Autumn Bones

Forty-one

Stacey Brooks uploaded footage of the haunted wedding reception to YouTube at five forty-three p.m. on Saturday afternoon.

By Sunday, it had gone viral. It turns out that Stacey had a knack for this whole social networking thing. I found out about it because Lee Hastings turned up on my doorstep to tell me.

“There’s something you should see,” he said without preamble, whipping out his computer tablet to show me.

“Holy crap.” I watched the footage with dismay. “Can she do that? Post it without our permission?”

“Pretty much, yeah,” Lee said. “You can file a complaint for violation of privacy, but it takes a few days to resolve it. Which they might not even do, since you’re not actually identified by name or anything.”

On the screen, a series of wedding guests babbled about the experience in a state of giddy excitement. I got a sinking feeling watching it. “This is a bad idea,” I said. “A very bad idea.”

Lee halted the playback. “Yeah, I thought you might think so.”

“Can you make it go away?” I asked him.

He shook his head ruefully. “If you’re asking if I can hack the PVB’s YouTube account, probably. But this thing’s already been mirrored a dozen times. It’s out there, Daisy. Even if it wasn’t, Stacey still has the original footage. All she has to do is upload it again, and if other hackers think someone’s trying to scrub it, they’ll do their best to spread it further. Your best bet’s to ask her to take it down and hope people decide it was just another hoax.”

“I’m calling her mother,” I said, fishing out my phone.

Not only was Amanda Brooks unsympathetic to my concerns, but she had no intention of telling Stacey to remove the footage. “Do you have any idea what kind of publicity this could generate?” she asked me grimly. “Or any idea how long I’ve been trying to find the perfect off-season marketing angle for this town? Daisy, you do your job and let me do mine. I’ll go over your head if you don’t drop the matter. As long as this lasts, we’re going to exploit it for all it’s worth.”

“I just think you’re asking for troub—”

She cut me off before ending the call abruptly. “Something’s come up. Just do your job and stay out of our way.”

I let out a low hiss of frustration. “Goddammit!”

“No luck?” Lee said.

“No.”

Lee fidgeted with his tablet. “I guess you can’t blame her for wanting to find the silver lining,” he offered. “And you can’t blame people for wanting a glimpse of real magic.”

“I just hope the coven gets their shit together soon,” I muttered. “Because—”

My phone rang.

It was Cody. “We’ve got another one,” he said tersely. “Grab your gear and meet me at Riverside Grove.”

I gave Lee’s good arm a squeeze. “Thanks for the heads-up. I’ve got to run.”

Riverside Grove’s School of the Arts was a charming establishment out in the woods overlooking a lagoon. Back in the lumber days, the site boasted a hotel situated on a bend of the Kalamazoo River that catered to passengers traveling on Lake Michigan, but it was left stranded when the course of the river was altered around the turn of the century, cutting off the hotel from its patrons. Thanks to a handful of visionary artists and architects, the hotel and its surroundings got a second life as a haven for the arts, and it remained a thriving program to this day.

Which is also one of the reasons that until the dollar store opened, you could buy a painting for ten grand in Pemkowet, but not a pair of socks.

Anyway, the majority of Riverside Grove’s programming takes place in the summer and it should have been fairly empty at this time of year, but as luck would have it, the Pemkowet Historical Society was hosting an open house on this particular Sunday and had arranged hourly tours of the rustic campus with commentary by local historians.

It was a nice idea, and I understand it was a rousing success before the caretaker’s ghost showed up.

“Hello, dear.” Mrs. Meyers greeted me placidly when I emerged from my Honda onto the grassy parking area, where would-be tourgoers and other members of the historical society were hiding behind their cars. She nodded toward the insubstantial figure of a stocky man who was patrolling the verge and scowling, a double-barreled shotgun over his shoulder. Unlike the ghost bride’s, his feet appeared to make contact with the earth, presumably because he hadn’t died dangling above it. “I was just telling Officer Fairfax, I’m afraid Leonard’s risen.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Leonard?”

“Leonard Quincy,” Cody informed me. “Off-season caretaker of the facility until he was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head in the winter of 1968.”

“Suicide?” I asked.

Cody shook his head. “According to Mrs. Meyers, it was an unsolved homicide.”

“It was probably an accident. Hunters, you know. Poaching. I always suspected one of the Thornberrys, myself.” Mrs. Meyers lowered her voice. “I tried a banishing spell, but Leonard only flickered.”

A shiny black SUV came barreling out of the woods and pulled into the parking area, disgorging Stacey Brooks, camera in hand. “Did I miss it?” she asked eagerly. “Tell me I didn’t miss it!”

I rolled my eyes. That was probably the something that had come up while I was on the phone with her mother—an alert on the police scanner.

“You didn’t miss it,” Cody assured her. “And it’s not the Tall Man. Ready, Daise?”

“Yeah.” I hoisted the spirit lantern and shot a scathing look at Stacey. “Just make sure you stay out of our way.”

From the front, Leonard Quincy’s ghost didn’t look that bad. His scowl deepened as Cody and I approached. “Hey! This is private property. Didn’t you see the signs?” He raised his shotgun, resting the butt of the stock against his shoulder and sighting down its length. “Trespassers will be shot.”

Okay, I know he was a ghost, but staring into the twin barrels of that shotgun was really freakin’ scary.

“Mr. Quincy?” I called. “It’s all right. We’re here to return you to rest.”

Leonard’s head turned as Cody veered to the left, angling to get behind him. Now I could see that the back of his skull contained a ragged hole of blood and splintered bone where he’d been shot from behind by a hunting rifle. Yep, definitely not suicide. “Hey! What are you doing, boy?” Pointing his shotgun skyward, he pulled the trigger and fired a shot.

I flinched. It might not have been real, but it sure as hell sounded real. I could feel my eardrums reverberating.

“Daisy!” Cody shouted, an edge of panic in his voice. It must have sounded real to him, too. “Now!”

As Leonard Quincy’s ghost lowered his shotgun to take aim at Cody, I unshuttered the spirit lantern, throwing his shadow long and stark across the grounds of the Riverside Grove School of the Arts. A second blast sounded as Cody dropped to one knee and hammered a nail into the sandy soil.

Like the ghost bride’s yesterday, the caretaker’s apparition vanished.

Some yards away, Stacey Brooks lowered her camera. “Well, that was almost too easy, wasn’t it?” She sounded disappointed.

“Speak for yourself.” I closed the shutter on the spirit lantern and went over to Cody, who was still kneeling, his head hanging low. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” He got to his feet with an effort, pressing one hand to his chest. “Jesus! I swear I could feel the buckshot hit me.”

Moving his hand away, I examined the front of his dark blue uniform shirt. “It’s okay. There’s nothing there.”

He shuddered. “That could give a person a heart attack.”

I glanced toward the parking area. “Let’s hope it didn’t.”

The fact that it hadn’t could probably be attributed to Mrs. Meyers’s calm presence as much as anything else, but if this kept up, sooner or later our luck was going to run out. While Cody talked to the reassembled members of the historical society and Stacey dashed off to upload her latest, I steered Mrs. Meyers to one side.

“What’s going on with the coven?” I asked her. “Aren’t you supposed to be working on a summoning ritual?”

She patted my hand. “Oh, I promise, the others are hard at work on it, dear. I’m afraid I’ve been busy with the open house.”

I stared at her. “No offense, ma’am, but don’t you think maybe the open house would have been better served by de-haunting the town?”

“Well, I see your point, but you and young Officer Fairfax did a fine job. Poor Leonard,” she added. “He always was a terrible grump.”

I wasn’t sure if nice Mrs. Meyers was a little batty or just particularly sanguine about the dead. Either way, I guess it didn’t really matter.

As it happened, although I wish I could say otherwise, the whole summoning thing didn’t really matter either.

It wasn’t the coven’s fault, or at least I’m pretty sure it wasn’t. Jolted into a sense of urgency by my pestering and two back-to-back manifestations, they made the attempt at midnight on the following day in the Fabulous Casimir’s backyard.

To be honest, I was starting to have my doubts about the coven’s effectiveness, but even I could feel that this spell should have worked. Since it didn’t, I won’t belabor the details, but I was watching from the sidelines as they encircled Sinclair, who stood in the center with the empty pickle jar, a look of determination on his face.

According to Casimir, if the coven could bind Grandpa Morgan’s spirit in the circle, it wouldn’t matter that Sinclair wasn’t willing to fulfill the terms of the burden his mother had laid on him. Once the duppy was bound, their collective will would overpower it, and Sinclair could recapture it on his own terms.

It sounded good, anyway. And when the coven finished their incantation with a resounding, “So mote it be!” a flicker of white light raced along their joined hands before rising into the night sky with a sense of purpose that’s hard to describe.

Well, actually, it’s not all that hard—it felt like the supernatural equivalent of casting a net or a fishing line. For a few tenuous moments, my hopes soared. And then it felt like the supernatural equivalent of that net or fishing line coming back empty, or at least what I would imagine it would feel like, since the closest I’ve ever gotten to fishing was accidentally getting sucked into an episode of Deadliest Catch on the Discovery Channel.

A bitter sense of loss suffused me. Until the coven’s effort failed, I hadn’t realized exactly how much hope I’d pinned on their success. I let the disappointed members confer among themselves for a few minutes before asking what their failure meant.

“It means his spirit is already bound,” Casimir said soberly.

“To what?” I asked. “Or who? By who? Or . . . whom?” Despite Mr. Leary’s best efforts, I still had a hard time with that one.

Casimir shook his head. “I don’t know. I would have said there wasn’t anyone outside this circle capable of it.”

“What about Liz Cropper?” Mark Reston from the tattoo parlor suggested, which triggered a five-minute discussion about the coven’s history of infighting and bitter quarrels with former members.

I pulled out my notepad and jotted down “Liz Cropper” and a couple of other names they mentioned, watching Sinclair out of the corner of my eye. He was quiet, not taking part in the conversation.

“You don’t think it’s a disgruntled ex-coven member, do you?” I asked him.

Sinclair shrugged. “I can’t say for sure, Daisy. Whatever they’re talking about was before my time. But . . . if my grandfather’s duppy is bound to someone, I’m guessing it was him that did the binding.”

“To . . . whom?” I asked. “Like, whoever . . . whomever . . . stole the Tall Man’s remains?”

“Whoever,” he said. “Yeah, maybe. Do you have any new leads?”

“No,” I murmured. “I was really, really hoping this summoning ritual would work. Any further thoughts on what kind of death magic we might be talking about?”

“No.” Sinclair was silent a moment. “I’ve tried, you know. Tried to will myself to consent to do what my mother wants.”

“You don’t—”

He shot me a look. “Yeah, I do. I brought this on Pemkowet. If it’s within my power to stop it, I have to try. But it’s not working. Either I just can’t, or my mother was wrong and my grandfather’s spirit isn’t bound to the terms of their agreement.”

“Or both,” I said.

“Or both.” He summoned a wry smile. “Hey, at least those videos are going to be good for the paranormal tour business. And you look pretty badass in them.”

“Yeah, that’s an unexpected bonus.” I tucked my notepad back into my messenger bag. “Do you think it’s worth it?”

“No.” Sinclair’s smile vanished, his expression turning grave. “I think that if we don’t catch my grandfather’s duppy before Halloween, something very, very bad is going to happen.”

I sighed. “Me, too.”