by Vreni Fox
In theory, I could enchant any key to open any door. In practice, however… well, that was a different story. Conrad had tried for years to show me the spell but I just couldn’t get it right.
Chapter Fifteen
It was too late for me to try to get into the room. I had no idea how Moritz spent his evenings, but I hadn’t heard about him popping up at any of Drachenfels’ very few bars so I had to assume that he spent his nights in his room. I obviously couldn’t enter if he was in there.
I knew that he was usually out all day so I’d just have to wait. Which was honestly just fine with me because I was incredibly nervous.
The next day I woke with the sun and went through the motions at Zuckerfee. Once again, I could tell that something was off. I had my regulars come in for coffee in the morning, but several of them just happened to have just started ‘diets’ and turned down my breakfast pastries. Some people I had seen every single day for years just didn’t even turn up.
By around lunchtime, I was giving food away. Everything I hadn’t sold had to be donated anyway, so I figured that I might as well ‘donate’ it to the people who were still coming by my shop.
Hopefully when other people noticed that no one had dropped dead, they’d get over their fears and come back to me.
I think we might as well get started, Pudding suggested at around 3PM after we hadn’t seen a customer for two hours. I don’t think we’re going to see anyone else today.
I tried not to let it bother me. Everyone in town was on edge, I reasoned with myself. Maybe people just didn’t feel good about treating themselves to a piece of cake after a young woman had been brutally murdered.
I locked up the shop and cleaned up. I had enough pastry that would still be delicious and fresh the next day; things that kept very well like Baba au Rhum and bread puddings filled my cases. I wrapped them up and stored them and headed up to my flat with Pudding.
The enchantment for skeleton keys wasn’t in my family recipe book. I had to dust off one of the textbooks that Conrad bestowed upon me. Well, technically it wasn’t a textbook. It could have been considered more like his family recipe book, but he had memorized all of the ‘recipes’ inside, so now I owned it. When I was a teenager, he intended for me to memorize them too.
Obviously that hadn’t happened.
So Pudding sat on the bed with me as I paged through Conrad’s old book of enchantments. Enchanting men, enchanting furniture, enchanting doors. These books didn’t usually contain a Table of Contents so I had to keep flipping pages until I landed upon what we needed.
Enchanting keys.
Okay, I needed an old, useless key. I already had plenty of those. I needed virgin blood, which I always kept on hand like antiseptic because it was very useful, though very expensive. I needed sea salt, which I had because what kind of baker doesn’t have sea salt, especially given the trend for salted caramels. Finally I needed Wolfsbane.
Another poison that I grew in my garden. I pursed my brows in frustration. I grew wolfsbane. I grew it specifically in case I ever needed it for a spell like this. Now that the police were on my trail, though, I was afraid to harvest my own plants.
Wolfsbane was toxic. It was a poison that could kill a grown man. Were the cops watching me? If they were, I really didn’t want to head out to my garden and harvest another deadly killer. Who knows what I could get blamed for then.
I’ll get it, Pudding offered, reading my mind. I’m a cat. I can just act like it’s catnip and they won’t suspect anything. They’re not from around here. No normal person has a cat that is trained to harvest poison from their garden.
“Thank you,” I breathed a sigh of relief.
I waited for him to return with the flowers; I only needed the tiniest bit.
“Okay,” I took a deep breath. “Here we go.”
The spell for enchanting a key to turn it into a skeleton key was written in ancient Sumerian, which is why I was so bad at it.
Conrad had spent months trying to teach me Sumerian pronunciation, and he had failed miserably. I knew how the words were supposed to be pronounced; I just didn’t know how to make those sounds with my mouth.
I repeated the spell over and over with no results.
Finally, on the brink of tears once again…
“Hey! Hey, I think I’ve got something here! It’s hot!”
I couldn’t contain my excitement. I had never made this spell work before.
We have to test it.
“Oh my God, Pudding, I think I did it! Finally! I got it!”
I knew he was right though. No sense in taking the key to the Hotel if it didn’t work.
I shut the door to my bedroom and inserted the key. It fit! It was working! I locked the door, then used the same key to unlock it.
“We got it!” I exclaimed to Pudding, elated. Even my grumpy, nasty old cat looked happy.
We decided to test it a few more times and confirmed that it worked in all the doors in my house. It was a go; the key worked. I took it to the Hotel immediately so I had enough time to go through the room before the sun went down.
It wasn’t exactly easy to discreetly park the van at the Hotel. I only had one vehicle and it was my delivery van that read ‘Zuckerfee fine cakes and pastries’ on both sides.
If the Hotel had been closer I would have just walked, but it was nearly at the top of the mountain and time was of the essence. I found a decent spot empty between two laundry service vans and hoped that no one would notice me. If they did, I planned, I would just make something up about having to take a second look at the venue to get some creative inspiration. Which was ridiculous because the Hotel was the only venue in town, but I hoped that it would seem plausible.
Getting to the room without being detected was easy. The maids were out cleaning, pushing their cart full of linens and shampoos around, but they were easily avoided, spending most of their time in the rooms working hard.
Otherwise the Hotel’s guests were busy either enjoying our beautiful natural landscape or indulging in spa treatments. No one was in their rooms in the middle of the afternoon.
I strode through the hallway with purpose, as though I had somewhere I was supposed to be, until I reached the suite. Just in case, I knocked on the door.
“Sir?” I wasn’t taking any chances. “Sir, housekeeping…”
I knocked and waited until I was absolutely satisfied that the room was empty. Then I took my chance. I inserted the key into the doorway and it fit! Then I tried to turn it…
No dice.
“No!” I hissed under my breath. “Come on, don’t do this. Just work. You worked yesterday. How is this even possible?”
I messed with the key for several minutes, with absolutely no change. It just didn’t fit. Maybe the enchantment lasted for just a short while?
Okay, Plan B. I wasn’t ready to give up quite yet. I was going to do this the old fashioned way. Or the new fashioned way, depending upon how you saw things.
I glanced around the hallway for a place to conceal myself. There really wasn’t much available. The hallway was empty aside from a few end tables adorned with small statues and some large plants, though not large enough to hide a person.
Then I saw them. The floor to ceiling brocade curtains. It seemed to me like the most ridiculous idea ever, but I had no choice. I concealed myself behind a gold jacquard curtain and waited.
Fortunately for me, the curtain was long enough to cover my feet. Also fortunate for me: I hid behind the curtains, expecting to be standing in cobwebs and breathing dust. Instead the curtains smelled… surprisingly fresh. Saputra ran such a tight ship that it was obvious to me that they had been recently laundered.
By the time that the maids reached the suite, I was shifting my weight back and forth from one foot to another to keep my legs from falling asleep. I couldn’t give up now though. I watched as they entered the suite and told myself that it wouldn’t be much longer.
Finally they exited. They rolled t
heir cart to the slightly less expensive suite next door and entered. I knew from how long they had been in Moritz’s room that they would be inside for at least fifteen minutes.
I glanced around, crept from behind the curtains, and snatched the ring of keys from the top of the cart. Then I approached Moritz’s room and unlocked the door. Success! I propped the door slightly open and returned the keys to the cart.
Next I did something that I was ashamed of. I silently asked the maids for forgiveness and made sure I was alone in the hallway. Then I silently poured a bucket of dirty mop water down the hall in the direction away from Moritz’s suite. I absolutely soaked the expensive rugs, the bottom of the curtains, and the duster on the sofa.
This mess was going to take at least an hour to clean up, and I knew that it would give me the time that I needed to search the room. I would have to somehow make this up to the maids later, though hopefully they would never find out that I was responsible. After whispering an apology one more time, I let myself into Moritz’s room and locked the door with the deadbolt behind me.
It looked pretty much exactly the same as it had the first time I entered, except the food lying around was even more moldy and there was more of it. I guess they were both slobs, but Mandy owned more stuff.
My first order of business was to grab the document that had everyone’s name and number. I pulled it out from under the now moldy sandwich and stuffed it into my messenger bag.
“Ew,” I cringed, hoping that I could just throw the bag into the washing machine later and it would be good as new.
Then I saw it.
Moritz had left his laptop not only on, but logged in. He seemed to be editing photos that he left on the screen, hundreds of them.
And every single one was a candid shot of Mandy.
These weren’t normal shots, though, and I’m pretty sure that these pictures weren’t for her Instagram. I took note of where he had left the page and scrolled down. Almost every picture was of her sleeping, in various states of undress.
I wondered briefly if Moritz had Mandy’s permission to take these photos, though I knew in my heart that he didn’t. They seemed to have been taken over several weeks, maybe even longer judging by the changes in length to Mandy’s hair. There were pictures of her in night dresses of every shade, there were pictures of her in cute pajamas, and there were pictures of her completely naked.
I almost felt sick looking at her and invading her privacy like that. I didn’t even know whether I should take pictures of these pictures with my phone, or just somehow figure out a way to convince Horst that the police needed a warrant to search Moritz’s laptop.
Worst of all, I had no idea whether this made Moritz seem more like a suspect or less. What he was doing was definitely illegal, but I don’t think it was proof that he killed her. If anything, it was just more proof that he was obsessed with her. In a creepy, controlling way, sure.
But was Moritz the creep a murderer?
Chapter Sixteen
I decided not to take pictures of Moritz’s creep shots. I felt like a total scumbag even looking at them and there was no way for me to explain to Horst or the police how I got the images anyways. At least with the extortion accounting document, I could claim -- unlikely as it was -- that I had compiled that information by doing research on my own.
Next I glanced around the room, surveying the piles of clothing and accessories everywhere. I started with those on the bed. These clothes were all worn. I recognized the pink cashmere sweater Mandy had worn in my shop the last day she was alive; she must have changed at some point in the middle of the day. I could smell some fruity floral perfume and the faint scent of sweat on her things. It was a very humanizing scent and it reminded me that, as fake as Mandy seemed, she was actually a real person who had been the victim of a horrible crime.
I moved on to the other piles around the room and spotted something of great personal interest to me… a couple of brand new, fine leather handbags. I looked them over and immediately recognized them as the work of Martin Wolff, our local leatherworker.
There were four of them and each one was a thing of beauty. They were made with butter soft leather and hand stitched, and I had to resist the urge to touch them.
I shook my head and moved on. The bags supported my theory that Mandy was also accepting stuff in lieu of cash, but they weren’t really evidence of anything. I was just staring at them because I wanted one. Now was not the time to covet a dead woman’s personal belongings, especially those that I’m pretty sure she acquired by blackmailing my neighbor.
I made a mental note -- if I survived this ordeal with my life and business intact, I’d have to put aside some money to buy myself a handbag.
None of the other stuff in the room looked promising. It was all just mounds of clothes and expensive things, most of which were brand new and had never been used. I didn’t see any more documents or anything that struck me as especially unusual. Every single square centimeter of surface area in the bathroom was covered with various lotions and potions. Not the magic kind… the anti aging kind.
I knew that I could possibly get more dirt if I searched the files on Moritz’s computer, but I didn’t have the technological know how to do that and then cover my tracks. I didn’t want to risk him figuring out that I’d been in his room, going through his things.
Satisfied with the progress that I had made and the evidence I was able to grab, I released the deadbolt and exited through the balcony. I could still hear the maids outside the front door cleaning up the gross mess I made and there was no way that I could exit that way unnoticed.
Fortunately for me the suite was on the ground floor of the Hotel. I just had to discreetly hop over the railing and make my way back around to the front of the building undetected. Now, I wouldn’t exactly describe myself as ‘fit’ or ‘sporty,’ but I wasn’t a complete klutz either. I popped over the railing easily and found myself at the top of a large basin that led down to one of the mountain’s beautiful hot springs.
Now I just had to figure out how to get from the balcony to the spring without attracting any attention. The Hotel rooms didn’t have direct access to the springs, so casually strolling down the hill wasn’t exactly going to work because there were several bathers down there enjoying the warm afternoon already.
I crept along the side of the building until I made my way to a service path that led from the kitchens down to the spring.
Just when I thought I had made it, the kitchen door swung open and out walked Sabine Natter, carrying a clipboard and looking uncharacteristically jolly.
“Brunhilde? What are you doing here? This is the service entrance to the kitchen?”
“Yes, Sabine! I was just…” I had to think fast. “Looking for you, actually. I was looking for you and I heard that you might be back here.”
“Why didn’t you just ask in the dining room? Well, anyway,” Sabine didn’t take her eyes off of her clipboard, “what is it you need?”
“I just wanted to ask your opinion about the cake,” I lied. Usually I would do whatever was necessary to avoid Sabine.
“Really?” this caught her attention and she gave me a suspicious glance, but apparently decided to dismiss her misgivings. “Well, alright. I can see where you’re coming from. Now that Little Miss Selfie is gone, the sky’s the limit!”
“What do you mean?”
I knew that Mandy had some ideas about what she wanted to photograph, but so far none of them had struck me as particularly crass or outlandish. I probably wouldn’t have chosen to make a purple princess cake for a full grown adult, for example, but if she wanted her princess cake then I really had no trouble selling her one. It was part of being a businesswoman; I didn’t always retain full creative control over my baked masterpieces.
“It’s like an enormous, tacky weight has been lifted from our shoulders. No more fad foods, no more sourcing açaí berries for her stupid little breakfast bowls that she didn’t even eat, no more luxury
‘street foods,’ no more wrapping everything on the menu in a tortilla so that she can picture her fusion burritos…”
“I get it,” I stopped Sabine from her interminable list of criticisms of modern food trends. “I take it that you’re not a fan of Instagram-able foods.”
“Are you kidding me,” snorted Sabine. “I’d sooner drop dead of starvation than prepare a meal just to be photographed for social media. I have no idea what’s gotten into the Mayor. Usually she knows good food and she trusts my judgment. I don’t even think she’s considered the consequences of catering to someone like Mandy Unterwegs.”
I didn’t think I’d ever seen Sabine so passionate over a subject. Her face lit up and her short, straight hair brushed back and forth across her high cheekbones as she enumerated the shortcomings of social media culture.
“Which consequences do you mean?” I encouraged her. To tell the truth, I wasn’t entirely sure what she was so worked up over. So this girl liked to post pictures of her food on the internet. I didn’t use social media, but I knew that food pictures were one of the most popular subjects. Hey, I liked to look at pictures of good food too.
“What kind of people do you think someone like Mandy Unterwegs would attract to Drachenfels?” Sabine demanded. “Her little fans follow wherever she goes, and they want to buy the same experiences that she sold them on her Instagram page. If we were to cater to this new breed of tourist, we’d have to change the entire menu. Fresh and local would be out the door. I’d be running an assembly line of Hawaiian Poke bowls and unicorn colored ice cream cones.”
“I see your point,” I replied, considering what Sabine had said. It was probably true; if the Mayor’s plan had worked, we’d probably both be working with a lot more pastel food coloring.
“Look, Brunhilde. I love Drachenfels and I love my job. But I’m not about to sacrifice everything I’ve ever learned about food so that some teeny bopper can take a cool picture that will already look dated in six months. If Mandy Unterwegs had succeeded in turning Drachenfels into a hip young person hot spot, I’d have to leave.”