“Ooh! ‘Master’ Shade. That’s MEOW-velous! I think that’s how you all should address me from now on,” he suggested.
“How’s about I lick a stamp and slap it on your forehead and address you to Timbuktu?” Jet offered, still licking the milk from his fur.
“Hmmph,” Shade snorted in reply and slinked off into the shadows to find a mouse. Or at least a more appreciative audience.
Portia turned her attentions back to Chief Trew. “So, Chief. Am I to understand that you entered my home in my absence because you believed Mr. Silverback to be lodged here and you somehow believed him to be responsible in some way for Spithilda Roach’s untimely demise?”
The Chief flushed a little red around the tips of his ears. He pulled nervously at his collar. I wondered if he thought Portia capable of slipping a Truth Serum into his tea. Or worse.
I guess he decided honesty was the best policy. “Yes, ma’am. We did knock. But, there was no answer.”
“I was procuring the necessary ingredients to develop Mr. Silverback’s much-needed monthly elixir. I had run out of a few key ingredients myself. Luckily, Ms. Joyvive’s establishment is a well stocked and well run apothecary. But, back to Lady Roach’s death. You say Spithilda expired three nights past, correct?”
“That is correct,” Chief Trew agreed.
Portia stood, with her typical stiff grace, and glided to a wall belabored with pigeon-hole racks. Scores of rolled documents, ancient maps, charts, spells, and graphs, were stuffed into the open spaces. Portia ticked a long, gnarled finger in the air, searching for just the right scroll.
“Aha! This is the one.” She pulled a long, ethereally white scroll from her collection and brought it to the table. Once there, she rolled it out to reveal a brilliantly illuminated lunar chart. A flowing, looping script delineated the cycle of the moon in pearlescent blue ink. Portia laid a long, thickly yellow nail upon the full, silvery orb in the center of the chart.
“This, of course, is the full moon. It is the full moon that commands our greatest attention each month. We witches can use the power of this moon to work some of our strongest magic.”
“If you’re into the sort of thing,” Chief Trew jibed. The thin hard line of Portia’s dry lips indicated her level of amusement. The Chief cleared his throat.
Portia continued. “But, even the Unawakened have reason to give the full moon pause. The werewolf legend has root in their history as well as our own.”
I remembered my little self-guided tour down lycan memory lane. A sudden shudder rippled down my spine.
“But,” Portia gave the silvery orb several rhythmic taps. “A lycan, be he born or cursed, will not only feel the effect of the moon’s power on the rise of the fullest moon. He or she will also succumb to the beast for the twenty-four hours before as well as twenty-four hours hence. He will metamorphose for three days into the form of a ravenous, consuming wolf, fierce and powerful. Enormous black eyes that reflect the fires of hell. A gnashing mouth, filled with tearing teeth, foams rabid with his blood-lust. He is not a man in control. He is the animal.”
I was suddenly very, very glad I had left Fraidy at home.
“Even in the daylight hours, when he walks among men, the Beast is of snarled brain, wanting only to shred and devour, and waits only for the moon rise to take control.”
“So, you’re saying then, that Rad would not have had the wherewithal to poison Spithilda since she was killed within that three-day period.” Chief Trew summed up.
“It is highly unlikely, Chief Trew. Not, only the wherewithal, but also he would have had no mental or physical faculty to accomplish such a thought out, restrained act. Rad always ran a risk when he went out in public during his cycle. I clearly advised him against it and told him, one day, he could lose his tenuous grip on his humanity.”
“Ok, so, Rad wasn’t biologically capable — he would have most likely ripped her apart, not take the time to crush up some pokeberries to feed her. So, we’re one suspect short of an investigation, Hat.” David looked at me with tired eyes. My heart thudded briefly. I just nodded.
“And, so why did he come here? I thought the Fearwyn’s hated werewolves,” I pointed out.
Portia’s face twitched.
“That was always Mother’s opinion. Not mine,” she spat.
The growling and snarling had stopped. Portia’s potion had done its job. The old witch made a move to open the big door. The Chief readied his weapon.
Portia clucked her tongue. “That won’t be at all necessary, Chief. The elixir has quite taken effect by now.”
She opened the weighty door with surprising strength. Just another reminder not to underestimate Portia Fearwyn and what the old sorceress was capable of.
A haggard, ragged Rad Silverback shuffled from the basement.
“How are you feeling, Rad?” Chief Trew asked.
“Tired. I think it may be time for me to stop kidding myself. I’m no longer human, and I should stop pretending to be the same. I had too many close calls this cycle. Thanks to you, Hattie, and to you Portia, I was spared from committing some horrible atrocity that I never would have been able to forgive myself for. Thank you, ladies.”
Portia gave an informal bow. I gave the werewolf a quick salute.
“What will you do now?” the Chief posed.
“I’m going to head out to other side of the Isle. Where the rest of my kind live. Hopefully, they can help me learn how to manage my affliction.”
“You’re always welcome here, Rad,” I offered, remembering the values Grammy Chimera had instilled in me.
Accept everyone, and anyone and your house will never want for friends.
Grammy’s voice echoed again in my mind.
Chief Trew threw me a sudden and very concerned look.
“Just maybe not during a particular three days a month!” I suggested hurriedly.
The Chief and I had crossed one suspect off our list, but we still had work to do. We graciously excused ourselves and left Portia’s crumbling manor.
We each grabbed our own brooms from their posts against the wall.
“That was nice of Portia to help Rad out, even if they never actually tied the knot. Portia’s okay,” Chief shook his head as he straddled his broom.
While I agreed that Portia had done one good deed, I wasn’t one hundred percent sold that she hadn’t balanced her moral ledger out by performing a bad one. A late night butterfly flitted in front of my face and landed on the pokeberries in Portia’s garden. As the insect alit on a bright, violet berry then down onto a verdant, broad leaf, a question nagged at the back of my mind. I decided that tomorrow’s first order of business was to pay a visit to Verdantia Eyebright’s greengrocer stall at the market. Somewhere in all of the clues and evidence, the solution to this mystery was hiding.
Twin cannonballs of black rocketed onto the back of my broom as Shade and Jet zoomed out of nowhere.
I shrieked for the third time that night. You might say I was feeling a little edgy.
13
drop dead gourd-geous
I hadn’t slept very well after the cats and I had gotten home from Portia’s. I kept rolling the facts of the case over and over in my head, and something was not making sense. Maude Dulgrey had said that Spithilda had been poisoned with the pokeberry plant. I had closed my eyes and replayed the premonitory dream that I’d had, where I had been Spithilda.
I remember scratching at my tongue with the tip of the quill. Maude had even pointed out the stains and markings on Spithilda’s tongue at autopsy. Certainly, if Spithilda had been using pokeberry ink as she wrote, the toxins could have gotten into her bloodstream via the self-inflicted tiny nicks and cuts she was effecting on her tongue with the sharpened nib of the quill. But, it hardly seemed like it could be enough to cause her death.
I could remember accidentally confusing a pokeberry with a blueberry as a small child. I had gotten very sick – in fact; it was probably the first time Grammy Chimera had ever gi
ven me Cronewort Tea – but I certainly hadn’t died. And the juice from a single, ripe berry surely equaled the toxin level that Spithilda had potentially ingested.
Wait! I thought. Cronewort Tea. Carbon’s tummy troubles! The sudden revelation prompted me to place a early morning call to Maude at the morgue. Thankfully, the old pathologist was still at the lab.
“You’re absolutely right, Hattie. It is very unlikely that Spithilda ingested enough toxins from her quill to cause her death. But, there’s no doubt about it. Pokeberry is definitely what did her in. I’m not changing my findings on that. But, yes, she would have had to have had just about a plateful to make it a fatal dose,” Maude confirmed, cheery as ever to be talking about death and dying.
“Thanks, loads, Maude. You’re the best!” I thanked her wholeheartedly.
“Aw, golly, Hat. You’re making a ghoul blush. Good luck with the case!”
“You betcha!”
A whole plateful, huh?
“Polk Salad Annie. Gators got your Granny.” Polk Salad Annie. The 1970 Elvis tune riffed through that old mental jukebox.
I suddenly upended several of my sleeping kitties on the bed and shoved my feet into my fuzzy slippers. One of the slippers didn’t take too kindly to the abuse and yowled sleepily.
“Why am I not surprised?” Gloom groaned as I accidentally mistook her for my left slipper. “Guess that’s all I am to you. A Doormat to be walked all over. I see how it is.”
I gritted my teeth. “Sorry, Gloom. Didn’t see you there.”
She yawned mightily. “Typical.”
I found the actual slipper and bounded down the stairs to grab one of Grammy Chimera’s books. Garden Herbs: Not Just for Salads by Morag Wyrmwood. I rapidly flipped through the pages.
“Pokeberry. Pokeberry. Pokeberry,” I mumbled as I ran my finger through the index pages.
Midnight padded into the room. “What’s happenin’, Cap’n?”
He was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed compared to his seven sleeping siblings upstairs. The Witching Hour was his beat.
“I think we’ve been going about this all wrong,” I informed him. “This whole time we’ve been looking for someone with access to pokeberries! But, there are other parts of the pokeberry plant that are just as toxic and just as deadly as the berries themselves. Spithilda’s killer might have been staring her right in the face, in the form of a well presented culinary di.. Ha! There it is!”
I jammed an insistent finger down on the open page. Midnight jumped up on the counter and looked over my shoulder at the recipe listed.
“Poke Sallet?” Midnight sounded confused.
“Yup!” I declared somewhat gleefully. “Delicious dish made from the leaves of…guess…that’s right! The pokeberry plant. But, if not prepared correctly, it can be fatal.”
“Oh!” Midnight exclaimed. “Like fugu!”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Like fugu. Delicious, but deadly.”
“So, now you just have to find someone who’s had access to pokeberry leaves.”
“Oh,” I sighed heavily. I dropped a heavy chin in my hand. “You mean, like everyone who shops at Verdantia Eyebright’s greengrocer?”
“Oh,” Midnight agreed somberly.
“I’m going there next. It was on my list of things to do.”
“Well, just be sure to take Shade along,” Midnight suggested.
“If he finds out you go see Verdantia without him, he won’t speak to you for a year. He thinks she is the most beautiful creature anywhere in the Coven Isles.”
I momentarily consider the pros and cons of Shade remaining silent for a full three hundred and sixty-five days, but I finally cave.
“Okay. Got it. Shade! Shade!.” My groggy, sleep filled cat appeared at the door, crumpled and dazed looking. “You cool, boss lady?” he mumbled sleepily.
“Wanna take a quick trip to Verdantia’s?” That’s all it took; I didn’t need to bribe him further. He shook and stretched and padded after me without comment.
Take a pause on an early weekend morning at Verdantia Eyebright’s greengrocer, and you will find yourself awash in an ocean of sensory experiences. Brightly colored banners flutter in the breeze, announcing to one and all that a celebration of life is happening among the well-stocked stalls. And a rainbow of fresh fruit and vegetables arcs widely in front of you, just waiting to be sampled.
A cloud of pleasant smells soaks into your nostrils. The pungent aroma of freshly ground, organically-grown local coffee. The sweet, earthy smell of sage. The peppery, savory aroma of thyme.
Your taste buds will quiver in anticipation as you bite into a plump wedge of citrus, the sugary sweet juice running free-flowing down your chin. It’s a pleasant weekend gathering place where friends can meet and swap recipes for squash stew or three-bean vegetarian chilli, or find some of the most unique, hard-to-find fruits and vegetables that might not ever grace the shelves at your major chain stores. Pluots, purslane, and papalo, nestled among the fairy tale eggplants, the Lady apples, and the dragonfruit.
For the curious, a pluot is an unusual cross between a plum and an apricot. Purslane, otherwise known as hogweed, is a small-leafed succulent with a slightly salty and sour taste that can be eaten in salads or stews and can have more Omega-3s than certain fish oils. And papalo has its origins in Mexico, a strong tasting green also known as Bolivian coriander.
But, papalo wasn’t the green I had come to Verdantia’s to discuss.
I searched for Verdantia among the bodies and bobbing heads of the Gless Inlet inhabitants who had come out to support their local farmers and growers and get some really spectacular deals of some incredibly fresh, delicious produce and farm goods.
I wasn’t the only one looking for Verdantia. Shade weaved like a snake between my legs. He jumped up on stalls and craned his skinny little neck over the flowered hat of a would-be tomato connoisseur. Not satisfied with a wayward chrysanthemum atop the hat that was blocking his view, he flattened the flower with a steady paw.
“Oh, my gracious!” hat lady cried, uncertain of the proper farmer's market etiquette for dealing with a cat that had hat issues.
I grabbed Shade and promptly set him down on the ground where he was, again, off like a shot, in search of his paramour du jour.
“I’m so sorry ma’am,” I mumbled apologetically, trying to straighten the crushed flower on her hat. I finally just grabbed a bouquet of fresh mums from a nearby vendor, handed him a folded bill, and gave the old woman the bouquet. Then, I took off after my crazy cat.
When I finally caught up with him, it was in front of the pumpkins. The stall was overflowing with enough pumpkins that the Headless Horseman could have a different head for every day of the year – including a leap year. Did you know that there are over forty-six recognized varieties of pumpkins and that’s before you even get into the winter squash! And they had as many unique names as we had unique citizens in Gless Inlet.
They had one called Jack-Be-Little, but not to be outdone was the Jack-Be-Quick. There was the Baby Boo and the Baby Bear. There was the venerable Old Zeb and the One Too Many. And of course, you had to have a pumpkin called the Cinderella.
And the way Shade was standing, slack-jawed and staring, I think my moggy mole had found his Princess Charming.
Verdantia Eyebright certainly lived up to her name. Everything about her radiated with the fertility of life. A halo of golden sunshine seemed to surround her, suffusing her porcelain-perfect skin with an idyllic glow. Her flowing green dress billowed with every graceful twirl and polite gesture shared with each passing customer. Indeed, as she glided past each stall, the fruits and vegetable therein seemed a little more vibrant. A little juicier. A little brighter. Beefsteak tomatoes plumped to an even heartier, robust red. Bananas became the yellow of sunshine.
Her emerald eyes were bright. Bright as stars. And they twinkled nearly that much as well. Her hair would have made Rumpelstiltskin jealous. It flowed in spun gold waves over her slight shoulders and very ne
arly halfway down her shapely back.
The rumor, if you listened to that sort of thing, was that Verdantia was a Seelie. A Faerie. I suppose Verdantia’s ears did have slightly angular point toward the tip.
Seelies belonged to a segment of The Fae that wanted desperately to work with the Unawakened to celebrate life and help heal the planet we shared. They lived side by side with humans and could be found on the Mainland working with groups like Greenpeace, Charity: Water, and The Nature Conservancy, just to name a few. They were self interested, to be sure, but they still did great work worldwide, a member of a host of worthy causes.
Here, on Glessie Isle, Verdantia was simply a joy to be around and willing to help a neighbor with any task, be they ghost, goblin or ghoul. At the moment, I was the one needing a little bit of aid.
“Verdantia! Verdantia! Over here!” I waved to catch her attention. Verdantia nimbly footed her way through the busy market and towards us. I swore I saw Shade lick a paw and smooth back the fur on the top of his head, before he took a cool, relaxed position atop a pumpkin.
As she approached, I was scooped up in an armful of summer breezes and fresh flowers. Her hugs, like everything Verdantia did, were earnest. I struggled to catch my breath.
“Oh, Hattie!” she exclaimed. “How very wonderful to see you!”
She spied Shade on the pumpkin, his arm resting across the top, as if he was a guy at a bar. His grin looked a little glued on though, and his eyes seemed to pleading.
“Hey, babe.” my dude-like moggy said.
“Shade!” She scooped him up into a ball of black fur and planted a Cupid’s bow kiss right on the top of his head. “My perfect little puss! How are you doing?”
I could now see why he had had such a pained expression on his face; he’d been sitting on top of pineapple that had been carelessly discarded among the gourds.
The cat practically melted into a puddle with whiskers as she cradled him in her arms. “Muccccch better now.”
The Violet Countercharm: A Paranormal Cozy Mystery (Hattie Jenkins & The Infiniti Chronicles Book 2) Page 13