Strangetown Girl (Welcome To Witch County Book 1)

by C. M. Cevis

  Silence.

  There was one light on in what looked to be the kitchen, towards the middle of the first floor, but that was it. Nothing out of place… except for the blinking red light just opposite the door Luna had stepped through.

  That probably meant that Wesley and Georgia had a silent alarm that she’d just triggered. Red and blue flashing lights from the front of the house let her know that she was right, and she cursed internally. Who in the world had an alarm system in a town like Calidity?

  She closed the back door behind her, turned the lock, and slipped into a small coat closet, leaving the door cracked so she could see what was going on.

  The officer who came in was the same the one she’d sent on the wild goose chase through evidence. Poor guy. He was alone and didn’t turn on any lights. That struck her as odd behavior for a cop coming in response to an alarm, but what did she know. She waited until he headed in one direction before slipping out of the closet and heading in the other. The last thing she wanted was to be a sitting duck, waiting for him to find her.

  Luna’s tiptoeing mad dash brought her to what appeared to be Wesley’s home office. She looked around as she slid the sliding barn doors almost closed behind her. The walls were lined with things that seemed to mean something to Wesley. His graduation from the police academy, a plaque from his election to sheriff of Calidity, his bachelor’s degree in psychology… that one explained quite a bit about how he operated, didn’t it, Luna thought to herself.

  She wasn’t ready to whip out the camera. The last thing she wanted to do was draw attention by having the flash go off and alert the officer. Instead, she started looking through desk drawers, thankful for the bright moonlight streaming through the window behind her.

  Most of what she found were mundane things, like receipts for housework, handwritten reminders in Georgia’s cursive script, and pushpins. It was the last, smallest drawer that made Luna work. It had been locked. It wasn’t anymore.

  The drawer was filled with pictures. The ones on top were of Georgia, though they looked to be older pictures from when she was younger. But under those were pictures of other women. Some of them were police officers that Luna recognized, some people that owned shops in town, some daughters of people that she knew. All about the same age as she was.

  At the very bottom of the pile, all together as if it had been organized that way, were pictures of Luna. Some where she was alone, and some where she was not. None were posed—they all looked to have been taken from hiding places, like the bushes across the street from her house or around the corner from Mom’s house.

  “Oh my goodness,” Luna whispered as she flipped through.

  Some of them were from when she’d first moved to town, even before she’d bought the bed & breakfast. There were almost ten years of pictures in this drawer!

  The very back of that drawer contained a rolled plastic bag. For a moment, Luna thought she’d found someone’s weed stash, but the bag seemed to hard in her hands for that. She unrolled the plastic, and leaned in so that she could see in the dimly lit room.

  “The sunglasses?” Luna whispered to herself. It looked like the broken glasses that she’d found the day that this had all started. They’d been just outside of her house, and she’d seen Officer Bo put them in an evidence bag. So why were they here, in the sheriff’s house? Luna frowned, and slipped the glasses into her bag.

  Luna shivered involuntarily, just as her senses picked up approaching footsteps. She cursed at herself for getting distracted, shoved the pictures back where she found them, and ducked under the desk.

  It wasn’t until she heard the doors slide open that she realized her bag was on the floor beside the office chair. The officer’s feet had just rounded the desk and stopped almost exactly in front of her.

  “What the heck is this,” she heard him ask out loud as he toed the bag. “I guess the sheriff was working overtime.” He chuckled, leaving the bag, and walking back the way he’d come.

  Luna let out a sigh of relief as his footsteps stopped just outside the office door. She froze, waiting for the door to slide shut. It didn’t.

  There were several slow, painful moments of silence.

  “Yeah, boss, I walked the whole house, there’s nothing here. Are you sure you turned down the sensitivity? It was wildlife setting it off before, remember?... I was right up the street, it didn’t take be long to get here thankfully… Yeah, I’ll check out back before I go, but there’s nothing in the house, and nothing is out of place at the entry points… No problem, enjoy your dinner.”

  Luna heard the beep of the call ending, and the footsteps moving toward the way that she’d come into the house. She had a few panicked moments of trying to remember if she’d left anything out of place before realizing that of course she hadn’t.

  When she heard the back door open, she started moving again. She left her bag where it was, not wanting him to return to the office for some reason and notice it missing, and instead made her way to the front hall. She was betting there was a coat closet near the door, and that was where she was heading. She needed to know how to disarm that alarm system.

  The officer didn’t take long to come back inside and make his way back through the house and to the front door. He paused, looking around, presumably to make sure he hadn’t missed anything or left anything behind, and then flipped open the panel cover on the alarm keypad by the door.

  Luna stood on her toes inside of the closet, watching through the cracked door, and whispered the numbers to herself as the panel beeped. She had to make sure she remembered.

  “Five… six… one… eight… two.”

  Luna repeated it in her head several times as the alarm beeped a few times and began what sounded like a countdown until it armed. The officer stepped quickly through the front door, closed it behind him, and locked it. Luna counted to three before she moved.

  She punched in the code, heard three beeps in response, and the panel lit green just as the officer’s police car headlights swept across the front of the house and turned to head back down the driveway.

  Now, she could get back to why she was there.

  First up was that damn drawer. She was taking pictures of what was in there. If he was stalking her and others like this, that had to be cause for dismissal. The glasses were leaving with her in person. Graham might be able to do something with the that she couldn’t.

  Luna went over the instructions for the luminol in her head as she readied the camera and the bottle. She was going to have to work fast.

  She sprayed her way around the room, but nothing reacted. That surprised her. The desk was negative as well. She sighed, picked up her things, and started her way through the rest of the house.

  She took a few more pictures of minor things that she found, circumstantial evidence, as Graham had called it, before ending up back at the kitchen. She did just like she’d done in all the other rooms, starting at an entry point with the luminol and the camera in hand. At this point, she was starting to doubt her certainty that she’d find anything more than some creepy photos and a matching set of boots to what she found in Wesley’s office at the station.

  Good gravy, was she wrong. The luminol started glowing as soon as it hit the counters, and Luna had to shake off the shock to get her pictures before the effects wore off.

  According to what the chemicals told her, the blood hadn’t gone farther than the kitchen, but it had been spread on both sides of the door frame and across almost half of the counters. She could also clearly see steps that had been taken in bloody boots, but only just inside the door. That must have been where sense hit him. Sense, or his wife.

  Luna was one hundred percent convinced that the person spreading blood around wasn’t Georgia. Innocent until proven guilty her butt. This was Wesley’s doing.

  Luna made her way back outside, into the backyard. She was looking for signs of whatever had been burned out back. The remnants of a fire were at the back of the yard, tucked into th
e only part of the fence that wasn’t butted up to trees and forest.

  “At least they were halfway responsible about it,” she mumbled to herself as she began taking pictures.

  She wasn’t sure what the receptacle, a good-sized wooden box that looked to have been built there, had been before it was burned. Maybe a compost box. Inside were ashes, of course, but there were other things. Chunks that weren’t anything nature-like. Luna pulled several from the ash and slipped them into the gallon-sized bags she’d brought, just in case.

  Then, she took pictures. If anyone had been looking out of their back window, they would have thought there was a lightning storm going on, and while Luna wasn’t excited about having to hide from another cop, she wasn’t willing to not get what she needed from the yard. This was her life; this was her going down for a murder that she didn’t commit, and the murder of family member at that. This was important to her.

  The last thing Luna did before deciding that it was probably time for her to get going was to try spraying the luminol on the wooden box. She wasn’t too hopeful, but when the top and the outside of the box started glowing faintly through the burn and mess, Luna grinned and snickered, taking a few more pictures before finally stuffing everything back into her back and going back into the house.

  She wasn’t super excited about having to go out of the front door but she didn’t want to set the alarm from the wrong entry point. She was pretty sure she could get out without drawing too much attention to herself, and she hadn’t noticed any extra lights coming on when the officer had left earlier, meaning the lights outside weren’t motion activated. That seemed a bit silly, if security was what the Jays were worried about, but she wasn’t going to pick with something that was good for her in the moment.

  She repeated the code to herself once more, then punched it into the keypad by the front door and slipped out before it armed. The officer had locked the door behind him when he’d left, but Luna didn’t have a key to do the same. Hopefully, they would think that the officer had simply forgotten on his way out.

  Luna said a small apology for having the officer take the blame for something she’d done. Her words were picked up by the wind as she made her way through the well-manicured bushes to the street. Picking up the pace, she turned at the end of the street and down the few blocks to where she’d parked her car. She hopped inside, let out a breath that she felt like she’d been holding forever, and started the engine just as her phone lit up in the center console, where she’d left it.

  It was Graham, letting her know that he had just watched them drive away from the restaurant. Luna put the car in drive and made sure that she was out of the neighborhood before she replied.

  I’m already gone, and I have what we need.

  23

  GRAHAM WAS LEAVING EARLY. HE’D promised Wesley that he wasn’t sticking around any longer than necessary, and he was keeping his word. His first and last stop in Calidity was Luna’s house on his way out of town.

  She’d handed him her bag from last night, just as it was when she had left the Jays, minus a note on the sunglasses. Wesley had snatched those from the case evidence for a reason, which meant Graham probably needed to look into it. Everything that she’d used the night before was in that bag that was about to be on its way out of town. That way, she wouldn’t be found with anything that made her look guilty of something that she’d actually done this time. Graham had agreed with the logic, taken the bag, hugged both Luna and Asher goodbye, and hit the road.

  “Is he going to be back?” Asher asked as she and Luna stood in the road and waved goodbye until he was out of sight.

  “Bet on it,” she replied without hesitation.

  ~*~

  WESLEY HAD CHANGED HIS ROUTE into the station that morning. He wanted to make sure that meddling agent had left, like he’d said he would.

  He hadn’t wanted to go to dinner with him the night before, but Georgia had wanted to go and thought that he was a nice man and blah, blah, blah. Wesley couldn’t convince her of anything else without raising alarms that would lead to arguments that he wasn’t in the mood to have, so he went along. He wasn’t paying anyway, and the restaurant was one that he liked. He could act nice for an hour or so.

  He’d almost welcomed the interruption of the alarm going off. He knew that Sanders was just trying to be helpful, saying that he was in the area anyway and would go check it out. It was literally the one time he’d regretted adding some of the officers to the list of people alerted when the alarm went off. He hadn’t appreciated him not locking the door though. Since he and Georgia came and went through the garage most times, it had been the morning before either of them had noticed.

  Wesley pulled into the parking lot of the hotel that the agent said he was staying at and whipped into one of the handicapped spots at the front before hopping out and adjusting everything so that he could be intimidating, if needed.

  Calidity’s tourist season hadn’t started yet. If it had, the lobby would have been humming with activity. Instead, he saw only the two people standing behind the desk.

  “Slow morning, huh?” Wesley asked as he strode across the tile and onto the carpet that surrounded the reception desk.

  “Very. We’ve got a few customers, but only one who was checking out today, and he’s already long gone.”

  “Tall guy, beard mustache combo, glasses?” Wesley asked.

  The guy behind the desk nodded. “Are you looking for him?”

  Wesley nodded, sensing the man had more to say.

  The clerk leaned forward conspiratorially. “I guess you know he’s FBI then. We had to verify who he was so that the feds would pay for the hotel room. They tip really well, too.”

  Wesley pretended to laugh, though he was mostly annoyed the guy had nothing interesting to tell him. “Yeah, that’s him. I was just stopping past to see if he was gone already.”

  “He left about an hour ago.”

  Wesley nodded. “That’s all I needed to know. Thank you for your time. And good luck with the other guests.”

  “No problem. Have a good day, Sheriff,” the man called after him as Wesley walked back outside to his car.

  That was one big problem taken care of, and Wesley could breathe again. He hadn’t liked having other agencies in town, poking around in his city’s business. It made him nervous, and nerves was the last thing you wanted in the head of the local police force.

  Wesley climbed into his car, let out a sigh of relief, and got ready to pull out of the parking lot.

  24

  LUNA AND ASHER WERE SETTLED into the rocking chairs on the front porch when Wesley’s car stopped in front of the house and the engine fell silent.

  “Called it,” Luna said softly.

  Asher half chuckled, half groaned in response.

  “No breakfast this morning?” Wesley called as he climbed out of the vehicle.

  Neither of them answered.

  “No stinging barbs hurled my way either. Could it be that you are in a funk because your federal knight in shining armor has left?”

  Luna took a sip of her coffee. This cup had been combined with a bit of alcohol since she’d known that he was coming past.

  “I still wasn’t able to find out why you had a federal knight in shining armor anyway. Something about it being above my paygrade. I didn’t really appreciate that, but I guess that’s not your fault, is it?”

  Luna and Asher shared a look. Asher didn’t know why either, but she wasn’t worried about finding out why. She trusted Luna to tell her if she ever needed to know.

  “Did you know that your officers have the legal right to arrest you if you are in the process of doing something illegal? Say, trespassing on someone’s private property,” Luna said calmly.

  “This is a murder scene,” Wesley rebutted.

  Luna shook her head. “This scene has been cleaned and returned to my possession. This is a private residence that you have no right to be on without my permission.”

&
nbsp; “You wouldn’t call the police on me.” Wesley narrowed his eyes at Luna. She wondered if that was supposed to be intimidating.

  “Sure I would. I should have been calling the police on you all those times that you walked through my house and into my kitchen without permission too.”

  “Others walk into the house all the time to see you.”

  “They have my permission. You don’t. Keep that in mind,” Luna said with a wink.

  Wesley’s face darkened. “You are still a suspect in a murder.”

  “I still haven’t left, like you asked. I’ve done nothing to raise suspicion or to hinder the investigation. Though you did when you had the place cleaned.”

  Wesley looked like he was going to start growling at any moment. “Who said that I had anything cleaned?”

  Luna almost responded with something that pointed out the lack of blood when she’d arrived, but decided that silence was a better option for her in this case.

  “Sheriff,” Asher said, her eyes narrowed. “Are you okay? Do you have some sort of injury right—” she reached her hand out toward Wesley, but he jerked away, as if Asher was about to do something violent when she clearly wasn’t.

  “No,” he barked. “Cut myself shaving.”

  Asher’s face said she didn’t believe him, but she closed her mouth and sat back, not pushing the issue.

  Luna took that as her cue to get rid of Wesley. “It’s been wonderful to see you, Sheriff, but I’m sure you have other things that you need to attend to. You have yourself a wonderful day of fighting crime.”

  Wesley didn’t move for several seconds. He didn’t say a word either, almost as if he’d finally run out of steam. For the day, at least. Luna and Asher waved as he turned and left.

  “That was not a shaving cut.” Asher said once Wesley was out of earshot.

  “What was it?.”

  “Not a shaving cut,” Asher said with a shrug. “You think he’ll leave you alone for a bit?”