A Spell of Murder

by Clea Simon

  Becca nodded. Clara didn’t have to be as psychic as Laurel to know she was thinking of Jeff and of what he’d told her. “So you did hear some things,” she said, and Clara looked up with pride. Cats don’t tend to think of their humans as successful hunters. They know the average biped is far too inept. But this girl was sharp.

  “I was working right outside her apartment at that point.” Nathan spoke as if it were no big deal, but Becca was on it like a kitten on a catnip mouse.

  “And I assume you told the police that her living room window was open?”

  Clara held her breath, every guard hair on alert.

  “I’m sure they know.” Now it was his turn to look away, flustered. “And they had people all over that apartment. I haven’t been allowed back to finish, or even get my gear.”

  “You haven’t—” Becca tilted her head, as if she’d heard a whistle far away. Maybe, Clara thought, she was thinking of keys—and access to a young woman’s apartment. “How well did you know Suzanne?”

  “Me? Not at all.” He shook his head. “We said hi a few times.” His sadness seemed genuine, but Becca pushed on. “I didn’t know any of the tenants.”

  “So then who hired you, Nathan?”

  “Some management company.” He was staring at the door, like Harriet at a cabinet full of treats. “I get referrals. Why are you asking—you don’t think that I...”

  “I don’t know what to think.” Becca said, speaking slowly. “I’ve never been involved in a murder investigation before.”

  Chapter 14

  Becca was on her phone as soon as she left the coffee house.

  “Maddy, I’ve had the weirdest morning, you wouldn’t believe who I just had coffee with.” She sounded breathless, and Clara didn’t think that was due to her pace. Nor did she give her friend a chance to answer. “That painter I told you about?”

  Late morning, and it was easy for the shadowing feline to keep up, the rush hour crowds she’d battled earlier having all dispersed to their various daytime destinations. As Becca walked, holding her phone to her ear, Clara realized that her friend was one of those office drones. That would explain why her person was sharing her news over the phone rather than at one of their customary confabs. It might also have explained the friend’s mood, which—from Becca’s face—was not improved by the news that Becca had shared a snack with this particular young man, no matter how solicitous he might have seemed.

  “Maddy…Maddy, wait.” Becca actually stopped, raising her hand as if her friend could see her. “This wasn’t a date. I know he was there. We ran into each other at the police station. Look, we talked about it. I asked him a bunch of questions, and they did too. No, he’s not a suspect.” She lowered her voice on that last word, but Clara’s ears pitched forward to catch it all. “I was down there answering questions too, Maddy.”

  After she hung up, Becca walked the rest of the way in silence. That gave her pet a chance to mull over what she’d learned—and what she could infer. This Nathan, for example, was not previously known, not even to Becca’s more gossipy friend. That he seemed to like Becca was obvious, even without that rather flattering admission.

  To her cat, this made perfect sense. Clara knew Becca was an attractive young woman. Her coat was smooth and glossy, and she always smelled nice to the little feline. Plus, as her pet well knew, Becca hadn’t had any suitors since Jeff had broken her heart. And while Trent had seemed promising—those flowers had been good enough to eat—he hadn’t made any moves that a friend wouldn’t. Well, if you bought his line about the bouquet being a hostess gift, that is. It didn’t take any magic to see that Becca liked the painter as well, perhaps because of his pleasant pine-y aroma. And while Becca had been appropriately skeptical, asking some good questions, Clara had witnessed that blush.

  But the conversation had taken a dark turn once Becca had brought up the ongoing investigation. For all that the cute painter had claimed not to have kept track of the time, he did seem to keep adding details to his recollections—details that might implicate Becca. And when Becca had asked about his work—about who owned or managed Suzanne’s apartment—he’d become as skittish as a kitchen mouse. Clara could tell that Becca was disconcerted when the handsome painter had excused himself rather suddenly and left. What she didn’t know was whether her human had been more upset by the questions he had left unanswered—or the ones that he had failed to ask her.

  Perhaps it was too much to expect some peace in which to ponder all these variables. Too much to expect a quiet afternoon once the two got home. Not when they’d left Laurel and Harriet behind. After all, Clara had tried to get them involved, and she should have known that both her sisters took a while to get started in the morning. But Becca and Clara returned to find the apartment a wreck—all the cushions off the couch and the mauled remains of Trent’s bouquet spread across the floor.

  “Oh, kitties!” Becca immediately began gathering the scattered blossoms, most of which were broken or shredded past recognition. They had been fading anyway. Now, however, they were beyond recall.

  “What were you thinking?” Clara found Laurel and Harriet on the sill, reclining in the sun. For once, Harriet wasn’t hogging all the space, and their calico sister jumped up to join them, squeezing in between the two. “Isn’t she having a hard enough time without this?”

  “We were…investigating,” said Laurel with a faint purr. “I’m not sure I trust that Trent fellow.”

  “I’m not sure I do either,” Clara had to admit. Men, she was beginning to realize, were often a complication. “But…”

  “I thought about cleaning it all up.” Harriet looked up, blinking, and Clara realized her oldest sister had been asleep. “But you threw such a hissy fit last time.”

  “That was diff–” Clara caught herself. No good ever came out of arguing with Harriet.

  “Besides,” the oldest sister said as she began to bathe, “Jeff wouldn’t want to see some other man’s flowers here.”

  “Jeff?” Clara turned her head and caught it. The vibration. Someone was coming to the door. With a thud, Harriet landed first and waddled off, but Laurel and Clara quickly caught up as she headed toward the door.

  “What the—kitties?” Becca looked up, broken stems in her hand, just in time to hear the buzzer. “Jeff!” She opened the door, reaching up reflexively to smooth her hair, and only succeeded in dropping some pale pink petals in her brown curls.

  “Here, let me.” In lieu of a more traditional greeting, Jeff leaned over and picked out a few blossoms as Becca sputtered. “Cats got at the flowers again?”

  “Yeah, they can’t seem to resist.” Becca turned toward the kitchen, where she dumped the ruined bouquet rather unceremoniously in the trash.

  “I don’t know why you bother.” Her ex followed, stopping only when he saw the vase, where the one rose had somehow survived. “Oh,” he said, the reality dawning. “You didn’t…”

  “A friend brought them.” Becca focused on cleaning up the rest of the debris. “Just a thank you gesture.”

  “Silly girl,” Laurel mewed as she leaned her tan side against Jeff’s shin. “We got him to notice them, didn’t we?”

  “Becca doesn’t play those kinds of games.” If looks had claws, Laurel would have felt Clara’s. “So that’s why you trashed the place.”

  “Huh.” Harriet sat staring up at Becca. To her, a human in the kitchen meant only one thing: food. “She just attacked them because she could.” Of course, the bouquet had been on a high shelf. Becca has grown rather used to the cats’ tricks, at least, the non-magical ones.

  “With everything going on, I took the day off,” Jeff explained as he extricated himself from Laurel and reached out to Becca. “I wanted to see you. I mean, that—it—must have been so awful for you.”

  “Yeah, it was.” Becca fussed a bit more with the dustpan, chasing the last few petal
s with the brush as they skittered away like so many moths, before giving up. Standing, she turned to face her ex. “Saturday was possibly the worst day of my life, but today hasn’t been great either.”

  “Oh, honey.” He reached to embrace her.

  “Don’t!” Her raised hand stopped him short. “Jeff, you can’t—I didn’t even know about you and Suzanne before…before Saturday. You can’t just waltz back in. Not now, that she’s…”

  “Becca, it’s not like that.” His arms had dropped to his sides, but he showed no sign of retreating. “I told you. I’d broken it off with Suzanne. We were over.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s not what the cops think.” Her voice had an edge that set Clara’s ears back.

  He shook his head as if bewildered.

  “They accused me of stalking her,” Becca said.

  “Oh.” That one syllable was enough.

  “Jeff?” It was the warning voice. The one Becca used with the cats when they got too close to a candle.

  “It’s just—” He paused and his boyish face assumed a hangdog look. “They came by to talk to me this morning. They had a lot of questions, and they seemed to know we’d, uh, gone out a few times. They seemed to think it was somebody Suzanne knew and, so, well… Anyway, I’d told them that Suzanne had been freaked out recently. That she was worried that someone was following her. I didn’t know that they’d think it was you.”

  “So that’s why you took the day off. I think you’d better start at the beginning, Jeff Blakey.” Becca nodded toward the living room, but from the way she was standing, arms crossed, she wasn’t thinking of her guest’s comfort. “And this time, don’t leave anything out.”

  ***

  “I didn’t mean to get you in any trouble.” Twenty minutes later, they had moved to the couch, though Becca was keeping a cushion—the cushion—between them. At some point during Becca’s retelling of what had happened and Jeff’s apologies for what he’d said, Harriet and Laurel had given up and gone to seek out real moths, leaving only Clara to listen in. “It was all that stupid group—your witch group.” His voice dripped with contempt. “The coven she was so proud to be part of.”

  Becca held her tongue, but a more sensible man would’ve noted her expression.

  “I mean, who believes in magic in this day and age?” He was digging himself in deeper.

  “What do you mean?” Clara saw the effort it took for Becca to keep her voice level. Maybe Jeff did too, because he sighed and pushed his hair back before trying to explain.

  “Well, like, Suzanne told me there were some issues. I guess she’d gone out a few times with someone in the group? Anyway, he’d given her this necklace. You know, that glass thing she always wore?”

  “The crystal teardrop?” Becca had only seen it briefly, but she could visualize it. Her hand moved up and she touched the hollow of her own throat.

  “Yeah.” Jeff nodded as he watched the movement of Becca’s hand. “That’s the one. She was really careful about taking it off before you guys met, though. Said it would bring down bad juju or something. What kind of craziness is that?”

  “Really.” Clara knew there was more to this. Becca did too, from the way she stared at her ex. “Bad juju?”

  “I don’t know. I thought maybe it was a jealousy thing. You know, ’cause she’d dumped the guy. Then I thought, well, maybe it was some other ex. But the group is mostly women, right?”

  She nodded. “So you told the cops that I was stalking your new girlfriend. Making me the prime suspect for her murder.”

  “Oh, Becs, I’m sorry.” His arm went up on the sofa back, so Clara jumped to the space between them and settled in. One couldn’t be too careful. “It was just the first thing I thought of—I never meant for them to suspect you.”

  Becca shot him a look Laurel would have been proud of but held her tongue.

  “Really,” he said, leaning over Clara. The cat yawned and stretched to her full length. “I meant what I told her. I’ve really missed you.”

  “So you keep saying.” Becca stood and walked to the door, arms once again crossed across her body. She didn’t need Laurel to suggest that it was time for Jeff to leave. “And maybe it’s even true. But all that means is that maybe you had reasons of your own to get rid of Suzanne.”

  Chapter 15

  “And I left my hat at the police station too!”

  Becca was leaning on the door, having just ushered Jeff out. But all her resolve seemed to crumble once her ex was gone, and she collapsed on the sofa with a wail that brought her three pets running.

  It wasn’t just the hat, of course. Even Harriet recognized that, as much as she had liked to sit on the velvet topper—when it was dry—and who now offered her bulk as comfort. It’s hard when your heart has been broken, Clara figured as she rubbed her head against the prone girl. It’s harder still when your ex suggests you have a motive for murder—and you realize he might have done it himself.

  But the Becca who sat up, dislodging Harriet, and wiped her face seemed more clear-eyed than the love-struck girl of only a few minutes before. And after she blew her nose, she pulled her laptop computer toward her and began typing.

  “I don’t know if Jeff meant to get me in trouble,” she said, glancing over at the calico cat who had sat beside her, grey tail coiled neatly around her white paws. “But he’s forgotten that I’m a researcher. If someone really was stalking Suzanne, I bet I can find out who.”

  Her typing was interrupted by the phone. Not that she answered it—not right away—but she did reach for the device. The observant feline watching her could tell by the way she bit her lip that she was considering letting it go to voice mail—yes, cats know about such things—before, on the sixth ring, she picked up.

  “Hey, Kathy. I mean, merry, uh, meet?” She made the effort to put some cheer in her voice. “What’s up?”

  In the pause that followed, her shoulders sagged.

  “No, no news.” Her assumed cheer was drooping as well. “I answered some questions for them, and I guess they talked to—well, they’re talking to some other people as well. Look, Kathy, I was in the middle of trying to research something—” A pause, and she sat back up. “You do? Wow, that would be great. With everything going on, I could use some good news. Thanks.”

  An hour or so later, the bell rang and Becca jumped to answer it. Despite having hosted the coven only five days earlier, she’d spent much of the time since the phone call cleaning up—as if the tufts of fur her pets had placed so carefully in the interim were something to be ashamed of.

  “Kathy, come in!” Becca ushered in her guest. “I guess I should say merry meet, but…”

  “Darling, don’t worry about it,” said the redhead, whose all-black outfit seemed somewhat at odds with what had become a bright spring afternoon.

  “Thanks. Is that…” Becca hesitated. “Are you in mourning?”

  “Of course,” said Kathy, who plumped down on the sofa right in Harriet’s spot. Clara looked around for her oldest sister, but she and Laurel had made themselves scarce, which was odd. Laurel, in particular, usually relished a chance to adorn black clothing with her lightest brown body fur. “Oh, you mean—all black?”

  Becca nodded and took her usual seat, while Clara made herself comfortable on the arm rest.

  “I just came from work.” Kathy shooed the word off like a pesky fly. “I want them to respect me there.”

  Becca nodded again, as if this made sense to her.

  “Do you have, like, a glass of wine or something?” Kathy leaned forward, her voice becoming conspiratorially soft. By force of habit, Clara looked around. Laurel had appeared in the doorway, tail up inquisitively.

  “Oh, sure!” Becca retreated to rummage in the kitchen, while Clara leaped to the floor to fill her sister in.

  “Something about a job,” she mewed, ever so soft
ly, in her brown-tipped ear. “Though I think this one wants to gossip.”

  “I know that.” Laurel glanced sideways at her sister, her blue eyes looking deceptively innocent.

  “Oh, look at your cats!” Kathy called into the kitchen. “They’re head-butting each other.”

  “They are?” Becca appeared with the glasses and the bottle of Chardonnay she’d opened on a whim two weeks before. “Usually, they fight.”

  “Cats.” The redhead reached up to take the bottle with an exaggerated shrug. “Who can tell? Anyway, I’ve been meaning to stop by and see how you were doing. I’ve been thinking about you. How awful that must have been—finding her and then being interrogated by the police.”

  “Told you,” Clara whiskered to Laurel as the guest shivered dramatically.

  “Well, not interrogated, actually.” Becca stared into her wine. “They just asked me about what I saw and how I know her, and everything.”

  “Horrible.” Kathy shook her head. Her mouth was pursed in concern but her eyes were wide with interest. “What you must have seen…”

  In response Becca only nodded and took a swallow. When she started to choke, the other woman jumped up to pat her back.

  “Sorry.” Becca wiped away the tears from her coughing fit. “Yeah, it just brought it all back.”

  “I can only imagine.” Kathy eyed her own glass, then appeared to think better of it. “They don’t have any suspects yet…do they?”

  “I hope not.” As her guest blinked, Becca rushed in to explain. “I mean—I don’t think so. Only I’m worried they might think I was involved.”

  “Oh, they can’t!” Kathy protested, reaching for Becca’s hand.

  “They called me back in this morning to answer more questions.” Becca sounded glum, even as Kathy held onto her. “And they said they might have more.”

  “Well, we know there’s nothing in that—and we’re all here for you. Here.” Kathy topped off her glass, and lifted her own in solidarity. “Interesting.” She examined the bottle.

  “It’s been in the fridge for a while.” Becca admitted.