The Sinister Secrets of the Deadly Summoner
by
Constance Barker
Copyright 2018 Constance Barker
All rights reserved.
Similarities to real people, places or events are purely coincidental.
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Chapter 1
Clouds shrouded the early September sky rolling like watercolor from a swished brush. Storms were predicted for Labor Day weekend. Grace Longstreet drove through the town square beneath a sagging banner twitching in the wind...New Carfax Clam Fest. For Grace, the coming storm was a perfect one. Fried clams were the one thing that could keep her from the beach in summer. She preferred her clam feasts indoors.
And these weren’t just any fried clams. Dug at low tide on the mudflats on the south end of town, hauled into local restaurants, battered and fried, you couldn’t get a fresher fried clam unless you dug them yourself next to a deep fryer.
Clam Fest also included a clam bake on the sort-of beach at Cove Park. Grace felt that free outdoor festivals always dragged the oddest people out of the woodwork. She avoided the clam bake like the plague. But Judy’s Java fried ‘em up good and fresh and hot and included onion rings. The eponymous Judy herself lived in the neighborhood above the mudflats. She clammed and shucked along with her neighbors. So Judy McCaffrey really knew her clams. Although it was a day early, Grace parked in the lot and pushed through the doors.
Judy, in honor of Clam Fest, dyed her hair ship’s-bell-brassy-blonde. Only a few customers sat at tables in the diner. Judy sat behind the counter, head in her hands. Her modified bee hive hairdo suffered from the posture.
“Why so glum, chum?” Grace took a stool in front of her.
“It’s definitely not rhyming day,” Judy said.
The day before Clam Fest? “What’s wrong?”
Judy looked at Grace from between her fingers. “There’s no clams.”
For a moment, Grace couldn’t speak. According to the town ordinance, clam season in New Carfax began on the first of September and ended on the fifteenth of November. It gave the clams plenty of time to grow. Even though the little spit of mud flats was only a few acres, it always produced. Clamming was always at the mercy of rough weather and algae blooms called red tides. There had been neither.
“Bill says he’s never seen anything like it.” Bill being Bill Mudge, one of the mudflat property owners and the town’s new shellfish constable. He’d taken over from George Ryan, who passed from cancer in February. “We dig and dig and not a single clam.”
“Not one?”
Judy shook her head and covered her eyes again. “I’ve got crates of Vidalia onions, fifty extra gallons of oil, a hundred pounds of corn flour, and not a single damn soft-shell clam.”
“What are you going to do?”
Judy laughed, a bitter sound. “Buy ‘em at the fish market. It’s not like you can’t get clams just about everywhere on the North Shore. That’ll eat my profit down to nothing. The only reason I do this is because I dig the damn things out of my own backyard.”
Judy’s Java made a killing, as the only restaurant in town that participated in Clam Fest. It was a haven for those who, like Grace, disliked mingling with the out-of-town weirdos drawn by tents of craft and fair food vendors. Not that Clam Fest was a huge draw. Like Judy said, you could get fried clams everywhere.
“I never thought I’d say it, but I sure miss George. The guy was an asshat, but he knew shellfish.”
Grace had never met George Ryan, although he proceeded over the opening of Clam Fest in a tux and top hat every year before an F-level celebrity sang the National Anthem and the Carfax Middle School Band lurched, honked and squealed its way through “America the Beautiful,” “Under the Sea” from Disney’s Little Mermaid, and, strangely enough, an arrangement of Led Zeppelin’s “The Ocean.”. More reasons she preferred snarfing her clams at Judy’s.
“This’ll be the first Clam Fest in sixty-five years without ol’ George.” Judy dropped her hands and craned her neck to look at the ceiling. “Or maybe it won’t be.”
“Bite your tongue,” Grace scolded.
“Well, what am I supposed to do?”
“Do what every other clam shack on the North Shore does.”
“Raise my prices?” Judy’s face brightened up.
Dammit, Grace thought. The other benefit of Clam Fest was the low prices. Really, when the main ingredient came out of the mud in your yard, why wouldn’t they be cheap? “Say, if I go down to the Essex Bridge and dig my own clams—”
“No I will not fry your clams for you, Grace Longstreet!”
Grace huffed. “Fine. Anything else going on around town?”
“How would I know? This time of year, I get all my gossip at the shucking bee. But there’s nothing to shuck. There’s just a bunch of old timers and their grand kids dragging rakes around. We’re like farmers of the damned. Or something.”
“Wow. That sounds ominous.” Grace’s brain churned. Ominous, unfortunately, was a big part of her business. Not just as an insurance investigator, but as a private antiques appraiser. For reasons she didn’t understand, Longstreet Heirlooms and Antiques Appraisals attracted numerous items with dark histories and, occasionally, strange powers. Ominous, she thought again.
“I don’t like that look, Grace.”
“What look?”
“That look you get before you end up in the hospital, or arrested, or just… weird.”
“I do not get weird!”
Judy harrumphed. “All you Longstreets get weird. Your uncle, your grandfather, and back before I was born, I bet.”
Grace hopped off the stool. “You’re full of it, Judy.”
“And you hang out with weird people, too!” Judy called as she pushed out the door.
Chapter 2
It turned out, of course, that Judy was right. Bill Mudge was weird. He wore athletic shorts circa 1979, hip waders, a Hawaiian shirt and a cowboy hat. “It makes no sense.”
The Flats was a neighborhood of six houses that stood on a low ridge above a swampy creek. Below that, the land leveled out to this stretch of brownish nothing. A few other property owners raked the mud in different areas. A few more sat in the shade of a long, narrow shack. All looked dejected. All swatted at mosquitoes that swarmed from the creek.
“Why do you think the clams aren’t here, Mr. Mudge?” Grace asked.
Mr. Mudge, because he had taught sixth-grade science to Grace years before. It was hard to shake the “Mister,” even after all this time.
“Well, thought we had dead mud at first,” Mr. Mudge said. “That’s when the PH in the soil falls and the acidity just eats the shellfish right up. Like salt on a snail. You get it from agricultural runoff. Well, we got storm water runoff from Beverly, but it isn’t acidic. So that isn’t the problem. I sent samples in to Manomet for testing. We got fine mud for growing clams. Just no clams.”
Manomet was some kind of aquaculture think tank. Grace frowned. “What else could it be?”
“Don’t know.” Mr. Mudge leaned on his rake. “After George passed, the selectmen appointed me the new shellfish constable. Funny thing is, I haven’t found a single clam since the man died. That’s been since February. I knew there was a problem, but I didn’t really know how bad until now. We got worms, t
hough, plenty of sea worms. But they aren’t good eating. Unless you’re a striper.”
He laughed at his own joke.
Same ol’ Mr. Mudge. Fish stories and terrible jokes. “What about green crabs?”
European green crabs were an invasive species that loved shellfish. They arrived in the New World around a hundred years ago, proving that if you weren’t born in New England, you were always an outsider.
“Fences are up, not much more we can do about ’em. Be good if we could do what folks down south are doing about lion fish.”
Grace asked, “What would that be?”
“Eat ’em. Turn Clam Fest into Green Crab Fest, have crabbing contests, recipe contests. You know. You got lemons, you make lemonade.” He shrugged. “You got invasive crabs, make crab cakes. But the crabs aren’t eating all the clams. The beach would be crawling with ’em, if that were the case. But it’s not.”
Grace thought about what Mr. Mudge said. “Do you think George was doing something to the mudflats? Seeding them, or, I don’t know, whatever you do to produce a lot of clams?”
“This is a small operation, and we did some seeding or course, but nothing outside the DMF guidelines. We’re on private property here, but, you know, the government could come in and close us down if we were using bleach or salt to bring up the clams instead of digging.” He adjusted his cowboy hat. “It’s a nice addition to my retirement money, but this won’t make or break anybody. Mostly, it’s just a hobby.”
Not to me it isn’t, Grace didn’t say. Her parents used to drag her to Clam Fest every year. Some of her happiest memories occurred over the consumption of the clams from this mudflat.
“Maybe you could ask George’s wife,” Mr. Mudge nodded toward a rail-thin woman in a black tank top and billowy shorts. “But I really didn’t think George did anything unusual out here on the mudflats.”
Talking to a recent widow about her husband was not high on Grace’s list of fun things to do. Still, she was becoming obsessed with this clam problem. She trudged her way through the mud to where Millie Ryan sat fanning herself with a broad brimmed wicker hat.
“It’s sad, really sad, that there’s no Clam Fest this year. At the same time, you know, it’s like the clams are honoring George’s absence.” Her brown eyes began to swim.
Grace plunged ahead. “Is it because George did something special down here? I mean, he was the shellfish constable for a long time. He must’ve been good at it.”
The potential tide of tears subsided, and Millie smiled. “Oh, he loved it. He used to be a fisherman, you know, going out for months fishing for swordfish. But it was hard work. Clamming, well, you just walk around the mud and dig them up. You didn’t have to worry about your boat going down in a storm or anything like that. And it was something we could do together, the whole family clammed together. Me and the girls gather up in the shuck hut, shuck those clams and talk for hours. We’re a small community, but a tight one.”
“Did he have a special technique? I mean, there were a ton of clams at every Clam Fest since I was a little kid.”
“Special technique…” Millie repeated. Her eyes darted around, but there was no one in hearing range. Her lips made a straight line.
Grace pushed. “There was something, wasn’t there? It wasn’t illegal, was it?”
“Oh, no, nothing like that!”
“Well, that’s good, since he was a public servant and everything.” Grace tried to find the right buttons. “Very important to the town. To the whole community.”
Millie studied the ocean, lips once again pressed white. Grace thought she wanted to talk.
“I don’t think there would even be a Clam Fest without George at the helm,” she tried again. “You can get clams just about anywhere, but people come here, year after year. My mom and dad took me every year. Some people go to the beach on Labor Day, or Six Flags, but we always did Clam Fest. It was a family tradition.”
Eyes shut, Millie took a long breath. Grace had cracked the old woman. “There was this thing. But it was just silliness.”
Grace made half of her living off of silliness. “What was it?”
Millie’s eyes popped open, scanning the flats. A few of the clammers had moved closer. Gossip was the currency of small New England towns. Grace understood that.
“Tell you what. Let me visit you later, so we can talk in private.” She understood that Millie had a need to talk about George. Whether it was about his work as a shellfish constable, or just how much she missed him. Grace’s mother was dead, she’d killed herself while Grace was still in high school. She understood both the need, and the reluctance.
“I’ll bring some wine.”
“Okay.” Millie jumped on the wine offer, as if it were a great excuse. “I like it sweet. How about seven o’clock?”
Chapter 3
As she drove up the winding drive shared by the mudflats neighbors, her Prius’ Bluetooth talked to her.
“Call from. Work.”
Dammit.
“Don’t answer!”
“Answering. Call from. Work.”
“No, no, no—”
“I’ve just received a call from an important client, Miss Longstreet.” The Old Lady’s voice boomed from her speakers, like the voice of God. “I want you investigating immediately.”
As an insurance adjuster, and frequent fraud investigator, Grace’s hours were not exactly nine to five. She sometimes worked overtime, late into the night, and, unfortunately, on holidays. Such was the life of a salaried employee of Cartwright and Sons. But her expertise was in art and wine collections, fine antique furniture, rarely anything that amounted to an emergency. Didn’t other people want time off?
Grace sighed. “Um, are you sure this is… I mean, this is—”
“Labor Day weekend starts on Saturday, Miss Longstreet. The weekend.”
I’m so busted.
“I would have waited until Tuesday, but this is not just a very important client, he’s one of our best lead generators. He’s also in New Carfax. I assume you’re there, trying to get an early Clam Fest sample.”
Busted, busted, busted.
“To get this cleared up right away, I’ll send you some help.”
Help? Since when did Grace get help on an assessment?
“I’ll have my secretary text you the address. There will be a report on my desk Tuesday morning.”
Before she could argue further, the call ended. Grace pulled to the curb to check the address. She didn’t need to plug it into Google Maps.
The black Queen Anne Victorian didn’t have quite the gloomy impact it did at night. L’art de L’occulte was part occult bookstore, part curiosity shop. The place had a hair-raising inventory. Open after dark, and lit by candlelight, Grace might consider it a tourist trap. Except for the fact that beyond the hoodoo hotfoot powders, crystals, and New Age hoo-haw, genuine black magic paraphernalia was for sale here.
The owner, Jack Stoughton, looked a little like Mephistopheles. She found it a little ironic, as the man was descended from a Salem Witch Trial judge. Over the years, Grace had appraised purchases from the shop. While everything always appeared to possess the proper provenance, something told her that Stoughton was a fence for valuable black arts objects.
Given that the shop she ran part-time had historically worked with sacred and cursed antiques, Grace had reluctantly turned to Stoughton for his expertise. Today, however, the shoe would be on the other foot. Before she could mount the porch steps, the puttering of an engine stopped her.
A Vespa the color of a traffic cone pulled behind the Prius. The rider set huge green goggles on a riveted bronze aviator helmet. She wore a leather jacket with huge pointed shoulders and brass buttons over a black velvet mini dress and fishnet stockings. Leather boots went up to her thighs. Wild green hair blew in the wind as she doffed the helmet. Her face was starkly black and white. From the front luggage rack on the scooter, she pulled a mirror. “How’s my makeup? Any bugs stuck to it?”
This was the help The Old Lady sent? “What are you doing here, Paisley? Shouldn’t you be manning the reception desk?”
Paisley snorted. “What, on the Friday before Labor Day?”
“Three day weekends start on the weekend,” Grace said.
The Goth girl opened the top box on the scooter’s rear fender. Paisley took out a case and put the helmet inside. “You sound like Aunt Vickie.”
Aunt Vickie, as in Victoria Cartwright—The Old Lady who ran Cartwright and Sons was also Paisley’s aunt. For some reason, the boss thought that Grace should take Paisley under her wing and show her the ropes of insurance investigation. Grace took the folder Paisley handed over.
“Pretty thin.” Grace opened it.
“The client reported a book stolen from his private collection. Cops took a report.” Paisley hiked her pointy shoulders. “That’s about it.”
Grace looked over the three pages. One was from Stoughton’s personal catalog. The allegedly stolen tome was listed as: Encyclopædia of Archaic Profanity in Function and Form, (illustrated) Ezekiel Southwark, 1813, private printing, folio, 904 pp. A photo of an enormous bound in tooled red leather followed. Given that folio size meant a foot wide by nineteen inches tall, it wasn’t something you could easily stick down your pants and run out with.
“I know, right?” Paisley sort of read her mind. “All the wicked cool stuff in there, and someone stole a dusty old book.”
“If it’s from his private collection, how did anyone get to it in the first place?” Grace mused.
Paisley smiled with one half of her mouth. “We’ll have to give him the third degree. I volunteer to pat him down, if it comes to that.”
“What?”
“Oh, come on, the guy’s the gorge-dot-orge.
“Dot-orge?”
Paisley nodded. “Hashtag studalicious.”
Grace gave her a face. “He looks like Satan.”
“Softcore porn Satan, maybe.” The half-smile went full on. “He’s into you, y’know. Warm for your form.”
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