Wisteria Warned

by Angela Pepper

  And he liked it.

  He liked being a little bit sad all the time. It helped with his guilt over not having been able to protect his fiancée.

  The weight of guilt felt better when it mingled with sadness.

  The man sitting next to Chet Moore in the gallery leaned over and elbowed him.

  It was Agent Rob, who said in a low voice, “If it’s a dusty old book that’s gone missing, what are the odds your witch neighbor has something to do with it?”

  Chet’s thoughts returned to the present. He sat up straight in his chair. Rob had a point. This weekend’s so-called emergency did have the hallmarks of Riddle shenanigans.

  “I’ll talk to Zara,” Chet said gruffly.

  Rob grinned. “That’s not what I’m asking, Moore. I mean, what are the actual odds? Do you think it’s three to one? A few of us have a betting pool on the go.”

  “Good one,” Chet said.

  It was a good one. A betting pool that Zara Riddle was somehow involved in the new Magical Calamity of the Week? Now, that was a game that could pay out in both cash and entertainment value.

  Chet Moore wanted to laugh, but the anxiety-related stiffness had returned to his back, plus he’d forgotten to breathe again.

  Chapter 11

  ZARA RIDDLE

  By the time Bentley steered the car into the museum parking lot, Zoey had apparently already dealt with the flat tire.

  I saw my daughter sitting on the bumper, watching for us to come in the entrance. She waved as we pulled up alongside the 1986 Nissan 300ZX known as Foxy Pumpkin.

  “Don’t you look fresh as a daisy,” I said through the open window.

  “Why, thank you,” she said, grabbing the rim of her wide-brimmed sun hat and tipping it toward us. “You didn’t need to come. I told you I already dealt with the flat tire.”

  Bentley turned off the engine and stepped out. He went straight to my daughter, knelt in front of her, and began examining the palms of her hands. “These hands didn’t change a tire,” he reported back to me over his shoulder.

  Zoey pulled her hands away, laughing. “I dealt with the flat tire a different way,” she said. “Griffin changed it for me.”

  Bentley stood and put his hands on his hips. “Don’t you know how to change a tire? You should know. Someone should have taught you. Here, I’ll show you now.” He waved for her to open the trunk.

  “I know how to change a tire,” she said, not moving from her seat on the bumper. “I only sent Mom that text message because I was confused about the spare being one of those skinny ones, but Griffin and I figured it out together. I would have been able to change it myself, but Griffin insisted on doing it for me so I didn’t get my hands dirty.”

  Bentley looked over at me. “What do we know about this Griffin person?”

  I opened the passenger door, stepped out, and counted off the main points on my fingers. “Griffin Yates. Age seventeen. Works here, at the museum. No felonies on his record.”

  “What about misdemeanors?”

  “I don’t know about misdemeanors.”

  “Didn’t they tell you when you checked him for felonies?”

  I looked down and kicked a pebble across the asphalt of the parking lot. The sun was causing heat waves to radiate up around us. “To be honest, I didn’t check for felonies. But I did see him dressed in a cave man costume, and he didn’t have any visible tattoos that would cause a mother any concern.”

  Zoey jumped in. “He’s just a kid, you guys. A regular kid. I know him from high school.”

  “Just a kid,” Bentley mused, then asked, “Are you two serious?”

  She let out a nervous laugh. “We’re serious about just being friends.” She looked at me. “Is he always like this?”

  “The new and improved Bentley is full of surprises,” I said. “Apparently, your grandmother programmed him to be some sort of guardian for us.” I squinted at the tall detective, cocking my head to the side. “It was for both of us, right? Package deal? Two Riddles for one big, strong guardian?”

  “I told you that in confidence.” He shook his head. “You two don’t keep anything from each other, do you?”

  Zoey said, “She tells me way more stuff than any daughter should ever know.”

  “I believe it,” he said.

  More heat waves rose up around us from the dark asphalt. A road-paving crew was working a block over, and I could smell the even hotter asphalt they were laying down.

  Bentley walked around the side of Foxy Pumpkin and kicked the skinny spare tire. He continued around to the driver’s side, opened the door, and folded his tall body into the seat. Once seated, with the top of his head touching the top of the car’s interior, he started turning knobs and adjusting mirrors.

  Zoey asked me, stage whispering, “What’s he doing?”

  “My best guess is a safety inspection. Remember, he was programmed to be our butler.” I shook my head. “I mean guardian. No, wait, that’s not it.” I struck one finger in the air. “Bodyguard.”

  “Gigi made him promise to protect us?”

  “Using her special zombie magic,” I said. My mother didn’t like being referred to as a zombie, but she preferred it to “the evil undead.”

  “That was nice of her,” Zoey said.

  “Nice. Sure.” I glanced around the parking lot. “Nice in the way that it makes me wonder what other ‘nice’ surprises she left behind for us.”

  “Mo-o-om,” she moaned. “Why can’t you accept that Gigi is back in our lives and wants to do nice things for us?”

  “Because her nice things always come with strings.” I pointed down to the car’s tail lights, which were flashing on and off as Bentley tested the hazard lights. “For example, now we’re going to have to put up with Bentley safety testing all our vehicles.”

  “We only have the one car.”

  “What about all the brooms? And when he’s done with the car and the brooms, then what? He’s going to find the stuff we have at the back of the fridge and declare our whole house unfit for habitation.”

  “You may be overreacting.” She took off her sun hat and used it to fan me. She’d noticed I was starting to perspire in an unladylike fashion. She was such a sweet kid.

  Zoey asked, “What happened with your nuisance call, anyway?”

  I gave her a quick recap of our fun Saturday morning at Temperance Krinkle’s house.

  When I was done, she said, “Dollhouses always gave me the creeps. Thank you for not getting me one when I was little. All those tiny plates, and bowls, and coffee mugs with their too-thick rims.” She shuddered. “They’re even more disturbing than those child-sized tea sets, also with their too-thick, not-to-scale rims.”

  “You were such a weird kid,” I said. “You didn’t go through the usual development stages other kids do.” I clapped my hands together. “Speaking of which, say ‘hang-a-burger’ for me. Please. Just once.”

  She refused, as usual. Weird kid. Sweet, but weird.

  Bentley stepped out of the car and declared it to be “safe enough,” given its age. Then he asked Zoey if she wanted us to follow behind her while she drove to a garage to get the flat tire fixed.

  “There’s a garage about two blocks away,” she said. “I think I’ll be fine.” She turned and glanced at the museum. “Actually, I’m not leaving yet. Griffin says I should apply for a summer job here. He says I’ll have more fun hanging out with him and his friends who work here if I’m in on all their jokes.”

  My heart swelled. I gave her a look of motherly pride. “You’re applying for a job so you can learn more in-jokes? I’ve never been more proud of you.”

  Bentley frowned in the direction of the museum. “Why would you want to work here? The building’s modern enough, but all museums do is glamorize cult leaders and pagan worship.”

  I let out a bark of laughter. Bentley turned his frown from the museum to me.

  “Oh,” I said. “You’re serious. What did museums ever do to you?”<
br />
  He relaxed his expression as he turned back to Zoey. “Don’t mind me,” he said gently. “If you want to work here, then by all means, work here. You can use me as a personal reference.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “You won’t tell them about my felonies?”

  He mimed zipping his lips.

  Zoey stopped fanning me with her sun hat and returned it to her head. “I’d better get in there soon, before I get too sweaty from standing out here in the parking lot.”

  I hugged her goodbye, then stood where I was.

  I watched my sixteen-year-old daughter walk toward her first job application. She would get the job, of course. I’d encountered a number of local teenagers through the library, and there wasn’t a single one of them who came anywhere near as perfect as my daughter was for this or, well, any job. But it was possible love had clouded my vision.

  Bentley patted me on the shoulder. “She’s growing up fast, but she still needs you. Just wait and see. When this Griffin boy breaks her heart, she’ll come running to you.”

  “I know,” I said, my voice sounding hoarse. My throat was so tight.

  “Let’s get that lunch I promised you,” he said. “How does Dreamland sound?”

  I wiped some stray parking lot sand from the corner of one eye and then the other. That darn parking lot sand.

  “Sounds good,” I said. “They do make a decent lunch.”

  “Plus, we can ask your friend Maisy Nix what she knows about dollhouses.”

  I agreed that it was a good idea on both counts.

  Chapter 12

  DREAMLAND COFFEE, TOWN CENTER LOCATION

  Maisy Nix wasn’t in the coffee shop, but the store manager assured us she would be returning shortly.

  I looked over the lunch menu, and asked Bentley what he thought looked good.

  “I’m not hungry,” he said.

  “You always say that, but then you put away food like you’ve just come home from the health spa.”

  I ordered something on his behalf. I knew his kind ate regular human food, thanks to sharing meals with my mother, whose appetite after her big change had diminished no more than her love of bossing around waiters.

  We sat, choosing a non-jinxed table, and he dug into his potato chowder and beef dip sandwich with gusto.

  As for the blood part of Bentley’s diet, I’d assumed he had been getting a synthetic compound from Dr. Ankh at the DWM. He reluctantly confirmed that this was true while dipping his beef dip in his soup.

  We talked about the possible missing person’s case as we ate lunch. He’d received an update from Lund that the student technicians were tackling the project eagerly.

  “Doesn’t that worry you?” I asked. “They have no idea what they’re dealing with.”

  “This is how investigations work,” he said. “We have to rely on each other as a team.” He gave me a steadfast look. “That doesn’t mean I don’t still attempt to handle everything on my own.” His silver eyes twinkled. “And get myself deep into trouble.”

  I nodded and pushed my chair back. “Can you stay out of trouble while I use the washroom?”

  He glanced around the busy coffee shop. “I can if you can.”

  *

  Maisy Nix walked into the women’s bathroom while I was washing my hands. The alarming part was that it was a single-user bathroom, and I had definitely locked the door. But, when it came to witches, there was no such thing as a locked door.

  “How was your lunch?” Maisy asked.

  “Lunch was excellent.” I turned off the faucet using magic, and then dried my hands using a spell. I could have used the paper towels that were next to the sink, but I wanted to impress my fellow witch.

  “Good,” Maisy said.

  “The roasted turkey I had in my sandwich was surprisingly tender and moist.”

  She quietly stared at me in a way that said she didn’t care how tender and moist my turkey had been.

  Maisy was an intimidating woman, even to a powerful witch like yours truly. She was over six feet tall, slender, and strong-looking. She had medium-brown, perfect skin, black hair, and equally dark eyes. If there was one thing about her that wasn’t perfect, it was that her upper lip was bigger than her lower lip—but both were still beautiful.

  The last time we’d seen each other, she’d been dropping me off in my back yard after taking me on my first broomstick ride. In order to give us super speed on our flight back into town from the mountainside, she’d borrowed my powers. Without asking. Ribbons felt that her power theft had been a violation that deserved violent retribution, but then he was always looking for an excuse to talk about violent retribution. Me, I had been bothered by the way she’d drained my power without asking, but not nearly as much as I was bothered by the way she’d walked in on me in the bathroom without so much as a knock on the door.

  “Are you and the detective working on a case?” Maisy asked. She had her feet spread wider than her shoulders. A fighting stance.

  “How’d you guess?”

  “It’s either that or you’re on a date. Are you on a date?”

  I mimed pushing up my sleeves, even though I was wearing a tank top with no sleeves. “All right, Maisy. How do you want to do this? A magic duel? Arm wrestling? Or just a basic girl fight where we pull each other’s hair while crying hysterically?”

  She blinked twice. She didn’t move from her wide-legged stance. She was blocking the only exit.

  “Listen,” I said. “It’s become quite clear to me that you’re interested in the detective.”

  No response.

  “And you can do whatever you want with him,” I said. “That’s between you two. I’m not his girlfriend.”

  “I didn’t think you were.”

  “I may not be his girlfriend, but you should know that he has pledged his allegiance to me.”

  She narrowed her dark, pretty eyes. “In what way?”

  “As a bodyguard.”

  “Why? How?” She looked me up and down, then repeated, “Why?”

  I kept my mouth closed and crossed my arms. I wouldn’t discuss my mother’s reappearance in my life, let alone how she’d given Bentley the gift—or curse—of a second life. But something—the look on her face, probably—told me she already knew enough to piece together the rest.

  She broke the silence. “Do you always let your mother turn men into vampires who are sworn to protect you?”

  Ziggity. She was good. Even so, I wanted to correct her. Technically, the first thing had only happened as a result of the second thing. Bentley bit into his vial of emergency blood because he had to save me, along with a few other people.

  She pushed out her fat upper lip as though preparing to drink from a straw. The gesture was cute yet disconcerting.

  I uncrossed my arms. “I didn’t ‘let’ my mother do anything. If you knew anything about Zirconia Riddle, you’d know she never asks for permission.”

  Maisy’s fat lip recessed and spread into a smile. A genuinely friendly smile. “Mothers,” she said with a chuckle. “Yours sounds exactly like mine. Except for the part about being a creature of the grave. Mine is a witch, naturally.”

  “Mine was too, originally.”

  She scrunched up her face and unfocused her gaze, as though putting together a mental model of my family tree. Then her expression relaxed and she said, with an air of generosity, “You can have him. Fully and completely.” She held up one hand as though swearing an oath in a court of law. “He is yours, Zara. My word is my bond.”

  She was giving me Bentley? How, um, generous.

  I said, “Isn’t that up to him?”

  She sniffed. “You’re funny, Zara.”

  “What makes you think I even want him?”

  She gave me a knowing look, her dark eyes flashing wide.

  Behind her, the door handle started to turn. Without so much as a glance over her shoulder, Maisy flicked her finger, and the door locked. She spoke to the person on the other side, in an eeri
e, magic-infused voice. “You want to use the other washroom.”

  From the other side of the door came the muffled sound of a woman saying, “I think I’ll use the other washroom.”

  The walls of the tiny washroom seemed to be closer now. Being trapped in close quarters with a witch who wasn’t family finally got to me. I shifted from one foot to the other. “Maisy, are we going to be in here much longer? Bentley might wonder what’s taking me so long. I’d hate for him to come crashing through that door in a heroic burst of chivalry.”

  “How long we’re in here is up to you. Ask me about whatever it is you’re after. I know you didn’t come here just for the roast turkey sandwich. Stop stalling.”

  When Maisy Nix told you to stop stalling, you stopped stalling. “What do you know about dollhouses that predict the future?”

  “Are we talking about voodoo dolls?”

  “Not exactly,” I said, and I explained what we’d found at Temperance Krinkle’s house.

  When I finished, she said, “The Krinkle woman doesn’t have any powers that I know of. It’s possible she was meant to be a minor mage, like her mother, but her powers were suppressed. Do you know about Animata transfer?”

  I waved one hand in a level gesture. My knowledge was so-so. Zinnia told me a witch with suppressed magic could accidentally imbue the objects around her with her own life energy. This was why it was important for witches to never give names to objects, or talk to objects as though they were alive. It was also why she’d been so concerned about my daughter’s powers not manifesting on her sixteenth birthday.

  Maisy gave me a refresher on Animata transfer, then concluded, “The answers may be inside the dollhouses she builds. You must focus your investigation there.”

  “Bentley has a team working on that already. Dr. Lund is supervising.”

  Maisy wrinkled her nose.

  I picked up on her reaction—was it disgust?—and said, “I know, right? What is up with that guy?”