Danica came to a small clearing and stood there, gazing around her. Again, the place looked as if no one had visited it in a hundred years.
“Are you here?” she called out softly, but only the sound of the wind in the pines came back to her.
Then she heard the crunch of dead pine needles and turned quickly, heart pounding.
Two almond-shaped dark eyes surveyed her solemnly. The doe blinked once at Danica, then turned and moved quite calmly back into the forest, clearly not too startled by the stranger she’d just encountered.
So it was deer that had made the tracks through the trees. Danica’s heart sank at that realization, even while she wanted to scold herself for thinking there could be any other explanation. She still could have completely imagined the stranger, after all. Angela sure hadn’t been able to detect even the slightest trace of his presence.
Just go back to the cabin, she thought. Read, or watch TV. Fix something to eat. He didn’t even show up last night until after you went to bed.
So she did just that. Television seemed too intrusive, so she got out her phone and the portable Bluetooth speaker she’d brought along, and turned on some music. Not the retro metal that always made Caitlin wince, but a playlist she’d put together specifically for her time in the woods — old-style country, Johnny Cash and Patsy Cline, and acoustic guitar, and some newer stuff that she’d thought would blend, like the Civil Wars and Zac Brown. It hadn’t taken that much time to throw the playlist together, once Danica had told her mother of her intention to come here.
Out of respect for her surroundings, she kept the volume down, but the music was still enough to drown out the echoing silence of the woods, the sense that she was very alone out here.
Her gaze strayed to the satellite phone where it sat on the dining room table, and she relaxed a little. That phone was her lifeline, should she need it.
She ate frozen linguini and salad, and even popped open one of the bottles of wine. Just for a single glass, and then she stuck the cork back in it and returned the bottle to the kitchen. It helped, though. Took the edge off, which was exactly what she needed.
After she was done with dinner, though, and had washed her plate and wine glass and put them away, she realized she didn’t feel like reading, or watching TV. She wanted…what?
To solve the mystery.
Two wooden benches sat on the front porch. The weather was getting a little chilly for lingering out there after nightfall, but she’d brought a jacket, and she could wrap one of the spare blankets from the linen closet around herself.
Besides, she couldn’t think of anything better to do.
She retrieved her jacket from where she’d hung it up in the coat closet, then got the first blanket that came to hand, a heavy wine-colored cotton thing. After draping it over one arm, she headed out to the porch, although this time she didn’t bother to lock the door to the cabin.
For all she knew, she’d need to beat a hasty retreat.
By then, full night had fallen. The moon hadn’t come up yet, and so all was utter darkness, except for the broad star-spangled expanse of the heavens above her, the glittering belt of the Milky Way stretching from one end of the sky to the other. With the coming of night, the temperatures had dropped precipitously from their mild low seventies of the daylight hours, and Danica was glad of the blanket she’d brought with her. She wrapped it around herself now, thinking it was a good thing her parents had no idea of what she was up to at the moment. They’d probably start shopping for another shrink, stat.
Maybe it was crazy to be sitting out here, waiting for him to come back. Still, there was something to be said for waiting openly, looking straight into the darkness. She’d show him that she wasn’t afraid.
And if it turned out he really was a lost re-enactor, and had decided to return tonight to apologize for trespassing, well…he was awfully good-looking.
She thought she saw movement in the darkness, and she stiffened, reaching out for the walking stick she’d brought with her. Telling her pounding heart that it was probably just the deer coming back didn’t seem to do much good.
Whatever was moving out there was coming straight for her.
As it approached, drawing nearer to the little pool of yellow light cast by the fixture next to the front door, she saw that it was him.
Mouth dry, she stood, blanket falling to the bench behind her. He paused at the bottom step and stared up at her.
God, he really was gorgeous. The light was better here, so she could see that his eyes under the straight, dark brows were deep blue, his lashes long. A faint trace of dark stubble couldn’t hide the strong lines of his jaw, or the curve of his lips.
“Who — who are you?” Danica asked, managing to find her voice. That wasn’t so bad. She hardly sounded nervous at all.
He didn’t answer, but only continued to look up at her. Now she could see more details of his clothing — the suspenders under the long frock coat, the shirt thinly striped in black and blue, the high black boots that seemed to mold themselves to his muscled calves. The toes of those boots were dusty, as was the hem of his coat. A gold chain disappeared into one of his pants pockets. A watch, she supposed.
Everything item of his clothing seemed perfect in every detail, but she knew re-enactors tended to be fanatical about their costumes. He probably should have been wearing a hat, and a waistcoat and a cravat or something. She didn’t mind that he didn’t have a hat; this way, she could see how his wavy dark hair flowed back from his fine brow.
“Are you lost?” she asked. Surely that had to be the logical explanation. But who would get lost in the exact same place two nights in a row?
At that question, his eyes widened. Then his gaze seemed to shift, as if he was looking at something over his right shoulder, toward the door of the cabin. Unnerved, Danica glanced in that direction as well, but she saw nothing except a few moths fluttering around the porch light.
Even as she looked back toward him, he staggered backward, one hand going to his chest. Dark blood began to flow down the front of his striped shirt.
Danica let out a gasp and began to run down the steps toward him. His despairing eyes caught hers, and he shook his head. As he lifted his hand from his shirt, she could see the hole there.
A bullet wound.
And then he was gone.
4
So he was a ghost. There couldn’t be any other explanation.
Danica sat at the dining room table, shaking, a glass of water next to her. When she’d run back into the house, she’d thought about pouring herself some more wine. But that was a stupid idea. She needed her wits about her — what was left of them, anyway.
Someone had shot him. One of her long-ago Wilcox ancestors? From what she’d heard through the family grapevine, they did sound as if they were hard men, used to getting their own way and not worrying too much about any civilian laws they might break to get ahead. Danica figured she could be objective about those family members when examining the problem, since that was all so very long ago. It was entirely possible that one of the Wilcox relatives wouldn’t scruple at shooting someone in the chest, if the killing was something that turned out to be in their best interests. But why shoot the man at all? Couldn’t they have used a more witchy way to get rid of him?
Maybe, she thought. Or maybe they decided that shooting him was easier, and a lot less conspicuous. Back in the day, Flagstaff had been a pretty wild frontier town. Would anyone have noticed an extra grave out in Boot Hill?
If Flagstaff had had a Boot Hill. She didn’t know.
There was a whole hell of a lot she didn’t know.
Now wasn’t the time to focus on her shortcomings, though. She needed to think about this logically. According to everything she’d read, ghosts tended to haunt the places where they’d met their end, which meant the stranger must have been killed here at the cabin, or at least somewhere on its grounds. No wonder he was hanging around.
As to why…she couldn’t
begin to guess. Shooting someone that gorgeous seemed like an awful waste to her, but of course she doubted her Wilcox ancestors — Jeremiah and his brothers — were too concerned with such niceties.
If it had even been them at all. She supposed someone else could have been lurking around the Wilcox homestead and shooting trespassers or whatever, but that didn’t seem very likely. Then again…when did they abandon this cabin and move to their fancier houses in town? She thought it was sometime in the 1880s. Family history had never interested her that much, except maybe the all-important tracking of how closely everyone in the clan was related to one another, and who was okay to marry and who wasn’t. That whole cousins thing could get a little weird, which was why a lot of Wilcoxes married civilians. Such arrangements came with their own set of problems, but at least you didn’t have to worry about inbreeding.
Not that even any of her distant, and therefore “safe,” cousins had seemed that interesting to her. She’d hoped maybe she could meet someone at school. And then, when the world seemed to open up after the curse was broken, she’d thought she might meet someone in the McAllister clan the way her sister had. Problem was, she hadn’t found any of the available McAllisters all that interesting, either.
Anyway, Danica realized that her knowledge of what the Wilcoxes had been up to back in the day was definitely sketchy. She could fix that, though. Tomorrow she could go into town, go to the historical society, dig through a few records.
And…what? If some random guy had really been gunned down on the Wilcoxes’ old homestead, she kind of doubted there’d be an official account of the crime. She didn’t know a lot, but she did know that no Wilcox had ever spent any time in jail. Which meant this murder — if it really turned out to be a murder — had been covered up.
Still, she might as well try.
What else did she have to do with herself?
* * *
The trip to the historical society did yield a few tidbits, including the information that the Wilcoxes had established their homestead in 1877, long before Arizona was a state and before the railroad even got to Flagstaff, but then moved into a series of five houses built on adjoining lots on Leroux Street in 1883. They’d begun as sheep ranchers, but later expanded into cattle ranching and lumber. And, unlike a lot of people in the boom and bust Wild West of the late 1800s, they’d always prospered, had always seemed to know when to invest and when to divest.
Danica thought that sounded as if they’d had someone like her cousin Lucas around, someone whose magical talent was luck, or at least a shrewd understanding of the financial markets. But interesting as that one piece of information might be, it didn’t get her any closer to discovering the identity of the man she’d seen.
He didn’t look like a Wilcox. True, he was tall and dark-haired, but his eyes were blue. She’d seen the old portrait of the original settlers, because almost every Wilcox household had a reproduction of it. The four Wilcox brothers, three of them with their wives — obviously, Jeremiah had been forced to perpetual widower state by the curse at that point — and their sister Emma with her husband. All of the Wilcoxes had black hair and piercing dark eyes. Not one set of baby blues among them. And the dead man wasn’t Emma’s husband, either, because he’d also had dark hair and dark eyes, if not quite as jet-black as those of the Wilcox siblings.
If only she could travel back in time, could see exactly what had happened. Now, that would be a useful talent.
She’d been walking back to her SUV when that notion struck her, and she stopped dead in the parking lot of the historical society, one hand clutching the strap of her purse.
What if…?
No, that was ridiculous. Sure, she could give herself an extra five minutes here and there, but that was only a few minutes, not more than a hundred years. Time travel in that sense didn’t exist.
Although didn’t she travel in time a little bit whenever she used her talent to buy herself those five minutes?
Since she realized she must look like an idiot, standing there in the parking lot with a gobsmacked expression on her face, Danica hurried over to the Land Rover and got in. She wished she could talk to someone about this, but she had the feeling that anyone she broached the subject to would probably give her some serious side-eye.
Except…Angela had seemed sympathetic. And she’d done a bit of time travel herself, or at least astral travel, when she met with Nizhoni and Jeremiah Wilcox, two people who had been dead for more than a century, and broke the curse. Surely Angela would have better insights than anyone else.
Heart beginning to race, Danica picked up her phone and pushed the button to make the call. Yes, she and Angela weren’t exactly close, but every clan member had their prima’s and primus’s number programmed into their phones.
Just in case.
* * *
Angela had sounded a little puzzled on the phone, but when Danica got to her house in Forest Highlands, she just smiled and let her in.
“Connor’s out back, playing with the twins, so we shouldn’t be interrupted. I hope,” she added, casting a dubious glance over one shoulder toward the rear of the house. “It’s the twins, so anything could happen. But let’s hope for the best.”
She led Danica into the living room, saying, “I don’t let them play in here, so we can walk without worrying about stepping on any Legos or stuffed animals. Or the dog’s chew toys.” Her tone sounded resigned, but from the light dancing in her green eyes, Danica guessed the prima really wasn’t too concerned with the state of her house.
“It’s fine,” Danica said. “I know I’m kind of barging in without much notice. But I really needed to pick your brain.”
“Pick away,” Angela replied. “Although these days it’s kind of fried, so I’m not sure how much help I’ll be.”
Now that the time had come, Danica wasn’t quite sure of the best way to explain herself, at least in a manner that wouldn’t sound completely off the wall. Then again, they were both witches. Off the wall kind of came with the territory.
“Well, first off, the man I saw is definitely a ghost. Last night, he came back to the cabin, and I — I saw him get shot.”
“He was shot?” Angela asked, eyes widening.
“Here,” Danica elaborated, pointing to the approximate spot on her own chest. “I saw it happen, and then he disappeared again.”
For a second the prima didn’t say anything. She seemed to hesitate, as if considering her words, and then remarked, “That’s unusual. Most ghosts don’t want to reenact their deaths. They don’t like to talk about it. Not that I can really blame them.”
“So what do you think it means?”
“I’m not sure, but it’s obvious that he’s trying to communicate with you. Maybe it’s just that you’re the first person he’s resonated with, and he’s trying to get you to understand what happened to him so he can finally move on.” During this speech, however, she was frowning, as if annoyed at herself for not being able to sense the stranger’s violent death.
Even if Angela was feeling frustrated, her comments sounded logical enough on the surface. But…. “I’ve been to the cabin before,” Danica pointed out, “and I’ve never seen him. So why now?”
Again Angela paused. Her gaze flicked toward Danica and away, toward the tall windows across the room with their view of the surrounding ponderosa pines. Then she said, “Yes, but you hadn’t been through a truly traumatic experience before. What happened to you this past spring….” The words trailed off, and she shook her head. “These things can leave psychic echoes, emotional residue. You’re not the same person you were before. So maybe now, for whatever reason, you can resonate with this man, this spirit. He sensed that, and came to you for help.”
The thought that what Matías had done to her had materially changed her in some way made Danica cold all over. She didn’t want to be changed. Hadn’t she spent the last six months desperately trying to get back to the person she used to be?
But if she had bee
n changed, and there was nothing she could do about it, then she might as well make that change matter.
“Okay, maybe that’s true,” she said. “So what should I do next?”
“I’m not sure,” Angela said frankly. “All the ghosts I’ve encountered were pretty chatty. They wanted to talk to me. But this man hasn’t said anything, right?” Without waiting for an answer, she went on, “Do you even know for sure if he’s really interacting with you, or just replaying a traumatic experience from his past?”
Danica shook her head, hating the feeling of helplessness she was experiencing. She thought he’d been trying to communicate somehow, but she just didn’t know for sure.
“So that makes it a lot harder. Sometimes they only want to talk, to have an interaction that makes them feel as if they’re alive again. I’ve gotten a few to cross over, but a lot of the spirits I’ve dealt with don’t seem to care about that. They’re clinging to this plane of existence, for whatever reason.”
“What if — ” They’d come to it now, and Danica knew she had to say the words. She just wished they didn’t sound so ridiculous. “What if this ghost doesn’t want to talk, or cross over? What if he wants me to stop his murder before it even happens?”
Dead silence. For the first time, Danica heard the ticking of the clock that hung over the huge stone fireplace, then, from farther away, a series of unearthly shrieks. A second or two passed before she realized the noise must have come from the twins playing with Connor in the backyard. Well, good. At least they sounded distracted.
Then Angela spoke, her tone almost too gentle. “How do you propose to do that?”
“I — ” Danica hesitated, then said, all in a rush, “My gift. I mean, I always thought it was kind of a stupid gift, because what are you supposed to do with an extra five minutes? But that’s a kind of time travel, isn’t it?”
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