by Elle Adams
“Nope.” I really didn’t want to talk about my ex-coven. “I’ve never been to Hawkwood Hollow before.”
“Right, you said,” he said. “So you’re certain she’ll speak to you?”
“If she doesn’t object to you coming with me,” I said. “If you need me to ask her any particular questions, then give them to me and I’ll see if I can get answers.”
“Did she explicitly say she was murdered when you spoke to her earlier, then?” he asked.
“She said her death wasn’t an accident,” I said. “She also said Dolores was the reason she was here at the house when she died, which we now know to be a lie. Unless Dolores cancelled on her or something.”
But that didn’t fit with their general enmity with one another. Why would someone who hated her pay a social call? No… there was definitely something missing in what I’d heard from Mrs Renner so far. I was more inclined to take Dolores’s word as truth, but if I wanted to get the ghost on my side, I’d have to refrain from doing anything that might tick her off.
As if on cue, a rattling wind came through the hallway, making me shiver. Is she listening to us right now?
“Without direct confirmation from her, we can’t be sure,” he said. “Also, taking the testimony of a ghost on behalf of an outsider isn’t my usual method of gathering evidence.”
“I gathered.” He might never have seen a ghost before, but he definitely knew something about the weirdness going on in town. That, however, would be a question for later. “Though I’m surprised, given how many other ghosts are here. I guess it’s rare that someone’s death isn’t an accident, so there’d be no need to consult any ghosts.”
He cut me a sideways glance. The breeze started up again, whistling overhead. “Murder is a rarity here, yes. Hawkwood Hollow is a small, close-knit community, for the most part.”
“Are you new in town, then?” I asked.
He tilted his head. “Is now the best time for this conversation?”
“Just wondering if you’re going to continue to get in my way.”
His brows rose. “I could say the same for you.”
“Hey, I’m not in your way now,” I said. “I’m offering to help you.”
That is, if our ghost ever showed up. I placed a foot on the bottom stair, which gave a creak.
“I’ll catch you if you fall,” he said.
That was… more reassuring than I’d have expected. “I’ll hold you to that.”
I climbed the stairs quickly, hopping over the hole in the floorboards and heading for the part of the landing where I’d spoken to the ghost earlier. Drew followed closely behind me, which made me jittery for reasons I couldn’t put my finger on. Maybe because now he seemed to believe me, and I wanted to give him conclusive proof of my ghost-hunting talents.
As for the Reaper abilities, though… I’d rather not show them off in front of him. A cold breeze whistled through the roof beams. Then one of the bedroom doors slammed.
“Uh-oh,” I said. “I think she’s realised she has company.”
“Leave, now,” her voice echoed throughout the house. The wind struck up again, louder this time, and there came a crash from downstairs, followed by a scream.
My heart gave a lurch, and I looked at Drew. “Did you hear that?”
He nodded. “I did. Someone screamed downstairs. A woman.”
Who? The construction workers were all male, but I hadn’t seen Mr Renner’s wife earlier. She must be somewhere inside the house.
I ran to the stairs and took them two at a time down into the hallway. As Drew caught me up, I opened the door to the living room. There, I found Mr Renner’s wife lying beneath the sofa, which hovered a foot off the ground.
“Mrs Renner!” I shouted. “Stop that at once.”
I flicked my wand and the sofa flew into the air, smacking into the wall with a thud and dropping to the floorboards. Claudie climbed to her feet, shaking all over.
“Thanks,” she gasped. “I was sitting on the sofa when it fell out from underneath me, as though someone yanked it across the floor.”
I gave the sofa a stern look. “Really, Mrs Renner?”
“The others are outside,” said Drew.
Claudie followed Drew out of the house, and I ran behind her in case Mrs Renner started throwing things again. In the front garden, the construction workers gathered below the window which had broken the previous night.
“What is going on?” Mr Renner bellowed.
“The ghost,” I said in explanation. “Why did you leave your wife alone in there?”
As Claudie headed over to talk to him, I turned to one of the renovator wizards. “I’m starting to see why you had so much trouble making progress on the renovation work.”
“Oh, it’s not just since she died,” he said. “The house’s very foundations are flawed. It’s only getting worse, too. If I didn’t know better, I’d say there’s a spell at work, especially on that extension.”
“A spell… on the house?” I frowned. “Don’t get me wrong, this place is clearly falling to bits, but everything I’ve seen so far has been caused by a ghost.”
Except her death… which had been caused by the door frame collapsing on top of Mrs Renner herself.
“We’ve tried to call in a specialist to see if the place was under a hostile spell,” he added. “But she died before he showed up, and now the place is haunted, he won’t set foot in there.”
“You think someone put a spell on the house?” I asked. “Something that caused her death? Who would have done that?”
Dolores had said she hadn’t been there when Mrs Renner had died… but she’d visited before. Mrs Renner had said so. And she could have used the spell at any time, in theory.
“The signs are there, but we haven’t found where it started,” he explained. “If it was a simple hex, then any sign pointing back to whoever cast it would have disappeared by now. Even if it was a curse, the person who cast it would have only needed to hit part of the house for the rest of it to be affected. Otherwise, no traces would be left behind.”
Well, that’s inconvenient. It fit with what I knew about curses and hexes, but I’d never heard of one being used on a house before. He was probably right, though… the odds of any evidence being left behind to point back to the person who’d actually cast the spell were low.
“I had the impression that the renovations started weeks or months before she died,” I said, addressing the group as a whole. “Were there problems from the start, or did it happen at a specific point in the project?”
Before anyone could reply, a tremendous crash sounded. As I turned in the direction of the house, a loud scream came from inside. A teenage girl’s scream.
I ran to the front door and opened it, Drew behind me. “That sounded like…”
“Carey?” I called out. “She’s supposed to be at school. I already dropped her off at the academy.”
Had she come back here after all? I moved through the hallway, following the direction of the noise, until I came to the kitchen at the back of the house. The back door, which I hadn’t acknowledged before, lay open, and a figure lay outside, surrounded by a scattering of roof tiles.
It was old Dolores Malone, and she was dead.
9
Drew retreated down the hall to speak to the others. I, meanwhile, scanned the kitchen for the source of the scream until I spotted a small figure concealed beneath the table.
“Carey?”
She crawled out from under the table and straightened upright, her eyes wide and frightened. “She’s dead!”
“I know. Let’s get you out of here.” I beckoned to her and she hurried to my side, not looking back at the body in the garden. “Did you see what happened?”
“No, but I heard a crash, and when I looked outside to see what was going on…” She blinked hard. “I thought they’d blame me if they found me beside her body.”
“We don’t, but we’d like to know what happened.” I stepped as
ide to let Mr Renner, his wife, Drew and the others enter the kitchen, and we all made our way through to the garden.
Outside, Dolores Malone lay sprawled in a pile of fallen roof tiles. Above, the roof was half-bare, as though they’d slid off of their own accord. A chill raced down my back. Did Mrs Renner do that? Had she thought she was getting revenge on her so-called nemesis for her own untimely death?
A head popped up behind the chimney, and the rat shifter stared wide-eyed down at Dolores. “I heard a crash—”
“She’s dead,” said Mr Renner. “What have you done?”
“I didn’t—” He clutched the roof’s edge, looking like he was going to faint. “I didn’t see her. I moved some of the roof tiles around, but I didn’t know there was nothing holding them together.”
Is he telling the truth? I hadn’t even noticed he’d left the rest of the group behind to climb up onto the roof, but I didn’t see why he’d have cause to lie. Yet as long as Mrs Renner remained unaccounted for, I’d have to keep her name on the suspect list. If she had done it, and I hadn’t banished her yet… there was nothing for it. I’d need to get rid of her as soon as possible.
Two of the other construction workers helped levitate Louis down off the roof, since he was shaking too hard to walk in a straight line, let alone climb a ladder. The instant his feet hit the ground, Mr Renner pounced on him and the others, bombarding them with questions.
Drew, meanwhile, was on his phone to someone, probably the police. He hung up a moment later, glancing around at Carey and me. “Can you stay here until the police show up?”
“Sure.” I nodded to Carey, who looked pale and scared. Her ghost goggles lay askew, while she still hadn’t explained when and why she’d decided to skip school after I’d dropped her off. With the police on the way, I didn’t want to add to her worry about having to explain what she’d seen, so I said nothing.
The police showed up within ten minutes. A werewolf officer with blond hair and broad shoulders called a terrified-looking Carey over for questioning, and despite my protests, he wouldn’t let me accompany her. Reluctant to end up drawn into Mr Renner’s ranting at the builders, I retreated into the back garden and found myself standing in a swamp. The area around the back of the house was so overgrown I hadn’t seen how damp the ground was, no doubt due to the river curving around the edge of the house. I backed onto drier ground and used my wand to remove the water from my shoes.
After checking nobody was watching, I turned my back on the house and whispered, “Mart, where are you?”
He appeared an instant later. Despite his propensity for running off and getting up to mischief, he never strayed too far from me. “What now? I was in the middle of a delightful and involved argument with your ghostly intruder.”
“Wait, you were talking to Mrs Renner?” I glanced over my shoulder at the now-prominent gap in the roof tiles near where the rat shifter had been standing. “For how long?”
“A few minutes,” he said. “I don’t know, I didn’t set a timer. Why?”
“Because a bunch of roof tiles just fell and killed someone,” I said. “Someone who used to be Mrs Renner’s mortal enemy.”
“Ooh, she was?” he said. “I thought she’d have a few of those.”
“It isn’t funny,” I hissed. “She died, Mart.”
“So did I, but you don’t see me complaining.”
I ground my teeth. “What did she have to say to you, then? Were you having a chat about the long-term pros and cons to spending years as a bodiless spirit?”
“No, she wanted to have a whine about all the people who wronged her.”
“I see you’ve found common ground.” If she’d been with Mart, maybe she hadn’t been responsible for the falling roof tiles, but I knew from experience that ghosts were expert multitaskers when they wanted to be. “Did she say whether her death was an accident or not?”
“No. I wasn’t working from a script.” He drifted over the swampy ground. “She listed all these people who she wanted to haunt if she could get out of the house.”
“Like who?” I asked. “Didn’t you take notes?”
“With what?” he said. “I don’t have a notebook and pen, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“All right, all right,” I said. “It would have helped if she’d given those names when I was talking to her, that’s all.”
It would also help to have a list of people who’d have a reason to target both her and Dolores… except for those who were being questioned by the police right now, that is.
“Maybe she likes me better,” Mart said. “She’s not thrilled with you being here at the house, and she said she’s not going anywhere, whether there’s a Reaper around or not.”
“That figures,” I said. “I wanted to banish her, but if she was murdered, someone out there in town is a killer. And now we have another potential murder victim, who might have been killed by the ghost herself. It’s a mess.”
“You couldn’t just take on a simple job, could you?” He shook his head at me. “What about the detective, then? Does he still think I don’t exist?”
“He and I came to an understanding, for a wonder,” I said. “We did some investigating in the house, but Mrs Renner didn’t want to know.”
“Oh, really?” he said. “You know, I thought there was something weird about the way he looked at you. He likes you.”
I frowned. “He has a funny way of showing it if he does. He’s just here to get to the bottom of Mrs Renner’s death, nothing more. Did she tell you who hired him?”
“No, she didn’t. Why not ask him yourself?” He grinned. “Tell you what, buy him a drink or five at the bar next to the inn. That ought to do it.”
“No,” I said a little too loudly. “We’ve barely started being civil to each other. Besides, he won’t tell me. Confidentiality policies and all that.”
I clamped my mouth shut when I spotted the man himself crossing the garden towards me. Mart snickered and made kissing noises, which I studiously ignored. Honestly.
“Hey,” I said. “Any luck?”
“It’s not looking good for Louis,” said Drew. “Turns out he and Dolores don’t have a pleasant history. She was always hanging out at Mrs Renner’s house while the construction was in progress and I gathered they weren’t fond of one another.”
I arched a brow. “Enough for him to drop a roof on her head and make it look like an accident?”
“I couldn’t say.” He glanced behind him. “You should take Carey home. Her mum might have heard what happened by now, and she’ll be worried about her.”
Especially since Carey was supposed to be at school. “All right, but I expect an update later.”
His brows rose. “If you like. I’ll drop by the inn.”
It was only when I’d turned away that I realised I’d implied I wanted to see him later. Maybe Mart was rubbing off on me. Things had changed between us so abruptly that I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, and Dolores’s sudden death didn’t help in the slightest.
Besides, I had Carey to worry about. She walked with me out of the house in silence, her expression downcast, and I had no idea how to comfort her. After we’d walked in silence for a few minutes, she turned to me with her eyes brimming over with tears. “I didn’t do anything. I swear. I didn’t kill her.”
“The police didn’t give you a hard time, did they?”
She shook her head. “No, but I… I shouldn’t have hidden under the table. What if they blame me?”
“They won’t,” I insisted. “It’s poor Louis who’s going to take the brunt of this, by the sound of things, but the odds are high that it was an accident. Or Mrs Renner’s ghost. Not the ideal scenario, I admit.”
“How do you know it might have been her?” she asked. “You didn’t see her, did you?”
“No.” I wasn’t sure how Mart would feel about me telling people he existed. I’d never told anyone since the year or so after his death, and that was a long time ago. It wasn�
��t like she could actually see him, either. But mentioning my brother’s ghost would invite in a flood of questions I didn’t know how to answer yet.
We reached the inn, where we found Carey’s mother behind the desk in the lobby. She gasped a little when she saw Carey. “What’s going on?”
I moved back to let Carey explain. Her mum would be able to give her a level of reassurance I couldn’t give her myself, and besides, I was the one who’d dropped her off at school and assumed she’d stay there. The other issue was that I’d originally intended to leave Hawkwood Hollow and go home today, but I couldn’t imagine turning my back and leaving this level of chaos behind. Besides, Carey wanted me to stay. Even Drew no longer wanted me gone, as weird as it might seem.
Carey left the lobby and went upstairs, while her mother approached me. Some of the tension inside me unknotted when I saw her expression was filled with concern, not disapproval.
“Sorry about earlier,” I said. “I did drop her off outside the academy, but I should have kept a closer eye on her.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Carey is strong-willed, and she’s been having a rough time at school lately. I should have guessed she wouldn’t want to be left out while you went back to Mrs Renner’s house. None of us could have guessed such a tragic event would take place while she was there.”
“I still feel like there’s more I could have done.” I hadn’t managed to find Mrs Renner’s killer, if there was one, and now the number of dead bodies had doubled.
“Regardless, I wanted to thank you for taking care of Carey,” she said. “Since her father’s death, she’s had this unending fascination with ghosts, to the extent that it often gets her into trouble. To tell you the truth, I’m relieved she’s found someone who can give her guidance.”
My stomach squirmed with guilt. I didn’t think I’d done that spectacular a job, considering I’d led her headfirst into a confrontation with Mrs Renner’s ghost and she’d then witnessed another murder. Not that I’d actually known she was there at the time, but still.
“I’ll try to keep her out of trouble,” I said. “Truth be told, this isn’t like any other ghost case I’ve dealt with. I don’t typically run into spirits who were murdered, or believe they were. Nor one who’s quite this violent.”
