As the Crow Flies Read online

  As the Crow Flies

  Samantha Weller, a forensic scientist turned paranormal novelist, owes her life and writing career to a crow that saved her from certain death. When she buys an old bookend that looks like her avian muse, her world begins to resemble the plots of her novels.

  Determined to find the mate to her bookend, Samantha and her antiquarian sidekick, Liz, go on a search leading them to the beautiful and wealthy Gwen Laraway. Samantha is instantly smitten, but the age difference has Gwen second-guessing Samantha’s interest.

  Meanwhile, Liz is crushing on Gwen’s niece, Isabel. As clueless as she is sensuous, Isabel hasn’t had a date since her high school prom ten years ago, and she’s petrified to act on her sudden attraction to Liz.

  Romance seems to be blooming all around, but problems arise when a restless ghost emerges from the ether to roam the dark corners of this haunting tale that explores the quantum mechanics of immortality.

  As the Crow Flies

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  eBooks from Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com

  eBooks are not transferable. They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.

  Please respect the rights of the author and do not file share.

  As the Crow Flies

  © 2018 By Karen F. Williams. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 13:978-1-63555-284-3

  This Electronic Book is published by

  Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 249

  Valley Falls, NY 12185

  First Edition: November 2018

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Credits

  Editor: Shelley Thrasher

  Production Design: Stacia Seaman

  Cover Design by Melody Pond

  By the Author

  Meeting Ms. Roman

  The Feeding

  Nightshade

  Love Spell

  Acknowledgments

  I wish to express gratitude to the incredible staff of professionals at Bold Strokes; to my editor, Shelley Thrasher, for her sharp eye and insights; and to a fine group of friends and beta readers for their respective contributions: Judith Portnoy, Donna Ramirez, Jean Giunta, Charlotte Demescko, Marie Monterosso, and Francie McMahon. Heartfelt thanks go out to Carryl Cole for keeping me and my story on point; Michelle Lisper for her support and technical expertise; and Dr. Kelly Wacker, my dear friend and on-call luminary. I’m blessed to have you all in my life.

  This book is dedicated to Carryl

  And to the memory of an extraordinary junkyard dog whose life I changed, and who changed mine.

  I’d give anything to rewrite her story.

  And to my readers.

  Life is like a game of connect the dots.

  Never underestimate the unseen forces that draw those lines and link us in mysterious and purposeful ways.

  The ink may be invisible, but the connections are indelible.

  Chapter One

  For almost five years now, since the eve of her forty-second birthday, Samantha Weller lived on borrowed time. She didn’t mind it, though; in fact, she rather enjoyed the notion. There was a strange pleasure, an odd sense of liberation, in knowing you’d defied death, beat the forces—outlived yourself, so to speak.

  Of course, a taxi ride around Manhattan was a sure way to further tempt the Fates. Samantha braced herself in the back seat of a yellow cab as the driver cut off two cars and a bus. “Hold on, mami,” she warned Samantha in broken English, a wad of pink gum muffling her words and obstructing her vision as she blew a bubble so big it touched the brim of her purple baseball cap.

  The only thing left for Samantha to hold was her breath, and she did just that as the taxi crossed two lanes and careened to the corner of Hudson and West 10th Street. Stunned, Samantha looked at the giant pink bubble and two dark eyes staring at her in the rearview mirror. For a moment they regarded one another blankly, and then the cabbie began slowly inhaling, deflating the bubble until half of it collapsed on her chin. Samantha watched, amazed, as a tongue darted out and, in one quick swipe, gathered up the whole pink mess and retreated into her mouth.

  “Mami, you gettin’ out or what?” the cabbie asked. And when Samantha didn’t respond, she cracked her gum so loud Samantha thought someone had fired a gun, and she jumped.

  Forcing a polite smile, Samantha took a deep breath, paid, and climbed out.

  The cabbie gave her the once-over with a crooked smile, her elbow propped and sticking out of the open window. “Thanks,” she said, acknowledging the generous tip.

  “Oh, no, thank you, Ms. Ramos!” Samantha bowed with an exaggerated sweep of her arm. “A roller-coaster ride couldn’t have been this exhilarating.”

  Ms. Ramos stopped chewing, her eyes narrowing. “How you know my name, mami?”

  “It is Ramos, yes? Myra Ramos?”

  Squinting suspiciously, she gestured at Samantha with her chin. “Me and you…we slept together?”

  Samantha laughed. “No, we did not! And it’s a good thing for me. I barely survived a taxi ride with you.” She pointed to the displayed photo ID. “Nice picture, too.”

  Smirking, Ms. Ramos stared her up and down, then cracked her gum again and sped away.

  Samantha shook her head as the cab veered back into traffic and took a moment to collect herself. It was June and unseasonably cool in New York City this week—mid-seventies, expected to dip into the fifties tonight—but the late-afternoon sun was strong, and the reckless taxi ride had her sweating. Samantha slipped out of her blazer, checking the street signs as she rolled up the sleeves of a white shirt. Then she hiked the strap of a messenger bag over her shoulder and tightened her grip on a canvas bag in which she carried an old bookend.

  The bookend itself was a ceramic sculpture of an open book, a nearly life-size crow perched upon its pages—unless the crow was meant to be a raven. Samantha couldn’t be sure. She’d bought the thing at an estate sale only last week. But it was heavy, a good few pounds, and after carrying it around the city all day, she felt like it had doubled in weight.

  Strolling down Hudson Street, she craned her neck to note the names of shops along the way. She was searching for her sister-in-law’s sister—the gay sister of her brother’s new wife, to be exact. Liz Bowes owned an antique shop somewhere in the vicinity. At least that’s what she’d told Samantha at the wedding four months ago. Liz had named the shop after a movie, she remembered her saying, although just what movie she couldn’t for the life of her recall.

  Samantha could have had the bookend appraised elsewhere, but she preferred to deal with someone who, by moral reason of them being related by marriage, wouldn’t take advantage of her ignorance. Not that Samantha intended to part with the piece. It wasn’t every day one stumbled upon art in the form of a raven or crow. The ill-reputed birds had certainly made a permanent nest in the branches of literature and folklore, but definitely not in the visual arts. People didn’t seem to care for the likes of them in their homes—a raven figurine on a shelf, say, or a crow on canvas over the sofa. People preferred ducks, roosters, flamingoes, whimsical birds with less threatening aspects. It was an unfortunate fact, especially for Samantha, who happened to be the proud owner of a real crow. Never mind finding a painting of a crow to hang over her sofa—finding a woman to sit on the sofa with a live crow proved a more difficult task these days.

&n
bsp; Time and again Samantha’s dates outright insulted the bird. From mistaken remarks such as “crows carry disease,” to the more superstitious “crows and ravens are bad omens,” right on down to the more sophisticated “that bird gives me the freaking creeps,” Samantha had heard it all. And so it came to pass, as it always did, that Samantha was forced to choose between a woman and her bird, which didn’t leave much choice at all. For, contrary to superstitions surrounding the black birds and bad luck, Bertha the crow brought only good luck.

  Hurricane Bertha was sweeping the East Coast on the night Samantha and the bird made one another’s unlikely acquaintance. Driving home from a friend’s birthday dinner in the city, she was stopped at a red light in White Plains when, amidst whirling branches and wind-driven debris, something black and very much alive tumbled to the ground. What with the drag created by the bird’s panicked flapping and fluttering, the fledgling survived the fall, but to Samantha’s left and right, where the traffic light was green, oncoming cars approached in the distance. In the middle of the road the helpless crow hobbled in dizzy circles, cawing, summoning Samantha to its rescue.

  Without taking time to think, she threw her car into park and jumped out. Using a forearm to shield her face against the windswept rain, she dashed into the intersection, scooped up the huge baby with both hands, and backed away from oncoming traffic just in time. But as she did, a thunderous crash and a boom came from behind, followed by shouts and screams and the honking of horns. Squinting against the pelting downpour, Samantha spun around to see her car—what little she could find of it—buried beneath the canopy of a fallen tree.

  The windshield was mashed, the roof crushed clear to the steering wheel. And at that moment Samantha realized she had been meant to die that night—right there, at a red light, an inadvertent victim of Hurricane Bertha. Or maybe she wasn’t meant to die.

  Soaked and in shock, Samantha and the baby crow shared a ride home in the tow truck that evening, and for the rest of the night she sat in her kitchen, alternately feeding the fledgling and trying to decide whether she’d saved the crow’s life or the crow had saved hers. By morning she concluded, in no uncertain terms, that she and the bird had simultaneously saved each other. The whole event, Samantha was sure, was a fine example of cosmic intervention. Synchronicity, perhaps. Maybe synchronicity had saved them both. And so Samantha and Bertha, as the crow was aptly named, went about conducting their lives on borrowed time. And the living only got better with the bird around.

  Before Bertha, Samantha’s would-be career as a mystery writer had been bereft of good luck. She’d spent the past fifteen years as a forensic investigator working for a crime lab, which is to say she worked long hours in unsafe and unsanitary conditions, tolerating offensive smells and disturbing scenes. Sometimes those scenes included dead people in various stages of decomposition—in basements, in pieces, in dilapidated buildings, wooded lots, sometimes in two feet of mosquito-infested pond water. In accordance with strict chain-of-evidence procedures, Samantha wrote her highly detailed reports, one after the next, year after year, until one day she decided she wanted to write something else. Forensic investigation wasn’t as glamorous as it appeared on television, but it had given her plenty of ideas for writing glamorous murder mysteries.

  Over the course of a year, Samantha spent her days off creating a fictional counterpart and completing a manuscript, but her hopeful agent couldn’t find an interested publisher. And then on the night of her first Halloween with Bertha, Samantha got a new and even better idea for a would-be sleuth.

  She had just carried a lighted jack-o’-lantern in from the porch and set it by the hearth for Bertha to see. “Do you remember when we met?” Samantha asked, stretching out on the floor beside the crow and the pumpkin and affectionately recounting their fateful meeting. “Come on, Bertha…speak for Mommy, speak for Sam-Sam. Say it. It was a dark and stormy night,” Samantha began, as all good stories do. “Come on,” she coaxed the crow, ruffling the shiny black feathers on its neck. “It was a dark and—”

  “Daak!” the crow yelled, visibly mesmerized by the orange glow. She inspected the pumpkin’s nose and peeked through its triangular eyes, fixated on the flame of the burning candle inside. “Daak-daak!” Bertha squawked when Samantha tickled her under the wing.

  “That’s right, Sam-Sam’s brilliant little birdbrain. It was a dark—or daak, if you prefer—and stormy night. A daak and stormy—”

  Without warning, the idea struck Samantha as hard as the tree had struck her car, and she found herself caught up in another storm: a brainstorm this time, about a nocturnal sleuth who travels the world, solving paranormal crimes under the guidance of her familiar, a psychic crow. She’d call her sleuth Detective Candice Crowley. Bertha would become her avian Watson.

  Samantha wrote it. Her agent liked it. The publisher loved it. Mystery readers couldn’t read the stuff fast enough. In less than four years Samantha had become the acclaimed author of the best-selling Detective Crowley mystery series, her fifth book coming off the press in two weeks. No small thanks to Bertha. And no small thanks to the cosmic principle of synchronicity that had brought them together.

  Looking up at the signs around Christopher Street, Samantha wiped her brow with the back of her hand and was just turning to backtrack when a shop across the street caught her eye. Tiny pink lights twinkled in the window, and on a green awning above the door were pink letters reading “Somewhere in Time.” That was it! Somewhere in Time. She’d known it was around here…somewhere.

  Samantha waited for cars and a limousine to pass, then sprinted across the street and peeked in the window. Two customers stood at the counter with their backs to her, but between them she recognized Liz standing in front of an old brass register. It looked like a scene from a bygone era. She knew Liz was only thirty-two, but with sparkling earrings, knotted beads, and wavy auburn hair slicked back, she looked like a 1920s flapper who’d just stepped out of…well…somewhere in time. Of course, at the wedding she’d been more formally dressed, both she and her female companion, as it were. According to Samantha’s brother, Jason, Liz was quite the ladies’ woman: charming, decadent, rarely seen twice with the same one. Samantha remembered Liz’s older sister, Lisa, telling her over dinner one night that her sister’s promiscuity was attributable to what she suspected was untreated attention-deficit disorder. “Liz can’t focus on anything or anyone for too long. She’s always been the wild child,” Lisa had said.

  Wild or not, sitting at Liz’s table at the wedding had been a lot of fun, and Samantha wondered if perhaps Lisa was secretly envious of her sister’s charisma.

  Samantha turned the handle of the glass door and went in, bells jingling overhead. As much as Liz appeared to step out of the past, Samantha felt herself stepping into it. The door seemed to be a vortex to the Roaring Twenties. She attempted to close it quietly, but the bells jingled again. Liz looked up from the counter, acknowledging her with an impersonal glance at first. But then her big green eyes widened in recognition. “Sam?”

  “Liz!” she said with a nod of greeting. The two women at the counter turned, looking Samantha up and down, and then turned back and whispered to each other.

  “Sam—oh my God!” She beamed. “What are you doing here?”

  “I was in the city having lunch with my editor, and, well,” she gestured at the bag in her hand, “I need something appraised.”

  “I can’t believe it. Are you in a hurry?”

  “No, no.” Samantha held up a hand. “Take your time.”

  “Good. Have a look around.”

  Samantha didn’t care how long she waited. She had found the place and was glad she’d decided to come. Glad, too, that Liz was so happy to see her.

  Chapter Two

  Samantha hated antique shops. Such dank, dreary, depressing places they were. Everything for sale was old, used, somehow expired—like the original owners, she speculated—and if forced to work in one, she’d require antidepressants by p
ayday. That and nasal spray to combat the stuffiness.

  But not this place. Liz’s shop was different—colorful and very much alive. Ragtime music wafted from hidden speakers, glass lamps casting seductive glows, and the scent of potpourri masked any would-be mustiness. Overhead, a ceiling fan fit for a saloon spun in rhythm with the music, stirring together sounds and scents and collective memories so that, all in all, the shop had an enchanted feel.

  In one panoramic glance, Samantha surveyed everything. She felt like a kid who had discovered the treasure-filled attic of some abandoned mansion. Each aisle was loaded with a hodgepodge of curiosities, an expensive hodgepodge, and she suddenly grew uneasy about breaking something. Setting her belongings down beside a Chippendale chair, she slipped her hands into her pockets and headed down the nearest aisle to browse. But just as she turned, she bumped into her own reflection in a cheval mirror and almost pardoned herself.

  Feathery boas and sequined hats were draped over the top of the mirror, and seeing her image framed by it all made Samantha think that, like Liz, she wouldn’t have looked so out of place in the nineteen twenties or thirties. She stood in front of it, thinking that she seemed strange to herself—a bit taller than she remembered, brown eyes darker, lips fuller, jaw more pronounced. Maybe this was an old trick mirror, some antique recovered from a Coney Island carnival and—

  “Yoo-hoo! Where’s the mistress-of-mystery hiding?” Liz called, both her voice and the jingle of bells ringing out as the customers left the shop.