Son of a Witch: A Witch Squad Cozy Mystery #2

by M. Z. Andrews

  “Sergeant, did your wife know that Harper was in town? Did you tell her?”

  He shook his head as if that was his saving grace. “No! I didn’t tell her. She didn’t know! When we found out that Harper had died, she was shocked that Harper was even in town.”

  “That could have been an act,” Alba pointed out skeptically.

  “I think it’s time we get your wife and Elena home. They are out to lunch right now,” I told him. “I think you should call Louise.”

  He nodded crazily. His hands shook as he lifted his phone. He looked down at it in a daze.

  “He doesn’t look so good, Mercy,” Sweets whispered. “Maybe he should sit down.”

  Sweets was right. The white haired man was falling apart right before our eyes. “Sergeant Bradshaw, let’s get you to the living room, I think you need to sit down.”

  “We could call Elena,” Holly suggested, following us to the living room as we helped him sit down on the formal sofa.

  Alba nodded as she whispered to me. “It might be too much for him to call his wife. If she’s behind this, he could tip her off.”

  I sat down next to the Sergeant. He stared at the wall opposite him in a daze. “We’ll call Elena and have her bring Louise back. Ok? You just sit here and relax.” He didn’t flinch. It worried me that perhaps he had fallen into a state of shock.

  I pulled my cell phone out of my back pocket and dialed Elena’s number. It rang and it rang with no answer until finally, it went to her voicemail. I hung up the phone. “She’s not answering. They’ve got to come back eventually. I mean she was only taking Louise out for lunch.”

  “Speaking of lunch,” Sweets began. “I’m getting really hungry. Sergeant Bradshaw, do you mind if I check your fridge for something to snack on?”

  “Sweets!” Alba admonished. “How can you think of your stomach at a time like this?”

  Sweets looked around innocently. “A time like what? Lunch time? Easy. My stomach reminds me that it’s lunch time.”

  Sergeant Bradshaw didn’t move or make any other signal that he had heard Sweets’ request.

  “I’m sure it’s fine, Sweets. I’m going to go find a sweater myself. It’s freezing in here!”

  “I put the screen back and shut the window.”

  “I know you did, thanks Sweets. I’m still freezing.”

  “I’ll help you look,” said Holly. “I saw a couple of sweaters in the master bedroom closet.”

  I laughed. “I’m not going to wear one of Mrs. Bradshaw’s expensive cardigans. Elena has got to have an old bedroom here.”

  “I did see a spare bedroom down the hall, come on, I’ll show you.”

  Holly led me down the hallway behind the study and to a bedroom painted lavender with white bedroom furniture and a lavender quilt atop the bed. “This looks like a girls bedroom to me,” I told her as we entered.

  “Look, it’s a picture of Elena and Harper,” said Holly as she held up one of the photographs on the dresser.

  I peered over her shoulder at the photograph. “Oh, they look like teenagers in that picture,” I said with a smile. They looked almost identical at that age.

  “Such a shame that Harper’s gone now,” said Holly wistfully. “She was a beautiful girl.”

  “Yeah,” I said sadly. “We’ve got to bring her killer to justice!”

  Holly opened the closet and reached in to grab a sweater and as she pulled it off of the hanger just like that, her body locked up. I’d seen that vacant expression enough to know that she was having a vision.

  “Holly!” I exclaimed as I caught her before she fell to the ground. I pulled her limp body to the bed and managed to get her up onto her back.

  Her eyes were closed, but I could see her eyes darting about frantically behind her eyelids. I rushed to the hallway. “Girls!” I hollered. “It’s Holly, hurry!”

  Jax and Alba came running immediately. Sweets followed seconds later with a butter knife covered in peanut butter.

  “What’s going on?” she asked nervously.

  “Holly’s having a vision. She touched one of Elena’s sweaters and then just collapsed.”

  All eyes riveted to Holly. Her body convulsed slightly and then finally, it went slack as if she’d fallen asleep. “Holly?” Jax asked tentatively.

  Holly’s eyes shot open. She stared straight ahead of her at the ceiling. The four of us bent over her nervously and gradually her eyes wandered to scan each of our faces.

  “Are you alright?” Sweets asked her.

  Holly’s eyes widened. “Elena,” she whispered, and then before promptly fainting, she added breathlessly. “In danger.”

  { Chapter Twenty-One}

  After she awoke, it took a glass of apple juice and a couple of bites of Sweets’ peanut butter and jelly sandwich before Holly felt strong enough to talk.

  “She was in a car with a blonde woman with gold jewelry,” she began before taking another drink of her juice.

  “That’s her mother,” I told the girls, remembering what Louise Bradshaw looked like from the night Harper had been discovered dead.

  “Her mother had a gun pointed at her,” Holly exclaimed. Fear covered her face. “Elena asked her where she was taking her. Her mother said ‘To our special place’.”

  “What?!” Jax shrieked.

  I was equally in a state of shock. The faint possibility that Louise had killed her daughter, Harper, existed, but to think of her killing her other daughter now too? What in the world was going on?

  “Where were they?” I asked Holly.

  Holly shook her head. “I’m not sure. They were in Elena’s car. I couldn’t see anything else.”

  “Where would Mrs. Bradshaw be taking her? Where is their special place?” Jax asked nervously.

  “I have no idea, but we’ve got to find out. Let’s pack up the Sergeant and go find Harper. Maybe she’ll know where to look!” I suggested.

  Alba looked at Holly. “Holly, you can stay here and rest. We’ll come back and pick you up.”

  Holly shook her head. “No, I’m fine. I feel a lot better now. I can make it.”

  “Shorty, you and Sweets help Holly get to the car. Red and I will get Sergeant Bradshaw.”

  “Is there room for all of us?” Sweets asked.

  “We’ll make room,” I assured them.

  “Should we call Detective Whitman?” Jax asked.

  “We don’t know where we’re going yet. We have to find Harper.”

  “Ok,” she agreed and helped Holly get her arm around her shoulder.

  Alba and I dashed to the living room to get Sergeant Bradshaw to his feet. “Come on Sarge, we’ve got to go save Elena.”

  “Elena?” he asked vaguely, as if he were caught up in a dream.

  “Yes, Elena. Your daughter. She’s …” I trailed off, I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to tell him that his daughter was being held at gunpoint by his wife. He was already in a precarious mental state.

  “She needs your help,” Alba finished. “We’ve got to go. Come on, we’re going to drive you to her.”

  “To Elena? Elena needs me?” he asked, coming out of his foggy mental state little by little.

  “Yes, but we have to go, right now.”

  Sergeant Bradshaw looked more lively than he had moments earlier. He stood of his own free will and followed us out to Sweets’ car where Jax was sitting on Holly’s lap in the back seat and Sweets was in the driver’s seat.

  “Get in!” Sweets ordered.

  Alba and I helped the Sergeant into the front seat and she and I crammed ourselves into the back seat.

  “Ok, all in. Let’s go!” Alba hollered.

  Sweets squealed the tires as she pulled away from the curb and then whipped around the corner, knocking Jax’s head against the door frame of the car. “Oww!” Jax shrieked.

  “Sorry,” Sweets called out.

  Aspen Falls was a very small town, so it didn’t take long to get to Jimmy’s Bed & Brew. “You guys
stay in here,” I asserted. “I’ll go get her.”

  “I’ll come with you,” Alba offered. “In case you need any help.”

  I nodded as I ducked out of the car and sprinted to the front door, which sure enough, was locked. “It’s locked.”

  “Stand back,” Alba ordered, raising her flattened palms.

  I put a hand on her arm. “Alba, you’d make a terrible cat burglar. You can’t just go around blowing doors off their hinges. There’s got to be a subtler way to do this.”

  “It would be handy if you learned to summon ghosts,” Alba scoffed. “Then you could just call Harper down here and we wouldn’t have to go up.”

  “I realize that, but I’ve been a little busy solving murders lately to put much time into studying!” I barked at her. My nerves were more than a little shot. I was worried that Elena was going to be harmed before we had time to get to her.

  Suddenly a thought hit me. There was a window in the room that Harper stayed in. We’d looked out it a dozen times. It faced the alleyway and I was almost positive there was a fire escape up to the window. “Let’s go to the alley,” I suggested.

  We ran around to the back and there it was, the fire escape that went all the way up to Harper’s window. When we got to the top, I let out a sigh of relief that the window wasn’t locked. Carefully we slid it open and climbed into the room. I pulled open the closet doors to find Harper in her usual fetal position.

  “You really should get out more, Harp,” I quipped. “You’re getting a little pale.”

  Alba slugged me. “Nice, Red.”

  “Well that was rude,” Harper grimaced. “I can’t help that I’m dead!”

  “I’m sorry, I was kidding. Look, we need you to go with us. It’s Elena, she’s being held at gunpoint, but we don’t know where she is.”

  “Elena’s being held at gunpoint?” she asked as she quickly got to her feet.

  “Yeah, we need your help finding her.”

  Harper’s eyes opened wide and she splayed her hands out in front of her. “How in the world can I help? I’m just a ghost!”

  “She’s being held by your mother,” I told her.

  “What?!”

  “We’ll explain it all later, but we think that your mother is the one that paid Jimmy to poison your drink.”

  “Ugh! That witch!” Harper cried angrily.

  “Hey! Watch it!” I snapped. “You say, witch, like it’s a bad thing!”

  “Oh, sorry, girls,” Harper said, covering her mouth.

  “What did she say?” Alba asked.

  “Nothing, she just called her mother a witch,” I said with a chuckle.

  “We’ve got to go,” Alba said hurriedly.

  “Let’s go, we can talk about it in the car.”

  “Can I ride in a car? I’m a ghost.”

  “Of course you can, I hear about haunted cars all the time,” I told her seriously.

  “Really?” Harper asked.

  “Yeah, absolutely.”

  “Our car’s pretty full, though,” I told her.

  “Like she’s going to take up a lot of space?” Alba asked.

  “True. Ok, you can sit on my lap,” I suggested.

  “Oh, one more thing,” Alba said quickly. “We’ve got your dad with us.”

  “Daddy?” Harper’s eyes lit up at the mention of her father.

  “Yeah, we should probably save the reunion for after we’ve found Elena, ok? We’ll have to keep your presence on the down low,” I told her.

  “Ok,” she said quietly.

  “Let’s go, we’re running out of time.”

  Alba and I climbed out of the window first and Harper trepidatiously let herself float out the window. She pulled her head back to soak in the sunshine. “It feels so good outside!”

  “See, you should have left earlier,” I told her.

  Quickly we descended the stairs and made our way back to the car. Alba and I climbed in first and Harper stuffed herself on top of me. Her presence made my chills worse and I hugged Elena’s sweater tighter around my arms.

  “Daddy!” she cooed excitedly.

  “Relax,” I whispered. “Down low, remember?”

  “Where are we going?” Sweets asked immediately.

  Alba looked at me. “I don’t know, Mercy,” she enunciated my name in a funny way. I was so used to her calling me Red, that hearing her say Mercy sounded foreign to me. “Where would their special place be?”

  “Hmm, let me think if there is anywhere that maybe she’d have gone in her childhood, maybe somewhere her mother would have taken her to hide out?” I asked aloud.

  Jax and Holly looked at me as if I were crazy. “Why do you two sound like zombies?” Jax asked hesitantly.

  Alba elbowed Jax’s leg. “Oh!” Jax hollered.

  Harper thought carefully. “Well, there’s this creek that wanders through town to the waterfall. But if you follow it up the creek there’s an old cabin that we used to walk to when we were little girls. Our mother used to do tea parties in the cabin with us. She said tea parties would teach us manners and make us well behaved society girls,” Harper said with a little laugh. “I guess that blew up in her face.”

  Sweets caught my eye in her rear-view mirror. “There’s a creek that runs through town, Sweets. We can follow it from the waterfall in the center of town. Start there and follow it upstream.”

  “Ok,” she said.

  It took only a minute before we were following the stream. We followed it to a country road just outside of town. “There!” Harper pointed. “See that little grove of Hemlock trees? The cabin is over there.”

  “There!” I shouted at Sweets. “That grove of trees.”

  “Is there a road?” Sweets asked.

  “There’s an old country road, keep going and this road will fork, take a right,” Harper added.

  “Yeah, keep going. There’s a fork in the road up ahead, yeah, there!” I pointed. “Stay to the right.”

  We followed the road as it veered off I could see the cabin through a break in the trees. “There,” I pointed. “Turn off here!”

  Our car bustled over the bumpy terrain until we got to the cabin’s driveway. “I see a car,” Holly hollered from her side of the car.

  “We should call Detective Whitman,” Jax said nervously.

  “And tell him what address?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, a cabin along the creek,” Jax responded.

  “Fine, you call him,” I said and handed her my phone as we pulled into the cabin’s parking area. “We’re going in.”

  The girls all started to pile out, but Sergeant Bradshaw remained seated. “Sergeant Bradshaw. We need you to help us. Elena might be in there.”

  “Elena?” he asked again. I was starting to think that was the only word he knew anymore.

  “Yes, your daughter. She needs your help, remember. She’s in that cabin. She’s in danger.”

  His eyes perked up again. “What are we waiting for? Let’s go!”

  I smiled at him, glad to see that he was coming out of the coma he had been in. I jumped out of the car and met him as he was getting out. The girls were all waiting for us beside the front of the car. Jax had stayed back to call Detective Whitman and fill him in and ask for police backup.

  Trepidatiously we approached the house. As we passed the other car, my arm rubbed up against the hood. It was still warm. I hoped that we had gotten there soon enough to save Elena.

  We converged on the house. Nervously I knocked on the front door as I waved at the other girls and Sergeant Bradshaw to hide around the corner. Harper stood bravely by my side as I waited for someone to answer the door.

  I heard a scuffle inside and then the door cracked open a sliver. “Yes?” I heard a woman’s voice call out from the inside.

  “I’m selling Girl Scout cookies, I was wondering if you wanted to buy any?” I asked facetiously.

  The woman peered at me through the crack in the door. I was fairly confident it was Loui
se Bradshaw, but not completely, the crack was too narrow for me to see anything more than one eye and a spot of blonde hair.

  “We don’t want any,” she said. “Wait, aren’t you…” she began again before nearly slamming the door in my face.

  “Yup!” I cried and with all the force in my body I slammed against the door, sending her reeling backwards. The door flew open and I ran in, the girls and Sergeant Bradshaw came running in behind me. It was Louise alright and she had Elena by a fistful of blonde hair with a gun to her head.

  Harper sucked in a breath.

  “Louise! Elena!” Sergeant Bradshaw cried when he saw the two of them entangled in such a way inside the cabin.

  “Daddy!” Elena screamed. “Help!”

  “Hello, Henry,” Louise smirked as she shuffled to her feet with Elena’s hair still in her grip.

  “Louise, what in the world are you doing?”

  Alba, Holly, and Sweets stood by anxiously, not knowing what to do. Sergeant Bradshaw began slowly inching his way towards Louise. She pulled Elena’s head back farther and pointed the gun at her husband. “Stop right there! Not another muscle, Henry. Or I’ll shoot both of you.”

  “Louise! What in the world has gotten into you? Are you off of your meds?” he asked, appalled.

  “I’m just fed up Henry.”

  “Fed up? Fed up with what?”

  “Your daughters,” she spat at him.

  “My-my daughters?” he stuttered, looking at Elena shiftily. “Don’t you mean our daughters?”

  “No you fool!” she screamed at him. “I mean your daughters! We both know that they aren’t our daughters.”

  “Louise, you’ve got to be off of your meds. You can’t possibly know what you’re saying here.”

  “Oh, I know exactly what I’m saying! For years I’ve pretended that your daughters were my own. I treated them like my own. And what did it get me? Humiliation and disappointment! That’s what it got me! Both of those girls turned into nothing more than the town harlots. Neither one of them made a single decent grade in school. They didn’t go to college. They didn’t marry into a good family. They sleep around with whatever man will have them. They’ve been a drain on us financially, and don’t think I don’t know that you’ve been supporting both of them since high school! Just because you handle our finances, doesn’t mean that I’m an idiot!”