The Pumpkin Man

CHAPTER

THIRTY-SEVEN

Emmaline Foster née Perenais watched the earnest young police officer walk down her crooked sidewalk and back to his squad car. The poor man was leaving with more questions than he’d brought, she imagined. She couldn’t help but smile at the memory of his expression when she’d told him she was Meredith’s sister-in-law. He’d come here thinking he could offer her protection. He hadn’t expected that she was related to the witch!

Her smile soured, however, when she thought of the reason that he came. The evil had risen yet again over the past few months. The legacy of Perenaises. From the house atop the hill, the house that was rightfully hers but had passed to an innocent from Chicago, a girl who would no doubt die at the hands of the evil if she chose to try to hold on to it.

Emmaline had never gotten along well with Meredith, and so she’d been unsurprised when the will left her unnamed. Still, she was a patient woman. Lord knows she’d lived with Harry long enough! She had been biding her time, waiting for someone to finally decide to dispose of the house following Meredith’s death—at which time she would put in her bid and take it back. Then the Perenais estate would revert to someone truly of the family. Emmaline knew things about the old house that nobody in town could ever imagine, no matter how their imaginations might wander the fields of superstition and fear. Even now, she could almost see the face of the elder crying out in the night from his hidden room up there.

Crouching down before her old coffee table, she pulled out the bottom drawer. From beneath a pile of colorful magazines and books she pulled a small red leather-bound tome that had once occupied a bookshelf of the Perenais family home and opened it to a well-worn page. It always made her feel better to read the spells of old before working on her own personal magics.

To Talk to the Dead the page title read.