I zeroed my attention back on Jeffrey. “Know too much? What do I know? That you’ve found some documents that will prove that one person—one, mind you—cut and pasted what appeared to be ghostly images into a picture so that she could profess to have ‘captured’ ghosts on camera? Is that what I know that’s too much?”
Silence answered me. “Or is it that because y’all are so angry at Haunted Hollow residents for cashing in on your existence that you’re going to increase your hauntings? Be more aggressive when you appear to tourists looking for a thrill? You going to start stealing candy from babies, is that it?”
I splayed my arms. “Why? Because you’re still angry in death at something that happened in life?”
I glanced at a woman who wept. “Or do you mourn what happened to you in life and want to hurt someone else?”
I pointed to my chest. “Igetpain. I get it. I was just told today I couldn’t be around a man I loved anymore. At all. Zip. That relationship’s gone. But am I going to take it out on other people because of it? No.”
Jeffrey seethed. “You’re making a joke of us. This isn’t about a broken heart. This is about the living stealing from us. Stealing our reputations, profiting from those who can’t profit anymore.”
I shrugged. “So? What will you do? Storm the village? Rip it apart? Then no one will come see any of you. Those of you who haunt the buildings in town, you won’t get any more visitors. No one to follow, no one to pickpocket. All of it will vanish.” I snapped my fingers. “Just like that.
“Is that what you want? Or do you want to do what’s right, which is for me to expose the one person who’s responsible for these pictures? That, I can do. But the other, let you rampage through town? I can’t.”
“Why not?” said a young man dressed in shabby clothes that looked at least a century old.
“Because my job is to bring peace to you and help the living. That’s what I do. In fact, I could bring the light right now. Shine it on the lot of y'all and see who has enough bravery to go into it.”
Months ago, the sight of all these free-floating spirits would’ve sickened me. The dead were supposed to move on. They weren’t supposed to stay with the living.
Turned out these spirits didn’t like my answer about the light. Their bodies twisted into plumes of smoke, and within several seconds most of them had vanished.
My gaze snapped to Granny Mildred’s. “I won’t tell Captain Blount or Farmer Kency what you were up to here. I don’t think they would look too kindly on you wanting to wage battle on town.”
She fixed a beady-eyed stare on me and then disappeared without a word.
When the last spirit left, I hooked my attention back on Jeffrey.
“Give me the pictures. I’ll expose Birda as a fraud.”
He glared at me but said nothing.
I extended my hand. “I already have it worked out. I’ll make sure the pictures get into the right hands.”
“You were there that night,” Jeffrey accused. “When I helped Tallulah take them. I thought I sensed someone.”
“Oh, that may have been my perfume,” Alice offered.
“He said ‘sensed,’ not smelled,” I corrected.
“Oh,” she said quietly.
I glared at Jeffrey. “I know y’all took the letter that begged Cora to tell the police she had been wrong about the gambling den at Tallulah’s house.” I folded my arms. “The letter was pleading with Cora, but there was a hint of something else there.”
“What’s that?” he said.
“A veiled threat. Stop the police, or else.”
Jeffrey bristled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t you?” I said. “Why else would you have taken that letter, too? The pictures were enough, weren’t they?”
His face crumpled. “We couldn’t take them when Cora was alive. Tallulah wouldn’t do it. But her death changed things.” He shoved the pictures toward me. “You see what they’ve done.”
I nodded. “It wasn’t right of Birda to create false pictures of spirits. I agree with you. But to decide on all-out war against this town is wrong, too. One person did this.”
“But several knew about it,” he snapped.
