Witch on First: A Jinx Hamilton Mystery Book 4 (The Jinx Hamilton Novels)

by Juliette Harper

  When we were settled with big glasses of ice tea, and Pete was off to the kitchen with our order, Chase said, “Now, talk to me about this possession business.”

  “Why does that word bother you so much?” I asked.

  “There is dark magic in the world, honey,” he said, “far darker than anything Brenna Sinclair could dish out. Possession is serious business.”

  “I think I figured that out when I tried my psychometry on the chessboard,” I said, describing my vision of the board’s hellish interior prison and watching as Chase’s expression grew even more clouded.

  Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. “You’re scaring me with that look on your face,” I said.

  “From what you're telling me, we should all be scared of that thing,” he replied. “What did Barnaby say about all this?”

  “That,” I said with a sigh, “is where things start to get complicated. I think he knows something about the chessboard, but he wouldn’t tell me until he talked to Moira. That’s the conversation I was talking to TorI about. Barnaby said he’d get back to me just as soon as he and Moira talked.”

  “Okay,” Chase said, “that’s good. Nobody knows more about magical artifacts than Moira unless it’s Myrtle so . . ..”

  He stopped and looked at me.

  “Okaaaaaay,” he said warily, “I know that expression. There’s more, isn’t there?”

  I nodded and launched into a long recitation about our suspicions regarding Myrtle’s behavior. Chase didn't say anything, but when I finally ran out of steam, he took a long drink of his tea like he wished there was something stronger in the glass. Then he said, with complete conviction, “The aos si would not lie to you knowingly.”

  “I don’t want to think she would,” I said, “but how can you be so sure?”

  “Because I know her,” he said simply. “Her behavior has to be tied to that damned chess set in some way.”

  “I could use a dose of that faith,” I said.

  Chase considered my words and then said, “Why don’t we go get some for you?”

  “Where?” I laughed. “The Faith Store?”

  My wisecrack made us both laugh, which was something we really needed to do. The last lingering tension between us dissipated and Chase reached across the table and caught hold of my hand. “I’m sorry I made it sound like I don’t think you can take care of yourself,” he said.

  “And I’m sorry I went all ‘I am woman hear me roar’ on you,” I admitted. “A lot of that was just rattled nerves over finding Fish out front and not wanting to give you more to deal with by telling you about Myrtle.”

  “That’s okay,” he smiled. “Water under the bridge.”

  I can tell you exactly what I thought at that moment. “If Chase and I never had disagreements more serious than this one, life was going to be easy.”

  File that one away under “Tempting Fate.” You’ll see why by the time this story is done.

  “So,” I said, “what’s this business about getting me some insta-faith?”

  “What I had in mind,” he answered, “was a trip out to the waterfall tonight. It’s still a full moon, you know.”

  Knasgowa.

  Why didn’t I think about that?

  My ancestor’s spirit dwells near an enchanted pond. The night I met her, she told me to talk with her any time. I hadn’t been back since. But Chase was right. I needed the advice of the founder of our line.

  “That’s a really good idea,” I said.

  “I do get them occasionally,” he said, adding firmly, “and I’m coming with you.”

  Chase cut the protest that rose to my lips short with his version of the raised hand “hold on” sign.

  “Don’t even,” he said. “I’ll go in panther form and hang back at the edge of the clearing, but I’m going, and that’s that.”

  Since we had just made up, and I really didn’t like the idea of wandering around the woods with a killer on the loose, I gave in.

  “Okay,” I said, “I won’t argue.”

  Then something occurred to me.

  “You realize you’ve never shifted around me,” I said.

  Chase grew still, studying me with eyes that betrayed just a flicker of doubt. “How do you feel about that?”

  “Well,” I said reasonably, “it’s not like I haven’t seen you as a panther before.”

  “You didn’t know it was me,” he pointed out quietly.

  “Oh,” I said, “I think I did. No one else looks at me the way you do.”

  Chase colored a little. “You’re nice to look at.”

  Reaching back across the table, I caught hold of his hand again. “Thank you,” I said, “and it doesn’t bother me at all. We need to get you over being afraid of that.”

  “We do, huh?” he asked, grinning.

  “Yeah, we do,” I grinned back.

  “Okay then,” he said, “it’s a deal. Leave at sunset?”

  “Sunset it is.”

  We made a point of talking about anything but “business” for the rest of the meal. When we were ready to leave, it took several tries to get Pete’s attention. He seemed completely preoccupied with a text conversation he was having on his phone.

  When we finally were able to pay the bill, we decided to make our usual circuit of the square before we went back to the shop. We hadn’t gone a block when Chase received a text message of his own.

  “Well,” he said, squinting at the screen, “I’ll be damned.”

  “What?” I asked, on high alert for more trouble coming our way.

  “It’s from Furl,” Chase said. “He and his brothers are coming to Briar Hollow tonight. He wants to talk to us about the hit man.”

  “Do we still have time to go to the waterfall?”

  “Yes,” Chase said. “They won’t be here until late. It looks like we’re going to have an interesting evening.”

  Right.

  Because things had been so boring up to that point.

  14

  We saw the Sheriff’s car pull up in front of the shop when we were about halfway around the square. John Johnson spotted us, too, and stood there waiting with crossed arms until we joined him.

  “Thought I’d come by and tell you what we know so far,” he said, “and maybe drink a cup of that fancy ex-press-o stuff while I’m here.”

  Smothering a laugh at his exaggerated pronunciation, I said, “Hi, John. I’ll make the espresso myself if we can talk in Chase’s shop instead of mine.”

  “How come?” Johnson asked.

  For just a fraction of a second that little Evil Jinx, who sits on my shoulder some days wanted me to say, “So our possessed chessboard won’t hear what you say and send messages back to the mother ship,” but I caught myself.

  Instead, I smiled and said, “My customers have bat ears, John. Anything you tell us will be all over town before you get back to the station.”

  Johnson chuckled. “Yeah, reckon you’re right about that. We’ll go in the cobbler shop.”

  “I’ll be right back with coffee,” I said. “Chase? Vanilla latte?”

  “Please,” Chase said. “And if there are any of those bear claws left . . .”

  “Bear claws?” Johnson said, his face lighting up.

  “Coffee and artery-clogging pastries coming right at you,” I laughed, opening the door to the store.

  As I walked past the seating area, I noticed our usual afternoon regulars at their favorite tables. Mrs. Larson, a retired schoolteacher, had her head buried in a cozy mystery and two old men were absorbed in a game of checkers. The musical chessboard sat untouched in its usual place. I knew it was just my imagination, but I could have sworn I saw an evil, glowing aura around the damn thing.

  Tori was behind the counter. When I joined her, she asked, “Where’s Chase?”

  “Next door in his shop with the Sheriff, who is getting ready to fill us in on what he knows about Fish Pike,” I said, “as soon as I get back over there with coffee and bear claws.”<
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  “Well,” she laughed, “I know who gets the bear claws. I hope John’s wife doesn’t find out we’re helping him sabotage his diet.”

  “Actually, it was Chase who asked for them,” I said. “How he can put pastries on top of all the pepperoni pizza he just ate is beyond me.”

  “Vanilla latte for him?” Tori asked, moving toward the machine.

  “Yep,” I said. “Double espresso for the Sheriff, and a cappuccino for me. I’ll get the bear claws . . . oh, and we’re going to have company tonight.”

  “Company?” she said. “Who?”

  “The triplets.”

  She stopped in mid-coffee grind. “Here? In fur coats?”

  “Yes, here, and I have no idea how they will be . . . dressed,” I said.

  “Well,” she replied, going back to the espresso machine, “this ought to be interesting.”

  “That’s what Chase said,” I said, sacking up the bear claws.

  “Great minds,” Tori quipped.

  She finished making the drinks, snapped lids on the cups, and secured them in a cardboard carry tray, which she held out to me with the firm admonition. “Go get the scoop. Come back and tell me everything.”

  “Always,” I said, wedging the paper bag in between the cups before I took the tray and headed for the door.

  When I came in the cobbler shop, Chase stood up to help, handing Johnson his espresso and setting our drinks on the counter. “Let me grab a roll of paper towels for the pastries,” he said, ducking into his work area.

  I might have wondered how Chase could eat a bear claw after the big lunch we’d just had, but that didn’t stop me from bringing one for myself, too. The three of us settled on the benches that form an L-shape in the waiting area, and Chase and I watched Johnson gnaw through his first pastry. I brought two for the Sheriff in deference to his diet-deprived status.

  “Jinx,” he said, washing down a mouthful and wiping the crumbs off his chin with a square of paper towel, “you may have just saved my life. I love my wife, but what kind of woman sends her husband to work with a salad that has tofu in it? What the hell is tofu anyway?”

  “John, that’s one of the great mysteries of the modern world,” I assured him.

  “Well, I am not into mystery meat, especially when it’s not meat at all,” he declared defiantly.

  Privately, I wondered if that was how he talked to his wife, or if he just ate what she put in front of him at home. My money was on option number two.

  “You wanted to tell us something about Fish?” Chase prodded.

  In between bites, Johnson filled us in on the investigation to date. As we suspected, Fish was killed with what the Sheriff called a “weapon with fixed multiple blades,” but the old man had, as Festus suspected, died of a cut throat.

  “That was the only lucky break the poor old bastard got,” Johnson said.

  Grimacing at the imagery, Chase asked, “How do you figure that was a break?”

  “Probably didn't take him more than a couple of minutes to bleed out,” the Sheriff explained. “All the really terrible damage was done later.”

  Johnson was right. Fish caught a break.

  “Do you have any clues about the murderer?” Chase asked.

  “Not the kind where we can go out and arrest somebody,” Johnson said, “and honest to God, I don’t think we ever will. Looks like to me Fish got mixed up with something kinky online.”

  I was swallowing a mouthful of coffee, and the conjunction of the words “Fish” and “kinky” sent me into a paroxysm of choking. Chase had the good sense to get my cup to safety before he started patting me on the back.

  First rule of rescue: save the coffee.

  When I could breathe again, and I’d wiped enough of the tears out of my eyes to see the Sheriff with some degree of clarity, I croaked, “Kinky? What on earth are you talking about?”

  Johnson flushed. “Maybe I should just tell Chase this part,” he said delicately.

  Oh, for God’s sake.

  “Maybe,” I said, “you should just quit beating around the bush and talk.”

  Johnson shot me a wary look. “Sorry,” he said, “it’s just I don’t like to talk about things that are potentially . . . sexual.”

  “John,” Chase said, “at Fish’s age, you’re not seriously suggesting that sex had anything to do with his death, are you?”

  Reddening even more, Johnson said, “Well, not the normal kind anyway. I think Fish may have had himself one of those fetishes.”

  “A fetish?” I said incredulously. “For what?”

  “Mountain lions,” Johnson said. “When we opened up his house, everything looked pretty much the way Martha Louise left it except for this one room that was padlocked at the back of the house.”

  “And?” I said impatiently.

  “Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” Johnson said. “The whole place was plastered with pictures of mountain lions. He had this big ole map of Briar Hollow and all the surrounding counties up on the wall with all these red push pins in it and lines of yarn run between them. The whole thing was covered in sticky notes.”

  I didn’t dare look at Chase, who asked very calmly, “What did the notes say?”

  “Crazy stuff,” Johnson said, shaking his head. “A lot of nonsense about portals to some hidden valley and parallel streams of time. I knew Fish was nuts, but I didn’t know he was that bad. He had an old computer in there hooked up to the Internet. My deputy knows about that technology stuff. Fish was talking to a lot of other nut jobs about paranormal crap. Werewolves and sh. . . . stuff like that. Near as we can figure, Fish got it in his head he could turn into a mountain lion. And . . . well . . . there was this notebook filled with rambling entries about mountain lions mating with humans.”

  Chase took a drink of his latte and made a show of shaking his head. “That’s really sad,” he said. “You think maybe he started having some dementia after Martha Louise died?”

  Dementia. Good angle. Certainly more believable than Principal Snyder on Buffy the Vampire Slayer blaming everything on street gangs tanked on PCP.

  I waded in. “Oh, that just breaks my heart!” I said, making my face crumple to the point of tears. “Dementia is a terrible disease. And Fish was all alone. Someone must have taken advantage of his diminished capacity.”

  “Maybe it was dementia,” Johnson said as if the idea hadn’t occurred to him before. “He wasn’t drinking or doing drugs or anything like that, but he was talking to another crazy online who had that same idea about turning into a mountain lion. My money's on this crazy guy showing up here with some kind of fake claws or something and killing Fish. We found a username on one of those discussion boards we think is probably the killer. Looks like he was somewhere in the Seattle area.”

  Alarm bells started going off in my head.

  “What was the username?” Chase asked.

  Johnson reached into his hip pocket and took out a notebook permanently bent into a banana curve. He flipped through a few pages filled with scrawled handwriting and then said, “Jeremiad. Whatever the hell that means.”

  “It means a long, mournful complaint,” I said softly, “a lamentation or a list of woes.”

  “Huh,” Johnson said, unclipping a pen from his shirt pocket and adding the definition to his notes. “Well, there you go. Somebody with a grudge looking to work it out on a crazy old man. The whole thing is just God awful.”

  “It is,” Chase agreed. “Did it look like a robbery, too?”

  “Nope,” Johnson said. “And there wasn’t a drop of blood in the place. Looks like Fish went willingly with the killer. We still haven’t found the actual crime scene, but I imagine this nut job is long gone. I think he just propped Fish up down here for show. The bench outside your shop is the only one on this side of the square, and this is the road straight out of town. The note must have been a reference to the mountain lion thing, kinda the killer’s way of saying, ‘Look what I did.’ We’ll poke around a few more
days, but like as not all of this will go straight to the Feds and right into a cold case file.”

  Which we couldn’t risk happening. The Registry might have looked into the Seattle killings, but human law enforcement had to have been involved as well.

  Johnson lingered around a few minutes longer before heading back to the station. As the door closed behind him, I said, “Chase, are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “That the username ‘Jeremiad’ is awfully close to the name Jeremiah?” he asked.

  I so wanted that just to be in my imagination.

  “Do you think the hit man is one of the Pikes?” I asked.

  “I think there’s a good chance,” he said.

  “But if the killer is another werecat, why the fake claws? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “No,” he said, “it doesn’t, but we have a more immediate problem.”

  “The mountain lion room,” I said.

  “Exactly,” he said, blowing out a long breath. “We have to get in there and make sure that nothing falls into the hands of the authorities that could lead them to The Valley or . . . “

  That’s when the lightbulb switched on in my head.

  “Or that implicates you,” I finished. “Oh my God, Chase. This could be a frame job in the works. What if somebody figures out the symbol on the dagger is from your family crest?”

  “Honestly, honey,” he said, “I don’t think John’s that smart, but we don’t want somebody smarter having any reason to start asking more complex questions. I don’t think we have a choice. When the triplets get here tonight, we have to perpetrate a little cat burglary.”

  That turned out to be a literal statement.

  15

  Thanks to what my father calls “that damned made-up daylight savings time,” leaving at “sunset” meant Chase loaded my bike in the back of the Prius a little after 8 o’clock. We reached the trailhead at dusk with a big silver moon rising over the mountains. On my last visit to the waterfall, Knasgowa’s spirit told me not to fear the five-mile ride through the woods. She assured me my magic would protect me, and I believed her. It also didn’t hurt that my hypervigilant mountain lion boyfriend would be loping along beside me.