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Ghost
of a Chance
Hardback - Coming January 1
Publisher: Covenant Communications Inc
Order from
Seagull Book and Tape.
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Advance
praise for Ghost of a Chance
Bravo!
Kerry Blair has done it again! Ghost of a Chance is yet another masterfully woven mystery that had
me laughing out loud, gasping at the unexpected plot twists, and sighing
blissfully at the romance. Bring on
the next book in the Nightshade series! I’m
hooked!
~ Erin Klingler, author of Love Beyond Tomorrow
Blair’s sense of humor keeps
readers laughing, the suspense creates more than a few chills, and the
interwoven mysteries and puzzles set this book apart as truly unique.
~
Jennie Hansen, book reviewer for
Meridian
magazine and best-selling author
Kerry
Blair is at the top of her form with Ghost
of a Chance. You will savor every page. Her rapier wit and cunning plotting
make this one fantastic read!
~ Cheri
Crane, best-selling YA author
I have
a ton of dishes stacked in the sink, several loads of dirty clothes in the
laundry room, and six kids who want to know if we're eating cereal for dinner again
tonight. I have not been able to put your book down. It was
fabulous! I laughed right out loud, and bit my nails down to the nubs.
In other words, I love it!
~ Sonia
O’Brien, author of Perfect Shot
Chapter 1
“I ain’t afraid
of no ghost,” I told my stakeout partner, hoping it was true.
Outside the windows
of our hearse, the crumbling remains of the San Rafael Mission seemed to glow
under the ochre spell of a late-October moon. Built by Catholic friars in the
days when
Arizona
was claimed by
Mexico
—and
Mexico
by
Spain
—it had once been an architectural marvel, towering over the vast and barren
Sonoran
Desert
. But in the last two centuries,
Phoenix
and its suburbs had grown up around it. Now
San Rafael
crouched in a barrio, its adobe walls profaned by graffiti and overrun with
thorny bougainvillea. Even so, the mission looked beautiful. It looked ethereal.
It looked . . . haunted.
I quit looking.
“You ain’t
afraid of ghosts, either,” I assured my partner with a pat on her velvety
head. If Clueless noticed that my hand shook a little, she was too polite to
mention it. I waited for a witty comeback, but although the Weimaraner is about
my age in dog years (twenty-three) she must have missed Ghostbusters
growing up. Or maybe she wasn’t into lighthearted banter. She’d wanted to go
home about the time we ran out of snacks.
“Just a little longer,” I
promised as I picked up the crossword puzzle I’d been working.
My partner sighed and lowered
her head to lick crumbs of powdered sugar from my lap.
Maybe I should introduce
myself. I’m Samantha Shade, interim head of Nightshade Investigation and a
rookie detective who is hopelessly addicted to crossword puzzles and
powdered-sugar donuts. The first is pretty benign as vices go, but the second is
bad. So bad, in fact, that now it’s giving me nightmares.
Just the other day (I work
nights, sleep days), I dreamed I was Batgirl: black spandex unitard, yellow
knee-high boots—the works. I’d draw you a more vivid mental picture but,
believe me, you don’t want to
imagine me in spandex astride a Bat Cycle. In the dream I tore back to my
Fat
Cave
in humiliation. I’d let the bad guys have
Gotham
City
before I’d let the citizens get a gander at my love handles.
I’ve always dreamed of being
a superhero. I think that’s what makes me so self-conscious about my figure. I
mean, can you name one member of the Justice League with thunder thighs? No,
Superman doesn’t count. Name a female member
who doesn’t look like Angelina Jolie. Think about it. I’ll wait.
My point exactly.
Remembering the nightmare, I
frowned down at my supposedly slimming black pants and sucked in my tummy.
Nothing moved.
Clueless lapped at the crumbs
of sugar on the seat. (Powdered-sugar donuts are not only fattening, they’re
messy.) “Enjoy it while you can,” I told her. “It’s carrot sticks for us
from here on out. As of this second, I am on a diet.” Clueless snorted. Or
maybe she sneezed. Whatever she did, it meant the same thing. I’d threatened
to diet before, but this time I’d do it. I’d lose those love handles if it
meant eating rabbit food for the rest of my life.
I turned on the seat and leaned
against the door to make myself more comfortable while I divided my time between
working the puzzle, watching the old mission for signs of a ghost, and
daydreaming of a more wraithlike me. In the meantime, Clueless explored the
floorboards for any remaining atoms of powdered sugar.
I was staring at the mission
and contemplating what a great setting it would be for a horror flick when
somebody tapped on the window behind my shoulder. If I’d been a snake I’d
have shed my skin. As it was, I set a new world record for long jumping across
the bench seat of a hearse. Clueless—alert now that she’d been alerted—let
out a shrill bark from the safety of my lap.
“Sorry, Sam,” a deep,
familiar voice said through the window. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“You didn’t scare me!” I
croaked. (It was a froglike croak, not an expired-on-the-spot kind of croak,
though my heart had considered it.) I scooted out from under the dog and back over
to the driver’s side. Then I rolled down the window with one hand and pushed
my partner back with the other. I had to keep pushing her because there’s
something about Thomas Casey—the handsome young police detective who’d
almost given me a coronary—that attracts female attention, apparently even
that of the canine variety.
“You shouldn’t be out here
alone,” he said. Thom tends to be short on small talk and long on advice.
“I’m not alone,” I said.
“I brought a partner.”
“Your partner’s a dog.”
I stroked the Weimaraner’s
velvety muzzle. “Don’t you like dogs?”
“I like dogs fine.”
I was glad to hear it. I was
glad to hear anything I didn’t already know about Thom, what with him being
the new love of my life and all. “Do you have a dog?”
“No,” he said. “I have a
cat.”
“What’s its name?”
“Mr. Mistoffelees.”
“A tomcat!” I said, hoping
he would admire my quick wit.
“She’s female.”
“But I thought you said mister.”
“The name is from T. S.
Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical
Cats.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’ve
been planning to read it.” I said it as if it were on my nightstand atop
volumes of H. G. Wells, e. e. cummings, and other notable men of letters Thom
admires. In reality, I don’t have a nightstand beside my bed, let alone any of
those authors lying around. I fudged a little because Thom is a police detective
by profession, but he’s a literature professor at heart. It wouldn’t
surprise me to learn that he has stockpiled more books than the
Mesa
bishops’ storehouse has grain.
I was about to
change the subject from T. S. Eliot to anything
else when a to-die-for dimple winked into Thom’s cheek—something that
happens when he frowns—and he changed the subject himself. “There was
another murder.”
I told you he was short on
small talk.
“Where?”
“The body was found a few
blocks from here. It’s on the way to the morgue now. The victim was probably
shot last night, but the corpse was dumped within the last couple of hours.”
He pulled a PDA from a jacket pocket. “You’ve been in the neighborhood. Can
I ask you a few questions?”
I nodded. A
few. A dozen. A hundred. A thousand. “Come in and sit down,” I offered.
Thom’s gorgeous gray eyes
slid along the side of my uncle’s hearse with something less than
appreciation.
Some
people. The hearse is a classic—a 1963
Superior
Caddy in mint condition. It’s easy to see why it’s one of the earthly joys
of my uncle Eddie’s life. It’s teal green with Nightshade
Investigation in bold, black letters on the sides. Within the large letters
is a smaller, greenish script that, like the print on our business cards, glows
in the dark. (Very appropriate for a place that’s open from
8 P.M.
to
5 A.M.
, don’t you think?) It might not be the ideal vehicle for an ordinary
stakeout, but what’s ordinary about trying to catch a ghost?
“Where’s your car?” Thom
asked.
I sighed. I love my little
black V-dub almost as much as Eddie loves his hearse. “You know how I told you
the other day that she was going thwip-ping, thwip-ping?” I asked Thom. When he nodded tentatively,
I said, “Well, then she started going thwup-pong,
thwup-pong. And then she finally went thwip-thwup-pong-thwup-ZOING.”
“Uh-huh,” Thom said. He had
no idea what I’d said, but he didn’t ask for more information. He circled
the hearse’s long, sleek hood as he headed for the passenger side. As he
passed in front he stopped for a second to run his hand over the silver raven
hood ornament. (This might be an apt time to slip in that Edward Shade—my
uncle, the stake patriarch, and the founder and owner of Nightshade
Investigation—is a tad . . . um . . . eccentric.)
“You have to get in back,”
I told Clueless as I unlatched the sliding panel that separated the driver’s
seat from the formerly casket-bearing part of the vehicle. I slid open the small
door and wrinkled my nose at a faint odor that wafted into the front. Clueless
whined, but I pushed her into the carpeted, wood-lined compartment anyway.
“You’ll be fine,” I assured the dog while I motioned for Thom to open the
door.
“It smells like a hearse,”
he observed when he had opened it.
“It’s your imagination,”
I said. “There hasn’t been a corpse in this thing for thirty years.”
Thom looked
dubious, but he got in anyway and closed the door behind him. Then he cracked
the window.
“
Delano
took it in to be detailed,” I explained. “We want it to be perfect when
Uncle Eddie gets back from
Europe
this weekend. The car-wash people must have used something stinky to clean the
paneling.”
Clueless whined
again and stuck her head out between me and Thom.
“I’m with you,” Thom told
her.
“It’s not that bad,” I
insisted, but I left my window down. “Tell me about the murder. Was it the
same killer?”
“Same M.O.”
Thom didn’t have to
elaborate. I already carried a grisly picture in my mind. I’d heard about it
often enough. There wasn’t a news affiliate in the city—or in the country,
for that matter—that wasn’t covering the story of the “Marigold
Murderer.” In the last nine days there had been three murders. All the victims
were young Latin American males. All were found within blocks of one another.
All had been executed by a single gunshot to the forehead, but that wasn’t the
ghoulish part. After they were killed, each man’s tongue had been removed.
Then the murderer carefully cleaned the blood from the victim’s face and
inserted the slim stem of a marigold between the lips. Finally, in the middle of
the night, the creep left the corpses where they couldn’t be missed, lying
faceup with arms folded serenely over their chests.
Thinking about it,
I struggled to keep down the donuts I’d so recently eaten. “That’s
awful.”
Thom stared out the
window toward the mission.
I studied his
handsome profile and felt a rush of sympathy for a guy who’d clearly rather
read Death of a Salesman than investigate one for the Phoenix PD. Still,
I knew it was his sensitivity and intelligence that made Thom so good at his
job. Uncle Eddie has a description of the quintessential detective hanging on
the wall at Nightshade. It says: “Down these mean streets a man must go who is
not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.” (It’s from Raymond
Chandler’s The Simple Art of Murder—if
you haven’t read this classic 1939 detective novel, trust me, you should.)
That is so Thom. He’d left academia
to please his terminally ill father, a captain with the LAPD. He’d been
promoted to detective recently and already he was assigned to homicide on the
trail of a serial killer. Then again, every
detective in
Phoenix
and the surrounding areas was probably working that case.
“I’m sorry,”
I said softly, knowing as I did that the words wouldn’t make any difference.
To my surprise, he gave me a
grateful smile. “Thanks, Sam.”
Have you ever been so in love
with somebody that hearing your name fall from their lips gave you goose bumps?
That was me.
And Thom is so observant that
he noticed the gooseflesh even though he was oblivious to the cause. He thought
I was creeped out over the serial killer. “I’m sorry too,” he said. “But
I do need to ask you those questions.” He pulled the stylus from his PDA.
“How long have you been parked here?”
“Uh . . . ” There’s no
clock on the dashboard of my uncle’s hearse. There isn’t even a radio.
What’s more, the battery in my watch is as dead as my dearly departed
Volkswagen. “Let’s see,” I said. “I’ve worked one crossword puzzle,
that takes me about forty-five minutes, but I’ve also walked Clueless,
reviewed my Sunday School lesson, and—”
“What time did
you leave Nightshade?” he interrupted while I was still trying to do the math.
“A little after
midnight
.”
“It’s almost three now.”
“No wonder Clueless wants to
go home!” I exclaimed. At the sound of her name, the Weimaraner whined. “She
hates to miss Twilight Zone.”
“I’ve been of the
impression that’s where you live.”
Okay, so Thom didn’t say
that, but I know he thought it. And I couldn’t blame him. The first night we
met I’d had him arrested. The next time we were together I lost a priceless
Egyptian mummy (yes, a real one) and he got the back of his head bashed in. The
very next night I demolished his patrol car. In the days to follow I almost cost
him his badge, got him sprayed by a skunk, and was the reason he was lured into
a potential death trap at an old planetarium. (Yes, it had
occurred to me that our relationship might be off to a rocky start, but I still
had hope. Who was it who wrote that the path to true love never does run smooth?
Thom would know.)
Thom said, “So
you’ve been here at least a couple of hours?”
“Yes.”
“Any unusual activity?”
I looked at
San Rafael
and sighed in resignation. Or maybe it was relief. “No,” I said. “No
ghost.”
“No kidding.” Thom tapped
his PDA. “I’m asking about the unnatural, Sam, not the supernatural.”
“You don’t believe in
ghosts?”
“I believe in the Holy
Ghost,” he said. “And in resurrected beings. And I believe in the occasional
pseudo-physical manifestation of a spirit currently abiding in another sphere
appearing with God’s approbation.”
“Is that a yes or no?”
He smiled. “To quote H. G.
Wells, ‘It will take a very tangible ghost to frighten me.’” (What did I
tell you about H. G. Wells? Do I know Detective Casey, or what?)
Well, that made it
unanimous. None of us in the hearse were afraid of ghosts. But Father Pedro
Rodriguez, under whose jurisdiction the abandoned property fell, was
afraid of a ghost. Of course, he didn’t believe in ghosts, either; what he
feared was the gossip and alarm that haunted his parish. He’d already given in
to a group of his parishioners—superstitious people newly arrived from small
Mexican villages—and performed an exorcism. The supposedly undead monk who was
said to walk the halls of
San Rafael
hadn’t shown up for the rite. But he (or someone or something) had been
active since, as evidenced by the strange lights and low moans that continued to
plague the mission.
I’d toured the condemned
building with Father Rodriguez—in the daylight and wearing boots and a hard
hat because of the building’s disrepair. There were ample signs of rats, feral
cats, and other four-legged trespassers—and some signs of partiers, mostly of
a previous generation—but no indication of pranksters or live-in vagrants as
I’d suspected.
For a week now my coworkers and
I had taken turns staking out the mission for several hours every night. Knute
and
Delano
and I had changed times, vehicles, and places we’d parked. Either the ghost
was more observant of us than we were of him, or our timing was lousy. Nothing
unusual happened on any of our shifts, but when we returned to the neighborhood
the next night, we’d almost invariably hear that we’d missed a
“haunting” by an hour, sometimes less. The phantom reportedly showed up one
or two nights a week. We showed up five or six, but never at the same time.
“Anyway,” Thom said,
breaking into my thoughts, “I’m looking for somebody a whole lot less
ethereal—and far more dangerous—than your ghostly friar.”
I nodded somberly. I wouldn’t
change places with Thom for all the world and a new pair of skates besides. Give
me a phantasmal phantom over a maniacal murderer any day.
Clueless read my
mind and whined her agreement. Or maybe she still had her mind on the odor
and/or the lack of donuts.
“Did any vehicles pass by
while you were parked here?” Thom asked.
“Yes.” Before he could ask
for a description I added, “But I didn’t look at them, Thom. I’m looking
for a ghost. Ghosts don’t drive lowriders.”
Anybody else would have said,
“What do they drive?” but not
Thom. He merely frowned and extended an elbow to block Clueless’s full frontal
assault on the passenger seat. He was unsuccessful. I wondered what was wrong
with that screwy dog. I was still wondering it when Thom resumed his
interrogation around the beast. “Did you see any pedestrians?”
“Only the usual gang,” I
said, meaning it literally. “The ones with the orange bandanas. Six of
them.”
When Thom looked up, the
worry-born dimple was back in his cheek. “You shouldn’t be in this
neighborhood alone, Sam. I can’t believe Knute and
Delano
let you— ”
“Until Uncle Eddie gets back,
I’m the boss at Nightshade,” I
interrupted. My cheeks grew hot. “This is my job,
Thom!” I paused to count to ten and got as far as four before I lost my
temper. (For me that’s pretty good.) “And I’m good
at it. You’ve said so yourself.”
I pushed Clueless
aside so I could better glare at Detective Casey. Rather, I tried
to push her aside, but the hound wouldn’t move. Instead, she held her ground,
raised her muzzle toward the moon-filled windshield, and let out an ear-piercing
howl.
As bad as that was, what
followed was worse. Two hundred yards away in the spooky, supposedly deserted
mission, someone—or something—answered with a bloodcurdling cry of terror.
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