Witch at Heart: A Jinx Hamilton Witch Mystery Book 1 (The Jinx Hamilton Mysteries) (7 page)

T
he sun was so bright
when we emerged from the trees, we had to stand at the edge of the forest blinking our eyes until our vision adjusted. Maybe it was the effect of the blinding light, but that was when my brain kicked in with a lot of really important questions that should have already occurred to me.

I turned toward our spectral companion. “Grace,” I asked, “why did you appear to us at the clearing this morning?”

“I heard you,” she said. “You were louder than the others.”

“The others?”

Grace nodded. “The people who walk on the trail all the time,” she answered. “When I hear them laughing and talking, I come to the edge of the trees and listen. If the people stay in the clearing a long time, I go over and try to make them hear me.”

“But somehow Tori and I were different?”

She nodded. “Yes. You were shouting, so I came straight to the clearing.”

Now it was my turn to be confused. Tori and I hadn’t been shouting. In fact, on our walk up the mountain, we’d talked about how everyone else in town was probably still in church. We agreed that being on the mountain alone on such a beautiful, quiet day felt more like a sanctuary than any church building we’d ever been to.

“We weren’t shouting,” I told Grace. “We were just talking in our normal voice. What exactly did you hear?”

The girl seemed to consider what I’d said carefully before she answered. “You weren’t shouting with your voices,” she said hesitantly. “The pictures you saw in your head were shouting.”

She must have been referring to the vision I had when I stumbled. That’s what she heard?

“Do you have any idea why you might have been able to hear what I was seeing?” I asked.

Grace nodded. “I think it was because when you fell you touched the place where that other girl was found,” she said. “You know, the one people remember?”

Tori and I both shook our heads. Murdered, thrown away, and forgotten. Was it any wonder Grace’s spirit wasn’t at rest.

“Were you watching when they found her?” Tori asked.

“Yes,” Grace said. “I hoped maybe if I went down there the policemen would find me, too, but they didn’t search far enough into the woods. Besides, I was still under the tree then so they couldn’t have seen me anyway.

As much as I hated to ask her the next part, I really didn’t have much choice. She might be the only witness we’d ever find.

“Did you see who left the other girl on the trail?”

“No,” Grace said, “but I felt him.” A ripple went through her form, and Tori and I both shivered at the cold draft that washed over us in its wake. “He scared me,” Grace continued. “It seemed like maybe I should know him.”

She was still trembling, so I couched the next words very softly, “Do you think he was the same man who hurt you?” I asked.

A terrified look filled the hazy outlines of Grace’s face and she wavered in and out of sight. “I don’t want to remember,” she said. “Please don’t make me remember.”

“Hey,” I soothed, “it’s okay. I’m sorry. You don’t have to remember. It’s okay.”

Grace was letting off little gasping sounds, but slowly her form stabilized.

“Better?” I asked.

She nodded.

“I need to ask you one more question,” I said. “It’s not scary, but it is important. Is that alright?”

“Yes,” Grace said uncertainly. “I’ll try.”

I chose my words carefully. “Other than coming from the tree into the clearing,” I asked, “have you ever tried to leave this place?”

Confusion washed over her face again, but she remained steadily visible.

“No. I’m not even sure I ever thought about leaving,” she admitted. “It just seemed like this was where I was supposed to be until somebody found me, like they found that other girl.”

Beside me I felt Tori’s hand on my arm. “Are you thinking about the others at the graveyard?” she whispered.

Grace didn’t give me a chance to answer Tori. Instead, she blurted out all in a frightened rush, “I don’t want to go to a graveyard!
Please
don’t make me go to some place like that.”

I actually hadn’t thought about taking Grace to the cemetery before that moment, but it wasn’t a completely bad idea. Well, scratch that, at the moment it was a bad idea because she was so upset, but the company of other spirits might help her in the long run, and if she and Jane talked, they might jog each other’s memories.

Of course, there were two problems. The spooks at the cemetery were trapped inside the fence, so for all we knew, Grace wasn’t going to be able to come with us at all if she was in some way bound to the forest.

If she could come with us, then the whole confinement thing must be tied to the cemetery, which meant if we did take her there she might get trapped inside. That would be a pretty awful thing to do to her even if she would have company.

I watched as Tori assured Grace we had no intention of dumping her off at a graveyard, but I could tell Tori and I were on the same page about the matter of Grace’s mobility or lack thereof.

As soon as Tori was able to convince Grace that she would be staying with us, the girl brightened up -- literally. It was almost as if the energy of the first excitement she had felt in decades lent a new stability to her form. She appeared almost solid as she drifted eagerly ahead of us on the path.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Tori whispered to me when we were fairly certain we wouldn’t be overheard.

“Yeah,” I said. “This might be a really short trip for Grace if she runs into the kind of barrier that keeps the resident ghosts at the graveyard.”

As it turns out, there was no need to worry about Grace’s mobility. She was getting more mobile by the minute. She floated right down to the parking lot where she waited patiently for us since she didn’t know which car was mine. Even though we hadn’t seen anyone on the trail, there were four other cars and a pick-up in the small lot.

When I pointed to my candy-apple red Prius Grace gasped. “Is
that
what you drive?”

“Yes,” I said, smiling at her reaction. “It’s a hybrid.”

“What’s a hybrid?” Grace asked, circling the car curiously.

“Part of the time it runs on electricity stored in a big battery in the trunk,” I said. “It gets really good gas mileage.”

“Cool,” Grace said. “I drove my Uncle Mike’s old green Chevy Vega.”

Okay. Now her situation was just getting pathetic. The only car she drove before she died was a used Chevy Vega? Who has luck that bad?

Before I could even unlock the doors, Grace was already sitting in the backseat of the Prius waiting for us.

“Guess getting around isn’t going to be an issue after all,” Tori whispered. “She’s totally up for a road trip.”

“Uh, yeah,” I agreed, “but now we’ve got another mystery. Why are the others under house arrest at the cemetery? Is it just the unfinished business thing or is there more to the story?”

“Maybe because they have actual graves?” Tori suggested. “Maybe that keeps them tied to that one spot.”

“But what about ghosts that hang out in houses?” I asked. “They’re not bound to their graves on a short leash.”

“You got me,” Tori said. “That’s another question for the ‘Ask Aunt Fiona’ list.”

I rolled my eyes. Aunt Fiona was not exactly proving to be a reliable -- or for that matter an accessible -- reference source.

When I got behind the wheel and pushed the start button, Grace leaned forward from the backseat and stared at the digital dashboard. “Cool,” she said again. “It looks like something off of
Star Trek
, but where’s the cassette player?”

She definitely had some catching up to do.

We stopped at the store to drop Grace off before going to the Sheriff’s Department to file a report. Technically, she could have come with us. In fact, from what I could tell, she could actually go anywhere she liked, but Grace was proving to have something of an obedient streak. Instinctively I knew that when she was alive, she was the kind of girl who never gave her mother any sort of trouble, which made it all the more difficult to understand how she wound up murdered and buried in a forest.

On the drive into town, when I suggested that Grace wait for us at the shop while we went to the Sheriff’s office, she hadn’t protested at all. I think she was too grateful that we hadn’t left her alone in the woods to risk being difficult.

I didn’t voice my real concern about having her ride shotgun on the trip to the Sheriff’s Department because, frankly, it was a pretty selfish concern on my part. I was afraid if she was involved in the process of “discovering” her own body, Grace would talk too much, and to some degree, I’d have to answer her. I really wasn’t ready to be branded as the new local nut job that talked to thin air.

The idea of leaving Grace alone so soon after her earlier upset did make me feel guilty, however, until she followed us upstairs to my apartment and let out a happy squeal at the sight of my cats.

“Oh!” she exclaimed happily. “You have kitties. And they’re all so beautiful! What are their names?”

As she made a beeline for the cat-covered couch, I identified the cast of players for her. The poor thing was clearly a fellow feline lover who had been deprived of furry companionship for too long. As Tori and I watched, the girl sat down on the couch, and just as Aunt Fiona had done two days earlier, Grace started petting Zeke with one hand while rubbing Yule’s tummy with the other.

“You can touch them?” Tori asked in a shocked tone. “How does that work?”

“Cats aren’t like other animals,” Grace said, as if she were intoning a principle law of the universe.

From the look Winston gave me, it was clear he thought I should know that already.

“So you’re going to be okay here by yourself?” I asked.

Grace looked at me and actually smiled. Then I realized what I’d said.

“Sorry,” I said. “Guess you’ve got the alone thing down by now.”

“Thank you for bringing me here,” Grace said. “I’ll be fine. And I’m not by myself now.”

She gazed adoringly into Zeke’s eyes and I felt my throat constrict. I couldn’t even imagine how alone this poor child had been for the last thirty years.

Grace saw me looking at her and misinterpreted my expression. “I won’t bother anything,” she said earnestly, “I promise.”

“I’m not worried about that, honey,” I said gently. I really wanted to go over to the couch and give her a hug, but I think giving her four cats to pet probably meant more to her right at that moment. “Make yourself at home,” I said. “We’ll be back as soon as we can.”

T
ori
and I drove to the Sheriff’s Department even though we could have walked since it was just on the other side of the courthouse square. I wanted to make sure we had our own transportation. After a little initial confusion, the elderly dispatcher agreed to call the deputy, who was playing in a local softball league game.

He showed up in uniform, but not the right one. No small town sheriff’s department is broke enough to have a Curly’s Crispy Chicken sponsorship logo on the back of their shirts. The deputy listened as we related our story again, and then disappeared into the back of the office to change his clothes.

When he re-emerged, now in the correct uniform, he explained he was going to get the Sheriff, who was attending a family reunion.

“Oh,” I said, “I’m so sorry to pull him away from that.”

“Don’t be,” the deputy said. “It’s his wife’s people. He’ll be tickled pink.”

We were given instructions to “get on back up to the trail” and to wait in the car until the local authorities arrived. “Now don’t you all be going back up there to look at those bones again,” he admonished us through the open window of his cruiser.

“Don’t you be worried about that,” I assured him, and I meant it.

Tori and I had been in the lot for about 15 minutes when the Sheriff’s car pulled up beside us. The deputy made perfunctory introductions, which the Sheriff cut off with a crisp, “Okay. Show us.”

We did as we were told and dutifully led the way up the trail. No one said anything until we reached the clearing and started down toward the creek. The Sheriff stopped and stared pointedly at the “Stay On The Path” sign.

“I’m assuming you ladies can read?” he said gravely.

“That’s my fault, sir,” Tori said quickly. “I really wanted to win that photo contest I was telling you about.”

“Uh-huh,” the Sheriff grunted noncommittally. “All right. Go on.”

With me in the lead, our little group retraced our earlier path to the decaying hickory. When we drew to a stop, I pointed to the tree and said, “The skeleton is in there.”

Unclipping a MagLite from his belt, the Sheriff circled the tree, then leaned down and shined the light inside. He stayed in that position for a minute or two before straightening up and pushing his hat back on his head. “Okay. You want to take me through exactly how you managed to spot that skull back in there?”

Tori’s demonstration was an an Oscar-worthy performance. She produced her first “mushroom” photograph, all the while boring the socks off both men as she rattled on about how and when to use a fill flash. She even pulled up the current spate of “Signs of Decay” entries on her phone and showed the contest site first to the Sheriff and then to the deputy. By the time she was done, they were both more than ready to believe our story just to get her to shut up.

From there, the legal process pretty much took over. The Sheriff called the State Police for backup, and told us to go back to the clearing and wait to give our statements. A quartet of burly State Troopers arrived in less than 30 minutes. They separated us to take our statements, and then told us we were free to go.

As we were starting to walk away, I called out to the Sheriff. He excused himself and left the troopers talking to a newly arrived team of crime scene techs.

“What can I do for you, Miss Hamilton?” the Sheriff asked.

“I was just wondering if you could let us know what you find out about those bones,” I said. “I mean, if that’s not against procedure or something.”

The Sheriff was a big man and vaguely stereotypical in that famous Southern sheriff kind of way. He seemed to have made up his mind that Tori and I weren’t some sort of criminals because his earlier official brusqueness had now been replaced with genial good humor.

In response to my question, the Sheriff rolled his omnipresent toothpick over to the other side of his mouth and said, “Miss Hamilton, in a town like Briar Hollow, there’s no keeping anything secret. I knew you moved into Fiona’s shop with four tomcats before you even got their litter boxes filled. I was real sorry about her passing on so sudden like.”

Okay, that was a good sign. He’d known my aunt and apparently liked her.

“Thank you,” I said. “And my name is Jinx. I guess you do have a point about small town . . . information sharing.”

“The word you’re looking for is gossip,” he grinned.

“How did you know my aunt?” I asked.

“Well, pretty much everyone knows everyone else in Briar Hollow,” he said, “but I played dominoes with Fiona at the VFW Hall on Friday nights. My name is John, by the way,” he finished, offering me his hand.

John Johnson? Seriously?

“I know,” he said, reading my reaction to his name on my face as we shook hands. “My folks didn’t have much imagination in the naming department.”

I glanced left and right and then said in a stage whisper, “Don’t tell anyone, but my real name is Norma Jean.”

Sheriff John let out a big belly laugh. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Your secret is safe with me. I’ll come by the shop and let you know if we find out anything.”

I thanked him and then said, “Uh, John, isn’t this the place where the local Jane Doe was found in 1995?”

The Sheriff looked at me appraisingly. “How do you know about her?” he asked.

“I found a whole file of clippings about the case in my aunt’s shop,” I answered truthfully. “It looked like Aunt Fiona had an interest in the case.”

John pushed his hat back again and let out a little puff of air. “That she did,” he said. “Fiona always blamed herself for not getting that little gal’s name when she was in her shop the week before she was found dead up here.”

Tori cleared her throat and the Sheriff looked at her questioningly.

“Isn’t it kind of . . . well . . . more than a coincidence that there’s another body pretty much in the same spot that other girl was found?” Tori asked.

The Sheriff looked at her. “Who are you again?” he asked.

“Tori Lewis,” she said. “I’m Jinx’s best friend. I’ve been helping her get settled in at the shop this weekend.”

“You like to watch a lot of those CSI-like crime shows and such?” the Sheriff asked.

I knew for a fact that Tori hated those shows, but she had sense enough to play dumb and to play along. “Yes, sir,” she said feigning sheepish embarrassment. “I do.”

“Well, don’t get it in your head this is anything like one of those programs,” he said firmly. “That skeleton probably just belongs to some drifter who climbed in there to get warm and died.”

Uh-huh. That was small-town-sheriff speak for, “I think we’ve got a serial killer on our hands, but I’m not about to say so.” We pretended to buy his explanation and left.

On the drive back to town, Tori was strangely quiet.

“Okay,” I said. “What’s going on in that head of yours?”

Out of nowhere, she said, “I think I need to ask Tom for some time off.”

“To do what?”

“Help you get really settled at the store and solve these murders.”

Somehow I think she reversed the order of importance there, but I let it slide.

“You can’t ask Tom for more time off right after I up and quit on him. He’ll flip out.”

Tori stared out the window for a minute and then said, “Maybe I wouldn’t mind if he did flip out.”

I recognized her tone of voice. It was the same one she used with sentences that began, “Hey, Jinksy, I’ve been thinking,” and ended up with me jumping out of an airplane or something equally insane because “it will be fun.”

“Are you trying to get yourself fired?” I asked. But I already had a pretty good idea where this was going.

She turned to look at me. “You need help,” she said again.

“Those girls aren’t going to get any deader in the next week,” I said. “Come back next weekend.”

Tori sighed. “Okay. I guess I’m going to have to walk you through this step by step. You need to hire me to work in the store with you, and since I’m going to be living in a room out back, you don’t have to pay me very much.”

“There’s no room out back of the store,” I said, frowning.

Did I mention I can be ridiculously literal at times?

With infinite patience, Tori said, “There will be a room when we have it built, which I will help pay for. There’s plenty of space between the back door and the alley.”

Now, before you start thinking Tori is the pushiest woman on the planet, we’ve been talking about running some kind of business together since were were six years old and opened up our first lemonade stand. The plan has changed a lot over the years. We’ve envisioned ourselves as everything from bookstore owners to furniture refinishers. (The last idea went by the wayside when we realized how hard that is on your nails.)

In that weird, Vulcan-BFF-mind-meld thing we do, Tori basically read my mind.

“The shop is pretty much every idea we’ve ever had under one roof,” she said excitedly. “Myrtle just makes it all a jillion times better than we could have ever imagined. If we start carrying a few books and put in an espresso bar, people will start coming in to hang out. Remember how Chase was talking about all those local musicians? We could have live music nights and . . .”

While she kept talking, I started thinking. When I first learned Aunt Fiona left me the store, I’d been a little apprehensive about becoming a storekeeper, but I’m a fast study. Then I realized I was theoretically in charge of a store with a mind of its own. So far Myrtle was cheerful and helpful, but what if that changed?

Then there was this whole witch thing. In the last three days I’d gone from talking to my cats to moving objects with my mind and asking stray ghosts to come home with me. As long as Tori and I kept up our constant running chatter of clever jokes and bright ideas, I was fine.

I hadn’t bothered to mention waking up three times the night before from heart-pounding nightmares, all with scenarios where my newfound magic went horribly wrong and hurt the people I love. Even though the circumstances had changed considerably, I was still going with my original plan. I was faking confidence on pretty much every front right now.

Tori had finally noticed that I wasn’t saying anything. There was a worried note of doubt in her voice when she asked the next question. “Don’t you think it’s a good idea?” She faltered, “I mean, I kind of thought you would have come up with it yourself by now.”

Which I should have. #BestFriendFail

“Which good idea?” I asked, intentionally flashing her both a big grin and an apology with my eyes. “You’ve spit out about six dozen of them so far. And I’m sorry, Tori. There’s just been too much going on for me to think straight, which is what I have you for.”

When I saw the incredible relief on her features, I felt even worse for making her think even for an instant that I had given up on our long-held entrepreneurial dreams. “That’s okay, Jinksy. I know you’ve been on overload. So, first, I tell Tom I quit, and then we hire a contractor.”

I laughed. “Okay. Plan revision time. First off, it is a great idea, but you have to give Tom at least a month’s notice. He hired us right out of high school and he’s been a good boss even if he does holler all the time. We can’t just both up and quit on him.”

Blowing out a sigh, Tori said, “You’re right. Man, it sucks to be a grown up.”

“Agreed,” I said. “But seriously, it’ll take at least a month to get that room added on. You have to go back to your place so you can be in at 5:30 a.m. on the dot for the 6 o’clock breakfast run. I can hold down the fort until you get back next weekend. It’s not like we don’t talk, text, email, and Facetime every day. You’re not going to miss anything good, I promise. And besides, you’re going to have to tell your mom about this plan.”

Tori’s face fell. “I thought maybe you’d tell her.”

“Oh,
hell
no,” I said emphatically. “I’m still trying to recover from the fit my mom threw when I told her I was moving to Briar Hollow. You’re on your own with Gemma.”

“Coward,” she accused.

“Guilty,” I confessed.

“But overall we have a plan, right?” Tori asked.

I took my right hand off the wheel and held out my fist. We did a celebratory bump. It was a plan, one that was forged just as I pulled up in front of the shop and spied Grace through the big display window.

“Huh,” I said, as I got out of the car, “Grace is downstairs.”

The instant I unlocked the door, Grace said, all in a guilty rush, “The cats are safe upstairs. I didn’t open any doors or anything.”

See what I mean? So
not
a wild child.

“I wasn’t worried,” I assured her. “Did you just decide to come down and have a look around?”

“Myrtle asked me if I wanted to come down and talk to her,” Grace said happily. “This place is great!”

“Oh my God!” Tori gasped. “Myrtle talked to you . . .
is
talking to you? Have you seen her? What does she look like? Is she a ghost?”

The shop itself laughed and Grace joined in. “Myrtle says you ask too many questions all at once. She says she’s not a ghost.”

“Then what is she?” I asked.

“She’s the store,” Grace said matter-of-factly, and then she immediately shifted into a more complicated gear. “So now that you’ve told the police about my skeleton, can we call my mom? Please?”