Case of the Curious Crystals by Shanna Swendson

Author:Shanna Swendson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shanna Swendson

Chapter Twelve

I tingled all over. This was it, I knew. The tiara had to be a key to the case. It was related to the sideshow, it had belonged to someone who might have had powers, and it had a big crystal in it. I felt like the pieces were starting to come together.

I called out to Jean. She took her sweet time appearing, and I wondered if I’d caught her at a bad time. What amounted to a ‘bad time’ in the afterlife, anyway? “You do realize that you work for me, and not the other way around,” she remarked as she materialized sitting on the corner of my desk. “I’m not at your beck and call.”

“What about we make a deal—you don’t pop into my apartment unless I invite you, and I won’t demand your presence in the office,” I said. I figured that would be a win-win for me, since I’d get either privacy or a ghost on demand.

“You drive a tough bargain kiddo, but it’s a deal. Now, what did you want in this, your last chance to summon me?”

“Did you ever see this tiara?” I pointed at the picture on the computer screen.

“Isn’t that the one the fortune-teller used in the show?”

“Looks like it to me. I was hoping you’d know. It’s the tiara they give the Spring Blossom Queen.”

“Really? That’s not what I recall from back in my day.”

“It’s been going on that long?”

She struck a pose. “You’re looking at the Spring Blossom Queen of 1919. And I wasn’t the first. We definitely didn’t use that crown in my day, and they were still using the same one I had when I transitioned to a higher plane.”

“So this is relatively new, even though the tiara’s been here since the thirties. Interesting.”

“Why?”

I pointed to the picture again. “That’s a pretty big crystal. And it’s associated with the sideshow. You’ve got to wonder if that’s a part of the same crystal. If so, the thieves are bound to go after it, maybe using the festival as an opportunity. Or maybe they already have. Do they keep the tiara at the school?”

“They kept the old one in the school trophy case. I don’t know about this one.”

“That might explain the attempted break-in last night. That would be the big prize, and maybe they needed all the other crystals to be able to pull that off. The trophy case would be too visible during the school day, and the school is secured at night. They needed to con that girl into getting into the alarm box to create a diversion, and it almost worked.” I didn’t think it would be tactful to point out to Wes that I was the one who’d thought of that. Otherwise, the thieves might have made it through the back door while the cops were mobbing around the girl. Not that I could tell Wes what the thieves had been after or why since I got the information from ghosts.

“They’re playing for keeps if they’re doing something that’ll affect the coronation,” Jean said.

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