Secrets and Specters

by Raven Snow

  “Secrets and Specters”

  A Witch Cozy Mystery

  Dark Lake Chronicles Book 3

  Raven Snow

  © 2018

  Raven Snow

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner & are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Products or brand names mentioned are trademarks of their respective holders or companies. The cover uses licensed images & are shown for illustrative purposes only. Any person(s) that may be depicted on the cover are simply models.

  Edition v1.0 (2018.12.24)

  http://www.ravensnowauthor.com

  Special thanks to the following volunteer readers who helped with proofreading: Richard Bryant, Sue Fay, Renee Arthur, Jim T. and those who assisted but wished to be anonymous. Thank you so much for your support.

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Authors Note

  Books by Raven Snow

  Chapter One

  Lady was not a particularly athletic woman. She didn’t lift weights in a gym. She didn’t jog on the side of the road in the mornings. The most cardio she got was lugging around buckets of rain water for Ms. Poole. That was too much of a workout already, if you asked Lady.

  So how had she ended up scaling the side of the Fisherman’s Inn? Lady was doing a lot of reflection as she shimmied across the crossbeam of wood that extended below the second story windows. Only the lip of it protruded from the walls. There was just enough to get the toe of her sneaker on. Her life was flashing before her eyes. What had led her to this? How had she ever convinced herself it was a good idea?

  She knew, of course. She was the only one at the inn this evening. That never happened. Someone was always there. Usually the owner, Ms. Poole herself. Tonight, good old Althea Comfrey had talked her into going out to the movies. “My son was supposed to go with me. I have an extra ticket. You have to go. I insist you go. I’m not going alone. I’ll buy you dinner.” Al hadn’t let up until Ms. Poole had grudgingly agreed.

  So Ms. Poole had left around seven. She left Lady to man the front desk with instructions to clean the floors. No one ever checked into the Fisherman’s Inn, so Lady was marching around with a push broom when Doyle came down the stairs. He was wearing a new suit made of thick black material but was trim around the waist. It looked very striking with his thin frame and dark complexion. Otsuya came tripping down the steps behind him. In a sun dress and bedazzled platform tennis shoes, she cut a less imposing figure.

  “Hey, pretty Lady,” Otsuya said with a wave and a wink as soon as she spotted her friend.

  “Hey.” Lady leaned against the push broom. “Where are you going?”

  “Out,” said Doyle before Otsuya could answer, his tone clipped and curt.

  Otsuya gave Lady an apologetic smile and shrugged helplessly. “You wanna go to the library tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Lady watched them cross the lobby and leave through the front door. She couldn’t imagine what they were going out to do. It was probably better if she didn’t, frankly. She was still unclear on what it was Doyle did for a living exactly. She knew he made deals with people, terrible deals. Otsuya helped him. Not that Lady thought any less of Otsuya for that. It wasn’t like she had a choice in the matter. She owed him a debt.

  No, Lady shouldn’t have wondered… but she did. She wondered about it a lot. And now she was all by herself in the inn. What better chance would she get?

  Lady waited a few seconds before going to the window and looking out. She scanned the stretch of road in front of the inn. There was no sign of Doyle or Otsuya. Perfect. She turned and hurried upstairs. Doyle had a room on the second floor, one he had been occupying as long as Lady had been staying there. She reached for the knob and turned. Locked. Really, she should have seen that coming. Just because Lady left her room unlocked and Otsuya left her door wide open didn’t mean everyone did.

  Lady rushed down to the first floor, taking the stairs two at a time like Doyle might be back any moment. There were keys behind the front desk, one for every room in the inn hung on corresponding pegs, but the key to room number 3 was gone. Of course it was. What had she expected? Doyle had that key, no doubt. Surely there was another key, though. There must be a master key.

  Lady opened up drawers and cabinets. She rifled through paperwork and around boxes of pens and paper clips. Everything was very well organized, but she saw no sign of extra keys, no skeleton keys or giant, jingling key chain. No, the only key chain Lady had seen like that dangled from Ms. Poole’s hip like a prison warden. Knowing the woman, it was probably on her hip even now, a familiar weight at her side in the dark theater. Lady swore, but she wasn’t going to give up just yet.

  After thoroughly tearing up the edges of her debit card, Lady had the bright idea to try the window. None of the windows had locks on them. The building was old. The windows stuck sometimes but were all relatively easy to force open. It had seemed like a good idea when she was in the vacant room next to Doyle’s, leaning her head out the window. It didn’t look far, and she was only on the second floor. Worst case scenario she twisted an ankle. Big deal.

  Now that Lady was outside, several feet from the window she’d left out of and hugging the inn wall, she had so many regrets. She was on the second floor. What was she thinking?! She was going to die!

  A meow came from the open window. Lady turned her head to see the top of Lion’s orange head poking out, watching her. “Go back in, Lion!” she yelled at him. “Don’t come out here!”

  Lion meowed again, his eyes wide. It didn’t look like joining her outside the inn was even a thought in his head. He was a cat, and even he had more common sense than she did apparently.

  “Stop looking at me like that,” Lady snapped at her cat instead, suddenly feeling like he was judging her. She was certainly judging herself pretty hard. God she was so stupid.

  Lady slid her feet along the narrow beam, shuffling over slowly towards Doyle’s window. She could feel the frame of it beneath her left hand. She was so close.
She shuffled over a little further.

  “Open, open, open,” Lady said softly, like maybe if she said it enough the window would do it on its own. Frankly, she didn’t want to let go of the side of the building long enough to try and pry the window open herself. What if it stuck?

  It wasn’t like she could stay there hugging the side of the inn until someone came home. Lady put her hands on the glass and pushed up with all her might. The window opened easily. Too easily. She nearly fell backwards after expending so much more force than necessary. With a shriek, she pinwheeled her arms and pressed her body back to the building. Her front half went through the window and she was only too happy to commit all her weight to that. She flung herself forward and scrambled inside. It wasn’t graceful, but she had done it. She collapsed bonelessly onto Doyle’s floor. “Thank God,” she breathed into the carpet. “You did it,” she told herself. “You’re awesome.” Pushing away the lingering visions of slipping and breaking her neck, she popped up to her feet and took a look around.

  The room was… dark. That was the first thing that struck Lady. It was also cramped. She found that out when she stood to get to the light switch and banged her shins against a low table. She swore once and then again when she hit the lights and nothing happened.

  There were curtains over the windows, but they had been knocked back some when she had fallen through. She could make out shapes in the hazy evening light that filtered through them. Her eyes were starting to adjust. Lamps. There were lamps in the room. Lady dove for the first one she saw and pulled its cord.

  Gradually, the room was illuminated. Doyle hadn’t struck Lady as a guy with a thing for ambiance, but the place certainly had it. The lamps kept the light a controlled yellow glow. They had tinted glass shades that cast green and blue light reflecting off the walls. Colored silks hung from the ceiling, cordoning off parts of the room. There was a wooden roll-top desk and a four-post bed. Stacks and stacks of newspaper were piled up beneath the mattress, tied off in foot-high parcels with beige twine. Was Ms. Poole really okay with this? The room looked like a fire hazard to her.

  Worse were the kerosene lamps and kerosene by the desk. Lady didn’t light those. She didn’t know how to work them. Visions of everyone coming home to a smoldering pile of ash and wood filled her head. Yeah, better to leave them alone.

  Lady grabbed the smallest of the lamps and angled its green shade to better illuminate the desk. She rolled up the shutters. The inside of the desk was well-organized. The whole room was well-organized, frankly. Cramped and dangerously flammable, but well-organized all the same.

  There was a laptop on the desk. Lady hadn’t expected to see that after all the old-fashioned stuff. Doyle wasn’t all that behind the times, it seemed. It looked like a nice laptop too. Not that that should have come as a surprise. Given the vast array of fine suits she had seen him in, money couldn’t be something he was short on.

  Lady fought the urge to open the laptop and poke around in it. It was probably password protected. Besides, snooping on someone’s electronic device felt like an especially heinous invasion of privacy. Breaking in through someone’s window was one thing, but a man’s browser history was his personal business.

  She opened a drawer. Fountain pens, ink, a blotter. She opened another drawer. A large, leather-bound book. That looked interesting. Lady picked it up. The thing had some heft to it. She grunted with effort as she heaved it up onto the desk.

  A plaintive meow came from the door. Lady turned her head toward it. “It’s okay, Lion. I made it. I’m in here.” The meow came again. Lady sighed, crossed the room, and opened the door for her pet cat. “See? I’m fine.” She squatted down and scratched her orange tabby cat between the ears before heading back to the desk. She expected Lion to follow her in, but when she turned to look back at him, he was still waiting near the door. He was eyeing the threshold like it was a dangerous snake. “Suit yourself.” Lady went to the desk and sat in front of it. She tried to shrug off her cat’s apprehension, but it was difficult. A niggling feeling kept telling her this was a bad idea, but she hadn’t climbed in the window for nothing. She was going to do at least a little snooping. She opened the big black book.

  The book was both what she had expected and not. She had expected the contents to be mysterious, sure. Doyle was a mysterious guy. The pages inside were on a whole other level. She could make neither heads nor tails of them. “What the heck?” Lady muttered to herself, turning the first few pages slowly. They were old and yellowed. The corner of one crumbled between her fingers. Lady swore and dusted her hand off on her pants leg. Hopefully Doyle wouldn’t notice the damage. He couldn’t crack this thing open that often if the pages were so delicate. When Lady touched the book again it was with a much lighter touch.

  The words on the page weren’t in English. Lady didn’t know what language they were in. The characters weren’t something she recognized. There were columns and columns of illegible, scrawled text. Arabic, maybe? She couldn’t be sure. There were small drawings in some of the margins, faces, landscapes. It all looked very old, like something that should be in a museum rather than a desk drawer.

  Lady skipped ahead in the book. The rest wasn’t much better. If anything, it only got more confusing. “Who even is this guy?” Lady turned page after page. They were all old, antique. The columns of text persisted, but the drawings in the margins got more elaborate. Toward the last quarter of the book there were even black and white photos between pages. Lady was especially careful with those. They really looked like they belonged somewhere safer than pressed between the pages of a book.

  The text changed to characters she recognized. There were names, she realized. And signatures. Hundreds and hundreds of signatures. It was hard for Lady to wrap her head around the possibilities. Did he have a family tree extending all the way back into the dark ages? Did his ancestors all make shady deals like him?

  Was this all him? Were these all deals he had made? It seemed absurd that Doyle could be that old, but it also seemed absurd that supernatural creatures existed. Heck, Otsuya was a freaking ghost. Doyle had struck up a deal with her ages ago and didn’t have any of the signs of advanced age to show for it. Maybe he was hundreds of years old. The mere idea made Lady shiver.

  There was an evil creature of indeterminate age living at the inn and she was snooping around through his personal belongings. Maybe Lion had the right idea. Lady turned a few more pages.

  There were no dates next to the signatures, but the last page had another photo on it. A man stood next to one of those long posts used for tying up horses. He had what looked for all the world like a cowboy hat in his hand. “Are you kidding me? He was in the old west?”

  Lady closed the book and looked in the drawer for another. Sure enough, there was a second one about the same size. Biting her bottom lip, she pulled that one out as well. It wasn’t nearly as thick as the other book. It wasn’t crumbling and there wasn’t anything shoved between the pages. The pages themselves weren’t filled out beyond about the midway point. It looked like they stopped in the nineties or so judging by the radical fashion sense of the folks in the photos. “I guess he went digital after that, huh?” Lady aimed that rhetorical question at Lion, but Lion was gone. His absence sent Lady’s heart racing.

  The sound of a door closing downstairs made Lady’s heart race even faster. She shut the newer book and replaced both of them in the drawer. Jumping to her feet, she rushed for the door, only to realize she’d left the window open. It occurred to her then that whoever was downstairs might be able to hear her through the floorboards. The building was old after all.

  Lady shuffled across the floor as lightly as possible and as quickly as she dared. The window stuck when she tried to close it, because of course it did. She pushed down harder and nearly shrieked when it came down fast, too fast. The window closed with a noisy thud.

  The lamps. She needed to turn them off too. God, she was bad at this. Lamp one, lamp two, lamp three. She stopped
and looked around once she had gotten them all, trying to make sure that there wasn’t anything else she had missed. It struck her too late that she probably should had done that before she turned off all the lights. There was nothing to do for it now. Lady left the room in a hurry.

  She closed the door and froze in the empty hallway, straining her ears to try and hear what was going on below. There weren’t any further sounds coming from downstairs. Someone was back home, but she couldn’t be sure who.

  “Lady!” came Ms. Poole’s voice from the base of the stairs.

  “Yes, Ma’am?!” Lady yelled back, still frozen.

  “Get down here!”

  Lady swallowed and did as she was told. She stopped on the landing. “I, uh, didn’t finish sweeping upstairs.” She hadn’t started sweeping upstairs, but she left that part out.

  “You can finish later. Come join me in the kitchen.” Ms. Poole’s footsteps faded away.

  Lady came down the steps and went to the kitchen after her boss, her heart in her throat. “How was the movie?” She went up to the island and leaned against it.

  Ms. Poole was standing at the open pantry. She turned, her stern and heavily-lined face more sour than usual. That seemed like a pretty straightforward answer to Lady’s question. “I would like you to go to the movies with Ms. Comfrey next week.”

  “What?” Lady’s heart started beating normally again. It didn’t seem like Ms. Poole had overheard her snooping around in a part of the inn she shouldn’t. “Why?” She almost backpedaled and took the question back. Ms. Poole didn’t like being questioned when she gave instructions. Lady should count her blessings and be a good employee for the rest of the night—except being a good and obedient employee would probably look suspicious.