Witch at Heart: A Jinx Hamilton Witch Mystery Book 1 (The Jinx Hamilton Mysteries) by Juliette Harper Read Free Book Online Page B

questions, Tori came hurrying up. “Jinx,” she said urgently, “you have to come over here and meet someone.”
    Leave it to Tori to work the undead room.
    I followed her over to a lonely grave in the far corner of the cemetery. She pointed at the flat granite stone. The words etched in the stone were, “Jane Doe, Died in Briar Hollow, 1995. Known Only to God.”
    When I looked at Tori questioningly, she gave me the same look she flashed at me the day she showed up with Winston and Xavier when they were kittens. “Jinksy, meet Janie,” she said, stepping aside to reveal a gossamer thin wisp of an entity with enormous sad eyes. “Janie, meet Jinksy.”
    Dear God. First it was homeless skunks and now Tori was moving up to forlorn ghosts.
    “Hi, Janie,” I said. “It’s nice to meet you.”
    “Jane isn’t my name,” the ghost said softly, her voice little more than a shy whisper.
    It was easy to see why Tori, Saver of the Strays, latched onto this one. If I had to guess, Jane was no more than 18 years old when she died. Her long hair hung down around her shoulders, and judging from the tones of her now gray and white color palette, I was guessing she’d been a brunette.
    “What would you like us to call you?” I asked.
    The girl’s voice broke when she answered. “I don’t know my name,” she said, the words coming out in kind of a low moan. “I don’t know anything about myself except someone killed me. Then I woke up here and I can never leave.”
    From beside me, Colonel Longworth’s sonorous voice said gently, “Fiona called Jane the hardest of her hard cases.”
    “She doesn’t remember how she died?” I asked.
    “Worse,” the Colonel said, “she cannot name the shiftless brigand who murdered her.”

8
    Y ep . That’s right. The Universe must have thought Jinx and the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day she was having needed a little sprinkle of twenty-year-old murder for flavor.
    Colonel Longworth explained that, in Aunt Fiona’s opinion, the reason Jane could not move beyond this earth might be because she didn’t know her name and her killer had never been brought to justice.
    “Did Aunt Fiona try to solve the murder?” I asked. The Colonel and I had once again stepped away, leaving Tori to talk to Jane since our conversation was obviously upsetting the fragile spirit.
    “Yes,” he said, “but never with any degree of success.”
    “What do you know about how she died?”
    “Only that she was felled by a single blow to the head on a local trail in the year nineteen hundred and ninety-five,” he said.
    I looked around at the ghosts wandering the cemetery. “Why do all of the rest of you seem so . . . well-adjusted?” I asked.
    “We know who we are,” Beau answered, “or rather we know who we were. We can speak with one another of our families and of the lives we lived. We have learned things as each new spirit has joined our number. Jane is a blank slate. She remembers nothing of her life and she has no idea who she might have been.”
    So, there is a hell. And we were looking at it. Damn.
    Tori walked up just as the Colonel finished speaking. I saw what she said next coming a mile off.
    “Jinx, we have to fix this. We can’t leave her here like this.”
    Glancing at my watch, I said, “Tori, I’ve had this whole ‘powers’ thing exactly 18 hours. How do you think I . . . we . . . are going to fix this exactly?”
    “I don’t know,” she said stubbornly, “but we have to do something.”
    Beau was beaming at Tori again. I swear I think he was getting sweet on her. “I like your spirit, young lady,” he declared. “You are a true daughter of the South.”
    Since it was getting on toward one in the morning, I suggested that me and Miss Scarlett best get back to the plantation. Beau walked us to the gate.
    “If I come here during the day, can I see you all?” I asked him.
    “Not all of us,” he said. “It would seem we grow more . . . experienced the