Sapphire Nights

by Patricia Rice

  “Did you find it?” Amber called from the left. A crashing of underbrush and old leaves followed.

  Mariah arrived on silent feet just as Amber stumbled over a log and caught herself on a tree trunk. Both women looked around expectantly at the tall grass and saplings.

  “It feels right,” they agreed simultaneously.

  “It’s not too hard to reach,” Amber said, gazing skeptically back up the hill they’d descended.

  “It’s flat and wide enough and the walking stick approves,” Sam added, hoping this would draw Val out of the hills.

  “I think this is where the old church was.” Mariah turned around to study the trees. “That was back in the day when even the spiritualists still believed in good and evil. They would have blessed this land when they consecrated the church.”

  Amber beamed proudly at Sam. “Your cards said you would were the Earth Mother. Let’s bring this meeting to order.”

  Earth Mother? Sam felt more like Class Clown, even more so when the Lucys began arriving without any particular command for them to do so. Convenient, when cell phones didn’t work. She needed to learn psychic communication.

  Maybe desperation had made her a little nuts.

  “Daisy, will you be able to reach Val from here?” Mariah asked as the numbers filled the small clearing.

  “Val is already here,” Daisy replied, settling on a rock. “She is watching for Cass. The buzzards are circling. It is almost time to dispel them.”

  Sam glanced questioningly at Mariah, who shrugged. “She’s time walking, seeing a different circle in a different time where Val is present. But she can communicate from anywhere, so let her be.”

  That was one step past crazy into Twilight Zone. Sam wanted to run back to the lodge and the familiarity of technology, but she feared she was letting down her new friends if she did.

  Desperation had apparently given her a ridiculous niggling hope that maybe woo-woo could return her memory if modern science couldn’t. That thought fled when she saw her new friends lighting dry tree branches in a makeshift rock basin they’d created.

  “You can’t have fires up here,” she cried. “One spark could set this tinder into disaster!”

  “We’re careful. We’ve cleared it down to dirt around the cauldron.” Mariah removed dried leaves from a pouch on her belt and blew them toward the small flame dancing in the rock bowl of dirt. The flames danced higher.

  Each woman had her own pouch and her own smoldering branch, but they all chanted the same words. Smoke circled the clearing, smudging the air in the same manner as the fog had earlier.

  Visions of soaring flames rushing through the woods, engulfing the timber-clad lodge and its occupants froze her in panic.

  The scent of sage and incense swirled. She swayed dizzily, but her feet were rooted to the ground. The ground. . . she let the energy flow upward, clearing her head. The staff in her hand bobbed excitedly.

  The owl shrieked again. A swirling wind swept through the clearing, casting flames higher. The chant rose. Mariah flung more ashes on the flames. And a circle of white light nearly blinded the clearing.

  Sam screamed, grabbed her head, and dropped to the ground.

  Chapter 12

  Afternoon, June 19

  * * *

  Walker had started downhill the minute he’d seen smoke rising behind the lodge. From his vantage point, he could see the crazy coven in a clearing far below.

  He watched as, surrounded by the Lucys, Samantha raised a stick. In the flash of an instant, the circle exploded in an inferno of light.

  Save him from the effing crazies! Walker broke into a run. Arson was no laughing matter. Just when he thought—

  Sam collapsed, screaming, while smoke rose around her. Her cry escalated his heart rate to terror mode.

  He leaped over fallen trunks and skidded through debris, descending the hill at a breakneck pace. Resort personnel ran toward the clearing with buckets and hoses, but he could only see Sam crumpled in the weeds. He barely noticed the women stomping out smoldering branches and chanting what sounded like Blessed Be. It was his own damned fault for letting a mentally impaired female loose with the looneys. Sam’s lack of memory was definitely an impairment if she didn’t know better than to set fires.

  He stumbled into the clearing, out of breath and furious.

  The women finished stomping on their smoking sticks and throwing dirt on their fire. Lodge security shouted curses and dumped buckets of water on hot rocks, exploding them in steam. Walker could see Carmel Kennedy and her chauffeur marching in this direction, steaming hotter than the rocks.

  His duty was to keep the townspeople from killing each other, but right now, the victim he’d sent into this brawl was his primary concern.

  He scooped up Samantha and felt her wriggle. Good. She was alive. Now he was damned well taking her down for medical help, as he should have done in the first place.

  “I’m fine, put me down,” she sputtered, wriggling to get free. “I was just a little overcome with smoke.”

  “Yeah, most people shriek and wave wands when they have smoke inhalation, right.” He marched on, taking the shortest unmarked path to the parking lot. Stones and rubble rolled beneath his boots, but he didn’t release his grip.

  “Not a wand,” she muttered, pounding his shoulders. “Just one of Harvey’s walking sticks. I kept the Lucys busy, didn’t I?”

  “You let them nearly set the mountain on fire! That is not what I meant about keeping them busy. What the hell did they explode on that fire? The place lit up like a ten-thousand-megawatt magnesium flare.”

  “For all I know, it was magnesium.” She shoved hard, nearly toppling them both. “I do not need medical assistance.”

  “Pretend you do so I can get us both out of here. The sheriff has his homicide team up there and doesn’t need me. I’m supposed to be covering my rounds or giving assistance to the locals. You’re the local. I’m assisting. We’re getting off this mountain now, before Carmel rains fire and brimstone on our heads.”

  Even as he said it, he saw Kurt Kennedy crossing the parking lot and Aaron Townsend jogging up the trail, headed his way.

  “We can take Miss Moon down to the ER,” Kurt said with concern. “This happened on resort property, and I’d like to see that she’s unhurt.”

  “I’m unhurt,” Samantha shouted. “And I’m not going anywhere with potential murderers.”

  Kurt’s dark eyebrows shot up. Aaron looked amused. Walker kept walking.

  “She’s impaired,” Walker said grumpily. “The Lucys probably put pot on the fire.”

  “We did not,” Aaron protested. “We released the spirit of the man who passed this mortal coil last night. Miss Moon was not prepared for the impact. And I wish everyone would desist from calling us Lucys. I am not female, nor is Harvey.”

  “We could call you Looneys,” Kurt offered, following Walker across the gravel lot.

  Aaron was a big man, larger than Kurt. If they squared off. . .

  Samantha yanked one of Walker’s fingers and pulled it back almost far enough to break it. In retaliation, he dropped her. She had to grab his arm to steady herself once she was on her feet again, but she had everyone’s attention. “I am not going anywhere with any of you. I’m going back to town to play in dirt.”

  “Not with emergency vehicles flying up that drive, you’re not.” Walker caught her arm and kept marching her to his Ford. “I’ll take you down.”

  “I can go with one of the others.” She tried to shake him off, but he wasn’t allowing that finger trick again.

  “We offered rides,” Kurt reminded them. He crossed his arms and watched Walker open his door and fling Sam in. “Are you arresting her?”

  “Maybe. I’m thinking about it.” He slammed the door. When she opened it again, he removed his cuffs from his belt. “You stay put or I’ll lock you in.”

  “You wouldn’t dare.” Her eyes were a challenging, long-lashed azure, and Walker could almost fe
el her ire cutting out his heart.

  “I don’t respond to zanies anymore,” he told her. “Stay there or I’ll haul you in with cuffs.” He glared at Aaron and Kurt, who were looking belligerent. “She needs help. Stay out of this.”

  “Zanies, nice,” she repeated in a fulminating tone that might well lead to an explosion.

  Walker checked to see that his gun was still in place.

  Mariah popped up like an evil genie, her hair braided with trinkets, making her look more like a lunatic than any of the Lucys. “Find out about Cass,” she commanded. “That was her with us just now.”

  Even Sam stopped protesting to stare.

  Mariah shrugged. “If you can’t tell, I can’t explain. Just go. She shouldn’t be on the astral plane this long.”

  Walker climbed in, shoved his sunglasses on, and turned the ignition. “Are you sure you want to stay with the Looney Tunes?”

  Sam remained silent long enough for him to send the car rolling down the drive and away from their audience.

  “I understood what she meant,” she finally said in a small voice.

  “About the astral plane?” He almost ground his teeth. His late wife had always sounded perfectly rational when she’d talked about the voices in her head. He’d never known when Tess was referring to characters in the novels she wrote or the demons that controlled her.

  “No, I know nothing of astral planes. But I felt another presence that wasn’t me, unless I really am crazy. I need to dig some plants, do something constructive.”

  “You need grounding,” he almost said in relief. People who realized they were thinking crazy weren’t really crazy, were they?

  She smiled weakly. “Right. Grounding. But I remember what Cass looks like now.”

  He almost slammed the brake. Instead, he drove straight through town, aiming for the main highway. “Describe her.”

  “Tall and thin, like me. Classic roman nose, no makeup, blue eyes, silver hair pulled back tightly from Katharine Hepburn cheekbones.” She fell silent, as if waiting for his approval.

  It was only as he recognized the description that he realized what she was really waiting for. “She resembles you. That’s why the Lucys took to you.”

  “You said she’s in her sixties. She couldn’t be my mother unless she had me in her forties.” Her voice trembled.

  “What do you mean, your mother? Your mother is Jade Moon. Her name is on all your records.” He’d been hoping against hope that she was sane and it was the town that was nuts, but none of this computed.

  “You didn’t look up my parents, did you?” She gazed out at the passing landscape. “You’d understand if you’d seen their photos.”

  “My phone should start working when we pass the gas station.” He handed it to her. “Call up the images you saw.”

  She poked at icons as if she knew what she was doing. “Jade appears Asian, Wolf, Native American. Neither of them looks anything like me. And they must have looked horribly out of place in Provo. I researched the town where I grew up too. It couldn’t be any more white if it had been bleached.”

  “Maybe they were Mormons,” he argued, even knowing that was grasping straws.

  He pulled into the gas station and took the phone when she passed it to him. The couple staring back at him possessed none of Sam’s classic—blond—beauty. They were handsome in their own way, but he could see what she was saying. Her mother looked more like him than Sam. He scrolled down, read the article, then handed the phone back to her and returned to driving.

  So chances were good that Sam had never been who she was raised to be.

  “What else are you remembering?” She’d been raised by a Chinese mother, as he had. What did that signify? Jia Walker had more superstitions than a house full of cranks, but she was completely, totally sane—almost painfully so.

  Sam shook her head. Her hair was falling from the combs she’d used to hold it off her nape. Had Cass’s hair once had streaks of gold and ash?

  “Nothing, really. There are just these vague. . . shadows. I may be remembering the restaurant where I met her. I’m not certain. But my life before, nothing. Maybe I need the Lucys to chant over me.” She said that grimly.

  He glanced over to be certain she wasn’t looking as if she’d like to jump out of the car. His late wife had led him to be wary of hysterical females. Sam seemed weary but calm, so he brought the conversation around to a subject that almost made sense. “Thank you for keeping the Lucys off my back and bringing Val down. She was giving us all the willies. Was that a signal fire that had her scrambling off that rock?”

  “You don’t want to know,” she assured him. “But I’d take matches and lighters away from the lot of them if I could.”

  “I’ll agree with that, but even if I catch them on a no-fire day, all I can do is slap a penalty on them.” Remembering that flash of light, he resolved to investigate the ashes, but first things first. “Val has probably spread the word of the body’s identity in her death goddess role, but she doesn’t know the details. If I tell you what I know, can you keep quiet?”

  He didn’t know why he would trust anything she said, but he liked it when Sam was paying attention. Her powers of observation were as keen as her hearing.

  “Like you, I know how to keep my mouth shut.”

  He nodded approval. “We found Juan up there, the resort’s security manager. He’d been mauled by a cougar. He was last seen at the lodge bar, so I don’t know how he got out there. We’re treating it as suspicious. How did Val know he was there? We need to nail where everyone was last night.”

  “As far as I know, except for Harvey, we were all in bed, listening to his spirit howl,” she said, sounding as unhappy as he felt. “Did he have a family?”

  “No wife or kids. He’s a long-time local. His parents live down the mountain. They’ve been notified. I hate that part of the job.”

  “I don’t even want to imagine it,” she said in a troubled voice. “But as far as the Lucys are concerned, Juan now rests in a better place and his spirit won’t haunt us. Let’s find a normal topic. Who are you and what are you doing up here?”

  “Wow, that took a nasty turn.” Walker ran a hand through his hair. One thing led to another, and he really didn’t want to open up his life to anyone.

  “I ran a search on you, you know. I like knowing I can trust the people to whom I’ve bared my soul.” Her voice was distant and stiff.

  Shit. Of course she had. “You didn’t find much,” he said with assurance. “My firm is paid well to keep personal information out of the news when it’s of no importance to anyone but the people involved.”

  “Yeah, if you’re the Chen Ling Walker from LA, your firm did a good job,” she said with a wry intonation that he deserved. “I don’t want to pry into your family situation, but it would be good to know why a CEO is working a deputy’s job. Is that part of your business?”

  Shit, he was bad at explaining, and she had every right to be ticked at his keeping secrets when she was an open book.

  “I took time off,” he said, weighing his words. “My father started the company. He performed fraud investigations, had an accounting and a criminal justice degree. He disappeared on a case eighteen years ago. At the time, his office was ransacked. The files he was working on were destroyed, the computer hard drives smashed. Back then, cloud computing wasn’t easily available. Even flash drives were pretty high-tech, so he backed up his files on paper. Recent files, he carried on memory sticks, which he carried with him. Needless to say, none of the files were found.”

  She uttered a sympathetic noise and patted his thigh—the sore one. If she thought that would make him feel better, she was mistaken. He got hard. Therapists had told him that it was far easier to get physical than explore the emotion. More pleasant, too.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. You don’t have to talk about it if it’s painful.”

  Yeah, this itch could become a real pain if he didn’t satisfy it—especially sinc
e he wasn’t satisfying it with any more lunatics. Walker forced his dirty mind back to a subject guaranteed to cure what ailed him. “The only clue we had was a phone call. Dad called my mother every night that he was away. The last one came from Hillvale. He was staying at the lodge. The police questioned everyone in the blamed town. You know enough to understand how far they got.”

  “Even the Kennedys didn’t cooperate?” she asked in surprise.

  Recalling his research on his father’s disappearance eased the tightness in his pants. “Eighteen years ago, Kurt and Monty were kids in school. Carmel had just lost her husband to a sudden illness. She was trying to cope with his estate and the business and claimed to know nothing about the guests. They verified my father had checked in. His car wasn’t there. They found it in San Francisco a week later.”

  “You think the skeleton belongs to your father,” she said in horror.

  “Almost certain. Just waiting for the tests.” He could feel her stare nailing him, but he kept his eyes on the road.

  “Was Val there then? Did she wail his fate?”

  He was relieved she skipped over the sympathies and platitudes. He could handle no-nonsense, practical questions, even if they were about insane subjects. “As far as I’m aware, Val didn’t arrive in Hillvale until about five years ago. We’re still trying to find out who lived in Hillvale back then—Juan did, he’s lived here all his life, but he swore he knew nothing.”

  “And now he’s dead. That’s suspicious,” she said, as if thinking to herself. “All I know is that Mariah, Tullah, Amber, and Dinah arrived over the last few years, well after your father’s disappearance, but the Kennedys, including Carmel’s brother, have been here forever. I haven’t got further than that. The older people keep to themselves and don’t talk to me much. Cass really is your ticket, isn’t she?” She slumped lower in the seat as they drove into town.

  “Yeah. I’ve got the cops and my firm working on her, but she’s disappeared into thin air. We don’t even know how she gets off the mountain.” He pulled into a run-down shopping center. “Clinic is here. They’re expecting you, but I’ll go in and show them my badge so they don’t ask for details. Then while they’re drawing blood, I’ll run over to the taco shop and pick up food.” He nodded at the restaurant.