Over the Broomstick

by Mara Webb

  I had to read on.

  After today I thought that the council was a bit more of a neighborhood association for witches, but this was actually important work. I delved into the notes from the subsequent meeting.

  My focus was broken by the sound of knocking at the front door. Who could that be? I glanced across to the kitchen clock. It was 7:55pm. I had been so determined to consume more information that I had neglected to check the time.

  Quin was lying flat on his side next to the flesh-less fish skeleton. He had fallen asleep with flakes of fish in his whiskers and a paw still on the dish, his stomach swelled from fullness. How could I answer the door like this? What if Benjamin was smartly dressed and I was still in the hoodie and shorts I had been wearing all day? I couldn’t just ignore the door.

  He knocked again. I moved towards the sound, glaring over at a sleeping cat that had been no help at all. I turned the handle and my fears were realized. Benjamin, all six foot five of Benjamin, stood on the step just outside the house looking as beguiling as ever.

  He wore a three-piece suit in a lightly patterned grey with a crisp white shirt, no tie. A combination of meticulously thought out details and effortlessness. I had never felt so underdressed but before I could begin my explanation of how few minutes it would take to be ready, he presented a chilled bottle of wine from behind his back. “Drink?”

  It didn’t appear necessary to tell him to get comfortable. He handed the bottle to me and wandered towards a cabinet in the kitchen to collect two glasses and a corkscrew from the drawer. He placed a glass on the breakfast bar and gestured for me to sit in the seat closest to it. With a few steps he was standing close again, leaning close enough that I could smell his skin, and he took the bottle from my hands.

  “Is O.W.L. still making you paint yourselves a little family tree or have they moved on to something more exciting?” He pulled the cork from the neck of the bottle and poured shimmering ruby liquid into my glass; each ‘glug’ sound caused my stomach to tighten a little at the possibilities of the evening.

  “Yes, I have to get as creative as I can within the next few days, catch up on council business, take my wand safety assessment quiz. Everything seems to have been thrown my way, but it is significantly more exciting that my life a week ago. Oh, I haven’t even mentioned about Edith and ho—”

  Before I could finish my train of thought, Quin appeared on the counter. He had sprung up from the ground without looking and crashed into Benjamin’s glass, throwing wine everywhere. It was all over his suit. He lurched back in response, holding his arms wide and looking down at his body to see the state of himself.

  “Stupid cat! This suit is ruined! I can’t believe this.”

  As he raised his head to look at me, I gasped. His face was changing. The firmness of his sharp jawline seemed to be wobbling as if something was crawling around where the bone should be. Subtle movements of his nose showed it morphing from the perfect nose he had to a longer, wider nose covered in broken blood vessels. Were his ear lobes growing? He caught my eye and in that second, I could see him thinking. He said nothing further, just marched to the front door and left.

  I could have died from embarrassment, but luckily the universe had something far worse planned instead.

  10

  People often joke that the mistakes they made in their teens sometimes keep them up at night as adults. That your mind could become so determined to prevent you from sleeping that it would play a personalized showreel of embarrassments for you to dwell on until the early hours. Your thoughts allowing you to sleep just enough to survive but not enough to feel in any way able to cope with the day once you finally open your eyes.

  I wasn’t confident my eyes were closed for more than sixty cumulative minutes the whole night. The mistake of not checking the time, the embarrassment of Quin’s clumsiness, it was all fresh. None of the details had faded over time, they were brand new and raw. The first man that I had felt any hint of interest in was actually interested in me. I am not self-deprecating, and I have no false impression of my looks.

  I am intelligent, kind and pretty. I deserve a guy like that, I deserve someone who wants to be with me, finds me interesting and romances me. It was the belief that I deserved this that contributed to my marriage breaking down, Greg had lost sight of my value. What kept me up through the night was that I had answered the door in the same sweaty clothes I had been wearing all day, a clear demonstration that I didn’t see our date as worthy of putting any effort into.

  Then my cat had wrecked his suit with a glass of expensive wine. I doubted my entire inheritance could afford to replace that suit either.

  In situations like this, or like the one I have been living in for the majority of the year, you can either wallow in it or try your very best to see the funny side. My husband promised me forever and managed three years. That is funny.

  A man so handsome he could sell sand in a desert wanted to take me on a date, instead the world’s most talkative cat threw red wine over his white shirt and silk lined jacket and waistcoat. Funnier still.

  Quin must have known he had done something bad as he didn’t speak much after Benjamin left. He muttered something about “that guy isn’t that great anyway, there is something not quite right” and took himself to bed.

  As the sun began to burst through the bedroom window, I swung my legs out of bed and my feet hit the floor. The movement of my body woke Quin who was curled up at the foot of the bed, he turned to look at me, tentatively waiting to see how our relationship was after the evening’s events. I reached over to nuzzle behind his ear with my fingers, an olive branch so that we could start the day with a clean slate. A talking cat is my only real friend in this town at the moment so I couldn’t afford to stay mad for long.

  Over breakfast I spoke to Quin about some additions to the family tree that I would be able to make on my version after some late-night research on my phone. Not sleeping was awful, but to distract myself from the slideshow of humiliation I logged into my O.W.L. account and using their search engine, ‘The Curious Crow’, was able to find some fun extra facts, but I was still missing Edith’s cause of death.

  I couldn’t write that she had drowned, because as I had been told now several times now, witches can’t drown. But how do you investigate a potential murder with no body? I could ask at the police station; they may have closed the case but perhaps there were some clues that they overlooked. Who found her? Maybe they had more to say about it all.

  I wondered if I should send a bottle of red wine to Benjamin’s house, or would he not be able to laugh about it yet? I decided to ask Quin, not sure what sort of answer length I was about to receive.

  “Do you know much about the guy that was round here last night, Quin?”

  “Rooper? Yeah, I have heard about him. He doesn’t like cats; I know that much. I have spoken to other familiars and any time they interact with him he gets upset. Doesn’t like fur getting on his clothes. His family is rich, his mother is ill, I think. Other than knocking wine over him, we haven’t actually met. I don’t think Edith was a big fan of his though. She said he was narcissistic and sometimes didn’t recognize that other people have actual problems, too busy caught up in his little universe with him at the center. Quite helpful during the witch hunt scare though.”

  That reminded me that I had more work to do for the council, the first couple of files that I had read last night before the drink spill disaster had vanished. They must be zapped back to the shelves in the records hall. The pile of remaining documents teetered and threatened to collapse.

  “I wish there was an audio to listen to instead of this pile of old papers. I could be getting other stuff done and still working my way through the meeting minutes,” I lamented. Quin was beaming at me, grinning ecstatically. “What is amusing you so much about my struggle Q?”

  “You don’t know do you? Of course, you don’t, why would you?” Come on, let’s get to your laptop. I have something to show you, it
is actually helpful this time! I’m helping, I’m helping!”

  He was almost skipping up the stairs and along the carpet towards my bedroom, leaping up onto the desk and waiting by the computer for me to catch up. I wasn’t as filled with energy and enthusiasm, so I was walking much slower behind him.

  “Quicker! You’re going to love this, come on!” he yelled. I dragged my feet up the final step and shuffled into the bedroom. Hopefully my morning coffee would start to make me feel more alive, more human. Well, more witch I suppose. Quin started to speak so fast that I although I could hear him, I couldn’t process what he was saying at the same speed.

  “Okay, okay!” He was almost out of breath with excitement as he spoke. “Okay, so there was this witch called Joan and she was married to this guy called Edward, he was a librarian. Edward would ask her questions and she would give him one-word answers, always one-word answers.

  “When Edward’s parents died in a big awful house fire, he was heartbroken and needed someone to talk to, but Joan still barely spoke, he couldn’t take it anymore. He put a curse on her so that she would never stop speaking, never ever stop speaking, she speaks in her sleep to this day.”

  “I bet she took that well.”

  “She did! It actually turned out she had been cursed many years before she met Edward by her sister, who was sick of hearing her voice, so she cursed Joan to only ever speak a few words every day. Very sad story actually. Anyway, Edward loves the sound of his wife's voice and they are much happier now.

  “Joan records audio versions of every magical text for a little extra cash, they have a holiday home on the islands of Turks and Caicos now, I’ve seen the pictures. It looks great! Anyway, you could send her the files and she could read them out for you! The pages are enchanted so they can’t be copied or photographed, and she signs a confidentiality form too so it’s totally fine!

  “There will be copies of all your O.W.L. textbooks on there, and you can get help for your wand exam, then you can get your wand! Then we can have so much fun, I was thinkin—”

  I had to cut him off otherwise nothing would get done today.

  Quin told me the name of the website. ‘Witch words would you like me to read next’ dot com, a lengthy title for a business but as she was the only one doing it, I suppose she didn’t need to be good at marketing.

  From there I had to give the address for the house, describe the table that I would be leaving the documents on, make sure they were the only papers on it, then enter my card details. For some reason she only wanted to be paid in Euros, it was unreasonably cheap. Within seconds of clicking ‘submit’ the files on my desk disappeared.

  An email pinged into my inbox from Joan thanking me for my business and telling me that I would receive audio files as soon as each recording had been made, the first one should arrive soon. As we waited for the first email I browsed her catalogue and found a few titles that sounded useful, as well as a copy of the book I had been sent by O.W.L.

  A few Euros later and I had a guide called ‘How to be a wand proficiency test whizz(ard)’, ‘The beginners guide to beginning to make beginner level potions: Let’s start at the start’ and ‘Magic for little idiots,’ I think it was intended to be a gentle nod to the ‘for dummies’ series but sounded more patronizing than the original.

  I didn’t want to start a book and then have to immediately stop when Joan emailed me document one, so I pushed my laptop to the side and spread out my family tree project paper. I already knew how many people would be included and their relationship to each other, so I used a ruler to make careful measurements, marking locations for each person in pencil.

  Once that was done, I sketched out a horizontal line to act as the ground and from that a large tree bursting out from the soil, branches bending towards each name to include them and leave enough space for details underneath. With the watercolor pens I had bought I carefully populated the white page with browns, a field of green around the base of the tree, warm earthy tones beneath the grass and an orange fence in the background.

  After watching a tutorial on calligraphy, each name was added with a slow hand, triple checking the spelling of each name before touching the fountain pen to the paper. Another ping sound let me know that I had an email.

  Joan had taken just over an hour to reply to me and although I had only been expecting one at a time, she had somehow recorded four. “Quin, I’m heading out to get some chocolate, do you want anything?”

  Yes, he did.

  I added the audio files and Quins shopping list to my phone, threw on some clothes and grabbed my headphones on the way out of the bedroom. I turned the TV on to a history channel, it was a day of programs about the great Kings and Queens of England. At least it wasn’t cooking. Headphones plugged into the jack and onto my ears and I was ready to go.

  The voice of a strange witch was now a familiar sound in my ears. The council had discussed the witch hunter again and Edith sounded more afraid now. Joan had included a note to say that she had put a charm on her reading glasses so was able to see the inflection in speech and the tone in which things were said, so these were now part of her re-telling.

  Was Edith afraid of the witch hunter because she thought she might be next? Was the hunter her murderer? What clues did they have as to the identity of this mystery witch killer?

  I took another larger bite of a caramel filled chocolate bar and listened on. I needed to know who had found Edith, so I walked towards the police station in Sucré.

  Officer Brent was behind the reception desk. Emma was wandering around behind him with a folder. He seemed surprised to see me, his features seemed softer than I remembered, but then I hadn’t paid any attention to him when we last met, I was in shock.

  “Didn’t think you would be sticking around Ms. Wildes, but I am glad you have! How can I help you today?”

  “This feels like an awkward question to ask, but do you know who found my aunt by the lake?” I didn’t know what to do with my hands, should I be smiling politely when I ask? There isn’t really a protocol when you are improvising your way through a D.I.Y. murder mystery.

  “Oh, that would be a Ms. Jennifer Watts. She lives out in the hills on the outskirts of town, a bit further out of Sucré than yourself but not by much.” He smiled again. “How come?”

  “No reason! Thanks!”

  Guiltily I turned my thoughts inwards and now, for the second time, I was completely ignoring the perfectly nice gentleman standing in front of me trying to help. Jennifer Watts? As in Jennifer the witch from the council meeting that never mentioned she found Edith dead at the side of the lake Watts?

  Why didn’t she tell me?

  What was she hiding?

  11

  Once I had left the police station, I started the audio files again so I could listen while I walked around a small grocery store in town looking for all of the things Quin had asked for. I still couldn’t believe that Jennifer had kept a secret like this. Either she had a part to play in Edith’s murder or she is covering for someone.

  As Joan read out the minutes from a meeting six months ago, I could hear Ryan getting angrier as he spoke, Amber had asked him to sit down and take a deep breath, but he was shouting at Edith. There had been an explosion at a barn on his property and he wanted to rain down harsh punishments for those responsible. Two teenage witches had stolen a wand and had been messing around too close to a propane tank, sparks had flown out and luckily, they were safe, but the barn had been destroyed.

  Edith had tried to reason with Ryan, she said she understood his frustration and obviously they shouldn’t have done it but this was a first time offense from both of the young women involved and she didn’t believe they should have their powers withdrawn for any period of time or any of the more archaic discipline techniques Ryan was suggesting.

  He was furious.

  “You don’t know how much money that has cost me, you have no idea what I have lost in that burned out pile of debris Edith, how dar
e you tell me they shouldn’t be reprimanded! How dare you tell me what I can and can’t do!” He was alluding to having stored valuable items inside that he wouldn’t discuss with any of them, even though they tried to draw it out of him.

  “What could be so important in that barn that you would threaten young witches over it, Ryan?” Amber had enquired softly, trying not to set him off again. The shouting lessened slightly but tension hung in every conversation of that meeting until it was done. Was Ryan the one that had hurt Edith?

  He had been so angry with her that it could be possible. What was he hiding in that barn that would provoke him so much? I turned off the sound in my ear and put my headphones into my pocket while I paid for Quin’s cat biscuits, ham joint, cream cheese, canned tuna and full fat cream. I needed to remember that the inheritance money wouldn’t last forever, and that Quin would need to start following a less expensive diet.

  On the way out of the store something caught my eye in an electronics store window. There was a universal TV remote control for partially sighted people, the buttons were quite large and set apart, this would also be useful for a cat with a TV addiction and clumsy feet. I paid the cashier, put the remote in the grocery store bag and walked home in silence, I needed time to think.

  Edith could possibly have been killed by someone she knew on the council. But who?

  Jennifer found her body and didn’t tell me; Ryan was furious with her six months ago at those meetings. Amber was put in charge once Edith died, was that a position she wanted that badly? Could she have wanted it enough to murder my aunt? What about Benjamin?

  It then dawned on me that I might be in danger.

  I didn’t know how to protect myself from a witch hunter, or a fully trained witch or wizard with a vendetta. I needed a wand. I started to walk a little faster, the sooner I got home the sooner I could try the wand test online and arm myself.