Regardless, he’d likely be lead detective on this one. But then I saw someone behind him. Someone short and curvy with copper-red hair in a messy bun atop her head, held in place by a funky-colored headband.
She wore a green T-shirt that read Dunder Mifflin (which made me send her a silent thumbs-up. I loved The Office) beneath a cropped leather jacket with spikes around the cuffs and along the wide lapels. Her jeans were loose and looked comfortable, her high-top sneakers pink and green.
She smiled at me from behind a glowering Detective Moore and waved cheerfully. “You’re Stevie Cartwright, yeah?” she asked, holding out a hand with a multitude of rings.
I wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing that she knew my name. But I gave her a half-smile in return while taking her hand and giving it a quick pump. “That’s me.”
She grinned even wider, her eyes shiny and brown “So cool! I’m Melba. Er, Melba Kaepernick… Um, I mean Detective Melba Kaepernick. Shoot. I’m still getting used to that title. Anyway, you’re the lady who talks to dead people, right? So-so cool! I’ve heard a gazillion things about you since I joined Eb Falls PD a few weeks ago.”
I eyed Detective Moore—who looked rather pained at this point—with a raised eyebrow. I was sure she’d heard plenty about me from him.
“I bet every last one of those gazillion things was complimentary, too.”
“Well, no. Not all of them. In fact, most of them weren’t very nice at all, but I like to judge for myself—”
“Detective Kaepernick?” Detective Moore ground out, gripping Melba’s upper arm. “We have a dead man outside. This isn’t a social call. And there are witnesses inside. Go do your job and talk to them. You know, make like a real detective?”
“Sure-sure,” she agreed on a nod as she disentangled her arm from Detective Moore’s grip, her eyes narrowing ever so slightly in his direction before she caught herself. Then she turned back to me, her smile back in place. “Anyway, super to meet you. Totally wanna grab your ear in the near future—”
“Kaepernick!” Detective Moore groused. “Go!”
Melba scurried past me and into the parlor where the judges had gathered, as Detective Moore glared at me.
“Not just a new partner, but a brand-new detective, too, Starsky?” I teased, referring to one of the many TV cop names I’d called him and his ex-partner. “Your world must be all kinds of turned upside down.”
He made a face and clenched his angular jaw. “Uh, yeah. Fresh-off-the-truck detective.”
I wagged my finger at him. “Serves you right for gossiping about me, Starsky. I’ve helped way more than I’ve hindered—”
“Pascal!” a voice shrieked from my lawn. “Pascal, where are you, ma cheri!”
Petula, our local caterer, pushed her way past people and Detective Moore, tears streaming from her swollen eyes. She grabbed my arm, her hands ice cold. “Stevie, is it true?”
My heart crashed against my ribs. I hated this part. Hated it so much. I liked Petula a lot. She was our go-to for any event Win and I hosted. Though, I will admit, the whole Pascal thing never felt quite right. But seriously. What did I know about true love?
I’d been dumped at the altar by my ex-fiancé Warren and I’d had absolutely no idea he was cheating on me when he did the dumping. To make matters worse, I was a witch at the time. You’d think my Spidey-witch senses would have picked up his cheater’s vibe. Love really can make you turn a deaf ear.
So I pulled her into a tight hug and squeezed. “I’m so sorry, Petula. Please, come inside and I’ll get you something warm to drink while we figure this out, okay?”
But she shrugged me off, her red-rimmed eyes wild as the wind tore at her hair. “No! I don’t need anything warm to drink. I know who did this, Stevie! I know who killed my sweet Pascal!”
Chapter 4
I gripped the edge of the sink in my guest bathroom after washing my hands and throwing cold water on my face, a little overwhelmed from the flurry of activity outside the door.
“Win?” I called out, catching the ugly truth of my appearance in the mirror. I looked pale and tired, with deep purple smudges beneath my eyes. Oh, and muddy. Very muddy. “Win? It’s okay. I’ve finished up.” We had a strict rule about my private time—that included the bathroom. Win never went past the threshold of the bathroom unless I called to him.
My Spy Guy’s warm aura wrapped around me in a gentle hug. “Dove. Oh, Dove, what can I do to comfort you while they finish up out there?”
“We need to figure out what happened to Belfry, Win. Where could he be?” As per Detective Moore, I wasn’t allowed to leave until everyone was questioned. But that didn’t help me where Bel was concerned. I couldn’t look for him while on lockdown. Time was of the essence here—maybe even crucial.
Why did I feel in my gut time was crucial?
“I’ll confess, I’m at my wit’s end about now, Stephania. Whiskey’s going absolutely mad upstairs, pacing back and forth like a bloody caged tiger while Arkady attempts to soothe him and the turkeys. You know how he gets when he’s away from our man Bel for too long. But I’ve looked in every cranny of this house we call home, and I’ve come up dry. It’s as though he’s fallen off the face of the planet.”
My stomach clenched into a tight knot—so tight I had to sit down on the toilet seat. “I can’t feel him anymore, Win. I don’t know what to do about it. I can almost always feel him, but there’s this hole now. This big, empty hole and…and…”
I bit back a sob and focused on the framed picture of some cliffs in Ireland by an artist Win had found while we’d antiqued. I had to remain calm. Nothing would be accomplished by losing my mind.
“I know, Dove. I know. Please, let’s just concentrate on getting everyone out of here so we can begin a proper, unencumbered search. Tell me about Petula. What in all of heaven did she mean when she said she knew who killed Pascal? Has this been labeled a murder already?”
I shook my head. “No. No one’s said a word about that, but Petula’s convinced Pascal’s wife is responsible.”
Win gasped in clear outrage. “His wife? The scoundrel! Has he been wooing our Petula whilst in the confines of marriage?”
Swallowing hard, I clenched my fists tight. “No. Not exactly. According to Petula, he’s separated from his wife—whom, according to Detective Kaepernick, still lives in France.”
“And how accurate is that assessment?”
“I don’t know. The detectives are looking into it as they question everyone, checking airlines and customs. But we have more than just Chef Le June’s death on our hands, Win. We have turkeys, and Easter bunnies, and baby Jesus zombies. What in the world is going on? Who did this, and how could they have possibly switched out all my decorations in such record time? I mean, how much time between Petula’s staff arriving and Enzo leaving does that give a person to pull off something of this magnitude?”
“That’s a good point. Clearly one needing investigating. We must ask Enzo if the egg-dispensing Easter bunny was on the roof when he left, and we need to find out who Petula sent to do the setup. Also suspicious? The number of turkeys now lounging about in our guest bedroom, soiling the one-hundred-dollar-a-square-yard, oyster-white carpet. There are four. Upon recollection of your order with Gobble Unlimited, you ordered four turkeys, did you not?”
My misery deepened. “I noticed that, too. But maybe it’s just a coincidence? Maybe we’re just being overly observant?”
“No, Dove. I don’t believe that—especially not if we both took note of that fact. This is all connected. I firmly believe this madness is also connected to Bel’s disappearance. There’s not a chance in Purgatory Bel would have allowed this sort of nonsense, had he been present. Someone is toying with us, and I want to know whom.”
Shivering, I remembered my conversation with the “Pour Some Sugar On Me” singers. “One of the carolers said their boss told them the work order had changed at the last minute, and if everyone would just get out of this
house, we could call them and ask who they spoke with!”
“Dove, you’re panicking. I hear it in your voice. I feel it. Please, I beg of you, attempt calm. I know how dearly you love Belfry. We all do. But it will do no good if we don’t do what we do best to try to find him.”
“Sleuth.”
“Indeed.”
Then something dawned on me. “Do you think…do you think it was Balthazar who did this?”
Of course! Win’s evil twin!
I knew Win’s voice would be filled with snappish tension before he even spoke. Balthazar was the sorest of subjects for him.
“As we’ve discovered since he, too, disappeared into the great unknown last summer, he’s quite incompetent, Stephania. He couldn’t even pull off showing up to steal all our money. It was rather in the bag for him, wouldn’t you agree? I’m dead. He’s not. He has my DNA. He had a test to prove as such. Yet, when the time came to hornswoggle our riches, he was a no-show. How could he possibly do something of this magnitude if he couldn’t show up for a simple meeting?”
That was a fair statement. It was true, Balthazar had shown up here in Eb Falls, slick as the day is long, posturing and gloating about how he was the real Crispin Alistair Winterbottom and how he was going to take every last penny of Win’s riches from me. But the very day we were to meet with our mutual lawyers, the meeting was cancelled and no one had heard from him since.
Further investigation did, in fact, prove Win and Balthazar were separated at birth and given up for adoption. Balthazar went into foster care for most of his life, and Win went to the woman who, though now deceased, he still lovingly calls mother.
The more I thought about it, the more true the theory rang. “But you have to admit, he does have motive. He hates my guts. He hates yours, too, even though he’s never laid eyes on you. I’m telling you, he harbors serious resentment that you weren’t tied up in the foster care system. You had a home. A family. He was jealous. How he got his hands on all your pertinent background information, I don’t know if we’ll ever know. I mean, you’re a spy and even you didn’t know you had a twin or that you were adopted, for goodness sake.”
“I think the point here is,” Win said in a dry tone, “I didn’t know I needed to look for anything, Stevie. Clearly, Balthazar wanted to locate his family because he didn’t have one. I had one. One that kept things from me, but one nonetheless.”
I winced. This was the sorest subject ever. I hated venturing into these waters, but Bel was on the line and a chef was dead. “Still, looking back on his smug conversations with me, he was definitely jealous of how you’d landed, where your adoption was concerned. That’s motive enough for me.”
“I still don’t know what to say about my alleged adoption…” Win muttered, making my heart tug.
When we’d found out Balthazar really was Win’s identical twin, and we’d done some serious digging, we’d come up with an adoption agency called Hopeful Horizons based in London. So we’d snooped, and then we’d snooped some more via all manner of totally illegal avenues.
Yes, I said illegal.
I don’t care that we chose some shady ways to go about finding out where Win and Balthazar came from, and that’s just the honest truth. Sue me. I simply couldn’t bear dejected, lost-without-answers Win. He’d been so blindsided after finding out the woman who’d raised him wasn’t his biological mother and he’d never had a single clue, I’d vowed right then and there to help him. I wanted to hold his hand during what I’m sure was a painful journey for him—much in the way he’d held my hand when I’d found out my father was alive.
We still hadn’t figured out why his mother never told him. Her deception had to have a valid reason, of that I’m positive, because according to my International Man of Mystery, he’d had a pretty happy childhood. So what had Win’s mom been hiding, and why?
“I’m sorry, Win. I don’t like bringing him up. I know how much finding out something like that hurt you. But it’s still a viable explanation.”
“Then why didn’t he show up to that meeting, Stevie? He could have had it all.”
“No. That’s not true. MI6 has your fingerprints and they were willing to hand them over to prove you were deceased. Balthazar might have your DNA, but he can’t have your fingerprints, Win. Maybe he got wind of the fact that we were going to force him to give up his fingerprints, got scared off and flew the coop.”
“Bah! Fingerprints are easily faked.”
I rolled my eyes, bracing my hands on the tops of my thighs. “When you’re an International Man of Intrigue and work for MI6—maybe. But not when you’re an average kid raised in foster care who worked at a cell phone store before he found out about you.”
“All that aside, it’s not a reason to sabotage your Christmas decorations, Dove. Not to this extent.”
I pushed all my fears about Bel aside and tried to focus on getting everyone out of my house so we could physically search for him. “Okay, so let’s set your evil twin aside for the moment. We still have a saboteur. Someone made the outside of our house look like a brothel, and there’s a reason. I just don’t know what it is. We also have a dead chef on our hands. One I’m praying wasn’t murdered.”
“Maybe he had a heart attack, Stevie? It certainly wouldn’t shock me. He did spend his days indulging in gooey pastries.”
“He’s in pretty great shape for a heart attack, but stranger things have been known to happen. I’d bet there are plenty of folks who look like they’re in perfect health on the outside, but inside lurks hardening arteries or high blood pressure. I hate to say it, but if he had to die, I’d rather they declared something of that nature. We’ve had a lot of murder lately, Win. After Sophia last summer…” I stopped, swallowing hard. Sophia’s death was still the hardest of all our murder investigations combined. “I guess I’m still feeling pretty sad about her.”
Win’s mournful sigh shuddered in my ear. “I mirror that sentiment, Dove.”
A sharp rap of knuckles on the bathroom door forced me to stand up. “Miss Cartwright? You’re needed out here.”
“Dove?”
“Mmm?”
“I’m here. I’m right here.”
My insides warmed. There was no disputing that fact. Win was always with me. “Thanks, Win,” I whispered as I popped open the door to find Officer Nelson with his arms stoically crossed over his broad chest.
“Where to, Officer Happy Pants?” I asked.
Dana actually snorted. “That’s a new one.”
I chuckled. “But is it your favorite one?”
“Nah. I’m still pretty partial to Officer By The Book. It’s neck and neck with Officer Rigid. Anyway, now that you know my kryptonite, mind talking about your idea of Christmas decorations? I don’t get it, Stevie. Were you going for some sort of out-of-the-box theme? Because I have to tell you, the tombstones with the committee names on them? Quite the personal touch.”
As he asked the question, I stopped midstride and looked around. Whoever had thrown up all over the outside of my house hadn’t bothered with the inside. There was still a touch of Christmas in every corner.
From the pearl lights strung through pine boughs with red and silver Christmas ornaments atop our kitchen cabinets, to the sprigs of fresh holly and ivy on one surface or another, my joy hadn’t totally been stolen.
I stopped just outside the parlor door, where everyone had gathered for questioning, and gave him a glare. “I had absolutely nothing to do with that. I know it’s a hard answer to swallow, considering the obvious care someone took in pranking me, but when I left here this morning, it was Christmas all day long. So while we investigate what happened to Chef Le June, how about we also consider I’ve been vandalized, and maybe the person who did this has something to do with what happened to the chef?”
Officer Nelson tapped my arm, stopping me from entering the fray of my noisy parlor where my enormous Christmas tree sat, glowing and perfect, surrounded by bikinis and stiletto heels.
&n
bsp; “You’re telling me someone switched out your decorations for the witch with the wand in her… Well, you know.”
I jabbed at the air with an angry finger. “That’s exactly what I’m telling you, Officer Rigid. In the eight or so hours I was gone, someone, probably someone who thought I might give them a little competition, made that mess out there. I’m sure they’re rolling around just laughing and laughing about it as we speak. But right now, we have a death on our hands. So for the moment, let’s go and get this handled. We can talk about the cretin who ruined my entry in the competition later.”
He motioned for me to enter, rolling his arm in a grand gesture. “Sounds like a plan. After you, She Who Talks To The Dead.”
Now I snorted. “Nice improv, Officer. Very nice.”
“Two can play your game, Miss Cartwright,” he said on a smug chuckle before directing me to the group Officer Moore was in the process of questioning.
When my turn came, and Sean Moore only shot two or three less-than-snarling questions at me then dismissed me, I have to say, I was stunned. I wasn’t sure if he hadn’t grilled me like our days gone by because he thought I was now a trusted witness to a crime, or he was just done with me in general because I got under his skin.
Either way, I decided to go to the back of the line and simply observe as I fought to keep from screaming at everyone to get out of my house so I could search for my familiar.
While I waited behind Petula and some of the carolers, I finally had the chance to give a good look around and see if indeed Petula’s staff member had placed the pastries where I’d asked.
Sure enough, they were exactly where I’d requested—on a gorgeous antique buffet right next to the fireplace, highlighted by the glow of our Christmas tree.
A mound of delicate, fluffy squares sat upon a silver tray, glistening with colored sugar. The secret-recipe salted-caramel sauce Chef Le June had bragged so over—in a matching silver server with ladle—was right next to them, on a Sterno in order to keep it warm.
How the Witch Stole Christmas (Witchless In Seattle Book 5) Page 5