by Amy Casey
I couldn’t deny what I felt.
There was somebody in this house.
A presence.
And they were watching me.
Chapter 28
I saw the movement and I’m not gonna lie, I felt myself pee a little.
Just a little.
Honest.
The house was dark, even darker than it seemed when I came in here. Outside, I could hear the wind whooshing against the building. It had been creepy enough beforehand, especially knowing I was rooting around a dead guy’s place. But now it was especially creepy.
I’d seen movement. There was no doubt about it.
And I’d felt like there was someone watching me too, suddenly cutting through the solitude I’d experienced just moments prior.
My heart raced. The tension in my chest grew. Who could it be? Steve? Maybe he’d suspected I was going to come here and wanted to catch me in the process. Or maybe Mary? She could’ve followed me. But if she had, that’d be bad news for both of us because it’d put us both at the scene of the crime.
My heart beat faster as I walked closer towards the bedroom doorway where I’d seen the movement just moments ago.
Who else could it be?
The rabbit with the lead?
No. Stupid. That was an invention of my own. Idiot.
I lifted my hand to push the door, even though deep down I didn’t really want to see what was behind it.
I swallowed a lump in my throat, knowing damn well I didn’t have a choice, not anymore.
“Well,” I mumbled to myself. “Here goes nothing.”
I pushed the door aside.
Who I saw wasn’t exactly as expected.
It was Pedro.
He was standing there staring at me. His eyes looked… lost. Unfocused. Like he didn’t totally recognise me—or didn’t recognise something about his current situation, anyway.
And it was then that I saw the glow and I realised.
He was a ghost.
Of course he was a ghost. He was dead. What was I thinking?
Tension picked up some more. I realised the fortune of my situation. I’d been lucky that Krissy had stuck around and that I’d been able to grill her on more than one occasion. What were the odds that I’d be face to face with Pedro’s ghost, too?
I cleared my throat. Tried to think of all the things I could ask him before he disappeared.
And it was just my luck that the first thing that blurted out of my mouth was, “You did have to go and die on me just when I thought I had you, didn’t you?”
I half expected Pedro to react with bemusement. Ghosts carried the traits of their past selves, after all.
But the way Pedro reacted was nothing like Pedro at all. At least, not like the Pedro I knew.
“I was… I was just washing up,” he said.
I frowned. “Washing up? What—”
“My daisies. My daisies needed watering. I was washing up and my daisies needed watering and…”
He stopped, then. And he looked right at me. Nothing unfocused about the way he stared at me anymore. Nothing lost about the way he stared at me.
Just total recognition.
And total fear.
“No Entry.”
The second he said those two words, a shiver crossed my body. Because they were the words that I’d seen just recently. Very recently, actually, scrawled across the back of that photograph in Pedro’s bedroom.
“What did you know about Krissy?” I asked.
Recognition in Pedro’s eyes again. “Krissy? Poor girl. Poor, poor girl. Such a waste of life. Such a waste of such a young life.”
I heard the way Pedro was speaking and it just sounded wrong. Something was off about all of this. The way he was talking. The words he was saying. They just didn’t seem to… well, click.
And then I saw Pedro’s ghost was starting to fade.
I stepped towards him, urgency growing. I needed more from Pedro before he faded into the ether, potentially forever.
“Pedro, I just need to know something. Anything. About Krissy. About—about what happened to you. I need—”
“Oh that face. That awful face.”
My body went even colder. The presence Krissy’s boyfriend described Krissy seeing. “What kind of face?”
Pedro was fading even more rapidly. Time was running out.
“Pedro, I need to know whose face you saw.”
“I didn’t see a face. Just the darkness. The tunnel where there never used to be tunnels. The…”
He stopped then. And for some reason—perhaps my paranormal senses taking lead—I saw an image.
It was an image just like the scribbling on the back of the photograph Pedro had taken of Krissy.
An image like a vortex. A darkness.
A tunnel.
And then…
I shifted back into the present moment. Pedro had almost completely faded now.
I stepped even closer towards him. And as much as I knew it was a faux-pas to use magic on ghosts, I knew there was no other way around it right now.
So I cast a quick clarity spell and looked right into Pedro’s eyes—even if quick spells were akin to ready meals in their effectiveness.
“Who did this to you, Pedro?”
Blankness.
More fading.
“Pedro, who did—”
“No Entry,” he said.
And then he disappeared into oblivion.
Gone.
Chapter 29
When I got back home, Mary was already gone.
She’d left a note pinned to the fridge. Had an emergency of my own. Want a serious word with you when you’re back.
I knew what Mary’s “serious word” would entail, of course. She wasn’t going to be cool with how I’d just charged out of this place and left her in here with Rocky and Beatrice, especially when she didn’t know exactly what I was doing or where I was going.
And sure. She had reason to be miffed with the way I’d treated her.
But there were serious matters at hand. And those serious matters needed addressing, one way or another.
I looked at the notes I’d spread across the floor. Everything I knew about the case, everything I knew about Krissy and her links, everything I knew about Pedro or Daryl. I saw the link to Krissy’s two boyfriends, one of whom I still hadn’t been able to speak to because he’d jumped town soon after he’d been questioned—and been cleared by the police, according to Steve. But how much was I supposed to read into that, really? If I knew one thing about the local police, it was that they were hardly The Bill level of competency when it came to serious case-cracking.
Or perhaps that’s exactly the level they were at. No disrespect to The Bill.
I looked at the circle in the middle of my names and notes. The dark circle that had been scrawled on the back of the photograph that I’d found in Pedro’s house. I hadn’t brought the original along with me of course, but I’d used some magic trickery to replicate it for a limited time right here in front of me—a spell that took some serious magic energy out of me, that was for sure.
But for some reason, I felt like this was worth it.
Because I felt like somehow, this dark vortex or whatever it was, ‘NO ENTRY’ written underneath, offered the answers to my questions.
I just couldn’t see the answers clearly yet.
“Still messing around with all that nonsense?”
I heard the voice from my right. When I turned, I saw that it was Rocky.
He had a sad expression on his face, like he was getting cuddle withdrawals. And I sympathised with him, snarky as he could be. He obviously just wanted things back to normal, and I wanted that too, obviously.
“I’ll get to the bottom of it soon, pup. Don’t you worry.”
“Mary has a point, you know?”
“A point?”
“About how it’s not your job to be looking into things like this. You’re getting obsessed. It gives your eyes a fun
ny look.”
I glanced into the mirror. I couldn’t see what Rocky was referring to.
“I don’t see…”
“You won’t. You’re a human. I’m a dog. We pick up on facial expressions really well, remember?”
I sighed, aggrieved that my often-daft dog’s intelligence in some ways transcended my own.
I looked back at the drawings and the notes I’d placed across the floor like every clichéd amateur sleuth. Pedro was my prime suspect. He’d purchased the Valerian concoction from Collette’s store. Not long after I’d learned that, he’d died—and his ghost had been acting extremely weird.
I remembered all the things he’d said. The gibberish he’d come out with. Stuff about washing up, stuff about daisies. And that look in his eyes. That look like he wasn’t really… well, there.
And then I wondered.
What if Collette had been lying to me?
What if, for some reason, she’d been…
“Shit,” I muttered.
I rushed over to the page where I’d got Peter’s information written down. I looked at his family tree—at his parents. Then I headed onto the local Ancestry page that Goosridge was so proud of—probably to avoid awkward accidental dates with family members—and I found it.
Collette Richardson.
She was once married to Peter’s mum’s brother.
She had links to Peter.
And maybe, just maybe she was closer to him than she’d been letting on.
I stared at Peter’s page again, everything clicking into place.
Pedro hadn’t bought the Valerian concoction after all. He was just a newcomer, so it was easier to pin on him.
Collette had supplied Peter with the concoction.
She’d supplied him with it and she was protecting him because she knew the truth.
The truth about the Valerian concoction.
And the truth about the Hemlock that Peter must surely have spiked the concoction with.
My hands started to shake. My body went cold. Not for the first time in this investigation, it felt like I actually had something.
But this time, it felt momentous.
This time, it felt serious.
I checked my watch. Five past eleven. Too late to go seeing Peter? Probably.
But he was a young man.
And if my feelings were right, he wasn’t going to be getting much in the way of sleep lately.
I walked over to Rocky. Patted him on the head.
“Aw, thanks,” he said.
“I was actually just grabbing some of your hair for a truth serum. But it’s okay.”
He grunted.
I walked over to my kitchen, prepared myself to put this serum together. Hair of a dog. Grain of white rice, preferably Uncle Ben’s. Spit of a sister, whatever the hell that meant. I just gozzed in the bowl and hoped for the best.
And when I was done, I stood by my door again and prepared for the next step in this crazy adventure.
It was time to question Peter.
It was time to find out the truth.
Chapter 30
I stood outside Peter’s house and this time I knew there was no time for messing around.
I knew that Collette Richardson had supplied her technical nephew, Peter, with the Valerian concoction. I was certain of it now. That was the link between them. That was why they were trying to pin the blame on Pedro.
It was Peter. It had to be.
But as I stood there in the cold, in the dark, another question was bugging me, getting to me. And that was the question of Pedro himself. Why had he been killed? Was it Peter that’d done that too, in an attempt to confuse the situation even more? When the post-mortem was conducted, would traces of the Valerian concoction be found in his bloodstream, too?
It felt like even though I had part of the answer, the full answer was still just out of reach, just out of grasp.
But I was a lot closer to finding out the truth—that much I knew now.
I looked down into my hand. I had a truth serum that I had developed through the day. It had been an arduous thing to develop, and it would require a lot of magic on my part, but if anyone or any situation required some magic right now, it was Peter.
I could go to Collette, I knew. But she’d only be confirming a truth I already knew.
Peter was the person of interest.
Peter was the person I needed to use this truth serum on.
I swallowed a lump in my throat and stepped up to Peter’s door. There was another reason why I was anxious about this whole sequence of events, and that was because using the truth serum required me invoking hard magic. Hard magic was magic that didn’t go by the usual rules of the book; dark magic that came from a “different source” according to some of the ancient texts.
I didn’t really believe in all that mumbo-jumbo. But it was still the case that hard magic was more difficult to use, and it had potentially more devastating consequences.
There were other reasons not to use hard magic, too. Even though it was generally easier to invoke—and sometimes didn’t even require a whole load of ingredients and concoctions—there were rumours that people policed the use of hard magic. Some weird magic council that I also thought was nonsense. And that if you used it enough, you’d be banned from using any kind of magic for good.
Manipulating people’s thoughts definitely crossed the line between soft and hard magic. Sure, taking a sneaky peek into someone’s mind wasn’t exactly a rule breaker. But forcing someone to reveal their thoughts… that was different. Very different.
There were no limits to how much could go wrong.
So I wanted to get this done as quickly and with as little fuss as I could.
I took a deep breath and banged on the door.
The longer I waited, standing there in the silence, the more cautious I grew. I remembered the last house I’d gone to like this. Pedro’s. And what’d happened there. What I’d found there.
I knew that if a similar thing happened here then I might not be lucky enough to escape its clutches this time.
But then I saw movement. And I heard footsteps.
And I knew it was almost time.
I lifted the truth serum, popped off the lid.
Peter started to turn the lock.
The door opened.
I saw Peter looking me in the eye, just for a split second.
And then I said the words, I repeated the mantra, and I threw the truth serum right at him.
At first I worried that perhaps I hadn’t got him square in the face. That the serum might’ve missed his eyes or nostrils.
But then I saw the look.
The instant dilation of his pupils.
And although I knew it was technically—technically—a breach of the law, I stuck my foot in the way of the door and stopped it from closing.
“Peter, you’re going to answer my questions. You’re going to be entirely truthful with me. Okay?”
I saw him waning in the way he was looking at me. I saw his stare faltering, and I feared I was losing him.
“You’re going to be entirely truthful with me. You’re going to tell me everything. Okay?
I thought for a second that Peter was lost. That he was completely over the edge and that the serum hadn’t worked.
But then he looked right back at me and, although still entirely conscious and in control of the rest of his actions, he nodded. “Okay.”
He relaxed his composure then. And he did something else I wasn’t totally expecting, which made me suspect I’d got a cleaner hit with the serum than I first thought.
He stepped away and let me inside.
I looked over my shoulder, making sure nobody was watching. I knew how dodgy this would look, especially if something ended up happening to Peter. One witness and I was done for.
I thought about what Pedro had told me about the “square” and how there would be more killings, and how if I were pinned for this, then I would go down for it forev
er and nobody would ever know the truth.
I tried to gather my thoughts, tried to pull all of my questions together while the truth serum was at its strongest. Figured I might as well go for the jackpot. “Peter, did you kill Krissy?”
“No!” Peter shouted.
The way he said it, there was such a certainty to it. Such an assuredness that, even though I knew the truth serum wasn’t entirely flawless, made me question myself and my line of enquiry after all.
“Can I ask you that again?”
“You can ask me as much as you like,” he said. “My answer is the same because it’s the truth. I didn’t kill Krissy. I wouldn’t do such a thing.”
I swallowed a lump in my throat, feeling shot down all over again. It had to be Peter. I was sure of it.
So how was this happening?
How was it possible that Peter was protesting his innocence at all, especially when I’d gone to such lengths with the truth serum?
“But the Valerian,” I said. “You bought it, didn’t you? A lot of it. From Collette. And you spiked it with Hemlock.”
“Yes,” Peter said. There was remorse in his voice. Guilt in his voice.
“And why did you do that?”
“I pretended… I pretended I was okay with her and Mark’s relationship. But I wasn’t. I really wasn’t. I went over the edge. I… I wanted to do something to Mark. Something to take him out of the picture. Something silent. Something peaceful. Something… something gave me the idea. I don’t know where it came from, but it was strong and once I got it, I couldn’t resist it. So I bought the Valerian. I tore out the pages of Collette’s sales book when she wasn’t looking. Then I… I added the Hemlock.”
I stared at Peter in stunned realisation. “You wanted to poison him.”
Peter nodded, reluctantly.
“Where did you get the Hemlock?”
He looked at me, glassy-eyed. Like there was a gap in his memory that he couldn’t quite see with any real clarity.
Peter went off on a new trail of thought. “But I… when I’d realised just how mad I was, when clarity came to me, I went to get rid of the Valerian concoction I’d bought from Collette. But it’d already gone.”
“Already gone?” I said.