The Witch's Beauty_A Cozy Witch Mystery)

by Iris Kincaid

  “It is a bit of a physics and mathematical exercise,” Max agreed. “Also, hand-eye coordination. Also, good imagination. Because sometimes, there’s absolutely no way to get your ball in, and that being the case, you have to figure out a way to get your ball in.”

  “How long does it take to get good? I mean, how long before I’m as good as you?”

  “You can be as good as me by this time next month. I’m not that good,” Max confessed.

  They shared a laugh. Then Max shook his head and looked at her thoughtfully.

  “When I first saw you at the coffee shop, you tried to talk to me and I was as rude as all get out. And when I was jump roping with the girls and you tried to talk to me . . .”

  “You were as rude as all get out.”

  “Yes, I was. And I need to apologize for that. I looked at you and all I saw was a beautiful woman. And I thought I knew exactly what that meant. I thought I knew what type of woman you were. And I couldn’t have been more stupid or more wrong.

  “I don’t know if I ever told you that my mother was killed. She was murdered. And the woman who murdered her was a beautiful woman. And that always stuck with me. That beauty was a mask capable of hiding great evil. Knowing that about my mother’s killer always made me distrust beauty.

  “And of course, there’s just this general assumption that people have, that beautiful women have it pretty easy in life. Which I could never relate to, and which I know has not been the way that your life has been at all. You’ve lost just as much as I have, your mother and your father as well. Those things can’t be soothed by beauty.”

  It wasn’t the whole story, and if he wanted to know her, then he really needed to know what her life had been like. She pulled a photo out of her wallet of herself, her face scarred and burned at its worst. So many times, she’d been tempted to throw it away. She could hardly explain why she held onto it. Now, she needed him to see.

  “I was badly burned in the car accident that killed my parents. This is what I looked like for most of my life. This is what I looked like.”

  She handed the photo to him and waited for his response. Max’s brain could hardly make the connection between the poor scarred girl in the picture and the gorgeous creature he had come to know. But close examination revealed the mind-boggling truth. It was indeed the same woman.

  “How? How?”

  “It was kind of a miraculous plastic surgery. I’d already been through a dozen other procedures. But I found someone who was able to work magic. So, yeah, now I’m beautiful. But my life has not been beautiful. I wish it had been. I wish I were one of those spoiled, entitled women that you assumed I was. I wish all of these years hadn’t been so painful and lonely and hard.

  “I had a foster family too. But I saw more of the burn unit than I did of them. But I survived it. And I get to start out all over again, with possibilities that just never existed for me when I was younger. The possibility of being happy.”

  Max put the pool cues back in place. He was no longer in the mood for lighthearted play. What Lorna had gone through was almost unimaginable. His first assumptions about her could not have been more wrong. What strength she possessed. Did he even have the right to ask whether she would share her strength with someone who was still not capable of envisioning a better future?

  “Have you ever worked with children? I ask because I have a student who is so unhappy, and so the lonely, and so isolated that it breaks my heart. And I have no idea what to do for her. Would you consider maybe meeting her, and just advising me on what to do? We don’t have to single her out. You could come give a presentation to the class on pretty much anything. We have a lot of career days. Maybe talk about being a librarian.”

  “No one wants to be a librarian. Young kids think it’s the dullest thing in the world. But yes, I’ll come and try to reach her. Of course, I will. What can you tell me about her?”

  “She’s painfully shy. She has no friends. And she’s heavier than the other kids, quite a bit heavier. I think that’s mostly the reason she’s so excluded. But she’s as smart as a whip. And she has the most mature interests. She’s got a copy of the Wall Street Journal on her desk most mornings. She’s going through the stocks. Who does that when they’re fifteen?”

  Umm, maybe an investment genius who could turn five hundred dollars into seven thousand in three short years?

  CHAPTER TEN

  Good thing that Lorna’s supervisor’s love life was going so well. She didn’t blink an eye when Lorna asked for a little bit of an extension to all of her time off. She had to help Max out. The murder was still very unsolved. And Finn Cochran had informed her that there was another important interview to conduct. To her great surprise, it was a revisit to see Jake Partridge.

  “Yeah, when Mr. Westworld and his fiancée were saying how grateful they were to Stella’s book, which helped to get rid of the wrong woman, the judgmental woman, the prude, he forgot to mention that Stella Kirby received death threats from him after the publication of her book and after his first fiancée left him. And she had an ongoing restraining order on him. But she’s dead now, so I guess it’s not ongoing. The point is, he hated Stella, and she considered him to be a danger.”

  “Geez. It sounds like he was really torn up at the time,” Lorna said. “Maybe he was able to get past it. Maybe he really sees it as a blessing in disguise now.”

  “Or maybe he was full of hooey.”

  “Or that.”

  *****

  This time, they needed to speak to Jake Partridge without his new fiancée nearby. There was no guarantee of his honesty, but if she was listening in, there was a high probability of dishonesty. He was still barking orders at his construction site and was none too pleased to see them again.

  “Going to be needing a few more moments of your time, Mr. Partridge. Alone. Could you take a walk with us?” Finn made it sound like a request, but he did not look as if he was going to take no for an answer.

  “Okay, but just ten minutes. This is a very busy day.”

  They were soon out of sight range of the worksite.

  “We also have many things to do, Mr. Partridge. So let’s cut to the chase. Death threats. Restraining orders. Why don’t you tell me about how okay you were with Stella Kirby’s book?”

  “I . . . of course, being dumped by your fiancée is a very hard thing. One minute, you’re planning a wedding. You’re thrilled beyond belief that the most incredible woman in the world wants to spend the rest of her life with you. And then the next thing you know, she’s looking at you with disgust and your whole world is crumbling. And things will never be the same again. She ruined my life. Stella ruined my life.”

  “But you met someone new,” Lorna reminded him. “You fell in love with someone new, and now you’re going to have a great life with her.”

  “Kimberly is a very good woman. Very industrious. Very dependable. She’s going to make a good . . . partner. A good companion. But, I’m never going to feel passion again the way I did for Amy, the woman who should have been my wife. I still think about her every day.”

  “Sounds like Stella ruined everything for you,” Finn said.

  “Yes, of course she did. But if you’re implying that I killed her, might I remind you about that restraining order? How could I possibly have gotten anywhere near Stella Kirby? Now if you don’t mind, I really need to be getting back.”

  As they watched him return to the construction site, Finn shook his head. “He had that alibi right at the tip of his tongue. Almost rehearsed. That’s never a good sign.”

  “He made a mistake, and the love of his life couldn’t forgive him. I feel sorry for him. Don’t you feel sorry for him?”

  “Don’t go into police work. You’re the biggest softie I ever met in my life.”

  “I’m not a softie. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and . . . help out at the local high school.”

  “Softie!”

  *****

  Walking through h
er old high school hallways didn’t bring back a single pleasant memory for Lorna. Back then, she had just kept her eyes low and tried to survive every uncomfortable day. But as always, she was reminded that now was very different than then. The teenage crowd was awestruck at the sight of such beauty in their midst.

  She was standing outside Max’s classroom, waiting for his last class to end and for the next one that she would be addressing. She was practicing her speech and concentrating so hard, and gesturing with her hands, that she inadvertently swiped the cheek of a sixteen-year-old boy passing by. He flinched from her touch.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry. Did I hurt you?”

  He shook his head, barely able to meet her eye. He had a terrible case of acne, one of the worst she had ever seen. There was no doubt that he was feeling terribly self-conscious about it.

  “It was so clumsy of me. I need to learn how to talk without waving my hands around.”

  Lorna did her best to keep rambling, even though she was looking at something that was even more remarkable than the flowers springing back to life. The patch of skin that she touched on the boy’s face was now completely clear. It was still surrounded by large amounts of acne-scarred skin. How on earth was it going to be explained?

  “I think I had a bit of skin cream on my hand that I accidentally got on your face. Sorry about that. I didn’t realize there was still some on my fingers. It’s a strong medicated solution. I hope it didn’t sting.”

  “No, I’m fine.” The boy reached up to touch his face and was startled to feel the clear spot. No doubt he thought it was his imagination, and as he stumbled away, Lorna was fairly certain that he was headed straight toward the nearest mirror.

  *****

  The withdrawn fifteen year old girl’s name was London, and Max introduced her to Lorna before they entered the classroom and left them to speak one-on-one for a moment before class began.

  “Your teachers care about you, London. I hope you know that. Mr. Crowe especially. I know right now that it must feel as if the kids don’t like you, as if there’s no way you could ever be comfortable and fit in.”

  London could hardly believe that this really beautiful woman was taking the time to speak to her. “They don’t like me. They don’t want to be seen with me. Because I’m fat. Because I don’t know how to talk to people.”

  Lorna put a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Forget about it.”

  “Forget about what?”

  “Let’s go inside. I think you’re going to like this class. We’re going to be talking about the stock market.”

  “That is so cool. That is one of my favorite things,” London said excitedly, shyness forgotten.

  “But don’t be surprised if I need you to lend a hand to help me out.”

  London beamed. How did this lady know that she had experience with the stock market?

  *****

  They were the perfect audience for this talk, tenth-graders with big dreams and no money. After Lorna had given them a chilling portrait of the state of the economy, including the likelihood that they’d still be living with their parents at age thirty, the crushing student debt they wouldn’t be able to pay off until they were fifty-five, the unlikelihood that they would ever own a home, and other alarming predictions.

  “Unless you become very smart with money. Do you realize that if you had invested a thousand dollars in Snapchat when they first went public, you’d be sitting on over half a million dollars right now?”

  That certainly got their attention. “And you sure wouldn’t have to live with your parents for the next fifteen years. Or never be able to afford to travel. Or stay in that rotten job that you hate for ten years, or twenty years, or your entire life, because it pays the bills and the thing that you really want to do may not pay a whole lot. Maybe you want to write songs. Maybe want to start a nonprofit. Maybe you want to be a yoga instructor. Very healthy lifestyle, but not a lot of money.

  “The thing is if you have a solid stream of investment income coming in, it gives you a lot of freedom to live your life the way you want to live it. And when you start young, the sky’s the limit. You learn about investing now, you start investing in a few years, and you’ll be ready to be semi-retired by twenty-seven. And semi-retired just means doing whatever it is you want to do, and still knowing that the money will come pouring in.”

  “How do we learn about it?” one boy wondered.

  “You find an expert to teach you. Not me. I’m doing okay, but I know someone who’s had a lot more success than myself. London, I talked to one of the local stock traders in town and apparently, you’ve made quite an impression on the trading community. None of them can believe that their results are being beaten by someone who’s still in high school.

  “I was going to offer everyone a few tips, but your classmates are better off learning from someone who is at the top of this game. By the time London is twenty-five, she’s going to be able to buy an entire house with cash. And since it gets a bit chilly up here in the winter, where is your winter home going to be, London?”

  London grinned. “Cancun.”

  “Anyone else here interested in having a tropical getaway some day?”

  Several hands popped up in the air.

  “Traveling around the world? Being able to afford your own new car? Creating a recording studio for yourself? Starting your own restaurant? Getting out of college without a dime of debt? Helping your parents to pay off their mortgage?”

  By then, almost every hand was in the air.

  “London, I know you haven’t had time to prepare anything, but can you give us a few general guidelines, some solid advice on how to get started?”

  “You have to pay attention to the things that people are playing on their phone. To the things that they’re wearing. To the things that kids are nagging their parents for. You have to read about medical developments. You have to read about real estate issues. You have to read articles about new tech developments. And you don’t have to understand completely. I don’t have to know everything about AI to know that I ought to have some money in AI.

  “And you start with fake money. You pick your stocks and your portfolio and you see how much money you would have made if you put actual money down. You take a whole year to figure it out. Until it becomes clear that you really can’t afford not to invest. And then you take the plunge.”

  Lorna and Max watched delightedly as the other students hung on London’s every word. At least a dozen of them started scribbling down notes! She was turning into EF Hutton.

  “You know what I always thought would be a great idea?” Lorna chimed in. “I know there are all kinds of afterschool clubs that are interesting and fun. But what about one that really sets you up for some financial security? I think an investment club would be an excellent idea. You could use one of the conference rooms over at the public library. And London could run it, because I can think of no one better qualified. If you want to get on the fast track, I think she can help point the way.”

  The class started chattering excitedly. Max sent a very grateful glance in Lorna’s direction.

  *****

  As Lorna exited the classroom, the young man with the acne approached her with nervous excitement and agitation.

  “That lotion that you accidentally got on me. Can I buy some of that? Or could you tell me where I could get it? It really works. I mean, seriously works. I really need to get a hold of it. If I don’t, I’ll probably look like this all the way to graduation. That’s three years. That’s . . . forever.”

  There was, of course, no magic lotion. Only Lorna’s magic touch. But she did have a placebo in the form of a very ordinary skin moisturizer.

  “It’s not on the market yet, and I have no idea when I’ll be able to get another bottle. So, it has to be used sparingly. I’ll put it on you because if you do it yourself, you’ll probably use too much. So, meet me out in the guest parking lot, and I’ll see what I can do.”

  They met outside ten
minutes later. It was very unsettling how fast the boy’s skin cleared under her touch. It was a beautiful miracle, but how on earth was he going to explain it to his family and friends? Well, there are worse problems. Without the problem skin, he was an extremely handsome young man.

  “Try not to break any hearts,” Lorna teased him.

  He reached up and felt the incredible smoothness of his own face. He looked at Lorna, completely overcome. She patted his hand.

  “It was my pleasure. Now, if any of your friends should ever have a similar problem, send them to the Oyster Cove Public Library and have them ask for Lorna Sinclair. I might have a few drops left. All right. You have a great . . . life. Bye.”

  How different his life was going to be. That was as satisfying as a love spell any day.

  *****

  It had been a day of good deeds and it should have been rewarded with a night of deep, peaceful sleep. But something kept fluttering in the back of Lorna’s mind. Something about witches. Something about Max.

  Delphine had said that Max’s mother was killed by a witch and that he knew it. But of course, he couldn’t mention that to her because he didn’t know that Lorna knew anything about witches. He did, however, say that his mother had been killed by a beautiful woman. Which was it? A witch? Or a beautiful woman?

  It was a ridiculously, unforgivably late hour when Lorna found herself ringing Delphine’s doorbell, unable to live with the uncertainty for another moment. Delphine appeared in a dusty rose house robe, looking as if she’d just been dragged from bed, but not tired in the slightest.

  “You said that a witch killed Max Crowe’s mother. Who was the witch? Who was the witch who killed his mother?”

  Delphine examined her latest protégé. “If you have come to ask me that question at three o’clock in the morning, then I think you must already know the answer.”

  Lorna shook her head. She didn’t want to know. But of course, she knew. Max Crowe’s mother had been killed by Lilith Hazelwood.

  *****

  After Delphine had gently urged Lorna to go home and get some sleep, it was time for Lilith to weigh in.