Death by Tarot Card (A Ghost & Abby Mystery Book 4) Read online

  But that was then. That was the old Eric, the one I fell head over heels in love with. He was my companion, my confidant, my partner. Now the new one had an immortal, breathing body, and things were different between us.

  “Someday, I’ll invite you over for dinner.” I swallowed. “But not yet.”

  “Will that someday mean you forgive me?”

  “You know some things can’t be forgiven.”

  “My äskling …” A term of endearment in Swedish.

  I put up my hand for him to stop. I wasn’t ready for this conversation. Maybe I’d never be ready. Long story short: Eric, who had been a ghost, sold his soul to Guiden, an evil wizard, in exchange for an immortal body. He had promised me he wouldn’t do that, but he did. He said he did it for me, so that we could be together. But I know he did it for himself. It was an offer he couldn’t refuse.

  I cracked my side window for air. No other cars traveled the back roads at this hour. The salty breeze flowed into the Mini and I inhaled deeply.

  A pair of large, hairy hands reached out of the mist and slid through the window opening. They grabbed the steering wheel and yanked it to the right, causing my car to careen towards a wall of trees. I screamed.

  Eric pulled the wheel left. The car veered left and right and left again. I took my foot off the accelerator and applied the brakes. “Get out of my car,” I yelled at the disembodied enemy.

  Spark gave me a mental nudge and I chanted: “I call on …” Heck, I couldn’t remember who to call. I pushed the brake to the floor but the car rushed on. “I call the universe …” Sweat poured down my face. The Mini pulled one way then the other. We careened down the road. “I summon thee …” I should be more specific. That was lesson one. We hit a pot hole and the car jolted. “The West, East, North, South … the goddess … the powers of light.”

  “Get. Out. Of. Here,” said Eric.

  “So mote it be,” I said and clicked my fingers.

  The shadow-hands vanished. I pushed on the brakes and the car came to an abrupt stop. My body flew forward.

  I opened the door and got out. It felt so good to be on solid ground. Eric and Spark joined me. “What the heck was that?” I said.

  “Trust me, you don’t want to know.” Eric walked over to stand by me.

  “Try me.” I crossed my arms to keep out the cold, but the shivers running up my back had nothing to do with the temperature of the air. Goosebumps rose on my arms and I began to shake. Shock. I was in shock.

  He frowned. “It’s dark and it’s angry.” He reached for me.

  I stepped back. Dark and angry? That could describe a lot of things, including my mood. “If you don’t tell me more, I’ll show you dark and angry.”

  His jaw firmed. “It’s a nebulous, negative energy … thing.”

  “Thing?” I swallowed with some difficulty. “A ghost?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “A vampire?”

  “No. This one isn’t interested in your blood type.”

  Good. I thought. Two beasties off my list. “Poltergeist … witch … lost soul? Am I getting warmer?” I watched his eyes as I rambled. They didn’t flinch. “Stop me when I get close.”

  “None of the above.”

  “So, you’re telling me I’m being stalked by a dark cloud of energy that can manifest in different forms?”

  His eyes lit up. “Close.”

  “Evil?”

  His lips firmed, a sign he was working on a better answer.

  I waited.

  “It’s a shadow-warlock.”

  Chapter 3

  I dropped Eric off at the teahouse and headed home. So what if a shadow-warlock hunted me? I’d dealt with worse. Having lived in Sunset Cover for two years I expected weird things to happen. I’m not sure at what point weird became normal for me, but it had. My state of shock passed into a state of caffeine deprivation. I needed to get to my kitchen.

  My mind wandered back to the hairy hands. No doubt about it, I attracted the wild, the wicked and the weird in a not so wonderful way. I came to the cove a bereaved widow, desperate to find a way to support my family, and took the only job available in town—the night-janitor in the haunted teahouse. Talk about a learning curve! In the last two years I had come face to face with all the legendary night stalkers, which was okay at first. I preferred knowing about the beasts that exist than not, and I had money to feed my kids. But then I screwed up a magical potion and became a witch with powers I don’t understand. I should have stuck with Pinesol.

  I shook my head. Going over my situation again and again would never change things. I needed to get home, feed my kids and drink coffee. Not necessarily in that order. Oh, and I needed to find out what why Alderman Harris, a really mundane human, had his shorts in a twist. Had he run out of paper clips? I would never understand politicians.

  I sang along with the country song on my radio. Even the potholes along my driveway couldn’t diminish the joy of returning home. The dawn light melted the morning mist and transformed the landscape into a paradise. Bright spring sunshine reflected off the windows of Graystone Manor. Plump, pink blossoms hung from the old cherry tree outside the kitchen window. The tulips and daffodils we planted had opened for the first time, greeting me with the beauty of spring.

  My three-story stone manor was a blessing beyond my wildest dreams. My last home was condemned. How I got these digs was a long story, with a happy ending. Let’s just say it was part of my payment for solving a mystery. As fabulous as being given an estate may sound, in reality it came with a few problems and an enormous monthly electric bill.

  Once the home of an eccentric woman who dabbled in the occult, it held residual magic, and, like old mold, the magic gathered over the years and bred in the nooks and crannies. I needed to vanquish it all. Little by little I had made progress and replaced the dark stuff with a warm magic of my own.

  I had five rooms left to cleanse on the second floor, but if I followed my latest to-do list I would get that done in a week. After that, I planned to move my detective office from the attic of the teahouse to my home. It would simplify my life. All it would take was a box of incense, a lot of chanting and time. That’s what I was short of—time.

  My plan was to tackle one room a day, make a real push to complete my spring-cleaning project, give it a real witch-clean. I lined up in my head all the things I needed to do to tackle the first room.

  So what if a pair of creepy hands wanted me dead. I had plans.

  Spark, who I thought had fallen asleep, sat up and spoke. “You know what they say about plans. The goddess laughs.” She yawned.

  I drove up to the manor. Alderman Harris sat on the top of my entrance stairs. Coffee would have to wait.

  His upside-down smile screamed trouble. The man usually oozed salesman-smarm, complete with a toothy grin that made my blood run cold. As he stood to greet me I glanced at the rest of him using my sleuthing skills. A thirty-something, medium-sized man, he wore well-pressed gray khakis, a button-down collared white shirt open at the neck and expensive leather shoes. His hands trembled and his eyes had a glazed look. In his arm, he carried a sport’s jacket. I colored him prim, proper and terrified.

  I strode up the stairs, and offered him my hand.

  “I need to speak to you,” he said.

  That didn’t sound good. “I didn’t mean to mess up my recycling bin.” I pushed some stray hair out of my face. “The kids put the pizza boxes in it by mistake.” I hoped confessing to the least of my law-breaking activities would pacify him, or at least lighten his mood.

  He shook his head. “I’m doomed.”

  “Come in,” I said. Dealing with “the doomed” was part of my job description as a Sunset Cove PI.

  I could hear the kids in the kitchen, so I ushered him into our living room. The sound of Jonathan and Jinx complaining to Jill over why they didn’t get pancakes filtered into our space. I slid the cedar parlor door closed, muting the sound.

  I motioned fo
r him to take a chair, but he remained standing. “You have to save me,” he said.

  “From what?” I said.

  “I’ve received this in the mail.” He pulled a tarot card from his sport’s jacket, a Rider-Waite tarot card, the most popular brand.

  I looked at it and scrunched my mouth. “The Death card,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  I examined it closely. It felt normal, but that really didn’t mean anything. It could have been spelled and the residual magic had worn off. I sniffed it. It smelled okay. I ran my fingers over the surface and sensed something off, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. The texture felt altered. “Looks pretty normal,” I said. Sometimes I lie.

  “It’s a Death card.”

  “Yes, well …”

  “I’ll pay you double your usual rate to find out who sent it to me.” He rubbed the sweat off his brow.

  I stared at him for a moment, not for any clever reason, but because I needed caffeine.

  “Triple.”

  “Done.”

  He looked ready to leave. “Wait,” I said. “Who would send you a death threat?” What had he done or not done to anger this person? This should be a simple case. Right? Any Nancy Drew fan could do this.

  He stared at Spark, who had narrowed her eyes to slits, because she hadn’t had her breakfast of sardines.

  I stared back. “She goes where I go,” I said.

  “I want the job done. I don’t care about … her.”

  “Please, sit down. I need to know more.” I took out my cell phone. “I’m recording our interview.”

  He looked as if he had swallowed a gopher.

  I shook my head. “Trust me. I’m the only person who will listen to the recording and I’ll destroy it after we solve the case.”

  He nodded, but the muscle in his right cheek twitched.

  “How much do you know about tarot cards?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” he said with disgust.

  “Okay. Let’s start there. The Death card does not mean death.”

  He nodded slowly.

  “It doesn’t mean you’re going to die soon.” Unless of course it did, but I left that fact out.

  “Why would anyone send me one?” Sweat trickled down his brow.

  “That’s what we need to figure out. It could be a warning.”

  “A warning of what?”

  “Clueless,” mumbled Spark in my head. “Absolutely clueless.”

  Biting back a laugh, I said, “Have you upset anyone lately?”

  “Upset anyone?” He looked down at his well-manicured hands. “I am on the town council. No matter what we do we upset people. You can’t please all the people all the time.”

  I try to follow local politics but I get lost in the bickering. “What’s twisting everyone’s sails lately?” Why did I say sails? I really needed coffee.

  He blinked and exhaled noisily. “I’ve been thinking about that.”

  “He thinks. Eek, great goddess, the man in the button-down shirt thinks.” Spark’s throaty voice drawled. I really needed to feed her soon, or she might bite him. I stroked her head.

  He brushed his cuff. “Right now, there are three town issues. Well, there could be more.” He looked towards the door. “Some people get upset about the littlest thing, but three main issues come to mind.”

  “The docks,” I said, trying to speed him along. I could smell the coffee.

  “Yes, there are many problems with the town Dock Renovation Project. Everyone agrees they need to be improved, but the how and when are things no one agrees on. The cost of the renovations could bankrupt us if we’re not careful.”

  I had heard a lot of dock complaints at Margarets, the town café where gossip is as fluid as the coffee. Coffeeeee. I needed to concentrate. “What else?”

  “Problems within the council.”

  “Someone’s stealing paper clips?” I loved that image in my mind.

  “No, it’s worse than that. As much as it grieves me to tell you, our staff at City Hall don’t always get along. Alderman Shields wants us to spend money on team building. She says she’d rather put money into that than into court cases, which will happen when one of us decides to kill another. The council is divided right down the middle on this counseling issue.”

  A lightbulb turned on in my head. “I heard someone dumped a truck load of manure on the front lawn of City Hall.” Another tip from the café.

  His shoulders tightened, making him look like a cyborg in a bad movie. “Yes, that’s true. A day later a couple bags full of goat manure were dumped in one of our aldermen’s boat.”

  “Retaliation? In excrement?”

  Ignoring my wit, he sighed. “These antics happened in the dead of night. No one is sure who is slinging the …”

  “Crap,” I said.

  Spark snickered in my head.

  “Okay, that covers politics. How about your personal life?”

  “My personal life?” He sputtered over the words. “Classified.”

  Ooh, that sounded more like it. “Classified? As in not for anyone to hear, or just not for me to hear?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  I gave him my witchy stink-eye.

  His fingers curled into a fist and he straightened them out again. Then they clenched, as if the action pumped his courage. I waited, anticipating something big would eventually fall out of his mouth.

  “I don’t have good luck with love.”

  I nodded and waited. Who did?

  “I’ve had one main lover in the last year, but the relationship didn’t work out. I’ve seen other women as well, but that was just physical.”

  My mouth dropped, and I cleared my throat to mask my response. I thought I knew all the gossip in town, but this was news to me. I had no idea he got around so much.

  “I need to make a suspect list. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll grab my laptop and be right back. Would you like a coffee?” Please say yes.

  “No, thank you.”

  I returned, without any java, and we settled into work. An hour later I had a list of nine people on an excel sheet. Three for each of the issues. As we reviewed the list I made a mental note to start with the craziest one: Harold McGregor. He was at the top of the suspects related to poop.

  As I said goodbye to Harris, he turned and said, “I don’t have a good feeling about this.”

  I gave him as confident a smile as I could muster, but the truth was I didn’t have a good feeling about the Death card either.

  Chapter 4

  After two cups of coffee, I did the morning drop-offs: Jonathan and Jinx to the local school and Jane to daycare. Jill took off in her mobile beauty-van for a day of appointments. I settled into my new case.

  As I listened to my taped interview and filled in a few more spaces on the suspect chart, no one really popped out at me. Should I set up interview times with my first three suspects? Nah. I would get more of a sense of them if I took them by surprise. I’d decided to start my sleuthing that night, after supper, when Jill was home to be with the kids.

  That left me a couple hours to attend to chores. The forbidden zone called my name. I gathered cleansing tools, an assortment of cleaning fluids and magic potions, and headed to the first bedroom. A full bedroom set circa 1930s lay under a two-inch blanket of dust. After I used my all-purpose cleansing spell to rid the room of lurking warlocks, spirits, or supernaturals of any shape or size, I vacuumed, dusted, washed and polished. I wanted to do it the old-fashioned way with a bit of spit and polish, to make it feel like my home. I had just finished the room when the alarm went off on my phone, reminding me to pick up the kids.

  Other than some random purple smoke that squealed as it slid out of the top of the west baseboard and flew out of the room, nothing seemed abnormal. One room down, four to go. I hurried out to pick up the kids.

  Jonathan had a play date at our place with his best friend Nicolas. After they wolfed down a plate of cookies with milk they headed o
ut to the back yard to play on the trampoline. The sound of laughter flowed through the screen door. Jinx headed up to her room to play with her dolls. Jane nuzzled into me for cuddles. “Story,” she said.

  Who could resist her big blue eyes? I picked her up and took her over to our favorite reading chair in the living room. She picked the books one by one and I read. We were starting our third, Benjamin the Turtle, when an odd noise stopped me. I closed the book. It sounded as if someone sang in the wind. It sounded magical and otherworldly. I listened.

  Silence. Something was off. Way off.

  I sniffed the air. Lingering scents of last night’s spaghetti sauce, Jonathan’s sneakers and—I sniffed again—wacky magic filled the room.

  Eye of newt. Who dared to hex me in my own home?

  Spark’s tail rose. “Don’t take it personally, Blondie. The magic could be aimed at any of us, or it could just be hangin’ out. You haven’t finished cleaning.”

  Her Mae West voice irritated the heck out of me at the best of times, and this wasn’t the best of times. I could text Dante, a man-witch who knows about such things, but I really didn’t want to involve him in my life more than I absolutely had to. Interacting with him held its own dangers.

  “Mommy, mommy, mommy.” Since when did Jinx sound sing-songy, as if she starred in a morning kid’s program?

  “Jinx?”

  She ran down the grand staircase grinning from ear to ear. “Mommy, I love you.”

  Her beautiful sage-green eyes blazed a magical emerald green. I gulped.

  “Jinx, have you been in my bedroom?” That’s where my magical stuff is locked away.

  “Nope.”

  “I smell magic,” hissed Spark. Her lynx hackles rose.

  “The lynx talks,” said Jinx with glee.

  “You heard her?” I asked casually, making every effort to hide the terror rising inside me.

  “Of course. Didn’t you?”

  “Uh, yah.” I always hear her, but normal people shouldn’t be able to. “What happened to Jonathan?” I said, suddenly realizing I couldn’t hear the boys any more.