I caught Kiwi cocking his head at me and giving an inquisitive look as I followed after my customer. I just shrugged my shoulders at him.
When we had Nina in her dress I took her back out to the main part of the shop where there was plenty of room to walk around and really see how it looked in motion.
“Pretty lady!” screeched Kiwi from on top of the bookcase. I gave him a sly thumbs up.
Briefly, Nina smiled. “Thanks, parrot,” she said.
I took Nina by the shoulders. “Nina, is everything okay? You don’t seem your normal self today. Is something the matter?”
First, she frowned at me. Then she pulled her lips tight. Finally she let out a sigh and collapsed into one of the armchairs.
Forcing a smile, I joined her in the neighboring chair.
Please don’t cancel. Please don’t cancel. Please don’t cancel.
She said, “I’m thinking of canceling.”
Argh!
“Nina!” I said, in shock. “Whatever’s the matter?”
“It’s Rick. I just... I don’t think I even know him. He’s been acting so strange recently. I just don’t know what's going on with him. I mean, you think you know someone, really know them. And then…” She shook her head, as though clearing out some mental cobwebs. “You know, I’d seen his net worth in the gossip columns, I’d looked up his family on Wikipedia, and I even Googled the best man. But now... I just don’t know, Aria. Maybe I never knew him at all!”
“Oh, Nina,” I said, “it’s perfectly normal to have jitters before the wedding.”
She sighed and nodded and shrugged her shoulders, and then fell back into the chair again. “Do many brides question whether they know their husbands?”
“Well, jitters take many forms. Some wonder whether they’re old enough—or if they’re too old. Some wonder whether they want to ever get married at all. And of course some wonder whether they’ve chosen the right person, like you.”
She nodded sadly. I’ve always thought there’s nothing sadder than a forlorn woman in a beautiful wedding dress, and Nina was proving me right.
“But answer me this, Nina. Do you feel safe with him?”
Kiwi let out a caw from atop the bookcase.
Nina gave me a funny look. “Safe?”
I nodded. “Do you feel safe with him? You know, that he wouldn’t hurt you... or anyone else.”
Nina pulled her shoulders forward, sat up straight and stared at me.
Uh oh.
“What do you mean?” she asked pointedly, narrowing her eyes.
“I mean, you said he was acting a bit out of character, right? Does he worry you at all?”
She slowly shook her head at me. “I know what you’re implying! You, of all people!”
“I’m sorry?”
“Of course I feel safe with Rick. He’s not a... MURDERER!”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that he—”
“That’s grand coming from you. You’re the one under suspicion. You’re the one that everyone is saying murdered the old man. You’re the one who’s been breaking into the crime scene!”
My cheeks flushed and my stomach squirmed. Oh no! What had I done?
“I’m sorry! Please, understand, the murder was nothing to do with me!”
“Well you would say that!”
“Of course I’d say that! It’s true!”
“Yeah, well. You’re lucky the wedding’s less than a week away. If it wasn’t, I’d find someone else!”
“I’m so sorry!” I reiterated. “I didn’t mean to imply that Rick was a killer or anything. Please, forget I said anything. I only want you to have the very best wedding you can Nina, and if Rick makes you feel safe then you should certainly marry him!”
She leaned forward, elbows resting on her knees, hands under her chin. “You mean that?” she asked.
I nodded and put on the most sincere expression I could muster. I would have to keep my suspicions about Rick to myself until there was some kind of evidence. It had been silly of me to even ask that question.
“Well. Okay then.”
“The dress looks wonderful, doesn’t it?” I said, trying to lighten the mood.
She nodded at me, almost resentfully. “It does look good. You can tell it’s an expensive dress.” The corners of her mouth turned up into the hint of a smile.
“I’m glad you like it. It really does look good, you know. Now, I want you to know, everything else is in hand too. The decorations, the settings, the tableware, the flowers—everything. It’s going to be a beautiful wedding, Nina.”
“Beautiful, huh?” she asked me.
“The most beautiful,” I said, “especially with what’s going to be in that dress!”
She cocked her head at me.
“You!”
We both giggled and the moment was saved.
I had been close to losing Nina’s wedding there, and her bill was going to be necessary if I was to keep the business running. But even with that, I still needed to clear myself of suspicion. If no new business came in, it’d be curtains for us.
“Pretty lady!” cooed Kiwi again from atop the bookshelf.
Nina gave me a look. “Are you—”
I shook my head before she could even finish, and mercifully she stopped with a laugh.
No amount of money was going to get me to sell Kiwi.
“Let me get out of this dress, and I’ll get out of your hair. I’m sure you’ve got other clients besides me!”
We both laughed and I decided not to answer the question. Better to avoid it than tell a lie.
“Busy!” screeched Kiwi before flying a circuit of the shop.
And it turned out that keeping me busy was what Kiwi had in mind for the rest of the afternoon.
Chapter 25
With a twist of the lock the bolt slammed to, and the shop was shut up for the day.
“Well, that wasn’t a total disaster, was it?” I said.
Kiwi answered with a screech. Despite his speech abilities, he was still at least half parrot and communicated in his bird-like way a lot of the time.
“I mean, we could have lost that account. But I saved it in the end.”
“Didn’t find the murderer, though,” said Kiwi.
He had to bring it up.
As he should, I supposed. There’d been no new business since the murder and I knew it wasn’t just a cyclical slump. It was the vicious rumors being spread by Priscilla.
“Idea! Idea!” screeched Kiwi.
“Oh?”
“Come!” he commanded and flew down from the bookcase to the door that led upstairs. He stood in front of it, like an affronted VIP waiting for a doorman to appear and do his duty.
With a smile on my lips, I followed the bird as he led us upstairs to the apartment. Once the top door was open, he flew inside and landed atop the small computer desk that was situated by the window overlooking the street outside.
“Internet!” he screeched.
“Internet?” I asked.
He nodded his head up and down.
“Why?”
“Answers! Magic!” he explained in his own unique manner that often left me just as confused as before the explanation began.
Kiwi only had a vague understanding of the Internet, and I knew that to him it was just as magic as when I used my special abilities. I suppose the fact that with a few clicks we could summon up pizza or cheese puffs was a kind of magic, in a way.
“So what specifically are we going to look for?” I asked him.
He shrugged his wings and shook his head a moment while he thought. “Missing people.”
“Missing people?” I asked.
He bobbed his head up and down. “That spirit. Find out who he was.”
I nodded my head slowly. Maybe. If we found out who that spirit was, then maybe we could reach out to it better.
Perhaps even find an object that belonged to it to strengthen the connection, or even a living relative that he cared a
bout. And then the spirit could tell us what happened to old Fletcher!
“He said he was betrayed. I think he was murdered. But it wasn’t reported as murder.”
This seemed to make sense. We’d been focusing on murder victims before, but perhaps what we were looking for was someone whose murder wasn’t known—a person who’d merely gone missing, as far as the public was concerned.
“Let’s search the old newspaper archives,” I said.
Kiwi bobbed his head in approval of the plan.
I pulled up the Sequoia Bay Times website and clicked through to its archive. As a regular subscriber, I had an account which gave me access to their complete archives, going all the way back to the turn of the previous century.
“We’ll search for ‘missing,’ and see what comes up,” I told him.
Kiwi cawed in agreement. It wasn’t the best plan, but it was the only one I had at the moment.
After performing a search of the headlines for ‘missing’ or ‘missed,’ I narrowed it down to the period from 1970 to the current day. From his style of dress, he couldn’t have been much older than that.
I scanned through the headlines as quickly as I could.
I was amazed at how many different things had gone missing over the years in Sequoia Bay, and not just that they had gone missing, but that the fact that they were missing was deemed important enough to write a newspaper article about.
Missing Cat Found After Night of Worry. Missing Dog Has Whole Town Out. Missing Horse Was Never Gone. Valuable Book Goes Missing! Missing Train Tickets In Jacket All Along! Election Missed Because of Last Year’s Calendar.
Life had certainly never been dull in Sequoia Bay.
“Hey, look at this!” I said to Kiwi.
He jumped up onto my shoulder to see what I had found.
“Look at all these missing mailboxes! What was happening in 1985?”
Kiwi bashed his head against mine.
“What?” I asked him.
“People. Not mailboxes.”
Oops. That’s the thing with the internet—you can get drawn down all kinds of rabbit holes. When it came down to it, researching missing mailboxes in the 1980s probably wasn’t going to help me solve Fletcher’s murder.
A lot of things had gone missing in Sequoia Bay over the years, but it seemed that people were not one of them. There were of course a few cases—a couple of children had gone for a walk and gotten lost in 1975, but they’d been found by the next issue of the paper, and a man had gone missing in 1981, but it turned out he’d been fishing up the coast a ways and had a heart attack, dying all alone.
But there weren’t any unsolved missing-persons cases involving middle-aged men. At least, none reported in the newspaper.
“Well, that’s two hours of my life I won’t get back,” I said as I stood up and turned away from the screen, blinking my eyes.
“There’s another three decades you won’t get back either,” said Kiwi.
“It was just an expression! You didn’t have to run with it,” I said.
“I don’t run. I fly, like a bird!”
“You are a bird,” I pointed out.
Kiwi shrieked like a seagull as if to prove the point and flew a circuit of the room.
“Any other bright ideas?” I asked him.
“No!” he declared with disappointing certainty. “Do you?”
I did have one, but I didn’t like it.
“Maybe,” I admitted.
He made an inquisitive chirp.
“We could ask Mom,” I said.
Kiwi did one of his bird-frowns that looked more cute than annoyed.
“I know, I know,” I said. “I hate to ask her too. But she’s a stronger witch than I am. I bet if she summoned that spirit she’d get some answers out of it.”
Kiwi slowly nodded his head up and down in reluctant agreement.
Mom was a stronger witch than me—she would be, she’s older—but she also imposed fewer restrictions on herself in her witchcraft. Her personal code of ethics was much less stringent than mine, to put it politely, and she wouldn’t have any qualms in forcing the answers out of a ghost instead of merely encouraging them, as I try to do.
“Unless you’ve got any better ideas?” I asked Kiwi.
He answered with a forlorn shriek and flew away, apparently losing interest in my company.
I guess he didn’t even want to hear Mom through the telephone, let alone meet with her. But there was nothing else I could do. Unless the police had a miraculous breakthrough—and it didn’t sound like that was likely—the murder was going to be marked unsolved, and Jack and the rest of them would return to their usual workload.
I, meanwhile, would be out of work.
Depressed but determined, I chose Mom from my list of contacts and hit dial.
It rang half a dozen times before it was answered, which was odd.
Mom was always on her phone, and generally answered on the first ring. Unless she was playing the candy matching game she liked so much, in which case the call would be canceled right away, leaving me to talk to her voicemail.
So, six rings was odd.
“Hello?” said a voice that definitely wasn’t Mom.
“Hello?” I answered.
“Who is this?” said the voice at the other end.
“Who is this?” I replied.
We weren’t getting far.
“I found this phone in my café. Do you know the owner?”
Oh.
Oh no.
It was her.
The woman who had been badmouthing me all over town. Priscilla Hart.
It seemed she’d taken a break from gossiping about how much of a murderer I was to steal my mother’s telephone.
“Yes, I do know the owner. This is Aria Whitmore,” I said stiffly, using my full name and trying to imbue it with strength and confidence that I didn’t really feel but wanted and needed to project. “And that phone belongs to my mother.”
“Oh,” said Priscilla breezily, “your mom must have left it here.”
I put my hand over the microphone of the phone and muttered under my breath. Why was this woman trying to be so friendly after what she’d done to me? It was all an act, I supposed—this must be her way of bolstering her business while ruining someone else’s.
“That doesn’t sound like Mom. She’s never off her phone. How could she just leave it there?”
“How? Well. I mean, I don’t know. It’s here and she isn’t...” she said, sounding flustered before her words trailed off.
“Clearly.”
“She was having lunch here, with Donovan and that developer. And that foreign couple who are getting married.”
“Foreign couple?” I asked.
“Not foreign, New Yorkers, but might as well be!”
“Mom and Donovan were having lunch with them?” I asked with a frown. What were they all doing together?
“Oh, and Margaret Honeywell was with them too.”
Shaking my head, I tried to puzzle it out. What in magic’s name were they all doing together? I hoped they weren’t all becoming friends. I imagined how annoying Mom could be with a couple of rich New Yorkers in tow. She’d no doubt be swapping dieting tips and plastic surgeon recommendations with Nina in no time.
“Well that’s very odd,” I said. “I’m sure Mom will be back to collect her phone in no time. Please tell her to call Aria when she does.”
“Of course, dear. Is everything okay? Is there anything I can help you with?”
I rolled my eyes. Did she really think she could be that two-faced with me and get away with it? She’d hang around in her coffee shop all day, badmouthing me, and then be kind and friendly when she actually spoke to me? I wouldn’t stand for it.
“No. Goodbye.”
I hung up and shook my head to myself. I’d try not to let her get to me. But it was very odd about Mom, I thought. Where could she have gone, and without her phone to boot? It was very unlike her. So unlike her, in f
act, I started to get a bad feeling, a kind of creeping dread in my spine that went right up to the base of my skull.
After I’d gotten off the phone, Kiwi flapped his way back into the room and sat down in front of me.
“Mom going to help?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Mom left her phone in the Black Cat Café. I just spoke to Priscilla.”
Kiwi screeched his disapproval loudly.
“I know. I had to talk to her,” I complained.
Kiwi shook his head in understanding.
“She said Mom had been eating with Nina and Rick and Mrs. Honeywell, as well as the mayor. And that developer from San Francisco.”
“They didn’t invite you?” asked Kiwi.
I snorted. It was not surprising they hadn’t invited me since in my attempts at amateur sleuthing I’d managed to upset Mom, Donovan, and Nina already. Possibly Rick as well, if Nina had spoken to him.
“No, they didn’t invite me. I wonder where they’ve gone? I guess it must have something to do with the property—they’re all interested. Maybe it was a viewing before the auction next week.”
“Maybe they’ve gone to look at the ghost,” said Kiwi.
I laughed again. If they did run into the ghost, I imagined it would give most of them a shock, except possibly Mom who was used to that kind of thing already.
“Let’s go there, and see if they’re there.”
“Why don’t you try calling Donovan first?” suggested Kiwi. “See if he’s with Mom.”
After some brief pondering I decided I’d give it a shot. Luckily, I had his number already—Mom, Donovan, and I had gone on an ill-fated ‘family’ trip together the previous year and I’d input it then.
After finding him in my contacts, I pressed the dial button and waited for the phone to begin to ring. It didn’t. Instead, it went straight to his voicemail.
“Hi. This is Aria. Mom left her phone in the café. If you’re with her, or you see her, please let her know. Thanks.”
Pleased at the formality with which I’d spoken, and the politeness I’d maintained in the message, I was satisfied when I hung up.
“Let’s go!” said Kiwi with a screech. He didn’t seem so afraid this time. I supposed we’d been there so many times already, and the ghost had been relatively unthreatening, and so it had lost some of its scariness.
A Wedding to Die For- Wedding Bells and Magic Spells Page 17