The Sweets of Doom

by Wendy Meadows

  “I don’t see anything so unusual about that,” I remark. “Dogs must do that to you all the time.”

  “It’s not that!” he rasps. “It was the water! He shook it all off and it made a giant fountain of spray, but the droplets didn’t fall. That’s what I’m trying to tell you! They hung there in midair for several minutes. They didn’t fall. They formed a great cloud of water droplets all suspended in the air around the dog. It looked like a mist in a perfect sphere around the animal. I never saw anything like it in my life.”

  I glance at Simone. She stands riveted to the spot, taking in every word with wide, staring eyes.

  “Something mysterious is going on in this town, Margaret,” Mr. Stewart hisses. “I don’t know what it is, but dark forces are afoot.”

  I open my mouth to say there must be a logical explanation for all this or something ridiculously banal like that. Before I get the words out, loud footsteps ring down the sidewalk outside. Stacy Koontz dashes inside, slams the door, and shoots the bolt.

  “Hey!” I exclaim. “Don’t do that. We’re still open.”

  Stacy doesn’t answer. She peeks through the windows. Then she starts creeping around the same way Simone did.

  When she finally faces us, her eyes bug out of her cherry-red face. “Something weird is happening around here. You won’t believe what just happened.”

  “What?” Mr. Stewart and Simone both exclaim at once.

  Stacy approaches the counter and waves the others to join her. They all put their heads together while Stacy whispers out her awful tale. “I was over in my café just now. We were getting ready to set up the salad bar for lunch, and I went over to the ice machine. I opened the door, and this big plume of steam came out of it. I swear it had the form of a dragon spitting more steam right into my face.”

  Simone gasps. “The same thing happened to me. I saw a face in the steam, only it was a human face.”

  “I wasn’t the only one who saw it,” Stacy goes on. “Two of my employees were standing right there. One of them screamed in horror and dropped the cottage cheese on the floor. It was horrible.”

  My heart skips a beat. I have to stop this crazy talk before I, too, start to believe strange doings are going on around this town.

  “I bet it was that witches’ coven on the other side of town,” Stacy goes on. “I bet they put a hex on the whole town so we’ll all be cursed.”

  “Hold your horses, all of you,” I interject. “The coven didn’t do anything to you.”

  Simone compresses her thin lips. “I say we march over there and run them all out of house and home this very minute. How are decent, peace-loving people supposed to survive and earn a living in a town under a curse?”

  “I say we get the police to deal with them,” Mr. Stewart declares. “What do we pay their salaries for if they can’t protect us from monsters like this?”

  Now I know I have to intervene before this turns into a lynch mob. “We pay the police to keep law and order, and that means making sure someone really has committed a crime before they get arrested or punished or thrown out of house and home.”

  Stacy pulls out her phone. “I’m calling 911 right now.”

  “I’m going to get Kyle Davidson.” Mr. Stewart lays his hand on the doorknob. “I know he has plenty of weapons in his house. He can help us round them up.”

  An electric charge torches through me. I rocket at him and slam the door shut just as he pulls it open. The force of the blow tears the knob out of his hand. I spin around and snatch Stacy’s phone out of her hand.

  “None of you is going anywhere until you see sense,” I bark. “Do you hear what you’re saying? You want to call 911 for seeing shapes in steam? Do you hear how ridiculous that sounds? You want to grab a bunch of assault rifles and go shoot up the neighborhood because a cloud of water droplets hung suspended in the air? Come on, people! You’re all intelligent adults and you’ve all got businesses to run. You can’t go jumping at ghosts, and you can’t call the cops for something that, first of all, wasn’t a crime, and second of all, wasn’t even remotely dangerous. No one did anything to you. Okay, so you saw a few things that were out of the ordinary. That’s it. Now leave it at that and get back to your stores before you make even bigger idiots of yourselves than you already are.”

  The three of them stare at me with their mouths open. I struggle to steady my breathing. My heart thunders in my neck. My body trembles with a mixture of fear and rage.

  All at once, Mr. Stewart pulls the door open and scoots back to his grooming parlor. Simone regards me for a moment. Her papery eyelids droop when she blinks. Then she slips outside and glides away down the sidewalk.

  Stacy lowers her gaze and mutters under her breath. “Sorry, Margaret. I guess we all got a little carried away.”

  I hand her phone back and nod toward the café next door. “Get out of here and let’s all pretend it never happened.”

  She takes her phone and vanishes. I retreat to my little closet of an office and collapse into my rickety old desk chair. I bury my face in my hands and draw several ragged sighs.

  This case has gotten way out of hand. Everybody is walking a tightrope between superstitious fear of the unknown and trying to function in a world that claimed not to believe in all that mumbo-jumbo.

  I’m no better than they are. That’s the worst part. I can’t trust myself to stay focused on reality anymore. After those notes appeared in my house and in the store, I find myself checking over my shoulder, too.

  What if someone in town is out to get me? What if there is a witch in town—an evil witch—who wants to curse me? I shudder at the thought. What did I ever do to inspire that kind of ire? Well, I tried to put Jose’s killer in jail, for one thing.

  The killer wanted to make Jose’s death look like witchcraft when it was anything but. Still, what if the killer did dabble in magic? Why shouldn’t they use their skills to foil the investigation? It stands to reason they would at least try.

  10

  I turn the key in the candy story lock and about jump out of my skin when a firm tread approaches me down the sidewalk. I whip around and my hand flies to my heart. “Man, you scared me!”

  David smiles. “Everyone in town is a little jumpy right now, I’d say. I’m here to walk you home like we agreed.”

  I slip my hand through his elbow. “I’d be very grateful if you did. I don’t like the idea of walking home in the dark right now.” We set off down the street.

  “How was your day?” he asks.

  “Do you mean selling candy to children, or do you mean thwarting a lynch mob set to burn the neighborhood to the ground to get rid of the devil-worshiping menace?”

  He shakes his head and clucks his tongue. “I didn’t know it had gone as far as that.”

  “They wanted to call 911 for seeing apparitions in mirrors and stuff like that. You would have heard all about it if I hadn’t stopped them.”

  “I appreciate that. I did some digging, too. I discovered those weird symbols we found in your house and at the store are called sigils. They represent intentions the spellcaster wants to focus their magic on. They’re designed to concentrate the spellcaster’s subconscious mind on their goal.”

  “Fan-freakin’-tastic,” I mutter. “That’s just what I need.”

  “Here’s what I want to know.” He speaks in an absent way to the darkening landscape around him. “Someone obviously went to a lot of effort to learn that. Someone must have studied magic in a serious way to get that far advanced. It goes way beyond drawing pentagrams on the ground and lighting some incense. I mean, even a clod like me knows about that stuff, but I never heard of a sigil before. Someone knew about this and developed all those sigils—hundreds of them. That tells me this is no weekend hobbyist. This person is a card-carrying professional.”

  I nod. I don’t like the subject, but now that he brings it up, I have no choice but to face it head on. “I thought of that, too. The killer created that fake ritual around Jos
e’s dead body. They knew we were bound to figure out it was a fake. They knew we would assume the case had nothing to do with the occult when it really did. So they developed… what do you call it…a double-blind. It was pretty clever of them.”

  “So why would they give themselves away by leaving all their sigils lying around?” he asks. “Wouldn’t you think they would want to keep their real magic a secret?”

  “I agree it would be a stupid move except for one thing.”

  “What’s that?” he asks.

  “The coven. When you think about it, it really was a stroke of genius. Everyone in town is blaming the coven for Jose’s death and for the weird stuff going on around town. People want to blame the coven for every little thing that happens. So what does the killer do? They plant these sigils of theirs around my house and my store to make it look like the coven did that, too. It’s the perfect cover for casting their real spells.”

  “I don’t necessarily see it that way,” he remarks. “I still think the coven had something to do with it. From where I stand, it’s a little too inconvenient that a real witches’ coven could be sitting right there in town and have nothing to do with this.”

  I measure my words before I speak. A full-on, frontal assault on Detective David Graham never works. Arguing accomplishes nothing to change his mind, so I adopt a more subtle approach. “And what do you say was their motive? None of the women in the coven knew Jose from a hole in the ground. He just moved here and they’ve all been here for years. Whoever killed him was heavily invested in developing a relationship with him. That sort of thing takes time.”

  “Not necessarily,” he counters. “People can fall in love pretty fast. Psychos who kill people tend to project their own feelings onto the other person. A complete stranger could have fallen in love with him and developed a persecution fantasy that he didn’t love them back. That would explain why he threw away her flowers and her cards. She could have gotten mad that he didn’t return her feelings and killed him. It fits the MO so far.”

  “I still don’t buy it,” I reply. “If that was the case, she would have had to shadow him. She would have to know where he lived. She would have had to come into contact with him somewhere, and that means Peterborough.”

  He stops in front of my house. “Let’s leave it alone for tonight, okay? We’re both full of ideas. Try to get some sleep. We’ll meet up tomorrow and see if we can put our heads together on this.”

  “All right.” I rise on my tiptoes and kiss him on the cheek. Then I turn away toward the house. “See you tomorrow.”

  He grabs my arm and yanks me back. “Hold it right there. You don’t think you’re getting away with that pathetic excuse for a kiss, are you?”

  I burst into a grin and he gathers me in his arms. I let his warm presence enfold me, and his satiny lips touch mine. When he releases his hold, his startling blue eyes shine down into mine. “Good night.”

  I can barely speak above a whisper. “Good night.”

  At that moment, Zack explodes out of the house and rushes at us. “Mom! Detective! You have to come inside right away.”

  I settle back to Earth. “What now?”

  “Come take a look.”

  David and I follow him inside. Zack bustles into the living room and lifts back the carpet. He points down at an embroidered pouch pressed flat between the carpet and the floor.

  I bend low to examine it. “What is that?”

  “I didn’t dare touch it until you came home,” Zack replies.

  David slips on a latex glove and pries open the strings holding the pouch closed. “It looks like some kind of herb. That’s weird.”

  “There’s more. Look over here.” Zack shows us into the kitchen where he reveals another pouch tucked behind the sugar crock in the pantry. “I found it when I started making lasagna for dinner.”

  David checks the contents and freezes. All color vanishes from his face, and he stares into the pouch with a stunned expression.

  “What is it?” I ask. “What’s in it?”

  He shoves it at me and whips out his phone. I glance down into the pouch. It’s filled with dozens of human teeth. Fillings or rims of gold shine on some of them. A few have their roots broken off, but most are perfectly intact.

  David marches around the kitchen snapping orders into his phone. “Send three squad cars to 134 Cherry Tree Lane, West End. Arrest Cheryl Whitfield and anyone else connected with that coven of hers. I don’t care. Just take them into custody. We’ll question them all down at the station and get to the bottom of this.”

  He hangs up and starts rummaging through my kitchen drawers. “Is that really necessary?” I ask him. “You don’t have any evidence the coven did this.”

  He pulls out two Ziploc bags and holds one open to me. “That’s what you keep saying, but we have all these women practicing witchcraft right here in full view of everyone. It would be foolish not to treat them as the most obvious suspects.”

  “Maybe that’s what the killer wants you to do.” I drop the bag of teeth into the Ziploc.

  “I’ll let you know if we come up with anything,” he replies, “but the lynch mob would be after me if I didn’t at least question the coven about this. You two stay inside tonight. I don’t want to see you in the hospital tomorrow morning.”

  He puts the bag of herbs in another Ziploc. Zack and I watch him walk away into the night. That guy never shies away from walking around town after dark. He isn’t afraid of ghosts or rustling leaves in the gutter.

  Zack murmurs into my ear. “Do you think someone is trying to put a curse on us, Mom?”

  “I doubt it.” I do my best to sound more certain than I really am. “If I had to guess, I would say someone is trying to make us think they’re trying to curse us. They’re trying to scare us. That’s all.”

  He passes his hand across his forehead. “They’re succeeding. I’m going to bed. I hope you don’t mind if I leave the hall light on tonight.”

  “I don’t mind, sweetheart.” I kiss him. “Do whatever makes you feel safe.”

  He climbs the stairs, but I remain standing at the window. I gaze out into the dark neighborhood for a long time. My mind spins through a dozen possibilities.

  Let’s say someone is just trying to scare us—or me, more specifically. Let’s say they want to spook me off this case. Let’s say the killer faked that ritual at Jose’s house, and now they want to fake using magic, first to scare me off, and second to cast suspicion on the coven.

  If that’s true, the killer wouldn’t use real sigils. Unless the killer was a dentist or a dental assistant, they went to some trouble collecting all those teeth. Besides, dentists have to dispose of teeth using biohazard protocols for isolating human tissue. They don’t leave them lying around for would-be sorcerers to collect.

  The scene at Jose’s house was fake, but the sigils and the two pouches are really, horrifyingly real. They’re intended to cast real magic on me, to interfere with the murder investigation.

  I would be willing to bet the killer put similar charms around David’s house and possibly his work for the same purpose. He’s probably too busy and too focused even to notice something like that.

  If that’s the case, if the killer undertook the study of magic as a real endeavor, then it follows that they would have used their skills and knowledge to try to enchant Jose into loving…her. We can probably safely assume the killer is a woman. Jose was a straight guy, and most gay guys I know are too sensible and intelligent to develop a psychotic fantasy romance with a straight man.

  Okay, so our killer is a woman, a woman who knew Jose pretty well. She fell hard for Jose but he didn’t return the favor, so what did she do? She used her magic to try to make him love her. If she went to the effort of putting sigils and charms around my house, it stands to reason she did the same thing around Jose’s house.

  I listen. No sound comes from upstairs, and David is miles away up to his neck in arresting the coven. No one will see me slip over
to Jose’s house to check. I drop my handbag on the hall table and tiptoe out of the house. I ease the door shut so as not to disturb Zack.

  I hurry across the street and down the block. I dive under the cordon tape and don’t stop until I reach the entrance hall in Jose’s big house. The place echoes like a mausoleum. It will probably be years before someone buys this house again.

  I walk straight past the sitting room with its tape outline of Jose’s body. The killer wouldn’t leave her spells in the same room she designed as a fake display to fool the authorities. She would put them somewhere intimate.

  I trot up the stairs to a long corridor lined with doors. David searched up here before, but he probably wasn’t looking for magical devices. I wander down the hall throwing open doors. Sealed boxes crowd nearly every room—all except two bedrooms.

  Posters of skateboarders, rock stars, and scantily clad models adorn the walls of the first bedroom. The whole place has “teenage boy” written all over it. I smile to myself and close the door. I know enough about raising a teenage boy to recognize a normal one’s bedroom when I see it. I also know enough never to tell a living soul, especially not Michael himself, what I saw there.

  The second bedroom bears all the hallmarks of a responsible adult male. A chocolate brown bedspread covers the immaculately made-up bed. A large-screen TV hangs from the opposite wall. The remote rests on the bedside table along with a phone charger and a laptop computer. This was Jose’s inner sanctum. If the killer put charms anywhere, it would be here.

  I hesitate in the doorway to survey the place. If I was a practicing witch and I wanted to magic a man into loving me, where would I put my spells? I circle the bed first. The killer wouldn’t put the charms anywhere Jose would find them.

  I get down on my knees and run my hands under the mattress. I thrust my arms up to the shoulder and sweep them sideways until my fingers touch a lump of fabric. I pull out a similarly embroidered pouch like the one from my kitchen.

  My heart flutters when I tug the strings loose, but I don’t find any teeth. Thank the stars for that. The pouch contains a mixture of plant material, including rose petals, dandelion heads, and a bunch of powdered leaves too small to identify.