“It’s just Paws,” I said.
“Yes, JUST Paws,” the cat drawled.
“He’s coming?” Greer asked, as Charlie, who had yet to touch a ghost, reached out and stroked the cat’s back.
“Yeah, he comes now,” I said.
“Tell them how useful I am and how happy you are about it,” said Paws.
I rolled my eyes.
“I saw that,” said Paws. “Tell them.”
“You’re very useful,” I said. “I’m delighted to have you come along!”
“That nearly sounded believable,” said Greer out of the side of her mouth. Some color was returning to her cheeks.
“Are you okay?” I said.
“Yeah, I never knew, I mean, I thought she hated me and the fact that I was dating Deacon, and maybe she did, but she somehow got it into her head that he’s sad about the breakup.”
“Imagine that,” I said. “What do you think she came to the house for?”
“She wanted to know why I had broken up with Deacon, what he had done wrong. I didn’t know she thought he could do wrong. I told her he’d done nothing wrong. I don’t think she believed me.”
“Strange,” I said, and Greer nodded, still lost in thought.
Jeff lived on the outskirts of town in one of those places that doubled as a modest home and a small junkyard. If my farmhouse was in the boonies, Jeff’s place was really out there. To get there we had to turn off a dirt road onto another dirt road, the second one littered with potholes. I slowed the car down, because besides the potholes, branches were scraping against the sides of the car.
“He probably has a truck he tools around in,” I said. “Just floors it down the road without a care in the world.”
Jeff’s property was around a bend and down a small hill. There were a couple of lights on in the ramshackle building, but otherwise the place looked deserted.
“Great, this isn’t terrifying,” said Charlie.
“Don’t worry,” said Paws, who had been happy as a clam in the back seat as Charlie scratched behind his ears, “I’ll protect you.”
I gave a very unladylike snort. “We can go back,” I offered.
“Not a chance,” said Charlie. “If anyone threatens us I’ll tell them I’ll write an article about them. Besides, he asked you to bring your reporter friend.”
“That’ll help,” said Greer. “It’s just stunning that he doesn’t know you by name. I thought everyone read your articles in the Mintwood Gazette.”
“I mean, everyone should,” said Charlie.
I parked next to an old truck that was missing its doors, among other things. Most of the vehicle had rusted and the tires were sunk down into the ground.
We all got out of the car. Paws stayed close.
“Shouldn’t he have come out by now?” Greer said, eyeing the house.
“Probably,” I said. “Come on.”
We were almost to the old porch when a dog started barking wildly.
“MY LIFE IS OVER,” said Paws, his fur standing straight up as he tried to jump into Charlie’s arms. For anyone who couldn’t see the ghost, she would have looked ridiculous as she bent down and picked him up.
“Calm down,” Charlie cooed. “It will be okay. He’s in a cage.” She looked up at me. “He is, right?”
“Must be, since he hasn’t attacked us yet,” I said.
While I squinted into the darkness, Greer pulled out a flashlight. “Thought one of these might come in handy,” she said. “Might have to get an upgrade if we’re going to make a habit of sneaking around dark and deserted buildings.”
“I already said we wouldn’t,” I muttered.
She shined the light over to the right, illuminating a cage that held at least four dogs. All the dogs looked lean, their eyes burning in the darkness as the flashlight beam caught them.
Paws ran over to investigate, while I marched up to the front door. An old screen door hung slightly open, as if it didn’t fit properly on the frame. I rapped on the door. I could hear a TV on somewhere in the house, so I rapped harder.
“Jeff?” I called out, hoping he’d answer and we wouldn’t have to go inside. This wasn’t the kind of house I wanted to appear like I was breaking into.
“There’s a TV on inside. He was just at my house. Should we just go in?” I didn’t know what to do.
“JEFF!!!” Charlie yelled.
“I see him,” said Greer. “He’s asleep in the chair.”
“Is he asleep,” said Charlie, “or is he dead?”
Without hesitation I burst into Jeff’s house. The door opening and slamming against the wall created enough of a racket that Jeff woke up with a shocked start.
“What? Who? Help!” he said, bleary-eyed and confused. My two friends and I stood there looking at him, while he rubbed his eyes and stared back.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said. “You scared me to death.”
“Sorry, but you didn’t answer your door,” I said.
Jeff sat forward and grabbed the remote. After he shut off the television he said, “Thanks for coming.”
“Yeah, you said it was important,” I said.
“It is,” he said. Then he frowned and added, “That was a nice car in your yard.”
“Yeah, it’s all right,” said Greer quickly. “Nice car but not very practical.”
“I guess,” said Jeff, but he clearly didn’t agree. “Anyway, I had something to tell you about Gracie. I thought you’d want to know.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “Why did you think I’d be interested?”
Jeff snorted. “I’m not dumb. You were fleecing me for information the other night. Greer saw me at the bar and immediately called someone, and then you show up and pretend you don’t know how to act in a bar and chat with me, and then your reporter friend shows up. I figured she was trying to get the scoop and you two were helping her. Gracie going missing is the biggest story in Mintwood this year.”
Charlie fell right into character. “Anything you could tell us would be a big help, Jeff. My friends just wanted to help me get the story.”
“I want her found just as much as you. She just up and . . . “ Jeff swallowed.
I glanced around his place while I waited for him to go on. It wasn’t in good shape, but it was clean. The carpet was vacuumed and the mantle was dusted. “Maybe the three of you should sit down?”
We sat down on an old maroon couch that sat underneath the window.
“Do you live here alone?” I said.
Jeff shook his head. “I live with my aunt. She works nights as a nurse. She took me in a long time ago. Now I help her out with yard work and stuff.”
“What was it you wanted to tell me about Gracie?” I said.
“She was planning something,” he said. “She wanted to move out of her parents’ place, get a home of her own, do something with her life. She said she had a way to make that happen and it was only a matter of time,” said Jeff.
“She told you all of that?” I said.
“Yeah, I should have known it was too good to be true,” said Jeff, shaking his head. “A girl like Gracie would never go out with a guy like me.”
“And she just up and disappeared?” said Charlie. She’d taken out a notebook from wherever she kept it hidden around her person, plus an official-looking pen. Now she was scribbling away in the notebook.
“I don’t want to be quoted in the paper or anything,” said Jeff quickly, clamming up.
“Oh, no,” said Charlie smoothly. “I’m going to use any information you give me strictly to find Gracie. She needs all the help she can get, and I’m sure, given how close the two of you were, that there’s something you know that would be of great use. I promise none of it will make it into the paper. This is strictly off the record.”
Jeff was fidgeting. “I thought it was such a good idea to come to your place earlier. Nice that the three of you live together . . . I’d sure like to live with my two high school buddies. Anyway, after I
left the note I started to think maybe I was being silly. Maybe I didn’t know anything about it. Maybe I’d imagined the whole thing.
“Here’s what I know. Gracie was planning something, but then she got scared. She started to say stuff about someone being after her, and that her plan had a bad history. She even talked murder a couple of times. Like, she was worried about her own safety. I told her she was being crazy, that nothing ever happened in this town. If it did, Gracie would be the last person anyone would want to harm. She was a sweetheart.”
“But she didn’t listen?” said Charlie.
Jeff ran his fingers through his hair. “I don’t know, do I? She’s up and disappeared. Something bad must have happened to her, that’s the only thing I can figure. She was afraid, and I didn’t listen. I wasn’t there to protect her and I should have been.”
“It’s not your fault she’s gone missing,” said Charlie soothingly. “We’ll find her. I promise.”
Jeff nodded. “I just keep thinking about the last conversation we had. In the afternoon, she sounded stressed. She said she’d done a face mask to relax.”
I sat upright, stunned. That was the afternoon she had gone missing. If she had already been kidnapped, how would she have called Jeff? This was the phone call Jeff had mentioned in the bar!
“She called you when?”
“I don’t know, maybe around three,” said Jeff. “Our house phone doesn’t have caller ID. Wouldn’t it be nice if we ever got good cell service here?”
“It would sure change the town,” said Charlie. “For the better.”
“Agreed,” said Jeff. “Anyway, she sounded funny on the phone. A little out of breath. I asked her what was wrong and then she sneezed, and then she sneezed three more times. She sounded really stuffed up. She got that way sometimes.”
“What did she say when she stopped sneezing?”
“The stuff I said at the bar. She was done with me. She never wanted me to begin with, and no matter what happened I shouldn’t look for her.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Charlie, leaning forward and looking very concerned.
Jeff shrugged. “Like I said, she was too good for me anyway.” His expression implied that he thought something else, but he kept it to himself.
We didn’t stay long after that. We thanked Jeff and said our goodbyes, with Charlie again promising to keep his name out of it. Once we were outside I said, “Something very strange is going on with Gracie Coswell.”
“You can say that again,” said Charlie.
Something about what Jeff had said was niggling at me, but I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was. I told myself I’d have to think it over.
Paws was waiting for us as we walked to the car, his tail swishing lazily. The dogs had settled down.
“You don’t think Gracie was there, do you?” said Charlie, peering around the corner of the house as if a ghost was about to jump out.
“Like Gracie would stay in a place like that,” said Paws. “Smells like dog.”
“People have dogs,” I said. “And still manage to live where they are.”
“The horror,” said Paws.
“It is nice, small, but nice. It’s all about what you do with the space,” said Charlie. “His aunt works hard. Besides, it’s not big enough for her to hide in. If she were there, we’d know. But anyhow, I think he would have told us. He’s been pretty broken up about her disappearance, and that seemed genuine.”
“Paws, why are the dogs quiet?” I said.
“No reason,” said Paws. “Just that I told them they’d never eat another dog bone again if they kept barking.”
“They can hear you?” I said.
“They stopped,” said Paws.
The three of us piled into the car, Paws hopped into the back seat, and we headed home. We had to find Gracie Coswell, and we were running out of time.
Chapter Twenty-One
When we got home Charlie said, “Those damn tea ladies! How much tea can they drink?”
The usual shenanigans were under way on my lawn. Although I was getting used to the hullabaloo, it was still strange to have ghosts hanging around the place all the time.
“Your grandmother made friends with them, you know,” said Paws.
“Who?” I said.
“The tea ladies, every one. She didn’t fight being able to see ghosts. She embraced it,” said the cat.
“She embraced a lot of things,” I said.
“Just because she made it look easy doesn’t mean it was,” said Paws.
“Tea, we need tea ourselves,” said Charlie, grinning at Greer. “We haven’t had too much tea yet, and we have thinking to do.”
We went into the house, made tea, and had another meeting in the living room. Once we were settled, there was a pawing at the window. Paws was glaring at me from outside, so I went and opened the door. He followed me inside, tail high.
“You can’t have a meeting about a mystery without me,” he said irritably. “How would you ever solve the case?”
“Charlie is a reporter, I’m a witch, and Greer’s the scary one,” I said. “We don’t need a mouthy cat, too.”
“I speak my mind, and that you do need,” he said. “All of us are needed in our own way. Just don’t ever bring in Funnel.”
“You didn’t tell me Mrs. Goodkeep owned the Pier Pearl. You made me talk to her instead,” I said.
“You handled it,” he told me. “It was better if you figured it out on your own than if I just told you. Now you can feel that burst of accomplishment.”
“He has a point there,” said Charlie. “Aren’t you just bursting?”
“What do we do now?” said Greer. “We’re no closer to finding Gracie. We’re running out of time.”
I sighed. We were missing something, but I wasn’t sure what it was.
“We need to do a witch board,” said Paws. “It’s what Lemmi’s grandmother always used to do.”
“Do you think it will help?” said Charlie. “Paws, what did Evenlyn do?”
Paws ran over to the closet, and Charlie followed. I hadn’t opened the closet since I’d moved into the house, so I was as curious as anyone to see what was inside it, and glad I wasn’t alone when I found out.
Inside the closet there turned out to be a large black board with lots of pins stuck into it, and one of those pins attached a bag of white markers to the board. Charlie fished it out and brought it over.
“Okay,” she said, “here’s what we know so far in the case. The ghost Mrs. Goodkeep says her great relative Gracie Coswell, queen of the prom and not of academics, is in grave danger, and that Lemmi must help immediately, so Lemmi, good-hearted and forgiving soul that she is, goes over to check on the poor girl. When Lemmi arrives at Gracie’s, Gracie acts a little strange, but she’s fine and in the bathroom. There’s nothing wrong that Lemmi can see.”
“What made you go back to Gracie’s later?” Charlie asked.
“Don’t you already know the answer to that?” said Greer, frowning.
“We have to be thorough! We don’t know what’s happened, but we have a lot of information now. It’s important to revisit all of it to see what we missed, and then we can put it in an order that makes sense, just like Lemmi did when she went back.”
“You’re right,” I said. “So here’s what happened. I realized that Gracie had been acting oddly on my first visit, and I thought she might have been in trouble and trying to let me know that without making it obvious. I figured it was probably nothing, but I wanted to go back to her place to make sure.”
“And you found?” Charlie prompted, frantically writing down what I said.
“I found a ghost named Hank, who was their old butler,” I said. “He died of a heart attack and mostly stays on the property now. The place was dark, but we found some fresh tire tracks behind the house, in a spot where, if a car had been there earlier in the day, I wouldn’t have seen it. Of course, I don’t know for sure if a car was there. Gracie’s car
was exactly where it had been that morning, so I don’t think she went anywhere in between, at least in the car, and she certainly hadn’t gone anywhere in it when I was there.”
“Then what did you do?” said Charlie.
“I went into the house,” I said. “First I knocked on the door and called out. The house was dark, so it was pretty clear she wasn’t there. Hank was with me, and he thought I should go inside too, and make sure she was okay. If something had happened to her, the sooner the police were alerted the better.”
“And you found?” Charlie said as I tried to remember the house as accurately as I could.
“I found the bathroom empty and her robe and face mask on the floor. We went into her bedroom, just in case she was a slob and she was just sleeping in there regardless of the mess. By the time I went back that night it was pretty late in the evening. Her room was turned up side down, as if someone had been looking for something or didn’t understand the concept of clothes hangers.”
“And then eventually found it,” said Charlie. “Was anything else taken as far as you could tell?”
“I don’t really know,” I said, thinking back. “I did see some jewelry thrown around on the floor, so not everything was taken.”
“Gracie probably wore pretty expensive jewelry,” said Greer. “Who would just leave it?”
All three of us lapsed into silence, each thinking our own thoughts about our high school classmate’s disappearance.
“There’s something strange about all of this,” said Greer.
“It’s a kidnapping,” said Charlie, “of course there’s something strange.”
“But if she was kidnapped,” said Paws, chiming in for the first time, “why hasn’t there been a ransom demand? Why hasn’t anyone come forward to say they have her, or what they want?”
“They have what they want,” I said. “The Pier Pearl.”
“So, why did they bother taking Gracie?” said Greer.
“She would be able to tell on them if the thief didn’t take her away,” said Charlie.
“Maybe, but they could have just tied her up. No one else was home, and except for Lemmi showing up being annoying, no one was bound to come there for a while. They’d have plenty of time to get away.”
Witch Way to Mintwood (Witch of Mintwood Book 1) Page 16
