“She has a name.”
“What is it, then?”
“Wisteria? Mysteria? Oh hell, something like that.” Her bluff called, Clara’s face went slightly pink.
“Listeria?” Sounded familiar to Mag.
“Now you’ve resorted to rhymes. And Listeria’s a bacteria, not a name.”
The hastily whispered conversation continued while their steps took them closer to the patio.
“It’s a name for a bacteria, isn’t it? I guess Double Bubble is close enough and that one is Toil, and over there is Trouble. Look how they go. Toil is constantly picking at things. See how she straightens out the utensils? Trouble is the one with the sour look. Together they’re sublime if you think about it.”
“Toil is Winifred Owens, and the pretty one is Selena Sanderson. You’re going to have to take the time to learn more about the coven if you’re going to be an effective member.”
Mag bristled at the gentle scolding.
“When they do something worthy of my notice, I’ll remember their names.” That last Mag hissed just before she and Clara came within earshot of the cluster of younger women. “For now though, we have to be polite, don’t we?”
“If you want to use that excuse, be my guest, but I’d eat my own shoe if I thought you actually gave a damn about Miss Manners’s rules of social etiquette.”
“Can it, Clarie!” Mag looked down at her ensemble, knew it wouldn’t match up the crisp, pastel-trimmed tennis whites sported by the lunching ladies, and wondered if she cared what they thought.
“Good morning, ladies.” With apparent difficulty, Mag leaned on her cane to navigate the two short steps up onto the patio and deposited herself with a sigh onto one of the metal chairs at the next table from the young witches. Clara followed suit and flashed a sunny smile.
“Is it true the mailman died right over there?” Double Bubble nodded in the general direction of the scene of the crime and laid down her fork to listen eagerly for any hint of scandal. “And you’re the ones who found the body?”
The question she really wanted to ask, Mag thought as she observed the younger woman’s eyes searching Clara’s face, had more to do with the history of how her sister managed to get de-stoned.
A cardinal sin, the killing of one witch by another came with immediate and irrevocable punishment—the murdering witch was turned to stone. Never had a stoned witch returned to take her place among the living until Clara Balefire had been proven innocent.
As it turned out, her stoning had been of the faux variety, and the unhappy result of magical mishap during a knock-down drag-out fight with her daughter. Intention combined with split-second bad timing, and both mother and daughter had paid the price.
For Clara, that meant spending twenty-five years as living rock while Sylvana was imprisoned in a portal. While neither witch would have declared innocence, neither had committed a mortal sin, either.
Since Clara preferred to let people think what they liked, she ignored the way certain eyes never met hers, but it burned Mag’s butt every single time.
“It’s true,” Mag confirmed tersely.
Pressed for details, the Balefires gave a watered down version of the story.
“I know everyone has a bad mail story, but he helped me once.” Selena Sanderson sighed. If Mag had to come up for a name for her, it would have been Blondie McPerky. Right on the cusp of her twenty-fifth birthday, the young witch would spend the next thirty years looking like she should be walking a runway. Not that Mag envied her or anything.
Her sour look had turned nostalgic. “I was eleven or twelve at the time and riding my bike out toward the old mill when I hit a patch of loose gravel and wiped out. I’d bent one of the rims, scraped my leg up something fierce, and sprained my wrist.
When Mr. Dean came along, I was limping home and trying not to cry. He saw me and stopped to help. Put my bike up on the roof of the mail truck, and moved things so I had a place to sit, and he turned right around and took me home. All the rumors can’t be true if he’d do a thing like that.”
Selena had a lot to learn about the ways of the world, but that she believed the best about a man most had been willing to vilify made Clara think more highly of her. Didn’t change her opinion of Taylor Dean much, though. He’d stolen from Mag, and by the looks of the back of his mail truck the day he died, had been checking packages for more things to steal.
Not that she thought he deserved a brutal death for his sins, or that his poor wife should be thrust into such drama. For Babette’s sake, the Balefires were on the case, but Clara also felt as if finding his killer would go some way toward paying penance for uncharitable thoughts toward the man. Everyone has some good in them, she supposed, even thieves and blackmailers.
“My hip is acting up again, Clara. Let’s go.” Abruptly, Mag used what had come to be known as a code phrase to escape sticky situations, but this time Clara recognized it for what it was—more than just an easy getaway from a conversation. Mag’s gaze had caught on something in the background.
They bade the women goodbye, and Mag made a beeline for the opposite direction of the parking lot.
“What’s going on?” Clara asked, huffing and puffing after her sister.
“Honey-pixie sighting,” she said, jabbing her chin to an area somewhere ahead and to the right. “A pair of mates, and we’re lucky none of those women recognized them for what they are. It’s pretty clear none of those girls possesses the wherewithal to have killed Taylor, so there’s nothing more to be discovered listening to them prattle on. And, we don’t need Penelope shoved any further up our badonkadonks than absolutely necessary.”
“You know Hagatha’s anti-cussing charm doesn’t reach this far, right?”
“I’ve come around on that particular term, and now I find it sort of amusing if it’s all the same to you.”
Clara lifted her hands in mock surrender. “No skin off my nose if you want to sound like a thirteen-year-old boy.” She followed Mag, who had waited until they were under deep tree cover to conjure a large butterfly net and a gilt-trimmed cage thrumming with magic.
“Need some bait.” Mag dug through her magically deep pockets and began pulling out jars, potion bottles, and packets.
“No wonder you walk like you’re dragging the weight of the world,” Clara observed as the pile grew larger. “You’re carrying half a workshop’s worth of ingredients in there. What is all that stuff?”
“A few odds and ends. Things too dangerous to leave unprotected.”
“Oh, Maggie,” she said, her heart going out to her sister, “I feel like you’ve been too much alone. When we get home, we’re going to make a charmed safe for your stockpile. Get some of the weight off that leg and give it a better chance to heal. You should have told me you needed more space in the workroom.”
“Old habits run deep.” Mag’s tone was gruff as she continued to dig through her pockets.
“Now, what are we looking for?” Clara picked up an amber jar and peered inside, then jumped back slightly when a blinking eye peered back.
“Andruvian trumpet flower.” A hint of a smirk played over Mag’s lips.
“Where did you find one of those?” Considering they only grew on the southeastern slope of the Andruvian mountains deep in the heart of the Faelands and were protected besides, Mag having one smacked of scandal.
“I didn’t find it. It was a gift.” And the great Margaret Balefire blushed.
Clara’s eyes widened. “From a man?” Mag’s blush deepened, and Clara learned something new about her sister. Somewhere under all the bluff and bluster lay a sentimental streak if she was carrying around a flower given to her by a beau.
“Get the stars out of your eyes and help me find it. Never met a pixie could turn down a taste of Andruvian nectar.”
For now, Clara let it slide, but there was a story, and she planned to dig it out of her sister eventually. It took a few minutes of sorting, but Mag finally turned up the crystal potion bottl
e containing the perfectly-preserved flower.
“Got it.” A wave of her hand cleared the jumble of items.
Delicate petals of palest porcelain pink freckled with wine-red spots curved into a trumpet-shaped cup that contained a pool of nectar that smelled of everything sweet. Holding the flower up to the sun revealed a miniature rainbow arching across the top of the belled opening. It was a lovely thing, and Clara sighed at the sight.
“Now we need to find just the right spot.”
They spent another few minutes finding a clearing where the sun slanted through the trees and creating a mound of fern fronds in which to nestle the bait, then Clara conjured a fan. A few waves of the pleated paper directed the enticing scent of the nectar in the direction she’d last seen the pixies hovering. She pulled the old pop tab out of her pocket for the second time that day, rubbed it to activate the charm that silenced her footsteps, and waited for Clara do to the same.
“And now we wait.”
Not for long. With a buzzing of wings and the twitter of tiny voices, the pair of pixies zipped into the clearing and arrowed toward their doom. Okay, maybe not doom, since the Balefires meant them no actual harm, but capture, for sure.
Clara, armed with the net while Mag had taken control of the cage, crept closer and tried to stay out of the pixies line of sight. She needn’t have bothered, though, since the liquid carried intoxicating properties and by the time she was close enough to deploy the net, both pixies lay draped over each other, fast asleep.
Into the cage they went while Mag carefully re-bottled the flower, and when she ran a finger over the petals with the faintest look of regret on her face, Clara declined to comment. She picked up the cage, slung an arm around her sister, and took them home.
Chapter Thirteen
Despite her insistence that participation in several community organizations and clubs hadn’t begun to take over her life when it came time for the next crocheting club meeting, Clara had to admit her schedule had become tight enough to force a game of Sophie’s choice.
Inconveniently, both Pyewacket and Jinx had skedaddled off somewhere, so asking them to spend the day tending the backyard garden wasn’t an option. Not that it mattered.
If history repeated, they’d get one-tenth of the way through the project and end up chasing butterflies anyway. If you want something done right, it’s best to do it yourself, she thought.
Clara sighed, loathe to approach her sister with the type of request she was about to make. “Maggie, I could use your superior problem-solving skills, if you don’t mind.” A little flattery always proved indispensable.
Or maybe not.
Mag smirked at her. “What exactly do you want, Clara? Your nose has a brown stain on it, and I’m not stupid enough to believe you can’t decide on your own.”
“Fine,” Clara retorted, “I need you to go to crocheting club today. By yourself.”
“Why on earth would I agree to that?” Mag’s eyebrows arched then beetled into a frown.
“Because Babette Dean is a member, and I think it’s our best shot of learning anything useful about the case.”
“You can’t do that yourself? I was planning to tail Reggie Blackthorne today.”
“I have weeding to do. Work that nets us an income, and more importantly gives me the ingredients I need for your hip cream. If I let it go any longer, the stinging nettle crop will be ruined.
Clara heaved a sigh. “The best growing conditions are in that corner spot along the back fence, so it has to be done the old-fashioned way. No magic in public, remember? Mrs. Green has been camped in front of her telescope all week. It’s a good thing her eyesight isn’t what it used to be, or she’d be telling everyone in town there’s something funny about those Balefire cats.”
With a wicked twinkle in her eye, Clara added, “Or you could weed the nettles for me and I’ll go instead.” Mag’s distaste for the prickly plants ran deep and would either outweigh her reluctance for social interaction or not. Clara was betting it would.
“What are we hoping to learn, and what makes you think Babette would unburden her soul to me?”
“You’ve spent a good portion of your life persuading people to do things they don’t want to do. I think you’ll figure out a way to see if she has any fresh ideas about the killer. Besides, she likes you since you gave her all that money for the writing box.”
“Don’t remind me, Clarie.” Mag considered Clara’s request, and in an uncharacteristic display of remorse for all of the griping she’d put her sister through, agreed to attend the meeting.
At least that’s the way she played it. Clara knew better.
She also knew her sister thought Babette would be the best source of information on whether Chief Cobb had moved on in the investigation. If he didn’t back off, Mag swore she would turn him into a toad and dump him in the swamp behind the post office.
That was how it happened that Mag was alone as she trudged along Mystic Street leaning heavily on her cane.
She made quite a picture with a knitting bag slung across her chest, her free hand waving a battery-operated, personal misting fan she’d picked up at the drugstore one intolerably hot afternoon. Anyone driving by might have thought her an escapee from an assisted living facility, in her floppy sun hat and orthopedic shoes.
The inside of the Harmony town library smelled too clean and not of musty paper as such establishments had in Mag’s day. She silently cursed the digital age for being well on the way to rendering parchment and wax obsolete.
What would be the fate of the library without books?
“Welcome back.” Seated alone in the room, Maude Prescott didn’t seem surprised that, after her show of rebellion at the last meeting, Mag had returned for a second go-round. “Needles or hooks today, Margaret?” She asked with a straight face.
Mag’s curiosity was piqued. There was something disconcerting about Maude’s demeanor. It was rare that a regular human could catch her off-guard, but for all the world, Mag couldn’t tell when the woman was being serious or sarcastic.
“I’ll be knitting if nobody objects.” But she’d wield the needles with a bit less disruptive force this time around.
Maude gave a sharp, approving nod. “A woman after my own heart, sticking to your guns. Screw ‘em all, I always say. I do as I please, and if someone doesn’t like it, well that’s just too darned bad.”
Just as Mag was cracking a smile and thinking she might have finally met a kindred spirit in the straight-laced town of Harmony, Babette Dean ducked inside the meeting room.
Maude glanced in the direction of the door, “Poor thing,” She murmured, shaking her head sadly.
“Yes, poor thing indeed,” Mag mused, “Though perhaps she’s better off now.” The words fell from her lips before common sense kicked in. Maybe Clara was right, and she really did suffer from a bad case of verbal incontinence. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”
“Don’t mince words on my account. Taylor Dean wasn’t exactly a pillar of the community. Do you know how many months in a row he didn’t deliver my fruit-of-the-month basket? It’s not as though Tosca pears grow on trees. At least not in New England. Untrustworthy, he was. Dollars to donuts he had some skeletons in his closet. Babette will be just fine now.”
Mag nodded in agreement. “Time heals many wounds.” She knew better than most that it couldn’t heal them all, but hoped that wouldn’t be the case for Babette.
As the rest of the group filed in, Mag took a seat and motioned for Babette to join her, and was surprised when the widow appeared relieved and plopped down in the proffered chair. Now flanked by two new potential friends, Mag was starting to understand why Clara was so willing to participate in town clubs.
“Thanks,” Babette said, releasing a big breath. “You have no idea how nice it is to see a friendly face. Everywhere I go these days, people stop talking and stare with either malice or pity. It’s exhausting.”
“People still think you’re respo
nsible for your husband’s death? I thought you’d been cleared by the police.” Mag’s hackles went up, and some uncharitable thoughts about Chief Cobb flitted through her mind.
Babette nodded, “Officially, yes, but that won’t stop the rumor mill, and now the police are getting annoyed with me because I don’t have any helpful information. They keep asking for a name, but I can’t imagine who would want to hurt my Taylor.”
Babette answered Mag’s next question before she had a chance to ask if there were any new suspects. The widow’s eyes carried a perpetual rim of red these days and it took very little for them to well up with a fresh barrage of tears.
A short silence fell while Babette pulled herself together.
After a few sniffs, she said to Mag, “How did you know I’d been cleared? Chief Cobb only made it official today.”
This is what you get when you make friends, Mag thought. A case of the loose lips.
“He showed up at my place asking questions. Grasping at straws, he was, since last I knew, it wasn’t a crime to tell someone they were bad at their job. No offense intended.” Mag lowered the heat when she heard a snort from Maude. Social niceties. Bah.
When the widow relinquished her seat for a cup of sludge labeled coffee, Maude whispered to Mag, “You shouldn’t feel bad for speaking your mind. If telling Taylor Dean he was a lousy mailman was a crime, half the town will be on trial. This murder might never be solved.”
“Well, someone bashed the poor lout over the head. Whoever it was must have left a clue. Nobody is that careful.”
Maude nodded in agreement but dropped the subject when Babette returned to apply hook to yarn.
It was at about that time Mag realized most of the crocheters were working off the same pattern and turning out a series of small, rounded sacks with drawstring closures at as furious a pace as they could manage.
“What are you all making?” Asking in spite of herself, Mag wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
“Club cozies,” Babette’s reply was the most cheerful Mag had ever heard her sound. And provided no useful information whatsoever.
Murder on the Backswing Page 9