“What?” Zinnia's whole body tensed. Why was Annette talking about potions? Did she know something about Zinnia, or about Margaret? Was this her way of starting a conversation about witchcraft?
Annette laughed. “Just kidding. I know there's no such thing.”
Ah, but there was such a thing, and Zinnia knew all about it. She also knew a certain gnome who might be able to procure the ingredients for an anti-love potion. But dealing with such magic was almost always a terrible idea.
“I'll take care of Karl myself,” Annette said. “He's not the only one who can share his feelings.”
“Oh, Annette. Promise you'll let him down easy. He's only got six hundred and nine working days left until retirement.”
They collapsed into each other, giggling.
The First Day of Fall
The staff meeting to discuss reports about other reports was the most boring event Zinnia had ever attended. She was seriously considering shocking herself with magic just to stay awake when the mood in the boardroom suddenly shifted.
Karl got to his feet and yelled at Annette across the table. “Your reports were late again, which made my reports late! You have to stop letting down the members of your team! There are other people in the world besides you, Annette!”
Annette blinked rapidly and rolled her chair back. “Karl, I sent you the reports as an email attachment.” Her voice was trembling. “I was only a few minutes late, if that. It's not my fault it took you three hours to figure out how to open the file in the right application.”
He jabbed his finger at her. “You did something to my computer!”
Annette looked around at the others, who were just as flabbergasted as she was. “Karl, calm down. I did not—”
He banged both fists on the table. “You're fired! Clear out your desk and go!”
Nobody moved.
Zinnia wanted to do something, but what? Wave her hands in the air and take full blame for pushing Karl into pursuing Annette back in January? Zinnia held herself steady. Speaking up now would only make things worse. She should have prepared some kind of potion for just such an event. Karl's boardroom blowup wasn't exactly coming out of the ether. It had been building for months, ever since Annette's attempt to let him down easy. There'd been an increasing number of snide comments and passive-aggressive overtures. And it certainly hadn't helped morale in the office that the heating and cooling system was on the fritz. The air was freezing one moment, boiling the next. Maintenance couldn't figure out why. The only good thing about being up in the boardroom today talking about reports was the room's steady temperature. Not that it was cooling down Karl's foul mood.
“You're fired,” Karl said to Annette again. “Just go. I'll have someone else clean out your desk.”
Dawna waved a hand to draw everyone's attention. “Nuh-uh. No you don't, Karl. You can't fire her for some imaginary thing she didn't do. If you're computer's wrecked, you did it yourself. You probably downloaded a virus. Let me look at it for you when we get back. Stop all this nonsense about firing people.”
“Dawna's right,” Gavin said. “There's a process here. You need to file an official report, and then—”
Karl banged his fists on the table again. “I'm the boss here, and I'll fire whoever I want to fire!”
Softly, Gavin corrected him. “Whomever.”
“Gavin, you're fired,” Karl said. He pointed at Dawna. “You're fired, too. Don't think I'm not onto you, Dawna, with your expensive purses and jewelry. I'm not a complete idiot. You've got money. I've seen the car you drive and the house you live in. There's no way you paid for that with your Permits Department salary.”
Everyone looked left and right in astonishment at their coworkers. Now that Zinnia thought about it, Dawna did have a lot of nice purses and jewelry. And her car was a newer model.
Gavin said, “You can't fire Dawna for having good taste, Karl. Now sit down. You haven't had your post-lunch snack, and you always get like this in the afternoon. I've explained to you how metabolic disease happens. You've got to push aside the processed carbs and have a vegetable now and then.”
Karl lifted one fist and waved it at Gavin. “Don't you tell me about vegetables, Mr. Fashion Pants. I'll turn you into a vegetable.”
A stunned silence followed, and then a chortle. It was Jesse laughing. Zinnia kicked his shin under the table and shot him a look. Not here. Laughing at Karl would only make the situation a thousand percent worse.
Karl turned in slow motion until he was facing Annette again. “This mess is all your fault, woman. You're... a witch.”
Margaret, who was seated next to him, gasped audibly. The word witch has a special sting to someone who secretly is one. Zinnia could feel her pulse in her throat.
“Witch,” he repeated, getting louder. “Witch, witch, witch!”
Margaret jumped up from her chair, pulled back her arm, and slapped Karl across the face.
Detective Fung's Office
Now
“And that was more or less what went down in the boardroom,” Zinnia explained to Fung.
He nodded thoughtfully, one finger at the corner of his mouth. “Interesting.”
She agreed. “It does shed some light on the Karl-Annette dynamic.”
“No, I meant the part about Margaret slapping Karl. Didn't you slap Gavin Gorman earlier today?”
“That was different,” Zinnia replied.
“There's a lot of slapping going on in your office.”
“Just two slaps. And to be precise, Margaret didn't slap Karl in the office. We were upstairs on the third floor, in the big boardroom.”
“Ah, well that clears everything up.” Fung dropped his hand from his mouth and smiled broadly. “What happened next? Did you all pile on each other for a big slap fight?”
“Karl fired every single one of us. Then someone from another department heard the kerfuffle in the boardroom, and came running in with donuts. After two rainbow sprinkle donuts, Karl offered to hire us all back, but for half our pay. There might have been more yelling and slapping, but the mayor walked in right about then and shut everything down.” Zinnia reached for the second-to-last celery stick on Fung's desk and gave it a good crunch. “Human Resources sent Karl out for counseling, or maybe rabies testing, or who knows what. He wouldn't say. But he's been fine ever since.”
“No hard feelings?”
“It's Karl, so there are always hard feelings, but it's down to a manageable level.”
“Until last night, when he snapped and killed your coworker.”
Zinnia's celery-chewing slowed to a stop. “I think Karl's just one of those guys whose bark is worse than his bite. Maybe you're half right. Maybe there's another guy out there who she also rejected. Annette treasured her friendships, but she didn't seem interested in romance.”
Fung's dark eyes twinkled. “There's nothing wrong with friendship and dedication to one's work.”
“True.”
“We have officers canvassing her neighbors right now. Annette was on her own here, no family in town. She didn't have many friends outside work, so it won't take long to track down her other rejected suitors, assuming there are any.”
“Don't forget, there's also the book she was writing.”
Fung laughed. “Good one.”
“I'm serious. Dawna has very strong feelings about Annette's book. We were all trying to find it when you busted into the office this morning with your SWAT Team impression.”
Fung could barely restrain his amusement. “Yes, the secret book must be the key to everything. I bet it's full of more clues than The Da Vinci Code. I'll have our technician pull it off Annette's computer and I'll send you a copy.”
Zinnia was not nearly as amused as the detective. “Send it to everyone in the office,” she said evenly.
“So I can have all your coworkers sniffing for clues in a work of fiction?” He dropped his head to the side, feigning weariness. “I'll need to hire an assistant to deal with all their s
crewball theories.”
Zinnia said nothing. Smart witches know that the true power of having a voice is knowing when not to use it. If she waited, Fung would hear his words echo back in the silence and change his mind.
“Then again,” he mused, rubbing his chin. And there it was. “Screwball theories might not cut it in other towns, but we live in Wisteria, where the truth really is stranger than fiction.”
She nodded.
“I'll even read the book myself,” he said. “Right after I rule out Karl Kormac as a suspect.”
“That sounds logical to me. One must never jump to strange theories when an ordinary explanation will do.”
He agreed, “There's nothing more ordinary than a jilted lover.” Fung looked pointedly at Karl's crumpled receipt from the convenience store. “Zinnia, you do realize this alibi of Karl's is practically a confession, don't you?”
“If that's what you believe, I trust your judgment.”
He looked up at her, his small, quick eyes flicking around her face, searching for clues. “What about Annette, anyway? Was she the type of person Karl accused her of being that day in the boardroom? Was she... a witch?”
“No,” Zinnia answered without hesitation. “She was one of the nicest people I've ever met.”
He looked at her through his eyebrows. “Ms. Riddle, you know what I mean.”
She turned her head to check that nobody was standing near the open doorway. She turned back to Fung. “Annette Scholem had no supernatural powers that either Margaret or I were aware of. That is the truth. I give you my word.” The air between them filled with a shimmering mist that only a witch such as herself could see. She completed the pledge with the final phrase. “My word is my bond.”
Chapter 7
Wednesday
Early Morning
Zinnia woke up before dawn and couldn't get back to sleep. How could the exact same bed feel so luxurious some mornings but inhospitable on others? Was her bed angry at her for the previous day's misunderstanding? It was possible. Sometimes the objects around witches took on magical properties, and magic did have a mind of its own. She tossed the covers aside—using her hands, not magic—and got up. It was 5:35 am.
After getting dressed in a tasteful everyday outfit of green pants and a ruffled floral print shirt, Zinnia sat in her quiet, dark kitchen, sipping her first cup of tea of the day. She would consume a dozen cups by nightfall. The tea was a special herbal blend of her own design. The chamomile calmed her nerves, the licorice made it sweet, and the two drops of black scarabyce blood kept the spell around her heart working. The blood of the deadly black scarabyce was versatile, and GRAS—Generally Recognized As Safe—in small doses. In large quantities, it could be used for all sorts of things, including preventing tissue rejection. In theory, a witch could play Dr. Frankenstein and attach assorted body parts together in ways nature had not intended. A four-armed woman? Why not! Who couldn't use an extra set of hands? Rumor in the witch community had it that some enterprising—and almost certainly criminally insane—witch had used black scarabyce blood to create actual flying monkeys. Like the ones in The Wizard of Oz. Ah, the twisted creations of a witch gone mad with power.
The blood itself was not black, but a pale lavender hue. It even smelled similar to the purple flowers. Over the last year, all of Zinnia's coworkers had shown an interest in her special drink at one time or another, so she'd been keeping packets of store-bought herbal tea handy for them to try. But the decoy tea didn't always work as planned.
One time, just before Halloween, Annette had been showing Zinnia how to fill out a particularly tricky permit application, and she had absent-mindedly taken a sip of Zinnia's tea. As the tea took effect in her mouth, Annette's big brown eyes had widened as the normal redness at the corners turned bright white. Before Zinnia could stop her, Annette had swallowed down the whole mug.
“That was so refreshing,” Annette said, blinking her redness-free eyes. “I've tried brewing your tea, but it never comes out the same for me. Is it something about your thermos, or the fact you make it at home?” She snapped her fingers and shook her head, her brown curls sweeping her round shoulders. “I know! You must have magic water coming out of your kitchen tap.”
“That must be it,” Zinnia replied with an enigmatic smile. “Magic tap water.”
Across the workstation Zinnia shared with the other office witch, Margaret cleared her throat and shot Zinnia a behave-yourself look. Thanks to having four rambunctious children, Margaret's behave-yourself look had been honed to maximum effectiveness. It cut through Zinnia's playful mood like a sharp razor. A little bit must have caught Annette, too, because she began to shiver. Then again, it could have been the cooling qualities of the tea.
Annette rubbed her arms. “Does it feel chilly in here to you two ladies?” She reached for Zinnia's thermos. “I could use more of this tea. You don't mind, do you, Zinnia?”
Zinnia felt a sharp pain on her shin. Margaret didn't have the leg length to kick Zinnia from where she sat, so she must have used a spell that mimicked a kick. Times like these, Zinnia regretted taking the desk across from a witch.
Zinnia jumped up from her chair and grabbed her thermos before Annette could pour a single drop. “We could all use more tea,” Zinnia announced. “I'll go boil up a fresh pot for everyone, so it's nice and hot.”
Margaret also got to her feet. She was wearing the hard-soled boots that made her sound like a hoofed mammal, even on the room's threadbare commercial carpet. She clip-clopped her way to Annette's chair and grabbed the woman's new cardigan, which was pink with pearl buttons.
“Here you go,” Margaret said, draping the cardigan over Annette's shoulders. “That should warm you right up. And I do love this pretty sweater of yours.”
Annette patted Margaret's hand atop her shoulder. “You're a good one,” she said. Annette looked over at Zinnia, her eyes twinkling in that endearing way she had. “You, too, Zinnia. I'm so lucky to have you both as friends. We make quite the trio, us women of wisdom!”
As the memory faded, Zinnia wiped her eyes with a square of paper towel, and then poured another cup of tea.
She could feel sorry for Annette all day, or she could do something useful. She started to make breakfast but stopped herself. She'd been using her hands for everything these days, which was probably why her magic was so rusty. If she ever wanted to send a shin kick back to Margaret under their desk, she'd need to work on her speed and accuracy. Making breakfast in the privacy of her own home was the perfect opportunity to practice. What would it be today?
Egg drills! She heard the suggestion in her mentor's voice.
No, she though. Not egg drills. Not today.
Soft-boiled eggs and toast sounded warm, salty, and comforting. She cast a spell to open the refrigerator door then got everything in motion. The eggs wiggled out of the carton obediently. So far, so good.
While the breakfast made itself, she ran upstairs. Inside her bedroom, she opened a magically hidden cabinet and pulled out a stack of dusty books. She also grabbed Annette's purple writing pen from the place she had stashed it the night before. She'd mentioned the pen to Fung, but he'd been even less interested in it than in Annette's fiction, so Zinnia had promised to assess it for spells and report back to the detective. She loaded her arms and lugged everything downstairs, where she could spread the books out on the table. She turned the corner and entered the kitchen just in time to run smack-dab into her toast and soft-boiled eggs, which had been circling the room waiting for her. The food bounced off her arm and clattered to the floor. Hot yellow yolk erupted from the two eggs like twin exploding volcanoes. Eggs that were soft-boiled by magic were much more volatile than standard eggs!
Zinnia scrunched her face and uttered her favorite curse. “Floopy doop!”
Two and a half hours later, Zinnia sighed and pushed aside her dusty magic books. She had checked her resources for magical enchantments that could be placed on pens, and so far her search had been f
ruitless. She had tested the pen for the usual spells, everything from never-ending ink to heat-seeking mini-missile, but it sat lifeless on the table. It seemed to be just a regular pen.
The fact that Gavin Gorman seemed interested in the pen was the only thing that made her suspect it was enchanted. She didn't know if Gavin had any magical abilities, or even if he knew about magic—people were understandably secretive about such things—but she did know Gavin's uncle Griebel Gorman. Griebel had his small gnome hands in several pies, from potion ingredients to magically enhanced mechanical devices. He ran an appliance repair shop in town as a cover, but due to the changing of the times, appliance repair was becoming less of a disguise. New stuff was so inexpensive these days that most folks tossed broken toasters aside and bought new ones rather than deal with the cost and bother of repairs. Griebel kept talking about changing his storefront, but he was a busy little man, buying and selling things to the highest bidder, with no qualms about where objects of power ended up.
If Gavin Gorman had been after Annette's pen, he might have been tipped off about its value by his uncle. Or perhaps by someone more dangerous than the Gormans. Someone who also knew about the enchanted object, and killed Annette for it.
Unfortunately, as tidy as Zinnia's theory was, it couldn't be true if the pen was worthless. Sure, the attacker could have taken the magical pen and replaced it with an ordinary duplicate, but that didn't match up with the murder method. An attack that violent spoke of anger, a fit of rage—the opposite of planning.
Zinnia had only one test left.
She went to her fridge and grabbed the grocery list. She paused to look at the photographs that were also stuck there with magnets. The pictures were from the office's first night bowling as The Incredibowls. There were several group shots, and one of Jesse and Zinnia together in the retro arcade, posing by the Donkey Kong machine. They had their cheeks pressed together, and Jesse had taken the picture himself, with his phone.
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