by Angie Cabot
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Author's Note
THE CHAKRA OUTLINE
by Angie Cabot
This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, who would have enjoyed it.
Chapter One
You are cordially invited to attend my murder.
The invitation was from my Aunt Elizabeth with an elegant script, but Aunt Liz always had beautiful penmanship. It was one of the least irritating things about her.
I hadn’t seen Aunt Liz or my Aunt Clara since my mother’s death six years back, and after the way they argued at the service, I didn’t care if I ever saw either of them again. I mean, I tried to cut them some slack because they’d lost their sister, but I’d lost my mom.
I tossed the fancy invitation on the card table in my tiny studio apartment. Oh, I was living high on the hog now. I had the card table, a fold-up metal chair, a beat-up old mattress lying on the floor, a box of paperback books, and a suitcase filled with clothes.
The future looked dim, but it was sure better than the past.
My cellphone rang.
I dug it out of my purse, and stared at the caller ID. Aunt Liz.
Shaking my head, I declined the call, and went to the kitchen. The refrigerator held a half-empty bottle of mustard, a jar of hamburger dill chips, a stick of butter, and a pitcher of sun tea. No wine.
I didn’t remember finishing the bottle, but a glance in the trashcan clued me into the truth about last night. I’d been closed off from my feelings for so long, I sometimes needed a few drinks to relax. And sometimes I overdid it.
The phone rang again.
“Persistent, aren’t you?” I said, and didn’t bother answering.
The phone stopped ringing, and a moment later a swish sound notified me that I’d just received a text message.
I sighed, and checked the text from Aunt Liz.
I know you’re ignoring me. Answer the phone. Calling back in 3 - 2 - 1…
And the phone rang again.
I sighed, and answered.
“I don’t want to talk to you, Aunt Liz,” I said.
“Obviously, but Clara and I need you to come to Cassandra Springs to help run the bookstore. And I want you to come to my murder. Your invitation was delivered today, so I know you’ve seen it.”
“What makes you think I’ve checked the mail?” I asked.
“I’m psychic, remember?”
“Then you’ll see this coming,” I said, and hung up on her.
Childish, sure, but I take my pleasures where I can these days.
The phone rang again.
I considered letting it go to voicemail, but Aunt Liz would keep calling until I talked to her. She’s persistent. Another of her least irritating qualities. I’d list her most irritating qualities, but that would take a month and a half of steady writing.
I answered again on the third ring.
“Let me speak, or I’ll keep calling you,” Aunt Liz said.
“I’ll put the phone on vibrate and ignore it.”
“No you won’t.”
“You’re really pushing the psychic thing today.”
“I don’t need to be psychic to know you need a change.”
“I had a change last week.”
“So I’ve been told,” she said. But she didn’t want to talk about my divorce being finalized, or the fact that splitting nothing right down the middle leaves you with nothing.
I pinched the bridge of my nose, hoping to fend off a headache. “Just say what you called to say.”
“Did you read the note with the invitation?”
“Nope.”
“Perhaps you should. There’s cash enclosed.”
“I don’t want your money,” I said.
“And I don’t want to give it to you, so you’ll have to earn it. We’ll call it an advance on your pay.”
“My pay?”
“You lost your job,” she said.
“I didn’t lose it. It no longer exists because my boss died.”
“Exactly. And how does that make you feel?”
“After being married to Derek for so long, I learned how not to feel.”
“That’s why Clara and I want to hire you to manage the store.”
“To learn to feel? No thank you. I don’t want to live in Cassandra Springs. There’s nothing to do there.”
“Nonsense. You and the kids can come up—”
“My kids are grown. They moved out.”
“Even better.”
Well, at least she didn’t pretend to care about Michael and Susie.
She kept talking. “You can come up, get acquainted with the staff, then join us on our retreat where I’ll be the victim of the murder. If you solve the crime, you’ll get a bonus.”
Aunt Liz was always the victim because she wrote up the clues for the game.
“Your murder games are stupid,” I said.
“Games don’t have knowledge. The players may or may not be stupid, but it’s rude to point it out if they are.”
Aunt Liz had been doing her annual murder retreats since I was a little girl. Back then, I was amused by Aunt Liz saying she got to be murdered every year. But I was ten. At that age, they were fun. Thirty-mumble-odd years later, not so much. She would work out characters for each participant to play, along with the list of clues they had to give out during each phase of the game. I got to be the killer when I was twelve, and I enjoyed that. But when I was thirteen, Aunt Liz made me play the detective, and I was so embarrassed to not be able to figure out whodunit that I spent the rest of the weekend in my room crying. It didn’t help that Aunt Liz liked to rub it in, saying how obvious it was, and that anyone with any sense could figure it out. And when she told me who did it, she was right. It was obvious. And I felt stupid. I refused to play again after that.
And once I graduated from high school, I got married and didn’t have to go to those stupid murder retreats anymore.
Though the retreats sometimes looked good when I was trapped in a loveless marriage.
I snapped out of my memories because Aunt Liz said something I didn’t hear.
“Sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t paying attention. What did you say?”
“I said we’ll give you a starting salary of sixty thousand dollars a year with free room and board.”
“I’m not moving in with you and Clara.”
“Of course not. You’ll have grandpa’s house.”
“There’s no way your weird little bookstore can afford to pay me that much.”
“The Eye of Ra does phenomenal online business,” Aunt Liz said. “We can afford you. And don’t try to tell me you’re too busy. You’re currently unemployed, divorced, broke, and alone. You have no o
ptions unless you want to move in with one of your children.”
“God, no,” I said.
“That’s what I thought. Get up here.”
“I don’t want to work for you and Aunt Clara,” I said. “You two fight like cats and dogs, and if I have to answer to both of you, I’ll be ripped apart every day.”
“You’ll answer to Clara,” Aunt Liz said. “Read the note I sent with your invitation. Be here tomorrow.”
And she hung up on me.
Turnabout is fair play.
I sighed, and picked up the envelope the invitation arrived in. Sure enough, the envelope held a folded piece of paper. When I unfolded it, two crisp one hundred dollar bills slid into my hand.
The note read:
Dear Katherine,
This weekend is the annual murder retreat with the staff. Clara will stay at the store this year. I had a premonition that someone will murder me in real life at the manor. If I’m right, you need to bring my killer to justice.
And no, you can’t talk me out of going. It’s tradition, and if my time is up, I’ll simply drop my body and ascend to a better place.
Love,
Elizabeth.
I rolled my eyes. The nonsense about her seeing her own death was preposterous. Expecting me to solve it was a cruel reminder of the year I’d tried to be the detective.
“Thanks a lot, Aunt Liz. You witch.”
Only I didn’t say witch.
Chapter Two
Cassandra Springs is a picturesque little mountain town in the Rocky Mountains. It’s a ways off I-70, so it doesn’t get the traffic some towns do, but it’s well-known to residents of the Front Range who want to escape. The Eye of Ra Books and Gifts is a destination spot for the metaphysical crowd. The hot springs are known for their healing qualities. There are wonderful restaurants, and friendly people living in beautiful homes.
It’s exactly the kind of town I’d love to live in.
If my crazy aunts didn’t live there.
Oh well, you can’t win them all.
I pulled into town at two in the afternoon. The sky was gray and cold, and the meteorologist predicted a massive snowstorm, but for now it was just windy.
The Eye of Ra didn’t have a parking lot, but was on the corner of Main and Sycamore. There were no spots available on Main, so I turned left on Sycamore and found a spot halfway down the block. I parked my old Honda, and got out into the cold. The battery in my key fob was dead, so I used the key to lock the car. Everything I owned was packed away in the back. Not that anyone would want to steal any of it. And bless them if they did since I wouldn’t have to carry it inside the house.
Cassandra Springs didn’t have much crime to speak of, so I probably could have left the car unlocked. Old habits die hard, though, and living in Denver had taken its toll.
The wind blew my hair into my face, and I lowered my head to avoid as much of the cold as I could.
Bad idea. I ran right into an older man as I rounded the corner.
“Excuse you,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He turned to look at me. “Kathy? Kathy Sinclair?”
I blinked and studied him for a moment. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. His broad shoulders looked bigger in his blue ski coat, and he’d clearly been eating too many doughnuts.
“It’s me,” he said. “Rob Taylor from Cassandra High.”
Rob Taylor? Oh, the years had not been kind. He was one of my high school mistakes. We went to the senior prom together. Back then, he’d been a football star, but a knee injury kept him from getting his scholarship to CU Boulder. God, he looked old for being in his mid-forties.
Did he think I looked old, too?
“I didn’t know you lived here,” I said.
“I’m a cop,” he said. “Off duty right now, so I won’t arrest you.” He laughed like he’d said something funny.
Clearly, he hadn’t invested in a personality since high school.
“Good to know,” I said.
“Your aunt is on the warpath,” he said. “If you kill her, I’ll help you cover it up.”
I blinked at him.
“That was a joke,” he said.
“Nice to see you, Rob,” I lied. “I’m freezing, so I’m going inside.”
He nodded. “We should go for coffee sometime,” he said.
I pretended not to hear him, and entered the Eye of Ra.
The heater worked well in the store, and I thought I’d walked into paradise. I unzipped my coat, and tried to shake off the chill.
The Eye of Ra had been the town’s best and only metaphysical bookstore for forty years. My aunts opened it when I was in grade school, and I’d spent many an afternoon flipping through tarot cards, or reading books about astral projection, astrology, and ancient Egypt while my aunts ran the place. I also spent a lot of time petting Hannah Rose, the store’s black cat. Every day, my mother would pick me up at six, and take me home.
“Don’t you put any stock in all that nonsense,” she always said. She also told me my aunts didn’t believe any of it, but didn’t mind making a buck off of it.
But I knew different. Aunt Clara believed all of it. Aunt Liz believed some of it. For example, she rolled her eyes when I went through an ancient astronaut phase and read every Erich von Daniken book they had in stock.
I’d left all that behind.
But standing in the store for the first time as an adult brought waves of memories back to me. The aroma of the incense—sandalwood at the moment—made it seem like yesterday.
The store was still divided into sections. Downstairs had jewelry. Lots of pentagrams, skulls, ankhs, and crescent moons. There were items for ceremonial rituals including some wicked sharp knives. Racks of clothing lined one wall filled with T-shirts, Hawaiian shirts with dragons or Egyptian motifs, and ceremonial robes. There were shelves loaded with crystals and herbs and amusing potions, including my favorite: Jerk Be Gone, the surefire way to get rid of an ex-boyfriend or ex-husband. Maybe I should get a bottle to use on Rob Taylor.
At the back of the store, a series of cabinets featuring more tarot decks than I knew existed stood before a row of doors leading to small private rooms where employees gave tarot readings.
Based on the store directory sign, the upstairs still had new and used books about everything from Aleister Crowley to Carlos Castaneda, and a third level was devoted to classrooms and a row of small rooms for therapeutic massage.
A Goth girl stood chewing gum behind the counter on the ground level. She finished ringing up a purchase—a statue of the Norse god Odin—then thanked the customer, and answered the ringing phone.
She had the phone on speaker.
“Eye of Ra, how may I direct your call?” she said.
“I have a demon in my house,” the caller said, “and I don’t know what to do.”
“Please hold,” the girl said. “I’ll connect you with our resident demonologist.”
She put the caller on hold.
“You have a demonologist on staff?” I asked.
The girl gave me a blank stare, and tugged her gum so it stretched out like a long pink tongue. “Doesn’t everyone?” she said. Then she popped the gum back into her mouth and pressed the intercom. “Manny, call on line one. Manny, line one.”
She looked at me again, bored.
“I’m Katherine Sinclair,” I said.
“I’ll alert the media.”
“Elizabeth’s niece,” I said.
She looked me up and down. “You don’t look evil.”
“I don’t feel evil either. Is she here? Or Clara?”
“Back office,” she said. “Turn right at the tarot counter, go through the beaded curtain. You can’t miss it. Watch out for the ghost cat.”
I bit back a laugh when I saw she wasn’t kidding. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Did you say ghost cat?”
“That’s right. Hannah Rose.”
I narrowed my gaze at her. Hannah Rose
died when I was a teenager. Maybe this girl was humoring my Aunt Clara, who adored Hannah Rose, and would have wanted to believe the cat was still around.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
She popped her gum and kept her bored eyes on me as she pointed to her name badge. It featured an Egyptian eye with a curved line arcing down to her name, Rain. But Rain was crossed out and Secret was etched below it.
“Right,” I said. “I guess I won’t tell anyone.”
“Cool,” Rain said, and turned to help a customer with a handful of crystals.
I dodged a few customers and wound my way back to the office.
The beaded curtains rattled, and I thought I felt something brush my leg, but when I looked down, expecting to see a cat, there was nothing there. I stepped through the curtain, and saw the heater vent, which had just come on.
Maybe the cat was upstairs.
A black tapestry hung on the office door featuring a gold circle in the center and two crescent moons facing outward on either side.
I knocked on the jamb.
“Who is it?” someone called.
“Katherine.”
The door swung inward and the tapestry danced. Aunt Clara smiled at me. She was a large woman with long silver hair and bright blue eyes. She wrapped me in a bear hug.
“Kathy! Ooooooh, it’s good to see you.”
I returned the embrace with a little less enthusiasm and a lot more dignity.
“Nice to see you, Aunt Clara.”
“Let me get a look at you,” she said and held my upper arms while her eyes swept up and down my black coat and blue jeans. I wore black boots as well. “We need to feed you.”
“I’m on a diet,” I said and patted my stomach. I was carrying some extra weight because ice cream had been my best friend through the divorce.
“Nonsense,” she said. “You’re skin and bones.”
I opened my coat. My red blouse flared a bit at the waist.
“You look eight months pregnant in that shirt,” Aunt Liz said, stepping around Clara to look at me.
“Be nice,” Clara said.
“Just stating the obvious.”
“I love you, too,” I said.
“Give me a hug,” Aunt Liz said.
I gave her a quick hug. She planted a fake kiss on my cheek without her lips actually touching my skin.
