“Well, it’s nice to be worried about.”
Felicity didn’t say anything and I couldn’t read her eyes behind the reflection of the moon in her glasses.
“You ready for week two?” I asked her.
“Oh, hell yeah.”
“I do have one request for when I arrive at the office tomorrow,” I said.
One eyebrow arched above her glasses. “What’s that?” she asked suspiciously.
“I’d like some more of those apple bakes.”
“Would you, indeed?”
“Any kind of baked goods will do, actually.”
She nodded slowly. “Okay, I think I can manage that.”
I grinned. “We’re going to make a great team.” I raised my bottle. “Here’s to many cases in the future.”
Felicity smiled. “I’ll drink to that.” She clinked her bottle against mine and we drank our beers while looking up at the bright stars.
Maybe this sleepy town wasn’t so bad after all.
Buried Memory
Harbinger P.I. SERIES Book Two
1
It was a bright, hot summer morning, and as I parked my Land Rover behind the building that housed my office, I felt some of the day’s warmth touch my soul. It felt good to be alive. Almost two weeks had passed since I’d moved to Dearmont, Maine, from Chicago, and I felt like I was settling in here. I wouldn’t say that the small town felt like home, but I was getting to know my way around and some of the residents even spoke to me on the street. Their conversation was usually limited to a “Good morning” or “How are you today?” but it was more of a verbal exchange than I’d ever had with any of my neighbors in Chicago.
The good folk of Dearmont seemed to accept that a P.I.—Preternatural Investigator— had hung out a shingle on Main Street next to the donut shop.
In fact, Felicity had called me from the office this morning to tell me that I had a client. Since the changeling case at the Robinson place two weeks ago, my workload had dried up, making me once again re-evaluate the supernatural potential of Dearmont. I’d come here thinking that it might be a dead zone for cases involving the weird and the strange but the discovery of two changelings and two werewolves had changed my mind.
But since then, there had been no cases to occupy my time. So, I’d been arriving late at the office every morning, which was why I’d been at home beating the hell out of the training dummies in my basement at nine-thirty this morning when Felicity had called to say we had a new client and I needed to come in.
So here I was, freshly-showered and full of anticipation at the thought of a shiny new case.
I walked a short distance along Main Street to the door that had HARBINGER, P.I. printed on its frosted glass panel and went through, ascending the narrow stairs to my office. The smell of warm cinnamon drifted out of Felicity’s office, making my stomach growl. I hadn’t eaten yet today, and I knew that whatever Felicity had baked, it would taste just as good as it smelled.
I entered her office. “Good morning,”
Felicity was dressed in black slacks, a white top, and black boots. Her dark hair was swept back into a ponytail, and dark-rimmed glasses framed her brown eyes. She was standing by the coffee machine, pouring the contents of the pot into two mugs. Beside the mugs, two cinnamon rolls sat on a small, white plate.
“You sound cheery,” she said, adding cream to the coffees.
“Any reason I shouldn’t?” I asked.
“No, it’s just that I haven’t seen you this animated in a while, especially in the morning.”
“We have a case,” I said. “As long as the client is genuine and not some guy who thinks the face of Jesus appeared in his muffin this morning, I’m happy.”
“Oh, this client is genuine,” Felicity said, handing me a mug of coffee and the plate of cinnamon rolls. She took a sip of her own coffee and added, “You may have to be careful how you handle this one, though.”
I wasn’t going to let her dire tone affect my good mood. “Spill,” I said. “What’s the case? Who’s the client?”
She checked the clock on her wall. “She’ll be here in about three minutes, so I’ll leave that as a surprise.”
“Okay,” I said, intrigued. “I’ll be in my office. Bring her in as soon as she gets here.” I took the cinnamon rolls and coffee into my office and placed them on the desk. After sinking into my chair, I bit into one of the rolls. The pastry melted in my mouth and the taste of cinnamon seemed to erupt against my taste buds. Felicity’s baking skills were second to none, as far as I was concerned.
I turned on the computer. The usual news sites came up when I opened the browser, including a site that reported local news for Dearmont and the surrounding area. The headlines on that site were usually concerned with bake sales and coffee mornings, although lately, they’d become focused on the murder of local lumber magnate, George Robinson.
George’s wife had stuck to the story I’d advised her to tell the police; that she’d found her husband dead and had no idea what had happened to him. The police, having no leads or evidence, hadn’t made any arrests. Nor were they likely to, since George’s murderer had been a faerie changeling and I’d killed the creature with my sword, along with its partner in crime.
The office door opened and Felicity entered, carrying a tray of drinks and cinnamon rolls and being followed by the last person I had expected to see in my office.
I stood. “Deputy,” I said, reaching out to shake the hand of Sheriff Cantrell’s redheaded deputy. I knew her name was Amy after hearing Sheriff Cantrell shout it at her, but I would let her tell me how she wanted to be addressed.
“You can call me Amy,” she said, shaking my hand with a strong, warm grip. She was stunningly beautiful, with long red hair, high cheekbones, and green eyes. Her uniform did little to hide the curves of her figure.
“Call me Alec,” I said. “Please, take a seat.” Felicity had been right; this was a surprise.
She sat and spoke a phrase that I’d heard some variant of almost every time a client entered my office: “I’m not really sure why I’m here.”
“Hopefully not to arrest me,” I said. I’d never used that line before; this was the first time I’d had a cop as a client.
She laughed, but there was little humor in it. I could see that she was going through some sort of inner conflict, probably wondering if coming here had been a mistake.
“Take your time, Amy,” I said.
She nodded. “If my dad finds out that I came to you, it’s going to cause a lot of trouble.” Looking at me intently with her green eyes, she said, “I assume that everything we say in this office remains confidential?”
“Everything regarding your case will be kept confidential between me and my team.”
“You have a team?” she asked, looking around at the office. The place was a little bare, with a clock on the wall, a bookshelf full of leather-bound books, and not much else. I really should have made the place a little more welcoming, but I didn’t have enough people walking through the door to make decorating a priority. At least the office smelled of cinnamon, which was nice.
“I have a small team,” I said. “Miss Lake is my assistant and I have other associates I work with if the need arises. Nobody else will know that I’m working for you, including your dad. Is he against you coming here because of the nature of what we investigate? Many people don’t believe that the preternatural world exists.”
She frowned at me for a second and then her face relaxed as a look of understanding crossed her features. “Oh, you don’t know, do you? Of course not, you’re new in town. My dad is the sheriff.”
I almost choked on the coffee I’d been about to swallow. “Sheriff Cantrell?”
Amy nodded.
I tried to wipe the surprised look off my face. Amy looked nothing like her father; he was a big bear of a man with a gruff attitude, where she had delicate features and seemed anything but gruff. She must have inherited her looks from her mother.
“He doesn’t hate you. I told you before, he hates what you are, not you, personally. Please don’t be offended.”
It was kind of hard not to be; being a preternatural investigator was part of who I was, just as being a sheriff was part of who Sheriff Cantrell was. So if someone hated preternatural investigators, I was going to take offense. I didn’t tell Amy that, though, because I didn’t want to erect any barriers between us. Despite the fact that she was related to Sheriff Cantrell, there was something about her that I liked. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it went beyond her fiery hair and bountiful curves. That sounded crazy even to me; this was only the second time I’d met Amy, so it was way too early for me to say whether I liked her or not. But there it was.
“I can assure you that Sheriff Cantrell won’t hear about this meeting from me or my team,” I said. “So, what can I do for you?”
“I’d like your opinion on something,” she said. “Something strange has been happening at North Cemetery. Last week, Dennis Jackson, the cemetery manger, called us and said that someone had been tampering with the graves. I went to check it out and found some tombstones that had been pushed over and a few mounds in the earth that the manager swore hadn’t been there the day before. I told Dennis that it was probably teenagers climbing over the fence at night and making a nuisance of themselves and said I’d get a car to drive past during the nightly patrol. That seemed to placate him, but he called me again two days later, shouting and ranting about grave robbers. I drove over there and what I found shocked me.”
She took a folded white envelope from her uniform pocket and slid it across the desk to me. I opened it and removed three photographs, laying them on the desk in front of me. When I saw what was on them, I understood why Amy had come to me for help. This wasn’t a simple matter of kids fooling around in the cemetery at night, or even grave robbers.
The photos showed graves that had been disturbed. The earth in front of the tombstones had been churned up and pushed aside, as if the dead residents of the graves had crawled out of their coffins and tunneled up to the surface to escape their final resting place. And sure enough, trails of dirt led from the disturbed graves to bodies lying a few feet away. The bodies were face down and looked as if they had crawled as far as they could before collapsing from exhaustion. But these bodies weren’t exhausted; they were dead.
There were two men and a woman. The men wore dark suits; the woman, a dress that had once been bright red but had faded and was covered in clumps of dark earth.
“I know it sounds crazy,” Amy said, “but those people crawled out of their graves. The men are Ben White and Ethan Jones. Ben has been dead a little over a year now, and Ethan died last summer. The woman in the red dress is my mother, Mary Cantrell. When we buried her last year, I never thought I’d see her again, but there she was, lying on the grass in the dress she was buried in.” Her green eyes filled with tears. I handed her the box of Kleenex I kept in my top drawer.
Keeping my voice gentle, I asked, “What did you do with the bodies?”
She seemed taken aback by the question, as if the answer was obvious and I was a fool for asking it. “We put them back into the ground, of course. Dennis got two of his gravediggers to dig up the graves properly and put the bodies back in their coffins.”
“When they brought the coffins up out of the ground, what were they like?” I asked. “Were they damaged?”
Amy nodded, her eyes on the photos. “The lids were smashed, as if those poor people had pounded on them to get out.” She looked at me and I could see fear and confusion in her eyes. “I’ve hardly slept since those graves were filled in. I lie awake at night thinking of my mother and wondering how she … came back to life. Did she think of my dad and me when she was digging her way out of her grave? Was she trying to reach us? She must have felt so lost and alone….” She broke down, unable to stop the flow of tears.
Felicity went over to Amy and put a comforting hand on her shoulder.
Amy soon regained her composure, her professional training probably helping her hide her emotions, push them away until later. “I’m fine,” she said to no one in particular as she dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. Felicity went back to her seat.
“You knew this was no ordinary police case,” I said. “Did you tell the sheriff about what you found at the graveyard?”
“No, I couldn’t submit a report about the dead climbing out of their graves. And I couldn’t tell my dad that one of them was his wife; it would devastate him. He took her death very badly last year and the emotional wounds still haven’t healed. That’s why he hates what you do for a living, because of the way my mom died.”
I leaned forward. “Do you want to share that with us? It might be important.”
Amy nodded and said, “My mom was killed by a preternatural investigator.”
2
“An investigator?” I asked. “Are you sure?” If Mary Cantrell had been killed by a P.I., then she must have been some kind of monster or she was a threat to humans in some way. The rules and regulations followed by P.I.s were clear and had been handed down with barely any change to their wording since the seventeenth century; we were only allowed to kill preternatural beings or humans that were using magic or supernatural forces to harm others.
It was a rule I had technically broken when I’d locked Tunnock in a room with two werewolves, but if I was ever hauled up before the Society and questioned about it, I could claim self-defense, the only other circumstance in which an investigator was allowed to use lethal force.
So why had Amy’s mother been killed by a P.I., and did that have anything to do with why she was now crawling out of her grave?
“It was the investigator who worked here before you,” Amy said. “Sherry Westlake.”
I didn’t say anything, but I looked over at Felicity and raised a questioning eyebrow. She gave a slight shrug. Like me, she had obviously thought that I was the first P.I. in Dearmont, that this was the first office the Society of Shadows had opened in the small town. That was evidently not the case.
“Did Sherry Westlake have an office here, in this building?” I asked Amy.
She nodded and looked from me to Felicity and back again with narrowed eyes. “Yes, but you must know that, since you’re her replacement.”
I nodded noncommittally. “Did she leave town after she … after your mother died?” I asked.
Amy nodded again. “Sherry Westlake disappeared that night.”
I sat back and took a much-needed drink of coffee. I’d thought that the Society had set up an office here in Dearmont to punish me for what happened in Paris, when I’d allowed a satori —a powerful mind-controlling creature—to escape the Society’s clutches. I’d known that there were corrupt elements in the Society and had decided that the satori was too powerful a creature to fall into the wrong hands. When I was kicked out of my Chicago office and sent to Dearmont, I’d had no idea there’d been an investigator here before me.
“Tell us what happened, Amy,” I said. “Take your time.”
She nodded and took a deep breath. “Before I tell you what happened to my mom, I need you to know that she was a great mother to my brother, Mike, and me. We had a great childhood and she loved us very much. Nothing bad happened until a couple of years ago after Mike moved to New York and I got my own place in town.” She sighed. “What I’m trying to say is that all the crazy stuff wouldn’t have happened if either my brother or I were still at home. Sometimes, I blame myself for that. If I’d been there for her, she’d still be alive today.”
I took another sip of coffee but kept quiet, letting Amy tell the story in her own time.
“Family was everything to my mom,” she said after a moment. “She was an orphan and spent a lot of her childhood in foster homes and institutions, so when she met my dad and they had Mike and me, she finally got the family
she’d always wanted but never had. She doted on all of us and went out of her way to make sure we were happy. So when we grew up and left home, it left a void in her life. Mike was busy with his job in New York and I was working all kinds of unsociable shifts at the station. I still went to my parents’ house for Sunday lunch if I wasn’t working, but it wasn’t enough for Mom. We’d been her whole life and now we were distant, I guess. She still had Dad, of course, but he was busy being the sheriff, so she spent a lot of time home alone. All parents go through a period of adjustment when their kids leave home, but it affected her more than most.”
Amy picked up her coffee and sipped at it before continuing. I wondered if she would rather be drinking something stronger. It was obvious by the look in her eyes that the story she was telling was one that haunted her.
“Mom finally found something to occupy her time,” she said. “She began attending a church over in Clara. That’s a small town a few miles east of here. Well, it isn’t really a town, just the church and a few houses, really. My mom used to drive over there a couple days a week as well as every Sunday, so the Sunday lunches that had been a family thing became just me and Dad eating together. Mom would eat her lunch with the other members of the church and wouldn’t return home until the evening. That’s what hurt the most, I guess; where family had been everything to Mom, the church was now her whole life, and became more important to her than Sunday lunch with me and Dad.”
“How did your dad react to that?” I asked. From what I’d seen of Sheriff John Cantrell, I was guessing that his reaction wouldn’t be too pleasant. He was a man who spoke his mind and had a short fuse. Although, maybe he’d only become like that after the death of his wife.
“He didn’t say much about it at first. He knew Mom was having a tough time so he kept quiet. We began having Sunday lunch at my house because Mom’s empty chair at the dining table at home was a constant reminder of her absence. Eventually, when Mom began driving over to Clara at night as well as going there in the daytime, Dad confronted her and asked her what was so great about the church that she was never at home anymore. She told him that he wouldn’t understand and ignored his pleas to spend some time with her family.” She paused to drink more coffee.
The Harbinger PI Box Set Page 16
