Murder on the Oregon Express

by Samantha Silver

  So while everyone else huddled outside to gossip while they waited for the wake to start in an adjacent building, I made my way toward the back of the church, following a path along a gorgeous garden of freshly blooming flowers. While I was only a few feet away from the dozens of people talking, their sound didn’t travel to this side of the building, and I found myself feeling peaceful and serene as I admired the flowers and the first few bees of the season floating from bud to bud, collecting nectar.

  As I continued along the path, however, my peaceful stroll was suddenly interrupted by the sound of arguing. I looked back toward the front of the church, but the sound wasn’t coming from there. Looking around, I suddenly noticed an open window in the church; as I made my way toward it, it became obvious that was where the sounds were coming from.

  “I think you’re overreacting, Isabella,” a man’s voice said.

  “How am I overreacting, dad? I can’t believe it. After everything he’s done to me, after everything he’s done to my children, I find out he had a firearm in his home?” Isabella’s voice was high-pitched, she was practically shrieking.

  “This is still America dear, a lot of people have guns,” her father replied. “You know I have a gun, and you still let the children visit me.”

  “You keep your gun in a locked safe at the back of a locked closet, dad. There’s a difference between that and keeping a handgun in an unlocked drawer in your desk like Brian did.”

  I suddenly heard Chase’s voice. “So you had no idea that Brian even had a gun?”

  “No!” Isabella replied vehemently. “Of course I didn’t. Brian was absolutely the kind of man who would just leave something like that lying around. I never would have let my children spend any time in his home at all if I’d known.”

  “Pardon me for asking, but I thought that Mr. Armitage didn’t see your children often.”

  “Oh, he didn’t,” Isabella replied, her voice venomous. “In fact, I think they only spent one day there. It was when my father had to go to the hospital in San Francisco for emergency surgery. I didn’t want the children to have to see him like that, and my best friend was out of town. I asked Brian, and he agreed to watch them for the day. It was the only decent thing the man had ever done. And now I find out that while my children were in his home he had a gun in an unlocked drawer.”

  “That is what he told us when he reported the theft, yes.”

  “And the theft was reported after the day my children spent with him?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “If he wasn’t already dead, I’d kill him. I know, it’s terrible to say, and no child so young should have to attend their father’s funeral, but damn if they’re not much better off without him.”

  “Thank you for your time, Miss Parsons, Mr. Parsons. I’ll be in touch.”

  A minute later I heard a door closing, and figured Chase had left.

  “I’m sorry, Issy,” the woman’s father said to her in a low voice. “I’m sorry that my surgery put your children in harm’s way. You’re right, the children should have never been in a home with an unsecured gun.”

  “Oh dad, you don’t have to be sorry about anything,” Isabella replied. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Well, it was my gall bladder’s fault, really, and that is a part of me.”

  “Don’t be silly, dad. Besides, I suppose it’s all moot, now, isn’t it? The gun was stolen, and Brian is dead.”

  “Yes, he is. Come on, let’s go find the kids. They’re not taking it as badly as I’d feared.”

  “Probably because Brian was nothing like what a real father should be,” Isabella replied, venom in her voice. I sat down on a nearby bench and idly looked at a couple of flowers while I thought about what I’d heard.

  If Isabella was telling the truth, and she didn’t know about Brian’s gun until just now, then that meant she hadn’t stolen it, which meant she couldn’t have been the person who killed him. That put Carl Green right back up at the top of the suspect pool. After all, Brian’s business partner would be pretty high up there on the list of people who had access to the man’s home, right?

  I got up and made my way back to find Cat and Peaches. I had to tell them about what I’d found out straight away.

  Thirteen

  “I think you’re completely right,” Cat said, nodding as I laid out my theory that meant Isabella couldn’t have been the murderer.

  “You’re taking this way too simply, though,” Peaches replied. “You’re accepting what Isabella said at face value. What if she knew about Brian’s gun, and she’s the one who stole it, and now she’s lying about knowing it was there?”

  “If she did that, though, it meant she would have left her kids in a home with an unsecured gun. You’ve seen her with her kids. Do you really think that’s the kind of thing she would do, especially knowing that Brian wasn’t exactly the greatest dad ever?”

  “Maybe she didn’t know at the time. Maybe she heard about it later, and decided to steal the gun to make Brian look bad, and then just hung onto it until she decided to kill him after finding out about his new girlfriend that he took to Mexico instead of making child support payments.”

  I had to admit, Peaches had a point. “I don’t think she was lying,” I replied, shaking my head.

  “You don’t think she was lying because you like her. And there’s nothing wrong with that, Isabella is a sweetheart. But sweethearts can murder people, too.”

  “Great,” Cat sighed. “So really, we’re still absolutely nowhere, and there’s still a chance that Isabella’s going to be arrested for this murder, even though Carl had as good an opportunity as anyone.”

  “If only there was a way to make the embezzlement public. Heck, if only there was a way for us to know for sure that Carl knew about the embezzlement,” I mused. “Can magic do that?”

  Cat shook her head. “Sadly, not really. It’s extremely hard to magic your way into someone’s thoughts. None of us are strong enough to be able to do it. Grandma Cee maybe could, if she really put her mind to it. And even then, the bigger a secret something is, the harder it is to coax it out of a person’s mind. So while it might be possible for Grandma Cee to find out what he thinks about the Seattle Seahawks, it would be almost impossible for even the strongest witch or wizard in the world to find out whether or not he killed Brian.”

  “What’s the point of magic if you can’t even make simple things like that real?” I huffed in reply, and Peaches laughed.

  “Look at it this way, it means your deepest and darkest secrets aren’t being discovered by anyone in Brixton Road either.”

  “I don’t have any deep and dark secrets. Ok, maybe I cut Alexa Knight’s hair in kindergarten and blamed Jeremy Schmidt for it, but I’d definitely let the whole world know that if it meant being able to find out who the murderer is.”

  Cat giggled. “I don’t really mind the whole world knowing my secrets, either. After all, I’m pretty sure Grandma Cee knows all of them anyway.”

  “Like that time she caught us smoking pot by the lake when we were in high school,” Peaches said, and Cat groaned.

  “Ugh, don’t remind me. She came flying through the woods, screaming her head off. There were six of us, and we were all so scared, we had no idea what was happening when this old lady comes rushing toward us. Leon Ares tried to scramble up a tree, fell off the second branch and broke his arm.”

  “And Lawrence Carter straight up ran into the lake.”

  “Peaches and I just clutched at each other, terrified. We didn’t know what to do, we just froze. Grandma Cee stopped in front of us, and told us that if the zombie apocalypse came, we were going to be the first to be killed. Then she grabbed us by the hair and dragged us back home.”

  I laughed. It absolutely sounded like something Grandma Cee would do.

  “She told us she wasn’t even upset about the pot. She was upset about the fact that we were hanging out with an idiot like Leon Ares.”

  “I still
to this day don’t know how she found out,” Peaches said, shaking her head. “Leon Ares is like Cat and yourself, he’s a wizard who lives almost exclusively in the human world. His grandfather and Grandma Cee were apparently an item when they were young, like a million years ago, and then something happened between them, but now they hate each other.”

  “I imagine that couldn’t have been made better by Grandma Cee causing the guy to break his arm?”

  “Yeah, that didn’t go down well,” Cat grinned. “Apparently, there were fireworks in the sky that night at Brixton Road, and the next day when people finally dared to come out of their house a couple of the trees near where they had been fighting had disappeared.”

  “Wow,” I said, my eyes widening.

  “Yeah. I mean, it’s a stupid fight. We both get along fine with Leon, he’s a nice guy. You’ll probably meet him eventually, he works for the mountain now in some kind of management job.”

  “But you don’t know why the two of them hate each other?”

  “Nope. And if my mom knows, she refuses to tell us, too.”

  I smiled to myself as I let my imagination wander. I wondered what could have possibly caused that much strife between Grandma Cee and Leon Ares’ grandfather. Then again, knowing Grandma Cee, I could absolutely see her being the type to hold a grudge for years as well.

  When I made my way back to the bookstore, there was a message sitting on the cash register.

  “Come to Brixton Road now. You need extra lessons.”

  I sighed and considered ignoring the message. After all, it was getting to be late afternoon, I was hungry, I was tired, and I just plain did not want to go try to learn to ride a broom again. But, Cat and Peaches’ story fresh in my brain, I figured it was probably safer in the long run to do what Grandma Cee wanted.

  I closed the blinds to the shop so no one could see inside, and opened the portal to Brixton Road. I was actually starting to get used to the weird tornado-like effect that jumping through the portal had. When I finally landed in Brixton Road, everything there was starting to look normal. The only difference today was that the sky was a lovely coral color, not unlike that of my cousin’s hair.

  Walking past an exceedingly hairy man known as Keith the Werewolf, I smiled at him and he grunted in return. I wondered if Keith ever spent any time in the regular human world. Somehow, I doubted it. Making my way to the home where Grandma Cee lived along with the rest of the Calliope family, I eyed the tree that had saved my life with gratefulness, although did it have to be so… sticky?

  Pausing for a minute before knocking on the door, I finally managed to work up the courage, but before I managed to press my knuckles to the wood, the door opened and Grandma Cee was standing there.

  “What are you wasting time for, girl? Come in!” she ordered, and I did as she asked.

  “You do remember my rule, don’t you, mother?” I heard a voice say from the other room. “You’re absolutely not to teach that poor girl any more magic without me being there.”

  Gratitude poured through my body toward Cat and Peaches’ mom, Sage, as she appeared in the doorway. I had a very strong feeling that with Sage overlooking everything that the odds were a lot better that I wasn’t going to end this lesson falling out of the sky.

  “Yeah, yeah, I heard you,” Grandma Cee scowled. “You’re simply going to hold us back by refusing to allow me to teach the girl what she needs to know. Besides, you don’t need to worry, I wasn’t going to teach her how to fly again today anyway.”

  “Oh thank goodness,” I muttered under my breath, but apparently not quietly enough. Despite her advanced years, the look Grandma Cee shot me indicated she’d heard me perfectly.

  I blushed slightly as we headed down the expansive hall toward the backyard.

  “I’m hearing from a few people who have chosen to spend time in the human world that the Others are back,” Grandma Cee said. “Just the other day, I heard that Henry Gunter felt a cold presence around him that he couldn’t explain.”

  “I can explain it, mother. It was a gust of wind.”

  “You think that boy doesn’t know a gust of wind when he feels one?” Grandma Cee replied. I found it cute how she always referred to everyone as ‘boy’ and ‘girl’; Dana Gunter’s husband had to be at least thirty. “There’s a difference between the Others and a gust of wind.”

  “So they feel a bit like Dementors? The Others, I mean,” I asked.

  “What’s a dementor, dear?” Sage asked me nicely, a smile on her face.

  “Oh,” I replied, not realizing that the witches here had never even heard of Harry Potter. “They’re bad creatures from a series of novels in the human world, about a wizard and his friends. Dementors were the creatures in charge of guarding Azkaban, the wizarding prison. Whenever they got close everyone said they felt really cold, and then they remembered the worst moments of their lives.”

  Grandma Cee nodded. “That is partly correct. Whenever the Others appear, they are invisible to begin with. They must be drawn out to be seen, but you will feel them. They make the air around them feel colder to the touch. If you feel cold on a hot day, be careful.”

  “But you don’t really need to worry, Alice,” Sage assured me. “The Others are not making a reappearance.”

  “If you were so certain of that, why did you agree to have us tell Corrine everything about the Others and bring Alice back to Sapphire Village? She wouldn’t need the family protection if she really wasn’t in any danger.”

  “Well, I thought it was better to be safe than sorry,” Sage said, glancing at me almost guiltily.

  “It’s ok,” I told her. I actually was really enjoying living in Sapphire Village, and it felt nice to be wanted. I agreed with Sage; it was unlikely that these Others, whoever they were, were actually around and trying to steal our souls or whatever it was that they did.

  Still, I couldn’t help but think of the other day when I had felt slightly cold while walking through the village. What if that had been them?

  “What are you supposed to do if you do run into them?” I asked. “You know, just out of curiosity.”

  Grandma Cee eyed me carefully. “Just out of curiosity, you say?”

  “Yes,” I replied, trying to keep my voice even. I absolutely had no idea if the cold chill I’d felt a few days ago was Others coming to try and take my soul, or if it was just my body having a moment of crazy.

  “Well,” Grandma Cee replied, “The most important thing you can do to fight off the Others is to have more witches and wizards around you. You see, every witch and wizard has a power sphere around them. It is not something we can feel, or sense, but it is there. Your mother was a very powerful witch. Her power sphere was large, and I suspect yours is as well. For the Others, the larger the sphere of the witch or wizard whose soul they take, the more powerful they become. However, at the same time, when witches and wizards come together, their power spheres become too powerful for the Others to be able to handle, and they are driven away. So the best thing you can do, if possible, is to find other witches and wizards.”

  “And that was why my mom had her soul taken, right?” I asked quietly. “She was alone in the car?”

  Grandma Cee nodded, her face grim. “Yes, that is why.”

  “But what if you found yourself in that situation, where you didn’t have any other witches and wizards to call on? What could you do then?”

  “Come to the backyard, and I will show you.”

  Fourteen

  I followed Grandma Cee with trepidation, Sage following closely behind. I had absolutely no idea what to expect here.

  “The most important thing to do if you know you’re encountering the Others is to make them visible to you,” Grandma Cee announced as we headed into the backyard, with its weird, springy, pastel-green grass. “The Others thrive on their invisibility. If you can see them, you can attack them. If you can’t see them, you don’t know where to send your attacks. So the number one thing you must focus on when
you encounter them is making them visible.”

  “Ok, got it,” I replied. “How do I do that?”

  “This is more abstract magic. This is what I was going to teach you the other day, until our lesson was cut short.” Grandma Cee glared at Sage. I didn’t comment on the fact that the lesson was almost cut short by my own untimely death. I didn’t think Grandma Cee would appreciate the comment very much. “It is simple to imagine a change, and to make it happen through magic, when that change is physical. But what if it is not? What if the magic you want to perform is more abstract? How do you do it then?” she asked me, pointedly.

  I thought about it for a minute. “Do you have to will it to happen?” I answered at last. I was pretty sure I was completely wrong.

  “Yes, that is a good way of putting it. You need to truly want the action you need to happen. And if you are dealing with something that is alive, you need to feel its power. So to answer your question about how to make the Others visible, you need to begin by finding their aura. You need to focus your energy on finding out where they are coming from. When you know, you can will them to become visible. If your will to make them visible is greater than their will to stay hidden, then they will no longer be able to hide, and they will appear before you. That is the same with any other invisibility spell, or other spell that a witch or wizard has placed on themselves or others.”

  “Ok,” I replied, nodding. I was pretty sure I understood what Grandma Cee was saying.

  “Of course, this is much more difficult to practice than other things,” Grandma Cee said. “If I were to make myself invisible, for example, there is no way you could force me to become visible. I am simply more powerful a witch than you are. I don’t mean to insult you, but you only began studying magic two weeks ago.”

  “None taken,” I replied. I was pretty sure literally everyone born with magical powers was a stronger witch than I was right now.