Witchin' Around the Clock

by Amanda M. Lee

  “Yeah, and I figured out early that it wasn’t a good thing to tell her. She got frustrated. Plus, well, I didn’t want her to send me away, so I stopped telling her about what I could see for a long time. We’ll have to make sure that doesn’t happen with our kid.”

  Landon looked pensive. “Why did you think she would send you away?”

  I shrugged. “It just seemed a possibility. My mom and aunts watched a lot of those Lifetime movies and they were always talking about sending crazy people away. I was convinced I was crazy for a long time.”

  “I’m sorry.” He pressed a kiss to my forehead. “You shouldn’t have had to go through that. You won’t ever again. Our daughter won’t either.”

  “What if we have a son?”

  He smirked. “I have pretty much convinced myself that we’re going to be blessed with girls. I’m fine with that, by the way. I don’t care what we have as long as he or she is happy.”

  That was exactly what I wanted to hear. “Same here.”

  He gave me another kiss. “How about we shower and head up to the inn? I’m hungry and I want to talk to Terry. We need to come up with a plan on how we’re going to greet the day ... and start chasing down leads. So far, we’re doing nothing but chasing leads that circle and die quickly.”

  “Are you including me in that ‘we’?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. It depends on what we plan. Let’s play it by ear for now. What I really want to do is eat some bacon, and torture your mother and aunts about being grannies and grand-aunties.”

  I smirked. “You’re going to give them a ton of grief about this, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, you have no idea.”

  Seventeen

  Landon and Chief Terry had met with Landon’s boss, who wanted an update on the case. They couldn’t very well take me with them, so I took advantage of the situation and headed to the office. I had some things to do — including okaying the layout for the week’s edition — and I couldn’t shirk my duties no matter how much the birds bothered me. Investigating murder wasn’t my primary job, but the way things had gone the past year and a half I probably should’ve considered heading to the academy for proper training.

  Viola was waiting for me. “Where have you been?” She was positively apoplectic.

  “Around,” I replied, furrowing my brow. “Why are you so worked up?”

  “Why do you think?”

  I had no idea. Viola was tempestuous in life. She was even worse in death. For some reason, though, I enjoyed her company. She reminded me of Aunt Tillie in a way, even though they were bitter enemies. She often said idiotic things that made me laugh, and because she was dead she had a lot of time on her hands to spy on others. Occasionally she came up with a good gossipy tidbit, so I tried to appease her as often as possible.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “Why don’t you tell me why you’re upset and we’ll tackle the problem from there??”

  She shot me a withering look right out of my mother’s playbook. “Don’t handle me. I can’t stand it when people handle me.”

  “I’m not trying to handle you. I’m just trying to figure out why you’re so worked up.”

  “Them.” She gestured vaguely at nothing.

  I glanced around, confused. “What?”

  “You know.” She leaned forward so we were in a conspiratorial huddle. “Them.”

  I had no idea if that was supposed to mean something to me. “I need more information.”

  “Oh, geez. I can’t believe I have to spell this out for you. Them. Them. Them!” This time she waved her hand toward my office window.

  I looked through the glass. There was nothing out of the ordinary happening. In fact, all I could see were festival shenanigans. “The witches?” I asked finally. “Is that who you’re talking about? I thought you were looking forward to them visiting.”

  “That’s exactly who I’m talking about.” She bobbed her head. “How could you invite them here? And excited isn’t the right word. I’m hypervigilant because they need to be watched.”

  “I didn’t invite them.” It was my mother and aunts who decided to resurrect the gathering. This was on them. “I’m just covering the event.”

  “Well, they’re evil.”

  “Why?”

  “All witches are evil.”

  “I think you’re preaching to the wrong choir there,” I argued. “You know I’m a witch?”

  Viola’s “Well, duh” look was right out of a slapstick comedy. “You’re not an evil witch, though.”

  “You just said all witches are evil.”

  “I wasn’t talking about you ... or your mother and aunts, for that matter.”

  “What about Clove and Thistle?”

  “Clove is a sweet girl. Nobody could ever consider her evil. As for Thistle ... I think the less said the better.”

  I smirked. “Probably. What about Aunt Tillie?”

  “Is that even a serious question? Of course she’s an evil witch. I mean ... her photo is on Wikipedia next to the evil witch entry. No joke. I put it there.”

  “After you died?”

  She nodded. “I’m getting better at affecting the physical world. It took me an entire night, but I managed to load her photo.”

  Not that I didn’t believe her, but I had to check. I logged onto my computer, briefly shoving Viola’s witch hysteria out of my mind. When I navigated to the page in question, I found she was telling the truth.

  “Wow.” Without thinking, I took a screenshot so I could forever remember this moment ... and share it with Clove and Thistle. They would get a kick out of it. “I can’t believe you managed that. I’m impressed.”

  “Yes, well, I’m impressive.” She made a big show of sitting in one of the chairs across from me. She was a ghost, so she didn’t need to sit, but she’d held on to many of her mannerisms from life. I found it comforting to know that her mind was still intact ... especially after she died directly in front of me from a gunshot to the head. “You need to get over the witches,” I suggested, shifting the conversation back to the original topic. “There’s nothing you can do about them, so there’s no point in getting worked up about something you can’t change.”

  “Of course you would think that. You like the witches.”

  “I don’t particularly like or dislike them. I am curious about why you’re so anti-witch. I mean ... other than Aunt Tillie. I know she gave you grief the course of your life, but you’re hardly alone in that.”

  “I told you that I don’t like any witches.”

  I decided to let the indirect dig go. “Okay ... but why?”

  “This town has always been crawling with them.”

  That was news to me. As far as I knew, we were the only real witches who lived in the area. “You know that most of the people in this town aren’t real witches, right?” I couldn’t be sure that Viola’s knowledge base extended that far. “The people here just pretend to be witches for the tourists.”

  “Are we really having this conversation?” She flicked me between the eyebrows, and she was strong enough that I felt it.

  I reared back, surprised. “You really are getting better at that.” I rubbed my forehead. “That was ... wow.”

  “Yes, I’m gifted.” Viola rolled her eyes. “I need you to focus. Those witches out there are dangerous, especially given what’s going on with the birds.”

  The statement was simple enough, but it set my teeth on edge. “You’ve seen the birds?”

  “Have you?”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen them.” Oddly enough, even though she was a kvetch of the highest order — something Aunt Tillie had been telling me for years — Viola was actually circling an important topic. “What do you think they mean?”

  She shrugged. “How am I supposed to know? I’m not a bird expert … but I have found that they sense ghosts and don’t like us one bit. I can change their flight path if I’m feeling feisty, although that’s sort of lost its luster.”

  I filed
away that tidbit for later. “You’re not a bird expert, but you seem to believe you have some knowledge about witches. The birds have been a thing since Adam died.”

  “Yeah, that’s sad.” Viola worked her jaw, her eyes trained on the window. “He was a good man. I never understood why he married Lorna.”

  “Do you know something about Lorna?”

  “Just that she’s a witch.”

  Viola could’ve knocked me over with a harbinger feather I was so surprised by the statement. “How do you know she’s a witch? I’ve been around her numerous times and I’ve never gotten that vibe.”

  “Well, maybe she’s not the same sort of witch you are. Have you ever considered that?”

  “What other kinds of witches are there?” I genuinely wanted to know.

  “Evil witches.”

  “But ... .” This conversation was going nowhere. When Landon mentioned earlier that the investigation kept circling and dying, that’s how I felt about my interaction with Viola. “Let’s start from the beginning.” I forced a smile for her benefit. “Tell me why you think Lorna is a witch.”

  “I don’t have any concrete knowledge that she’s a witch,” Viola admitted after a beat.

  “Then why did you say that?”

  “Because her mother was definitely a witch.”

  I leaned back in my chair, conflicted. “I don’t remember Lorna’s mother all that well. She died a good fifteen years ago or so, right?”

  “That sounds about right.” Viola nodded as she did the math in her head. “Maybe it was closer to twenty now. It’s hard for me to remember now that I’m dead. Time doesn’t pass the same way.”

  “I can look up her date of death,” I offered. “I was a kid when she died. I remember it was big news around town because it was some sort of weird accident. Mom didn’t think it was a good idea to take us to the funeral because we were too young.

  “I remember being interested because everyone was whispering about the death,” I continued. “It was some sort of freak farm equipment accident or something. She fell in a thresher, I think.”

  “That was one hunch,” Viola confirmed. “There were whispers that it was something else, though.”

  “What sort of whispers?”

  “People said that Diane’s ghost killed her.”

  Now I was really lost. “I’m sorry... who is Diane?”

  “You know ... Diane.”

  It took everything I had to keep my temper in check. Having a linear conversation with Viola was often a fruitless endeavor. “I still don’t know who Diane is.”

  “Lorna’s sister.”

  I racked my brain. “I didn’t know Lorna had a sister,” I said finally. That seemed like something I should know. “She’s lived in Hemlock Cove her entire life. She was born back when it was Walkerville, but I was under the impression that she’d never left the area.”

  “That’s true.”

  “So ... how do I not know about her sister?”

  “She disappeared when you were still a kid,” Viola replied. “Lorna and Diane were eleven months apart. They were the sort of twins who weren’t really twins.”

  I knew what she meant. There was a name for siblings born within a year of each other: Irish twins. “What happened to her?”

  “Nobody knows. Diane was the older sister and was closer with the mother.”

  “What was the mother’s name?”

  “Leslie Merchant.”

  I nodded and typed the woman’s name into the newspaper archives. I found her obituary relatively quickly. “She died nineteen years ago, which would’ve made me eleven. It looks like there was a police investigation at the time because Lorna was home when the incident occurred.”

  I typed in Diane’s name. There was less information on her. “It says here that Diane ran away.”

  “That was the assumption. She was always a wild child. She had crazy dark hair, like Clove, and she was rail thin. She had a face like Thistle, though.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Like she was always smelling something nasty.” Viola mimicked the face in question and I couldn’t swallow my chuckle. I very much doubted Thistle would appreciate Viola’s imitation of her.

  “Was Diane a witch?”

  “The whole family was rumored to be witches, with Leslie the queen of the coven. Lorna was considered the quiet one. People had high hopes for her ... but now I have to wonder if she was simply better at hiding her true nature.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m saying that Lorna probably killed Adam. That’s what everyone in town is whispering about anyway. I heard Margaret telling her little flying monkeys about it yesterday. She’s telling anyone who will listen that Lorna is guilty.”

  That didn’t surprise me. “Mrs. Little should keep her mouth shut about things that aren’t fact,” I said. “This isn’t the first time this week that she’s been spreading absolute nonsense. She told me that Sheila Carpenter was having an affair with Adam and that turned out to be total nonsense because she just wanted to pay me back for stealing the campground property and pay Sheila back for not allowing her to deliver a sermon at church.”

  “Yeah, that sounds just like her,” Viola agreed. “But I don’t know that she’s wrong about Lorna. Even Margaret is occasionally right.”

  “Well, there’s no proof that Lorna is guilty.” I thought about the bereaved woman I’d spent the previous morning with. “She’s mourning hard. I know that doesn’t necessarily mean anything — it could be remorse if she did kill him — but I’m not prepared to declare her guilty based on rumor and innuendo.”

  “I’m just telling you what I heard.”

  “What about the sister? How did she disappear?”

  “It was in the middle of the night,” Viola replied. “She was supposedly in bed sleeping when Leslie turned in for the evening and was gone by the time she woke. Lorna and Diane shared a room. Lorna swears she didn’t hear anything.”

  “Were any of Diane’s belongings missing?”

  Viola shrugged. “I have no idea. It was a long time ago. If I were you, I’d ask Tillie. She helped search for the girl. They never found her.”

  Even though I was fed up with Aunt Tillie’s antics and attitude, that’s exactly what I planned to do.

  SHE WASN’T HARD TO TRACK down. As was her everyday routine of late, she was dressed to impress — the dragon leggings I knew for a fact had been chucked more than once covering her legs — and zipping around the sidewalks on her scooter.

  “I’m thinking of giving the scooter a name,” she announced when I flagged her down. “What do you think about Monster?”

  “As a name for your scooter?”

  “Yeah. I’m riding my Monster. I think it has a nice ring to it.”

  I honestly didn’t care. “Go nuts.”

  “I might paint flames on it, too.”

  “That sounds like a surefire way to make Mom’s head implode ... so go for it.”

  She grinned. “You’re still mad about last night, aren’t you? I know things didn’t go how you expected, but it’s better that the news is out. Lying is always a poor way to improve familial relations.”

  That was rich coming from her. Still, a niggling suspicion cropped up at the back of my mind. “You didn’t purposely arrange it so the information came out that way, did you?”

  “What a horrible thing to say about your favorite aunt. I can’t believe you would even go there.”

  That wasn’t a denial, but because things had worked out — er, well, mostly worked out — I was willing to let it go. At least for the time being. “Nobody likes a fink,” I reminded her. That was a mantra she’d preached constantly when we were kids and she was trying to keep us from tattling on her. “I need to ask you about Diane and Leslie Merchant. What do you know about them?”

  “Why are you asking about them?”

  “I just had a very long conversation with Viola.”

  “I’m
sorry.” Aunt Tillie was solemn. “Do you want me to put you out of your misery now? I’m sure you want to die after having a conversation with that woman.”

  I ignored the dig. This was not the time for one of Aunt Tillie’s petty fights to derail me. “She claims Leslie was a witch and she passed on her magic to Lorna and Diane.”

  Aunt Tillie snorted. “Oh, please. Leslie was not a witch.”

  “Why does Viola think that?”

  “Leslie pretended to be a witch ... and before it was considered cool in this town. She didn’t have any magic. She was a fair potion maker. That was basically her claim to fame.”

  “And what kind of potions did she concoct?”

  “The usual. She made healing potions, claimed she could cure alcoholism ... which was a steaming pile of crap. She also made love potions and peddled them to the women in town so they could snag a husband.”

  That was hardly the first time I’d heard a similar story. Women of a certain age, when they had children to provide for, were called witch and worse when they thought outside the box. “What happened to Leslie’s husband?”

  “Drank himself to death. He was a mean cuss. Nobody mourned his death ... including Leslie and her girls. It was almost a relief when he died.”

  That was interesting. “So the husband died of alcoholism ... and the mother died in a weird farm accident ... and the sister disappeared. That’s a lot of odd happenings around one woman.”

  “Are you thinking Lorna took all of them out?”

  I wasn’t sure what I believed. “I don’t know. That’s a lot of coincidences. Viola said you helped search for Diane. Do you believe she ran away?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t know her all that well. She was a mouthy girl — and I didn’t want her hanging around your mother and aunts because they were mouthy enough — but I often thought she was misunderstood more than malevolent.”

  And that right there was why you could never fully write off Aunt Tillie. Buried deep down — extremely deep down sometimes — was a good heart. She probably searched from sun-up to sunset looking for that girl ... and for days.

  “No sign of her was ever found?”