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

nothing but cause the cats to stare at me like I’d lost what little intelligence they ever thought I had in the first place. (Which, for you non-cat people, is precious little on a good day.)
    “Aw, come on, lay off Aunt Fiona,” Tori said, uncorking a fresh bottle of red wine. “She obviously trusts you to figure this all out, including what happened to Janie. Why don’t we go up to the hiking trail in the morning and see if we can find anything?”
    Like I didn’t see that one coming.
    “Tori, Jane was killed 20 years ago,” I said, pointing out what should have been obvious to my overly enthusiastic BFF. “The cops have been all over that trail hundreds of times. Anything they were going to find, they found years ago. What do you think we’re going to see that they didn’t?”
    “I don’t know,” Tori said, handing me a full wine glass. “But don’t we kind of owe it to Jane to see where she was found? It just seems kind of . . . respectful given her current situation. And besides, you don’t really know everything you can do yet. Maybe you will see something Fiona didn’t. Not all witches are alike, right?”
    Truthfully, I had no idea if that was true or not, but the notion did make sense.
    We finished the evening playing a cutthroat game of Settlers of Catan, and turned in around midnight. The next morning, the smell of frying bacon awakened me. I walked into the kitchen to discover that Tori was fixing her to-die-for western omelettes.
    “Hey,” I said, “where’d all this come from?”
    “Irma and George are open on Sunday mornings,” she said. “I woke up early and slipped down to the corner. Coffee?”
    “Lord, yes,” I said, taking the cup she held out. “And thanks. This is great. It’s a bribe to get me to go up to the trail, isn’t it?”
    Uh, yeah. I saw right through the whole BFF breakfast thing the minute I smelled the bacon.
    Tori laughed. “Okay, fine. Busted. Did it work?”
    I sighed. “Yeah, okay, fine. We’ll take a field trip.”
    Since Tori didn’t have to leave until late afternoon, we took our time and enjoyed our food. Props to my girl. Her skills with eggs and shredded cheese are awesome. By the time we’d both dressed and I’d cleaned up the kitchen, which was only fair, it was about 11 o’clock when we set out for Weber’s Gap.
    As hiking trails go, this one was definitely a bunny slope. Tori and I strolled leisurely up the gentle grade enjoying the bright sunshine and the crisp, clean air. We weren’t exactly sure where Jane’s body was found, but when we rounded a bend in the trail and came on a simple, rough-hewn stone with the inscription, “Here an unknown soul was lost,” we knew we’d reached the spot.
    “Wow,” Tori said, “maybe nobody knows Janie’s real name, but she’s sure hasn’t been forgotten.”
    I leaned down to get a closer look at the marker, and that’s when I tripped on an exposed root and fell forward toward the stone. Putting out my hand to break my fall, everything around me turned into a confused, swirling mass of color. When my vision cleared, I was standing in a vast, empty space and something black and shiny was coming straight toward me. Pain shot through my left temple, and then I heard Tori’s voice calling to me.
    Blinking and reaching for my head, I realized I was sitting on the ground with Tori crouched beside me. “Jinksy,” she asked in a worried voice, “are you okay? What the heck just happened?”
    “Yeah,” I said slowly, still getting my bearings. “I’m okay.”
    “Did you have a dizzy spell or something?” Tori asked. “God, I hope that ham I put in the omelettes wasn’t bad. I wasn’t trying to poison us.”
    “You didn’t poison us,” I assured her. “I think I just had a vision of where Janie was killed, and it wasn’t here.”
    “Get out!” Tori said excitedly. “A vision? What did you see? Where was she killed? Tell me everything!”
    “I’m not sure exactly where it was.