Smoke and Mirrors (37 page)

“Not much gets by you, does it?”

“CB is going to have your ass.”

“If he can get it out of this house, he's welcome to it.” As Amy made a series of totally grossed-out faces, he capped the marker and stood. “I need you to count slowly to a hundred and sixty, that's three minutes.”

“Thanks for the math lesson, Einstein. A hundred and eighty is three minutes.”

“Fine, count to a hundred and eighty. When you get there, grab the back of my jeans—don't touch skin—and haul me out of the circle.”

“Me, I'm not the wizard, but that sounds a little dangerous.”

“It is. A little.” Arra's notes weren't specific on just how much. “But just to me, you'll be fine. It's the emergency exit procedure.”

“Great. I'll be fine. What's the nonemergency exit procedure?”

“That'd be the second half of the spell.”

“Then why not . . .”

“Because the laptop won't be coming with me, and I don't have time to memorize it.”

“Tony . . .”

“Three people are dead, Amy.”

“Yeah.” She sighed and cuffed him on the back of the head. “Go on.”

He stepped into the circle, bent, and set the laptop on the third step where he could see the screen. The first part of the spell was a string of seventeen polysyllabic words spaced to indicate the rhythm with room left to add the elemental's name if known. Arra had helpfully added a phonetic translation. The second part was also a string of seventeen polysyllabic words—not the same seventeen, not that it mattered since he was unlikely to remember the first seventeen. It was, essentially, hopefully, a more complex version of the Come to Me spell aiming for a totally different result. Trying not to think of exploding beer bottles, Tony began to read.

When he inserted “Lucy Lewis” between the dozen or so clashing consonants that made up most of the words, his lips twitched. It sounded like Jabba the Hut's dialogue.

Garble, garble, garble, Han Solo. Garble.

Lesson one: The spell guides the wizard. It is the wizard who manipulates the energies. With time and practice, the wizard will find such guides unnecessary.

Someday, he'd have to go back and read lesson two.

Garble. Garble. Garble.

All except for the pattern drawn on his chest.
That
was almost uncomfortably warm.

She'd have been cute when she was alive. Not very tall, brown hair, hazel eyes behind small round glasses—he thought there might have been a scattering of freckles but with all the swelling and discoloration, it was hard to tell. The
er er
sound was the creaking of the rope Lucy had hanged herself with.

Had PBS ever done a series on hanging? He didn't think so, but he knew he'd seen something about the way most suicides changed their minds when the rope started to tighten, that no matter how determined they started out, faced with slow strangulation they clawed trenches into their own skin trying to get free. Lucy hadn't.

Worst part, there was someone home behind the eyes.

Trapped.

“Can you hear me?”

“Yes.” Barely a word. The rope had destroyed her voice.

Great. If he wanted any hope of understanding her, he'd have to keep this to one-word answers. “My friends and I are trapped in the house and we need your help to get out. Did you read Creighton Caulfield's journal?”

“Some.”

“Does it contain information about the thing in the basement?”

She shuddered violently enough to start her swinging. “Yes.”

What makes the dead shudder?

“Can we use the information to defeat it?”

“Don't.”

“Because you don't think it'll work?”

The laughing was worse than the shuddering.

This was taking too long and he didn't know what questions to ask. No way he could get the information one word at a time. “Do you know where the journal is?”

“Now?”

Of course now—no—wait, her now was a hundred years ago. No way the journal would still be there. Except during her replay, he was there, too. In the same time as the journal. His chest burned, his head started to ache, and he had a sudden insight about that Don't.

“Okay, now.”

Even given distortions, the look she shot him quite clearly said,
I may be dead, but you're an idiot
. “Hidden.”

“Caulfield hides it? Where?”

“Don't.”

Very helpful. “Appreciate the warning but we don't have a choice. Where does . . . did Caulfield hide the journal?”

“Li . . .

Something grabbed his jeans.

“. . . bra . . .”

Pain blocked out the last syllable. When it faded enough for him to speak, he was propped up against the wall of shelves with the taste of copper in his mouth and a splitting headache. “Ow.”

“Ow my ass.” Boots back on, Amy squatted in front of him. “You had convulsions.”

“Didn't plan to.”

“You bit through your lip.”

Talking hurt. “I know.”

“You scared me half to death.”

She flicked him just above the naval. His skin felt tight, sunburned. “Ow.”

“Suck it up. Did you find out what you needed to know?”

“I think so.”

“If your head wasn't so damned hard, you'd have a cracked skull, so be sure.”

“I'm sure.”

“Let's hear an amen from the choir!” She reached out to help him up. “Come on, get dressed and we'll tell the others.”

The others had moved into the butler's pantry. Amy flatly denied panicking when they returned to the hall and found a scattering of salt and two disks of warm candle wax.

“We needed a better way to keep people from wandering during when Fred and Ginger take center stage,” Peter told them, beckoning them through the dining room. “This room is small, we can block both doors, and no one's died in it.”

“What about Everett?” Tony asked as everyone shuffled closer together to make space for two more. With fifteen people crammed into the butler's pantry, small was an understatement.

“I convinced Tina that Everett wasn't going anywhere.”

“What about the circle of salt?” Amy demanded.

“Keeping evil spirits out is going to have to take a back seat to keeping actors in,” Peter snorted. “I can work with the possessed, the dead are a little beyond my skill. What the hell happened to Tony?”

Amy rolled her eyes. “He didn't stick the dismount.” “I don't really care what that means.” Turning back to Tony, Peter folded his arms. “What did you find out?”

“Well, she wasn't a big talker . . .” Head to one side, he lifted an imaginary rope.

“The dead can dance, but they can't talk?”

“I'm not making up the rules. I'm not even sure there are rules. Back when Lucy killed herself, the journal was hidden in the library. I'll have to find it and read it during her replays.”

Crammed in between Kate and Saleen, Mouse began to shake, eyes wide and cheeks pale. “You can't go into the library,” he moaned, twisting both hands in his T-shirt. “The library is haunted!”

Her head pillowed on Zev's backpack, Brianna managed to combine a yawn with an expression of complete disdain. “The whole house is haunted, you big baby!”

“ALL RIGHT,
that's it for me,” RCMP Constable Danvers rolled her chair away from the desk and stretched. “Bad guys caught, paperwork filed electronically and redundantly, government satisfied—I'm heading home for a shower and four blissful hours of shut-eye before I have to get up and get my darling children off to day camp.” She balled up a scrap of paper and tossed it at her partner. “Jack! Hello, Earth to Jack! You planning on staying here all night?”

“I'm just checking into something that Tony kid said.”

“What, this afternoon out at the house?” When Jack grunted an affirmative, she ran over everything she could remember of the conversation. “He asked about that murder/suicide from the fifties.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So you looked it up?”

“I looked it up.”

“You don't have enough to do?”

“He got me curious.”

“Uh-huh.” Like all good cops, Jack could get a little obsessive and over the last few months she'd gotten used to dropping in on CB Productions—studio or location shoots—when the mood took him. She had no idea what he thought he was doing, but she trusted his instincts and Lee Nicholas was easy enough on the eyes she didn't begrudge Jack the time.

“It went down pretty much the way Tony told it. Father went crazy, axed his two kids and then himself.”

“And . . . ?” They'd been working together long enough that she knew when the story wasn't over.

“And then he asked if we'd heard about anything more recent.”

“And you gave him grief about ghosts. So?” Jack looked up from his computer and Geetha stifled a sigh. He was wearing his bulldog expression, the one he wore when he was hard on the heels of a hot tip. The one that said RCMP Constable Jack Elson always got his man.
If he doesn't make detective in the fall, I'm asking for a transfer to Nunavut.
“I know I'm probably going to regret this, but what did you find?”

“November 17, 1969, Gerald Kranby bought the house.”

“Kranby of Kranby Groceries? The largest independent chain west of Winnipeg? Best in the west? Fresh or frozen, Kranby keeps costs do . . .” His new expression cut short her commercial moment. “Sorry. It's late, I'm a little punchy. That Kranby?”

“Yeah, that Kranby. In the early seventies, his ten-month-old son, Karl, was killed.”

“Murdered?”

“Set onto a roaring fire like a Yule log.”

“A Yule log being something you Christian folk burn at Christmas?”

“That would be it.”

“Hey, I'm all about context.” She stacked her fists on her desk and rested her chin on top. “Did they nail the perp?” When he winced, she grinned. “Just trying to sound hip, dude.”

“Don't. And they didn't have to look far. His mother was lying beside the fire with burned hands and knitting needles in her eyes.”

“Knitting needles? Plural? She put her baby on the fire and killed herself with knitting needles?” The shudder was only half faked. “That's very twisted.”

“Or she tried to get the baby off the fire and was killed by whoever had put it on.”

“That's a theory.” One her partner clearly didn't believe. “Official line?”

“Murder/suicide. The nanny found the bodies when she came back from the kitchen with snacks. The cook and gardener were both in the kitchen at the time. Kranby had a rock-solid alibi and no one had a motive.”

“Please, Kranby was a successful businessman. They always have enemies.”

“And that's what Kranby said. But here's the odd bit . . .”

“Odder than Yule logs and knitting kneedles?”

“. . . Kranby said that someone was piping ballroom dance music into his house.”

“So he suspected Baz Lurman.
Strictly Ballroom
. . . it's a movie,” she continued when Jack stared at her blankly. “You have got to start watching something besides crappy science fiction. Let me guess; the dance music drove his wife mad.”

“That's what he said. In her statement, the nanny agreed that Mrs. Kranby had been getting increasingly nervous of late and had mentioned that she was afraid of the man with the ax.”

“The man with the ax?”

“Chris Mills killed his teenage children with an ax.”

Geetha blinked and sat up. “And Chris Mills would be the father who went crazy?”

Jack nodded.

“That happened a little over a decade before Kranby bought the house.” She knew what he was implying. And she was staying as far away from it as she could.

“That's not all.”

“Oh, joy.”

“I went down to records and I pulled everything we had on the house. March 8, 1942, Captain Charles Ban-net killed his wife Audrey and then took a dive over the second-floor railing onto his head.”

“Well, that's . . .”

“Not all.” Jack ran one hand back over his scalp, brushing his hair up into pale yellow spikes, and fanned the papers on his desk with the other. “Constable Lui-tan, the officer who wrote up the report about the Ban-nets, did some research of his own. January 12, 1922, Mrs. Patricia Haltz, a wealthy timber widow, hacked her gardener into pieces and then swallowed a fatal amount of rat poison. February 15, 1937, thirty-nine people—hosts, guests, and band—died at a Valentine's Ball. Official verdict was a gas leak, but Luitan's notes mention that two of the entrances were barred from the outside and the third was locked. The host had the key in his pocket.”