by Linnea West
“Oh my goodness you guys!” Jill said as she rushed in the door. “I just finally had a minute to find you and talk about what happened. I heard all about it this morning as I was working at the Tavern. Did someone really put a spell on Linda that made her throw up all of her organs so that she died?”
It took Maggie a minute to realize what Jill had actually said because it was still very distracting to talk to a furry werewolf, especially one who was wearing a sweatshirt that said “Coffee is my love language” on the front in sparkly silver letters.
“That isn’t quite what happened Jill,” Esmeralda said gently.
She pointed a finger and conjured up a fourth chair and teacup for Jill. Abby eyed the werewolf wearily as she sat down, probably because Jill’s personality and style was a direct opposite to Abby’s goth style. It might also have something to do with the fact that Jill had a large pink bow clipped into the thick brown fur on the top of her head. It sat right between her two ears in place of her normal mom bun.
For some reason, both Esmeralda and Maggie had a soft spot for Jill, despite the bubbly werewolf’s propensity for saying the wrong thing and not reading social cues. Perhaps it was because Jill always meant well and was able to talk herself out of trouble or perhaps it was because Jill had decided to be Maggie’s best friend and did all of the legwork to maintain the friendship. Maggie tried, but her nerves made her want to sequester herself in her house. On the other hand, Jill had four kids and needed time out of the house and a friend to talk to. Maggie just happened to be a willing victim.
“What happened then?” Jill asked as she poured herself a cup of tea. She was so excited that she managed to pour half a cup’s worth onto the table which she then mopped up with a napkin that Esmeralda handed her. “I know Linda died and I know it happened during that potion making class. I really wanted to take that and now look! I’ve missed all of the excitement and I didn’t get a good luck potion.”
“I don’t think you want the potion,” Abby remarked. “That’s what killed Linda.”
Jill’s eyes got wide over the rim of her cup. She slammed the teacup down onto the table and slapped her leg.
“Shut the front door,” she exclaimed. “Why’s it called a good luck potion if it kills people?”
“It wasn’t the potion that did it,” Maggie said. “Someone poisoned the potion.”
“Do you know that for sure now?” Abby asked. Her eyes flicked between the two witches as she took a sip of tea.
Maggie glanced at her mother. She hadn’t meant to release information that she shouldn’t have. Perhaps that fact should have been kept on a need-to-know basis. Esmeralda gave her a look as if to say ‘it’s all out there now so you might as well keep going.’
“We do know that,” Maggie said. She tried to pick her words a bit more carefully. Even if they knew about the poison, they didn’t need to know all of the details. “We know that someone poisoned Linda’s potion and only Linda’s potion. We do have a suspect in custody.”
“I heard that Ned did it, but then I saw him in his shop today,” Jill said. “The closed sign was up, but he was definitely in there. Wait, is he on the run? Did I just provide good information that will lead to the capture of a fugitive? I’d love if I could have some reward money for that. Or maybe just an interview on the news. Either way, just remember that I was the one who told you about his whereabouts.”
Maggie suppressed a giggle. There was probably not a person in this world who could dislike Jill. She was loud and boisterous, but she was sweet as honey. Maggie had to admit that she was glad that Jill was so gung-ho on being best friends. Maggie enjoyed her company and could feel her spirits lift just from being around her.
As Esmeralda tried to give Jill the correct information while also letting her down gently about the absence of any reward money, Maggie noticed that Abby had gone quiet, staring off into the distance. Maggie had the sense that she was thinking of something pertinent to the case, but she wasn’t sure how to bring it up. Perhaps this was the start of her being at least a little bit like her mother. Esmeralda could sense things like this but while she could bring things up tactfully, Maggie still lacked that sense.
Esmeralda was wrapping up a long-winded explanation about how there would be no television interviews when Maggie managed to catch her eye. Jerking her head toward Abby, Esmeralda’s hazel eyes twinkled once she noticed the same look on Abby’s face that Maggie had seen.
“Abby, dear, it seems to me that you may have thought of something,” Esmeralda said gently.
The older witch had a way of speaking that seemed to make everyone draw closer. It was like their circle closed just enough to make them feel closer emotionally as well as physically. Maggie could say that same exact sentence and it would not have the same effect. It was definitely not something she could learn. She hoped that it would come naturally, like magic was supposed to come.
Abby looked up, her cheeks going pink at the attention. It looked strange against her dark clothes and dark red lipstick. She shook her head slowly from side to side like she wasn’t quite sure she was giving the right answer.
“Oh, silly me, I thought I saw the spark of an idea in your head,” Esmeralda said. She took a sip of tea as she waited to deliver the next line. “If you had any sort of idea at all, you could tell us. Even if you were wrong, it might help lead us to something that helps us solve this murder.”
“I was thinking about all of the potion bottles that we stock around here,” Abby said. “Or should I say that we used to stock. Cauldron Things used to carry more than just cauldrons. For a while, they carried potion supplies until Ned got upset and drew a line in the sand. He said that he would stop selling cauldrons in his shop if this store stopped selling potion supplies. That was way before I started working here, of course, but I’ve seen the bottles in the back…”
Abby’s voice trailed off as she became lost in her thoughts. She glanced back at the doors to the storeroom like she was willing somebody to read her mind. Maggie glanced at her mother, who was stirring her tea. Esmeralda was masking her anxious energy well, but Jill was not hiding her curiosity at all. The werewolf was sitting on the very edge of her velvet chair, her hands on her knees to steady her as she leaned forward. She had long since abandoned her teacup on the table in front of them.
“There’s a bottle marked poison in the storeroom,” Abby said. “Do you think that might have been what killed Linda?”
Chapter Sixteen
If Abby hadn’t been there to show them where the bottles of potion supplies were, Esmeralda and Maggie would have never found them by themselves. The storeroom was still stuffed full of cauldrons, but Abby was able to show them an almost hidden tunnel that ran between a shelf and the wall at the far end of the storeroom. The entrance was almost covered by a stack of cauldrons, but once Abby showed it to them, it seemed so obvious.
Jill had been so excited by the unveiling of the hidden tunnel that she had almost pushed over the whole stack of cauldrons in her glee. At that point, Esmeralda had expressly forbidden her from touching anything or being at the front or back of the group. If the werewolf was trapped in the middle of the pack, someone would be able to stop her from touching something before she made a giant mess of anything.
At the end of the tunnel was a bookshelf that was hidden from every other aspect, but on it was a bunch of bottles. They all looked old but were curiously not dusty despite every other shelf in the storeroom being thick with dust and grime.
“Did one of you dust these?” Maggie asked.
“I never did,” Abby said. “In fact, I was told never to come back here, but once Linda forbid me from coming back here, I just had to see what she kept in this little tunnel. I came back here a few times and it was always dusted clean.”
“Why? I don’t think I keep my house as clean as those shelves are,” Jill said.
Maggie could attest to that. Jill’s house was one step away from falling apart at the seams most o
f the time. It was comfortable in that lived-in, everyone welcome sort of way. But Jill was not a great housekeeper. In fact, the only reason she was a stay at home mother was that finding affordable childcare for four young children in Grimwood Valley was simply not a thing. Instead, Jill focused her energy on keeping her kids alive, drinking enough coffee to function, and making sure her house wasn’t accidentally demolished by her children in the course of a day. Dust on the shelves probably didn’t cross her mind more than once a year.
“I don’t actually know, but I have an idea,” Abby volunteered.
She hesitated. Abby might have hated her boss, but she apparently didn’t want to divulge all of Linda’s secrets. As Abby seemed to think over what to say, Jill reached out to touch a bottle with a brilliant, green sparkly liquid. Maggie managed to bat her paw away before Jill did any real danger, but Jill held her paw and pouted about being reprimanded. At least, she pouted as well as a werewolf with a mouth full of sharp, pointy teeth could pout.
“It’s okay,” Esmeralda said. “You can tell us. Linda is gone. What you are thinking might be something that could help us solve her murder. I think if she were able, she would say it was okay for you to tell us.”
Abby bit her lip, one of her fangs poking her dark red lip so hard that Maggie wondered how she didn’t draw blood. Then she realized that vampires didn’t have their own blood. Or something like that, she really needed to study up on paranormal creatures.
“I think Linda was jealous of Ned and his abilities,” Abby said.
For once, Esmeralda managed to keep her feelings about Ned’s supposed magical abilities to herself. Maggie was sure that there was some sort of internal sigh that happened, but it wasn’t audible. Esmeralda even managed to keep a straight face, although Maggie did catch the fleetingly long blink.
“Linda worked here because she really liked cauldrons and the idea of potions,” Abby said. “The only problem was that she was never good at making them. Sometimes she would come back here and try to brew a potion, but every time it just turned into black sludge. I’m not even sure how she managed to make anything during this potion class.”
“Probably because she hardly brewed any of her own potion,” Maggie said. Jill turned to look at her, her furry head cocked to one side. Maggie had almost forgotten that Jill hadn’t been able to come to the potion making class so she explained how the class had gone. “Ned made the first part of Linda’s potion because she was busy with a customer. Then Nancy finished it up for her. Linda did barely anything herself.”
“It makes sense because Linda always had trouble making potions,” Abby said. “She would follow all of the directions, but it was like she didn’t have the actual magical ability to get it to make anything.”
Esmeralda was nodding slowly, her eyebrows furrowed. Maggie felt just as confused as her mother. If it took some magical ability to make a potion, how come everyone at the potion making class was successful with their good luck potions? Or maybe they weren’t successful. It was something Maggie would have to look up.
“Did she try to brew potions often?” Esmeralda asked.
“Once a month or so,” Abby said. “I’m not exactly sure. She didn’t do it during store hours. I would just find the remnants back here when I came in the next day. I don’t think she really wanted anyone to know about it.”
Esmeralda turned back to the shelf, scanning the bottles for anything that might have a bearing on the case. Jill reached out again to try and grab a bottle full of little orange spheres, but this time Esmeralda caught her furry arm and gently pushed it back down. Jill rubbed her arm as if she had been pinched. Jill’s kids were wonderful, but Maggie realized they must get their impulsiveness from their mother.
Maggie was trying to scan the shelves to be helpful while also keeping an eye on Jill and her grabby paws when something caught her eye.
“Wait a minute, what was that bottle?” Maggie asked.
“This one?” Esmeralda asked, picking up a bottle that said Stinkweed and holding it at arm’s length as the disgusting stench managed to escape the tightly corked bottle.
“Definitely not that one,” Maggie said. Jill pinched her nose shut as well as she could while Abby managed to simply wrinkle up her nose in a dignified way that showed she was not a fan of that scent.
“Which one?” Esmeralda asked. There was a hint of annoyance in her voice. Here they were stuck in this tiny little space with a surly vampire and a werewolf that had no self-control and her daughter wouldn’t just say what she meant.
Maggie opened her mouth to say the word she thought she had seen on one of the bottles, but she didn’t want to scare anyone. She was at the back of their foursome, but she pushed her way to the front so that she could show her mother which bottle she was talking about. She just hoped that it didn’t say what she thought it had said.
“Hold on, let me find it again,” Maggie said once she reached the shelf.
As she got a closer look at the bottles, she realized how jarring it was that they were all so clean. They looked like they had all been rubbed down and cleaned within a few days. Maggie was a bit weirded out. It felt like they were disturbing something so secret, so deeply personal. But Linda was gone and it was up to them to figure out what had happened to her.
Maggie rifled through the bottles until she found the one she was looking for. Holding it toward the light, the label said exactly what she thought it said.
“Poison,” she read.
Her mind hadn’t been playing tricks on her. There really was a bottle marked poison on the shelf. It seemed odd that it was not only bluntly labeled as poison, but also that the actual name of whatever was in the bottle was not used. All of the other bottles had names like “Root of Elm Tree” and “Frog Eyes,” but this bottle was simply labeled “Poison.”
“Nice spotting Maggie,” Esmeralda said. “Now, let’s take it back to the other room where we have a bit more space and can actually see.”
She held her hand out and Maggie was glad to deposit the bottle of poison into it. Everyone spun around and started back out of the tunnel. Jill only had to be stopped two more times from touching things on the way out. Each time she threw a guilty, but apologetic look at whoever had to stop her. Maggie was starting to remember why it was better to leave Jill out of the investigations, if Jill would let them of course.
Back in the other room, each woman settled herself back into her chair. Only when she was comfortably seated did Esmeralda open up her hand to really investigate the bottle that she had been holding. The older witch looked through the side and swirled it around, looking at the light through the bottle. Esmeralda then opened the stopper and wafted the scent her way, safely smelling to determine what was inside.
Maggie waited impatiently as her mother seemed to slowly test the bottle in a dozen different ways. She looked at it from all directions and seemed to do everything except take a drink from it. Finally, Esmeralda put the stopper back in and set the bottle on the table.
“It’s poison alright,” Esmeralda said. “I can’t say much else about it. I’ve never really had to deal with anything like this before.”
“Can you tell if that was what was in Linda’s potion?” Abby asked.
Her dark red lips were pursed and Maggie couldn’t quite read her expression. Abby’s hands were tightly clenched together in her lap. Esmeralda seemed to roll Abby’s question around in her head a bit before she answered.
“I can’t say one way or the other,” Esmeralda said. “When we dissected the potion, there was nothing that looked like that in it. On the other hand, Ned told us that none of the ingredients we brought him were poisonous. But he did confirm that the potion itself had some sort of poison in it.”
“Well maybe that was the poison that killed Linda,” Maggie said.
It would certainly make things easier if they could prove that the bottle they found prominently labeled as poison was what had poisoned Linda. Maggie knew it probably wasn’t goin
g to be that easy though.
“Of course it wasn’t that stuff,” Jill said.
The other three women turned to look at the werewolf. Jill had poured herself a fresh cup of tea out of the magical teapot and was sipping it as delicately as a werewolf could sip. She seemed oblivious to the looks being thrown her way.
“Why do you say that?” Esmeralda asked, once it was clear that Jill was not going to offer up her own explanation.
“It’s full,” Jill said with a shrug. “If some of it had been used in Linda’s potion, wouldn’t there be some missing from the bottle?”
Maggie looked at the bottle again and noticed that the bottle was indeed full. Could Jill really have been the most perceptive out of all of them?
“But maybe someone refilled it,” Abby said.
“Was there another bottle of poison back there that someone used to fill this one?” Jill asked, her dark eyes wide.
“I don’t think so, but maybe someone brought a bottle of poison with them to refill this one,” Abby said. “Someone like Ned. He’s the only one who would have ready access to stuff like that.”
Esmeralda was shaking her head, but she didn’t say anything. Maggie couldn’t possibly believe it was Ned. Sure, this story sounded like something that could happen, but that was all it was: a story. They had no evidence that Ned had anything like this poison in his shop or that he had brought it with him.
“Wait a minute,” Maggie said as she thought through the story that Abby was trying to spin. “Why would Ned go find this bottle in the back room just to refill it with poison that he brought with him? Why wouldn’t he just use the poison he had? Besides, he wouldn’t know that bottle would be back in the storeroom anyway. Abby said she only found it by accident and she worked here.”
Esmeralda’s face broke into a smile. Maggie got the sense that her mother had been waiting for her to speak up. Abby’s face, on the other hand, turned down into a scowl. She was not pleased that Maggie had poked a few holes in her theory.