She sat back and glared at me.
As if a demand and a mean face meant I was going to obey Lizzie’s orders! I was tempted to ask her what she was smoking, but I decided to play along instead. It might end up being entertaining.
I started by glaring back at her. “How did you get in here, anyway?” I asked.
Her face clouded. That was not the response she’d been looking for. “If you meant to lock your door at night, you’ll be sadly disappointed to hear that it was open, so it wasn’t that hard.”
“Right,” I murmured, trying to get my bearings. Around the dark curtain I’d hung over the window, sunlight was streaming in. How long had I slept?
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Time to get a watch,” she said.
When I just looked at her, she huffed. “It’s almost ten.”
I gasped. I hadn’t slept that late in years. Or maybe ever.
“Lizzie, you can’t just come into my room and demand answers. I don’t have to tell you anything,” I said.
Her eyes flared harder. She was trying to terrify me, and, it goes without saying, failing miserably. What she didn’t know was that Lark sometimes took pictures of Lizzie and drew horse noses on her face. It was hard to take her seriously with that image in my head.
“How’d you get her to let you fly?” she said.
I sighed. I was tempted to just tell her to bugger off, but then I had an idea. A little payback suddenly felt very appealing.
“I helped her with her cauldron,” I said, leaning forward and doing my best to look conspiratorial. It was difficult given that I knew my hair looked like roadkill.
To my total shock and surprise, Lizzie appeared to believe me completely. She leaned forward, her eyes shining brightly. “Tell me more.”
“She likes help with her cauldron. She likes having ingredients put into it. If you help her with that, she’ll love you forever,” I promised.
In fact, in the real world, Cookie might actually kill Lizzie if she interfered with the cauldron. If Lizzie believed me, I might have committed her to death by Cookie.
“You think she’ll go for that? You already did it. She might not be impressed enough,” she whispered. Her eyes were shining with a crazy light.
A small part of me told me to stop this madness, to pull back before I went too far.
The rest of me didn’t listen.
“She’ll definitely go for it. She even hinted that she’d take us flying again if we helped her out some more,” I said.
I was going to be in such big trouble. There was no way I would ever hear the end of this. Lizzie was never going to forgive me, and I didn’t want to think about what Mom would do if she found out.
Oh, well.
“Don’t tell anyone about this! And don’t help her yourself. The next flight is mine.” Lizzie bared her perfect teeth and used her hands to push herself up off the couch. Then she strolled out of the attic looking smug, clearly sure she’d gotten away with something. I could see on her face that she was already considering what she should give Cookie.
“That went well.” Rose came out from amongst the boxes that were still stacked in one corner of the attic.
“How long have you been there?” I asked.
“Long enough to hear all the lying. I must admit I’m proud. Shall we go down to lunch?” she asked.
I winced. “I’m not that late to breakfast.”
“It’s brunch now,” she said.
“Brunch doesn’t exist,” I said. “It’s either lunch or breakfast. Brunch makes no sense in the small or large scheme of the world.”
“Maybe it’s a city thing. Good thing you’ve come all the way back to the country.”
We made our way to the kitchen, which was empty, as I’d suspected it would be. I grabbed some coffee and ate a muffin in a hurry, because I had to get to the library before Mom could give me work to do. There were supernaturals I needed to look up. Like, a lot of them.
The first research subject on my list was Mr. Nutcracker. I had heard about him before, but in my day to day life I never thought about him. His name hadn’t been breathed in my presence in a long time—okay, maybe that was because I had run off to New York—but now that he had shown up on our doorstep at a time of crisis, I certainly needed to know more about him.
I also needed to know more about Jefferson Judge. More than likely I’d add more names to that list soon, but Nutcracker and Judge were enough for now.
I went to grab Pep and Lark on my way to the library; they were already at work in the gift shop and the ice cream parlor respectively.
True to form, my cousins were just as excited to get started in the library as I was.
“Mom is still furious at us,” said Lark as we headed off to do some research.
“I don’t know what she expects. They went away for days. There was a murder. We couldn’t very well sit here until they could come back and deal with it. We had to go fetch them back,” said Pep.
“Exactly,” said Lark.
“Someone should tell them we’re adults, anyway,” said Pep.
I was surprised. Usually Pep was the first one to fall into line with what our moms wanted. She didn’t like getting in trouble and she didn’t like doing what she wasn’t supposed to be doing. Still, she had a point. They couldn’t really be mad at us.
Except maybe for the flying.
On the way to the library I told them about Lizzie’s visit.
“You are going to be in so much trouble,” said Lark, shaking her head, but grinning slightly as well.
I winked. “I don’t know what came over me. It just happened. Maybe it’s some continued resentment that she took my room away from me.”
Before I went off to college and New York, I’d had a room on the fourth floor of the mansion, where all the family rooms were. Then, while I was gone, Lizzie came to live at Haunted Bluff. My mom hadn’t wanted to make her stay far away from everyone else, so she’d given my cousin my room.
That’s how it came to be that when I arrived back home for good I was relegated to the attic.
“Whatever it is, you’d better hope that Cookie doesn’t find out you sent Lizzie to follow her around all day,” said Lark.
She had a point there.
Luckily, the library was quiet when we arrived. Everyone else had a lot to do that day.
“Where do we start?” Pep asked.
“What we really need is to talk to the owner of the delivery company. Until we can do that, we should just look into who Blu was and who Jefferson Judge was as well,” I said. “Or is,” I added thoughtfully.
“Do you think Cookie’s ledgers have any information?” Lark asked.
“I’m counting on it.”
Cookie liked to keep track of other supernaturals. She never liked it if someone had a better haunted house than we did, or was more successful, so for years she had kept track by maintaining an exhaustive enchanted database in the library, constantly adding to and amending it.
To my surprise, she had always just left it available for anyone to look at. I was pretty sure that was because she didn’t expect anyone else to be interested in what she was tracking. Now that I was forming my own detective agency, I sure was interested.
“Where are her books?” Lark asked, her voice echoing in a slightly muffled way off the walls of leather-bound volumes.
I pointed to a small cabinet under the large window straight in front of us. We headed that way and I opened the cabinet. Inside it were a bunch of enchanted books.
They weren’t real books that you could hold and touch. It was more like they were globes of light. They followed basic enchantments and hand commands.
“I can barely read her chicken scratch. You’d think she was a doctor or something,” said Pep. She was leaning forward and squinting, trying to decipher the scribbles on the page to which she had opened one of the books.
“I hope that woman is never in charge of someone’s well-being,”
said Lark. Then she paused and thought for a moment. “I suppose actually she has been in charge of a lot of witches’ and warlocks’ well-being. I’ll have to think about that,” she added.
She had said what we all knew. When push came to shove, Cookie took care of people.
There looked to be at least fifteen books stuffed into the cabinet. We each took one to start with.
We had been poring over our volumes for half an hour with no luck when I heard a faint knocking.
“Is that the library door?” I asked.
“I think it’s the front,” said Pep.
I looked up. “Were we expecting company?”
My cousins shook their heads. I set the enchanted book down and went to see who was knocking.
The sky was gray, but it was still bright outside. Standing in the doorway, framed by the light, was a hulk of a man, so big that the very top of his head nearly disappeared above the doorway. Given that the entrance to the mansion was itself outsized, the visitor was huge. Orwell would probably look normal-sized next to this giant.
“Can I help you?” I asked. This man could be an assassin, so I had to be careful. But I also had to be polite, in case he was . . . someone else.
“I’m the owner of the Speedy Spider Delivery Service. I was summoned for an interview,” he said in a booming voice.
There was no sign of Grant, so I reasoned that the only right thing to do was to entertain this man myself until Grant arrived.
“Won’t you come into the library. Mr. . . .?” I said.
“Horticulture,” he said.
As I led him to the library, Jezebel floated past. She gasped when she saw him and went to hide, but Horticulture shared that he had seen ghosts before, so there was no reason to worry.
Jezebel looked relieved, and I had the distinct impression that if ghosts could blush, she’d have been doing so. “My apologies. I’m so relieved I didn’t scare you.”
“It takes more than that to scare me,” said Horticulture, looking around. “This is quite the place. I’ve heard as much over the years, but I never managed to get here before now. I’ve heard that it’s run by a battle-axe, and that you don’t want to cross her. I never saw the point in coming up if I was just going to annoy somebody.”
“You must mean my grandmother Cookie,” I said. “She’s not so bad when you aren’t in the same room with her.”
Horticulture’s huge chest rumbled in amusement. “I like that. I’ll use that.”
“These are my cousins, Pep and Lark,” I said.
Mr. Horticulture nodded in his genial way.
Once we were seated, Horticulture said, “Are you the police? Do you live here? What can you tell me about what happened to Blu? I run this business, and I want it to run smoothly. Murders are not part of it. Why do you think I came to a sleepy area to start a company? For sleep.”
The three of us combined to tell him everything we could. I hoped that if we shared information with him, he would tell us more about the truck and what it had been doing here in the first place. Specifically, with a new driver who was really an assassin. I couldn’t tell from what he had already said whether he knew that Blu was a hired killer or not.
We did leave out the key detail that Blu had apparently been trying to kill Cookie.
We didn’t know who this man was. Just because he said he owned the company didn’t mean he was trustworthy. In fact, I had started to think that the whole company might be filled with assassins, though this man did seem a bit too emotional for such coldhearted work.
“This is all terrible. I can’t believe Blu was murdered in the driveway of your mansion. I know you had some trouble recently, and this really doesn’t help. Poor Blu,” he said at last.
“Word has gotten around?” said Lark.
“The mansion is famous. The destruction of the Skeleton Trio and then the death of the warlock at the wedding were widely reported,” Horticulture responded. I frowned at the very large man. I was sure he was a warlock, even though warlocks as big as he was were very rare.
“Do you have any idea who might have wanted to kill Blu?” I asked.
“No idea whatsoever. He was a relatively new employee, but I guess you know that. He did good but not exceptional work. I paired him with Orwell because Orwell is very responsible. I figured he could show him the ropes. It’s strange, though, I would have thought the case of wine would’ve been delivered that first day. It was on the truck,” he said.
I frowned. I hadn’t realized that Blu had actively chosen not to deliver the wine that day. Clearly he had wanted an excuse to come back. The idea that I had foiled the murder with my presence that first day was starting to seem pretty reasonable. Cookie would never be grateful, but she should be.
“That’s very strange,” said Lark.
“He clearly wanted an excuse to be here again. I was wondering if he was tracking Down Below. Maybe he was exchanging packages,” Horticulture mused. “It’s really the only explanation I can think of for why he would want to come back two days in a row when he didn’t have to.”
“Did he have any family?” I asked.
Blu’s employer gave a nod. “He had a distant aunt. That’s about it. We notified her, and of course she was upset, but she wasn’t that close to him. She was the emergency contact he listed when he was hired; we require everyone to have one.”
“Where did he live?” I asked.
Horticulture turned his head to the side as if he had suddenly realized we were interrogating him.
“I suppose it’s natural to be curious about all this, even though you aren’t the official investigator,” he said, peering at me as if he was trying to figure out what my angle was. “I hope you won’t say anything bad about my company. We really are trying to stay afloat. We have a lot of employees who are going to be harmed by this situation.”
Okay, I told myself, he was just worried about his company, so I hastened to reassure him. “Speedy Spider Delivery Service has been around for years, Mr. Horticulture. We would never say anything bad about the company.”
That wasn’t true, but I didn’t have to tell him that.
“Okay,” he said, taking that as enough to go on with. “Blu lived a couple of towns over. I believe he was renting a room in a house. Nothing fancy. I brought the information so they could check it out. Speaking of which, I’m amazed that His Majesty of Magic himself is on this case. I’m sure it’ll be solved in no time at all. I want to assist in any way I can.”
“His Majesty of Magic is the head investigator in the Northeast now, yes,” said Pep. “I believe he’ll be involved in any big cases in the area from now on.”
“It’s just incredible. I didn’t think someone of his stature would ever take a role like that,” said Horticulture. “He’s so famous and successful! I suppose it’s good for me that this case will be resolved in short order. And good for the memory of Blu, too, naturally.”
“We’re very glad that His Majesty of Magic is in the area as well,” I said.
Horticulture leaned forward, bracing one massive elbow on one massive knee. “Tell me, do you think he’s as good as everyone says? It’s been hard for me to believe. I can’t believe all the stories are true, but everyone swears by them.”
“We haven’t seen any evidence to suggest that the stories aren’t true,” I said through gritted teeth. Grant deserved all the praise he got as a warlock, but I still wished he’d let me be involved in investigations.
I could help him. Why didn’t he understand? I resolved then and there to ask him point blank. Or ignore him. Or maybe both, depending on what he said. Not that I hadn’t been doing a pretty good job of ignoring him already.
Chapter Sixteen
Just then the library door burst open and Grant strode in. He did not look pleased.
“I wondered where my interviewee had gotten too,” he said, walking up to Mr. Horticulture and extending his hand. Horticulture being almost twice Grant’s size, Grant’s entire hand disapp
eared in Horticulture’s palm.
“Never fear. These young ladies were keeping me company, catching me up to speed on the case,” said Horticulture.
“Isn’t that good of them,” said Grant dryly. He glanced at me and then looked away, clearly irritated.
“We’ll just head to the kitchen and let you two talk,” said Pep.
“I think that’s an excellent idea,” said Grant.
Before we could leave, he pulled me aside to a far corner of the library. “Are you again conducting an investigation on something that I’m working on?” he demanded. There was no warmth in his eyes this time.
“Again, it happened at MY mansion. Besides, everyone says I’m good at investigating. Why can’t I investigate? I can help you,” I told him.
His face clouded. “That’s not how things work. You can’t just decide to investigate a murder and have access to all the information. There are rules and channels.”
“I’m not allowed to be a hunter. I’m also not allowed to investigate what happens around my own property?” I asked.
Grant raised his chin and looked at me. “Where were you coming from when the Vice Chancellor showed up the other day?” he asked.
My mouth closed with a snap. We had come from Down Below after Peter had dragged us down there to help with Jefferson Judge’s disappearance. I couldn’t very well tell Grant, for any number of reasons. We weren’t allowed Down Below under any circumstances; going down there broke pretty much every supernatural rule in the book, never mind my mom’s.
“I take your silence as an indication that you’re not going to tell me. Now you see what a predicament I’m in,” he said.
“It’s a totally different situation. Like I said, I can help you with this case,” I insisted. “I already told you Blu was here to murder Cookie. She wouldn’t have told you that in a million years.”
“She would’ve told me if I offered her wine,” Grant correctly pointed out.
“You would have bribed a witness?” I asked him incredulously.
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