By Familiar Means (21 page)

“So mote it be,” answered Val and Grandma.

“Merow,” agreed Alistair.

I waited. I breathed. I stared at the candle flame. I did my best to clear my mind and focus entirely on Jimmy Upton, on who he had been, on what had happened. I tried to open my mind to the truth, whatever that truth turned out to be. We needed to know what had happened to Jimmy Upton, the good, the bad and the ugly.

So mote it be.

Julia repeated the chant, and the others took it up, turning it into a steady cadence. The room filled with the scent of warm wax and herbs. The shadows cast by the tree branches outside shifted in the autumn wind. Alistair purred, and we all waited and waited.

I tried to stay focused on Jimmy and the murder, I really did, but the truth is, I was starting to get bored. The other women's chanting droned heavily around my head. I wanted to stretch. I wanted to move. I had places to be. Things to do. People to meet. This was the time. Finally. The stars were all aligned, and this time I wasn't going to let anything mess it up.

My hand was moving, the pencil was scratching against the paper, but the movement of my hand seemed entirely divorced from the thoughts filling my head. My motions were quick, practiced, broad. My thoughts, though, were tiny, hard things, dropping like pebbles from an open hand.

Screw this. I should just go now.

Not this time. Chance like this won't come again.

Need to try.

Better get out now.

My hand moved faster. Impressions tumbled through my mind, crowding together, practically fighting to be poured out onto the page. I felt love and hate and desperation. I felt steam heat and greasy paper rolled against my palm. I felt triumph, and the furtive hope that came from clutching secrets too close for too long.

I was sure I could do this, but at the same time, I was terrified it would all fall apart again.

Stay. Go. Stay.

I was so sure.

I was so scared.

I was . . .

I was . . .

23

Something strong and soft banged against my hand. My pencil skittered from my fingers.

Someone was saying my name, a long way off.

“Annabelle Amelia Blessingsound Britton. Your sisters call. Come back to us. Come back to yourself, Annabelle.”

I blinked heavily. I was right where I had been, in my attic, in front of my altar. Julia was still here, and Val, and Grandma B.B. And Alistair, of course. Alistair was kneading my stomach with his paws and mewing with concern. He must have knocked the pencil out of my fingers. Slowly, the pain of the writer's cramp filtered into my fuzzy brain. Normally, my hand felt like this only after hours of frantic sketching.

“Merow?” said Alistair. “Merp?”

“I'm okay,” I said or, rather, croaked. My throat felt like I'd been swallowing sandpaper.

“Annabelle,” said Julia to Grandma B.B. “We need to open the circle.”

“Yes, of course,” said Grandma B.B., and this time there was no hidden sarcasm under the statement.

They walked the edges of the circle, opening the spell the same way they'd closed it. I sat in the middle with my cat on my lap and tried not to shake.

I swear I felt the energies flowing out like the whole house had been holding its breath.

“Here, Anna, drink this.” Val shoved a cup into my free hand and I took a long swallow of lukewarm peppermint tea. It was a good thing it was lukewarm, too, because suddenly I was gulping it down like there was no tomorrow.

“Are you all right, dear?” Grandma crouched down next to me.

“Merow!” said Alistair, which I took to mean,
I'd have told you if she wasn't.

“I will be; just give me a second.” I had to use my hands to push myself up off the floor. I glanced at my watch. It had been less than an hour since we started. It felt like a month. “I . . . did we get anything?”

“Did we ever.” Val held out the sketch pad.

I took it from her, and I stared. It had been a fresh pad when I started. Now the first three pages were covered with drawings. They weren't consistent. There were some rapid, sloppy sketches and some more detailed drawings. And I didn't remember making a single one of them. I just remembered the feelings, and I shivered, because those feelings hadn't been mine.

“I think I need to sit down,” I said.

“We should go downstairs,” said Val. “What you really need is something to eat.”

The only surprise there was that she said it before Grandma B.B. could.

*   *   *

Julia took charge of the sketch pad. She informed us that we would be able to look at the results once I had been taken care of. Nobody was willing to argue with her, not even Grandma B.B.

In short order, we were all gathered in the kitchen. Valerie and Grandma, after making disparaging remarks about
the lack of actual food in my refrigerator, fixed up a plate of sandwiches and leftover muffins. Julia brewed more tea, while Alistair and the dachshunds alternated between supervising the humans and stalking around the house in case of unauthorized entry or stray negative energies.

I downed most of a ham-and-cheese sandwich and a glass of orange juice and felt a lot better.

Apparently satisfied, Julia set the sketch pad down in the middle of the table. Alistair jumped up on the table and took a personal cat-moment to look smugly down at the wiener dogs whining and wagging below.

I set my tea mug down, held my breath and flipped back the cover on my sketch pad.

The first page showed a drawing of a young man wearing a chef's jacket.

“Jimmy Upton?” said Julia.

“Jimmy Upton,” I agreed. It looked a lot like the photo that had run with the
Seacoast Times
article and the resemblance to his sister was striking. I'd spent a lot of time on the portrait. All the aspects were clear and distinct. His dark hair was slicked back under a bandana, and his wiry arms were folded over his chest. His face was detailed enough to catch his movie-star looks and the way he looked out of the page like he owned the place and didn't think much of the rest of us cluttering it up.

“And this is?” Grandma B.B. laid a finger on the paper and we all craned our necks, including Alistair. His whiskers tickled my cheek.

Jimmy held center stage on the paper, but around him was a smaller drawing. It showed a man—Jimmy, I thought—standing between two women; they were standing hand to hand, facing straight out, like a line of old-fashioned paper dolls. Something was passing from the left-hand woman to Jimmy and from Jimmy to the right-hand woman.

The problem was that this drawing had been made a lot more quickly than the portrait, and the figures were little more than outlines. Both women were curvy; one was short; one was tall, with straight hair down to her shoulders. It was
hard to tell anything more—hair color, ethnicity—since neither was much more than an outline.

“Anna?” said Julia, but I shook my head. Once I've woken up from the trance state, the vision's specifics fade pretty quickly, like a dream, and I'm left with only a bundle of feelings. And like a dream, it can be difficult to explain in a way that makes any kind of sense.

“There was anticipation,” I said slowly. “And . . . closure. It was like . . . a problem was going to be fixed. Someone, I guess it was Jimmy, was really looking forward to whatever it was being solved. By this.” I touched the square that was passing from the left-hand woman to Jimmy. Alistair, helpfully, pawed at the same spot. “Whatever it is.”

“Money?” suggested Val.

“Papers?” suggested Grandma.

“A ledger?” murmured Julia.

Better not. Better just pay and go.
The words popped into my mind.

“Money,” I said, and as soon as I did, it felt exactly right. “It's that five thousand dollars. He, Jimmy, was meeting her,” I pointed to the right-hand woman again. “To pay her off. One of these has to be his sister,” I said. “Doesn't it?”

“One of them could be Gretchen,” added Grandma. “Or what about her daughter, Christine? She's the hotel marketing director.”

“And then there's Kelly Pierce,” added Val. We let this fall into the silence, because none of us wanted to say the other name.

Miranda.

“But whoever he was meeting, the deal must not have gone through,” said Val. “Jimmy still had the money on him when they found him. Shelly Kinsdale denied that Jimmy offered her a bribe at all.”

“Merow,” Alistair put his nose to the page.

“Off, cat.” I lifted him onto my lap. He humphed resentfully and slid down under the table.

Grandma B.B. adjusted her glasses. “Could it have been the other way around?” she said. “Maybe we're reading it
backward. Maybe this woman was meeting Jimmy to pay him off.”

“Or maybe it was a setup,” suggested Val. “Somebody said they'd take a bribe, or a payment or something, to lure him to . . . wherever he died?”

“It's possible.” Julia cocked her head toward the sketches, considering the whole page carefully. “Unfortunately, what we can see here doesn't give us much clue as to where that might be.”

“We know where it was,” said Grandma. “It was in the Harbor's Rest, probably wherever that tunnel comes out.”

“The police must have found it by now,” I added exasperatedly. “I mean, that is one honkin' big door.”

“Anna, have you ever seen the basement of a major hotel?” asked Val. “It's a maze. There's going to be a laundry, a dozen different storage rooms, a whole section of walk-in freezers, and that's just to start with. There's also going to be the power plant, furnaces, employee locker rooms, and . . . What?” she said, because now we were all staring at her. “I didn't just up and decide to open a B and B because I was bored one day, you know. I worked a lot of hotel jobs back in the day.”

“It sounds like a great place to murder someone,” I said, but Val shook her head.

“A hotel basement might be huge, but it'll be full of staff, pretty much around the clock—housekeeping, maintenance, maybe even the laundry, and the kitchen and at least some wait- and bell staff. There might be a little window around three in the morning, but the fresh shift will be in by five at the latest. If I was going to kill somebody, I'd want someplace a lot quieter.”

Like the basement of a building undergoing renovations, which just happened to have the utility tub all hooked up and ready to go. I really wished I did not have to think about that. I slumped back but straightened up again because Grandma was watching.

“We'll worry about that later,” said Julia. “At least now we know Jimmy Upton was meeting someone. We know he
wanted the meeting and that he thought it was going to solve a problem for him. That is more than we did have.”

“What's on the next page?” asked Val.

I turned the page over. Alistair, sufficiently recovered from his huff, jumped back up on the table, right in the middle of the pad.

“Off, cat.” I put him back on my lap.

Max sneezed, and I swear it sounded like a laugh.

This page was crammed with drawings, one after the other, like panels on a cartoon page. This time, the faces were recognizable; at least some of them were. Here was Mrs. Hilde, her face furious and her mouth open, shouting at Dale. Here was Dale, shouting at another man, who was shouting right back.

“That's Rich Hilde,” said Val. “He's Gretchen's youngest son, and this next one, that's Christine.”

Christine Hilde wore a trim skirt suit, and she had her hands thrown up in the air as she shouted at Dale and the man Valerie said was Rich.

“Oh, my,” murmured Grandma as she touched the final drawing on the page. That was Mrs. Hilde sitting across from her daughter at a hastily sketched table. I'd actually drawn in a little line of knives going from one intense face to the other. Glaring daggers at each other. My magic had a weird sense of humor.

“I'm almost afraid to turn the page,” I whispered.

So Julia did it for me.

“Oh, no,” breathed Val.

My mouth went dry. My hand shook where it rested on the table. Grandma covered it. “Breathe, dear; it's all right.”

There were three drawings on this page. The largest was fast and sloppy, with lots of quick shading, but it was very clear. It showed two men. One had a gun in his hand. The other was falling backward, clutching his middle. The back of my neck prickled hard and I was having trouble catching my breath.

“It's all right, Anna,” said Julia. “You're safe.”

“I know. I know.” But something deep in my guts did not believe it.

Below the shooting was another sketch, all curved lines and sloppy, quick lines to indicate shadows.

“What is this?” said Grandma.

“It's the tunnel,” I said. I could recognize the curving walls, the propped-up ceilings and the dirt floor. “And . . .” I touched the page.

“A hat?” said Val.

“A fedora,” said Grandma B.B.

She was right. A man's hat, like the kind they all wore in 1930s gangster movies, sat squarely in the middle of the sketch.