Watchful Wisteria (Wisteria Witches Mysteries Book 4)

by Angela Pepper

  “I’m working on paying him back for the house deposit, with interest,” I said. “That’s all I owe him.”

  “You said he used to spend time with you for one day out of the year. Was it on your birthday?”

  “Not my birthday. It was just some random day in the summer.”

  “Was it really random?”

  I poked at the croissant with my fingertip. “I can’t remember,” I said. “He’d show up in the morning to pick me up, and then the whole day would be such a whirlwind. At the end of the day, when I crawled back into bed, it felt like I’d lived two or three full days.”

  “Sounds like you two had fun together.”

  “For the first few hours,” I admitted. “It didn’t hurt that he plied me with a week’s worth of sugar almost immediately. He liked to fuel up before we got down to petty crimes and misdemeanors.”

  The head librarian nodded thoughtfully. “Mind if I make a personal observation?”

  I stuffed the remainder of the croissant into my mouth and waved for her to go ahead. I didn’t know many people who asked permission before giving their opinion. When it comes to advice, most people think giving is far better than receiving. This thoughtful quality of Kathy’s was why she held the position of head librarian. Sure, she had her meltdowns, but they were in private, back here in the break room. And it was always pastries that took the brunt of her aggression, not people. Whenever she dealt with our patrons, even the challenging ones, Kathy was the epitome of manners and restraint.

  “Your situation with your father is unwinnable,” Kathy said sagely. “You’re angry that he wasn’t a part of your life in the past, and now you’re angry that he wants to make amends by doing the opposite. It’s unwinnable for him.”

  “You think?”

  She answered my question with another. “Is there anything he can do right now that won’t upset you?”

  “He could go away,” I said, pouting.

  Kathy pursed her lips, emphasizing the pointed tip of her sharp nose. “Is that what you really want? For you and your daughter?”

  My daughter. Zoey had been so happy over the last two days, skipping around the house instead of scuttling. She enjoyed spending time with her grandfather, and he easily drew out the bubbly little girl who’d all but disappeared into moodiness over not getting her powers. His presence had rolled back the clock, bringing us back to a more innocent time—a time of animal-shaped pancakes. What harm could be done by having him around? Zoey was barely sixteen, still a minor, so even if my father did get both of them arrested sneaking into somewhere they weren’t supposed to be, Zoey wouldn’t face adult charges.

  “No,” I admitted sullenly. “I don’t actually want him to go away.”

  Kathy pointed at my chest. “What you want to go away is that feeling you have. The clinging bitterness that reaches up and consumes you from below, squeezing you in its jaws.” She made a clawlike gesture with both hands.

  “Squeezing me in its jaws?” Like how my house was squeezing me out?

  Does she know?

  I looked at Kathy in a new light. Her golden-brown eyes did seem to sparkle with secret knowledge. She might know about my shifting house. She’d never given me any signs of harboring supernatural powers, but then again, our other librarian, Frank Wonder, hadn’t done anything but dye his hair pink before he suddenly turned into a flamingo shifter. Two out of us had magical powers. What were the chances all three of Wisteria’s full-time librarians had supernatural abilities?

  “Whoooooo knows,” she hooted, waving one hand. “Listen to me carrying on about the heart’s speech. This always happens when I read a bunch of self-help books back to back. I open my beak and out comes all this woowoo nonsense.”

  “It’s not nonsense,” I said. “A little woowoo, yes, but you make a good point. I don’t want my father to leave. I want the anger to go, and for my house to go back to normal.”

  “Normal,” she mused.

  “I know, I know. Normal’s just a setting on the dishwasher, between Lite Wash and Heavy Pot Scrub.”

  “Right,” she said.

  Kathy pulled one of her springlike curls and got a faraway look. She stretched out another curl and peered at it, as though looking for more of the stray twigs she’d had stuck in her hair two days ago. Something troubling must have happened Wednesday morning. She’d not spoken about it since, but she had been reading self-help books about family dynamics.

  Kathy said in a dreamy tone, “We mothers and daughters, we women, say the word normal when we mean something else entirely.”

  “Maybe.” What was she talking about? “But it’s not like me to wish to be normal. That’s my daughter, Zoey’s, mantra, not mine. I’m all about embracing the chaos, loving the weird and wonderful.”

  Kathy’s golden-brown eyes flitted over to mine and came into focus. “Yes, Zara. That’s you, all right.”

  I asked, “What does normal mean to you?”

  “Control,” Kathy said without hesitation. “And knowing what everyone is at all times.”

  “Don’t you mean where? Knowing where everyone is?”

  She let out a forced laugh. “Yes, that’s what I meant.”

  I looked down at Kathy’s feet. Her shoes were mismatched. It wasn’t uncommon for a librarian to show up at work with mismatched shoes, but Kathy’s weren’t simply two different shades of brown. One was black, and the other was blue.

  “Kathy, is everything okay with you? Are the boys still on the road with your husband?”

  She waved her hand. “Don’t worry about me. I’m quite fine. Back to you and your father.” She whipped off her glasses and started cleaning them with a white cloth from her pocket. Without looking up at me, she asked, “What if this is the new normal? Your father is here, and he wants to be in your life. Can you live with it?”

  I could live through it, because I’d lived through worse, including electrocution, possession by ghosts, and dying briefly. But could I live with my father? What if it meant living with the tiny dollhouse-sized door on my bedroom?

  Either I could get down on my knees to crawl through, or I could borrow a sledgehammer and start swinging.

  Crawling or sledgehammer.

  Going with the flow or throwing a tantrum.

  I had a choice to make.

  Chapter 15

  Throughout the day, I worked on finding my inner Zen. In between helping patrons with their materials, I took a few peeks at our self-help books, which collectively gave me a pep talk about boundaries.

  According to the majority of books about relationships, an adult can deal with difficult people, so long as the situation isn’t abusive or dangerous. The key is to draw up strong boundaries. What is a boundary? It can be as simple as a list of things you decide ahead of time that you will not tolerate. Or it can be more metaphysical. When someone says something antagonizing, picture yourself surrounded in white light! That made me smile. Self-help books aren’t written with witches in mind. If I focused too well on being surrounded by white light, I ran the risk of actually turning into a glow stick.

  Glow stick or not, I would handle the remainder of my father’s visit with grace and tongue biting. My daughter loves him, and I didn’t want to let her down. Whatever was bound to happen would happen, and the actions of other people were outside of my control. The future would unfold, and nothing was ever entirely good or entirely bad. Black-and-white thinking would only cause me pain. I had to be more gray. Gray like Detective Bentley, with his gray eyes and steely gray temples.

  Speak of the devil.

  Just as my shift was ending, Detective Bentley sauntered in.

  The weather was warm that Friday—warm enough that I’d had to confiscate several drippy iced drinks from patrons in flip-flops, but Bentley wasn’t in summer gear. He looked cool and unperturbed in his usual gray suit.

  Yes, I would do well to be more like Bentley. Driven. Cool. Unflappable. Unless you got the last sprinkle donut.

 
The forty-something detective scanned the library, stopping when his gaze met mine. He sauntered toward the circulation desk, where I’d been working on something that suddenly felt unimportant.

  “Bentley,” I exclaimed. “I’ve been thinking about you all afternoon!”

  He quirked an eyebrow. “Oh?”

  All five of the patrons using the computer kiosks looked up in our direction. I’d spoken louder than my usual library volume, and my voice had cut through the same way TV commercials blast through the din of a family restaurant.

  I grabbed the stack of books I’d pulled for him over the last two days and set them on the counter between us. He’d mentioned something called Wakeful, and I could never resist a juicy research project.

  “Detective Bentley, this is everything we have on Wakeful.” I spoke in my soft, business-like, nothing-to-see-here-folks librarian tone. The faces at the computers dropped back down, and the patrons returned to their homework and those other clandestine things they quickly hid whenever a staff member walked by.

  Bentley perused the stack of books, which were mainly about local Wisteria history. I’d used one of my magic spells—the one for finding a specific page in a book—to locate mentions of Wakeful, and then I’d marked the pages with Post-It note tabs.

  “The Wakefuls were one of the founding families of Wisteria,” I said. “Not to be confused with the Winfields or the Winnfurs, who were also founding families.”

  “That’s interesting. But you shouldn’t have bothered.” His hands fluttered over the stack, betraying his excitement. “I’ve already forgotten why I was interested.”

  Liar, I thought.

  He opened one of the books to a full-page photograph of a general store. “Wakeful Home Goods,” he said, reading the hand-painted sign above the tidy shop in the photo. “Established in 1910.”

  “The Wakeful name was on all sorts of businesses, from shops and services to train stations and coal mines.”

  Bentley glanced up at me, his steely gray eyes glinting silver. “And how many of these Wakeful businesses are still in operation today, Ms. Riddle?”

  He already knew the answer and was trying to make a point.

  “If you already know, just say so, Smart Pants.”

  “The answer is zero,” he said. “There is not one business or historic site in this town that currently bears the Wakeful name.” Bentley leaned back, pulled out his badge, and set it on top of the books.

  “Are you arresting those books for obstruction of justice?”

  “I was hoping to borrow them. Is that the right term?” He sounded it out to himself. “Borrow.” He looked up at the ceiling then at me. “That’s the term a lot of thieves use when they’re caught with something that’s not theirs. ‘Officer, I wasn’t stealing this bike, I was only borrowing it.’ It’s a shame we don’t have a public library for all things. It would really cut down on theft.”

  “A public library for all things,” I mused. “Imagine all the librarians the city would have to hire.”

  “And all the detectives they’d have to let go.”

  “Ah, the yin and yang of life,” I said. “Maybe you could become a librarian.”

  “Let’s start with me becoming a card-carrying library customer.”

  “The term is patron,” I said. “And it would be my pleasure to set up an account for you. I trust you have some means of identification other than your shiny badge?”

  Bentley flipped over the badge to reveal his driver’s license and address. I stepped over to the computer terminal and started setting up an account, starting with his full name, which was Theodore Dean Bentley.

  “Theodore,” I said excitedly. “Your first name is Theodore.” My voice came out much louder than I’d meant. Loud for a library, anyway. Once again, all five faces at the computer stations looked up at me.

  My pink-haired coworker, Frank Wonder, also heard. He actually shushed me as he came over at a fast-paced walk.

  “Zara Riddle,” Frank said with a haughty air. “If you can’t keep it down, take it to the discotheque.”

  I stuck my tongue out at Frank. It had been our running joke that week that noisy people needed to “take it to the discotheque.” What’s funnier than a dated vocabulary word frequently used in French language textbooks from the 1980s? Not much!

  I managed to finish setting up Detective Theodore Dean Bentley’s patron card and check out his books without too much oversight by Frank, who I could tell was desperate to be a part of the interaction.

  After hovering nearby for several minutes, Frank finally came over and put my purse on my shoulder. “Good work today,” he said loudly. “Have a nice walk home.” He looked at Bentley and then back at me. “Zara Riddle, I certainly do hope nothing happens while you’re walking yourself home all by yourself right now, since you’re done work for the day.”

  I gave Frank a strained smile. “Thank you so much, Frank Wonder. That’s very thoughtful of you.”

  I moved toward the staff lounge. Frank shifted his body to block me.

  “Bye!”

  “Frank, I still need to...” I mimed punching out my timecard. The WPL had a strangely antiquated time-tracking system that included a machine that made an un-library-like KERCHUNK when it stamped a card.

  “I already kerchunked your card,” he said.

  “That’s strictly against WPL policies.”

  Frank flashed his ultra-white teeth at me. “I’ll write myself up.” He lifted his chin to point it toward the exit. “Get on out of here with your bad self. Take it to the discotheque!”

  I shook my head.

  “I’ll walk you home,” Bentley said gamely behind me. “I still need to pick up my car from your street, anyway. It’s been there two days. I hope I didn’t get a ticket.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Frank’s eyes bulged as he inhaled with excitement. I shot him a quick eyebrow lift to let him know we could discuss the matter of Bentley’s car being parked on my street some other time.

  I walked out of the library with Bentley, who was carrying his borrowed books in a Wisteria Public Library canvas tote he’d purchased for ten dollars to help a national children’s charity.

  The walk home in the late-afternoon sunshine was everything I love about walking home on a Friday: dappled sunshine, families getting ready for weekend camping adventures, and the sounds and smells of barbecues. If a whole town can give off the sensation of putting its feet up while cracking open a tasty beverage, Wisteria was doing it.

  While we walked, Bentley regaled me with his wild conspiracy theory. He suggested that the Wakeful family had committed crimes so unspeakable that they’d been erased from the town’s memory. He felt he might find some evidence in the borrowed books. I wished him luck, but I knew from doing my own research on the library’s materials that he wouldn’t find any genuine talk of witchcraft or supernatural beings.

  We slowed to admire a hedge that had been trimmed into the four-digit number for the home’s street address.

  At the corner, we both smiled over a resident’s act of kindness. Someone had found a child’s dropped teddy bear, given it a good wash and a mending, and affixed it to a fence with a note.

  “Teddy has been found,” I said. “Cancel the Missing Bear Report.”

  “I’ll close the case when I get back to the station,” he said with a chuckle.

  “Teddy is a nickname for Theodore,” I said.

  He made a nonverbal sound of agreement.

  “Did the girls in school call you Teddy Bear?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. Were you cuddly back then, or were you always how you are now?”

  He glanced over at me. “And how am I now?”

  “Never mind. You answered my question.”

  “You can call me Teddy if you’d like.”

  I shrugged. “I’ll stick to calling you Bentley.” I kicked at an old pinecone on the sidewalk. “Did you have much luck over th
e last two days as a gumshoe detective? Did you see anything you wouldn’t have seen from your car?”

  He didn’t answer. I glanced over to catch him smiling.

  “You did get lucky,” I said. “You look like the cat who ate the canary.”

  “I might have met someone,” he said cryptically.

  I kept kicking the pinecone. “What? Who? A woman?”

  He looked down at my feet. “That’s odd. She was wearing the exact same boots as you.”

  “Now I know you’re pulling my leg. Nobody around here wears these old-fashioned granny booties except me and my aunt, Zinnia Riddle. The shoe store only orders them in our size, because we Riddles are the only ones who buy them.”

  “I’m not pulling your leg, and I’m not one of those men who’s fashion-blind. I know what I saw. She wears boots like yours.”

  “What did the rest of her look like? Is she a ravishing beauty, with red hair and hazel eyes?”

  “She’s... indescribable.”

  “Come on, Bentley. Is that the best you can do? Give me a height, a build, a general age range.”

  He stopped walking. We were in front of my house already.

  “She’s indescribable,” he repeated, his tone flat, as though he’d been hypnotized.

  “Nothing’s indescribable,” I said. “You could try.”

  “She’s very tall and she wears green,” he said flatly, staring straight at a neighbor’s pine tree.

  “Is she triangular?”

  “Yes. Her hair goes like this.” He made a pine tree shape with his hands.

  This was all very familiar. Dr. Katz’s assistant, Fatima, had sounded that way when she described the person who’d paid for the fox’s medical bill—the person I’d assumed was my father’s partner.

  I wanted more information from Bentley. I wondered if Zinnia knew a spell that would help us break through a glamour.

  Bentley, however, had other ideas. He crossed the street and climbed into his car. He started the engine and drove away.

  I stood on the sidewalk, staring after his boxy gray car, long after he’d disappeared around the corner.

  A feathery breeze caressed the back of my neck. Someone or something was watching me.