by Ami Diane
It couldn’t have been more than a minute, but that minute stretched into a lifetime for Libby. She had a perfect view of the front door in the distance.
And Bruce as he opened it.
Her heart jumped into her throat. She turned to tell Marge to abort, but she collided with the woman. The apothecary shoved her into the hall with the finesse of a linebacker.
“Did it.”
Libby redirected them back to the restroom, the only place out of Bruce’s line-of-sight. “Perfect timing because he’s on his way back.” She still didn’t know what “it” was.
They both ducked into the lavatory which Libby quickly discovered was the size of a broom closet. She breathed through her mouth so as not to get a lungful of air freshener, but she didn’t complain. It was nothing compared to the odors she’d been assaulted by in the last couple of days.
She cracked the door to see what was happening in the hallway. “Okay, the moment he goes in, we’ll head out. I wonder if there’s another exit?”
Marge shouldered her aside for a view. “No way, Red. I’m not missing this.”
“What did you do, anyway?”
“You’ll see.”
Libby chewed her lip, regretting the life choices that led her to this moment while also reminiscing about her quiet life back in Oregon.
“He just went in with someone. Looked like a customer,” Marge said gleefully. She opened the door wider and slipped out.
“What—where are you going?” Libby hissed before following her.
Bruce’s door was open, and an occasional word floated out. Libby and Marge lingered where the sheetrock wall met the first glass office, listening. Even though the man couldn’t see them, this did nothing to quell the feeling of being exposed.
As they edged closer, Bruce said, “Sign here stating that you agree to—heehaw!”
Libby stilled, confused. Beside her, Marge’s hand flew to her mouth, stifling a laugh that wracked her shoulders.
Bruce cleared his throat. “Excuse me. What I meant to say is that for a used vehicle ten years or older, we can finance up to seventy percent of the retail value on—heehaw!”
Libby choked on a snort and covered her mouth as well. “Did you do that?”
Marge gasped, fighting hysterics. “I call it Jackass.”
Bruce coughed. “Pardon me. I’ve got a frog in my throat.” The sound of his coffee mug scraping across his desk followed.
Marge’s eyebrows wiggled at Libby.
Libby’s eyes went wide. “You put the potion in his coffee?”
The apothecary nodded.
“There,” Bruce was saying. “That’s better. So, for a term of up to sixty months, we can give you an APR of heehaw!” Something slammed onto the desk. “Son of a heehaw!”
Marge doubled over, tears streaming down her face. Libby bit her lips together to keep from laughing out loud as she slid down the wall.
Bruce yelled, “I’m going to kill her!”
His potential buyers spoke up for the first time. “Excuse me?” It was a woman’s voice. “Who?”
“My crazy ex-heehaw who did this heehaw.” A chair scraped across the floor.
“Where are you going?”
“To find her heehaw. She’s gotta be here somewhere.”
Libby choked on a laugh and grabbed Marge. All good humor fled at the very real threat that was about to storm out of the office.
At the other end of the hall, an exit sign illuminated like a beacon in a storm.
“Come on. Hurry!”
Their footsteps echoed as they sprinted down the hallway, stealth no longer their top priority.
Marge wiped her eyes. “If he kills us, it will have been worth it.”
“Speak for yourself. Some of us still have decades left to live.”
Enraged shouts exploded far behind them as Bruce spotted them. His curse-filled diatribe was cut off as they bolted out the exit.
“This way,” Marge yelled.
Libby’s auburn hair broke loose from its ponytail as she sprinted after the older woman.
They reached the depot, grabbing their sides and gasping for air. The fact that it was only three blocks away was disconcerting.
When they reached Marge’s Volvo, they discovered that some heehaw had boxed her in.
“Crap! Inside!” Libby dashed for the depot.
Irate shouts floated on the breeze as Bruce loped his ginormous frame across the street.
“You get back here! I see you, you heehaw!”
Inside, the depot buzzed with activity. Every table in the small eating area was occupied. Marge lunged at the nearest one, pulled out a chair, and dropped beside a very bewildered elderly gentleman.
“Sorry, we’re just going to borrow this seat a minute.”
Libby dove into the chair across from them as Bruce’s silhouette ran past the windows, heading for the door.
“Pretend you know us,” she instructed the older man.
Very bushy eyebrows that could’ve used a weed eater climbed his forehead. She slid his half-eaten salad over and pretended to be eating it. Marge did the same with the man’s grilled salmon.
The front door rattled in its frame, nearly tearing loose from its hinges. Bruce filled the doorway, his face flaming red.
Blood-shot eyes fell on them, and he stormed over.
Libby let out a hollow laugh, looking at the stranger across from her. “Ha, Fred, you’re hilarious. What a funny joke. Isn’t that a funny joke, Marge?”
“So funny. I’ve always said, Fred here should do standup.”
The man looked back and forth between them as if they had each sprouted two heads. “My name’s not Fred.”
“You,” Bruce spat, stomping up to their table. Foam formed at the corners of his mouth as he continued to point a thick finger at Marge.
“You,” he seethed again. He seemed so full of fury that he was unable to string proper words together.
Marge blinked up innocently. “What?”
The entire depot, from diners to seafood customers at the display cases had gone quiet. The front door softly opened, and footsteps sounded behind Bruce’s behemoth frame.
The car salesman continued to shake. “Kill. You. What the heehaw did you do to me?”
“I hope that wasn’t a threat to kill someone that I just overheard.” Deputy Jackson stepped up to their table. He stood nearly as tall as Bruce but had half the man’s mass. “What’s going on?”
“This devil woman put some sort of heehaw spell on me.”
“That so?”
“Don’t look at me like that. Can’t you heehaw it? See?!”
“Alright, Mr. Singer. Just calm down.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down!” Bruce rounded on the deputy.
Jackson seemed unaffected. “Tell me what happened.”
Bruce’s short, curse-filled recount was interrupted every other sentence by him braying like a donkey then adding, “See?” each time. When he finished, he glared daggers at Marge and said, “I want them both charged.”
“To be honest, Mr. Singer, I’m not sure what you can charge them with. You want me to believe they put some sort of spell on you that makes you sound like a donkey?”
“Jackass,” Marge corrected under her breath, causing Libby to kick her under the table. Thankfully, the comment had gone unheard by both gentlemen towering above them.
“Yes, that’s what I’m saying,” Bruce retorted.
Jackson stared at the man a half-beat then turned for the first time to the table. “Ladies, were you over at the lot at all today?”
They couldn’t say they weren’t because they had been seen by the other salespeople. “We popped over to use the restroom when this one was locked,” Libby explained. “You can ask that guy who works the showroom. I didn’t catch his name.”
Marge nodded. “That’s all we did. We came right back here and have been having lunch with this nice gentleman since.” She nudged the man’s now cold salmon t
o confirm her story.
The man possibly named Fred stared vacantly into the middle distance as if resigned to whatever hallucination he was experiencing.
It took several more minutes before Jackson could convince Bruce to leave without incident, telling him to return to the station with him so he could ask him follow-up questions. Libby got the impression he was humoring the irate man.
Once they left, Marge sucked in a breath. “Sometimes, there’s justice in this world.”
“You can wax philosophical later, Socrates. Bruce doesn’t know about… you know?” She kept her question about Marge’s extracurricular potion activities vague for Not-Fred’s sake.
“Nope. Just suspicions, but he never found or witnessed anything concrete.”
They paid for Not-Fred’s meal and ordered him another salmon before they left. As they walked to Marge’s car, which was now accessible again, Libby asked, “Still think this was worth it?”
Marge grinned. “Heehaw!”
Chapter Sixteen
BACK AT MOTHER Nature’s Apothecary, they took advantage of the shop being closed. While Libby faced shelves, Marge sat at the front desk and called Brent Stevens’s wife Shirley.
Libby overheard the one-sided conversation, resisting the urge to butt in with the worn-out joke: “And don’t call me Shirley” from the movie Airplane. When the potionist hung up, Libby paused amid arranging bottles of L-Glutamine to ask, “Is she stopping by?”
“Yep. Told her that her favorite brand of St. John’s Wart just came in. She wanted to come in tomorrow when it’d be more convenient, but I convinced her I was already here and doing nothing important. She sounded suspicious, but…” The sentence trailed off with a shrug.
When Libby finished facing the bottles on the shelf, she stared at the next row, her heart no longer in it. Instead, she mixed essential oils to create a unique, calming blend. Just like her potion-making skills, something went awry because what she ended up with made her gag.
Sighing, she replaced the tester bottles and practiced moonwalking down the aisle—not Michael Jackson’s signature dance move, but actual bounding steps as if she were on the surface of the moon.
Marge looked up from the register where she’d been going over the receipts. “You’ve got a screw loose, you know that?”
“Just for that, you don’t get to join my Apollo mission.”
The door rattled. A woman pressed her face against the glass and peered in. When Libby let her in, the lady swirled in with the salty air.
“Welcome,” Libby greeted her. “Surely you’re Shirley.” She grinned at her own joke.
The woman stared an uncomfortably long time without a hint of a smile before Marge beckoned her over.
And don’t call me Shirley, Libby mentally finished. The joke setup was a mental tick, an echo that needed finishing.
She lingered on the fringe as the two women exchanged pleasantries like a practiced dance, beginning with asking how the other was doing to eventually getting to the weather.
“How’s Brent doing?” Marge threw out casually as they gravitated toward the register.
“Oh, fine, I guess. He keeps himself so busy, I don’t see him much except in the evenings.”
“That surprises me. I thought one of the advantages of living at the resort and being host was that you got to stay home?”
“It is, but with such a new resort, there’s really not much to do. So, Brent’s usually hanging out with his fishing club buddies. I swear, he spends more time with them than sleeping.”
“Fishing club?” Libby asked.
When Shirley turned, surprised at the intrusion, Marge shot Libby a knowing look behind the woman’s back. The fishing club must be the guise the AWC used, like PMS’s book club. An anti-witch anything would probably raise more than a few eyebrows, not to mention, paint any member as being a crackpot.
“Yeah, it’s a local chapter,” Shirley explained. “They’re supposed to meet once a week, but they’re all joined at the hip. If I’d have known that’s what he’d be spending most of his time doing when we got married, I’d have thought twice about saying, ‘I do.’” Her voice was thick with bitterness.
“I’m sorry. How long have you two been married, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Eleven years.”
As much as she tried to hide it, Libby’s inner thoughts must have been in her expression because Shirley added, “This is our second marriage each.”
The woman wore the years well, but her hair was more gray than not, and her posture slumped as if the world had worn her down.
Marge tallied up Shirley’s total, and the lady slid her credit card across the counter, her gaze far away. “His first go didn’t work out because he was cheating on her.” Her voice caught. “Honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s what he’s been up to. Always fishing, my foot.”
Libby wanted to comfort the woman, especially because she knew what Brent was really up to. However, she felt the words might sound hollow coming from a stranger.
Marge handed back Shirley’s card and her receipt. “I bet he’s doing nothing but farting around with his buddies. I’m sure I’ve seen him at the docks, right, Red?”
Libby nodded.
Stuffing the bottle of St. John’s Wort into her purse, Shirley hedged towards the door, and Libby realized they hadn’t asked her their questions yet.
“With the weather getting nicer, I’m sure he’ll be out more often, especially if we have more days like last Wednesday.” The words came out in an eager rush, so Libby leaned against the counter in what she hoped was a casual stance.
Marge picked up on the thread. “Yeah, I bet he was out all day Wednesday fishing, wasn’t he?”
Shirley rolled her eyes. “He left just after breakfast, and I didn’t see him until late that night. Crawled into bed smelling like he’d been rolling around outdoors.” A crevice formed between her dark brows. “Oddly, he didn’t smell like the bay. Whatever. The lazy bum left me to blow leaves and clean up a mess from a previous camper myself.”
After mumbling “thanks” for the bottle of herbs, she left. The bell over the door tinkled, then the shop lapsed into stillness. Shirley’s revelation that her husband hadn’t been home Wednesday, along with the fact that she didn’t know where he’d been, wasn’t an admission that he’d been at Beatrice’s house. It did, however, at least confirm that he hadn’t been at home.
After grabbing a bowl of clam chowder to-go from her favorite Bayside Seafood Depot, Libby headed home. Her car climbed the steep drive up Cottage Grove Lane as the narrow road wound along the coastline. Her two-story Victorian house rested at the summit, freshly painted in a pale yellow like a lighthouse against a blue sky. The clouds had partially burned off, showing off a summer sunset.
Inside, she guzzled down the chowder while dividing her attention between Jasper and Orchid. For her own sanity and to make up for having been gone most of the day, she squirted cat gravy into Orchid’s bowl then gave Jasper extra eggs.
As it turned out, ravens were carnivores, but she couldn’t stomach feeding him mice. So, she left him to do most of the meat hunting himself outside, feeding him the occasional chicken eggs, arthropods, and seeds inside.
In the library, she opened a window for his evening flight with the gulls. The drapes fluttered in the cool ocean breeze.
When she finished washing dishes, she wandered through the library into the oblong, rarely-used sitting room to tend to her orchids. She kept more in the greenhouse, but she wanted the cheeriness to extend into the house, as well.
Most of the house was decorated with Arlene’s things and in her style—which was Grandmother Eclectic if Libby had to label it. The decor and furniture had come with the place, which suited Libby’s needs just fine since she’d brought little belongings in her hasty move.
She filled the trays beneath the orchid pots with water, creating little moats around the containers. When the water evaporated, it kept the air surro
unding the plants humid. After that, she spritzed the plants with a special fertilizer spray before soaking up any moisture that had accumulated in the well of the leaves or crown.
Next, she checked the roots, noting their color. It would be time to water them in the next couple of days.
A particularly deep, royal purple phalaenopsis pulled her attention. It had been her mother’s, the woman who birthed Libby’s love of gardening and all things botany, especially her affinity for orchids.
This particular plant had been a rescue from a grocery store, planted in the wrong medium. Her mother had cut the spikes and repotted the plant in coconut husk chips. It took patience and time, but eventually, the plant grew new leaves and roots and thrived.
When it was clear the plant would survive, her mother had said, “See? All things can be made new. All things grow under the right conditions.”
By the way her mother said this, Libby knew she meant more than just plants. It was a lesson she hadn’t really taken to heart until after her mother’s death. Her brokenness had led her to Oyster Bay and a new path. With the exception of sticking her nose into murder investigations, she was thriving with a new beginning.
When she turned away from the rainbow of blooms, she ran smack into a large entertainment center—large television included—that hadn’t been there minutes before.
“What the—” She stared at the monstrosity. Where had this been hiding elsewhere in the house?
Once the shock wore off, she finagled the heavy furniture, rocking it back and forth to move it, until it was no longer in the center of the room. With a bit of furniture rearranging, she had a cozy nook from which to watch TV.
The problem was there was no cable or satellite hooked up, so she improvised with a DVD player and old movies she discovered on one of the cabinets.
She popped in Some Like It Hot and plopped onto the couch. As the credits flashed across the screen, she thought of Beatrice’s murder. So far, Brent Stevens and Stacy Blackwood were still her top suspects.
The problem was, she couldn’t think of a motive for Brent killing the potionist. Perhaps the AWC had ordered it? One less “witch” to worry about in the small town.