Always Read online

  “Does it say that in there?”

  “No, I just know it.” She grinned. “I know it. Isn’t that wonderful? I don’t have to read about it or strain my mind trying to figure it out, I just know it.”

  “How nice for you,” Jack said, sarcastic. “Okay, what’s next? Let’s see. Here’s one on Adam Drayton, of Drayton Falls.” Silently, he scanned the article, then put it down on the bed. “What else is in there? What happened to Tom and Tula?”

  “Give it to me,” Darci said softly. “I want to see what happened to Adam.”

  “I don’t think—” Jack began, then, as Darci stared at him, he had an overwhelming compulsion to give her the paper. He had to, couldn’t stop himself from handing her the paper.

  “Oh no,” she said. “Not Adam.” As her eyes teared up, she handed the copy of the article to Jack so he could read it aloud.

  About three weeks after Lavender’s and Jack’s deaths, Adam Drayton had been discovered by Fontinbloom Nokes inside the tunnels with a keg of gunpowder and fuses. Adam was planning to blow the tunnels up. Nokes shot Adam Drayton, killing him with one shot. At his trial, Nokes said that before he died, Adam had said that he was going to blow up the tunnels so they couldn’t be used for evil later.

  Darci fell back against the bed, tears in her eyes. “Adam did it for us. Because of us. If we hadn’t gone to him, he’d never have known about those tunnels and would never have tried to destroy them.”

  “Wait,” Jack said. “Look at this one. It’s dated 1850, and it says that the old garnet tunnels are said to be haunted. ‘There have been two serious attempts by Fontinbloom Nokes’s heir to see if there are still garnets to be mined, but the sounds of two men arguing and of a single gunshot that echoes through the tunnels scares all workers away. Frustrated, Mr. Nokes’s nephew boarded up the entrances to the tunnels and went back to his country of origin, Australia. He left warnings that all trespassers would be prosecuted.’ ”

  “I wonder if the tunnels stayed empty until the witch began to use them?” Darci asked. “All those years of sitting there empty when they could have been destroyed.”

  “But wouldn’t she have just gone somewhere else?” Jack asked. “There are lots of tunnels around the world, and it was my understanding from the file I read that she had special reasons for wanting your sister-in-law. And you,” he added softly.

  She held up her left hand. “Nine moles. She’d foreseen that the person who would kill her had nine moles on her left hand.”

  “Too bad she could foresee anything,” Jack said.

  Darci’s eyes widened. “Take away her ability to foresee the future and she wouldn’t know what was going to happen to her or who was going to do it.”

  “If you take away her ability to foresee the future, do you still have a witch?”

  Darci thought of several replies to that, but before she could say anything, the phone rang and Jack answered it.

  “Greg, old man, how are you?” Jack said cheerfully.

  “No, nothing’s wrong with me, I’m just in a good mood, that’s all. Now, now, Greg, that’s not true. I’ve been in a good mood before.”

  Pausing, he smiled at Darci. “Uh, no,” he said, “we haven’t made any progress in finding my father. Yeah, I know where my relatives are. No, Darci didn’t do it. She was asleep. I sent my relatives to work in the homeless shelter. Yeah? That clean, huh? Send them to another one. Yeah, we’ll report to you if anything happens.” He hung up the phone.

  “Let me guess,” Darci said. “Greg wants us to do what we’re supposed to be doing.”

  “More or less,” Jack said, sitting back down and looking at her. “Can you still feel my dad?”

  “Yes. He’s safe. In fact, he’s more comfortable today than he was yesterday. He’s waiting for something. I’m not sure he’s a prisoner at all.”

  “Ah.”

  “What does that mean?” Darci asked.

  Jack looked at the two objects on the table. “You have that healing ball with you?”

  “Always. What do you have in mind?”

  “I wonder what would happen if we went into that room in my father’s bedroom and took all these things in with us.”

  “You mean the box and key, the crucifix, the egg, and the Touch of God?”

  “Yeah. If two of them together hum, what do you think all of them together would do?”

  “Find spirits?”

  Jack jumped up. “I’ll get these two, you get the other two. Meet you in the secret room.”

  “I’ll get there before you do,” Darci said and took off running.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “I DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY ARE OR WHAT THEY do,” Darci said, looking at the eight objects before them.

  “You’re the soothsayer,” Jack said, “so why don’t you know?”

  “You’re the FBI agent, so why don’t you know what these things are and where your father got them? Was he involved in some nasty occult thing? Maybe he’s a warlock.”

  “If you knew my father, you’d know how absurd that was. And how do we know these things have anything to do with the occult? Maybe he just liked them. Or maybe they were here when he bought the house and he doesn’t know about them. The previous owner died and my father bought the house from his heirs, so maybe the last owner put them in here.”

  “Is the man you’re now defending the same man you used to despise?”

  Jack grinned. “Yeah, but back then I…”

  “Had a very angry spirit around you.”

  He cocked his head at her. “You don’t think that schizophrenics have other spirits around them, do you? And what about those people who hear voices?”

  Darci decided it was better not to answer that question. They’d spent over an hour in the hidden room and had been unable to figure out anything. She had four objects that hummed in a way that even Jack could feel, but their vibrations didn’t increase when she put them next to the four objects that had been in the room. They had all eight of them lined up on the shelf beneath the gory painting and had looked at them in every way possible. They’d even tried to fit them together.

  “What interests me is that there are like items,” Darci said. “It’s like in the coloring books of my daughter and my niece. Match the objects.”

  Jack put the Touch of God next to the blue glass ball, the iron egg next to the stone egg. The ivory statue of a Biblical-looking figure went next to the crucifix. The key went next to the silver box. “We know that those two go together.”

  She looked at him suspiciously. “You’re not thinking of putting the key and that box together again and going back to Lavey, are you?”

  “No. I had a night to sleep on it and the lack of dentists began to scare me. I think I’ll bide my time and let you find her here.”

  “Hope she’s what you want,” Darci muttered, but Jack wasn’t listening. He was looking up at the painting of the man with the branding irons.

  “We haven’t paid any attention to this thing. Other than probably being worth millions, I wonder if it has any significance.”

  “Except to scare away evil spirits?”

  “Or to attract them,” Jack said, his face pressed to the wall as he looked at the back of the frame of the painting. “Get that side and help me get it down.”

  It took them several minutes, as the painting was large and heavy, but they eventually managed to get it down and set it against the far wall. When they turned they saw a little door set into the wall.

  “We’re good,” Darci said.

  “The best.”

  “My abilities and your devious mind.”

  “Glad to be of service,” Jack answered.

  They both expected a lock to be on the little door, but there was none. But before he opened the door, Jack made Darci stand as far away as possible. “Last time we used anything from this room we ended up a couple of centuries from here. I don’t want to take any chances with this.”

  “All caused by you,” Darci