Witch at Heart: A Jinx Hamilton Witch Mystery Book 1 (The Jinx Hamilton Mysteries)

by Juliette Harper

  So much for the whole sleep thing. If I was going to be awake, I might as well be productive and get started in my research.

  I eased out of bed and went into the living room to retrieve my laptop. When I came back, Xavier had already appropriated the warm spot I left behind.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” I scolded, picking him up and depositing him between Yule and Zeke. I don’t even think he bothered to wake up.

  It wasn’t hard to find the news reports about the discovery of skeletal remains on a hiking trail near Sparta, but I really didn’t learn anything else. The only thing Chase left out in his verbal account at dinner was the fact that the skull showed signs of blunt force trauma. That was consistent with the medical findings about Jane’s death, and with my fleeting perception of a tripod coming right at my face.

  Grace thought I had the vision because I stumbled on the exact spot where Jane’s body was found. Did that mean what I saw was triggered by touch? Huh. That was an interesting idea.

  After several minutes with Google, I had a name for what happened to me -- psychometry. Official definition: The supposed ability to discover facts about an event or person by touching inanimate objects associated with them.

  I stared at the words on the screen. The first time was an accident. Could I use the ability intentionally?

  Glancing around the room, my eye fell on an antique music box sitting atop the high dresser in the corner. When I was little, Aunt Fiona would wind the box for me and let me listen to it play, but she never let me touch it, saying, “This music box is very precious to me, honey. I don’t want anything to happen to it.”

  I got up again and walked over to the dresser. With great care I picked up the music box and suddenly I was in a warm, cozy room with a huge Christmas tree in the corner by the fireplace. In my hands I held a box wrapped in red and green paper. I could see my hands, or rather the hands of a child, carefully peeling the paper away.

  Inside the package, the music box lay nestled in tissue. A little girl’s awed voice said, “Oh, Papa, it’s beautiful!” And then a man’s voice answered, “Open the lid, Fiona. It plays Chopin.”

  The first tinkling notes began to play and I was once again standing in the bedroom holding the music box in my hands, tears filling my eyes. I had just heard my grandfather’s voice again for the first time since I was 10 years old.

  Almost reverently, I put the music box safely back in place. If I could touch something that belonged to Grace, could I help her find her mother? But what could that “something” possibly be? So far the only option was the poor girl’s skeleton. I couldn’t imagine waltzing into the coroner’s office and saying, “Excuse me? Could I please touch those bones so I can get a vision and figure out who this poor kid really was?”

  Not that I wouldn’t have done it to help Grace, but I was pretty certain I wouldn’t be allowed to do it.

  Let me give you a word of advice disguised as a little literary foreshadowing. Most of the time when you think you only have one option? Think again.

  In the end, I wound up letting the cats have the bed while I curled up on the couch where I was finally able to fall asleep. The next morning I awakened to find all four of the furry miscreants sitting in a perfect row on the coffee table staring at me. No alarm clock needed in my household.

  After they were fed, I had yogurt and toast, dressed, and went downstairs to greet the day. Or rather to greet Grace, who was, once again, standing at the front window watching people starting to come and go on Main Street.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “Hi,” she answered. “Can you come here for a minute?”

  “Sure,” I said, walking over to join her. “What’s going on?”

  “Do you see that florist’s shop over there by the library?” Grace asked.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “I think my homecoming corsage came from there.”

  I wanted to let out a celebratory whoop. This was our first sign of progress, but something told me that if Grace was remembering, the images she was getting might be very fragile. I kept my excitement in check and simply asked, “Are you sure?”

  Grace nodded. “Pretty sure,” she said. “And I think I have a library book that’s overdue.”

  Uh oh. Unless the local library offers a debt forgiveness option, somebody was going to be in for a shock when that bill came due.

  “Do you think you lived in Briar Hollow?” I asked cautiously.

  “I think I was a cheerleader,” Grace said suddenly. “For the Briar Hollow Bears.”

  Never mind name, age, and Social Security number.

  She knew the high school mascot.

  Now we were getting somewhere.

  “Let’s go to the library,” I said.

  Grace’s face fell. “I don’t know where that book is,” she said. “It was something for English class about catching grains.”

  Huh? Catching grains?

  Oh. Wait.

  Catcher in the Rye.

  She was close enough.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “The librarian can’t see you and you wouldn’t have liked that book anyway. Trust me.”

  The day was still young enough that I didn't have to be worried about customers. This was too important to wait anyway. What if Grace’s emerging memories started to fade?

  She followed me willingly across the square to the library, which was housed in an old red brick building. The hinges of the front door squeaked when we came in, which alerted a very stereotypical librarian, complete with gray bun, to stick her head out of the room behind the counter.

  “Good morning,” she said. “Help yourself to coffee.” She indicated a single-cup coffee maker and a carousel of assorted brew cups on a table under the big front window that looked out on the square.

  “Thank you,” I said, “but I don’t really have time to browse. I’m Jinx Hamilton. I inherited my Aunt Fiona’s store across the square.”

  “Oh my goodness!” the woman exclaimed, coming out from behind the counter and engulfing me in a hug. “I’m Linda Albert. Fiona and I were in the same book club. I just loved your aunt to pieces! She did pick some strange books for us to read sometimes, but my heavens, she was just so much fun that we didn’t mind.”

  I wisely refrained from asking about Aunt Fiona’s “strange” literary choices.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Linda. I was wondering if you could help me with something?”

  “I’d love to, honey,” she said. “What do you need?”

  “Do you have old copies of the local high school yearbook?” I asked.

  “You bet I do,” she said. “All the way back to 1906. Come with me.”

  Grace and I followed Linda into a side room, where she pointed out a long shelf filled with high school yearbooks covered in various combinations of red and black in keeping with the local high school colors.

  “Why in the world do you want to see old yearbooks?” Linda asked me curiously.

  “Oh,” I said, “I’m just finding lots of things in the store that seem to be local heirlooms. Sports trophies and such. I thought I’d try to get them back to people who might care about them.”

  It was one of my thinner fabrications, but Linda seemed good with thin. Before she could ask me anything else, I was literally saved by the squeaking front-door hinges announcing the arrival of another patron.

  “You just come find me if you need anything else,” Linda said, bustling off toward the front. “Take all the time you want.”

  I turned to Grace and said in a low voice, “Are you ready to do this?”

  She looked hopeful and terrified at the same time. “Yes,” she said. “I want to know who I am.”

  Scanning the yearbooks, I pulled out the one for 1984, just in case Grace’s memory was off. It wasn’t. We found her on the second page of the junior class portraits. Under the picture, the name read “Elizabeth ‘Beth’ Barlow.” She had been a cheerleader, and judging from the list of other activ
ities, she had also been fun.

  Beside me, the girl let out a little sigh. “I loved that blouse,” she said simply.

  “You remember?” I asked gently.

  “Yes,” she said. “But I don’t know how I got up there in the woods.”

  The sound of voices from the other room made me rethink the wisdom of having this conversation where we might be overheard. Or rather where I might be overheard.

  “Let’s go back to the store,” I suggested. “We can talk about it there.”

  18

  As we crossed the street, it suddenly occurred to me that not everyone lived and died by cell phone the way Tori and I did. The shop still had a hardwired telephone, which meant there was probably a local phone book somewhere under the counter.

  It didn’t even take a minute for me to produce a slender local directory printed on cheap paper and stuffed with advertisements. Thumbing to the “b” section, I ran my finger down the list: Barden, Barker, Barland, Barlow.

  I looked up at the ghostly girl I now had to learn to think of as Beth. “Does the name Emily Barlow mean anything to you?”

  Beth nodded. “Yes, that’s my mom. Can we go see her?”

  It didn’t seem to occur to Beth that she didn’t need me to take her to see her mother. Asking permission and being polite were so ingrained in this girl even thirty years after her death, that striking out on her own was an alien concept.

  And that, more than anything else, continued to bug me.

  How does a girl like that wind up getting murdered? I found it really hard to believe that Beth’s story would turn out to be anything more than the classic “wrong place wrong time” storyline.

  “I don’t know your mom,” I explained patiently. “I can’t just go over there and tell her that her daughter’s ghost is with me and wants to talk to her. She’ll think I’m nuts, Beth, or worse yet that I’m some kind of con artist trying to get money out of her or something. Besides, we don’t even know what happened to you yet.”

  Beth took that in for a minute and then pointed at my laptop sitting on the counter by the cash register. “Won’t that tell us?” she asked. “My friend Joey had a Commodore 64, but I think your MacBook is a lot smarter.”

  Uh, yeah. Steve Jobs just did a grave spin on that one. But Beth did have a point.

  I opened the laptop, went to my browser, and searched Google for, “Beth Barlow Briar Hollow 1985.”

  It was odd reading the accounts of a missing girl’s disappearance with the victim herself looking over my shoulder. In life, Beth didn’t just have fun, she was the most popular girl in the Briar Hollow High Class of 1985. She was head cheerleader and the senior class favorite, an accomplished pianist, and president of the school’s Future Homemakers of America chapter.

  Beth went missing on a Friday night after the homecoming game -- still wearing the same corsage she’d remembered that morning when she stood looking at the florist’s shop. According to her grief-stricken mother, Beth asked for permission to attend a chaperoned, alcohol-free party after the game.

  Witnesses at the party said that Beth went to her car to get her jacket a little before 11 o’clock. It was midnight before her classmates realized she hadn’t come back. Going to check on her, they found the car door open and her letter jacket lying on the front seat. There was no sign of a struggle, and Beth was never seen again.

  “Do you remember any of this?” I asked, turning toward the girl.

  She nodded. “It was cold that night,” she said. “The party was up at the Briar Hollow Family Campground in the big party room. When I went out to the car, someone came up behind me, I think. There was this rag over my nose and it smelled awful. All gross and sweet.”

  I turned back to the computer and did another Google search. According to Wikipedia, chloroform is a “colorless, sweet-smelling, dense liquid.”

  “Somebody knocked you out,” I said. “Do you remember anything after that?”

  “I think I was in some kind of big, open space,” she said. “Someone was taking pictures of me.” Her form wavered in and out, a disruption I had learned meant she was agitated and afraid.

  “I don’t want to talk about that,” she said, fading out again. “That’s a bad thing and I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, quickly closing the laptop. “You don’t have to talk about it. I promise.”

  My assurances seemed to help Beth to solidify herself, but her voice still quivered when she said plaintively. “I want to go see the cats now.”

  “You go on, honey,” I said sympathetically. “They love it when you sit with them. Don’t be upset, Beth. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  I didn’t even get the last words out before she was gone.

  That evening when Tori called on Facetime, she frowned and leaned in toward the camera. “What are you doing in the storeroom?” she asked. Then she spotted our resident rat sitting on my shoulder. “Hi Rodney!”

  I kid you not, Rodney picked up his little paw and waved at the screen.

  “He’s going to talk one of these days,” I said, looking at Rodney and then turning my attention back to Tori. “I’m downstairs because I really don’t want Beth to hear all this again”

  Tori frowned. “Who’s Beth?”

  “Grace,” I answered. “Her real name is Elizabeth Barlow and she went missing after the homecoming game in 1985.”

  I explained everything I’d learned that day to Tori, who listened without interrupting me until I got to the part about Beth’s memory of the chloroform.

  “Bastard,” she muttered darkly.

  “Agreed,” I said. “Beth got so upset at that point that she didn’t want to talk anymore, but she did say she thought she had been taken to a big, open place, and she remembered a camera.”

  “Let me correct myself,” Tori said. “Sick bastard. So you think the killer is someone local?”

  “Maybe,” I said, “but I am pretty certain that Beth is the only local victim. No other girls have gone missing in Briar Hollow since her disappearance.”

  I had confirmed this fact after three hours of digging through the online files of the Briar Hollow Banner. Think “small town newspaper hell.”

  “Of course no other girls have gone missing in town,” Tori said. “He couldn’t take any more locally. The risk of getting caught would be too high.”

  You see? You don’t have to obsessively watch CSI and Criminal Minds to figure these things out.

  “So why dump the bodies on the hiking trails?” I asked. “He could get caught just as easily doing that.”

  The camera jiggled as Tori shifted on the couch. Beside me, Rodney bobbed his head in time with the screen until her image went still again. “I’ve been thinking about that,” she said. “He only dumped Jane. He buried Beth and the other girl.”

  “You looked her up?” I asked.

  “Better than that,” Tori said. “A couple of state troopers came in the cafe today. I told them I was one of the rule-breakers who found the skeleton up by Weber’s Gap and asked them if they thought there was a connection to the other body found near Sparta.”

  I could just see the innocent-eyed performance she’d put on while no doubt keeping the troopers’ coffee cups filled to the rim.

  “What did they say?”

  “Those bones were found pretty much the same way we said we found Grace,” Tori explained. “A couple out bird watching crouched down by a old log to watch a bunch of turkeys. When the woman looked down, there was a skull by her foot.”

  I frowned. “Another skull beside a tree that had fallen over? That’s no coincidence.”

  “I said that to the trooper,” Tori told me. “He was the younger, better looking one, by the way.”

  Of course he was.

  “His partner was in the men’s room,” Tori went on. “He told me the official theory is that the killer buried the two girls at the base of those trees so he would have a marker. I think he planned to do
the same thing with Jane’s body, but something interrupted him and he couldn’t go back and finish the job.”

  “You mean the killer wanted a marker so he could go back to where he left the bodies?” I asked. “God. That is disgusting.”

  “They say serial killers do that kind of thing all the time,” she observed solemnly.

  “Who are ‘they?’”

  “The people on the forums where I’ve been lurking,” she answered. “These nutjobs are completely obsessed with sicko serial killers. Do you know that some of the women on those message boards actually write letters to murderers in prison?”

  I shuddered. “Thank God we can stop looking into this as soon as we find out Jane’s real name.”

  Tori looked at me like I had two heads. “We have to catch this guy,” she said.

  Note the once again dangerous usage of the word “we.”

  “No we don’t,” I said sternly. “We promised a ghost we’d figure out her name. Finding Beth was just an accident. She wants to see her mother and then she can move on.”

  “To where?” Tori asked seriously.

  Okay. Unfair pop quiz if I ever heard one.

  “I don’t know,” I stammered. “Into that light people are always talking about.”

  Tori looked at me and then asked in her grown-up voice, “Jinx, have you even started trying to learn about all these things?”

  “Of course I have,” I said defensively. “I told you about the psychometry.”

  Tori shook her head. “That was so you could understand what’s happening to you. I mean have you started trying to understand what’s happening to them. Do you even have a clue why they’re still here?”

  “Isn’t it because they don’t know who they are?” I said. “I mean, that’s pretty much what they’ve told us.”

  “That’s what they’ve told us because that’s all they understand,” Tori said. “Jinx, I know you’ve had a lot of surprises these last few days what with the witch powers and the ghosts and everything, but you have to get up to speed here. From what I’m reading, the girls could still be here because their spirits want justice. For all we know, there’s another lonely ghost up on that trail in Sparta wanting the same thing.”