Unlucky Charms

by Linda O. Johnston

  “I can,” I said. “I wish this was all over.”

  I felt pretty sure I was about to get my wish. As I glanced toward Brad again, I saw Justin approach. I started fake-coughing again and bent over, even as I made that cough start sounding like, “Killer, killer.”

  Justin got it. Before Brad could react, he’d been pushed to the ground, with his hands grabbed by Justin.

  “Gun in his pocket,” I said, and Justin immediately found it, pulled it out, and placed it on the ground as he started cuffing the writhing, shouting Brad and reciting his Miranda rights.

  Sweet man that Justin was, he believed my story immediately, with no questions. Or maybe the fact that Brad was armed had something to do with it.

  And it helped that a cuffed Brad began cussing me and ruing aloud that he hadn’t killed me, too, when he’d had the chance.

  In moments, it was, in fact, over.

  My second wish on that unreal falling star had also come true.

  Thirty

  I did the appropriate thing, because of our sort-of alliance, and immediately called Celia Vardox as I stood off to the side while Justin’s backup arrived to investigate the scene and take Brad away.

  “Who? He what?” Celia’s shrieks over the phone nearly deafened me, but I smiled.

  “I’m sure I’ll get in trouble if I give you any details,” I said to her. “But if you want to try to interview anyone here at the crime scene—my crime scene, where I was a victim of sorts—you’d better get here fast.”

  Local shop owners from stores nearby were beginning to show up, populating the crowd along with the tourists. When Jeri arrived with her mother, I smiled in relief and asked her to go across the street, tell Martha and Millie what was going on, and let them know it would be a while before I could come in to work.

  “I can help out there now,” Jeri said, glancing at Kiara, who smiled and nodded at her. “But what’s really going on here?”

  I didn’t want to get into details since I wasn’t sure whether my talking to anyone besides the police would taint my ability to testify against Brad. I just said, “Brad Nereida has some legal issues he needs to deal with.”

  Jeri, ever astute, opened her dark eyes wider in a shocked expression. “Did he kill Flora? Why?”

  “Rory can’t talk about it,” said Celia, who’d just arrived. “But Derek and I will be interviewing everyone possible and putting the story up on our website even before a new edition of the Star comes out.”

  This was one of those times that I appreciated Celia—unlike some other times recently.

  I asked Jeri to keep an eye on Pluckie, glad in many ways that my dog had remained safe in the shop while I experienced the ordeal. “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I said.

  Detectives Choye and Fidelio had been among the first cops to arrive. Choye had helped Brad into the back of a police vehicle that a uniformed officer was driving, and then they were gone. Some crime scene technicians remained around, and one asked me for my fingerprints since they would undoubtedly find some inside. I didn’t see Justin and assumed he, too, was in the Wish-on-a-Star shop.

  I had a real urge to cross the street to my store and get out of this area that still stoked my emotions. I even took a couple of steps through the crowd in that direction.

  But before I got far, Justin exited the store and came up to me. “We need to get your statement, Rory,” he said softly, and I heard caring and sympathy in his tone. “Detective Fidelio will take it, but I’ll be there, too.”

  Shouldn’t he be able to talk to me alone, be nice to me in front of crowds now, since I should no longer be considered a murder suspect?

  Although that might still be premature until they conducted more of an investigation against Brad. And part of that investigation would be whatever I said against him.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Please come to the station, then. You and the detective can both ride with me.”

  Lura Fidelio had come up to us on the sidewalk and heard what Justin said. “Fine,” she agreed, which I said as well. We crossed the street, since Justin’s car was parked near the front of the Lucky Dog.

  A black cat sat right in front of my shop. The same one who’d been in front of Wish-on-a-Star before Brad had been taken into custody?

  If so, whatever bad luck he’d provided by crossing someone’s path had slammed into Brad, not me. Of course, in some cultures black cats were all good luck.

  I decided that was true for me. After all, I loved all pets. Lots of people kept black cats as family members.

  “Thanks,” I whispered, smiling at the cat, who only lifted a front paw and began licking it.

  I wondered if Catrice was anywhere around. She was hard to find, and almost impossible to talk to. But I hoped to be able to tell her about this … if she didn’t already know.

  I saw Gemma approaching from the Broken Mirror, along with Stuart. I excused myself before getting into Justin’s car.

  “What’s going on?” Gemma demanded, looking over my shoulder with wide eyes toward the children’s shop.

  “I can’t say much now,” I told her, “but one good thing is that I’m no longer a murder suspect.”

  “Brad?” She looked amazed.

  I nodded. “Tell you more later.”

  Gemma turned toward Stuart, who had caught up with her, and he took her into his arms.

  Hey, if anyone needed comfort it was me, and Justin had already gotten into the driver’s seat of his car without giving me even a cool but kind hug.

  But the worst was definitely over. I was fine. I’d tell the authorities all I knew—and call to cancel my appointment with Emily Rasmuten.

  I no longer needed a lawyer.

  I hoped.

  The session did, in fact, go well. I answered Detective Fidelio’s questions, and they all seemed logical. I explained first why I’d happened to go to the Wish-on-a-Star shop early that morning: to ask Brad more about his conversations with Flora about her possibly getting into commercial real estate.

  “I have to admit,” I said, knowing my expression looked sheepish, “that I had suspicions then that Flora’s boss, Brie, had found out about her aspirations to be a commercial real estate agent and that she didn’t want the woman she’d trained dumping her job and going into even remote competition with her.”

  “You thought she might have killed Flora because of that?” Lura asked.

  Even though this was a follow-up interrogation of someone who should no longer be considered a murder suspect, the tall detective, as always clad in a dressy suit and serious demeanor, loomed over me where I sat at a table in a department conference room, as if menacing me to be sure to tell the truth.

  And of course, I did. “Yes. Brie had given me the impression that she was really upset to hear that Flora had let clients know her aspirations, and I gathered she might have told Flora about her anger, too. Since Brad was the one who’d mentioned that Flora had talked to him about getting a listing on his shop, I decided to ask him about it when I saw him arrive early this morning.”

  I hadn’t thought much about it before, but maybe I’d jumped to the conclusion about Brie and Flora since the accusation against Martha, when she was a murder suspect, had also peripherally involved whether she would be willing to sell the Lucky Dog property. Real estate in Destiny apparently had worth beyond normal property values—and it was superstition related, like everything else here.

  “So what made you decide to change who you thought was the murderer?” Lura’s tone was both interested and scornful, and I looked up at her and grinned ironically.

  “Oh, maybe Brad’s aiming a gun at me had something to do with that.”

  The interrogation didn’t really last long, but I felt exhausted afterward.

  But one really good thing was that Justin said he would drive me ba
ck to the Lucky Dog—without anyone else along.

  Yes, he definitely could talk to me in public again.

  Word had gotten out. In fact, I gathered that everyone had heard what had happened.

  I hoped that Brad would get a fair trial, whenever that might be, since it was likely that around here, at least, people would already think they knew he was guilty.

  Which he was, of course, but that didn’t mean his trial shouldn’t be conducted fairly.

  All afternoon, people kept coming into the Lucky Dog, asking me questions. Even Arlen came in, after his aunt called him, to say he was glad the vandalism cases had been solved and the murderer of the woman who’d done it all had been found—and that I hadn’t been the killer. Not that he’d thought I was … or so he claimed.

  “But I’ll bet one thing the cops won’t be able to resolve, now that she’s dead, is how Flora committed all the mischief here, breaking into shops and ransacking and stealing and even turning the horseshoe at the Rainbow B&B upside down, without anyone catching her in the act. Or spilling salt on the floors of some of the places she’d vandalized, after what she’d left there before had already been cleaned up. Or how she heard a police radio and slipped into and out of the sound booth at the Break-a-Leg Theater without anyone catching her there either.”

  “Maybe she was just lucky,” I speculated wryly, and Arlen smiled.

  When appropriate, though, I might even run those questions by Justin.

  When I took Pluckie out for her mandatory walks that day, there was no way to give her any privacy—not that she really cared.

  At one point I ducked into the Broken Mirror with her, just to get away from the people hounding my dog and me. Gemma was there with Stuart, and although they had a number of customers, she was able to break away to say hi.

  “You okay?” she asked me.

  “I sure am,” I fibbed. I didn’t like this notoriety, even though it wasn’t because people thought that I was a killer anymore.

  “You know, stepping back to where we were before, it turns out it’s a good thing that unit seven at 7 Ladybug Lane wasn’t available.”

  I blinked as I looked at my long-time friend. Her lovely face was aglow with a big smile.

  “And why is that?” I asked, thinking I might know the answer already. Stuart was helping some customers nearby. Was he the reason?

  “Well … it’s too soon for anything definitive,” she said, “but I’m going to find a place where I’ll stay by myself for now. Stuart’s heading back to his job in New York City tomorrow, but he’ll be back soon, and I’d like for us not to have to stay together in the bed and breakfast—or even with you around, I’m sorry to say.”

  “You’re not sorry at all.” I grinned. “This sounds serious.”

  She shrugged one of her narrow shoulders beneath the lacy white blouse she was wearing that day. “Could be.”

  I reached over and hugged her. “I hope so, if that’s what you want.”

  “I want,” she said, with a big smile that faded a bit almost at once. “Although I can’t help thinking … ”

  “About that face in the mirror? I get it, but so what if this is Destiny? It might just have been your imagination, and if it wasn’t, well, not all superstitions are true.”

  “Of course. That’s just silly. Stuart’s the one for me.” She smiled again.

  I hoped she was right. But time would tell …

  My feelings about superstitions were changing. As always. Now that I’d been in Destiny for a while, I’d come to believe that the validity of superstitions might partly depend on how you look at them, and how they treated you and you treated them.

  As with my loss of Warren. He’d had the bad luck to walk under a ladder, which resulted in his death—definitely bad luck for him. And for me.

  And yet it had led to a major change in my life as I tried to figure out superstitions and good luck, and now here I was, in Destiny, with a new life and new people …

  I found myself smiling pensively as Pluckie and I made our way back to the Lucky Dog, through throngs of people.

  Throngs. Maybe I could turn this situation into one where my shop would get even more business—since I wasn’t sure all these people interested in my store were buying anything. I’d been putting off scheduling another of my talks on animal superstitions until the suspicion around me was removed. I’d have to schedule one soon.

  But it wouldn’t be the next night, I learned when Martha came over to me with a big, happy grin on her face. “I’m so glad you cleared yourself of murder, like you did with me. Good girl!” She sounded as if she was talking to a pup, but I knew how much she loved animals, so that was fine.

  “Yes, I guess I did,” I replied.

  “Well, our dear mayor is planning to reassure us and the visitors to Destiny that all’s well in our town of superstitions. Word is out that he’s throwing a new Welcome tomorrow night.”

  Bevin Dermot was known for using any opportunity he could find, or create, to talk to people in Destiny about our wonderful town and its superstitions, so I wasn’t surprised. I only wondered which superstitions he would work into his talk. I decided I wouldn’t be surprised if he happened to mention that things happen in threes. If so, Destiny shouldn’t have another murder in … well, forever.

  I felt my fingers cross fervently about that.

  The rest of the day passed quickly and, yes, the Lucky Dog actually did a lot of business, since word had apparently gotten out that its manager had been the recipient of some pretty good luck that day.

  I wasn’t about to argue with that.

  I was somewhat surprised when Justin arrived at seven o’clock that evening as I was in the process of closing up. I hadn’t heard from him since he’d dropped me off back here late that morning, and I had no doubt that he was busy.

  That could happen to a police chief in a small town when an arrest was made in a murder case.

  Martha was still in the shop, but our assistants had already left.

  “Hi, Justin,” I heard her call while I was putting a few things away in the storeroom. I hurried out and smiled to see the two of them hugging, once again like mother and son. I didn’t interrupt them.

  When their embrace ended, though, I approached Justin. “How are things?” I asked. He was bound to realize I was inquiring about whether all seemed to be going well in the arrest and future prosecution of Brad.

  I’d thought often that afternoon about Lorraine, and I hoped she and her kids would return to Destiny. The Wish-on-a-Star hadn’t been open for business today, but it would surely be a good thing to continue to have that children’s shop with its superstition-related merchandise open in this town.

  “Things are going well. I can’t talk much about it, as you know, but so far I think we’re putting together a good, solid case against our murder suspect—thanks to you.” To my surprise, he bent down and kissed me.

  Not that I was surprised that he kissed me, but in public? And particularly in front of Martha?

  “Let’s keep the heat level down around here,” my boss and friend said with a laugh. “Why don’t you two head out for dinner?”

  We hadn’t talked about that at all. I looked up at Justin, then toward Martha. “Sounds good to me, if Justin wants to, but why don’t you come with us?”

  “Oh, I don’t think I’d like to be a third wheel tonight. But you should bring your dogs along.” She looked toward Pluckie, who was sitting eagerly by the counter where she was tethered.

  “Okay.” I drew the word out a bit, especially when I saw the two other humans in the room exchange smiles that seemed to convey something I didn’t understand.

  Justin accompanied Martha upstairs while I finished preparing the shop to close. Then we were ready to go.

  “My car’s right outside,” Justin said. “You and Pluckie can come with m
e and we’ll pick up Killer to join us, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  In the car, we decided to head to Ojai so we could eat dinner at Randie’s, a nice restaurant with a pleasant patio where we’d eaten before. We picked up Killer and headed out there. I was surprised when the server on the patio, who’d taken care of us before, exchanged glances with Justin before placing champagne glasses in front of us.

  The dinner was delicious, consisting of prime rib that we shared with both dogs. The conversation didn’t even touch on murders or Justin’s job, which I liked a lot.

  But there was something in his demeanor that I didn’t quite understand. Or did I?

  We headed back to Destiny, but instead of going straight into town, Justin said, “How about if we pretend tonight that we’re on a tour?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have an urge to go see the place where those Forty-Niners actually saw the end of the rainbow that caused them to find gold—and found Destiny.”

  “Really?” I could have said no, that the drive at night on that narrow winding road could be particularly treacherous.

  On the other hand, it would definitely be scenic. And I knew Justin and his driving. I trusted everything about him.

  “Really,” he answered.

  “Let’s do it.”

  He drove slowly up that road where no other cars were present. The dogs seemed nice and calm in the backseat behind us. The car’s headlights lit the guardrail ahead of us, and every once in a while, as we turned, I could see the lights of Destiny below us. The sky was a bit overcast, although a quarter moon peeked out from behind the clouds now and then. When a larger break arrived in the clouds and I happened to see my first star—or planet, as the case might be—I chanted “Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight.” And of course I crossed my fingers before glancing toward Justin.

  What did I wish? Let’s just say it had to do with him.

  Maybe he guessed that. I didn’t know. He was watching the road ahead, not me, but he was smiling.