Autumn Bones

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.”