Wildes Witches Cozy Mysteries Box Set 2

by Mara Webb

  Judith had made a speedy retreat after our conversation, I wondered if she knew more than she was letting on about what had transpired today. I also wanted to know what the journalist had been investigating here. He was well known for tackling corruption head on, what could possibly be happening with the people at this animal show that would have caught his attention?

  It took three trips to the car to load everything up, but finally I was done, and we were driving off the parking lot. It had been the strangest of mornings and I needed to take my mind off it. I couldn’t stop thinking about the marks on the journalist’s body though, they looked a bit like bullet wounds, but something was different. My intuition was telling me to dig deeper.

  I pulled up to number thirteen Charm Close and walked up to the front door with Quin. I would take the supplies back to the café later, I needed to lie down on my couch and stare at the ceiling for a few minutes. Quin had complained about a stomachache the entire way back from the event hall and was now lying on the rug by the fire, groaning loudly. Will I ever have a moment to myself again? My cell phone started to ring, it was Brent.

  “Hey, what’s up?” I asked.

  “Nora, are you okay? I just got a call from the station about what went on at the animal show. It is very busy at the café right now, every table is full, some people are standing against the walls! I guess you handed out a lot of those flyers.”

  “Yeah I’m okay. I don’t think I will ever get used to stumbling across a dead body, even though I seem to be making quite the habit of it. I just want to do something useful; my intuition is telling me that there is more to this murder,” I said, trailing off into my own thoughts.

  “Well I can’t get away; they need all hands-on deck here. Why don’t you go and visit Jennifer? You mentioned yesterday that you wanted to speak with her about her nephew, I know it isn’t the happiest way to spend your afternoon but if you are feeling the urge to help someone then why not start with your friend?” he said. I had forgotten about Jen and her nephew. Seeing that news report yesterday morning had felt like a lifetime ago.

  I heard shouting in the background of the phone call and Brent made a hurried goodbye. It sounded manic over there, but I knew they could handle it. I decided to leave Quin by the fire and drive over to Jennifer’s house. I wasn’t sure what it was that I could do to help in their search efforts, but I needed to do something. My friend was hurting.

  It wasn’t a long drive to her house. She had such a beautiful home, it looked older than it was, covered in Ivy that hugged the outside walls and wrapped elegantly around the windows. The front yard held a collection of large plants that were thriving under her care. I knocked on the large oak door with my knuckles, it swung open.

  “Nora! What a pleasant surprise, is everything okay?” she asked.

  “I’m fine. I saw you on the news talking about Cody and I wanted to offer my help. I should have called first.”

  “No, no. I appreciate the offer but I’m not sure what we can do yet. Please, come on in,” she said. She stepped back and I was able to see the hallway open up behind her. It had a low ceiling that arched, it made a tunnel through the center of the house with doors branching off into other rooms with low ceilings. They were ideal for short people, not great for me.

  “I have set up a bit of a ‘search HQ’ in here, I’ll show you what I have so far.” Jennifer guided me into her dining room. The table had tripled in size since my last visit, and was covered in photographs, newspaper clippings, notes and receipts. I soon realized that Cody’s disappearance was more complicated than it had first appeared.

  6

  “What’s all this?” I asked Jennifer. I didn’t want to touch anything and mess up the system she’d created. It looked as though she was investigating a series of disappearances, she must think that they were all connected to Cody somehow.

  “Nora, I know my nephew hasn’t just run away. I’m not the only person in this town with a missing relative that the police are dismissing. Over the last year there have been at least a dozen disappearances of wizards and witches alone, not just from our town but from ones close by. I started asking around, reaching out to people online and searching through archives. This looks like a much larger problem, but I don’t know where to start.” She sounded defeated and I could understand why.

  It was common that when a teenager disappeared that police would assume they had runaway, I had seen it on almost every true crime documentary I had ever seen. No one ever seemed to ask too many questions and it never seemed to end well. The police had searched the lake and the forest and when no dead body had been found they wrote him of as a runaway and stopped looking.

  The black and white newspaper clippings referred to missing youth, prominent businessman or popular local government member. On the surface these people all seemed completely separate from each other, as if nothing could possibly link them. They were all missing, and Jennifer said they were all magical.

  “Can’t we just use a spell to find them? I’ve done it before, we just need a—”

  “No,” she interrupted. “It isn’t that simple. People have tried, I can’t even tell you how many different spells I have used to look for Cody. That’s how I know that this is something huge, there is a great deal of magic protecting the location of these missing people, our spells aren’t working. That suggests to me that there is more than one person doing this. That concerns me deeply.”

  “Is there anything that we can do on the council, what if all of us worked together on a spell?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I have been trying to find him using group magic, my whole family, every magical member at least, has been gathering to pool our powers but it hasn’t been enough. My brother is painfully desperate to get his son back, there is no stronger magic than that and it still hasn’t worked.”

  I looked at the articles on the table. They were from a variety of different newspapers from across the country, I leaned in to read a few. There weren’t helpful, just the usual ‘my daughter had a smile that would light up a room’ and various accounts of the last places people were seen.

  “I have been sent a lot of these,” Jennifer said, pointing at the clippings. “I found a website that a wizard had set up to help look for his son about three years ago, it has now become the main site for this growing problem in our community. I started to speak to people on their about a week ago and then a package appeared on my doorstep with all this.”

  I saw a larger piece of newspaper that wasn’t yet yellowed with age. I read the headline and then saw the name underneath the article, Joseph Hawk.

  “Wait, was this journalist was helping you? Did he know about magic?” I asked, curiously.

  “Yeah, he knows, his father is a wizard. He has a little magic himself, not incredibly powerful but it helps him enough. He said he had something to tell me actually, I’m expecting him this afternoon. He’s been on that website too, not sure how he found out about the whole situation, but he is an investigative journalist, so I suppose he is aware of most things.”

  Jennifer didn’t know.

  “I don’t know how to tell you this. Joseph is dead. I found his body this morning.”

  She turned her head rapidly away from the sea of paper on the table to look at me.

  “What? How? Where?”

  “He was at the animal show at the events place across town. I don’t know what happened exactly, but he was inside a locked room, lying in blood. It looked like he had been shot or something.” I didn’t know what I should say. I thought about mentioning the unusual wounds, the strange shapes they had been, but she seemed shocked enough.

  “The animal show…” she whispered to herself. “Why would he have been murdered there? What must he have found out? I…I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what he was working on, maybe he had a few things he was looking into, otherwise it’s this.” She gestured to the table with her eyes. “He might have found out too much about what was going on wit
h all these people and he has been murdered because of it. We have to find out what happened Nora. We need to call Sophia too.”

  She was referring to Sophia Ashcroft. Sophia was the sister of another council member, Ryan. She was the Sucré pathologist, and also a witch. This allowed her to work on both human and magical cases effectively, she could establish a cause of death if it had been caused by magic, a human pathologist wouldn’t be able to see anything unusual, but Sophia would. She would be the only person that could tell us what happened to Joseph.

  “Should I call Brent? I don’t know what to do for the best here Jen. We don’t know what he found out, what he was planning to tell you,” I said.

  “That will come next, I think it’s best to find out what happened to him first, so we know what we’re up against.” She was right. We could find ourselves meeting the same fate if we weren’t careful.

  I pulled out my cell phone and called Sophia. After four rings, she picked up.

  “Hey Nora, I know what you’re calling about. I can’t tell you anything yet, I haven’t had a chance to be alone with the victim since he arrived.” Sophia was letting me know that until the humans on her team stepped out of the office, she wouldn’t be able to properly investigate the body. “Something has happened here for sure; I will let you know.”

  I felt a little guilty that Sophia had known I was calling for a favor. We were friends but often it seemed that I was the one calling for help with things instead of inviting her round for a drink or a movie night. She had a baby; I knew she would appreciate the occasional offer. She promised to call me within the hour and hung up.

  “No news then?” Jen asked. I shook my head. “Okay, well then maybe we can retrace his steps or something. Did you see him at all before he died? Was he just a customer at the show or had he been moved there from somewhere else? Sorry, how could you possibly know that.”

  “I saw him last night. I went to set up and he was arguing with a man there, when they realized they were being watched, they split. It was the chief events officer in charge of the show, I didn’t hear what they were saying but it looked serious,” I blurted.

  She paused as she processed what I had just said. “That seems so strange, he was such a levelheaded person. I’ve never heard him raise his voice. Perhaps there is a way to trace their argument, Joe had enchanted most of the things he owns to act as Dictaphones. He never had to wear a wire for an undercover interview, his jacket would record it, or his belt buckle, or a sock. When you found him, was he wearing the same clothes as last night?”

  I had to think for a moment. I had barely recognized him in the dark during the argument, I couldn’t have given a single description about his clothing, never mind saying if it matched the blood-stained things he was wearing when I had next seen him. I slowly shrugged my shoulders.

  “I have no idea,” I said apologetically.

  “That might slow us down a bit, but that isn’t a problem. I think we should head to his office first then, or his car…where would he have left most of his things? I know he barely went home anymore; he spent more time sleeping on his desk than in his bed.” Before Jen could finish this thought, my phone rang. It was Sophia.

  “Hey, change of plan. Can you come to my office, like, right now? I’ve frozen everybody here, so they won’t notice you guys slipping in and out. But if you are looking into what happened to this guy then you need to see this.”

  I didn’t know what had happened in the ten minutes or so since I had last spoken to her, but I assumed Sophia had managed to find herself alone with Joseph’s body and had found something that she needed to share. I seemed to have developed a reputation for involving myself in the solving of crimes around here. The police force was made up of humans, so they weren’t so good at solving magical crimes, and I had proved quite good at it if recent events were anything to go by.

  Jennifer followed me out to my car, and we made our way towards the medical facility that housed the pathology lab. I had seen these freeze spells used a few times now, they could be used in various ways. Sophia seemed to have used a spell that froze the humans nearby but allowed witches and wizards to continue with their day.

  A small old lady was skipping through the carpark as we pulled up, I recognized her as Mrs. Daines. A lovely witch that gifted everyone in the local community with honey each summer, she had one of the largest beehives that I had ever seen in my life. The honey she had given me tasted of peanut M&Ms. I waved to her as we hurried over to the front doors of the building. Sophia was waiting to let us through.

  “Quick, come in. I don’t really know how to explain it, you have to see for yourself.” Sophia seemed anxious. She took us through into an autopsy room that I hoped we weren’t about to enter. On the silver table in the center of the room lay the body of Joseph Hawk. His shirt had been cut away and a white piece of fabric obscured some, but not all, of his face.

  His chest was on full display. The strange injuries I had briefly seen at the event hall were now plain to see. He had six of these wounds on his chest, each looked like a cone had been drilled into his body, like he had been shot at by the head of a small rocket. The coloring around each wound site was shimmering from deep blue to lilac like an unusual pond on a foreign planet.

  “What on earth caused that?” I asked. I was completely taken aback by what I was seeing. Jen was silent. She lowered her head gently.

  “You’ve seen this before Jen?” Sophia asked. “I saw it in a textbook once, never in real life. Is this what I think it is?”

  It was like I was being left out of a top-secret conversation. Jen looked back up to make eye contact with Sophia and gently nod. Sophia gasped.

  “Hello?” I asked, trying to get some information.

  “I don’t know much about this,” Sophia explained, “but someone has used magic to kill him. The strange coloring is like a residue, similar to how a gunshot wound may contain residue related to the weapon. This is really dark magic Nora, whoever did this wanted to really cause suffering. It’s a spell that sort of—”

  “Shoots you from the inside,” Jen interrupted. “It causes energy waves to fire out from the core of the body, getting more powerful as they travel. It is an incredibly horrible thing to do to someone. I have only heard about this happening once before, I hoped to never hear of the spells use again.”

  I looked at them both. I couldn’t wrap my head around it all, someone had killed Joseph in the most horrible way imaginable, but why? What had he known? We would soon find out.

  7

  Before we left the pathology office, Jen had managed to convince Sophia that we needed to borrow Joseph’s clothes. She couldn’t specify one item as he could have recorded the argument between himself and the event organizer on anything. It would take us some time to work through it all, and that was only if he had been wearing the same clothes when he died. If he had changed clothes between the argument and his murder, we might never find out what was said.

  Sophia asked us to wait outside while she removed the rest of what he was wearing and came back out of the autopsy room with a bag. We walked back out of the building and once she saw that we were inside our car, she lifted the freeze spell, and everything burst back to life.

  “So, what do we do with all of this?” I asked Jen. It was great to possibly be holding on to a voice recording of an incriminating argument, but how did we access it?

  “I’m not quite sure. I think we should take it back to my place, or…do you think…yeah.” Jen was in a conversation with herself that no longer involved me at all. I patiently waited for my turn to rejoin the discussion. “I think we should call an emergency council meeting. This counts as council business. We haven’t really paid too much attention to this crisis of witches and wizards disappearing, it had only been a few and it didn’t seem like as big of a problem as it truly is.

  “If Cody hadn’t disappeared, I never would have reached out online and understood the scale of this problem. It’s time we i
nvolved ourselves. You drive us to the council building; I’ll call everybody and have them meet us there.”

  With the engine of the car humming along, I drove us out of Sucré to the little square building on the outskirts of town. The high council was made up of myself, Jennifer, Amber, Ryan and Justin. The five of us had occasionally pooled our powers when the situation called for it, this would be one of those situations. Hopefully we could find out what secrets Joseph had stumbled upon, and who was so desperate to stop those secrets getting out that they had murdered him.

  I drove silently until Jennifer had made her three calls, once she rested her cell phone down on her lap I looked over. “Tell me about Cody.” Jen knew that I was growing more confident with my witch intuition, she knew that my questions were suggesting that he was alive.

  “What do you want to know? He’s a sweet, intelligent guy. He is on track to start at the University of Awa in the fall, you might be helping him in his classes actually, he isn’t really set on a subject just yet.” Jen smiled a little.

  I had been working at the University of Awa for months now. It was a University for witches and wizards and among the more traditional subjects, was a mix of fascinating new things for enthusiastic students to immerse themselves in. I worked within the Science department, but I frequently attended classes in other areas if I had the time. I enjoyed my job so much, it pained me that Cody may never get to experience the community there.

  “Well, whatever he chooses, I’m sure he will thrive,” I said. I had such a painful doubt that I would ever meet him, but I didn’t let Jennifer know this. I hoped that it was just a wave of anxious thought and not my witch intuition telling me something I didn’t want to know.