Read The Metaphysical Detective (A Riga Hayworth Paranormal Mystery) for Free Online Page B

end of all things!”
    She kept him in her peripheral vision as she passed, wary, avoiding eye contact, and continued the few blocks to her office.
     The door was unlocked.  She pushed it open, her mood shifting to fear-fueled anger, and stalked inside.  Pen sat behind her desk, an open book and a legal pad in front of her.
    Pen gave Riga a long look.  “Are you going to a hoedown?”
    “Casual Fridays,” Riga said.  Her haphazard grab for clothing had resulted in blue jeans, cowboy boots, a white blouse, and her suede safari jacket.  In comparison, Pen looked well put together in her anti-Che Guevara t-shirt, Che’s face enclosed by a red circle with a diagonal bar through it. 
    “Your parents told you not to come back here,” Riga said.
    “Technically, they told me to stop working for you.  I’m working for myself.”
    Riga opened her mouth to speak but Pen continued, cutting her off.  “I was doing some reading on that Tarot card you put next to the photo of Helen’s body – the Hanged Man.  She’s positioned just like him, upside down with one leg bent, hands overhead… It says here that the card represents Odin, sacrificing himself on the World Tree in order to attain the Runes.  Odin was a psychopomp, a walker between the worlds of the living and dead, which may have been why he’s associated with the god, Hermes,  who's the founder of Hermeticism and a hermaphrodite...?”  Pen waggled her brows.  “But another meaning of the Hanged Man is traitor – traitors were hung upside down in Renaissance Italy.  So was she a sacrifice or a traitor?  What do you think?”
    Riga walked to the desk and closed the book.  “I think you should forget about it.”
    Pen thrust her jaw out mulishly. “Why?”
    “What’s the second law?”
    Pen rolled her eyes.  “The observer of a metaphysical event is a part of the metaphysical event.”
    “That’s why.”  Riga returned the book to its place on the shelf. “Someone’s dead.  Your parents don’t want you involved, and neither do I.” 
    “Aunt Riga, I can help!  Research, leg work, I want to help.”
    “No.”
    Pen leapt to her feet, grabbed the legal pad and pushed past Riga.  “That’s not fair!  You treat me like a little kid and I’m not!  You’re just like everyone else!”
    Riga stopped Pen with a touch on her arm.  “I’ll take the office key.”
    Pen breathed heavily, the color high in her cheeks, but she dug in the pocket of her cammo pants, pulled out the key, and slammed it on the desk.  “There!  Are you satisfied?” she shouted.
    “The legal pad too.”
    Pen backhanded it, slapping Riga lightly in the chest.  “Here!” Her eyes glittered with tears.  “Take it!” She grabbed her backpack, which lay upon the ground next to the desk, and stormed from the office. 
    Riga heard the front door slam.  Hell, the whole floor probably heard it.  She fell into the chair behind her desk and looked at the notepad.  Pen had drawn an upside down stick figure of the Hanged Man, or Helen, in the center of the paper with a circle around it, and then spokes and bubbles of connected ideas: the stick figure to Odin to Hermes, and Hermes to Hecate, Thoth, St. Michael, Gabriel, and Morpheus.  They were all psychopomps, guides to the realm of the dead.  Hecate had been underlined twice, and Pen had drawn another spoke to the word, “moon.”
    Riga frowned and went to stand in front of the bulletin board.  The haiku about the freezing moon had a certain Hecate sound to it; Hecate was a triple goddess, and associated with the moon’s phases.  But that was the problem with Hecate: she had so many associations – from childbirth to crossroads to canines.  It was easy to see her everywhere one looked.  Hecate was worse than that trickster, Hermes, so ubiquitous no one really knew her. 
    She went to the window and raised it.  It stuck about two inches up.  She smacked the bottom of it with her hand.  It gave another