Page 34 of Justice & Liberty

“Maggie would always look through the book and see if anything stood out that seemed helpful,” Hex told me. “Then later, when she got older, she sort of had things memorized, so she knew what there was that might help. Truth tea, or a karma spell, or once, she summoned a ghost. That was fun.”

I blinked down at her as I picked up the empty kheer bowls.

Summoned a ghost?

That was . . . something.

My mind immediately strayed to not just summoning a ghost, but to summoning my mother’s own ghost.

It probably wouldn’t help with the investigation into Ephraim Collins’s death. Even if she’d disliked him as much as anyone else in town, Mom clearly hadn’t killed him. But...I could talk to her.

Get that moment that I’d been thinking about so much since the hospital had called me. That one last chance to talk to her.

So when I sat down on the couch, covered with cats bathing themselves after their treat, I might have been a little overly focused on that idea.

Summon the Unembodied Spirit, the page I found called it. Unembodied. What a weird word.

It seemed to fit the circumstances, and...well technically, I should probably be looking to summon the spirit ofEphraim Collins. He was the victim. If anyone knew who had murdered him, it’d probably be him, right?

Except I didn’t even know how he’d died, other than the sheriff said poison. That could have been anything from his dinner to forcing him to swallow pills at gunpoint.

I couldn’t believe that Sabrina had killed anyone. She was full of sunshine and puppies, and didn’t have violence in her.

Her sister, Charlotte, didn’t even live in South Liberty anymore, and no one had mentioned her visiting, so it wasn’t likely to be her. She’d moved to Chicago to become a nurse and never come back. Not only had her grandfather had no reach or say in things there, but I imagined given their population, Chicago also needed rather more nurses than South Liberty.

I wondered if anyone had even told her he was dead. Sabrina might have; I knew they spoke on occasion.

He’d probably disinherited her when she’d gone, though, so I wasn’t sure how much difference it all made to her. He’d threatened Sabrina with the same when she’d said she wanted to go away to college. That if she left town, he would sell the shop and disinherit her.

Sabrina hadn’t cared all that much about the money, but she had cared, deeply, about the shop her parents had built.

His other granddaughter, Sabrina’s cousin Abigail, was considerably older than the sisters. She was Ephraim’s long-dead older son’s child, and when we’d been tiny kids starting kindergarten, she’d been graduating high school. She had to be in her forties now, and she...well, I didn’t know her.

I wouldn’t have blamed her either if she had killed him, though.

It was clear to me now, with hindsight, that she’d gotten the same threats about being disinherited. Instead of staying in town to save her parents’ beloved business like Sabrina, or leaving because she didn’t give a damn like Charlotte, Abigailhad stayed right there in the house with him. Not just stayed in South Liberty, but lived with the man her whole life. Worse still, for most of my childhood, he’d treated her more like a housekeeper than a granddaughter.

More than once when I’d been visiting Sabrina as a kid, I’d caught him yelling at her over cold coffee or dust on shelves.

I gave a deep sigh, setting the book aside, and looked at the cats. “You know, guys, I’m never going to be pro-murder, but like...are we even sorry Ephraim is dead? Why am I trying to help find his killer at all?”

Bee considered, giving me what looked like a confused little kitty frown, as she clearly agreed with me.

Hex, on the other hand, gave another deep, put-upon sigh. “Because if it’s a murder, and the sheriff coming to you for help said that it is,someoneis going to jail for this. It’s not about the mean old man anymore. It’s about the innocent people who might go to jail, or have their lives ruined, in the aftermath. Someone sank the boat. It was a terrible boat and no one misses it, but the wake it’s left behind it might drag down any number of innocent people. We don’t want that.”

That was an excellent point, and I didn’t have any counterpoints. Maybe we’d get lucky, and Lucy Beasley would have done it. She could go to jail, and it’d be a net win for the town.

Just the thought gave me a little jolt of shame, though. Ephraim had been awful, but murdering him was too much. I didn’t even much like the death penalty for killers, and no one had ever claimed the old man was that.

Still, the murder part was done, and I wouldn’t be sorry to be rid of that mean old woman who’d maligned my mother as well as a man who’d made my best friend’s life difficult.

I looked back down at the spell on the page. Unembodied Spirits. Maybe everyone on the other side could chat together,and Mom’s ghost would, in fact, know who had killed the old man. It seemed very in character for her to have been keeping an eye on the town, after all.

Who was I kidding? I just wanted an excuse to summon up the ghost of my mother. Imissedher.

If it didn’t work, or she didn’t know anything about Ephraim Collins, I could do something else later. Magic didn’t seem to be finite, so I could try more than one thing.

And sometimes it was okay to do things for myself, wasn’t it?

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