Krewe of Hunters The Evil Inside 4 (15 page)

“Merlin!” she said quickly.

“Merlin,” Ivy said, a dry edge to her voice. “Your next appointment is waiting.”

“I’d heard you were here,” Tommy said, brown eyes dancing as he looked at her. “Will I get to see you?”

“Sure,” Jenna said.

“Gotta go now! Business is good, but there’s competition in town,” he told her. He turned, thoughtfully rather than dramatically, to the young woman who was his next appointment. “If you will, please?” He indicated the back.

Jenna smiled. “So Tommy is a medium now?”

“He’s very good,” Ivy said.

“I believe you,” Jenna assured her.

“He can stand against any of them,” Cecilia said. “Even the new blood with the big boobs.”

“Who’s the new blood with the big boobs?”

“Samantha,” Cecilia said.

“Oh? Samantha Yeager—who wanted to buy the old Lexington place?” Jenna asked.

“The one and only,” Ivy said.

“She’s working at a shop down at the end of Essex Street. It’s right next to Winona’s Wine Bar. I think her people come in on the
spirited
side to begin with. Also, she gets lots of men who wouldn’t step foot in with a medium if their lives depended on it otherwise…”

“Ah. I’m curious about her,” Jenna said. “Maybe I’ll go for a reading.”

“Merlin is much better!” Cecilia assured her.

“Much!” Ivy added.

Ivy frowned. “You’re not into a different—lifestyle these days, are you? I mean, it’s absolutely fine with us. We love our friends no matter what their religion or whatever, including sexual likes.”

Jenna smiled. “No, no lifestyle change. Just curiosity.”

“She’s investigating stuff for the Lexington House murders, silly,” Cecilia reminded her. “But, hey, we’re curious as all get-out about Samantha, too! You’ve got to come back and tell us all about it.”

“Will do,” Jenna promised.

She left the shop and walked along the pedestrian mall. Haunted Happenings remained wonderfully in full swing. She noted a row of small buckets and saw that the town fathers had figured out how to have kids bob for apples in a more sanitary fashion than when she’d been a kid. One mouth in a tub—and then it was washed and refilled. The bobbing-for-apples crew—attired in pirate gear—was busy.

A medieval group had set up to sing and play a bit farther down, and one shop front boasted The Best Haunted House In All New England.

Still farther along, a busy group had children doing mock gravestone rubbings.

There was something for everyone.

At last she came to a shop where a large sign advertised Madam Sam, the Best Reading In All New England!

Not in Salem—just like the haunted house, she was the best in all New England!

She noted the wine bar next door and smiled.

Bells chimed when she opened the door to the shop. Like the other merchants, the store was enjoying the busy trade of Haunted Happenings. Men and women in and out of costume looked at beautiful dolls, herbs, gris-gris bags, magical stones, jewelry and clothing.

Jenna approached the counter and asked about a reading with Madam Sam.

“Well, you’re in luck!” the girl behind the desk with black pigtails and a huge nose ring told her. “A lady just became faint, and had to go back to her hotel. We’re otherwise booked all day, so you are lucky, lucky, lucky!”

“How lucky indeed,” Jenna murmured. “The woman is all right?”

“What?”

“The lady who was faint—she was all right?”

The girl waved a hand in the air. “Oh, her husband just took her back to her room. It’s the Fates! You’re the one who should have the reading!” she said happily. “Come along—we have to adhere to a schedule, of course. You’re ever
so
lucky!”

Jenna followed the woman to the back and a setup that was similar to that at A Little Bit of Magic.

The clerk opened a heavy damask drapery for her and led her into the small cubicle where the medium was working.

Madam Sam was a beautiful woman. She was wearing a low-cut gypsy-style dress, and her hair was ink-black, long and sleek as it fell down her back. Her eyes were so blue they were almost violet, but Jenna could see, even by the dim light that added atmosphere to the cubicle, that the color had been enhanced with contact lenses. She wore very heavy makeup, especially around her eyes, adding to her look of the sexy gypsy reader.

She wore a live boa constrictor around her neck; the animal somehow seemed to increase the size of her breasts and enhance her sensual mystique. There was something about her that seemed familiar, but Jenna couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

“Ah,” Madam Sam said softly. “Welcome. How curious that you have come to me for a reading!”

She didn’t offer Jenna a hand but instead indicated a chair in front of her table, which held a crystal ball and a large tarot deck.

Jenna said. “You know me? Have we met?”

Madam Sam—or Samantha Yeager—laughed, a low, throaty and melodious sound. “Of course I know you. Your name is Jenna Duffy, and you’re attached to that delightfully devilish rogue, Sam Hall, and you’re here to investigate the recent horrors that have occurred in Salem. Have we met? No, never, I’m afraid.”

“Very good,” Jenna told her. “I mean, we haven’t met, but you do know exactly who I am.”

“Oh, yes, and you work for the FBI,” Madam Sam said.

“Okay…”

“Aye, yes, well, my other powers may be questionable, but I do read the local papers very well,” Samantha said, grinning. “You didn’t have to pay for a reading to speak with me.” Her voice had changed; it was tinged with amusement, and the sound was down-to-earth.

“I’ve wanted to talk to you. And with all the business going on with Haunted Happenings, I thought I should seize this opportunity.”

“Talk away. We have fifteen minutes,” Sam told her.

The boa stretched out toward Jenna.

“Nefertiti won’t hurt you,” Samantha assured her quickly.

“I’m not afraid of snakes,” Jenna told her.

“Good old Saint Patrick got them all out of Ireland, eh?”

“Doesn’t she scare away costumers?”

Samantha shrugged. “Some, maybe. But I think she attracts more than she loses. It’s all showmanship, really.”

“So you’re not a medium?”

“What’s a medium, really? I talk to people, I try to understand them. I don’t tell them that money is going to fall into their laps, or that they will find true love. What I do is try to draw out what is troubling them, and show them the directions they might take. I don’t have any kind of a degree in psychology but, really, reading people is simple as long as you listen.”

Jenna laughed softly. “Some might call that being a fraud,” she warned.

“And some might call it making a living. I’m sure that some call you a fraud.”

“Oh, definitely,” Jenna said, chuckling some more.

Samantha picked up the tarot cards and shuffled them. “Not the tarot cards—they come up as they come up, and a reader is supposed to interpret them. I’ve studied the tarot and all the ways that the cards might be interpreted. So, shall we read the cards? Cut, please, and we’ll use the Celtic Cross layout.”

Jenna cut the cards and Samantha began to lay them out.

“So, what did you want to know?” she asked.

“You wanted to buy the Lexington House.”

“Yes, I did. I still want to buy it.”

“And you made an offer to Abraham Smith?”

“A very generous one.”

“But he turned you down.”

“Flat.” Samantha looked up at her. She was smiling. “And you want to know if I killed the old man and his family—except for the crazy kid—to get my hands on the house?”

“More or less,” Jenna admitted.

Samantha kept looking at her, still amused. “Nope,” she said.

“You think that Malachi Smith is crazy?”

“As a loon!”

“So, do you think that he killed Peter Andres and Earnest Covington, too?”

“Yup.”

“Even though the grocer swears he saw Malachi in his shop?”

Samantha laid out cards before answering her, and then looked at her again. She sighed. “I’m not a cop or investigator or whatever, but I understand that the poor kid is truly a pathetic creature and I can also understand that you feel sorry for him. But you have to feel sorry for the dead people, too, the victims. Why kill Peter Andres? He was a farmer who substituted at the schools now and then. And Earnest Covington? He was harmless. You had to be crazy to have killed either of them, that’s all I can imagine. Oh, dear!” she said suddenly, looking down.

Jenna wasn’t really familiar with tarot cards, but she saw that the horned god—or, according to the cards, the devil—had come up in the middle. She tried to recall what she did know of the tarot…. The card known as the devil was really a half god, half devil, and he represented what was in all men, and the fact that they had to choose to be slaves to the evil within, or to slip out of the chains that bound them.

Samantha looked at her and smiled. “Well, seems you have a few options ahead of you. Give in to decadence, or hold the line of morality. If it were me—I’d sleep with the man!”

Samantha had been intuitive enough on that one!

“It could mean, too, that there’s both evil and goodness around me,” Jenna said.

“Oh, it could, but how boring! And look, you have the Fool over here—ah, yes, so, moralistically, you are looking at others. How rude of you! Your Fool looks down upon the Devil, yet sees no evil in himself. And there—you have the hanged man. At least it seems you are progressing and realizing the foolishness of judging what you see as evil in others. Sex, perhaps. Is that it?” She looked curiously at Jenna.

Jenna didn’t answer. She tapped another card. “Death, of course, means change?”

Samantha laughed. “Or death! Oh, come, I’m sorry. Yes, it signifies change. But, without kidding you or just being bitchy—really, forgive me—the layout of these cards is almost…”

“Almost what?”

“A warning that if you judge others and pursue them, you will die.” The look she gave Jenna was perplexing. “You seem like you’re really nice. Yes, I’m a fraud, but…maybe you need to be careful. You have the Devil, followed by Death.”

Suddenly, the cards seemed to leap from the table and fly across the room. Both women jumped back in their chairs.

And then they stared at each other accusingly.

“I swear, I didn’t do that!” Samantha breathed, and the look she gave Jenna seemed both stunned and fearful.

“I didn’t do it,” Jenna said.

Samantha waved a hand in the air. “You’ve asked your questions. Go, will you?”

“I have another question,” Jenna told her, rising.

“What?” Samantha asked crossly.

“Where were you when the Smiths were killed?”

“That’s easy. I was right here—ask the clerk!”

“And what about Earnest Covington?”

“I was probably right here!” Samantha said, growing agitated as she started picking up her cards.

“And Peter Andres?”

Samantha stopped and stared at her. “How the hell would I know? That was six months ago! I had barely gotten to town. Look, please, this is how I make a living.”

“Sure. Thanks,” Jenna said. She slipped out from the curtained cubicle and walked to the counter to pay for her reading. She wasn’t sure what she thought about Samantha Yeager. She was a woman who knew showmanship and how to use her assets. She knew it was all a game, as well. And yet…

She started looking at the jewelry in the glass case at the checkout counter and drew the young clerk with the huge nose ring into conversation. When they had chatted about the marvels of Madam Sam and Haunted Happenings, Jenna asked her, “And Madam Sam has been working here since the Haunted Happenings began?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Huh. How sad that none of the mediums in Salem thought to warn Abraham Smith that he and his family were about to be murdered,” Jenna said, shaking her head with sorrow and leaving the shop.

“Malachi, we know that when Earnest Covington was killed, the grocer, Mr. Sedge, saw you in his store,” Sam said.

“Yes.”

“But David Yates and his friend claim they saw you coming out of Mr. Covington’s house,” Sam reminded him. “Are they still angry with you? Is that why? David believed, you know, that you had mind control over him and made him hurt himself.”

Malachi had been tenderly cradling the acoustic guitar Jamie had just bought for him. The guitar was a modest piece of equipment, to be sure, but Jamie had been certain that it would make the time pass for the boy. He had strummed a few strings and listened in awe. And then, of course, he wanted to play with it.

But now he paused, frowning and concerned. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand what happened at all. I had just gotten my tray. I saw David Yates and I knew he would try to knock it out of my hand or walk over and spit in my food. I was only looking at him to try and figure out the best way to back away from him. He stared back at me and started screaming—and then he started beating himself in the head. And he begged me to stop! A bunch of his friends stared at him, and then at me, and then they came after me—and I ran. I almost flew like a bird, I was so afraid. The school was in an uproar, and the cops came, but the kids had to admit that I hadn’t touched him.”

“You were never anywhere near him,” Sam mused.

“Had you ever threatened David Yates?” Jamie asked gently.

Malachi looked at Jamie with such confusion that Jamie might have been the one considered to be mad. “Me? Threaten him? Never. Dr. Jamie, sir, look at me. And look at David Yates. He could rip me to shreds in a minute. And it’s not like I don’t know how to take a beating, and I know, God help me, that you turn the other cheek, but…no. No. I never threatened David Yates.”

“Was he acting?” Sam asked. The boys would have all been young teenagers at the time, all about fourteen. Still very impressionable. If they heard talk around town about Malachi’s family, they might believe what they heard.

“No, sir. I don’t believe he was acting. He almost broke his own nose. And he was bawling. Tough guys like David aren’t supposed to cry, I don’t think,” Malachi said. He paused, looking at the guitar again, forgetting Sam and Jamie for a minute. “I cried. I cried so hard it hurt. But crying doesn’t ease the pain when you lose somebody. It’s just something that happens, and you can’t really stop it.”