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“I’m so sorry about that,” I told Melanie, who wore an expression of understandable curiosity on her face. “Something came up.”
“Is everything all right?” she asked. “I heard sirens, and then there were a bunch of deputies outside. A little later, I thought I heard something happening in the lobby, but I was with a customer and couldn’t check to see what was really going on.”
There didn’t seem to be much point in trying to hide what had gone down in Victoria’s studio a few hours earlier — I knew the news would be all over town soon enough — so I didn’t bother to lie, although I didn’t think Melanie needed to know all the nitty-gritty details of the blackmailer’s unexpected death.
“Victoria — the woman who owns the design studio upstairs — was meeting with someone, and he died,” I said. My assistant’s eyes widened, but I figured I should do what I could to forestall the inevitable questions and added, “What you probably heard in the lobby was the EMTs taking him out to their ambulance in the parking lot.”
“Oh, my God,” Melanie said, looking almost dazed by my revelation. “How awful.”
Yes, it was extremely awful…but until we had more details, I didn’t see the point in saying anything else on the subject. “It was,” I replied. “That’s why Victoria’s going to work from home today. And I need to go upstairs and cleanse the space.”
“‘Cleanse’?” Melanie repeated, now looking dubious. “Shouldn’t she hire cleaners for that?”
I did my best to hold back a smile. After all, my new assistant didn’t know me very well, and even though I ran a New Age shop, that didn’t necessarily mean she’d assumed that I subscribed to pagan beliefs.
“A spiritual cleansing,” I explained. “I need to grab a few supplies, but it shouldn’t take me much more than fifteen or twenty minutes. Can you hold down the fort for just a little while longer?”
“For as long as you need,” Melanie said stoutly.
“Thank you,” I said, and meant it. Not one word of complaint about being left alone in the shop for hours, even though this was only her third day on the job. Well, we were still in our honeymoon period, and I supposed she thought she needed to continue making a good impression on me.
It didn’t take long to gather up a smudge stick and a couple of pieces of palo santo. There were other ways to clear an area than using rituals that some people thought appropriated Native American ways, but since Calvin had told me I should do what worked best for me — and since the smudge sticks I sold in my store were actually made by his fellow San Ramon Apache — I thought what I was doing should be all right.
I wouldn’t be lying if I said I wasn’t utterly thrilled about having to go into the studio by myself…the same key opened both our businesses, so there’d been no need for me to ask to borrow Victoria’s…but I made myself mount the stairs, anyway. It never felt good to be in a place where someone had died unexpectedly, even though I hadn’t gotten a sense that the blackmailer’s ghost lingered in the fateful spot.
Then again, with my powers checked as they were by the child growing in my womb, would I have been able to feel the man’s ghostly presence even if he was there?
That was a question I preferred not to answer.
Instead, I walked steadily up the stairs and into the studio. The deputies who’d investigated the crime scene hadn’t taken very long, so there wasn’t any yellow police tape barring my way, nothing except the knot of worry growing ever tighter in my midsection.
What if there really was a ghost lurking in Victoria’s studio?
Then you’ll talk to him, I scolded myself. Stop being such a baby. It’s not like this is your first rodeo.
That was for sure. I’d had Danny Ortega’s ghost as my almost constant companion while I tried to solve his murder almost two years ago now, and I’d also interacted multiple times with Alice Bigelow, the sad specter who’d hung around the Victorian mansion my parents had bought not too long after my arrival in Globe. Alice was gone, reunited with her lover in the afterlife, so the house was now blessedly ghost-free.
At any rate, I definitely couldn’t claim that I had no experience dealing with the recently — or not so recently — deceased. However, I kind of doubted the specter of the blackmailer would be anywhere near as affable as Danny Ortega had been. Globe High School’s former principal had been the kind of guy who wasn’t fazed by much…not even by being dead.
I unlocked the door to the studio and let myself in. It felt strange to be here alone; Victoria had invited me in to see the place after the remodel was complete, and I’d popped in multiple times since then, but there had never been any reason for me to be there by myself.
There was also a sort of odd dissonance in seeing what the place looked like now and yet still recalling what it had been like back when I lived here. In a way, that shadowy overlay was its own ghost, a specter of the months I’d spent in the apartment…the window where I’d let Archie in from the balcony on my very first day here, the place where my dining room table had once been located, where Calvin had proposed to me on a snowy December evening not so long ago.
As best I could, I pushed all those memories away. Yes, it felt a little sad to be here, the melancholy wistfulness in my heart not so dissimilar from the same emotion I might experience when I came across an old photo of my younger self or a once-beloved dress that now needed to be donated to charity, but I had a job to do.
Victoria had kept the original wood floors and only sanded and re-stained them a lighter color, so cleaning up the spilled coffee had been an easy enough task for the deputies who’d bagged the evidence and cleared the scene. All the same, I was careful to skirt that part of the floor as I went over to the conference table so I could set down the smudge stick, abalone shell, and pieces of palo santo I was carrying.
Then I took in a breath and closed my eyes, doing my best to open myself up to the vibrations of the space. It all felt curiously neutral, as though nothing untoward had ever happened here…as if a man hadn’t died in this very spot only a few hours earlier.
Well, that had to be good, right? At least, it didn’t appear as if his spirit was lingering in the studio.
Or maybe I simply wasn’t sensing anything because the baby was blocking any signals I might be receiving from the universe.
That idea didn’t appeal at all, and I pushed it to the back of my mind as best I could.
But even if every scrap of psychic power I possessed was currently out of commission, that still shouldn’t stop me from lighting the smudge stick and doing my best to send out as many good vibes as possible so the space would be workable for Victoria again. True, she hadn’t seemed too worried about coming back to the studio. Despite that, it just seemed better for her to start over fresh when she returned tomorrow.
I’d brought along a lighter with the rest of my smudging supplies, so I lit the sage stick and let it flare for a moment before I blew on it gently to snuff the flame and have it smolder in the dried herbs. A faint trail of smoke emerged from the end of the little bundle, telling me it was ready to do its work.
