Obviously, someone disagreed. It could have been Dianne, but after speaking with her I didn’t think she was the person I should be focusing on. She seemed like a genuinely nice human being who reached out to Leonard when not a lot of people would.
A moment later, the door opened once more, and when I looked at the person who walked in my breath caught in my throat. It was Leonard!
No, on second thought, it wasn’t him. But my goodness was there a family resemblance. Their faces were exactly the same shape, but this man had a slightly larger nose, and his eyes were rounder, and more deep-set. Apart from that, the two men could have been identical.
He confirmed my suspicions as soon as he made his way to the counter and spoke.
“Everyone is saying this is the coffee shop where my brother died. Is that true?”
So this was Roman. “It is. I’m sorry for your loss,” I replied.
“Well, I’m not. As far as I’m concerned, Leonard should have left this earth years ago. I’m not sad he’s dead. My only hope is that the medical examiner treats his body the way Leonard would have hated, the way he forced us to do with my mother.”
Wow. Roman Steele was not mincing words. I had no idea what to reply, so I kind of just gaped at the man. That didn’t seem to bother him; he just kept talking.
“So it was here that he died. Good. He had it coming, quite frankly. I still can’t believe he did our mother that way. She told me what she wanted. Told me just a few hours before she died. And all because Leo wouldn’t believe me when I told him we had to go through all that trouble, just to have mom buried in the churchyard. She wouldn’t have wanted that, you know. She didn’t want that. Didn’t want it at all, but he made her get cremated all the same. She should have been buried, her body with her family. That was what she really wanted. She loved her family, mom did. But now he’s dead, and I’m glad for it.”
“Do you want a coffee or anything?” I finally managed to stammer out, not exactly knowing where this insane rant was going.
“Eh?” Roman asked, surprised, as if he didn’t realize where he was. “Oh, a coffee? Nah. I just came here to see the spot where that no-good brother of mine finally died. I’ll do everything I can to make sure he isn’t buried next to mom. He doesn’t deserve to spend eternity next to such a good woman.”
And with that, Roman rapped his knuckles on the counter a couple of times, looked around, nodded as if satisfied with what he saw, and walked back out.
I widened my eyes at Leanne, who wiggled her eyebrows at me.
“I told you he was a little bit strange. They both were.”
“You were not kidding,” I replied. “But hey, grief makes people act in strange ways.”
“I don’t know, that didn’t seem to me like a man who was grieving his brother.”
I shrugged. “I barely remember what I did the first few days after Dad died. Grief does weird things to you. Roman might make some decisions now, do some things and say some things he’ll regret later.”
“Maybe,” Leanne said, but she didn’t seem convinced.
Either way, I wasn’t going to judge Roman too harshly. There was absolutely no way he was the killer – I would have noticed him being in the coffee shop at the same time as his brother – which meant he couldn’t have killed him. So he had just lost his brother. The two might have hated each other, but I figured when you lived under the same roof as someone for what was probably sixty-some years, losing them suddenly like that would have an effect, regardless of how well you got along.
Chapter 13
The rest of the morning passed by without incident, to my immense relief. A part of me was genuinely worried that Cackling Witch Coffee was going to spontaneously explode, or something along those lines, given how my last few attempts at making it through a whole day of work without disaster had gone.
I was worried that we would have fewer customers, but in fact, the opposite happened. I got asked so many times what table Leonard was sitting at when he died from wide-eyed lookie-loos that it appeared the risk of being poisoned to death while eating here wasn’t so strong that it kept people from coming in to see the spot for themselves.
It made me feel pretty icky, personally. A man had died. Sure, he wasn’t a very well-liked man, and it appeared no one in town was really going to miss him all that much – Dianne was the first person who had even attempted to make him out to be human – but that didn’t make it any less weird to have people coming by to stare, as far as I was concerned.
A few minutes before my lunch break was set to begin, Jack Frost – I giggled inwardly at the name – walked through the door and made his way toward me.
“Hello,” I greeted him warmly. “What can I get for you?”
“A regular coffee and a chocolate chip banana muffin, please,” he asked, pulling out some pre-counted change and handing it over to me. This was obviously his regular order; it was also what he had asked for the day before.
“You used to be a teacher, right?” I asked, and Jack smiled.
“Yes, that was me. Leanne here was one of my students in the last year before I retired.”
Leanne flashed him a smile and a wave. “You were one of the best, Mr. Frost.”
“Please, you know you should just call me Jack now.”
“Sorry, you’ll always be Mr. Frost to me.”
“Ah well, you win some, you lose some,” Jack said to me with a hearty laugh. “You’re new to town, aren’t you?”
“I am,” I explained. “I’m Leanne’s cousin. My mom, Patricia, was Leanne’s mom’s sister.”
“Oh, you’re Patricia and Daniel’s little girl. Why, I actually remember when you were born. Both your parents were in my classes. They pretended to hate each other at the time, but I had a sneaking suspicion they were going to end up together. I took great pleasure in being right. Of course, it was a tragedy what happened to your mother.”
I nodded sadly as Jack continued. “So what brings you back to town now? Is your father still in town? Last I heard he had moved, and taken you with him after Patricia died, but none of us ever found out where.”
“San Francisco,” I said. “That was where I grew up. Unfortunately, dad died a few months ago.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. Your father was a good man.”
“He was,” I agreed. “What was he like as a teenager, if I may ask?”
“Of course. I very much enjoy reminiscing on my old students. He was a rambunctious young man. He played football, and he was quite good at it, if I remember correctly. He was the kind of person who was always on the go, never sitting still. Even in class he would always have one leg jiggling, like he couldn’t bear to sit still for even a single second.”
I smiled. That certainly did sound like Dad. He played soccer with a bunch of his coworkers every Tuesday night after I was old enough to be left alone at the apartment for a few hours.
“And my mom?”
“Well, she was almost the opposite. Patricia was quite quiet, and thoughtful. She would always think before she spoke, and I never heard her say a mean thing about anybody. She studied very hard, and got excellent grades. I wasn’t the least bit surprised when she graduated and went to Washington State. Daniel went there as well; he was a Husky. We were all very proud of them. They didn’t run in the same circles at all, but I think having someone from home that they could talk to was good for the both of them. That was where they eventually fell in love. I don’t think anyone saw it coming; they were so different. But Patricia was good for Daniel. She taught him to think a little bit before he spoke, and he taught her to get out of her comfort zone a little bit. After they graduated they both came back to the island, and a few years later you were born.”
“Wow,” I said, emotions getting the better of me. “I didn’t know any of that. Thank you.”
“Did your father not talk about his past?”
I shook my head. “He didn’t talk about my mom at all. I knew almost nothing about her. I know
he missed her terribly; when I was young I caught him crying a couple of times when he didn’t think I was around.”
“Oh, yes,” Jack said, nodding solemnly. “Daniel loved Patricia. That much was obvious to anybody who saw the two of them together.”
“Why didn’t he tell me about her, though?” I asked, not expecting a real answer. It was something that had bothered me ever since I found out about this side of the family. Dad had never told me about any of them. Why had he hidden it?
“We all have our reasons,” Jack said with a shrug. “Perhaps he simply found it too painful to talk about.”
I nodded, then remembered that I wasn’t supposed to talk about my parents with Jack, but rather figure out if he was the person who had murdered Leonard.
“You were here yesterday, weren’t you?” I asked, and Jack nodded.
“When Leonard passed on? Yes, I was. That poor man.” Jack shook his head sadly. “I spoke with him only a couple of moments before it happened.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, he was trying to get me to help him with a legal problem he was having with his brother. Roman wanted to sell the property they were living on, and Leonard didn’t. He wanted me to help him show to his brother that they were financially better off by hanging onto the land, or selling it to someone else. I believe he was going to try and argue that ideally they would continue to live on the property for the next ten years or so.”
“And did you help him?”
Jack shrugged. “I told him there was nothing I could do. After all, it was a family matter, and I’m not an expert in real estate transactions. I could teach him how to do trigonometry, but predicting the future of the real estate market was not in my skillset. I told him he needed to speak with a real estate professional.”
“How did he react to that?”
Jack shrugged. “He seemed angry, but that was par for the course for Leonard. He was muttering about Roman ruining everything, and how first he had tried to destroy their mother’s memory, and now this. There was a lot of animosity between those two, and there had been for years. It was quite sad to see, really.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Yes, I think Roman will be very happy that his brother is gone, and that’s a tragedy. If you ask me, they never should have been living under the same roof, but they were both too stubborn to leave.”
“It sounds like it was a sad situation all around,” I said, grabbing the muffin from the display case and putting it on a plate for Jack.
“Oh, it really was. The fights between those two men were legendary here in town. I’m sure their mother would have been incredibly disappointed to see what became of them both. She would have wanted them to get along, but not even her memory could do that. After Roman claimed that she had changed her wishes, and then been denied, there was no chance of reconciliation between the two. Frankly, I’m surprised. If anyone was going to kill Leonard, I would have thought it was Roman.”
I nodded slowly. “Right. But no, that’s impossible.”
“It is, and yet I can’t think of who else could have wanted Leonard dead. I supposed there was a lot of money in that deal he was refusing to let through. People have been killed for less.”
I poured the coffee and passed it to Jack. “That is true.” Jack thanked me and headed to a table at the back, and I pursed my lips, thinking hard about his words.
I didn’t think he was the killer either. Maybe I was just too optimistic to be a proper detective. I automatically assumed the best of everyone, but Jack had seemed like a genuinely friendly and nice guy. And I appreciated that he told me about my parents.
If I was lucky, Don Kilmer would come in soon wearing a t-shirt saying ‘I did it’, but I couldn’t exactly count on that.
Chapter 14
When we finally closed up shop at the end of the day I breathed a sigh of relief. I had finally gotten through a full day of work without a major disaster. No one died. I didn’t fly through a mall on a broom. As far as I was concerned, I considered it to be a massive success.
Leanne and Aunt Debbie showed me how to clean up for the night, and we packed up the leftover baked goods to sell for cheap the following day. I got a ride home with Aunt Debbie, and when she pulled into the driveway she killed the engine and turned toward me.
“I think we should do your first magic lesson before dinner. How does that sound?”
Frankly, it sounded terrifying. I was still coming to grips with the idea that magic still existed, and there was a part of me that wasn’t one hundred percent convinced that I actually had magical powers. What if I was the exception? What if I was like Leanne, who hadn’t inherited them? I knew I had flown around on that broom, but what if there was a different explanation for that?
“Sure,” were the words that came out of my mouth, though. “That sounds great.”
It didn’t sound great at all.
I followed Debbie into the main living room, where she went to a cabinet and pulled out a wand. It was a plain piece of wood, a little under a foot long, painted a nice shade of pastel purple.
“I hope you’re ok with this wand,” Aunt Debbie said, handing it to me. “We don’t have a ton of options out here I’m afraid. If you have specific requirements you could always ask Kyran if he would buy you one. Wands are only available to buy in the paranormal world, and of course, we don’t have access to that.”
“This is fine, it’s actually quite pretty,” I said, taking the wand carefully from Aunt Debbie. A part of me wanted to wave it around and pretend I was Hermione Granger, but another part of me was overly cautious about doing anything with it at all. After all, I didn’t want to accidentally set a couch on fire or anything like that.
“Feel free to just hold it normally,” Aunt Debbie said with a kind smile, obviously noticing my hesitation. “You’re not going to do anything by accident. I promise. You have to cast an incantation before anything will happen when you hold the wand.”
“Ok,” I said, gripping the wood with more confidence that I wasn’t going to mess anything up completely. “So there are chants you have to say to perform magic?”
“That’s right,” Aunt Debbie said, rifling around a cabinet and pulling out a notebook and a pen. “I’ll make you a list of all the spells I teach you, and that way you can memorize them on your own time. Now, every coven has their own spells. We’re members of the coven of Saturn, which is an air coven. We’re witches who are naturally more skilled at everything that involves air – for example, dealing with the weather, or riding a broom.”
I barked out a laugh at that last comment. “I guess I’m the exception that proves the rule.”
Aunt Debbie gave me a kind smile. “Don’t write yourself off just yet. You had absolutely no idea what you were doing; you didn’t even know magic existed. You can’t be expected to be perfect at everything straight away. But you may find that you take to broom riding faster than witches from other covens. If we knew any of them, anyway. Besides, you don’t need to start riding a broom anytime soon.”
“But we can change the weather?” I asked. “Does that mean we can single-handedly take care of climate change?”
Aunt Debbie laughed gently. “Unfortunately, no. Every witch has a certain amount of magical energy inside of her. Whenever you cast a spell, some of that energy is used up. It regenerates automatically through rest and through not using magic, but it means that there are limits on how much magic you can use before your energy stores are depleted and your magic no longer works.”
“Ok, so basically you’re saying that it would take way too much energy to change the weather in the entire world all the time?”
“That’s right. So while you could cast a spell to make it rain on Enchanted Enclave for a small period of time you wouldn’t be able to turn this place into a tropical island. And frankly, that’s probably for the best. Nature is supposed to stay wild, unaffected by our magic.”
I nodded in understanding. “Alright, that makes sense.
”
“So, the most basic spells are those in which you transform ordinary, inanimate objects. Changing their size and color are the most common ways to start learning spells, so I’m going to teach you those ones first.”
I gripped the wand harder in my hand. “Ok.”
“Now, I’ll show you how it’s done first. You cast the incantation, and as you’re saying the words, you need to imagine the change happening to the item you’re casting the spell toward. The better you can imagine the change in your head, the better the spell is going to go.”
“Got it,” I said.
“Alright,” Aunt Debbie said. She grabbed a candle off the bookshelf. It was plain white, and she placed it in the middle of the coffee table, motioning for me to take a seat on the couch in front of it, which I did.
“Now, we’re going to change the color of this candle to start with. Repeat after me: “Saturn, god of plenty, in this world there are colors many. Turn this candle blue.”
I gasped as the candle in front of me instantly changed into a deep blue. “Wow.”
“Now it’s your turn,” Aunt Debbie said to me. “Don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t work at first. Do you remember the words I used?”
I nodded. Taking a deep breath, I gripped the wand and pointed it at the candle, doing the best I could to imagine it going from the color of the deep ocean to a shade of canary. “Saturn, god of plenty, in this world there are colors many. Turn this candle yellow.”
I let out a squeal of surprise as sure enough, the candle immediately turned a vivid yellow.
“You did it!” Aunt Debbie said, clapping her hands together with delight. “Good job!”
I couldn’t stop staring at the candle. This was it. I had done it. I had actually used magic. All of this was real. It wasn’t some insane, elaborate prank. I was really a witch, and I had just magically changed the color of a candle.
A Cauldron of Hot Coffee: Enchanted Enclave Mysteries Books 1-3 Page 8