Crook of the Dead (The Adventures of Lydia Trinket Book 3)

by Jen Rasmussen

  I managed to get from Charlie’s tirade that he’d borrowed Norbert’s computer the night before, because his own had some sort of problem. He’d found the file on Madeline. He’d put the rest of it together from there. After stewing all day (stewing was always an important part of Charlie’s process), he’d gone home to confront Norbert, who threw me under the bus by confessing everything. Not that I blamed him.

  “Charlie, I’m sure you see this as a betrayal—” I began as soon as I could get a word in.

  “See it as a betrayal? See it? Like this is just my skewed perception?”

  “No, that’s not what I—”

  “We should not even be having this conversation!” He shouted, and I resisted the temptation to point out that his screaming at me without letting me talk hardly qualified as a conversation.

  “You, of all people,” Charlie went on. “I should be able to trust you not to—”

  “Not to what?” I interrupted. “Charlie, he’s not Nat.”

  “And he’s not going to be!”

  “No, he isn’t! He isn’t—”

  “Just stop. I told you last time, when you let that ghost or witch or whatever she was into my house.”

  “I didn’t let—”

  “I told you you’d never see Warren again if you put him in danger like that another time.”

  “Warren is not in danger.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Charlie…” I drifted off, I guess just assuming he’d interrupt me again, but apparently his rage was spent.

  He crossed his arms, his eyes cold, and said, “Charlie what? What could you possibly have to say to defend this?”

  “YOU DIDN’T SEE HER!” I yelled it loud enough for Wulf to let out another whine from his safe spot in the other room. Funny, I didn’t even realize that was what I was going to say, until it came out with such violence.

  “You didn’t see her,” I repeated. “Birds had pecked and eaten their way to her soul. She had no skin. No face. No eyes. Her hair was in the fucking dumpster!”

  He started to say something, but it was my turn to interrupt now.

  “And when they did get to her soul,” I said over him, “they gave it to motherfucking Satan, Charlie!”

  I felt sick even saying the name. I’d never been especially religious, but you didn’t work in my line of business without believing in the afterlife, and powers bigger than those we can explain. Hell, demons, Lucifer. These things—even the possibility of them—terrified me.

  If Amias really had stolen Bella Traven’s soul and sent it to Hell, could it ever be recovered?

  And now all signs pointed to his doing the same thing on a large scale. How many souls?

  “We can’t find out,” I said out loud.

  Charlie was momentarily confused out of his rancor. “What?”

  “I can’t. I can’t let this happen,” I said. “Whatever the cost, Charlie. I’m sorry.”

  When Charlie finally answered, he didn’t sound angry anymore, or even disappointed. A little tired, maybe, but apart from that, his voice was completely flat and expressionless. “The cost is your family. I’ll come up with a story for Warren. Stay away from us.”

  He turned and left. I couldn’t think of any words that would stop him, or even ease his going.

  As usual, he was right. It was a betrayal. I was the only person who could really understand what he’d gone through with Nat, and he should have been able to trust me.

  But also as usual, I was right, too.

  With Charlie and I, it always seemed to come down to a choice between saving strangers and protecting the people closest to me. Charlie had a very strong and clear opinion as to where a decent person’s loyalty should lie, but I tended toward a triage approach, where the ones who needed my help the most got it. My family was rarely in any real or immediate danger, whereas the strangers almost always were.

  And this time? I had no idea how many strangers we were talking about. And I could imagine no greater peril.

  I told myself over and over again that it would be okay, somehow. It had to be. Charlie and Warren and Norbert were the only people I had that really felt like family. And this was hardly the first fight Charlie and I had had about my job. We always made up in the end.

  Still. A badly mutilated body left practically at my doorstep. An angry devil. A ginormous flock of killer birds. And now one really, really pissed off brother-in-law.

  All in all, it didn’t seem like a bad time to get out of town.

  “Fucksake. It doesn’t matter whether you’re human or not, all men are assholes when they’re lost.”

  “I am not lost.”

  “Oh? So remind me again why we’re driving down this godforsaken road in the middle of nowhere, with no clear aim?”

  “We have an aim.”

  “We don’t appear to know where to go to achieve it, though. Hence the expression lost.”

  “You didn’t expect that the land would have changed a bit in the last two hundred and fifty years?”

  It was our third day driving around the vicinity of Grey Lady Lake, New Hampshire, and the nearby town of Lady’s Slipper. I’d been fine on day one, admiring the breathtaking beauty of New England in the fall, glad to be at least physically away from my problems at home, wondering whether the lake was named after Lady Grey tea or some local legend. Lady’s Slipper was cute, and had a great diner besides. My teasing was good-natured when Phineas couldn’t seem to find what he was looking for.

  Phineas, true to his nature, stayed upbeat for longer. He made it at least halfway into day two.

  By day three, even Wulf was using foul language. You could tell by the way he glared and flopped himself down in the back seat that his sighs were the dog version of I hate you fucking people.

  The landscape was hilly, the roads narrow, ripe conditions for car sickness. And the weather had taken a rainy turn, dulling the foliage and making it hard to see very far.

  Now Phineas was driving my car down the same winding stretch of road for the fourth time. He leaned over the steering wheel to peer out into the mist, and snapped at anyone who asked a simple question or made a perfectly innocent observation.

  Finally he saw something that interested him, although I couldn’t imagine what it was. He pulled onto the narrow shoulder, half off the road, my car leaning down into the woods. Wulf started scratching at the door before the car was even fully stopped. Phineas got out without a word to walk him. I pulled up my hood and followed.

  The woods were overgrown, but at least there wasn’t a tall wire fence and a red sign telling us to keep out, like the bit of someone’s private property we’d hiked through the day before. I pushed my way through in the direction of the noise my big lumbering companions were making.

  Phineas saw me approaching and said, “Is it hunting season? I suppose we should be wearing brighter clothes.”

  He stopped and looked around. Then his eyes got sharper. He moved past me, handing me Wulf’s leash as he went by. I turned to see him crouching beside a big stone, half buried in the undergrowth.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  He gestured for me to come forward and I bent to look at the stone. There was something carved in it, something worn and very old. I couldn’t even make out what. “What is that?”

  “It’s a T and an F. I knew this was the right road, but I guess it’s shifted a bit since my day.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Traven Farm,” Phineas said. “Not the most creative name, but it got the job done. This is an old marker. It’s the edge of the property. Or was. Maybe they sold some of it off, I don’t know.”

  We left the car where it was, and made our way as best we could through the woods. It was raining harder now, and at one point I slipped and fell. Now in addition to being hungry and cranky, my wrist hurt, and my jeans were muddy. It wasn’t my favorite hike I ever took.

  But at least it was short. The woods started sloping downhill, then su
ddenly disappeared, and we found ourselves only maybe a quarter mile from the lake, which looked flat and drab in the rain. A half-destroyed farmhouse was between us and it.

  Wulf’s tail went up, and he began sniffing with much more purpose than he’d shown in the woods.

  “Is this the place?” I asked.

  Phineas was standing still, staring at it. He nodded.

  “Is it haunted?”

  Wulf sure seemed to think it was. He was straining and tugging at the leash. I started walking forward behind him.

  Phineas didn’t move or answer for a minute or so. Finally he caught up with me, closer to the house. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it was,” was all he said.

  I looked at him. He didn’t seem crabby anymore. But he didn’t seem like himself, either. His expression was downright wistful.

  Lydia, you idiot. He spent time here. With friends. With Mercy Tanner. This place was alive when he saw it last.

  “Good memories?” I asked.

  He looked down at me, a little startled, then one side of his mouth turned up in the smallest of smiles. “Some good, some bad.”

  I swallowed, decided not to ask, then asked anyway. “Is this the last place you saw her?”

  Phineas didn’t ask who I meant. “No. But it was the first.”

  “That’s right. You told me before that you met her here.”

  He nodded. “It was a safe haven for witches. The house was huge, as you can see, and there were two guest houses, besides. Even the stable could provide shelter in a pinch. Sometimes they had twenty or more people staying here. Not just women, but mostly.”

  “And you? What were you doing here?” Besides picking up hot, deceitful Colonial witches, that is.

  “Trying to flush out Amias. I knew he was in the area, and the Travens did their best to help me.”

  “With spells?”

  “That, and less glamorous things. Listening for rumors, gathering what information they could. A lot of travelers came through here who were sensitive to the presence of people like Amias. So I’d visit from time to time.”

  The house, which might once have been white, was blackened with fire damage and partly collapsed. It didn’t seem safe to go inside, but we walked around the perimeter, Wulf sniffing furiously.

  “So was this just like a hotel for witches, or was it kind of like a school, too?” I asked. “Did the Traven sisters teach them magic and spells and whatnot?” I was imagining three women like Granny, an idea that made me smile.

  “Sometimes. Or sometimes the guests taught the Travens some things. The Tanners, for example, were quite a clan for magic. Mercy’s mother and brother were also here at one point.”

  “At one point? They didn’t stay?”

  “Her brother got married, and her mother died. Mercy was pretty young, only fifteen or sixteen when they came here, I think.”

  “Please tell me she wasn’t still sixteen when you…” I let the sentence hang.

  Phineas smiled, still without his usual cheer. “She was twenty-four when I met her, a spinster by the standards of the day. She intended to stay here forever, I think, before Amias got to her. She had no interest in marriage.” He shrugged. “Or so she said.”

  I wondered just how that subject had come up, and how much of a disappointment that lack of interest had been to him. This was more than he’d ever opened up to me about Mercy before, and I wanted to encourage him to go on. “She liked it here that much?” I prompted.

  “The Travens more-or-less adopted her after her mother passed. Rebecca especially. Bella was always distracted by something. Usually a man. And Henrietta was more like an explorer, or a scientist, even. Traveling to find new herbs and spells and ideas. Coming home all bedraggled, wearing strange clothes.” He chuckled, lost in his memory. “But Rebecca was serious, quiet. I don’t think anyone was really close to her except her sisters and Mercy. Mercy was like her daughter.”

  “Then Rebecca must have been pretty heartbroken, when Mercy did what she did.”

  “It was Rebecca who broke it to me that Mercy had gone willingly. Amias had nearly killed me, and it took me a while to recover. When I did, and Mercy was gone, I thought he’d taken her. Killed her, even. I was beside myself.”

  “I imagine you were just as beside yourself when you found out the truth. How did Rebecca know?”

  “Mercy sent her a letter.”

  “I hope it said she was sorry.”

  “She apologized, yes. But only to Rebecca.”

  My heart sank for him, and I wished Mercy Tanner was still alive, just so I could punch her in the face. Our best guess was that Amias had murdered her. Even knowing what I did about Amias’s methods, I was almost glad.

  I blame the distraction of my anger for what I almost blurted out. “Do you think—” I cut myself off, but it was too late.

  “That she was using me the whole time? Working for Amias and plotting to seduce me from the start?”

  “No, that’s not what I…” But of course it was, and he knew it.

  “It’s okay. It’s not like I haven’t spent hours pondering that same question.” He sighed. “I honestly don’t think so. But it doesn’t really matter, does it? It was a lie. Whether I knew it. Whether she knew it. It was never real.”

  We kept walking, and I busied myself with looking around, trying to pretend the silence wasn’t awkward. With the grass so slippery from the rain, at least there was a lot of opportunity for looking down, pretending to watch my step.

  I wondered what Phineas expected to find. I couldn’t see any way for us to figure out where people who had left hundreds of years ago had gone. It’s not like they would have left a note.

  The place didn’t feel haunted to me. What it did feel was a little bit like Bristol: like it was steeped in magic. I’d never felt that anywhere else, and I’d been in Bristol many times before I came to identify it. I can’t really put it into words. It’s a sense of anticipation, maybe. Like anything is possible in that place. And like maybe things are happening right at that moment, all around you, that you can neither see nor understand.

  We walked around the entire house and found nothing, other than a few scattered crows who seemed to have nothing to say to Phineas. We moved on to the shore of the lake, where we found more nothing, unless you want to count weeds and goose poop.

  But then the hair on my arms stood up, and I shivered. (Although the latter may have been as much from being soaked as anything else.) I felt suddenly that the house was watching me, somehow. Not a person inside the house, but the actual house itself.

  A silly thought, no doubt, but still. I didn’t like having my back to it. So I turned around.

  The burned-out ruin was gone.

  In its place was a neat white house, very big but not pretentious, with hunter green shutters, and the door beyond the wraparound porch painted the same color.

  Phineas heard my gasp and turned too. He said something under his breath that I couldn’t catch, but I didn’t get a chance to ask what.

  Instead a voice, clear and feminine and stern, came from behind us. Even though we’d just been facing almost that exact direction, and there hadn’t been anybody there.

  “I almost didn’t recognize you,” it said.

  None of the phantasms I’d met previously—maybe nobody at all I’d met previously—had prepared me for Rebecca Traven. Phineas trusted her, so I didn’t doubt (much) that she was one of the good guys. But she was, in a word, scary.

  Not evil-witch scary, like Madeline Underwood. More like strict-teacher scary, with a dash of monster-who-might-eat-you scary. I found myself genuinely afraid of saying or doing something she would disapprove of.

  It was her eyes. They were the trademark gold of a phantasm, but a very pale version of it. Something about her stare reminded me of a wolf’s.

  When we met her outside, I thought I saw Phineas start to lean in for a hug, but Rebecca held out a stiff hand to shake. Then she looked at me, and I felt like I was bein
g measured. And found wanting.

  To Phineas she said, without taking her eyes off me, “Another human? I would’ve thought you’d have learned your lesson.”

  “Are you telling me you don’t take in humans anymore?” Phineas asked.

  Rebecca let out a short, flinty sound that must have been her laugh. Without saying more, she led us into the house.

  It was an enormous, sprawling warren of a place, but I didn’t see anybody else there. There didn’t seem to be anything electric—even the stove burned wood—and the furniture was almost entirely colonial. The rooms were dim on such a cloudy day. The kitchen had the most windows, so that was where we wound up.

  I sat on a stool at the stone counter, and studied Rebecca over the top of a mug of hot chocolate while she talked to Phineas. He’d already given her the basics on why we were there. Since I didn’t have any snacks to go with the drink, Wulf saw no reason to stay awake, and was already snoring at my feet.

  “It’s not unlike the sanctuary spell Amias used in—where did you say it was?” Rebecca was saying.

  “Bristol,” said Phineas. “In the Carolinas.”

  The Carolinas? I felt like I’d stepped back in time when I’d come through the door. The place was so weird, I honestly couldn’t be sure I hadn’t.

  “The Carolinas? Where they found Bella?”

  “Not exactly, but near there. Rebecca, Lydia is actually the one who found Bella’s body.”

  I wished he hadn’t told her. I tried not to squirm under that pale stare. But she didn’t ask any questions, only picked up the thread of what she’d been saying about the sanctuary spell.

  “Well, the illusion around the farm is woven in a similar way. It’s for our protection. Only those I choose to let through it can see what’s really here.”

  “You haven’t lost your touch then, I guess,” Phineas said. He smiled at me. “Probably the most talented witch I’ve ever met, Rebecca. Even better than Amias with magic.”

  Rebecca didn’t say anything modest in reply. “And so you’re here because of Amias.”

  “What happened to Bella?” Phineas asked. “Where’s Henrietta?”