I said goodbye to Grace and made my way over to the house from the factory. Ashley and Andrea were both there, with Ashley having made dinner for all of us. Some homemade pizza was definitely exactly what the doctor ordered right now.
“Any news?” I asked, looking between their two faces. It didn’t look good.
“Chief Enforcer Lupo isn’t backing down,” Ashley said quietly. “And I spoke with a lawyer we hired today. He said they have actual evidence, and that chances are Mom and Dad are going to be found guilty.”
“What?” I practically whispered.
“It’s ridiculous,” Andrea muttered. “Insane, even.”
“No kidding. Obviously they didn’t do this.”
“Unfortunately, we’re going to have to accept the reality that there is evidence showing they did this, even if they didn’t. The lawyer doesn’t think it’s a good idea to fight the charges.”
“How long?” I asked, my mouth going dry. “How long would they have to spend in jail?”
“Fifteen years, apparently, is what they’re being offered if they admit to it. And it would involve the company being shut down,” Ashley said.
“This is ridiculous,” Andrea said. “Someone is obviously setting them up. We have to find out who it is, and we need to take them down. Mom and Dad cannot spend fifteen years in prison for something they didn’t do. And they can’t fight it from in there, so we’re going to have to fight this battle for them.”
Ashley let out a little squeak. “But what can we do? We’re not Enforcers, we don’t know anything.”
“We can learn, though,” I said slowly. “I’m with Andrea. I don’t believe Mom and Dad did this, and not just because they’re our parents. I don’t believe they did this because it’s just not in their nature to. Even if they take this deal and go to jail, if we find out who framed them and manage to prove it, they’ll have no choice but to let them out. When can we go visit them?”
“The day after tomorrow,” Andrea said. “I asked about that today. Tomorrow they get transferred from simply sitting in the local lockup to Spellcatraz, the paranormal prison island. After that there are scheduled visiting hours.”
“Good, so we go visit them then,” I said firmly. “Do you know if they’re accepting the fifteen-year deal or if they’re going to fight it?”
“I don’t know,” Ashley said, shaking her head.
“In the meantime, I’m going to keep running the business,” I said. “Grace is showing me how to make chocolate as well, so no matter what, I guarantee you Pacific Chocolates will continue. Even if we have to go back to making one batch at a time in this kitchen.”
“Agreed,” Andrea said. “You’re definitely the best of the three of us at that sort of thing.”
“I want to help find out where that evidence came from, though,” I said. “Mom and Dad are obviously innocent, and I’m going to help you clear their names.”
“I guess I’m in, too,” Ashley said. “I don’t want to do anything illegal, though.”
“That’s fine, you don’t have to,” Andrea said. “Megan and I can take care of that.”
I nodded, but to be completely honest, I was a little bit more on Ashley’s side when it came to breaking the law. I wasn’t entirely enthusiastic about doing anything that would involve committing a crime, but at the same time, I also didn’t want my parents spending time in prison that they didn’t have to.
I went to bed that night thinking that surely this was it. Surely nothing else could go wrong, and things couldn’t get even worse than my parents facing fifteen years in jail for a crime they almost certainly didn’t commit. Little did I know how wrong I was.
Chapter 5
The next morning, with a little bit more of an idea of what I had to do to manage the chocolate shop, I made my way to the office at seven o’clock with a long list of things I wanted to get done that I had made the night before.
I wanted to make sure that everything ran smoothly until my parents took over once again. After all, it was looking like that might take a little bit longer than I had initially thought, so there were a lot of things I needed to figure out. For one thing, I needed to know how much to order of all the ingredients that were needed, and how to do so. I needed to figure out how payroll was handled and how to get access to the company’s money to pay both staff and suppliers.
Luckily, if yesterday was anything to go by, the staff on the floor were extremely competent and had a pretty good handle on things. I had visited a few people who all explained to me how their specific roles worked, and all of them had seemed like they knew what they were doing.
It was going to be a relief if I could spend a couple of days holed up in the office trying to get a handle on the administrative and managerial side of things without having to worry about the day-to-day management of employees too much.
That was why, as I unlocked the front doors to the factory, I was actually feeling a little bit enthusiastic about the day.
Until I saw the body lying there.
At first, I didn’t really register what had happened. The man was lying in the middle of the floor, not moving. Was he asleep? No, that made absolutely no sense. Why would a man be sleeping on the floor of the chocolate factory?
“Hello?” I still called out as I approached him carefully. As I got closer, I realized I knew exactly who it was: Charles Perkins, the employee who had implied that I wouldn’t be a good manager.
I gasped as I realized his head was at an unnatural angle, and a tiny little bit of blood had seeped from a wound on his head and onto the floor.
His face was gray, and his lips blue. He was dead.
Finally, my brain clicked that something bad was really happening. If there was one thing we were taught to do as Healers, however, it was how not to panic in stressful situations. After all, a Healer who panics is a Healer who finds their patients dead.
I looked around to make sure there was no one else in the factory, then carefully retraced my steps, made my way outside, and locked the door behind me with a quick spell. Then, with all of that settled, I pulled out my phone. I was immediately going to dial Chief Enforcer Lupo, but I found my fingers pausing over the buttons for a second. After all, he was the reason my parents were in jail.
Still, a second later I placed the call anyway. Someone had just been killed on the factory floor. I had no idea what the situation was, but the Enforcers were obviously going to get involved. There was no use trying to hide it from them.
Luckily for me, however, the Enforcer who picked up the phone wasn’t Chief Enforcer Lupo. I told the female Enforcer what had happened and where I was. She told me to stay there, not to move, and that someone would be there shortly.
I paced around the front of the factory. What was I going to tell the employees when they showed up today? There was no way the factory could open today, not a chance. I was going to have to send them home for the second time in three days. But worse than that, I was going to have to tell them that one of their coworkers was dead.
How had it happened? Why was he in the factory? When had he gotten there? I hadn’t heard anything in the night, but of course, I was a very sound sleeper and it wasn’t as though the factory was immediately next door to the house. There were at least seventy yards between the two buildings.
To my immense relief, the Enforcers showed up before the staff. The two shifters arrived on foot, and I recognized them both. One was Chief Enforcer Lupo. The wolf shifter had always been rather aggressive-looking. His dark eyes were deep set, his nose was long, and his mouth was thin but large, always giving the impression that he was ready to tear someone’s throat out at any minute. He was older now, probably in his late fifties, and he had been Chief Enforcer in Pacific Cove for as long as I could remember. I had never liked him very much; he always seemed more interested in arresting people than he did real justice, and the events of the last couple of days had absolutely not changed my opinion of him in any way.
The
shifter next to him was Lupo’s second-in-command, a dragon shifter named Ming. Her long black hair, pulled back in a ponytail, was tinged with streaks of purple and blue that shimmered in the early morning sun, and her face was serious. I had met Ming a couple of times, and I liked her a lot more than I liked her boss.
“Megan,” Lupo said, and I made my way toward him. “What’s going on here? I’ve seen enough of your family for one week.”
“Believe me, this isn’t a social call,” I said, motioning for the two of them to follow me to the entrance of the factory. I thought I saw a glimmer of a smile flutter on Ming’s lips. “I came in here this morning to try and get some paperwork done before the employees show up for the day, and I found this.” I opened the door and motioned silently to the body.
“This was here when you got here this morning?” Lupo asked, looking at me carefully while Ming made her way to the body.
“That’s right,” I nodded, trying to keep calm. The last thing I wanted was to be blamed for this body being here.
“It’s Charles Perkins, isn’t it?” Ming said.
“Yes. I met him yesterday,” I said.
“You didn’t know him before? How long has he worked for your parents?”
“I don’t know,” I shrugged. “Yesterday was the first time I met him. I’ve been away studying at Spellford, and I was never really involved in the business anyway. I know some of the staff that have been here for years, but anyone hired in the last few I don’t really know.”
Ming hunched over the body. “It looks like he’s got a broken neck and a wound to the head. Maybe he fell from up there?” she said, looking up to the second and third floors of the factory. The way the place was set up, there was a large empty space to allow for good ventilation between the floors.
“Did he have any reason to be here?” Ming asked, and I shook my head.
“No. All the staff left yesterday at closing time, except for Grace, who was showing me how to make chocolate. I locked up around maybe six o’clock, and the two of us went home for the night. There shouldn’t have been anyone else in here until eight this morning.”
“So the only people on the property last night were you and your sisters?” Chief Enforcer Lupo asked, and I absolutely did not like the gleam in his eye.
“Yes. We were together all night,” I said, crossing my arms. I wasn’t about to let this guy come after more of my family.
“Did you hear anything last night?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “But I’m a sound sleeper. I don’t think I would have heard anything unless there was a huge ruckus. You can ask my sisters, though.”
“We will,” Lupo replied.
“Do you know how long he’s been dead?” I asked.
“Looks like it wasn’t all that long ago,” Ming said, crouching over the body. “He’s still fairly warm. I’d have to say it was in the last few hours.”
“Weird,” I muttered. This was definitely not what I needed, although I was all too aware of the fact that Charles Perkins was having a far worse day than I was.
Suddenly, I saw a familiar face poking her head through the door.
“Hello? Megan?” Grace called out, and I immediately made my way over to her.
“Don’t come in!” I said. “Sorry. There’s been an accident.”
“An accident? What kind of accident?”
“Do you know Charles Perkins?”
Grace nodded.
“Well, I’m afraid he’s been found dead in the factory this morning.”
A gasp escaped Grace as she clasped her hand to her mouth. “Dead? Surely not.”
I nodded gravely. “I’m afraid so.”
“Was he murdered?”
I tilted my head to the side. “Why on earth would you assume that?”
Grace looked over my shoulder at the two Enforcers and pulled me aside. This was definitely getting interesting.
Chapter 6
“Charles Perkins was not what you would call an invested member of the community,” Grace told me when we had left the earshot of the two Enforcers. “To be frank, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if someone finally did him in.”
“Who is he? Perkins? I don’t recognize the name at all. He’s not from our coven.”
“No, he comes from the coven of Jupiter.”
“Ah, he’s originally from Western Woods, then.”
“That’s right. He moved here when he married a member of our coven, and while they got divorced after maybe two years, he still stayed here. I can’t imagine why; he’s rubbed quite a few people the wrong way. The only thing I can imagine is that he’d done the same back in Western Woods and felt he had nothing to go home to.”
“But who would want him dead? And why here?”
Grace shrugged. “As to why he’d be killed here, I have no idea. The who, well, that one is a bit easier. A couple of years back he stole a bunch of money from his ex-wife’s mother’s estate—I don’t know the details, but I know the ex-wife was extremely angry. The total sum of abras came out in the tens of millions.”
I let out a low whistle. Abras were the currency used in the magical world, and tens of millions was nothing to sneeze at. It was definitely something that I could see someone killing over.
“So you think his ex-wife could have killed him in revenge?”
Grace shrugged. “It’s certainly possible. Goodness knows if I were in her situation I’d have considered it. It could have also been someone else from her family.”
“What about his family? What do you know about them?”
“Almost nothing. I know one of his brothers came to visit him once. The Enforcers ended up being called out to his home, and his brother was escorted back to the portal.”
I raised my eyebrows. This didn’t exactly seem like the world’s most stable family life.
“Have there been any problems with him here, at the factory?”
“You’d have to ask your parents about that, but as far as I knew, no. I mean, sure, he didn’t exactly get along with people here, and he might have annoyed a few at the annual Christmas party with his jokes that weren’t very appreciated, but I’ve never heard of anything here that would lead to someone wanting to kill him.”
“Ok, thanks,” I said. “I’m probably getting ahead of myself, anyway. He was probably just here trying to steal some stuff before he quit and fell in the dark.”
Grace shook her head sadly. “That’s a stiff price to pay for breaking and entering.”
“Agreed,” I said quietly, looking back toward the body. “Anyway, obviously everyone is to go home again today. They’ll get paid for the day, but we can’t open.”
“Right,” Grace nodded. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I smiled and thanked Grace again as she left, just as the next employees began to pull up. I spent the next half hour or so breaking the bad news. I had expected it to be a somewhat emotional scene, but to my surprise, no one seemed all that broken up about Charles Perkins’s death. Well, I supposed that did fit in with what Grace had told me. Still, I had expected maybe a few tears, simply out of the grief of knowing the man who died.
In the meantime, a special Healer who looked at bodies had come and slipped past me, after a quick introduction, to look at the body. When all of the employees had been sent home, I made my way back into the factory to see what I could find out. After all, I was the acting manager here, and this was someone who worked for me, even if I barely knew him and I hadn’t particularly liked him the one time we had met.
The Healer was speaking to Deputy Chief Enforcer Ming and Chief Enforcer Lupo, who had their backs to me, so I casually skirted up behind them so I could not-so-subtly listen in on the conversation.
“So he’s been dead for two hours,” Ming said.
“That’s right,” the Healer replied. He was a small wizard with short black hair who I recognized a little bit from having seen him around town a few times. “It wouldn’t have been longer than that. An
d on top of that, while the fall killed him, given the trajectory of the body, I think he was pushed over the rail. He didn’t slip over by accident.”
“So this was murder,” Chief Enforcer Lupo said, and the Healer nodded.
“Undoubtedly. The fall was far too low for someone to try and commit suicide here; the odds of survival from a jump are insanely high. But being pushed off when you’re off-balance, yes, that would definitely lead to death.”
My eyes widened as I listened to what the Healer said. So Charles Perkins really was murdered. This wasn’t just some break-in with an accidental fall; someone had killed him inside my parents’ factory just after they had been arrested for fraud.
This was not good. At least the fact that my parents were locked up meant they were definitely innocent of this murder. They couldn’t be framed with this as well.
I decided now was a good time to make my presence known, before I got caught eavesdropping, and I coughed lightly. Both Enforcers looked over at me.
“I sent all of the employees home,” I said. “Obviously we’re not opening today.”
“Do you have a list of all of them?” Ming asked. “After all, we’re going to need to speak to at least some of them, seeing as Perkins was killed here at his place of work.”
I nodded. “I’m pretty sure I saw a list like that yesterday. Is it all right if I go upstairs to try and find it?”
Chief Enforcer Lupo nodded, and I made my way up to the office. As I walked along the hallway toward the office, I couldn’t help but have a look at the railing over which Charles Perkins’s body had apparently been thrown. I couldn’t look too closely, since I didn’t want the Enforcers thinking that I was doing anything untoward, but as I got closer to the office, I couldn’t help but notice that right in front of the door that led into it, the railing had a little bit of blood on the edge.
Dark Chocolate and Death Page 3