by Linnea West
“Salvus.”
She imagined a shimmery, see-through bubble that would become larger and envelope her entire body. Esmeralda had been coaching her during their off time and one thing she had said over and over was that seeing the magic she wanted to do in her mind was half of the battle. If Maggie could imagine it, she was already halfway toward making it happen.
Maggie let out a long exhale and watched the bubble grow from her hand up and over her entire body. She looked toward Lou and Mariah. They were staring at her, waiting for her to say something. Neither of them looked shocked or like they had just seen a giant bubble swallow her up. Maggie breathed another sigh of relief. Finally, a bit of magic that made her happy and proud. She would have to tell her mother about it soon.
“We know our place,” Maggie said. “Right now, my place is to get your alibi. For some reason, you seem unwilling to give it.”
The invisible protection bubble she had cast was making her feel a bit bolder. She felt as though she could venture out of her comfort zone a bit. If only there was a bubble she could cast to help her anxiety in the normal world. There probably wasn’t a spell to cast a bubble that saved her from odd stares and talking to people, but perhaps Maggie could be the one to invent it.
“You don’t have to take that, Daddy,” Mariah said. “She thinks she can boss us around, but she can’t. Tell her about how you own the place.”
She clutched onto the sleeve of his suit jacket, pulling on it like a small child who wanted a toy from the store. Lou brushed her hand away as if it were a piece of dirt on his expensive suit. Mariah grabbed her hand as though she’d been burnt, her mouth turned down in a frown.
“My daughter is right,” Lou said. “I don’t have to tell you anything. As much as you and your mother like to pretend, you aren’t the police and I don’t have to say anything to you.”
Mariah wrinkled her nose up at Maggie. She wished more than anything that her mother was here. She needed to get Lou’s alibi. Maybe Lou had somehow used Mariah to poison Linda. They were both so uncooperative that Maggie couldn’t tell if it was because they were guilty or just because they didn’t like being told what to do.
“Come, Mariah, we are going home,” Lou said.
He walked toward the door, not waiting for his daughter. Mariah tossed her cloak around her shoulders and hurriedly buckled the jewel-encrusted pin that held it shut. Grabbing her bag, she hurried along behind Lou. As she passed Maggie, she turned toward her.
“You can have that stupid potion,” Mariah said. “I don’t need luck. I have money and popularity instead.”
Mariah sneered toward Maggie, almost running into the back of her father as he stopped short. He turned around, this time glaring at his daughter instead of at Maggie. As soon as Mariah caught a glance of her father’s face, she shrunk back. Her shoulders slumped down as she stepped back, making herself as short as Maggie. As much as Maggie disliked Mariah, she could tell that Mariah’s home life was not one that was full of love and that made her a little sad for the banshee.
“How many times must I tell you not to rub it in people’s faces?” Lou said, spitting the words out with contempt. “It cheapens our level in society if we go around verbalizing it. We don’t have to tell people we are rich. If we are high enough above them, they will already know.”
Mariah stared at the floor, swallowing hard as she nodded her head. She was blinking hard and Maggie could recognize that she was trying not to cry. For one moment, Maggie felt almost sorry for her, but then Mariah looked at her again.
“What are you looking at?” she snapped. Mariah flounced toward the door again, her long dark hair moving like a wave down her back.
Lou turned to follow, but this time a receipt fell out of his pocket. He stopped and made a motion to grab it, but Maggie was faster. Snatching it up off of the floor, she recognized it as a hand-written receipt from the Slinky Possum, the tavern in town during the paranormal fog.
“This is dated today,” Maggie said.
“Of course it is,” Lou said, scowling at her. “I just came from having dinner there.”
“Then why couldn’t you just tell me that?” Maggie asked. “It is an easy enough alibi to check. If you have a solid alibi, I don’t know why you are unwilling to tell it to me.”
“I’m unwilling to share that sort of information with you because you have no need for it,” Lou said. “You aren’t the police, after all. But now that you know my alibi, you might as well check it out. I was there all evening and Dan will attest to that. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to get my daughter home. She’s had enough trauma for one evening.”
Lou walked toward Mariah, who was waiting for him to open the door for her. He pushed open the heavy door with one ghostly hand, somehow making it look easy to manage. Mariah walked through into the fog but Lou stopped and turned back to look at Maggie. As he stared at her, he turned back into his ghostly see-through form. He spoke, but only loud enough for the two of them to hear.
“Mark my words, Maggie. Don’t try to pin this on me or my daughter or you will pay. As if it isn’t enough that you and your mother are around making trouble for everyone. I’ll make life ten times worse for the two of you if you pull anything funny.”
With that, Lou floated backward through the doorway and the heavy wooden door slammed shut behind him. Maggie felt like ice water was running through her veins. She suddenly realized that the hand holding the protection bubble in place was starting to go numb so she released it, shaking out the cramp in her hand.
Before, Maggie had felt anxious about this case but now she was scared. Lou had threatened her, but would anyone believe her?
Chapter Ten
After a restless night of sleep, Maggie and Esmeralda were back to work at the cauldron shop in the morning. Maggie had told her mother everything that had happened the night before over coffee that morning. Esmeralda said that she believed Maggie, but said that nothing Lou said or did would change their investigation. Besides, he wasn’t even on the suspect list and neither was Mariah. Despite the threat and Lou’s motive, there was nothing actually tying him to Linda’s murder.
Esmeralda had pushed open the door to the cauldron shop that morning and after taking a deep breath, declared that she was ready to teach Maggie something new. Maggie wasn’t so sure how that was different than any other day of her life, but she now found herself facing the same good luck potion that they had made the night before, only this time they were taking it apart.
“I’m going to be honest with you, I’ve never had to dissect a potion before,” Esmeralda said. She was tying on a maroon-colored apron over her clothes as she spoke, looping the ties behind her back and tying them over her round belly. “I’m a bit excited. Potions are something I’ve only dabbled in because I can just make magic with my hands. I’ve only read about dissecting them in books, so we will learn it together.”
She handed Maggie a gaudy bright-orange apron that clashed horribly with Maggie’s red and blue flannel shirt, not that there was anyone around to notice that. Maggie tied it on and tried not to think about the poisoned potion and the fact that she would have to touch it soon.
Esmeralda bustled around the tables, clearing things away with a poof of her finger. Maggie wondered if there was somewhere in the universe where all of these random things ended up and she thought she might like to visit there one day, if only to see what all had ended up there.
“Come on Maggie, help out a little,” Esmeralda said with a laugh.
“I don’t know how to poof things away yet,” Maggie said.
“You don’t have to do that part of it,” Esmeralda said. “I cleared that front table. I’d like you to bring everything from Linda’s table up there so that we can start looking at it.”
Maggie didn’t move an inch. Her mother wanted her to start moving the poisoned stuff? They had no clue where the poison actually was and her mother was asking her to use her own two hands to touch everything. A shiver
ran down her spine as she thought about it.
“But Mom, I don’t…” Maggie started to say.
“You don’t want to touch it,” Esmeralda said. “Well of course you shouldn’t actually touch the stuff. Here, use these.”
With a wiggle of her finger, a pair of rubber gloves appeared floating in the air in front of Maggie. She grabbed them and pulled them onto her hands, making sure they were on all the way. Her mother had even made sure they were the extra-long kind, like some people used when they were hand-washing dishes. Maggie felt totally set. No way would she come in contact with the poison now.
She walked over to Linda’s table, glad that Linda was no longer laying on the floor next to it. The entire table looked just like all of the others had: splattered with yellow potion and full of different jars and containers along with the miniature cauldron they had been using to make their potion.
Little by little, Maggie started moving the things up to the empty table. She started with the cauldron and then moved the jars with the potion in them. After that, she moved all of the jars of ingredients and everything else she found on Linda and Nancy’s table. By the time she was done, all that was left were the spatters of things the crone and the hag had dropped the night before while they were brewing.
Looking around, the rest of the room was spotless, or at least the part with the tables was spotless. The rest of the store was still jam-packed with every sort of cauldron imaginable. Maggie could see why Abby and Lou would be a little out of sorts. Both this cauldron shop and its kitchen shop equivalent in the normal world could be quite successful if it were managed correctly. The shop needed someone adept at knowing what to stock and how much instead of just ordering everything and anything.
“Right, onto the potion dissecting,” Esmeralda said.
She pulled out two pairs of protective glasses and handed one to Maggie. Sliding them on her face, Maggie made a silent wish to anything in the universe that was listening that the glasses were simply a precaution and not a necessity for any calamity about to happen.
“The first step is that we need to go over the recipe and make sure all of the ingredients match up,” Esmeralda said. “If anything is off, even by a little bit, that could explain what happened.”
“What do you mean off by a little bit?” Maggie asked, pushing the glasses back up her nose. The one-size-fits-all nature of the plastic glasses meant that they didn’t actually fit anyone.
“I mean that if someone were to make a potion and the recipe called for willow bark, but they used willow root instead, that could mean disaster,” Esmeralda said.
“What kind of disaster?” Maggie asked, not sure if she actually wanted to hear the answer.
“Oh, blindness, turning permanently into a frog, or death,” Esmeralda said, just a bit too breezily.
Maggie made a decision right then and there that she would never brew another potion again. Just the thought of it made her skin crawl. She would be a nervous wreck the entire time she was brewing the potion, checking and double-checking to make sure she was adding the right amount of the right thing. As it was, she already did that just when she made boxed macaroni and cheese.
As Esmeralda read off the recipe, Maggie found the ingredients and double-checked that they were all the correct ones. Setting each jar to one side of the table, they came to the end of the recipe. All of the ingredients were correct and accounted for. That problem could be checked off of the list.
“Now what?” Maggie asked. She had sort of been hoping that the answer would be an easy one, especially because that would have meant it was most likely an accident and they could go let Ned out of jail and go back to just keeping the town running during the paranormal fog. That scenario seemed less and less likely now.
“Now we run the potion through a strainer to see if there is anything that has been added,” Esmeralda said. “Sometimes if a foreign object has been introduced to a potion, the potion won’t actually accept it and allow it to mix. That means it would strain right out and we would know what happened.”
Esmeralda wiggled her finger once more and another cauldron appeared, this one with a metal strainer on the top. Two ladles appeared on the table in front of them. Maggie hesitated. She wasn’t sure why she was so nervous, but all of a sudden her stomach was feeling sick.
“It’s alright dear,” Esmeralda said, reaching for one of the ladles. “I know how much this all is to take in. But you must learn these things. At some point, I won’t be able to help you and you’ll need to know how to do these things by yourself.”
“What do you mean you won’t be able to help me?” Maggie asked, making no moves to pick up a ladle.
“I just mean that I’m not getting any younger,” Esmeralda said with a weak smile. Her mouth was smiling, but it didn’t reach all the way to her eyes. Maggie wondered if she was hiding something behind it. “And it took you quite a while to come around to your magical abilities, not that it was your fault at all.”
Esmeralda started spooning the potion from one cauldron to the other as she chattered on. Whatever she was hiding, she was trying to push it down by going on and on about how late in life Maggie’s magical abilities had come. It seemed that Esmeralda was one of the youngest Ferndale witches while Maggie was one of the oldest to get her powers.
As Esmeralda listed each witch ancestor and how old they were when they got their powers, Maggie reluctantly picked up her ladle and started working. Whatever Esmeralda was hiding, there was nothing Maggie could do now to get her to reveal it. Maggie knew from experience that her mother was good at hiding secrets, only revealing them when the time was right.
“Let’s get a little music going in here,” Esmeralda said.
With a snap of her fingers, soft jazz music started playing from somewhere. Maggie had to admit that it did help her relax a little bit. Esmeralda started swaying her hips to the music as she scooped the bright yellow liquid from one cauldron into the strainer on top of the other cauldron. Maggie started to do the same.
“How exactly do you dissect a potion?” Maggie asked. “I know you said that this was the first step, but how in the world do you take it apart?”
“Magic,” Esmeralda said, winking at her.
Maggie rolled her eyes at her mother. Leave it to a parent to make such a lame joke. Obviously, she had meant more along the lines of spells or something.
“What? It’s true,” Esmeralda said. “We use magic to untangle all of the ingredients from each other. There is a certain spell we say, but then it takes some maneuvering to make sure we can catch all of the ingredients in separate containers as they come out. It’s a bit of a speedy process and if one of the ingredients goes down, then we’re in a bit of trouble.”
Maggie tried to imagine in her head what in the world that looked like, but seeing as she had a hard time imagining magical things in the first place, it was just not working for her.
“But what does it actually do?” Maggie asked. “Like after you say the spell, what actually happens?”
“Hold on,” Esmeralda said. She scooped the last two scoops of potion into the strainer. Then she lifted the entire strainer over to the original cauldron. “Let me just show you.”
Before Maggie could stop her, Esmeralda lifted her hands and said some sort of intelligible word. The entire ball of yellow good luck potion liquid lifted out of the cauldron by itself, hovering in mid-air like an invisible bowl was holding it. The liquid inside was churning like something was stirring it. Maggie didn’t like the look of it at all.
“Look alive Maggie!” Esmeralda shouted. “Grab a few containers so you are ready.”
Maggie scrambled to grab a few jars off of the table in front of her, fumbling them so badly that one dropped out of her hands and smashed on the floor. Her hands were shaking as she tried to figure out how to clean it up.
“Where is a broom and dustpan in here?” she asked her mother.
“No time, this potion is dissecting as we speak and will
start splitting off any second now,” Esmeralda said. “We will deal with it later. Just grab your containers and get ready.”
The yellow potion started swirling faster and faster in the air above the cauldron. Esmeralda had her eyes focused on the liquid, her arms full of empty jars. Maggie tried to focus on it too, but she was a bit distracted by the shards of glass that were glinting at her from the floor. How could she have made such a stupid mistake?
“Here it goes,” Esmeralda shouted.
Maggie ripped her gaze off of all of the glass that precariously littered the floor to look at the yellow potion. Except it wasn’t a swirling ball of liquid anymore. Now, it was splitting into different parts. A few small woody objects were floating in one group while a clear liquid was being pulled into its own spot.
“How do I know when to catch them?” Maggie shouted.
Esmeralda gave a disconcerting laugh while she wiggled her eyebrows, always keeping her eyes on the potion ingredients above them. Maggie didn’t like the sound of that.
Suddenly, the swirling ball of yellow potion stopped swirling. Everything seemed to have been pulled out of it until the yellow liquid was by itself.
“Now!” Esmeralda shouted.
Moving so quickly that Maggie almost couldn’t tell what she was doing, Esmeralda started catching groups of the ingredients in her containers, slamming full ones onto the table and grabbing more empty ones. Maggie watched, amazed at how fast her mother was moving.
“What are you waiting for?” Esmeralda yelled once she noticed Maggie standing around ogling instead of working. “Get the liquid ones first or we’ll be in for a mess.”