by Tegan Maher
"So," Rae said as she tossed the basket into the back seat and buckled up. "I think we have somewhere to point Hunter."
"Absolutely. I'm texting him now." I'd had my phone on vibrate while we'd been inside, and when I unlocked the screen, the message icon popped up. "Looks like he beat me to it," I said, holding my phone up. I tapped to open the message, and what I saw wasn't good.
Call me ASAP. Judge gave me 24 hours to solve it or arrest Coralee.
Cold washed over me and goosebumps raised on my arms as I showed Rae the text.
I hit his number as I stuck the key in the ignition and fired up the truck so it could warm up.
"Hey, sweetie," he said. "I'm sorry to text that, but I tried to call you three times and it just kept going to voicemail."
I twisted the heat to high, then buckled up, holding the phone between my shoulder and cheek. "No, it's okay. We were in the hotel chatting up people in the conference."
He sighed. "I know I should tell you to leave the investigating to me, but at this point, I know I'd just be talking to hear my own voice. Did you at least learn anything good? I went out there yesterday but only got about what you'd expect. Of course, only a couple dozen of them were there. The rest were on some kind of tour learning how to effectively show a house."
"We did a little better than you did then," I said, then told him about Leighann and the dirty stuff we'd heard about Loretta in general. "The last woman we really talked to said half the people in that room had better motive than Coralee does."
"Then it looks like I'll be making another trip to the hotel then. I need to talk to the Merryweather woman, oo. The one Loretta argued with in Sully's. First, I'll do some research on Ms. Cooly. See what I can find out about her. I have a list of names of attendees, and a couple officers here are checking into each one, but you can only learn so much that way."
I'd forgetten about her, what with all the other people who disliked Loretta popping up. I was beginning to wonder how there hadn't been a public lynching before it made it to the private stabbing phase. Maybe they'd all gotten together and drawn straws. Whoever got the long straw got the pleasure of offing her.
"What about the people who owned the businesses she sued?" Raeann asked, and I relayed the question.
"We're tracking them down now, and it appears the last forwarding address for Jenny Jacobs, the woman who owned the diner, was in Keyhole Lake. Problem is, she's not at that address now, and the landlords don't know where she went."
"Did you ask Coralee, Bobbie Sue, or Sully? Between those three, they know pretty much everybody in town. Oh, and you could check with Marybeth, too."
"I haven't yet, but it's on the agenda next, or it was. I just got the info back a little bit ago. Now I need to go to the hotel. I want to catch them before they have a chance to leave because I heard today was the last day. "
Fabulous.
I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel, thinking. We had two suspects but no proof, one of them was off the radar, the other was leaving town, and we only twenty-hours to find out who did it before our friend got her own concrete room in the big house. No pressure.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
WE DROPPED THE DONATION off at the shelter and spent some time playing with them. As always, we barely managed to make it out the door without taking half of them home with us. It always broke my heart to see them homeless, but Brianna, the girl who ran it, did a wonderful job finding homes for them. She also had nice play areas for the dogs and usually had plenty of volunteers to help them feel loved until she placed them. It was a no-kill shelter, so at least I knew they weren't headed for the gallows. Otherwise, I likely would have scooped them into the back of the truck. Max, who'd sworn he'd initiate a barnyard rebellion if I ever brought home another dog, would have just had to deal with it.
After grabbing a late lunch at the Starlite Diner—the good one, not the one Gabi worked at—we headed back to the farm. When we got there, Aunt Beth was there, piddling around in the kitchen. The smell of garlic and tomato sauce washed over us as we stepped in, and we exchanged guilty glances. If she was there fixing Addy's specialty spaghetti sauce, we were in trouble.
"Hey, Mama," Rae said, strolling over to glance into the big pot bubbling away on the stove. "Whatcha makin', and why are you makin' it here?"
Aunt Beth swatted her with the towel. "Don't think I don't know you just ate. And you're lucky, because it's stuffed peppers, not spaghetti, so it's gonna be a while yet."
Rae furrowed her brow and narrowed her eyes. "How do you know we just ate?"
Beth and Addy both had a way of knowing things, and though they always wrote it off the the whole, Moms have eyes in the backs of their heads thing, we'd always suspected they had some sort of magical GPS on us or something. Sometimes it was uncanny. And terrifying.
Addy, who was hovering over a chair keeping Beth company, tried to look mysterious, but couldn't quite smother a smile. "No, she's not tracking you and I'm not stalking you. You just have a blob of mustard on your shirt, Raeann."
Rae glanced down at her shirt then grinned, sheepish. "Oh," she said. "I knew that."
"Sure you did, honey," Aunt Beth said, her eyes twinkling. She took a seat at the table and made a curly-cue motion with her finger that set the wooden spoon stirring the pot in a lazy, swirly pattern. "So what are you girls up to?"
We gave them a brief rundown of the day and Addy nodded.
"You're onto something there with Gabi," she said. "It's the perfect solution for both of them."
Just then, the front door swooshed open and Emma and Shelby stepped in, both of them sniffing the air.
"Man, it smells good in here," Shelby said, making her way to the stove after she kicked her shoes off. "Spaghetti or stuffed peppers?"
"Peppers today, spaghetti tomorrow," Beth said. She always chopped the leftover stuffed peppers up into the juice and turned her peppers into spaghetti sauce the following day, assuming there were leftovers. The stockpot was huge and probably had a dozen peppers in it, all stuffed to bursting with what equated to giant meatballs, but when you threw Hunter and Matt, and usually Cody, into the mix, it didn't take long to tear through a bunch of groceries.
A thought struck. "Is Cody coming for dinner, Shelby?"
She lifted a shoulder. "He's coming to study, so he'll probably be here to eat. Why?"
As usual, Rae read my mind. "Have him invite Will," she said.
"Okay," Shelby replied. "But why? Just because, or do you have a reason?"
"Well, he's always welcome to supper," I said, "but this time we have another reason, too. We met Ali today. I have to admit—I figured for sure you were exaggerating, but she's at least as bad as you'd said. So, we have another, better candidate."
"Oh yeah?" she replied, grabbing some glasses from the cupboard and pouring a couple glasses of tea for her and Emma. "Who?"
"Gabi," Addy said. "She'll be perfect. Will needs somebody who knows what they're doing, and she needs a job where she's respected and doesn't have to work nights."
Shelby wobbled her head side to side. "That's actually not a bad idea. Though I don't think Will pays enough to make up for what she's making now."
"Do you think he has the wiggle room to up what he pays a little?" Rae asked.
Shelby snorted. "If it means replacing Ali with somebody who can actually run the place, I'm sure he'd at least consider it. He's already tied a knot in the end of his rope. I'm not sure how much longer he can hang on."
"I know," Rae said. "We saw, poor guy."
Shelby pulled out her phone and texted Cody, and within just a few seconds, her phone chimed with a response. She took a big gulp of tea, then glanced at it. "They'll be here around six." She glanced at Beth. "Does that work?"
Beth nodded. "Perfect."
"Yeah," Emma said, grabbing a bag of chips from the pantry. "That'll give us time to practice our magic before they get here, then we can all study afterward."
I went up and changed
into something I didn't mind getting horse slobbers on, then headed to the barn. I'd just brought the mares in from their pasture when Gabi pulled in."
"Hey!" she called, setting her purse on the porch and heading my direction. "Looks like I'm just in time." She shoved Mayhem back from the gate and opened it up, letting him and the other four geldings through. They'd all been there long enough that they knew the routine. One by one, they clomped toward the barn and meandered into their own stalls, heading straight for their feed buckets, which I'd filled before I'd started bringing the horses in. All we had to do was shut the stall doors behind them.
She slapped Mayhem, whose stall was at the far end of the barn, on the rump as he went in, and he turned and gave her a welcoming nudge with his before withdrawing and stuffing his face into his bucket.
"So," I said as she clipped his stall shut, "I had a grand idea today that'll get you out of the meat locker over there and into something that suits you much better."
"Oh yeah?" she asked, tossing her boy an extra flake of hay. "And what's that? I don't have the skills to be a surgeon or the patience to be a baby sitter, and as far as I can tell, those are about the only open jobs in the county right now."
"Well, technically this job isn't open yet, but it's about to be," I said. "At least if you and Will can come together on things."
She turned to me, her eyebrows drawn together. "Will? What's he have to do with anything?"
"He happens to be in desperate need of an office manager who knows her stuff," I replied.
"I've never worked in an office before," she said. "I don't know anything about running a veterinary practice. I'm sure there are profession-specific programs and all sorts of things."
I snorted. "Trust me—the bar's pretty low at this point. Besides, you can learn all that. You have a degree in business, so you can help him out with the books, too. And enough common sense not to put a Rottweiler, two cats, and a chinchilla in the same space."
She grinned. "That's awfully specific."
I explained what Rae and I had witnessed earlier. "The girl doesn't have the sense God gave a wooden goose," I finished. "Trust me—you'll be fine."
"Wow," she said. "Yeah, I can't really mess it up worse than that." We each grabbed a broom, and she started on one side of the alley and I started on the other. "I'd be willing to give it a shot," she said, scrubbing at a wet spot with her broom that had turned loose sawdust into a sticky mess. "assuming he could match what I'm making now. What's he pay?"
"That, I don't know," I said, frowning when I hit a spot of stubborn dirt. Another crappy thing about winter—when you combined Georgia mud and sawdust, you got something even stronger than Coralee's Aquanet. I leaned the broom against the wall and motioned for her to do the same, then stepped back and set the brooms in motion to do the work without us. Some things just called for magic rather than hard labor. "But maybe you can work something out. I know he's always busy, so maybe he has some wiggle room to up the ante a little for you."
She took a deep breath and blew it out through her cheeks. "Then I'll give him a call. I've never done it, but it can't be any worse than being harassed by a three-hundred-pound bully in a wife beater."
I laughed. "No, I wouldn't think it could."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THOUGH NEITHER WILL, Cody, nor Gabi had magic, they were all obviously in on the secret. That meant it was fine for us to schedule a practice section after dinner without waiting for everybody to leave. Our sessions tended to be casual, though we did try not to practice cornhole when other people were watching, just so they wouldn't get it in their heads that we cheated when we beat them. Besides, I was getting good enough that I didn't need magic. I had game.
What we hadn't factored in was that we'd eat ourselves into a food coma, though in hindsight, it should have been obvious. We all sat around on the sun porch after dinner, sipping wine and shooting the breeze. I gazed out the glass walls at the pool beyond. When we all gathered, I still liked to turn on the fairy lights around the pool, as well as the pool light. It looked festive even if it was still too cold to sit out there.
"You did a bang-up job with that," Will said to Matt, nodding toward the area. Matt and his crew had built the entire thing, including the fountain at one end and the detached baby pool that Max liked to refer to as his own personal bathing area. How many donkeys do you know with their own private pool?
"Thanks, man. It's one of my favorite builds. I got to experiment a little, and it helped that I lived here and knew sort of what she wanted. Plus, I wanted to make it extra special for her, considering."
He was referring to the fact that I'd insisted he move into the apartment over the barn rather than leave him in the lake cabin. And for some reason, he credited me with his current job as foreman of the biggest construction company in town, even though all I'd done was make the introductions. It had just been a matter of the stars aligning, and as far as I was concerned, I'd gotten the better end of the stick. I got a gorgeous backyard area, pool included, for basically cost and an awesome friend who went out of his way to help me around the barn. And Hunter got a best bud out of it, too. Wins all around.
"I'm considering putting in a pool next summer, so maybe we can get together and knock some ideas around," Will replied, and I took that as my opening.
"Speaking of ideas," I said, catching his eye, "Rae and I had a good one this afternoon, after experiencing Ali firsthand."
"Do tell, then," Will said, sighing. "I'm at my wit's end, so if you have something in mind, I'll be glad to hear it."
"Gabi's looking for a better job, and you're looking for a competent office manager. Seems like a no-brainer to me, that is if you two can work something out."
His gaze bounced from me to Gabi. "Is she serious?" he asked her. "Would you be willing to help me out? I'm warning you in advance—the books are a bit of a mess. I've tried to keep them up, but haven't done such a fantastic job. Shoot, for that matter, the whole place is a bit of a mess. There just aren't enough hours in the day for me and the kids to keep everything straight."
"I'd love to give it a shot," she replied, "except for one thing—I can't do it if I don't make at least what I'm making at the diner."
"How much is that?" he asked.
"I make at least a hundred a day," she replied, cringing a little when she said it as if it were a ton of money.
"Pht," he said, waving a hand. "If you can come in and make sense out of the chaos, I'll double that. Though I do have to warn you—I may need you on weekends sometimes. Not all the time, but sometimes."
She was practically glowing, she was so excited. "Deal. I'm already working myself half to death over there six days a week. If you're willing to be that generous, I'm more than happy to give up a weekend whenever you need me. I can't even remember the last time I had a Saturday off."
He grinned. "Then how about you start with this one. When can you start."
"Are you kidding?" she said, huffing breath out through her nose. "I can be there in the morning." She frowned. "Actually, I don't want to do that to the other girls. Can you give me a couple days to get my shifts covered over there? It's already a crappy place to work—I don't want to make it even worse than it already is by leaving them short."
I smiled. He was getting to see her work ethic up close and personal, and she didn't even realize it.
"Of course," he said. "Take your time."
There. Two birds, one stone. Gabi had a job, Will had a capable employee, and Shelby and Cody could take that of their plates so they could focus on finding good schools without the weight of it hanging over their heads. It had been a good day.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
AFTER SUPPER SETTLED a little, Rae, Shelby, Emma, Beth, and I gathered in the back yard to start practice.
"Before we start actually using magic," Beth said, handing me a necklace, "I made these for you. Between the stones and the magic I infused into it, hopefully, it'll help keep whoever this woman
is out of your head until you have a better idea of who you're dealing with.
The necklace had a filigreed cage made for holding crystals, and all I could see was that all three stones were different shades of dark purple.
"There's an amethyst, a violet fluorite, and a lepidolite," she said. "All of them are meant to encourage good dreams and dispel negative energy. I added a good dose of my own mojo, too, so if you wear it, then between the stones, my magic, and your own wards, hopefully it'll keep that woman—and anybody else—out of your head when your guard's down."
A flash of guilt shot through me as I briefly rebelled against the idea of keeping my dad out of my dreams. I still wasn't convinced he wasn't in danger, but she was right. Sleeping was no time to go toe-to-toe with a force powerful enough to break through the considerable shields I already had in place. I knew in my bones, the time would come to face her, but when I did, I wouldn't be alone, and I wouldn't be asleep. I held my hair up so she could fasten it around my neck.
"Now," she said, motioning toward the obstacles and objects we had scattered around the yard, "Let's get ready to take these witches on in style. They're about to learn what it's like to be on the wrong side of a Flynn."
"And me," Emma said, smiling.
Shelby shoulder bumped her. "You're close enough to family that you count as one of us."
"Indeed," I said, wiggling my fingers to warm them up. "Let's get this party started."
We focused on working together, finding different ways to use each of our strengths in tandem so they were doubly powerful. I lifted a good-sized rock with my mind, and Shelby used her air magic to fling it at a target. Rae waited until right before it landed to triple the size of it so that it didn't just hit the plastic bucket full of sand, it busted it into smithereens.
For her part, Emma was a strong telepath and earth witch, so she called forth vines and tree limbs to ensnare or hit whoever was playing the part of the bad guy. We all took turns in that capacity too, because we'd passed the point of practicing for the fun of it, and were now focused on taking down a real enemy. You couldn't learn that without an actual witch running her own plays.