Peter’s expression flickered.
I nodded. She wasn’t here to harm me, and she hadn’t killed Mike. I frowned. Why had the idea of murder popped into my head? It hadn’t been more than a minute or two between the time I’d heard Mike fall and I’d gone into the bookstore proper. He’d been alone. It was only a terrible accident.
“I told him to leave the ladder climbing to me.” Peter scowled. “He still thought he was steady as a mountain goat.”
Connor strode inside, his partner Owen in tow. Like Peter, Owen was a shaggy blond. Unlike Peter, Owen had a certain toughness to his manner, in spite of his boyish face. “We got a call,” he said. Taking in the scene at a glance, he came to stand beside us. “Doc?”
Rising, she shook her head. “It’s too late for the paramedics, I’m afraid. It looks like he fell off the ladder and cracked his head. A simple fall can be so deadly.” The corners of her mouth turned downward, and she met my gaze. “Humans are so fragile.”
I stiffened.
“Lenore, did you witness the fall?” Connor asked, his swarthy face serious.
“I work here too,” Peter said, his expression sour.
“Did you witness his fall?” Owen asked him.
Peter flushed. “No. I was out getting coffee for Mike.”
My nostrils flared. He’d been out getting coffee for himself to avoid work, as usual.
“Lenore?” Connor asked. “Did you see anything?”
“I heard him fall,” I said. “I called to him through the door. When he didn’t answer, I came out of the back room. That’s when I saw him.”
“Was he alone?” Connor asked.
I hesitated. “It seemed so.” Mike had been alone when I’d found him, but something about this didn’t feel natural.
“I knew we shouldn’t have called nine-one-one,” Peter said.
“It’s the natural thing to do under the circumstances,” Connor said.
“Would you come over here?” Owen asked Mike’s nephew. “I’ll need to take your statement.”
The two men moved beside the cash register.
“What’s going on?” a man asked from the front of the shop. Town councilman Steve Woodley, his tonsured scalp gleaming with sweat, stood in the open doorway.
Abandoning Peter, Owen hurried to the bookstore’s front door. He said something to Woodley in a voice too low for me to hear.
The councilman shook his head. “Terrible. Terrible.” He strolled away.
Owen shut the door and flipped the sign in the window to CLOSED.
Connor snapped photos of Mike’s body with his phone and spoke quietly with Doctor Toeller.
I backed away. Over the last year, my sisters had found their share of corpses – all murdered. Maybe that’s why my internal alarms were clanging. When a Bonheim finds a body, odds are the circumstances aren’t natural.
Paramedics arrived, and the decibel level in the bookstore rose.
Ignoring everyone, I rested my hand on the top of a freestanding book case and relaxed my vision, letting my mind float in a light trance.
Something, flashed, rose-gold in the corner of my eye.
Instead of looking at it directly, I turned, keeping the movement in my peripheral vision.
Mike paced between two bookcases. He muttered and wrung his hands, a gesture I’d never seen him make in life. But I’d never seen a pink flash presaging a ghost before either.
In the movies, ghosts are semi-transparent figures. I see them as real people. Mike looked solid, but he hadn’t fully manifested. That was why I could only see him when I was trying, in my half-trance state. But I shouldn’t have been able to see him at all. It was too soon after his passing. Was this another mark of things in Doyle getting weirder? I rubbed my arms. Or was Mike desperate to tell me something?
Still not looking at him directly, I edged toward the spirit and steeled myself not to weep.
Mike’s ghost babbled under his breath, his movements manic, jerky, fast. He pinballed off the bookshelves.
My heart twisted anew with grief.
Mike’s spirit raced back and forth in front of me now. One corner of his brown plaid shirt had come untucked, flapping behind him like a schoolboy’s. I swallowed the hard knot of grief in my throat.
If I’d believed that ghost was all of him, I couldn’t have borne it, but this was just a remnant, a fragment of his soul. Still, it was all I could do not to run sobbing from the bookstore.
“Mike,” I whispered, facing away from the others. “I’m here for you.”
But he didn’t listen to me anymore than anyone else did. Mike’s spirit raced back and forth, oblivious, and I swear I felt a breeze stir.
“Mike. It’s all right,” I said, keeping my voice low.
He spun to face me and clapped his hands to the sides of his face. His jaw hinged downward, elongating. His words were a shriek, long and deafening and raising the hair on the back of my neck.
I keeled forward, pressing my hands to my ears. My skull was splitting, agonizing.
His scream went on and on.
“No,” I whispered. No, no, no. “Mike.”
And then he was gone, and I was left with ringing in my ears, a dry mouth, and a tangle of fear and despair in my chest.
“Lenore?” Connor laid his broad hand on the curve of my lower back. “What can I do?”
I straightened, gasping. He probably thought I’d been crying, and I wanted to cry, but not now. “This can’t have been an accident,” I said.
Something shifted behind his near-black eyes. He drew me further towards the back room. “Did you see something?”
I couldn’t explain Mike’s ghost to the handsome cop. “No,” I said. “I think... I feel like there’s more here.”
“I know his death is a shock,” he said. “It is to me too. I was just here…” He trailed off and shook himself. “It’s understandable if you’re not ready to accept this.”
“Please.” I touched my fingers to his arm and as quickly withdrew them. “Please, just... look.”
“All right,” he said. “We’ll treat Mike’s death as a question mark until we have evidence that says otherwise.”
“Thank you.”
The skin between my shoulder blades heated, and I glanced behind me.
Peter and the Doctor watched us.
If they’d overheard me, that was too damn bad.
Mike had told me to run.
CHAPTER THREE
That day, we kept the sign in the window to CLOSED.
Peter said something about reopening later, “for Mike.”
Fighting tears, I’d nodded, numb, and walked out the front door.
I walked, but I didn’t see Main Street’s western-style saloon. I didn’t see the cool stone walls with iron shutters. I didn’t see the colorful gardens behind white picket fences. I didn’t see the tourists giddy from wine tasting. And Doyle was worth seeing. A relic of the Gold Rush, it was a beautifully preserved mining town in the California foothills. But all I could see was the memory of Mike’s ghost.
I turned left, walking past weathered Victorians and dappled pine forest. A squirrel loped across the road, his tail an ashen wave.
I brushed tears from my cheeks. Mike had been like a kindly uncle. I didn’t want to think of not having him around to talk books with. Every good reader spends time in wonderland, so Mike had never poked fun at me whenever I’d drifted off into my own netherworld. Mike had understood.
Mike, gone. My breath hitched.
I hadn’t told him everything about my chronic mental drifting. He knew I had an interest in spirits and shamanism, but not even Mike would believe a fairy curse – or an unseelie curse, as Karin insisted on calling it. Despite that secret between Mike and I – a secret that affected him as well – we’d been close, our relationship easy, sharing our passion for books. We’d loved more than just the stories and the characters. We’d loved the scent of the paper, the feel of the pages beneath our fingers, the fonts and
patterns of words on a page. These things had been lost in the digital age.
I swallowed the ache in my throat.
Finally, I reached our gabled stone and shingle house, and a weight dropped from my shoulders.
I trudged up the three porch steps.
A woebegone black cat huddled on the porch swing.
“It’s okay to come inside,” I said.
The cat, Picatrix, had attached herself to Jayce. But she refused to come into our house.
Picatrix looked away.
“Your choice.” I ruffled the black cat’s fur, hot on the summer day.
After checking to make sure Picatrix’s food bowl was full (it was), I unlocked the door and let myself inside. We’d inherited the house from our aunt. Its scent hadn’t changed since she’d passed – drying herbs and love and a hint of four thieves vinegar (our cleanser of choice).
I toed off my sandals and stood on the blue rag rug, feeling its softness against my soles. And then I walked upstairs to my bedroom and cried.
A lot.
But eventually, I had to stop.
In the window sat the calico Cat With No Name. His whiskered sneer told me to get over it.
“What do you know?” I asked. “You’re a cat. Even if you are rare.” Male calico births were roughly one in three thousand. I’d looked it up.
He swished his tail and yawned, unimpressed.
“You’re also dead. That makes you zero for two.”
Offended, the ghost cat hopped from the sill. Tail high, he strolled out the open bedroom door.
Someday, I’d figure out how to pass the cat on. But how do you tell a cat he’s dead? Go to the light, there’s catnip in the light… Picatrix wouldn’t help. The two cats hated each other with a feline vengeance.
I lay on my bed and stared at the white ceiling. Mike’s ghost had been wild with fear. I’d never seen him that way in life, but this wasn’t the full Mike, just a wayward piece of his spirit. I believed ghosts were remnants of the soul. A person’s soul could split into pieces when they were alive due to physical or emotional trauma, or after they were dead if their death had been unexpected or violent. The job of shamanic witches like me was to retrieve those missing pieces and return them so the person could move on in wholeness. Part of Mike’s spirit had moved on, but a piece had split away, remained.
My breathing quickened. Had Mike been murdered? Or was his death the accident it appeared?
I rolled off the bed and walked downstairs, to my workroom at the rear of the house. Its single, square window faced the rear garden. Unlit candles lined the windowsill. Taking a matchbox from a cubby in the antique, rolltop desk, I lit them.
I rolled up the thick, white carpet.
Seated at the rolltop, my feet planted firmly on the ground, I centered myself. I kept the desk neat, because it’s hard to get centered amidst chaos. So every cubby was tidy, the desk empty except for a thick, black, leather-bound journal, where I kept notes of my magical experiences. Small blue spray bottles – magical cleansing mists that Jayce had brewed – lined the desktop. They smelled of ginger and cedar and sandalwood, but I still preferred good old stinky burnt sage. The room still smelled faintly of sage from my last smudging.
I opened the magical journal – a modern grimoire – and flipped through its pages.
The dead cat crept through the open door and sprang to the top of the rolltop. He wove between the bottles, his calico tail coiling.
“Seriously?” I flipped through my grimoire. “You want attention now?”
I rarely had to summon spirits. They usually came to me. Or they had until I’d moved into my aunt’s old house. She’d spelled a web of magical protection around the house and yard. Not having to worry about bumps in the night or shades at my bedside was a relief. But generally, I liked talking to ghosts. They had interesting stories, they listened, and in the end, they all went away.
I reviewed the spell, nodded, and shut the book.
The cat meowed.
“I don’t have any ghost cat food, so you’re just going to have to cool it.”
Standing in the center of the room, I called in the four directions and the helping spirits. “The circle is cast,” I intoned. Energy shivered through me.
The cat hunched, bristling.
From the desk, I took a bit of white chalk from a drawer and drew a circle on the floor. I wrote Mike’s full name – Michael Bartholomew Gallin – around the inside circumference.
The cat peered from the edge of the desk, his whiskers twitching.
Grabbing my salt canister, I covered the chalk in salt. My aunt had expended a lot of magical energy keeping the wards around the house strong. If I was inviting a ghost inside, it was going to materialize directly inside my circle and stay there. Even if I was calling a ghost that would never harm me, a ghost I loved, the circle was inviolate.
I grabbed a brown and white patterned meditation cushion from one corner of the room and set it outside the circle. Sitting, I folded my legs, closed my eyes. “Michael Bartholomew Gallin, come.”
Electricity whispered inside the circle. The atmosphere grew dense, as if the molecules were expanding, pressing against each other. The hair rose on my arms.
Sometimes magic really is as easy as calling someone’s name.
I opened my eyes.
A slender woman in red corduroy bell bottoms and a floral-patterned tunic stood in the circle. A bead and feather hung from the tip of her narrow braid.
I swore. And sometimes, magic isn’t easy at all. I’d gotten the wrong number. I glared at the dead cat. “Some familiar you are.”
He meowed.
“Your name can’t be Michael Bartholomew Gallin,” I said to the woman. Judging from her clothes, she had died sometime in the sixties.
The woman frowned and adjusted her green-tinted glasses. “He said this was a portal.”
“Who said this was a portal?” I asked sharply. Dammit. Yes, the salt circle was a portal of sorts, but it wasn’t meant to be public access. How had I screwed it up?
Tentatively, she reached toward me, and her hand disappeared as it crossed the invisible barrier of my salt circle. She gasped and drew her hand to her chest. Her hand reappeared, and she massaged her fingers. “This doesn’t seem right.” She turned and vanished.
“Of course it wasn’t right,” I said to the cat. Her hand shouldn’t have dematerialized and then rematerialized. The barrier should have acted like a concrete wall – impenetrable. Her hand should have pressed against it, not disappeared through it.
A handsome young man in an old-fashioned narrow, tweed coat and slacks appeared. He wore a brown derby and a comically large mustache. “What is this place?” he asked. “Who are you?”
At least I’d gotten the gender right this time. “I’m Lenore. Who are you?”
He shook his head. “Uh, uh. Telling a pretty lady my name was what got me into this mess in the first place.” He took a step toward me.
“Don’t–”
He vanished across the salt line.
What the hell? That had never happened to me before. The man reappeared, walking backwards. “Oh yeah, he told me to keep your eyes peeled. He’s coming for you.”
I untangled my legs and stood. “He? Who?”
But the man backed over the salt border and vanished.
A warm breeze caressed the back of my neck, and I stiffened.
White lady. The words were a masculine whisper.
I gasped and leapt to my feet, feeling someone’s gaze upon me. But I was alone in the room with the ghost cat.
I hurried to the desk and reviewed my notes. I’d followed the spell exactly – to the last squiggle on the sigil. If something had gone wrong, it was because of me. Had my concentration broken? Maybe I hadn’t been in the right emotional place for this sort of magic.
In the distance, a bell tolled.
I shuddered, coldness washing over me, turning my skin clammy with fear.
Are you willin
g? the voice asked.
Mouth dry, I whipped toward the circle.
A pink and gold mist swirled inside the salt.
“Oh, shi—”
My hands fell limp to my sides, panic gone. The light was gorgeous, swirls of pink and gold making patterns I could almost make out. There were mandalas in that mist, beautiful things in that mist. Things I wanted. Wanted so badly...
“Lenore!”
I blinked. I stood on the edge of the circle. My big toe nudged the line of salt. I leapt backwards.
The mist folded in on itself until it was the size of my hand, then my thumb, then my fingernail. The light winked out.
Stunned, I gaped at the empty circle.
“Lenore?”
I turned.
Jade eyes wide, my sister, Jayce, stood framed in the doorway. “What the hell was that?” Her long, nut-colored hair cascaded over her crimson tank top. Her jeans looked painted-on.
I braced one hand on the rolltop desk, my fingertips brushing through the cat.
He hissed and leapt to the floor.
“I’m not sure,” I said, shaken. “I was trying to call a spirit.” And I’d wanted whatever had been inside that circle with a longing that still left me hollow. I straightened off the desk. My palm left a damp print on the wood. I was sweating from the encounter. And the worst part was, I wanted more.
Her brow furrowed. “Mike?” Her expression shifted to sympathy. “I heard. It’s all over the town. I’m so sorry. I know he meant a lot to you.”
The front door bammed open, light footsteps hurrying toward us.
I grabbed a broom and began sweeping up the salt.
“Lenore?” Karin huffed to a stop beside Jayce. Her baby bump was hidden beneath a loose, blue top, but I suspected her matching blue slacks had an elastic waistband. Our sister was six months along and starting to show. She walked into the room and hugged me. “I heard about Mike’s accident. How are you doing?”
“It wasn’t an accident,” I choked out.
My sisters glanced at each other.
“I thought he fell off a ladder,” Jayce said.
“I found his body near a ladder,” I said. “His spirit was already in the bookstore, and he was erratic, disturbed.”
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