Potions Are for Pushovers

by Tamara Berry

  I wait, allowing him a moment to gather his thoughts and explain. He takes his time with the task, crossing one leg elegantly over the other, but I’m not disappointed with the results.

  “Oona MacDougal is a smart woman and a strong one,” he says. “I’ve always admired her for that. Only the bravest and most determined souls can stick this village out long enough to carve a space in it.”

  There’s a message in there for me, I’m sure of it, but this isn’t the time for self-examination. “But?” I prompt.

  He sighs and scrubs a weary hand along his jawline. “But Ian MacDougal is none of those things, I’m afraid. He never has been.”

  I think of the apologetic, slightly cowed air of the man and nod my understanding. Ian MacDougal seems to be a decent schoolmaster and a good father, but he’s not the sort one would pick out of a crowd. Or, if I’m being honest, an intimate gathering of friends.

  “The problem with smart, strong, determined women is that they have a tendency to know their own worth,” Nicholas continues. He feigns an intense interest in his fingernails. “That’s not an easy thing for some men to accept.”

  “Some men?” I echo. The next question that hangs on my lips has nothing to do with the state of the MacDougal marriage, and everything to do with the kind of man Nicholas Hartford III is, but I don’t dare ask it.

  He answers anyway, his gaze lifting and locking on mine. “Weak men. Small-minded men. Men who can’t recognize a good thing when it shows up on their doorstep with tarot cards and promises to upend their entire worldview.” He holds my stare a few seconds before shaking himself off. “Well? Are you going to tell me what this has to do with Penny’s cake?”

  As much as I’d like to unpack the first half of Nicholas’s comment—and the fact that I don’t care much for tarot cards as a general rule—I can’t ignore the more pressing needs of this investigation. Especially since so much of the day has been wasted already.

  “The lovers,” I say. Since he has no way of knowing what I’m referring to, I trace the shape of the showdown snakes on my untouched toast. “It’s the MacDougals. The perfect couple, harmonious in all things. Or so Oona wants everyone to think.”

  He blinks. “You might want to start this at the beginning.”

  At this point, I doubt I could. So much has happened in the past week, so many people’s lives touched by this murder.

  “The short version is that I believe Oona was being blackmailed by Sarah Blackthorne. All of them were—the general, Penny, Oona, half the villagers with a secret to hide.” I lick the marmalade from my finger and pop the triangle of toast in my mouth. “Sarah kept track of it all in the notebook I was telling you about yesterday. Each villager was assigned a page in the book, and some of those pages had numbers and the wealth symbol—a record of the money she got from them.”

  “This is the notebook Oona took from Rachel and Lenora?” he asks. I could kiss him for his ready understanding. One of my favorite—and least favorite—things about this man is how little escapes his notice.

  I nod. “Theirs was just a copy I had them make. Every villager’s secret is in there. You said it yourself—the general isn’t really a general, but his symbol was the one for war. Oona and Ian aren’t really happy, but they were presented as the ideal lovers. And Penny’s cake is no miracle of baking science. She admitted it to me yesterday. She buys them from a bakery a little ways north of here—and don’t look at me like that, because I didn’t pry the name of it out of her. I didn’t have the heart to, not after all she’d gone through.”

  He looks only slightly conscious stricken. “It seems like a terrible waste, is all.”

  Spoken like a man who’s never been the victim of blackmail. “The exact figure isn’t clear, but it sounds as though Sarah got quite a bit out of her by threatening to tell everyone the truth if she didn’t pay up,” I say. “She must have been extorting everyone that way—Oona MacDougal included.”

  “I think you’d better show me this notebook,” he says.

  “Unfortunately, I don’t have it anymore.” Losing a valuable piece of evidence isn’t a thing I like admitting, but there’s no denying it any longer. “I’ve looked everywhere, but I can’t seem to find it. I think Oona must have stolen it from me.”

  He casts a careful look around him. “Oona broke into your house?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know.” I hold a hand to my temple. For once, it’s not intended to give the impression of fake mysticism. There’s still so much pain throbbing there, so much fuzziness I can’t seem to shake. “Between the roofers and the pair of us coming and going, I don’t know when she would have had a chance. But she couldn’t get the copied version away from Lenora and Rachel fast enough. And then, last night while she was stitching me up, she was almost taunting me about having tossed it out—and with the medical waste, where I have no chance of recovering it. Without either the copy or the original, everything I say is just conjecture and hearsay. And she knows it.”

  A thoughtful pause settles over Nicholas. I think he’s going to say something in Oona’s defense, chastise me for flying off into the realm of fantasy, but the question he eventually asks is both simple and surprisingly astute. “Where did the notebook come from in the first place?”

  I halt. I’ve spent so much time lately trying to decode that notebook, to determine why it’s missing and where it’s gone, that I forgot how mysteriously it came into my life in the first place.

  “I don’t know,” I confess. “It just appeared in my living room one day. Lenora and Rachel disclaim any responsibility for it, and I can’t see Inspector Piper planting it as evidence—especially not since the paper it was printed on came from his aunt, who’s already in trouble for growing the wolfsbane.”

  Nicholas just nods and watches me, following along as I work through the convoluted threads of my memory.

  “My living room was a disaster area, because the girls had been over the day before to go over all the werewolf lore they’d gathered from the villagers.” I glance up. “That was the same day Lewis came over to talk to me about something that was bothering him. He was agitated and shifting around. He knocked into that table right there.”

  We both look at the table in question. I’ve since put away the elephant tranquilizers and old Horse & Hound subscription, but I can picture them as clearly as if seeing a vision. He was sweating and nervous and had hit the table with his hip. Everything went flying, falling into the already messy heap of books from Lenora and Rachel. How easy would it have been for a notebook carried in a pocket or the waistband of his pants to have joined the fray?

  “Lewis King,” I say on a long breath. My eyes fly to Nicholas’s, which contain nothing but a calm acceptance of my conclusions. “He must have found the notebook while he was searching for the papers in his aunt’s house. He must have—Nicholas, he knew. He knows about the blackmail scheme. I’m sure of it.”

  “How sure?” Nicholas asks. “ ‘You want to ask him a few questions’ sure, or ‘you’re ready to call Inspector Piper’ sure?”

  I close my eyes and try to sift through all the facts I’ve assembled about Lewis King over the past few days. His relationship with his aunt, strained and cold, but still very much a part of his life. His obsession with making money, which he never seems to have enough of. His belief that he’s being cursed. His increasingly werewolf-like symptoms. His hyperhidrosis.

  I can’t tell the exact moment it all clicks, but my eyes snap open and I jump to my feet, heedless of the way my joints protest the sudden movement.

  “We have to call the police,” I say, my voice surprisingly calm considering the conclusions I’ve just reached. “And an ambulance.”

  “An ambulance?” he echoes.

  “Yes—and fast.” I don’t wait to explain. “I’m pretty sure that whoever poisoned Sarah Blackthorne is also trying to murder Lewis King.”

  Chapter 17

  “I believe this is the part where you tell me how you knew
Lewis King was passed out on his aunt’s kitchen floor.”

  I cross my arms and stare at Inspector Piper, refusing to budge so much as a centimeter. “Not until you promise.”

  He consults his notebook, which from my vantage on the other side of the interrogation room where I’m being held, I can see contains the image of a whale spouting water from its head. “Let’s see . . . You and Mr. Hartford say you arrived at one thirty-two, but the call was put in for an ambulance six minutes before that.”

  “Promise me, Inspector. It’s important.”

  “So either you peeked in the windows and saw him on the ground—and then lied about it—or you knew ahead of time that he’d be there.”

  “Or I’m the one who poisoned him and I developed a guilty conscience at the last minute,” I add. I approach the table and tap the paper. “Make sure you include that one.”

  Inspector Piper stares at me as he blows an enormous bubble out of what I’m certain is an unsafe amount of chewing gum. “Ms. Wilde, need I remind you that Lewis King has been transported to hospital, where his chances of survival are still in question?”

  “Of course not. I’m the one who told you what to tell the paramedics. Peter, please.”

  My use of Inspector Piper’s first name gives him pause. He snaps his gum and stares at me, his beady eyes unblinking.

  “I know you already talked to Nicholas, so there’s no need to waste time with this whole double interrogation method,” I add. He’s still not blinking, so I indulge him with a summarized version of events. “Lewis has been showing symptoms of the wolfsbane poisoning all week. The sweating, the thirst, the confusion—it was all there. He was probably feeling nauseous and dizzy, too, but I never thought to question him on it. I was too distracted by thinking those were signs of his transformation into a werewolf.”

  “Ah, yes.” He flips the pages of his book to one that accurately, if not helpfully, shows a picture of a dog-like creature. “That would be the one who supposedly attacked you last night?”

  I yank the notebook out of his hand and promptly sit on it. “I’m not giving it back until you agree to let me do this my way,” I warn. “Someone in this village has been poisoning Lewis King for the same reason they poisoned Sarah Blackthorne—to stop the blackmail. They also tried to kill me last night by luring me off a cliff. We have to stop them before they try again.”

  Without his notebook, Inspector Piper seems at a loss about what to do with his hands. He waves them ineffectively before deciding to clasp them on the table in front of him. “If you’re worried about your safety, I could always keep you in here until the investigation is complete. I wouldn’t mind.”

  Despite the gravity of the situation, a laugh escapes me. “I’m sure you would. And if it were just me you needed to protect, I might take you up on it. But you can hardly lock up me, Lenora MacDougal, Oona and Ian MacDougal, Rachel Hartford, Nicholas Hartford, and Aunt Margaret. They’ve all seen or heard about the Book of Shadows. Where would we fit?”

  The inspector looks around the small, cement-lined room where I’ve been held for the past hour as if trying to imagine the seven of us living here indefinitely. He sighs. “All right, Ms. Wilde. If—and I mean if—I play along with this scheme of yours, what’s the point? According to your conveniently misplaced Book of Shadows, nearly everyone in the village has a reason to want Lewis King dead. The fact that he’s still alive is all we have going for us. I don’t see what telling everyone he died will accomplish.”

  That’s because Inspector Piper suffers from a severe lack of imagination. Fortunately, I have enough for the both of us.

  “He shouldn’t be alive,” I say, ignoring the inconvenient truth that were it not for Nicholas’s well-timed tackle last night, I wouldn’t be alive, either. “He should have been dead days ago, but he takes atropine for his hyperhidrosis.”

  “And you know this because . . . ?”

  I emit a fake cough. I also adjust my position so I’m not sitting quite so squarely on the corner of his notebook. It’s starting to poke. “I have my ways. How I know isn’t important. But atropine, in case you weren’t aware, is—”

  “An antidote for aconitum poisoning. Yes, Ms. Wilde, I do occasionally come up with a nugget of information on my own.”

  He pauses and waits for me to continue, which I take as a good sign that he’s coming over to my way of thinking.

  “As long as Lewis remained alive and a potential blackmailer, the killer was frantic—worried. It’s probably why he made an attempt on my life last night.” I delicately finger the stitches on my temple, trying not to think of how near to success he’d come. “The closer I got to figuring out that Book of Shadows, the more likely it was that I’d talk to Lewis King and piece the rest together. One of us needed to be taken out of the picture. And since Lewis had enough atropine in his system to prevent the wolfsbane from doing its job, it made sense to try me.”

  “But you’re still alive.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you don’t have the Book of Shadows.”

  “No.”

  “Nor do you have a suspect.”

  “Neither do you,” I point out. He doesn’t have to sound quite so smug about it. I might not have a suspect, but I do have several dozen of them. That has to count for something. “Which is why I think you should make the announcement that he’s dead. With Lewis out of the picture and the evidence missing, the killer will start to feel secure again. Until, of course, I take advantage of tonight’s full moon.”

  “Ms. Wilde, I cannot, in good conscience—”

  It’s time to play my full hand. “Someone is working very hard to give the impression that this village is beset by a werewolf. The slaughtered animals. The missing pets. The wolfsbane dug up from your aunt’s garden when there were four other perfectly murderous poisons growing alongside it.”

  Not to mention the hunched creature luring me out over the landscape last night, his every footstep secure.

  “The moon has always had a strong influence on our world, Inspector,” I say. “Even Stonehenge is believed to have lunar correlations. If you’ll just indulge me for one night, I think I can deliver your murderer. Or at least help you narrow the list.”

  He snaps his gum. “Just one night?”

  “Of course. Tonight’s full moon is all I need to pull together the powers of the—”

  “Spare me the mystical homily, Ms. Wilde,” the inspector interrupts. He glances at his watch and sighs. “All right. I’ll hold off on making a formal announcement about Lewis King until tomorrow morning, but that’s all I can promise. What you do from there is no concern of mine. Legally, I can’t stop you from holding a public gathering or performing made-up rituals in the dead of night.”

  “How do you know it’s a made-up ritual?” I demand.

  He doesn’t answer. All I get is a long, careful look and a pained shake of his head. “And for the love of everything, please don’t make me bring you in on indecent exposure charges. I don’t get paid nearly enough.”

  * * *

  “You’re finally getting around to dancing in the moonlight, and I have to stay home and babysit?”

  Nicholas is waiting for me outside the precinct, leaning against his mother’s Land Rover like a chauffeur awaiting his pickup. As I approach the vehicle, he pulls open the passenger-side door and helps me in. All that’s missing is a cute black cap on his head to complete the picture.

  “It’s not ideal, but someone has to keep an eye on Rachel and Lenora,” I say as he lifts himself into his own seat. “They’re the only ones, with the exception of me, who’ve seen the completed Book of Shadows. I can’t risk having them at the Retribution Ceremony.”

  His eyebrow twitches at that last part, but he merely says, “Ah, yes. Not at the Retribution Ceremony. What was I thinking?”

  I laugh and wait until he pulls the car out before speaking. “I just need to get all the villagers involved in Sarah Blackthorne’s blackmail scheme in one p
lace, and this seemed as good a way as any. I don’t think another fête meeting will do the trick.”

  He sighs but doesn’t argue. He never does. It’s one of the things I like best about him.

  “Once I see them together, and watch how they act when I sacrifice the Book of Shadows by the light of the full moon, I’ll know more,” I add. “It’ll work—I’m sure of it. You know how good I am at reading people, Nicholas. I can prove it to you. Right now, you’re wishing you’d crashed that plane into the Pyrenees, after all.”

  Now it’s his turn to laugh, a low chuckle he combines with a rueful shake of his head. “Actually, what I wish is that I’d had you in the plane with me. Besides, how do you propose to sacrifice the Book of Shadows? You don’t have it.”

  “Well, yes, but none of the villagers knows that. Sarah could have had dozens of copies. That’s why I have to perform a sacrificial ritual. To lay all threats of blackmail to rest along with the spirits of the fallen. The killer won’t miss a chance to witness that firsthand. Pull over in front of the vicarage, will you? I have a few errands I need to run before I head home.”

  He obliges, but with a silence I know presages another of his thoughtful ruminations.

  “I won’t be hurt,” I say before he can speak. “I don’t plan to eat or drink anything that doesn’t come from a sealed package until the murderer is found, and the entire village will probably come out for the ceremony, so there’s safety in numbers. If it helps, I also solemnly swear not to chase any werewolves who appear under cover of night this time.”

  There’s no laugh this time. “Eleanor, you don’t have to do this.”

  “Of course I do. Even if Aunt Margaret would be willing to step in my place as the Witch du Jour, the whole point is that I’m the one who—”

  “Ellie. Stop.”

  I didn’t heed his warning to stop fast enough last night, so I’m careful to do so today. Especially since he called me Ellie. Other people might use my nickname with easy familiarity, but Nicholas Hartford III isn’t one to let his formality go without a fight.