Where There's a Witch

by Alt, Madelyn

  “Liss just got back.”

  Ooh. I hurried down the stairs. I had arrived at the store this morning in the nick of time after stopping in at Annie’s, only to find that Liss herself had been there and had left already for a quick trip to City Hall to fill out a form that would allow the store to be a vendor at the town’s Scarecrow Festival this fall. The note she left for me said that she expected to be back in an hour; it was now just after eleven. The line at City Hall must have been longer than she’d thought it would be.

  Minnie trailed me down the stairs, a black blur at my feet. She seemed to think that a trip down the stairs meant a foot race she needed to win, every single time. Most of the time, I let her.

  Evie appeared out of nowhere to scoop up an unsuspecting Minnie into a furry ball against her chest, which allowed me to win the race to Liss after all. As I passed the counter, I saw Tara sitting on a stool, blowing bubbles with her gum and texting fast and furious on her cell.

  I pushed through the purple velvet curtains to the back office. Liss was standing there in the muted light of the office, her back to me, but I knew instantly that there was something wrong.

  Something else wrong, that is.

  “What’s up?” I asked her. “City Hall certainly took their time, didn’t they?”

  Liss turned and sat down in the antique barrel-shaped desk chair with a sigh. “They turned me down,” she replied matter-of-factly . . . and yet the matter-of-factness of her tone did not hide from me her disquiet.

  “What?” The thought hadn’t even occurred to me. This was a small-town festival. They were always hungry to get vendors to participate. “Why on earth—?”

  “Limited slots . . . not the right kind of product . . . some opposition to the store in conservative quarters . . . there will be children at the festival . . . There were other reasons mentioned, but they were equally vague and meaningless.”

  My eyebrows had risen more and more with each statement. So had my indignation. “Just what do they think we sell here? Antique pornography? Do they expect us to man the booth as dominatrixes and force whips and fuzzy handcuffs on the children of Stony Mill?”

  “Oh, my dear, it’s not what they know we sell—the various antiques, the crystal decanters, the scented lotions, the chocolates. Nothing like that. It’s what they don’t know that worries them. Very offensive. At least I am.”

  “You?”

  She sighed, fiddling with the chain handle of the silk frame purse she still held in her lap. “Not Felicity Dow, businesswoman, so much as Felicity Dow, town witch. Despised universally for my religious practices and beliefs.” Her smile was a little sad, but a smile nonetheless as she straightened in the chair and briskly dusted off her slacks. “But no matter. These things happen for a reason, and it’s obvious to me that I have work to do here in this town. Just what that work is, I can’t be certain, but it will be revealed to me in time. Of that I have no doubt.”

  The Witch Factor. And that was it entirely. I felt my spirits sinking. “Oh, Liss. Oh, damn. I’m so sorry. I feel like this is my fault. It was my stupid sister who let the cat out of the bag.”

  Liss shook her head. “It would have happened some other way, if not for Melanie. The timing was the key. It was meant to happen precisely when it did. If there’s one thing I’m certain of in this universe, it’s that some things are meant to happen. It’s the other little things along the way that are decided by all of our decisions and actions.”

  Well, she might have found it in her heart to forgive Mel, but I wasn’t feeling anywhere near that magnanimous. Mostly because I knew Mel for what she really was. I knew what motivated her, and in this case I knew how shallow that motivation was, because that was the kind of existence my sister led. She was the ultimate small-town trophy wife, and she reveled in the quality of life and the social status that being an up-and-coming lawyer’s wife afforded her. For Mel, the universe was all about her. She was the star at its center, and she insisted that everyone else come into alignment with her. The problem with that was, she was constantly competing for status with other trophy wives in her tony subdivision, and that usually spelled trouble . . . of the gossipy kind.

  And the trouble this time was, a friend of mine was the unhappy target, with the potential for backlash to come at her in a big, possibly even dangerous way.

  Liss rose from the chair and began to put her things away in the closet where we kept coats and sundries. “Never mind all of this now. It will work itself out. How was your Sunday afternoon?”

  Tara poked her head in through the curtain. “Did you tell her, Maggie?”

  Liss raised a brow as she gazed back and forth between Tara and me. “I take it the festival was more eventful than you had expected.” But in what way? the continued lift of her brows seemed to be wondering.

  “A dead girl at the church!” Tara burst out with a force equal to that she used to come through the velvet curtains.

  Liss looked at me quickly. “Another body?”

  What she really meant was, Another murder? I could only nod.

  Evie joined us with Minnie draped over her shoulder, vulturelike, as Tara spilled the details. “The festival was pretty sucky when all was said and done, so Evie and I found Charlie and hung out while Maggie did her thing, and then the payloader thingie broke through the ground and nearly fell in this hole that was created by its weight, which made the excavation schedule pretty much shut down because they wanted to make sure it was safe, and then Evie and I went over to Maggie’s to wait for Charlie, and wow, the whole Ouija thing, which was pretty eventful in itself because I think Maggie drew something to her when she was out at the church, and Marcus showed up—did I mention that?—and then I couldn’t find my phone and we decided I must have dropped it out at the church, so we all went out there, Marcus included, and we all split up, and of course Charlie met us out there, but he got there first, so yeah, Charlie found the body, and she was kind of beat up around the head and he wouldn’t let us look, and then Maggie and Marcus showed up, and then the police, and so . . . yeah.”

  When Tara decides to spill, she really spills.

  “Well.” Liss looked back and forth between the three of us. “That was quite some night.”

  I nodded.

  “And what does our dear Tom say about all this?”

  The mention of Tom brought my conversation with Annie back full force. “I don’t know,” I said, my voice a bit more terse than I would have wanted it. “I haven’t heard from him yet.”

  “I see.” And I got the feeling that she really did, which was even more embarrassing. Me and my messed up love life. “Marcus was there?”

  I nodded again. It seemed to be all I was good for.

  “He was,” Evie answered for me, “the whole time. I don’t know what we would have done without him and Charlie.”

  “Pfft. We would have done exactly what we did with them,” Tara scoffed. “We would have taken care of business.”

  “All of that happened after you left here yesterday afternoon?”

  “All of it. After the cave-in, that is. Crazy, isn’t it?” I had found my voice, so I proceeded to explain to her with a little more clarity all that we had experienced and knew as fact. “The crew foreman looked down into the hole as much as he could,” I finished up. “He said it looked like there were crosses all over the walls and ceiling. Weird, huh?”

  “Hm. Very unusual indeed.”

  “The room or root cellar or whatever it is, wasn’t something that the pastor of the church knew about. He seemed as surprised as everyone else.”

  “Extraordinary.”

  “And then the spirit that followed Maggie home popped up through the Ouija,” Evie added excitedly. “He kind of scared me. Not as much as that garden, though. Still gives me the shivers.”

  “What are you, plant phobic?” Tara teased. “That’s a really weird thing to be afraid of, Eves.”

  Evie shrugged. “I can’t help it. It felt . . . off. Haun
ted. Lots of weirdness all wrapped up in a pretty package. I didn’t like it.”

  “Perhaps you were experiencing the same spirit that followed the lot of you to Maggie’s home,” Liss suggested.

  “Maybe.” But Evie didn’t sound convinced.

  The bell at the front of the store jingled. “Hidee ho, ladies! Anyone here?”

  Marian Tabor’s voice boomed through the store, loud enough to wake the dead—thank goodness we didn’t have any of those here. I went up front to greet her. “Hiya, Marian. How goes things at the library?”

  Marian Tabor was the town librarian and aunt to both Marcus and Tara. She was also one of my mother’s oldest and dearest friends, one of the few who did not balk from standing up to her . . . which made her a rarity in my book. Today her hair was teased to French-twist perfection, and her penchant for animal print was in full force: she wore a purple cheetah-print blouse that made her breasts appear even larger than usual . . . which was in truth rather startling and made it difficult to look directly at her for any length of time.

  “Oh, you know. Same old thing. Books in, books out. Ol’ Bertie and the Librarian have been going at it, but I just give them the business and they settle down. The important thing is that they don’t frighten the patrons with their antics.”

  Bertie and the Librarian. Bertie being Boiler Room Bertie, the library’s resident spirit, sometimes seen as a glowing blue orb in the library’s inner sanctums. Calling the second spirit the Librarian was Marian’s way of not honoring her long ago predecessor, whose selfish actions resulted in her own death and lovelorn Bertie’s earthbound existence. Karma . . . it was sometimes a harsh teacher. Sometimes a final one. In Marian’s estimation, the Librarian didn’t deserve to be remembered by name.

  “Marcus told me what happened last night.”

  I glanced up from my reverie in surprise. “He did?”

  “He did. He thought I might be interested from a historical perspective.” She tilted her head toward me. “He was right, you know. As the head chronicler for the county historical society, this is exactly the sort of thing I should be covering.”

  “You mean the murder?”

  “That, yes. But the cave-in, too. That hidden room. What a find. Who knows what might be in there. I’m going to go straight out to the Baptist church and have me a chat with the minister.”

  “Oh, I don’t know if today will be the best time for that.” I could just see Marian’s purple-spotted boobs leading the charge against the Stony Mill PD. I don’t think even Tom could stand up to that. Actually, that could be entertaining . . .

  “I’m not going to get in the way . . . but I’m not going to let them ruin the find while they process the scene for that poor young woman’s death, either. They’re just going to have to do what they can to keep it from coming to harm,” she said as the rest of the girls streamed out from the back office.

  “Hi, Aunt Marian,” Tara said. I saw the lift of her eyebrows at Marian’s outfit, but honestly, Tara had a few doozies in her wardrobe, too. Jump boots and leprechaun green tights, anyone? I rest my case.

  “Marian! How lovely to see you,” Liss said. “Have some tea? Tara, why don’t you get your aunt a cup of whatever she wants.”

  Evie just waved shyly with a pretty smile.

  “No tea for me, thanks. I just polished off a jumbo coffee and don’t want to float out of here before I show you my goodies. Oh, and I brought your paper in for you. The boy just delivered it,” Marian said, taking it from where she’d looped it through the handles of her canvas tote bag—a lovely, tasteful, imitation giraffe. She slid the newspaper across the scarred but polished wooden countertop.

  “A newspaper, today? It’s not Tuesday.” Our so-called daily paper was printed daily, per its publishing schedule . . . all except for Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. The owner’s idea of a joke. A little lame perhaps, but hey, we’re a small town. We have limited material to work with.

  “It’s a special early edition, according to the headlines. And somewhere here in this mess,” Marian said, digging deep within her roomy carryall, “is a tidbit of information I came across the other day while I was cataloguing some vintage books and files that were part of an estate that was deeded to the historical museum. I thought Liss would find it particularly interesting. Ah. Here it is. I photocopied it for you.”

  Minnie leaped down from Evie’s shoulders and walked over to the folded newspaper, pawing at it as a test, then attacking it with great abandon. While Liss began to read the photocopy Marian had brought for her, I scooted the newspaper over to Tara before Minnie could either shred it or make a bed out of it . . . both of which had been known to happen.

  “Fascinating,” Liss murmured, pursing her lips thoughtfully.

  “What is it?” Evie asked, peeking over Liss’s shoulder.

  “It’s a clipping I found saved between the leaves of an old diary,” Marian told the rest of us, “about a devastating fire that happened here in the county over a hundred years ago.”

  “If this is true,” Liss said, the intrigue in her tone readily apparent, “then the property my home now sits on once housed a kind of spiritual commune back in the 1800s. A spiritual center of great renown for its time. But which came first, the spiritualists or the energy? Did the spiritualists raise the energy that I feel there now, or were they drawn to the area by preexisting conditions that are a natural part of the land’s makeup? That, my dears, is the question.” She shook her head and looked up at us, her hand flat on the photocopy. “Fascinating, just fascinating.”

  “This is pretty fascinating, too,” Tara said. Except the flatness in her voice sent my wariness levels soaring. Tara had spread out the newspaper on the counter so that the front page was now readable.

  “What is it?”

  “Oh, just an article about the murder of that woman last night. Pretty fast work, if you ask me.”

  “Why’s it so interesting?” Evie asked. “We were all there last night. We know what we found.”

  “It’s not so much the murder as the other little details they put in there.”

  Chapter 10

  We all crowded around the paper. Front and center on the page was a lurid photo of the crime scene with its yellow DO NOT CROSS tape and red flags of evidence markers. The photo was taken in daylight, so they must have gone out as soon as the sun came up this morning. Very industrious of them.

  U-L-C . . .

  The memory of the Ouija spirit rose fresh and unbidden in my mind.

  “They shouldn’t have put that picture out there for just anyone to see,” Evie said, grimacing. “It’s just not right.”

  “I don’t think the press—even the small-town variety—have any understanding of callousness, you know,” Marian said. “It’s regrettable, but they seem to think their quest for readers justifies their sensationalizing the facts.”

  Sensationalizing. That was a good word, I decided as I read the article. The facts presented about the crime itself seemed to be fairly straightforward. It was the additional information they had dug up that was questionable.

  “Did anyone here talk to anyone associated with the newspaper?” I asked. Everyone present shook their heads in the negative. “Hm. I’m sure Marcus didn’t, either. Which leads me to wonder where they got their information.”

  “There was any number of people there last night that could’ve spilled the beans.”

  “Yes, but how many of them knew that Marcus is a knife maker?” I asked.

  “It says that in there?” Evie asked, her eyes widening with sudden nervousness.

  “That and a whole lot of other things.”

  The “other things” included the fact that one Charles Howell, an employee of the Furlow Construction Company, which had been hired by the church for its recent renovation plans, had discovered the body, along with me (Maggie O’Neill, an employee of downtown area gift shop Enchantments, it read), Marcus (described as a part-time musician a
nd independent knife maker), two female minors who would not be named in order to protect their identity, and Mrs. Letty Clark, mother-in-law to the minister of the church. Was I the only one who thought the inclusion of our places of employment ventured a little too far into our privacy? Also included was the fact that I had witnessed Veronica Maddox there with Tyler T. Bennett of the Little Turtle Trailer Court out on the State Road. Mr. Bennett was currently being questioned by authorities, the article stated; more information would be forthcoming, but it did appear that an arrest was possible.

  I couldn’t say that I was happy to have my witness statement exposed to the world at large. It seemed an awful lot of information to let out in an open murder investigation, and it surprised me. I wondered if Tom or Chief Boggs had vetted the flow of information to the reporter. Somehow, I didn’t think so.

  The rest of the article was dedicated to a thrown-together recap of the victim’s life. A poor life, raised by a single mother. Where her father was, who knew? No one they interviewed. A friend, a former teacher, and her mother chimed in about poor Ronnie, each with their own take on the girl’s psyche. The one characteristic each person agreed on was ambition and a desire to have it all. Ronnie’s mother told the reporter that “Ronnie was always a little bit wild. She was a good girl, though. She knew right from wrong. She just had a streak of the honeybee in her, always buzzin’ from this ’un to that ’un. Stirring things up a little, sure. But she was fixin’ herself up right good, finding a path with God and doin’ her best to straighten herself out. This didn’t have to happen. She was just a poor girl trying to make good in the world.”

  “The poor woman,” Liss murmured.

  Marian agreed. “I know Harriet Maddox from the library. She comes in regularly to pick up the newly arrived romance novels. A simple woman with a quiet life. I feel bad for her. Ronnie was her only child.”

  A mother should never lose her child, at any age, for any reason. The thought to me was unthinkable, and I didn’t even have kids. And yet it happened every day, all over the world. To have them taken away at the hands of another, though, without rhyme or reason? That had to be the ultimate in parental heartache.