Page 12 of The Aura Answer
She climbed in the truck. “Another day. It’s not as if I have time to read anyway.”
He thought Christmas break started soon, but he didn’t argue. She almost reminded him of the golden angel on top of the Christmas tree, a little bent and tattered and needing refurbishing.
He couldn’t fix himself, much less anyone else.
Five
“A hundred grand.”Roark whistled and shoved his hands into his pockets as he gazed up at the brick courthouse the next morning. “How do we even go about sorting through all the people who hated a lying, cheating crook?”
“Not everyone hated him, evidenced by the mob. Just the contractors he cheated. And maybe a lot of little folk he walked all over. Mostly, he wasn’t Larraine, so the back-to-the-fifties’ contingent wanted his return.” Evie kicked at the debris still littering the street from yesterday’s riot. Water bottles, cardboard food containers, cigarette butts... the street looked as if the senior class had gone on spring break here. “Block wasn’t all bad, just greedy and selfish. He did, occasionally, help people.”
“By way of helping himself?” Reuben suggested.
Reuben was a Black PhD originally from Miami. Roark was a Cajun MIT engineer with roots in New Orleans. They’d arrived in Afterthought via the military and Jax last spring, back when Block’s fraud had come undone. The former mayor had been trying to sell land he claimed belonged to Loretta’s deceased parents. R&R, former spies, had helped Evie form the Sensible Solutions Agency, then circumspectly developed relationshipshere and stayed. They hadn’t yet learned all the ins and outs of the town.
“Possibly,” Evie acknowledged. “But he helped the school grow and brought the town recognition that got businesses into these historic old buildings. Those aren’t bad things.”
“You’re trying to talk yourself into going in to see if his ghost is there, aren’t you?” Reuben studied the boarded-up courthouse as if planning to bomb it.
“Well, Block probably never knew that I talked to the spirits of Loretta’s parents and started the investigation that brought him down,” she said doubtfully. “But it was my family’s land he tried to steal, and he’s always despised our weirdness, so I can’t imagine his ghost will be friendly, like in our last case.”
“A hundredgrand,” Roark repeated. “Reuben and I can make lists of everyone who might have wanted Block dead, but just starting with the trailer park families he evicted, dey’re likely to be endless. We can sort through which ones were in town yesterday, but dat will take a while and won’t be foolproof. We can break into the sheriff’s records and find out who all was in the courthouse, but dat’s still likely to be in the hundreds. You’re da one wit’ da key no one else possesses.”
Roark reverted to his origins when excited. That two unimaginative engineers with cynical outlooks actually believed she talked to unseen spirits rallied her a little. They were men of intelligence counting on her woo-woo abilities, just as she counted on their computer expertise to take the information she provided and run with it. It was a good partnership.
“Sheriff won’t let me in there,” she hedged. “He’s not even letting in contractors to repair the damage until he’s satisfied he has all the evidence.”
“Do ghosts always stay where they die?” Reuben asked with academic interest. “Didn’t Loretta’s parents wander? And Nick’s beauty queen cousin?”
“Loretta’s parents had been dead for nearly a year. KK wasn’t connected to anything where she died. It’s complicated,” she admitted. “Spirit energy might linger for generations in one place, but without a body to contain it, it eventually dissipates, just like any energy. Or maybe I should say it concentrates until it comes down to one single purpose—usually the reason it lingered instead of passing on to the next plane. But when it’s new, the energy seems to be volatile and...” She gestured helplessly. “It’s hard to explain. Until Loretta came along, all I did was pass all that dissipating energy to the Great Beyond. I don’t really have enough experience with new energy to predict anything.”
“So Block might be at the morgue,” Reuben suggested. “Or he might have gone home. He might not be in that courthouse.”
“But I saw Bertie there, and he’s the one who may have seen what happened or know who else was in the attic. Although if experience is any guide, I’ll guess he won’t give me names. Maybe we should make like good detectives and question the victims’ families first, learn a little more about what was happening at the point this all exploded.”
“We’re strangers, bébé, dey’re not gonna talk to us,” Roark pointed out.
“With my share of the reward, I could convert the carriage house into an office,plushire a professional decorator.” She glared at the courthouse as she talked herself into this.
She knew what she had to do. But it was Christmas. She didn’t want to do it.
“The finger-pointing will get ugly shortly,” Reuben warned. “Larraine and your family will be on the top of everyone’s list of suspects, even if they physically couldn’t have done it.”
“Larraine was right there. But I think everyone would have noticed if she held a hand with a gun to Block’s head.” Evie shoved her hair out of her face. Dog-walking had been simpler.
“I’m betting every one of your family knows how to get into that attic. How long would it take for someone to sneak up those stairs, shoot, and rejoin the crowd? Think like the paranoid, bébé. You’re targets. You need to solve this.”
Evie shoved her chilled hands into her coat pockets, turned around, and headed home. “All right, start on those lists, hack the sheriff. I can’t play my hand too soon. I’ll send my mother out to console the families and learn what she can. Then we need to figure out how to get me into the courthouse.”
Except she probably already knew. Her father was a contractor who had worked on courthouse renovations back before she was born. She was pretty certain the blueprints were still in one of the boxes stacked in the library. And she knew from experience that the courthouse had an underground basement access that had once been a bomb shelter for elected officials back in the 1950s.
Come to think of it, plenty of others probably knew about it too. This was no closed-door mystery. The courthouse was wide open to anyone in the know—which included a lot of the contractors Block had defrauded.
In a far cornerof what Dante called the bookless library, Gracie hid in the cracking leather recliner and typed furiously at her laptop. If she focused on the scene she was writing, she wouldn’t have to remember last night’s embarrassing incident with the Brit.
She’d used her telekinesis.She never used her telekinesis, except in occasional party tricks where no one would notice. She lacked control, and her stupid gift was both useless and dangerous. She’d proved that so many times that she ought tohave killed the stupid instinct to use it by now—before she killed a person instead.
She’d almost killed Craig when she’d found out about his stolen goods. He’d been happy to divorce her and give her the house after she’d slammed him into the garage wall. Had he been a child... She might have cracked his head.
