Bailey frowned. “She isn’t back yet?”
“Not as far as anyone can tell,” Piper said.
Ryan sighed, and put his glasses back on. “You know she doesn’t deal with crisis very well, but the Sheriff’s department says they consider it highly suspicious. Who knows.”
Bailey felt herself being tugged back into it, and gently pulled herself away from it all before she fell headlong into this town’s problems and got herself into even more trouble. “Well, they’ll sort it out. You three need to keep your distance from it, okay?”
“What does she know, I wonder?” It was hard to say whose thought it was, but she knew it was a thought that wasn’t her own, now that she knew what to look for. It had the kind of patient, watchful quality she associated with Ryan, though. Maybe that was the key to knowing who was thinking at you. Either way, she focused her attention on her own thoughts, her own senses. Ryan’s mind was none of her business. “Well… I don’t want a long goodbye. I’ll run a few things to the tour office, and I guess just leave you my keys,” she said to Avery. “So I’ll be back in a bit.” She backed away, and then turned and found the basement door.
She did find Wendy’s old files, though only because she understood Ryan’s arcane system of organization. She also found the few boxes of odds and ends, souvenir projects for the Caves that were half finished in some of the boxes, and completed in the others but never put on display. Maybe Avery could pass them off as his own to get into Poppy’s good graces when she came back. Maybe they would even help make the most of whatever Tourists didn’t see the headlines about the murder.
Eventually, Avery helped her. He was quiet, and didn’t bug her about her choice as they worked. When the last box was in the car, he hugged her again. “Just come back, okay? When you find whatever you’re looking for. Don’t leave me alone here. I know it’s selfish but… I need you, Bee. Like… to survive here.”
“You should leave this town, too, Avery,” She told him. “When you’re ready.”
He shrugged. “Well… I know. But that’s not yet, so…” His eyes cast about, and finally settled on her again. “Bye, Bailey. I love you. Just… take care of yourself. And call me. A lot.”
She smiled as he left her, and tried to stamp down the questions that plagued her. Be strong. Do this. Get out of this town, away from this, and at least get some perspective. Then, decide if you want to come back.
Her resolved properly renewed, she started to get into her car.
“Leaving?” Chloe called from a few yards away. She had a box, and was headed toward Bailey.
Bailey wondered if she’d been reading her mind. It seemed unfair. She tried to focus her attention on Chloe, but the woman raised an eyebrow up as she leaned on the car door. She handed Bailey the box, heavy with cupcakes. “You can’t read me unless I want you to,” she said. “Same goes with the others. Witching one-oh-one. Which you’ll know soon, if you stick around but…” she looked at the back seat full of boxes, “…something tells me you aren’t.”
Every minute she spent with the woman was one she wasn’t on the road, and one more opportunity for Chloe to change her mind. The worst of it was that Bailey honestly wasn’t sure she could be certain, if she did change it, that it was her own intention. After all, if someone could read minds, what else could they do? Still, she felt like she owed her friend at least the time of day. “Hop in,” she said. “I’m stopping by the tour office first. We can talk on the way there, but my mind is made up.”
Chloe gave her a long look, and then nodded. She came around and slipped into the passenger seat.
The tour office wasn’t far, driving. They didn’t have much time to talk. So Chloe made the most of it, not bothering to mince words about why Bailey wanted to leave. Maybe she already knew.
“Your place is here,” she said simply, “with us. We can teach you about your ability, and about so much more. What you’re experiencing now is just the tip of an iceberg that runs deep, Bailey. You need to know about yourself.”
“This part of it is bad enough,” Bailey said, eyes glued to the road. “I don’t want to keep secrets from my friends, either, and even just what you said—that my place is here—it feels like I don’t have a choice in the matter. What about what I want?”
“What do you want, then?” Chloe asked.
“I want to run my own life,” Bailey said. “I want to find my own answers, and I want to know about my mother, and who she is, and where she is and if she’s still alive and why she gave me up and…” She had to stop, struggling against a knot in her throat.
“I suppose I understand all of that,” Chloe said quietly. “I didn’t have much of a choice myself, a lot of the time… I get it. But what we have, Bailey; it’s precious in a way you haven’t had time to comprehend yet. It’s new, and scary, and if you’re anything like I was you’re worried about what it all means. And I promise, it does mean something—something beautiful, Bailey. There’s nothing to be afraid of except being alone. And you aren’t, my love. You’re not alone in this. I promise.”
Bailey felt something unsaid. She glanced at Chloe. A moment later it came.
“And if you want to find your mother… this gift could be your one connection to her,” Chloe said. She said it gently, knowing that hearing it would be painful. It was. Bailey wanted to scream at her for playing that card. It wasn’t fair.
“If I learn,” Bailey asked, trying not to sound bitter about it, “can this… gift help me find her?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart,” Chloe said. “But if it can… do you really want to give it up?”
They pulled into the tour office parking lot and Bailey, ran her fingers through her hair. Chloe had a point. Of course she had a point. But she wished she didn’t. “That’s a decision I can’t make here,” she said. “I need to be away from all of this to think about it.” She opened her door. “I need to take all this inside.”
“I’ll help you,” Chloe said.
Bailey wanted distance from the woman. She wanted to think things through on her own. “I can handle it, it’s just a couple of boxes.”
Chloe fixed her with a look that brooked no arguments. “There’s a killer on the loose somewhere. You really think I’m going to let you walk around out here alone? No. I’ll help you, and then I’ll let you go on your way.”
Bailey only sighed, and nodded. It was a fair point.
And, as they came to the door of the building and Bailey unlocked it, she nearly dropped the box she’d propped on her knee to get the lock. Maybe Chloe had been right to come after all—someone was already inside.
Chapter 11
“Do you hear that?” Bailey whispered.
Chloe pressed close to the door, and shook her head. “No, what?”
Bailey shook her head, and tapped her skull. “I mean… you know.”
Chloe’s eyes grew distant. A moment later she frowned. “Is that… Poppy?”
Bailey would know the odd, frantic cadence of Poppy’s thoughts anywhere; they were exactly like her words, and they were rife with the same acerbic, permanently irritated sting. It hurt to hear them. It was no wonder Bailey always got a headache around the woman.
“I was in the kitchen, and then the bathroom, and then my bedroom, and I went back to the sink in the kitchen, and then the office… where did I leave them?”
Chloe and Bailey shared a look, but Bailey shrugged. It wasn’t uncommon for Poppy to lose things. They pushed quietly through the door, and Chloe took Bailey’s silent cue to stay quiet. The last thing Bailey wanted was to have to have this conversation about her leaving with Poppy. Her boss would lose her mind, and scream until she was hoarse about how Bailey was abandoning her, letting her down, and whatever else came to her mind to shout about.
Funny thing, though… the lights weren’t on inside the place.
If Poppy had lost something, it seemed like she’d have turned the lights on so she could find it. Probably lipstick, or her keys—or her
check book. She lost that a lot, though not nearly often enough and normally only when it came time to write Bailey a check…
Bailey had pushed the woman’s thoughts out of her head—something about the need she felt to have Poppy far away seemed to help. But as she and Chloe padded into the front office to drop off Bailey’s boxes, Chloe froze in the doorway. She nearly dropped her box, and Bailey had to move fast to help her steady it.
When she met Chloe’s eyes, her blood chilled. “What?” She mouthed.
Chloe looked toward the back of the house, and Bailey did as well. She reached for Poppy’s broadcasting mind as she looked, and found it easily, banging up against her own thoughts like an angry wasp trying to get through a window. She winced, learning very quickly that some people’s minds actually tasted bad, somehow, on whatever psychic equivalent of a tongue she had going on up there in her head.
All of that faded, though, when she felt and heard Poppy’s panicked hunt continue. “Should have gotten rid of the thing right away,” Poppy was screaming at herself mentally, her thoughts crisp and sharp. “I could be out of the country by now. Damn that woman, still trying to ruin me even in death…” It wasn’t completely clear what she was looking for, but the intention behind it was.
She was mortally terrified, angry, and looking for something that scared her to death.
Chloe hadn’t waited for Bailey to say anything. Instead, she had already picked up the phone and was dialing. A second later, she ducked behind the desk to whisper quietly into the cordless. Bailey couldn’t hear her, but she had to have been calling the Sheriff’s department.
Poppy was coming toward them now, retracing steps mentally, trying to find keys. Keys to the safe, Bailey imagined. Normally they were in the center drawer of the office… she crept across the room, and pulled the drawer out silently. There was lipstick in front which meant Poppy had probably been digging and… there they were, toward the back. Bailey started to grasp them and then stopped. Better not put her fingerprints on them. She’d just heard Poppy name what she was looking for.
She caught Chloe’s eye across the darkened room. Chloe had heard it too.
A rock. Poppy was looking for a ‘stupid rock’ that was all she needed to get rid of. She’d put it in the safe and then misplaced the keys, and was thinking that instead she should have just hurled the thing into the ocean over the cliffs. She’d panicked, though, and was someone here? Whose car was that…
Bailey was so caught up listening and trying to follow Poppy’s rapid, panic filled thoughts that she didn’t even realize until the office light clicked on that she’d reached them.
She stared at Bailey, standing behind the desk, and then spotted Chloe squatting behind the far end.
Instantly, she lost her mind, and Bailey even flinched as hot, red, nearly murderous rage filled Poppy’s mind and seemed like it might burn Bailey right where she stood. “What the hell are you doing here? Get out! Out! Both of you! I’ll call the cops!”
“I have a key,” Bailey snapped. “I came to drop off…” what had she come for? “…boxes. Things, for the office; for the tours!” It was disorienting, extricating herself so suddenly from Poppy’s mind. “They know,” Poppy thought. “They know. They’re in here in the dark, looking for it. No, no,no, no, no…”
“Poppy, calm down,” Bailey urged. She walked slowly from behind the desk, her hands up, fingers spread for peace—though she knew it was likely useless.
“Don’t talk to me about calming down,” Poppy screamed. “Office hours are over and you… you don’t belong here unless there are tours or… just go! Get out! You’re fired! You hear me? Give me back my key! Now!” Her face was twisted with anger that made her suddenly hideous. She’d genuinely lost her mind—Bailey could barely make out any of the seemingly random things that were broadcasting from it, it was all mixed up and backwards and senseless. A picture that had been broken and then pieced back together incompletely. Most of it meaningless but some of it—images and fragments of thoughts—stood out in stark, still relief against the rest.
Poppy was worried about a warrant. That’s why she had parked almost outside town, near the beach, and come up the long way. So no one would see her. They couldn’t serve a warrant if they couldn’t find her, she thought. She needed to come in and get rid of the evidence. The rock. It was the only thing that would tie her to the scene.
“The safe,” Chloe said, standing from behind the end of the desk. She laid the phone on the top of it, face down. “It’s in the safe, isn’t it, Poppy?”
“What are you talking about?” Poppy barked. “You don’t even work here. Martha warned me about you; that you’d come sneaking around. You probably killed her, didn’t you?”
“You know that isn’t true, Poppy,” Bailey said quietly. “You killed Martha, didn’t you.” It wasn’t a question.
“How dare you accuse me of…! You awful horrible little skank! I saw you with Trevor, flirting and flouncing—you two probably offed her together!” She sneered, jabbing a finger with a broken nail at Bailey. “Yeah, right! He hated her, and so did you I could see it on your face from the moment I told you she was in town. I even remember thinking that maybe it was a bad idea to put you two together; I’ve always thought you were unstable! I should have known, I should have known!”
Her thoughts told a different story, though. One that Bailey heard clearly. “No,” she said calmly, though her heart was pounding in her chest. “You killed Martha, Poppy. She… fell? But she got up again… not then…”
“After,” Chloe provided. She was staring intently at Poppy, taking slow steps toward her. “It was after. You came back and heard her talking to someone… no, on her phone. About what, Poppy?What was she saying that made you so angry?”
Poppy had stopped speaking actual words. She was sputtering and staggering backward a bit, her eyes wide and rolling. “No, no… you can’t know…”
Bailey caught more pieces as Poppy’s mind rehashed the scene again, and again. “She was going to sue?” She frowned. “She didn’t look injured.”
“She didn’t look injured to Poppy,” Chloe corrected. “It’s all from her twisted filter.”
That put so much else into perspective that the rest of the story seemed to coalesce around that thought, and Bailey felt it come tumbling into her mind even as Poppy began to try and talk herself out of remembering it again.
Martha had fallen, and Poppy attempted to help her up. It had made her dress dirty, but there was some soda water in a cooler, and Poppy, ever the sycophant, had offered to get it right away and fix the spot up right as rain. When she came back, she’d heard Martha on the phone.
“How injured do I have to be?” The memory of Martha’s voice was distorted in Poppy’s mind, echoing wrong, the same words booming in Bailey’s head as she heard them. “Legally, I mean. You tell me, and I’ll take a dive right now… no, of course you didn’t hear me say that, darling. Well I don’t know if they have insurance, but they have money; this woman lives half her life in Vegas and Baja, or some place. She won’t stop going on about it, it’s driving me insane. Just call me back then, and let me know. AVT pays crap. I bet we could sue this place for at least a couple million. Well then I’ll make sure it counts, Seymour.”
The rest of it was a red blur, almost. Poppy had come enraged. How dare this woman threaten to sue her? Sue her! For a little trip over her own too-long dress that she couldn’t even afford to have tailored properly. It didn’t matter what she planned to ‘reveal’ about the ‘secret’ of the Caves. Poppy would be ruined. All her money, dried up. She’d be stuck here in this crappy little back-woods town forever.
So she’d done what seemed, at the time, like the only course of action. She had charged Martha with a large rock the moment she hung up her phone. Bailey actually physically squeezed her eyes shut to avoid seeing the next part, but there was no avoiding it now.
After, Poppy had taken the phone, and the rock, and brought them both up to the o
ffice. Dazed, confused, and panicked, she put them both in the safe. She pulled open the top drawer, and pulled a flask out, and drained it and tried to decide what to do next. Unable to think clearly, she’d simply left town.
All of it happened in seconds. Bailey simply gasped when it hit her, and sat against the edge of the desk. Chloe, however, was howling with rage.
“You killed our sister!” She screamed. The air felt thick, and hot, and moist. “Over money? Because you wanted to hold on to your worthless, meager fortune?” There were tears streaming down her face.
“I… I couldn’t… you can’t possibly…” Poppy sputtered a moment more, and then fell to her knees, her face a mess of tears and smeared eyeliner. “She would have ruined me… forever. This is all I have and she wanted to take it from me because she was a greedy, selfish…” she shook her head, and put her face in her hands, and sobbed.
“Did you hear?” Chloe asked. Bailey looked up. Chloe had the phone to her ear again. She looked calmer, resolved; but merciless.
Bailey couldn’t blame her. She stood from the desk, and stared down at Poppy’s pitiful, wretched form crumpled on the floor in her expensive skirt and blouse. “I never thought you were capable of something so terrible, Poppy,” she whispered.
Poppy’s eyes were red, and puffy, and furious when she looked up. Bailey thought, for a moment, she might attack. Instead, though, she just stared. “You couldn’t have known unless…” she swallowed, and her eyebrows knit together in disbelief. “It’s true, isn’t it? What Martha said. I heard her once, whispering to someone on the phone. About the Caves. About… witches.”
Bailey’s eyes widened, and Poppy barked a sharp laugh of triumph, like she’d caught her in a lie. “I knew it!”
“Don’t listen to her,” Chloe said. “Poppy’s lost her mind. She couldn’t take the guilt of what she’d done. She’s projecting.” She sighed, sad and disappointed. “It’s textbook.”
Bailey turned to stare at Chloe, who didn’t seem at all concerned about the fact that Poppy had just named them witches. Of course; they’d read her mind. It had to be obvious, didn’t it?
The Witching on the Wall: A Cozy Mystery (The Witchy Women of Coven Grove Book 1) Page 9