A Murder in Hope's Crossing

by Brooke Shelby

  Further into the book, she learned more about the Corey family and their tribulations. Maggie noticed another common denominator through all the chapters that had something in common with the rumor in Hope’s Crossing—magic.

  “Bramble, did you know Aunt Clara was obsessed with magic?” Maggie smiled. “That stuff is very famous these days, you know. She would have made a fortune with these stories. I had no idea she had such an imagination.”

  From the book he had settled on top of, Bramble just glared at her with sleepy eyes. It was a good place to sleep and play bookmark. Maggie was entranced by the fascinating stories about the Coreys and their life in New England. Throughout so many eras, they had prevailed.

  “I just love this. All these spells and potions. This is great! Just about every story is about magic or some form of conjuration. A lot of fantasy stories make it onto film these days and I think this would make a great series,” she mumbled as she paged from year to year in the antique digests.

  The spells and ingredients, even the rituals within, prompted Maggie to another theory.

  “I get it. I know, they were pagans, but they were not inclined to just let anyone know that,” she reasoned. “I mean, I am Unitarian, so I understand what they did. Maybe this fictional account was their way of hiding their religious beliefs in a world that would not comprehend. I wonder what practice exactly they embraced. Is that somewhere in the books?”

  She jumped up and looked through another journal to find the answer, but it was a thick book to just scan through.

  “Coffee. I need coffee. Then I’ll get back here and do a proper study of this. Man, this is so interesting. I never knew that I came from such interesting people, Bramble. Writers, heretics, and healers. I must say, I am honored to be privy to these stories before anyone else in the world,” she carried on as she walked to the kitchen.

  “You know, sometimes you can be really thick, Maggie,” a voice said from behind her—a male voice. It was stately and firm and quite beautiful, had it come from an actual man, but there was nobody there. Maggie stopped in her tracks, her heart exploding in her chest. The feeling was similar to the day when she heard Bramble scratching in the closet.

  Not having a clue how to respond to what she knew was clearly a male voice, Maggie pretended not to have heard and continued on to the kitchen. Quickly she switched on the kettle so that she would be deaf to the disembodied voice and she was cheered to see Bramble’s black shadowy figure run into the room for company.

  “That was insane, hey, Bramble?” she laughed nervously as she started scooping up the coffee on the spoon.

  “The only thing insane here is how you cannot grasp what is right in front of you,” the voice said again. This time, Maggie shrieked aloud at the terrifying prospects. On her tiptoes, she pushed her back up against the cupboards and studied the kitchen and part of the hallway for concrete evidence of a person. “Maggie, stop fooling yourself with this preposterous nonsense of fiction and pretense.”

  This time Maggie followed the sound and it led her to Bramble. He was perched on the kitchen counter and his jaw moved slightly as he spoke. She felt her legs buckle at the unnatural occurrence, so overwhelmed by the unlikeliness of it, that she ignored his words at first.

  “This cannot be,” she chuckled, but there was no humor in her laugh. “I mean, this is crazy … and impossible.”

  “Nothing is impossible. There we agree with the Christians,” he replied, licking his front leg casually. She even heard the words fade as his mouth worked his coat.

  “I … I’m sorry, but I am having a really hard time with this,” she stammered. “If I were inebriated, this might have gone better.”

  “So? You know where the dandelion wine is. Go for it,” he suggested. Maggie frowned, her eyes welling in tears at the supernatural moment she was caught in. Sober and awake.

  “Bramble, give me a damn second to deal with this. I have been reading about magic, magic, magic all over the place,” she complained. “Sharon talks about Clara’s magic and Carl does not even flinch when people call me a witch. Excuse me if this is all a little too much of a coincidence. Of course, after all this insinuation I will start seeing things that aren’t real.”

  He leaped into her arms as he had been doing since they met. Instinctively, she grabbed him and held him, but her heart was racing and her mouth was bone dry from fear. Bramble pressed his face right up against hers so that she could see him up close and so that she would hear his voice in her ear.

  “Do I look real to you?” he growled softly, exasperated by her insistence that this was all unreal.

  “Oh my God!” she wailed, confronted by the irrefutable truth of what she was hoping to deny. “How the hell?”

  “Yes, Maggie, let it dawn on you. Geez, I have tried to show you this in every way possible for so long, but all you do in return is to disbelieve the obvious. Some witch you are,” he scoffed.

  “Witch? Like what Aunt Clara wrote about?” she asked slowly, not believing her own words as she said them.

  “Witch, my darling Margaret. The Corey line of witches and their powerful, rich history is nothing to be sniffed at! It is hardly fiction. What an insult to your forebearers that you would write them off as common fictional characters when they have forged the New England bloodline into something amazing and strong. Look at you! Smart, sassy, and assertive. Hardly the stuff of fiction, wouldn’t you say, Maggie?” Bramble reiterated. He was adamant to make sure that she took in every word.

  Maggie gave him a long hard look, secretly still wondering if someone was playing a trick on her with a hidden speaker and some animal manipulation. After all, this was too strange to just believe out of hand. Finally, she shook her head as if she was trying to shed her doubts.

  “Look, Bramble, you have to understand just how weird this is for me. You are intelligent to a fault, so I am sure if you try, you can imagine how scary and strange and unexpected … I actually cannot think of a proper word for what I am feeling,” she admitted, holding her chest. He did understand. He was simply impatient. There was a lot to be learned and a lot to do still in order to initiate the last of the Corey line, and hopefully the most powerful.

  “I absolutely grasp how strange this is for you, but you know, after everything I have done—all those un-catlike things—I was hoping that perhaps the notion of my nature would already have taken hold in your head,” he replied, while Maggie still gawked at his moving jaw when the words came out. “Margaret!” he shouted, sending her recoiling. “Pay attention to what I say!”

  “I am, I am,” she nodded profusely. “Just give me a moment to get over this, dammit! Just let me have time to process this. It is totally unnatural. Supernatural.”

  “There is nothing supernatural about it, my dear Maggie,” he retorted. “We are perfectly natural. It is not our fault that centuries of indoctrination has taught the world that we should not exist.” Bramble scoffed at the thought of patriarchal religions and their preposterous double standards. “We have existed on every plane since before time was recorded. We are older than you humans.”

  Maggie was terrified at the thought of what manner of creature was addressing her, but at the same time, she was entranced by his fascinating existence. Deep inside her, she felt honored that something like Bramble would deign to speak to her.

  “You say ‘we,’” she started out of curiosity. “Who is ‘we’?”

  “Familiars,” he answered nonchalantly.

  Maggie had heard of familiars in supernaturally themed television shows, but other than that, she knew very little about them. “Excuse my ignorance, but that is a witch’s pet, right?”

  Bramble hissed at her like he’d hissed at the man in the car that night. Maggie gasped in shock as the big black cat wailed, bristled, and swiped a coffee cup right off the counter. It smashed on the kitchen floor and Maggie knew she had insulted him.

  “Pets?” he growled, his voice deeper than before. “I have never been so app
alled at the assumption!”

  “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” she quickly apologized. “I asked you to excuse my ignorance, Bramble! My God, you have to understand that I know nothing about your world, let alone know the appropriate protocol involved, so excuse me!”

  For a moment, she reminded Bramble of her fiery nature and that she was as intolerant of his intolerance as he was of her ignorance. It dawned on Bramble that she really did not know anything about the true nature of her family or how she fitted into the powers of her heritage. He elected to try a more patient and gentle approach. After all, he did not want to lose Maggie.

  “All right, listen,” he sighed. “It is not my world you do not know. It is your own world. This so-called supernatural world is ours, Maggie, mine and yours. You are no more part of the normal population than I am a bloody cat.”

  “You’re not a cat?” she asked curiously.

  “Focus, Maggie,” he said, rolling his eyes.

  “Okay. Okay,” she agreed, catching her breath and genuinely trying to fathom it all. “So Auntie Clara was a witch … for real?”

  Bramble was wrestling with his impatience, but he composed himself.

  “Yes, and so are you, Maggie. You are the last Corey, the last in a powerful, if not the most powerful New England bloodline of witches,” he sighed laboriously, but this time, Maggie asked no more. It had finally sunk in, it seemed. Her eyes were static as she mulled it over and then she nodded slowly as she assumed her new role.

  14

  The big black cat sat on the coffee table all afternoon, telling Maggie things that would have taken her a few months to figure out by herself, what with her ineptitude at believing the unlikely. She had her hand in a bowl of popcorn again, paging through Clara’s books with the other hand.

  “Your aunt Clara was indeed a witch, my dear,” he reported. “However, she was not evil, not the mole-on-the-crooked-nose, boiling-children type.”

  Maggie giggled at the image he painted.

  “Good to know. Wouldn’t want that in my genetics anyway,” she winked mischievously. It pleased Bramble that she was jesting, because it meant that she had become more comfortable with the idea.

  “She was what some call a kitchen witch, a benevolent master of potions and herbs. Your aunt was in the business of healing and helping,” he filled her in like a proper lecturer—or a celebrity publicist.

  “Then why the hostility?” she frowned. “I think it is rather endearing to have a local witch to buy herbal remedies from. Very old-town charm, don’t you reckon?”

  “Of course I reckon,” he agreed, “but we are not talking about people like you. This town is inhabited by the ill-informed and narrow-minded, Maggie. All those things that make them ripe for religious indoctrination. These are people who have been brainwashed to treat anything out of the ordinary as rubbish, as a threat.”

  “Hmm, I can guess why,” she sneered. “That baleful preacher.”

  “Oh,” Bramble sighed, “don’t get me started on him!”

  “I know, right? He is a total ass …” she stopped abruptly and her eyes searched the ceiling as she mulled over a thought.

  “What?” Bramble prompted.

  “All the people here had it in for Aunt Clara because of that guy, I tell you!” she told Bramble.

  “There were many who treated poor Clara as if she was a leper,” he recounted in dismay. “After the soup incident where she healed all those children she was exposed for what she was, Maggie. It is no coincidence that this all happened mere weeks before her death. I wager that Clara was the target of some modern-day witch hunt, no matter how superstitious that sounds.”

  “Any suspects you can confirm?” she asked, pouring him some chamomile tea.

  “Well, as I said, there are many. For one, the sheriff’s daughter was one of the unvaccinated children who was saved by Clara’s sneaky soup submission, so that scraps Officer Walden from my list of suspects,” Bramble assured her. “Clara saved his child’s life. Sharon Blake is a tricky one, since she was the one who agreed to smuggle the soup into the church potluck. On the other hand, she was the one who ratted out Clara’s already timid secret and just confirmed what she was.”

  “But that was an accident, right?” Maggie asked, not sure of Sharon’s allegiance either.

  “As far as we know. She did seem terribly contrite, but she might just be a very good actress. Who knows?” he speculated, lapping up the delicious tea.

  “Who did Sharon rat to?” Maggie wanted to know. She tackled a new angle.

  “Directly?” he shrugged. “Apparently Bettina and her oaf son-in-law, but there may have been more ears to that wall, if you catch my drift.”

  Maggie nodded. She was wracking her brain, although she did not know some of the people Bramble spoke of and could not formulate her own conclusion. She would have to go and delve into Clara’s books to see if she could find more information on who these people were.

  After Bramble had retired—full up on the lamb roast he was gorging on—Maggie was not sleepy yet. It was still what she considered quite early, not yet midnight, so she endeavored to do more sniffing and digging. In one of the kitchen drawers where Clara kept her slips, odds and ends of paper with recipe ideas and minor bills, Maggie discovered some handwritten notes. They were apparently meant to be entered into her journal, but she had not had the time and ultimately, Clara had perished before she could do so.

  Maggie sat down at the kitchen table and spread out the array of notes and scribblings. There was one written in a different hand than Clara’s, so it drew Maggie’s attention immediately. Her brow furrowed as she perused the threatening note, one of two telling Clara to leave town.

  “Well, what do you know,” she whispered as she compared the two. “Same person. Same threat twice.”

  Thumbing through the rest of the scattered paper, she found a ‘note to self’ from Clara to remind her to enter it into her journal. It read, ‘”Remember to pen in those two who dared to try and chase me out of Hope’s Crossing, and don’t forget to mention problem solved and the oath.”

  “Whatever the hell that means,” Maggie muttered in confusion. “What oath? Which two?”

  She had no other notes pertaining to them or what had happened with the oath Clara spoke of, but Maggie was well aware that not telling and not murdering someone yourself were two distinct things. She knew that no matter how she pondered and speculated, the truth was that she did not know enough people yet to even begin to figure out who might have been involved. Briskly, she packed everything away in an empty tissue box that she decided to keep by her bedside.

  “No use trying to solve the mystery before I have all the pieces of the puzzle. Patience, Maggie,” she mumbled as she ascended the staircase of the big old stately house she now owned. “Concentrate on the immediate things, the simple things.”

  Maggie had become accustomed to lecturing herself since she left her failed marriage and shed the negativity of her other futile partnerships. Never one for mantras and meditation, she had to teach herself to step back from every situation and take stock of her immediate happiness.

  “Take stock,” she repeated her thoughts as she entered her cozy bedroom. The streetlight shed just enough soft light to illuminate a beautiful painting on the wall, depicting a black cat in the moonlight of Paris. “Simple things.”

  The two phrases evoked a solution to her immediate happiness, something that could keep her mind occupied on things other than the brutal murder of her aunt or the malicious people behind it. Maggie Corey knew what she was going to do, if only to settle and root her new life deeper in Hope’s Crossing.

  15

  Corey’s Herbs and Simples was once more in business.

  In the morning sun, the store façade shimmered with the newly redone decal Maggie had had made by a graphics place over in Lynn. Essex County’s people were a lot more helpful than the apparently flourishing businesses in Hope’s Crossing that did not need her patronage. The
re was certainly no way that she could have a sign writer from her own town do it, so she had done what she had learned to do by now: she’d looked right past the town sign and procured the services of outsiders just like her.

  “My, my, I am impressed, Miss Corey,” Bramble purred as he bounced about from surface to surface in the shop. “You have this old place looking almost civil again. Good on you!”

  “Why thank you muchly, Lord Bramble,” she winked with a curtsy. “I figured that we could do with some extra pocket money and a bit of welcome distraction. What say you?”

  “Maybe I will be more agreeable once I have had some funnel cake,” he hinted, pawing at the glass display lid of the cake she had baked earlier.

  “You do know that we sell herbal teas and such, right?” she laughed. “This is not a bakery.”

  “Where I am, everything is about food, darling,” Bramble bragged, curling back his on one side to reveal a tiny fang that looked adorable. Maggie laughed as she surrendered happily. She put the kettle on for some tea while she opened the doors of her new business, just to dip her toe in the trade waters, so to speak. Having tea and cake with Bramble in the warm sunny glow of the small town did wonders for her demeanor.

  Having restored Clara’s beautiful store paid off for her resourceful niece. Most callers were tourists and motorists passing to and from other towns, all delighted that the store with all the pretty flowers and herbs and jellies and pleasant scents and essential oils and … and … and … was still open. So many patrons told Maggie that they used to frequent her little store and talk up a storm with the ever-helpful Miss Clara, as they called her. Many had heard of the tragedy and paid their respects before purchasing something from the pretty woman with the black cat.