JESSICA BECK

  GHOST CAT 2

  BID FOR MIDNIGHT

  Ghost Cat 2: Bid for Midnight

  Copyright © 2013 by Jessica Beck All rights reserved.

  Second Edition: April 2015

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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

  Ghost Cat 2: Bid for Midnight

  When Christy Blake goes to an estate auction, she plans to pick up a few things for her secondhand shop, Memories and Dreams. She gets more than she bargains for, though, when her ghost cat, Midnight, brings one of the late owners to her for help. Summer and her father were murdered, and Christy must solve the case to free the victim so she can Cross Over. But by doing so, will Christy lose Midnight forever?

  The First Time Ever Published!

  The Second Ghost Cat Cozy Mystery.

  A Brand New Mystery Series by Jessica Beck.

  Jessica Beck is the New York Times bestselling author of the Donut Mysteries, the Classic Diner Mysteries, and the Ghost Cat Cozy Mysteries.

  To Mac, the cat who wouldn’t take no for an answer!

  Chapter 1

  I knew that something was wrong the second I spotted the ghost of my cat Midnight moving among the boxes at the auction.

  It wasn’t Midnight’s presence that threw me off, though.

  It was the fact that he wasn’t alone.

  A ghostly young woman hovered beside him, just as eerily translucent. It was the first human ghost I’d ever seen in my life, but I had no trouble recognizing her.

  That’s when I realized that things were about to get a lot more complicated.

  Chapter 2

  I never dreamed that I would be dragged into another murder investigation by the ghost of my cat Midnight at the estate auction at Silas Bentley’s farm, but that’s exactly what happened on a crisp Spring morning in Noble Point, North Carolina, when I decided that it was time to add a little new inventory to my eclectic curiosity shop, Memories and Dreams. My name’s Christy Blake, and if I’d had any say in the matter, I wouldn’t have gotten involved, but clearly Midnight had other plans. That cat had been difficult enough to ignore while he’d been alive; becoming an apparition hadn’t made him any less determined to get his own way. Shadow, my living cat, and I had learned long ago that we crossed Midnight at our own peril, and his change in status after crossing into the afterlife hadn’t affected that in the least.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  In the beginning, it had all started out innocently enough, but in the end, I probably should have known better.

  “Thanks for coming to the auction with me this morning,” I told Lincoln Hayes as he drove his truck deeper into the countryside outside town. Lincoln was a local attorney and, more importantly to me, the man who was currently doing his best to woo me. I was in my mid-twenties, and I had no desire to settle down, but Lincoln was determined to make his case, and I wasn’t about to shut him out completely. He was too handsome, too much fun to be around, and far too attentive to discard out of hand. Marybeth, my roommate from college and now my landlord as well, had dated Lincoln in high school, but their relationship had evolved into an easy friendship, and now Lincoln had set his sights on me.

  “I’m happy to do it. I love a good auction as much as the next man, but this one’s kind of special to me,” Lincoln said. He glanced over at me as he added with a smile, “Are you sure that you didn’t invite me just because I have an old pickup truck you can use to haul your finds back to your shop?”

  “It wasn’t the only reason, but I won’t lie to you,” I said. “It did cross my mind. That doesn’t hurt your feelings, does it?”

  “Why should it? I love Frannie, and I like to take her out every time I get the chance,” he said as he lightly stroked the truck’s dashboard.

  “Why do you call your truck by a woman’s name?” I asked him as we got closer to the farm.

  “What was I supposed to call her, Butch?”

  I laughed off his comment as I took in the landscape around us. The sun was barely up, there was still mist hovering in the fields as we drove past, but we were getting an early start for a good reason. I was only closing Memories and Dreams until noon, and I wanted to get to the auction site ahead of the crowds to scope out the lots that were going to be for sale that morning. While I was certain that many folks would be coming for Silas’s vast antique-tool collection, I was there for his late wife Ginny’s things, and some of his daughter Summer’s possessions as well. Ginny had been a longtime accumulator of the cheap and gaudy, and I was hoping to restock my inventory with some of her baubles. In fact, my old boss, Cora, had tried to buy them earlier, but Summer had wanted everything for herself, and I couldn’t really blame her. It was terrible that a gas heater had killed Summer and Silas the month before, carbon monoxide overwhelming them both in the middle of the night, but the real tragedy was the fact that Summer had moved back home recently from Charlotte just to help her father out on the farm, a decision that had ultimately cost her her life.

  I couldn’t allow myself to dwell on the unfortunate circumstances of their deaths, though. A great many of my customers came by the shop every week or two to see what was new, and I was afraid that if I didn’t offer them a constantly changing selection of goods, I’d lose them, and I couldn’t afford that. Cora had left me majority ownership of the place, but I had to work hard if I was going to keep the doors open for the five years she had dictated in her will in order to retain possession of the shop. I hadn’t added anything new since Cora and Midnight had been murdered there, and it was time to embrace my new role in life. I still missed the warm presence of my cat near me, but Midnight had stuck around after what had happened despite all odds and conventional wisdom; I was thankful that I still had a part of him every time he mysteriously appeared to me, but I never knew if the next time he showed up would be the last.

  “Christy, did you hear what I just said?” Lincoln asked, pulling me back to our conversation.

  “Sorry, my mind was somewhere else,” I said. “No, you’re right. I suppose Butch would be a ridiculous name for your truck.”

  “That’s all I’m saying,” Lincoln replied with a smile. “Are you really going to all this trouble just to buy a few boxes of junk?”

  “I’d resent that if it weren’t true,” I said with a grin. “But there’s something you need to remember. One woman’s junk is another woman’s treasure. Men are just as bad at amassing things they probably don’t need, and we both know it.”

  “I wouldn’t deny it for one second,” he said with a laugh. “I have my eyes on a pitchfork of Silas’s that I’d love to own.”

  “Do you have a reason to move a lot of hay these days, Lincoln?” I asked him with a gentle grin.

  “Not for quite a while, but who knows what the future might hold? Christy, you don’t know this about me, but I worked for Silas an entire summer when I was in junior high school, and one of the things I did was help him put up his hay. I’ve never worked so hard in my life, but I learned a lot that summer, and that pitchfork and I spent a great deal of time together.”

  “Lincoln, there’s nothing wrong with being sentimental,” I said.

  “I think so, too, but I’m not all that sure that Silas would have agreed with you, at least not out loud. He was a practical man in most matters, but there was a strong sense of sentiment in him as well; you just had to dig down pretty deep for it.”

  “Well, from the flyer I read about the auction, it wasn’t buried all that far down. After all, he and his daughter both kept his wife’s costume jewelry, and she’s been gone ten years.”

  “Silas loved Ginny with a great deal of passion, and he doted on Summer, too,” Lincoln said. “I hope you get some good pieces today.”

  “That’s why we brought your truck. I’m counting on scoring big. I’ll tell you what. I’ll even buy that pitchfork for you if you’d like; you’ve been a really good sport about the whole thing.”

  “As much as I appreciate the offer, I can’t accept it. It’s important that I spend money that I earned myself. Do you understand?”

  “Perfectly,” I said. “I love how that works out sometimes.”

  He glanced over at me. “What do you mean?”

  “I made you an offer, but you politely refused it. I get all of the credit for the thought, but I don’t have to crack my wallet open to follow through. That’s a big win in my book any day.”

  “You’re something else; you know that, don’t you?” he asked with the hint of a grin.

  “Something good, I hope,” I said.

  “I’d say so,” he said, and then Lincoln whistled softly to himself. “Would you look at that?”

  I looked where he was pointing, and I was alarmed to see that Silas’s field closest to the road was already nearly full of pickup trucks, SUVs, and just about every other type of vehicle there was.

  Evidently I wasn’t the only one
who’d decided to get an early peek at what was being offered for auction that day.

  “Do you want to split up, or should I just tag along with you?” Lincoln asked me after we registered at a long table in front of the old farmhouse and got our bidding cards. My number was one hundred fifty-seven, and Lincoln was one fifty-eight. We weren’t the last ones, either; there was a long line behind us waiting to register as soon as we were finished.

  “Either way is fine with me,” I said absently as I hunted for the treasures that I knew had to be there.

  I glanced over and saw Lincoln smiling at me. “Tell you what. I’m going to walk over to the barn, and you can scout through the boxes in the house. We’ll meet up later, okay?”

  “It’s a deal,” I said, and I was quickly on my way.

  I hurried into the house and found a crowd there already. This wasn’t going to be as easy as I’d hoped, but after I got a look at several of the boxes overflowing with Ginny’s possessions, I wanted to win at least a few of them desperately. They were exactly what I’d been looking for, and I wasn’t going to walk away empty-handed if I could help it. We weren’t allowed to go through the treasures, but I could see enough on top to make them interesting to me. The boxes happened to be sitting on a table near the heater that had killed Silas and Summer, and I marveled at how such an innocent-looking household appliance that most folks never noticed could be a silent killer.

  “Christy Blake, I don’t even know why you’re here. This is clearly all just junk,” an angry little woman I recognized said the moment she spotted me drooling over one of the boxes of gaudy trinkets. Her first name was Lucy, but I didn’t have a clue what her last name might be. I’d seen her in my shop a time or two, but she’d never made much of an impression on me one way or the other. Lucy added with a hint of scorn in her voice, “This entire box isn’t worth a dollar.”

  I laughed, which immediately brought a frown to her face.

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. “I’ll probably go quite a bit higher than that.” I could just see the top layer of jewelry, but I liked what I saw. In each box, there was a layer of newspaper separating the levels, so no one could be exactly sure about what they were getting, since we weren’t allowed to dig through the boxes hunting for treasure.

  “You’ll be a fool if you pay more than a buck,” Lucy said angrily.

  I decided not to let her spoil my mood. “Well, it won’t be the first time.” I made it a point to stare at the box in question a little longer, just to rattle her a little. Making a careful note of the number, I brushed past the angry little woman as I said, “Have a nice day, and good luck with your bidding.”

  “Luck’s got nothing to do with it,” she answered with a frown.

  “Lucy, come over here and look at this,” a pale, thin woman in her late fifties said as she grabbed my combatant’s arm.

  “Myra, let go of me. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  “If she won’t go with you, I’d love to see what you found, Myra,” I said with a broad grin.

  “Never you mind about that,” Lucy said.

  “No worries. I’m sure I’ll be able to find it on my own,” I said with my most saccharine smile.

  Lucy was still giving Myra grief as I walked among the other offerings.

  For a single moment in time, everyone seemed to vacate the small alcove where I was standing. It was as though they’d been moved out at the same time by some mysterious force, and it left me with an immediate sense of uneasiness.

  Then I spotted Midnight, along with his new translucent friend. Silas might not still be around, but his daughter Summer was still there, apparently watching over her mother’s things from beyond the grave.

  “Is there anything I can do to help you?” I asked Summer as I spotted the anguished expression on her face, feeling silly the second I heard my own words. She’d just died, after all. Summer looked as though she wanted to reply as Midnight nudged her with his nose, but they both vanished in an instant as an older man, quite alive, came around the corner and ruined our solitude. What had Summer been doing there, and how had Midnight managed to form a bond with her? Had he become some kind of guide to the afterlife when his own candle had been snuffed out? I hardly thought it could be a coincidence that the two of them were together, but stranger things had happened before in my life, including the reappearance of Midnight himself.

  “Were you just talking to me?” the old man asked me.

  “Sorry. I thought I saw someone that I used to know,” I said feebly.

  “Forgive me for saying so, but you look as though you’ve just seen a ghost.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” I said as I made my way past him and headed outside.

  By the time I left the house, my nerves had calmed down quite a bit. Either Summer would show up in my life again or she wouldn’t, and there was nothing that I could do about it in the meantime. I wasn’t entirely positive that she’d been trying to communicate with me, but I wasn’t about to rule it out. Though the gossip around Noble Point believed that the farm deaths had been nothing more than a pair of tragic accidents, I was starting to become suspicious.

  I had other things on my mind at the moment, though. Returning my attention to the auction, I decided that there were five boxes I wanted to bid on; I just hoped they went on sale before I had to leave. Strike that. If they weren’t, I’d wait them out and open the shop whenever I got back, no matter how long that might take.

  After looking around for a few minutes in vain, I finally found Lincoln relaxing in an old armchair that was painted a bright orange hue. He looked cool sitting in the shade cast from an ancient oak tree. “Hi, Christy. Would you care for a seat?” he asked as he gestured to the empty purple chair beside him.

  “Where did you get these?” I asked as I sat.

  “An enterprising young fellow is renting them out over there,” Lincoln said as he pointed to a teenager with more business than he could handle at the moment.

  As I looked around, I saw that Lincoln had found a perfect spot where we could see the auctioneer clearly but still be in the shade if the sun got too hot later. Late Spring brought on unpredictable changes in our climate, so there was no telling what kind of weather we’d be getting later.

  “He’s got quite a racket going, doesn’t he?” I asked as I lightly stroked the chair’s arms.

  “I prefer to think of it as discovering the perfect niche market,” Lincoln said. “He told me that he buys these chairs at every auction he goes to and ends up renting them out later. When he gets his new inventory home, he makes sure that they are sound, and then he paints them with distinctive colors so no one will try to walk away with them later.”

  “How did he get permission to do all of this from the auctioneer?” I asked.

  “Are you kidding? He loves it. The more comfortable people are, the longer they’ll stay, and the more they’ll bid. It’s absolutely brilliant.”

  “Did you find your pitchfork?” I asked. It really was quite thoughtful of Lincoln to rent the chairs for us, and I was glad again that I’d asked him to join me.

  “It’s there all right, but there’s another buyer who wants it. The woman was practically drooling over it when I got there.”

  “Is she going to use it for hay?” I asked with a grin.

  Lincoln’s face clouded up a bit. If he noticed my smile, he didn’t comment on it. “She wants to hang it on the wall as a decoration. I’m getting that thing, no matter how much it costs me.”

  “Seriously? Can you really afford to do that?” I knew that I had limits with the purchases I could afford today, but I doubted that Lincoln had many such restraints. From what I’d heard around town, he was very good at what he did.

  “Christy, I’m doing well enough to indulge myself every now and then, and this is something that I really want.”

  “When do you think that it’s going to go up for bid?” I asked. “I heard someone say that the house’s contents would go first, and then the tools in the barn would be last.” I started to wonder if I might have to end up getting a ride back to the shop if Lincoln was held up waiting for his pitchfork to come up for bid.