Lawrence, part 3

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Sometimes spirits turn evil if they died as children. We've run across a few of those, including the drowned boy in Lake Manitoc, Wisconsin, and more recently an angry little girl in a New England hotel. Years after she died, the owners of the hotel decided to shut it down, and boy, she made it clear she didn't want to go. Three or four dead bodies later, we showed up, and we found some things that you don't expect in white-picket-fence, small-town New England.
The first thing was a series of quincunxes in and around the hotel. A quincunx is an arrangement of dots-or anything, really-that looks like the five-spot on a die. Hoodoo practitioners use them to fix a spell in place by creating a symbolic crossroads to enhance the magical potential of a particular location. That's what was going on in that hotel, and the little girl spirit was indulging in some image magic, too, using her playmate's collection of dolls to bring hotel guests-not to mention representatives of the people who wanted to buy the place-to gruesome and untimely ends.
The second thing we found was an old woman, squirreled away like the crazy aunt in Wuthering Heights (who said we never read a book?) and wearing a hoodoo necklace. That's when we started to put things together and realized that the owner's daughter wasn't kidding when she talked about having an imaginary friend. Turned out that this girl had died in the hotel and couldn't stand the idea of her playmate-now the old hoodoo-wearing woman-leaving her behind. So she started killing everybody in sight.
Kids, man. They're tough. Eventually, we realized that like the drowned boy in Wisconsin, this one wouldn't just go away without a sacrifice. All we could do was watch as the old lady went to join her friend. It wasn't one of our more satisfying jobs.

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