“Yes, it is… though, like I said, Joseph doesn’t much like to talk about it. I don’t want you to take this information and turn it against him, either. Theirs might have been a troubled relationship, but Joseph loved his sister and would never do anything to hurt her.”
“Perhaps he wouldn’t,” Celestial mused. “You seem very protective of Joseph, though. Maybe you saw how much Jolene was hurting her brother, trying to control him, and thought you might do something about it?”
The Reverend glared at her, a cold and stony and hate-filled glower that made Celestial immediately regret provoking him when they were so utterly alone. She thought she saw some evidence in him in that moment of the fire-and-brimstone, fear-inspiring element that must have made him such a good preacher, capable of whipping up his congregation into such a frightful state.
“Don’t be stupid,” he spat. “I’m a man of the cloth, after all.” And with that, he turned on his heel and, limping slightly, left.
Chapter 19
The Reverend had been gone for only a minute or so, leaving Celestial very little time to collect herself, before the door opened again and someone else came in. This time, it was one of her regulars--Mrs. Atkinson again.
“Please, call me Jennifer,” she said miserably when Celestial greeted her. “I’ll probably have to change my name back. Who wants to keep the name of the no-good cheating husband who dumped them? Listen, I’ve got to shake these blues. Please tell me you’ve got something that can help cheer me up.”
“Of course,” said Celestial, waving Jennifer over to a nearby display of small, round pump bottles filled with lotion. “One of the qualities of lavender is that it can help you feel better, more peaceful, when you’re sad. My other customers say it works wonders. I have this lotion here, and some soaps over on that table, too, if you’d like.”
“Ooh, give it here.” Jennifer reached forward and pumped the nozzle down, squirting lavender lotion into her hand. Celestial winced--that one hadn’t been a sampler bottle--but tried not to show it. She was going through a lot right now, after all.
“Aah, that smells nice,” Jennifer said, rubbing the lotion into her hands and wrists then bringing them up to her nose. “Brett never likes me to wear floral fragrances, you know. Pretended to be allergic, but I knew better. Then one day he up and admits he just doesn’t think it’s manly to walk away from kissing me smelling like an old lady’s garden. He’d buy me these horrible, chemical smelling perfumes, which I never wore. But then he would come home smelling like those perfumes anyway, so I knew that he just bought them for me so that I wouldn’t notice that he was smelling like her.”
“His secretary?” Celestial said.
“No, no. This was the one before. I found out about her, who she was, and I was able to scare her away. Thought that would be the end of it. But no, he just went off and found a new one.”
“You’re better off without him. You said you didn’t go to college because of him, right?”
“Didn’t finish. I was getting my degree when I met him. He said if we got married there was no need for me to complete it.”
“Maybe it’s for the best,” said Celestial warmly. “You can start over.”
“There’s no way that would work for an old lady like me,” said Jennifer, but she did seem a little less miserable as she said it, and she ended up buying the lavender lotion she’d sampled from, after all.
Just as Jennifer was leaving, Nikoli was coming in; for a moment, they had a standoff in the doorway, neither one willing to pass through before the other, but Nikoli won the politeness dance, awkwardly craning to hold the door open so Jennifer could leave.
“I should just install a revolving one,” said Celestial. “People have been coming and going all afternoon.”
“I got your calls.” Nikoli waggled his phone in the air and walked up to Celestial at the counter. “Sorry, I was busy with work. Is it urgent? I assumed it was since you called three times, but you didn’t leave any messages.”
“I wanted to talk to you directly. Fill you in on everything I’ve learned.”
“Shoot,” prompted Nikoli, so Celestial pulled out her notebook and walked him through the last few busy hours she’d spent.
When she was finished filling him in, Nikoli stroked his chin thoughtfully, looking off into the corner of the shop. “Maybe we should investigate the nature of this conflict in the Bennett family a little more closely. I’d hate to just take the Reverend’s word for it, let alone Bennett’s story. Either one of them could be hiding anything.”
“I agree. I feel like there’s something important we don’t understand yet about that family.” Celestial looked back over her notes. They were starting to look more and more like an elaborate, looming algebra equation, one she couldn’t quite wrap her head around. She didn’t even know what was the x she was supposed to be solving for.
Her eyes landed on Sofia’s name. It looked so wrong, there on the page. Thinking of the harried, terrified Sofia she’d comforted in this very shop not long ago, Celestial felt strongly that she would do anything, absolutely anything to be able to strike Sofia’s name off this page once and for all.
Nikoli’s a professional, she reminded herself. And you’re not bad yourself. You can crack this the way you always do. Just slow down, breathe, and think about all of the variables.
“What do you think we should be looking into?” Celestial asked.
“It strikes me as particularly significant that when his parents divorced, Joseph Bennett chose to live with his poor father, rather than his rich mother. Why?”
“If we’re to believe the information we already have, then he chose to do so because his mother was controlling.”
“But how controlling? And in what ways? And is there something else, something more tangible, that we’re missing?”
Celestial nodded. “I see what you mean. I’ve got some ideas for how I might look into it.”
“Of course you do,” said Nikoli with a smile. “As a matter of fact, so do I.”
Celestial smiled. “Want to split up, find out what we can, then reconvene and compare notes?”
Nikoli nodded. “I’ve got to head back to work now, but call me when you get something?”
“Sure thing!”
Nikoli turned to leave, then paused when he had nearly reached the door. “Oh, and Celestial?”
“Yes?”
“If I don’t answer… leave a message.”
Chapter 20
A few hours of research later, Nikoli was just about ready to give up. All of his work looking into Jolene Bennett in the police records and newspaper archives was turning out to be not only fruitless but also incredibly, mind-numbingly dull. In the newspapers, he saw all manner of evidence of her social life. Of course, she attended an impressive stream of ribbon-cuttings, fancy fêtes, and county fairs, always making sure that she managed to elbow her way up to the nearest reporter to provide the most quotable bon mots. She was also occasionally mentioned in the slightly seamier articles, but never in a way that might be helpful for Nikoli’s purposes. “I swear I never knew there were such terrible sinners in a town like this,” she would say, in response to some shocking local event. Or, “Anyone might have known a boy like that, raised without the influence of church and family, might go down the wrong path.” The Jolene Bennett from the last decade of local news reports was something of a self-styled angel-cum-socialite--very much the proper representative of the LMS.
Her police record hadn’t provided anything more spurious about her character, either. Not even a parking ticket on her Lincoln.
Nikoli’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He leaned back, grateful for the distraction, but was distressed to see that the phone was buzzing to alert him of a missed call, and a stored voicemail, rather than a call. I must have been so distracted with these files I didn’t notice it vibrating, he said, self-consciously switching his ringer on.
It was Celestial. He felt guilty for missing her agai
n. Oh well, at least she’d listened to him and left a voicemail this time. He didn’t fancy having to chase her down to her shop again just to be sure she wasn’t in some terrible mortal danger.
“Look, this is me--leaving a message, just like you asked,” Celestial’s voice chirped through the earpiece. “Okay, so, I’ve been asking around Jolene Bennett’s old haunts--hair salons, country clubs, that sort of thing--telling people I’m just trying to learn more about Jolene and what she was like. Boy, are these people willing to let loose about her! I’m wondering now if there’s anyone in this entire town who wasn’t this woman’s enemy. It turns out she had a real drinking problem--this is according to nearly every single server at the club restaurant, as well as the host at her favorite French place. She also had a tendency to get verbally abusive, even a little violent-seeming… and not just when she drank, either. This is relevant, right? The sort of thing we should be looking into? Anyway, I hope things are going well on your end. Let me know if you find anything--and I’ll keep digging over here. Bye.”
Nikoli sat for a minute, processing the information Celestial had dug up about Jolene. It did help flesh out the character profile he’d been mentally sketching about this woman, and how her family troubles might fit into the story of her murder.
His phone, still in his hand, started to ring, and he answered it before the first ring had ended.
“Nikoli? This is the lab. We’ve got those results for you.”
“Go ahead,” said Nikoli, holding his phone between his ear and shoulder and pulling out his notepad.
“The honey came up negative for everything,” said the lab technician, voice terse and businesslike. “Looks like it was, in fact, just honey after all. In addition, there’s nothing either in or on the bodies that leads us to believe the deaths were caused by anything except for suffocation.”
“Suffocation?”
“Build-up of natural gas.” A pause followed. “You get all that?”
Nikoli finished scribbling it down. “Yeah, I got it. Thanks.” He hung up, tapping his pen on the page. If it was suffocation by natural gas that had done it, then it all came down to the burners, the ones that had been turned all the way on. Someone must have done it intentionally, and far enough in advance so that the gas had enough time to build up to deadly levels.
But, if that was the case, then which of the four victims had been the intended target?
* * *
Celestial had just rematerialized in the shop when Athena buzzed up to her excitedly. “I learned something important!”
“What is it?”
“I overheard two of the neighbors near Jayne’s place talking about ‘that young man’ who had visited Jayne the morning of the explosion. One of them recognized him as ‘the Bennett boy’--it must have been Joseph!”
Stella phased in nearby, followed rapidly by Bella. “We heard it, too,” Bella said animatedly. “The neighbors were talking about how nice it was that Joseph and Jayne had always remained close, regardless of Jolene’s actions. Evidently Joseph thought of Jayne as a sort of aunt figure, and he saw her regularly. Jolene didn’t know, though.”
Celestial sighed. “Seems to me that Jayne’s house is practically Grand Central Station, everyone streaming in and out of it all the time. The question isn’t who was there, it’s who wasn’t.”
The phone rang, and Celestial answered. It was Nikoli, who updated her on what he’d heard from the forensics lab.
“So wait, they suffocated on the gas?” Celestial looked around at Stella and Bella, who were leaning close to the phone receiver with interested expressions on their faces, and Athena, hovering eagerly nearby.
“Carbon monoxide in their system backs this up,” Nikoli explained. “They also all had pink skin and bright red lips, which is a pretty visible physical symptom. It looks like it was definitely the gas stove that killed them.”
At least, Celestial considered, it was starting to look better for Sofia, since the honey wasn’t directly implicated in the murders. However, anyone who had been to the house that morning might have been the one to tamper with the stove--and, since Sofia had been there, maybe this information wasn’t quite so exonerating, after all.
Chapter 21
Now that the question was who had the opportunity to switch on the stove the morning of the explosion, Celestial decided it was time to take a closer look at the Reverend. She went to the street where he lived and checked his house from outside to make sure he wasn’t around: as far as she could tell, the place was empty, so--stepping behind a tree down the road so that none of the neighbors would be able to see her--she poofed into his house, determined this time to look around quickly. If there was important evidence to be found, she would be able to find it on her first visit instead of having to come back later for it.
Luckily, the Reverend’s house wasn’t as elaborate or distracting as Jolene Bennett’s had been. He seemed to keep his living space with a characteristic monastic straightforwardness, everything properly ordered and in its rightful place--no unnecessary ornaments or frills. She found his office quickly enough. His desk was tidily kept, papers neatly stacked in a way Celestial didn’t realize was possible.
I’ll have to go through these neatly, she thought. I don’t want him to realize I was here--not if I can help it.
It didn’t take her very long at all to find something of interest: a paper a few sheets deep in the stack, on which the Reverend, in his tidy handwriting, had copied out a list of names.
Names… who was being named? Celestial’s gaze raced down the list, trying to make sense of all she was seeing, when she noticed that a few of the names had been crossed out.
Four of the names, as a matter of fact: Jayne Buchanan, Jolene Bennett, Gladys Carey, and Mariah Knight.
The front door to the Reverend’s house opened, and she heard two men’s voices in conversation.
Just my luck, she thought. I really ought to be getting used to this by now.
Frozen, she strained to hear who was talking. One of the voices was unmistakably the Reverend himself, which of course explained how he had entered the house so easily and rapidly. The other, she realized, belonged to Joseph Bennett.
But what are they talking about? She knew she had better poof out and back to her shop, or at least out of the house, but she couldn’t help but linger just a second longer, hoping to see if she could pick up on their conversation. Meanwhile, she tucked the list of names back into the stack of papers on the Reverend’s desk as neatly and rapidly as she could, praying he wouldn’t notice they had been disturbed. It would be best if he didn’t know she’d seen the list.
Then, quite distinctly, she heard the Reverend say: “--that meddling Celestial Meadows woman–”
In that instant, stunned, Celestial saw the Reverend turn the corner into his office. Without a second’s hesitation, she disappeared, but not before the Reverend’s eyes met her own.
“What is it?” Joseph asked, hurrying into the office after hearing the Reverend give a loud, enraged cry.
“Nothing, nothing,” the Reverend said, furious. “Just never you mind.” But his mind was racing. He’d known someone was in his house, had just been able to feel it as he was letting himself and Joseph in seconds ago. He’d even had an inkling who it was, and had been sharing his suspicions with Joseph--had, in fact, been in the middle of saying I bet you anything it’s that meddling Celestial Meadows woman, when he had rounded the corner and caught her in the act, leaning over his desk. His first impression had been not anger but vindication. How would her detective friend like to know that she had been playing burglar, hmm? In the name of truth or not, there were laws in this land, and Reverend Younger had rights to privacy and property that Miss Meadows had felt more than happy to shamelessly break at a whim.
The Reverend hadn’t been prepared for the woman to disappear before his very eyes however, a sight that froze him with fear and rage. He had never known she was a witch. Sure, he had been uncomforta
ble in her little apothecary shop, had disliked the feeling of being surrounded by all those new age-y herbalist products she peddled, but he’d never really suspected her of witchcraft--not until he’d seen perfect evidence of it for himself, in his own house.
“Is there anyone here? Can you tell?” Bennett started looking around the room for evidence of anything out of place. “I guess they might have gotten out through the window? But it’s closed.”
Indeed, the room looked now just about the way it always looked. Perhaps Celestial Meadows hadn’t had much time snoop around. Reverend Younger cut his gaze to the desk, but everything there looked more or less in place. Perhaps she didn’t find anything, the Reverend thought. She had, after all, looked as surprised to see him as he was to see her. He bit his tongue, not eager to tell Bennett what he had seen. He was still absolutely furious, and didn’t want to speak in anger and let slip anything he would regret.
“It’s nothing,” the Reverend said. “I must have been mistaken. Paranoia in my aging years, I suppose.”
Joseph stopped searching the room. “It’s understandable, of course, considering everything,” he said. “Come, let’s check the rest of the house, just to be safe.”
Of course, it made sense that Celestial Meadows was a witch. In fact, it helped explain why she was after him so bad--all his anti-witchcraft preaching had to be getting to her, making her feel in danger, like lashing out. To her, he was merely an enemy to eliminate.
The rage the Reverend had been feeling was replaced, suddenly and chillingly, by a sharp shot of fear. He wondered what, if anything, he could possibly do to protect himself, and to get Celestial Meadows to stop meddling and harassing him.
Chapter 22
Celestial looked down at the flyer in her hand announcing the ‘Ice cream Social’ at the church. She scrunched it up and aimed at the basket next to the counter. She had heard about the ice-cream social before; they planned one every year but she had never really thought about going.
Graves and Goons (A Hocus Pocus Cozy Witch Mystery Series Book 4) Page 7