This Spells Trouble

by Stacey Alabaster

  And I was also starting to feel incredibly cold. I shivered and tried to warm up. Geri asked me if I was all right. “It’s quite warm in here, dear,” she said, looking concerned.

  “Maybe I am just coming down with the flu or something,” I said. But my symptoms were very strange and not like any flu I’d ever had before. I was just very, very cold, like my veins were filled with ice and nothing I did made me any warmer.

  Geri looked at me with suspicion. So I tried to play it down. I tried to focus on Vicky’s music and not on the fact that I was turning into an ice block.

  “So,” I said to Prudence, who was the closest to me. Physically, that was. She still seemed to hate me. “Maybe I should start with the basics here. Do you know what Clover was last seen doing on the day she was killed?”

  Prudence just looked at me. “I don’t know why Geri even invited you to be part of the coven. We were doing JUST fine without you. And as for us needing a detective… Well, we DON’T.”

  Maybe it was just the fact that I was freezing that gave me no tolerance for this bull-dust, but I’d had enough of being treated like I had the plague.

  I banged the table. “There is a dead witch! You all need to pull your heads out of the sand and stop being so darn rude to me! I know what I am doing, and I know how to solve this case. Now do you want me to help you or not? Huh?” I paused and looked around at their startled faces. “Every one of us could be in trouble, so it is time to cut out this nonsense.”

  Vicky stopped playing and grinned at me, nodded and winked in approval. And my little outburst had worked. Everyone looked guilty and properly put in their places.

  Prudence looked apologetic. Well, she wouldn’t really look me in the eye, but she did seem sorry. “What do you want to know?” she asked.

  Finally. I was getting somewhere. “I need to know exactly what Clover was doing during her last few days alive.” I lowered my voice so that Vicky couldn’t hear. “And did she have a necklace that she wore all the time?”

  Prudence nodded. “Yes,” she said very quietly. “A clover that she wore. Like her name.” I noticed that she sort of kept subconsciously looking over at Geraldine as she spoke, looking for some kind of permission, but Geri was only half-listening.

  “Clover was in some sort of trouble, I think,” Prudence said, a little louder now that she was sure that Geri wasn’t paying attention. “Financially, I mean. She was working for the local milk production company and she’d been caught stealing, so her pay was being docked. I know that she wasn’t happy there and that she didn’t get along with the staff.”

  “And you didn’t think to tell any of this to the police?” I asked in shock.

  Prudence shook her head.

  I could see what the problem was now, and just how deep this insular nature of the coven ran. I felt like there was a lot of pressure to solve this case.

  “It must have been one of our enemies.” Prudence looked certain of this.

  “And just who are these enemies?” I asked her. I thought it was much more likely to be someone at her work that had done it. But these witches already thought they knew all the answers. That was the problem, though.

  Vicky took a break from playing while the food was served. “Is there a spell to make me warmer?” I asked with a laugh as I rubbed my arms to try and get some heat.

  Geri looked over at me in concern. “Are you sure you are all right? Did anything happen to you today? Anything out of the usual?”

  I shook my head. Nothing that I could think of. The only notable thing that had happened that day was that I had fired a difficult client.

  Geri asked if I wanted some of the appetizers. But I was going to have to leave. The coffee house was too cold, and Vicky had stopped playing. I wasn’t sure I wanted to speak to her now that I had a new suspect to investigate—her. Why did she have Clover’s necklace?

  With only one case on my hands now, I had all the time in the world to focus. And my mind had focused on one thing: Vicky’s ditziness. I kept thinking about how easy it could have been for her to have cast a spell that went terribly wrong.

  And cost Clover her life.

  But first, there was farm business to attend to.

  Even with the spell that Vicky had accidentally cast, the animals were still there. I could still ‘hear’ them in the same way that I had always been able to. Vicky’s spell must have only affected humans. And I was glad. I fed the hay to the cows and gave the chickens their feed and smiled when they thanked me. I’d always taken their gratitude for granted. But I wouldn’t any longer.

  With the animals all fed and happy, I went by the mailbox to grab my letters. The box had been full that morning, but I’d left in such a rush that I hadn’t had a chance to grab it.

  Then I noticed that my mail was missing.

  And I was growing colder and colder.

  8

  “Hello, Ruby in The Dust!”

  “Huh?” I asked, spinning around. Vicky. Oh gosh. I didn’t expect her to show up at my farm.

  “It’s a song.” Vicky leaned against the fence post. “From the seventies. The Byrds.”

  “Oh, right. I can’t say it’s coming to mind.” I laughed. I did appreciate Vicky’s ability to pull song lyrics from the sky, though. She told me to look them up on Spotify or if I didn’t have a subscription, she could loan me the records.

  She did look a bit more witchy than usual, dressed in black and looking solemn, so I asked her what was up. “Why do you look like a professional witch all of a sudden?”

  She looked at me with wide eyes full of bemusement. “Uh, it’s the full moon.”

  “So?” I asked.

  She blinked at me. “Wow. You really have lived as a mortal your whole life if you’re not acutely aware of when the full moon is.”

  “You’re going to have to explain this to me like I am brand new at this. Because I am.”

  “It’s the best time for spells, silly.”

  Well, I needed all the help I could get. So maybe I would attempt to practice the spell again while the going was good. But as I put the saddle on my horse and tightened the reins, I started to wonder if that’s what I really wanted—my psychic skills back, that was.

  Vicky was squinting at me. “When did you get time to go to the hair salon since last night?”

  “Huh?”

  What was she talking about? I spun around and checked out my reflection in the barn window.

  And screamed.

  My raven black hair had turned to red.

  Oh my gosh, oh my gosh.

  “Vicky. Something has happened to me…” I was frantic.

  I gripped her by the arms and then realized that I was being a bit too crazily intense, so I backed off a bit, and even tried to laugh it off. Except that I didn’t really think it was funny.

  She also laughed nervously. “Um, okay,” she said. “What’s going on?”

  “I did not go to the salon,” I said. I was breathing heavily. Not only did red hair not suit me at all, but I was still freezing cold and growing colder every minute. “Something strange is happening to me.” I glanced up at the sky. “Well, even stranger than usual.”

  There was a dawning look of both horror and understanding on Vicky’s face. “Someone has put a hex on you.”

  “How is that possible?” I asked, still shivering. My horse was just looking over as if to say, ‘Is anyone actually going to ride me or what?’

  No, as the case would be.

  Vicky asked, “Have you upset anyone lately?”

  I thought back to the coffee shop the night before. About how I had yelled at everyone. “Yeah, only a whole coven of witches!”

  Vicky looked horrified at the accusation. Her mouth dropped open and for the first time since we’d met, I felt like I had actually offended her. “None of them would have done this, Ruby.”

  “Well, they…” I started to exclaim. And then I stopped. “No, hang on, wait. I was already feeling cold before then.” />
  Vicky exhaled heavily and looked relieved. Also sorry that we had almost gotten into a fight. I was relieved as well. I thought back to the events of the previous day.

  “I mean, there was a client I had a run-in with,” I said, thinking back to May’s final words before she had stormed out of my office. “I fired her. She was not happy. She even said I would be sorry for what I had done.”

  “What is her name?” Vicky’s usually rosy cheeks had gone pale. I noticed that she was no longer wearing the clover necklace.

  “May Sheridan.”

  She gasped and looked like she was about to faint. “You have been involved with May Sheridan?”

  I shrugged. “Yeah? So, what’s the big deal?”

  Vicky shook her head slowly. “She’s a bad witch.”

  My horse neighed and kicked out her back leg, and Vicky had to jump out of the way so as not to be kicked in the teeth. “It’s okay, girl,” I said, giving her a rub while I tried desperately to collect my thoughts. I didn’t want to offend the only witch friend I had, but this was crazy. There was no way that May Sheridan was a witch. Then again, I had thought there was no way that I could be a witch until three days earlier.

  “She’s not a good witch like we are,” Vicky explained quietly, while I was still trying to come to terms with the fact that May was a witch at all.

  “Oh, come on, Vicky, that’s ridiculous.”

  “It’s true. She’s what we call a ‘dark witch.’ One that practices black magic.” She nodded toward my hair. “One that puts hexes on people.”

  Of course, I wanted to argue, to tell Vicky that there was no way that the first client who had hired me was secretly a dark witch who had cursed me, but I reached up and touched my hair with my freezing cold fingers and something—maybe just plain old witch’s intuition—told me it was true.

  Vicky was looking a mixture of horrified and appalled. “Ruby, how could you work with her?”

  “I didn’t know who she was!”

  She slapped her hands against her face like she was Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. “Oh. Ruby. Oh gosh. If Geraldine finds out about this, then she will kick you out of the coven.”

  I was suddenly starting to wonder if the chill inside me was coming from the hex or from the fear of being left out in the cold. But I did know one thing—if I got any colder, I was going to get hyperthermia and freeze to death. “Vicky, you have to help me. You’re right, I can’t tell anyone else in the coven, and especially not Geri.”

  She took a step back. “Bu-but I don’t know how to revert a hex!”

  “Then you’re just going to have to help me figure it out. You’ve been at this witch stuff a lot longer than I have.”

  Vicky groaned. “Didn’t anyone try to warn you about this?” she asked me, sounding perplexed. “There are measures in place to protect us against this kind of thing. Normally we get messages through some kind of channel.”

  I thought about this. Oh. Right. “Well. The cat. She said I was in danger. But I didn’t take her seriously. And she was too cryptic! And every time I tried to ask her about it, she was taking a nap.”

  Vicky raised an eyebrow and nodded sagely. “Yeah, they can be a bit like that. Oh gosh, Ruby, what are we going to do?”

  “That’s what I’m asking you, Vicky!”

  We were just staring at each other, like the other one had the answers while in the meantime, my horse had given up entirely and wandered away to chew on a bale of hay.

  Vicky glanced down at my blue hands and shuddered before she took a step backwards. “These things aren’t contagious, are they?”

  “Vicky, you’ve been a witch for twenty-five years longer than me!” Oh gosh, it really was the blind leading the blind here, wasn’t it?

  I really needed Vicky to step up to the plate. Take charge.

  “Okay, okay. Firstly and most importantly, we have to make sure that Geraldine NEVER finds out about this,” Vicky said firmly. “We’ll handle this between the two of us. Have you got it?”

  “Er, I got it.” I certainly wasn’t confident that I could keep something secret from the leader of a witches’ coven, but if Vicky thought we could do it, that gave me a little hope.

  Vicky promised me that she would drive straight home and search through her spellbooks for a hex reversal that she couldn’t screw up, while I stood there shivering and nodding, wondering how long before my blood completely turned to ice. But she made me vow something before she took off. “You can never ever have anything to do with May Sheridan ever again, okay?”

  “Of course,” I reassured her.

  I wanted to keep my promise. Really, I did. And when I told that to Vicky, I completely meant it. Not only did it make total sense, I never lied to a friend.

  But Vicky and Prudence and even Geri had all told me that the person who killed Clover would be one of the coven’s enemies. And it seemed like May Sheridan was the biggest enemy of the coven that there was.

  Full moon.

  It was low in the sky, yellow, and almost looked like the sun. The shadows cast across the paddocks of my town looked like long fingers trying to pluck up the top of the hills.

  “The best time for casting spells.”

  I spun around and saw Indy sitting on the windowsill, also staring out at the hilltops.

  She was trying to make a point. But I had another point to make. “It’s also the best time to investigate.” I had bundled up in three layers of clothing and I had four pairs of socks on underneath my sparkling pink UGG boots. Not very ‘detective.’ Not very ‘witch.’ But I secretly loved the color pink and all things sparkling.

  “Will you be able to take care of yourself while I am gone?” I asked Indy, who looked over her shoulder at me in shock. Oh gosh, she knew what I was up to, didn’t she? Well, I’ve never made the promise to her that I wouldn’t go anywhere near May.

  “Be careful, Ruby,” she said in a low voice.

  I gathered up my purse and files. I almost dropped them, my hands were so numb. “How much worse can it possibly get?”

  She just stared at me as if to say, “Uh, a lot worse than you think, dumb human witch.”

  I’d gotten May’s address from my client file. Now, this time, I definitely wouldn’t be able to bill her. But I was still working on a case, just not hers.

  As I climbed into the car, I realized that I never actually told Geri my hourly rate. I sure hoped she was paying me for my time now that she was my only client. Though something told me that she would be expecting me to work pro bono since it was a coven matter.

  I pulled up onto May’s street and turned my headlights off a few houses down. Luckily, the full moon let me get a good look at her house. My eyes widened when I saw the gothic style arches and chimneys. There were even little towers. There was a statue out in front of a large cat. Possibly a panther.

  Huh. I sure wished I’d seen her house before then, or even before I’d agreed to take the case. It was all your typical wicked witch stuff. Not that I ever would have believed that wicked witches existed a week earlier. Or any kind of witch, for that matter. But now my hands were so numb that I could barely clutch the steering wheel.

  I caught sight of myself in the rearview mirror as I turned on the radio to give me some company on my stakeout. Hmm. Maybe red hair did suit me. It was certainly a lot livelier than the black. And my third-grade students had always told me I would look better in a lighter and brighter color.

  I sang along with the song and bopped up and was thankful that the chair dancing was warming me up a little. But then I saw movement in one of the towers of May’s house and quickly snapped off the radio. Showtime.

  What the— There was someone in the tower with her. I quickly grabbed my binoculars and tried to focus them on the window. Darn it! They were a brand-new pair and I had never actually used them before. I couldn’t get them to focus in the heat of the moment. I quickly searched through the glove department for a manual, but it was no use. Even if I could find
it, I would hardly have time to troubleshoot. I threw them on the passenger seat and leaned forward. It was an argument. If only I could hear what they were saying.

  It was a man who May was arguing with. But was it her husband, Mark? I could only see a shock of black hair at the back of his head. He had his back to the window and never turned around.

  I didn’t know what to think. All the words from my instructor during my private investigator’s course were swimming through my head. Be impartial. Stick to the evidence in front of you. The silly thing was, though, that I had actually liked May. And that was throwing me. As a detective, wasn’t I supposed to have good instincts? As a WITCH, wasn’t I supposed to have good instincts?

  I had to remember what Vicky had told me. She was one of the bad guys. And sure, with her intimidating demeanor, brisk manner, and the fact that she, er, cast hexes on people, that was relatively easy to believe. But was she capable of actually killing?

  And if that was Mark with her, then why had she lied to me about him being missing?

  The lights turned off, and I sat there for a moment, waiting and hoping for something else to happen. When nothing did, I went home.

  I screamed when I walked in the house and turned on the light in my kitchen. Geri was standing there with Indy in her arms. They were both giving me the same judgmental look. I’d had enough frights that night. And enough judgements. Couldn’t I take one second off from being a witch? “Geez. How did you get in here, Geri?” I asked, turning more lights on as I searched through the pantry. I needed a strong cup of tea. A hot one too.

  “One of my powers, dear,” she said with a bright smile. “I can move through walls and doors. They are no impediment to me. One of the very first spells I learned.”

  Right. I wondered if she had invented that spell as well.

  “Nice new hair color,” she commented, and I froze. Quite literally. Did she know? Surely Vicky wouldn’t have said anything to her. We had made an oath. Oh, but she was such a ditz. She could have let something slip or even completely forgotten that we had made an oath in the first place.