witches of cleopatra hill 07 - impractical magic

by Christine Pope

  “It’s also one of the best spots in town to see orbs,” she added helpfully.

  Almost as one, everybody in the group lifted their phones or their cameras and started shooting. Colin didn’t bother. He sure didn’t believe in orbs, and the battery on his phone was starting to get low. Standing next to him in the semi-gloom, Jenny lifted an eyebrow, but she didn’t say anything.

  “Oh, my gosh!” Kathy from Nebraska exclaimed. “There are hundreds of them!”

  What the — ?

  Everyone crowded around her as she held up her phone. On the screen was, presumably, the last photo she took. Even though she stood several feet away, because it was so dark and the screen fairly bright, Colin could see an image crowded with hundreds of pale glowing spheres in various sizes.

  It would be easy to dismiss those strange spheres as an artifact of using her flash in the darkness…but she hadn’t. Everyone had, per Frankie’s instructions, turned off the flash function on their various devices.

  Colin shot a questioning look at Jenny, and she raised her shoulders.

  “They’ve always been here,” she said simply.

  A creepy-crawly sensation started somewhere around the base of his neck and proceeded to work its way down his spine. There had to be a perfectly logical explanation for those palely glowing spheres that crowded the screen of Kathy-from-Lincoln’s phone…but he was damned if he knew what the hell it might be.

  The other people in the group started shuffling through the images they had taken, and, sure enough, every single one of them showed more or less the same thing, although not all of the photos were as crowded with orbs as the one that had startled Kathy so much.

  “They must like you,” Frankie said with a grin. “But we’re getting to the end of our tour, so let me take you to say hi to Maisie before we call it quits for the night.”

  “Maisie?” Colin inquired.

  “Oh, she haunts the side street next to Spook Hall — Lawrence Auditorium, I mean. Before the hall was built, that piece of land had a brothel built on it.” As she spoke, she was guiding the group away from the vacant lot and down a not very well lit street. “Poor Maisie had a jealous customer, and he cut her throat one night. She’s been there ever since.”

  That’s a heck of a way to spend eternity, Colin thought grimly as he followed the other ghost hunters, Jenny at his side. Once again she wore that closed-off, tight-mouthed expression, and he wondered what was going through her head.

  Well, he could guess. Joking about ghosts and ghost tours was one thing, but if she believed in ghosts at all, maybe, just maybe she’d also found herself wondering from time to time whether her own sister, also the victim of a gruesome murder, had decided to remain on this plane like the unfortunate Maisie.

  No way would he ever ask, though. If she wanted to talk about it, he’d be there for her, but he certainly wasn’t going to force the issue. Right then he wished they weren’t surrounded by strangers. Judging by the expression she currently wore, he thought she could use a hug.

  They paused next to a nondescript building with a large display window that was currently filled with leftover Halloween decorations. They’d better get a move on that, Colin thought. Thanksgiving’s next week.

  Or maybe they left the Halloween stuff up year-round. Jerome did seem like a very Halloween-ish kind of place. If Pumpkin Jack and Sally and the rest of the gang from A Nightmare Before Christmas ever decided to live in the real world, the former mining town was just the kind of place where they’d take up residence.

  “A New York paper once referred to Jerome as the ‘wickedest town in the West,’” Frankie said, hands on her hips as she seemed to inspect the blocky outlines of “Spook Hall.” “A term that no one really disputed, considering this tiny scrap of land boasted thirty-seven saloons and twenty-nine brothels at its peak. There was — well, you couldn’t really call it easy money, what with the way these girls had to earn it, but they flocked here. Maisie Templeton was one of those girls, and she died here when she was just nineteen years old.”

  “And she’s still…here?” Kathy-from-Lincoln asked, a definite quaver in her voice.

  “Oh, yes. The building itself has a long history of manifestations — cold spots, knocking on the walls, objects moved from one place to another. Part of the reason why the committee in charge of the decorations in the front window likes to leave them there for so long is that they have fun checking to see what’s gotten moved around and when.”

  Frankie had to be kidding…didn’t she? Colin sent a questioning look at Jenny, but she only gave another of those shrugs.

  Well, rack that up as another one of roughly a hundred things he wanted to ask her about during dinner.

  “Has anyone….” Barbara began, a definite quaver in her voice. She studiously avoided looking at her husband as she went on, tone a little firmer, “I mean, has anyone tried to help these ghosts move on?”

  “Oh, sure,” Frankie replied. “Sometimes it works. But some of them, for whatever reason, seem very rooted to this place. They don’t want to leave. Maybe being here helps to remind them of when they were alive. What’s beyond — that next place — it frightens them.”

  “Frightens a ghost?” Alan said, clearly not bothering to keep the contempt from his voice.

  “Ghosts used to be people, Mr. Lundquist,” Frankie said. “Just because they’re no longer alive doesn’t mean they can’t still be scared.”

  An uneasy silence fell after that remark. None of the ghost tour guests seemed to want to look at each other, and even Jenny stepped a few feet away from him so she could stand there, arms crossed, as she stared at Spook Hall. Colin didn’t want to know what she might be thinking.

  “Anyway,” Frankie went on, obviously realizing she’d just thrown a major damper on the tour, “we’ve got one more stop on the way back to my office, so if you’ll follow me — ”

  They all moved after her as she began to head back up the steeply sloped street. Jenny moved quickly as well, as if glad to be away from the building that stood on the site where another young woman had been murdered.

  For some reason, though, Colin didn’t feel inclined to begin walking right away. If they were headed toward the Jerome Ghost Tours office, he knew basically where they were going and could catch up soon enough.

  Instead, he stood there, arms crossed, looking at the glass-fronted façade of the building. Why, he wasn’t really sure. It wasn’t as if he expected to see the drippy candles and fake cobwebs and hanging bats in the Halloween display start moving around on their own.

  But then he did catch a pale flash out of the corner of his eye, and he startled, pulse beginning to race…until he realized that the pale flash had only been a young woman who was walking up the street toward him. She looked to be around twenty, with curly blonde hair piled up on top of her head. Her clothes were strange, a high-necked white blouse and a long dark skirt, but he thought maybe she worked in one of the shops here and had adopted the turn-of-the-century dress to enhance the old-time atmosphere of the town.

  The strange young woman paused a few feet away from him and planted her hands on her hips. This close, Colin noticed that she had very fine, pale skin, and big blue eyes framed with thick gold lashes. Very pretty, if nowhere near as striking as Jenny.

  “You better tell her,” the young woman said, speaking to him as familiarly as if they were long-time friends, rather than two strangers who’d never seen one another until this moment.

  “Excuse me?” he responded, not sure what else to say. Maybe she’d mistaken him for someone else.

  The blonde girl jerked her chin up the street, as if to indicate the rest of the ghost-hunting group. They’d disappeared around a corner, but Colin fancied he could still hear Frankie’s voice echoing off the tall brick buildings.

  “She don’t like it when people lie,” the strange young woman — girl, really — said. “So you’d better come clean, Colin Campbell.”

  At her use of his name
, he did startle. How the hell could she know who he was? Well, he supposed it was possible that Jenny had talked up his trip here so it was common knowledge among the McAllister family. For some reason, though, he didn’t think the young woman standing a few feet away was a McAllister. He couldn’t even explain the difference, only that there was something in her features which didn’t seem at all similar to theirs.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about, Miss….” He trailed off, hoping she would supply her name.

  But she didn’t. She only crossed her arms and sent him a penetrating blue stare, one he could see clearly even in the half-lit gloom of the narrow street where they stood. “Oh, yes, you do, even if you don’t want to admit it to yourself. Miss Jenny McAllister has been through enough already without you lying to her. Why, when she finds out, it’s going to break her heart.”

  He went cold. Dimly, Colin noted how he’d never actually experienced that sensation before, and yet, he might as well have been a block of ice in the shape of a man right then. But here was this girl telling him he was a liar, and how the hell could she have known that? He hadn’t said anything about the McAllisters and his involvement with Jenny to anyone. The closest he’d come was mentioning to Ryan that he’d met a woman at the wedding reception and that he was going to Jerome for the weekend to visit her. That little bit definitely wasn’t enough information for anyone to go on, even in the unlikely event that Ryan had started snooping and had somehow made contact with the strangely dressed woman who seemed to know far more than Colin believed she should.

  “Who are you?” he demanded, his tone rougher than he’d intended. But damn, this girl had shaken him up.

  She smiled, an enigmatic Mona Lisa sort of smile. Her eyes flicked toward Spook Hall and then back to him. “Oh, I think you know exactly who I am, Mr. Campbell.”

  And then…she was gone. It wasn’t as if he’d blinked and she’d taken off running down the street or anything like that. No, one second she’d been standing there, clear as day, and the next she had disappeared into thin air. On stage, it would have been a pretty good trick.

  On a gloomy street in Jerome, where the air felt thick with memory, it wasn’t such a good trick after all. In fact, Colin was pretty sure it hadn’t been a trick. It had been….

  A shiver went over him, followed by another. His mind wanted to reject the explanation, wanted desperately to come up with something that would explain the young woman and her strange prescience and the way she’d blinked out of existence as if she’d never been there in the first place.

  Colin realized then that he’d seen his first ghost. The ghost of Maisie Templeton, to be precise. As a woman who’d been betrayed by a man, she no doubt had very personal reasons for making sure that Jenny McAllister could avoid experiencing that same betrayal.

  And if the strange girl really had been a ghost, then that quite possibly meant….

  No, he refused to believe that. He just wouldn’t. Jenny McAllister was the most amazing woman he’d ever met. She couldn’t be….

  But what if she is? his mind pushed at him, and he didn’t have an answer.

  It would definitely be a joke from the universe that the perfect woman for him just happened to be a witch.

  * * *

  Something was up with Colin, but Jenny couldn’t figure out what it might be. He’d lagged behind a little bit after the group stopped at Spook Hall, but he’d caught up soon afterward, looking as pale as….

  Well, as pale as if he’d seen a ghost.

  Which was ridiculous. Not that there weren’t ghosts around, only that Colin, a civilian, certainly wouldn’t have been able to see one. The only person in Jerome who could actually see a ghost was Angela, the prima, and she wasn’t even here right now. She’d be down in a little less than a week for Thanksgiving, but until then, not a single one of Jerome’s denizens, witch or civilian, should have had the dubious pleasure of seeing a ghost.

  He’d mumbled something about wanting to look at the display in the windows at Spook Hall, and Jenny had let it go. After all, it wasn’t as if he’d ditched her or anything, only allowed himself to get distracted for a few minutes.

  Still, she was glad that the tour was over. She managed a smile for Frankie as she handed over her EMF reader, and Colin also smiled and thanked the tour operator for a very educational experience.

  Again, it was probably her imagination, but Jenny could have sworn she heard a special inflection in his voice as he said “educational.”

  There really wasn’t time to do anything except head up the hill to the Asylum restaurant. It was quite a climb, but Colin seemed to manage well enough. However, the exertion required to get to one of Jerome’s highest points was sufficient that neither one of them was too inclined to talk.

  Just as well, Jenny thought. It was probably good for them to have a bit of decompression time after the ghost tour. She still wasn’t sure why the whole experience should have bothered her so much. Was this what she had to look forward to — having every little thing set her off about Roslyn?

  Goddess, she certainly hoped not.

  Because they had reservations, they didn’t have to wait at all. The hostess led them to a quiet table in a corner near one of the fireplaces, a welcome spot on a chilly November night.

  “You’re sure I shouldn’t have gone back to your place and changed?” Colin asked in low tones after giving quick glance toward a very young couple seated a few tables away. The boy had on a tie, and the girl a nice dress.

  “You’re fine,” Jenny replied calmly. “I’m pretty sure they’re going to the homecoming dance down in Cottonwood after this. You’ll notice most people aren’t nearly as dressed up.”

  Another glance, one that seemed to take in the remainder of the diners, most of whom were wearing sweaters or long-sleeved T-shirts. His shoulders dropped slightly — from relief, Jenny guessed. “You’re right, of course.”

  She liked that “of course” but decided it was probably better not to make too big a fuss about it. Instead, she said, “Any of the wines look good?”

  “Um…all of them?”

  She couldn’t help chuckling at his comment. “Well, we might want to narrow it down just a little.”

  They settled on a local wine from the Pillsbury vineyard, and decided to get some soup because they’d done enough walking on the ghost tour to justify the extra calories. Besides, soup sounded good on a cold night like this. After they’d given their order to the server and she’d gone off to get things started, Colin settled back in his chair and smiled across the table at Jenny.

  “That was quite the tour,” he said.

  “I didn’t work you out too hard, did I?” she asked, letting a teasing note just barely enter her voice. Better to lighten the mood a little after the ghost tour.

  “Nah.” He shifted slightly, then gave an exaggerated wince. “Well, except maybe that last leg up the hill to get here. I thought I was going to dinner, not mountain climbing.”

  “Wimp.”

  A grin then, his hazel eyes dancing in that way which made her thighs feel all warm and tingly. “Hey, it’s nothing that a little muscle relaxant couldn’t cure.”

  As if on cue, the server came back with their bottle of wine, along with assurances that their soup would be along shortly. That sounded great, but right then Jenny was more concerned about the wine. Colin had the right idea about that “muscle relaxant.”

  In no time, though, she had a nice measure of wine sitting in her glass. After the server headed off toward the kitchen, Colin raised his own wine glass.

  “Here’s to Jerome.”

  She knew she could drink to that, so she lifted hers and clinked it against his glass. “So you liked it?” she asked, trying not to sound too hopeful.

  “Absolutely. It’s got a great mixture of history and funkiness, the people are friendly, the views are amazing — I can see why you’d want to live here.”

  Not like I had much choice, Jenny thoug
ht then. But true, she did love it here. There were some in the clan who’d moved down to Cottonwood or Clarkdale or even Page Springs or Cornville, but she knew she wouldn’t feel quite complete if she couldn’t get up in the morning and see all of the Verde Valley spread out before her, the warm red rocks of Sedona, the distant purple of the mountains along the Mogollon Rim. “I’m glad,” she said, and decided she’d better leave it there. Anything else, and she might end up sounding too needy.

  He seemed to understand, though. His expression grew serious, and he leaned forward slightly, fingers clasped around the stem of his wine glass. “And I can also see why you weren’t that thrilled with Tucson.”

  She hadn’t been expecting that response. “I liked Tucson just fine. That chimichanga was amazing.”

  Most guys probably would have made a crack about the chimichanga that had absolutely nothing to do with Mexican cuisine. As she’d learned already, however, Colin Campbell was not most guys. “Okay, the food and the shopping are pretty great. But I saw your eyes widen once or twice when we were stuck in traffic or when an emergency vehicle went by, or whatever. It’s crowded, not really your kind of place.”

  “I had no idea I was being that obvious.”

  One corner of his mouth lifted in a lopsided smile. “Maybe you weren’t…but I have keen powers of observation.”

  He looked so goofy — and cute — right then that she just had to grin back at him. “Oh, naturally. Well, you’re probably right.” She hesitated for a second, then realized she’d better be honest. This wasn’t a matter of not liking him or not being attracted to him, but more that she didn’t want to set up false expectations. “I guess I’m just a small-town girl at heart. My cousin Caitlin was happy to go off to the big city, but even though I’m glad for her, I can’t help thinking about what she gave up.”

  Colin’s smile faded, and the expression he took on looked almost too neutral. “Maybe she didn’t look at it that way.”