Esmerelda Sleuth: Beyond the Portal (Book 3)

A thin layer of powdery snow blanketed the ground.  Beneath it was an icy crust that had assaulted the landscape just hours earlier.  The frozen moisture on the trees gave them a glassy appearance.  We’d had one of the worst recorded snowstorms in Virginia history and it was still coming down.  I stomped the snow from my boots and took them off.   Setting them on the boot tray, I slipped my feet into my office loafers.  Then, I opened the door to shake my jacket outside of the building.  I worked as fast as I could so that minimal falling snow replaced what I was shaking off it.“You’re fighting a losing battle,” Nora said as she snuggled under an afghan while sitting in a tapestry covered winged back chair that she’d taken from one of the rooms in the unused west wing of the mansion sized house that Lance turned over to me when we were married back in time.  She’d strategically placed it in fron

I spent the next few days learning the purpose of and how to use the equipment that Nora had purchased in preparation for our taking on the paranormal.  I found it both interesting and frustrating.  There were gadgets for almost everything one might imagine, such as electromagnetic detectors and thermometers.  Apparently, ghosts use electricity to help them manifest and, when they do, the temperature in the room will change even if you can’t see them.  Being a skeptic at heart, I found the equipment both interesting and amusing.Although she insisted that she was up to task, I was adamant that we stick with our original arrangement of her handling the office affairs and me doing the investigations.  The last thing that I needed was for Nora to freak out if I uncovered ghosts in the Havershaft attic.Fully armed with my newfangled paraphernalia and fairly confident that I knew what to do with it all, I trekked on over to Cecil’s home

Although I was fairly certain that Jason wouldn’t return right away, Killian refused to leave my side.  While I was in the shower, he’d cleaned up the mess from when I’d pushed things off of my nightstand to gain his attention and then changed the sheets on my bed so that I was able to snuggle into fresh ones. I offered to have him lay beside me, but he insisted on holding vigil in the club chair that was located in the sitting area of the room.  He was of the opinion that Jason might very well return to untie me and remove my gag.  He was certain that, if he did, he wouldn’t think to look to the far side of the room for someone sitting in the chair.My very brave and intuitive detective was right.It was about an hour after he’d left me tied and gagged that Jason stepped out of the cheval mirror and approached my bed.  It was still quite dark, but if you were awake and alert like Killian and I were, it was

We went back to the office and finished hooking up to the cameras through the special app that Nora acquired for situations just like the case we were working.  Since I hadn’t studied that part of the new equipment usage, I let her tend to our remote connection while I called a nearby Italian restaurant for dinner delivery.  Because we expected it to be a long night, I also made sure that our supply of coffee was up to snuff.Pasta had a tendency to make me sleepy.  This time, it was no different.  We’d been so preoccupied with collecting our gear and then taking it to Cecil’s to set up that neither of us had thought to eat lunch.  Therefore, we ate more of the sleep inducing cuisine than was advisable for a night on the job.I was aroused from the light dosing state that my body couldn’t refrain from going into by the sound of the door opening and a disgruntled male voice. “I saw that your eyes were closed through

I was so taken aback by my conversation with Anton about Lance’s marriage to Lilith that I completely forgot that I’d promised to let Nora know when I was going to go over the recordings of the activities in Cecil’s attic.  When she stormed into the office wearing a look of disappointment, I felt truly awful.“Anton threw me with some bad news,” I offered with an apologetic tone.  “All I could think about was getting out of there.  I’m so sorry.”“What bad news?” she asked with a pouty voice that told me that she was trying to understand and forgive me, but wasn’t quite there yet.Don’t ask me why, because I told Nora everything, but, for some reason, I wasn’t ready to admit to her what Lance had done. “I’ll tell you about it later.”  I motioned for her to join me at the monitor.  “Here.  Look at this.”She rushed to my