Belladonna was right. There was some sort of spell at work, and its residual effects were still plaguing Francine. Lexi had turned the Ladies Brigade members into empty shells and filled them with her ambitions and plans. Francine had somehow found her way back home, but she was still at least partially empty. She'd absorbed Belladonna's thoughts the other night and made them her own.
"Go ahead and mop, Francine. I appreciate it. I'm going to go into the back and mix up the color for our first appointment. Be ready to do a shampoo, okay?" Belladonna said and gave Francine a quick pat on the back.
She was going to have to figure out the best way to help Francine. It could be dangerous to remove the spell because it might leave Francine a partial shell. Belladonna was going to have to figure out a way to get her personality back. She’d have to get rid of the spell and keep Francine away from negative influences until she could solve the problem.
"Francine, how do you feel about working as my assistant full time?" Belladonna called out from the back room.
Twelve
Carly paced back and forth in her living room. She was twirling a strand of her hair and chewing on her fingernails. "Ow!" she cried out as she carelessly bit her ring finger with a fang. It didn't stop her from worrying her fingernails, though.
She was moving back and forth at a frantic pace, and if she didn’t stop soon, Carly would wear a path in the Persian rug underneath her feet. The room around her was big and dark, but right now, it felt like a coffin.
Thoughts of being thrown into a human prison invaded her brain, and it was more terror than she could handle. In prison, there’s be no hiding what she was. How was she supposed to stay alive? If humans found out about her, they’d put her in a laboratory and torture her until she had to recede into her mind. If they thought she was a murderer too, there’d be no escape from the pain.
What she'd done was going to look really, really bad. Nobody was ever going to understand, and Carly was convinced she'd end up going down for murder. Her mind was racing at a breakneck pace, and she had to get out. It was turning out to be a cloudy day, so if she was careful, it wouldn't be too dangerous to leave now.
She could drive until the clouds gave out. If she was lucky, they would carry her until nightfall. If Carly could drive through the night, there was no telling how far away she could get.
Her old suitcase was stuffed in the high shelf in the back of her bedroom closet. Carly pulled it down and ducked out of the way when a box full of Christmas garland came down with her luggage. Garland and ornaments scattered all over the floor.
It occurred to her that she should have put these decorations out by now. Carly fought back the tears as she remembered what she had planned for this Christmas. Winterfield was the first place she’d lived in a long time where she wanted to make friends. Putting up a big tree with all of the lights and sparkly ornaments would be a first for her, but the decorations would make this place feel magical when she had people over for dinner and cookies.
None of that was going to happen now. Carly cursed herself for not knowing better. Vampires were supposed to live dark and solitary lives. They weren’t meant to make friends with hair stylists and dream of roasting turkeys and making homemade cranberries during the holidays.
It was time to leave those silly whims behind. It would be better for everyone. Carly’s family was just going to have to understand that the landscaping business wasn’t right for her. She loved it, that much was true, but someone else needed to take over. They could sell it too. Then her family would be done with Winterfield forever.
She hoisted the case onto the bed and popped the ancient latches. Her mind was in a flurry as she grabbed her clothes from the dresser drawers and closet. Carly shoved them into the case. She filled the case with jeans, t-shirts, and socks.
The logic being that you might as well be comfortable while you’re on the run. There was a small, collapsible umbrella shoved in the back of her sock drawer. An emergency umbrella she’d kept hidden just in case.
Well, this was about as close to an emergency as she’d ever run into, so she took it out of the drawer and shoved into the front pocket of the suitcase.
The last thing she needed was an old stuffed bear that sat next to her pillow. The animal was a gift from her mother, and she couldn't leave without it. Holding it made her feel a bit calmer, so instead of packing it, she stuck it into the pocket of the oversized parka she slipped into before leaving.
Carly made her way downstairs, and as she walked through the kitchen, she had a moment of hesitation. This wasn't like her at all. She wasn't the kind of person who did the things she'd done and then ran away. But, it was too late to start worrying about what kind of person she was or who she wanted to be. That was already done. She was a bad person who did bad things, and that sort of person didn't belong here in Winterfield.
Her boots were sitting by the back door. She leaned against her refrigerator while she pulled them over her socks and worked the laces. Carly’s hands were trembling, but she still managed to get the boots on.
The garage was gloomy, but her eyes adjusted quickly. The hearse she'd driven into town was still sitting there like it was waiting for her all along. The keys were in the seat where she'd left them when she arrived.
That was the kind of place this was. You could leave your keys in your car in an unlocked garage, and no one would even think about stealing. Good places would spit bad people out like a sour grape. Carly wasn't waiting around for that to happen.
The front passenger door stuck a little, but it eventually gave out and swung open. Carly tossed the suitcase into the passenger seat. Before closing the door, she pulled the umbrella out of the pocket and set it on top of the case. It would be better to have it ready given how quickly clouds could break and let sunlight flood into the car through the windshield and windows. Carly also set the teddy bear next to the umbrella on top of the case. For a moment, she considered seat belting him in but decided against it.
“Let’s go.” She whispered to the stuffed bear and closed the car door.
She got in the long, black car, pushed the button to open the garage door, and put the key in the ignition. The hearse roared to life, and Carly backed down the driveway. She half expected Nick or Belladonna to show up and beg her not to go, but that didn't happen. Nobody came. In fact, her street was completely empty, so no one even saw her leaving.
Carly rolled down the street slowly as if giving Winterfield one more chance to beg her to stay. It didn't, and the next thing she knew, Carly was on the interstate headed towards nowhere.
She would get hundreds of miles away before realizing that she’d left her purse, with her cell phone in it, on the dining room table.
Neptune
Old Man Jenkins had never seen anything like the cruise ship in front of him. He'd never seen anything like Neptune either. Everything was so beautiful, but it was also very overwhelming. He was really starting to miss his shackmansion and Granny Pepper. Here he was about to go on a cruise on one of the solar system's outer planets, and he hadn't even taken her on the date he'd promised.
"Ma'am. I think I want to go home." Jenkins said to Naiema.
"You don't want to cruise Neptune? It will be fun. I promise."
"I bet it would be, but I need to get home. Can we go back, and you can abduct me another time? I need to talk to my friend Pepper."
Naiema had gone on the Neptune cruise before, so she wouldn't miss it if she didn't go right away. In fact, the earth was one place she hadn't explored much, and Almoy could probably learn a great deal there too.
"Alright, we'll go back."
The trip back to earth couldn't go fast enough, and it also went too fast. The sheer size of Jupiter filled him with a sense of awe and wonder Jenkins hadn’t felt since he was a child. He didn’t know that a zombie could feel so alive again. It was so beautiful, and Jenkins wondered if he’d ever see anything so wonderful again.
He knew he would. Once they
were back, he’d invite the aliens to stay with him for a while, and maybe he’d get Pepper to go with him on the Neptune cruise.
He chuckled at the thought of a zombie and a ghost on a cruise in outer space. Part of him ached for Pepper. She was still here with her family among the living, but she could no longer enjoy the physical pleasures of the world. It seemed unfair to him.
Old Man Jenkins had died too, but he’d been given a second chance. He could still drink his beer and eat tomatoes.
Pepper could move through walls and sneak up on people real good, but she couldn’t hug her friends. Jenkins wanted to ask Naima if there was any place she’d visited in her travels that could make Pepper have a body again. He couldn’t imagine how they’d do it, but then again, he couldn’t imagine a lot of things. That didn’t stop them from being real.
It was kind of a pickle. A man who could never physically die falling for a woman who was actually a ghost.
“Are you alright Papa Jenkins?” Almoy’s tiny voice broke him out of his deep thoughts.
“Yeah, I’m okay. I was just thinkin too much.” He said and patted his new friend on the head.
“Do you want to go to the kitchen and have the food replicator make you some fresh maters?” Almoy had heard Jenkins call them maters so many times that he’d picked up vernacular himself.
“Sure. I reckon we could go get us some mater sandwiches.”
The walked to the ship’s kitchen, and Old Man Jenkins decided that it didn’t matter if he could hug Pepper. He just wanted to be near her. If he could sit down to supper with Pepper, her kin, and his new friends, that would be as close to heaven as one old zombie could get.
Thirteen
The call came into dispatch at around five. Ben couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Someone found a body in Winterfield woods right outside of the cemetery.
Dispatch called Ben because Chief Frost wasn’t answering his phone, and apparently Officer Lucy Cornwall wasn’t answering her radio either. The caller was anonymous, and they hung up before dispatch could trace the call.
Ben went outside and got in his black cruiser. He made the drive over to the cemetery while keeping his eyes peeled for anything suspicious. Dispatch had no details for him other than that a body was lying just on the other side of the tree line that acted as a boundary between the graveyard and the forest.
He drove through the cemetery's small streets and noticed that no one was around. Either whoever had called it in was making it up, or they were long gone. Ben parked his car and got out.
It didn’t take long for him to discover that they weren’t making it up. A few feet down from where he parked his car and a couple of paces into the forest he found the body.
Nick, the cook, was laying sprawled out on the forest floor. His skin was a chillingly pale shade of white, and when Ben bent down to look at him, he noticed the two tiny puncture wounds in Nick’s neck.
“Jeeze.” He said a little louder than he intended.
Ben should have called it in, but at that moment, he made a different decision. He took his phone out of his pocket and called Belladonna.
“Babe. I need you.”
Belladonna hung up the phone and looked at Francine. “I have to go. We’ll finish cleaning up in the morning.”
“Are you okay? Is there anything I can do?” Francine asked.
“No. Sorry. I have to go. I’ll see you tomorrow. Thank you for your hard work today.”
Belladonna wished she could confide in Francine, but it was too soon. She wanted to call Murielle, but that wouldn’t be right. Muri and Luke were getting ready to leave for their honeymoon, and the last thing they needed was to be dragged into another murder.
She grabbed her coat and locked up the salon as soon as Francine was gone. Belladonna grabbed her wand from her purse, a Kate Spade Ben had given her as an early Christmas present, and said, “Fast Feet.”
Bella was able to walk across town to the cemetery in less time than it took to drive a car there. The downside is that even though she used magic to move so quickly, she was still completely out of breath.
“I’ve got to work out more.” She said as she was bent over panting.
“Really? We could run together.” Ben said as he held her hair off her neck and fanned her with his hand.
“No. That is not a thing I will actually do.” She said and stood up as soon as she could focus on something other than sucking air into her burning lungs.
Ben took Bella’s hand and led her back to the spot where Nick’s body was sprawled out on the forest floor. Belladonna knelt down to look at him and gasped.
“You don’t think Carly did this?” She said as she grasped her necklace with one hand and worried the hem of her coat with the other.
“I don’t want to think that, but it’s the only thing I can think right now. That’s why I called you instead of calling it in. I need your help here.”
Ben told Belladonna about Carly’s outburst at the police station today. He filled her in on the details of the conversation and explained how that combined with the conversation he’d overheard was more than enough to establish a motive.
“We need to talk to Carly. There has to be a rational explanation for all of this. I mean, Carly’s not the only vampire in the world. Moreover, she could be in danger. The real killer could be killing off suspects.”
So, the two of them got in the car, and Ben drove over to Carly’s house. Belladonna could sense right away that the house was empty. She wasn’t quite sure how, but she just knew that no one was in the dark, ominous looking room.
“She’s gone,” Belladonna said softly.
Neither one of them said anything while they sat in the car and thought about what to do next. Bella stared at the house. In the daylight, the paint on the siding was a bright green color, but now it looked shadowy and foreboding.
The windows looked like hollowed out caverns. The house looked hungry. It gave Ben and Belladonna pause, but they had to go in.
“We have to go in,” Ben said as if he could read Belladonna’s mind.
“I know. It just looks so eerie. I’m not usually creeped out by dark houses, but everything just feels off.” Belladonna said.
That’s what she said out loud, but as they got out of the car and made their way to the back door, what she thought about was how silly it was to believe that they could get rid of the black magic.
Sure, when they’d defeated Lexi and the dark coven, the Nightshade witches had stopped the floodgates from opening. But, it was really only temporary.
Belladonna was lulled into a false sense of security thinking that they could just clean up the dark magic residue that had been left behind. It was foolish to think that it would be over once they’d found the little flames of black magic and put them out.
The darkness wanted back into the world, and Lexi was at large. It was only a matter of time before somebody started another attempt to open the gates again.
In fact, it could be happening right now. Something about Carly’s house wasn’t right. It was almost as if it was infected with dread.
Ben took her hand and led her the rest of the way. He tried the knob and found that the door was locked.
Belladonna looked around and spied a frog statue sitting on the floor of the back porch in the corner farthest from where they were standing. She walked down to it and plucked it from its spot on the oak boards. Underneath was a key.
“How did you know that was there?” Ben asked.
“Jeremy had a pet hamster for a while. I had to feed it once when he had to travel. We just have to hope that Carly didn’t change the locks.”
“Does anyone around here ever change their locks?” Ben asked.
“Nope.” She answered as she slid the key into the lock.
It worked.
They went inside and started to look around. Belladonna walked around the living room while Ben went upstairs. It was pretty obvious to Belladonna that nobody used the living roo
m for much. It reminded her of the formal family rooms that some of her friends had growing up. Belladonna always found it funny that they were called family rooms when the family wasn’t allowed to use them. At Bella’s house, rooms were meant to be used and lived in.
The gorgeous red velvet couch looked like it had barely graced a bottom in its long life. Every piece of furniture in the room was antique, opulent, and unused. She ran her fingers over the mahogany coffee table. Despite being unused, it was completely clean. This room may not have been utilized, but it was well cared for. It was also a dead end.
Bella walked up the stairs to find Ben. She could hear him shuffling around in one of the many rooms located off the hallway at the top of the stairs. It was the only door open, and when Belladonna walked over the threshold, she could feel the oppression in the room.
If Belladonna had let it in, the heavy feeling in the room could have taken over. Fortunately, she was prepared. Bella took a deep breath and looked around. Ben was standing in the closet looking through the racks of clothing.
She could see the Christmas gifts scattered all over the floor of the closet. Ben was doing his best not to step on the glass bulbs that were rolling around on the floor.
“I think her suitcase was on the shelf and she knocked the box down when she pulled it down. It makes me think she left in a hurry.” Ben said.
Bella looked at what had to be Carly’s dresser, and one of the drawers was half-open. She walked over and looked inside. There was a couple of pairs of worn socks sitting in the bottom.
“I think she did too. Looks like she packed in a hurry.” Bella said and closed the drawer.
Just when the situation started to seem hopeless, they heard Carly’s cell phone ring in the dining room.
Fourteen
“Where do you want to look?” Sumac asked Granny Pepper.
“Don’t ask me questions right now. Let’s go.” Granny said and lit her pipe.
Fairly Hexed: Cozy Witch Mystery (Witches of Winterfield Book 3) Page 7