Amber Affairs

by Patricia Rice

  He hung up and rummaged on the table for more food. That had to be a good sign. Amber abandoned the computer and joined him.

  “Did they persuade you to be sensible and head back to LA to handle this?” she asked point blank.

  He snarled mean enough for a feral wolf. “No way. Willa was here. What happened to her was here. I’m staying until I know who did this.”

  Which meant that Hillvale would again be inundated with reporters covering a murder story and not the upbeat wedding one the town needed.

  As Jacko might have said, farkin’ pig swivers.

  Five

  “I need to get out of here before I go stark raving bonkers,” Josh shouted at the room. The food had restored some of his brain power, and he glanced at the mess he’d made in his emotional break-down. Well, half the chaos had probably been caused by his working all night.

  “Are you planning on going incognito as Wolfman or would you prefer to shave and dress first?” a familiar sultry voice asked from the shadows of the kitchen. How many years had he spent carrying on conversations in his head with that seductive voice?

  Ginger. Maddening, refreshing Ginger had crossed time portals into his life again, except she wasn’t Ginger anymore. She was Amber, and he hadn’t really known her at all. He glanced down at himself—he hadn’t buttoned his shirt and yesterday’s jeans still had ink on them from where he’d snapped his pen.

  Her hips swayed in her ruffled skirt as she entered the main room, and it was as if the sun had broken through the clouds. She glittered in amber beads and gold bangles, frilly blouse and Gypsy skirt. Her bright coppery hair could easily rival the sun. And then there were those high, real breasts. . .

  Okay, he was on full alert now. Back down, boy. “Right, on it. Do I wear black and feed the crows?” He started for the bedroom, which looked even worse than the trashed front room, with clothes strewn everywhere—including some of Willa’s. That was why he wasn’t dressed. She must have packed hastily.

  “I believe sackcloth, ashes, and whips are the appropriate attire,” she called after him. “But we’re not fussy. Clean is good.”

  “I didn’t bring much. I may have to special order sackcloth, although Willa probably has a collection of whips in her closet.” Trying not to look at a lacy bra and a pair of sandals half under the dresser, he slammed into the bathroom and let the shower wash away some of the aches.

  Willa had been friend and lover these past months. They’d conspired together, made plans, had laughs. He recognized her for the controlling bitch she was, but he was a director. He handled crap like that for breakfast. The wedding had never been more than a publicity stunt. They may never have made it as a couple after this film was over, but he liked to think they would have remained friends.

  Now he would never know.

  He scrubbed at his hair and hoped to wash some sense into his head. He could see Willa’s dream crashing while her company struggled to replace her. He needed to call Tessa, her VP. He’d sunk a lot of cash into the project. So had Willa. If Tessa pulled the plug. . . Both their dreams would go down the drain with the film. And if Willa’s father reeled in his shares. . . He was doomed.

  He needed to find new backers, but his heart simply wasn’t in it. Willa had understood his vision. She’d known his script would be a difficult sale. That’s why they’d conjured up the wedding scheme. Try explaining that to reporters and her father.

  Why would anyone kill Willa?

  That’s what he could focus on. He, of all people, was in the best position to determine motivation.

  Unless, of course, she’d been kidnapped, raped, and murdered by some random stranger. Josh had a feeling that Willa would have blasted a few holes in any stranger who dared approach. She carried a Glock.

  Vengeance wasn’t his shtick, but justice. . . he could get behind that full steam.

  He dragged on a white linen shirt and clean jeans and padded back to the front room, drying his hair. “I need to know what the cops know. I don’t suppose your psychic powers can help me there?”

  He used to ask her stupid questions like that. And she’d pat him on his stupid head and give him the common sense answers he needed.

  “Sam’s husband is the chief of police. I’ll know when she knows,” she said, proving she hadn’t changed, and then she spoiled it by adding, “It’s too soon to see if Cass can contact Willa’s spirit, but the Lucys will be out looking for her. Spirits tend to cling to Hillvale. It’s something to do with the vortex and the crystal energy, but we don’t have specifics.” She waited expectantly.

  “You could have stopped with the chief of police,” he growled, giving her the reaction she expected, he presumed. They used to read each other like books, but they’d both added a few pages over the years. “Tell me the chief tells this Sam everything, and I’m with the program. After that, I need the script.”

  Her wide red lips curved approvingly. “This isn’t Hobbiton. We’ll never be picturesque. We use terms like Nulls and Lucys instead of trolls and elves. But Hillvale is where magic happens. If you’re willing to accept that, welcome to my world. Come along, and I’ll introduce you.”

  She took his arm and steered him toward the door.

  “Why do I have the feeling the train just left Harry Potter’s platform?” He lifted her heavy bag, remembering it from last night. “What do you carry in here, crystal balls?”

  “Cards, mostly. They’re pretty heavy stock. I considered Fiona’s trick of carrying rocks to bash muggers, but the cards ought to do the trick.” She dragged him into the corridor, checked both ways, and headed for the rear exit. “You have a car handy?”

  “I’m processing on no sleep, kid. Give me time to catch up.” Josh pulled out his phone, then remembered it didn’t work here and cursed. “I haven’t set this up with the lodge’s wi-fi. I’ll have to go back in to phone a valet to bring the car around.”

  “You’ve forgotten how to drive?” she asked, not turning back. “And in case you haven’t noticed, I’m not a kid anymore.”

  “You were never a kid. I just called you that to remind you I was older.” He fumbled in his pockets, found his wallet, but the key fob wasn’t there. “We could walk. It’s only what, about a mile? That will give us time to prepare for the circling orcs.”

  She shot him a look as if he’d just taken off his head and batted it down the hall.

  “What? You can’t walk? You have your hiking stick. You must use it.” Josh shoved open the rear door and checked to be certain no reporters lurked. “I want a Gandalf hood and cloak. I could grow a long beard and see if it turns white. It’s not as if my face is all that familiar anymore.”

  “Delusional,” she concluded, stopping in the lot and obviously waiting for him to choose a car. “Unless you think I’m equally unrecognizable. I am, actually. I’ve been invisible for years. But put us together. . . brains start clicking.”

  He mock cuffed her ear. “Don’t start sounding like your mother. Let’s walk. It’s a gorgeous day.”

  She emitted a long-suffering sigh. “I might make it down the hill without breaking my neck and two limbs, but if you ask me to walk back later, I will have to kill you to prevent spreading the madness.”

  “Lazy. You were always lazy.”

  “My metabolism is slower than yours,” she asserted.

  They’d once argued like this all the time. It made him feel youthful. He took off at a brisk trot, then stopped when she hadn’t made it past the first cars. He was still remembering teenage Ginger, who brightened the day with laughter and wisdom. Adult Amber moved slower and actually seemed to need the funky stick. “You’re injured?” he asked in concern. “I’ll get the car. I’m sorry for being such a selfish bastard.”

  “It’s just that old injury to my knee from that stupid stunt. My weight makes it worse. I suppose it’s good for me to move, but I’m stiff. I’ll walk, just not at a rabbit hop.”

  “Don’t give me the obese crap again,” he warned. “Th
at’s the Harpy talking.” He used the nickname they’d once given Amber’s nagging mother. “You’re just out of shape. We’ll walk as far as you’re comfortable, then I’ll jog down and call a valet to pick you up. You always needed a shove to get moving.” He slowed his pace to walk beside her.

  Maybe there was something to this more leisurely pace. Amber’s laidback style had a way of calming his fuming boil. “You’re better than a toke,” he decided. “You let me bliss out, when everyone else rags on my last nerve.”

  Her laughter broke like crystalline notes over the crisp morning air. “Put that in a review on my website, please.”

  “Okay, if you tell me the story of Lucys and Nulls.” He shoved his hands in his jean pockets and admired the lush greenery. Willa had been right. A place like this would film better than New Zealand. He didn’t know how Hillvale produced greenery in desert, but the photo shoot would have been spectacular.

  He needed to make the film happen in Willa’s memory. That gave him something solid he could put his hands around.

  “The Lucent Ladies were spiritualists who occupied the town back in the 1800s,” Amber said as they walked. “Do you recall Lily Dale? It was pretty famous in its day, back when the Victorians believed in psychics and speaking to the dead.”

  Josh dragged his thoughts back to the fairy tale princess at his side. “People are sheep,” he said cynically. “Yell burn the witches, and they do, without rhyme or reason. Then some wit comes along and calls them psychics and all of a sudden, the very same women are worshipped.”

  “Worship is going too far. Laughed at instead of feared, maybe. Anyway, the legend says the spiritualists heard about Hillvale’s little ghost problem and began gathering here. Most of us with aberrant talents probably descended from those Victorian spiritualists.”

  “Aberrant,” he scoffed. “I can see it now, the League of Aberrant Powers. Okay, I’ve got it. The Lucys are the local eccentrics and the Nulls are the mundanes. And you think the Lucys can summon spirits who know what happened to Willa?”

  She was silent as they navigated a particularly steep portion of the road. A few cars drove past, and Josh began to understand the difficulty of walking this narrow drive. He offered his arm, and she accepted it until they rounded the curve. She wasn’t breathing heavily, but she’d started to limp.

  “Do we need to stop here?” he asked in concern, looking for a rock or bench to sit on.

  She shook her sunset hair. “No, not for the little distance left. The incline is the worst. I can’t explain what the Lucys do. We’re like anyone else. We mull around, doing our own things, and stuff happens.”

  “Examples,” he demanded, wanting to believe.

  “Do you remember a toddler kidnapped a few months back?”

  “Unless it was in the Hollywood news, nope. I’ve been pretty heavy into pulling together the new project.” And Willa had been a slave driver, but he refrained from speaking ill of the dead, even if it was truth.

  “It’s a complicated story. But we drew all the suspects up here with Fiona’s food. Mariah used ectoplasm to make them tell the truth. Harvey’s walking sticks—” She brandished the one she’d been leaning on. “—added energy when the bad guys kidnapped Fee and Keegan, and. . .well, things happened. Of course, it helped that Mayor Monty got mad and knocked off one of the jerks with a football, but that could have been crystal energy too.”

  “Crystal energy?” he asked, fascinated despite himself. He’d look up the story later, ascertain the facts.

  “Talk to Keegan and Teddy about crystals. Energy vibrations aren’t my specialty. But the theory is that the crystals mined in this area react in some way to the spiritual vortex by the cemetery, making it easier for some of us to reach beyond the veil between life and death.” She was starting to breathe harder, but they’d reached the bottom of the hill.

  “You mentioned ectoplasm. How does that work into this energy theory?” His mind spun possibilities for a new script.

  She released his arm to lean on her staff, and he missed the bit of closeness.

  “Mariah says that the energy in our physical bodies after we die transmutes into metaphysical energy in the form of ectoplasm that she can feel.”

  “Energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed, basic physics. I like it, pseudo-science at its very best. I’ll take results any way I can. What do we do next?” He gazed over the sleepy town. Too early for the shops to open. It would be hours before reporters arrived. The only activity appeared to be at the café.

  Although he heard music carrying on the clear mountain air. The sound grew louder as they approached a church-sized building that he’d been told housed an art gallery.

  “Depends on how much you want to reveal to complete strangers and how much you trust me.” She halted when he did, outside the gallery’s double doors. “That’s Val and Harvey, practicing their wedding repertoire. Willa probably wasn’t on Val’s spiritual radar. She’s our resident Death Goddess and usually makes the death announcements, so she must not have heard. I don’t know what her death will do to the rest of the wedding schedule. June was booked solid yesterday, but murder has a dampening effect on festivities.”

  The music was so haunting, Josh was certain the acoustics in the gallery had to be amazing. “Is it okay if we go in?”

  She looked uncertain. “They’re both Lucys. Like me, they’re here for a reason. Every time reporters show up, they strip away a little more of our privacy. Can you just accept them as they are?”

  “You do realize that just made me more curious, don’t you?” he asked, opening one large door.

  She didn’t answer, rightfully so. The voice pouring from inside filled the nearly-empty building, rolling off the walls and lifting any listener into the realms of the sublime. And just as the music threatened to carry him away, the piano wove into the harmony as if it were one with the singer, and Josh simply collapsed into the nearest chair. He didn’t even recognize the song until the haunting final refrains of Ave Maria echoed like a choir of angels.

  “Wow,” he muttered, imagining how that would fill a cathedral. A bride would be an afterthought.

  Amber sank into a chair beside him. “The one in the black veil is Val. Her real name is Valerie Ingersson.”

  “The musical sensation of San Francisco a few decades ago—Willa pointed out her bio online when she told me who she’d hired for the wedding.” Josh recognized the death goddess allusion from a video game. Willa hadn’t explained that one—and probably hadn’t been interested. “I guess I don’t get to know everyone’s story.”

  “Not unless they’re willing to tell you. We’ve only recently persuaded Val to sing for something other than the dead. Once she hears about Willa, she’ll be out looking for her spirit.”

  He nodded as if he understood that weirdness, but he was fixated on the present in the form of the pianist. Slender, in black t-shirt and jeans, with long black hair tied at the nape, the musician once wore a tux on the concert circuit, if Josh was any judge. “And this is where Isaac Berkovich holes up? Why?”

  “Isaac?” she asked in amusement. “That’s Harvey Menendez, although he doesn’t claim the last name. I don’t know his story either, but he carved our walking sticks and can choose crystals that suit our personalities and enhance our energies.”

  She showed him the amber-studded dragon’s head on hers.

  “That’s Isaac,” Josh said in confidence, studying the stick, then the man flipping pages of music. “He was an international sensation until he disappeared a few years back. How long has your Harvey lived here?”

  “He came and went for years before he moved in a few years ago. We knew he was a concert pianist. But here, he plays guitar, writes music, and carves sticks.”

  “Walking sticks with magical energies, presumably. There’s a hell of a lot of talent hiding up here,” Josh concluded.

  “We’re not all creative. It’s just that creative minds are more open to possibility. We notice whe
n we’re different and experiment with exercising those differences instead of hiding them. Nulls prefer to be—”

  “Sheep,” Josh finished for her. “Although I’m guessing there’s a lot more to it than that. I am officially fascinated.”

  “Shall I start here then? Once I tell Val about Willa, she’ll connect with Cass, and before noon, the Lucys will be traversing the countryside. They’ll want to see that Willa finds her way across the veil. We don’t need any more lost souls stuck in Hillvale.”

  That made just enough sense to resonate with the hole in his heart. Josh nodded. “Do it.”

  Six

  Val and Harvey were two of the less social Lucys. They shied from strangers, not because they were timid, but because they didn’t wish to be recognized. They acknowledged Amber’s introduction to Josh, offered condolences when told of Willa, and performed their amazing vanishing act soon after.

  But they were Hillvale’s communication system. Harvey would tell Aaron, who would connect with Monty the mayor and the other men. Val would head straight for Cass, the closest thing Lucys had to a leader.

  “We can stop here at the central nervous system or head straight into the heart of town,” Amber said once they were back outside in the sunshine. “How are you feeling?”

  Josh tilted his head and snapped photos of a colorfully beaded ghostcatcher net hanging from the boardwalk roof. “Overwhelmed, exhausted, frustrated, worried beyond measure, and weirdly expectant. Is that how one describes grief?”

  “Shouldn’t you be writing the scripts for these films you make?” she asked, almost irritated with his reply. “You still have a way with words.”

  “Scripts are written by committee these days, and books sell like crap, so there’s no money in writing. People want flash and bang. I can do that with film.” He examined the nearly empty parking lot. “Tarot reading and weddings can’t produce a lot of income either. How does anyone survive up here?”