by Tonya Kappes
The only good thing that did come out of that whole poisoning thing, Aunt Helena and Eloise saw that my union with Oscar was far more important than some little ritual.
“This is a problem,” I said referring to Constance not seeing the little boy.
“He is awful.” Her nose curled. “He plucked the ostrich’s feathers. He taunts him and even tries to poke him in the eyes. He only does it when Constance is around.”
“That is why she thinks you’ve gone crazy.” The ball rolled back toward us and stopped at my feet. I ran my hands over baby Orin when he moved.
Orin lifted his little head, opened his eyes, and a big smile made his little man mustache curl.
“You shouldn’t have brought Orin with you.” Patience’s eyes shot open. Her head slowly moved side to side. “He likes babies,” her tone sent chills up my spine.
“Okay.” I wanted to give her some sort of hope. “I will help you get him to the other side. I don’t know how, but I will. All I’m asking you to do is not pay attention to him when Constance is here. If you need a place to hang out, come see me.”
There was only one place I knew to look. The Magical Cures Book, the grimoire, Darla had left me.
Chapter Eight
Baby Orin was getting a little restless. I assured Patience I would get back to her once I found something to help her get the little ghost boy where he needed to go. I tucked the edges of my cloak around Orin’s snuggie and held my hand close to his head. Trying to jingle my bracelet to keep him occupied and bounce while I walked down the street was a difficult task, only assuring me that children were far off for me and Oscar.
My efforts were proving to be fruitless.
“June! Wait!” Raven Mortimer was standing underneath the awning on the sidewalk in front of Wicked Good Bakery. Her long black hair was draped over her right shoulder. Her black embroidered Wicked Good Bakery apron was nearly white from all the flour splashed all over it. She held a silver pan in her hands.
“I can’t stop!” I called halfway across the street toward A Charming Cure. “I’ve got Orin and he’s fit to be tied.”
“But I have something to tell you!” She had a bland ball of dough in her fist, not uncommon for her to have in her hands.
“I know! I know!” I lifted my hand in the air and wiggled my bracelet back and forth.
“But I need to talk to you now!” she insisted. The dough squeezed through her fingers.
I stopped at the urgency of her voice and looked back at her. Orin let out another scream, sending my feet in a forward motion.
“Not now!” I waved her off and headed to the gate. “It’s going to be okay,” I said in my best baby voice and put my hand on the gate to A Charming Cure.
The most god-awful, blood-curling scream came out from under the man-mustache; it made me detour around the shop and up the hill. Orin was not happy when he noticed I was not his mother or father.
“It’s okay. We are going to see your mama,” I assured the little guy.
Petunia was addressing Izzy, Gerald, Oscar, and Chandra and a few other people I didn’t recognize. Orin had calmed down the squeal to a gurgle so I decided to stand in the back. Petunia and I made eye contact. I smiled to let her know everything was okay, even though it wasn’t and I couldn’t wait to get him unstrapped from me.
“I’m not sure this is a good idea.” A man stood up from the crowd of people with his back to me. “It’s not the rides kind of carnival. We will walk through the streets with some juggling, balloon tricks, sword swallowing. You know,” the man’s shoulders shrugged. “Light magic.”
Light magic? Oh, the sound of that made my ears perk. We had never had other spiritualists join in on our bazaar. No wonder they needed to vote. But. . .
I gulped. Why hadn’t they asked me to cleanse? I took a deep breath when my intuition started to go off. The smell of money curled around my body, down my nose and made me squeak. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t take my eyes off the man.
The man stood about five-foot-eight, thinly built and had on a blue overcoat. It was a coat I had just seen this morning. The man’s words stopped when he turned around to address the crowd and our eyes met.
“You,” I gasped when I pinned him as the customer I had made a potion for earlier this morning at A Charming Cure.
His face clouded with uneasiness. A warning voice whispered in my head, causing me to become dizzy. When I became dizzy, I knew what followed. Passing out. I sucked in a few quick breaths.
“Not now,” I repeated and made circles on baby Orin’s back with the palm of my hand. “Not with baby Orin strapped to you,” I talked myself out of my dizzy spell. Or it could’ve been the crazy mixture of a rapid heart rate and the bitter cold taking over my body.
Like a lightning rod, the man bolted from The Gathering Rock circle and disappeared into the wooded area.
“Wait!” I screamed and snugged baby Orin close to me. I ran after him, as best I could without jiggling the baby around too much. “You! You wait!” I screamed, waving my arm in the air.
He was obviously a spiritualist from somewhere, and he knew that when he came into my shop. If anyone found out I had made him a special potion, I’d be in a lot of trouble.
The trees on the edge of the woods parted on my arrival. I stopped, turned around and noticed Petunia, Gerald and Oscar were running after me.
As if frozen in time, the Whispering Falls Gazette came through with the bitter breeze.
Hear ye, hear ye. The winds have spoken, the chill hangs in the air. Hopefully the winter bazaar will be a great success for the village once again! We welcome the spiritual carnival. This update is brought to you by Glorybee Pet Shop and Village President Petunia Shrubwood who brought this wonderful carnival to town. Faith’s voice faded off when the snap of branches cracked in the distance.
“Him.” My eyes darted between the depths of the woods and the thunderous footsteps behind me.
“June! Wait!” Oscar yelled from behind me. There was a tense shrill to his voice.
I did the exact opposite. I ran toward the sounds of the breaking branches deep within the woods.
The towering trees began to shed what leaves they had left and they rained down on me. The owl hooted. The sky turned grey. Suddenly I felt suffocated as if the branches were curling around me.
I stopped. The air was thin. My chest heaved up and down. It felt as if I was struggling against something. Struggling to breath. Struggling to move. Struggling. . .
“June! What have you done?” Oscar scrambled over to me. His eyes drew down to my feet, causing me to look.
“I. . .I. . .” The words were struggling to come out of my mouth. The man was lying on the ground next to my feet. My potion bottle in his grip.
“Fresh body,” Constance Karima’s voice escalated. She lifted her nose in the air and took a few quick inhales through her nose. Eagerly she rubbed her hands together. Excitement exuded from her. Her aura even glowed. “I must get Patience and the ambulance.”
I glared at her as she scurried off in the direction of Whispering Falls.
“Give me him.” My body jerked as Petunia grabbed the snuggly pack from my body.
Oscar’s eyes met mine. My body stiffened with shock.
“June Heal.” Three little bodies floated down from the tops of the trees and hovered over the man’s body. All three of them cross-legged, arms folded, and six eyes staring at me.
I gulped. Hearing the Order of Elders say my name made my stomach hurt. They only showed up when something was wrong. Clearly, something had gone very wrong.
“Yes,” my voice died away. I looked between all three Marys. Mary Ellen, Mary Lynn, and Mary Sue made up the trio.
At the same time their legs uncurled. Gracefully they floated to the ground, landing on their black pointy-heeled boots.
“He’s dead.” The chill hung on Mary Ellen’s words. “You are hereby confined to Whispering Falls, pending the investigation of the death of th
is man,” her voice cracked.
She cocked her leg to the side and slowly drew her arms down her skintight black unitard and past her toes. She planted her finger on the guy’s neck before jerking back up to standing.
Her dark lashes cast a shadow on her face as she drew them open and focused on me. Her eyes slightly closed, her lips pursed. The lingering eyes of Chandra, Izzy, Gerald, Constance, and Oscar stared at the man while Petunia cradled baby Orin, singing in his ear.
Chapter Nine
“I didn’t do it.” I paced back and forth in front of Oscar’s desk in the police station.
“June, please sit.” Oscar pointed to the chair.
“I can’t sit.” If Oscar or anyone else there staring at me thought I was going to just sit there and let it look like I had killed that man, they were nuts. “I didn’t do it.”
“It sure looks like you did,” Chandra’s eyes narrowed. “I mean, your bottle was in his hand. A bottle that you put your special gift in.”
Everyone knew that my intuition potion bottles were different than the bottles the basic homeopathic cures are in.
“And how did he get your bottle without coming into your shop? The special potion bottle?” Izzy tapped her chin with her long skinny finger. She swooped around, her A-line polka dot orange and black dress twirled, and came face-to-face with me. Her long blond hair swept behind her shoulders. “June,” she gasped, “you didn’t make him a special potion?”
I gulped.
“Answer the question, June,” The Marys said in unison. Mary Sue’s voice more brash than the others.
“He came into the shop and he was looking around at my stress potions. When I walked closer, I smelled money.”
“Money?” Petunia asked. Everyone looked at her and she clamped her mouth shut. When the Order of Elders speak, you are supposed to remain silent.
“Yes. Money,” I confirmed. “I didn’t mean to read him. My intuition took over and it did. If I’d known he was some sort of spiritualist in town, then I wouldn’t have read him.”
“Not only does this look like you murdered him by the evidence, but you also broke the first by-law.” Mary Lynn stood four feet tall. She rubbed the fox stole around her shoulders with long, deliberate strokes.
“How was I supposed to know?”
“Did you read your intuition?” Mary Ellen strutted around the police station in her unitard. She coiled a strand of her long black hair around her finger. “Did you get chills, a pit in your stomach?” She pointed to her gut.
Chills? Pit? Did I. I had been having chills since I woke up. I grabbed my wrist and ran my finger over the brass bell charm.
“What?” Oscar asked, concern in his voice. He was good at reading me. His eyes drew down to my hand. “Did you get another charm?”
My eyes grew as my chin slowly lifted up and down.
“I woke up chilled to the bone. Goosebumps covered me from head-to-toe. It was as if I couldn’t get my body temperature to come up.”
The Marys stared at me, making me feel like I needed to keep talking. Which I did.
“I got this charm from Mr. Prince Charming.” I held out my wrist. The Marys brought their heads together and at the same time dropped them down to take a look.
“Brass,” each one of them gasped at the same time.
“And a bell,” Mary Lynn squealed in a small voice. She dragged the palm of her hand in a long deliberate motion down her fur.
“Mmhmmm.” Mary Sue’s nose curled. She lifted her arm and uncurled her long finger toward me. “If you would’ve listened to your intuition of chills and body temperature. . .”
The sound of the ambulance caused us all to look out the police station window. The swirl and twirl of the siren screamed throughout the village. The Karima sisters had their heads stuck out the window of the ambulance on each side.
“You’re fine. You aren’t going to hit anything! Punch it!” Patience hollered out the window when the ambulance nearly sideswiped A Charming Cure trying to get up the hill to retrieve the body of the man. “We have a fresh body to get!”
“June, why didn’t you tell me?” Oscar pulled me to the side while everyone was watching the Karima sisters try to get the ambulance up the hill. At one point Patience jumped out and used her arms to flag the way for Constance, who was driving. The whipping wind billowed out her housedress, making her look like one of those orange windsock flags you see at the airports.
“I didn’t want to bug you because I didn’t even know what it meant. I just found out today that there was some sort of evil lurking. And it was after he came to the shop,” I said as fast as I could in a low whisper. “He didn’t want me to know he was a spiritualist.”
“At least I would’ve known and been on alert.” Oscar made sense and it was something I had never thought of. “We are married now. You cannot go around keeping your intuition to yourself. And you won’t go around trying to figure out who did this.”
“But. . .” I protested. He knew me all too well.
“There is no but and I mean you keep your head out of all of this until I can get all of it figured out myself. The right way.” He tapped his sheriff’s badge.
“Or not.” Colton Lance appeared behind Oscar. He stood around six-foot-three with big brown eyes and messy blond hair. There was a pretty young woman with long red hair standing next to him. She was not Ophelia Biblio, Colton’s better half.
Colton and Ophelia had moved to Whispering Falls from a village out west when Oscar had lost his memory for what seemed like forever. Oscar had given up his heritage and all his powers to save me, yet again. Luckily, I was able to get a potion that helped him remember and since he wasn’t technically a spiritualist when I did it, I didn’t break any rules. Still, Colton and Ophelia fit into the village perfectly and the village council made Colton and Oscar both sheriffs, splitting the job.
On Oscar’s days off as sheriff in Whispering Falls, he was a deputy in our former town of Locust Grove. If he had to work a long shift, he would stay in his old house but that was rare.
“This is Cecil Buviea.” Colton introduced the woman. “She is the attorney for the carnival and will be handling the case of Paul Levy.”
“Paul Levy?” I asked. Oscar put his hand in front of me. His eyes gave me the death stare, telling me to zip my lips.
“Who is Paul Levy?” Oscar asked.
“He’s the man she killed.” The woman drew her arm in the air and pointed her long green fingernail directly at me. “And there is no way we feel you,” her eyes drew up and down Oscar, “will be able to help put her behind bars due to the nature of your relationship. That is why we have asked Sheriff Lance to take over the investigation. And we want her in jail!”
“Jail?” My jaw dropped.
“June Heal is a pillar in our village,” Izzy took a step forward in my defense. She pushed back her long hair and ran her bony fingers down her A-line skirt.
“Our rules are as follows.” Mary Ellen snapped her fingers and a scroll appeared in the air. She reached up and retrieved it pulling the scroll apart, she read, “According to the Spiritual By-Laws,” she cleared her throat, pulled the scroll taut and held it close to her face. “When a spiritualist is accused of a crime, they are to be put on village arrest and unable to work in their shop or perform their spiritual gifts.”
“That is not in our rules.” The woman snapped back.
“Ms. Buviea, it is our rules.” Mary Ellen’s dark lashes flew down. “And you are in our world.”
Our world? Mary Ellen’s words felt like a punch to my gut. What did that mean?
“When we are guests in a town, we expect to be treated as such. Not come to town and have one of our own killed.” Ms. Buviea stepped up and stood her ground with Mary Ellen, something I would have never done. “And we expect this, this,” she turned her head and looked down her nose at me as if I were a piece of trash, “this so called pillar of the village to be taken into custody and jailed until the autopsy com
es back.”
As if on cue, the ambulance barreled down the hill and took a leap forward, twisting around in mid-air, landing on Main Street before zipping up the road, siren blaring as the ambulance made its way to Two Sisters and a Funeral. But not before I caught the glaring eye of one Constance Karima.
“God help me,” I whispered, hoping I could at least get Patience’s little problem cleared up so Constance would do everything in her power to find out the real cause of death.
Everyone stared at me. The chill from the outside had definitely made its way inside.
“Don’t you dare jail my client!” Mac McGurtle stepped through the door. He wore a grey pinstriped suit. Thick black-rimmed glasses sat on his large nose. Underneath them his blue eyes zeroed in on Celia.
“Well, well, well.” Celia lowered her voice in a mysterious way, “It looks like we finally get to have that match in court.”
“Now, now.” Colton Lance stood between them. “Hopefully it won’t get to that.”
“That’s right.” Celia stepped up. She leaned her body to the right, planted her hand on her hip, a long lean leg popped out from the split in the pencil thin skirt. “I have enough evidence to charge June Heal for the murder of Paul Levy. He came into her shop as he was strolling around the town, getting ready for his debut for your bazaar and she gave him a potion to kill him.”
“I did no such thing.” I protested, pulling my shoulders back.
“Did he or did he not come into your shop?” Her eyes snapped toward me. Her tone held venom.
“You can answer that question,” Mac nodded.
“He did. But he didn’t tell me he was a spiritualist.” There had to be a way around this charade.