A Season of Miracles

by Heather Graham

  Across the bit of distance between them, he opened his eyes and looked at her.

  “I have to go now,” he said.

  “No…!”

  “But I must. And you…”

  “Yes?”

  “You must pay attention.” He laughed softly. “Don’t let it happen again.”

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  A loud cawing sound seemed to rip through the air.

  He looked at her sadly and said, “Quoth the raven—nevermore!”

  CHAPTER 1

  “There’s been an incident, a very bizarre incident,” Jackson Crow said.

  His voice over the phone as he spoke to Griffin Pryce was steady—as always. Jackson had pretty much seen it all. As field director of a special unit of the FBI—unofficially known as the Krewe of Hunters—Jackson had just about seen it all, although he’d be the first to say they’d probably never “see it all.”

  The “bizarre” was usually the reason the Krewe got called in.

  “What’s the incident?”

  “You’ve heard of Franklin Verne?” Jackson asked.

  “The writer? Yes, of course. Kind of impossible not to have heard of him—he likes to do his own commer­cials. He’s known for action books with shades of hor­ror, right?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s dead.”

  Griffin frowned, thinking about the night before. He’d actually heard mention of Franklin Verne’s name—he and Vickie had stopped for a damned good dinner and some excellent wine at a spectacular new Baltimore restaurant. Their waiter had mentioned that Franklin Verne was in the city and they were hoping to see him in the restaurant for a meal—and, of course, an endorsement!

  “Griffin?”

  “Yeah. I’m thinking that you’re about to tell me how he died, and since you’re on the phone with me, and you know we’re in Baltimore, I’m assuming he died in Baltimore?”

  “Yes, last night. He was found in the wine cellar of the Black Bird, a new restaurant—”

  “What?” Griffin said. He knew the restaurant—pretty well! It was, in fact, the posh place where he’d taken Vickie last night.

  “The Black Bird,” Jackson repeated.

  “We ate there last night.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s convenient. You know right where it is.”

  “I do. Fell’s Point, not far from where we’re staying. You know Vickie—we found a really great old historic hotel. Blackhawk Harbor House. In fact, I’m standing outside. It’s so wonderfully old and historic, though I can’t seem to make a cell phone call from inside.” He glanced up at the building. It had been built as a hotel in the 1850s—built with concrete and care. It would probably withstand any storm. The hotel was hand­some and elegant, and Griffin enjoyed it—but he still found it annoying when he couldn’t get a decent signal on his phone from his room.

  “They sure weren’t expecting Franklin Verne at the restaurant,” he told Jackson. “They talked about the fact that they hoped that he would come in. His patronage would be great for business.”

  “I imagine. Well, he was there—is there. Sadly, he’s dead. At the moment, they’re calling it an accidental death.”

  “Okay. So. How did he die? Was it an accident, pos­sibly…?”

  “A combination of over-the-counter drugs and al­cohol,” Jackson said. “That’s a preliminary—the ME, of course, will deny he suggested any true cause as of yet. You know how that works—they won’t know for certain what caused it until all the tests are back. I take it you haven’t seen any news yet?”

  “Jackson, it is 7:30 a.m. This was our last weekend before settling in—me back from a long stint in Boston, and Vickie moving to a new state and an entirely new life. Hey, it was supposed to be free time. We were out late last night. Vickie is still sleeping.”

  “Okay, you haven’t seen the news. Anyway, Frank­lin Verne used to be quite the wild man, drinking, get­ting rowdy with friends, playing the type of hard-core character that appears in most of his books. His wife, Monica, put a stop to it a few years back—when the doctors told her he wouldn’t make it to old age. But his body was found in a wine cellar. According to Monica, Franklin had been clean for two full years.”

  “You know all this because…?” Griffin asked him.

  “Because Franklin Verne gave generously to a lot of the same causes our own Adam Harrison holds so dear,” Jackson said.

  Adam Harrison was their senior advisor—he was, in fact, the creator of the Krewe, and a man with a phe­nomenal ability to put the right people together with the right situation.

  “Naturally,” Jackson continued, “he’s quite good friends with Monica, so… Well, there you have it. He’ll wrangle us an invitation into the investigation eventually—you know him and his abilities with local police.” Jackson hesitated a minute. “Even if we wind up having to tell Monica she lost her husband because he slipped back into addiction, she’ll have the truth of the situation. For the moment, I need you to go make nice with Detective Carl Morris.”

  “Carl Morris, sure,” Griffin said.

  So much for the incredible plans he’d had with Vickie for the day!

  “Addiction, a friend, temptation… It could have been an accident,” Griffin said.

  “Yes. Except that none of the waitstaff saw him in the restaurant, much less down in the wine cellar. And, as I said, Monica—who claims she really knew her husband—is calling it murder.”

  “Ah. Okay, are you coming up?” Griffin asked Jack­son. Krewe headquarters was only about an hour and a half—two hours at most—from Baltimore, even count­ing Beltway traffic.

  “Maybe, but Adam wants to move delicately with this. We’re not invited in yet—Franklin Verne’s death isn’t even considered to be a murder at the moment. But of course, the way the man died, there has to be an au­topsy and an investigation. Get started for me, and then give me a call. Let me know what you think.”

  “All right. When did this happen?”

  “He was found about an hour ago. Adam got the call from Monica immediately after she was visited by the police and informed that her husband was dead. If you head in quickly, you’ll see the body in situ. Oh, and one more thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, it is Baltimore, and Poe is buried there, and, hell, the name of the restaurant isn’t Raven, but it is Black Bird…”

  “What?”

  “He was found gripping a little bird. Yes, a raven, of course. It’s the kind you can find just about anywhere they have Poe souvenirs. Cheap, plastic, black—on a little pedestal with its wings out, beak open…and the word nevermore written on the base.”

  “Like you said, you can buy those souvenirs any­where.”

  “Yep. And, sorry. Just one more thing again.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He was surrounded by three dead blackbirds. Nat­urally, of course, no one can figure out how Franklin Verne—or the birds—got into the wine cellar.”

  Vickie opened her eyes.

  For a moment, she was disoriented.

  She wasn’t at all sure where she was!

  And then she realized that Griffin was there, look­ing down at her with concern. A half grin curled his lips, though that grin was far more rueful than amused.

  Grim, even.

  “A nightmare?” he asked her gently, a trace of worry crossing his bronzed face. There wasn’t a reason for her to be having nightmares—at the moment. The Krewe cases with which she’d been involved had come to their conclusions.

  She was in the wonderful hotel in Baltimore’s Fell’s Point where she had enthusiastically suggested they stay on their trip from Boston to Arlington, Virginia—even though they hadn’t really needed to make it an over­night trip, much less a weekend one.

  But she and Griffin had wanted time together. Fun time, sightseeing, before Griffin reported back to head­quarters; Vickie was preparing to enter the FBI’s tr
ain­ing academy at Quantico.

  Eventually, they’d both be working out of the main special offices of the Krewe of Hunters unit. But for now, Griffin would be getting back to work, they’d both be settling in to living together—and Vickie would be starting up with the next class for twenty weeks of train­ing that would lead to her graduation and an official position with the Krewe.

  Vickie could have told Griffin about the dream. The Krewe were more than simply dedicated and well-trained agents. They had been gathered together care­fully because they all had unique abilities, the center of those abilities being that they could communicate with the dead.

  When the dead chose, of course.

  She and Griffin had both known for years just what the other was capable of. While they had only rekindled their relationship recently, they had first met almost a decade ago—when a serial killer had nearly taken Vickie’s life. It had been a ghost, the older brother of the child she was babysitting, who had saved her by sending her running out of the house to safety, straight toward a young Officer Pryce. He’d been a cop before becoming an agent, though he had now been with the Krewe of Hunters for quite some time. He’d always known that he wanted to be in law enforcement.

  It wasn’t that way for Vickie.

  She loved history. She’d been a guide, leading youth-group tours as a historian, and she was an author of his­tory books. She was proud to say that she was good at it—the most important reviews to her were the ones that said she had a way of making history fun for the reader.

  It was only the cases with which she had recently become involved that had made her want to veer in a new direction. Not a change—an addition. There had been a case in which an incarcerated serial killer had managed to reach out to strike again, and then another where modern-day Satanists had tried to bring the devil back to Massachusetts.

  She was now determined to do her best to become an agent herself, and it was a decision with which she was really pleased. It was odd to realize that she had once been embarrassed by her secret talent—the abili ty to speak with the dead. She hadn’t wanted to admit that it could be real. But she’d learned recently that her so-called curse allowed her to actually make a differ­ence. She might have the ability to help in more bizarre cases—to save lives. And that mattered. To that end, she’d applied for and been accepted to the academy at Quantico. The Krewe might be a special unit, but even so, the agents were required to go through the academy. Vickie had passed the necessary tests on paper and made it through the grueling physical regimen neces­sary to become an agent.

  Griffin already had an apartment in a wonderful old row house in Alexandria. For him, it wasn’t a move—just a return to his home of the past several years. He had only been back in Boston—where he and Vickie both were born and raised—on assignment.

  Vickie had gone to college at NYU and then lived in New York for several years, but never farther south.

  It was, she’d assured him, exciting to move.

  But she was aware that Griffin believed it had to be a tug on her heartstrings as well—she was leaving a lot behind.

  And she was. But she was also happy to be mov­ing forward.

  “A nightmare?” he repeated, and the note of worry seemed higher.

  She smiled, staring into his dark eyes. Griffin was fine with her decision to become an agent; the Krewe was composed of both men and women, and he knew women were every bit as efficient and excellent as agents as men.

  It was just her—but of course, he loved her. It wasn’t going to be easy for him to accept her walking into the same danger he did daily. He would, however, get used to it—and she loved him all the more for that fact.

  “No, not a nightmare!” she told him. He far too quickly became concerned for her. All it had been was a bizarre dream. It might well have been due to the way they’d overindulged in some delicious blue crabs at dinner last night.

  She would stay mum. For the moment. After all, she was in Baltimore. Edgar Allan Poe was buried here; he’d died here. Having dreams about him didn’t seem the least bit strange, actually.

  But for the moment…

  “It was a dream, and rather a cool one. I was walk­ing around Baltimore…”

  “We’re in Baltimore, so that seems…normal, maybe?”

  She grinned, rolling onto an elbow to better face him—he’d already gotten up and showered and dressed for the day. He was an early riser—alert and ready to face the world as soon as he opened his eyes.

  Vickie…not so much! But she was getting used to early mornings.

  “Perfectly normal,” she told him. “It wasn’t a night­mare. It was just a dream. About beautiful old Baltimore—hey, it’s an important city, right? And we are going to go and do some cool things today, aren’t we?”

  “Absolutely,” he promised. “Fort McHenry, the Inner Harbor, Federal Hill—”

  “Don’t forget the aquarium!” she said.

  “I wouldn’t dream of it. But I thought we might want a full day for that. We can do whatever you choose, my love. Anything you would like.”

  “You’ve done it all too many times before?” she asked him.

  He laughed. “No. I mean, I have done it all before, but not with you, so it’s as if it’s the first time, right?”

  “That is an incredibly good suck-up line if I have ever heard one!” she assured him.

  She thought that the line might take them some­where, but he smiled and stepped away from the bed.

  “I just have a couple of hours of work first,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Work. But there’s not much involved at the moment, and not much I can do.” He added quietly, “Franklin Verne—you know who he is?”

  “Yep. I’m living and breathing and have ears and eyes. You can’t miss him. What about him?”

  “He died last night.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad—terribly sad! I’ve seen him speak. I mean, I write nonfiction and he writes fiction, but I’ve been at a number of conferences where he’s been a speaker on a panel. He was charming and very funny…helpful, giving. He’s actually written some his­torical fiction, and while Verne tended toward horror—some action, some sci-fi and some mystery—he was a wonderful researcher as well.”

  “Always the writer!” he teased.

  “That’s not going to be a problem, is it?” She’d spo­ken with other agents and she believed that—assuming she did make it through the academy—she’d still be wel­come to write on her own time. It seemed that Krewe agents were, in fact, encouraged to keep up with any previous pursuits.

  “It’s fine!” he assured her quickly.

  “So what happened to Franklin Verne? I know that he was ill a few years ago—in fact, he joked about it sometimes when he spoke, saying that his wife taught him how to have fun and not be totally boring without a dip in a whiskey vat.”

  “Yes, I had heard that he was supposedly as clean as a newborn babe.”

  “Supposedly?”

  “He was found dead in a wine cellar.”

  “In a wine cellar—he didn’t have a wine cellar. I don’t think he even drank wine. When he did drink.”

  “Not his wine cellar. But how do you know he didn’t have a wine cellar?”

  “He was very open about his health problems, about his wild days—and his love for his wife,” Vickie said. “So, if not his own wine cellar—where then?”

  “The Black Bird.”

  “What?”

  “Amazing. That was my exact reaction when Jack­son told me. Want to come with me? I’m on my way there now. Heading off to kowtow to a local cop named Carl Morris.”

  Vickie rolled out of bed. “Ten minutes,” she told him.

  He nodded; he knew she was telling the truth.

  Vickie and Griffin had both thoroughly enjoyed the Black Bird the night before; the service had been won­derful and the food had been delicious.

  Vickie had especially like the decor; the building was 1820s Federal
style, and the restaurant had the first two floors and the basement of the building while the remaining three floors above were given over to of­fice space. Upon entering a long hall of a foyer with exposed brick walls and plush red carpeting, you came to the hostess stand. From there it went through to the bar area.

  The bar was lined with portraits of Poe and his fami ly; there were framed posters of quotations and more, all having to do with Edgar Allan Poe.

  Stairs led from behind the bar to several sections of seats and a few party rooms of various sizes. The main dining room was the first floor, and tables and booths were surrounded by bookshelves.

  Of course, not even the master could have written enough to fill the restaurant’s shelves; it was an eclectic mix of secondhand novels. The venue had charmingly been planned on the concept that every diner was wel­come to take a book, and, naturally, you were welcome to leave a book or books as well.

  New editions of Poe books were sold in the gift shop, which was conveniently on the way out, at the back of the restaurant. Of course, one could leave through the front door, but the bookshop was like a minimuseum, and Vickie sincerely doubted that many people ignored it. Their waiter—he’d introduced himself as Jon—told them that though the restaurant was comparatively new, they attracted a lot of local, repeat clientele, for which they were very grateful. But locals didn’t tend to shop for souvenirs, unless they were entertaining out-of-town friends. Since they were happily playing tourist, Vickie and Griffin made sure to visit the shop. Lacey Shaw, the woman working the little boutique, was a bit of a Poe aficionado, and she assured them that even the lo­cals loved to come in and chat.

  And their waiter was also quite the enthusiast. “Se­riously, poor Poe was much maligned in life, but most of the time, the people who wrote about him were se­riously jealous competitors, so of course they tried to make him out to be nothing but a drunk with delusions of grandeur. In truth? He was brilliant. You do know that we credit him with the creation of the modern de­tective novel? ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’! What an imagination the man had!” Jon had told them, eyes bright with his admiration. He might be a waiter there, but he truly loved the works of the man and had stud­ied his life.