Dark Divide (Cormac and Amelia 1)

At this, she gave a frustrated huff. “He’s just your basic know-it-all. Oh my God, don’t tell me you’ve run into him already.”

“He was out at the state park.”

“He’s obsessed with the park. Keeps trying to get people to sign petitions to change the signs—not even the information on the signs, it’s just that he wants to be the one to write them. He’s not even local. He’s originally from Fresno!”

“Right. Thanks.” He turned to go, but she stopped him.

“Are you really a detective? Like a private detective, like on TV?”

“I’m not sure I’d go that far,” he said. He was still trying to figure out what kind of detective he really was.

“So is there really something weird going on with Arty? Like some secret evidence that tells what really happened?”

Cop and detective TV shows tended to portray murder as some kind of baroque puzzle, with obscure pieces that only an intrepid hero could discover, that when assembled pointed to the most unlikely suspect imaginable, who had equally baroque reasons for wanting the victim dead. Murder in the real world hardly ever worked like that. Not even when the supernatural was involved. Sure, sometimes a murderer worked out an elaborate plot to kill someone in secret, without getting caught, usually for the most prosaic reasons—sex or money. But most murders were violent, sudden, messy, unpremeditated. People killed people they knew when they got angry. Nothing mysterious about it, and it was often just a case of tracing back the blood spatters, metaphorical or otherwise, to the person standing at the source of them. Trick to not getting caught was not to be the person standing in the spot the spatters all pointed to. Being a professional mostly meant knowing to not be standing where the evidence led back to. Cormac had only failed at that once; that was all it took.

Here, a magical bomb had gone off. Where did the blast point back to?

“Nothing as fancy as that,” Cormac said. “I’m mostly just helping Ms. Domingo clean up the cabin.”

Trina was clearly disappointed—this probably wouldn’t make nearly as interesting gossip as some other tale about a horrifying secret behind Weber’s death.

“Ah. And everything else? You getting around okay? You find the grocery store? Gas station?”

“Everything’s fine.”

“Okay, just let me know if—”

She might have still been calling after him, but he shut the door as he walked out.

I have an idea.

“Oh?” They were back in their sage-scented room, their maps and books spread around them. Night had fallen. He’d grabbed fast food for dinner, and his stomach wasn’t thanking him for it. They had only arrived in Truckee that morning, after driving through the night. Really, they ought to sleep. He wasn’t quite vibrating with exhaustion, but he was getting close.

Only speculation, really. Someone—or a group of someones—casting powerful spells and not cleaning up after themselves. Not using circles to ground the magic, but rather letting it simply. . .explode.

He could imagine the gesture, Amelia raising her arms and flicking her fingers out to demonstrate.

I want to set up a kind of. . .alarm. In case it happens again, we’ll know and can perhaps track down the culprit.

“Can it wait till morning?”

I think so. But right now I want to look for ghosts.

“I thought you said—”

Indulge me.

The Donner Party camped over the winter of 1846 and ‘47 in two different locations. The first, the main camp, was near the lake, where the visitor center, monument, campground, and park were located. The bulk of the party stopped here, holing up in three cabins. The other camp was

some six miles away, near Alder Creek, off a state highway, commemorated by a national forest turnout and trailhead. The Donner family itself, stymied by broken wagons and injuries, had stopped here and tried to tough out the winter under little more than a tent and tree branches. Most of them hadn’t made it.

For decades, ghost hunters assumed the whole valley must be haunted. Over forty people had died in one long, drawn-out, horrifying event. Surely the place was saturated with supernatural energy.

Not necessarily, Amelia murmured.

Recently, ghost hunters had done all the usual, taken EMF readings, searched for EVP—but noise from the freeway complicated both those efforts. They always found the usual: vague feelings, unsubstantiated clues. Psychics had their opinions.

But the ghost of Tamsen Donner was said to walk between the two camps, a trek she’d made in life right before she’d died, and—possibly—been consumed by the main camp’s last survivor, Louis Keseberg.