Three's a Coven

by Samantha Silver

  “And you,” Alex said with a smile. “If you ever get to the point where you’d like to learn about magical math, please feel free to enroll in one of my classes. I’m absolutely willing to give you some leeway based on your recent introduction to the magical community, and I think eventually getting a formal education would be good for you.”

  “Thank you,” I said to her with a smile.

  I made my way back towards Sara, mulling over what I’d heard. She was on the other side of the room now, speaking with a couple of witches near where the flower petals were being thrown into space.

  This time, I was a little bit more prepared for the effects of the room as I made my way towards Sara. Before I reached her, however, my attention was caught by a couple of young witches speaking to each other nearby.

  “You know, I can’t believe she would do something like that.”

  “Don’t you? Do you remember what happened to Anita after she got together with Richard?”

  “Yeah, of course I do, but that doesn’t mean that Kelly did this. There is a pretty big difference between casting an ugly spell on someone and murdering them.”

  Yes, eavesdropping on this conversation was a much better idea than making my way over towards Sara. I wondered who this Kelly they were talking about was.

  “Sure, but isn’t that how it starts? Someone who has a huge disrespect for another person’s decisions might eventually turn to murder. Besides, I heard she was failing that class.”

  “Me too. Kelly told my sister that Professor Lei told her she needed to get at least ninety percent on that final exam for her average mark to be a passing grade.”

  “Well? What if she couldn’t do it? I mean, we all know Kelly isn’t exactly the shiniest wand in the pile. What do you think the odds are that she would’ve gotten ninety percent on a final exam in an advanced witch class?”

  “I don’t understand why Professor Lei even accepted her into that class,” the first witch said. “After all, anyone who knows Kelly should’ve known that it was above her skill level.”

  “Her mother wants her to go into engineering,” the other witch replied. “Her mom was telling my mom about it the other day. From what I heard, Kelly’s mom put a significant amount of pressure on Professor Lei, and Lita, to let her into that class. I guess they eventually gave in, thinking that Kelly would fail and then she would never get to be an engineer anyway.”

  “Geez. I’m glad my mom doesn’t care what I do. But still, do you really think Kelly has it in her to have killed Professor Lei?”

  “I don’t know,” the other witch said slowly. “I mean, it is a jump to go from cursing someone to killing them, but then, you never know what someone will do when they get desperate enough.”

  “True. Well, I know that no matter what, I’m going to try not to get on her bad side anytime soon.”

  The two witches moved on, changing the topic to when the funeral might be, and I did the awkward half-jump half-walk towards Sara, who was just moving away from the crowd of people she was speaking to.

  “You won’t believe what I’ve heard,” Sara said.

  “And you won’t believe what I’ve heard,” I replied. “Want to get out of here and compare notes?”

  “Yeah,” Sara nodded, and we left the prayer room. I had to admit, as soon as I stepped over the door’s threshold and back into a normal part of coven headquarters, I breathed a sigh of relief. Being in that fake space environment had a real creepy quality to it. I really wasn’t entirely sure I was a fan.

  Sara and I made our way back to the front of the building, only to find that Amy was busy talking with someone else. We waited for a couple of minutes, then decided to go home, waving at her as we went past. After all, Sara and I had some notes to compare.

  Chapter 8

  “Ok, you go first,” Sara said when we got back home. I plonked myself down on the couch and told her everything from my conversation with the professors, and the one I had overheard between the two witches.

  “I assume you know the people involved better than I do?” I said, and Sara nodded.

  “Yeah, for sure. Alex is Professor Alexandra Lyn. She teaches predominantly practical mathematics courses at the Academy. Her specialty overlapped with Professor Lei’s quite a bit, so I’m not surprised she was there; the two of them would have worked pretty closely together quite a lot of the time.”

  “And Elias?”

  “Professor Elias Blesk. I don’t actually know him very well, he never taught me at all. I get the feeling he’s not the nicest wizard, though. Actually, Professor Lyn never taught me either. But I know her through my mom; they’re kind of friends. Blesk is a potions professor, I think. But he mainly deals with the advanced classes. Amy will know him for sure. John… is he the short and thin John, or the tall John who looks like he spends all his free time working out?”

  “The latter.”

  “Right. Then he’s actually one of the spell-teaching professors. He deals with a lot of the younger students; Ellie, Sara, and I all had him as a Professor when we were teenagers.”

  “Let me guess, he was the Professor all the students had a crush on?” I said, and Sara grinned.

  “You got it. One hundred percent. Ellie claims she managed to convince him to go out with her once, when we were seventeen, but none of us believed her.”

  “That does sound like the kind of story she would make up.”

  “That’s interesting what they said about the Healers. I’ll have to talk to my mom about it. I know the Healers all have a record to see who has been in for what that they can all access, just so that if there are any emergencies they can see exactly who has seen that paranormal before.”

  “And then there’s this Kelly thing,” I said. “Do you know who that is?”

  “I don’t know her, no. But then, I don’t know a lot of the younger witches. We should wait for Amy to get home; she knows them all because she spends so much time at the Academy. Plus, it was one of the girls in her class, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I nodded. “That’s right. Because they said that she needed a really good mark to pass. Now, what was it that you found out?”

  “Well, I was speaking with a witch who’s one of Professor Lei’s neighbors. She told me that a couple of nights ago, her husband Anthony left their house after a bit of a screaming match and didn’t come back for a few hours afterwards.”

  “Did she know what the fight was about?”

  “No, she said she could hear them yelling, but it was too far away for her to make out what they might have been fighting about.”

  “Ok. So it might have been nothing, but at the same time, it might not have. A couple of nights ago is awfully close to the time of the murder.”

  “That’s what I thought, too.”

  “So we have three real avenues to look into,” I said, ticking off my fingers as I went. “First, we have the potential medical issue. I can’t really see what that might have to do with her death, since she was murdered, but I think we should look into it all the same as it was a behavior change in the weeks leading to her death.”

  “Right,” Sara agreed.

  “Next we have the husband. And finally, this Kelly witch.”

  “I think there might be a relatively easy way to find out if the husband did it,” Sara said. “After all, the entrances to the coven headquarters are all watched. It’s done magically, and stored on a large scroll. Amy should be able to access it for us; I can text her. She’ll be able to tell us everyone who was in the coven headquarters when Professor Lei was killed.”

  “Excellent,” I said, rubbing my hands together. “This might actually get us a solid lead or two. And better yet, it might even eliminate one of our suspects and help us focus a bit more.”

  Sara sent off the text, then kept tapping away at her phone. “I’m also going to ask my mom about what Professor Lei needed Healers for. That should answer that question for us, too.”

  “Good,” I said with a
smile. “Now, if that’s it for now, I think I’m going to try and figure out what to do for my next movie night.”

  “Oh, you’re going to keep doing that?” Sara said, her eyes lighting up. “Good! I liked the last movie you did.”

  My movie nights were my small way of trying to bring the different paranormal communities together. I didn’t like the segregation that seemed to dominate the paranormal world, and I wondered if using something everyone could love – in this case, movies from the human world – couldn’t help bridge that gap.

  “Spice World?” I said with a grin. “Yeah, that’s a great movie. I was thinking I would stick with stand-alones for a little bit, since I want to bring people in. No one is going to want to come start off watching Star Wars with the fourth movie.”

  “Good plan,” Sara nodded. “Any movie in mind?”

  “Maybe Dodgeball,” I replied. “That’s got some memorable lines, and it’s really funny. It’s kind of an older movie now, but of course, no one here even knows that, since no one in Western Woods watches human movies anyway. I’m going to text Kyran, and try to get him to get me a copy.”

  “All right,” Sara nodded as I grabbed my phone off the table and began to text him. Kyran was an elf who lived somewhat in exile from the rest of the residents of Western Woods. His self-determined job kept him travelling in the human world extensively, which meant that he was the perfect person to send to find me DVDs I could use for my displays.

  Hey, next time you’re in the human world can you get me a DVD of Dodgeball?

  I tried not to keep my eyes glued to the phone waiting for an answer. After all, Kyran had his own life. He almost certainly wasn’t sitting around staring at his phone, waiting for me to text him to ask a favor. Still, as my phone dinged to indicate a reply, my heart skipped a beat.

  Sure. I’ll come by later with it.

  Heat rose to my face involuntarily as I read the reply. Nope. I was totally not going to get involved with someone this soon after moving to Western Woods. Besides, I was a witch. I didn’t even know if inter-species relationships were allowed here.

  Nope. I was definitely not going to let myself be into Kyran. I was doing all right for myself on my own. There was no need to ruin it by bringing a man into the picture. Kyran and I were just friends, and that was how it was going to stay.

  Before I had a chance to get further into my own head, however, Amy came into the room.

  “Shift over?” Sara asked, and she nodded.

  “Yeah. Did you guys find out anything interesting?”

  Sara and I recounted everything we had discovered in the prayer room.

  “Do you know who this Kelly might be?” I asked, and Amy nodded.

  “For sure. That sounds exactly like Kelly Treach. She was in that class, you would have seen her there yesterday. One of the girls who was crying in the corner.”

  “Maybe she was crying because she knew she’d done something awful, not because she was upset about a death,” Sara offered. “What do you know about her?”

  “She’s annoying, a terrible witch, and she should never have been accepted into that class in the first place,” Amy said. “Frankly, I feel like having allowed her in there was detrimental to everyone else’s learning, since she was constantly interrupting and talking about stuff that had nothing to do with our assigned topics.”

  “So the witches weren’t wrong, the class was above her skill level?”

  “Absolutely,” Amy said. “Once I traded papers with her when we did a quiz; she got forty-five percent on it. I can’t imagine why Lita would have let her into that class.”

  “Well, pressure from her mom, no doubt. It’s hard, you guys, when your parents have expectations for you that you have no chance of being able to meet,” Sara said softly.

  “I know,” Amy said. “All the same, it is no excuse for murder. You never would have killed a professor to get out of an exam.”

  “Only because I knew you would have killed me in retaliation,” Sara shot back. “Ok, maybe that’s not entirely true. You are right that I never would have done something like that. I just never pushed when I wasn’t accepted into advanced classes, because I knew I didn’t belong there. And luckily, I think my mom knew that as well.”

  “Right. So she’s definitely a suspect,” I said. “She would have been in the coven headquarters at the time of the murder. Speaking of, Amy, did you bring the list with you?”

  Amy nodded. “Obviously, I couldn’t bring the list itself,” she said. “I did, however, copy down the names and entry times of everyone who entered coven headquarters that day.”

  “Does the list cover when people left, as well?” I asked, but Amy shook her head.

  “No. Only when they enter.”

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s see it.”

  “It’s a long list,” Amy warned as she took a small notebook from her pocket and handed it over to me. Sara got up and made her way towards me, and I pushed the notebook between us so we could both read the names at once. I started off by flipping the pages to see just how long the list was, and as I kept flipping and flipping, my heart sank.

  “There have to be at least a hundred names here.”

  “I told you, there were a lot of people who went through headquarters,” Amy said with a shrug.

  “All right. So the first person to go through the doors this morning was Lita,” I said. “Then there’s a few other names here I don’t recognize.”

  Sara and I scanned through the list. It seemed like half the coven – and a bunch of non-witches – all made their way into coven headquarters that day. I saw a bunch of names I didn’t recognize, and some that I did. Patricia Trovao, who worked at the hospital, had come in early that morning. Lita’s name appeared three or four times, and there was Heather Leach. John came in late in the morning, and Alex a couple of hours later. Amy’s name appeared an hour before the exam was about to start. About four pages in, however, as I read one of the names just below Amy’s, I let out a bit of a triumphant cry.

  “There!” Pointing to one of the names on the list, Amy and Sara both looked forward to see what I had noticed.

  Yao Lei – 3:47pm

  “So her husband came into coven headquarters about an hour before she was killed,” Amy mused. “Interesting.”

  “I wish we knew what that argument they had was about,” Sara said. Just then, her phone beeped and she looked at the screen.

  “My mom says that Professor Lei hadn’t seen a Healer in over six months,” Sara continued, her features folding into a frown. “So why would she tell people that was where she was going?”

  “Could the information be wrong? Could she have seen a Healer without it being recorded?”

  Sara shook her head. “No, Healers are required to report every single patient they see, and their information. It’s one of the most important parts of being a Healer in the paranormal world, and any Healer who saw a patient without recording the visit would be sanctioned harshly.”

  “So she was lying to her coworkers about what she was doing,” Amy mused. “And at the same time, we know she was going to the town Hall. We know she was visiting Chief Enforcer King.”

  “I think we need to figure out what it was Chief Enforcer King was working on,” I said. “It might be nothing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the murder and the disappearance have something to do with one another.”

  “Okay, so how do we go about that?” Amy asked. “After all, it’s not like we’re just going to be able to go into coven headquarters and look through her things.”

  “Maybe Kyran will be able to help,” I said. “After all, he’s coming over later today with a DVD for my next movie in the park.”

  “So we wait for him,” Amy nodded. “That works for me.”

  “While you’re working at coven headquarters, you should also try to find out what you can about Professor Lei and her marriage,” Sara suggested to Amy. “After all, I don’t think we should write off the husb
and just yet, especially seeing as he came into the building less than an hour before Professor Lei was killed.”

  “Okay,” Sara agreed. “We’re going to tackle this from a few different angles, and hopefully we can narrow down exactly why Professor Lei was killed.”

  Chapter 9

  A few hours later Ellie came back home, and we kept her up to date with what we had discovered.

  “Crazy. I never would have imagined that Professor Lei would have so much going on that there would be multiple people out there who might want her dead,” Ellie said, shaking her head.

  “Hopefully Kyran will have some information for us,” I said. As if right on cue, all of a sudden there was a knock at the front door, and I stood up to get it. “That’ll be him now.”

  I made my way to the front of the house, and as soon as I opened the door I beamed at the elf in front of me. Kyran almost looked like way too much of a bad boy to be an elf. He certainly didn’t look like Orlando Bloom or Hugo Weaving in The Lord of the Rings. Instead, his short brown hair was cut somewhat regularly and gave him a permanent just got out of bed look, and his eyes were as blue as ice on a glacier.

  “Hey, how’s it going?” I asked.

  “Yeah, good. Mind if I come in for a minute?”

  I pulled the door open and stepped aside to let Kyran come past.

  “Did you manage to find the DVD?”

  “I did, eventually. Why can’t you just embrace modern movies like most humans? If you wanted Thor or The Avengers it would have been way easier to get a hold of.”

  “Yeah, well, those movies don’t have amazing lines like “if you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball”.”

  “Fair enough,” Kyran laughed, handing me the disk.

  “Hey, while you’re here, I’m wondering if I can ask another favor from you?”

  “Go for it,” Kyran said.

  “I was wondering if you’d be able to find out for us what Chief Enforcer King is working on right now.”

  Kyran frowned. “Why do you want to know?”