Free The Curse of Jacob Tracy: A Novel by Holly Messinger

mister.”
    “Thanks for the tip,” Trace said tartly.
    The kid looked embarrassed. “I don’t mean to tell you your business. It’s just I know the guy. He’s the dirtiest ink-slinger in town.”
    “Ain’t you one?” Boz said.
    “Um … not really. I’m just the printer’s devil, but I was the only one in the office this morning, and I figured my boss’d crown me if I didn’t check out this murder. Will you pull that sheet down for me?”
    Boz exchanged a disgusted look with Trace and bent to pull the shroud back from the body. Trace touched the crucifix around his neck, muttered a quick benediction for the dead.
    The photographer glanced around again. “You friends of the Herschels?”
    “We knew him,” Trace said. “Why?”
    “Didn’t figure you were from the neighborhood,” the young man said. “But I meant to say, the Roths are progressive—they’ll let Gentiles attend memorial services, if you wanted to pay your respects.”
    “Thanks,” Trace said. It was about the nicest thing anyone had said to him all day.

 
    CHAPTER EIGHT
    “So what’d you see,” Boz said, as they were finally riding away from the Herschel farm, “made you holler like that? You have some kind of vision?”
    “Guess you could call it that. First I saw these … black things comin out of the body, kinda like when McGillicuddy died—”
    “I don’t remember that.”
    “You probably couldn’t see it. But to me it looked like somethin nasty beatin a retreat. And when I touched one of ’em, I saw—it was like I got pulled into Herschel’s skull, and I saw him beatin down the girls like I was doin it with my own hands. And laughin while he did it.”
    Boz looked shocked, but not incredulous. “You think somethin got into him and made him take after the girls with an ax?”
    “You said it, not me.”
    “Makes as much sense as Miss Anna doin for ’em.”
    “Amen.”
    Boz chewed on that for a while. “You notice the living room, how neat it was?”
    “Aside from the blood, you mean?”
    “If they were fightin in there, whalin on each other with axes and pokers, they shoulda been staggerin about, knockin into things. None of the chairs was knocked over—the rug wasn’t even out of place.”
    It was true. Trace remembered Whistler’s blunt fingers gliding over the checkerboard, the undisturbed bowls of popcorn and cider mugs beside the game. Mrs. Herschel’s needle woven through the fabric of her embroidery, the way a woman would if she had to get up for a moment. It was as if, at some prearranged signal, the family had set aside their peaceful evening activities in order to murder one another.
    Trace shivered and passed a hand over his face.
    “You all right?”
    “I’m tired, ” he complained. “Seein them all dead like that, and then standin around for hours gettin worked over by that detective, tryin to make out whether we’d been involved in it somehow, and then havin that vision on top of it—”
    “Was their spirits in there?”
    “No,” Trace said, which was surprising, now he thought about it. Usually people who had died bad tended to haunt their deathplace, screaming and clawing at him as soon as he got near. “No, they seemed to have gone on, at least.”
    “So how was it you saw what Herschel saw?”
    “I don’t know. I never had that happen before.” This questioning was making him acutely uncomfortable. He’d always had the sense of his curse being a private thing, not only because of the nasty events connected to it, but also because it was so tightly tied to his faith. Boz was not in the habit of respecting the unseen, and so tended to go at the subject like he was killing snakes. “Everything’s been so quiet, the last couple weeks…”
    “You mean you ain’t been seein things?”
    “I always see them,” he said, though that was half the truth. The spirits were always there, but for the past fortnight or so they had been less inclined to come near and demand his