by Tegan Maher
I shook my head as I rooted through the blends to find the one she used for Loca Mocha, my favorite energy brew. Aside from standard powers most witches were blessed with, Raeann was primarily an earth witch of the highest order and put her talents to use via making some of the best coffee and tea blends you could imagine. Energy, sore muscles, sleep, mood, upset stomach, arthritis—if you had a problem, chances were good Raeann had a coffee or tea for it. Of course, she didn’t advertise that she used magic to make them, but she was open about using herbs, and people loved them so much that she’d built a nice side business selling the blends bagged like the chain coffee shops do.
Her magical green thumb was also the reason I had fresh fruit and berries to use in my baked goods year-round, which was a good thing. The cost to buy them in the winter would have eaten up any profit I might have made and would have likely required higher prices.
“Nah,” I replied, pulling the loca mocha blend from the back corner of the cabinet. I haven’t talked to Hunter yet today. I figured I’d wait ‘til after I get my hair done, then walk him over a coffee and tell him what I learned.” I measured the blend into the espresso basket and rinsed out the milk cup so I could froth my own. “Have you heard anything good here this morning?”
She shook her head as she squirted caramel into the latte she was making. “Nothing other than wild speculation. There seem to be two modes of thought. One, Evie killed him because he ripped her out of that truck when she was the one who paid for it. Two—and this one seems less popular—an angry husband got him.”
I raised a brow at her. “Is that a thing? I mean, it was obvious he fancied himself God’s gift to women, but were there actually women willing to risk a marriage for him?”
She lifted a shoulder. “You know how people are.”
Unfortunately, I did, and I was convinced half the people I talked to in an average day were walking around with their brains in backwards. I slid around Levana, who was checking a woman and her young daughter out and slid the pastry case open. I was surprised to see that it was slim pickins in there since I’d just filled it up the day before. “Was there some great pastry craving that I didn’t hear about?”
Levana shook her head as she handed the lady her change. “No, but it seems with the murder and the races being canceled, people who had planned on camping came to town for breakfast instead. We had people waiting at the door when we opened, and it’s been nonstop ever since.”
“I guess I know what I’m doing tonight, then,” I said. In a way, I was a little relieved because I needed the stress relief, and it would be a good time to think without actually thinking. Baking is therapeutic for me, which is the main reason I have no interest in opening a bakery. I don’t want one of my biggest pleasures to turn into a chore. Still, it’s a great time to let my mind wander. It’s amazing what you can work out when you just let things simmer in the back of your brain.
“Looks that way,” she said. “The mixed-berry turnovers seem to be the hottest commodity right now. We were out of them within an hour.”
I felt a little guilty taking some of what little was left, but I grabbed a couple of cranberry-orange muffins along with three blueberry turnovers and stuffed them into a paper bag. I’d found that folks were much more willing to chat when you handed them free baked goods, and Coralee definitely had a sweet tooth. Not that she needed any incentive to talk, but a little goodwill in the form of her favorite muffins never hurt.
“I’ll see you two later,” I said, dropping a couple of ice cubes into my cup before I snapped on the lid. “By the time I get my hair done, you should be past the rush.”
“And you’ll probably know more, too,” Raeann tossed over her shoulder with a saucy grin. Her green eyes—replicas of mine—were sparkling with humor, but I knew she was only half kidding. There’d been a couple of times when she’d learned about something secondhand, and those times hadn’t gone well for me, not that I blamed her. We’d been peas and carrots since we were kids, especially after my dad had dropped Shelby and me off at Addy’s and driven away for good.
I nodded as I headed back toward the back door. “You’ll know something as soon as I do!”
The sun was shining as I made my way down the alley to the salon, and I squinted when I pushed through the door. Silence fell, and you could have heard the proverbial pin drop. Coralee smiled at me but turned her attention back to the older, gray-haired woman in her chair.
“Hey, Coralee. Hi, Ms. Millie,” I said, setting the bag of pastries on the counter and taking a seat in one of the vintage red Naugahyde chairs. How’s the mister?”
“Hello, Noelle,” the woman replied, wrinkling her nose and trying not to inhale the cloud of AquaNet Coralee was spraying around her puff of blue hair. “He’s fine. Arthritis is actin’ up a little in his knee with these cold nights startin’ to settle in. I swear, buyin’ a house in Florida to winter in is lookin’ more and more appealin’ the older we get.”
“I don’t blame you,” I said. “I’d have a place down there, too, if I could. I’m not lookin’ forward to the cold.”
“Pft,” she said, flapping a gnarled hand. “When I was your age, I was sleddin’ and livin’ it up. I loved the snow back then. But that was before the cold was able to work itself into my bones. And before I had to worry about breakin’ a hip on ice.” She shook her head. “Agin’ is better than the alternative, I suppose, but it sure ain’t the way I’da designed it had I been the one in charge of things, you can take that to the bank.”
That was slippery territory since Millie’s daddy had been a preacher, so I decided it was a great time to show how virtuous I was by remaining silent.
“So who up and kilt that no-good Jackson Prescott?” she asked, making me wish I’d have continued the conversation about the Good Lord’s creation bloopers.
“We don’t know yet, but Hunter’s working hard to figure it out,” I replied.
Belle, on the other hand, did not choose virtue. She turned away from supervising—and by that, I mean bossing—Alyse, Coralee’s perky protégé, who was giving Marge from the hardware store a perm. She raised a perfectly drawn silvery brow and piped up. “Shoot, if Millie’d been in charge of creation, men woulda been born with rings in their noses and women other than herself woulda been built with zippers that didn’t open ‘til their weddin’ night.”
I coughed to cover a laugh, but Ms. Millie glared in her general direction. “You know I can hear you even if I can’t see you, you old bat.”
That was true, though nobody understood how. Ms. Millie said it was because she had such a close relationship with God that she could sense out evil. The two had never gotten along, even though Millie’d never had her hair done anywhere else. “And with the seven husbands you had, that zipper’da been worn clean out by the time you finally bit the dust.”
“Eight,” Belle corrected. “And you might wanna be careful talkin’ about other women’s zippers. Don’t forget I knew you in high school. A gym bag didn’t have nothin’ on you.”
Millie hmphed with the level of indignation only the righteous can achieve, but slammed her lips shut and stood from the chair. She dug through her purse and pulled out a twenty, then thrust it at Coralee. “Keep the change, sweetie. You deserve it, bein’ stuck here in this shop with that old windbag all day.”
As the bell on the door clanged with her exit, Coralee turned to Belle. “I don’t know why you insist on tormentin’ her. I swear you two are like a couple of old hens, cluckin’ and peckin’ at each other. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you had a history.”
Belle drew her eyebrows down and crossed her arms as she hovered above the washing station, but she didn’t reply.
Coralee turned to me after she’d dusted the chair off and swept the hair clippings into a pile. “C’mon, sugar. Let’s get you even prettier than you already are. She glanced toward the paper bag and shoved a stray lock of bleach-blonde hair from her face. As always, her makeup was flawless ev
en if it was a little more colorful than I would have used, and her big hair was held in a perfect feather by enough hairspray to choke a horse. “That for me?”
“One of ‘em is,” I replied. “I haven’t had breakfast yet, and I figured Alyse was hungry, too. Marge, there’s an extra blueberry muffin if you want one.”
“Thanks, Noelle,” Alyse said as she squirted the last of the perm solution onto Marge’s curlers.
I distributed the goodies, then sat back down with mine. Coralee sat in her barber chair and sighed as she bit into her turnover. “I will never get tired of these,” she said around a mouthful.
I smiled; the only thing better than baking them was hearing that they made somebody happy.
“So, really, where’s Hunter at on the investigation?” Belle asked, swooping down so that she was hovering over the chair beside me.
Careful not to put my arm through her, I peeled open my muffin.
“He’s exactly where I said he was,” I said. “He talked to a bunch of people last night, and I ran into Evie, Jackson’s ex. She was with some guy named Stuart, who I guess used to be friends with Jackson.”
“I went to school with Evie,” Alyse said, popping open a can of Coke. “She was a couple years ahead of me, but she always seemed okay. A little hoity-toity, maybe, but she never did anything to me.”
Coralee shook her head, and I marveled once again how it all moved as one piece. “That Stuart, though, he’s been trouble since the day he was born.”
My gaze snapped to her. “Really? I didn’t get that impression from him. He seemed nice enough to me, at least until they figured out I was asking questions to rule them in or out rather than just to be friendly.”
“Nope,” Marge yelled from under the dryer. No matter how often we told her, she didn’t seem to remember that she was the only one who had problems hearing while she was under it. “One thing you can be sure of—if someone was ever friends with Jackson, at least for any time, he’s trouble. Stuart’s no exception. Like runs with like, and those boys were always up to no good. I can’t even count how many times I caught ’em sneakin’ candy from the store into their pockets. Then when I’d call ’em on it, they’d bald-faced lie to me and say they brung it in with ’em.”
“Yeah,” I said, a sliver of doubt forming in my mind. “but they were kids. Did they stay friends as adults?”
Belle nodded, her beehive wobbling. “They sure did. And had their fingers in some pretty unsavory pies, too. They ran a used car business for a while until people stopped buyin’ from them cuz all they sold was junk. Fillin' the differentials up with sawdust, rollin’ back odometers ... you name a dirty trick, and they done it. Matter of fact, it almost got Stuart a beatin’ one night when Louellen Sayer bought one to get her back and forth from work and it turned out to have a blown head gasket. When she went to talk to them, Jackson told her she bought it as-is. Her brother went down the next day to show ’em what happens when they deal with somebody capable of standin’ up for themselves. Jackson wasn’t there, but Stuart was. It wasn’t long after that, they shut it down.”
“So what happened?” I asked. “And how long ago was that?” It wouldn’t be the first time a man had gotten himself dead for ripping off the wrong person.
Coralee washed a bite down. “That was years ago. Louellen’s brother got her money back for her.”
Alyse’s gaze took on a faraway look. “That boy’s a looker. It’s a shame he moved to New Orleans.”
Well, that shot that idea right in the butt.
“What about other people like them, though? I’ve had all of five conversations about the man, and every one of them involved him ripping somebody off in one way or another. Surely there has to be somebody with an ax to grind. Or a screwdriver to wield, I suppose,” I said.
Coralee paused, then heaved a sigh. “You know I don’t like to spread anything that I don’t know for a fact is true”—not entirely correct, but she did try—“but I’ve heard rumors he had a problem spendin’ outside of his means.”
“I assume you’re not talkin’ about a maxed-out credit card or twelve,” I said, and she shook her head.
“No, I’m talkin’ about a maxed-out credit line with folks you don’t want to owe money to.” She popped the last of her turnover in her mouth and wadded up the paper, then stood and brushed her hands off. “You ready?”
“Almost,” I said. “So who are these folks you’re talkin’ about?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Just the generic them. You know, people talk about how he borrowed money and got in over his head. Nobody really says who he borrowed it from. That’s why I said I didn’t know if it was true or not. What is true is that he had a lot of nice things and no job.”
I furrowed my brow as I took a final swig of coffee, then climbed into her barber chair. “He didn’t have a job?” I couldn’t believe I hadn’t realized that until now, but, come to think of it, nobody’d said a word about where he worked.
“That boy ain’t held a steady job since he graduated high school,” Marge said. “He either gets fired or decides havin’ a job is too much work within a few months of startin’ somewhere. He’s worked out at the lumberyard and at the feed store. He tried his hand at the oil rigs, but they fired him pretty quick when he almost got a chain hand killed.” She waved a freshly manicured hand. “The boy’s simply allergic to honest work, though I suspect back in the day, when Hank was runnin’ things, he was thick into some of the seedier things goin’ on in town.”
“What about Evie’s brother Andy?” Alyse said. “Shouldn’t they look at him? After all, they did have words over the whole truck thing.”
Coralee furrowed her brow as she ran the brush through my hair. “Now that you mention it, yeah, but that was over a year ago.”
“Not that long,” Alyse said. “I seen ’em arguin’ in the parking lot out at Pigs just a couple months ago. I couldn’t hear what they were arguin’ about, but Jackson spun outta there like his tailpipe was on fire, and Andy looked ready to spit nails.”
By Pigs, she meant the Piggly Wiggly, our local grocery store. It was a great place to people-watch while you were grocery shopping and maybe trade tidbits with folks you ran into, but that was it. We wouldn’t get any good information from anybody there, but it was interesting to know. At least I had something to take to Hunter because unless he’d had better luck since last night, any string to pick at would be welcome.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
We talked a bit more, but I didn’t learn anything else of interest. It was sort of nice, though, that I didn’t get raked over the coals for details. Apparently, Belle had popped in out there last night when she heard the news from Addy, who’d heard about the murder from Cheri Lynn. Those three were probably the biggest gossips in town, and they were especially bad because they could be anywhere they wanted to be and could eavesdrop shamelessly, right in the same room, because nobody could see or hear them unless they wanted them to. Except for Millie, but her case was unique, and I swear it was because of some connection she and Belle had. Maybe they’d just been at each other for so many decades that they’d formed some kind of weird tether that stretched beyond living and dying.
Once I left the salon, I decided more caffeine was in order. Plus, I hadn’t really sat down and talked to Raeann in a few days, and I missed her. We’d gone from spending every day together to only seeing each other a few minutes a day if that. I mean, we still talked, but we hadn’t hung out in over a week. She and her boyfriend Dave, a doctor she’d met when we’d had to take Shelby to the ER for stitches, were getting serious. I was happy for her, but at the same time, I missed the old days. I sighed. More change, and though I was doing my best to come to terms with it, I was still a little restless. I felt like everything familiar and loved was slipping through my fingers faster than I could find a way to come to terms with it all.
I shook off the sense of melancholy that was threatening to settle over me and decided to walk to Brew4U. I
texted Hunter on the way, but he didn’t answer. Since he always responded right away if he could, I had to assume he was busy with the case and would get back to me when he had a minute. I composed a longer message about Evie’s brother and the cryptic them that Jackson was possibly in the hole with, and held my face up to the sun. It was turning out to be a beautiful, if warm, day, and I smiled when I thought of the snow the upper part of the country was getting. I know some people loved it, but I’d take my blue skies and warm weather all day, every day.
As predicted, Brew had quieted down in the hour I’d been at Coralee’s. In fact, it was as empty as the pastry case, and Raeann and Levana were sitting at a table, Rae with a cup of coffee and Levana with tea. She’d been born and raised in a much different era—century, in fact—and still preferred to the occasional cup of tea to coffee.
“Hey, ladies,” I said, shaking my head so that my freshly cut hair fell around my shoulders in that perfect way it always did when I left the salon. One of the best things about getting your hair done. “What’s new with you two? I feel like we haven’t talked in forever.”
“I know,” Levana said. “We’ve all been so busy that we haven’t spent any time together outside of work.” Her mouth turned down into a frown. “I really miss it. We need to make time for each other. It’s important because when it comes down to it, we’re family. Or at least that’s how I feel.”
“Me, too,” Raeann said. “Dave and I have been spending a lot more time together than usual, and it’s distracting me. What say we have a girls’ night tomorrow? We’ve skipped the last couple of weeks, and we need to get back on schedule.”
Some of my stress lifted away at the idea. “Perfect. And yes, we do. Fancy’s? Seven o’clock?”
They both agreed, and I made myself another Loca Mocha and collapsed into a seat at the table.
Raeann leaned in. “So, dish.”