She remembered why they didn’t make a good couple. “Don’t you dare hang up on me, Toby. I’m not a naïve teenager you can order around anymore. Frogs arenotmore important than murder investigations. My family is not any crazier than your father is greedy and selfish. And you can start your own danged protest march. I prefer to nail your underhanded pig of a father to a wall for trying to steal my family’s land.” With wicked delight, she slammed the receiver down. She could really get into slamming phones. Who needed a stupid cell phone?
He rang right back, of course. She didn’t answer.
Tobias Block had been the coolest kid in school. He’d had a motorcycle the instant he’d turned sixteen. Long blond hair, shoulders twice as wide as his hips, football star, rich, the works—and he’d dated her for about all of two seconds after she’d turned sixteen and grown big boobs. Then he’d gone to college and she’d never heard from him again.
He’d been her first taste of male conceit. Not necessarily the last, but the first was the one that counted. And the troubling part was—Toby was actually a good guy, if his aura was to be believed.
And then Jax with the angry killer aura strolled in, and she was pretty sure he was a good guy too. He eyed her with interest as she answered the blaring phone by removing the receiver and letting it dangle on the far side of the counter with Toby’s voice still barking orders.
“New means of talking to ghosts?”
“Old boyfriend. He says they’re digging up the pond and endangering the gopher frog. I don’t suppose the cops care?” She didn’t want to hurt the frogs, but she couldn’t abandon the Posts either. Life never happened in black and white. One was always left choosing the paler shade of gray.
“Old boyfriend?” With a malicious look in his eye, Jax picked up the receiver and spoke into it. “If you had any brains, you’d hire a lawyer to protect the frogs. I’ll send you my fee schedule, if you like. Nonprofits get a special discount.” He handed the phone back to her. “He hung up.”
Evie laughed. “That’s what he does best. Have you talked to your sister this morning? Pris says she established a link with her and doesn’t sense any disturbance. She didn’t try to go in. Did your team fetch her clothes?”
“As far as I’m aware, Ariel is fine and well supplied with clothes. It’s Loretta you should be asking about. Your gossip network must not be working. Did you stuff Mavis in a trash barrel? Shoot the raven? Do you need a cell phone to keep up? The kid thinks you do.” Obviously enjoying himself, he set the window crystals swinging.
The rainbow collision almost did her in. Annoyed, she came out from behind the counter to stop the spinning. “I’ve been out walking the dogs and keeping an eye on the pond. They gave up on divers, and they’re trashing the low end with heavy equipment. I hope the frogs move to the other side. What did I miss?”
After Jax explained Loretta’s flight, and his consequent confrontation with his adoptive father and boss, Evie covered her mouth and returned to circling on the counter school, contemplating the implications. She opened her inner eye as she did so, but she really didn’t need to verify that he was both furious and confused.
“Can he fire you? Does this mean Ariel can’t go home?” She wanted to run to Loretta, but it sounded like the kid had handled the situation with intelligence. Evie thought her maternal instincts might need a little work if she thought it was okay to escape to a rooftop, though.
“Stephen can probably ask that I be fired, but the other partners will want evidence of wrongdoing, and he can’t easily provide it now that I’ve switched out that Cayman account. But insubordination is a hanging offense, so I’m walking a fine line. I’m going next door to grab lunch. Want me to bring something back?”
She had his number now. Jax brushed off the fight as if it were nothing, but he was seething. Cooling him off wouldn’t be easy.
“Bring me a milkshake. Gertie can’t poison that. What do you plan to do about Loretta?” Her fingernails bit into her palm as she waited for an answer.
“Buy phones for both of you, I guess. I’d rather ship her off somewhere safe, but she’d only run away again. She needs to be sent to her room without cookies. The sight of her up on that roof... I’ll get the milkshake.” He strode off without finishing that loaded statement.
Evie feared they’d taken two steps back to where she’d plotted her own team to counteract his. They needed to work together but not if he kept rejecting what she could bring to the table. Jax was hardheaded and refused to accept the paranormal, because it only led to conjecture and theory, not hard evidence. She was starting to see the fallacy in believing she could be a detective.
She might call in Orbis Jr., but what good would it do to know twenty-year-old papers held trauma or anxiety or whatever? She’d learned all the spectral Posts had to offer, and that wasn’t enough. Auras might tell her of potential villains, but they didn’t stand up in court. How did one find a killer and a thief? She didn’t even know if they were the same person, although it would make sense that anyone who stole deeds and land might want to remove people owning that land.
And how did that tie into Jax’s adoptive father finagling Loretta’s accounts? And warning him to stay away and take Loretta with him? Surely Stockton wasn’t a killer! He was too old and set in his ways.
Becoming a detective was definitely not a good idea. She just wanted a real job, one where she commanded a little respect for her abilities, such as they were.
Apparently sensing her distress, Psy leaped into her lap and batted her hand to scratch him. Once his itch had been satisfied, he climbed on the counter, curled around the crystal ball, and uttered a commandingMaaavvv.
“Mavis? You want me to call my mother to read my future? Not happening, old boy.” Evie spun some more. Crystal rainbows bounced around the room. “I need cold, hard evidence, not theories.”
Lakeland Development needed the land at Witch Hill.
Someone had removed the deed owned by the family trust from the registrar’s office, apparently along with the trust tax payments. That returned all the deeds to their original owners from decades ago. If tax notices had been sent to dead relations—they’d been returned to the courthouse.
The county now wanted to auction off the individual plots for back taxes—which would put Witch Hill in the developer’s hands. All that had to happen at the courthouse. The mix-up could have been a computer glitch. Evie was fairly certain it wasn’t.
If she blotted out all the other complications of contractors and lawyers and bank accounts, the problem boiled down to land. Could thecitymayor order the trust deeds removed fromcountyfiles? Mayor Blockhead had invested all his real estate in Lakeland and stood to gain from buying Witch Hill, so yeah, if there was a will, there was probably a way.
She didn’t like to think Toby’s father could kill, but after the mayor condemned a trailer park for a pharmacy that never got built, she could see him committing fraud to get what he wanted. The mayor had grandiose dreams of turning Afterthought into a suburban oasis where he could buy and sell houses for the rest of his life. So he was her main suspect.
When Jax returned with her milkshake, Evie had her laptop set up on the counter. “Explain how this deed thing works. We know we have the original deed for Letitia’s small share of the family land from John Post’s desk. But the deed transferring all the other lots into the trust isn’t recorded at the registrar’s office?”
“Right. I’ll guess Val holds the original trust deed. We need that and the trust agreement if we go to court.” He set the carry-out bag on the counter and produced sandwiches and fries. “I checked the microfiche this morning. The deed numbers on the tax notices are for the original individual plots in the name of folks I’ll guess are long dead. I assume your family never bothered with probate courts and changing titles or anything normal people do? Until the trust came along, anyway.”