The Trouble With Twelfth Grave

by Darynda Jones

  Before receiving the summons from the frazzled Mrs. Blomme, I’d been hunting.

  Charisma jumped to her feet. “I have to pee.”

  “Okay, have fun,” I said to her back as she rushed out of the room.

  I still wondered why Mrs. Blomme couldn’t see her. Not for long. Maybe, like, seven seconds. I had too many other things on my plate to wonder overly long, but it did tickle the back of my brain.

  “I told you,” Mrs. Blomme said. She was still using my shoulder as a protective shield. “My house is haunted. You saw them, right? The woman and the boy?”

  “I did. But, Mrs. Blomme—”

  Before I could continue with the bad news, my phone dinged. I dug it out of my back pocket. My uncle Bob, a detective for the Albuquerque Police Department, had texted me about a case we were working together. I sometimes consulted for APD, mostly because my uncle knew what I could do, and solving cases was a thousand times easier when the murdered victim could tell the police whodunit. This case, however, was far more disturbing than I’d led my uncle to believe.

  Two bodies had been found mutilated and burned. But mutilated in a very unusual way and scorched in random spots. The burns didn’t kill them. Internal damage and blood loss from the mutilations did them in. It was as though they’d been beaten and clawed to death, but the ME said the attacks were not from an animal. He said they were human.

  Or, I had to wonder in the back of my mind, perhaps they were made by a god inhabiting a human body. An angry god made of lightning and fire and all things combustible. His temper, for example.

  A pang of anxiety caused my stomach to clench and my cheeks to warm.

  Uncle Bob’s text asked simply, “Any luck?”

  I texted back. “Not yet.”

  It would not be the answer he wanted, but it was the only one I had to give. I’d been using all my resources on the case, and no one, dead or alive, knew anything about the murders.

  I turned back to Mrs. Blomme. One of her curlers had worked loose and hung lackadaisically over an ear. “Mrs. Blomme,” I said, softening my voice.

  She glanced up at me from behind my shoulder.

  “I’m so sorry to tell you this, but you’re right. Your house is haunted.”

  She swallowed hard and nodded, taking the news well.

  “But, hon, it’s haunted by you.”

  Straightening a little, she leveled a curious stare on me. “I don’t understand.”

  “You died thirty-eight years ago.”

  She blinked, and I gave her a moment before continuing. To absorb. To process.

  After another couple of minutes where she stared at the floor, trying to remember, I said, “It took me a while to find your death certificate. Your husband found you unresponsive on the floor in your kitchen. Massive stroke. He was devastated. He died a year later, almost to the day.”

  “No. That’s not right. I live here.”

  “You did, yes. I’m sorry.”

  She leaned back against the wall, sorrow consuming her.

  My chest squeezed tight. I took her hand into mine. “But the mother and son you’ve been seeing?”

  Without looking up, she nodded.

  “That’s your granddaughter and your great-grandson. See?” I pointed to a wall where Mrs. Blomme’s picture hung, a faded color photo of her and her husband.

  She stood slowly and walked to the massive mantel that displayed generations of Blommes and, now, Newells. They’d kept the house in the family. Updated it over the years. And allowed one branch of the Blommes’ children’s children to grow up here.

  She turned back to me, her eyes wet with emotion. “I had no idea.”

  “I know.” I stood and walked to her. “It happens more often than you think.”

  A soft laugh accompanied a melancholy smile.

  “You can cross through me. I’m sure you have tons of family waiting for you, including your husband.”

  “He didn’t remarry, did he? He was always threatening to marry Sally Danforth if I died first. He knew I detested that woman. She stole my pickle recipe and won a blue ribbon at the state fair with it.”

  “She didn’t,” I whispered, scandalized.

  “I wouldn’t lie about pickles, Miss Davidson. Serious business, that.”

  I grinned. “No, he didn’t marry anyone else, Mrs. Blomme. He died miserable and alone.”

  “Oh, well, good. He deserved it. Man was horrible.” She turned when emotion slipped through her lashes and slid down a weathered cheek.

  “I’m sure he was wretched.”

  As her reality sank in, her physical state became an issue. She smoothed her housecoat and patted the curlers in her hair.

  “Good heavens, I can’t go nowhere looking like this.”

  “What do you mean? You’re perfect.”

  “Nonsense,” she said, smoothing her housecoat once more. But something captured her attention, and her gaze flitted back to the door leading to the hall.

  I turned to see that Charlie was back. Arms full. Fists restocked.

  Leaning over, I whispered in Mrs. Blomme’s ear. “That’s Charlie Newell, your great-grandson.”

  A hand flew to her mouth as a new moisture threatened to push past her lashes to follow the first. “My goodness, isn’t he beautiful.”

  “He’s gorgeous. And you have a great-granddaughter here, too. Charisma.”

  Mrs. Blomme found a chair and sank into it, and I knew I’d lost her. No way would she leave these children to their own devices. They needed order and discipline. But mostly they needed spoiling.

  “Can I stay just a little while longer? Can I watch over them?”

  I knelt beside her. “Of course you can.”

  I said my thanks to Mrs. Newell, a single mom with two inquisitive children on her hands.

  “Did you, um, make contact?”

  She was gracious enough to let me in to do my thing, an openness I found surprising, and I couldn’t help but wonder if she wasn’t a tad sensitive herself.

  “I did. And you were right. It’s your grandmother Blomme.”

  She smiled to herself in thought, wiping her hands absently on a dish towel.

  “I just have one question,” I continued. I gestured toward the hall. “What’s with the gravy boat?”

  She giggled and shrugged. “Some kids have security blankets; some kids have gravy boats.”

  I laughed with her. “That needs to be a T-shirt.”

  I still couldn’t help but wonder why Mrs. Blomme could see her granddaughter and great-grandson but not her great-granddaughter.

  Ah, well. A mystery for another day.

  After explaining to Mrs. Newell that her grandmother was going to be hanging out for a while, a fact she took with no small amount of enthusiasm, I left. I had much to do, including solve a couple of murders and hunt down a recalcitrant deity. But first, I had a skip tracer to harass.

  2

  I don’t want to look pretty.

  I want to look otherworldly and vaguely threatening.

  —MEME

  Half the time I sat at the Newells’ house, my stomach growled. I hadn’t slept, not deeply, in three days, and I’d hardly eaten as well. Anxiety kept my stomach full.

  But I had a long night ahead of me. I needed sustenance, so I drove through Macho Taco, ordered three taquitos with extra salsa and a Mexican latte with extra foam, because anything worth having was worth having extra, and started for an irascible skip tracer’s house on the other side of town. Luckily, at this hour on a weeknight, the town was nearly deserted.

  I headed east on Menaul and had barely managed a bite when I picked up a hitchhiker. A departed thirteen-year-old gangbanger named Angel, also irascible. Though I hadn’t met him until a decade after his death, Angel and I had become fast friends. And now he was my top—not to mention only—investigator. He popped into the passenger’s seat of Misery, my cherry-red Jeep Wrangler, in all his gangbanger brilliance. Red bandana low over his brows. Dirty A-l
ine T-shirt. Gaping chest wound.

  Angel popping in was not unusual. Angel pretty much popped in and out as he pleased, but this pop seemed direr than most.

  The moment he appeared, he turned to look out the window, his shoulders hunched, his mouth oddly silent. Like, seriously, it emitted no sound whatsoever. He was only quiet when he was upset, hiding something, or secretly checking out a hot girl on the horizon. Since there were no hot girls around …

  I knew this would take my full attention, so I pulled into the parking lot of a strip mall, one replete with a nail salon, a gym, a bizcochito bakery—where has that been all my life?—another gym, a burger joint, and a psychic, the only open shop on the strip. She must’ve known we’d pull in there. Eerie.

  “Okay,” I said between bites. “What has your panties in a twist?”

  He didn’t turn to look at me. He was upset. When he hid things, he tended to look me right in the eye, as though that would throw me off the scent. In his defense, he’d died young.

  “I can’t find him.” Disappointment edged his voice.

  “Angel, it’s not your fault. I can’t find him, either, hence my siccing you on his trail.”

  “You don’t understand.” He shifted in the seat but continued his vigil. “I can feel him, I just can’t find him.”

  “What do you feel?” I asked, dread inching up my spine. If Angel was feeling what I’d been feeling for the past three days, we could all be in a world of hurt. All as in the entire human race.

  “Anger,” he said softly.

  Yep. We were screwed. But none of this was Angel’s fault. If anyone was at fault, it was my boneheaded husband. Cause I damned sure wasn’t taking the blame.

  He turned to me at last, his brown eyes shimmering in the low light, his peach fuzz darker because of it. “The question is, mija, what the hell are you going to do with him when you do find him?”

  “You’re right,” I said between crunches. “That is the question.”

  “If you have a plan, now would be a good time to implement it.”

  I swallowed the salsa-drenched taquito, then gaped at him. “Dude, did you just use the word implement? In a sentence? Correctly?”

  “For real?”

  “That’s a mighty big word there, buddy.”

  “Ay, dios mio.” He looked back out the window, but I felt the weight on his shoulders lift, if only a little. “Are you gonna tell me what this is about?”

  “Yes. Just, not yet.”

  “When?”

  “I’m going to talk to Garrett. He’ll know what to do. I’ll summon you the minute I know something.”

  He nodded, seeming to accept my conditions. Without argument or endless negotiations involving me in a state of undress. Something was definitely off.

  “Sweetheart, what’s up?”

  He shrugged and looked out the window again.

  I rested a hand on his cool one, and without turning his gaze toward me, he turned up his palm and threaded his fingers into mine. That act, that one, simple gesture, terrified me. I knew Reyes could be a problem, what happened could change everything, but for it to affect Angel to such a degree was unexpected.

  I set my jaw, preparing to hear something I didn’t want to, and asked, “Bottom line, Angel: Could he kill? Do you believe him capable?”

  He glanced down at our hands. “That’s the problem, corazón. Could Reyes kill? Hell, yes, but only to protect you. Or Beep. Could Rey’azikeen kill?” He pulled his lower lip in through his teeth, turned once again to stare out the window, then spoke so softly I had to strain to hear him. “By the millions.”

  * * *

  By the time I got to Garrett’s house, the clock had struck one. Thirty-eight. Ish.

  Garrett would be asleep, which was why I didn’t go to him earlier that day when I realized I was in a tad over my head. I could ambush him. Tell him what happened with the god glass and the smoke and the angry deity, and he’d be too sleepy and disoriented to reprimand me. Win-win.

  Garrett Swopes had been one of the more reluctant believers in my circle of friends, but since he’d come to terms with who I was and what I could do, he’d become an invaluable asset. He was also a top-notch researcher, which was weird. Before he began exploring old texts and ferreting out ancient prophecies in one form or another, I had no idea he could read.

  I grabbed the cupcakes I’d stolen from Cookie’s apartment, the one right across the hall to which I had a key, wound up Garrett’s walk, took out another key labeled “Secret Key to Garrett’s House, Shhh,” and let myself in.

  Since I’d had the key made without his knowledge or, more importantly, his consent, the last time I used the key, I told Garrett I’d picked the lock. The schmuck believed me. I could pick locks, just not in a super timely manner. Those things were harder than they looked.

  I used the light on my phone to traverse the harsh landscape of Garrett’s abode. Books, papers, and manly things lay strewn about along with a couple of empty beer bottles and a half-empty bottle of wine. Since when did Garrett drink wine?

  I finally made my way back to his bedroom and things just got curiouser and curiouser. Garments of all shapes and sizes peppered the floor, and since I doubted Swopes was a double D, I had to assume he was with a woman.

  Yep. He lay sleeping on his back, his torso bare except for the double D draped across him.

  This was awkward.

  I sat on a weight lifting bench he had in a corner, trying to figure out if I should wake him or not. My sitting there in the dark, staring at a couple post-coitus, could be considered creepy by the more conservative of the population. Then again, Garrett had a great torso. At least half of said population would totally understand.

  Before I had a chance to wake him, Garrett stirred.

  I started to say hey, but no sooner had I drawn breath than I found myself staring down the barrel of a .45. I dropped the cupcakes and raised my hands in surrender.

  “It’s me,” I said, my voice a mere squeak. “I brought cupcakes.”

  “What the fuck?” He reached over, without taking his eyes or the barrel off me, and turned on a lamp. “What the fuck are you doing in my bedroom?”

  “Bringing you cupcakes.” Since the gun was still trained on me, I kept my hands raised.

  The girl moaned and rolled off him, exposing more of his mocha-colored skin. His hard, muscular mocha-colored skin. I stole a quick gander for posterity’s sake, then returned my attention to the matter at hand.

  “Charles,” he said in warning, his voice deep and sleepy and edged to a razor-sharp sheen.

  I may have ovulated, but only a little. I was a married woman, damn it.

  When he continued to glare, and point a gun at me, I caved. “Fine. Holy cow. You called me, remember?”

  He finally lowered the gun and rubbed his eyes. “I called you three days ago.”

  “Right. Sorry about that. I’ve been busy.” I gestured toward the woman now sprawled across the other side of the bed. “Who’s the ho?”

  He glanced at his bedmate, then back at me, his mouth agape. Like literally. “Are you kidding me? She’s not a ho. I thought you of all people would understand that, considering your background.”

  “My what?”

  “You should be the last person to judge someone for jumping into bed with a superhot bond agent with fantastic abs—”

  He did have great abs.

  “—who may or may not have had a shitty night so he went for a drink and met a wonderful young woman with whom he shared a mutual attraction and, since they were both consenting adults, decided to spend some quality time together. For you to call her a ho—”

  “Dude,” I said, interrupting him mid-rant, “her shirt says HO.” I pointed to make my point pointier. It was right there on her shirt. The letters H-O.

  He let out an annoyed sigh and scooted back against his headboard. “Hope, Charles. It says Hope, as in Hope Christian Academy.”

  That time I gaped. “You’re
sleeping with a high school student?”

  “She’s a teacher,” he said through gritted teeth. It was funny.

  “At a Christian academy? Isn’t that kind of, well, unethical?”

  “She’s a teacher, not a nun.”

  “Point taken,” I conceded even though his point wasn’t nearly as pointy as mine had been. “Why are you in bed with someone who is not your baby mama?”

  Garrett had had a baby with a lovely girl, and because she’d set him up to purposely become impregnated by him, as they had a similar remarkable heritage, he distrusted her. Go figure.

  “Why are you here, Charles?”

  “I need your help, but first, why’d you call?”

  “I told you in my message.”

  “Yeah, I don’t really do messages.” I did, actually. Something about a children’s book? But I’d been busy at the time chasing the ball and chain all over the world. Dude was fast.

  He ground his teeth—I did that to people—then looked at the floor. “You really brought cupcakes?”

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, Garrett was a new man, all freshly washed and smelling like an Irish spring. Not that I’d ever been to Ireland in the spring. Or any other time of year, for that matter.

  “I stumbled upon these by accident,” he said, handing me a set of three children’s books.

  “You’re finally learning to read? Good for you, Swopes.”

  He strode to the coffeepot and poured two cups. I didn’t want to tell him that I’d already had twelve cups that day. Mostly because one could never have too much of the dark elixir I considered more of a lover than a beverage. But also because it had been a long day.

  He brought the coffee back and tore into the cupcakes. “Who made these?” he asked.

  “Maybe I did.” I examined the books he’d given me. The covers were beautifully illustrated with sparkling stars over a colorful kingdom.

  “No, really.”

  “Fine, Cook did. What are these?”

  “That’s the first one,” he said, pointing to the book in my hands.

  It was titled The First Star and was written and illustrated by a Pandu Yoso.