by Sam Short
A Water Witch Cozy Mystery Boxed-set
Books One, Two, Three and Four
Sam Short
www.samshortauthor.com
Copyright © 2017 by Sam Short
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Created with Vellum
For Louise. The best daughter a father could wish for.
Contents
Under Lock And Key
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Four And Twenty Blackbirds
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
An Eye For An Eye
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
A Meeting Of Minds
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
About the Author
Copyright © 2017 by Sam Short
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Created with Vellum
For Katie.
My love. My life. My all.
Chapter One
"I'll stick this onion so far up your backside, that your breath will smell like a Frenchman's!"
Sacré Bleu! That's not what I expected to hear just as I was about to take a big gulp of wine — or a little sip in my case — naturally. It's lucky that I hadn't managed to get any wine in my mouth — it would have been spluttered all over my clothes, and I knew from bitter experience that elderberry wine does not come out of a white summer dress.
The berries had been picked under a full moon, and the glass which contained the crimson liquid brushed my lips enticingly as the woman’s voice echoed around the clearing. I took a last sniff of the fruity aromas and reluctantly placed the glass next to a pot of herbs on the flat roof of my boat.
“I’d better go and have a look,” I said to Rosie, who was pacing on the roof behind me, nagging me for her evening meal. “It sounds like somebody’s got a bee in their bonnet!”
It's sometimes lonely on a boat, and I unashamedly used Rosie as a surrogate person to talk to. Anyway, I wasn't one of those people who thought speaking to animals was crazy. In fact, some of my most memorable conservations had been with Rosie. One sided as they were.
The cat gave me a look that I interpreted as a final demand, and mewled pleadingly, her black tail swinging in annoyance. "It's not time yet," I said. "Catch a rat if you're that hungry, I'm sure there are plenty along the canal bank."
Rosie looked at me with the disdain I deserved. She would chase rats off the boat, but kill them she would not — and eat them? No chance. I put it down to her being a pacifist, but my friends insisted she was just bone idle and a fussy eater. Maybe it was a mix of both. Either way, my boat was free of vermin, and I was never treated to the macabre gift-giving habits of other people’s cats.
I clambered off the roof and stood on the bow deck of the Water Witch as the shouting female launched her next verbal barrage, this time a little less xenophobic. Or was it racist? I'd not spoken to Granny for sixteen weeks, so my knowledge of politically correct buzzwords was meagre to say the least. She'd soon jog my memory when I got around to visiting her. "You're an awful man, Sam!" the woman shouted. "A greedy man who should know better! You grew up here in Wickford, how could you do this to us?”
I deduced that the shouting was coming from the shared allotment gardens, which were at the top of one of the three footpaths that led up the hill from my secluded mooring. The woman’s threat of using an onion as a highly intrusive weapon strengthened that theory.
The female voice wasn't recognisable, but I guessed who the person she was shouting at was — Sam Hedgewick, local businessman, and owner of the football pitch sized piece of land that was the allotments.
The shouting continued as I stepped ashore onto the strip of stonework which separated my boat from the grass, and skirted the mooring, reminding myself that I’d have to thank whoever it was from the hotel who’d mowed the grass for me. I’d been away for four months, taking my floating witchcraft shop on its first business trip along the canals and rivers of England, and it was nice to come home to freshly cut grass.
The Poacher’s Pocket Hotel, hidden by trees on the hill above me, owned the mooring spot I leased, and I could access the hotel’s beer garden using the second of the three footpaths. The final path gave me access to the town of Wickford which was a short walk away, and emerged on Bridge Street, near the Firkin Gherkin greengrocers.
The hotel had once offered canal trips, and the two picnic benches the customers had used while waiting for the boat, were still there, a few feet from the water's edge. The potted plants I'd left to fend for themselves still looked healthy, and the water and electricity supplies, housed in a green metal box, were the cherry on top of the cake. There'd be no more worrying about the boat's batteries going flat, or having to cruise a few miles to fill up my water tank — until I took my shop on its next trip at least. It was good to be home.
I'd been strangely lucky to have been offered the lease. When the hotel stopped offering boat trips, w
ealthy people had queued up to buy the unique mooring, but after a visit from my grandmother the hotel owners had offered me the chance to lease it — for a surprisingly affordable monthly fee.
I was convinced that magic had been involved, despite my grandmother's vehement denial. She vehemently denied everything she was accused of though, including the infamous incident of Farmer Bill's whole dairy herd working out how to leap a four-foot fence. It had coincidentally occurred just two days after he'd publicly spurned my grandmother's completely inappropriate sexual advances, and Granny had been seething with rage and embarrassment.
It was only when the cows had finished causing havoc in the town and reached my grandmother's cottage, churning up her lawn, that the herd had decided their field was a better option after all. The police who had escorted the animals home had never worked out why the cows had suddenly turned around and headed back to their field, just as Granny hurled a tirade of abuse at them. My grandmother had tried to blame the whole incident on a low-pressure weather front coming in from the east, but my sister was adamant she'd seen Granny brewing a potion that involved milk and an energy drink.
Impressed at how far away the shouting woman could make her voice heard, I climbed the steep hundred-metre-long footpath. The gate at the top of the hill which led into the shared gardens was open, and a group of gardening enthusiasts crowded around Sam Hedgewick and his angry adversary.
I paused for a moment before stepping through the gateway. Was I being nosy? No, I decided, I was being naturally inquisitive — a quality that any good witch needed — according to my mum.
Anyway, I’d recognised the shouting woman as Hilda Cox, a normally mild mannered woman, and certainly not the sort of person who routinely made vegetable related threats of violence. Something must have really made her angry, and I absolutely needed to know what. How could that possibly have been construed as nosiness?
I weaved a route between the beds of vegetables and bamboo frames which bean plants covered with bright red flowers, and joined the group of spectators. I recognised a lot of them, and some of their eyes lit up when they saw I was back in town. Now was not the time to catch up with them, though — now was the time to watch a woman clutching an onion twice the size of the ones you find in supermarkets, giving a sullen faced Sam Hedegwick a dressing down.
"How could you, Sam?" yelled Hilda. "You know most of us will be lost without our allotments. We can't all afford homes with big gardens." She looked Sam up and down. "Like some people."
"Hilda," said Sam, his business suit looking as out of place amongst the vegetable patches as a cow did in a horse race. And I'd seen that. Believe me. With a grandmother like mine, I'd seen a lot. "I don't want to sell it, but I have to. You'll all get your rent back for the remainder of the year, you don't need to worry about that, but the allotments are being sold next week. That's the end of the matter."
"It's not my rent that worries me," Bill Winters, a ruddy faced man with a full head of snow white hair, chimed in. "It's the fact that I was probably going to win the largest marrow contest this year. How can you do this to me? To us? You know I've been trying to win that competition for ten years, and this year I've got it right. It's going to be a monster marrow, Sam! A monster!"
Sam looked down at his shoes and shook his head. "I'm sorry, Bill. Really, I am. There's nothing I can do. The contracts are being signed next week, and then it's up to the developers to decide how quickly they start building."
"So, my beautiful cabbages will be buried beneath posh folk's fancy apartment buildings?" said another man, much to the agreement of the grumbling crowd.
"Can you dig them up before I sell?" asked Sam, looking somewhat flustered.
"They're not ready!" spat the man. He lowered his head, and his body slumped, his voice faltering as he spoke again, "my cabbages aren't ready. They're just not ready."
A woman placed her hand on his back. "There, there, Timothy. Don't upset yourself. You know what the doctor said, no stress, and no whiskey. Oh, and no fried bacon. I must remember that one." She turned her attention to Sam. "See what you've done to him? My husband is a proud man, who grows the best cabbages in this town —”
"Easy now, Marjorie," interrupted a tall elderly man with a stern face, leaning on a gardening fork which he twisted into the soil. "They're good cabbages, yes, but the best? I'm not so sure."
"See what you've done, Sam?" said Marjorie. "You've got us bickering amongst ourselves now!"
"I'm sorry all right!" said Sam. "I can't help you. Any of you. I'm sorry."
Several people spoke at once, and Sam's panicked face flitted between them. "What about our sheds? They cost money,” said one. "And my tools. Where will I store them? I live in a tiny apartment!" pleaded another.
Sam dropped his head and turned his back to the crowd. "Sorry folks," he mumbled, and began making his way across the allotment towards the small carpark. "Really, I'm sorry."
He cut a sad figure as he meandered along the muddy paths, and I couldn't help feeling sorry for him.
"Watch your back, Sam Hedgewick!" yelled Hilda, brandishing the onion above her head like a gladiatorial weapon, her face beetroot red. "You've made a lot of people angry!"
Sam raised a hand in surrender and continued his lonely walk.
Fingers tightened on my wrist, and I turned to see the smiling face of Veronica Potter. Her make-up was as garishly applied as always, and I struggled to keep a smile off my face as I remembered my mother once referring to her as a pantomime dame. She had certainly put an awful lot of effort into getting prepared for a visit to an allotment. "It's good to see you back, Penelope!" she gushed. "I thought I heard a boat in the distance, and I said to Marjorie, 'Penelope's sister told me that she's due home this week. I wonder if it's her!'"
"It's great to be back, Veronica, but I wasn't expecting all this as I settled in for my first evening at home. I’ve only been back for an hour.”
Veronica moved her head closer to mine. "Ignore it," she whispered. "They'll get over it. They can take up bowling or something when the allotment goes. It's only a hobby after all. It's not like they can't buy veg in the supermarket."
The other people had begun traipsing back to their plots of land since Sam had left, and I waved and said hello to the ones who greeted me.
"Why is he selling it?" I said, freeing my wrist from Veronica's surprisingly strong grasp.
"He didn't say. He just came here and broke the news." She moved her face even closer to mine. "He's a gambling man, and not a very good one, he's probably got himself in debt. Between me and you, Penelope. I don't really care. I only come here to flirt with the men. It's just a shame that most of them are at the age where they feel the cold more. It's summer, and I was hoping to at least see a few torsos."
I hid the shudder that traversed my whole body. "What about Ron? Aren't you and him still an item?"
"It's complicated, Penelope. The nursing home have a new rule in place stopping us from visiting each other's rooms after nine at night. We can get around it of course, but it's not nice to be sneaking around at my age, and then of course we’re forced keep the noise down. And where's the fun in that?"
I wished I'd learnt a spell that would stop Veronica speaking, or at least one that would wash away the images that Veronica had conjured up in the darkest recesses of my mind. "It must be hard," I murmured, thinking of an excuse to get away from there. Quickly.
"Yes, well. It's not easy being old, dear. You'll see one day."
That wasn't totally true, but of course Veronica didn't know that. Not many people knew that real witches existed at all, and of those people, only a select handful knew about the existence of the haven. A place I was never going to get to if I believed my mother. Not that it bothered me too much at the age of twenty-three. I had plenty of time left to put in the work needed to ascend.
"Didn't Ron want to come to the allotment?" I asked. "He's usually here tending the nursing home's patch. He kept me well supplied
with green beans last year."
The nursing home was not a run of the mill retirement home. It was for people who had been financially successful in life, and the allotment patch kept the kitchens supplied with the freshest of produce for the chefs to prepare outlandishly delicious meals with. The home encouraged its residents to get out into the open air and do a little gardening from time to time, and with the home being less than half a mile from the allotments, it was a relatively easy walk for the fitter of residents, and a minibus ferried the less mobile back and forth.
Last year had seen a record crop of green beans, and thanks to the kindness of the allotment owners, I'd practically lived off them — coated with a little melted butter and sprinkled with cumin seeds. It was handy having the allotment so close to my mooring, and to my shame, as well as accepting free offerings from people, I'd once or twice sneaked in under the cover of darkness and dug myself a potato to bake in the oven. To even out the universe and absolve myself from guilt, I'd cast a gentle fertility spell over the allotments which had been too late in the year to benefit last year's produce, but was certainly responsible for the size of Bill's marrows this year.