Buried Secrets. Evelyn Vaughn

footage, fingerprints or hair. Only when that proved a dead end did he turn, reluctantly, to the death itself.

      He’d found her drowned in their bathtub. The front door had been locked and her clothes were where she had always hung them. Even in shock, he’d noticed those things; he’d been trained to notice. He’d dragged her from the water, so strangely beautiful even in death, and he’d called 9-1-1, her long black hair soaking him, and he’d cried, wanting her back, barely believing—but some damned cold part of him had still noticed the other details. Nothing pointed to suicide or murder. An autopsy revealed that she’d had some kind of mild heart attack and passed out. If she hadn’t been in the bath… If he’d just been home… It was an accident.

      Or was it?

      Her corpse’s disappearance upped Zack’s suspicions. He began to ask the M.E. how a bright, healthy woman of twenty-three could have even a mild heart attack, and whether it could have been drug induced, and whether drugs existed that were new enough to not show up in the tests. Then, needing more answers, he went after her new friends. The Life Force, they’d ironically called themselves. He hadn’t known she was even in a club until some of its members, other college students, showed up at her funeral. And if the death hadn’t been an accident…

      Murdered women generally die at the hands of family or friends, not strangers. Zack had known Gabriella’s family his whole life. But these new kids—they were into reincarnation and near-death experiences, stuff he’d laughed at while Gabriella was alive. Was that why she hadn’t told him? With her dead, he found himself tracking her friends down and asking so many questions that they began to whine about police harassment.

      His captain told him to let it go, and Zack quit to become a private investigator. There was something suspicious about the Life Force, even if most of its members were goofs.

      Something dark. Something beyond the normal world, even.

      And at the point that Zack finally tracked down the club’s president, that something tried to kill him. Either that, or in one weekend he developed the worst luck in human history. Three car accidents. A runaway bus. An electrical fire. Dizzy spells. A nurse in the E.R. came within a needle-prick of giving him penicillin, despite his chart labeling him as deathly allergic. His Nona began to babble about the evil eye. After his pistol went off by itself, grazing him and barely missing a three-year-old nephew, Zack didn’t dare disbelieve.

      Out of possibilities, he’d turned to impossibilities—and to Cecil Taylor, the young man he’d met at the cemetery. Instinct said to trust Mr. If Anybody Respects the Dead, It Is I, and Zack’s instinct proved right. Taylor knew some honest-to-God, twentieth-century, Windy City magic users who managed to break the curse that was haunting him.

      Barely.

      When Zack went back to find the sonovabitch who’d run the Life Force Club—certain that nobody would freakin’ curse him unless they were guilty of something—the boy had vanished.

      Unlike Gabriella, he’d done it alive.

      He’d been searching ever since, Cecil’s help becoming a partnership. That’s when he’d learned that once you started looking, really opening your eyes, monsters and dark magic lurked everywhere. Lorenzo Investigations began to specialize.

      Bringing him here. With a civilian woman.

      Pulling up in front of the Bruja’s adobe hut, braking to avoid some scrawny chickens, Zack made a grudging stab at shielding Jo. “Wait in the car while I see if she’s home.”

      “Hah,” said Jo, climbing out unaided.

      So much for that plan.

      Jo doubted she’d ever met Doña Maria Ruiz, but in her job as small-town sheriff she’d visited several homes like this one—dry, sparse and proudly neat for a house made of baked clay. The curtains in the open window were white and starched.

      So this was how Brujas lived.

      Zack knocked on the wooden door, and Jo rubbed her hands nervously down her jeans. These old Latin ladies could be pretty disapproving of a woman in pants, even in this day and age. It was daunting even when they weren’t witches.

      The door cracked, revealing only a narrow shaft of the shadowy interior. One rheumy eye regarded them from a visible strip of dark, craggy face—classic witch. A potpourri of candles and herbs and something strange wafted out, something that sent shivers of warning through her. “Quién es?”

      “Uh, hi,” said Zack. “Do you speak English?”

      The one rheumy eye seemed unimpressed.

      So he didn’t need help, huh? Jo stepped closer. “Buenos dias, Señora. Estoy…él está…nosotros…” I am, he is, we are—freshman conjugations! She hoped her pidgin Spanish was up to the occasion. “Buscamos a la Bruja. Por favor.”

      We seek the witch, please.

      “La Bruja?” That one eye looked plenty suspicious.

      Zack slanted a dry gaze down at Jo, as if she’d peed in his yard. “Si,” he mimicked awkwardly. “Bruja.”

      The woman asked, “Por qué?”

      “She wants to know why,” translated Jo quietly. It’d been hard enough asking about magic at the clinic. Now she had to do it in Spanish?

      Before she could try, Zack said, “Look, ma’am, we think there’s something evil in Almanuevo. We think it’s desecrating the dead. If it is, I’m gonna stop it. Can you help?”

      “You can pay?” challenged Doña Maria cagily. So she understood English after all.

      “Twenty dollars,” offered the P.I.

      The Bruja eyed the Ferrari. “Fifty.”

      Well, he was the one who insisted on the expensive toys.

      “With all due respect,” Zack said dryly, “thirty.”

      After a moment’s pause, the old woman nodded—and opened the door wider. “Come in,” she granted, so solemnly that Jo wondered if they could have entered without permission. Trying to think magically was starting to mess with her head, wasn’t it?

      The mix of abnormal scents was almost overwhelming.

      “Thank you, ma’am,” said Zack, extending one long arm to hold the door open for Jo to go first. For a pushy guy, he sure was polite about doors.

      Then Jo noticed the older woman nodding satisfaction to herself at the gesture. Ah.

      Suck up, she mouthed at the P.I., who grinned.

      Instead of the apple-peddling wicked witch from Snow White, the Bruja now looked more like Aunt Bea from the Andy Griffith Show…if Aunt Bea were Mexican. She wore a long, embroidered white dress, a black lace shawl piously covering her neatly braided white hair.

      “Mi santuario,” she directed, taking them through her portrait-lined kitchen to what looked like a lean-to or pantry—or it did until they entered. Then Jo, again going first, saw that it was some kind of magic room, complete with a wooden table covered with a black cloth, shelves of strange-looking supplies and a shrine to what she assumed was the Virgin Mary.

      Other statues of saints, as well as little cards with religious pictures, were set neatly about the room alongside flowers and candles and several rosaries. Though no expert on Brujeria, Jo knew it was a Mexican religio-magical system that worshipped Mary as Guadalupe. Just this afternoon, Ashley had suggested that Guadalupe stood for a more ancient Aztec goddess, providing a safe way for native women to continue their worship after their long-ago conquest by the Spaniards.

      Ashley had also suggested not casually mentioning that theory to the Brujas, many of whom considered themselves devout Catholics, not goddess worshippers.

      Jo noted the stranger items in the room—old jars holding mysterious mixtures, sewing needles and what looked to be three dead and partly mummified hummingbirds. A human