Mystic Pieces

by Ada Bell

  I gave Thelma a polite hello, then turned to Sheriff Matthews.

  “Nice to see you again, Aly,” he said. “My nephew tells me you didn’t vote for me.”

  Why did everyone fixate on that? My face flamed. “Um, well, no. I just moved here. Look, but if you clear Olive’s name, I promise to vote for you in the next election.”

  “Are you offering to give me your vote if I free an accused murderer?”

  Beside me, Thelma gasped. Great. Now on top of telling the whole town that Olive was a murderer, everyone would think I was trying to bribe the sheriff into setting her free. A pretty pathetic bribe, too. My vote surely couldn’t be worth much.

  “Relax, Thelma, I’m joking.” Sheriff Matthews said. “Did you need anything else?”

  “No, thank you. I have to go.” Thelma sighed. “My afternoon shows have already started. I’ve been too upset to watch, but now that the killer is behind bars, maybe I’ll be able to focus.”

  In my efforts not to tell her off, I bit my tongue so hard, I tasted blood. Gross.

  Sheriff Matthews turned to me as Thelma slowly riffled through bag, presumably looking for her keys. “How can I help you?”

  “I’m here to see Olive,” I said. Preferably without Thelma within a thirty-block radius.

  As soon as the door closed behind her, I said, “Sheriff Matthews, have you tried talking to Wendy Diaz about Earl’s murder?”

  “Wendy? Why do you ask?” His face turned red. “Oh, Aly. Now I know why that name is familiar. I thought it was because Doug interviewed you at the store the other day, but you’re the one who’s been interfering in my investigation.”

  A chill went down my spine. How he could possibly know that I’d been asking questions? And asking questions wasn’t interfering, was it? I just wanted to prove that Olive was innocent. It wasn’t like I was planting evidence or faking DNA test results.

  “Interfering? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “So you’re not poking around town, asking questions, interviewing people?”

  Oh, crap. Yes, I was doing that. How did he know? Lying to police felt a lot weirder than lying to Wendy and Benji, but I didn’t have a choice. I straightened up and lifted my head. “I’m doing research—.”

  “Stop right there,” he said. “I don’t know how they do things in California, but in Albany, most people don’t get an associate’s degree in biology before moving on to broadcast journalism.”

  My cheeks grew warm. It never occurred to me that anyone might look into my story. “I’m not allowed to change my major?”

  “You are,” he said. “But if you did, then Organic Chemistry, Physics II, Molecular Genetics, and Advanced General Biology Seminar seem like an odd course load for the spring semester.”

  Suddenly, I felt light-headed. All I wanted was to help Olive. One white lie didn’t seem like a big deal at the time. Now I’d gotten caught lying to the sheriff. He was going to lock me up and throw me back there in jail with her and—

  “Relax. You look like you’re going to throw up.”

  “I might,” I whispered.

  “Good. Consider this your only warning. Butt out.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just want to find out what happened.”

  “We know what happened,” he said. “We have a suspect in custody, as you’re aware.”

  “Olive didn’t do it. She was framed.” I started to detail the evidence, but he cut me off.

  “Well, if she didn’t, then it’s my job to find the truth,” he said. “The police force has a small budget since last year’s cuts, but we don’t need a teenager risking her life solving murders.”

  “I’m twenty-one-years-old. I’m not a child. And something’s not right,” I said. “I ran into Wendy at the bowling alley last week, and she lied about where she was when Earl was killed.”

  A bark of laughter escaped him. “You think Wendy killed Earl? She barely weighs a buck twenty, soaking wet. How could she hit anyone hard enough to kill them?”

  “Force equals mass times velocity. Anyone could kill with the right object.” My cheeks grew warm. “Except, you know, Olive.”

  “Nice try, kid. I know you’re upset about your boss, but I promise, Wendy didn’t have anything to do with this.”

  “So you’ve talked to her?”

  “Not that it’s any of your business, but I personally confirmed her alibi.”

  What alibi? That she was walking Fluffykins at the time of the murder? He had to be lying, unless he spoke dog. Did anyone in this town ever tell the truth about anything? My head was starting to spin from all the lies and misdirection. I wanted to bang my head against the counter, but I had a mission to complete.

  I reminded the sheriff that I’d come to talk to Olive. He apologized and went to unlock the side door leading to the area where prisoners were kept. “Right this way.”

  A large holding cell took up about three quarters of the room. A wooden chair faced the bars, reminding me of The Silence of the Lambs. We apparently didn’t have anyone else in jail at the moment. The cell was empty, except for one bench along the far wall where Olive sat, staring at the floor.

  My poor friend looked like sh—well, she looked like she’d been in a jail cell all day. Old makeup smeared under her eyes, hair limp and greasy. This was the first time I’d seen her without lipstick, and it made her seem naked.

  She opened her arms when she saw me, pushing her hands through the bars. I went right in for a hug, despite Sheriff Matthews’s protests and the metal digging into the side of my face. Her familiar scent enveloped me.

  “Make room for the Holy Ghost, ladies,” he said.

  “You think I’m going to slip her a weapon or maybe a dose of arsenic?” I asked.

  He snorted. “I’m just saying—stay apart. I need to see all your hands at all times. You two can talk for a bit, but I’ll be right on the other side of that door, watching on that camera.”

  Begrudgingly, I left Olive’s side to settle into the hard, wooden chair. She remained at the bars. Finally, the sheriff left us alone.

  “Are you okay? Really?” I asked as soon as the door closed behind him.

  She nodded. “Maria came by to see me earlier, then Sam, as you know. They both know I’m innocent. As long as I have my family, I’ll get through this.”

  “What about the lawyer? Jake Something from Willow Falls?”

  “Oh, sweetie, I appreciate the offer, but I don’t need a lawyer. The truth will prevail.”

  “Olive, you’re in jail. You’re going to be charged with murder.”

  “Pfft. Everyone knows I didn’t do it. Just because I didn’t like him doesn’t mean I killed him.”

  Okay, sure, not liking a person didn’t mean she killed him. Lots of people didn’t like each other. But having an argument with the victim mere hours before he was killed certainly gave police reason to suspect her. Especially when they’d found the murder weapon in her store, and she freely admitted extreme dislike for him. I didn’t know much about law enforcement, but if “everyone” knew she was innocent, she probably wouldn’t be in jail.

  “They found Earl’s skillet in the store,” I pointed out. “That looks pretty bad.”

  “Do you think I did it, too?” Her voice rose with each word.

  “Of course not! I’m saying, get a lawyer. Don’t take a chance on representing yourself.” With a glance at the door, I cleared my throat, then said, “Hey, listen, something weird happened.”

  “Weirder than police finding the murder weapon inside the store and arresting me for a murder I didn’t commit?”

  “Touché. But also, yes.”

  She leaned toward me, voice lowered to ensure that Sheriff Matthews couldn’t hear. “You had another vision!”

  I nodded. “Not about Earl, though. It was weird.”

  Quickly, I explained about drinking from the tea set and the experiments with Rusty. “I don�
��t know what’s happening, but I can’t control it! It’s so frustrating. How am I supposed to get you free if I don’t know what I’m doing?”

  “Take a deep breath. You’ve made a lot of progress in a short time. Already you’ve discovered that you’re more likely to have a vision if you’re using an item rather than just touching it, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And you’re finding that you’re only having visions of important events, right?”

  “Mostly. The swing dancing was fun, but not exactly earth-shattering.”

  “True. Maybe that moment meant more to the person who experienced it the first time.”

  An excellent point, so I nodded to acknowledge it. “I also don’t know how to control the visions. It’s totally inconsistent. I’ve never had anything hit me while driving Kevin’s car. Or, you know, using his plates and sitting on his furniture all day, every day.”

  “Maybe the owner has to be dead for you to get something off an object?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know much about the people I saw. I felt one woman giving birth, but I didn’t have any sense of what happened to her later.”

  “It’s also possible that your powers will get stronger with time. Maybe what you’re getting now is very powerful memories. Driving in a car is pretty mundane, not likely to leave an impression. In time, you’ll probably have more control. You may even be able to turn it on and off with practice.”

  I would love to be able to turn this power off. But choosing when to turn it on would also be useful. At the moment it felt like someone had handed me a powerful flashlight that only worked in brightly-lit rooms.

  “I hope you’re right. Meanwhile, I need to get my hands on that skillet. That should tell me who wielded it, right?”

  “It may not be that simple,” she said. “If the killer grabbed the skillet, passed a mirror, and then hit Earl, sure. But otherwise, when you’ve had these visions, have you gotten a sense of whose vision it was?”

  “No.” I sighed heavily. “What a useless power.”

  “Stop that! It’s not useless. When I get out of here, we’ll work on making you stronger. But meanwhile, you may get something else that helps. A flash of jewelry, rings. Even the fingernails may give you an idea who we’re dealing with.”

  “Especially if it’s Thelma.”

  Olive said, “Exactly. She wouldn’t be caught dead leaving the house without a perfect manicure.”

  An unfortunate choice of words, but accurate.

  “It’s all moot unless I can get to the skillet, anyway,” I said. “Without a coroner’s report, we don’t even know it was the murder weapon. Only that it went missing from Earl’s house after he died.”

  “It’s not the murder weapon,” Olive said.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “That pan was seasoned when they found it.”

  I looked at her blankly. “And…?”

  “You’re not a cook, are you?”

  I couldn’t tell her that a three-year-old helped prepare most of my meals. “Not really.”

  “Cast iron is great because you can bake oil into it to make the surface non-stick. They call that seasoning. You don’t scrub cast iron. If you do, it loses the non-stick quality. You also don’t sell a used cast iron pan with an inch of seasoning on it. Any pan in Missing Pieces should be smooth and clean.”

  Realization dawned on me. “So you’re saying the pan they found hidden in the store still had its coating?”

  “Right,” she said. “It didn’t look like it had been washed recently. If it actually killed Earl, there would be evidence still on it. Hair, blood. But there wasn’t. We were both standing right there when Doug bagged it.”

  I was rather impressed she’d taken in any of that while being arrested. Most of my energy had been used for not panicking. “Then what killed him?”

  She raised her hands in a shrug. “That’s the million-dollar question.”

  Chapter 15

  When I got back to the lobby, Sheriff Matthews was nowhere to be seen. Probably over in the Mayor’s office congratulating himself on making a quick arrest, I thought bitterly. Doug sat one of the desks behind the counter. He looked up when I entered.

  “You ready to sign out?”

  “Not quite yet,” I said. “I’d like to review the police report, please.”

  He shook his head slowly. “Aly, I like you. You’re smart. You’re passionate. And you’re making a big mistake here. You’ve been working at Missing Pieces for what, a week?”

  “Three days,” I mumbled.

  “Is this really the hill you want to die on? I know you want to protect your boss, but all the evidence points at Olive. Let it go.”

  “If all the evidence really points to her, I’ll let the evidence convince me. Come on. I know police reports are available to the public. It’s on your website.”

  “It’s not finished yet.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  “Who says I’m working on it now?”

  I waved my arms at the open space. “What else would you be doing? Mediating the dispute over the Changs’ cat? There’s no crime in Shady Grove.”

  “There is now,” he said.

  His tone sobered me, because he was absolutely right. At the end of the day, a man was dead, and I needed to remember that, even though I’d barely known him. It was easy to crack jokes, but the best way to help Earl now was to find the killer and bring them to justice.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “This is all so hard to believe. It’s murder, you know? But listen, something weird’s going on.”

  I told him about the conversation I’d overheard while lurking outside the Mayor’s office, and how it happened very shortly before they’d shown up with the warrant based on the mysterious tip from an “unknown caller.”

  “That tip was legit,” Doug said. “I took it myself.”

  “Yeah? Who called it in?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  I shook my head. “I think someone planted the skillet and then made the tip. Someone broke into Missing Pieces during the last couple of days. I know it sounds nuts, but I think it was Thelma. I found her handkerchief in the alley.”

  He shook his head. “You can’t just walk around accusing people, Aly.”

  “But she dropped her handkerchief!”

  “That monster!” Doug gasped, then spoke in his normal voice. “Sorry. I appreciate that you want to help your friend, but unless you bring me something concrete, the case is closed.”

  “And I appreciate that you want to help your uncle. But where is he now? Why did he only arrest Olive after the mayor told him to get someone? Without a coroner’s report or a final police report?”

  Doug rubbed his chin thoughtfully. After a long moment, he dropped his head into his hands before looking up at me. “Listen. I thought it was odd that Uncle Tim wanted to review the report before I released it. I’m not saying that I believe you, but I’ll take things from here. If you promise to let it drop, to leave the investigation to the professionals, I’ll show you the draft before I give it to him.”

  I had promised no such thing. I’d only said I would let the evidence convince me. But it didn’t seem prudent to mention that. “Thank you.”

  He handed me a few paper-clipped pages and returned to his desk, one eye still on me. “Don’t try to leave with that.”

  As if I could outrun him to the door. Even considering that Doug would have to open the gate separating the lobby from his work area—well, I wasn’t stupid. “I promise.”

  The basic report was fairly straightforward and didn’t give much information I didn’t already have: they got the 911 call from Thelma, she seemed distraught, and the ambulance driver confirmed that Earl was dead when they arrived. The preliminary conclusion was that the time of death was around four-thirty, about an hour after Earl left Missing Pieces.

  At the bottom of the p
age, Doug had inventoried the crime scene. Mostly standard kitchen stuff. He noted a hanging pot rack with a full range of cast iron arranged by size. That explained how they’d realized a single pan was missing. I wouldn’t know if anyone item vanished from my own kitchen, unless it was the toaster. Don’t mess with my breakfast. Then the report detailed the items on the table where Earl had been found: feathers, powdered rose thorn, and skink root sitting beside a small, empty cauldron and a dagger.

  The phone on Doug’s desk rang. I glanced up long enough to note that as he answered it, he perched on the edge of his desk, his back to me. Please let this be a long, long call.

  I flipped the page to the attached images. I hurriedly skipped over the pictures of Earl and moved to the inventory. There. The final picture zoomed in on Earl’s kitchen table, set up an awful lot like some of the pagan altars I’d seen online while searching for more information on psychics. Was Earl a witch? If so, what type of spell had he been planning to cast before he died? Was that why he’d been so sure the statue of Oshun was fake? Maybe he put a love spell on someone, and it didn’t work. If his girlfriend found out, she’d be pretty angry. Especially when she’d spent her entire day making him a romantic meal. Walking in on him would’ve been a slap in the face.

  Funny how easily I accepted that witches were real. There was only one problem: who was the intended target? Thelma wasn’t the only one who wouldn’t be thrilled to learn that Earl wanted to use witchcraft to make them love him. Was it Julie? That made it more likely that Thelma was the guilty party.

  No way Doug would let me make copies of this report. I glanced quickly over my shoulder to make sure he was still on the phone, and then snapped images of the altar with my phone. I didn’t have the first clue what to make of these items, but Earl probably bought them locally.

  Time to visit the magic shop.

  Back on Main Street, Come In For a Spell was thankfully open for the first time I’d ever seen. I didn’t know where to have gone next if it was still closed. Nervously, I stepped over the threshold, worrying that I’d somehow stumbled into a place I shouldn’t be.