“I was eight!”
“Yes, but you were painting with purpose,” she said, wagging a finger at me.
Sometimes, there was no winning with my mother.
“Anyway,” she said, waving a hand, “I’m going to hold my tongue a little on this one. If you want to make some changes, I know it’s your right to do that.”
“You don’t need to tell me everything Dad told you to say,” I said with a smile, and she blushed a little, looking at the ground. “Anyway, I wanted to get your input on a few things. I’m thinking about new counters, first of all, because I really think-”
“Now that you mention it,” she interrupted, snapping up the opportunity, brightening and striding around the kitchen to follow my gaze, “there were a few times when I was running the place that I thought the wood didn’t exactly match the countertops, and it has been through a lot with me, but…”
And just like that, Mom started to open up to some of my ideas piece by piece, starting with the counters and moving on to the interior colors. It turned out that all I really needed to do was figure out how to plant ideas in her head to make her feel like she’d been the one to have the idea. We sat down to browse through some options online, and when I showed Mom some sites she’d never seen before where you could look through model homes and designs as long as you wanted, she really got into the spirit of things.
By the time the sun was setting and I started thinking about what to do for dinner, I probably could have convinced her to smash down the whole house and start from scratch, I thought. Well, I liked to think that, but I didn’t want to press my luck too much with Mom. Even meeting me halfway for this was an accomplishment, if I did say so myself.
And best of all, she was so distracted that she never brought up the niggling little issue of the murder investigation.
In fact, I forgot all about that too, right up until it hit me like a sack of bricks.
If tackling home renovations with a tug-of-war for control with my mother was looking like an appealing distraction, then the investigation was really in a bad way.
And if I couldn’t pull the information together soon, I’d rather build a whole new house with mom than face Elisa.
Chapter 17
The next morning, I woke up to the sound of rain pattering against the window. It was the kind of gentle rain that sounded just like one of those white noise tapes people play to help themselves fall asleep. I used to have some of those when I was a baby.
I sat up in bed and stretched, yawning. Luna came crawling out from under the blankets, her fur sticking up all over the place. “Good morning,” she said softly, her meowing voice a little scratchy from sleep.
“Morning,” I replied, rubbing my eyes. The rain made me feel lazy. I knew I had no guests to worry about this morning, so really, if I wanted to, I could have probably stayed in bed for a while longer. But then, I knew that if I did that, there was no telling how long I would stay there. The soft, soothing sound of the rain would lull me right back to sleep if I snuggled back down under the covers. Nope, I needed to be productive. Just because there weren’t guests staying here for me to worry about didn’t mean that I could just slag off the whole day and stay in bed, as much as I really wanted to. I still had responsibilities. Well, one responsibility, anyway: I needed to get to the bottom of the Susanna Andhrimir case. It was important, for Susanna’s sake, as well as her nieces Elisa and Bella. And, to be honest, I needed to satisfy my own burning curiosity, as well. I needed to know what happened to her and who to blame.
“What time is it?” Luna asked.
I glanced over at the antique alarm clock I had recently brought back up into my room. I wasn’t using it as an alarm most of the time anymore, but the night stand looked awfully empty and sad without it. The time read 7:05. So I was actually awake before my alarm would normally go off. How odd. Was it really just the rain that broke through my slumber and jerked me awake? I was a light sleeper, to be sure, but not that light.
Perhaps it was something else that had prodded me out of my dreams. Something deeper, more instinctual. Warning me. Urging me to get up and get moving. When a witch got a feeling like this, it was best to follow it.
“It’s early,” I told Luna as I got out of bed. “Just after seven.” I swung my legs over the side of the bed and winced when my toes brushed the freezing-cold floor. I glanced around the dimly-lit room for my slippers. It definitely felt like winter now, for sure. I squinted and made out the shape of my pink fluffy slippers underneath an armoire across the room. Pointing at them with my finger, I said quietly but firmly, “capioroa.”
The slippers began moving, sluggishly at first, then picked up speed as they slid across the floor toward me. Luna prickled up beside me, watching them with nervous eyes. She was not a fan of this spell, so I rarely used it. Apparently, it made her feline instincts kick in, alarm bells going off in her head. The slippers moving ghostlike across the floor made her anxious, like something was going to chase after her. It was unfortunate, because this spell was quite useful around the house, and if not for Luna, I would have probably used it all the time.
When the slippers reached the floor beneath my feet, I slid into them and padded softly across the room to the bathroom, sweeping my long black hair back away from my face. This was going to be one of those days when I just couldn’t be bothered to really look good. I had a feeling: it was rainy outside, I had no guests to impress, and I had a lot weighing on my mind and distracting me. So when I looked in the mirror, I just grabbed my vintage hair brush, combed the snarls and tangles out, then scraped it all back and up into a tight, high ponytail. From there, I braided the ponytail so it was neater. To think more clearly, it always helped to have my hair out of my face.
Luna walked into the bathroom and leapt up onto the counter. She stared up at me with a weird look on her face. I glanced at her, frowning.
“What?” I asked, my voice a little scratchy, too.
“You look different,” she said slowly. “Wait. No. You don’t look different. You feel different, you smell different.”
“What do you mean?” I prompted. I lifted my arm to smell my armpit and Luna made a gagging sound of disgust.
“No, not like a stinky human smell. Although, you do need to wash your face,” she said. “No. It’s like a shift in your blood or something. Your heart, maybe?”
“Okay, are you reading my aura or something?” I scoffed. “Been reading my old textbooks again?”
“Ugh, no. Stop. I’m being serious. There’s something off about you and I can’t quite put my paw on whatever it is,” she said, a little concerned.
“Well, let me know if you figure it out, but right now I need to focus,” I said. I dampened a rag with warm water and washed my face before changing out of my pajamas and into an outfit for the day. I put on some no-nonsense black pants, a dark gray sweater, my favorite black boots, a cardigan roughly the color of an orange autumn leaf, and arranged a circular black scarf around my neck. I looked a little gloomy, but that was okay. I had a feeling it was going to be a very contemplative, quiet day. Or at least I kind of hoped it would be, after the whirlwind week I’d been having so far.
I headed downstairs and into the kitchen to get started on breakfast for myself and Luna. I fed her and then took out the ingredients for a simple breakfast. I grabbed a few eggs, some milk, goat cheese, onions, spinach, portobello mushrooms, and some roasted red pepper. After chopping my vegetables, I whisked the eggs and milk together with some salt and pepper until it was thick and frothy, then poured it into a buttery hot pan on the stove. It was just a simple omelette, but the quality of the ingredients and precision of my cooking made it taste gourmet. Good enough that Luna kept trying to sneak bits of it whenever I looked away for even a moment. I turned to scold her every time.
“Lu, you’re not supposed to eat people food,” I warned her.
“Who are you, the food police?” she shot back, eyeing my plate enviously.
&
nbsp; “No. Just a concerned friend who does not want to have to take care of you when you inevitably get super sick from eating non-cat-friendly food,” I told her. I scooped up my plate with a glass of orange juice and headed out to the back deck. It was covered partially by a big awning, so I sat down at one of the covered tables with my breakfast. As I ate, I stared out over the foggy water. The rain was still falling softly, more of a mist than a downpour. The sky was pale gray and the sun only a watery hint of light behind some thick clouds. It was the perfect day for staying inside and reading, but I knew I couldn’t quite adopt that luxury today. There were things to do. Mysteries to unravel. Suspects to close in on. A case to solve.
It just felt like I was missing something. Something big, something vital to the case. I had all these moving parts to the story and nowhere to fit them in. How was I supposed to put the pieces together when they all felt so separate and scattered?
As I finished up my breakfast, I toyed with the idea of calling Xander. He was a cop. He obviously had more experience tying together all the different points of a case, getting the facts straight. That was why he was a police officer, wasn’t it? Because he had an aptitude for putting two and two together even when they didn’t appear to fit at first?
I looked down at my cell phone on the table next to my glass of orange juice. My heart skipped a beat at the thought of calling Chief Forsetti. I wanted to slap myself for that. What did my heart have to do with any of this? It was just a dumb distraction. A weird fluke of my physical weakness. He was handsome, sure, and I could still recall in perfect detail the feeling of his hand over my mouth, the way he winked at me. The way I could feel his warm breath on my face when he leaned in to tell me secrets, details about the case that were confidential, vital to the investigation. Things I probably was not supposed to know.
It hit me again, how crazy it was that he let me in on that kind of knowledge. About the insurance claim, about how Elton stood to benefit enormously from Susanna’s untimely death. It was the kind of detail that could blow a case wide open or, just simply, blow it to pieces if it fell into the wrong hands. Which meant that, in some small capacity, Xander had to think of me as the owner of, well, the right hands. He trusted me. At least with that.
There it was. That flutter of my heart again.
“Come on, Arti. Get it together. He’s just doing his job. You’re just another resource to him, remember? That’s what he said. Maybe he only fed you that bit of knowledge to urge you in the right direction so that the case could get solved more quickly. Or maybe it was just his way of thanking me for helping in the first place. Just a little tidbit to placate me and make me feel special so I would stop getting all up in his business while he was just trying to do his job.
“Ugh. That weird smell again,” Luna said, wrinkling her nose. “Oh, my moon. I know what it is,” she added suddenly with a gasp.
“What? What is it?” I asked, worried.
She stared at me in silence for a moment. Then said, “You have a crush, don’t you? On that yellow-haired police man.”
My eyes went wide. “No!” I exclaimed, perhaps a little too defensively. “No, I certainly do not have a crush on a cop. Especially not that cop. Of course not. Your sense of smell must be off today, Lu, because that is purely ridiculous.”
“So you weren’t just thinking about him, like, ten seconds ago, then?” she asked coolly, knowing perfectly well what the answer was.
I decided to change the subject. And my mind. I wouldn’t call Xander - Chief Forsetti. That was a bad idea. He couldn’t help me. Heck, he would probably just give me crap for bothering him while he was on the job. He had more important stuff to do than talk to some random armchair sleuth about her ideas.
No, I would call someone else. Someone who was possibly even more organized and detail-oriented than any cop on the planet. My sister, Di.
I picked up my dishes and carried them inside, putting them in the sink. As I pressed the speed dial button for Diana, I pointedly ignored the smug expression on Luna’s face. Ugh, she was going to be insufferable about this, wasn’t she?
After only two rings, Diana picked up. “Hello? Arti?”
“Yeah, it’s me. Hey, Di. Do you have a minute to talk?” I asked, turning away from Luna, who was smirking at me on the counter.
“Uh, just a quick minute. I’ve got to go do the morning announcements in a few minutes, sis. Can you make it fast?” she asked, sounding somehow equally stressed and calm. That was just how Diana was. My little sister had a knack for calming people down. Well, more than a knack. It was her own unique brand of personal magic. She could take the tension in a room and smooth it all out, take a harrowing situation and soften it, turn a heated argument into a casual debate. It was a very useful skill, and it helped her survive the kinds of high-stress jobs she took. She had once been the youngest ever elected mayor of Moonlight Cove, for a brief time, until she decided that her powers and experience would better serve the community if she worked directly with the youth of the town. So she became the principal of the Academy, where she still worked today.
“Okay. So. I’m working on the Susanna Andhrimir case.”
“Again? Artemis, don’t you think the cops can handle it?”
“Well, Elisa asked me to work on it for her. She’s grieving. She and her aunt Susanna were very close, you know. I couldn’t exactly tell her no,” I explained.
Diana sighed. “Okay, fine. So you’re a detective now on top of running the bed and breakfast. Got it. What did you need from me, though?”
“Well, I’m having some trouble connecting the dots, so to speak. I have a lot of moving parts and suspects I need to keep straight, and my head just isn’t filing them neatly, if that makes any sense. And you’ve always been so good at that kind of thing. What should I do?”
“Hmm. Okay. Here’s what I suggest: write it all down. Make a chart. A cheat sheet, if you will. But don’t tell any of my students I just used the phrase “cheat sheet” or I’ll kick your butt,” she added quickly.
“Alright,” I said. “I’ll try that and see what happens. Thanks, Di.”
“Don’t mention it. I’m serious. Don’t mention it. If any of my students find out I used the words “cheat sheet” they’d have a field day,” she said, sounding distracted. “Gotta go, sis.”
“Cool. Talk to you later,” I said. She hung up, leaving me staring down at my phone for a moment. That was not quite as helpful as I’d hoped, but it was a very Diana-esque answer. Just write it out. Make a flow chart. That was the kind of way she dealt with everything. And so far, it had worked out pretty well for her, so I figured I might as well give it a try.
I grabbed a notebook and pencil from a drawer in the hallway, then sat down on the couch to try and scribble out some connections. I worked at it for a while, my mind still reeling in circles. But I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. My sheet looked less like a chart and more like the etchings of a madwitch. With a groan of frustration I set it aside and got up to go get my coat. Luna came trotting after me.
“Where are you going?”
“Coffee shop,” I replied. “You coming?”
“Obviously. Got to make sure you don’t walk off a cliff while daydreaming about your big strong police man,” she teased.
“Luna, I will leave you behind,” I warned her.
“Fine, fine. I’ll drop it. For now,” she said, her face pulled into the closest thing to a smug grin as possible for a cat. She clambered up onto my shoulder and we headed out into the cold, drizzly morning. I waved my wand over my head.
“Tegoroa,” I said, creating a small invisible force field over my head that acted like a magical umbrella, keeping the rain out. We wandered down the driveway while my thoughts raced in a hundred directions. Maybe some coffee would help me sort it out.
Chapter 18
“Don’t walk so fast, the coffee will still be there if we take a few more minutes to get there!” Luna called as she trotted to keep pace w
ith me down the road as I made my way to the coffee shop.
“You don’t even drink coffee,” I said.
“No, but sometimes the cafe serves smoked salmon, and the other customers are suckers for a cute cat,” she said with conspiratorial delight.
“Ooh, then you should keep an eye out for a cute cat to steal from,” I said with a grin, and she looked back up at me with the most offended look on her face I’d ever seen.
“I’m not even going to dignify that with a response,” she said after a moment.
“Good, I’ll have time to think,” I said, and that was just what I needed to do. I mentally ran through the things I’d written down earlier, as if there was going to be something there that I hadn’t put together yet. I hoped that caffeine would help, but the fact of the matter was that no amount of information seemed to line up the way I needed it to.
Susanna just wasn’t a very killable person, as callous as it was to think that. I tried to wrack my mind for alternatives I hadn’t thought of yet. Could it have been an accident? No, there was nothing an old woman could do that would accidentally strangle her to death with a large rope and result in her body being found attached to a buoy in the bay. Could it have been a spell that had gone wrong, making her accidentally do it to herself? It wasn’t totally unheard of for inexperienced witches to do that, but Susanna was old enough to be careful about that kind of thing. She hadn’t shown any signs of going senile, either. No, accidental suicide didn’t add up for her either. But what if-
“Waah!”
“Ow!”
“Oof!”
In the middle of my thoughts, I turned a corner to the coffee shop and ran smack into someone, our heads colliding with a small crack before we staggered back from each other. When the stars stopped spinning around my head, I blinked and saw none other than Lara Lancaster in front of me.
Witching for the Best Page 13