Behind it was a small, antique lockbox.
Chapter Twelve
As soon as I found the box, a car drove by outside and it made me nervous. I took the box, got Meri out of the Frasers’ fridge, and we headed home. I supposed that I could have searched further, but Rebecca’s ghost had used her last moments on Earth to lead me to that lockbox. I figured it was all I needed.
Plus, I wanted to get home before Thorn got back to Hangman’s House and found me missing. Fortunately, he was not in my driveway when I arrived.
I took the box inside and examined it. The box had to have been a hundred years old or more. All I needed was a touch of magic to get inside, but then I remembered something.
The key Dorian and I found was in my purse. Instead of using magic, I retrieved the key and slid it into the lock.
It worked.
I wasn’t sure what salacious secrets I’d expected to find inside the box, but two scraps of paper weren’t it. On one of the tiny pieces of paper was a website address to an old blogging site that almost no one used anymore. The other scrap had a series of letters and numbers.
“What is it?” I asked.
Meri jumped up onto the sofa next to me and put his paws on my thighs. He examined the two sheets of paper and then jumped down and began to saunter toward the kitchen.
“It looks like someone’s old blog and a password,” he said over his shoulder.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Well, I cracked the case. I want my reward,” he snarked.
“I wouldn’t say you cracked the case. That’s a bit of a stretch,” I retorted.
“Oh, really?”
“Fine, I’ll get you some bacon. I need to get my laptop from the kitchen anyway.”
Apparently, the house wanted to reward Meri for cracking the case as well because when I opened the refrigerator, there was a plate full of maple bacon. It was already cooked and ready to go.
I ate a couple of slices while Meri happily devoured his. “This house is the best,” he said happily with his mouth full. It was rare to see him so pleased.
The peanut kicked as I shoved the second slice of bacon into my mouth. I felt a twang of guilt when I looked at Meri eating. Things were going to change so much for him.
Again.
“If the house doesn’t give up another plate of the stuff, I’ll make sure and get more at the store,” I said.
Meri just looked at me, licked his chops, and started eating again. While he did that, I opened my laptop and put in the web address I found.
Sure enough, it was the old blogging site I remembered. Its horrible web design was something from a bygone era. I used the password from the other scrap of paper to gain access to the username attached to the end of the address.
“Is this Paul’s blog?” I asked.
Meri ran over and jumped onto the kitchen table. He examined the website. “Looks like it, but it’s from a long time ago.”
“None of this is live on the internet right now, but look, it was at one time. There are tons of comments. Look at how many followers he had.”
It was a food blog, but more than that, it was a critique blog. Paul wrote scathing reviews of everything from other food blogs to restaurants. He even had a few entries bashing recipe sites.
While he seemed to get a lot of attention on every post, there was one that had three times as many comments. It appeared to have been shared across the web and on other blogs thousands of times too.
“Whoa, look at this,” I said to Meri. “His takedown of this one particular restaurant went viral. Did things go viral back then?”
“I think they did,” Meri said. “If not, this sure did.”
“So, this is that Jack Rabbits place Dorian was talking about. It looks like Paul and his blog were responsible for shutting the restaurant down… Oh my gosh, look at this,” I said and pointed to the screen.
Just then, while Meri was reading what I’d found, my phone rang. I picked it up. “Dorian, I was just about to call you. You’ll never guess what I found.”
“Kinsley, I need help…”
The line cut off. I tried to call him back, but he didn’t answer.
“We have to go,” I said and snatched Meri off the table.
I hurried to the front door, slipped my feet into my ugly garden clogs, and ran out to the car. The drive down to the shop felt like it took an eternity, but I was there in under five minutes.
After slamming on my brakes in the alley, I jumped out of the car and made a beeline for the back door that led up to Dorian’s apartment. I could only hope that he was there since he hadn’t actually told me where he needed help, and given the way his voice had sounded on the call, I had no time for a location spell.
As soon as I opened the back door, I could hear the struggle. I nearly lost one of my clogs as I ran up the steps to his apartment.
I burst through the door and found Dorian down on the floor with Wylie Romano on top of him. Wylie’s hands were wrapped around Dorian’s neck, and though Dorian fought, the chef squeezed the life out of him.
I made it halfway to him when a ghost appeared next to the two men. This spirit was far stronger than Rebecca. He almost looked like a living person.
The room got so cold around us that I shivered and my teeth began to chatter. The ghost was sucking all of the energy out of the room to manifest.
He looked almost familiar, but it wasn’t the time for me to figure that out. What happened next was as shocking as it was welcome.
The ghost somehow managed to seize Wylie and toss him across the room. The specter looked down at Dorian, who was scrambling to get up, for a long moment before he vanished completely.
Wylie pushed himself to his feet and tried to come at Dorian again, but I made light work of him. A little wave of magic and his butt hit the floor again. His head thumped against the wall hard enough to daze him but not hard enough to kill.
By the next time he tried to get up, Thorn and one of his deputies had run into the apartment.
“What are you doing here?” I asked as Thorn put Wylie in handcuffs.
“I could ask you the same thing,” he said. “We’ll talk after I get this POS down to the station and into a jail cell.”
“I called him,” Dorian said. “Wylie was outside for a while. He was pacing and yelling out front. It made me nervous, so I called the sheriff. They still hadn’t arrived yet when he broke in, and I tried to call again. That’s when I accidently called you.”
“You said you needed help.”
“Yeah, when I saw that I’d called you, I figured you’d get help for me. I’m glad I accidently called you.”
“We need to talk,” I said. “I can explain everything.”
“You’re stronger than you look,” Dorian said with a smile. “I couldn’t even fight that guy off, and you just tossed him across the room like a rag doll.”
The veil.
Dorian thought he saw me knock Wylie down. He didn’t interpret it as me using a wave of magic.
“I did,” I said. “I work out.”
“Is that true, cat?” Dorian asked Meri who sat at my feet.
“Meow,” Meri did a bad impression of a normal cat.
“My father too,” Dorian said when the deputy left the room.
“What?” I asked because I wasn’t sure if I heard him right.
“I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it myself, but my father was here too. I saw him, Kinsley. You helped him save me.”
Excellent. So, the veil kept Dorian from figuring out that I was a witch, but he’d for sure seen the ghost. And… that ghost was his father.
Chapter Thirteen
“I don’t understand,” Thorn said as he sipped his beer. “You’ve told me before that ghost was a woman with long black hair.”
“Yeah, so apparently, Dorian’s dad really liked that one movie. You know, the remake of the Japanese horror film. The one with the chick who comes out of the televi
sion. Oh, and before the drugs got him too bad, he had a sense of humor.”
Thorn sighed. “You’re going to get involved in this, aren’t you?”
“Are you?” I asked.
“You know that I don’t have the resources to investigate a decades old cold case, Kinsley. That’s why I passed the file onto Dorian. I figured he could hire an investigator,” Thorn said and took another swig of his beer. “But Kinsley, you are not an investigator.”
“I kinda am,” I said. “I figured out who killed Paul and Rebecca Fraser and saved Dorian’s life. You didn’t even think it was a murder at first. But I was right all along. Wylie tried to kill Paul. He’d been waiting years for the chance, and I screwed it up. But, I only managed to delay it until Wylie went into Paul’s hospital room and shot his IV full of Wolfsbane. The same stuff he injected into Rebecca at the grocery store. Made it look like a heart attack, right? But you saw the needle stick. If Rebecca had pushed for an autopsy, they’d have possibly known about the poison sooner, but nobody really suspected murder. Well, almost nobody.”
Thorn’s eyes darkened. “If I had listened to you, then Rebecca might still be alive.”
“You shouldn’t think like that,” I said. I felt a stab of guilt and took his hand. “We saved Dorian. Good thing in his rage he tried to strangle him instead of just injecting him with the Wolfsbane right away. I mean, I could have brought him back if I’d gotten there in time, but that’s a big if. Either way, I don’t think it’s good for you to beat yourself up about any of this. I’m sorry I said that the way I did. I really don’t want you to dwell on what could have been. Rebecca moved on to the other side. I watched her go. I’m sure she’ll find a place where she can be at peace. Maybe without her gross husband driving her insane, she’ll even make it to heaven.”
“No, I have to think like that, so I don’t make this mistake again. I want to be better. I will be better.” Thorn said. “I didn’t even pat Wylie down well enough to find the syringe he was hiding. He could have gotten me or my deputy. I got sloppy, and I’m capable of better. I just can’t believe that all of this chaos and death is over a blog post.”
“A blog post that shut down Jack Rabbits. Wylie’s first restaurant. He’d been carrying that rage with him for years,” I said.
“But why kill Rebecca? Was he just losing it at that point?” Thorn mused. “He must have thought she knew something and wanted to shut her up.
“Maybe the rest of the details will come out in time for the trial. I have faith in you getting to the bottom of all of it. Perhaps she said something to him at the funeral that set him off, but perhaps he’d even tried to kill her before. There were those mysterious mushrooms They could have been from him. Exotic could have been poisonous, but she threw them out. Did you find them? I didn’t see them when I was in her kitchen. You know what, why don’t we talk about something else right now?” I offered. “We can always come back to this after some time and space. How about that?”
“What did you want to talk about, sweetie?” Thorn asked. “What about the wedding? Maybe a little wedding talk will distract us both.”
I laughed. “Well, we do have to finalize a date,” I said.
“It’s got to be this year,” Thorn said. “I don’t want to wait.”
“Oh,” I said with a smile.
“Is that a problem?” Thorn cocked an eyebrow. “You were talking about wanting to do it this year.”
“No, it’s just somewhat unexpected. I wasn’t sure you’d agree, and I thought maybe you’d want time. I mean, I hoped you wouldn’t, but I was prepared for it.”
“For what?”
“I just don’t want to rush you. We’ve been through a lot,” I said.
“Well, I want to rush. I was thinking… what about your favorite holiday?”
“You would get married on Halloween? For me?” I said.
“Honey, I’d do anything for you. Anything. Getting married on Halloween would be fun. We have that huge festival in Coventry now, so I was thinking, if we got married at the end of that, we wouldn’t even have to spend that much on decorations.”
“Seriously?” I asked with a huge grin. Good thing he agreed since I’d already sort of told Viv and Reggie. I had Viv planning Halloween wedding cakes, and I was ecstatic I wasn’t going to have to walk that back.
“Yeah, they do that haunted house thing. We could get married outside of it on the last day. Heck, we could get married inside the haunted house if that’s what you want.”
“Oh, my gosh. Thorn it would be so perfect! Are you sure? I know you’re not as into this stuff as I am.”
“I’m as into it as you are because you love it so much,” he countered. “Plus, it will be fun. Anybody can have a regular wedding.”
“It’s only a couple of months away. I won’t be showing much yet, so I could even wear a normal wedding dress.”
“You could wear a paper sack, and I’d be the happiest man alive to marry you,” Thorn said.
I think my heart literally melted at that. If a heart could melt and pound its way out of your chest, that’s how I felt right in that moment.
Two months to plan a wedding wasn’t much. It would be much easier though because we wouldn’t have to do any real decorating, and the catering would be a snap too. I could just pay for the food vendors that were already at the festival to feed our wedding guests. I’d need a cake, a dress, and maybe some fall flowers. Viv would do the cake. I was sure Lilith probably had the perfect dress stashed somewhere. If not, I could go into the city and find something.
I could pull all of that off in two months.
It also left me plenty of time to figure out who killed Dorian’s father too…
Thank you for reading!
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© Sara Bourgeois 2020
This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons alive or dead is a coincidence.
A Taste for Magic (Familiar Kitten Mysteries Book 5) Page 12