Familiar Spirit

Sarah squeezed the old woman’s hand, trying to be sympathetic, trying to control her impatience. But she had to know. “Mrs. Owens. You were telling me about the house on West Thirty-fifth Street. What was it that happened there? What awful thing frightened your husband?”

“He was only a child then, of course.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.” Mrs. Owens smiled—a crooked smile, since only the right half of her mouth lifted. “I keep forgetting. So foolish of me. What’s your name again?”

“Sarah.”

“Sarah. Yes. Of course. And you’re a friend of . . .”

Sarah sighed. “I live in the house on West Thirty-fifth Street,” she said. “I rent from you. You were going to tell me about the house.”

Mrs. Owens frowned. “Now, what stories did you hear? We don’t generally tell people. You know how it is. Rumors and gossip. And people don’t feel comfortable. Although there has never been any trouble. Some people won’t live in a house where there has been a murder. They just don’t like the idea. But the house isn’t haunted, you know. It was only my late husband who felt that. It was a personal thing, because it was his mother. And his father.”

“When did this happen?”

“Oh, a long time ago. Back in the Twenties. And no one who lived there ever since—although it was empty for awhile after, I believe—ever had any trouble. There was never any reliable report of . . . ghosts, or anything like that. My husband found it too painful to go back to the house where his parents had died so horribly, but that was understandable. No one else ever saw or felt anything in the house, despite all the talk about witchcraft and black magic, and the nasty rumors . . .” Mrs. Owens moved up on her pillows slightly, seeming more alert than she had been yet.

Sarah stared at her, questions bubbling in her mind, but did not speak. She was afraid of asking the wrong question and sending Mrs. Owens off on a tangent, slipping and sliding among all her memories of years past.

“You mentioned black magic and witchcraft,” Sarah said carefully. “What did that have to do with the murders?”

“It was the reason for it. That’s what they said. She—Albert’s mother—she was involved in some sort of magical practices.” Mrs. Owens sighed and closed her eyes. Then she opened them again and smiled her lopsided smile at Sarah. “Sorry, dear. I don’t mean to bore you.”

“You aren’t boring me. I want to know about it,” Sarah said. “You were telling me about your husband’s mother. Was she a witch?”

“Oh, my, no, she was a very sweet woman, from what I understand. But different. Perhaps overeducated for her time. Interested in things which weren’t common for Texas in the Twenties. Imaginative, sensitive, but very strong-willed. When her husband ran off she took it very hard, and the people she turned to for friendship were not . . . ordinary folks. They involved her in strange things. Magic, they called it. Shocking things . . . It’s all in her diary. What happened, or what she thought happened. Perhaps she was crazy, but it wasn’t her own craziness. It was those people, that man she got involved with, a sorcerer or magician or whatever he was. That man who called himself Jade.”

It changed everything. Mrs. Owens’ story created a new picture. A man called Jade in the 1920s—a demon called Jade nearly sixty years later—they were connected, possibly even the same being. What did it mean?

Sarah hoped the diary Mrs. Owens had spoken of would tell her more. Perhaps it held the clue to what Jade was, and how he could be destroyed.

Mrs. Owens had expressed a sleepy, drifting surprise at Sarah’s interest but had agreed that she might borrow and read the diary. Impulsively, Sarah planted a kiss on Mrs. Owens’ thin, dry cheek.

“Thank you,” she said. “You don’t know how this may help! I’ll be back to see you after I’ve read it. Maybe I’ll have a story to tell you!”

But in spite of her impatience to read the diary, Sarah had to wait. Several hours passed before she was able to find the neighbor who could open Mrs. Owens’ house for her, and then she spent a frustrating half-hour searching for the book. She found it at last, not in the drawer where Mrs. Owens had thought it would be, but on a shelf between two Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. It was a small volume covered in dark red leather. The diary of Nancy Willis Owens for the year 1923.

Sarah felt excitement rising in her as she held the book. Flipping through it, the name Jade seemed to leap off the handwritten pages at her. But she restrained herself; she didn’t want to read it in bits and pieces, but all at once. There was an answer in this book; maybe the answer she was looking for. Just as it had seemed most hopeless, she had been presented with a new weapon against her enemy.

Realizing she’d had nothing to eat all day, Sarah drove by the Burger King. Impatience to read the diary made her eat quickly, but something still nagged at her mind.