“He found a sting during the autopsy. That wouldn’t be much, but he’d seen that type of sting before in South America. It’s from a little scorpion. One of the few that are actually deadly on the continent. He had to send samples to another lab to be tested, but he was fairly confident.”
“A scorpion sting?” I said. “That’s odd.”
“Yep. But I know there is at least one person in town, Ruby, who grows poisonous plants. I thought that maybe you knew someone who raised venomous animals? Perhaps for potions or something like that?”
“I don’t,” I said and he deflated. “But wouldn’t you be able to track that? Like, if they bought it at a pet store. There must be some record.”
“Brighton, people don’t just buy venomous animals at pet stores. It’s illegal, I think. Or at the very least, a huge liability. They buy them at exotic animal trade shows. There are no records. Most of the sales occur without any kind of licenses, and they are not going to talk to me,” he said. “I tried asking around town, but most folks just looked at me like I was nuts. The most exotic pet around Coventry that I’ve found is the iguana in Mrs. Byrd’s fifth grade class.”
“That’s kind of a dead end,” I said.
“This whole case is a dead end.”
“Wait, that gives me an idea,” I said. “We can use the dead to figure it out. I mean, she’s been trying to tell me something, I think. Either that or she’s been trying to exact her revenge from beyond the grave, but either way, perhaps if we control the situation, we can get answers.”
“Bright, sweetie. What on earth are you talking about?”
“Langoria. She’s appeared to me more than once. In fact, I saw her ghost here in my living room before I even knew she was dead. I thought she was astral projecting as a way to get to me, but it turned out she was dead. Her specter appeared with flowers in her hand. The same ones found with her body. Maybe she was trying to tell me something. Maybe if I figure it out, she’ll stop trying to attack me.”
“You said she appears, but how are you going to control that?” Thorn asked. “I can’t believe I’m even asking this. Two days ago, I would have thought that you’re nuts, but now I’m…”
“It’s okay. You’ll get used to it. I promise. I had no idea I was a witch when I came here,” I said. “Anyway, we’ll summon her spirit. Meri can help with that, I’m sure. We’ll summon her and ask her questions. Hopefully, she’ll tell us who killed her.”
Thorn just stood there blinking at me. I could only guess that I’d crossed the line where he did think I was insane.
“Brighton, I appreciate what you are, but I have to solve this case the old-fashioned way. I don’t know how I would even make an arrest if the evidence leading to that arrest came from summoning a spirit.” His tone told me his mind was made up.
That was okay, my mind was made up too. Thorn stayed for a while and finished his tea, but he eventually had to leave. There was still work to be done at the station, and that gave me the opportunity to do the summoning before he came back over for dinner.
“Meri, where is the best place for me to summon Langoria’s spirit?” I asked once Thorn was gone.
“Her house, her grave, or the node on the ley line,” Meri answered.
“I can’t do the node because people are still around. Same for her house. It would be a bad idea for me to try and break in now.”
“You should be doing the summoning under the moonlight anyway,” Meri said.
“I need to do it now. I guess I’ll use her grave. Where do you think she’s buried?”
“In a cemetery.”
“I know that,” I said. “I mean where. It’s not at the one I’m restoring. Is there another cemetery in Coventry?”
“The Coventry Memorial Cemetery on the outskirts of town. There’s a Skeenbauer Mausoleum. She’s probably in there.”
“That’s perfect. We can do the summoning and people won’t be able to see us.”
“We?”
“You’re my familiar. I’m going to do some magic.”
“Fine,” he said. “But this is probably a really stupid idea.”
We took the car to the Coventry Memorial Cemetery. It wasn’t hard to find with Meri’s help, but I wasn’t so sure about the new part.
I’d expected something more modern than the gravel roads and iron entry gates. In fact, the new cemetery was a bit creepier than the old graveyard.
In the center of the graveyard was the Skeenbauer section, and smack dab in the middle of that was the massive marble Skeenbauer Mausoleum. I parked the car on the gravel road in front of it.
We made our way to the entry doorway. It was secured with an iron gate-like door. Fortunately, the lock was ancient. A little coaxing magic was all it took and the door popped open.
“That was easy,” I said.
“That’s because no one would be stupid enough to break in here,” Meri said. “No one but us.”
“Hey, maybe if I solve Langoria’s murder, it will go a long way to repairing the relationship between the covens,” I said.
“Keep dreaming,” Meri said as I set him down inside.
The mausoleum didn’t look any different than the regular ones I’d been in before. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected, but I guess I’d expected something more witchy. The witchiest thing about the place was that there were pentagrams in the places where you’d expect to see crosses in a human mausoleum. There was one on the wall over a marble shelf that served as an altar and smaller ones on some of the graves. The altar had some candles on it, but there were no herbs or crystals.
“It looks like the crypts near the door are the oldest,” I said. “That means we’re going to have to go deeper in to find Langoria’s.”
“Awesome,” was Meri’s response.
We walked down the dim, cool corridor until we found Langoria’s tomb. There was some light coming in from small exterior windows, but they were covered with frosted glass and metal bars that prevented much light from penetrating them.
“We’ll cast the circle right here in front of her vault,” I said.
“Have I mentioned that this was a bad idea?” Meri said.
“You have. I think more than once. But let’s just do this. It will be good for everyone, and we’ll be safe within the circle.”
“Look at you all acting like you’re a magic expert now,” Meri countered.
“Are you going to help me cast the circle or not?” I said as I took my backpack of supplies off my shoulders.
“Fine.”
We cast a circle of white salt around us first for protection, and then a circle of black salt inside of that for extra protection from the dead. I lit candles while Meri walked around the inside edge of the circle mumbling some sort of familiar incantation. I couldn’t really understand what he was saying, but he said that didn’t matter. I didn’t need to be able to understand familiar magic because I’d never be able to use it.
“All right,” I said when the circle was ready. “Let’s raise the dead.”
“That’s not funny,” Meri responded.
“It’s a little funny,” I said with a shrug.
Before we’d left Hangman’s House, I’d written a summoning spell on a little piece of paper. The incantation came from one of the books upstairs in the library. Not the Tuttlesmith Family Grimoire, but an important family book of shadows none the less. I’d wanted to just bring the book, but Meri had advised against it. He said it wasn’t a good idea to bring a powerful Tuttlesmith spell book into a Skeenbauer sacred space. I’d thought that was a little paranoid, but suddenly, I found myself grateful.
I hadn’t even begun to read the spell when the ground began to shake beneath our feet. “It’s working. I think it’s working,” I said enthusiastically.
“Brighton, how can it be working? You haven’t even started the incantation. This is bad. This is really bad.”
“What? What’s going on?”
Suddenly, the marble front on one of the
crypts closer to the entrance blew open, and a woman dressed in all black crawled out of the grave. She moved like a spider first as she emerged from the tomb, and then even more so as she crept across the ground toward us. Her back hunched, head jutting out, and her body propped up on her fingers and the tips of her toes.
“Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no,” Meri babbled.
“She’s freaky,” I said and took a step back.
“Brighton, don’t break the circle,” Meri shrieked.
I looked back and saw that my heel had almost breached the salt barrier. When I took a step to the middle of the circle, Meri began to run around the edge chanting his spell faster and far louder than before.
When the woman was almost to us, she stopped and stood up. Her face morphed from the wrinkled visage of the crone into that of a young, beautiful woman. Her long, gray hair began to turn ebony at the roots, and the color worked its way down to now soft curls that rested over her shoulders.
“We have to find a way out of here,” Meri said. “Maybe there is another door if we keep going down the corridor.”
“You want to leave the circle. You just said not to break the circle. Make up your mind.”
“It’s not going to protect us for long, Brighton. That’s Isobella Skeenbauer. They called her The Black Widow. She doesn’t like me very much.”
“Why doesn’t she like you, and how dangerous is she?”
“You know how I’m cursed to serve the Tuttlesmith family for eternity? Yeah, she helped with that. As far as how dangerous she is… If she gets any closer, we’re going to die. I can feel her draining my magic.”
“But we’re in the circle. The circle is supposed to protect us.” At that point, I was in complete denial about our predicament.
“Brighton, even together we can’t cast a circle strong enough to keep her out. We need to run.”
“What if there isn’t another door that way?”
“Run!” Meri said as Isobella opened her mouth and took another step toward us.
I managed to grab the bag as I turned to follow Meri down the corridor. Isobella skittered along the ground behind us. I didn’t dare turn and look, but she was gaining on us. I could hear the tips of her fingers and points of the shoes she was buried in scratching across the marble floor of the mausoleum.
“That thing you did in the basement, can you do it to her?”
“She’s not a demon,” he said. “Isobella is one of the most powerful witches to have ever lived. She’s far more dangerous than a low-level demon.”
“We have to do something. She’s moving really fast,” I called out between sucking breaths.
My heart sank as we reached the end of the mausoleum and there wasn’t a door. We’d gone deeper in, and it had trapped us even farther from what I’d thought was the only exit.
Meri pivoted to my left, and that’s when I saw the door that led out the back of the mausoleum. The door was chained shut from the inside, but Meri wiggled his nose and the chain fell away.
We burst through the door and into the fading light of the day. I pushed the doors closed behind us just as Isobella crashed into them, but she did not make it through. I heard her howl and then watched what I could see of her face through the stained glass in the door. She was trapped inside.
“It seems that even the Skeenbauers don’t want them getting out,” Meri said as we backed away from the door. “That shows you how dangerous even a dead witch can be. I told you this was stupid.”
“Let’s go home,” I said. “I don’t think I’ll be coming back here.”
Chapter Nineteen
The evening came and went. Thorn and I had dinner together, but I’d had enough of Langoria’s case for the day. I didn’t bring it up, and neither did he.
We watched a couple of movies together, and I held tightly to his hand. I didn’t want him to leave, and I’d hoped that if it got late enough, he’d just crash on the sofa again.
What had happened with Isobella Skeenbauer had terrified me, but I didn’t want Thorn to know what I’d done. So I just kept holding his hand and wishing for him to stay.
When the second movie was almost over, Thorn got a call. His deputy that was on duty needed him for a traffic stop that had turned into drug bust.
“I have to go. Are you going to be okay? Have things been quiet around here?”
“Around here? Yes. No sightings of ghosts or people watching me through the windows since the last time.”
“Maybe you should go over to Annika’s house or something. I don’t like you staying here alone.”
“I’ll be okay. I’ve got Meri.”
“I’m coming back after I’m done helping the deputy. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said and kissed him. “I’ll try to wait up.”
“You don’t have to as long as you don’t mind waking up to let me in.”
“I don’t mind,” I said.
I thought about telling him that I’d get him a key soon, but that would probably open up a whole can of worms. He had to go. It just wasn’t the right time.
While I waited for him to come back, I made myself a cup of hot tea and then read on the sofa. A couple of hours later, I heard a car door followed by someone walking up the steps of the front porch.
Thinking it was Thorn, I got up to answer the door. I didn’t want him to think I was waiting by the door for him, so I decided to at least wait for the doorbell to ring before I opened the door.
“Brighton, step back,” Meri said from behind me. “Step back now.”
“What?” I asked, but somehow, I instinctively listened to his command and took a step back.
It was a good thing that I did because at least a couple dozen little tan scorpions came pouring under the gap between the door and the frame. When I saw them, my heart began to thunder.
I backed to the middle of the room as quickly as I could while Meri put himself between me and the tiny invaders. “What are we going to do?” I asked frantically.
“I’m going to zap them,” Meri said gleefully.
“What?”
“I’m going to zap the little buggers.”
As I was about to ask Meri to clarify, little bolts of lightening shot out of his whiskers and zapped the scorpions. Each one let out a little shriek and then sizzled out of existence. It took him under a minute to get rid of them all.
“That’s what I meant when I said I was going to zap them,” he said with a laugh. “That was kinda fun.”
“That might have been fun,” I said, “but the killer must know we’re close. Now they’re after me.”
After an hour of sitting on my sofa watching the door with terror and paranoia, I somehow managed to drift off to sleep. I must have exhausted myself by getting scared half out of my mind twice in the same day.
Eventually, Thorn returned and I let him in. But I was half asleep when I did it. So he crashed on the sofa and I drifted off to bed without even thinking to tell him about the scorpions.
When I got up in the morning, he was already gone again for work. He’d left a note that he had to meet with some federal officials about the drugs, and that he’d be nearly unreachable unless it was a real emergency. Since my life wasn’t in imminent danger right in that moment, I decided to wait until he was done with the feds to tell him about the scorpions.
Not wanting to stay at home or go work alone in the cemetery, I decided that day was as good as any to go down to the courthouse and find out about paying the back taxes and fines. I hadn’t had any mail or calls about the issue, and I was tired of waiting. The last thing I wanted to do was lose Hangman’s House because I wasn’t proactive.
Something told me to call my grandmother first. If nothing else, I wanted to know why they had let the taxes fall into arrears before I went to the courthouse to discuss it.
“Hello, Brighton,” she said cheerfully. “I wasn’t expecting a call from you for at least a couple more months.”
“I did say I would call more often.”
/> “That you did, but I have a feeling you’re calling about something today,” she said less cheerfully.
“You’re actually right,” I said. “I was hoping you could help me out with an issue related to the property taxes on Hangman’s House.”
“Issues with the taxes? What do you mean?”
“I mean that no one has paid them for years, and now the town council is threatening to get a lien for them and then foreclose to satisfy the lien,” I said.
“Well, that’s just absolute garbage, Brighton. Of course we paid the taxes. They would have no grounds to put a lien on the property. Do I need to call my lawyer?”
“No, not yet. Let me go down to the courthouse and ask for myself. I think I know what happened,” I said.
“Very good, dear. Well, call me back if you need my attorney.”
“I will, thanks, Grandma.”
After a few minutes of polite conversation, I let her go. I was furious with Langoria for lying to me, but I knew I should go down to the courthouse and check for sure.
The woman working in the tax office at the courthouse confirmed my suspicions. There were no back taxes due, and Langoria had just been trying to run me out of town.
The good news was that meant I got to keep the ten grand from the cemetery job. The bad news was that I ran into Maximillian on the way out of the tax office.
Literally.
I wasn’t looking up and plowed right into him. He was on his way in looking about as down as I’d ever seen a person look.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s all right. I wasn’t looking either,” he said glumly. “I don’t want to be here right now.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again because I didn’t know what else to say, but Maximillian took it as a sign that I wanted to converse about his current plight.
“Drusilla, that’s my girlfriend, she made me get rid of the new truck. Said it was too extravagant. So I’m here to try and get the tax department to give me the local taxes I paid on the sale back.”
Doom and Broom Page 12
