by Catie Rhodes
Business at my store has been the same as usual, mostly colored. But Bertram Holze came by today. He asked if I knew the whereabouts of the Herrera children. Holze said they were looking for them. I asked if it had to do with the tragedy that befell their mama. He told me to mind my own business if I wanted to keep my store. I said no more.
All I own is in this store. People in these parts have little coin. My family eats well, but we do so on trade. If I leave here, I leave with nothing.
Hooty stopped reading, but the video kept running. The members of the museum board sat in silence. I took notice of the reactions of the members.
Eddie and Julie didn’t look surprised. Hooty must have read it to them beforehand. Sheriff Joey’s face had gone the color of red dirt, and his breath came out in puffs. Felicia wore her usual resting bitch face. I knew her well enough to see the anger and indignation brewing behind her flat eyes.
Amanda still tapped on her cellphone, oblivious to it all. I wondered if she’d heard a word. I liked Amanda well enough but thought she was doing the Burns County Museum a disservice by not giving up her husband’s chair on the board after his passing last summer. Benny leaned forward in his seat, eyes wide with shock, mouth curled with distaste.
“That was some ugly stuff,” he breathed.
Sheriff Joey turned to face the camera. “Hannah, turn off this camera right now. And I mean it.”
The screen went blank.
For a moment, silence reigned in Hooty’s study. Nobody moved or made a sound. I guessed we were all busy trying to get over the window of ugliness Hooty’s ancestor’s words had opened. The lynching felt immediate, not like events dating back a century. The horrible images had jumped right from the crumbled page and into my mind, vivid in their horror and cruelty. My chest tight, muscles hot with rushing blood, my breath came in shallow pants. Sweat dampened the back of my neck. I couldn’t stop picturing the old gallows behind the museum. I saw them at a distance at least once a week. I could have been Priscilla Herrera a century ago, hanged because I could see ghosts.
A huge, black bird landed on the windowsill, watching us like some sort of spy. It tapped the glass with its beak, breaking the spell in the room. Everyone seemed to let out the collective breath we’d all be holding.
“You all right?” Hooty asked me and exchanged a glance with Rainey. She grabbed a box of tissues from the small table next to her chair and brought them to me.
“You’re sweating,” she said. I mopped my damp face, trying to get hold of myself. The stuff I’d heard on the video happened a long time ago. It had nothing to do with me.
“I’m guessing Sheriff Joey argued against adding the journal to the museum’s collection after he made you shut off the video?” I asked Hannah.
“And how,” she said. “Felicia threatened to sue the museum for libel.”
“After the meeting, she followed me out to my car to talk about it.” Rainey snorted and shook her head. “She’s about as smart as a jar of peanut butter, but her outrage is still loud enough to cause problems.”
“I’ve got the minutes of the meeting,” Eddie said. “I’ll be happy to show ‘em to you if you want to know what-all got said.”
I didn’t, not really. My imagination filled in the blanks pretty well by itself. Every gaze in the room rested on me, waiting for my answer. Would I help or not? I still wanted to say no. Hearing what happened to Priscilla Herrera for being different made refusal seem an even more attractive option.
“Someone stole the journals for a reason,” I said. “If we can figure it out, it might go a ways toward finding who did it. I bet Sheriff Joey wanted the journals burned, right?”
Hannah shifted in her chair and nodded, her eyes on the carpet.
“Any other idea on why someone would want them?” I glanced at each person in the room in turn. If there was a way to get this done without using magic, I wanted to figure it out.
“The journals have the exact wording of the curse in them.” Eddie scribbled something in his notebook. “Someone might think they can use the journals to get the curse off the treasure.”
“If we’re going to call the motive for the theft magical,” Rainey said, “I have a theory the book on folk medicine actually belonged to Priscilla Herrera. Some of the stuff in it went further than herbs and roots.”
I hunched my shoulders. More mumbo jumbo. Groovy.
“These ledgers are an amazing representation of the darker side of Gaslight City’s history,” I said. “I am more sorry than any of you know they’ve been stolen, but I’m not sure—”
“I see the no all over your face. Might as well be a flashing neon sign.” Rainey stood, smoothing down her skirt and making a face at the wrinkles sitting down had carved into it. “I’ve got to go back to the office.”
“I’ve got Amanda’s laundry to do.” I pushed myself out of the chair.
“I told you to bring it here,” Hooty said.
“There’s too much. I couldn’t impose on you and Esther. I’ll take it to the laundromat.”
“Watch out for the tweakers—I mean my clients,” Rainey said. To my surprise, she pulled me into a hard, fast hug. “Thank you for listening to us. Will you promise to give it some thought?”
“I will.” My promise was really to figure out a way to resolve this without contacting the spirit world.
Hannah and Eddie hugged me, too, and Hooty walked me to the door, planting a firm kiss on my cheek as I left.
I hurried to my car, not wanting any more close encounters with tourists today, but I took my time lighting a cigarette and getting back into traffic as thoughts cluttered my mind. I kept coming back to the way Sheriff Joey and Felicia acted at the museum board meeting. Did either of them have enough larceny in them to steal the journals to keep people from seeing what a jerk their ancestor was? Yep. Absolutely. Would they take the risk? Much harder question. There was one person who might be able to give me some insight into them.
Hannah Kessler.
3
Gaslight City’s nicest laundromat was located in a newish shopping center on Highway 59, nearly out of town. It catered to the folks who had houses on Piney Lake and featured top-of-the-line washers and dryers, an on-site attendant, and air conditioning. I didn’t go there.
I went to the cheapest and least nice laundromat in Gaslight City, partially because it was less than two blocks from the Burns County Museum and partially because the less I spent washing the towels, the more money I’d make. The facility featured dirty floors, one broken dryer, and no air conditioning. Sweat pouring down my face and dripping off my jawbone, I divided Amanda’s towels between the two largest washing machines in the place and went outside to sit on the curb and smoke.
I hated to call Hannah and voice my thoughts about her uncle and cousin-in-law. Even though she told me they were no longer on speaking terms—and I was dying to know why—it somehow felt wrong to butt into other people’s family business. I sure hated it when people did it to me.
It wasn’t like Joey or Felicia would tell Hannah they’d stolen the journals. Talking to her might result in no more than hard feelings between us. Despite my refusal to play paranormal investigator when Hannah demanded it, I loved our friendship and would do just about anything to keep it.
If I didn’t figure out someone who might be behind the theft, my next course of action was to conduct an informal séance to contact the ghost who did the stealing. That settled it. I decided to send Hannah a text instead of putting her on the spot with a voice-to-voice phone call.
I’d like to talk some more about how Joey and Felicia reacted to Hooty’s reading at the board meeting. I pressed send and went inside to put the towels in the dryer. My cellphone buzzed, signaling the arrival of a text message, as I put the last quarter in the dryer’s coin slot. I hurried back outside before viewing the message.
I think we do need to talk.
I quickly tapped in a reply. I’m at the laundromat on San Jacinto Street.
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Be there in 10, came her answer.
Seven minutes later, Hannah marched up the sidewalk. I couldn’t believe she’d opt to walk even two blocks in the dog days of summer. Invisible waves of fiery heat rose from the asphalt, rippling over Hannah’s approaching form, her face turning redder by the second. I met her with a bottle of cold water I took from the cooler I kept in the backseat of my car. She guzzled the water and held the bottle to her face.
“Why walk?”
“The little high-schooler I hired for summer help is nosy as all get out. Her mother and Felicia are big buds. I didn’t want her to know I was meeting you.” She sat down on the curb next to me, still gasping from her trek and holding the sweating water bottle to her cheek.
“I guess the big question is whether you think, from what they said at the meeting, Joey or Felicia would steal the journals.”
“And I guess my big question is why you won’t contact the ghost we saw in the video. How hard could it be?”
“This why you agreed to come down here?”
“Okay, okay. I think they were pissed enough to do something stupid.” Hannah drank the rest of her water, staring out at the hellish landscape.
“My one problem with this theory is the surveillance video,” I said. “It shows a ghost breaking into the museum. I know how the Holze family, especially Felicia, feels about anything they consider satanic.”
Hannah snorted. Her snort turned into laugher, which rang over the empty street and bounced off the brick buildings. At first, I worried she might be suffering heat stroke. I pushed myself to my feet, the combination of the extreme heat and the sudden movement making me unsteady, and hurried to my car, where I dipped a paper towel in the icy water in my cooler and took it back to Hannah. She held it to her face and closed her eyes.
“You ever hear of those people who protest in front of abortion clinics all the time but go in the back door to get abortions?” She glanced at me. “Then the next day they’re right back out front protesting again?”
I shrugged, wondering where this was going.
“The Holze family—my uncle’s family—would do that.”
I squinted at her, trying to reconcile the abortion clinic to our current conversation.
“What it means is they’ll do whatever they need to do so things’ll go their way, which brings me to why we’re no longer speaking.” She stood from the curb, went to my car, and helped herself to another bottle of cold water. “I’m embarrassed to tell you this stuff about my family. Are you sure there’s no way I can convince you to contact the ghost? I’ll provide whatever you need.”
I dropped my gaze. Embarrassing Hannah made me feel like a second-rate person. I knew from experience the receiving end of embarrassment hurt and demeaned like nothing else. I pressed my lips together, trying to reconcile myself to dropping the subject, offering an olive branch, when I felt her hand on my arm.
“Forget what I said. I know this is hard for you, too, and I know my family’s behavior has made your life harder than it has to be. I can take one for the team.” She flashed me a weak smile, and I nodded in thanks.
“You know I bought the Mace House from the bank, right?”
“Yes. Still planning to turn it into a bed and breakfast and event venue?”
She nodded. “And I plan to generate a little income giving tours of the place. But this is more about what you found in there the night you solved your cousin Rae’s murder. Remember?”
“Those books. Luther Palmore’s books.” An icy shudder climbed up my spine as I remembered the night I found those books.
“Gone.”
“Maybe the bank auctioned them off to recoup some of their expenses.”
“No. They sold the house and contents as a single package. I saw the box of books when I toured the house with the bank’s realtor. They were in there as late as three weeks before we closed. Someone came, literally like a thief in the night, and took them.” She pulled up her knees almost to her chest and draped her arms over them. “I was disappointed but accepted it, until I was at Uncle Joey’s house last Memorial Day.”
The direction this was going sounded really, monumentally bad. My shoulders tensed in sympathy for Hannah.
“You ever been in Uncle Joey and Aunt Carly’s house?”
“You kidding? They’d probably have to burn the place to purify it after I left.” I nudged her with my elbow, and some of the tension broke. We shared a brittle laugh. “I do know they had a new house built on Piney Lake last year.”
“The house has all these nooks and crannies and closets for storage. One of them is a little room off the laundry. One of Felicia’s kids helped me spill wine all over myself, and I went in there to look for some stain remover. I opened the door thinking it was the logical place for Aunt Carly to have laundry supplies, but what I found sure wasn’t stain remover.”
My imagination supplied several different things she could have found in the room. Drugs. Sex toys. An electric chair wired for home use.
“This closet was full of old stuff. Most of it didn’t mean anything to me, but Luther Palmore’s trunk of books was sitting right in the middle of it.”
“What? Did you look through any of it? Was it all Mace Treasure stuff?” My pulse kickstarted and sped up. I never knew Joey Holze had an interest in the Mace Treasure.
“Regretfully, no. Aunt Carly came up behind me and berated me for snooping in her home.”
“What’d you say?”
“I let my temper get the best of me. Told Aunt Carly I knew exactly what I’d seen in there and went outside, interrupted the barbecue, and accused Uncle Joey of stealing from a former crime scene.”
I kept my mouth shut, already seeing the writing on the wall.
“Uncle Joey went bananas. I mean, I really thought he was going to hit me, and Scott was right there behind him, waiting for his turn. In one instant, the whole family turned on me, calling me a traitor, telling me to get off their property.”
“And you left.” Though I loathed Hannah’s family with the intensity of a flaming case of herpes, her falling out with them made me feel bad for her. Finding out people aren’t who they pretend to be is never fun. Especially when they’re loved ones.
“Nothing else to do but leave. Thing is, I’m wondering now if the Bruce journals and Priscilla Herrera’s book of folk medicine are sitting in the storage closet at Uncle Joey’s and Aunt Carly’s.”
“One way to find out.” I said the worlds jokingly, knowing Hannah would never break into anybody’s house.
“Yep.” She checked her watch. “Aunt Carly’s weekly hair appointment and manicure starts in twenty minutes. She’s usually at Amanda’s Hair Flair for an hour, longer if she gets to gossiping, but lets depend on an hour. I’ve still got my key. Want to go see for ourselves?”
She didn’t have to ask me twice.
We hurried to fold towels in the stifling laundromat, both of us shining with sweat. Whoever decided to call it a glow needed his or her head examined with an ice pick. By the time we loaded the towels into the car, I was soaked and exhausted and ended up letting the hot metal burn the undersides of my arms. I jumped away from the car with a yelp. Using a bandana to protect my hand, I opened the driver’s door, started the car, and turned the air conditioner on high to push out some of the pent up heat.
“We’ll take the towels by Amanda’s,” I said. “See if Carly’s there.” I leveled my gaze on Hannah. “You sure you want to do this?”
Hannah bit her lip and twisted her fingers.
“We don’t have to do this.” I didn’t know how else we’d see if Joey had the Bruce journals and the folk medicine book with the rest of his treasure trove, but I didn’t want to force Hannah into doing something she didn’t want to do.
“Yes, we do,” Hannah said. “I won’t stop wondering until I know for sure.”
I took Amanda’s towels into the salon and saw Carly Holze’s sour, lemon face for myself. Her gaze, glowing with hate,
followed me as I took the towels into the laundry room and put them away in the cabinets Amanda had set aside for them. She sneered as Amanda paid me, jabbering nonstop about how happy she was to have her new washer. I gave Carly a wave on my way out, and she turned her face away, pretending not to have seen.
Did I feel guilty about breaking into her house? Not as much as I should have.
The drive out to Piney Lake took us a good twenty minutes, during which we said little. Hannah took a key off her keyring and fumbled it through her fingers until she dropped it and had to dig on the floorboard for it. I turned into Joey and Carly’s subdivision.
“No,” Hannah said. “Their house backs up to some woods over by Billy Ray’s Marina. Let’s park there, and we’ll sneak through the woods.”
I did as she suggested, adrenaline pumping jangly tension through my body, and pulled into a parking place between two super-sized trucks with empty boat trailers hitched to them. The subdivision’s houses peeked through a screen of skinny pine trees and overgrown brush. People loitered everywhere. There was no way we’d be able to walk into the woods without someone seeing. Hannah gazed out the window, probably realizing the same thing I did.
“The thing to do,” I said, “is act like we belong in those woods. Walk into them like we do it every day.” I glanced at Hannah. “We can call this off if you’re too scared. No shame.”
She got out of the car without answering. I followed. Together, we strode toward the woods, both of us keeping our eyes straight ahead.
“Hey. What y’all gonna do in those woods?” A male voice yelled.
“Can I watch?” Hollered another.
I half-turned, ready to tell them they could all go masturbate and use sand for lubricant. Hannah grabbed my arm and squeezed hard.
“Ignore ‘em. They’ll remember us better if you answer them.”
I grumbled but obeyed, and we stepped into the woods. About twenty feet from us rose a wall of seven-foot wooden privacy fences, the second stories of the houses visible behind them.
