Donn's Legacy, page 16
Still nothing.
“Any response?” Yuri whispered.
“No. He’s back in bed.”
It felt strange and rude to talk about the spirit while he was right in front of us, but I had to assume he couldn’t hear us. Frustration grew in my chest, and I squeezed Yuri’s and Alexi’s hands. There was some kind of invisible barrier blocking my words from reaching the ghost, and I didn’t know how to break through it. Was he too far gone? Could only the recently dead be channeled? Did I need a more personal connection, something more meaningful than, Hey, look, I see a ghost, so let’s talk to it?
No. Or rather, maybe. It could be one or all of those things, but the main problem—the key issue—had to be me.
I wasn’t strong enough.
I was no Gabrielle.
With a sigh, I released my grip on the others in the circle. “I’m not getting a response.”
“Maybe if you knew his name,” Yuri mused. “I might be able to find it. I can look into the historical records and see if there’s anything about deaths of the miners who lived here.”
“Sure,” I said half-heartedly.
Yuri stood, and as he broke the circle, the sleeping spirit faded away. Striker hopped off my lap and went to sniff the floorboards where the ghost had been, but I took my time getting to my feet. Disappointment and frustration warred with elation and exhaustion inside my body, and I worried I might keel over if I stood too quickly.
Fang switched on the overhead light, face jubilant. “Holy crap! You guys, that was awesome. I mean”—he grabbed his long hair with his hands and pulled it straight against his cheeks—“the door just whooshed, and then Mac was all, ‘It’s a ghost!’ And I felt it. I felt it!”
“Yeah, kid,” Noah muttered. “We were all there.”
Our new cameraman looked even more stunned than I had dared to hope. I fought the smile off my face and asked casually, “Believe me now?”
“I want to see what the cameras picked up before I say for sure. But…” He ran a shaking hand down his face. “Damn.”
“Are you okay leaving the spirit here a bit longer?” I asked Alexi, who still sat on the floor across from me. “I guess I could try to help him move on with a smoke cleansing now if your tenants are really uncomfortable.”
Banishing a spirit didn’t require any level of personal connection. It was something I had done on my own, and I knew it was well within the limits of my abilities.
Limits being the key word, I thought sourly.
I expected her to take me up on my offer, but her eyes danced. “Are you kidding? Do you know how many people will want to spend a night in this room now? The ghost can stay forever.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
It seemed I had left all my luck in the New Mexico desert. Sleep—that easy, natural thing that had come so easily to me before our trip—eluded me yet again. The morning after our investigation at the Ace of Cups, I slumped across the table in Primrose House’s shared kitchen and watched Graham pull apart packaged cinnamon rolls. He arranged them with more care than they deserved on a cookie sheet and put them in the oven before finally tackling the task I had been dying for him to do all morning: brew some blasted coffee.
“Need a pillow?” he asked.
“No,” I grumbled. The table wasn’t exactly soft, but my face had already stuck to the polished wood. I was too tired to lift my head back up, so there was no point in him bringing me anything soft to rest it on.
The door to the butler’s pantry opened. Fred and Lucy Hawkes sauntered into the kitchen. They had the relaxed, happy expressions of a couple on vacation, and I envied their disposition.
“Good morning.” Lucy beamed.
“Morning,” Graham returned. “What are your plans for the day?”
“We’re going to drive out to Moyard, check out the town,” Fred said.
Graham grabbed a sheet off the grocery list pad. “I know you love donuts, Fred. Let me write down the name of this bakery. You don’t want to miss it.”
“’Preciate it,” Fred said.
“We’ve just been eating our way around town.” Lucy pinched a nonexistent spot of fat on her stomach. “Elizabeth’s family was kind enough to include us in a big breakfast yesterday, and I still feel full from it all. I’ve always heard food is the primary love language for country folk, but this is the first time I’ve gotten to experience it.”
With much effort, I finally forced myself to lift my head off the table. “Aren’t you guys ‘country folk’ all the way out there by the ranches?”
“Fred maybe, but not me.” Lucy smiled. “I’m a Seattle girl.”
I sat up very straight. “Seattle?”
“And let me tell you,” she said. “We know how to be hospitable in the Pacific Northwest. But Donn’s Hill is like nowhere else.”
I knew I should have said something then, but my brain wasn’t sending the right things to my mouth. Eventually, I managed to choke out, “And where are you from, Fred?”
“Oh, here. There. Everywhere. Travel keeps you young.” He grinned at his wife. “Didn’t want to settle down till I met Lucy, and by then, she had fallen in love with the desert life.”
She glanced at her wristwatch and elbowed him. “If we want to catch the breakfast menu at the diner, we better skedaddle.”
“Whoops. Can’t start my day without pancakes.” Fred shuffled after her toward the door. “We’ll be back tonight. Save one of those cinnamon rolls for me.”
I stared after them, feeling more awake than I had any right to be. Through the kitchen window, I watched Fred’s face from every angle as he settled Lucy into the passenger side of their car and rounded the sedan to get into the driver’s seat.
Their Seattle connection bothered me. Where had he and Lucy met? When had they met? Had Fred ever gone by another name?
I felt foolish for not asking these questions before. I hadn’t recognized Fred at all when we met, but my memory of Anson Monroe’s face was fuzzy at best. The more important question was: had Fred recognized me when I checked into the Yurt in Luck Resort? If so, he was a heck of an actor. He played the part of a gracious host perfectly. But then, Horace was quite an actor too. He had twisted me into his world of lies, and I’d bought everything he told me.
A frustrated, guttural growl choked its way out of my throat. Horace had twisted me up, all right. He made me so anxious and paranoid that I was second-guessing myself at every turn. Of course Fred wasn’t Anson Monroe. Like I’d told Graham, I would feel it if he was, the same way Grey had felt my powers. Wherever he was, whatever he was up to, he was doing it from the shadows. That was his MO.
My phone buzzed, rumbling across the table and startling me.
“Mac? Did I wake you?” Deputy Wallace’s normally bombastic voice was subdued. She sounded as exhausted as I felt.
“Hey, Cynthia. No, I’ve been up for a while.” It wasn’t a lie. Two days was arguably “a while.”
“Do you have some time today to help me sort through my grandmother’s things?”
Her request had come sooner than I expected. Packing and organizing the contents of Elizabeth’s shop sounded like it would take way more energy than I currently had available, but I struggled to come up with a valid reason to bail on a promise.
We made plans to meet at The Enclave in an hour, which would theoretically give me time to breakfast and shower. After another high-powered dose of sugar and caffeine, I thought I would be strong enough to handle the task ahead. But when Wallace let me into the day spa’s waiting room, the sorrow weighing down her features immediately spread to my own.
My heart ached as I stared around at the empty chairs. Standing here in a place that was heavy with every smell I associated with Elizabeth—frankincense, lavender, lemon—made her death feel more real than even her funeral had. This room should have buzzed with her energy. Instead, it just felt… lifeless.
“Thanks again for helping me with this. I brought some packing supplies.” Wallace pointed to a stack of flattened cardboard boxes on the counter.
“No problem,” I assured her. “We’ll sort through it all together.”
She pressed her lips into a thin, joyless smile. “Grandma’s will said to sell as much as we can, so I guess just try to box similar things up together. I’ll take everything to my house and deal with it when I get back.”
“Back? From where?”
“We’re going to go spread—” Her voice cracked. She cleared her throat and started over more quietly. “We’re going to spread her ashes into the ocean. My whole family.”
“That sounds really nice. When are you leaving?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Well…” I gazed around the room and tried to nudge my worn-out brain into waking up a little more. “Let’s get started.”
For the next several hours, we moved from room to room, categorizing and boxing up everything in the spa. Elizabeth had managed to organize a lot of things into a relatively small space, and her personality shone through in unexpected places. The drawers beneath the counter in the waiting room were mostly filled with business supplies like envelopes and blank appointment reminder cards, but there were also a few pieces of jewelry made from black tourmaline and a dozen tiny bottles filled with her own personal blend of essential oils.
I tucked the oils into a tote bag for Wallace to take on her family’s trip. I didn’t know how many people were going, but I felt sure Elizabeth would want her descendants to use the oil and think of her. As an afterthought, I grabbed a sticky note off the countertop and scrawled a quick message for her family: Elizabeth was a healing presence in the world. She will never be forgotten.
Together, we pulled the posters of lotus plants off the walls and rolled up the rug on the floor. We packed away towels from the massage room, cat treats and dog bones from the furrapy room, and cleaning supplies from the bathroom.
“There’s no bedroom,” I realized. “I thought she lived up here.”
“No, her house is down at the edge of town. The forest grows right up to her property line, and wild animals are always coming into the backyard. She says—” Wallace had to pause and clear her throat again. “She always said she had the best neighbors because they either had four legs or feathers.”
That made more sense to me. When I heard how Elizabeth died and where they found her, I had imagined her walking all the way across town from The Enclave to get to the woods. But if she only had to go out her own back door…
“Hey, this is going to sound like a really weird question, but did your grandma have a wooden jewelry box?”
Wallace thought for a moment. “Yeah, she did.”
My pulse quickened. “What did it look like? Small and square?”
“No, it’s pretty big. Like the size of a phone book. It has a little heart cut into the top.” A wistful smile settled onto her lips. “I remember looking at her jewelry through the heart-shaped glass. My grandpa gave her a new wedding ring every ten years, so she had a little collection of diamonds to mark how many happy decades they had before he died.”
“Oh. And that was the only one?”
“Yeah.” Wallace narrowed her eyes. “Why?”
“It’s just a feeling I have. I can’t shake it.”
“About her jewelry?”
“No, not that.” I hesitated, not sure how much I should tell her. But even in grief, Wallace’s large eyes held the same inquisitiveness they always did. I could tell I had piqued her curiosity, and if anyone would believe my wild theory, it was her.
“What is it?” she pressed, voice rising.
“Remember last month, how that little box got stolen out of Graham’s garage? I think I know who did it. There’s a psychic named Anson Monroe who used to mentor my mother, way back when I was a kid.” I took a deep breath. Wallace had been open to all things paranormal in the past, but what I was about to tell her pushed the boundaries, even in Donn’s Hill. “He can astral project. I would be somewhere, and then I would see him. And he talked to me.”
She looked confused. “Some guy who used to know your mom?”
“He pretended to be a ghost named Horace haunting the Oracle Inn last month. He told me he could help me clear my name when Raziel was murdered, but only if I went out past Moyard and got him this little wooden jewelry box from the woods. I went out there, and it called to me.”
It felt so good to be telling her everything. Graham knew it, but he was like me: powerless to do anything about it. Deputy Wallace could do something. She could help.
The words tumbled out too quickly. My drained mind couldn’t keep up, and it kept skipping forward just to give my mouth something to say. “Then the box got stolen, and that van Graham and I found? The one that caught fire? It had New Mexico plates. And that was too weird. I mean, I’m from New Mexico. So we took a chance. We had to go. And the girl, the one who was in our yurt before us, she died. Of exposure, just like my mom. And she had a box. A wooden one, just like Horace made me get.” I sucked in air. “And that box called to me too. Just like the first one. He’s doing it. Horace. Luring people—women, I guess?—outside with the box. And then he kills them. He did it to my mom and Camila and then Elizabeth.”
When I spoke her grandmother’s name, Wallace’s eyes flashed. Her jaw clenched, and her voice hardened. “You think this Anson Monroe guy murdered my grandma?”
I panted slightly as I nodded. Recapping the bizarre events of the past week had sapped the few drops of energy I had left, and I desperately wanted to sit down. There weren’t any chairs in the little hallway between the treatment rooms, so I crumpled down the wall until my legs rested on the floor. My stomach growled noisily, and I tried to remember the last time I ate a real meal.
Wallace towered over me, hands on her hips. “And if I’m following you correctly, this guy also killed your mom?”
I nodded again. How long would it take me to get home? I couldn’t wait to be in bed.
She made a strange sound, like she was trying to get something gross out of her throat. “Unbelievable.”
“What?” I squinted up at her. “It all happened.”
“Not your story. You.” Her eyes burned with anger. “How dare you pull my grandma into your twisted, egocentric delusions? My grandma is dead, Mac. She’s gone. She died alone in the woods. Nobody was with her. None of us got to say goodbye. Isn’t that horrible enough without pretending she was murdered?”
My head spun. I couldn’t understand why she was so upset. “Cynthia, I don’t know what I said, but—”
“Save it. Just… save it, okay?” She rested a hand on her forehead like she was taking her own temperature. Tears glistened on her cheeks. “And just go. I don’t need your help anymore. Leave me alone.”
I staggered to my feet and reached a hand toward her.
She slapped it away and turned her back on me. “Go. Now.”
There seemed little point in arguing. Head pounding, belly empty, and desperate for sleep, I stumbled out of the spa and down the stairs in search of rest.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
My fatigue was so complete that I had no memory of getting back to my apartment. As I lay in bed, every muscle in my body ached. My mind begged for sleep. But just like every night since Elizabeth’s memorial service, fear kept me awake. Sleep tugged at me the way those jewelry boxes had, pulling me toward it, enticing me along. But the more tired I grew, the more apprehensive I became. I couldn’t let myself drift off into unconsciousness. Every time I felt myself nearing the edge of that cliff, I pulled back.
Just dive off, a voice inside me urged. Come on in. The water’s fine.
I jerked myself into full wakefulness for a few seconds, determined not to lose myself in the great, ghostly river Grey had described. But within moments, my exhaustion coaxed me toward sleep again, only for my fear to yank me back.
Rinse and repeat.
Eventually, though, it wasn’t my choice anymore. I had been awake for days, far longer than anyone should be. My fatigue was too strong. My anxiety lost the battle, and my eyes closed.
When they opened, I was standing in the backyard of Primrose House, facing the large window overlooking the lawn. I could see myself in the glass, wearing the same clothes I had worn to help Wallace. Well, almost the same. My purple zippered hoodie was now a dark charcoal, and my blue jeans were a pale nickel. Like the last time I slept, the world around me was a study in gray scale, and no sound reached my ears when I clapped my hands in front of my face.
A deep crease formed between my reflection’s eyebrows. The silence and the lack of color were exhausting, and it wasn’t fair. Even in my dreams, I felt tired. Why couldn’t I dream about taking a nap in a hammock or curling up with a good book on a warm window seat?
I tried to imagine myself somewhere else. Anywhere else. I would take my old recurring nightmare about falling down the stairs over this. But no matter how many times I closed my eyes and pictured myself on a white sand beach, I opened them to my monochrome reflection in the kitchen window glass.
What if the ghost at the Ace of Cups wasn’t just an imprint, a movie playing over and over? What if his spirit was trapped in a loop, and every time he closed his eyes, his mind put him back in the same spot? If I died here, would the same thing happen to me? Would my mind just get stuck on repeat?
Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned to find Camila Aster looming over me again. I hadn’t seen her in the reflection. I wondered if she could see herself, but like last time, there was no way to ask.
Her brows scrunched together as she glared at me.
“I’m not exactly overjoyed to see you either,” I said silently.
She mouthed something back. Like before, I couldn’t make it out. She lifted and dropped her shoulders in an exaggerated sigh, making her feelings crystal clear.
In college, I had a roommate who claimed all dreams were just the result of our brains trying to process and catalogue everything we’d seen that day. Sometimes, things we hadn’t consciously noticed, but which our eyes had seen, would pop up. If we saw that same thing later—like, say, a billboard for a new company—it would feel like déjà vu.
