Buried Secrets (10 page)

Jo said, “Tell me about magic.”

And with a nod, Ashley did. For the entire meal, and into their dessert of sopaipillas and honey. Hardly anything in her explanations seemed concrete—and yet it all felt
right,
which was something Jo was already beginning to associate with the idea of magic. Magic might be abstract, but it was real.

And individual. “We all have certain powers,” said Ashley. “Mine is healing. Lorenzo's abilities are clearly protective. Yours…I think your talent lies in grounding.” She described a visualization very much like Sigrid Thorson's World Tree imagery.

“Do that, and you'll empower yourself, every time,” Ashley said. “Anything you deliberately think, during that meditation, may also carry more weight in the universe, so think ethically.”

“
Think
ethically?”

“Many Wiccans believe that any harm you magic toward others comes back at you three times as powerful,” Ashley cautioned. “And we're against doing manipulative magic.”

“Like love spells,” Jo guessed, remembering the charm.

“Exactly—at least if you name someone. Why would you want a person you have to capture through magic in the first place?”

Even once she was home for the night, to the happy greeting of Butch and Sundance, Jo couldn't forget Ashley's question—or the answer that felt far too clear and powerful to be ignored.

Because it seems safe,
she'd thought.
Because the idea of risking rejection can be scarier than zombies.

Or was that the idea of risking
acceptance?
Blaming magic would make the pain easier, if it fell apart—and it would taint everything. Jo still wasn't sure how much she believed in magic. But just in case, she took the dogs for a long hike, where hardly anything could sneak up on a person, and she brought the love charm the
Bruja
had given her. It smelled of dried roses. She untied the ribbon and let the silk fall open, and let the contents blow away in the Texas wind. “No harm,” she whispered.

Maybe it was just superstition. But as the dogs escorted her back to the comfortable normalcy of her house, loping by to lick her hand—Jo felt increasingly tempted to end this craziness.

Tempted to leave the socializing to social people.

Tempted to leave the investigating to the investigator.

Zack had been right. Missing bodies in Almanuevo weren't under her legal jurisdiction. True, things in Spur weren't busy. She had vacation time, and Deputy Fred had her pager number. But who would it hurt if she left the complications and the people—and the
breathing
and the
feeling
—alone, and went back to her nice, quiet existence in her nice, little town?

She went to bed, almost convinced. But instead of zombies, her sleep was plagued by more pleasant scenarios concerning a certain private investigator and what could've happened if she'd put the love charm to use, and a voice.
Is there harm here…?

When she startled herself awake, aroused and aware in the windy night, Jo changed her mind. Giving up on the investigation would be cowardice. If there was one thing Josephine James was not, it was cowardly.

That the desert air blowing through her cracked window smelled faintly of roses…that had to be her imagination, right?

At least the weather was cooling off again.

 

“You have got to be kidding,” deadpanned Angelique Dupres, hands on her gauze-wrapped hips as she glared at Zack. This was Interview Number Twelve—Jo had dubbed the previous day “Wiccan Wednesday,” since they'd chatted with practitioners of Gardnerian Wicca, Faerie Wicca
and
Dianic Wicca. Well, Jo had talked to the last group; that particular coven did not like men.

Today they were debriefing a voodoo queen in the back room of the Good Vibrations occult shop. Folding chairs formed a big, empty circle—for rituals, drumming, or discussion? Zack, Jo and Miss Dupres stood.

“I'm not kidding,” said Zack. “Necromancy. Walking dead.”

“Honey, I do not do zombies,” stated Miss Dupres.

“Lucky zombies,” said Zack; not that Angelique was hard
on the eyes. But that big boa she wore over her shoulders—and not the feather kind—tended to distract a guy from the mocha-colored cleavage she had on display. “That doesn't answer my—”

“What Mr. Lorenzo probably means to say,” interrupted Jo, “is that we realize you have nothing to do with whatever's going on in Almanuevo. But as one of the leading practitioners of voodoo in the area—”

“Vodoun,”
corrected Angelique, though clearly intrigued.

“Excuse me,
Vodoun,
” agreed Jo, “you are our best hope to finding out who
is
responsible…and hopefully stopping him.”

Zack was so impressed, he decided to forgive her for that
What Mr. Lorenzo means to say
crap. He liked that Jo wasn't thrown by the snake. Or the cleavage. He was kinda thrown by the cleavage. Angelique's top was tight and low-cut, under the snake.

“Honey, if you are dealin' with zombies you'll need more than guns or badges,” advised Angelique. “Only way to stop a zombie is to kill him again—cut off his head, sew up his mouth so he can't be answerin' the
bokor.
Like that.”

Jo cocked her head, encouraging. “The
bokor
being…?”

“
Bokor's
a
houngan
—a priest—who does black magic. But you've been visitin' the Almanuevo two-plex too much, if you're thinkin' that's what Vodoun is all about. We are a legal religion, we worship the old
loas,
and yes, we do magic.”

Zack said, “This town just has a
two-plex?
Only
two movies
at any given time?” No wonder the place was full of nut-jobs.

Jo said, “Including necromancy, right? Vodoun has been known to do magic dealing with dead people.”

“Could say the same thing about Christianity,” noted Angelique. “That whole Lazarus story—how do you explain
that?
”

Zack opened his mouth to protest that there were a few important differences between voodoo
bokors
and Jesus Christ, but Jo surprised him by putting her arm around his waist, and he shut up. Again. When he glanced down at her, she shot him a dark look.

At least she hadn't kicked him.

“Santeria, there's a few of them who do necromancy too,” Angelique continued. “And you'll be findin' more of them around here than us. You find
mayomberos
—black witches, Santero witches—and maybe you'll find your necromancer. But don't you be tryin' to frame Vodoun.”

“We're not trying to frame anyone,” Jo assured her in that forthright voice. “We're just trying to find out what's going on in Almanuevo.”

“Somethin' sure is,” muttered Angelique. “Somethin' bad.”

But the priestess would admit to nothing more.

“See, this is the part of the job that I hate,” griped Zack, climbing into the passenger seat of Jo's blue, '80s model, four-door truck. After another of their sources—supposedly a gypsy woman—had looked at the Ferrari before naming a ridiculous fee, Jo had insisted on doing at least some of the driving. Zack didn't like it. Mainly, he'd prefer to drive, but they'd had that argument. Neither did he enjoy feeling like he was in the opening credits for the
Beverly Hillbillies.
Jo's shocks weren't what he was used to and there were places on the bench seat where only duct tape held the springs into the upholstery. She didn't have either a CD player or air-conditioning—if the weather hadn't dipped into the fifties the previous day, still windy of course, that would have been a deal-breaker.

He particularly didn't like being on the passenger side with nothing to do but look through her box of tapes. Actual
audio cassettes
with the names of the bands written on them in a satisfyingly messy hand. At least it was good music. For tapes.

“What don't you like,” challenged Jo with an easy grin. “Buxom priestesses?” The door squeaked painfully when she slammed it shut—and it did need slamming, for the latch to work.

“Who the hell says buxom anymore? The woman was stacked, and no, that was not the problem. What I don't like is that the flakes are bad enough but at least they talk. What they say may be bull, but they say it—and say it and say it. Even nowadays, when you'd think anything goes, too many legitimate practitioners are either under vows of secrecy or scared off by the badge.”

He looked deliberately at the star pinned to Jo's denim hip.

She snorted, and started the truck. It took two tries to catch. “So now
I'm
the one intimidating them?”

“Satan as an IRS agent couldn't intimidate that woman. All I'm saying is, it gets frustrating.” And that wasn't the only frustration about their search. Despite his best efforts not to notice, Zack liked how the sheriff slanted her laughing blue eyes toward him, her soft lips fighting a smile. She wore another of her T-shirts under a denim jacket—today's shirt was green—and despite being neither tight nor low cut, it didn't do a lousy job at delineating how
buxom
Jo was, either. Not that he'd call her stacked; her figure was more understated, enough so that he'd gotten the impression she didn't wear a bra.

Which, he reminded himself, was really none of his business.

What he liked most about Jo, though, was that she spoke her mind. Gabriella used to agree with him a lot when they were dating, enough to make him feel really good about himself—until they had married and he starting seeing how much she'd held back. Then he felt like something of a stooge. He'd loved her even more when she stood up to him—but he'd never been sure whether to believe her, when she got agreeable. He'd found himself holding back, if she agreed too fast, and that was no good either.

If ever Jo James
did
agree with him, he guessed he would believe her. She sure had nothing to gain from flattery.

“You know, sometimes you just don't sound like an investigator of paranormal phenomena,” she said now.

“See, now you're making me sound flaky too,” he protested. “I'm a legitimate P.I. who just has an open mind about weirdness.”

“You said Crystal, at the rock shop, should report to her mother ship.”

“Did I say it to her face?” No, he did not.

“That's real big of you.”

Zack refrained from either joking about how big he really was—
professionalism, Lorenzo
—or asking when Jo's truck had last gotten a tune-up. Especially since the answer probably
hadn't changed since the last two times he'd annoyed her by asking.

He hated her truck. They weren't taking her truck again.

“Here's what I don't get,” Jo admitted as she bounced them toward their next appointment. This meeting, Zack's partner Cecil had set up with a man who claimed personal concerns about Almanuevo's missing dead. “One minute, you seem to really believe in this magic stuff, the next, you're mocking it.”

“I never mock magic,” he protested.

“Her mother ship?”

He held up a hand to fend off her sarcasm. “I was mocking a woman who is
pretending
to be magic,” he clarified. “Did you hear some of the jargon coming out of her mouth? ‘Auric vibrations' and ‘attuning energies' and ‘tapping the earth force'? I bet she didn't understand half of it herself.”

“The way I see it,” said Jo, “magic seems pretty hard to describe. You said yourself that it cloaks itself in reality.”

“Yeah, well I'm a smart guy.”

“So if magic is abstract,” Jo forged on, “then it makes sense that different people would describe it in different ways. Why should ‘vibrations' and ‘attuning energies' seem silly when we're already talking magic?”

“You forgot about ‘tapping into the earth force.'”

She flipped him off, which made him grin.

He relented. “Half of the crystals she was selling were enhanced, synthetic, or flat-out imitation. I work with a supplier in Chicago—it's a good way to monitor the magic community—so I know the Federal Trade Commission requires sellers to disclose which gems are man-made. For fair-trade reasons, though you'd think it would also affect how well the stone
taps into the earth force.
”

Jo said, “Well…they were manufactured on Earth, weren't they? It's not like they're attuned to the Mars force.”

Was there nothing this woman wouldn't fight him on?

Zack said, “
And
her stock was overpriced. Jade, turquoise, obsidian—semiprecious stones at precious stone prices.”

Jo considered that. “Really?”

“Really. Trust me on this. The lady makes out like she's
Wiccan, with her pentagram and saying ‘Blessed Be' when we walked in, but unlike some magic users—like a certain
Bruja
I won't mention—most real Wiccans are iffy about the charging for their magic, definitely about overcharging. Either Crystal's putting some expensive spell on the crystals without mentioning it—big no-no—or she's selling baskets full of overpriced rocks. She's using the whole magic angle—and the fact that most tourists are probably long on want and short on knowledge—to run a con. Not only should she contact her mother ship, she should take the first flight home, which is probably just Suburbia U.S.A.”

Not that he felt strongly about people duping suckers hungry for a taste of something beyond the harsh reality of their lives, right? Hell, that sort of thing had angered him even before he realized some of the magic was real.

And that Gabriella may have been duped of more than money.