Spooky Spider Read online

  Spooky Spider

  (The Jane Garbo Mysteries, Book 3)

  by

  Addison Creek

  Copyright © 2017 by Addison Creek

  Cover Design © Broken Arrow Designs

  This novel is a work of fiction in which names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons, places, or events is completely coincidental.

  License Notes

  Thank you for downloading this eBook. This book remains the copyrighted property of

  the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial

  purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Epilogue

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  Chapter One

  My cousin Lizzie had always annoyed me. Our having to co-exist under the same roof made our problems all the more evident. The fact that she had taken my fourth floor room while I was away in New York had been the last straw in a long line of last straws.

  The ample size of the roof we were under didn’t help. I was in big trouble.

  So was she.

  The problems between us dated from when we were twelve. It all started with one crucial family vacation.

  Lizzie’s family had come for a visit to Haunted Bluff Mansion. While they were here, Lizzie kissed the first boy I ever had a crush on.

  Right after I told her I had a crush on him.

  Until that moment, I had thought maybe we could get along. Even though I wasn’t as close to her as I was to my other cousins, Lark and Pep, up till then I had gone along thinking that there was hope for us. We had a family bond, which was why I had confided in her about my secret crush.

  Lark and Pep had always been my best friends. When I was still young and innocent, I thought that maybe there was room for another cousin in my life. I had been willing to give Lizzie the benefit of the doubt, even though she smelled like oranges all the time, which was weird.

  Our problems may have started with that kiss, but they got worse after that.

  Lizzie’s parents liked Shimmerfield so much that they said they were going to move there when Lizzie was older, and they were as good as their word. Lizzie’s family came to live nearby for the most stressful and important time in my life: high school.

  In ninth grade, something even more unforgivable than that long-ago kiss took place between us. The high school Witch Formal had been planned for the end of the year, as usual, and everyone was terribly excited about it.

  Everyone included me; I couldn’t wait.

  The Formal would be my first dance ever, so everything had to be perfect. The dance itself was going to be magic chocolate skipping over rainbows, so naturally the preparation had to go off without a hitch too.

  Everything was running perfectly smoothly in the lead-up to the big night. My mom had even said that I could pick out my own dress, as long as it wasn’t too expensive. Naturally, I already had one in mind.

  My dream come true was a dress by the famed witch designer Gloria Galloway. It was the most beautiful dress in the world, full of sparkles and shine. It even came down past the knee, and I knew my mother would appreciate that. Aunt Meg approved too.

  The stars had aligned for that dress, and I was just waiting for it to go on sale. Even the delay didn’t bother me. The dress wasn’t affordable at its regular price, but a sale was coming, and all I had to do was wait. I started checking every couple of days; I knew the sale would come.

  Then my whole world came crashing down.

  Lizzie had heard that there was a dress I wanted, but I was no fool. Lizzie could not under any circumstances be allowed to find out which dress I had my eye on.

  But Lizzie was craftier than I anticipated. Meg unfortunately did not know that the secret needed to be kept, and one night she let slip to Lizzie which dress it was.

  What happened next should have been predictable, even to Meg. When Lizzie went to check out the dress and saw how beautiful it was, she had her parents buy it for her immediately.

  My heart was broken. The best dress in the world was lost to me. Nothing would ever be the same again, and I resolved to hate Lizzie until my dying day. I also prayed for her to trip on her own two feet and rip the dress as she walked into the dance.

  Of course, she didn’t. It was as if a spotlight shone on her all night: her shiny blonde hair, her white teeth, and my beautiful dress, Gloria Galloway’s perfect creation ruined by Lizzie.

  Up to that point, her theft of my first crush had been long forgotten. I had even started to tell myself that I had misjudged her, that maybe she wasn’t as bad as I thought.

  How wrong I was.

  After the episode of the dress, it was war. Lizzie took every possible opportunity to sabotage me. We didn’t even go to the same school, only the same Witch Formal, but since she was a relation I saw her fairly often. One night she even managed to put whipped cream in my shoes.

  Problems came to a head when we were eighteen. One thing Lizzie had not been successful at was driving. She was, in fact, terrible at it. Given that she hadn’t passed the driving test the first five times she’d taken it, her parents were a wee bit reluctant to get her a car.

  Lark, on the other hand, was an excellent driver. She passed the driver’s test on her first go and gave all of us rides everywhere. A real success story.

  To reward her, and because she had such excellent grades all through high school—although not as good as Pep’s—Meg gave Lark an old car.

  Lark loved that car, even though it would scarcely have been classified as junk to anybody but her. If she hadn’t been driving it, it would have been scrap metal.

  Lark didn’t care. It was hers, and it ran, and that was all that mattered.

  One night Lizzie wanted to go somewhere. Maybe to the mall, it doesn’t really matter. But without transportation of her own, she was stuck at home with the family.

  Well, Lizzie had a solution for that. She decided to steal Lark’s beautiful, beat-up car.

  She took the car, as she thought was no more than her due, but she didn’t make it very far. Three miles down the road, she crashed into a tree.

  The poor thing was totaled. The car, I mean. Lizzie was completely fine.

  She tottered away unharmed on her sparkling pink shoes, and her parents took no responsibility whatsoever for Lizzie’s theft and destruction of her cousin’s vehicle. Despite her dismal driving record, her dot
ing parents blamed the crash on mechanical failure. They would never believe that anything could be their dear darling Lizzie’s fault.

  Lark’s car was never replaced.

  All of this was becoming relevant at Haunted Bluff Mansion, where we all lived, because Lizzie was up to her dirty tricks again. One day, while almost everyone else was away haunt hunting, I had been assigned to watch Grandmother Cookie. The task was impossible, like being told to keep a tornado in one spot. Lizzie was supposed to do it, but when she heard about the hunting she casually suggested to Mom that I’d be a better fit for Cookie duty.

  My mom figured it was fair, because unlike everyone else at Haunted Bluff, I didn’t have a real job there. Even if being a detective counted somehow or other, that wasn’t mansion business.

  So instead of going shopping, I was stuck at Haunted Bluff.

  With Cookie.

  At least it was a beautiful late fall day.

  Chapter Two

  Situated on a cliff on the coast of Maine, Haunted Bluff Mansion was filled with dangerous supernaturals. Blood-sucking vampires worked alongside secretive ghosts. Skeletons held court and ran the show, while le-haunts were shifty and hard to read. If you lived at Haunted Bluff, you took your life in your hands. Literally.

  The most dangerous creature of all was short in stature. Instead of any predictable kind of monster, this one was more subtle. A vampire flashing out of a coffin, a horde of skeletons, those were monsters that went bump in the darkness. But they weren’t the most dangerous creatures at Haunted Bluff.

  “Isn’t it a beautiful day?” my grandmother Cookie asked, waltzing into the large and sun-filled kitchen. Bright morning light streamed in through the windows, and I could see the ocean sparkling in the crisp fall air outside.

  We hadn’t had rain in weeks, and the cool days were turning cold. My mother was always happy when it didn’t rain, because in a cruel twist of fate, ghosts become more powerful in wet weather. When they get wet, they go from an atemporal state to a solid one, that makes them extra deadly and our haunted house even harder to manage than usual.

  I had recently started worrying that our ghosts might get the bright idea of just walking into the ocean and solidifying that way, but my mom had reassured me that salt water doesn’t have the same effect as rain or bath water.

  Anyhow, the leaves had fallen for another year and the grass outside Haunted Bluff Mansion was browning. Still beautiful, fall was passing into winter.

  Shimmerfield, Maine, was cold.

  Cookie had once tried to convince Mom to let her cast a spell designed to ensure eternal summer. Mom had told her she’d be more than happy to let her cast a spell for warm weather. It was called purchasing a one-way ticket to Florida. Cookie hadn’t taken her up on the offer.

  “You look different,” I said to my grandmother.

  She glared at me from around the large silver coffee pot. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Why are you still here, anyway?”

  “Where else would I be?” I said.

  “I figured you’d go back to New York City. Is there anyone in that town that hasn’t already fired you?” she wondered.

  “I only got fired like ten times. They have hundreds of thousands of companies there,” I said. “It’s not like it’s Shimmerfield.”

  “Sounds like a lot. Do you want help with your résumé?” said Cookie.

  “You think I should let you help me after you got me fired a bunch of times?” I said.

  “That was for your own good,” she told me.

  She clearly didn’t want to tell me what she was all giddy about, so I coughed and went back to eating my breakfast. I was sure I’d find out soon enough.

  The house itself had been quiet for the last few days, but the Root of All Evil, which had begun its campaign of mayhem at Haunted Bluff before being discovered and driven out, had been causing trouble up and down the coast. Graveyards had been disturbed, and several skeletons had gone missing from a local museum. It was all over the news, reported as a robbery, but we knew the truth: the skeletons had gotten up and walked out of their own accord. Now they were probably with Mirrorz’s gang somewhere.

  Sad to say, the vampire Mirrorz had been Haunted Bluff’s butler for many years before we found out that he was plotting our overthrow. Now he and his gang were on the run and creating mayhem everywhere they went.

  Haunt hunters had been especially busy trying to keep up with the string of pranks and petty crimes. Kip, Corey, Cam, and Lizzie had been gone almost all the time. As of the morning when Cookie strolled into the kitchen in a buoyant mood, they’d been away on an assignment for the past two days.

  Kip and Corey were the children of family friends. They had come to live with us when they were young, after their parents died. Kip was the strong, silent type. Corey was nerdy. As they’d grown into adulthood, their presence had filled a void at Haunted Bluff that had been created when all the men of my dad’s generation died.

  Cam was my younger brother, a dreamer and an idealist. I hoped that someday, like any good brother, he would finally accept that I was always right.

  Lizzie was, as I have said, Cam’s and my cousin. Having tired at last of Shimmerfield, Lizzie’s parents had decided to spend their time traveling the world. As much as they made a show of doting on their only child, they didn’t actually care enough about her to take her along. She had come to live with us.

  Women weren’t usually allowed to become haunt hunters, but Lizzie’s parents had said yes when she begged to be trained. Then they’d gone off on safari to Africa.

  Lizzie now got to train at my dream job, while my mom still refused to let me anywhere near it.

  Lizzie also had a longstanding crush on Kip. He had no idea, mostly because Lizzie tended to talk about cosmopolitan guys who got manicures as the right sort to be seen with, whereas Kip could probably have carried a tree on his shoulder all by himself. Plus, he was the kind of guy who didn’t know what a manicure was.

  How Lizzie thought Kip was supposed to read between the lines to realize that he was the one she wanted, I had no idea. Nor did I care. The more Lizzie’s plans were thwarted, the happier I was.

  My other cousins, Pep and Lark, rounded out the younger generation living at the mansion. As sisters they had a deep bond, but their personalities were very different. Pep did everything by the book, while Lark was more wild and creative.

  As for the middle generation, Aunt Meg took care of costumes and decorations and Aunt Audrey cooked for all of us. Mom, Meg, and Audrey were the widows of Grandmother Cookie’s sons. Audrey wasn’t a witch. When Uncle Bill died she had stayed on because she liked the place, and where else would she go, knowing our secret?

  That morning, as I sat with Cookie over coffee contemplating a busy day, the doorbell rang.

  Besides the haunt hunters, my mom and Aunt Meg were also gone. Lark wasn’t a morning person, so she probably wasn’t even awake yet. Pep would be at work in the Enchanted Bits and Bobs gift shop and paying no attention.

  In short, besides keeping an eye on Cookie, I was on default duty for anything random that came up. The doorbell ringing mid-morning was certainly random.

  “I’ll answer the door,” said Cookie, shoving me aside and scampering into the dimly lit hallway.

  As she went by, Steve the skeleton popped his head out of the nook where he spent most of his time. “Visitors!” he said with delight.

  “We’re on it,” I said, trailing after my grandmother.

  “I’m on it. She can stay behind,” said Cookie over her shoulder.

  “I remember how nice it was to have the love of family,” sighed Steve as he slid back into the darkness.

  Cookie had a hard time pulling the front door open, but she managed it. Barely. When she finally got it open, we found a lone delivery guy standing on the stoop. He was tall and strong-looking, and I was impressed. I didn’t know they had warlock models delivering stuff now.

  “Hey,” he said, lookin
g between Cookie and me and smiling.

  Behind the delivery guy was his bright green truck, on which was painted a very large spider and the words “Speedy Spider Delivery Service.” Thus I was clued in that this was the supernatural delivery service.

  Meg sometimes ordered decorations or costume materials through the human system, but we tried to avoid that when we could. The more we minimized the presence of humans around Haunted Bluff when the haunted house was closed, the better. At least, that was how my mom felt. She was the boss, after all.

  “Can I help you?” said Cookie coldly.

  “Right, yeah, I have a delivery for Garbo,” he said, examining his notes.

  “Cookie?” she asked.

  “Crescent Garbo. That’s a strange name.” He looked up and smiled.

  “That would be me,” said Cookie.

  I gasped. In all these years of her being my grandmother, I had never known that her real name wasn’t Cookie.

  The delivery guy turned around and went to his truck to retrieve a package. He came back holding something small in his hands. Cookie frowned. I was standing next to her now.

  “What’s that?” she said.

  “Your delivery. Was there supposed to be something else?” he asked.

  “Yeah, but I can’t say it in front of the kid,” she replied.

  She took the little package from the guy and threw it over her shoulder into the foyer. It landed with a crackling sound. As it soared past my head I noticed the word “Fragile” written on the label.

  “I’m twenty-five,” I groaned.

  “Maybe what you were expecting will be delivered tomorrow,” said the guy, whose name tag said he was called “Blu.”

  “It was supposed to be delivered today. Check again, please,” said Cookie, tapping her foot impatiently.

  Blu looked like he wanted to argue, but one glance at Cookie and he thought better of it.

  “Remind me again what you’re having delivered,” I said to Cookie.

  “I already told you I can’t tell you. Nosy!” Cookie fumed. “I’ve been getting packages here for decades while you’ve been off living in cities. You can’t just come back here and expect me to tell you things that are none of your business.”