  The leg cramp intensified – burned – twisted –

  * * *

  I popped awake, yelling, “Marc!”

  He looked over in amusement. “Back with the living? You had a good snooze there. It’s nearly – what –” He glanced at the screen of the tablet, still resting before him. “Three a.m.”

  I blinked in surprise.

  Sure enough, the scene outside the windows was dark, with only moonlight streaming in through the panes. Sarah was curled up in my plush chair, gently snoring. Felix was right at her feet. Marc must have put my laptop on the coffee table when I fell asleep, for it was shut and charging.

  I climbed my way over to his side. “I had this dream. You and I were on our boat –”

  He chuckled. “Oh, we have a boat now? You do know that I’ve never really been out on the ocean.”

  “We can fix that,” I assured him. “But the important part was that I got a muscle cramp. And I realized –”

  “Potassium,” he said. “Potassium mimics a heart attack and wouldn’t be detected. Our bodies naturally have potassium in them anyway, especially after a body dies and the muscles contract.”

  I blinked. “How’d you figure that out?”

  He pointed. “I’ve been reading the same book you did. And I was awake for several hours after you fell asleep, to delve into it further.”

  He pointed to his screen. “There are some specialized tests which can be done, to try to determine if excess potassium was injected to cause the death. Lanceolate crystals should accumulate in some of the organs.”

  “Lanceo-what?”

  He smiled. “Lanceolate. It’s a fancy word which just means the crystals are shaped like little lance heads. Oval with a point.”

  “So is that something we can test for?”

  He nodded. “Fortunately, my mother wasn’t keen on cremation or any of the other options. She went with an old fashioned burial. It’s been quick enough that we should be able to take her back out and examine the organs. I’ve already communicated with the Captain. They’ll be doing that in the morning.”

  “But what are you going to tell Alex? Won’t she wonder why you’re exhuming your mother?”

  He nodded. “I thought of that. The Captain’s agreed that, for now, we’re going to say that a piece of equipment was accidentally left inside my mother from the autopsy. We’ll ask Alex to keep that quiet, and I’m sure she will. Whether Alex is involved or not involved, she won’t want a fuss made, either way. It’ll give us the excuse to have the body back in the lab for a short period of time and hopefully won’t alert whoever the culprit is.”

  I leaned against him. “If it does turn out that someone injected Josephine with potassium, and induced the heart attack, then we have the how. But we still don’t have the who or the why.”

  “I imagine if we figure out one of those things we’ll have a solid lead on the other. And if my mother really was killed, it gives a reason why action was taken against Anna. She could have been a witness to the murder. The murderer probably never imagined there was a spirit in the house keeping an eye o
n things. The moment they realized about the spirit, their main focus was probably on ways to shut that spirit up.”

  I shivered.

  “That’s how this all began,” I explained to Marc. “Gertie and Prudence had realized there was a spirit in a house.”

  We both looked over to Sarah’s sleeping form. She seemed wholly angelic, curled up in the chair.

  I gave a small smile. “Gertie wanted a book on how to drive her away – and soon they’d hired Cassandra to do the deed. But I don’t think either one would have worked, even if Sarah had been malicious.”

  “Oh?”

  I settled down in against him. “We can do actions like smudging with white sage or laying down garlic or so on. If a spirit was just passing by, the spirit might sense the change in energy and move on to somewhere it was more comfortable. But if a spirit really had a strong reason to be somewhere? If it was convinced that this one location was its home to defend? That’s an entirely different ballgame. At that point you’re more in the mindset of a hostage negotiator.”

  Marc nodded. “You don’t want to try to blast him out with guns. He’s got too many ways to dodge and avoid. You want to talk him out. Help him see the reason of moving on.”

  “Exactly. You want to show the spirit why it’s in their best interest to be somewhere else. Or at least to be a comfortable partner in the space.”

  Marc considered this. He put his arm up on the back of the couch and I moved into the nook. His arm came around me and he laid the tablet down on the side table.

  He asked, “So what does this mean for Anna?”

  I eased against him. He was so sturdy and comfortable. Where had he been ten years ago? Why had he waited so long to come into my life?

  I knew the answer to that. I probably wouldn’t have appreciated him back then. My priorities and goals were different. He had come to me exactly when I was ready. Just when I would appreciate all he had to offer.

  I brought my mind around to his question about Anna. “I don’t think anyone could have driven Anna away. She was eager to learn more about her sister and we hadn’t told her yet where her sister was located. She would have stayed put to be able to talk with us. Things like garlic and white sage would have annoyed her, but not enough to make her go far.”