by Raven Snow
On the bed, Eric and their dog Chester both groaned. Eric rolled over, turned his back to her, and pulled a pillow over his head, desperate for more sleep.
Rowen looked down at the face of her phone. It wasn’t a number she recognized, but she answered it anyway. It was bothering her too much to let her phone go unanswered at this hour. She would be unable to go back to sleep, wondering what kind of call she had missed. “Hello?” Rowen was already leaving the room as she spoke. There was no reason to force Eric and Chester to wake up with her.
“Hello?” echoed a women’s voice on the other end of the phone. “Is this Rowen Greensmith?”
“It is.” Rowen plucked her silk robe from the back of the bedroom door as she passed it.
“This is Miranda Allen,” said the woman’s voice. “I work for—”
“Gaby. Right. She told me you’d be in touch.”
“Right, well, that’s what I’m doing.” Miranda sounded impatient. It was like she didn’t want to be talking to Rowen at all, even though she had been the one to make the call. Had she called this early in the hopes that Rowen wouldn’t pick up the phone? It seemed like a distinct possibility. “What do you want?”
“I’d like to meet up, ideally.” Rowen rubbed the dry sleep from her eyes as she walked down the stairs.
“Why?” Miranda asked the question immediately, like she had been startled by Rowen’s suggestion. “We’re talking now. What can’t you ask over the phone that you could ask in person?”
Rowen wasn’t going to tell Miranda the truth, that she was a witch and that meeting people in person gave her a better opportunity to get a read on them. “Well, I need to head to work anyway and I always stop for coffee. The only coffee shop in town is next to the only hotel in town, so maybe we could kill two birds with one stone? My treat. You had a long night, yeah? Got into Lainswich late? You could probably use it.”
There was silence on the other end of the phone. Rowen could only assume that Miranda was considering her options. No doubt Gaby had told Miranda to humor Rowen, to do whatever it took to ensure she left her employer alone. Having coffee together was a fairly innocuous request. It wasn’t much of a walk for Miranda at any rate. “Sure,” she relented. “I guess that’s all right. What… What time should I meet you there?”
“Give me thirty minutes.” Rowen wasn’t going to miss this opportunity. She didn’t want Gaby waking up and deciding she needed Miranda more, pulling her away from their interview. Best to just throw on some clothes and get down there before the winds of fortune changed on her. “I don’t live far.”
“All right. I’ll see you there, I guess.” There was still plenty of reluctance in Miranda’s voice before she hung up the phone.
***
Rowen was making a habit of heading out the door with the bare minimum of effort put into her appearance. Eric always said he preferred her without makeup. That’s the way he saw her at home, he said. It was the way he saw her when they were intimate. It made sense, but Rowen still had her doubts as she checked her reflection in her car’s rearview mirror.
“I should at least put on some foundation,” Rowen muttered to herself, fingers tugging at bags under her eyes. “Maybe some mascara.” Oh well. There wasn’t anything to do for it now. Rowen took the time to pull her unruly auburn hair back into a ponytail, but that was it. She climbed out of her car and headed into the coffee shop.
There was only one other person sitting in the shop, a woman with dark brown hair. She already had a coffee sitting in front of her. There was a phone in her hand and her attention was on it. She didn’t even look up until Rowen said something.
“Miranda?” Rowen stopped at the table and put on a smile.
The woman looked up and put her phone away. “That’s me.” She matched Rowen’s smile with a forced, thin-lipped one of her own. Unlike Rowen, she had found the time to put on makeup. She was an average-looking woman with a high forehead and almond-shaped eyes spaced close together. “You’re Rowen, I take it.”
“Guilty as charged.” Rowen nodded to the cup of coffee. “You didn’t wait to take me up on my offer.”
“Like you said, I needed the energy boost.” Miranda raised the coffee cup in a tiny salute before taking a sip. “Don’t worry. I can afford my own coffee.”
“I don’t doubt it. Working for a woman like Gaby, she must pay you plenty.” Rowen could tell that Miranda was being mildly unfriendly on purpose. She clearly resented having to come out to the coffee shop. “A tall mocha latte, please.” Rowen placed her usual order. She paid for it with a swipe of a card and sat down across from Miranda to wait. “So, how do you like your job?”
Miranda had gone back to her phone while Rowen placed her order. She put it down again. “It pays the bills.”
“Is Gaby a good boss?”
Miranda raised a dark eyebrow. She took a sip of her coffee, regarding Rowen over the top of it as she drank. “Is that why you called me out here? To ask how I liked my job?”
“I’d like to get an idea of what kind of boss Gaby is.” Rowen took her usual pad of paper and pen from her purse. “I’m trying to get a clearer picture of Kyle, get a better understanding of what it was he did for a living. As far as I can tell, you’re the person best equipped to elucidate all that for me. At least, that was what Gaby seemed to be suggesting. The two of you did have the same job, right?”
Miranda’s rigid posture relaxed a little. Rowen’s questions weren’t completely out of left field. Perhaps she had felt like she was being interrogated about the murder itself before now. “We both work as Gaby’s assistants.” Miranda paused then. She winced. “We did work as her assistants. It’s so strange to think that he’s gone.” She shook her head at the thought and took another sip of coffee.
“Did you know him well?”
“Not really. I mean, we talked to one another quite a bit, but we rarely saw each other face to face.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ms. May—Gaby, that is, travels a lot. She has several assistants. We don’t work for her all the time. Most of us have other jobs. When we do work for her, we exchange notes through video calls.”
“So Kyle had a second job?” That was news to Rowen. No one had mentioned a second job to her. Granted, there was a good chance his parents wouldn’t know and Ben might not have cause to mention it to her if he did.
The question gave Miranda pause. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “He certainly worked for Gaby more than anyone else did. There were a couple other people who worked for her, but more often than not my video calls were with Kyle. He might have worked for her full time now that I think about it. I’m not sure how, not unless she was paying him a lot more than she pays me.”
“The pay isn’t great then?” Rowen didn’t have any shame in asking that question. Luckily, Miranda had no shame in answering it.
“It’s not exactly the gold standard.” Miranda looked past Rowen and at the door, like she was afraid Gaby might come through it and overhear her. “It’s work, though. It’s not something I do full time, just a little extra cash on the side. It helps.”
“You came all the way here though? Seems like you’re really going out of your way for her this time,” Rowen pointed out. She paused to thank the barista as her latte was sat down in front of her.
“I’m getting paid a lot more for this than I normally make. Maybe she wants to fill Kyle’s spot now that he’s gone.”
“Would you be up for that?”
Miranda shrugged. “Depends on the pay.” She took another sip of her coffee. “You didn’t call me out here to interview me for the position, did you?”
“No, sorry. I’m getting off topic.” Rowen sat up straighter in their booth and took a sip of her own latte. It burned her mouth, and she regretted it immediately. She tried to play cool anyway. “When did you last talk to Kyle?”
“Oh, I don’t know. What’s today?” Miranda reached down and touched her phone, lighting up the display.
“It was… Two or three days ago, maybe?”
“Really?” Rowen hadn’t expected that. “So you didn’t talk to him long before he died.”
“I guess not.”
“Did anything seem strange to you?”
“Strange?” Miranda repeated.
Rowen nodded. “Yeah, strange. Was there anything off about him when the two of you last exchanged words? Was that last exchange of yours a video call?”
“It was.” Miranda had gone tense again. She didn’t seem to like these sorts of questions despite the grief she’d given Rowen for wasting her time.
“And?” prompted Rowen.
“And he seemed stressed out.” Miranda raised her shoulders in a shrug. “That wasn’t unusual for him, though. He seemed stressed out a lot, if you ask me. I figured that was just part of his personality.”
“Did you ever ask him why he was stressed out?”
“It wasn’t any of my business.”
“Did you ask him, though?”
Another shrug. “I guess. Maybe I asked if anything was wrong once or twice. I was just making polite conversation, you know?”
“And what did he say?”
Miranda lapsed into silence. Her fingers tapped on the lip of her coffee cup while she thought. “He didn’t really say one specific thing was bothering him.”
Rowen read something more there. “Did he say something… indirectly?”
“Sort of? Maybe?” The tight-lipped frown on Miranda’s face deepened. “He asked what Ms. May typically had me do for her.”
“And what does she typically have you do for her?”
Miranda shrugged. “The usual, I guess. I take calls, deliver messages, run errands.”
“And that’s what you told him?”
“That’s what I told him,” Miranda confirmed with a nod. “Then he asked if she ever had me do anything else, anything more important.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t have any idea.” Miranda widened her eyes and raised her hands in a display of abject innocence in the matter. “I asked him what he meant, but I couldn’t get a straight answer out of him. I figured he meant Ms. May asking us to do something illegal.”
“Has she?”
Miranda was looking at the door again. Even Rowen glanced back to make sure they weren’t being watched. “Little things,” said Miranda. “I’m not going to discuss them, but… Normal stuff, you know?”
“Like what?” Rowen pressed despite Miranda’s assertion that she wouldn’t discuss the subject.
“I like my job fine and don’t want this showing up in the paper, thanks.”
“This won’t end up in the paper,” Rowen promised. Even as she said the words, she knew they probably didn’t have a whole lot of weight behind them. Miranda had no reason to believe her. “If you can’t tell me, you should at least go to the local authorities. Tell them what little you know before this all gets out of hand.”
“Whoa, no.” Miranda shook her head, laughing a little like Rowen had misunderstood. “Like I said, it’s little stuff. It’s not anything I plan on going to the police over. It’s…” Miranda trailed off. She cast a furtive looked about and shifted closer to the table, closer to Rowen. She lowered her voice. “She has me pick up her medications from her… private pharmacist sometimes. Other times I might handle a mix up with the police for her. I just make sure money gets exchanged correctly here and there, you know?”
Rowen tried her best to not let her surprise show on her face. So Gaby took drugs recreationally and had bribed the authorities in the past. For what, Rowen couldn’t imagine. She doubted Miranda would tell her if she asked. “And you’re okay with all that?”
“It’s never anything big,” Miranda assured her. “It’s little stuff, and she pays me well for it. If you mention this to anyone—”
“My lips are sealed.” Rowen had made a promise, and she intended to keep it. “Did you tell Kyle what you told me?”
“More or less. I’m not sure it’s what he wanted to hear. He kept asking more questions.”
“What about?”
“He was a little like you. He kept pressing for more and more.” Miranda rolled her eyes. “I was starting to think that maybe he was working for the cops. Maybe they’d caught Ms. May doing something… I don’t know. Bad. Something worse than the things she has me help her out with.”
“Do you know of anything she does that’s worse than the stuff she asks you to do?”
“No,” Miranda said quickly. “I’ve never seen her do anything like that or had her ask me to do anything I was super uncomfortable with. That’s what I told Kyle, but he kept pressing. That’s why I figured he was maybe working with the cops, recording the whole thing maybe.” She took another sip of coffee. “And that’s the last I heard from him before I heard the news that he was dead. I really don’t know any more than that.”
“Do you know if Kyle had a gambling problem?”
“Hmm?” Miranda cocked her head to one side. “I don’t know. Maybe. He seemed like the type, I guess.”
“How so?”
That got a chuckle from Miranda. “He just struck me as the type. We only met in person a couple of times. The first time we met, he was a real show off. He took me out for a night on the town. We went to a fancy restaurant and then to this really exclusive club. I kept telling him I couldn’t afford it, but he just flashed me a wad of cash and said he had it covered. He was suave. It was a good night.”
“Were the two of you…” Rowen trailed off, searching for a professional way to say sexual partners.
Miranda guessed at what Rowen was thinking before she found the words. “Oh, goodness no. He wasn’t my type. I let him take me out, but I didn’t go back to his hotel room or anything. I didn’t lead him on. I let him know from the beginning I wasn’t interested in anything like that. He insisted on us going out as coworkers. I think he still thought I would change my mind at the club, once I was drunk enough. I didn’t.” Another sip of coffee. “Anyway, the next time we met we went out for dinner again. He didn’t offer to pay, so we got separate checks. Only, Kyle’s card got declined. When the waiter came back and told him, he got real red. That’s when he turned to me and said I could pay. He’d paid for a way more expensive night out last time, so it was only fair. He was laughing about it and trying to make light of the situation. I paid, of course. I didn’t want to make a scene. It was awkward, though.”
“Sounds like it. Did he say anything afterward?”
“He paid some lip service to having to call his bank and figure out what was going on. Obviously, I went along with it. What else can you do in a situation like that but smile and nod, you know?”
Rowen put on a smile and nodded. “Thanks.” She stood, picking her coffee up with her as she did so. “You were a big help.”
“Was I?” Miranda didn’t look so sure about that. “If you say so, I guess.”
Rowen headed for the door. Despite what she had just said, she wasn’t sure she knew more now leaving than she had coming in. There was something to what Miranda had told her, though. Her instincts told her there was something there, she just wasn’t sure what yet.
Chapter Twelve
It wasn’t often that Rowen went to her aunts for help. Involving them in a case they weren’t already involved in was often a mistake. Aunt Nadine wasn’t so bad, but Lydia would blow the whole thing out of proportion. Granted, it was a pretty big deal. Even so, Lydia would be hungry for more and more details. She had a real appetite for drama.
Rowen needed their advice, though. She had yet to hear back from Ben and didn’t have anyone else to turn to at this point. She drove to Odds & Ends. It wasn’t too far from the Lainswich Inquirer and would just now be opening up for the day. Nadine, Lydia, and Uncle Norm all ran it together. Tiffany worked there when she was in town. Rowen hoped she was in today. She could use another Tarot reading.
There was a back entrance, but Rowen entered through the front. The little
bell over the door made a tinkling sound, and Aunt Lydia looked up from behind the counter. “Hey there. Is there anything we can—” The friendly smile on Lydia’s face widened. “Rowen! What a nice surprise!”
Lydia stepped around the counter and hurried across the floor to give her niece a hug. Lydia was a plump woman with waves upon waves of graying hair and an eclectic sense of fashion. Her long skirts swished around her as she flung herself into a hug. It wasn’t unlike her to greet Rowen like this. If she hadn’t seen her within the last twenty-four hours, it might as well have been months. Lydia greeted Rowen like she was coming home from a long war.
“Isn’t this a wonderful surprise!” Lydia released Rowen from her tight embrace and pushed her back to arm’s length. “You’re the second visitor we’ve had today!”
“Second?” Rowen looked around the store like maybe she had missed a familiar face upon entering. Of course, at this hour, the store was empty besides her.
“Peony is in the back with her mom.” Lydia motioned to the curtains separating the front of the store from the back. “She got here a few minutes ago with that friend of hers.”
“Tina?”
“That’s the one.”
Rowen headed for the curtains. The room for Tarot readings was beyond them. Beyond the Tarot room was the stock room. Rowen didn’t have to go that far. Aunt Nadine, Tina, and Peony were all seated at the table typically used for readings. The three of them looked up from the round table when she entered. “Rowen?” Peony said, making the name sound like a question like she had the potential to be some sort of impostor. “What are you doing here? Did something happen?”
Rowen shook her head, noting the concern in Peony’s voice. “I was just here to see if they could help us figure out what happened to Kyle. Why are you here?”
“The same reason,” said Peony. She hesitated then glanced to Tina.