Spirits in the Material World by Lisa Shea

Author:Lisa Shea [Shea, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Minerva Webworks LLC
Published: 2019-09-03T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nineteen

I was standing in a murder scene. One where Marc’s mother had been deliberately killed.

Anna was still missing. Had she known something about the murder? Had Anna been silenced – somehow – to prevent her from telling us what had really happened to Josephine?

I looked to Marc in confusion. “Do you think they’re related? Your mother’s death and now Anna has gone missing?”

He was moving along the shelves, taking in each item with that detective’s gaze of his. I had a sense that he was not missing any detail. “We have a saying in the cop world. There’s no such thing as a coincidence. Here we have a murderer who thinks they’ve gotten away scot free. They think they’ve pulled off the perfect crime. And then suddenly, out of the blue, a witness appears. Someone they couldn’t even have imagined. There’s a lot at stake. So the murderer has to do whatever it takes to preserve the secret.”

My brow scrunched in. “But that doesn’t make sense. The only people who knew about Anna were –”

I paled.

His nod was solemn. He didn’t stop his careful, item-by-item perusal of the room. “The list is pretty small, isn’t it. Anna. Roger. Gertie and Prudence. Cassandra and Serene. Bryane.”

Coldness seeped into me. “I can’t believe it. None of them seem capable of hurting Josephine. I mean, Alex didn’t seem to get along well with her mother, but to kill her? To go to these lengths to hide the evidence?”

Marc ran a finger down one of the leather book’s spines, letting his fingertip move along the ridges and embossed letters. “You work on enough murders, you realize that just about anybody could be pushed to that point, in the right combination of circumstances. Maybe it’s just the perfect storm of fury and frustration and lack of options and someone gives someone a push. Someone sweeps out a hand. And then the victim falls down a stair or tumbles into a sharp corner or trips and then nothing can be taken back. There’s no rewind button. No undo option. There’s just the new reality that has to be handled.”

His lips pressed together. “People panic. Their brains can’t cope. They figure something out – anything – and desperately wish that the world will magically reset. That they’ll wake up tomorrow and things will be the way they always were.”

I murmured, “But they don’t.”

My mind went to that day when I was told that my parents had been lost at sea. I had taken it calmly, because I knew it was a mistake. The police were simply wrong. I knew how my world was supposed to go and this wasn’t it. All I had to do was make it through the day, go to sleep, and when I woke up my parents would be back. They’d have a laugh about whatever hiccup had happened and we’d all hug and life would continue on the way it should.

I had waited for that cosmic reset to happen.

I’d waited … and waited … and waited …

Marc was standing there before me.

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