Murder & Macarons (A Stella Storm Cozy Witch Mystery Book 2)

by Amy Casey

  I was on the doorstep of a killer and I was going to bring them to justice.

  I went to knock on the door when I saw it was already partly open.

  Now usually, I’d knock anyway out of politeness. But I could hear something. Something like… like rushing around upstairs. A mad rush.

  So I didn’t want to let this person I know I was here.

  I didn’t want them to know I was ready to confront them—or God knew what they’d do in retaliation.

  So I looked over my shoulder. Thought about what Annabelle said about doing things myself and how I had to start trusting other people, too.

  Well maybe I would. In time. Perhaps.

  But right now, this was mine to deal with. My mess to clean up.

  And I damn well would clean it up, that was for sure.

  So I pushed open the door and crept inside.

  The first thing I noticed was the mess. The piles of papers. The ornaments out of place. Either someone had broken in here… or something else was happening here.

  Someone was trying to break out.

  I started to climb the stairs when I saw them stagger out of their bedroom.

  They stopped. Stopped right there on the landing area. And as they stared down at me, I saw the panic in their eyes; the fear in their face.

  And right then, fully visible, I knew it was time to confront him, once and for all.

  “Hello, Stephen,” I said. “Going somewhere?”

  At first, Stephen Hankinson opened his mouth, suitcase by his side. He looked like a trapped rat, trying to wriggle away.

  But then he closed it and his face hardened and he did something else entirely.

  He lifted his heavy looking case and threw it right down the stairs towards me.

  A normal person might’ve cowered. They might’ve stepped aside.

  But I was no normal person.

  Again, do you really need reminding of that shit still? After all this time?

  I lifted my hands as the heavy weight of the suitcase flew towards me. And I knew if this failed, I’d be in big trouble. Because as time felt like it slowed down, that case did look heavy. Really heavy. And it’d put me on my arse.

  “Stoppus haltius.”

  I waited for the suitcase to stop. Waited for my powers to freeze it in time, then fire it back up at Stephen, who I would confront and get a confession from, ending the Andy Carter case once and for all.

  But of course, things were never straightforward in my life.

  So naturally, my powers lifted a little ornament from the floor and dropped it a few inches.

  The suitcase, on the other hand, slammed into my body, winded me and sent me tumbling down onto Stephen’s floor.

  I lay there, a little disoriented, the taste of blood in my mouth. I tried to get back to my feet, to stand up to Stephen once and for all. Because I knew what I’d done now. I knew what this was all about.

  I went to stand when I saw him above me.

  He looked down at me with this look in his eyes. It was the same look as when he’d come to kill me that night.

  “I don’t know what you are,” he said. “But you need sorting out. You need sorting out fast.”

  He lifted an ornament off the floor and went to throw it at my head.

  But then I pushed the case aside, raised my hand and blasted a forceful shock of magic right at him.

  The ornament didn’t hit my head.

  Instead, it hit Stephen’s. Repeatedly.

  He stood there, thumping his own head with this ornament. Tears rolled down his cheeks. “Make it bloody stop!” he cried.

  I stood up then, still a little unsteady on my feet. I walked over to him, kept the ornament thumping at his head—not too hard, just hard enough to hurt. “You killed him, didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t touch him.”

  “Don’t lie to me, Stephen,” I said, readying my truth serum. “You killed Andy Carter because he learned about your plan to run away with Chatty Charlie. It was her idea to rob Andy, and it was yours to rob your good friend, Herbert, steal their shares of the money. But it went wrong, didn’t it? It went wrong and Andy Carter ended up cottoning on to what you were doing. And then he ended up dead. Right?”

  I went to throw the truth serum as Stephen kept on thumping his head.

  But then something remarkable happened.

  Something that made me wonder whether I needed the serum at all.

  “I was going to run away with Charlie,” he said. “I—I was going to steal from Herbert. And Charlie was going to steal from Andy. But we didn’t kill Andy.”

  “And how am I supposed to believe that?”

  “Because I wasn’t even at the wedding. Not before Andy died anyway. Only… only when Herbert called me with a problem he had.”

  I froze, then. Kept on allowing Stephen to bang his own head, of course. “What problem?”

  Tears were streaming down Stephen’s face now. “Herbert... Herbert found Andy’s body.”

  “But that doesn’t add up,” I said. “Bill was the one who found the body.”

  “That’s what Herbert wants people to believe. But he was the first there. He went back. He… he went back to that room because he found out about what Charlie was planning. He hadn’t learned my side of the plan at that stage. So he went there to warn Andy. But things got heated. Andy was in denial. And then… by then it was too late.”

  I was totally still. I didn’t know what to believe.

  “So what happened next?” I asked.

  “Herbert called me. He—he told me he’d found something terrible. But he knew how it would look if he reported it. There was too much between him and Andy. Way too much. So I… I went back there. I went to make sure Herbert hadn’t left anything there because—”

  “Because if he was done for murder,” I said, “you wouldn’t be able to rob him.”

  “I feel guilty for what I did. But I’m sick of this life. I want out of this corruption. And honestly, I thought it’d all point back to Herbert a lot more easily than it has. And Charlie wants out of it too. We just… I didn’t kill Andy. Charlie didn’t kill Andy.”

  I stood there, the revelations pouring through my body.

  “So Herbert did this?” I asked.

  Stephen shrugged and shook his head. “I… All I know is that Herbert kept going on about something on the phone.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “What did he keep going on about?”

  “He… he kept going on about how purple Andy’s lips were.”

  “Purple lips? If he were poisoned then his lips probably would be purple.”

  “I guess so, but it sounded… it sounded desperate. And there was something else. Something I saw when I got there. Something I probably should’ve reported.”

  “What did you see, Stephen?”

  He looked down at the floor. He was beating his head a little less hard now.

  “Stephen,” I said. “What did you see?”

  He looked back up at me, right into my eyes. “His lips. They weren’t purple at all. They were a normal shade.”

  Then he looked away.

  “And I saw a tissue right beside him.”

  “A tissue?”

  He glanced back up at me. “There was purple on that tissue. Purple—”

  “Lipstick,” I said.

  I stopped making Stephen beat his head now. I stopped everything and I froze completely.

  Because I knew where I’d seen that lipstick before.

  I knew exactly who wore purple lipstick.

  “Stay here,” I said, rushing to Stephen’s front door.

  He narrowed his eyes. “You aren’t going to tell the police, are you?”

  I scanned him, head to toe. “I’d love to. Really. But right now, I’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

  “What’re you talking about?” he asked.

  I looked outside, across the street, over towards where I knew I needed to go.

  “I’m going to catch a kil
ler,” I said.

  Chapter 40

  Gina Carter took a deep breath as she looked between her curtains and outside her window.

  The rain was coming down even heavier now. But she found it kind of therapeutic, the rain. She liked the sound of it when she was trying to sleep, tapping away on the glass. Even when her parents were arguing when she was younger—which they did, a lot—she always knew she could find solace in that rain. Because it was another noise. A noise from outside. And it was proof that, no matter what’d happened, no matter what was going on in her house, with her parents—with everyone… there was always still a life going on outside. That there was still a normality outside, and that things were just moving along.

  She looked at the rain as it lashed down onto her garden and for the first time in her life, she was struggling to find the comfort in it. Because she knew what was coming next.

  She stepped away from her curtains, walked into her lounge. On the coffee table, she saw one of Andy’s old favourite glasses that he drank his whisky from late at night. He often did that. Disappear for the day on some job or other, then come home and sit there, whisky in hand. At first, when Gina used to come downstairs, he’d be nice with her. He’d let her join him. And to be honest, that’s how it remained for a long time. It wasn’t a perfect relationship they had. But who did have a perfect relationship, anyway?

  Besides. Perfect was uninteresting. Flawed was much more interesting.

  At least Gina thought, anyway.

  She sat down on her sofa, stared at that bottle of whisky. It was so tempting to just pour a load of it down her neck, but she knew she shouldn’t. She had to stay calm. She had to stay measured. She had to be ready for what was next.

  She heard the footsteps creeping up her drive. And as they did, she thought back to the time when she and Andy started to drift. It was that deal he was involved in with the property moguls of the surrounding area. They were the first people she blamed for the estrangement of her husband. And sure, she knew he slept around. He wasn’t exactly a closed book about that. She got it—every man had his needs when he was away from home, and Andy Carter wasn’t just any old man. But Gina learned to live with it. She learned to deal with it.

  Just as long as she never had to look those women in the eye.

  But things… things came to a head. Andy was growing more distracted. And it all seemed to be to do with this deal.

  And then she learned the truth. Then she saw them together. And things just… snapped.

  She heard a knock at the door. She looked over at the cupboard across the room. Sighed as she stood up, walked towards it, then reached inside it and pulled out a pistol.

  She slipped it into her pocket and walked over to her front door.

  When she opened it, she saw Stella Storm standing there.

  And she knew from the look on Stella’s sodden face that she’d figured it out.

  “Well,” Gina said, doing her best impression of the downtrodden, desperate wife who was at the end of her tether. “You’d better come inside,” she said, grasping her hand as tightly as she could. “I’m guessing we have a lot to talk about.”

  She saw Stella nod, then follow.

  She let go of her hand.

  Now, she just had to wait for the pieces to fall into place…

  Chapter 41

  So. No need to small talk. And I would ask if you’d perhaps like a cup of tea. But I’m guessing you aren’t in the habit of accepting cups of warm, seemingly innocuous fluid from a woman who just poisoned her husband, hmm?”

  I listened to the words coming out of Gina Carter’s mouth and I couldn’t quite believe them. I’d been to visit her, that very day after Andy’s body was found. She’d looked me in the eye and told me how little she actually cared about him—how she wouldn’t want to burden herself with his murder because he wasn’t worth it.

  She’d come across so convincing. So utterly convincing.

  And she hadn’t used any magic in order to come across that way.

  This wasn’t like the Krissy Palmer case. This wasn’t a case that required trickery.

  This was human nature, on show. And it was scary as hell.

  “Why?” I asked. It was all I could manage.

  Gina sipped at a glass of whisky. We were in the lounge. The curtains were shut. And despite the cool air outside, it was boiling in here. Stuffy, even. Like the heating was cranked up to the max, way beyond any comfortable temperature.

  Gina shrugged, nonchalant in her manner, still so matter of fact about everything. “Love, I suppose.”

  “You suppose? But I thought you said—”

  “I told you I didn’t want to be burdened with my husband’s murder. And you’d be right in saying that. Which was why his deal with his property friends in Herbert and Stephen was the perfect distraction.”

  I shook my head. “You… you knew they were going to be in the spotlight for the murder and you let them be.”

  Again, Gina shrugged, like she didn’t particularly care much. “I knew they would be. Or that ultimately, Charlie would be. I thought about killing her too. I mean, she was the one who tempted Andy. She was the one who made him act so unfaithfully—and right in front of my face, too. But in the end, I had faith that one way or another, things would lead back to her. I knew Charlie was double-crossing Andy. I knew Stephen was involved, too. So I just had to wait for the guilty party to make their move, then…”

  “Bam,” I said.

  Gina smirked, nodded. “Bam, indeed.”

  I sat there, rubbed the sides of my temples. Everything was suddenly so obvious, suddenly so clear. Gina Carter had killed her husband as an act of revenge for his affair with Charlie. She’d let the chess pieces and repercussions of Andy’s deal with Herbert, Stephen, and Bill fall into place; for Stephen’s double-crossing of that very same group to manifest in his planned escape with Chatty Charlie. She’d helped place some of the dominos very strategically. Now it was just a case of waiting for one to fall.

  Only I’d got here first.

  “There’s still things I don’t understand,” I said, rigid with fear and confusion. But mostly fear.

  Gina sipped back her whisky. “Shoot.”

  It disconcerted me just how open and honest she was being with me. Made me worry where she was actually going to take this. I had spells on the tip of my tongue and had concocted a few serums before coming here. And I was going to have to use them fast, as soon as I understood completely. Because sure, I had a confession. I had Gina Carter.

  But knowing what Andy Carter was like…

  Something told me she had a story worth hearing out.

  “Killing Andy. What was that going to achieve?”

  Gina frowned. “Have you ever been in love, Stella?”

  I glanced at the floor.

  “I’ll take that as a no,” Gina said. “Stella, there are things about love you need to have experienced to understand. Andy and I, we had an unconventional relationship. But we had boundaries of trust. We had rules in place. And those rules were not to be broken. And when I saw Andy with Charlie… when I saw them looking so happy together… and when I saw him giving her that gorgeous platinum necklace in the same way he’d given one to me all those years ago—and spoke to her the way he’d spoken to me all those years ago—I realised it was all a facade. I’d been so stupid to believe I was any different to any of his other women. And that’s why I wouldn’t have blamed Charlie, in a way, even if she had fallen for him—which in hindsight, I know now wasn’t entirely true. Because he was just the same with me. And that’s what hurt me most.”

  She sipped back her whisky.

  “So I put on some poisonous lipstick, and I kissed him right on the lips. He went up to that room, had his little arguments with whoever. And he dropped dead not long after.”

  Again, just hearing all of this in such a matter of fact manner… it made my skin crawl.

  “I went back up there later that night, after his arg
ument with Herbert—who watched him die, by the way, of that I am sure. I wiped the lipstick from his lips. I shed a tear for him. And in that moment of emotion… well, I guess that’s where I made my error. Where I dropped the tissue.

  “I went back for that the following night too, of course, when I realised my error. But later, I learned that Bill Collins had seen the lipstick on the tissue. I was wearing a similar shade when he came round for a brew one day. And Bill, well… he was observant. Far more observant than most.

  “It was a shame, what had to happen to Bill. He was a good man. But he couldn’t live, not as long as he knew the truth. And as for Andy… make no mistake. I loved that man. I loved him. But I made a vow to myself right there that I would not shed another tear for him. And I would not let a pig like that drag me down. So that’s where we are right now, Stella. Do you understand?”

  I saw the way she was looking at me change. I couldn’t quite detect how. There was just more of a distance to the way she was looking at me. More of a… disconnect.

  “I don’t…”

  And then I realised it wasn’t the way Gina was looking at me at all that had changed. It was the world around me that was changing. Everything was getting smaller. Everything was spinning. Everything was…

  “I’ve seen the way you bite your nails, Stella,” Gina said. “You should really cut that out. It’s a nasty habit.”

  I looked down at my hand and I saw it.

  I saw it, just a little fragment of it—of purple—right between my fingernails.

  And then I remembered what’d happened when I’d come in.

  The handshake.

  The cold grasp of the hand.

  The lipstick.

  “Please…” I stared.

  I tried to summon my powers. I tried to draw on my abilities. But everything was turning dark. Everything was spinning, faster and faster.

  And when I looked up, I saw Gina Carter standing right over me, whisky glass in hand.

  “I made a promise never to go down for what happened to my husband,” she said.