A Cauldron of Hot Coffee: Enchanted Enclave Mysteries Books 1-3

by Samantha Silver

  A moment later a chair from the dining room began floating over, placed itself down on the floor next to mine, and the wood groaned slightly under Tina’s weight as she sat down on it.

  “Ok,” I said. “Let’s see what Karen was up to here.”

  Tina and I spent at least forty minutes going through all the files we could find on the computer, but it was all hunky-dory. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary at all. Most of the files were things a schoolteacher would print out for her students. We managed to log into her email account with some more magical help from Tina, but everything there looked normal as well. Just emails from parents thanking Karen for taking such good care of their children, asking about what time to come by for a meeting, that sort of thing.

  “Wow, this lady led an impressively boring life,” Tina said. “There doesn’t seem to be a skeleton in any of the closets.”

  “Frankly, if I had three twin boys under the age of seven I’d probably be pretty boring too,” I replied. “I imagine she doesn’t have much time to do anything shady under the table.”

  “That’s a good point,” Tina replied. “Might as well check the trash, just in case.”

  I clicked on the icon for deleted emails, and Tina and I scanned through the list. Spam, spam, more spam, a couple of newsletters, but nothing strange.

  “Hold on, what’s that?” Tina asked suddenly.

  “What’s what?” I asked. “If you’re pointing to it, I can’t see.”

  “Whoops,” Tina replied sheepishly. “I always forget that. The third one from the bottom, the appointment confirmation. What’s that?”

  My eyes scanned the page until they landed on the email Tina mentioned. I clicked on it, and the screen popped open the email.

  Karen had made an appointment for that Saturday, the day after she was stabbed, at two in the afternoon. An appointment with a law firm.

  “McKinney and Associates,” I read aloud. “Enchanted Enclave, Washington.”

  “Do you know who they are?” Tina asked.

  “No, I haven’t heard of them. Actually, I think I’ve seen a sign for their office, they’re in one of the fancy buildings on Main Street, but I don’t know what they do.”

  “Google them,” Tina suggested, and I did exactly that.

  “McKinney and Associates is a firm of experienced divorce, family law and personal injury attorneys who have been practicing in Washington State for over twenty-five years.” I read aloud. “Wow. I wonder if Karen was considering getting a divorce.”

  “Now there’s a reason to stab someone if I’ve ever heard one,” Tina replied.

  “No kidding,” I muttered.

  “Are there any other emails from the law firm?”

  I typed in the email address in the search bar. “No, nothing.”

  “Well, there’s a good lead to follow up on,” Tina said. “What associate was Karen seeing?”

  “Jean McKinney,” I replied. “I’m guessing she won’t know a lot, but we might as well go and speak with her.”

  Before Tina had a chance to reply, however, a noise from the front door reached my ears. I instinctively looked over to where Tina was sitting, even though I couldn’t see her.

  “Hear that?” I asked in a hushed whisper.

  “Yeah,” she replied, her voice equally quiet. I quickly closed the computer programs and shut the lid, not entirely sure what to do. We could always go back out into the hallway to see what was going on, but then if whoever this was came into the hallway, we had limited options for not getting caught.

  We could also just go out the window and into the backyard. This was my instinct, but at the same time, that meant we would never find out who was in this house. And frankly, a part of me suspected that if someone had just broken in, there was a reasonably good chance they were the person who had tried to murder Karen.

  Of course, there was a chance that whoever had come in was allowed. It might have been Kyle returning home, or possibly Karen’s parents arriving ahead of time. It might even have been a friendly neighbor who had been given a key checking in on things.

  Tina grabbed me and pulled me towards the en suite bathroom. It was a good idea; an intruder was probably less likely to go into the bathroom than anywhere else in the house.

  “Stupid idiot,” I heard the person mutter as he made his way into the bedroom. “The stuff’s got to be here somewhere.”

  Tina grabbed my arm gently as the intruder entered the bedroom. The two of us were standing in the middle of the bathroom, looking out into the bedroom as a man who looked to be in his late forties, with greying brown hair and a bit of a beer belly sticking out from his polo shirt and jeans looked furtively around.

  Eventually, his eyes settled on the desk and he rushed over there, doing a much sloppier job than I had when it came to looking through the documents. Luckily, he didn’t seem the least bit interested in the fact that there was a second chair at the desk. Instead of carefully having a look and putting everything back as he found it, the man simply tore through everything as fast as he could. He was obviously looking for something specific, and wasn’t finding it.

  Finally, he looked at the laptop. He looked around furtively, as though he was checking to make sure no one was watching him, then he unplugged the laptop and headed back out into the night.

  When I heard the front door close behind him, I waited a solid fifteen, maybe twenty seconds before I finally spoke.

  “Wow,” was all I managed. My legs felt like jelly and my heart was beating at a million miles a minute.

  “Yeah,” Tina replied. “He just… took that laptop.”

  “I wonder what he wanted with it.”

  “Do you know who he was?”

  I shook my head. “No. But then, if he wasn’t a coffee shop regular, I wouldn’t know him. I haven’t lived here for long enough to get to know a lot of people. For all I know it could have been Kyle.”

  “It wasn’t him,” Tina replied. “There were a few pictures of the family in the living room. Kyle is thinner, with black hair. I don’t know who that was, either.”

  “Ok, well, I suggest we get right on out of here in case one of the neighbors spotted this guy and decided to call the cops,” I said. “Besides, I’m pretty sure we had a good look at everything.”

  “Right,” Tina said.

  The two of us left via the back door and headed back home. My heart was still racing from the scene we’d just seen. Who was the man who had been rummaging through Karen and Kyle’s things? Was he the one who had stabbed her? The odds had to be pretty good.

  Chapter 13

  Twenty minutes later Tina and I were sitting in the living room, after having made it back home and fed Cleopawtra, who insisted that she’d been starving and that had it not been for my timely arrival she would have surely succumbed to a painful death.

  Now she was happily munching away at her food in the kitchen while Tina and I enjoyed a glass of wine waiting for the others to appear.

  “Why don’t you show me one of the spells you’ve learned?” Tina suggested. “Just a simple one. No pressure, obviously. If you don’t want to do it, then don’t.”

  “No, it’s a good idea, I need the practice,” I replied, pulling out my wand. “Saturn, god of plenty, make this lamp float with grace aplenty.”

  I pointed the wand at the floor lamp in the corner. It immediately began to hover about six inches off the ground, and as I waved my wand around the lamp followed. I made sure not to let it wander around too far; as it was still plugged in I figured things might end badly if the electrical cord got too taut. But after a moment I put it back down and dropped my wand, breaking the spell.

  “Good job,” Tina said with an approving nod. “That wasn’t too shabby at all.”

  “Thanks,” I said with a grin. “I still only know a handful of spells.”

  “Don’t apologize for it,” Tina replied. “No one should be expecting you to know more at this point. Yes, there’s going to be a learning p
eriod where you’re going to be catching up, and you’re going to be far behind everyone else in your family, but you’re also decades behind in terms of the time you’ve spent doing it. No one would expect you to be at an expert level right now. At least, nobody should be expecting you to be. Take your time to learn your skills properly without worrying about catching up. You’re running your own race, and everyone started before you. You might not beat them to the finish line, but you’ll get there eventually, and that’s the most important thing – that you get there. You just have to do it, you don’t have to do it on someone else’s schedule.”

  “Ok,” I said, feeling my confidence growing with every one of Tina’s words. She was right. I had to focus on learning at my own speed, and to stop trying to take shortcuts and to try to catch up to Kaillie. I was going to get there. It might just take a bit longer than I was hoping for. “Let me try another one. This one I’m not completely sure about; I only learned it the other day.”

  “Go for it,” Tina encouraged.

  “Oh the weather outside is frightful, but the fire is so delightful. Saturn you’re the god that makes things grow, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.”

  I waved my hand around while Tina burst out laughing. A light dusting of snow began falling into the living room, seemingly from nowhere. I lifted my face to the ceiling, letting the light snowflakes fall and land on it.

  “That spell is hilarious,” Tina said.

  “Well, I hope you know one to make the snow stop,” I replied. “Because while I can make it snow, I cannot stop it from snowing, and so in a few minutes it’s going to look like January in here instead of early May.”

  “That’s not a problem,” Tina replied, waving her wand around and muttering a spell herself. A moment later the snow disappeared, and Tina cast another quick spell to make the flakes that had landed dry up like they had never existed.

  A moment later the front door opened, and the other four piled in.

  “Ooh, wine,” Ellie said, making a beeline for the kitchen.

  “Don’t be rude, Ellie,” Tina chastised. “You’re a guest, you have to ask if you can have some.”

  I laughed. “Help yourself,” I said. “Glasses are in the second cupboard from the right.”

  Ellie pulled out her wand and muttered a spell, and a minute later four wine glasses flew down from the cupboard, landing in a perfect row on the kitchen counter, and she poured out one for everybody.

  “So did you guys find out anything good?” Ellie asked.

  “We have some potentially juicy information,” I replied. “We were also interrupted by an intruder, though.”

  “Were you really?” Sara asked as she grabbed a glass from the counter and sat next to Tina on the couch. “Who was it?”

  “We’re not sure,” I replied with a shrug. “He was maybe in his late forties, with greying brown hair, wearing a polo shirt.”

  “Oh, that sounds like Andrew,” Ellie said. “He seemed pretty shaken up by the time Leanne and I finished interviewing him. That’s a guy with something to hide.”

  “No wonder,” Kaillie replied. “I should never have let the two of you go together. I bet Leanne steamrolled him completely.”

  “That sounds like Ellie, too. Alright, spill, what did you two do to him?” Sara asked.

  “We didn’t do anything,” Ellie replied, crossing her arms. “We just asked him about Karen. It’s not like we beat him to a pulp or hexed his face to turn into a pineapple or anything like that.”

  “Alright, well then why don’t you tell us what you did ask him, and we can maybe figure out why he decided to make a beeline for Karen’s house after speaking with you two,” I said.

  “Honestly, I have no idea why he did that,” Leanne said. “We went to his place. I’ve known him for years, since he runs the rec center here. Basically everyone who grew up in Enchanted Enclave as a kid knows Andrew. So we knocked on his door. He was surprised to see us, but he invited us in.”

  “We jumped straight in when we got into the house, and we told him he had been seen arguing with Karen just a few days before she was stabbed. We told him that he had better tell us what they were arguing about before someone else found out about the argument and decided to tell Chief Jones,” Ellie said. “He wasn’t happy about that at all. He wanted to know who I was, and who had seen him arguing with Karen, but we refused to tell him. We said that we knew he was a good guy and would give him the benefit of the doubt if he told us what the argument was about.”

  “Then, he completely blew up on us,” Leanne continued. “He told us that there was no argument, that whoever had told us that was lying. He insisted that he and Karen were on good terms, and that there was nothing between them that would have meant a fight. He was so mad I was sure he was going to start throwing things, but in the end he just shouted at us to leave. We did, but I do think the man protests too much.”

  “Agreed,” Ellie said. “On our way out we did see a car in the driveway, a silver Prius. We had a look at the seats inside, but there wasn’t any blood or anything that might have indicated Karen was stabbed there.”

  “We should have thought to watch the house and follow him. Instead we went to the hospital to see if Karen had come back to town yet. We found out from one of the nurses that I went to school with that she should be coming back tomorrow morning, along with Kyle and the boys.”

  “That makes sense, they weren’t at their house, and there was no car there to indicate they were on the island,” I said. “I guess we’ll have to sneak a look at Kyle’s car tomorrow when he gets back.”

  “That’s very interesting that Andrew went straight to Karen’s house and stole her computer, though,” Leanne said thoughtfully. “I wonder what he was after.”

  “He was definitely looking for something,” Tina said. “He rummaged through all of her stuff. It sounds like he had a cursory glance at the living room, and then went straight for the bedroom. He went through the papers there really quickly, then grabbed the laptop and ran off.”

  “There were just credit card bills, bank statements, that sort of thing in the other papers that he left,” I added. “So yeah, I don’t know what he was looking for, but he must have guessed it was on the laptop.”

  “I’m surprised the cops haven’t come by and taken it away, actually,” Kaillie said thoughtfully. “You would think that with Karen having been stabbed they would have already gone through the house and taken anything that might be important.”

  “I bet that’s Chief Jones’ incompetence,” Leanne replied. “It sounds like just the sort of thing he would do.”

  “Anyway,” I interrupted, “before Andrew came and interrupted us, Tina and I did find something interesting on the laptop.”

  “Oh?” Sara asked.

  “Karen had an appointment with a lawyer here on Enchanted Enclave scheduled for the day after she was stabbed. Jean McKinney.”

  Leanne’s eyes widened. “She’s a divorce lawyer.”

  “Is that it?” I asked. “The website seemed to indicate she did a few other things as well.”

  “The firm, as a whole, deals with other things. There are, I think, three lawyers that work there. With a place this small, you don’t exactly need more than that. They run the gambit from personal injury to getting people’s speeding tickets reduced to criminal activity, if needed. But Jean McKinney herself almost only does divorce and family law cases.”

  “So you’d say it’s a pretty good bet that she was going to see about getting a divorce?” I asked, and Leanne nodded.

  “Yeah, Leanne is right,” Kaillie confirmed. “Divorce and custody situations are what Jean does. She’s basically the go-to in the entire San Juan Islands for anyone who’s looking to get a divorce.”

  “Well, we were right,” I said to Tina. “That certainly gives Kyle one heck of a motive if he wanted to get rid of his wife.”

  “What about Gary Vanderchuck?” I asked Kaillie and Sara. “Did you guys see him?”


  “We did,” Kaillie replied. “Gary takes his workouts very seriously. He was drinking a protein shake and eating beef jerky when he walked in, which is ridiculous since he wasn’t even doing weights. He just finished eating then jumped right onto the treadmill. He wasn’t pleased to see us. Sara and I each took one of the treadmills next to him. Of course, I’m pretty sure he thought Sara was a complete weirdo when she started ordering the machine around, telling it what speed to run at.”

  Tina snickered. “Now she knows how I felt my first time at a paranormal gym!”

  “Wait, your treadmills are different?” I asked, then shook my head. “No, not now. You were saying?”

  “Well, I finally figured out that you have to push buttons to make the treadmill work,” Sara said. “It was so quaint, I’ve never seen anything like it. And there’s no immersion capabilities either, so I think it would be quite boring to run on those for an hour or so.”

  “It definitely is,” Leanne confirmed.

  “Anyway, Gary initially seemed pretty pleased to have us running next to him, and was happy to strike up a conversation, until we asked him about Karen,” Kaillie said. “Then he tried to shut it down pretty quickly.”

  “Kaillie mentioned the fact that it was well known he was in the middle of a big argument with Karen,” Sara said. “He tried to deny it at first, and then we told him we had that information from multiple sources, and it was like he just gave up, you know? He turned off his treadmill and said he wasn’t going to talk about it there.”

  “So we went out into one of the studios that wasn’t being used,” Kaillie continued. “He asked us why we wanted to know about Karen, and I told him the truth. I said Leanne was the one that hit her, and that the very least she could do for Karen was to find the person who tried to kill her, and that Sara and I were helping her to do that.”

  “Gary looked at us for a while, as if he was trying to tell if Kaillie was lying to him, and eventually I guess he decided she was telling the truth, because he started talking. He told us that yes, it was true that he and Karen had disagreed about the way under-performing students should be treated, and that their discussions had gotten heated, but he said that overall, we had it all wrong,” Sara said.