Curses & Cupcakes (A Stella Storm Cozy Witch Mystery Book 1)

by Amy Casey

  I knew that he’d bought a load of the Valerian from Collette.

  I knew that Krissy had died because she’d been poisoned with a lethal dose of that concoction—spiked with Hemlock for the killer blow.

  I also knew that Pedro had only recently shown up in this town under a new name; under an alias. A journalist undercover for some paranormal magazine. Those magazines no doubt desperate for some kind of story, some kind of breakthrough.

  Everything added up. Everything clicked into place. Everything made sense.

  And yet there were still things that just inherently didn’t make sense about this whole case.

  I took a deep breath. At least I knew there was something to this story. At least I knew there was something to this line of enquiry.

  “Might as well go for it,” I said, realising I’d said something similar to myself just moments earlier.

  I muttered the mantra as I crossed the road, approaching Pedro’s house. I noticed there were no lights on as I got closer. Just a dim orange glow that looked like it was coming from the upstairs front bedroom.

  And then, as I felt the weightlessness beginning to kick into gear, right in time, I noticed something else.

  The door to Pedro’s house was open. Not just slightly ajar, but open.

  And I’d been here for a while. I’d been here long enough to have noticed someone going in. But hell, I’d been here long enough that I should’ve noticed that the door was open already.

  I felt the weightlessness kicking in, but not as strong as it perhaps had done in the past because I was losing my focus.

  I looked at that door and for some reason, I felt something pulling me over towards it rather than merely floating through the wall. Like there was something behind it I needed to see.

  I felt myself being torn in two directions; felt two opposing forces tugging me either way. Because I suspected Pedro. Of course I suspected him.

  But on the other hand, I couldn’t deny just the genuine, unfiltered sense of curiosity I felt. Because it wasn’t normal for a door to be wide open like that. Not at this time of night. Not in Goosridge.

  And especially not after the murder of Krissy Palmer that had occurred so frequently.

  There was something amiss in this town. And it didn’t feel like this was the end of it.

  I walked slowly over towards Pedro’s door. My invisibility still hadn’t been activated. I was too focused on what was ahead of me to even consider that right now.

  When I reached the door, I saw something.

  Footsteps.

  Muddy footsteps.

  I narrowed my eyes as I stared down at them. If there was one thing I knew about Pedro, it was that he was a pretty neat guy for a biker. He seemed to take his appearance seriously, which meant that he surely took the appearance of his home seriously, too. I’d never known a well-groomed guy to live in a pig sty of a place.

  So this. This seemed… uncharacteristic of the Pedro I knew—even if I didn’t know him all that well.

  Unless he was scared about something.

  No. The footsteps. They were going into the house. Which meant that whoever they belonged to had been trying to get inside Pedro’s.

  And the size of them. They looked… well. I’d seen the kind of shoes Pedro wore, and these definitely seemed too small for him. Not extravagantly so, but a little.

  My heart pounded. I knew something was wrong here. And I knew that simply by going into this house, I was getting myself into some kind of problem-territory. Some kind of danger.

  But hell. I’d been getting myself into danger for a long, long time. Wasn’t ready to stop any of that now.

  I pushed the door slightly more ajar, just gently.

  But there was something there. Something stopping it.

  I tried to push harder. But the more I pushed, the more I realised that whatever was there was… heavy. Very heavy. Why would Pedro have something heavy across his door? What would he be trying to stop getting inside?

  I pushed harder. Tried to get myself around the door, between the crack so I could just see inside.

  “Pedro?” I called, no regard for my silence now. Because this wasn’t right. This went way beyond my amateur sleuthing. This was real life.

  “Pedro?” I called once more, pushing harder against the door, trying to get myself inside. If I could just push through. If I could just see…

  When I got my head between the crack of the door, I realised I was being stupid. I had my weightlessness. I was trying too hard.

  I took a few deep breaths, restored my sense of weightlessness so I was back in tune with it, fully.

  Then I floated my way in through the door, inside Pedro’s house.

  When I looked down at what was blocking the door, I was surprised to see that it was nothing more than a large, heavy dumbbell. A dumbbell that was wedged against the door, stopping it opening all the way.

  I looked around. Noticed the phone was dangling off the hook.

  My heart pounded harder. Something was wrong. Very wrong.

  I looked up the stairs. Saw that dim orange glow. And as I looked up at it, I knew I needed to go up there. I knew I needed to see what it was.

  I walked up the stairs slowly. Felt the steps creaking underfoot. Every now and then, I swore I felt a presence watching me. Like eyes were looking at me.

  But I kept steady. Kept on going.

  I reached the top step. Turned to look at the room where the orange glow was coming from. And as I looked down the corridor, down towards the room, I remembered something then. Something Pedro had told me about that stupid “ritual” or whatever he’d called it.

  “Krissy Palmer was the first edge of the square…”

  And when I walked down the corridor, down towards the orange glow, I couldn’t help replaying his words in my mind.

  “More people will die…”

  I held my breath, heart racing, as I pushed open the door.

  When I saw what was lying there—who—was lying there, everything I thought I knew about this case crumbled apart.

  Pedro was dead.

  And his body was in the same condition as Krissy’s had been in.

  Little stab marks all over it.

  I felt my stomach tighten. Felt an overwhelming nausea come over me. I had an urge to get out of here. An urge to run—as far away as I could.

  But before I could react, before I could even make my next step, something else happened.

  Every light in the house came on.

  And as I stood there, exposed, I heard voices downstairs.

  Someone was here.

  Chapter 23

  Detective Inspector Steve Burke knew something was wrong the second he stepped inside the house that Daryl was renting out.

  Okay. He probably knew something was wrong because he’d got a phone call from a neighbour saying something was wrong. But still. Don’t play down his intuition. His spidey senses were tingling. That always counted for something, right?

  The second he stepped inside, he saw the dumbbell lying in front of the door. He saw the phone dangling off the hook. Weird. It looked like there’d been some kind of struggle in here; some kind of race to get to the phone. But then the call about something happening at this place—someone snooping around—it hadn’t actually come from here. It was one of the neighbours who had made the call.

  So what had happened here?

  What had actually happened?

  He walked over to the staircase. Stood at the bottom of the steps. And as he stood there, he got that strange, tingling feeling in his body. A sense that there was somebody up there, and that he wasn’t alone in this house.

  But it was a strange kind of “strange feeling.” The kind that made the hairs stand on the back of his neck. Like there were forces unfolding in this house that were beyond his understanding.

  Of course, he thought all mysticism was a load of old rubbish, so he knew already those thoughts and suspicions were unfounded.

 
“Daryl?” he called.

  His voice echoed up the stairs. The silence that found him in response was cold and uninviting. So much so that he wanted to make more noise through whatever means necessary to just fill it.

  So he coughed. Cleared his throat, shuffled about a bit. “Daryl? You okay up there? We had a report that there was some kind of event here. Some kind of…”

  He stopped talking, realising right away how ridiculous it was that he was talking to nobody at all. He looked over his shoulder, over at the door. Nobody there. And that loneliness, it hit him. It hit him hard. Because it wasn’t just the loneliness of being a small town cop. The loneliness that accompanied budget cuts, a lack of staff, and an overall lack of quality policing, all because the most interesting thing this town had to offer was usually a little vandalism, something like that.

  But there was loneliness in his life, too. His personal life. A gap, which he still wasn’t sure how to fill.

  He found his thoughts wandering and somehow, for some reason, hiding in there was Stella.

  He shook his head. Took a sharp, deep breath in right away. No chance. Besides, you shouldn’t be thinking about your personal problems on the job. Especially not the most interesting bloody case you’ve ever had to deal with.

  So he steadied his ground. Regained his composure.

  And then he started to ascend the staircase.

  Every step he took, the knot in his stomach—which was already pretty knotty—tightened further. He knew nerves weren’t good for his acid reflux. He’d always had a case of it that was triggered by stress, and he was a guy who got stressed out when he couldn’t park his car exactly in front of his house at night, so this was on a whole different level completely.

  “Just keep your cool,” Steve muttered. “Just keep your crap together.”

  He got further and further up the steps.

  Then he stopped.

  Movement.

  Movement, right ahead of him.

  “Argh!”

  His little yelp of a scream was embarrassing even though there was nobody else here. But he swore he’d seen something moving; something scuttling along at the top of the stairs.

  He’d always hated rodents. Always had a fear of them. But then, why would there be a rodent in this house? Daryl seemed like a relatively tidy guy. Not the kind who’d keep a rat lying around.

  Unless that’s exactly the kind of guy Daryl was. Maybe he thought it would be funny, somehow. Perhaps he thought he’d just give the police officers a scare. After all, he didn’t know Daryl as well as the other townspeople. Nobody did, really.

  He was losing himself in torrid images of monster rats creeping up on him when he saw the body in the corner of his eye.

  He froze when he saw it. A sickening tension gripped hold of him. Because although this wasn’t the first body he’d come across in the last couple of days, this was the first one that he’d been the first to discover.

  He walked over towards it, being sure to keep an eye out for that dastardly rat in the process.

  When he reached it, he felt his stomach sink.

  Daryl was dead.

  And the way he had been killed… it was just like Krissy.

  He felt his heart picking up in pace as he stared down at the body. All the jobs he’d have to do flooded into his mind—calling in the CSI, forensics, all the paperwork, the extra briefings. And it was dizzying, truly. At least it meant there’d be some help now anyway from the nearest city police. Although he’d heard what they could be like, too—heavy-handed to say the least. They didn’t understand the way small communities worked. They didn’t understand just how hard to repair those bonds could be once they were broken.

  He was about to turn around when he saw it.

  His first instinct was to jump straight to a suspect. Because what he had seen filled his mind with a suspect—that was for sure.

  But no.

  It couldn’t be the case.

  He had to take it easy. He couldn’t be rash.

  He crouched down. Looked at it closely.

  And as much as he didn’t want to jump to conclusions, as much as he wanted to thoroughly investigate before he speculated, there was nothing he could do. Not now he had seen it, right up close.

  There was a silver bracelet on the floor. A silver bracelet encrusted with sparkling diamonds.

  A silver bracelet he’d seen Stella Storm wearing every single day he’d seen her in their many years of knowing one another.

  Chapter 24

  If there was anywhere I’d least like to be right now, it was working front of house at Witchy Delights and trying to pretend like I didn’t know that Daryl—or Pedro, as he called himself—was dead.

  Because as far as I was aware, I was the only person who knew.

  Or at least, there was one other person. The perpetrator. They knew too, whoever they were.

  And thinking about it, the police probably knew now, too. It was all just a waiting game. The big countdown for the reveal to come out.

  And when it did, the town of Goosridge was going to be rocked forever; there was no doubt about that.

  But right now I had coffee to serve, and two annoying friends beside me to serve it with.

  “I just don’t think they nailed the landing,” Annabelle said.

  Mary tutted and shook her head. “Nailed the landing? Annabelle, JJ Abrams is a genius. He knew exactly what he was doing with Lost. Right from the very start.”

  “Rubbish,” Annabelle said, as she cleaned out one of the coffee machines that had been leaving a rather unpleasant froth on customers’ drinks recently. “You’re telling me he totally intended to wrap it up how he wrapped it up?”

  “One hundred per cent,” Mary said.

  “Then you’re a bigger fool than I thought. I mean, how could he have possibly—”

  “Do you mind not chatting about Lost?” I snapped. “I mean, surely there’s more important things to talk about right now than Lost?”

  Mary looked at Annabelle, who raised her eyebrows in return. “Wow. Something’s got into you. Another late night?”

  “Watch it, Annabelle,” I said. “Important to remember you’re still only on a temp contract.”

  Annabelle’s face dropped. “Is that you threatening me with the sack? Is that actually what just happened right then? All because I was questioning the long-term artistic integrity of a US serial?”

  “You can interpret it however you want. I just… Just get on with what you’re supposed to be doing, okay?”

  I served a customer. There was a quiet atmosphere in the cafe. It was only pretty early, in truth, so it was never all that busy around this time. Outside, it seemed sunny. Pleasant. The exact opposite to how it really was, and how I felt inside.

  Because there was a dark cloud over this town. Make no mistake about it. No number of conversations about Lost could cover that up. Nor could an infinite number of Millionaire Lattes.

  Although to be fair, they could do a fair job of covering things up for a few delicious minutes.

  As I wiped down a few of the tables, I found my mind wandering to the case again, and namely to last night. I’d found Pedro dead. There was a dumbbell by his front door, and the phone was off the hook. I didn’t know exactly what happened. I could only assume that for whatever reason, Pedro had been targeted by the same killer that had killed Krissy.

  I hadn’t seen Pedro’s ghost. I hadn’t had a chance to ask him what’d gone down.

  The police had shown up just moments after I’d discovered the body.

  I remembered using a few quick spells to get out of there, but it wasn’t easy. I’d morphed into a rat for a few seconds, hid away while Steve walked his way up the stairs. And then I’d got out of there as quickly as I could.

  Mentally, anyway. Physically, I’d stayed in that house for a long time afterwards. To be honest, I was still stuck in there now, still going over everything in my mind.

  I thought about what Collette had t
old me at the newsagents. How she’d sold a massive batch of the Valerian concoction to Pedro. It had to be Pedro. His description matched the one she’d made out to me.

  And that same stuff had been found coursing through Krissy’s bloodstream.

  I’d been so certain that Pedro had to be involved at that stage. It added up, after all. The pieces of the jigsaw slotted together. The mystery newcomer. The sniffing around me and Mary. And everything else. It felt like all I had to do was catch Pedro in some kind of act and that’d be it. Case closed. Mystery solved. Goosridge returns to mundane normality.

  But then I’d found his body and suddenly everything had changed.

  “Hey.”

  I turned around, jolted out of my trance.

  Mary was looking at me. Concern in her eyes.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  I nodded. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not fine. I mean, you never say ‘I’m fine’ when you’re fine for one. I’ve known you long enough to know that. So come on. The truth. It’s about time you got it off your chest.”

  I opened my mouth and I wanted to share everything with Mary, I really did. But I knew that doing so would potentially get me into trouble. Because I was supposed to be in the same position as someone else. I wasn’t supposed to know about Pedro. I wasn’t supposed to know what’d happened at all.

  And there was Mary herself to think about, too. She liked Pedro. Damn it, she’d fallen for a bad boy again, only this time she was going to have her heart broken for a different reason entirely.

  There were so many things I wanted to get off my chest to Mary. But the fact of the matter was, it wasn’t my place to do so. At least, not yet.

  So I swallowed a lump in my throat. “Mary. It’s…”

  “Oh, hey up. Someone’s here to put a smile on your face.”

  She nudged me.

  When I turned around, I saw Detective Steve Burke walking inside the main door of Witchy Delights, looking right at me.

  It was then that I realised something else, too. Something I’d been closed off to; that for some reason I’d remained oblivious to.

  But the people in the coffee shop. They were whispering about things. Looking at their phones. Shaking their heads.