Spirits of the Season: Eight Haunting Holiday Romances

by Amanda DeWees

  “Yes ma’am,” Lorraine replied, pouring maple syrup from a ceramic jug into a pot on her stove for warming. “It was made out of bright red wool, the fanciest piece of clothing she ever had. But she passed on twenty years ago last Christmas Eve.”

  Brandi glanced Dooley’s way, who was scampering off to join the two men in the woods in boulder costumes with sticks of explosives in their hands. She checked the mirror in her grip again.

  “Well, she’s here visiting you now,” Brandi nodded, her face appearing pale. “And somethin’ tells me if we wanna find out what happened to Granny, we’re gonna have to use her heirloom mirror.”

  Chapter 4

  Brandi trudged through the woods of Bender Lake with the antique mirror in one hand and the other clasped tightly around Lorraine’s. Since it was her day off from the Moo & Brew, Brandi wore heavy boots lined with fur and more appropriate winter clothing, given the December weather. She led Lorraine carefully to where the creek was that she’d seen the night before under the Cold Moon. Both women were bundled in wool coats and scarves, with hats and mittens to keep them warm. After all, neither knew how long it might take to see what happened to Granny, and in the satchel Lorraine carried was some wood in case they decided to build a fire.

  Brandi’s coat pocket held her revolver as well. It hadn’t been much help the night before, but she wasn’t going to place any bets that it might not come in handy.

  Breathing so hard that puffs of moisture escaped her lips, Brandi set down the old mirror beside the creek. She happened to notice there was a perfect line of round stones beside it, covered with tufts of snow like glistening mushrooms.

  “Do ya think somebody marked this place as where a burnin’ spring might be?”

  “Reckon it was Granny herself,” Lorraine replied. “She always came out here to collect roots and herbs, come rain, sleet, or hail, even if she had to dig for ’em with gloves on in the snow. She said they grew best here, near this spot, ’cause that’s where the departed came to bless ’em.”

  “Departed?”

  “Yep. I think she believed her ancestors helped infuse the herbs with power.”

  “Well, she always could heal about anything that pained a person,” Brandi nodded. “So let’s go to work.”

  Brandi propped up the mirror against a tree next to the line of stones and rolled a couple of nearby rocks in front of it to help keep it vertical. Then she grabbed Lorraine’s hand and stepped back to look directly in the mirror.

  “So what do we do now? Chant somethin’ to see what happened to Granny?”

  Lorraine shrugged. She folded her arms for a moment and thought about it, tapping her lip. “You know, I seem to recall her sayin’ once that if’n you ask properly, a spirit is obliged to show itself and speak. But who’s to say what ‘proper’ is to a spook?”

  “Polite words, I expect. Here,” Brandi grasped Lorraine’s hand again, “let’s give it a try.” She looked intently into the mirror. “Granny, we know this mirror can show us that spirit that whisked you away. So if you don’t mind–”

  “Stop,” Lorraine halted Brandi. “That ain’t her real name. She don’t have no grandchildren I know of. She just goes by the name Granny ’cause a lot of folks don’t like to give their real names around Bender Lake. You know, ’cause of their–”

  “Pasts?” Brandi finished. “Especially a woman like Granny, right? Who some bad folks would love to see dead. Then what do you think is her real name?”

  Lorraine shook her head. “God as my witness, I don’t know. She never would reveal it to anybody, and compromise their safety if someone came lookin’ for her. But I saw an E once embroidered on one of her pillows in her wagon. Maybe it’s for Evelyn? Or Eileen, or–”

  “Evangeline.”

  A voice whispered through the morning mist, startling Brandi and Lorraine. Inside the mirror, from within the reflection of the early fog around Bender Lake, a woman appeared.

  She had bright red hair which tumbled in wild curls to her shoulders. A streak of gray swept across her forehead, like Granny’s, and she was wearing a long, dark skirt with an apron, cinched tightly at the waist, and a shawl over her head and shoulders that looked like a cape. Yet at the bottom of her skirt, her feet were bare and slightly soiled. She stood next to a gypsy wagon with an old draft horse hitched to it, her head held high and her eyes fiercely focused, with that same timberwolf gray that gave everyone who knew Granny Tinker the shivers.

  “Evangeline,” the woman whispered again as if from beyond the grave. Brandi and Lorraine grabbed a hold of each other, their bodies riddled with goosebumps. To their confusion, the woman smiled slightly, and she turned to gesture at what appeared to be mist behind her.

  “Do you think that’s Granny’s great-great grandma? The one who passed down the mirror?” Brandi whispered to Lorraine.

  “F-From the sound of her talkin’, I’d say that’s right,” Lorraine stuttered. “They both have the same kind of voice.”

  “And eyes,” Brandi nodded. “I guess Granny’s real name must be Evangeline. So pretty—it’s a shame she could never use it.” Brandi paused, swallowing hard. “Her great-great grandma is trying to show us something in the mist, Lorraine. I figure it’s what happened to Evangeline. You ready?”

  “No,” Lorraine replied, trembling. She sighed. “But I reckon it ain’t up to me.”

  Brandi hugged Lorraine tighter and gave the woman in the mirror a timid nod. “Can you please help us find our f-friend,” she asked kindly, assuming that’s how one addresses a spirit.

  “There will be a price,” the woman answered with an Irish lilt.

  “W-what kind of price?” Lorraine inquired, her shoulders trembling.

  The woman smiled again, her twinkling eyes the only thing that shined from her peasant demeanor.

  “Now when does a magical woman ever reveal her secrets?”

  Chapter 5

  Brandi turned to Lorraine and searched her face, but Lorraine’s eyes were downcast, lost in thought.

  “I don’t think Evangeline wanted to go with that man willingly,” Brandi observed. “So I’m not sure we have much choice. We gotta help her somehow, price or no price.”

  Lorraine nodded. “Then let’s get on with it.”

  Brandi drew in a deep breath and called out to the woman in the mist. “Please show us where Evangeline went, and how we can get her back.”

  The woman stepped aside in the mirror and the mist began to thin. Soon, instead of hardwood trees, stripped of their leaves around Bender Lake, before them a pine forest appeared with snow-capped mountains in the distance, lit by the light of a full moon that made the blanket of snow shine like stars. On a branch, a great horned owl lifted its wide wings and hooted, flashing its gray and white feathers to the moon.

  And there was Evangeline Tinker, who Brandi and Lorraine only knew as an older woman, now young and perhaps in her twenties. It was dark outside and she was in the forest, walking alone in one of her typical, velvet dresses and the same crimson, lace-up boots, scanning the snowy bases of trees and old logs with a lantern in her hand. Every once in a while, she’d pull out a small, empty jar from her pocket and sigh, shaking her head. A voice cut through the air from Evangeline’s great-great grandmother.

  “I passed down all the herbs and plants I’d dried in my lifetime to my descendants,” she noted with an Irish cadence to her voice. “But by the time Evangeline was a woman, some of the herbs had run out. The most magical ones, of course. And the problem was that they’d become extinct.”

  Brandi’s brow furrowed, not understanding at all what this had to do with Evangeline’s disappearance in the creek. Then in the mirror, she could see an image of Evangeline sprinkling what herbs she did have remaining from another vial. Her lips were moving, speaking some kind of incantation, and she held out her arms to the moon. All at once, she disappeared–

  Brandi gasped, only to hear Evangeline’s great-great grandmother speak again.

 
“Evangeline came up with a unique solution that day,” she noted. “She cast a spell that she thought would help her find the right herbs. And it did—by taking her back in time over a hundred years. She was transported to a remote area in Colorado in the late 1800s. She didn’t know that’s where she was headed, of course. She only asked the powers that be to send her to where the herbs could be found. But that also sent her straight into the arms of Virgil Hollow.”

  And sure enough, in the mirror, there was Virgil Hollow, too. He was a young man then, with hair as black as anthracite and riding a dappled gray horse, waiting for his partner to toss a bag of money from a stagecoach they were holding up. But along with receiving the bag, Virgil found his open arms also catching Evangeline Tinker, who’d dropped from the sky.

  “Love happens that way sometimes,” Evangeline’s great-great grandmother appeared in the mirror with a slight smile. “Out of the blue, when you least expect it.”

  “But I thought there was a Tinker curse,” piped up Lorraine. “Evangeline told me once she never allows herself to be attracted to any man, ’cause the Tinker women drive men mad. Not angry, but crazy—the kind o’ crazy that howls at the moon each night and tries to follow the Tinker women’s scent through farm and field, hoping to catch a glimpse of ’em. Evangeline said her life had been littered with dozens of poor souls who’d ended up in straight jackets, babbling to nobody.”

  “Evangeline is not inclined to tell everything she knows,” her great-great grandmother replied. Strangely, she began to disappear. All at once, they saw Evangeline in the arms of Virgil Hollow on his gray mare as he attempted to make a getaway from the stagecoach. He’d fired a couple of shots into the air when he stared, wild-eyed, at the beautiful young woman on his saddle, between him and a bag of cash.

  “W-Where’d you come from?” Virgil stuttered, aghast, never slowing his horse’s gallop for a second. He wrapped his arms around Evangeline and fired one last shot back at the stagecoach driver for good measure. “Did you jump from the coach? Sweetheart, we’re hardly the kind of men a decent lady should be seen with–”

  “That’s all right,” Evangeline smiled. “’Cause decent is about the last thing I’ve ever been called,” she laughed. She swiveled in Virgil’s lap to face the front of the saddle and grabbed the reins from his hands, giving the horse a kick. “By the way,” she turned to call back to him, her voice stolen by the wind, “got any rare herbs?”

  Chapter 6

  “The only one who has herbs around here is Iron Feather,” Virgil said, his striking face lit with orange and red hues by a campfire. “He keeps ’em in his pouch.”

  Virgil nodded at one of the three outlaws sitting on logs around the fire who had a turquoise pouch dangling from a rawhide string in his hand. He was a Native American man in his late twenties, like Virgil, with long black hair that swept to his shoulders. He wore a dark, flat-brimmed hat, the kind many Native American men used to wear in the Southwest, and he had on a black wool coat with brass buttons over deerskin pants and moccasins. Iron Feather’s fingers traced over the bulge of his pouch as he met Evangeline’s gaze. Dancing flames reflected in his dark eyes.

  “This medicine is powerful,” he warned, tapping his fingers on the pouch. “It holds more than you know. But you must earn it.”

  “Aw, now hold on,” one of the outlaws said, a scruffy young man with blonde curls who looked like he hadn’t bathed in weeks. “You ain’t hinting that she’s gonna ride with the Bandits Hollow Gang, are ya? We don’t have use for a woman ’round here–”

  Iron Feather held up a revolver to cut the man off.

  It worked. The camp became eerily silent, but for the crackling sound of wood on the fire.

  “We have use for her magic,” Iron Feather insisted. He nodded at Evangeline. “You see things. True?”

  Evangeline, her face unlined and dewy in her twenties, yet with eyes as cunning as a wolf’s, nevertheless lost any measure of color in her cheeks. All along, she’d thought she was in control. On a lark, merely heading into the woods to collect supplies and casting what she’d thought was an ordinary spell to replenish her herbs. So she happened to land in Colorado around the year 1895, which she surmised from the type of stagecoach they’d robbed. But surely she could cast a spell to return as easily as she’d come, right? She’d heard stories growing up about how her great-great grandmother traversed through time at a whim, always winding up back at her gypsy wagon in Connemara. But now Evangeline was beginning to suspect there was more to this story. That maybe Iron Feather had summoned her for his own reasons...

  “W-what kind of magic did you have in mind?” Evangeline pressed, trying her best to keep her expression of stone and not reveal any fear.

  Iron Feather picked up a large rock and held it aloft on top of his index finger, swaying his hand slightly so it wouldn’t fall. “Balance magic,” he replied.

  “I-I don’t understand what you mean.” Evangeline hugged the long duster tighter around herself that Virgil had loaned her to keep warm. The fur of the buffalo hide against her neck comforted her a little.

  Virgil tossed another branch onto the fire, watching the bright sparks lift into the sky and expire like fireworks. “He’s talkin’ about justice,” he nodded as the snap and hiss of the wood died down.

  Virgil dug into his pants pocket and held out a note to Evangeline. It was written in artful penmanship and addressed to presumably the owner of the next stagecoach they would rob:

  You love gold more than life

  and you gladly took a life to claim it.

  But by the light of the moon,

  nothing that shines

  can protect you when it’s time to pay for it.

  Evangeline trembled at the words, keeping up her brave face. “What are you, Black Bart?” she said in a flat tone to hide her bewilderment. “Leaving poems after you steal from others to get some kind o’ fame?”

  “He don’t care nothin’ about money,” one of the fellow outlaws sniffed, a wiry, chestnut-haired young man with sinewy muscles in his jaw and an intense gaze. “He divvies up some to us for our trouble. Then leaves the rest at the door of orphanages and charities.”

  Eyes wide, Evangeline twisted a little on the log she was sitting on. “I-I’m not following you–”

  “Poetic justice,” the blonde outlaw nodded. “Frank Topper killed our friend Caleb Lott for his claim at Destiny Creek. Then he went on to make millions in what he calls the Topper Mine. These robberies by the Bandits Hollow Gang,” he shifted his gaze with reverence to Virgil, clearly a man he considered their leader, “are our way of balancing them scales. And we ain’t about to stop till we give every penny to a worthy cause and bleed that son of a bitch dry.”

  He stared at Evangeline with a venom that was frightening—even to her. “If Iron Feather brought you here with his magic, then there must be some way for you to help. Ain’t that right, Iron Feather?”

  Iron Feather said nothing, but Evangeline felt as if his stare bore a hole between her eyes. “I-I don’t have much experience in outlawin’,” she confessed.

  “You don’t have to,” the chestnut-haired young man pointed out. “All that’s required is a certain, shall we say...dedication. At the end of each month, Topper sends his gold over to a bank in Florence. Sometimes by unmarked stagecoaches or disguised wagons, other times by narrow gauge train. He’s smart as a weasel an’ varies his tactics so his wealth won’t be detected–”

  “Or robbed,” Evangeline finished his sentence, her eyes registering the plan. “An’ you need me to tell you which coach or train it is...”

  She swiped a glance at Iron Feather, who didn’t nod. Her gaze appeared alarmed, as though wondering how on earth he knew of her fortune-telling powers.

  “Six more hits,” Virgil Hollow nodded, chewing on a blade of straw. “Then we figure we’ll have ol’ Topper cleaned out. Word on the street is that his vein will only last till the end o’ the year. Then you can go back to wherever you
came from. You in?”

  Iron Feather held up his turquoise pouch, its color vibrant in the glow of the fire. Evangeline knew it held the herbs that could send her back to the present. He opened the pouch and dipped his fingers inside, pulling out a rock with a large flat section of mica imbedded in it that reflected the faces around the campfire like a mirror.

  Iron Feather balanced the mica rock in one palm and the turquoise pouch in the other like a scale. “You show us Topper’s gold cargos,” he said, lifting up the rock, “you get the herbs.” He raised the pouch even with the mirror rock.

  To Evangeline’s surprise, the mica in the stone acted instantly like her crystal ball at home, with images hovering over its reflective surface. But it wasn’t a picture of a stagecoach or a train being robbed. The image she saw unnerved her far more than some future crime. It was a silhouette of her kissing Virgil Hollow...

  “You in?” Virgil urged, his blue eyes more tender and welled with anticipation than he probably cared to reveal, for someone who was simply looking for another member of the Bandits Hollow Gang. But under the starlight, with her face delicately highlighted by the campfire’s hues, it was hard for any mortal man to resist the beauty of Evangeline Tinker.

  Evangeline’s gaze was arrested by Virgil’s blue eyes, the same color as the medicine pouch Iron Feather held in his hand.

  “I-I reckon I don’t have a whole lotta choice, now do I?” she stammered. “If I’m ever fixin’ to go home–”

  She darted her eyes from Virgil’s, focusing on the pouch for a moment. Her gaze locked on Iron Feather’s to seal the deal.

  “Jus’ six more robberies. You promise, Indian man?”

  Silent, Iron Feather’s eyes glistened from the leaping flames of the fire. He tossed Evangeline the mica rock and tucked his pouch safely inside his coat pocket.