Mintwood's Magical Map

by Addison Creek

  I told myself that I might have to figure out a way to see Mrs. Smith without Gracie around, and possibly without Hamilton as well. He might be devoted to his employer, but he was also unpleasant. Still, the time for drastic measures hadn’t come yet, so I let it be for now.

  “Thank you for your time,” I said, “and thank you for the tea. You have a beautiful home. If it’s all right, we’re going to wander out to the garden to take a look around.”

  “Of course. Of course,” said Mrs. Smith. “The police were out there, but they didn’t find anything in particular. I know that with the rain the garden is probably in good shape. The problem is that if Burbank doesn’t return soon I might have to hire someone else. I could try to find the people who worked as his assistants before.” But the topic was finally getting her agitated. She was starting to worry with her hands, and getting distracted, and I knew it was time to leave her in peace for now.

  We excused ourselves with more thanks and headed toward the front hallway. Hamilton let us out the front door, and as soon as we were away from the house Charlie said, “That could be a motive right?”

  Gracie had decided to come with us, unfortunately. She had debated what to do with her high heels on the soft grass, then borrowed a spare pair of shoes from somewhere in the mansion. I figured the shoe closet probably held hundreds of pairs of shoes, so there would surely be a pair that fit her.

  “A motive for murdering him?” Gracie asked. She said it as if it were an entirely foreign concept. I didn’t know why, because murder had clearly been a possibility all along.

  “Yeah, for murdering him,” said Charlie. “An assistant might want his position. Mrs. Smith clearly has a ton of respect for him. She also has a ton of influence. I can see how other gardeners might want that.”

  “How could you possibly think he was murdered?” Gracie asked.

  Charlie looked at her as if she had never seen her before. “Murder is the most likely explanation. We thought you knew that.”

  Gracie looked at Charlie as if she wanted to slap her.

  Hansen quickly stepped in to smooth things over. “Are you concerned about your grandmother getting bad news?”

  “Yes, of course. She loves Burbank. She’s way too old to hear such bad news. If he was murdered on her property, that would be really terrible,” she said.

  “Of course it would be,” I said. “It would be a terrible blow. Your grandmother is strong, but she would definitely need your family support in that case.”.

  Gracie squared her shoulders. “We would be very supportive.”

  “Your grandmother seems like quite the lady,” said Hansen.

  Gracie smiled at him as if she thought he was wonderful. On her other side, Charlie glared. Meanwhile, we kept walking.

  The newest garden on the property was almost half a mile away. While we walked, Gracie explained that her grandmother would have taken a golf cart to get there when she went. I had been wondering how she got around, and now I imagined a fancy golf cart polished to perfection.

  “Here we are,” said Gracie.

  A garden that was half churned mud appeared before us, trees circling the outside edges. I could see how it would be a beautiful spot, but at the moment it didn’t look like much.

  “As my grandmother said, there are no dead bodies,” said Gracie, as if her assertion proved anything. She looked like she wanted to turn around and walk away again. When Charlie moved forward to get a better look, Gracie stopped and scowled.

  Hansen and I spread out. I wandered toward the water to see if there were any clues there, but nothing caught my eye. Hansen went to join Charlie, and the two of them went to the far side of the garden, where it looked like some planting had already been done. Gracie started wandering around as well, apparently too bored to stand still.

  I glanced out at the water. It was crystal blue and the sun was sparkling on it, the flat surface not disturbed by the tiniest ripple. Once this garden was finished, it would be an incredibly peaceful place. I would have to tell Burbank the ghost that he had picked a perfect place for his last project.

  I was just thinking that we should head back when Gracie let out a scream.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I spun around to see what had upset her. It turned out that she had found a shovel and was now standing in an uneven part of the garden, holding the shovel awkwardly. The soil around her was turned up.

  When I looked more closely, I saw what I was pretty sure was a shoe sticking out of the soil. Gracie was at the highest point of the new garden plot, and the recent rain might have washed away some of the dirt that had covered Burbank’s body. Surely that shoe belonged to the missing gardener.

  Charlie, Hansen, and I went running toward her. The first to reach Gracie was Hansen, who took the shovel gently from her hands. She barely noticed his presence; she was staring down at the ground and shaking like a leaf.

  Charlie wrapped her arm around Gracie’s shoulders and led her away, Gracie jabbering something incoherent about soil and shovels and life wasn’t supposed to be like this. I stared down at the only thing that was visible: the toe of a shoe.

  “Do you think it’s him?” Hansen asked.

  “It sure looks like it. It also definitely looks like murder,” I said.

  Hansen nodded slowly. Bodies did not bury themselves. The police had already been here, and they would obviously have seen a body if it had been lying on the ground. But this one had been intentionally concealed. The police must have just assumed that the ground was churned up because of the installation of the new garden. They hadn’t taken the possibility of murder the least bit seriously.

  As usual at this point in a case, I felt a wave of sadness. It was especially poignant this time because of Mrs. Smith. She had really cared for her longtime employee, who sounded like a great gardener and a good man. She also had no idea why someone would want to kill him.

  Yet, here we were.

  Hansen was a remarkably sound and solid individual. He looked grim, but it was clear that he had been in terrible spots before, and he knew how to handle himself. Gracie was crying, and Charlie was trying to comfort her. This wasn’t the outcome we had wanted, but given that I had met Burbank’s ghost already, it wasn’t unexpected. Somehow that didn’t make it easier to accept.

  The next several hours passed in a blur. We had to call the police, and Detective Cutter was not pleased. Tom came as well now that the crime scene had been discovered.

  Lucky for me, Gracie defended me when Detective Cutter demanded to know what I was doing there. She insisted that she had every right to employ a private investigator.

  I had the feeling that Detective Cutter would have argued with anyone else in town, but he was so at a loss about how to deal with someone like Gracie that he didn’t bother. Instead he merely agreed with her and asked if she wanted him to inform her grandmother that the gardener’s body had been discovered, or was she going to do it herself. Gracie informed him that of course he was supposed to do his job, but she would be on hand. As would Mrs. Smith’s assistants.

  I decided as we left that it had helped me that Gracie was the one who had actually discovered the body. It would have been a bit much for the detective to swallow if I had made the crucial discovery, besides being on the scene in the first place. When Gracie said that I had been looking out at the water when she found the shoe sticking out, some of the detective’s hackles had come down. He still wasn’t pleased, but he was at least a little less hostile.

  Charlie was now desperate to get to work on her story. Hansen also needed to get back to his life in Caedmon. I was sure our couch was comfortable, but no couch was that comfortable. With the assurances from Josephine and Scarlett that he wouldn’t be harmed, we all felt much better about letting him return to his own house. I was still a little worried, but Hansen tried to reassure me.

  “I’ll be okay. I promise,” he said.

  We decided to drop him off first, even though it was out of the wa
y, so Charlie could say goodbye. “Just call me tonight. We can see each other tomorrow,” she said.

  Hansen looked at her for a long moment, as if trying to divine whether she meant more than she was saying. He appeared to have enough sense to know that because she was female, she probably did.

  “I’ll keep you posted,” he said. “I’ll check my house before I go in, and if anything looks fishy I’ll drive straight back to your place. Are you sure Rosalie is fine with all of this?”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “I just think she has other things to worry about now. She didn’t realize that the dark witches were going to be such a problem. Now she understands.” At least I hoped she did. Realistically, that was not yet clear to me at all, but I didn’t want to dump my worries onto Charlie and Hansen right at the moment.

  Hansen got out of the car after saying his goodbyes, and Charlie and I drove away in silence. I kept glancing at Charlie to see if I could figure out how she was feeling. She had clearly liked having Hansen around the house, and I wondered what she would do now that he was going back to his own life. She looked lost in thought, and I finally asked her what she was thinking.

  She snorted. “I was just thinking that he isn’t even going home to shower first.”

  I laughed until I nearly cried.

  Greer had said she’d pick Charlie up later, so I didn’t have to worry about that after I dropped her off at work. But before I could actually go home, I checked on the rabbit. Then I was going to back the farmhouse, and when evening came I was going to have a long chat with Paws.

  I got home, had a late lunch, and showered. Then I grabbed a couple of my grandmother’s spell books off the shelves in the kitchen and studied them until the tea I had made for myself went cold. I was looking for any spells that might help with dark witches. I knew I’d need more defensive spells if we were to fight against Puddlewood, since I had finally faced the fact that they weren’t going to disappear and leave me alone. After I had done about as much of that as I could tolerate, I wrote a quick note to Harriet, addressing it to her post office box and hoping it would find her soon. It was becoming ever clearer that we needed her in Mintwood, the sooner the better.

  By this time it was dark enough so that I’d be able to see Paws clearly. I made myself more tea, grabbed a light jacket, and headed for the porch.

  As soon as Paws saw me, his face filled with questions. Apparently he wanted to talk to me as badly as I wanted to talk to him, but I decided it would be best not to point that out, lest he think I liked him. Or worse, that I had noticed that he liked me.

  “How goes the new mystery?” he asked.

  “The body was found today. It was buried in a garden, so we know it was murder. We don’t know who did it yet. Nor do we have a motive. I’m hoping Detective Cutter will tell us in the next couple of days how the man was killed,” I said.

  “Do you have any suspects?” Paws asked.

  “His family has been ruled out. There’s a chance that one of his assistants wanted his job, but to commit murder over that seems unlikely. One thing I want to know is whether Burbank’s employer was intending to leave him any of her fortune in her will. That might be a motive for murder on the part someone in her family,” I explained.

  Paws didn’t say anything for a few minutes, then he said something very out of character. “How are you doing?”

  I frowned at the grass beyond the porch. “Better than I expected I’d be. I’m glad Hansen is safe. Standing up for him and performing spells feels good,” I said.

  “Do you have more spells you’d like to practice?” he asked.

  “I was actually just looking through some of Evenlyn’s spell books,” I explained.

  “Oh, no. The whole house is gonna come down,” groaned Mrs. Goodkeep, who had wandered over and was listening in. As usual she was dressed in a voluminous fur coat. She also carried a broom over her shoulder as if she wanted to be ready to swat at the mice at any moment.

  “Maybe I’ll practice now,” I said. “I have a bit of time.”

  “Time before what?” Paws asked.

  “I’m seeing Jasper tonight,” I told him.

  “Darn. I had hopes that we were done with him for good,” he said.

  I crinkled my nose at him. “I don’t know why you’d think that.”

  “Me neither,” said Mrs. Goodkeep. “True love knows no bounds.”

  Ignoring both of them, I walked out onto the grass and pulled my wand out of my sleeve. It felt warm in my hands as I started to wave it around, practicing simple spells. A stream of green sparkles spewed from the end of it, then Paws told me to practice a basic shield spell. Although I knew the spell, I had rarely tried to use it.

  Now I performed it over and over again. It wasn’t long before Tank saw the sparkling green shield surrounding me and came over to offer his own help and advice.

  At first he just watched, but after a while he said, “Let me help you with that. You need to know how sturdy that shield is.” Indeed, the green sparkles were flimsy. I could see right through them to the ghosts who were scattered around the yard watching.

  “Right as he hits your shield,” said Paws, “please turn him into water.”

  I sighed. “Don’t be ridiculous! There’s no need for anything like that. Besides, how am I supposed to practice if I turn him into water?”

  “Maybe ghosts don’t like water. It would be good to find out,” said Paws.

  “Probably just cat ghosts,” I told him.

  I started putting up the sparkling green shield again and Tank tried to get through it. At first he hopped through easily.

  “See, you need to make your shield stronger, sturdier. We shouldn’t be able to see through it,” said Paws.

  “Why didn’t you point that out before I came over?” Tank said.

  “I don’t want to destroy her confidence,” Paws said sagely.

  Just then the sound of a car turning into the driveway had me whirling around. I had been so preoccupied with practicing spells that I had forgotten that Jasper was coming over.

  I raced for the house, stuffing my wand into my sleeve. I at least wanted to run a brush through my hair before he saw me, and maybe put on a bit of makeup. Jasper could wait on the porch with Paws. The ghost cat was likely to give him a piece of his mind, and at this point I was perfectly content to let that happen.

  When I emerged from the farmhouse ten minutes later, Jasper was indeed sitting on the porch. He looked calm and relaxed. For once he was not examining the structural integrity of the boards underneath the building. I supposed I should be grateful.

  “Evening,” I said.

  Paws looked up at me and glared. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

  I frowned at him. “I live here. I had . . . plans . . . with Jasper,” I said. I nearly said that Jasper and I had a date, but I managed to stop myself at the last moment. As usual with Jasper, I didn’t know what this was. I also knew deep down that I was tired of that.

  “Hey. You look great,” said Jasper, standing up. He wore dark jeans, a light-colored shirt, and a leather jacket. His hair was perfectly tousled as usual.

  “Thank you. You do as well,” I said. I stood on the threshold of the door, unsure. “Why do you want me gone?” I asked Paws.

  I felt that Paws would act as a good buffer until I felt less awkward with Jasper; it had been a while since I had felt so uncertain around him. Whatever he had been angry about earlier, he seemed to have gotten a handle on it and was his cool and placid self again. I wondered if it had been something work-related. I wondered if he would tell me.

  “We were having a nice conversation. Then you appeared and ruined it,” said Paws.

  “What were you talking about?” I asked.

  “Guy stuff,” said the cat.

  I raised my eyebrows and looked at Jasper. He let out a chuckle and said, “Have to agree. I can’t tell you. Guy stuff.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest and said, “You are bo
th ridiculous. I hope you know that.”

  “Thank you,” said Paws.

  “We should probably get going,” said Jasper.

  “Maybe you can come around some time and just hang out with me,” Paws suggested.

  I tried not to roll my eyes, but Jasper merely grinned. “I’d like that.”

  Paws started washing himself with satisfaction.

  I let Jasper walk me down the stairs. I started to head toward his truck, but he shook his head. “We’re actually close enough to walk. I’ll just leave the truck here if you don’t mind.”

  I didn’t mind, but I was certainly surprised, since there was really nowhere to walk to from my house. Nevertheless, Jasper started strolling down the driveway, and I had no choice but to follow.

  It was a beautiful night, and I found myself looking up at a million stars. This really was a beautiful town. I couldn’t imagine living somewhere where I couldn’t see the night sky. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere but Mintwood. Lastly, I couldn’t imagine going out for an evening stroll like this with anyone but him.

  Chapter Fifteen

  When I caught up with Jasper and felt his presence next to me, some tightness in my chest eased. It meant the world to me to have him walking at my side. For his part, he seemed content to merely stroll and not say a word. He was in no hurry to tell me where we were going.

  When we reached the road, I understood. Across the street, there were lights on inside the Manor Portrait House. I frowned. “Is that where we’re going?”

  “I thought it would be an original date,” said Jasper.

  He glanced sideways at me, and I wondered if he had used that word intentionally. Did he want to know if this was a date too? I didn’t dispute what he had said, nor did I confirm it. I wasn’t in the mood to make it easy for him.

  “What do you plan to do with the house?” I asked.

  “Fix it up. Maybe sell it. Maybe keep it and have a place closer to town than the cottage,” he said. “I don’t want to be weird, though. Having a place right across from you. I guess you could say I’m open to ideas on what to do with it. Until we got going on it, I didn’t realize how much beauty and solid structure there was to the place.”