A Harvest of Bones Read online

  Sifting through the pages, I looked for anything that might be useful in our situation. I had just hit a page with a charm on it designed to call lost loves home when I felt a presence near me. I glanced up and there was Nanna, sitting on the bed.

  “Nanna!” I dropped the book and turned to her, overjoyed. My grandmother had become a regular visitor since she died. In fact I saw more of her now than I had in the years right before her death when my ex, Roy, refused to visit my family. She offered comfort, and now and then helped me out of a mess that I couldn’t handle on my own. Now, she sat there bold as life, holding Samantha in her ghostly arms.

  I reached out for Sammy, but my hands passed through the vision and my heart quivered. Could I be wrong? Was Sammy dead? But then the cat looked at me and I heard, rather than felt, her mournful meow. That was no spirit, but the wail of one very lost kitten who wanted to come home.

  Nanna pointed toward the journal. I glanced at it. “Are you telling me the answer to bringing Sammy home is in the book?”

  She tapped the page with the love charm on it.

  “I’m supposed to cast this? That will bring her home?” I thought about it. Samantha was a lost little love. It made sense. Nanna nodded and smiled, then blew me a kiss and faded out of sight, taking Samantha with her. I watched her disappear, and only then did I realize I was crying.

  I picked up the journal and headed downstairs as the doorbell rang. It was Aunt Margaret. Margaret Files was a spry woman in her early seventies who had been a county clerk before she’d retired. She liked romance novels, played a mean game of pinochle—and I do mean mean—and was staunchly in Joe’s corner on his choice of girlfriends. Not once had she mentioned our age difference, and not once had she expressed anything but support for our relationship.

  I invited her in. “Would you like tea? I think we have some leftover cake in the fridge.”

  Margaret dropped her purse on the coffee table and slipped out of her jacket, draping it over the back of the rocking chair. “Tea would be lovely, dear, but I’ll skip the cake, if you don’t mind. I overdid it at dinner tonight.”

  “Where did you go?” I asked, heading for the kitchen.

  “To the FED,” she said, following me. The FED was short for Forest’s End Diner, one of the more upscale bistros in Chiqetaw. “Lanny took me there and we had a wonderful dinner—steak and lobster.”

  I grinned at her as I put the kettle on to boil. “You guys are getting awfully chummy, aren’t you?” She’d been seeing Lanford Willis, a retired physician, for the past couple of months. Joe and I suspected that they were more than friends.

  Margaret blinked, then gave me a cagey smile. “Well, my dear, you know as well as I do that age has nothing to do with desire.”

  With a laugh, I arranged cups and saucers on a tray and picked out my prettiest pumpkin teapot and filled it with Spicy Autumn tea bags. “Oh, I know. I’ve just noticed you two have been seeing quite a bit of each other.” I sat down at the table across from her while we waited for the water to heat. “You like him, don’t you?”

  She giggled. “Yes, I like him. And he seems to fancy me. We get along. It’s comforting to have a companion at this age.”

  I reached over and took her hand, squeezing it. “I think it’s comforting at any age to have a companion. So, are you two planning on getting engaged?” I might as well have asked her if she was going to start smoking crack for the look she gave me.

  “Engaged? No, and don’t you go spreading rumors like that to Joe. I’ve never been married and I don’t plan on it now. Years ago, when I was just graduating from high school, I told my father that if he expected me to be a wife and mother, he could just kick me out of the family right then.” She snorted. “I never had the desire to have children of my own, but I have loved playing Auntie to my nephews and nieces. I seem to do a fine job of it.”

  I poured the steaming water into the teapot. “So you don’t ever want to get married?”

  She laughed again. “My dear, I’ve lived seventy-three years in peace and comfort without a man around the house cluttering up things and telling me not to buy the spicy sausage or the German chocolate cake. I do things the way I want to do them and have no intention of breaking the habit now. Why, I couldn’t do half the things I like to do if somebody else lived with me. But I do enjoy going out to dinner and to the theater.” Her cheeks flushed and she gave me a naughty smile. “And a little hanky-panky is always good for the soul.” With a satisfied sigh, she leaned back in her chair. “Perhaps I will take some of that cake.”

  I peeked in the cupboard for the cake tray. There was just enough chocolate cake left over for two so I divided it onto dessert plates and handed her one, keeping the other for myself. As I settled back in my seat, she poured the tea and we ate in silence, munching away and sipping at the fragrant and spicy blend. After a moment, I sighed and pushed back my plate.

  “Margaret, you were here in Chiqetaw fifty years back, weren’t you?”

  She blinked. “Actually, yes. I moved here when I was nineteen. I was hired to work as the county clerk right after graduating from Bellingham High, and against my parents’ wishes, moved to Chiqetaw, rented my first apartment, and settled into the working girl’s life.”

  “That must have been unusual for the time,” I said.

  “Oh, it was scandalous. But my father was busy with his own life and finally accepted my choice after one nasty argument. My mother died the year before I left, you know, and he didn’t want to lose me too. Shortly after I moved, Father remarried to a very nice woman and started a new family. I have two half-brothers. The oldest, Dexter, is Joe’s father. He came along a year after I moved to Chiqetaw, and he’s twenty years younger than me. Well, he played the good son, stayed in Bellingham and got married, until something snapped.”

  I knew Joe’s father wasn’t around, but I had never pried. “What happened? Why did Dexter leave town?”

  “Dex wasn’t good at handling responsibility. He’s a compulsive gambler and Terri, Joe’s mother, kicked him out when he lost their life savings. He took off for Vegas and Joe and Nathan grew up without their daddy. They saw him on holidays but seldom more than that. Terri tried, but she always resented raising the boys alone. She drank a little too much, brought home too many strange men. When both boys were both in college, she moved to California and opened a little wine shop. I think Joe talks to Dex a couple times a year, but he’s never forgiven his father for putting his addiction ahead of his family.”

  So that’s what had happened, and that’s why Joe sternly refused to even think about visiting a casino. I filed away the information and returned to the subject at hand. “Well, the reason I wanted to know if you lived in Chiqetaw at that time is this: Do you remember a house on the lot next to mine? The lot Joe’s trying to buy?”

  Margaret leaned forward, propping her elbows on the table and resting her chin on her hands. After a moment, she snapped her fingers. “Yes, I remember that house. In fact, I knew someone who lived there.”

  “Irena Brunswick, perhaps?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “I didn’t rub elbows with Irena—she was high society and I was a working girl. No, my friend was Brigit O’Reilly, the Brunswick’s maid.”

  I sucked in a deep breath. So my thoughts that Brigit might have been a servant were right on track. She hadn’t been a distant relative. No wonder her bedroom had been in the basement. “What was she like? Where is she now?”

  Margaret looked at me closely. “You have a reason for wanting to know this, don’t you?”

  I nodded. “I’d rather not tell you why yet, but yes—it’s important.”

  She inhaled slowly and let it out in a thin stream. “Brigit O’Reilly. I haven’t thought about her in years. She was a lovely girl. Close to my own age, you know, although I can’t remember just how old she was when we met. She was tall, at least five-ten, and willow-thin, like a reed. I remember being so envious
of her hair, it coiled down her back, long and curling and thick, a deep russet red. But I think the thing I remember most about her was just how fragile she was.”

  “Fragile?”

  “Emotionally. Like a flower. If you even breathed on her, you thought she might blow away in the wind. She seemed to have so much sorrow in her young life—her parents were dead and she’d lost a fiancé at a young age. She never talked much about her personal feelings, though.”

  That would fit with the poems she wrote. “What was she like?”

  Margaret closed her eyes and I knew she was reaching back in memory. “Brigit was the sunshine of a spring morning. She always had a kind word for everyone, no matter how awful they were to her. Back then, folks around here didn’t treat servants with much civility, you know. And she was incredibly passionate. If she believed in a cause, she’d fight tooth and nail for it. She came over from Ireland, hoping to earn enough to go to school and become a teacher, but something happened and she ended up hiring on as a housekeeper. In the time I knew her, she withdrew and grew despondent.”

  “What happened? Did she stay in Chiqetaw?” I held my breath, but Margaret could shed no light on the situation.

  She shrugged. “I think she went back to Ireland. She told me that she was leaving town. ‘Maggie,’ she said, ‘I’m going home. I mean it this time.’ She always called me Maggie.”

  Maggie… Margaret must be the Maggie mentioned in Brigit’s journal. “Go on, please,” I said, feeling like the young woman’s spirit was suddenly taking on a life and substance I had only been able to imagine before.

  “By the way she talked, I assumed she meant it. I think she had a cousin over there, though from the hard times that had befallen her family, I couldn’t understand why she’d want to go back. But people miss their homes, unhappy memories and all. The last time I saw her, she kept saying that things would never work out and that she didn’t know what she was going to do. I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. She was a tightlipped thing.”

  “Thanks,” I said, mulling over this information. If Brigit had left for Ireland, how would we find out? “One last question. Did she have a cat?”

  Margaret laughed. “How funny you should ask! Oh my dear, her cat was almost the spitting image of your Samantha. I remember she named the little thing Mab, after the legendary faerie queen. Brigit loved reading poetry and mythology. Speaking of cats, did you find your wayward girl yet?”

  I shook my head, thinking about Brigit and her faerie sprite of a cat. Another part of the puzzle clicked into place. “Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate the information.” After a moment, a thought struck me. “Did she leave before or after Brent was put away?”

  “Brent? Oh, Brent Brunswick. You mean before he went overseas? That was big news back then, I’ll tell you that. I think, if I remember right, Brigit left about a month or so before he took off.”

  Another interesting tidbit. I tucked it all away for later and segued onto another subject, sipping tea until nine o’clock, at which point Margaret kissed me on the cheek and left for home.

  WHITE DEER LOOKED a little thinner since two months ago when I’d seen her at Murray’s annual family fish fry over on the reservation, but her eyes were still that same deep brown that held me spellbound, and she had a look of peace about her that felt both ominous and restful to me. I gave her a big hug. She returned the embrace with a warm smile.

  “Emerald, it’s good to see you again. Anna told me all about your problems. Sounds as though you’ve stumbled onto a real mystery.”

  I offered her a chair. She sat on the sofa.

  “The problem is, we’re not at all sure what’s going on. Whether the skeleton is someone who was killed or who died naturally. I think I know who it is, but can’t be sure until tests are run.”

  “Well, I can put that question to rest—the one about how she died.” White Deer unzipped her boots and set them aside, crossing her legs on the sofa. “Anna asked me to tell you that they’ve determined that the skeleton is a woman who was probably in her early twenties and she didn’t die of natural causes. The skull was fractured across the front of the forehead. The cat’s skeleton, however, doesn’t look like it suffered any trauma at all.”

  So the woman had been murdered, but the cat had died naturally? “How odd. Are they treating this as a homicide?”

  White Deer pulled out a notebook. “Anna jotted down a few things for me to tell you and said for you to call her tomorrow.” She consulted the page of notes. “For all intents and purposes, yes, they think this was a homicide, and they’re placing the death at some fifty years ago, based on the style of the dress and the condition of the bones. The dress matches the size of those found in the basement room, and so they’re checking into Brigit O’Reilly’s history to see if there’s a record of her leaving town.”

  “I’ll have to call Murray and tell her what Margaret told me about that subject. Might give her a heads-up on the time period in which to check.” I sighed, then launched into what had happened with Nanna’s spirit that afternoon. “So she seems to think this love spell will bring Samantha home to me.” I retrieved Nanna’s journal and flipped it open to the page, then handed it to White Deer.

  She read and re-read it. “Oh, this is a simple one. We can easily pull this together. Let’s see, what do we need?”

  I glanced through the spell. “Amber, some crystals, rose petals, and honey. A picture of Samantha or something that belonged to her. I’ve got a picture on the desk over there—we were using it for the fliers that we posted around the neighborhood. And I think that using the fur you wanted me to find from Sammy would be a good idea too—a bond to call her home.”

  White Deer laughed. “I knew that I brought these along for a reason!” She opened her backpack and withdrew a small bundle, wrapped in soft felt. As she pulled open the flaps of material, I gasped. Six beautiful carved-and-polished quartz spikes rested within, each a good five to six inches long.

  “Oh man, those are gorgeous. I have an amber necklace—that should work for the amber. I’ll go get it.” I ran upstairs to fetch the necklace out of my jewelry box, then handed it to White Deer when I returned and headed for the pantry where I kept my stash of herbs. Rose petals, peppermint, and a brown bear bottle filled with honey. On the way out of the pantry, I snagged the cat brush. There had to be Sammy fur in there—the kids hadn’t cleaned it for a couple of weeks by the amount of fuzz poking through the bristles.

  White Deer was holding the necklace up to the light when I returned. “Nice—very nice. Beautiful inclusions.” She tilted it under the lamp to look at the bee that had been encased within the thick mass of hardened resin. The oval cabochon was honey colored and rich, almost as big as an egg.

  I set everything on the table. “Okay, what do we do next?” At that moment, Kip and Randa appeared at the bottom of the stairs.

  “What are you two doing up?” I asked. “It’s past your bedtimes, both of you.”

  “I heard voices down here,” Kip said. “I knew it was White Deer!” He ran over and threw his arms around her. “Heya!”

  “Kip woke me up,” Randa said, close on his heels. She gave White Deer a peck on the cheek. “I wish you lived in Chiqetaw. We never get to see you enough.”

  As much as they loved Mur, they loved her aunt even more. White Deer had a way with kids. She listened to them, really listened, and made them feel that what they had to say was important. As their mother, I’d never be able to pull that one off—they wouldn’t let me get away with it.

  She kissed them both and motioned them to the ends of the coffee table. “Sit, you can help us. That is, if your mother doesn’t object.”

  I glanced at her and saw that she really wanted them to join in.

  “Okay,” I said. “But as soon as we’re done, it’s off to bed again. No whining about it, either.”

  “What are we doin’? Magic?” Kip’s eyes lit up. He loved working Nanna
’s charms with me, but I had to be cautious about what I allowed him to do. Kip had the predilection for going off half-cocked; more than once he’d gotten himself in deep trouble. I finally had to accept that he wasn’t ready for the responsibility yet. Until he was older, I had decided to just try to help him understand his psychic abilities, so he wouldn’t grow up afraid of them.

  “We’re putting out a call for Samantha. Your mother is positive she’s alive and so am I. So we’re trying to guide her home through magic,” she said, arranging the crystals in a hexagonal pattern over the picture of Samantha. “We’ll send out a psychic S.O.S. signal and hope that she’s able to follow it.”

  She draped the amber necklace around the picture and crystals and scattered the rose petals and peppermint over the top. Then she opened her pouch of herbs and withdrew something I immediately recognized as catnip. Within moments, Nigel, Noël, and Nebula came racing into the room, meowing.

  “I think the catnip will work better than honey, considering we’re trying to lead a cat home rather than a person. Don’t you?” White Deer said. I nodded. She laughed as one of the kittens scrambled up in her lap and batted at the pouch. “You want to help, too, don’t you? You must be missing your mama something fierce.” White Deer sprinkled the catnip around the coffee table’s legs and the kittens went wild, squirming on the floor, playing and wrestling.

  “What do we do?” Randa said. Usually she was reticent about magic, but this was Sammy we were talking about. Randa would walk through hell and high water to get her back. She’d already proven that by going down into the foundation of the old Brunswick house.

  White Deer gave me a glowing smile. “I sense she’s trapped somewhere—not in a house or garage, but somewhere between the worlds. Something crossed over and took her place, bouncing Samantha into the spirit world even though she’s still alive.”

  “I was thinking about that,” I said. “Brigit had a cat named Mab. Joe’s aunt said that Mab and Samantha look so much alike that it’s hard to tell them apart, which would account for the sightings the kids and I’ve had. Somehow the two exchanged places.”