Where Dead Bodies Lie (The Body Dowser Series, #1)

By Kat Cazanav

For as long as I can remember, I have been told to follow three important rules;
Always guard my ability
Never share my secret
And pretend to be normal.

However, those three little rules don’t make my life easier. I still find dead people and deal with strange visions. Not to mention, an attraction to a boy who doesn’t exist. Whenever we cross path’s he mists away like smoke on a mirror. He drives me crazy, that Kaff Cooper.

As a flock of dead crows fall from the blackened sky, Kaff becomes the only one who can see the truth straight to the dark underbelly of who I actually am.

My hands feel the pull to extract the forsaken, the lost, the forgotten. It comes as naturally as breathing and there is no stopping it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kat Cazanav
• Release date: Feb 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310583889

Kat Cazanav

Kat Cazanav graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles with a B.A. in film. After working in television and starting a family, she moved to the Pacific Northwest. She shares her life with family and pets on five acres of woodland. When not writing you can find her reading and when not reading she is usually writing. On occasion when writer's block hits, walking through her favorite neighborhood in Seattle will usually spark an idea.

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Table of Contents

Book Blurb

Also by Kat Cazanav

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Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Acknowledgements

The Accidental Kiss by Nicole Simone

" For as long as I can remember, I have been told to follow three important rules;

Always guard my ability

Never share my secret

And pretend to be normal.

However, those three little rules don’t make my life easier. I still find dead people and deal with strange visions. Not to mention, an attraction to a boy who doesn’t exist. Whenever we cross paths he mists away like smoke on a mirror. He drives me crazy, that Kaff Cooper.

As a flock of dead crows fall from the blackened sky, Kaff becomes the only one who can see the truth straight to the dark underbelly of who I actually am.

My hands feel the pull to extract the forsaken, the lost, the forgotten. It comes as naturally as breathing and there is no stopping it."

Also by Kat Cazanav

The Virgin Detective

"Before dowsers, there were seekers, questers searching for the truth, then I came along and

found you"

TWENTY FEET DOWN, in almost complete darkness, lay a mile of underground tunnels. The mine had been abandoned since the 1950s, left to the inhabitants of the underworld. Bat wings fluttered, insects buzzed, and rodents scurried through pitch-black channels and as an eight-year-old on summer vacation; I could think of no better place to be. Every turn, every passageway held new treasures for me to discover. I was too young to appreciate the power I possessed but my mother reminded me I had come from a long line of dowsers on her side of the family. Our ability to locate water could be traced back to the 1400s when dowsers were thought to be witches, burned at the stake for having a sixth sense like mine. Even now, my grandmother, who dabbled in alchemy and dowsing, kept her talents to herself.

Most folks think we’re the devil’s children, she would say. We could wind up hangin’ from a clothesline if we’re not careful.

Terrified she might be right, I only showed my talent during the summers, excavating mines with my wildcatter dad. According to him, my dowsing was both a godsend and a curse. It put food on the table, a roof over our heads, and had us marked as ‘crazies.’ I found underground riverbeds sparkling with gold, silver, and flecks of diamond and then, of course there was the occasional dead body. Occasional being the operating word. I’d only located two stiffs—one in a mine and one in an alleyway walking home with a friend. Dowsing had its perks and its downfalls. The dead bodies were definitely a downfall. But, as with all afflictions, you learn to accept them and I did. Until this one particular morning in June. I was eight years old, on summer vacation and had no idea my ability would bury me alive.

My dad and I had traveled by plane, train, and puddle jumper to a tiny spot off the coast of Alaska. It was here, in the wooded tundra, we set our sights on an abandoned mine. According to outdated maps, gold had been located but never extracted from the site. Odd as that sounded it wasn’t unusual for wildcatters to be spooked by strange noises from Mother Nature’s belly and leave in a hurry. But this only fueled my dad’s curiosity to find gold and I was his ticket to locating it.

Now, as we walked through several underground shafts, the odor of damp earth and rotten potatoes gave me a headache.

You feel anything yet, Stella? Dad adjusted his headlamp and squinted into the darkness. Tall and hunched over from all those years of crawling through low lying passageways, even today he ducked in a cave where the ceiling was a good ten feet high.

Nope, nothing. I ran my hand over the small crystal pendant hanging from my neck. It was a family heirloom, handed down from years of use by the women in my family. My mother had gifted me with it just before she disappeared.

The crystal’s faint vibration was all I needed to guide me toward treasures within the rocky walls. But this morning the pendant was quiet and to make matters worse, my headlamp sagged over my forehead. I pushed it back up and walked a few more feet, stopping where the tunnel forked off into two passageways—one on the left and one on the right. Awhile back, the left tunnel had been boarded up but now the rotted wood planks lay on the ground at the mouth of the opening. Scavengers had been here snooping around. I wondered if they’d found anything worthwhile.

What’re you feelin’ now, Stella? Which one do we choose?

I knew the drill by heart. My hands clutched the tiny crystal and waved it in the air, picking up prickling static. A hum began to build in my fingertips. Hand to the left and the feeling died. Hand to the right and the vibration grew bolder.

The right one. I said.

You sure?

A faint buzz traveled from the crystal to my hand. A familiar wooziness settled over me. Yep, I’m sure.

My dad grabbed me at the waist and lugged me like a large doll under his arm, stepping over the rotted wood barrier strewn at the mouth of the passageway. Once inside the sloped shaft, he set me down and we moved cautiously over loose gravel. The tunnel narrowed and as we traveled deeper down into the chasm, my fingertips swept the craggy walls waiting for the familiar sensation to build. At some point I made a grunting noise to stop. The steady buzz in my hand turned to a throb, bordering on painful. My dad looked at me, silent and waiting. Glistening sweat trickled out of a crack in the ancient rock.

It’s here, I whispered, feeling the icy pricks of a thousand tiny needles in the tips of my fingers. I should have been excited but instead, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I wiped my forehead and pushed the headlamp higher, its beam of light drawing attention to a filmy dark shadow behind my dad. I squinted, trying to determine where the shadow was coming from. There were only two people in this cave—my dad and I—so what the heck was this dark shadow? It had this quivering, smoky effect expanding outward from the wall. I’d never seen anything like it.

My dad wasn’t paying attention to anything but the trickle of water leaking out of the crack. We’ll take a core sample and stake a claim, then we’ll go.

We have a thousand claims worth nothing, I groaned. I want to leave now. I stuck my hands inside my coat pockets to ignore the sensation and fixed my eyes on the inky outline of the shadow behind him. I have to go pee. When all else failed, Mother Nature called.

So go pee. You’re not the first to mark your territory around here.

I’m a girl. I have to sit down.

He looked over at me and the black aura pulled away like smoke drifting off into the recesses of the cave. I wanted to follow it but something told me not to.

Don’t be like your mother. He reached into his belt for a tiny pickaxe. Damn impatient, she was. Never could stick around long enough to see your talent blossom. He began to chisel away at flecks of shale in the wall.

Why did he always have to compare me to my mother? Did he think I’d vanish into thin air like she did? I wouldn’t. I loved my dad. I loved my mom too, but I think I’d scared her—not so much because I’d inherited her ability to find things, but because once you developed one psychic ability, you usually acquired another. My mom could find a missing earring but also bend a spoon and slam a door shut with her mind. She feared my talents might be equally varied if not stronger. She had a good reason for thinking the worst. By five years old I could mentally move the couch to get at a hard to reach toy. I once willed the family car a few feet backwards to remove a homework paper underneath it.

My ability was changing, growing, adding new dimensions. I’d begun to see things like the strange shadow that had visited us in this cave, then disappeared.

Dad stopped chiseling and glanced over at me. You okay, Stella?

I straightened up. I’m feeling the hum, but it’s different. It hurts.

It hurts? His voice carried concern. Anything different in these dark witching fields was cause for alarm. When did it start?

I closed my eyes and struggled to will away the premonition that the shadow and pain in my fingertips were related in some ominous way.

I want to leave, I announced with the willful determination of a frightened child. I glanced down at the crystal pendant dangling around my neck. Its fiery glow cast a pale pink light over the walls of the cave. Then suddenly, in that moment between my words and my dad’s eyes meeting mine, the earth began to rumble.

I screamed as a mountain of mud and rock broke free of the wall. An avalanche of mud roared toward us. Several bodies, somewhat preserved from the chilly elements, knocked us down, limbs intertwined like broken mannequins. Panicked, I clawed my way through mounds of dirt toward the exit of the cave. My dad’s words faded quickly, consumed by a second avalanche. I tripped and recovered, only to fall again, my headlamp flying off my head to the ground. I scrambled to find it in pitch-blackness when a monstrous ball of smoke plugged my eyes, nose, and mouth with dust, cutting off my air supply. My last breath of air was wasted effort.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, a young couple hiking along the trail found my body on the ground near the entrance to the cave. I never understood how I got there but I didn’t question it. Didn’t want to. The entire event was pushed under the rug, too horrific to reexamine through the eyes of a child. In a few fleeting seconds, I’d lost my dad, my childhood, and the crystal pendant. After my dad’s funeral, I vowed never to dowse for anything ever again. But no matter how hard I tried to erase my ability, I knew deep down it was as much a part of me as movement was to a shark or breathing was to humans. Body dowsing was in my blood. It would come back to haunt me.

Six years later -

IT WAS FALL, a few short days away from the beginning of my freshman year in high school. I sat across from my aunt Lily in the diner ignoring the brochures strewn across the table. Instead, I stabbed at my pancakes swimming in syrup and thought about Lily’s question.

What do I fear most? I asked. Well, I guess if I had to pick one thing it would be tomorrow.

Lily smiled. The title ‘aunt’ didn’t fit a twenty-seven-year-old with a red dragon tattooed onto her wrist. I know this is hard for you, Stella, but it’s a no-brainer. Opportunity is knocking and you have to go.

Opportunity for whom? She had inherited me when my dad died. She’d been twenty-one, I was eight. Too young to cook macaroni and cheese without setting the house on fire and too impressionable to live with my crazy grandmother who spent most of her time making scary potions out of dead stuff. There was no one I could live with except Lily, my dad’s younger stepsister. To tell you the truth, there were times I didn’t know who was raising whom. She was part mom, part sister, and part friend. She held down two jobs, law school, and taking care of me. Frankly, the ‘me’ part was killing her social life. Most of her dates hightailed it when they realized Lily was raising a kid on the verge of puberty. The idea contained more shock value than sticking their wet finger in a light socket.

So when she had entered me in the ‘under privileged highly accelerated program for the un-entitled youth of tomorrow,’ I didn’t squawk. I understood her motive. She wanted to get a life and give me one as well.

Point taken, I acknowledged. It’s an opportunity for both of us.

I ate a crispy piece of bacon and read the brochure on the table. The prep school was tucked away atop a mountain overlooking a small village in northern Canada. The impeccably manicured estate was home to 300 brilliant, driven young students, all sharing wealth, nobility, and entitlement—qualities I lacked but made up for in the ‘different’ category: high IQ and creepy lineage.

A third of the students at LeMoray never made it to their senior year while the survivors went on to the finest colleges in the world. I finished reading the horror story and shoved the pamphlet back at Lily.

Sounds super fun.

Cut the sarcasm. The school’s amazing. She turned the brochure over and tapped the photos. Check out the perks. Three salad bars, indoor swimming pool, tennis courts, crew, dressage, AND a mandatory program called the ‘Circle of Love’ where students learn unconditional acceptance. Pretty awesome, huh?

Wow. Fake friends. Can’t beat that. You think they’ll accept me when they find out I dowse for dead stuff?

Just be yourself. Lily said. You haven’t had any episodes since. . . .

Right. I cut her off. My dad’s death. No use talking about it. I’d lost the crystal pendant during the accident but I still had my fingers, which could do a sizable amount of body dredging if I put my mind to it. Which I didn’t. Any weird sensations in my fingers were ignored. I’d sit on my hands and hum or wear gloves. I had an entire collection of them. Anyway, I could finally get to sleep at night without nightmares.

What about tuition? Who’s paying for my makeover?

Endowments from the program and the school. Every so often, a student catches their eye who they feel is brilliant, like yourself, so they offer that student the opportunity of a lifetime.

Salad bars suck, I said suspiciously. And so do my grades, by the way.

You’re IQ’s impressive. They think your grades will improve once you’re there.

Doubtful. School bored me. I got D’s and F’s in just about every subject because the letter G didn’t exist, but if it had it would stand for ‘god-awful.’ The only subject that rocked was science. I’d read Stephen Hawking’s book on the theory of everything when I was in fourth grade, trying to make sense of the dowsing accident in the cave with my dad. The book didn’t give me those answers but still, it blew me away.

When do I leave? I asked glumly.

Next week. Don’t pout, she said, in a motherly tone. This is a chance to make new friends, get good grades, and meet some boys. It’ll be awesome.

What was wrong with the experience I was having right now? Eating pancakes in the diner, a part time job at the old folks’ home on Saturday afternoons where I created artwork out of mashed potatoes and dirty coffee cups, and, of course, public school where I blended into the sterile walls and counted the knitting club as my social hub even though I hated yarn.

I wanted to bail on this dumb idea but I couldn’t say no and I didn’t. Lily was struggling to keep herself afloat and one less obligation, like me, would help.

Fine, I mumbled. But it’s going to suck.

Yes. Lily gave me a high five and smiled from ear to ear. Let’s celebrate! She raised her orange juice in a toast. To my amazing niece. Onward and upward. May the next four years be the sickest ever!

THE GREAT THING about being a freshman in high school is you have no past and you have no future. You’re a blank slate. Whatever happens in those first few weeks will haunt you till your dying day.

For this reason, I didn’t go into detail about my family lineage with others. It screamed tragic with a dead dad, runaway mom, no siblings, a grandmother who believed alchemy cured the common cold, and one aunt only a few years legal. LeMoray’s realm of outlandish bordered on comatose so keeping things simple was important. I became Ella, removing the St in Stella. Less stuffy sounding. My dad’s death became an accident. The only glimmer of hope was the fact that I had inherited worthless claims on hundreds of abandoned gold mines from him that might be worth zillions in the future. This possibility allowed me to sit within spitting distance of the popular table with soul suckers like Dana Lewis and Kelly Daniels. I didn’t tell anyone about my ability to dowse. That quirk might send me to the nurse’s station so I told no one except Addy Lovitt, my roommate and BFF.

As heir to a cereal conglomerate family, Addy spent the better part of each summer at a factory in Ohio taste testing hundreds of gross cereals. She was funny, nice, and thought dowsing might be a secret power that could help locate other things besides bodies, even cute guys in Nebraska, if I gave it a shot. But I said no and she never pressed me. We became best friends.

A few weeks into the school year, I felt I was finally adjusting when a biology field trip killed me. Literally.

Our teacher assigned us to trudge a half mile into the forest and take sample cuttings of rare foliage to identify back in the lab. Half our grade for the semester depended on how thoroughly we completed this assignment.

Pretty soon, an undercurrent of competition grew into epic hostility as students staked claims to specific areas of the woods. I lost interest within minutes and split from the rest of the herd, moving deeper into the thicket to find edible berries. A clumsy oaf named Fielding Connaghy followed me, swearing under his breath as his starched uniform khakis snagged on nettles and blackberry twigs. I stopped near a ravine and waited for him to catch up. He detached himself from a mess of thorns and joined me by a dead tree.

You’re weird, he said, stating the obvious.

I rolled my eyes. Ten more minutes of this and I’d be set free to raid the vending machines in the halls. Yeah, so? I grabbed the metal tweezers out of his hand and plucked a dead caterpillar off his shoulder. He winced but remained cool.

Just saying. I can read girls pretty good and you’re not normal.

I handed him back the tweezers. His insight into my inner self was a bunch of crap. He knew nothing about me, nor my strangeness. He was fourteen, horny, and this was his way of starting a conversation. A really bad conversation. You’re right, I said flatly. I don’t do normal. I walked away, leaving him to rethink his torn pants.

Hey, wait up, Fielding shouted.

I picked up the pace to a walk run.

Slow down, he shouted.

I glanced back at Fielding’s torn pants and smiled. I could have easily lost him but his determination to keep up with me was kind of flattering so I slowed to an old lady trot. What do you want, Fielding?

He tripped over a rock and came up short, swinging his bag of leaves by his side. I need to know why you don’t hang out with anyone. You’re always alone.

What’s it to you?

His eyes pressed into two dark tiny peas, checking me out. I work on the school newspaper. It’s my job to find the dirt on every student around here. How’d you pull off being accepted to LeMoray? Pretty impressive considering you have nothing.

I flinched at the words, ‘you have nothing.’ I had more power in my fingertips than the entire school had in their trust funds. I took a deep breath to stifle my anger and responded coolly, Are you asking me how I’ve managed to keep everyone from talking shit about me?

Yeah, I guess. His face brightened at our deep connection.

I looked him straight in the eye. I’m tactless, I said flatly. I say what’s on my mind. It scares people away.

Really? You say the truth?

Where was he going with this? The truth? Hardly. No one knew the truth about me. I cleared my throat. Saying what’s on my mind and telling the truth are two different things. I’m just clueless. I turned and walked away with my bag of leaves. He followed.

I hear you’re smart. Scary smart. You never study and ace every test.

I tripped over an exposed tree root. I grabbed a fistful of leaves off the ground and dumped them in my specimen bag. I have enough leaves to build a hut. I’m heading back to class. I marched off. If anyone