She shook off that mouth-watering image and limped behind the counter to pour glasses of ice water to cool everyone off. “Let’s put our rock samples on the table and see if Keegan finds any unusual pattern in them.”
Apparently everyone in the party had collected pretty rocks. Keegan visibly calmed down when he saw the dirty loot piling up on Dinah’s clean counter. He worked through the stack with the speed of experience.
Teddy and Harvey picked up the stones he discarded. From their usual booth, Cass and Tullah watched and waited. Tullah had been quiet about what she’d experienced in the canyon. The thrift shop owner had a history, like everyone else in town. Tullah might have the majestic presence of an African queen, but she never said much, especially in public.
Using both his good and injured arms, Keegan shuffled a few of the dusty pebbles into inexplicable patterns.
Dinah began shoving platters of sandwiches through the pass-through window. Sam joined Mariah in handing out plates. No one quibbled over the menu as they gulped water and watched Keegan.
Aware of strangers lurking in booths and at the end of the counter, Mariah kept an eye on them. The journalists had apparently given up on their story for the moment, but there were always visitors in the café. She understood their curiosity about the notorious Hillvale eccentrics, but sometimes, they weren’t just tourists.
Like those in the furthest booth wearing brand-new, Hawaiian-style shirts. Journalists couldn’t afford high end lines like that, not new. Lodge guests leaned more toward boutique casual, not mall clothes. Mariah would bet good money the flowered-shirt guys were wearing pressed chinos straight off a Macy’s sales rack. Why should that raise her suspicion?
“There,” Keegan said in satisfaction, arranging the remaining pebbles. “They react in conjunction with each other.”
“I do admire a megalithic egghead.” Mariah limped over to admire the pattern he’d created. She saw nothing more than rounded stones with glittery bits in them—just like on the coast.
Teddy cautiously reached her hand over the stones. “Discord,” she concluded in satisfaction.
“Can you find a pattern that doesn’t cause discord?” Mariah asked in fascination.
“With the book,” Tullah said, surprisingly. “They have a book, with formulas.”
The entire café hushed. Glancing back at the three men in the booth, Mariah tapped Teddy’s hand. It took the jeweler a second to turn on her emotion monitor and read Mariah’s fear and wariness, but she instantly slipped over to Cass and Tullah in their booth. “A meeting,” she urged.
“We’re tired,” Amber complained. She looked longingly at the sandwich platter being passed around.
Surprisingly, Sam’s mother stepped behind the counter. “I used to waitress when I was a teenager. Sam, why don’t you take your friends someplace more comfortable? You’ve had an exhausting morning. Mariah, let’s box up these sandwiches.”
“Everyone needs a good mother,” Mariah murmured in amusement, doing as told.
She’d rather pick Keegan’s brain on her own, preferably somewhere with a bed. But that would have to wait until they cleared evil out of Hillvale. Two murders escalated the threat.
She hoped they’d find the killer soon or she’d live with constant paranoia. To that end, she followed orders and let the older women choose their gathering place.
With his sling still unfastened, Keegan carried a stack of boxes. Others grabbed drink trays. The Nulls had stayed in the canyon to guard the cave and watch for the sheriff. So it was strictly Lucys marching down the boardwalk to the meeting house.
Val balked at their choice, but Sam took her arm and whispered assurances in her aunt’s ear. No one wanted to hike out to the vortex in the heat of noon, and the meeting house had a door that could be closed to outsiders. Mariah understood Cass’s decision, but she worried about her mentor. Once upon a time, Cass would have dragged them up the hill to her place, where the Nulls never set foot.
“I’m wondering if ignorance might not be better for all,” Keegan muttered.
“Not if the villains have knowledge,” she murmured back. “What if the bad guys know something we don’t?”
“What if the villains have my family journals?” He posed the question as if thinking aloud. “Does that mean they can conceivably have the family curse as well?”
“Curse? I wouldn’t call molecular detection a curse. How many rural villages have you helped by discovering valuable minerals on their land?” Mariah steered him to a table to set the food on.
“The same number that have fallen to the greed and corruption of wealth and modern living,” he said irascibly.
“Well, there’s that. You’re sounding like a true Lucy now. We’re corrupting you.”
Over the babble of a dozen voices choosing their lunch, Cass rapped the wooden railing for attention. “In case you haven’t heard, there has been another murder,” she said in a carrying voice of command.
“I don’t want to be her,” Mariah whispered, surprising herself. She’d vaguely accepted that she would eventually end up as a crazy lady who ran the town from behind the Screen of Oz.
“You belong in a larger world,” Keegan replied, chowing down his sandwich.
What would happen if she told him who she really was? Given what she knew about him, he’d probably hate her.
Cass sent them a glare, and they quieted, along with the rest of the room.
“Tullah, would you like to tell us what you learned this morning?” Now that she had their attention, Cass took a seat.
Rather than move in front of the faded triptych on the back wall, Tullah simply stood where she’d been sitting.
“There is power in the stones,” Tullah said in her ringing voice. “Thompson’s spirit is trapped there. Mariah, I fear you will need to free it once the area is safe.”
“Crap,” she muttered. But she let Tullah continue rather than respond. Keegan squeezed her hand, and Mariah found that oddly comforting. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had tried to comfort her.
“His spirit is full of spite and anger, as well as a sense of despair and failure. In his mind, he had information he thought others wanted. His failure is related to that, I believe, but he’s not coherent enough to speak, except to mention the book and the formulas.”
“Did he leave any impression of who killed him?” Cass asked patiently—while Maria stewed in impatience.
“No, there is confusion. I received impressions of wealth and power and his desire for both. So it’s possible he was meeting someone who had what he wanted.”
Samantha stood to be acknowledged. At Cass’s nod, she added, “Walker says Thompson was shot from a distance, so it’s possible he didn’t see his killer.”
She glanced around the room until she located Keegan. “Walker found a newspaper article in Thompson’s pocket. It was about a chemist in Scotland who created synthetic diamonds and sold them as real.”
Mariah held her breath as Keegan stood and waited for permission to speak. He didn’t seem the least concerned, but it seemed he grasped how the Lucys worked. Did they have a similar system in his home, which he’d said was inhabited by equally eccentric residents? Regretfully, she would never know.
At Cass’s nod, Keegan reported, “A chemist in my family’s company is in jail for that fraud. We believe he was using formulas from an old family journal. My family has worked with minerals for generations, using knowledge and abilities we’ve passed down. I will admit, I never read those unscientific books, but they may contain information others consider useful. I believe you have heard of the crystal compendium Lucinda Malcolm left here—that was once part of my library.”
He sat down to the murmurs filling the high-ceilinged hall. Mariah caught his hand and returned his reassuring squeeze.
“Where is the journal your chemist used?” Cass asked.
“We don’t know. He claims he only had the formula and not the journal. Any member of my family is free
to access that library and copy anything of interest. Removing the journals isn’t permitted, but it has happened.”
Mariah stood. “Which means someone has the journals and may be looking for Lucinda’s volume, which brought them here. Daisy and Thalia Thompson were the last people known to have seen Lucinda’s crystal compendium, and they’re both dead. Sam’s mother verified its existence. George Thompson could very well have seen it in his sister-in-law’s home. Since he lived in the commune, he would be familiar with crystals and quite possibly the cave. He did have knowledge—and whoever took the recent journal might have been after it.”
Sam stood again. “If we think the search for the journals or the crystals is the reason for two deaths, we need to learn why they want them. That might point us to who might want them.”
Before anyone could remark that the deaths had occurred after Keegan’s arrival, Mariah popped up again. “We might not have the books, but we have crystals and two people who understand their composition. Possibly three, if Harvey will admit to it. I vote that we ask them to work together to see if they can find a use for our crystal inventory.”
Amid the ensuing hysterical discussion of evil and greed and burying all the stones, Keegan squeezed Mariah’s hand in gratitude. He was aware that she had diverted the suspicion which rightfully ought to fall on him.
She finished her sandwich and nodded in Teddy’s direction. The jeweler was looking back. With some unseen signal, both women rose. Mariah tugged Keegan after her.
He feared others might object but apparently they were settled in for a brisk argument over a good lunch. Only Samantha got up to join them. As an environmental scientist, she might lend objectivity.
Outside, Keegan located the musician strumming his guitar on the boardwalk, collecting coins from passing tourists—and probably acting as guard to the meeting.
“Go on to Teddy’s,” Keegan murmured. “I’ll bring our reluctant musician.”
“He won’t admit he’s a Lucy,” Mariah warned.
“Don’t blame him,” Keegan said with a snort. “I want to be called a Leo.”
“You’re a Capricorn goat.” She laughed and added, “Not a trace of a lion in you.”
He glared, then stomped down the boardwalk in pursuit of Harvey. Bri had called him a stubborn goat often enough. So, he’d live up to the name.
He grabbed Harvey by the arm and yanked him to his feet. “Come on. Don’t leave me alone with the women. If nothing else, you can agree with everything I say.”
“They’ve twisted your head around, too, have they?” Harvey hastily gathered his loot and shoved it into his pocket. “I can’t tell you what to do with a box of rocks.”
“You think early man knew what to do with fire? Or how to grow seeds or make knives?” Keegan gathered up the guitar and case. “Progress can’t be had by sitting on our bums and watching the world go by.”
“Progress gets us corrupt politicians and greedy financiers,” Harvey grumbled. “Maybe we’re better off in caves.”
“Where the biggest ax wins? I like to think progress isn’t about who has the biggest weapon, but about civilization, about working together to build a stronger community. A strong society has the ability to build a better ax if needed.”
Harvey didn’t have time to argue the point, Keegan shoved the more slender man through Teddy’s open door into the jewelry shop where the others waited around the oak table.
The petite redhead gestured at her elegant sister behind the counter. “Syd says we’ve had an unusual number of customers inquiring about our crystals.”
“A number of unusual customers,” Syd corrected. “It’s normally kids and women into the healing powers of smoky quartz. These were men in Tommy Bahama who looked like they belonged in suits. And they asked weird questions. I played dumb.”
Spies? Keegan’s gut ground, and he nodded at the door to the back of the shop. “Can we work back there, where we won’t be noticed?”
“It’s a galley kitchen with a tile counter and no table,” Teddy warned.
Mariah grabbed a blank poster board from the stack Syd had been working on. “Write out something professional looking—‘Rock club meets here on Wednesdays at 1 PM. Sign up online.’ Make up a website or give Teddy’s. We’ll just pretend we’re nutty spelunkers.”
Keegan tapped her Roman nose in retaliation for the insult to his profession, but he was too eager to get the meeting underway to argue. He had no illusion that they’d uncover a murderer, but any step toward solving the mystery of the crystals would help him sleep at night.
So would Mariah in his bed. She bounced her hip against his to acknowledge his mild rebuke, then set about organizing the meeting. He liked the familiarity of the gesture and that she was as physical in her reactions as he was.
Mariah wanted them to work together to find a use for their crystal inventory, but the only uses Keegan knew were material. He didn’t think she meant insulation.
Harvey wandered the room, examining the staffs he’d left on consignment and looking uncomfortable.
Rather than take a seat with the women and their dangerous box of crystals, Keegan poured his collection of pebbles on a shelf near Harvey. He could feel the molecular structure shift as he moved the stones, but he couldn’t tell if it was from his touch or the position to one another.
“Tell me what you see or feel on these things,” Keegan demanded.
Harvey glanced down at the motley assortment of rounded, mostly gray, pebbles. “Looks like you’ve been to the beach.”
“Exactly, they’re tumbled, as if they’d spent a lot of time in water. They came from all across the canyon. I suspect if I examined the topography more closely, I could see where it once broke through to the sea. A few hundred millennia ago, it was probably an inlet, possibly with a small volcano or earthquake fault at its furthest inland point.”
As Keegan expected, Harvey couldn’t resist playing with the pebbles. Behind them, the women were using the protective gloves he’d ordered to sort through Teddy’s crystals, but he knew they were listening.
“No sea glass,” Harvey said, mocking disappointment. “Why did you arrange them like this? Does it mess things up if I move them?”
He did so without waiting for permission. Keegan understood the temptation.
“They’re hot,” Harvey said in perplexity. “What did you do to them?”
Keegan held his hand over the newly re-arranged stones. “They weren’t hot a minute ago.”
The women pushed back their chairs, eager to see, but he held up his hand. “One at a time. Teddy, since you’re sensitive, see what you feel.”
The redhead studied the pattern of pebbles without touching. “I’m not feeling the discord.”
She picked a pebble with strong quartz lines. “It is hot.” She poked it closer to a bluish stone. “Still hot.”
Harvey reached over and separated half a dozen of the pebbles from the rest, then stepped back.
Keegan let Teddy test them first. She frowned. “It’s. . . resonating?. . . with the others.”
Keegan pushed his big thumb into the blue stone and felt the weird shifting. This time, he didn’t yank his hand away. When he was satisfied the molecules had stopped shifting, he lifted his hand.
He’d left a thumb print in the stone, one that glittered like polished crystal.
Both Teddy and Harvey gasped and backed away.
“Diamond,” they said in unison.
Twenty-two
July 11: Wednesday, late evening
“We’re never going to solve any of this, are we?” Entering her cottage, Mariah climbed on a stool to clean a wisp of ectoplasm off her net. “I hate this. Why can’t I make this goop talk? Or at least let me be a Grim Reaper so I could go around yanking out the souls of turds instead of just swiping leftover goop.”
“I don’t believe turds have souls,” Keegan said in amusement. “And I don’t think you get to choose your victims. What if you’d had to yank out D
aisy’s soul?”
“Gad, I hate rationality. Just let me rant. None of this is sane. You just made a diamond.” She reached in the refrigerator and produced a bottle of beer and one of mineral water.
“I could recite an essay on diamond formation,” he said, accepting the beer. “But essentially, it requires carbon, high pressure, high temperature, and takes thousands of years. It’s hard to believe my finger produced sufficient pressure.”
“I need a computer,” she grumbled, pacing the floor, fighting her need for knowledge with her fear of losing her soul.
“Walker has computers and minions who wield them. There is no need for you to do so. You’re exhausted. I want to know if sending ectoplasm to the Great Beyond feels as weird as creating a diamond.” Keegan slumped his big body on her couch and chugged his beer.
“I don’t even know if the goo goes up or down or just dissipates. I see the ectoplasmic remains, rub them, and they vanish. Nana never explained. If I could only learn from it as much as Tullah does. . .” She slumped on the cushion beside him.
Keegan’s solidness and life blocked the slime of the afternoon’s ordeal.
Keegan draped his good arm over her shoulder. She liked the way he was always touching her. It kept her grounded, and she seriously needed an anchor in reality. She had learned long ago to accept the weird, but today had stretched her limits.
“Do you think the killers really thought they could turn granite into diamonds if they had the right formula?” he asked in disgust.
“You did it. If the books say it’s possible, and maybe they had some example to go by. . .” She let her voice trail off, too tired to follow that thought.
“Since no one else could turn hot pebbles into anything, I’m guessing it’s just my family curse. Explaining that won’t keep my family out of jail. But now I have to wonder if Bri or her chemist boyfriend don’t have some of my ability. I should probably go home and start asking questions. The family has another library in Edinburgh, but I’m pretty sure I have all the geology tomes.” He finished his beer and set the bottle down. “Bed?”
Crystal Vision Page 20
