“She didn’t have the key,” Felicity said. “Fluff told me the book was torn apart, so whoever killed Mary probably has it. But that wasn’t me, and I can prove it.”
“How?” Of course, I knew Mary’s killer didn’t have the key, or at least they hadn’t gotten it from Mary, but I wasn’t about to tell Felicity that it had been in the box on my shelf at the time. She did seem quite certain that Mary’s killer had taken it, which meant she didn’t know it had been in the box. If that were the case, then she really didn’t have it.
“Gus questioned me about her death. Seems someone told her that I was upset that you sold the recipe book to Mary.” Felicity gave me a look indicating that she knew it was me. “But I actually have an alibi for the time of her death.”
“I’ll bet you do. How do we know that isn’t some sort of magical trick? The cops wouldn’t know to suspect that.”
“Because my alibi is you.”
“Me? How?”
“I was here buying a book from you at the time. I have the receipt. You see, Mary was able to dial 911, and Gus arrived right after the murder. The times are all recorded in her police log.”
“You could have killed her and rushed here to create an alibi.” But the more I thought about it, the more I realized Felicity couldn’t be the killer. She had been mad about the recipe book when she was here, but if she’d killed Mary just before that, she would have already known I’d sold it to her.
“Gus looked in her log. She had found your card in Mary’s hand, and while Jimmy was securing the scene, she rushed over here. The log shows how long it takes to get from Mary’s to Last Chance Books, and it proves that I wouldn’t have had time to kill Mary, change my bloody clothes, and then come here and buy a book.”
I thought back to the day in question. She had been sitting leisurely on the sofa. Not out of breath or rushing. I hated to say it, but I was starting to believe her.
“Okay, if this is all true, what do you want me to do?”
“I know you’re looking for the key, and now you need to also locate the box. I need the key and the box, as does Pandora. All I am asking is that you let me know when you find it. Give me a chance to get a whiff of portal air along with Pandora. I’ve already given you what I had to trade—the knowledge of how Pandora can regain her ability to talk to the Mystic Notch cats. Now, I’m trusting that you’ll keep your promise and notify me when you have the key and the box.”
I sighed. “Fine. But I can’t make any promises about actually finding them.”
“I know. But this is my only chance. All I ask is that you put my number in your contacts and text me if you do find them.”
Pandora paced the bookstore after Felicity and Fluff left. “I’m not sure we can trust them.”
“Me neither,” Willa said as she frowned down at her phone. “Felicity is the last person I ever thought I’d have in my contacts, but we don’t have any other ideas on how to restore your ability to talk to the cats.”
“If the key really was Robert’s and it opens the box he kept his poems in, that box could be the portal.”
“He described it in detail, so at least we know what it looks like.”
“If only I could communicate with the cats, I could send them out looking far and wide for a box that matches the description.”
“We may have to wait until Elspeth comes back to town next week. Maybe I can tell her, and she can tell the cats,” Willa said.
“A week? I don’t know if we have that long. We can’t risk the person who has the key finding it first.”
Willa glanced out the window. “That’s if we can even trust the information we got from Felicity, of course.”
“I can’t think of any reason for her to make all this up, but we need to proceed with caution,” Pandora said. “She didn’t lie about one thing. There are instructions about opening a portal.”
“There are? That’s good, right?”
“Maybe. Right now, they are buried in a safe place and being guarded by the cats.”
“Can we get them? If we find the key and the box, you could restore your ability without risking too much. I mean, if what Felicity says is true.”
“It won’t be that easy. They are buried deep. It’s going to be a project that you and I alone can’t handle. Unfortunately, I can’t ask the cats about this since I can’t communicate with them. There might be another way though.”
“Oh?”
“Remember Robert said that the box was almost magical for him, but if anyone else opened it, bad things happened?”
“Yes.”
“He may be one who is immune to the dire effects of the portal.”
“So, he can open it without bad consequences,” Willa said. “We might not need those instructions.”
“It’s possible.”
“I’m not sure if we should rule Felicity out entirely, but we do need to start looking into our other suspects. The fact that Fluff was at Mary’s does seem to indicate that they don’t have the key.”
“It does. And she did just give us that tip about the portal air. If that is even true. She looks like crap, though.” Pandora hadn’t sniffed out any trickery on Felicity. She really was falling apart. “And Fluff does seem distraught about her.”
“Yeah, but this whole portal thing seems dangerous. What if it’s really some elaborate trick to let demons out?”
“That’s another reason to message her if we find the key and box. If what she says is really true, then she won’t mind going first.”
Chapter Seventeen
That night, Striker stopped by after work. Given what I had found out about the tea, I felt a bit awkward about my assumptions about his intentions.
“Are you getting some work done on the place?” he asked as he took two pieces of ricotta pie out of a bag. My mouth watered. It was from Earline’s Diner, and her ricotta was my favorite.
I panicked and blurted out, “No.”
He looked at me funny. “Steve Wheeler said he came by.”
“Oh, right. I was just thinking maybe the bathrooms are a bit small. Wanted to see what my options were.”
Striker handed me a piece of pie. He didn’t seem bothered about a potential bathroom renovation. Maybe he didn’t care, or maybe I was making too much of it. Probably the latter.
“Sounds like a good idea. I’m happy to help if you need it.”
We settled down in the living room. The paperweight sat uselessly on the coffee table in front of us no matter how many times I looked at it.
Pandora sat at Striker’s feet, shooting me knowing glances and then tilting her head toward Striker. “See, he’s perfect. He brings pie.”
She had a point, but of course I couldn’t answer her, so I just smiled at her and made shooing motions. I felt bad for her. She had shown no interest in going to Elspeth’s barn, saying “What’s the point” in a defeated voice when I had asked her earlier.
“So, how is the case going?” I asked, trying to be subtle.
“Some interesting developments.”
That caught my interest. “Really? Anything you can talk about?” I shoved a piece of pie into my mouth. It was rich and creamy, sweet with just a hint of almond.
“It seems like Danielle Norden might not have an alibi after all.”
I glanced at Pandora. All this time we’d been focusing on Felicity and hadn’t looked into Danielle because we thought she had an alibi. Had Danielle lied? If so, that moved her to the top of my list.
“But what was her motive?” I asked.
“It turns out the two had competing blogs. Recipe blogs or something.” Striker waved his hand dismissively as if recipe blogs were of no consequence. “There was some sort of rivalry, I guess, and the fact that Danielle lied about her alibi makes us a little suspicious.”
It made me suspicious too. “You think she would kill someone over a blog?”
“It’s extreme, but I’ve seen people kill over less. We need to check it out anyway. She does s
ay a witness saw her leaving Mary’s before the time of death.”
Probably Jennifer Jones, though Jennifer hadn’t mentioned it.
“What about Felicity Bates? I heard Gus questioned her too.”
Striker’s brow quirked up. “You certainly are up on this case. Do you have an interest in it?”
I shrugged, feigning indifference. “Just making conversation. Mary was a good customer, and I guess I’m just curious.”
“We did, but she had the best alibi of all. She happened to be buying a book from you.”
“Don’t you think that’s a little convenient?” I asked. Even though it appeared as if Felicity couldn’t be the killer, I still secretly wanted it to be her. I wondered if Felicity could rig the receipt. Maybe she had computer skills or had done it with magic. I couldn’t tell Striker about the magic though. He wasn’t totally on board with it even though he could see ghosts. But Danielle was a more likely candidate. She had been overly angry about me selling the book to Mary and had lied about her alibi. That pointed to guilt right there. But was Danielle after the key, or did she really want the book for her blog? Looked like I’d be having a little chat with Danielle.
Striker finished his pie, put his plate on the coffee table, then pulled me toward him and gave me a kiss on the side of my head. “Let’s look on the bright side. At least we haven’t seen any ghosts in this one. Now, enough talk about investigations. We have more important things to do.”
After Willa went to bed, Pandora snuck out her usual escape route in the basement. She didn’t go to the barn though. Seeing the cats she could no longer talk to was too depressing. There was someplace else that was much more important to her right now. Gladys Primble’s backyard.
If only she could obtain the instructions for the portal. They would come in handy if they wanted to try to open it safely, but she couldn’t ask the cats to hand them over. Even if she could talk to them, she doubted Inkspot would allow it. And besides, digging them up would require human intervention. They were buried too deep and needed someone with shovels. Felicity was too weak to do it herself, but maybe she had convinced someone to do it for her. Pandora needed to see if they’d been dug up.
It was late at night, and the streets of Mystic Notch were empty. The moon was a crescent in the sky that lit her way. Not that she needed light. Her superior vision enabled her to see practically in the dark.
She stuck to the wooded areas, avoiding the feral cats for fear that she wouldn’t be able to talk to them either. She didn’t need anything to make her more depressed.
When she got to Gladys Primble’s modest house, she discovered she wasn’t alone.
Otis was crouched down behind a shrub at the edge of the yard, watching the very spot where the instructions had been buried. No one had been digging, which meant that Felicity didn’t have them. Time was running out, and they had no idea how to open that portal box safely.
The last cat she’d wanted to run into right now was Otis, so she turned to run, but he’d spotted her.
“Meow!” he said, probably to needle her about not being able to understand him.
Pandora remained silent.
To her dismay, he trotted toward her. She resisted the urge to run, which would make her look cowardly.
He sat down next to her, looking from her to the yard in an attempt to communicate. Was he trying to communicate without words?
Pandora nodded.
Otis passed his paw over his eyes and then pointed toward the spot. He was trying to tell her that he was keeping watch. Great, now Felicity would never be able to get at the instructions even if she had found a way.
But Otis had no way of knowing how important those instructions were to Felicity and Pandora, and Pandora appreciated his efforts to keep them safe. She bowed her head slightly, hoping it would show her appreciation but not deference.
Otis nodded and pointed back toward the woods, indicating that she didn’t need to stay. Either that or he just wanted to get rid of her.
Otis was being nice, and she did owe him. After all, he had guzzled down a potion to save her. Lucky thing he hadn’t had to resort to the most selfless thing—the breath of life. If he’d done that, they would be bonded for the rest of their nine lives.
She turned to go, but then his paw on her leg stopped her. She turned around and looked at him. She could see sympathy in his fiery orange eyes.
She nodded again, and then she turned and ran.
Somehow the sympathetic gesture from her archenemy was worse than all the other things that had happened to her.
Chapter Eighteen
“I thought the article about the bookstore would be in this morning’s Gazette,” Hattie Dearing said the next morning at the bookstore. She was settled on the purple couch with a Styrofoam coffee cup in front of her and the Gazette opened in her lap.
She pointed to a section of the Gazette where I could see Josie had printed the article on Mary Ashford’s blog. “She must’ve decided to print the article on Mary instead. I guess she was capitalizing on recent events.”
“Kind of ghoulish,” Cordelia said.
Hattie sighed. “I was looking forward to reading what you said about us.”
“That Josie is a bit cutthroat. I guess she is trying to claw her way to the top, but capitalizing on someone’s death is not the right way to do it.” Cordelia took a sip of her coffee. “She’s even getting aggressive. I saw her arguing with Sarah Delaney, trying to force her to give her an interview.”
At the mention of Sarah Delaney, Pandora and I both perked our ears up. I hadn’t forgotten that I’d thought I’d seen Sarah looking around my shop. Had I checked the box to see if the key was in there after I’d seen Sarah? I didn’t think so. I had no reason to check the key at that time. Could Sarah be behind this? There were no clues or evidence linking Sarah to Mary’s place, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t there. And I wasn’t forgetting about Felicity either. She was suspicious even in her weakened state. What if the two of them had teamed up?
I was kind of glad the article hadn’t been printed today though. Hattie was expecting a big chunk of it to be about her and her sister, but I’d barely mentioned them. She was not going to be happy.
The article was the least of my worries though. Given what Striker had said about Danielle last night, I knew I needed to talk to her right away. Pandora had filled me in about the instructions, and at least no one had dug them up, but maybe that was even worse. If the person who stole the key used it to open a portal without the instructions, that could be disastrous. But of course, if their intentions were nefarious to begin with, they wouldn’t be concerned with keeping demons and other undesirable spirits at bay.
I patiently made small talk with the regulars as I waited for them to leave so I could get Danielle into the store. All the while, Pandora was pacing around, casting furtive glances my way and saying things like, “We should be doing something, time is growing short.” By the time the senior citizens left the store, my anxiety was at peak levels.
Once the last of them had shut the door, I turned to Pandora. “I’m going to get Danielle to come here so we can talk to her.” I had already told Pandora about Striker’s revelation that her alibi had been a lie. Even though they had competing blogs, I doubted Danielle would kill Mary, but why lie about her alibi? Something more was going on.
“Finally!” Pandora said. “I was wondering when you were going to get to that.”
I raised my brow at her. She was one to talk. As far as I could see, she’d been spending most of her time lounging around and feeling sorry for herself other than one midnight trip to Gladys Primble’s.
She got the hint. “I’m going to do something too. I’ve decided I can’t wallow in my depression. I need to take action, so I’m going to seek out the Mystic Notch cats. Maybe even if I can’t talk to them, I can observe them and get a handle on what they are doing and maybe even some clues as to what they have discovered.”
I felt sympathe
tic toward Pandora. She’d told me about seeing Otis the night before. She made light of it, but I knew it had bothered her.
“So, if you’ll just let me out the front door.” Pandora had trotted over and was looking back at me.
I frowned. I didn’t like the idea of letting my cat out. The outside world was dangerous, and all kinds of things could happen. She could get hit by a car or mauled by an animal or get hurt and be lying somewhere, and I wouldn’t know to come to her aid.
As if reading my mind, she said, “I can take care of myself out there, trust me. There are plenty of cats around to help out if I run into trouble.”
I didn’t want to argue with her, and now that we could talk as equals, it didn’t feel right to demand she stay inside the shop. I crossed my fingers, hoping what she said was true, and opened the door, my heart squeezing as she trotted away down the street.
I scoured the shelves for an old recipe book that I could use to lure Danielle to the store. I didn’t find anything as ancient as the one Mary had bought, but I did find a 1970s version of The Joy of Cooking. It would have to do.
I put in a call and waited for her to show up. About an hour later, she came through the door.
“You found another old cookbook?” She looked excited, not like someone who had murdered another person for the previous old cookbook just days before.
“Yes. I mean, it’s not as old as the other one, but I thought you might have an interest.” I pulled the thick book from under the shelf and put it on the counter. It was a nice hardcover, white with gold letters, about nine hundred pages, and must have weighed a couple of pounds.
Her smile turned into a frown. “This?”
“It’s from the 1970s. It’s practically an antique,” I said.
She kept frowning.
“I know it’s not like the really old one I had, but considering…” I let my voice trail off and watched Danielle’s expression darken.
“It wasn’t fair that Mary got that old one. She didn’t deserve it. She’s a liar and a thief. She stole recipes from my blog!”
Claw And Order (Mystic Notch Cozy Mystery Series Book 8) Page 9