A frown pulled on the corners of Elodie’s mouth. “Not bad?” She echoed my words. “No, Darcy, not bad. It’s worse. Much, much worse.”
Her tone was starting to make me nervous. “How much worse?”
Short and thin with shoulder-length curly blond hair, a long, narrow face, wide-set blue eyes, and a shy but somewhat sad smile, Elodie was younger than me. I placed her to be more my sister, Harper’s, age—early to mid-twenties. Fairly young to own her own shop—just like Harper, who’d recently taken over Spellbound Bookshop. Tapping the countertop that separated us with short fingernails painted a sparkly blue, she said, “Have you ever seen that TV show about people who hoard?”
I had seen it. And immediately afterward started cleaning and throwing clutter away. “This is your house you’re talking about?” She didn’t look the type to live in squalor.
Crystals hung in the big bay window overlooking the village green, and every time the sun peeked out from behind fluffy white clouds, rainbows streaked across the room, spilling color on the already vibrant collection of goods in the shop.
“No,” she said. “Well, maybe.” Then she looked at me, her eyes pained. “I don’t know.”
“If it’s your house?” Seemed like a fairly straightforward question.
“Technically, it’s my mother, Patrice’s, as is this shop, but I’ve been taking care of both.” Her forehead wrinkled and her voice dropped. “Mom’s been missing for a year and a half, and there’s just not enough money to keep up payments on both places. I’m going to have to sell her house.”
I didn’t know much about Patrice Keaton’s disappearance. Only what Aunt Ve, in her feverish state this morning, had told me: Patrice had vanished without a trace.
“Can you do that?” I asked.
“As her trustee, I can. I don’t want to, but I can’t see any other option. I don’t have enough savings to pay her bills and mine, and there’s no one else to turn to for financial help.”
I had many questions, mostly about her mother and the circumstances surrounding her disappearance, but I didn’t think now was the right time to ask them. “Are you living there, in your mother’s house?”
She shuddered. “No. It’s really not livable. My fiancé, Connor, and I live here—upstairs.”
Village shops were either side-by-side shared storefronts or detached homes that doubled as businesses. Aunt Ve’s business, As You Wish, was in a gorgeous Victorian on a large corner lot at the west end of the square. The Charmory was also a Victorian. Though it was much smaller than Ve’s place, it had a similar layout. On the first floor was a front parlor, a wide hallway leading to a private office space, and a small powder room. In the back of the house would be a big kitchen and family room. Upstairs, there were probably only two bedrooms (instead of Ve’s three)—plenty of room for two people.
Surprisingly, I noticed Elodie wore only a modest diamond engagement ring— I would have thought a Geocrafter would have had an outrageous stone. And now that I was looking, I saw that she didn’t wear any other jewelry. Not even a dainty pair of earrings. I wasn’t a big jewelry wearer either, but if I had been surrounded by all those crystals and beads every day, I would have been tempted.
“In order to sell Mom’s house,” she was saying, “it needs to be cleaned out. Really cleaned out. I can’t hire just anyone. Mom didn’t collect just junk. She also collected treasures and her house is full of them, mixed in between twenty-year-old newspapers, cardboard boxes filled with flea market finds, and even some wedding presents that were never opened.”
A feeling of dread was beginning to take root in my stomach. “When was her wedding?”
“Nineteen eighty-five.”
I gulped. What was I in for?
Elodie’s mention of a wedding suddenly reminded me of my aunt Ve, who’d recently become engaged to potential husband number five, Sylar Dewitt. After two months, I still wasn’t sure about the upcoming nuptials, mostly because I didn’t have a good feeling about them. The wedding was this coming Sunday. And unfortunately, Ve had come down with a nasty virus. One that had terrible timing, as she was the one in charge of the preparations for the ceremony and reception. Preparations that now fell on me to complete, since Sylar was too busy running his optometry office, the village (he was the village council chairman), and the upcoming theater production of Cabaret (he was a producer and had a supporting role). First up for me as Darcy Merriweather, wedding planner, was a menu tasting later that day. Then I had to try to figure out why there was a surprising lack of RSVPs coming in.
“My dad tried to keep her collecting in check,” Elodie said, “but after he died, my mother’s hoarding escalated. I was talking to Mrs. Pennywhistle the other day when she was in here shopping, and she gave you the highest of recommendations. I need someone I can trust. Someone who’s not going to find an uncut gem amid the trash and stick it in a pocket.”
Mrs. Pennywhistle, or as most everyone called her, Mrs. P, was the village’s geriatric spitfire. I’d helped her clean out her granddaughter’s apartment a couple of months ago, after she’d been murdered. Since then Mrs. P had become like family.
“Can I trust you?” Elodie asked me.
For some strange reason I had a feeling she was asking about something beyond nicking a few trinkets. It made me nervous, which immediately gave me second thoughts even as I said, “Absolutely.”
“Then, you’ll take on this task?” Her hands gripped the edge of the counter.
Suddenly she seemed anxious, and a little bit desperate. Which made me really nervous. Was there something she wasn’t telling me?
Traces of panic lined her eyes. “Darcy?”
Cleaning a hoarder’s house sounded like a nightmare, but I had little choice. “As You Wish’s motto is that no request is too big or too small and no job impossible. I’ll do it.”
I didn’t break my word, ever. So now that I’d given it, I was all-in on this job, for better or worse.
She smiled her sad smile. “You might come to regret that motto, especially after seeing the house.”
I gazed at her. “Are you trying to scare me?”
“Just giving you fair warning.”
I ignored the growing unease in the pit of my stomach. “You do know we charge by the hour, right?”
She laughed. “You’ll earn every penny, Darcy. Every penny.”
* * *
“What do you know about the disappearance of Patrice Keaton?” I asked village lawyer Marcus Debrowski as I filled my plate with appetizers. He’d joined me for the menu tasting at the Sorcerer’s Stove, a local family restaurant.
A stuffed apricot slipped from Marcus’s fingers and landed with a splat on the table. His face had gone as pale as the crème fraîche on the salmon cucumber cups. “Where’d you hear that name?” he said softly, looking around as if afraid to be overheard.
I dropped my voice, too, just because he was making me so nervous. “Her daughter, Elodie, hired As You Wish to clean out Patrice’s house. She’s planning on selling it.”
Letting out a deep breath, he said, “You may want to turn down the job.”
What was with all the warnings? “What am I missing? What happened to Patrice?”
He looked around. “Stop saying her name!”
“You’re freaking me out!” I could barely eat the tomato, bacon, and cheese crostini I was holding.
“You should be freaked.”
“Why? What happened to her?”
“No one knows,” he said.
“You’re not telling me everything,” I accused. “Spill it.”
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It Takes a Witch: A Wishcraft Mystery Page 28