A Medium Specialist (The Haunted Life Cozy Mystery #6)

Chapter 1

Chapter

One

New Orleans suddenly felt way too big. Crowds of people coming and going on the street outside my store, Goldberg’s Antiques.

The smell of sweat and stale beer hung in the narrow street.

Somehow, the city held on to years of that smell, day after day of lives connecting in a minute or more.

The crowd seethed with too many questions, wishes, and dreams. The ghosts that hung around the French Quarter were feeding on the emotional turmoil. My anxiety level was through the roof.

Boone Charles, the detective in charge of the case had asked me to stay at my shop until he arrived bringing more information about the recent disappearance of a woman.

A medium that had just been talking to me as she made her way home to Florida.

Catherine Carter was a Miami fortune teller who had been in town and assisted with a failed ghost crossing over ceremony a few nights ago.

Well, the ceremony wasn’t a failure. The ghost, a charming academic, had decided to stay on for a while.

He has unfinished business in the form of a missing book from his trip to Egypt.

Naturally, he’s decided to stay in my shop.

Of course, he was tied to the new bookcase securely stored in my office.

And I’m getting off point. Anyway, I’d been talking with Catherine on the phone when she’d been taken. She’d thought quickly and had given me a description of the van and the man who’d forced her inside. So Boone wanted to interview me on what I knew.

Okay, maybe you need even more background.

I might have thrown too much at you without context.

I’m Eddie Cayce, and yes, I’m named after a famous clairvoyant in our family tree, the Edward Cayce.

Living with that name was hell during high school.

Kids can be cruel, but I got past it by pretending to be normal and keeping my nose in a book.

Ignoring the ghosts who tried to trick me into talking to someone that no one else could see. Even ghost kids have a mean side.

Bringing you back to today, the ghost had arrived at the shop through a bookcase I’d bought from a fire sale.

He’d been trying to destroy my shop and anyone who got in his way.

After the ceremony, the ghost, Forrest, was able to use his words, and we found out he was a lovely man who’d found an ancient text during a trip to Egypt.

A book that was now missing. I told him I’d help find the book.

And that he could stay in the antique store for as long as he wanted.

That probably had been a mistake.

Catherine had come to town to talk to my neighbor, Alexander Morgan, a knight for Charming Homes, a shell company for a secret society that protects the living from monsters who aren’t quite human.

He’d been part of the releasing ceremony as well.

He was very interested in the book. Catherine needed him to find out what was going on with the deaths of two of her friends who had been killed because of their psychic talents.

A situation that was now occurring in New Orleans. My brother runs a company that owns and manages all of the fortune telling shops in town, along with other side businesses, and he’d lost two of his best seers in the last few weeks.

I had a new guest in my unofficial ghost b-and-b, Catherine had been kidnapped, and we were no closer to finding the killer. I think that catches you up.

Once Catherine’s call had disconnected, I’d immediately called Boone since he was my contact for anything we needed the police to help with.

Or anything that the other cops called weird.

The City of New Orleans knows about the high number of ghost citizens inside it’s boarders, but they try to keep the woo-woo and paranormal occurrences quiet.

Boone’s assignment was a promotion that he hadn’t been happy with.

Boone and I had gone to high school together and he understood the unspoken reality that was New Orleans.

He was really good at doctoring a police report to hide the supernatural side of crimes.

He’d confirmed what happened with the airport team almost immediately. Catherine being pushed into the SUV had been caught on camera as well as observed by a guard in the security office, but by the time he’d got people there, the black Suburban was gone, with Catherine inside.

They’d found her phone on the sidewalk outside the Delta terminal.

This morning, Boone was coming over to talk about what the police had learned so far. And to try to connect the dots between the two murders of fortune tellers that had happened recently in New Orleans alone with the Miami murders.

Bubba, Beauregard, King paced the conference room as we waited.

Bubba is my bodyguard and my boyfriend. He had started freaking out about my safety right after Catherine was kidnapped.

Two deaths and a kidnapping was too much to be considered a coincidence.

Now they were looking at a targeted strike against the collection.

Catherine’s kidnapping just made it official. Someone was targeting people with my kind of talent, and I needed to know why. Especially since I was in danger alongside many of my friends.

I’m a medium, interior designer, and owner of the antique store that I’d bought with my grandmother’s inheritance. Right now, I was one more thing. Scared. To. Death.

“Sit down. You’re making me anxious.” I patted the table, but he shook his head and went to sit in the corner where he could watch everyone as they came inside the room.

We’d have a bit of a crowd since Nic, my brother, had arrived a few minutes ago, with his fiancé, Esmeralda and her friend, Rory Kerr.

They’d both been scheduled to leave for California today.

We’d all spent a sleepless night huddled together at the family compound where Nic lived. Rory kept trying to help with the cooking and was getting on Annamae’s nerves. The shop was a closer place for Boone to meet, so we’d all headed into town first thing this morning.

Mel Anderson, my store manager, was back in charge of running the antique store after being hospitalized due to a hard hit by a flying chair earlier this week.

A ghost incident. She’d been briefed on what had happened yesterday.

As much as I didn’t want her to push herself, it was nice, not having to worry about either the antique store or the interior design part of my company.

Heather King, Bubba’s mom, was handling that part for me.

All I needed to do was to figure out who had Catherine and where they were holding her.

Catherine had to be drugged, because when I’d tried to reach out to her telepathically, I got nothing.

Annamae and Lilac stayed back at the compound today. Lilac was my defacto foster kid and a strong medium in training. Annamae was technically Nic’s house manager, but really, she was so much more. She was family and had been Mom’s best friend.

All we were waiting on for the meeting were Boone and Alexander Morgan, the paranormal police officer slash knight.

Hopefully the two of them could make or follow some mutually agreed upon rules for the meeting.

Both were alpha males and they didn’t care what someone else was going through.

Breaking a law was a punishable crime in both camps.

We had at least one possible arch villain to talk about.

Paige Howard’s boyfriend. Paige was Bubba’s flakey cousin.

Her boyfriend had been watching me yesterday while we finished a tour of a cemetery.

Rory had wanted to play tourist while she was here, but when Catherine went missing, I cancelled the rest of the tour.

Nic asked them to stay around a few days until we could find the killer and make sure they were safe.

Boone and Alexander came into the room. Both men gave each other space and headed for the same chair in the corner where they could watch the door. When Boone realized it, he lifted his hand toward it, then sat next to me. Cops were all the same, always watching for the next threat.

“Okay, we’re all here. Boone, do you know everyone?” I introduced Rory and Esmeralda but the others, he already knew. Even Alexander. Once introductions were done, I pulled out my notebook. “What can you tell us about Catherine Carter’s abduction?”

“Officially, nothing, but since you all are my confidential informants on these types of things, I’ve decided to keep you in the loop.

On this and the two murders.” He clarified, limiting the scope of what he was willing to share.

Then he opened the laptop he’d brought with him.

Then he went over the facts of all three cases.

I wrote down most of what he said, then looked up when he stopped talking.

“That’s it. That’s all we know. The street light cameras show the SUV going back to the French Quarter, then disappearing in the Garden District, near Lafayette Cemetery.

” He leaned back in his chair. “The guy was tall, maybe mixed race from the blurry pictures, and had someone else driving the vehicle. The driver wore a mask and a hoodie with the hood up. Sunglasses. He might be white. No one paid attention when they pulled up because both wore one of those medical masks. People at the airport are always wearing those to keep from getting sick.”

“The vehicle?” Alexander asked, looking bored.

“It had a hotel shuttle sign. One of those magnetic ones you can take off? Hotel New Orleans. Which doesn’t exist, by the way.

” Boone glanced at his laptop. “I have someone looking into where they might have gotten the sign. When did Catherine come into town? This seems like this abduction had been pretty thought out.”

I turned to Alexander. “She came to see you first. So Friday?”

“She didn’t come to see me. She was here for some girls trip, then called to see if I was in town and could talk to her about the Florida killings.”