Memory Guild Books 1-3: A midlife paranormal mystery thriller box set, page 1
MEMORY GUILD BOOKS 1-3
A midlife paranormal mystery thriller box set
WARD PARKER
Mad Mangrove Media
CONTENTS
Author’s Note
A Magic Touch
1. Limping Home
2. Bad Memories
3. The Change
4. Inn and Out
5. The Magic Room
6. Buyer's Remorse
7. Coin Collector
8. Long Strange Trip
9. The Memory Guild
10. Face Time
11. Left in the Rental Car
12. Coin of the Realm
13. Can't Touch This
14. The Attic
15. Fowl Bowels
16. My Cousin Missy
17. Vampire Thief
18. The Knee Bone
19. Unfortunate Timing
20. Reconnaissance
21. Fathead
22. The Worst Scenario
23. Another Chapter About Bowels
24. Hot-Sheets Hotel
25. Black Magic
26. Great Balls of Fire
27. Homework Completed
What’s Next
The Psychic Touch
1. Dive Right into the Story
2. Give up the Ghost
3. A Tidy Murder
4. Sage Insights
5. Holding a Grudge
6. Gossip Girl
7. Under Attack
8. Slay Him
9. Love Scones
10. Doing the Devil's Work
11. Vampires Can Hack It
12. The Things They Left Behind
13. Reading Memories
14. A Visitor
15. Sam Spade
16. The In Between
17. Everyone Loves Shiplap
18. Euphoria
19. On the Road to San Marcos
20. Bolo
21. Even Her Tax Form
22. A Downside of Smoking
23. I'm a Man in Distress
24. The Father of Lies
25. It Must Taste Blood
26. Lip Balm
27. The Beach Troll
What’s Next
A Wicked Touch
1. Leave It to Cleaver
2. House Hunters Diabolical
3. Sleuthing for Free
4. Redhead Dead
5. Gone Girl
6. Werewolves Bite
7. Why Is a Psycho Acting Psychotic?
8. Messages from the In Between
9. Bad Mojo
10. Driving Me Crazy
11. Mr. Blister
12. Painful Memories
13. Druid Disc
14. Taken
15. Mended with Glue
16. Bad Haircut
17. Werewolf Biker Chick
18. One Crab, Four Silver Bullets
19. Malicious Mage
20. The Fleeting Nature of Our Endeavors
21. I Am Alive
22. See Y'all Again
23. Bad Moon Rising
24. Pernicious Parrot
25. Besties Forever
26. Runs in the Family
What’s Next
Acknowledgments
About the Author
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The city of San Marcos, the setting of these tales, was inspired by St. Augustine, Florida, a truly unique and magical place. However, I wanted lots of supernatural magic! And monsters, too! So I created the alternate world of San Marcos. While some details and historical references may seem familiar, San Marcos is entirely fictional, as are all the characters, names, and places described herein.
CHAPTER 1
LIMPING HOME
“As the Carpet King, I promise our prices are so low they’ll floor you! That’s the Knobble Family Flooring guarantee.”
I shut the car radio off. I’d been hearing Knobble commercials since I was a child. Over the generations, the family’s taste in advertising hadn’t improved one bit, nor had their taste in flooring. Hearing the ad meant I was getting close to my hometown, San Marcos, Florida. I was returning to start all over again, definitely older and hopefully wiser. I was half a century old (rounding down), toughened with the battle scars of life, but still naïve enough to believe I deserved to be happy.
My name is Darla and I talk too fast in run-on sentences, and I really, really promise I’ll try to avoid that with you. My first husband didn’t have the mental capacity to understand much of what I said at normal speed, let alone when I was in a manic state. Husband number two could keep up, but had a hard time getting a word in edgewise.
That might have been one of the reasons he up and left, though why would you leave a wife just because she talked too fast and too much? He didn’t have any other complaints that he mentioned.
When I’m depressed, I barely talk at all.
The exit to San Marcos was a mile ahead, so I moved into the right lane. I normally avoided driving on I-95, but I was traveling from Key West, a nearly 500-mile trip up the peninsula of Florida, too long a journey to do on local roads. I had driven overnight to avoid traffic. Doing so felt almost as if I were sneaking away from my failed experiment of trying to hang onto the bed-and-breakfast inn I ran with Cory before he bailed on me. I had learned it’s too hard to run a mom-and-pop shop when it’s just mom.
During the long drive, I endured long sequences of memories. As I came closer to my hometown, they bubbled up as strongly as the mythical Fountain of Youth that was once believed to exist around here.
After I exited the highway, I headed east, first through the countryside with farms and trailer parks. Then came the gated subdivisions, varying in age and price. As I approached the city, I passed the car dealerships, shopping centers, and big-box stores, lots of billboards, telephone poles, and palm trees. So far, my surroundings could be anywhere in Florida.
But as I continued eastward, the examples of human habitation grew older. Some sections were seedy and run down. Others were quaint and charming. All were built long before I was born.
Returning to San Marcos was a process of going back in time, literally and metaphorically. I wasn’t just returning to my hometown and my past. I was also entering a city that never fully existed in the present. San Marcos was laden heavily with history. It had witnessed centuries of European settlement and millennia of Native-American before that. My personal dramas that took place here were drops in the ocean of my city’s memories.
The city of San Marcos was like an ancient family member who passed the time as a faded retiree. It had secrets it shared with only a favored few. It had scars and resentments and long stretches of forgetfulness. It also had its proud moments of glory, as most cities do, yet these moments were more ancient and enchanting than those of any other city on this young continent.
Nowadays, its moments of glory survived only in memory and museums. But San Marcos continued to soldier on through the centuries, trendy new boutiques and restaurants coming and going, while the city’s true strength came from all the human stories that were its sustenance.
San Marcos was technically a city, but a small one. Its population was barely more than ten thousand. I skirted the outskirts of Spanish Colonial Old Town, which huddled tightly with its memories, its ancient structures hidden by the Victorian-era buildings that surrounded it. Those late-nineteenth-century homes lined the street I now followed. My mother’s house, where she and my twenty-four-year-old daughter lived, was up ahead in what only in San Marcos could be called a newer neighborhood. I turned off the main road onto her street.
I wasn’t returning to my hometown to make my life easier. I had to deal with my disaster case of a daughter. And if that wasn’t daunting enough, what did I do? I saddled myself with enormous debt, buying a 285-year-old inn, that needed extensive work, to open it as a bed-and-breakfast.
Was I completely nuts?
Yes. That's a fact, Jack. Being occasionally telepathic didn't help, either. I never knew if the voices in my head were real or not, whether they were my inner demons talking or the guy in line behind me at the supermarket. You see, the paranormal runs in the family. Not just me, but Mom and her mom. I didn’t yet know if my daughter Sophie inherited the gene.
Mom’s house was now in view down the street. It was our family’s home, where I grew up, but now it’s just Mom’s. The large yellow Victorian didn’t have a visual focal point. It was an explosion of rounded turrets, gabled roofs, bay windows, gingerbread trim, and a wrap-around porch.
When I grew up, my father was a real estate broker. My mother was a homemaker. And a witch. In the prehistoric era when I was born, it was common for wives to stay home with the kids. She also stayed home with magic spells and the occasional summoned spirit. When my sister and I grew bored with our games, there was always a poltergeist to entertain us.
Dad had been normal. His passions were sports and selling homes, and he didn’t have a drop of the paranormal in him. He tolerated Mom being a witch because she mostly practiced it when he was at work. To him, it was a silly hobby, and she pretended to agree. She concealed enough of it to convince him the witchcraft was nothing more than Tarot cards and incense burning.
My younger sister was also normal. She was an excellent student, stayed out of trouble, and eventually went to law school. She currently lived in California with her husband, two kids, and two dogs. Her holiday cards consisted solely of professional photos of her perfect family in their perfect home. She didn’t even write anything on the cards.
Then there was me. The weirdo. The weirdness I inherited from Mom, along with the paranormal genes. I don’t think I inherited anything from Dad except for my bipolar disorder, but that’s a story for another day.
Dad died from a heart attack when I was thirty and still married to Mr. Degenerate, husband number one. With no kids at home to support, Mom took the insurance money and most of their savings and blew it all on antiques. Our rambling home had always been teetering on the brink of becoming a hoarder’s paradise, because of Mom’s love of buying “bargains” at thrift and antique stores. She’d said she planned to resell them, but never did.
Now, with cash to burn and no husband to stop her, she surrendered to her acquisitiveness and filled the home with more stuff. Much more. She didn’t have a singular style or theme; she bought everything that fancied her from any era. With the house filled to bursting with furniture, art, knickknacks, and jewelry, she hung a sign out front and called it an antiques store.
On its rickety wooden front porch I stood and rang the doorbell which was literally a series of silver bells connected by strings.
My daughter Sophie answered, her beautiful milky skin threatened by tattoos creeping up from under her blouse, now reaching her lower neck. The neck ink was new. She had straight, black hair like mine. It fell upon her shoulders when she turned her head, covering the offending tattoos.
She smiled to see me, which was a good sign, and we hugged. A few random thoughts of hers popped into my head, concerned about how I was holding up a year after Cory left, whom she loved as much as her own father.
“You’re up early,” I said.
“It’s ten o’clock, Mom.”
“Early for you.”
“Not when I’m working. I got a job at that new seafood place on Front Street. I’m working lunch today, so I need to leave soon. How long are you staying here with Grammers and me?”
I noted the way she said, “Grammers and me,” as if they co-owned the house. Mom had generously offered to let Sophie stay there until she could afford her own place in San Marcos. So far, she’d been staying there for nearly a year.
“I’m only staying here tonight. Then I’ll stay with my friend Danielle in Old Town until I close on the inn and my stuff arrives from Key West.”
“Should be fun. Come in, and I’ll help you with your bags. Then I have to do my face and go to work.”
Sophie and I had been close when she was a girl, but had drifted apart since then. Because of my telepathy, she wanted to be as far away from me as possible when she was a teenager. What teen wouldn’t want to avoid a mother who could read her thoughts?
She fell in with a bad crowd in high school, and I stupidly allowed her to go to the community college in San Marcos instead of sending her off to another state where she’d have to make new friends. So she’d had problems at times with drugs. And boys. And holding down a job. Maybe it was for the best that I was back in town.
“Is that you, Darla?” Mom’s voice called from the back of the house.
“Hi, Mom,” I shouted in reply.
The bottom floor of my childhood home had a lovely parlor in front, overlooking the porch. Next was a formal dining room which flowed to a large living room, and finally a huge old-fashioned kitchen. A butler’s pantry led from the kitchen to the dining room. The ceilings were tall with crown molding. Wainscoting covered the lower portions of the walls. The home was brimming with Victorian-era charm.
But now it overflowed with junk.
Our original furniture was probably still in there somewhere, hidden by all the new pieces, display cases, bookcases, and random junk like a milking tub and a wagon wheel. It was the same in each room I passed through. There didn’t seem to be any system of organization. If you were looking for an Art Deco lamp, you would have to search every single room of the house. I was afraid of what I’d find upstairs.
The kitchen seemed like the only sanctuary from the encroaching tide of junk. It was cluttered, of course, but there was actually room to sit at the table or on a barstool beside the giant island.
I expected to find Mom here, but the room was empty. I poured myself a cup of coffee from the coffeemaker that had survived decades.
“Have a seat,” Mom said, striding into the room and hugging me. “Let me get you a scone.”
Mom had our family’s distinctive jet-black hair. Hers had long ago gone to gray, but she dyed it an unnatural black like the original. While Sophie and I had straight hair, Mom’s was frizzy and surrounded her head like the corona of the sun. She had a splotch of white paint on her cheek.
“What were you painting?” I asked.
“A rattan dining set I found put out by the curb a few blocks away. How someone could throw away something in great condition like this set is beyond me. It needs painting, though.”
Mom’s instinct for junk acquisition hadn’t faded.
She brought a plate to me with three of her homemade scones. She was famous for them. In fact, she often mixed certain herbs and powders into the batter, performed a spell while they baked, and claimed they had love-inducing qualities. All you had to do was feed them to your love object and by the time he or she had digested their meal, they’d be madly in love with you. Word on the street was that they truly worked. I reserved judgement until I tried them out myself on an unsuspecting man. That might be my only hope at this point.
After she set the plate down, Mom hugged me again and kissed the top of my head.
“Welcome back to San Marcos. How was your drive?”
“Exhausting. I did it in under eight hours.”
“You know, you can stay here until you move into your inn. You don’t have to stay with Danielle. I mean, she lives in an apartment above her store,” Mom said, as if Danielle’s living arrangements were a scandal.
“That’s okay, Mom. Thanks for offering. But it will be fun to hang out with Danielle, now that we’re both single women again.”
“I know you feel like this house is too crowded. Maybe I do have too much stuff.”
“It’s not just crowded with stuff. It’s crowded with Chesswick women.”
“You can stay in my room if you don’t want to sleep in the magic room.”
“It’s not that. I told you I want to hang out with Danielle. Get together with Jen. Drink too much wine. Not have to worry about being a bad example to my daughter who’s in recovery.”
“Ah, I see.” Mom nodded furtively.
It sounded awful trying to blame Sophie for my not wanting to stay here. That wasn’t the entire reason. I simply didn’t want this to feel like the forced cohabitation you endure when families gather for the holidays. I didn’t return to San Marcos to eat turkey. I came here to begin a new life as an independent woman.
“Mom, you hate it when I remind you, but I’m fifty-two. Danielle is forty-nine. We won’t go crazy and invite boys over. If things are too wild, I know your sewing room is waiting for me here.”
