Midnight Mysteries: Nine Cozy Tales by Nine Bestselling Authors

by Ritter Ames

  “Should we drink it?” Tinkie asked softly. “I don’t even have a clue why we’re here.”

  “I need to find out about Jim Red,” I said. “I’ll explain later.”

  Leila returned with the drinks, a refreshing iced tea with sprigs of mint. “I’ll tell you about Jim, the last descendant of the river pirates and my grandfather.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, trying to sound sincere instead of confused. If Jim Red was her grandfather and the man in the grave, why hadn’t she been there for the ghostly service? More concerning was her power as a priestess if she could summon the dead.

  “He was a good man, a legend on the river for many years. This past summer he grew too feeble to take his boat out. He told me he was ready to let go of this life.”

  “So he died of natural causes?” I was confused. Cece said Jim Red had drowned in the Mississippi River. If this was an accident, what had Coker come to avenge?

  “My grandfather was old and tired, but he could still swim across the river. His drowning was not an accident.”

  Now we were getting somewhere. “So what happened?”

  She leaned back. “Thom Cliburn.”

  “One of the founding families? I thought they were all dead.” Tinkie kept up with the dying lineage of the old South far better than I did.

  “There is Thom and there is me. We’re the last.”

  “And you have the land and he has…?”

  “Nothing.”

  “And Thom Cliburn is in jail for the murder of Jim Red?” It seemed a logical conclusion.

  “Of course not.” She poured more tea for Tinkie.

  Things in Cliburn didn’t work the way they did in Sunflower County. Coleman would never let a killer go without punishment. “Why was Jim Red killed?” I asked, knowing the answer would likely not make a bit of sense.

  “History.” She said it as if it explained everything.

  “Jim Red is a descendant of river pirates. Thom Cliburn is a descendant of land owners and slave holders.” I held out my palms for more.

  “Exactly.” She stood suddenly and walked to the front door. “You must leave.” All friendliness dropped away. “Now. There is danger on the way.”

  Tinkie and I stood and walked to the door. The abrupt dismissal was as confusing as everything about Leila and this dead community. As soon as I got out the door I intended to call Coleman.

  Leila stood on her porch and watched us walk to the car. When I’d gotten behind the wheel, with the dogs and cat in the backseat, she came down the steps and leaned to whisper in my ear. “The man you seek is here,” she said. “He must leave. His soul is in danger. The one you protect is in danger too. This is not the place for their spirits to be.”

  Leila, Cliburn, the whole trip, was a dead end with more riddles than explanations. Tinkie had a meeting to attend, so we left with only the stinky gris-gris bags to our credit.

  TINKIE CHATTED ABOUT Cece’s Halloween costume party as we drove back to Zinnia. I had five hours to get ready, and my mind was far away from dress-up as I let Tinkie and Chablis out at Hilltop and drove home.

  Dahlia House was empty when I returned. The house echoed with an absence I’d never felt before. Had I come home from New York two years before and found my ancestral home so devoid of light and the energy of Jitty, I doubt I would have stayed in Mississippi. Jitty was a huge part of my life—I’d always known it, but now I felt her absence like a gut wound. Whatever was going on with Coker and Cliburn, I had to figure it out. And fast. If Coker was in trouble for his conduct in the Great Beyond, Jitty would be right beside him.

  Sweetie Pie and Pluto searched the house from top to bottom, sniffing futilely for our ghost. Jitty was gone.

  Tinkie was hosting an afternoon gathering of the Sunflower County Alliance, a group of women dedicated to improving services to the elderly in the county. As head socialite in Sunflower County, Tinkie had a lot of do-gooder work fall in her lap. And it was just as well.

  The truth was, I had to finish this case alone. If I couldn’t tell Tinkie what I sought, she couldn’t help me look.

  Coleman checked into the Jim Red shooting in Washington County and discovered there was no report of any incident. He called me with the news that Jim Red’s drowning was a rumor all over the area, but no one had found his body or officially reported him missing. The Washington County sheriff had agreed to look for the gravesite I’d found—soon. Which might mean anything. No one but me and Jitty seemed to take the old man’s death seriously.

  It was almost as if Tinkie and I had driven to Cliburn and spent a morning in a time warp or alternate reality. Without Jitty’s guidance, I honestly had no clue how to proceed. Would my haint return? Had she violated protocol in the Great Beyond and been pulled back, never to communicate with me again?

  That concern had me pacing the floors of Dahlia House, fretting and desperately trying to think what my next step might be. As the afternoon wore away and internet research gave me only the story of Bodo Red and the river pirates who terrorized the port at Cliburn back in the 1840s and ’50s, I researched the stories of the long rivalry between the pirates and the wealthy Cliburn landowners. It was a feud as epic as the Hatfields and McCoys.

  Yet no records documented these tales—they were folklore. But I understood the blood link between Thom Cliburn and Jim Red—a rivalry that obviously transcended time and generations. Thom and Jim, cousins according to the stories, were merely the latest generation of feuding men. But what did Coker, Jitty’s man, have to do with any of this? Why was he in the middle of a feud and murder that had not been reported to the authorities and seemed not to exist?

  I had to find Thom. If Jim Red was dead, then Thom was the only person who could help me right what had gone wrong and created the incident that drew Coker from the Great Beyond. And I could only hope fixing this would return the balance and Jitty would come back to Dahlia House.

  The phone rang and I picked it up in the kitchen. “Oscar and I are headed to Cece’s party. Are you ready?”

  I looked outside at the darkness that had slipped around me without notice. My watch showed 8 p.m. Party time! And I’d forgotten all about it. I had to get ready. “I’m putting makeup on,” I lied even as I raced up the stairs to my bedroom where the palette of stage makeup awaited. “I’ll be there soon.”

  “If you stand us up, there’ll be hell to pay. I’ve spent all day with earnest people who have great ideas. I need to play for a bit tonight, and you’d better not disappoint Cece. I don’t know what’s going on with you and Cliburn, but it can wait until tomorrow.”

  “I agree.” I jumped into my green leotard, put on a cravat and the tails, and grabbed great Uncle Lyle Crabtree’s moth-eaten top hat and cane. With the green makeup, a skullcap to hide my hair, and some facial sculpting with a makeup pencil, I transformed into my favorite cricket, Jiminy. I refused to think about Jitty and what she might be up to, but I did take a moment to acknowledge that this helpless impotence might be how I made my friends feel when I danced with danger. Lesson taken.

  I had a lot of questions about why Jiminy was green instead of black or brown, as normal crickets were, so I took a moment to Google it and learned crickets come in a variety of colors that change depending on their activity. The difference between the two “cousins” was how they sang. Crickets rubbed their wings together to stridulate while grasshoppers rubbed their legs against their wings.

  I distracted myself with crickety facts as I drove to Cece’s lovely home in downtown Zinnia. The yard was ablaze with dancing and lighted skeletons. Blues music blared from some bodacious speakers. Scott Hampton was playing at his club, but he’d given Jaytee the night off to host the party.

  Cece and Jaytee had pulled out all the stops for a spooky, fun costume party. They were gangsters from the 1920s. Harold came as William Faulkner, complete with a damn good impression of the eccentric Mississippi author. Tinkie and Oscar had come as Sally and Charlie Brown, and Madame Tomee
ka had reached into the past for a chilling Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street. It was Millie who took the cake, though, in her elegant Glinda the Good Witch costume. She almost floated across the floor.

  Coleman had come as a sheriff, a fact that had Cece hot under the collar.

  “That is not a costume,” she pointed out. “If you wanted to drag work with you, you could have come as a prisoner.”

  “What if I’m called out on an accident or robbery? I can’t run around in a costume. Pick on Sarah Booth. She came as an insect. Surely there’s a law against that. She’s green. A fetching shade of green, but still green.”

  “What?” I’d only been half listening. My distracted state was obvious to everyone.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Harold asked as he steered me out of the crowded house and into a crisp night with a fingernail moon. “I love Halloween. At midnight the veil between the worlds is at its thinnest, according to pagan folklore. We should go to the cemetery and see if we can spy a ghost. I’ve always wanted to make out in a cemetery.”

  “What?” Once again I’d drifted into my whirlwind thoughts about how to get Jitty home.

  “Sarah Booth, you’re almost a departed spirit yourself. Your body is here at the party, but you aren’t.”

  “I know.” His words creeped me out. How easy it was to separate the spirit from the physical body with nothing more than thoughts.

  “Anything I can help with?” he asked.

  “Not unless you have details about the Cliburn family.”

  “Funny you should ask,” Harold said, giving me a peculiar look. “Leila Cliburn was in the bank Monday. She’s a beautiful woman, but odd.”

  Understatement of the year. “What did she want?”

  “She was trying to settle her family estate. It’s been in limbo for years because only a Cliburn can inherit, and now she’s filed a legal claim to the property. I’m not certain she is truly an heir.”

  “Do you know much about the Cliburn family?” I asked.

  “Leila is the last, or at least that’s what I understand.”

  “And what about her cousin Thom?”

  “Never heard of him,” Harold said. “Leila didn’t mention him. She wants to settle things before it’s too late.”

  “Too late?”

  “It’s been a decade since the death of Wilbur Cliburn. His will dictated the estate would pass to his descendants in exactly ten years to the day of his death. That’s tomorrow, I believe. Leila waited until the last minute, but she filed the proper paperwork at the courthouse and with the bank. Now if her blood claim is upheld…”

  “Is she a legitimate heir?”

  “That’s up to the courts. I wouldn’t want the property.”

  “Why not?” Harold wasn’t a land grubber, but he knew the value of fertile ground.

  “The Cliburn descendants are cursed to walk the property for eternity. They die but are never released. The Cliburn property is supposed to be the most haunted place in the South. Old Ezekiel’s wife, Azariel, was a high priestess of voodoo in New Orleans. It was said Ezekiel abducted her and forced her into the marriage. He was besotted by her and refused to take no for an answer. She never forgave him and when he killed three slaves in cold blood she cursed the whole family. Or that’s the story. You’re pale as a ghost. Are you okay?”

  “I need a drink.”

  “Always a good compromise. I’ll make us both one. Have a seat right here on the bench and I’ll be back.”

  I sat because my legs were weak. Something was very wrong. My ghost was mixed up in a property that had been cursed for generations. She’d abandoned Dahlia House, and if I didn’t help her, she might never come back.

  My cell phone buzzed. The number was not familiar.

  “Meet me in Cliburn. The person you’ve lost is in danger. Come now or it will be too late.” The line went dead, but I had easily recognized Leila’s lilting accent. And she had sounded scared.

  THERE WASN’T TIME to swing by Dahlia House to get Sweetie Pie, though I desperately wanted her with me. And I didn’t tell Tinkie or anyone else. I cut out of the party, my tails flapping in the wind. If I was to rescue Jitty, I had to go alone. My headlights cut a puny path through the vast darkness of the Delta as I rode northwest.

  Sooner than I wanted, I exited Highway 61 and took the country road to Cliburn. At night, the dead town contained the kind of energy that made me hide under my bed. All Hallow’s Eve, a time when the dead could more easily communicate with the living. I could sense them, just outside my vision. Jitty was my special ghost and the only one I cared to communicate with. But I didn’t have a choice.

  Leila hadn’t instructed me on where to go, saying only Cliburn. I stopped in the center of town and got out of my car.

  “Jitty!” I called her name four times in all directions.

  No one answered.

  “Leila!” My voice echoed and repeated for a moment and then fell silent. I got back in the car and drove to the old plantation where Leila lived.

  When I passed the ruins of the old house, I saw them—the ghostly mourners who’d been at the burial site. They wore their white dresses and head wraps, a cluster of dusky women swaying like limber trees in a soft wind. The faint hint of drumbeats came from their direction, and they kept time.

  I had no doubt I’d entered a world where voodoo ruled. Transference of souls, body possession, I thought of a hundred old movies where voodoo was used to bring a dark spirit into the world of light. And here I was, right in the very middle of it.

  “Jitty, this kind of episode is not good for the longevity of my eggs. I feel them cracking!” I tried to draw her out with no success. I walked toward the slave cabin.

  What was Leila Cliburn really up to? I’d trusted her enough to come to this place on All Hallow’s Eve in tails, a top hat, and cricket makeup. Now I wondered if I’d been duped into danger.

  Leila’s cottage was filled with a soft light that glowed from the house and illuminated the giant walnut tree that provided summer shade but in winter looked bare and skeletal. I felt a small measure of relief, because I’d feared Leila and the house had all been a figment of the past, some shade or specter that had pulled Tinkie and me into a different time and place. The only saving grace was Tinkie, too, had witnessed the old woman in town, the grave, and Leila. The gris-gris bundles stinking up the floorboard of my car were additional proof at least a portion of what I’d witnessed had been real and solid.

  Call me superstitious but I picked up the gris-gris, glad to see a string necklace I could use. I put both of them around my neck, ignoring the gruesome smell. I got out of the car and started toward the cottage. A tall man stood in the path. I saw only his silhouette, as he was backlit by the cabin.

  “Let her pass,” Leila commanded from the darkness.

  The figure shifted into darkness. I couldn’t tell if he was flesh and bone or spirit, and I didn’t want to look closely.

  “Where are Jitty and Coker?” I knew my haint had come here for her man, for whatever history the two shared with the Cliburns. “What’s really going on here?”

  “The past has returned,” Leila said. “Just as my ancestress, Azariel, foretold. Justice must be served.”

  I grasped her by the shoulders and gave her a little shake. “Stop this mumbo-jumbo crap and tell me what’s going on.”

  “I’ve never been manhandled by a cricket,” Leila said with deadly earnest.

  I let her go. “You called me here. Why? Tell me or I’m leaving.”

  “Sit down.” She motioned to the steps. “I couldn’t really talk in front of your friend. She isn’t linked to the dead in the way you are. She wouldn’t believe.”

  “But I will?”

  “You already know the dead are always around us. Tonight, manifestation is easier.”

  As she spoke a breeze rippled through the limbs of the big tree. The branches clacked together like bones rattling, and I recalled an old legend of the Yazoo Indi
ans who hung the bodies of their victims in trees. When the bones rattled, it was time to go to war. The Yazoos were a very aggressive tribe.

  Leila spoke softly. “Coker has broken the rules of the Great Beyond to come here for revenge. He means to kill Thom Cliburn.”

  “This is nuts. Coker’s been dead for a hundred and fifty years. Anyone he might care to take revenge on has long been dead.”

  “Time is meaningless in the Great Beyond. I thought you might have learned at least that. Your guide has fallen down on her job.”

  Snark was not going to make me like my situation more. “Don’t criticize Jitty.” How was it possible I’d come to defend my nemesis ghost? “Just tell me what’s going on? No double answers, no woo-woo talk. The truth.”

  “The man you call Coker was born on Cliburn plantation.”

  A lot of puzzle pieces fell into place. “I never knew.”

  “When Ezekiel Cliburn executed three slaves as an example to the others that he would kill them all rather than free them, he chose Coker’s father, Joseph. He shot him in the head in front of Coker and the slave population.”

  I could see where this need for revenge would transcend time and generations. “But Ezekiel is long dead.”

  “But he is still here. Thom is Ezekiel made over. It’s the only explanation. Thom has lived in Oregon his whole life. He’s never wanted anything to do with Cliburn Plantation. Now, suddenly, he is staking a claim as heir. The pull of the past has caught his soul.”

  “That doesn’t mean he’s possessed.”

  “Trust me, he is. And Coker knows this. He’s been waiting for Ezekiel to take human form, when he will be vulnerable.”

  “No one around here knows anything about Thom Cliburn.”

  “A deliberate effort to skew fate,” she said in her singsong voice. “His mother moved away when she became pregnant. She hoped to avoid the Cliburn curse, but no one can run from a curse. Thom returned last week. He plans to revive the port and town, to bring the plantation back with undocumented Mexican labor. He wants a new slave system.”