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

by Amy Casey

  Before the square was closed.

  And before all of this was forgotten again, another dark footnote in the history of Goosridge, dormant and waiting for another seventy-seven years…

  Chapter 37

  That night, I didn’t dream.

  That night, I lay awake and tried to piece things together, stitch by stitch.

  Hyperawareness, I called it. That wasn’t what the old witch scriptures called it, of course. They had some archaic, prehistoric sounding name for it that just made it out to be a bigger deal than it actually was. Really, it was just an ultra-enhanced form of concentration.

  And the reason I did it in bed? Well. It was so tiring and mentally draining that I usually drifted off to sleep in the middle of it and continued hyper-concentrating anyway.

  I thought back to the finding of Krissy’s body. Looking for Janice’s cat.

  And I went further back. Into the kitchen. Walking along beside me, telling me how grateful she was. The smell of flowers.

  And further back. At home, watching The Witch, of all movies. The phone call.

  “I’m so worried about my Piers.”

  I heard a snore and jolted out of my concentration.

  When I looked at the side of the bed, I saw it was just Rocky.

  I sighed and tried to carry on with my concentration, to carry on with my focus. I had to really believe that if I pictured the past enough, I’d be able to find the clues that led to the future.

  “Come on, Stella,” I said, well aware that speaking to myself in third-person was bizarre by its very nature, and then cursing myself for having these bold, deep hyper-aware thoughts about the nature of thought. “You can do this. It’s in there somewhere. You’ve seen all the answers, it’s—”

  “Erm, can you shut up, please? Trying to get forty winks down here.”

  Rocky’s voice cut through my concentration once again. I gritted my teeth together, resisted the urge to chatter to myself even louder. I loved Rocky, of course I did. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t be an absolute nightmare sometimes.

  I steadied my focus again and this time I found myself back in Pedro’s house. I found myself looking at that dumbbell by the door. Then climbing the stairs. Then jumping forward in time again and finding myself in his bedroom with all those empty wardrobes, that empty shell of a bedroom.

  Then looking at the photograph. The photograph of Krissy.

  The etching on the back of it.

  The letters.

  The words.

  NO ENTRY.

  “Why do they have to always say ‘No Entry’? I mean, it’s pretty obvious nobody’s going to enter there, right?”

  A thought. A fragment of a thought from some time ago. Long before the killings. Weeks ago, perhaps even months.

  But that thought. That fragment of a thought, of a memory.

  What was it?

  What was its significance?

  I tried to hone in on that thought once again. But it was kind of like when you get those weird images in your mind when you’re drifting off to sleep. If you focus too closely on them, you lose them.

  But I kept a steady focus. A gentle focus.

  I had to.

  Because I knew this was important.

  And then it was there.

  In full detail.

  Full, vivid detail.

  I was standing at the side of the road with Mary by my side. We were both looking out over the construction site, where they’d since torn down the old supermarket and were planning on building something new in its place. The weather was warm. The birdsong was loud. It must’ve been spring. Last spring.

  “What?” I found myself asking.

  Mary, who was wearing a white T-shirt and blue jeans, holding a fruit smoothie in hand, pointed ahead. “The sign. ‘No Entry.’ As if anyone’s going to enter a junkyard like that.”

  I could hear my past self continuing to talk. I could hear the words I’d said—about how kids were chaotic, and how they’d sneak in, and how Mary disagreed and we ended up in a weird little argument about just how stupid kids could be.

  But it was the vision I noticed most.

  The sight I had.

  When I turned to look at where Mary was pointing and then, in that instant, it clicked. It made sense.

  NO ENTRY.

  I opened my eyes. Sharply. Suddenly.

  And then much to Rocky’s dismay, I threw myself out of bed. Rushed over to my wardrobe to throw some clothes on, then to the phone to call Mary, regardless of whatever time it was.

  I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know the full significance of it all. Not yet.

  But I knew one thing for certain.

  The NO ENTRY sign was at the construction site. The construction site where the new shopping centre was going to be built.

  And more importantly?

  It was right in front of an old, blown-out entrance.

  Just like the opening scrawled on the back of the photograph.

  Just like the void.

  I might not know what I was going towards, as I waited for Mary to answer.

  I might not know exactly what I was getting into.

  But I was about to find out.

  I was about to find out everything.

  And it was going to be far more mind-boggling than I’d ever imagined.

  Chapter 38

  Mary didn’t think much about the sound of her gate rattling in the middle of the night.

  It was the wind. It was always the wind. Even when it wasn’t bloody windy, she seemed hyper-sensitive to it. She’d tried all kinds of solutions to help her sleep through it—sleeping tablets, meditation, herbal remedies. She’d even asked Stella to try and brew her up some kind of spiritual, witchy concoction, but apparently that was beyond her skill set.

  So she had to accept it. She had to deal with it. Whether she liked it or not, this sensitivity to outside noise was just a part of her life.

  She felt her eyes closing again, felt herself drifting into the darkness. Of course, this was what always happened to her. She had no trouble getting to that dozy stage. It was the stage after that which troubled her. The transition period.

  The doctors had told her to just stop trying to sleep. That she was trying to control an unconscious process too much. But that was easier said than done.

  It was a crutch that she looked forward to getting a little sniffle so she’d have an excuse to take some rather strong cough medicine that always knocked her out. But such was life. Everyone had their issues. Everyone had their flaws.

  She took a few deep, steadying breaths in, and then let them go. But as she tried to calm her mind, to steady her thoughts, she drifted to the case. She knew she shouldn’t think about it too deeply. She’d been lambasting Stella enough for getting too drawn into it.

  But she’d seen what that case was doing to her best friend. She’d seen just how much it was swallowing her up.

  And she couldn’t help shaking the suspicion that her friend was right after all.

  She’d heard what the police had said about the third murder. Sarah Seeks, of all people. First that it was a different kind of killing. But that had soon been debunked. And then they went with the “copycat killer” clarification, which kind of made sense, but at the same time… didn’t.

  Because who would the copycat killer be?

  Who would do such a thing?

  She thought about Sarah Seeks. Perhaps Richard Harbour’s wife, Hailey, decided to take out her revenge on her. Maybe she saw an opportunity to kill Sarah while there was all this panic and fear about an actual serial killer around and hoped to get away with it.

  But no. Mary knew Hailey. She was a quiet, meek woman. And while it was sometimes the quiet ones who surprised you, Hailey was certainly not the kind of woman capable of any kind of murder, let alone the kind of murder that had been committed here in Goosridge.

  She heard a rattle downstairs. Only this rattle was loud enough to make her open her eyes
, to divert her attention over to the dark doorway. She’d always been noise sensitive at night, ever since she was a kid. She didn’t like the thought that something could happen to her while she was unconscious. It’d been a fear for many years, right to the root of her sleeping troubles.

  But as she lay there, heart thudding, she told herself that it was just a noise. That it was just the creaking of the house, the natural sounds, and nothing more.

  Then something funny happened, as Mary started to calm herself. She felt herself getting jittery. But it wasn’t an unpleasant kind of jittery. It was as if there was some kind of scent in the air that was seeping into her body, into her lungs, making her feel… woozy.

  And as curious as she was about this strange floral smell, as much as she wanted to resist it because anything unfamiliar made her feel uncomfortable, she could feel it slipping its arms around her, drawing her into its clutches…

  And then she saw something.

  It was an opening. Like a void. A dark void. Except the darkness didn’t feel scary in any way. It actually felt inviting. Like someone was in there, calling her towards it.

  So she found herself doing something that went against everything she’d learned about dealing with a struggle to sleep.

  She found herself doing something that she would never do, not under any normal, ordinary circumstances.

  Mary found herself taking a deep breath of that calming smell, then stepping out of bed.

  She looked at the darkness. Saw all kinds of inviting things inside it. But more than anything, she saw the promise of a good night’s sleep.

  And that promise was intoxicating.

  That promise was worth more to her than anything she could be offered.

  She took a deep breath of the floral smells and stepped towards it, closer, closer…

  The next thing Mary knew, she had her sleep.

  She just had no idea what she’d gotten herself into.

  Chapter 39

  I knew I should’ve stayed wrapped up in bed. I knew I should’ve gone to Mary’s beforehand. I knew I shouldn’t have let my stupid nosy-ness and eagerness to resolve this case get the better of me.

  But that’s where I was.

  And this was how I got there…

  I tried Mary a couple more times. I started to get wound up when she didn’t answer on the third call. I knew she was a notorious insomniac. Where was she?

  But honestly, I didn’t put two and two together. I was too caught up with what I’d realised.

  With what I was beginning to piece together, slowly but surely.

  The location. It was the construction site. NO ENTRY.

  I wasn’t sure what I was going to find there. I couldn’t be certain. All I knew was that it was related to the case. It was related to the killings.

  Pedro had left a sign in his room. I wasn’t sure whether he’d been the one to write it and leave it there, but whoever had done it, they’d done it for a reason: to draw the police or somebody towards that location.

  The cavern at the construction site. The place where they were building the new shopping centre.

  That’s where I needed to go.

  So that’s exactly where I was going.

  I tiptoed across my bedroom floor, out towards the hallway, being cautious not to disturb Rocky or Beatrice. I knew the pair of them could sleep like logs so I wasn’t exactly terrified about waking them up, but I guess I just wanted to get out of here without saying goodbye, because saying goodbye wasn’t easy, especially when you didn’t know what you were walking towards.

  There was something else on my mind, too. Something other than the location. In my hyper-aware state, I’d remembered something. The way Pedro had been talking when I’d seen his ghost.

  And the way I’d heard Janice speaking that night when I’d gone to find her cat…

  I turned the handle of my front door. None of what I suspected seemed to make sense, not really. And yet the pieces were sliding into place. The reality was becoming more and more clear…

  The smell I’d had when I’d walked through Janice’s kitchen.

  The floral smell.

  And the daisies. The daisies in the kitchen. The kitchen where she washed up…

  The way she’d spoken to me.

  The way Pedro’s ghost had spoken to me…

  And the very fact that Krissy’s body was found in her back yard…

  Was it possible that Janice was responsible after all?

  It seemed absurd. Impossible, even. She was a sweet old lady. She could barely move through her house, let alone go through the physical ordeal of killing three people way younger and fitter than her.

  And yet the evidence. The memories. The fragments of the past.

  All of them pointed in that direction.

  All of them made it look like Janice was responsible.

  Unless…

  “Going somewhere?”

  I stopped. Almost jumped out of my skin, in all truth.

  I turned around and saw Rocky staring at me judgementally.

  I felt myself welling up with the way he looked at me. Because he was looking at me like he cared. Like he gave a damn. And that made me feel guilty. I’d been planning on walking out of here without even saying goodbye, but it was only because I didn’t want to say goodbye.

  “I’ll be back,” I said.

  “With food?”

  I smiled. “With plenty of food. All the food you want.”

  Rocky’s eyes widened. He ran over to me, planted a big sloppy kiss on my face. “Hot dogs?”

  “Hot dogs? Isn’t that like, cannibalism?”

  “It’s sausage. Dummy.”

  “Fair point.”

  “So hot dogs.”

  “Yes. Hot dogs.”

  “And—and gravy bones?”

  “Oh, more gravy bones than you’d believe.”

  He licked my face again. And even though I was still caught up in the whole web of the mystery, I found myself looking into his eyes and scuffing his hair.

  “I will come back,” I said.

  “Promise?”

  I swallowed a lump in my throat. Nodded. “Promise.”

  And then I turned around. I opened the door. Took a deep lungful of the fresh night-time air and realised I finally understood how Mary felt with all her sleep struggles.

  But this time, I got the sense that where I was going, it was for a final time.

  That where I was going, things were going to be resolved, one way or another.

  I was going to the construction site.

  I was going to the NO ENTRY tunnel.

  And I was going to see exactly what Janice had to do with these murders, once and for all.

  Chapter 40

  It didn’t take long searching for the “dark place” with the NO ENTRY sign pinned outside of it for me to realise I was heading down a path that I wasn’t sure I wanted to go down after all.

  The night was dark and silent. I could hear the songs of the night animals and see just a few lights inside the windows of houses; parents that were up late seeing to their kids, that kind of thing.

  I got closer to the construction site where the new shopping centre was going to be built. There used to be old ruins here, the remains of an old mental hospital. It was part of the town’s draw to outsiders, in a strange sort of way. Even though nobody was supposed to go inside the ruins, a lot of urban explorers liked to throw themselves inside it, posting photographs online of their creepy experiences.

  And although I knew damn well there was nothing particularly creepy about those ruins, I could see why they had an appeal to outsiders. And in a way, they meant something to the residents of Goosridge, too. It was a part of who we were. A part of our identity.

  So when the plans came in to demolish the ruins and build a shopping centre on the land, naturally people weren’t too happy.

  There were protests. There were petitions. But in the end, the behemoth of capitalism was hard to stop, especi
ally when the opposing voices were nothing more than the silent cries of a small town, irrelevant on the wider scale.

  People still protested to this day. People objected to every little detail in the proposals, in hopes of stalling the construction just a little longer.

  But in the end, there was only so long you could delay the inevitable.

  This was happening, whether the people of Goosridge liked it or not.

  The further I got to the construction site, the more I thought about turning around and heading home. Going back to Mary. Seeing what advice she could give me. But then again, I’d tried calling Mary, with no luck. She didn’t sleep great as it was. If she was finally getting some kip, I felt harsh interfering with that.

  No. This was my problem. This was my case to investigate. I couldn’t go dragging other people into it. I had to do this alone, whether I liked it or not.

  And I didn’t much like it to be honest.

  I walked further down the long, empty road that led just out of town. I felt my heart picking up as I got closer to the construction site. Because although I didn’t know exactly what I was going to encounter yet, I knew that whatever was there had to be key to this whole case, this whole investigation.

  And as I walked, the possibilities circled my mind.

  The possibility of who the culprit was.

  About what was happening, and how they’d done it.

  I walked a little further. And right then, as I turned a corner to finally reach the road that the construction site was situated on, I thought I felt something. It was hard to describe, but it felt like there was a presence. A presence, right there, watching me.

  I turned around. Looked over my shoulder.

  There was nothing there.

  I let go of my breath. Of course there was nothing there. I was on a creepy road in the middle of the night. I was walking right towards a place that I suspected was at the very centre of the murders that had been happening here in this town lately. I was more than justified in feeling a little creeped out.

  But when I turned around, I almost froze on the spot completely.