The Witch and the Dead

by Heather Blake

  “How is that possible?” I asked.

  “You should have some recollection,” Marcus added. “As far as I know the amulet doesn’t have the power to erase your memory. There’s only one kind of magic. . . .” He trailed off.

  I picked up where he’d been going. “A memory cleanse. It’s the only explanation. But Miles was a mortal. He couldn’t have been the one to give it to you.”

  Andreus said darkly, “Correct. It had to have been a Crafter.”

  Ve massaged her temples. “But who? And why?”

  Marcus stood up. “You obviously know something someone wanted you to forget.”

  “But what?” Ve said, her voice cracking as she looked among us.

  My heart hurt for her. I didn’t know the answer to her question.

  But I was determined to find out.

  Chapter Twenty

  My box of favorite keepsakes was heavier than I’d thought. I struggled with its weight and the wind as I walked home, glad I lived so close.

  Archie wasn’t in his cage. Smiling, I thought about him getting ready for the auditions later on, taking a bath, combing his feathers.

  It reminded me of the sketch I wanted to do of him with a cigar. I hoped I’d have some time to work on it before I was due at the scene shop this afternoon. I should still be out investigating what had happened to Miles, but there was time enough for that later, when I saw Penelope at the playhouse. I couldn’t help feeling that she was the key to this case, and now that I knew about the magic inside me, I didn’t discount the notion.

  I’d grill her later.

  And as much as I just wanted to curl up in front of the fire with my sketchbook, the very first thing I wanted to do when I got home was to check to make sure Mimi was still alive. Because it was nearing noon, and she still hadn’t texted me that she was awake. So when I glanced up at her bedroom window and saw her smiling face, I was a bit surprised.

  I smiled back as she opened her window.

  “Do you need help?” she called down.

  “I’ve got it.” I headed for the front walk. “How long have you been up? You didn’t text.”

  “Text?”

  “I left you a note.”

  She laughed. “So that’s what that confetti in the kitchen was. Annie must have found it. I called Dad to see where you two were. Are you sure you don’t need help?”

  I used my knee to keep the box from slipping. “I’m almost there. . . . I’ll be right in.”

  She laughed again and closed the window.

  I was halfway up the walkway when the Bumblebeemobile pulled into the driveway. I set the box on the stone path and waited for Nick to get out of the car.

  He smiled as he walked over to me. “Is it me, or does it feel like it should be eight, nine o’clock at night?” He leaned in and gave me a kiss that would have had Archie catcalling—or gagging—if he’d seen it.

  It had been a long day already, and it was barely noon. “It’s not just you. Did you ever make it over to Wickedly Creative?”

  “I was just there. Everything’s set. A forensics team is on its way to process the bunkhouse.”

  I rocked on my heels. “Did it look like paint or blood to you?”

  “With the Chadwicks’ permission, I tested a small sample of the stain on the table. It was positive for blood.”

  Instantly, I felt queasy. “Miles’?”

  “No way to tell yet. More tests need to be done.”

  “Well, I guess this at least suggests what Miles might have died from. Wait,” I said, bending to lift the box. “Did you hear from the ME’s office? Do you know what he died from?”

  Nick took the box from my hands. “I was on hold forever to be told that the office is understaffed and overworked. I’ve been promised a preliminary report by tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow? You waited all that time just to hear that?”

  “Pretty much. Not all was lost,” he said. “Marcus came by and worked some magic and found out that Dorothy’s first husband, Joel Hansel, was in fact out of the country the weekend Miles went missing. And I was able to check into Vince’s adoptive parents. Brenda Paxton worked as a secretary for Oliver Debrowski. She retired about fifteen years ago. She and her husband live in Salem, near the college.”

  His secretary? Was she the “friend” Marcus had referenced earlier? Had she paid one hundred thousand dollars to adopt Vince? “What does her husband do for a living?”

  “He’s a college librarian. Why?”

  I explained what Marcus had said at Ve’s about the adoption. “A secretary and a college librarian wouldn’t earn very much money, would they?”

  Nick shrugged. “You wouldn’t think so, but they could have family money. There’s no way I can check into their finances without a warrant, and right now . . .”

  “Limbo,” I said.

  He nodded, and then took a step and said, “I don’t like all the question marks with this case. There are plenty of leads, but we don’t know what we’re investigating just yet.”

  “Speaking of leads, another one just opened up at Ve’s. . . .” I told him about the memory cleanse. “I don’t know what it means, or if it relates to Miles’ death, but it’s another fact to keep in mind.”

  “This case just keeps getting odder and odder.”

  It did. We headed for the front steps. “If a memory cleanse was used, there’s absolutely no way to recover those memor— Oh no!”

  Nick had just taken a step when the bottom of the box gave out, and its contents crashed to the ground. He dropped the now-empty box and dashed after a drawing that had come loose from my sketchbook and was now blowing down the driveway.

  I fell to my knees, trying to keep my sketchbooks from soaking in the moisture from the puddles on the walkway, especially my favorite sketchbook, which was leather bound. I quickly picked it up, but the wind caught the cover just right, flipping it out of my hand. It fell facedown on the grass behind me, splayed open. I grabbed it, immediately checking to see if the tiny dried four-leaf clover that had been nestled between the cover and the first page was still there.

  It wasn’t.

  “Oh no,” I murmured, glancing around. “Oh no, oh no.”

  “Got it!” Nick returned with the sketch. He stuck it into my leather sketchbook, then turned the box over. He bent the flaps this way and that, folding the box so tape wasn’t necessary to keep the bottom secure.

  I put my face close to the grass, searching for that clover. It had to be here somewhere. Please be here somewhere.

  “What’re you looking for?” Nick asked as he started packing the box up again.

  A gust of wind sent hair flying into my eyes, and I said loudly, “I wish the wind would stop!”

  It didn’t. It had been worth the try, though. I ran my hand over blades of grass. Moisture soaked through the knees of my pants and dampened my palms as I crawled around.

  “Darcy?” Nick knelt next to me. “What is it? An earring? A contact lens?”

  “A clover,” I said, hearing the panic in my own voice. “Do you see it?”

  “A clover? There is lots of clover in the yard.”

  There was. Weed control had been low on my to-do list as the house neared the end of its renovation. I’d planned to tackle the bulk of the landscaping next spring. “It’s an old four-leaf clover. Dried. I kept it in one of my sketchbooks. . . . It blew away.”

  “With this wind, it could be anywhere.”

  Tears came unbidden to my eyes. “I need to find it.”

  He took one look at me and started crawling low to the ground, searching. “We’ll find it.”

  We looked for a good ten minutes, but it was nowhere to be found. I sat back on my haunches and wiped my eyes. “This is pointless. It’s gone.”

  “I’m sure we’ll find it if we just keep loo
king.” The knees of his khakis were soaked through and ringed with grass stains. Blades of grass stuck to his palms.

  He went back to looking.

  “I just need to let it go,” I said. “It . . . I mean, my wish came true, so I guess I really don’t need it anymore. It did its job.”

  “Wish?” he asked, crawling back toward me.

  “Do you remember the day Mimi gave me a four-leaf clover on the green?”

  It had been almost directly across the street from this house, near Mrs. P’s bench under the birch tree.

  “I do. It was what? Two weeks or so after you moved to the village. Mrs. P was there. You had cupcakes. Devil’s food, if I remember correctly. Mimi and I were waiting for you so we could return Missy after we found her at our house, running loose. Mimi found you a four-leaf clover and told you to make a wish . . . ,” he said, his voice growing softer the more he spoke. “You kept it? The clover?”

  That day was forever etched in my memory. It was so easy to recall how I’d felt standing next to him. The heat of his body. His stare. I felt it now as he searched my face with those dark eyes of his. I shrugged, trying to play it off as no big deal. “Of course I kept it.”

  He moved closer. “Why?”

  It felt to me as though the world around us stopped. The birds quieted. The leaves settled. The wind didn’t blow. It was just us, sitting here on the wet grass, in our own little bubble. Him and me. I swallowed hard. “I’m a sap. Everyone knows that.”

  Our knees touched. Sunlight glinted in his eyes. “Is that so? No other reason?”

  I gestured with my hands as though they were the scales of justice. To tell the truth? Or gloss over it? I glossed. Surely he didn’t want to know everything. “Okay, I admit it. I had a lot riding on that wish. Plus, Mimi gave it to me. It’s sentimental.”

  “What did you wish for?”

  Apparently he did want to know everything. Heat rose into my cheeks. I could feel them starting to burn and imagined them to be bright red. “I can’t tell you. . . .”

  “But you said your wish came true. So you can tell me. There’s no risk of negating it.”

  “It’s embarrassing.”

  His forehead crinkled in puzzlement. “I doubt that.”

  I couldn’t even face him. “Oh, it is. I’d just met you. . . .”

  “Me?” He nudged my chin upward. “What did you wish for, Darcy?”

  I wanted to bluff and bluster, to brush off the question. But when I looked into his eyes, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Not when I saw the emotion shining there. Taking a deep breath, I said, “I wished to love again. To love you. And for you and me and Mimi to be a family. It’s so silly. I mean, I’d just met you. . . . But I knew. I knew I wanted to be with you.”

  “It’s not silly. I knew, too. And I still know.”

  I tipped my head. “You did? You do?”

  He took hold of my hands. “I knew from the moment I—”

  A shadow fell across us and someone cleared his throat. “I hope I’m not interrupting.”

  Nick hung his head. “So close,” he murmured.

  “Terry? Is everything okay?” I asked as I stood up to greet my neighbor. “Is Archie all right?”

  “He’s fine,” Terry said. “But if hear ‘So Long, Farewell’ one more time, I’ll be saying the same. I can only tolerate so much. A vacation with Cherise will be in order.”

  “A vacation with Cherise should be in order, whether Archie stops singing or not.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “She’s been talking to you, hasn’t she?”

  I laughed. “No, but I’ll be sure to bring it up next time I see her.”

  Nick rose to his feet, shook Terry’s hand. “Good to see you out and about.”

  It was a rare occasion for Terry to leave his house, especially during daylight hours. For someone who didn’t like to call attention to himself, he’d certainly dressed to impress for this excursion. He wore a slim-fitting blue suit that looked like it could be vintage from the beatnik era. He’d topped it with a Red Sox hat.

  The outfit, if meant to distract from his Elvis-like looks, had failed in its job.

  He looked like an older version of Elvis in his Viva Las Vegas days who happened to be wearing a Red Sox hat. He’d fool absolutely no one.

  “I have information I wanted to share with the both of you, so I came straight out when I saw you crawling about so intently, like you were looking for your hopes and dreams or perhaps the engagement ring Darcy has yet to receive. . . .”

  Nick groaned. “Subtle.”

  Terry jutted his big jaw, curled his lip. “I don’t do subtle.”

  “Good to know,” Nick said with a smile.

  “What kind of information?” I asked.

  Terry turned his attention squarely on me. “When I witnessed your altercation with Dorothy yesterday afternoon, I was reminded of another altercation of hers.”

  I didn’t doubt that there had been many.

  “It was thirty years ago,” he said, “and I recall it only because it occurred the weekend Ve married that low-life scum bucket Miles Babbage.”

  Low-life scum bucket.

  Nope. There was nothing subtle about that at all. I wanted to hear what he had to say, so I didn’t tell him that Miles wasn’t nearly as bad as he had seemed. There would be time enough for that later.

  “Was Dorothy fighting with Ve?” I asked.

  “No, I didn’t see Ve at all, though the fight happened on her side porch.”

  “Who was Dorothy fighting with, then?” Nick asked.

  Terry took off his hat, ran his hand over his pompadour. How he didn’t have hat head was a mystery to me, and I figured some sort of magic had to be involved.

  “It was a full-fledged shouting match between Dorothy,” he said, “and Miles.”

  “Miles?” I repeated. “Dorothy told me she hadn’t seen Miles that weekend at all.”

  Terry looked at me with sympathetic eyes. “Is it truly any surprise at all that Dorothy lied?”

  Knowing what I knew of Dorothy, it shouldn’t have been a shock at all.

  But it was.

  Now I was more determined than ever to uncover what she was hiding and was left wondering if she’d had something to do with Miles’ death after all.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  An hour into the set build and it felt more like we were on the set of a soap opera. Animosity hummed in tandem with the power saw. Uneasiness punctuated the air with each pop of the nail gun.

  The Sound of Music movie soundtrack played in the background. Evan believed it would provide inspiration as we worked, but I thought it might be adding to the disharmony.

  Mimi kept sending me worried glances as she painted a faux stained-glass window onto muslin for the convent scenes. I’d already sketched the piece and labeled it. All she had to do was paint by number. I sent her reassuring smiles as I worked next to her, painting an exact replica of her window on my own sheet of muslin.

  I wished Nick was here. He was supposed to be, but he’d been sidetracked by a call from the medical examiner’s office, whose preliminary report was finally complete. It was being faxed to Nick’s office, so he had headed off to the police station instead of coming here with me.

  I hoped he’d walk through the door at any moment, not because I wanted to know what he’d learned from the report, but because I wanted him here if a fight broke out.

  At the moment, it was unclear who the fight would be between.

  It could be Vince and Oliver. The two were giving each other a wide berth and the evil eye.

  Or Oliver and Steve Winstead. Oliver had looked like a vein was about to pop in his forehead when Steve walked into the scene shop, declaring he was there to help with the sets.

  Despite the fact that no one had asked for his assistan
ce.

  So far he hadn’t done much other than try to get time alone with Penelope, but Oliver kept heading off the advances.

  Then there was Starla and Vince. She had, in fact, broken up with Vince last night. She said she had taken it harder than he had, especially when she learned he’d been keeping his search for his biological parents from her.

  She insisted he’d taken it well, but his glowering said otherwise. He’d probably just been trying to act brave in front of her. I wished he’d backed out of coming today, but I’d never known him not to honor his word.

  He looked like he hadn’t slept a wink, and I couldn’t imagine what he was feeling today. Between Miles’ death and the breakup . . . it was a lot to bear.

  I sighed, wishing it had turned out differently for him and Starla. I had to keep telling myself some things weren’t meant to be.

  It turned out that I hadn’t needed to worry about any lingering uneasiness between Glinda and Starla this afternoon, because Glinda had been a no-show. It was so unusual for her to be late that I’d called to check on her. The call had gone straight to voice mail.

  Mimi said, “Maybe you should take the nail gun away from Vince. Give him a paintbrush instead.”

  Vince was glaring at Hank Leduc, who seemed to be the only one in the room who hadn’t picked up on any tension.

  Probably because he was too busy staring at Starla.

  I could tell she was at war with herself, wanting to enjoy Hank’s attention but feeling horrible about Vince. She was doing her best to keep busy.

  It probably hadn’t been wise to allow Vince use of the nail gun, but he was whipping out framing for the canvas stretchers faster than Steve could transport them from one side of the scene shop to the other, where Starla then stapled canvas to the pine strapping.

  Pop, pop, pop.

  Vince tended to discharge the nail gun in threes.

  “Very nice,” Steve said to Mimi on one of those trips across the space. Then he bent down to me and whispered, “You might want to give Penelope some guidance.” More loudly, he said, “I would do it, but I can’t get past her guard dog.”

  Oliver looked over at him like he wished he’d been holding that nail gun instead of Vince. I’d assigned Oliver to be Hank’s assistant. Currently, he was connecting a spindle to a railing. I was mighty glad he had only a screwdriver in hand.