Alphas and Auras, a Sonny and Breanne Mystery, Book #5

By James Paavola

Eighth graders Sonny and Breanne look nothing alike—a short black boy, a tall white girl. Their special friendship developed after they discovered they both had psychic powers: they can read minds, and ghosts talk to them. Their ghost friends help them deal with bullies and solve mysteries. In Book 5 of the series, there are new threats from bullies and more requests for Breanne’s grandfather to help him with unsolved police cases. Two one-hundred-year old ghosts help fend off the bullies. Sonny’s grandmother gives him an ancient amulet that belonged to his great-great-grandmother who was a Hoodoo priestess. The amulet appears to give Sonny the beginnings of new skills to see auras and to be an animal-whisperer. At the same time, Breanne is developing her early skills to sense the presence of the hostile characteristics of bullies, especially bullied intent on hurting her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Paavola
• Release date: Nov 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781736413425

James Paavola

Dr. James C. Paavola is a retired psychologist. His primary focus had been children, adolescents, families, and the educational system. Jim began writing mysteries at age sixty-four. He lives with his wife in Memphis, Tennessee.

Book preview

ALSO BY JAMES PAAVOLA

Novels

A SONNY & BREANNE MYSTERY SERIES

Silence Speaks: A Sonny and Breanne Mystery #4

(A Killer Nashville ‘Silver Falchion Award’ finalist)

Astrobia: A Sonny and Breanne Mystery #3

(A Killer Nashville ‘Silver Falchion Award’ finalist & Featured in the 2020 ‘Diversity Issue’ of Kirkus Reviews Magazine)

Call Me Firefly: A Sonny and Breanne Mystery #2

Jack and the Beanpole:

A Sonny and Breanne Mystery

MURDER IN MEMPHIS SERIES

The Unspeakable: Murder In Memphis

(A Killer Nashville ‘Silver Falchion Award’ finalist)

Cast the First Stone: Murder In Memphis

Blood Money: Murder In Memphis

Which One Dies Today? Murder In Memphis

They Gotta Sleep Sometime: Murder In Memphis

The Chartreuse Envelope: Murder In Memphis

Short Stories

published in the Malice in Memphis award winning mystery anthologies:

Two Days Sober in Blues City Clues

Heinous Crimes and Murder in Blues City Clues

Five-Six-Seven-Eight in Lies Along the Mississippi

(MidSouthCon’s ‘Darrell Award Winner for Best Midsouth Short Story’)

A Cry from the Ashes in Mayhem in Memphis

Down in the Furnace Room in Elmwood: Stories to Die For

The Adventures of Sonny Etherly: Special Powers in Ghost Stories

The Silver Star in Bluff City Mysteries

Alphas and Auras

A Sonny and Breanne Mystery

(Book 5)

A NOVEL BY

James C. Paavola

Contents

Other Books by James Paavola

Title Page

Copyright Page

Acknowledgements

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Nine

Forty

Forty-One

Forty-Two

Forty-Three

Forty-Four

Forty-Five

Forty-Six

Copyright © 2023 by James C. Paavola

Website: www.jamespaavola.com

Cover Design: Shannon Paavola Greene

All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, duplicated, copied, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the express written consent and permission of the author.

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

Published by J&M Book Publishers

Memphis, Tennessee

ePub ISBN 978-1-7364134-3-2

Acknowledgements

I want to thank my core team: my wife Marilyn for her support and proof reading, our daughter Shannon for her creativity in crafting the cover.

Thanks also to our writing critique group—Phyllis Appleby, Barbara Christopher, Carolyn McSparren, and Patricia Potter—for their learned reviews and encouragement. Thanks so much.

The Sonny and Breanne Mystery novels were inspired by characters I introduced in two short stories published by Dark Oak Press—The Adventures of Sonny Elliott: Special Powers (2016), and Down in the Furnace Room: A Sonny and Breanne Mystery (2017).

Dedication

Joel David Paavola

9-16-71 to 6-4-18

In your short time with us, son, you made an incredible difference in our lives and in the lives of so many others. There is a hole in our hearts. We miss you so much.

One

I crossed the street to join Breanne Thurman for our usual walk to school. I looked up, did a double take. Whoa… The sun shining off your bright, green-rimmed glasses makes it look like you have an aura.

You mean like the Northern Lights? Breanne asked. Up by the Arctic Circle?

I stepped up onto the sidewalk. No, silly. An aura. Not the Aurora Borealis.

Oh, yeah. Aura…

I made a circular gesture toward her head. It’s more like you had your own little light show—a green cloud all around your head.

The colors of an aura are supposed to show a person’s character, right?

I nodded as we started walking. Remember, I told you my great-great-grandmother used to hold séances to contact the spirits of deceased loved ones?

Of course. How could I forget that?

Well, another one of her psychic gifts was that she could see peoples’ auras."

Cool. But what’s that gotta do with séances?

As a little girl, my Grams sat in on lots of her grandmother’s séances. Said her grandmother always checked the auras of each person sitting around her séance table. Naturally, everybody had their own qualities—good or bad. And the energy that flowed from those qualities showed up as surrounding clouds of different colors making up their aura—red, blue, yellow, green, silver, and so on. She was only worried when folks had a brown aura, and downright scared when they had a black aura.

Your great-great-grandmother ended up getting kidnapped, right? Breanne asked.

Yeah, by folks who claimed she was a witch. Grams said she never saw her grandmother after that.

That’s so sad.

I nodded. Grams thinks the people who came and took her grandmother away probably had black auras.

Can your Grams see a person’s aura? Did she inherit that skill from her grandmother?

I shook my head. She says that skill must’ve skipped a few generations like all the rest of her grandmother’s psychic powers.

Since your psychic powers seem to have been inherited from your great-great-grandmother, does that mean you can see a person’s aura like she could?

I squinted as I studied Breanne. Nope. Can’t see any circle of light around you now. Even the green reflection from your glasses is gone.

Breanne and I had recently become good friends. She’s a tall, skinny, white girl with long straight brown hair and, of course, braces and bright, green-rimmed glasses. Oh, yeah. She’s really smart.

Neither one of us ever had a real friend before. Too bad we had to wait until the eighth grade. Breanne had been homeschooled through the seventh grade. We met when school started this year, and we were in many of the same classes. She was the first person to ever sit with me at the small cafeteria table in the back—the one the kids call the nerd table.

Turns out Breanne and I have psychic powers—some the same, some different. We are both able to read minds, especially each other’s. She can hear ghosts but can’t see them. I can sense when a ghost is nearby, but only rarely see them. Kinda by accident, we discovered that when we touch hands, our psychic powers are combined so that we both can see and hear ghosts. You better believe that was a shocker when it first happened. But that’s a different story.

We’ve made many ghost friends in the few months we’ve known each other. They’ve protected us from school bullies and helped us solve old cases for the Memphis Police Department. How cool is that? Of course, we can only see and talk to the ghosts when we are touching hands. But there’s no way I’m gonna be caught holding hands with her in public.

Breanne leaned forward to rebalance her backpack, bulging with the clear outline of books. She began stretching out her long legs. My short legs had to work hard to keep up. After a brief silence, she said, Had a dream about Hadley and Mika.

What about them?

Nothing in particular. I guess it’s ’cause I miss them. I miss all our ghost friends.

I looked up at her. But it was time for their spirits to leave earth and cross over into the Light.

I know, and I’m happy that has happened for all the ghosts we’ve met—human and animal. I truly am. But our time together is always so short. We just get to know them, and then they’re gone.

Yeah, it’s been more than a week, and I still can’t get over how little Hadley’s ghost raised me off the floor, floated me away from the fire and out that small basement window. I never felt a thing. She wasn’t holding me or carrying me. I was weightless. Like I was floating in outer space.

Breanne nodded. Same for me. Even though you had to pull me the rest of the way through the window because her powers weren’t strong enough to float all six feet of me completely out.

Whadoya call what she did? Tel-e…?

"Her psychic skill was tel-e-kin-E-sis, the ability to move things just by thinking about it. She was able to raise us up in the air like there was no gravity, and then fly us across the room."

"Telekinesis, I said. She did all that with her brain. That was super cool."

Yeah. She floated us around the same way she’d made that book fly across Ms Garfield’s classroom.

I wish we could float ourselves to school.

Or, at least, float these heavy backpacks.

We can read minds, I said. Maybe we can do even more with our minds—maybe float stuff, like Hadley did.

Let’s try it, Breanne said as she stopped and shrugged out of her backpack.

I let my backpack slide to the sidewalk.

Breanne looked around, then back at me. Nobody’s watching. Let’s try it. Give it all you got.

I stared at my backpack and concentrated as hard as I could—tightened all the muscles in my body as if I was trying to lift a full-grown Saint Bernard.

Nothing happened. My lumpy pack full of books just sat there.

I glanced down at Breanne’s backpack. It hadn’t moved either.

Oh, well, she said. It was worth a try.

Maybe the power will come to us one day out of the blue. You know. Like all of a sudden you knew when that bully was watching you from the other side of the cafeteria. You even knew where he’d been. You could track him like a bloodhound follows a scent in the woods. That’s straight fire, too.

Breanne shrugged. Not sure how that happened. But it’s a new skill I’ll have to keep working on. It’s like I’m real sensitive to the negative energy of a person who wants to hurt us.

Would that be like being in touch with their brown or black aura?

Black aura? She cocked her head. Maybe. But, so far, I’m only sensitive to a person’s angry vibes. I never see any colors surrounding that person. She hefted her backpack and swung into it. We’d better get to school. Don’t wanna be late.

As we got close to the school, we saw students kind of bunched up waiting their turn to get through the school doors. When we turned from the main sidewalk to join the line, Breanne stuck her arm out in front of me.

I stopped, looked up. What?

I’m getting that feeling again.

Like a bloodhound picking up a scent?

She nodded.

Who’s negative energy is it?

She slowly shook her head. Can’t tell. But it feels familiar. It’s someone I know…someone who’s angry and wants to hurt me.

Come on, I said. Let’s go inside. I bet the name will come to you when you get closer to the source of the negative energy.

Inside, Breanne cut back on her long strides, and we slow-walked down the hall, taking time to shoot a quick look into each classroom. We came to the stairs and began to climb up.

I lost contact, she said. Whoever it is must still be on the first floor.

Keep your eyes open, Bree, and your bloodhound nose turned on.

She nodded.

Two

I went to my locker on the second floor while Breanne continued up the stairs to her locker on the third floor. I unloaded my afternoon books, then walked down the hall to first period history class. I heard more talking than usual among the students as I approached the classroom.

As soon as I stepped inside, the talking stopped. All heads turned to look at me.

Now what? I thought. I tried to make myself even shorter than I am. I looked down and hurried across the front of the class to my desk near the windows. I felt their eyes follow me. I quickly shrugged out of my backpack and dropped into my desk.

Within seconds, a single voice broke the silence, followed by other voices until the whole classroom was buzzing again.

What’re they saying about me? What’s going on? Could this be tied to the negative energy Breanne sensed? Does someone want to hurt Breanne? Hurt me?

Again, the room fell absolutely quiet, like someone had turned off the CD in the middle of one of Pavarotti’s powerful operatic solos.

My whole body tensed. I forced myself to look over.

A girl paused in the doorway.

Bethany Hamilton?

What’s Bethany doin’ here? She stole Ms Case’s Mickey Mouse watch and then tried to blame the theft on Breanne. She was caught in the act and expelled. Why’d they let her back in school?

Bethany looked serious, maybe a little scared. She walked in slowly. Ms Case got out of her chair, smiled, and took her hand.

Huh? It looks like Ms Case is happy to see her. I don’t get it.

Bethany forced a smile, turned toward the class and headed to her old desk, shooting me a wicked side-eye as she passed. The class remained quiet except for Allison and Caitlin, two of her bullying girl friends. They waved and hurried to meet her, then the three of ’em got all chatty.

I dropped off my afternoon books in my locker and headed down to my first period social studies class on the second floor. Inside the classroom, a girl greeted me with kind eyes and a smile—Francine. She wore a silver stud in her nose and swaths of purple accented her dishwater blond hair, which was styled in a bob with the left side of her head shaved. Besides Sonny, she’s the only kid in the school who actually speaks to me, and, on occasion, she’s stepped between me and some smart mouth kid. I smiled and took my desk behind her.

She swiveled around to me. You hear?

Hear what?

Bethany Hamilton’s back.

My stomach dropped. That’s whose negative energy I sensed, I thought. But Bethany was expelled—

I know, Francine interrupted. I was there, remember?

Yeah… So why’s she back in school?

The way I hear it, Ms Case didn’t want to press charges. So, Bethany didn’t have to go to juvie.

And what about Deena? She was the gang leader. It was all her idea. She was expelled too. Is she coming back?

Francine shook her head. Her mother enrolled her in a private school.

Deena’s your cousin, right?

Francine nodded. My mom and her mom are sisters.

She’s so mean. You two couldn’t be more different.

Francine smiled. Same for my mom and my aunt.

Three

I took the stairs to the third floor for algebra class and was already settled at my desk when Breanne walked in. We try not to speak when kids are around. Instead, we read each other’s minds. I had my head down and pretended to be going over my homework, but I couldn’t help myself, my mind practically yelled at her. Bree! I know whose energy you tapped into. You’ll never guess who showed up in my history class.

Bethany, Breanne thought, as she walked past me on her way to her desk in the next row, one back from mine.

How’d you know?

Francine told me. So, what happened first period?

Not much to tell. Ms Case was all nicey-nicey with her.

Heard Ms Case wanted to give her a second chance. Did Bethany say anything?

Only to Allison and Caitlin.

Now the gang’s back together, except Deena.

Oh, yeah. Bethany shot me an evil side-eye.

So, she IS angry. Just like Deena, she’s blaming us for her getting ex—

Breanne Thurman! Ms Eller said loudly, interrupting our mental conversation. Hello! … Anyone home?

All the students laughed.

Breanne looked up. Ma’am?

Are you with us this morning?

Sorry, Breanne said. I guess I was thinking about something else.

Well, Ms Eller said, it’s time to be thinking about algebra. We’re on homework problem number three. It seems the class had some difficulty with the way this question was worded. Admittedly, one must read it carefully. What was your answer?

Breanne pulled out her homework, ran her finger down the page. The answer to number three is seventeen, she said.

Ms Eller smiled. Correct. Tell us how you arrived at that answer.

I restated the word problem in an algebraic equation, then solved the equation.

We’re going to need a bit more information Miss Eller said. Come up to the white board and walk us through it, step by step.

Breanne slowly