Vendetta (Deadly Curiosities Book 2) Read online

  Kell reached out and took my hand. “Cassidy, if you can do that, I’ll be your raving fan forever,” he swore. “Thank you. Just having you believe me matters. And if you can come up with something that helps – that would be amazing.”

  I smiled. “Give me a day or two to track people down. I’ll call you as soon as I know anything.”

  “And I will happily buy you dinner for your effort,” he said. “Promise.”

  My cheeks flushed and I drew back my hand, but not before giving his a friendly squeeze. “Thanks. That sounds fun. But first let’s see if I can actually come up with something.”

  Kell and I parted company at the corner with a promise to have lunch together soon. I was deep in thought as I walked back to Trifles and Folly. I wondered if the wraith Teag and I had encountered was bothering other ghosts, not just Tad’s spirit. I got my answer when I walked into the store and saw Alicia Peters talking with Teag.

  Alicia gave me a friendly wave. “Hi Alicia!” I said. Alicia is a powerful spirit medium, someone Sorren and I had worked with on occasion. I had thought about calling her to see what she made of the hair necklace. The fact that she showed up on her own told me something big was going on.

  “Hi Cassidy,” Alicia replied. “I thought I had better stop by and see what’s up, since the ghosts are climbing the walls, so to speak.” Alicia’s strong Lowcountry accent gave her a smooth drawl. Her dark, shoulder-length hair was tied back in a ponytail, and she had a twinset on over a dressy pair of jeans.

  “I’ve got the front of the store,” Teag said, volunteering to handle customers since this was Maggie’s day off. “Why don’t you and Alicia go in the back?”

  I led the way, and offered to make Alicia a cup of tea from our pot, but she shook her head, looking preoccupied. “No thanks. I’m jittery enough.”

  “You don’t usually stop in unless there’s trouble,” I said. “What’s up?”

  Alicia knows about my magic, and she also knows about Sorren and the Alliance. “Last night, something panicked a lot of ghosts in Charleston,” she said. “You and I have seen some mighty strange things that haven’t sent the ghosts into a flurry. This did.”

  “I heard something like that from Drea over with the ghost tours.”

  Alicia nodded. “I’m not surprised. Valerie has some ability as a medium; that’s why her tourists always get the best glimpses of the ghosts.”

  I gave Alicia a quick recap of what had happened with the memento mori. She listened intently, looking more worried as I went on. “Do you still have the jewelry box?” she asked.

  I wasn’t about to handle it again, but I led her into the office, where the box sat on the corner of my desk, waiting for Sorren to come get it. “That’s it,” I said, pointing to the box. “Can you pick up anything about Tad?”

  Alicia walked close to the velvet box and bent down to look at it carefully. I brought my desk chair around to the other side and she sat down then I closed the door, in case things got loud. “I can sense the spirit that is tied to the hair necklace,” Alicia said.

  “Tad,” I replied. “I saw his memories, but I couldn’t actually communicate with him.”

  Alicia nodded. “I’d like to go into trance and talk to him. I’ll channel him and you can ask the questions.”

  “Do you need anything?” When I had worked with Alicia before, it was always part of something big, so I wasn’t sure what a ‘casual’ reading entailed.

  Alicia smiled but shook her head. “No, thank you. I’ll be fine. Give me a few minutes to get grounded, and then we’ll see what Tad can tell us about what’s going on.” I watched Alicia take several deep, slow breaths and saw her entire body relax. She closed her eyes, and leaned against the back of the tall chair.

  “Tad?” she called quietly. “I know you’re scared. I’m here to help, but I need to know what’s going on. If you’re there, Tad, come talk to me.”

  I waited, and realized I was holding my breath. Alicia was silent, but beneath her closed eyelids, I could see her eyes flickering back and forth as if she were dreaming. She shifted in the chair, and just like that, I knew that Tad was with us. Something about her posture seemed less like her and more masculine.

  “Tad?” I asked hesitantly.

  “I saw you,” a voice replied. The voice came from Alicia’s mouth, but it was deeper, and the accent was different. “You fought off the bad thing.”

  He meant the wraith. “Yes,” I replied. “Do you know where you are?”

  The ghost was quiet for a moment. “I’m a long way from home,” he replied. “And I can’t make any sense out of most of what I see. Folks move around so fast, do strange things. I wish I could sleep. But I don’t dare.”

  I could hear the confusion and weariness in his voice, and my heart went out to him. “Because of the bad thing?” I asked gently.

  “It eats you if you sleep.”

  “Has it always been around?” I asked. I hoped not. More than one hundred and fifty years was a long time to run from something in the dark.

  “No,” Tad’s spirit answered. “It came… not long ago…” Alicia’s face mirrored the ghost’s confusion. I doubted Tad could be more specific. Ghosts don’t pay attention to the passage of time the way living people do.

  “Did something happen to bring the bad thing? Did it wake up?” I struggled to ask questions the ghost might be able to answer.

  Tad was quiet for a minute. “The dark has been quiet for a very long time,” he said, and I could hear the loneliness in his voice. “I rested. I didn’t try to bother anyone. If I can’t go on from here, the quiet will do.” He paused again, longer this time. “Then ‘it’ showed up. I didn’t know what was happening until it hurt me. I didn’t know anything could hurt me anymore.” He sounded afraid. “It came out of the dark, and it took a bite out of me before I knew what was happening. I… ran. I didn’t know how to fight it.” Shame tinged his words, and I remembered that Tad was a soldier. Running away had to be hard.

  “There wasn’t anything else that happened before the bad thing came?” I pressed. “Anything at all?”

  “I heard a voice, far away. Someone I didn’t know. I couldn’t make out what he was saying. It woke me up, or the bad thing would have gotten me in my sleep. And then, I saw a line in the darkness that looked like fire. It came and went real fast. After that, the bad thing was there in the dark with me.”

  Sounds like someone is messing with magic, I thought. Who summoned the wraith? And how did they open a door for it? Important questions, but I knew Tad couldn’t answer them.

  “Have you seen the bad thing since last night?” I asked.

  “No. But it might come back. Then what?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I admitted. “But my friends and I are going to do our best to send it away.”

  “Thank you,” Tad said. “I’d like to go back to sleep.”

  Alicia was rousing from her trance. She shivered, and I knew she was back again when she opened her eyes.

  “Did you hear any of that?” I asked. Sometimes, mediums don’t remember anything after a session.

  “Yes,” Alicia replied. “And I don’t like the sound of it. But it squares with what Valerie saw on her ghost tour. A predator that eats ghosts. That’s bad – and Charleston has a lot of ghostly prey.”

  I went to the kitchen and came back with a cold glass of sweet tea. There’s not much that can’t be made better with a glass of cold tea. Alicia drank it gratefully, and after a few moments, the color came back to her face.

  “If you heard what Tad said, did you get anything from his thoughts that I might not have picked up?” I asked, leaning against my desk, well away from the problematic jewelry box.

  Alicia frowned, thinking back over the ghostly encounter. “Tad didn’t really have the words to tell you what he saw when the wraith appeared,” she replied. “Magic certainly isn’t in his vocabulary. What I got out of the memories I saw was that someone called the wraith forth from… som
ewhere. So we’ve got two problems – the wraith, and whoever summoned it.”

  I had been thinking the same thing, but hearing Alicia put my fears into words sent a shiver down my spine. “Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I got out of it, too. And that means we’ve got a heap of trouble.”

  “Are you going to call the woman who brought in the jewelry box?” Teag asked after Alicia left and I had given him a recap of what we had discovered. Before Teag came to Trifles and Folly, he had been working on his doctorate in history at the university. He still looks like a grad student, mid-twenties, good-looking, tall and slender with a mop of dark, skater-boy hair and a wicked sense of humor. Now, he pushed a lock of hair out of his eyes and gave me a look that was deadly serious.

  “I’m not sure she can tell us more than she did when she sold it to us,” I said, leaning against the counter. “That jewelry box has been in the family for over a hundred years without bothering anyone, and just recently, she starts getting bad dreams and blames the box. Pretty odd if you ask me.”

  Teag nodded. “I agree, especially that she’d single out the jewelry box. I wonder why – and what she saw in her dreams.”

  I remembered the woman who had brought in the velvet jewelry box. She looked tired and guilty. That’s not as surprising as it sounds. A lot of people feel pressured to keep everything they inherit. Sometimes, they’ve hated that item since childhood. Maybe the piece doesn’t work with their lifestyle or they just don’t have room for it. That’s when the guilt hits, and they sneak into Trifles and Folly like we’re their fence for stolen goods.

  For our customers, we’re a mix of antique appraiser, treasure hunt, and confessional. People bring us grandma’s unwanted silver flatware and want to know what it’s worth. Buyers love finding one-of-a-kind items, and collectors hope they’ll stumble on an overlooked Picasso sketch worth a million dollars. But before those items go into the glass cases out front, we talk to the people who own the pieces, and that’s usually when we know whether we’re in for trouble.

  “Let me give it a try,” I said. “I’ll see if I can steer the conversation back to her dream.” It was a long shot. The woman who had sold us the piece looked very uncomfortable even admitting that bad dreams had anything to do with her decision to part with the heirloom. Now that the box was no longer her problem, I was betting she’d revise her memories to conveniently forget all about the bad dreams. It’s amazing what people can ignore when the truth makes them too uncomfortable.

  I went into the office and dialed the number Teag gave me. A woman answered on the third ring.

  “Mrs. Hendricks? This is Cassidy Kincaide from Trifles and Folly, the store where you sold that marvelous Victorian heirloom. I have a couple of questions for you, if you don’t mind. Our customers love to have information about the pieces they purchase, and there’s a lady who wants to know more.” Technically, that was true, although I was the ‘lady’.

  “You won’t give out my contact information, will you?” Mrs. Hendricks asked suspiciously. But when I assured her that we would keep her name confidential, she opened up, to my surprise.

  “That necklace has been in my family for a long time,” Mrs. Hendricks said. She sounded like she might be in her sixties, with an accent that told me she had lived in or near Charleston all her life. “Thaddeus Anderson was engaged to marry my great, great-aunt Amelia. He died in the Battle of Rivers Bridge. He was just twenty-two years old.”

  “Your family must have been very proud of him.”

  “We are,” she replied in a mellifluous cadence I could have listened to all day. “Of course, he died before great-aunt Amelia married him, so there were no children. She never married. But Amelia lived into her nineties, and she kept a photograph of Thaddeus with her at all times. She was buried with that photograph.”

  I frowned. “But not with the necklace?” That seemed strange, especially given Amelia’s life-long devotion, and the fact that a hair necklace wasn’t likely to be something anyone else would want.

  Mrs. Hendricks chuckled. “Well now, you’d think so, wouldn’t you? And the stories vary as to why. One story says that the box with the necklace had been misplaced when Amelia went into the nursing home, and it wasn’t found until after she died. Another story says that they tried to bury her with it, but something kept thumping on the inside of the casket lid until the mortician removed that necklace. And the third story says that one of my great-uncles, a rather greedy man, thought the necklace might be valuable and refused to let them bury her with it. Take your pick.”

  I was betting on story number two, although I didn’t tell her that. “How long ago did your great-aunt Amelia die?”

  “She died in nineteen forty,” Mrs. Hendricks said.

  “So the necklace has been in the family all these years since Amelia’s death. What led you to sell it now?”

  Mrs. Hendricks was quiet for a moment, and I was afraid she was going to refuse to answer. “Some of great-aunt Amelia’s things came down to me through my mother,” she said. “Dishes and such. My parents have moved to Florida, and when they cleaned out their house, my mother gave me what she wanted me to have. That included a box of Amelia’s things, and in the box was the necklace. That was about a month ago.”

  I waited, hoping she would go on. “I knew about the hair necklace because it’s a family story. But of course, something like that is very personal to the one who made it. Not like regular jewelry. No one else would ever wear it.” She paused again. “Frankly, it gave me the creeps,” she admitted with an embarrassed chuckle.

  “Were there ever any ghost stories connected to the necklace?” I asked. “I’m sure someone is bound to ask.”

  Mrs. Hendricks hesitated a little longer before she spoke. “When I found the necklace in that box, I didn’t like the way it made me feel,” she said. “It seemed unlucky. I try to create positive energy in my home. So I thought I would let someone else appreciate it, since my own children have no interest in that sort of thing.”

  I had the feeling Mrs. Hendricks had said all she planned to say about the subject. “Thank you very much,” I said. “You’ve been generous with your time.”

  “I hope it finds a good home,” she said, and paused. “But I do hope no one tries to wear it. It’s just… strange.”

  I thanked her again and hung up. The necklace was indeed ‘strange’, but not in the way Mrs. Hendricks thought. Or perhaps, some latent magic warned her that the memento was not benign. That left Teag and me with a problem item to deal with, and no idea what to do about it.

  And I had a nagging suspicion that whatever had come after Tad’s ghost would be back.

  WE CLOSED THE store right at five, and even if Sorren was back in town, it wasn’t dark enough for him to be out and about yet, so Teag invited me to join him and Anthony at Jocko’s Pizzeria, our favorite place to grab a couple of slices and a cold beer.

  Jocko’s is run by Giacomo Rossi, ‘Jack’ to his friends. Jack gave us a wave and a hearty “hello” from behind the counter. Just walking into Jocko’s makes me feel good. It always smells of fresh herbs, ripe tomatoes, warm cheese, and freshly-baked crusts.

  “You want the usual?” Jack called. Teag shot him a thumbs-up and we went to our favorite booth in the back. Teag and I ate at Jocko’s at least once a week.

  One of the things that makes Charleston such a foodie town is the fact that a large number of our restaurants aren’t chains. They’re one-of-a-kind places you can only visit here in the Holy City. We love good food almost as much as we love history and sweet tea, which is saying a lot.

  The best restaurants have a history of their own that makes them special. In this case, Jocko’s had a mural on the wall that told the Rossi family history, and picked up with the turning point in Jack’s life that brought him to Charleston. Jack had been a stock trader in the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York back on September 11, 2001, and when he survived the attack, he decided that life was too short to spend b
ehind a desk. So he quit his job, moved his family to Charleston and opened up Jocko’s using some of his mother’s recipes. The rest, as they say, is history.

  We had just ordered drinks when Anthony joined us. Anthony Benton was the blond-haired, blue-eyed epitome of a Battery Row favorite son, and a partner in the family law firm. He and Teag were a long-time couple, and although Anthony didn’t know everything about our work with the Alliance, he knew enough to worry about both of us.

  “Did I miss much?” he asked, slipping into the booth beside Teag and giving him a quick peck on the cheek. The waiter brought pale ale for Teag, a red wine for me, and a Chardonnay for Anthony.

  “We’ve got a rampaging evil spirit that’s attacking ghosts,” Teag replied matter-of-factly. Anthony looked from Teag to me and back again.

  “Seriously?”

  I nodded drolly. “Yeah. All in a day’s work. How about you?”

  Anthony took a sip of his wine. “Honestly, I’d trade you. This big case is running me ragged. And it’s tough getting anything done at City Hall right now, since the police are going crazy trying to track down two disappearances in as many days.” Anthony is a lawyer, and that means he talks to a lot of people in law enforcement. While he’s bound by confidentiality, in some situations, when he can, he passes along information that might help with what we do.

  “Disappearances?” I keep an eye on the headlines and I’m pretty well connected to the grapevine. Teag’s Google-fu is strong, so between the two of us, we usually know what’s going on in town, and then some. This was new.

  Anthony looked around, assured himself no one was close enough to overhear, and dropped his voice. “Yeah. They’ve kept it out of the news, but given the weird stuff you two deal with, I figured I should mention it. Two people walked down perfectly normal staircases and never reached the bottom.”

  That was interesting. “Do the people have anything in common?” I asked.