Witch Myth Super Boxset: A Yew Hollow Cozy Mystery Page 10

  In one swift movement, Teagan seized a nearby frying pan. The metal handle nearly seared her skin off, but she chucked it through the small window at the top of the back door, pulverizing the glass. Then, planting a knee on the nearby counter, she hoisted herself up and out. She felt her palms slice open as she heaved herself through the window headfirst. The broken glass caught at her hips and legs, ripping through her pajama pants, but she wriggled forward, almost free of the raging fire in the kitchen. Then someone or something grabbed her ankle and pulled.

  She screamed, kicking wildly as whatever invisible entity tried to drag her back through the window. Teagan’s foot connected with something that felt suspiciously like a jawline. A jolt of pain raced through her ankle, but whoever held Teagan captive let go. She launched herself through the window, a shard of glass ripping open her thigh, and with a grunt, landed heavily on one shoulder. She ignored the pain, stumbling to her feet. Her shoulder felt dislocated. Her ankle was swelling, but it could hold her weight. As the house behind her was devoured by flames, igniting the night sky, Teagan sprinted off across the backyard, toward the small town of Yew Hollow, and never looked back.

  2

  In Which My New Job Takes Off

  The Yew Hollow Police Force mailed my new detective badge to me, despite the fact that the station was only about ten minutes from my house. The spring morning it arrived was a beautiful one in Yew Hollow. Dusty sunlight illuminated my new loft, and the soft chatter of awakening wildlife filtered in through the open windows. I extracted the shiny badge from its envelope, running my fingers across its smooth surface. In six short months, I had gone from Morgan Summers: Psychic Medium to Morgan Summers: Legitimate Detective. Well, not so legitimate, but my employment was pretty reputable for a twenty-nine-year-old who’d barely finished college. Yew Hollow’s police force had made an exception to the rule in my case, only because I had a unique skill that the other detectives didn’t possess. I could see and speak to ghosts.

  Yew Hollow, my hometown, was a strange and magical place. My family, a coven of eclectic witches, had settled the area in the late 1600s, and we still had a significant impact on the way the town was run. The townspeople had learned to leave us to it, ignoring or accepting the fact that Yew Hollow often experienced all sorts of odd occurrences. The only thing was, ever since I’d channeled an unstoppable power through the yew tree at the center of town last October, these odd events mostly consisted of several townspeople dying in sporadic accidents.

  They came in threes, these deaths. Earlier in the year, we lost twelve members of Yew Hollow, always to some peculiar accident. One guy slipped in the shower and banged the back of his head on the bathtub tap. A middle-aged woman had somehow managed to garrote herself with a clothesline as she hung her laundry out to dry. Someone had even mishandled a can opener to the point of a messy, unintentional suicide. It was silly but tragic, and at every scene, the familiar feel of witchcraft lingered in the air. At the police station, we’d decided to keep that detail hush-hush.

  A loud ring punctuated my thoughts as my cell phone demanded my attention. I glanced at the screen. It was a text message from my boss, the chief of police, asking for my presence at the station. I’d been helping the force out with yet another death. About two weeks ago, an elementary school gym teacher—a man named Ronan Riley whom I’d never met before—had been found strangled in the woods behind his own house. When I’d originally examined the crime scene, I’d expected to find more traces of witchcraft, but there was no hint of magic around the body or the area. Later his wife had found a suicide note. We were in the process of clarifying the details, but it seemed that this death was, quite simply, a run-of-the-mill tragedy.

  Before leaving the loft, I checked my reflection in the full-length mirror by the front door. Apple-green eyes, just like my father’s, gazed back. I’d dressed in jeans, a casual top, and a pair of slip-on boat shoes. Out of time to do anything with my shoulder-length golden-brown hair, I pulled it up into a casual bun at the top of my head. The chief of police always nagged me on my lack of business attire, but in such a small town, I couldn’t be bothered to go shopping for a blazer just to fulfill the illusion of professionalism. Besides, spring in Yew Hollow was far too pleasant to waste the breeze by wearing slacks and panty hose. Shoot me.

  I pinned my detective badge to my belt loop, left the loft, and strolled off along the bumpy dirt path that I had worn through the soft grass and new blooms of the woods. My new home was a renovated barn, buried in the forest behind the original Summers house. I liked my privacy, but it was comforting to know that my family was always within walking distance if I ever needed them. As the ground evened out and the trees thinned, I found my three sisters, Malia, Karma, and Laurel, decorating the old swing set in the backyard of the Summers house. As I headed in their direction, it occurred to me how different the four of us were. Malia and Laurel had inherited my mother’s trademark grey eyes, blond hair, and slender figures. Karma and I were both more petite, with olive complexions and darker shades of hair.

  “Morning, all,” I said, pivoting around one of the metal supports of the swing set like Gene Kelly with an umbrella. “What are you guys talking about?”

  Karma, installed on one of the swings, flew past me, reaching out her bare foot to nudge my shoulder. “The end-of-spring, start-of-summer festival.”

  I groaned, rolling my eyes. “Not another festival. Didn’t we just celebrate the beginning of spring?”

  Malia, the eldest of the Summers sisters, smiled serenely at my lack of town spirit. My sisters were members of the Yew Hollow Preservation Society, so it fell upon them to plan the town’s various events. Thankfully, I had yet to be recruited.

  “I like the festivals,” said my youngest sibling, Laurel. She caressed the petals of a nearby daisy.

  “Glad to hear it,” I said. I leaned down to pluck the daisy from the grass and then pushed it into Laurel’s wild hair behind her ear. “Gotta run. I was supposed to be at the station about ten minutes ago.”

  “Anything good?” Karma asked. A gust of air whipped a wayward strand of my hair into my mouth as she swung past me again.

  “Not sure yet,” I said, blowing the offending hair out from between my lips. I turned away from my sisters, waggling my fingers in a temporary farewell. As I headed toward the center of town, I called over my shoulder, “I’ll swing by later and let you know.”

  They waved me off, and I started toward the road at the end of the Summerses’ driveway. As I passed the main house, I caught a glimpse of my mother and the leader of our coven, Cassandra, through the big kitchen window and waved. She responded with a lazy wink and a hand motion that I’d learned was her way of saying she needed to speak with me at some point. I nodded, pointed down the road toward the police station, then gestured back at her. She gave me the thumbs-up.

  On my way through town, I stopped at the local bakery to pick up two dozen assorted donuts and a large container of coffee. When I’d first started working for the police force, some of the officers were skeptical of my employment. I guess I couldn’t blame them. I’d never had any experience as a detective before the force hired me. So every Monday, I’d wormed my way into their hearts and minds with a bribery of confectionary goods. Now everyone at the force loved me. Balancing the boxes of donuts in one hand and the coffee in the other, I kicked open the door of the station. A few startled desk officers glanced up, disrupted from their early-morning office duties by my unsubtle entrance.

  “Who wants donuts?” I asked, raising the boxes above my head. At once, I was surrounded by officers, all fighting for their favorites. I set the boxes down on a nearby desk, opening each one for easy access. “There’s coffee too, everyone.”

  The chief of police, a portly man named Marco Torres, emerged from his office and took a jelly-filled donut from one of the boxes.

  “You know, Summers,” he said, balancing the donut in one hand and filling a Styrofoam cup to the brim with black cof
fee with the other, “I’m trying to watch my weight.”

  “Sorry, I just love catering to stereotypes,” I replied and reached into a box to claim a chocolate-sprinkled donut before they were all gone. “No one’s forcing you to eat them.”

  “If I’m presented with an opportunity, I have to take it,” Torres said. He bit down into his donut, and jelly burst out from its opposite side. “That’s one of the first things they teach you at the police academy.”

  “What about the opportunity to watch your weight?” I asked, feeling slightly nauseated as Torres rotated the pastry and captured the escaping jelly.

  “What about your opportunity to wear an outfit that actually makes you look like a detective?” he retorted.

  I waved this away and poured myself a cup of coffee. “You’re just jealous because I don’t have to wear a hokey-ass uniform. Now, do you actually need me today, or did you just know I was going to bring in donuts?”

  He grunted in acknowledgement, set down his coffee, and gestured with his pastry-free hand for me to follow him. As he led me to the back of the station, toward the one and only interrogation room, he filled me in on the situation.

  “Remember Ronan Riley? The gym teacher we found? Well, his wife showed up today. She looks like shit, kinda like she got run over by a truck. Lacerations everywhere, dislocated shoulder, fractured ankle, the whole shebang.”

  “What’s the twist?” I asked. I popped open a tiny container of creamer and stirred it into my coffee. If there was any perk to living in a small town, it was that the coffee was always freshly made, rather than burnt away to bitterness as it would be in a chain coffee shop.

  “She says her husband did it,” Torres explained, shoving the last bite of his donut into his wide, mustachioed mouth. “Considering we picked up his body over two weeks ago, I figured this was right up your alley.”

  I frowned, confused. “Even if it is her husband’s ghost, he wouldn’t be able to affect her physically,” I said. “Ghosts can’t interact with the physical realm, no matter how strong their presence is.”

  Torres shrugged, halting outside the door of the interrogation room, his hand on the handle. “She said she was being haunted. I called you. That’s about all I care to know on this one. Now, if someone alive is kicking the shit out of her, I’m all ears. By the way, she also says he burned their house down. The inn is full of spring flingers, but you should be able to find her a room.”

  With that, he handed me a thick file with the label “Riley” stamped on it in red, flung open the door to the room, and gestured me inside. Behind the desk sat a young woman in her midtwenties. Torres was right. She looked as if she’d narrowly escaped a reckless car accident. There was a large cut on her forehead, sewn together with four or five stitches. Her face was bruised, a sling supported her left shoulder, her hands and arms were bandaged nearly the whole way up, and a single crutch leaned against the far wall. Behind the bruising, her eyes were set deeply in her skull, and anger and exhaustion seemed to wrinkle the skin around her mouth.

  “Mrs. Riley, this is—” Torres began.

  “Miss.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s Miss Riley,” she corrected, her voice hoarse with exhaustion. “Actually, call me Teagan. The only people who call me Miss Riley are under the age of eight.”

  “All right, then, Teagan,” Torres said, dipping his head politely. “This is Morgan Summers. She’s got a way with, uh, your particular complaint.”

  I extended a hand to gently shake one of Teagan’s bandaged limbs and asked, “Would you feel comfortable answering a few questions for me, Teagan?”

  She nodded, so I pulled out the chair opposite her and sat down. Teagan stared at Torres as though she were challenging him to a silent contest. I ping-ponged between them for a few seconds before saying, “I got this, Chief.”

  I could’ve sworn I heard him let out a sigh of relief as he exited the room and closed the door behind him. Teagan must have had quite a story to have already exhausted the chief of police. There was only so much talk about ghosts that one person could take. I cleared my throat.

  “So, Teagan, Chief Torres told me that you think your husband is haunting you?” I asked. I leaned back in my chair and crossed my legs, knowing that if I appeared relaxed, it would ease the other party’s nerves.

  “And you think I’m insane,” she stated bluntly, crossing her arms. “Who are you, the psychologist?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m a psychic medium and Yew Hollow’s one and only paranormal detective.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I speak to dead people,” I clarified. I flicked open her file, perusing the report of Teagan’s attack from the previous evening and examining a few photos of her ruined house. “You’re a resident of Yew Hollow, right? Usually, everyone here already knows about the Summerses.”

  “I’ve heard about your family, of course,” she said, adjusting a piece of gauze stretched across the palm of her left hand. “But we lived at the very edge of town. My husband wasn’t a people person. He liked his privacy. We only worked and ran errands in town then went straight home. I’ve never even been to one of those crazy festivals.”

  “Lucky you.”

  Teagan regarded me from beneath long eyelashes. Hesitantly, she asked, “So you don’t think I’m insane?”

  “No, I don’t, Teagan, because if you’re insane, then I’m absolutely crazy,” I admitted. “Walk me through what happened.”

  I listened intently as she recapped her night, taking notes on a spare sheet of scrap paper that had been buried in her file. Teagan’s terrifying evening had started with a bookcase unexpectedly toppling over and escalated from there. Apparently, the whole house had been possessed in its mission to kill Teagan. She’d dodged flying furniture, vases, pots and pans, and even walked through fire before she finally managed to escape through a window and run to town. The story matched her wounds. Her bruised, gashed head was a result of the falling bookcase. She’d fallen on her shoulder during her escape through the window. She explained all but one injury.

  “What about your ankle?” I asked, gesturing to where she had elevated it on the cross leg of the table. It was so swollen that it looked like a softball wrapped in sports tape.

  “This is where I sound even crazier,” she warned. She drummed her fingers on the table in front of her, as though exorcising some of her nerves through the movement of her hands. “I swear someone grabbed my foot with both hands and yanked. I was halfway through the window, and they tried to pull me back in, but when I looked back, there was no one there.”

  It really did sound crazy, even to me. I knew for a fact that ghosts didn’t have the ability to touch or harm humans, except under a few bizarre circumstances. Not long ago, my mother and sisters had lent strength to a friend of mine before she passed over, just so we could say a proper goodbye. Teagan’s story, on the other hand, wasn’t as easy to check out. According to the report, there was nothing much left of Teagan’s house. By the time the Yew Hollow Fire Department had reached the scene, it had already burnt to the ground. Someone clearly had to have doused the house with some kind of accelerant.

  “Teagan, can you think of anyone who might’ve wanted to harm you or your husband?” I asked, flipping through a few more Polaroids of the wrecked property that had been included in Teagan’s file.

  She shook her head.

  Tentatively, I asked, “And did you seek any kind of therapy after your husband’s death?”

  “See, you do think I’m crazy.”

  I winced. I was hoping to avoid a negative reaction, so I chose my next words carefully.

  “The only reason I ask is because, to my knowledge, spirits can’t manipulate the physical world. Occasionally, they appear to humans, mostly children. They have an effect on the physical world to a certain extent, playing with the temperatures of rooms and the like, but the odds of your husband’s ghost wrapping his hands around your ankle are pretty slim.”

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nbsp; “I’m telling you,” she insisted. She shifted in her chair, jostling her ankle. With a grimace, she continued. “Something grabbed my foot, and when I kicked out, I connected with somebody’s face. No one was there. I’m not crazy. That’s just what happened.”

  I sighed, unwilling to argue any further. It didn’t make any sense. Either Teagan was lying, or I didn’t know as much about the otherworld as I thought I did. I strongly suspected that Teagan just didn’t want to admit to something.

  “Teagan, sometimes after we experience something traumatic, such as an unexpected death, the stress can cause all sorts of things to happen,” I said, trying to reassure her.

  She made a motion as if to slam her fist on the table, then seemed to remember just how injured all of her extremities were. She settled for pointing a bandaged finger at my face. “Don’t patronize me.”

  “I’m not trying to patronize you,” I assured her. “I’m trying to figure out what happened. You could be suffering from PTSD. Paranoia, flashbacks, nightmares. Any of that sound familiar?”

  When she remained quiet, I realized that I had hit a nerve. She twisted her fingers together, picking at a hangnail until it began to bleed. I reached across the desk, separating her hands.

  “When your husband was alive,” I began softly, “did the two of you get along? I know this is a difficult subject. I worked the case when it first came into the office. Do you know any reason as to why he would’ve wanted to kill himself?”

  She shook her head, but a quivering tear wavered on her eyelashes.

  “Teagan.”

  She pulled her hand away from mine, tucking it close to her side. Staring up at the ceiling as if to control the moisture in her eyes, she finally said in a detached voice, “I can’t imagine why he would kill himself over this, since he never seemed to care while he was alive, but he used to hit me.”

  “He was abusive?”

  “Quite often,” she admitted. “It was awful. He threatened to kill me if I ever told anyone, but he’s dead now, so what’s the harm, right?”