The Midsummer Murders

by Jill Nojack

  William’s voice came unexpectedly from her open window. “Well, even if you knew her well, I think you’ll have a hard time recognizing her now.” He opened her door for her before she had time to turn toward it.

  “Shivering terrified timbers! Must you do that?” she complained. “Someday your flinging yourself about unseen will drive me to a stroke! Times have changed, William. Women are now capable of letting themselves out of cars. We’ve apparently had the ability to manage it for years.”

  “Nothing wrong with common courtesy.”

  “Common courtesy based on a woman needing two hands to wrangle her heavy skirts across the threshold in times long past. Door opening should have gone out with the miniskirt.”

  This didn’t stop him from rushing to the glass entryway door of the hospital side entrance and holding that one open for her, too. She shook her head.

  “You can’t expect me to catch up with the last fifty years in a couple of months.”

  “No, I daresay I can’t. And I don’t mind the courtesies as much as I mind the use of magic. Magic isn’t ordinary and shouldn’t be used for ordinary things.”

  “Gotcha. I’ll work on it.”

  They walked side by side for a while and started down the stairs to the basement together, but William hurried ahead to greet Doc Don, who was unlocking the door to the morgue as Natalie stepped off the bottom stair onto the old but well-waxed and shiny linoleum floor.

  “Gosh, Doc, thanks for coming out at this time of night!”

  As the coroner looked around, he replied, “When Robert calls, I jump. It’s a smart idea to humor the man who holds the purse strings. At least this time, I had time to finish my evening meal before the call came.” He nodded his head toward Natalie as she joined them, then pulled the morgue door open as he asked, “Did you fill her in on the condition of the remains?”

  “I didn’t want to spoil her dinner.”

  “Good call.” The coroner moved toward the metal wall to their left with its rows of doors. “As you’ll soon discover, refrigeration in this case is overkill, but health department protocols still need to be followed.”

  After opening a door and sliding out its tray, he undid the zipper and pulled the white plastic body bag away from the corpse’s face. Natalie nearly gasped. She’d prepared herself mentally for the shock of a newly dead acquaintance, but she couldn’t have prepared herself for this.

  A portion of the woman’s face had crumbled to dust, and the rest of her looked like it would soon suffer the same fate.

  “This can’t be Tildy Bentwhistle. She only died yesterday, didn’t she?” She looked to the doctor for confirmation.

  “It’s her, and you’re right about the date. And since several people have seen the body, I’d say this is not a drowning, if that’s what you were going to suggest.”

  “Yes. I can see it might be difficult to make a case for death by water.” She placed a hand over the body but didn’t touch it, probing for signs of magic in the remains. She had difficulty processing what she discovered as she probed. It simply couldn’t be right. It certainly wasn’t what she expected.

  “Any thoughts?” Doc asked.

  She dropped her hand back to her side and blew out a blast of air with a dry, exasperated, raspberry sound. “None. Why would I know what happened to her? You’re the coroner. She didn’t drown, if that’s what you’re going to call it. I can say that with a certainty. Do your job and stop looking to others to explain things!”

  With that, she turned and stalked out of the room.

  ***

  Josie turned the bottle in her hands. The glass was as shiny as the day it had been made, and the old skool styling told her that was a long time ago. It was about a third full of an amber liquid, and the tingle she felt the first time she’d touched it was even stronger now.

  Hadn’t it been empty when she first saw it on Tildy’s nightstand? Maybe she was wrong about that; she tried not to be too obvious when she scoped out the residents’ possessions. That could get her caught. In any case, the stopper was wedged firm so she couldn’t get a whiff of its contents. She didn’t try to force it. The last thing she needed was to break the bottle and risk spoiling the spell.

  She was tempted to put it up for sale in an online auction with the other things she’d collected in the past month. But with that tingle—that strong, strong tingle—the magic might make it worth it to hang on to the thing for a while if to figure out what it did and how to harness it. She handed it over the kitchen table to Janie for a closer look.

  “It definitely has magic,” she said as she sipped her wine, watching her younger sister turn the bottle in her hands. If Janie had magic, she’d know what she was holding right away.

  “I don’t know how you’d know that. And I don’t believe people just give you valuable stuff like this. I mean it, Josie. You won’t get community service if you get caught again, you know. That department store went easy on you. The families of helpless elderly people won’t.”

  “Says the person who makes her living conning people.”

  “I can read the cards! I do help people!” Janie’s mouth bloomed into a pout, which baby sis probably thought was cute but just looked dumb at her age. “And I have a nice-sized following around the county, too.”

  “Sure...” Josie said, sliding the knife in with a smirk, “...until they go to that Cinnamon Brown and get a real reading from a real witch. And then it’s ‘bu-bye Faker Janie.’”

  “Yeah? Well, I’m not the one who cleans up old-people poo for a living!”

  Josie felt her anger rising. She said, “A proper witch would know how I know the bottle has magic. The same way any witch knows. But since you don’t feel the tingle, maybe you’ve been lying about having magic all these years.”

  Janie glared, and she cranked at the top of the bottle, trying to remove the stopper. “I feel the tingle! I just thought you meant you knew what the magic does. And you don’t, do you?”

  “Hey!” Josie yelled. “Don’t break it. It won’t open. I tried already.”

  “I bet I can get it open.” She set the bottle back on the table, but her hand lingered, settling around it. “Don’t you want to find out what the perfume smells like?”

  “Sure, but not if I have to break the bottle to do it.”

  “I’ve got a tool at my place that might work. It won’t break it, at least. It’s not like I’d force it. And maybe I’ve got a ritual or two that would help. Let me have it for the night.”

  “Yeah? Like you ever do me a favor without expecting something in return?”

  “All I want is for you to stop insulting me about my talent! It hurts to have someone constantly running you down. Especially when she’s your own sister.”

  Josie’s tongue stroked across her front teeth while she rolled the offer around in her head.

  “Okay,” she said finally. “If you get the bottle open, I’ll never bring up your so-called fortune-telling powers again. But if you break it...”

  ***

  Natalie didn’t know what she’d expected to find in Tildy Bentwhistle’s room, but she hadn’t expected to find the same total absence of magic she’d found on the body.

  “It makes no sense,” she sputtered under her breath, her hands still spread out with her palms toward the walls as she slowly twirled in the center of the room.

  “What doesn’t?” William asked from where he leaned against a wall, relaxed and patient the entire time she’d spent working, repeating the same sweep around every inch of the space once, then twice, then thrice, and coming up with the same thing each time.

  She lowered her arms and shoved them deep into the pockets of her pantsuit. When she did, a button dived from her shirtfront toward the floor. William caught it effortlessly in a blur of motion and handed it back to her. She located the gap with a glance downward and was about to press it back in place and make it stick with a spell until she had time to stitch it, but she stopped and stuck it in her pocket i
nstead.

  “I’ll take care of that later. I don’t want to contaminate the room with my own magic and think I’m finding something I’m not.”

  “You’d be a good crime scene investigator. Even without magic. You think the right way. But you’ve been too quiet since you examined the body. What’s upsetting you?”

  “Nothing. A literal nothing is upsetting me. It makes no sense that there’s no magic on the body and no lingering traces in this room, either.”

  “So, magic didn’t kill Mrs. Bentwhistle. Okay.” William stood up straight, his mouth quirked at the right-hand edge. “Up to Doc to explain, then. Guess he was wrong about the ‘drowning.’”

  “No. It’s more than that. Tildy’s magic has been eradicated. Wiped completely away.”

  “Doesn’t that usually happen after death?”

  “Yes. Gradually over time. But magical essence is generated within the body and saturates its cells to the brim. Every witch leaks a little, leaving a faint trail in any room where she’s worked a spell or spent more than a few hours, and it takes days for the traces to dissipate fully from a body. Like blood...” Natalie paused for a moment, her right hand on her hip and her left hand curling to a loose fist. She brought it to her mouth where it tapped three times as her brow furled before she lowered her hand and said, “No. More like lymph. That’s a better metaphor. It’s distributed through the body similarly. And it stops flowing soon after life ends, but it doesn’t just disappear. It’s the same with magic.”

  William still looked puzzled.

  Natalie sighed. The explanation should be crystal clear. “How should I put this for you, then? Yes, I have it!” She smiled. “It’s like invisible ink—I know you’re familiar with that.” She forced herself not to smile fondly at him for the love notes he’d written her that way when they were courting and didn’t want his parents to know. “If you tip over an inkwell onto a piece of paper—that would be the death—the ink will still flow for a while until the paper saturates and the ink dries and disappears. But you can still see it with a little heat—or, in this case—a witch’s ability to sense magical essence.”

  “Oh, that makes sense! Thanks. So that’s what you do! You read the invisible ink.”

  “I suppose that’s as good a way of looking at it as any. And there’s not a drop nor a scribble here. Not one.”

  “But that still doesn’t tell me why it upsets you.” William’s brown eyes brimmed with concern.

  She felt tired suddenly. Maybe it was time to retire from this nonsense. She was old; no getting around that. She thought she’d seen everything in a lifetime that could possibly surprise her in her lifetime, but the universe wasn’t through with her yet. She started to sit on the edge of the bed, but William reached out a hand to stay her.

  He said, “Still an active investigation, remember? Be careful so you don’t contaminate the evidence.”

  “Wasn’t thinking,” she replied as she looked down at the bed where minute traces of Tildy Bentwhistle might have still lurked on the mattress. She assumed the sheets and coverlet had gone into one of Bill’s evidence bags. She took his hand and gave it a squeeze. “Get us back to the car. I’ll explain things over tea at my place. How does that sound?”

  ***

  Janie was careful with the bottle—it was so pretty, feminine, and old fashioned, she didn’t want to break it just for that reason. Plus, Josie would be cruel to her if she did. She’d been on Josie’s bad side often enough to know that wasn’t a place she wanted to be.

  But still, sisters, right? They were going to go at it once in a while. Just one of the side effects of sisterly love. At least with her sister it was.

  The problem was that Josie was right. Janie didn’t have any magic of her own, despite being born into one of the old Salem magical families. When they were kids, she’d wanted to impress her big sister, so she claimed to have magic like her big sis and her mother did. Her best friend helped her with minor spells that convinced her mother that both of her daughters were witches. She’d played her part so well that when she started interpreting the tarot, her mother found the future that Janie predicted every single time. And didn’t it just burn Josie’s backside when Mom favored her over the daughter who really did have magic?

  But she couldn’t confess now, even with their mother gone.

  No. Not going to happen. But she tried to do kind things for her sister when her sister wasn’t being awful, and sometimes even when she was. She owed her. She’d stolen the place in their mother’s affection that had rightfully belonged to Josie.

  The problem now was that she’d tried all of her best tricks to coax the stopper out of its resting place, but it was still stuck tight. Heating it? Check. Using her special jar lid removal tool? Check. Sweet talking it? Check again. Heating it and using the tool and sweet talking? Check. Check. Check.

  The thing would not open. She sighed. It wasn’t like Josie would back off bad-mouthing her. For a while maybe, but she’d start up again. She always did.

  Janie carried the bottle into her room and set it on the bedside table while she got ready for bed. It looked nice there. She might as well enjoy it for the one night she’d have it.

  As she slipped under the covers, the pale gold liquid in the bottle’s bottom appeared to glow for a second. She sat up quickly and picked it up. But no, it wasn’t glowing. Probably just a flash of light through the curtains as a car passed on the street outside.

  For a minute, she’d hoped it was the flash of the magic that Josie was sure the bottle contained and that it had responded to her as a witch. She could have magic, she really could. She’d never given up. Maybe it was just latent until now.

  But she couldn’t lay there awake all night hoping it would happen again. She lay back, rolled over, and tried not to think about Josie’s taunts when she returned the bottle unopened.

  ***

  Natalie filled two infusers with loose hibiscus tea, then poured boiling water into the cups, leaving them to steep while she leaned over the table toward William and said, “The biggest problem with all of this is that I don’t know what to tell Robert.”

  “And you know how you get when you don’t know everything.” William grinned.

  “Yes.” Her eyes narrowed, but only slightly. “Fine. I don’t enjoy being caught without an explanation, that’s true. But it begs the question—did something happen to Tildy’s magic before she died? Even my grandmother—who was the most powerful witch I’ve ever known—could only suppress another’s magic, in the same way that both I and Robert can. She couldn’t remove it. And I can’t see how it would explain the state of the corpse. I can’t even say for sure that the missing magic is related to her death.”

  She turned back to wait for the tea to finish steeping, then set the dripping infusers on a plate and moved the cups to the table.

  “Hibiscus is the one that’s good for blood pressure, right? I heard there are some other uses, more interesting uses?” William said, leaning in toward her as he made googly eyes.

  “Yes. Blood pressure. Not that I need it. Mine is excellent. And I do not understand what else you might be getting at.” She wouldn’t encourage him by verifying that it was also used to inflame the passions. The hibiscus was on offer only because she enjoyed the tart tang of the stuff; passion-inflaming was not on the menu. “Now stop distracting me. This puzzle needs sorting out.”

  “Well, what else could have done it?”

  “There are stories about an illness that robs witches of their powers, although I can’t remember what they called it. I was a child, and my grandmother assured me it was just a story elders told to keep the young ones in line. You could only catch it if you used dark magic, so they said. And I can’t see Clotilda Bentwhistle jumping on the dark magic bandwagon so late in life. Although, I have to say I’ve been caught out before by practitioners I never would have expected. Even Gillian toyed with the idea when her second husband was diagnosed with cancer.”

  �
�How would you tell if someone had contracted that disease?”

  “A potentially fictional illness? No clue. Which means someone will have to spend time in Robert’s library looking into it. I suppose it’s too late to call Gillian and put her to work.”

  William looked at the oven clock and was surprised by the late hour. But thinking about it, Marcus had popped his head in earlier to say goodnight on his way up the stairs to bed, so the signs were there. “You’re right. I don’t expect the mayor and his partner would take kindly to you getting them out of bed at this time of night.”

  “Then what are you lingering for so late? Be off with you. I’ve a full day ahead of me tomorrow.”

  He started toward her, leading with his lips, but she snatched up the tea cups and turned away toward the sink. “You know the way out.”

  “Good night then.” He was gone when she turned back, ready to apologize for being so brusque. Ready to lean in to a goodnight kiss if it was still on offer.

  Instead, she made her way up the stairs alone, feeling wearier than she should have. She couldn’t wave him toward her with one hand and push him away with the other forever—she knew that. She would have to decide about their relationship soon.

  But she would rather have a mystery to solve. Much less messy.

  6

  Twink twisted her curly black hair into a thick rope, arranged it into a loose knot at the top of her head, and shoved the jeweled comb in to hold it in place. She picked up her hand mirror while she sat at the vanity to view the results from the back. It looked good. The red rhinestones in the comb reflected light whenever she moved. She pulled a few curls out and decided it was a good look for her.

  Then she stood and appraised the tight, cropped tank top, turning admiringly for a look around back. Her favorite leggings showed off her curves just right.