At last, everything was in place. The stage was set, and all that remained was the task of preparing the spell. Lorna flipped through the pages of her book, looking for just the right recipe. She wanted to find the original page for solving mysterious murders, but sadly that page had been eaten by Lord Nottingham.
“Shame on you,” Lorna said to the cat. “How do you digest all that paper?”
Lorna was going to have to be resourceful. She leafed through the book, in desperate need of an alternate option.
“Clarity of Vision” was the heading to the recipe, and Lorna decided that it was just what she needed. She would not be able to share that recipe with Betty, because she would be met by so much scorn.
Lorna’s eyes ran down the page, and all the while she desperately prayed that the recipe called for black jellybeans. There were still some remaining from that morning’s oatmeal.
Chapter 14
Clarity of Vision
1 cup of milk
2 oz. butter
1 fig
14 cloves
1 can of Vienna sausage
3 black jellybeans
Victory! Would you believe that Lorna actually had a can of Vienna sausage on that occasion? She always enjoyed that strange meat, and had shipped herself a tin of it in one of her boxes. The jellybeans were also propitious, and Lorna was overcome with excitement for what lay ahead.
Hours passed, and by the time midnight struck, Lorna was seated at the kitchen table looking like a sea slug.
She was exhausted, her eyes rolling back into her head each time she almost fell asleep. Then her snores would wake her back up and Lorna would come to.
Leaning over the cauldron, she inspected the white stew. She was amazed that the black jellybeans hadn’t dissolved and turned it as black as her oatmeal. The Vienna sausage floated to the top and remained there. How odd that it floated like that. What the heck was that stuff made out of, anyhow?
Two in the morning rolled around, and Lorna had fallen asleep on the kitchen floor, settled in a position that was highly reminiscent of John Larkin’s corpse. One had to wonder if Bumblethorn would find her there the next morning, marking the placement of her body with death tape.
Lorna awoke bleary-eyed and confused to find Lord Nottingham sitting on the kitchen counter, drinking the stew.
“Hey!” Lorna exclaimed. Truly. The cat lived off a diet of paper and now he was eating milky sausage stew.
She picked him up and put him on the floor. He scurried away towards the broom that sat dejected in the westerly corner, missing his old home by the door.
Lorna hovered over the cauldron, afraid of what she might see. Perhaps nothing had happened at all. Maybe her powers were really gone. She had neglected them for so long, that maybe this was the universe telling her that the party was over. She had danced her last dance without knowing it.
But, no! What she saw in the cloudy mess of a soup were bubbles. Bubbles were a good sign! Something was happening. Perhaps she would receive the clarity of vision that she sought.
Yes, a very clear imagine was coming through the bubbles. Everything was being illuminated.
The bubbles bubbled up to the top of the cauldron, and Lorna feared that the mixture might spill over the top. Of course, Lord Nottingham would have a field day, but Lorna was not looking forward to scrubbing the kitchen floor at three in the morning.
Just as the bubbles hit the top, they stopped and began to deflate. Lorna heaved a sigh of relief. Finally, the brew settled completely and the surface became calm and quiet. An image came forth.
Lorna could see a man and his dog walking through a scene that looked a great deal like Tweed Park. The man was wearing a kilt, which seemed like an odd choice, but Lorna brushed it off. Yes, the man in the picture looked like John Larkin, and he was wearing a rather hefty backpack. There was a strong gust of wind and the kilt blew up the man’s thigh. Lorna thought that for shame she must look away, but of all things, a Vienna sausage obstructed her view of John’s modesty.
Just when Lorna was hoping to see more (not up John’s kilt, mind you), the milky soup became black from the jellybeans and the image dissolved.
“Darn it!” Lorna said aloud. She had not received as much information as she had hoped. Sure, she had some clarity of vision, but not the Clarity of Vision that the recipe had promised. This was not the case with Lord Nottingham.
Off in the corner, Lord Nottingham was wide-eyed and dreamy. It was as though he were at the gates of heaven and meeting God Himself. His head was swaying back and forth, in a trance, and he was singing. Yes, the cat was singing what sounded like a soprano aria, and Lorna was amazed by the beautiful sound.
“What on earth has gotten into you?” Lorna asked the cat. He looked as though he were on the same medication as Elizabeth Larkin. “What are you seeing, Nottingham?” she asked. Oh, how she longed to share his clarity of vision.
Wait! Maybe Lorna should have drunk the recipe as well. Maybe she would see it all better if she consumed the soup rather than simply staring at it.
Lorna walked over with a ladle and filled it with black soup. She brought it to her lips and then spat it out so furiously that it covered the kitchen window and slid down the walls.
“Yuck!” Lorna screamed. Maybe she was supposed to drink it while it was still white because she was certainly in no mood to sing a soprano aria. In fact, she felt furious.
“This is all your fault,” she said to Lord Nottingham, but the cat wasn’t listening.
Lorna had to go to bed. At least she had the image of John in the park with the dog and the backpack. She would return to Tweed Park that very morning to investigate.
Then the strangest thing happened. The potion finally took hold and Lorna rose out of bed like a sleepwalker. She felt tingly all over and altogether fabulous, if she were being honest. Even though she was half asleep, she put on an old John Fogerty album and spun around like a whirling dervish. After doing that for a bit, she became dizzy and went back to bed.
Lorna awoke at nine a.m. and John Fogerty was still playing. She barely remembered what had happened. No more clarity of vision had come her way during her spinning, but she did sleep really well once she had gone back to bed.
“Lord Nottingham!” she called out, wishing to learn the fate of the cat. He lay in the corner wearing a Robin Hood costume, sleeping like he had just spent the night at Studio 54. Lorna had no idea where the costume came from.
She walked into the kitchen to check on the stew. Black sludge still clung to the walls and Lorna moaned. Boy, she was not looking forward to cleaning that up. Amazingly, the rest of the sludge in the cauldron had disappeared into thin air, not leaving a trace. She was grateful that she wouldn’t have to clean it.
Lorna was off to Tweed Park as soon as she put on her blue eighties’ tracksuit. She loved that tracksuit because it reminded her of jogging, exertion, and action. She had a clear mission that morning, and only a clean tracksuit could express that.
She walked with confidence, so much spring in her step that Richard Simmons himself would have shed a tear. Within no time she was over the bridge, up High Street, and down at the park. It greeted her with majestic beauty. The birds were singing and the spring blossoms were a startling pink. Children played by the lake, morning hikers waved hello, and off on a distant bench, a man was eating his breakfast.
But Lorna was unconcerned with these delightful shows of normality and wholesome goodness; her interest was in death. No one would mess with her, and no one would get in her way, because she was wearing her eighties’ tracksuit.
She walked towards the ditch in which John’s body had been viciously thrown. When she was roughly thirty paces away, it was like the Clarity of Vision completely overtook her. Lorna could hear John Fogerty playing off in the distance and she had to hold herself back from dervishing around and around.
Lorna looked down and saw something rather remarkable. She knelt on one knee.
“Ouch
!” she cried. It was her bad knee, so Lorna switched knees, then finally had a good look at the imprint in the dirt. It was a paw print. She was almost sure that it was that of a Great Dane.
Montebello, she thought.
She recalled the image she had conjured the night before. John, the backpack, and the dog. She was so hot on the trail she didn’t even linger on the notion of the kilt.
Something was calling for her to walk towards a bush. She was pulled to it like a magnet. It was like the Singing Bush. No, wait, the Burning Bush—the Singing Bush was from the Three Amigos.
Once she made it to the bush, she realized that the reason why it was rustling so was because there was a squirrel in it, and he ran away. But upon further inspection, Lorna found a half-eaten sausage roll, a tin can, an Egyptian scarab, and a small painting that looked very much like a Picasso.
Lorna stepped away from the bush in shock. The items within it must all have been purchased on the black market by John Larkin.
“Sausage roll, scarab, Picasso,” she said to herself, as if it were an incantation.
Lorna walked further into the forest, and her tracksuit got snagged by a branch.
“Goddam it!” Lorna said. She was never one to take the Lord’s name in vain, but it was her favorite eighties’ tracksuit!
Lorna lay down in the forest, looking up at the trees and closing her eyes. She summoned all the powers that she had in order to put it all together. If the items in the Burning Bush were similar to those found in Bumblethorn’s home, then maybe it was true that he was in on the whole black market smuggling thing, and perhaps he was responsible for the murder after all. But why would Bumblethorn have been walking John’s dog that day? It didn’t make any sense at all. And why on earth would he have been wearing a kilt? She was told that his family was from Wales.
She considered going and getting Betty, bringing her to the park, and having her do a Tarot card reading or something, but decided against it; one of the most pathetic things that a witch can do is give up and ask for the assistance from someone else with a sixth sense. That was like one man asking another man if he could borrow his beer—it simply didn’t happen.
That’s when clarity finally came. Lorna was summoned to get up from where she lay in the dirt and walk over to a nearby tree. The tree was singing to her like Grandmother Willow from the movie Pocahontas.
There, as if tattooed on Grandmother Willow’s face, was an inscription that entirely solved the mystery. The exact details will not be shared quite yet, but suffice it to say that the words Lorna read then made everything abundantly clear.
Lorna was so elated that she went for a jog around the park. She was the very picture of vitality, and as she jogged, passersby waved in awe. Lorna had never felt so good in her life.
Having jogged around the park twice, Lorna was still full of energy, so she hired out one of the little rowboats and rowed out into the lake. She felt so good, she was surprised that when she turned around she didn’t find a Venetian gondolier behind her, feeding her olives and singing “Volare.”
Next, she stood up in the rowboat, looking up to the heavens and thanking God for the clarity of vision that had helped her solve the murder of John Larkin. That wasn’t the only thing she was thankful for.
“God,” she said. “Thank you for my new home and my new life. Thank you for the remarkable friends that I have made, the adventures that I have had, and the cottage that will eventually look like Great Dixter and make Martha Stewart faint.”
Something strange took place, then. As everyone knew, Tweed was prone to inclement weather, and so it should not have come as a shock that Lorna’s words were met with lightening. Her little barge was struck and Lorna was thrown into the lake. The boat broke in two. Had there been a gondolier, he might have saved her, but in reality, it was a villager who dove into the lake to save her.
The scene was so dramatic that one would not be surprised to find the telling of it in Moby Dick. The villager fought against the waves—luckily he was a powerful swimmer—and managed to drag Lorna to safety. Her tracksuit was filled with water, and had it not been for the intrepid villager, Lorna would have been pulled to the bottom of the lake like Ophelia, drowning in her skirts.
“Am I dead?” Lorna asked once she was on shore.
“I’m pleased to say that you’re still alive,” the gentleman said.
Lorna heaved and coughed. Then she looked up at the black sky in wonder, the drops of rain falling in her eyes.
“Where the heck did that come from?” Lorna asked.
“I’m afraid this sort of thing happens all the time.”
Once Lorna was no longer blinded by tears and rain, she could finally take in her rescuer.
Screw the storm, where did that guy come from? she thought to herself. He was a silver fox of a man with a firm jaw and respectable teeth.
Dear reader, please understand that the gentleman in question was a firefighter from nearby Whitley, having a morning picnic in the park, and he was a looker. That being said, this is not a romance, but rather a story of death and murder, so let’s stay on track.
Lorna eventually made it back to her cottage. Sure, she looked like a drowned rat, but she had to be grateful for her rescue by the British Tom Selleck.
Okay, Lorna had to admit that God had taken her down a peg with the whole lightning thing, and while she remained convinced that she had found out who the murderer was, she didn’t want to speak too soon. Would she possibly be responsible for yet another arrest of an innocent Tweeder? It would make her so ashamed if that were to happen. Yet, she had to act. Poor Bill Bumblethorn was still locked away in the library, clinking his tin cup against the bars of his prison and singing old hymns.
Lorna picked up the phone and called Muriel.
“Pronto,” a voice said.
“Muriel, is that you?”
“Why would you ask such a silly question. Of course it’s me,” Muriel replied.
“You just answered the phone with pronto,” Lorna said, confused.
“Oh, right. In light of the torrential downpour that we’re having, Muriel’s Café is celebrating Italian Cuisine Day.”
Lorna couldn’t quite make the connection, but she wasn’t going to complain. She loved Italian food.
“Well, you better make a lot of it because we’re going to need to have another town meeting this evening,” Lorna said, hinting that she had a big announcement to make.
“Oh?” Muriel asked, her voice filled with intrigue.
“Yep. This kind of news is best paired with a nice chianti,” Lorna added, thinking that it sounded witty.
“Oh, don’t say such a dreadful thing, Lorna. You sound like Hannibal Lecter.”
“Right,” Lorna replied drily.
Hours passed before Lorna decided to get ready.
She had a hell of a time peeling the wet tracksuit off of her, but once she got it to budge, she felt like a hotdog that had escaped from its packaging. She was free.
Since there was going to be a fine Italian feast that night (how propitious after all that nonsense with the gondolier), Lorna decided to dress up for the meeting. No doubt, Muriel would have already called everyone in town, and by the time that the villagers arrived at Muriel’s Café, they’d be more than ready to fill their bellies with pasta.
Lorna put on her best Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress and accompanied it with a green pair of Wellington boots—the Wellies couldn’t be avoided because it was still really coming down outside. She wore a pretty pair of blue crystal earrings that accentuated the color of her eyes and applied a swipe of lipstick.
Lorna looked in the mirror and was not altogether unpleased with the result. Now again, if this was a romance, then Whitley’s-take-on-Tom-Selleck would see her in that outfit and they’d fall in love. But alas, it was not to be.
“You look wonderful,” Betty said, entering through the cottage’s front door—the women had agreed to walk over to Muriel’s together.
&n
bsp; “Oh, don’t tease me,” Lorna said.
“No, truly. I can just tell,” Betty said. “Or perhaps it’s just the Elizabeth Taylor perfume.”
“How did you know that I’m wearing White Diamonds?” Lorna asked.
“I have a good nose,” Betty replied.
The ladies made a cup of tea, because they were still way too early for dinner.
“Why won’t you tell me?” Betty asked, the anticipation killing her.
“Because it’s best if I reveal it to everyone at the same time,” Lorna said.
“Of all the ridiculous nonsense,” Betty said, feeling slightly betrayed.
To distract Betty, Lorna talked about the night before, the cauldron, the spell, and how Lord Nottingham had dressed up like Robin Hood. Then she told of the park, the boat ride, the jog, and the lightning.
“It sounds like it’s been a rather eventful twenty-four hours for Lorna Merryweather,” Betty said with a smile.
“It certainly hasn’t been dull,” Lorna replied.
Once tea was enjoyed and the strong scent of Lorna’s White Diamonds had started to wear off, the two ladies began their walk uptown. Lorna brought her overly large umbrella from Cliff Miller’s golfing days, and she couldn’t believe how far she had come in such a short time. She smiled to herself. Lorna felt good. Not just about solving the murder, but also for finding her powers again. She’d wasted so much time thinking that the force had left her, when in fact it was still going strong.
“Oh my,” Lorna said, seeing the crowd outside of Muriel’s Café.
Would you believe it…Muriel had gone so far as to totally decorate the outside to look like an Italian piazza. There were café tables with white tablecloths, bottles of chianti, and there was even a man playing the accordion. Strings of twinkling lights hung from the trees, glowing in green, white, and red.
“Che bella!” Muriel cried, throwing her arms into the air. She was dressed like Sylvia from La Dolce Vita.
A New Witch In Town Page 12