happened before the bad thing came?” I pressed. “Anything at all?”
“I heard a voice, far away. Someone I didn’t know. I couldn’t make out what he was saying. It woke me up, or the bad thing would have gotten me in my sleep. And then, I saw a line in the darkness that looked like fire. It came and went real fast. After that, the bad thing was there in the dark with me.”
Sounds like someone is messing with magic, I thought. Who summoned the wraith? And how did they open a door for it? Important questions, but I knew Tad couldn’t answer them.
“Have you seen the bad thing since last night?” I asked.
“No. But it might come back. Then what?”
“I don’t know yet,” I admitted. “But my friends and I are going to do our best to send it away.”
“Thank you,” Tad said. “I’d like to go back to sleep.”
Alicia was rousing from her trance. She shivered, and I knew she was back again when she opened her eyes.
“Did you hear any of that?” I asked. Sometimes, mediums don’t remember anything after a session.
“Yes,” Alicia replied. “And I don’t like the sound of it. But it squares with what Valerie saw on her ghost tour. A predator that eats ghosts. That’s bad – and Charleston has a lot of ghostly prey.”
I went to the kitchen and came back with a cold glass of sweet tea. There’s not much that can’t be made better with a glass of cold tea. Alicia drank it gratefully, and after a few moments, the color came back to her face.
“If you heard what Tad said, did you get anything from his thoughts that I might not have picked up?” I asked, leaning against my desk, well away from the problematic jewelry box.
Alicia frowned, thinking back over the ghostly encounter. “Tad didn’t really have the words to tell you what he saw when the wraith appeared,” she replied. “Magic certainly isn’t in his vocabulary. What I got out of the memories I saw was that someone called the wraith forth from… somewhere. So we’ve got two problems – the wraith, and whoever summoned it.”
I had been thinking the same thing, but hearing Alicia put my fears into words sent a shiver down my spine. “Yeah,” I said. “That’s what I got out of it, too. And that means we’ve got a heap of trouble.”
“Are you going to call the woman who brought in the jewelry box?” Teag asked after Alicia left and I had given him a recap of what we had discovered. Before Teag came to Trifles and Folly, he had been working on his doctorate in history at the university. He still looks like a grad student, mid-twenties, good-looking, tall and slender with a mop of dark, skater-boy hair and a wicked sense of humor. Now, he pushed a lock of hair out of his eyes and gave me a look that was deadly serious.
“I’m not sure she can tell us more than she did when she sold it to us,” I said, leaning against the counter. “That jewelry box has been in the family for over a hundred years without bothering anyone, and just recently, she starts getting bad dreams and blames the box. Pretty odd if you ask me.”
Teag nodded. “I agree, especially that she’d single out the jewelry box. I wonder why – and what she saw in her dreams.”
I remembered the woman who had brought in the velvet jewelry box. She looked tired and guilty. That’s not as surprising as it sounds. A lot of people feel pressured to keep everything they inherit. Sometimes, they’ve hated that item since childhood. Maybe the piece doesn’t work with their lifestyle or they just don’t have room for it. That’s when the guilt hits, and they sneak into Trifles and Folly like we’re their fence for stolen goods.
For our customers, we’re a mix of antique appraiser, treasure hunt, and confessional. People bring us grandma’s unwanted silver flatware and want to know what it’s worth. Buyers love finding one-of-a-kind items, and collectors hope they’ll stumble on an overlooked Picasso sketch worth a million dollars. But before those items go into the glass cases out front, we talk to the people who own the pieces, and that’s usually when we know whether we’re in for trouble.
“Let me give it a try,” I said. “I’ll see if I can steer the conversation back to her dream.” It was a long shot. The woman who had