Fic: Thirteen at Dinner (2/15)

[jedisapphire]

Masterpost
Prologue

Chapter I: Frances Ashby

“Sounds like a standard haunting,” Dean said, leafing through Sam’s notes. “Frances Ashby killed her husband, who according to witness testimony was a douche who deserved it.”

Sam shrugged. “I don’t think anyone was very sympathetic to provocation as a defence in those days.”

“How’d she kill him?”

“According to the court account, a spell. She was tried for witchcraft.”

“Was it really a spell?”

“Who knows? Witnesses said they were all at dinner when he suddenly had a fit and died. A local pastor who was there testified that he was foaming at the mouth.”

“So it could’ve been poison?”

“Maybe. Back then they took it for a sign of demonic possession. Frances was arrested and tried, but she committed suicide in prison the day before the jury was due to pronounce its verdict. She hanged herself, which was an easier fate that what might’ve happened to her if they’d officially found her guilty.”

“Suicide.” Dean looked up at Sam. “Not buried in the churchyard, then.”

“Crossroads. Standard practice. The road fell out of use and got pretty overgrown, so nothing much happened until last year, when Josh Mathieson bought the land to put up some prefabs. All the people who moved in reported strange noises, lights, cold spots, the usual.”

“And we know it’s Frances because…”

“She writes her name on fogged-up windows.”

“That’s one helpful ghost.”

“Maybe.”

“What?” Dean put down the notebook. “I know that look. What’s wrong?”

“Something about this just doesn’t feel right, Dean. There’s something we’re missing.”

“All right. We’ll ask around, see what we can dig up… Maybe find us someone who knows some of the local lore.” Dean paused. “Mathieson said he could hook us up with some people.” Sam, as he’d expected, made a face. “Oh, come on, Samantha. I know you don’t like the guy, but he’s the one who called us in. He might actually be helpful.”

“He’s lying to us, Dean.”

“Yeah, he probably is. But not the way you think. He took one look at you and knew that if he said he wants to get rid of the ghost because it’s driving down property prices, you’d get all prissy and lecture him. He had to pretend to care more about keeping his tenants safe.”

“Dean!”

“So the guy isn’t up for the Nobel Peace Prize, Sam. So what? We still have a job to do.”

“I don’t trust him.”

“Let’s just get the names from him.” Dean was trying to conceal his frustration, but it wasn’t easy.

People said Sam was the trusting one, but that was just because they didn’t know him. Kid was too polite to make a show of it when he thought someone was a lying scumbag. He was nice to everyone, including jerks who didn’t deserve it, but he didn’t trust anyone but Dean.

Dean would be lying if he said he didn’t like that a little.

Right now, though, the instinctive dislike Sam had taken to Josh Mathieson wasn’t helping them any.

After a moment, Dean said, “Fine, how about this? I’ll get the names from him. That way you don’t have to talk to him.”

“That’s not the point,” Sam muttered.


Sam knew Dean thought he was being unreasonable, but something about Mathieson rubbed him the wrong way. Sam wasn’t a stranger to liars - they saw plenty of them, and a lot of the time they were normal people dealing with grief or stress or anger the only way they could. But Mathieson… He was just skeevy.

Sam sighed and tried not to scowl too hard. He’d tried to talk Dean out of going to see the guy. They could solve the case without his help. A standard haunting wasn’t something they hadn’t dealt with a thousand times before. These were the kinds of jobs they’d been handling solo since Sam had been in high school.

But Dean had insisted on going. And he’d insisted on going alone, like he thought Sam would be stupid enough to tell Mathieson he didn’t trust him.

Sam found himself wishing they hadn’t taken the case at all.

He took a sip of his vanilla latte and tried to focus on research, but he couldn’t. The café was too crowded, full of too many chattering college kids, whose laptops were using up most of the bandwidth on the already slow WiFi connection.

“Excuse me?”

Sam looked up.

A girl was standing behind the chair opposite his. She was college-age. Despite the fact that her brown hair was pulled into an unfashionable ponytail, she was cute, and Sam was surprised to see her alone. She looked like the type who had friends wherever she went.

“Do you mind?” she asked. “Everywhere else is taken.”

“Go ahead,” Sam said, trying to smile. It wasn’t the girl’s fault Mathieson was a scumbag and Dean was an idiot.

She sat, dropping her backpack to the floor and setting her cup of - by the look of it - hot chocolate on the table. “I spent all night working on a paper,” she explained. “I needed caffeine.”

“You couldn’t just crash?” Sam asked, amused. “You’ve finished the paper, right?”

“Sure. But I also…” She looked down at her hot chocolate, poking at the whipped cream with a stirrer, and then back up at Sam. “Promise you won’t freak out if I tell you something weird?”

“Trust me, I doubt you could come up with anything weird enough to freak me out.”

“I wanted to talk to you.” The girl drew in a couple of deep breaths, like she was steeling herself, before she went on, “I need your help.”

“My help?”

“You’re Sam Winchester, right?”

Sam’s eyes narrowed. “Who are you?”

“My name is Frances Ashby - no, wait, stop! You promised not to freak out!” She reached across the table with surprising speed, grabbing Sam’s hand before he could pull out a weapon. “Please, I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just want to talk.”

“I thought you committed suicide more than three hundred years ago.”

“I did. I’m a ghost. I managed to possess this young woman - no, I’m doing her no harm, I promise you. Please, just talk to me.”

“How do I even know you’re Frances Ashby?” Sam asked.

“Just hear me out. If you don’t believe me, I’ll leave.”

Josh Mathieson was in his sixties, exactly the kind of slimy businessman Sam was guaranteed to dislike. His suit was expensive, probably designer, and he’d promised them a nice commission if they got rid of the ghost before it did any serious damage. Dean didn’t like the guy any more than Sam did, but he was more than willing to take his money. It wasn’t like anyone else was lining up to pay them.

A smiling secretary, who couldn’t have been older than twenty-two, ushered Dean into his office.

“Dean.” Mathieson nodded at him, not bothering to stand. “You’re by yourself?”

“Yeah, Sam had some stuff to do,” Dean said. “Research. I’ve got to go help him or I won’t hear the end of it for months. I just came by to collect the list of names you said you’d give us.”

“Sam doesn’t trust me, does he?”

Dean shrugged. “Sam tends not to trust people who lie to him. You have that list?”

Mathieson reached into one of the drawers, pulling out an envelope and handing it over.

“There you go. Everyone who might know anything - witnesses, people who know something of the history of the area - and whatever contact information my people could dig up. I hope it’s useful.”

“Thanks,” Dean said, turning to go. “We’ll keep you posted.”

“Dean.”

Dean turned back. “Yeah.”

“I’m… I’m not a bad person, Dean. Here, look.” He got to his feet and came around the table to Dean, pulling his wallet out of his pocket as he did. “Look.” He thrust a picture in Dean’s face. Dean took it automatically. It was of a pretty brunette, about twenty. “That’s my daughter. Avery. She disappeared four days ago.”

Dean frowned. Sam had done some basic checking into Mathieson’s background, and he’d found records of his wife’s death in a boating accident about fifteen years ago. There’d been a grainy picture of a then-four-year-old daughter.

“There wasn’t anything in the papers about her disappearing,” Dean said. “Or on the local police database. Sam would’ve found it.”

“Do you think I wanted my daughter’s life to turn into the latest media scandal? I’ve hired a private detective to track her down - the best in the business - but he’s turned up nothing so far. I couldn’t help wondering if it had something to do with…” Mathieson made a face. “With Frances Ashby.” He met Dean’s eyes. “I know your brother doesn’t like me, and I’m not claiming to be a saint, but… that’s my baby girl.”

Dean felt a sudden stab of pity. Maybe the guy had been less than honest with them, but if Sammy had disappeared, Dean would’ve been doing a lot worse than lying to people he didn’t know.

“We’ll find her,” he said quietly.

Mathieson shook his hand. “Thank you.”

“I didn’t kill my husband,” was the first thing Frances Ashby said as soon as she and Sam were outside the café.

“Yeah, we’ll get to that in a minute. First, who are you possessing? You need to let the girl go. We’ll figure out some other way to talk.”

“Let’s go somewhere private.”

“Back to the motel, then.”

It was a short walk. Fortunately they hadn’t yet laid down salt lines, so Frances followed Sam into the room without any trouble. She insisted on him locking the door. Then, with a sudden gust of freezing cold, the ghost pulled itself out of the girl.

The girl swayed on her feet. Sam reached for her arm to steady her.

“Hey,” he said gently. “You OK?”

“Yeah.” She sounded disorientated, which wasn’t really a surprise. “Is it… Is it OK? Is everything OK? Did it work?”

“Did what work?”

“I told Frances she could… I said… I said I’d help her.”

“You gave her permission to possess you?” Sam knew he sounded sceptical. “Why? Why would you do a thing like that?”

“Because she needed help!”

“Look at me, Sam,” a hoarse voice urged.

Sam looked.

Frances bore a very slight resemblance to the girl she’d been possessing. She looked like a washed-out, translucent version of a human. She might have been pretty once, but now she was gaunt, sunken cheeks, blue-tinged lips, with what looked like a knotted bedsheet twisted around her slender neck and dangling down to her feet. Her dress was ragged, her boots worn.

“Would you have believed me?” she asked, still in that hoarse voice. Wrecked vocal cords, Sam guessed. “If I had come to you like this, would you even have listened to me?”

“Probably not,” Sam admitted. “But what do you want?”

“I didn’t kill my husband,” Frances repeated. “They accused me - everyone accused me, even Kat.”

“Kat?”

“Kat, my friend. More like my sister. We grew up together, we loved each other. I thought - I thought she at least would believe me. Nobody did. I’ll tell you everything. I want to pass on, but I can’t. Not until my name is cleared.”

“Does it matter?” Sam asked gently. “Everyone knows now the witch trials were based on ignorance and superstition, and most victims of the witch-hunts were innocent.”

“That’s what Avery said.”

“Avery?”

“That’s me,” said the girl, holding out a hand. “Avery Mathieson. Pleased to meet you.”

“Mathieson? Any relation to Josh Mathieson?”

“Yeah, he’s my dad.”

“He’s the one who called us in on this case. Does he know you’ve been harbouring a fugitive from beyond the veil?”

“I don’t think he’d notice the difference,” Avery said a little bitterly. “But that’s not important now. I told Frances the same thing - we all know the witch trials were a load of crap. But she says that’s not enough.”

“They might believe I wasn’t a witch,” Frances put in. “But anyone who reads the history of the trial might still think I killed Ralph. They’ll think I poisoned him. I have to clear my name - for Joyce. My daughter. I did all I could - I hanged myself, so she wouldn’t have to live with the shame of her mother being a convicted witch. But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t, and even if they don’t think I’m a witch they still think I’m a murderess.”

“Who’s they?” Sam asked.

“The others. Everyone! Please… You have to help me.”

“You have to give me more to work with,” Sam said. “OK, so you didn’t kill your husband. Who did?”

“I don’t know. You have to help me find out. Once I know - once my name has been cleared - I’ll be able to rest.”

Sam stared. “That’s insane. There’s no way - how do we even begin to find out? Everybody’s dead. The court records, even if we can get hold of any, are probably going to be useless since I’m sure all the witnesses were shrieking about black magic. Any physical evidence is long gone.”

“I can tell you what I remember. You can piece it together. This is what you do - hunters. I know it is. I’ve seen others before.”

“Other hunters?”

“They came to send me to my rest. I wanted to go, Sam, I did, but I never could. None of them could find my grave, and even if they had, they couldn’t have set me free. I can only go when my name is cleared. For Joyce.”

“I hate to break it to you, but your daughter’s dead by now.”

“I have to do it for Joyce,” Frances repeated stubbornly. “You have to help me.”

Sam sighed. “Fine. Let Dean get back. We’ll see what he says.”

“Not your brother.”

“Yes, my brother. We’re a package deal. You want my help, you need to talk to him too.”

“He won’t believe me. I’ve heard other hunters talking about him. They say he’s the hard one - the cold one. They say he has no mercy for supernatural creatures, nor any desire to give them justice. He only wants to destroy them.”

“Dean’s - look, Dean might seem that way sometimes, but he’s not hard or… or cold, or whatever other crap you’ve heard about him. He’s a good person. I’m not doing this without him.”

“Sam, please.”

“Trust me,” Sam said. “I’m not saying Dean’s going to start a petition for you, but he believes in justice.”

“I wish I could share your faith,” Frances whispered.

“Dean won’t let me down. Talk to him.”

“I said that, once, about Kat. And she… she…” Frances shook her head. “Very well. I… I don’t know if I can trust your brother. But I trust you. I’ll… I’ll talk to him.”

Chapter II: Walter Winn