Spooky Spells Read online

  Spooky Spells

  (The Jane Garbo Mysteries, Book 2)

  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

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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

  Haunted Bluff Mansion was an unusual place. With its setting in the picturesque state of Maine, its natural beauty brought visitors from all over the world. Located in the entirely normal town of Shimmerfield, Haunted Bluff was a stalwart member of the community and part of the local fabric, even if the fabric was thick, pitted, pilled and uneven in places.

  Overlooking the ocean, Haunted Bluff was the world’s only live haunted house. Of course, that’s not how it was billed. We didn’t tell the paying customers and guests that the vampire falling out of an upright coffin with a ghoulish grin was real. The blood on the side of his mouth was also not fake. Some things are better left unsaid.

  My family had lived at Haunted Bluff for generations. We gathered supernaturals to the mansion until they were ready to move on, or scat, as my grandmother Cookie liked to say. We had a real graveyard out front.

  The property that surrounded the mansion was extensive. Beyond the house itself, which had one hundred thirty-two rooms, three attics, and a haunted house, several outbuildings dotted the grounds, including a carriage house and stables and a row of small dwellings down the road that my mother rented out.

  If all that wasn’t excitement enough for one property, there was also Down Below. When the haunted house had first opened, there had still been some kinks to work out. The more criminally-minded supernaturals were unhappy with how the haunted house was run, but they didn’t have anywhere else to go. Instead of leaving, they went to ground.

  Literally.

  They’d been in the basement of the mansion ever since.

  The notorious Fudgy Bail ran a crime syndicate from Down Below, including the always informative and illegal Spooky Times newspaper, the Spooky Times radio station, and the Spooky Times Publishing House. My mother pretended old Fudgy sold baked goods.

  On the particular day when this story starts, I had worked hard all day long. I had finished covering the stables with hay for the haunted hayrides we’d be starting the following week. I had painted more than a hundred apples black and spotted them with gold. I had even kept Cookie from eating all but two of them.

  I had worked so hard all day for a purpose, a purpose that had to be kept secret from everyone but my cousins Lark and Pep. After dinner I said I was going to bed early, and Pep and Lark said the same, and we went in our separate directions. My cousins shared a room on the fourth floor of the back part of Haunted Bluff Mansion, while I was relegated to the attic.

  My mother had given away my lovely fourth floor bedroom to my horrible cousin Lizzie when I had been off living in New York. At first I’d been upset about the move, but then I realized something important: my mother could no longer keep such a close eye on me.

  That was her mistake.

  Besides Lizzie, who had gotten dumped in our lap because her parents traveled the world and ignored her, Kip and Corey Woodson also lived with us. Our fathers had all been haunt hunters together. They had died together as well.

  My younger brother Cam was training to be a haunt hunter, one of the searchers who went out and found ghosts, skeletons, vampires, and le-haunts who would be at loose ends causing trouble if they didn’t have productive employment in Haunted Bluff’s haunted house.

  Like any good little siblings, Cam and I fought often but loved each other.

  Aunt Meg was Pep and Lark’s mother. She was in charge of all the decorations around the property, including making the haunted house look as authentic as possible. Lark assisted her mother.

  My mom and Meg and my aunt Audrey had been married to Cookie’s sons.

  Aunt Audrey had no children and she wasn’t a witch, but since she knew our secret and loved to cook, she had stayed at the mansion even after she’d been widowed.

  The haunted house employees—ghosts, skeletons, vampires, and le-haunts—lived all over the grounds of Haunted Bluff. Most of them lived outside the mansion proper, but the vampire Mirrorz had been special. As the first supernatural to arrive at the Bluff, he had been a trusted member of the household for years. He had even had a room in the mansion itself, at the very top of the haunted house, small but all his own. Given that he was a vampire, his preferred place to live was of course a coffin.

  After Mirrorz been revealed as the leader of the Root of All Evil, a supernatural criminal enterprise, Grant Hastings of the Supernatural Protection Force had searched his room and taken most everything away. Grant, known as His Majesty of Magic, was only ever sent in to solve the toughest cases, most of which were somehow recently occurring at Haunted Bluff.

  When Grant was finished, my mother took charge and barred access to the space that had belonged to Mirrorz.

  That was all well and good. The room was now empty, and though I would have preferred to examine his belongings, I knew something that Grant didn’t. Even my mother didn’t even know it.

  Mirrorz had had another space in the house, hidden in one of the cleaning closets, a convenient hideaway since his favorite task was polishing the family silver. He had long ago ceased to work in the haunted house itself.

  After the investigation of the Root of All Evil ended and Grant left, I waited, biding my time. I couldn’t reveal what I knew too soon, or I might be pre-empted once again. If my mother hadn’t realized that Mirrorz stashed important possessions at the top of the closet, I certainly wasn’t going to enlighten her.

  But I knew, and it went without saying that I would tell Pep and Lark, who immediately wanted to check out what the vampire might have left behind before someone else discovered it.

  “I don’t think anyone’s going to find anything in that closet any time soon,” Lark said, “but just in case, we need to search it as soon as we can.”
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  “You don’t think they’ll notice stuff just sitting on the top shelf?” Pep asked.

  “How often does the cleaning closet get cleaned?” was Lark’s retort.

  “True,” Pep agreed.

  In the end we decided to wait until just the right moment. Mirrorz’s small room was still off limits, but time had passed, and the Root of All Evil was no longer on the tip of everyone’s tongue.

  “Should we go tonight?” Pep had asked me as we sat down to dinner. She didn’t need to say where she meant.

  I nodded once. Lark noticed the conversation. Pep winked twice, wiggled her nose, and tugged her ear.

  “Is she giving me baseball signals?” Lark asked.

  “Might as well be,” I said with amusement. Then I leaned over and told my other cousin what the plan was. She agreed that it was time.

  “Cookie is staring at us. The monkey has spotted the eagle,” said Pep out the side of her mouth.

  “Stop speaking in tongues,” Lark hissed.

  Pep opened her mouth, put her tongue out and tried to look at it. “I’m not speaking ‘in tongues.’”

  Past Pep I could see Cookie’s eyes narrow. She had a sixth sense for when we were about to do something we shouldn’t, so I had to distract her.

  “Hey Cam, did you tell Cookie you found her stash of wine in the library?” I asked.

  Cam was busy stuffing herbed chicken into his mouth and looked up in confusion. Immediately Cookie’s eyes swung to her grandson.

  “You better have left it alone,” she said through gritted teeth.

  “Don’t start,” my mother warned Cookie.

  Meg groaned.

  “More chicken?” Audrey asked us all.

  “No thanks,” I said. “I’m going to shower and get to bed. It’s been a long day.”

  “What do you mean wine in the library?” Cam tried to ask me.

  “Don’t play dumb. Just tell her what you did,” I told him.

  “We’re going up too,” said Lark, standing up.

  “But what about dessert?” Pep asked.

  Lark hustled her sister out. “We’re skipping it tonight. Good to do every once in a while,” she said.

  Pep looked disgruntled.

  “Hang on,” Cam tried to say, but Cookie interrupted him, unhappy about her missing wine.

  We left them to it.

  Once we were out in the foyer Lark said, “How did you know she kept wine in the library?”

  “Lucky guess. She keeps wine everywhere,” I said.

  “Good point,” said Pep, hurrying to keep up with us. “I still don’t know why we had to miss the chocolate lava cake, though. We could have done this after dessert.”

  “Come on. We don’t have a lot of time,” I said.

  My mom was tired after all the work we’d done that day, and so was everyone else. No one would question our going to bed early, since it was the rest of the family’s plan as well.

  Which meant that we had the mansion to ourselves while they ate dessert and then went straight to bed.

  The only trouble was that nothing ever stayed quiet in our family for long, so it was best to get our search done as quickly as we could.

  “Which cleaning closet are we talking about?” Lark asked.

  “I think it’s the supply room, actually,” I said.

  We made our way toward the kitchen and then took a left. A series of rooms followed, most of which were offices and storerooms.

  When the supernaturals had taken over Down Below, some rearranging had been done up above. Before that we had used the basement for storage, but now it was mostly occupied by ghosts, skeletons, vampires, and the occasional le-haunt, so we’d had to find other places to store things.

  Still, there was a bit of the basement that wasn’t being used by the supernaturals, a space below a new addition added in the 1970s, which had been set aside entirely for supplies and storage.

  The entrance to that part of the basement was past the kitchen, the offices, and the storerooms, and then through the potting room, which was where flowers from the expansive gardens that had once graced the mansion were brought in and turned into flower arrangements.

  Dusk had fallen by the time we got there, but I didn’t dare turn on the light. The door wasn’t locked and we slipped through and started down the stairs.

  Once the door closed behind us, Pep performed a simple light enchantment. Now it looked like each of us had a halo of fairy lights around our heads.

  The basement was divided into three rooms, two smaller ones off a larger main one. It wasn’t all that clean, but it was at least tended well enough so that there were no spiders or mice lurking in the corners.

  “Which room was his storage room?” Pep asked.

  “I think it was the one to the right,” I said, pointing.

  My cousins followed, as did our fairy lights. We found ourselves in a small room filled with shelves made of two-by-fours and holding all kinds of tools.

  We started examining the shelves one by one. Unlike the main room, this storage area was extremely clean. Everything was properly labeled in a neat hand.

  “I always thought the fact that he took such good care of everything meant that he cared about the mansion. I suppose he only cared about keeping it nice because he thought it would be his one day,” Lark mused. She had taken a box of the tools down from one of the shelves and was going through it.

  Pep was removing items from the shelves, seeing what was behind them, then replacing them.

  As for me, I was using each bottom shelf as a stepping ladder to a higher one, but I found nothing of interest on the first three sets I tried.

  At the fourth and last shelf, I pulled down a stack of dusters and something slipped free.

  “A note!” I cried triumphantly. As the paper drifted to the floor, I could see that it was still crisp and white, unmarked by age.

  “What does it say?” Lark asked as I picked it up.

  The note was short and sent chills down my spine as I read it out loud to my cousins:

  “Very good, Jane. You always were such a little detective. I left no trace.”

  M

  Chapter Two

  The next day, the Magenta Room of Exquisite Furniture, otherwise known as the grand dining room, was already filled with activity when I walked in after a long day of work outdoors. From a distance I could see the grim expressions on Lark and Pep’s faces. At the far end of the cavernous space I could also see something fluffy and white strolling at the level of the huge center table. My white cat, Rose, looked just as concerned as they did.

  There were no ghosts, vampires, le-haunts, or skeletons lurking in the corners, but after examining the room thoroughly I knew that Pep, Lark, and Rose were genuinely worried, and I couldn’t wait to find out what new development had alarmed them on top of the general difficulties we were already facing.

  Halloween was just around the corner, and the busy season of the haunted house was in full swing. But nothing had been the same since Mirrorz left.

  On the good side of the ledger, the group of supernaturals who called themselves the Root of All Evil had gone to take root elsewhere. My mother hoped they were never to be seen or heard from at Haunted Bluff again.

  On the bad side of the ledger, I hadn’t realized it until after Mirrorz was gone, but he really had been instrumental in keeping the place running smoothly. Okay, he had been about to run it into the ground, but he had been stopped.

  Just in the nick of time.

  Meanwhile, no one had slipped into his role in keeping the place humming. It was a problem, and I had no idea how we were going to solve it.

  As I walked into the dining hall I took in the view out the huge, ornate window across the room. A gentle slope dotted with scraggly old trees fell away from the house. Off to the left was just a peek of the never-ending ocean, a gray mass that seemed to merge with the gray sky above it.

  Everything here at the mansion was old, large, and magical,
even the view. The beams were sturdy, the walls were sturdy, our family was . . . sturdy-ish.

  At least I hoped so. Coming from a new generation of witches, I knew we’d have to be strong to make it successfully into the future. We had never seen anything like The Root of All Evil before.

  It was a comfort that even in times like these, the mansion itself rarely changed. This grand room held a mishmash of old furniture: old oak, old pine, old cherry. Old silver, too, but no one had polished the silver since Mirrorz left, partly out of laziness, partly out of sadness.

  Our dining room table was so old and so fine that nothing like it could even be produced anymore. It had been fashioned from the wood of one huge tree, and there were no trees like that left except for a few that were protected from being cut down.

  I could see my brother sneaking into the woods and cutting one of them just to be contrary, but truth be told he probably wouldn’t do that to a tree.

  The table could fit at least a hundred people. It usually had fewer than twenty sitting around it, in chairs like something out of a medieval castle.

  My mother insisted on eating in this room, I suspected because she didn’t want us to forget where we came from. We were part of a dynasty that had originated in a time gone by. The rules of our existence were old, the house was old, and the traditions were old. Being a modern witch wasn’t easy, my mother loved to say. If we grounded ourselves in the past, the past would help us thrive.

  I was trying to take in everything I was seeing, while struggling to catch my breath at the same time.

  I had been alerted to the fact that something was wrong by Cookie, who had come dancing gleefully up to the attic, two things I didn’t think she could do: climb that many stairs to reach the attic, or dance. What she’d come to say was that soon she would have all the wine she wanted. And even some champagne.

  “I didn’t think you celebrated anything,” I said. “You’d celebrate one of our marriages, but that would just be because you’d be getting rid of us.”