“There,” Ellie said to me, nudging me with her elbow and motioning toward a witch sitting by herself at a small table, drinking what looked like dragonberry juice, probably mixed with some sort of alcohol. She stared into the drink as if it held all the answers to life, the sadness in her eyes evident.
Ophelia Storm was small, with delicate features and a black pixie cut. Her eyes were framed with a pair of square glasses, and when Ellie and I made our way toward her table, she looked up at us with deep-set eyes, curiosity written all over them.
“Do I know you?” she asked, her voice soft and feminine.
“We wanted to ask you some questions about Rosa Lynn,” Ellie explained. “We know that she stole your boyfriend.”
“You’re damn right she did,” Ophelia muttered, averting her gaze. “She thinks that just because her family has money, she can take whatever she wants. Well, the universe certainly showed her, didn’t it?”
“Maybe you gave the universe a little bit of a helping hand?” I offered, and this time, when Ophelia’s eyes met mine, they were rock-hard.
“Don’t get me wrong, I hated the witch. Kyle and I had been together for six years, and then she comes in, asks him to be her personal trainer, and the next thing I know he’s telling me that he’s leaving me to go live with her? She’s a homewrecker without a single redeeming quality. She deserved what she got. But I didn’t do it.”
“There’s an easy way to find out,” Ellie said. “Where were you the day she died?”
Ophelia looked at us suspiciously. “Why do you want to know, anyway? Isn’t this a job for the Chief Enforcer? You don’t have any right to question me.”
“You’re right, we don’t,” Ellie said. “But the fact is, everyone in town thinks you killed her. If you talk to us, we can make sure word gets around that you’re innocent, and then maybe Chief Enforcer King will have a bit more of an open mind when she comes and talks to you.”
Ophelia mulled this over in her head a little bit, then nodded. “Fine. I’ll tell you what I know, but only because I don’t want to go to jail for something I didn’t do. She would love that, though. Not only stealing my boyfriend, but then making sure that I was locked up for a crime I was innocent of committing. Just one more way she could completely mess with my life, even from the grave.”
“So where were you yesterday?” Ellie asked.
“Well, it’s not going to help my cause,” Ophelia said, pressing her lips together. “I saw Rosa that afternoon.”
“What time?” I asked.
“Maybe one thirty?” Ophelia shrugged. “I had found some of Kyle’s things, and I went to the gym to drop them off for him. I didn’t want to actually see him, and I knew he was going to go there that afternoon, since he worked regular hours so he would be with a client. But she was there. I hadn’t been expecting that.”
“Did you speak to her?” Ellie asked.
“I told her she had some nerve, going around and stealing other witches’ boyfriends. She just smiled at me sweetly and told me that obviously Kyle was getting from her something that he couldn’t get from me. I asked her if that was just her money, and Rosa laughed. She told me money was what made the world go ’round. I told her there was more to life than buying things, and Rosa replied that if that was true, maybe Kyle would still be dating me instead of her. I’m not going to lie, I wanted to punch her. I wanted so badly to hit her right in the face, or to pull out my wand and cast a spell that would absolutely incinerate her. But I didn’t. I simply told her to go to hell, and I left.”
“Do you remember if she was going into the gym or leaving it?” I asked.
“Leaving,” Ophelia replied. “She was wearing her street clothes, her water bottle was almost empty, and she had definitely been sweating.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have noticed if she had a small cardboard box with her, would you?” I continued. “There would have been a sticker on the top keeping it closed.”
“Oh yes,” Ophelia said with a nod. “This sticker had a broom on it or something, right? She was pulling it out of her bag just before she saw me, and so she was holding it the whole time we had the conversation.”
Ellie and I shared a glance. It sounded like when she left the gym, Rosa hadn’t yet eaten the cinnamon bun. Of course, I couldn’t discount the possibility that Ophelia might be lying to throw us off, but she seemed honest enough. She obviously hated Rosa, but I wasn’t sure that she had killed her.
“To be completely honest, if it wasn’t for the fact that I’m a suspect in this murder, I would really want whoever did it to get away with it,” Ophelia said. “Rosa was a terrible person who rubbed everybody she met the wrong way, and the town will be much better off without her in it. However, I wasn’t the one who sent her off into the afterlife.”
I didn’t think we were going to get any more out of Ophelia, so I thanked her for her time and stood up. Ellie followed after me, the two of us leaving The Magic Mule.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Ellie asked as we left the bar and made our way back into the last dregs of sunlight. “That whoever poisoned that cinnamon bun did so while Rosa was working out at the gym?”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” I said.
“Well, with the way we’ve been eating with the bakery just opening, I think both of us could probably use a good workout,” Ellie said with a grin.
“Agreed,” I replied. “Besides, I’ve often thought since moving to Western Woods that I needed to get a bit more cardio in.”
Ellie and I made our way back to the gym and found the same fairy still behind the desk.
“Back again?” she asked with a polite smile, and I nodded.
“Yes, but this time we would like a couple of drop-in passes, please,” I said. The fairy obliged, I paid for the passes, and she stood up from behind the desk.
“Would you like a tour of the facilities?” she asked, and Ellie and I both nodded.
“Yes, please,” I said. “That would be great.”
“Of course. Please follow after me.” Handing us a couple of swipe cards to allow us access into the main gym area, the fairy led us through the swinging doors into a long, wide hallway lined with square shelves. A few of the cubbies were filled with clothes, bags, and other personal belongings. “This here is the entrance and the storage area. If you require a ward to protect your belongings, please feel free to ask one of the witches or wizards who work on staff to cast one for you. However, most of our clients don’t bother. Theft isn’t exactly a major issue here.”
“Rosa Lynn was here yesterday,” I said. “How about someone like her? Someone so rich probably has a ward cast on her stuff, right?”
“When Leon was her head of security, he always made sure that her items were warded,” the fairy explained. “However, since he was let go, Rosa has taken a much laxer stance toward her personal property. She chooses not to have her items warded, which shows the trust she puts into the security at this gym.”
Ellie and I shared a look as the fairy led us down the hall toward the main workout area. Perhaps Rosa’s trust in this gym’s security was what got her killed.
When we reached the main part of the gym, my mouth dropped open. I had expected to see everything you normally would in a human-world gym—a ton of treadmills and bikes, some weight machines, and a wall full of dumbbells.
Instead, everything looked completely different.
Against one wall were a number of boxes enclosed on three sides that reminded me of racecar games at the arcade. Each box had a broom inside of it, and one was being used by a witch who rode the broom inside the enclosed box. The walls of the box had turned into a simulator, and the witch moved her broom around, dodging all sorts of obstacles that the simulator threw at her.
“How did no one tell me that was a thing that existed?” I hissed at Ellie, motioning toward the woman.
“Oh yes, the broom simulator. We have invested in a top-of-the-line Sweepmaster 8000 ma
chine to give the most realistic broom simulation experience available on the market,” the fairy explained. “We only ask that during busy periods you limit your time in the simulator to half an hour to allow other people the opportunity to use it as well.”
All of the other cardio machines were completely magical as well. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen. There was the ladder machine, which was literally just rungs of a ladder that moved down from the ceiling to the floor before magically disappearing into the ether. The treadmills were built into the floor, and as soon as somebody stepped on one, a dome appeared, sealing them inside and presumably giving the runners a nice virtual reality experience as well.
While the fairy showed us around, I honestly stopped paying attention. I was completely mesmerized by everything I was looking at, to the point of being almost overwhelmed. She led us around the gym until we ended up back at the entrance hallway.
“Now, if you have any questions, please feel free to ask Michael,” she said, motioning toward a wizard wearing a polo in the company colors of blue and grey, wandering between the machines, slowly checking to make sure everything in the gym was running smoothly. He looked like any other wizard in his twenties, and familiar somehow, but I couldn’t quite place him. He kept wiping his curly brownish hair from in front of his eyes, and that was when I remembered.
His mother had died about a week earlier in a tragic broom accident, and we had all gone to the funeral, as we did whenever any member of the coven passed away. I hadn’t known his mother, but I could absolutely see the family resemblance. Michael’s hair was browner than his mother’s—hers had been a gorgeous copper—but they had the same eyes and mouth, and my heart went out to the young wizard. It wasn’t easy losing a parent, especially at that age. I knew all too well what he was going through. As soon as he saw us, though, he turned away. I wasn’t too surprised; I had learned at the funeral that Michael and Sara had dated for a few months last year, before I came to Western Woods, and it hadn’t ended well.
“Thank you,” Ellie said to the fairy, who nodded in reply and fluttered back out toward the reception desk.
“My guess is somebody poisoned the cinnamon bun while Rosa was working out,” Ellie said.
“And it would have had to be a witch or wizard,” I mused. “After all, Ophelia said the sticker was still on the package when she left the gym. That means whoever poisoned the cinnamon bun would have had to use a spell to make the sticker look brand-new after opening the box and closing it again, or Rosa would have noticed the tampering.”
“Right,” Ellie nodded. “We’re going to have to get a list of who was in here at the time. Luckily, they use those swipe cards, so all we need to do is get access to that computer at the front for a minute without the fairy seeing us.”
“Of course you would think that’s super easy,” I replied. “And here I thought we were going to manage to get through the whole night without committing any crimes.”
“Oh please, it’s not like it’s a bad crime. And besides, it’s for a good cause.”
“Tell that to the fact that my life expectancy has dropped fifteen years since moving here,” I muttered, and Ellie laughed.
Chapter 11
The two of us decided that it would be too suspicious if we tried to cause a distraction immediately after arriving, so we decided to actually exercise. Besides, Ellie was right. It wasn’t like we were health and fitness machines; the workouts would do both of us some good.
“I kind of want to try one of those weird treadmills,” I said with a grin, making my way toward one of them. It really did look exactly like a human-world treadmill, but built into the floor. “How do I make it start?”
“Step onto the carpet and command it with your voice,” Ellie explained. “You can tell it to speed up, you can tell it to slow down, you can give it a specific speed or tell it you want to do intervals.”
“Ok, here goes nothing,” I said, stepping onto the treadmill. I let out a small yelp of surprise as straightaway there was a whooshing sound as a dome appeared out of nowhere and covered me completely. The dome was made of a kind of clouded material so that I couldn’t see clearly what was going on outside of this little bubble I was in.
“Where would you like to run today?” a kindly voice asked, coming from nowhere.
“Um, I don’t know,” I muttered, not entirely sure how this worked. “Surprise me?”
“A random selection has been chosen,” the voice replied. “Starting treadmill at two miles per hour in three, two, one, go.”
The carpet underneath my feet jolted to life, and I gasped slightly as I began to automatically walk along it in rhythm. The glass around me suddenly changed, and I found myself walking in the middle of a path in a Japanese garden, surrounded by cherry blossoms. A light breeze—which I somehow felt while walking—blew some of the blossoms off the trees, and real, actual cherry blossoms drifted in front of me. I looked around in wonder; it was like I was actually in the middle of Japan.
This was the coolest workout I had ever done.
“Can you please speed up to four miles per hour?” I asked, and I began to jog as the carpet did exactly as I asked. I wasn’t entirely sure why I was saying “please” to a magical machine, but my parents had raised me to be polite.
I ran along that way for about ten minutes, starting to break into a bit of a sweat, before deciding I was going to see if I could change the scenery.
“Can the scenery change to a beach in Hawaii?” I asked. All of a sudden, the cherry blossoms disappeared—even the real-life ones that had been falling—and were replaced by the sounds of waves crashing along the shore. The temperature inside the dome rose slightly, and so did the humidity, an extra layer of sweat forming on me almost immediately. I was running along a path that lined a white-sand beach. A couple of turtles sunned themselves on the sand, and the ocean waves hit the shore in a rhythmic pattern that I found incredibly soothing. Probably because I came from a water coven.
I was definitely enjoying this. My coven, the coven of Titan, came from a magical island in Hawaii, and since I wasn’t able to go back there, I figured this was probably the closest I was going to get.
I wasn’t sure how long I ran for, but after a while, there was a rap of knuckles on the outside of the dome.
“Hey, Tina, are you running a marathon in there, or what?”
“Turn off, please,” I said to the treadmill, and the carpet slowed to a stop and the dome disappeared, along with the few grains of sand that had appeared on the treadmill as I walked near the “beach.” Ellie was looking at me, smiling.
“Did you find a new toy you liked?”
“Have you ever tried this?” I asked. “This is the coolest treadmill I have ever been on.”
“Of course I’ve tried them. That’s what all treadmills are like. Are they not this way in the human world?”
“No, there’s no virtual reality aspect to it at all. You just walk around looking at the rest of the gym. Sometimes you get lucky and the treadmill will have a built-in TV to watch, but that’s it.”
“Wow, the human world sounds like it sucks. Anyway, you’ve been on that thing for an hour. Let’s see if we can’t get the information from the computer.”
“Ok,” I nodded. “What do you want to do?”
“I’m going to cause a distraction. Something important enough that the fairy will come running to see what’s happened. You hang out by the cubbies for a bit. There was a water fountain there; maybe get a drink. When the fairy rushes past, you go to the computer at the front, find the files we need, and print us off a copy. I’ll meet you outside afterward.”
“Fine,” I said. “But what are you going to do to cause a distraction?”
“Why don’t you let me handle that?” Ellie said with a mischievous grin. Uh-oh. Luckily, it was almost eight o’clock now on a gorgeous summer day, and there weren’t that many people left in the gym. I had a feeling the fewer witnesses to what was about to happen, th
e better.
I made my way to the water fountain in the hallway near the cubby holes. I actually hadn’t realized just how much time I’d spent on that treadmill, and to be honest, I was completely parched. I hadn’t run for an hour in goodness knows how long, and while four miles an hour wasn’t exactly a blistering pace, it was a lot considering most of my exercise these past few months had come from running away from murders, or, on one occasion, the Chief Enforcer from a different paranormal town.
As I basically inhaled the water as quickly as I could, I kept an ear out for some kind of distraction. A moment later, I heard it.
“What in the name of Jupiter?” came Michael’s voice. “Are those snakes?”
Oh boy. That was definitely a distraction. The few people who had been in the gym came rushing out suddenly, and I found myself swept up in the crowd. I was pleased to see the fairy from reception rushing past us and toward the commotion. As soon as the small group of paranormals I was with reached reception, the others all left, deciding that snakes were apparently reason enough to end their workouts early. Fair enough.
That meant I was by myself in the reception area. I snuck behind the desk, hoping there weren’t any security cameras—luckily, they didn’t seem to be much of a thing in the paranormal world—and sat down in front of the computer.
I had always been fairly adept with computers, and luckily, the program the gym used to organize everything was pretty straightforward. I was able to find the list of users without too much trouble, and I even managed to set up a filter so it would only show me the paranormals who were at the gym the day before, and the times at which they swiped in and out.
Perfect. We had a list of about ten names. I went to print the list and quickly found the printer, but nothing happened. Crap. How come even in the paranormal world printers were the least reliable piece of technology? If even magic couldn’t get these things to work, how on earth was anyone else supposed to manage it?
Seven Year Witch Page 6