A Wild Fright in Deadwood (Deadwood Humorous Mystery Book 7) (55 page)

“No, a fortune seeker.” He glanced over my shoulder, nodding at someone and holding up his finger for them to wait. “After we get started, I’m going to open the door for you.”

“The root cellar door?”

“No, the door between now and then, where you’ll need to take Cornelius to find Wilda.”

“Shouldn’t we have discussed this plan before now?”

“You would have overthought it and made it tougher for me to do my part.”

“But aren’t you supposed to be the one freeing Cornelius from Wilda?”

“This is not a job for one medium, Violet. We have to work together.”

“Okay, so keep Cornelius with me. But how do I get rid of Wilda?”

“Cornelius says that’ll become evident once you two are in there.”

“In where?”

“The Hessler house.”

I shook my head. “Don’t make me go in there again.” The mere thought of returning to that house of the dead made me almost pee my pants.

He placed his hands on my shoulders. “You can do this, Violet. You’ve destroyed far more dangerous things than Wilda.” He kissed me on the forehead and then stepped back.

“Okay.” I gave in, but my heart wasn’t really in it. The beating organ had locked itself in a closet inside of my chest and refused to come out until I stopped doing such foolish stunts.

When he stepped away, Cornelius turned to me and held out his broken-horned Viking helmet. “Put this on.”

“Are you serious?”

“It will make it easier for you to connect with Wilda.”

“I don’t want to connect with her. I want to boot her out of your life.” And mine.

“Just put the damned helmet on, Parker,” Cooper said, “so we can get this over with. I have work to do yet.”

“It’s Thanksgiving night,” I reminded him.

“Exactly. Nobody will be at the station to bug me.”

“Fine, but I draw the line at holding that stupid clown cookie jar top, so don’t even go there.” I put the broken helmet on my head. “Now what?”

Cornelius lit the end of the dried sage bundle, waving it around in the air and then handed it to Natalie. “Smother that,” he told her and took a seat in the center of the dirt floor. “Violet, sit with your back to mine.”

I did, leaning back against his black coat. The coolness of the packed dirt seeped through my jeans.

“Close your eyes, Violet,” Cornelius directed. “And this time, instead of picturing one candle, picture two.”

Two? I had recently done that very thing and along had come Caly. Maybe two was a bad idea.

“Use the flame of the first candle to light the second, then set them a hand’s width apart and focus on the dark center between the flames.”

“You don’t want me to pair the flames?”

“No. Not unless you want to catch an entity in the web the pairing creates.”

Oops! Was that why Caly had come looking for me? Or was the doll ghost or Ottó the result of my pairing? Or had something else come forth that I hadn’t realized with the distraction of Ottó, the doll, and Caly?

Shaking off my worries for another middle of the night toss-and-turn festival, I closed my eyes and maneuvered the candles. Then I stared into the blackness, the flames flickering in my peripheral mind’s eye. After what felt like several minutes, I opened my mouth to ask Cornelius if I was doing something wrong, when he came walking out of the darkness and picked up one of the candles.

“Ready?” he asked.

“You didn’t do your humming thing,” I said, suddenly realizing that fact.

“I didn’t want to call her to us. We’re going to her.”

“We are?” That’s what Doc must have meant about my going back to the Hessler house.

“Grab that candle, Violet. I need you to lead the way since I haven’t been where we need to go.”

When I reached out and touched the candle, a wave of dizziness swept over me so strongly that I had to cover my eyes for a moment. When I lowered my hand, the candle was gone and I was standing outside under the starry night sky. In front of me, on the other side of a wrought iron gate, loomed the Victorian style Hessler house.

I stared up at the two-storied dwelling that had been the setting of so many of my nightmares. Even in the darkness, I could tell the house was different this time. The structure before me was younger and sturdier, the precursor of the dilapidated house I’d first seen back in July. A soft glow of light poured out through the windows on both floors, beckoning me inside out of the cold.

But I lingered, shivering with cold and dread, looking around for an option other than stepping inside Wilda’s lair. Wasn’t there a door number two? Another showcase on which I could bid?

The wood smoke in the air was thicker than before, the barking dog now silent. The street lights glowed white instead of orange, the street empty of any signs of life. The windows in the neighboring houses were all dark, shuttered, uninviting. In the distance, instead of lights dotting the hillside, there was nothing but blackness. That’s when I realized that I hadn’t stepped back in time but rather I’d entered the twisted world in which Wilda now lived.

“What are we waiting for?” Cornelius asked, joining me in front of the Hessler house. “We can’t remove her from here.”

At least I wasn’t alone. “I’m working up to it,” I told him, glad to have him by my side.

The front gate didn’t creak even a little. It was well-oiled apparently. We climbed the porch steps, the crunch of snow underfoot seemed muffled.

I raised my hand to knock.

“There’s no need,” Cornelius pointed at the door. “It’s already open.”

Was that Doc’s doing? Was he here somewhere, watching over us?

I pushed open the door and we stepped inside, shaking off the cold and snow from our shoes—a force of habit, even in dreamland. I looked over at Cornelius. “What now?”

The door slammed shut behind us, making me jump.

I shook my fist at it.

“Did you do that?” Cornelius asked.

The lights went out before I could answer.

Again, I wasn’t entirely surprised. Nor was I pleased about this. Walking through a well-lit haunted house was heart-stopping enough.

“No,” I told him. “I didn’t kill the lights either.”

I heard the sound of shoes scuffing the floor near the half-closed pocket doors that led into the dining room. When I squinted into the dark in that direction, I thought I saw the shape of a head in the darkness peeking around one of the doors. A giggle followed, then the shape was gone, the footfalls leading deeper into the house.

“There’s our little pest. I’m sure she’s the one responsible for our sudden lack of lighting. Let’s see what else she has in store for us.” I led the way toward the dining room, banging my knee on a table that hadn’t been in the sitting room when I’d gone through the house as Wolfgang’s real estate agent. “We need a flashlight.”

One appeared a moment later in Cornelius’s hand. He handed it to me.

“Where did this come from?”

“My pocket.” He pulled out a second flashlight.

“What other tricks do you have up your sleeve?” I jested.

“I’ve come prepared, Violet.”

I turned the light on him. “What do you mean?”

He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a chicken foot, handing it to me.

Next came a black feather.

“Raven or crow?” I asked.

“I can’t believe you’re asking me that.”

Then came a pair of fuzzy dice with seven dots on each side.

“Fuzzy dice?”

“I bought those from a guy in Vegas who practices a new age style of voodoo. He swore they’d protect me from unhappy gremlins.”

“Are there actually happy gremlins out there?”

“Sure. Gremlins have gotten a bad rap in the media.”

Next came a quarter-sized ivory heart, then what looked like a shark’s tooth with symbolic carvings on it, then a vial of bones.

I should’ve brought the alligator tooth that Zelda had given me. “What are these?” I held up the vial. “Baby bird bones?”

He scoffed. “Why would I have bird bones?” He shined his light on the vial. “Those are the bones of a Siberian pixie faery.”

I squinted at the tiny vial. It looked like a bunch of tiny twigs and a pebble to me. How much did a vial of Siberian pixie faery bones cost on the free market these days?

Before I had a chance to ask, he pulled out a horseshoe, well-scuffed and scratched, then a tiki doll carved out of obsidian, then a …

“Okay, stop,” I told him, handing him back all of his protection trinkets. “I think you’ve covered all of our bases.”

He stuffed them all back into his wool coat pocket, which didn’t even bulge when he’d finished. “I told you I’ve come prepared for battle.”

“Oh, yeah? Then where’s your cannon?”

“In my pants.”

I did a double take. That comeback wasn’t Cornelius’s style, more like Ray’s. “I can’t believe you said that.”

“It’s true.” He reached into his pants’ pocket and pulled out something, holding it toward me. I shined the light on his open palm. A miniature brass cannon from the Civil War era sat there, ready for battle.

“It’s my lucky cannon,” he explained and pocketed it.

I should have known better than to ask.

Through the narrow doorway to the kitchen, I heard the sound of another giggle, then footfalls running away again.

“Come on.” We started to follow Wilda toward the kitchen, but suddenly she was behind us in the entryway where we’d stood moments before.

I strode back through the sitting room in time to hear a door upstairs slam closed. Standing at the base of the oak stairway, I glared up the steps into the darkness. “I’m not going to play hide-and-seek with her in this haunted house.” I’d been there and done that with her brother, and frankly, the idea of going up into the violet wallpapered room turned my feet into anvils. I looked over at Cornelius. “How can I get her to come to us?”

“I don’t know that you have that ability, but I do.”

“Get her down here so we can finish this and get the hell out of here.”

Cornelius started chanting under his breath.

Then I remembered that I was wearing his Viking helmet. I took it off. The horn was no longer broken. “Wait,” I said and switched hats with him, plopping the Abe Jr. hat on my head. “Okay, go.”

He sat down on the second step and started again, chanting, humming, calling the ghost to him.

I stood next to him, squinting up the stairwell into the dark, waiting for Wilda to appear.

I heard no footfalls.

No doors slamming.

No giggles.

Something poked me in the back.

I looked down and around.

A garish clown face looked up at me with a ghoulish grin, scaring me so badly that I almost swallowed my tongue.

“Roses are red,” Wilda’s high-pitched child’s voice filled my head. “Violet is blue. Mother is mad. She’s coming for you.”

God, I hated that stupid poem!

My hand snaked out, latching onto her arm. “Gotcha, you little shit! What do we do now, Cornelius?”

He kept humming and chanting, lost in his own rhythm.

Wilda let out an ear-piercing shriek. She started tugging to be free, but I held tightly, stronger by far.

“Cornelius!” I yelled in the midst of the frenzy, but he continued to sit there, unaffected by the cacophony.

Wilda kicked out at me and then twisted in my arms, her teeth gnashing, trying to take a piece out of me. Why was everyone so into biting these days? I struggled to hold her, turning her around so her back was to me and bending down to lock her in a bear hug.

She stilled so suddenly that for a moment I thought I’d squeezed her to death. Then she whimpered, “Let me go.”

“Not until you let Cornelius go.”

“No. I won’t. And you can’t make me.”

Criminy, it was one thing to discipline an obnoxious kid in real life, but how did you make a bratty ghost child obey? I was at a total loss on what to do next.

Doc.

I closed my eyes and pictured two candles, one lit, one not. Following Cornelius’s earlier instructions, I used one to light the other and then focused on the black space in between them, trying to conjure Doc this time.

Nothing happened, at least not with Doc. Wilda on the other hand, began struggling again. After several seconds of fighting her and finally subduing her again, I closed my eyes and this time took the candles and held them together, merging the flames. Little bursts of light billowed up, then I pulled them apart again and stared into the black space. Come on, Doc.

Still nothing.

Damn it. I opened my eyes.

Cornelius was gone.

I looked up the stairs and all around us, but he was nowhere to be seen. “Where did he go?” I asked Wilda.

“I let him go.”

What? Had I somehow spurred her to free him with my candle trick? “Why?”

“I got what
we
wanted.”

There was that royal “we” again.

My stomach dropped. Oh no. She hadn’t somehow killed him, had she? “What’s that?”

“You.”

Suddenly, my strength ebbed and I could no longer hold her. She pulled free of my grasp and turned, her garish clown face had a sad smile painted on it now.

“Violet, the one that I love,” Wilda said, only her voice sounded more like her brother’s.

I took a step backward, stumbling as another wave of dizziness washed over me, Cornelius’s stove pipe hat fell to the floor. I bent to retrieve it and when I lifted it, I saw something shiny inside the black silk lining. I stuck my hand inside the hat and pulled out the top of the clown cookie jar.

What the hell?

Wilda cried out and snatched it out of my hand. “Where did you get this? Mother is going to be very angry. This is her favorite cookie jar. Nobody is supposed to touch it.”

A loud slam boomed from overhead, making the whole house shake. The sound seemed to rumble for several seconds, echoing throughout the house. It sounded like the Fourth of July fireworks earlier this year over the Open Cut in Lead.

I took a step back, aiming the beam up the stair steps. “What was that?”

Wilda’s clown face turned toward the stairwell. “Uh oh,” she said and giggled nervously.

My flashlight went dark. I banged it on my leg but had no luck. “Shit.” Now what?