The Trouble with Witches

  SHIRLEY DAMSGAARD

  The Trouble With Witches

  AN OPHELIA AND ABBY MYSTERY

  To Aunt Betty and Uncle Arnie. Thank you for all

  the wonderful times at the “real” Gunhammer

  Lake—Crooked Lake, Minnesota!

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Scattered pictures of a man lay on the table in…

  One

  A big black spider sat on Mr. Carroll’s shoulder, while a…

  Two

  For the rest of the day I stewed about calling…

  Three

  By seven o’clock that evening my suitcases were packed and…

  Four

  After exchanging pleasantries with Abby, Rick whisked us out of…

  Five

  After leaving Joan, Rick offered to take Abby and me…

  Six

  I learned when someone says a drive will take three…

  Seven

  When we arrived at the cabin, Lady met us at…

  Eight

  We easily found the town park holding the spaghetti dinner.

  Nine

  The rest of the evening passed uneventfully. I sat calmly…

  Ten

  The sound of a motor pulled me out of a…

  Eleven

  The boat, motor, and battery were right where Abby had…

  Twelve

  Cold—I’m so cold.

  Thirteen

  Darci and I were about a hundred yards from the…

  Fourteen

  After a restless night, haunted by half-remembered dreams that left…

  Fifteen

  When I arrived back at the cabin, the only ones…

  Sixteen

  It was becoming a morning ritual to drink my first…

  Seventeen

  Standing in front of the bathroom mirror, I put my…

  Eighteen

  We ate a simple but delicious meal of vegetarian lasagna…

  Nineteen

  Too much information. Too much information.

  Twenty

  Slowly I surfaced from my dream. My head felt heavy…

  Twenty-one

  I sat bundled on the couch in a blanket that…

  Twenty-two

  Tink beat a hasty retreat down the hall without saying…

  Twenty-three

  Instead of going into the cabin, Abby detoured around the…

  Twenty-four

  I held up my hand. “Whoa—time out. What do you…

  Twenty-five

  The next day my morning ritual changed—Abby was up and…

  Twenty-six

  “You what?” I gave her shoulder a small shake.

  Twenty-seven

  Tink shrieked as the spider crept away from the necklace…

  Twenty-eight

  Darci marched up to the library in Brainerd.

  Twenty-nine

  I paid for the three lodestones and the book and…

  Thirty

  I grabbed one of the pilings and scowled at Darci…

  Thirty-one

  Abby didn’t have to say it twice. Darci and I…

  Thirty-two

  “How did you find me?” I said, standing.

  Thirty-three

  “I can’t help it. I—”

  Thirty-four

  “Okay, let me get this straight.” I glanced over at…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Shirley Damsgaard

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Scattered pictures of a man lay on the table in front of me. The images drifted through my mind as I ran my hand over them. The hot Iowa sun beat down on a couple as they enjoyed a picnic by a quiet lake. The man’s dark hair absorbed the heat, and tiny beads of sweat popped out on his upper lip. The woman, smiling, reached out and wiped the beads away. He caught her hand and kissed it.

  The scene changed and the man stood alone in an empty pasture. The once green grass was now brown, cooked by the summer heat. Only the cawing of crows broke the silence. The man looked up at the sky and watched while they circled above him. Bowing his head, his eyes traveled to the gun he held in his hand. A sense of total hopelessness filled his heart. And slowly…

  Opening my eyes, I scooped up the pictures and placed them back in a folder. I snapped the folder shut as if doing so would erase the images from my mind.

  “Well?” Henry asked impatiently.

  Sliding the folder away, I looked up to see his dark brown eyes roaming my face.

  They belonged to Henry Comacho, detective with the state of Iowa’s Department of Crime Investigation. The Iceman. The man who’d suspected me of being involved with two murders. And who now wanted me to use my psychic talent to find a missing man.

  His dark black hair glinted in the afternoon sun pouring through my kitchen windows as we sat at the table. His brow wrinkled in a frown while his eyes searched my face. In those eyes, I could see what a struggle asking for my help had been for him. He had a desperate need to find the missing man, but at the same time was skeptical about using a psychic to do so. But the desperation had won. So here he was, with his folder of pictures, asking me for answers to his questions.

  And what did I have for him? Nothing.

  What had I been thinking? Why did I let him talk me into this? When he’d asked me last spring, after I’d helped the authorities catch the man who’d murdered my friend Brian five years ago, I’d been reluctant. Now I felt the frustration over the lack of clarity that comes with my so-called gift grind at me.

  Lowering my eyes, I stared at the folder. Why were the images always vague and couched in ambiguity? A road sign, or something recognizable, would’ve been helpful in locating the missing man.

  “Well?” Henry asked again, startling me out of my thoughts.

  Raising my eyes, I rubbed my forehead. “I think he’s dead—a suicide. In a pasture.”

  “Gee, a pasture in Iowa. That should be easy to find,” he said with a heavy dose of sarcasm. “I don’t suppose out of the thousands in the state you could tell me which one?”

  “One with crows.”

  “That’s it? One with crows? No cows, no landmarks like a river, a hill, or woods nearby?”

  “Nope,” I said, and pushed the folder across the table toward him. “I’m sorry, but I told you I couldn’t guarantee that I could help you. Visions are unpredictable at the best, symbolic at the worst. All I know is he was overcome by helplessness and committed suicide in an empty pasture somewhere.”

  “Crows? Could they be symbolic?” Henry asked, placing a hand over the folder.

  “I doubt it, but I don’t know for sure.” I sighed deeply. “I’m sorry. I really wish I saw more.”

  A frown creased Henry’s forehead. “Yeah, I do, too.” He ran his other hand through his hair. “If the guy is dead and if we could find his body, it would provide some closure for his family.”

  As he said it, I felt a little warmth slip through the shield of ice Henry kept around him most of the time. He really was a compassionate man, but it was a side he didn’t let show very often. I’d seen that side of him when he was with his niece, Isabella, and around my grandmother, Abby. But with me, the wall was usually firmly in place.

  I covered his hand resting on top of the folder with mine. “I really am sorry.”

  The flow of warmth flickered, and then stopped. Henry squirmed and pulled his hand away. “We keep looking. Who knows, maybe you’re wrong. Visions aren’t always one hundred percent right, are they? Maybe we’ll find the guy on the beach in the Bahamas.”

  “Maybe,” I replied, my to
ne sounding unconvincing even to my ears.

  Henry picked up the folder and stood to leave. I followed him to the door, where he paused and removed his sunglasses from his pocket. Shoving them on his face, he turned.

  “It was a stupid idea to ask you to look at those pictures,” he said abruptly. “If he’d committed suicide like your vision indicated, someone would’ve noticed his abandoned car, but it’s never been found, either. That tells me the guy’s still alive.”

  I rolled my eyes in dismay. A lack of hard evidence had driven Henry to ask for my help, but the truth was, he would never see my gift as anything more than mumbo-jumbo.

  He frowned and pivoted away from the open door and me. From the doorway, I watched as he marched to his car, slammed the car door, and pulled away without a backward glance.

  After shutting the door, I leaned against it. Scrubbing my face with both hands, I thought about my gift. Would this talent ever work the way I wanted it to? Would I ever be able to help someone before it was too late?

  I hadn’t told Henry everything. I hadn’t told him of the last glimpse I’d had of the man. Only what I saw wasn’t a man, it was a pile of bleached bones, picked clean by the crows.

  One

  A big black spider sat on Mr. Carroll’s shoulder, while a vein in his forehead throbbed as he yelled at me. He wasn’t happy about the library’s latest book order. He was sick and tired of all the smut. Each word was underscored by a constant jangling in the background.

  Where was the sound coming from? My eyes left Mr. Carroll’s face, searching for the sound, until the pounding of his skeletal fist caught my attention again.

  My eyes traveled from his face down his body. The tendons in his skinny neck stood out as he screamed at me, and I could see his bony chest wheeze in and out. His ancient ribs, covered by thin, dry, almost translucent skin, expanded like a bellows with each breath. As my eyes traveled past his chest, I shuddered and said a silent thank-you that the counter prevented me from seeing the rest of his naked, eighty-year-old body.

  Whoa—wait a second. What was Mr. Carroll doing in the library nude? And what was making that jangling noise?

  My eyes shot open and I found myself staring at the darkened ceiling of my bedroom. Thank God, I was dreaming. But why was I dreaming about Mr. Carroll naked in the library? And why hadn’t the jangling stopped when I woke up?

  The phone, the jangling was the phone. My hand shot out to grab it, and in the process I knocked my alarm clock off the nightstand with a loud clatter. Queenie, my cat, who had also been sleeping soundly on the pillow next to me, gave me an indignant look and stalked off the bed. Lady, my dog, startled by the loud noise, gave a short bark.

  I shoved a handful of dark brown hair out of my face and stared at the ringing phone as if it were a snake.

  “What?” My tone sounded grumpy, but I didn’t care. I didn’t appreciate phone calls in the middle of the night, even though they did rescue me from an awful dream featuring a naked Mr. Carroll.

  “Hey, know where I can find a good witch?” asked the voice coming from the receiver.

  I stared dumbly at the phone. I’d recognize that voice anywhere—Rick Delaney, award-winning investigative reporter with the Minneapolis Sun, and a guy who’d almost gotten me killed last fall when he pulled me into his undercover investigation of a drug ring operating in our small town of Summerset, Iowa.

  Closing my eyes, I pictured Rick in my mind. Dark brown hair, brown eyes to die for, and a crooked grin that turned most women to mush. I wasn’t one of those women. At least, most of the time I wasn’t.

  “What do you want?” I asked suspiciously.

  A chuckle rumbled over the phone lines. “Nice to hear your voice, too, Ophelia.”

  My eyes narrowed in the dark. “Oh yeah? If it’s so nice, then—”

  “I know. I’m sorry,” Rick said, interrupting me. “I should’ve called, but I’ve been really busy. I heard you’ve been busy, too. Heard you helped catch Brian’s killer.”

  I gripped the receiver in my hand. “How did you know about that?”

  “I’ve still got contacts in Iowa. I heard the killer, Charles Thornton, came after you.”

  My grip on the phone tightened. Rick was right. Charles Thornton, the man who’d killed my best friend, Brian, five years ago in Iowa City, had found me in Summerset, where I’d moved after Brian’s death.

  Charles, a descendant of a judge who had served at the Salem witch trials, saw himself as a modern day witch hunter. And Abby and I were the ones he hunted. He convinced himself that we needed to die. His plan had been to kill me at the abandoned hog confinement facility and make it look like a suicide. After I was disposed of, he’d then go after Abby. I ruined Plan A when I got away from him, so he switched to Plan B—kill me and dump my body in the sewage pit. Luckily, after a struggle, it was Charles who wound up swimming in the hog manure, not me. The whole incident ended with Henry and company rescuing Charles and hauling him off to jail, where he was now awaiting trial.

  “You didn’t answer my question. What do you want?” I asked.

  “I need your help.”

  My snort slipped out before he could continue. “Yeah? The last time I helped you, I got shot.”

  “I told you to stay out of it, but you had to go off on your own and go snooping around Adam Hoffman’s machine shed.”

  “And you’re lucky I did,” I argued. “If I hadn’t been there, you’d have been alone with Adam and his henchmen, Benny and Jake, trussed up like a turkey and tied to a pole. And remember, I was the one who got us out of there.”

  “Umm, yeah, I guess you’re right…” Rick paused. “Except I still don’t understand how you managed to do it.”

  “Never mind.” I had no intention of trying to explain to Rick how I’d used the energy throbbing deep in the earth below the machine shed to distract Adam, Benny, and Jake long enough for us to escape. “So again—what do you want?”

  “A young woman’s disappeared and I need your help to find her,” Rick said, getting right to the point. “She’s eighteen and the only child of some good friends of mine.”

  I remembered my failure to help Henry find his missing man. “Rick, I don’t think I can.”

  “Why not? You’re psychic. And so’s Abby.”

  “Look, I’ve tried to explain to you before, the gift doesn’t always work. The images can be blurred and hard to figure out. I—”

  “Before you make up your mind, hear me out,” Rick interjected. “About four years ago, Brandi—that’s the girl’s name—Brandi Peters—seemed to change. It was right after her grandmother died…”

  Those words struck a sympathetic response in my heart. My grandfather’s death of a sudden heart attack when I was fifteen, and then Brian’s death five years ago, had shaped my life in ways I was only now beginning to understand. But I kept my thoughts to myself and let Rick continue.

  “She dropped a lot of her friends at school, started to dress differently, spend more time alone—”

  “Did she get involved with drugs?” I interjected.

  “I don’t think so, but who knows? Kids can be good at hiding things like that.” Rick sighed. “It wasn’t until she took off after her high school graduation that her mother found a bunch of books about spiritualism in her room.”

  “You think she was trying to contact her grandmother’s spirit?”

  “Probably. And I think that’s how she wound up involved with a group up at Gunhammer Lake in Minnesota—the last place she was seen. The group is supposedly conducting paranormal research and psychic investigations. You and Abby—”

  The phone slipped from my hand.

  “—would be the perfect choice to check them out and see what you can learn,” I heard Rick say as I returned the receiver to my ear.

  “Group? Do you mean cult?”

  “Well…” Rick’s voice trailed off.

  “You do. You want me and my seventy-four-year-old grandmother to infiltrate a cult?”
I asked in a shocked voice.

  “Hey, it’s not a cult,” Rick said defensively. “Not exactly. The group’s not like the Manson group or Heaven’s Gate. At least, I don’t think they are.”

  “You don’t think?”

  “Pretty sure they’re not. It’s been hard for me to learn anything about them. The group does a lot of charity stuff for the town up there, so the townspeople are closed-mouth about anything to do with it.”

  “And you think the group would accept a couple of witches who happen to be psychics better than a snoopy reporter?”

  “Yeah.”

  I could hear the smile in his voice.

  “But you might want to forget the witch part. Just let it be known that you’re psychics,” Rick said.

  “And how do we do that? Set up a crystal ball on the street corner and give readings?”

  Rick’s chuckle rumbled in my ear. “No, Madam Ophelia, I don’t expect you to do that. Something a little more subtle would work better. It’s a small town, drop a few well-chosen remarks and they’ll seek you out.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  “You’re resourceful. You’ll figure something out.”

  I was silent while I thought about Rick’s request. I understood how the loss of her grandmother might have affected Brandi, but that didn’t mean I would be able to connect with her in some way. And I hadn’t helped Henry—what made me think I could help Rick find the missing girl? But no died on my lips with his next words.

  “Brandi never quite fit in, if you know what I mean. She always seemed to be struggling to discover who she was, even before her grandmother died.” Rick paused, listening for my response. When I said nothing, he continued. “She wasn’t a bad kid, just different, kind of lost. And since she was fourteen, I’ve watched while she tried to figure out where she belonged.”