And this might just be a serious case of ‘be careful what you wish for.’
5
Everything seemed eerily quiet as the sun rose the following morning. So quiet, in fact, that I thought I could even hear the leaves growing on the trees.
But I was excited. So excited that I jumped up and down and raced to my car, excited to go down the hill and see the rest of the town to make sure that, yes, I was cured of my affliction.
“Er, no plums today, I am terribly sorry!” I called out to my neighbor Violet, before speeding away as I waved good-bye. I wanted to test out this new power. Or lack of power.
“You’re in a cheery mood today!” Akiro commented as I walked in with a large grin.
“Are you saying I’m not usually?” I winked and handed him my customer stamp card. It was my day for a free one, and he took my card away and put it in the bin just in case I tried to claim one the following day as well. I had done that before.
“Okay. Just more cheery than usual. Has something happened?”
“Just that I…” Gosh. I had to keep so many things from him lately. It sucked. “Just have a lot more clarity today, that’s all.”
But my cheery mood was briefly halted when I got to the office and saw that May was waiting for me with a scowl on her face. She eyed my cup of coffee with disdain, as though she was blaming that for making me late. Well, what did she want me to do? Just not drink coffee? That was impossible.
I let her in and tried to make small talk, but she was in no mood for it that morning. In fact, her stormy temperament almost threatened to cloud my sunny one. Caffeine should help with that. I took another gulp and set the cup aside.
“I thought you were supposed to be a PI.”
“I am, of course I am.”
Geez, I didn’t want to go blowing my rep on my first case. She was right. I had been getting distracted, and it was just all such terrible timing. It was time to put all thoughts of witchcraft and spells out of my mind and just focus on my real life, mortal, totally human business.
I would do better.
“And so what have you discovered so far?” she asked me, crossing her arms.
I hadn’t been going to tell her this right away, but since she was pressing me to prove to her that I wasn’t wasting her time and money, I felt like I had to give her something. The only thing I had. “It appears that he has been having an affair with a woman named Kylie Leonard.”
May just kept staring at me in the same cool way. Gosh, she was a hard one to read.
She didn’t even give away whether this was new information to her or not. And if it had hurt her, well, she didn’t give that away either.
I was about to say something just to break the tension when she finally spoke, her voice like a knife through the tension.
“Do you think she did it?”
“Did…did what?” I asked.
May just stared at me. “Killed him.”
“Whoa.” I didn’t think we were at that stage yet.
But it was extremely interesting that May was already speaking like this, already assuming her husband was dead. Her language gave a lot away.
The door opened. I didn’t remember turning the sign to ‘open.’
It was that guy with the balding head and the gray suit. He walked right over to my desk and started speaking, even with May sitting right there.
“I still want you to figure out why my neighbor is stealing all my mail…”
“Please,” I said, cutting him off. “Isn’t this something you could go to the police about?”
He stuck his nose up in the air. “The police don’t want to hear about this.”
May looked a little bemused. She looked up at him and coolly said, “Yes, well, neither do we.”
My mouth fell open. I could not believe that she had just said that. This was a small town. You couldn’t get away with speaking to people like that—you would run into them again and would get a reputation as rude.
He just stood there a minute, as shocked as I was.
“I’ll catch ya later,” he said to me before flashing May a dirty look.
May perked up as he scurried out of the office. She gave me a smile. “There, problem solved.”
Well, she was right. I just hoped my PI business wasn’t going to get a bad rep before it had even gotten off the ground.
It might not just be my business that suffered. It could be my personal life as well. I might start getting a bad rep if I kept hanging around with May… There was something about her that was appealing, though. Intriguing. The way she just didn’t care what anyone else thought of her. She wasn’t out here trying to make friends.
“I want to know everything you can find out about this Kylie Leonard.”
“I’ll get onto it today,” I promised.
Boy, now I wouldn’t be able to cheat even if I wanted to. I was going to have to do some real-life detective work.
But first. Coffee.
“So, how’s the cat?” Akiro asked once the lunchtime coffee rush had lulled a bit. I was sitting on one of the bench chairs and still poring over my laptop trying to guess Kylie Leonard’s password.
I wanted to say, “Fat. And messy. And has too many opinions.” But I stopped myself and just nodded. “Er, yeah. She is putting some weight on her bones. Slowly coming back to life.” I smiled at him.
“So, you do you think you’ll keep her?”
Ha. Hopefully not. I wasn’t sure I could afford to buy new glassware every week. This wasn’t exactly the kind of cat you gave to the shelter, though. I grinned at him. “Think I might be stuck with her now. She’s grown attached.”
When I got home that night, Indy actually ran straight to the door and started purring as she circled my ankles. I reached down and picked her up. She was in full ‘cat’ mode right then. Just a sleepy kitty that wanted the attention of her owner. And some food.
Time for a quick spell practice before I got to work on the case.
I’d had no luck guessing Kylie’s password. Now that my powers had been cut off, I felt like I was flying blind. And I suddenly wished that I had the ability to ‘cheat’ if I wanted to.
Dang it, now I really did need this darn spell to work. But had I bitten off more than I could chew and even though the directions that Geri had given me seemed simple enough, I had no idea how to get my tongue around some of the words I needed to say. I kept remembering what had happened with Vicky, and I worried I would screw the spell up and erase my thoughts all together. Who knew just what could go wrong?
Indy was watching me intently.
“You know, if you actually accepted my help, then things may be a lot easier for you.”
“You only give me your help when it suits you.”
“And who’s to say that isn’t actually the very best time for you?”
I could swear she was actually grinning at me.
“Are cats always this cryptic or just witch’s cats?”
I put the ladle down, too nervous to actually attempt the spell. Time to take off my witch’s hat and put on my PI’s hat. May was paying me fifty dollars an hour and so far, all I’d told her was that her husband was having an affair.
Hmmm. I had to quickly check my own handbook to make sure that I wasn’t breaking any rules of my own client/detective contract. But I hadn’t put anything in about stalking the person who was paying me, so I decided to follow May and see what she got up to in the night, alone. Even though she was paying me, she was still my number one suspect.
During our meeting she had casually mentioned she was taking a 7pm yoga class that night and so I waited, inside my car, outside the studio until she came out, and then I started my engine. Shoot. That was way too loud.
“It would be much easier if I just added her to Snapchat maps and I could track her every move,” I said, following her black Jaguar around town. The PI’s course I had taken had told us to always keep three cars back from the car that we were tailing, but there weren�
�t any other cars on the road, so I had to just stay back and try not to be obvious. It had actually taken me two tries to pass the car surveillance part of the course, and I’d only scraped through the second time with a mark of sixty-five percent
Driving in general had never been my strong suit, but I’d been determined not to let that stop me from following my dreams. Because being a detective had always been my dream, even during my years as a teacher. I just really, really didn’t want to screw it up on my first case. I was going to find out what had happened to Mark Sheridan even if it meant not being accepted into the coven. That would just have to be a sacrifice I’d have to make.
It seemed like she was just circling the town. Uh oh. Was she on to me? I pulled the car over like I was parking and noticed that she seemed to slow down, like she was trying to decide if I was actually parking or not. But then she hit the gas and took off down the road. I pulled back out, this time with my headlights off. I know, not safe, but I didn’t feel like I had a choice. I couldn’t lose her.
I followed her until she reached her destination. It was the park where I had met the other witches.
By the time I got out of the car and found her in the park, she was already busy doing something. It took me only a second to realize what it was. She was digging, and it looked like a grave.
6
I was rattled. But Vicky was cheerful as she welcomed me into her living room, and I almost tripped over two guitars. Then I saw a piano, and a keyboard, and a drumkit.
“Whoa. You’re a musician?” I asked, taking stock of all her records and CDs.
She nodded. “This takes my mind off all the witchy stuff,” she said and cleared a space on the sofa so that we could actually sit.
I nodded and looked around at all her gear and smiled. Some of her scattered-brained nature made a bit more sense to me, now that I saw that she was a creative type and a musician. Of course she was messy and ditzy. It only made sense. Then again, what came first, the chicken or the egg?
She picked up one of the guitars and played me a song that she had been working on, and she was pretty good. “Oh wow, I’m impressed,” I said, trying not to sound too surprised. Vicky grinned at me proudly. But I wasn’t quite sure how to ask what I wanted to know without causing her offense.
“So, do you use your powers to help you…”
She glanced down at her guitar. “To write songs? Play music?”
I shrugged. “Both. Either.”
Vicky grinned at me and shook her head. “Nah, that would take all the fun out of it.” She paused. “And to tell you the truth, it would probably just make it worse.”
Well, there was that.
But I still worried about the moral dilemmas of using witchcraft to help in human pursuits. No one had fully explained the rules to me yet—what was ‘cheating’ and what was allowed in regular day-to-day life?
I flopped back on the sofa and Vicky took pity on me. “It’s not like spells and powers necessarily make anything easier, you know. They are as hard to master as any human skill.”
She was right about that.
“In fact, sometimes they make things worse.” She picked up her guitar and started strumming it again. It was a sad melody all of a sudden as she stared off into space, like she had seen some things in her time. But then she snapped out of it and was grinning at me again.
“There are music spells, of course,” Vicky said, standing up. She walked over to her bookshelf and I noticed for the first time that she had dozens and dozens of spellbooks there. Whoa. I sat up. These could be very useful to me.
I frowned as I flipped through them. A beginner’s guide to witchcraft, showing how anyone could perform any spell. “Hang on.” I snapped it closed and dust flew up into my face and stung my eyes. “Does this mean that anyone can be a witch?” I suddenly felt like I was less special and magical. If anyone could do it, then that didn’t make me very special, did it?
Vicky tilted her head and squinted for a moment, like she was considering the question deeply, but from what I knew about her so far, it was just as likely that she had gotten distracted and was thinking about what she was going to have for dinner later that evening.
“People can train to become witches, but Geraldine doesn’t consider them to be ‘real’ witches if they didn’t come from one of the bloodlines.”
“So, some are really born?” I asked, trying to get my ego reassured.
Vicky nodded. “And unfortunately, I am one of them. Unfortunate for the rest of the coven, I mean.”
“Oh, don’t say that!” I cried.
She shook her head and smiled, shrugged and laughed it off. “You may have noticed that I don’t exactly fit in with the rest of the pack.”
I leaned against the bookshelf. “I think that might be a good thing.” I was still flipping through the book. It had some tips on the mind-reading spell that I was still trying to master.
“You can take it if you like!” she said brightly.
“Thanks. It might help.”
Just as I was saying good-bye at the door, something slipped out from just underneath the collar of Vicky’s shirt. A necklace she was wearing. It was a silver chain with a four-leaf clover hanging off the end of it.
I was about to comment on how pretty it was. But she quickly hid it I before I left.
And then I realized—a clover.
May was bright and fresh as a daisy the next morning when she waltzed into my office and sat down across from me.
She didn’t look like she had been digging a grave. Then again, she’d had plenty of time to wash it all off. But I wasn’t sure what I made of her now. She wasn’t telling me the truth, not with her words, and now I had no way of figuring out her true motives without my powers. Unless I could get the spell to work, of course.
But I didn’t much like my chances of that. I had already resigned myself to the fact that I was going to fail the exam and live the rest of my life as a mere mortal.
She stared at me. “I know that you were following me the other night.”
Oh. Shoot. I didn’t even know what to say. I wasn’t sure whether I had gone red or pale, but I knew that I must have had a horrified expression on my face.
“All I want to know is whether you will be billing me for that hour.”
“I thought money was no issue for you.” I tried to remain confident. Unrattled. “Didn’t you tell me that I need to learn my own value?”
She smiled at me. “Good. You are learning. You should be billing me for that.” She leaned forward. “And you are right to suspect me.”
I was suddenly feeling very unsure about this whole situation. It was like I had been played from the very start by this woman. Was this some kind of double bluff? Had she been using me all this time for some kind of coverup? Some evil purpose?
I stood up. “I’m not sure this is going to work out, Mrs. Sheridan.”
She made a face. “What on earth are you talking about, Ruby?”
I kept my voice even. “I don’t think that I can be your PI any longer. I think there is a moral issue here… I’m not the right detective for your case.”
“Oh, I think you are exactly the right detective.”
What did she mean by that?
But I didn’t want to engage her any longer. And I didn’t want to waste any more of either her time or mine. I even offered to refund the money that she had paid me so far.
“Keep it,” she said, before stalking out of the office with long, angry strides. She spun around and glared at me.
“But you will be sorry about this, Ruby. You’ll soon come to see that there are more important things than money. More dangerous things as well.” She left, slamming the door behind her.
There was a clap of thunder. Or maybe I was just imaging that part. But something had gone wrong, something had changed, and I could feel it in my bones.
7
Geraldine was my second disgruntled client for the day. Only I had good news for her.
“Well, I’ve got all the time in the world now to work on your case, Geri,” I said, which pleased her immensely. She was trying to give me some pointers on who might have killed Clover. It seemed that she already had a few ideas of her own. She kept saying that the coven had enemies, powerful enemies, that wanted to bring us down.
Sounded a bit dramatic, but okay, sure.
There was a problem, though. Regarding me and the coven and me being able to solve this mystery.
None of them wanted to open up to me. What did Geri expect me to do? Get blood from a stone? “The rest of the witches are going to have to talk to me about what they know,” I said simply.
“Well, it’s not going to be anyone in the coven,” she said with a wide-eyed gasp after I explained the predicament to her.
I thought she was being highly naïve, if not downright delusional. It was more likely to be someone Clover knew well than a total stranger. But I bit my tongue for the time being and tried to humor her a little.
“No, of course not. But I still need to get some kind of information from them so that I know who I should be suspecting. What leads to follow. Do you see what I am saying?”
“Oh, yes, of course.” She nodded sagely. “Hmmm. Perhaps you need to come to one of our afternoon teas at the coffeehouse and get chatting to the girls in a more informal and natural setting.” She told me there was one that afternoon that I could attend.
My blood ran cold all of a sudden. Was there a draft in there? “Not the Onyx Coffeehouse?” I whispered.
“The one and only. Now come along, dear. Get your coat.”
I walked in slowly and sighed with relief when there was no sign of Akiro. It was 4pm, so he might have left early and left one of the senior staff members in charge.
Vicky was excited to see me, but she was busy tuning her guitar in front of the mic stand. She was playing a gig and as much as I liked listening to her song, I felt a little left out in the cold at the table with just Prudence sitting beside me for company.
This Spells Trouble Page 4