“Miss Carly! You’re a sight for these eyes. I was hopin’ to see you. Augustus is a mighty fine man, but he ain’t got your magic touch.” He held up one of my shop’s bags. “I think he sold me a dud.”
My daddy could dole out potions laced with Leilara tears the same as I could, but it was true that he didn’t have my kind of magic. He wasn’t an empath, so he couldn’t diagnose ailments the way I could.
That shouldn’t have affected Mr. Butterbaugh, though. His was a placebo potion, made only to ease his mind about his various psychosomatic symptoms.
“I drank it right up.” A breeze ruffled his graying hair, and he tamped it back into place. “It didn’t work a lick. My stomach still hurts, and I been getting chest pains every time I hear a bump in the night. Last night was a doozy, let me tell you.” He blotted his sweaty forehead with a handkerchief pulled from his back pocket. His voice rose as he exclaimed, “Bumps here, bumps there, bumps everywhere!”
I put a hand on his arm to calm him down. “Do you think someone was in the house?”
“Hand on heart, I went looking. Even down to the basement where most of the noise was coming from. That place gives me the willies. I didn’t see nothing or no one.” His eyes widened and he wiped his forehead again and also his upper lip. “Do you think it’s possible the place is haunted?”
It was entirely possible. “I don’t know what to make of it. Especially not after what you told me last night about the other things going on.” Specifically the grave being dug up. That was just plain strange.
“I’m not sure I can take much more of it. I might have to give my notice to them Harpies. Find a new job. Who’s going to hire an old man like me?”
“You’re not old,” I said. He was sixty-eight and still had plenty of life left. “There are lots of people around town who’d hire you in a second.”
They would, too. Though Mr. Butterbaugh was a bit eccentric, he was a hard worker and deeply loyal to his employers. He’d worked for Rupert Ezekiel for close to forty years and had done the best with what he had been given where the house was concerned. There hadn’t been money enough to fix it up right until the Harpies had come along.
Rolling his eyes, he said, “I feel old. My stomach . . . my heart. Your daddy said you were taking a day off, but I’d be right grateful if you’d make me up one of your special potions.”
I studied him. He did look a tad bit pale, and it wasn’t all that warm outside, so I wasn’t sure why he was sweating the way he was. I decided to read his energy and was more than a little surprised to find that he was in fact hurting. The anxiety running through his veins hadn’t given him an ulcer as he thought, but it had irritated his stomach lining enough to cause discomfort. But it was his heart that bothered me. It was off rhythm, skipping beats.
“I’d be happy to,” I said, feeling a twinge of guilt that I’d written off his symptoms, “but you’d do best to make an appointment with your doctor to get that ticker looked at proper.”
I wasn’t sure what was going on with his heart, whether it was stress causing something to misfire or if, as happened often with aging, the heart had simply started to give out. Although I could cure many things, I couldn’t cure terminal ailments. If his heart was failing due to age, no amount of my potions would fix it. Modern medicine and surgery might be able to, however.
“Already have a visit with Doc Hamilton scheduled for tomorrow,” he said.
We headed for Potions, Jenny Jane and Virgil following us at a good distance. “Then you’ll be good as new in no time.”
When he was, I’d ask him if he was interested in adopting a dog.
“Not if things keep going bump,” he said emphatically.
He was truly spooked by that house. “You said the noise was in the basement?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Is there anything valuable down there?” I asked.
“Not especially. It ain’t very big at all, and it’s plumb stuffed with building supplies.”
I stopped walking, looked at him. When I’d been at Haywood’s house earlier I’d seen the blueprints for the Ezekiel mansion. I’d taken special note of the basement—because it had been so large. It was unusual around these parts to have a basement at all, never mind a large one, thanks to the rocky soil. “It’s small?”
Eyes filled with puzzlement, he nodded. “Tiny. It was used only as a storm and wine cellar by Mr. Rupert.”
There had to be hidden rooms down there somewhere. “I don’t suppose you know if Haywood Dodd spent much time down there?”
“Now that you say so, I often saw him coming and going a fair bit. Never did say why he spent so much time down there. I assumed it was structural stuff.”
Maybe. Maybe not.
“I can’t rightly believe what happened to him last night.” He shook his head. “Though I hated to do it, I went to the sheriff this morning and told him about the argument I overheard between Mr. Haywood and Miz Patricia right before he was killed.”