“I really didn’t,” Glinda said. “I only took the DNA test as a lark, wanting to see how it worked and what it would show in terms of the Craft. I’d planned to show it to Vince as a way to stretch out the case until I could convince him to drop the warlock nonsense. Which I guess wasn’t nonsense after all. When the results came in today’s mail, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”
At that point, she’d gone straight to her mother, who’d explained everything.
Dorothy had been pregnant with Vince during her vow renewal and second honeymoon. She and Joel had stayed away long enough for her to give birth and get pregnant again so no one suspected. There had been no trip around the world. They’d been staying up the coast in Marblehead. Only Oliver, the family attorney, had known the truth.
“Apparently,” Glinda said, “my father insisted she give the baby up for adoption. He didn’t want a constant reminder of her infidelity. She wanted Dad back, so she agreed. When the time came, Oliver promised her the baby would have a good home. She knew only that she had a son. Not who his new family was, or where he lived. She said she wondered just about every day what had become of him. . . .”
I wondered if somehow what she had gone through with Vince spurred her decision to adopt a baby with her second husband. To give a home to a child who needed one, as her child had once been the one in need.
If so, Dorothy might have a heart under all that cleavage after all.
“What of the weasel?” Harper asked. “Did he know your mom was pregnant?”
Glinda pushed the pint of rocky road away from her. She set her elbows on the counter. “He did. They were dating when she found out. As soon as she told him, he told her to get rid of the baby, that he wasn’t cut out to be a father. She refused. He quickly left town. Almost as soon as she reconciled with my father, Miles came back. Apparently he was having second thoughts about fatherhood. My father decided the best way to get rid of Miles was to pay him off. A hundred thousand once the baby was born to sign over his parental rights, leave town, and never come back. Mom said it took some convincing, but Miles eventually took the deal.”
“But return he did,” Archie said. Higgins tried to lick his tail, and Archie flicked him in the face with it. “Pzzt!”
Glinda said, “He came back to town on what would have been the baby’s first birthday. He wanted to know what happened to the baby and wanted to see him. Kept going on and on about having made a mistake with the adoption.”
Roots. Miles had been trying to plant them. Too little, too late, it seemed.
Glinda put the top back on the pint of ice cream. “My mother says they fought about it.”
I’d bet that was the fight Terry had witnessed.
“Miles threatened to track down the whereabouts of the baby and challenge the adoption. He said he’d use Ve and As You Wish to look into the adoption. Mom still refused to tell him anything. Later that week, he eloped with Ve. Mom tried to contact Miles to work out a solution to their problem but was never able to reach him. He’d disappeared.” She dropped her head into her hands. “I thought my mother was going to be sick today when I told her about Miles’ amulet.”
It had to have been startling, but I knew that Dorothy had stayed with Miles of her own free will.
In light of all that had happened, it was probably best if she never knew that.
I kept thinking about what Glinda had said about Miles threating to use Ve to find the baby. . . . I’d been wondering why he’d chosen her to marry, and I suspected he’d taken advantage of opportunity. He’d gone to see her about the baby . . . and probably liked what he’d seen. The next thing Ve knew, she’d woken up a married woman.
“Weasel!” I said suddenly, hopping off my stool.
Starla leaned up. “Are you okay?”
I dropped in front of the file boxes that were still on the living room floor. “Ve called Miles a weasel.”
“Fittingly,” Archie intoned.
I found the box that held the W files and thumbed through the tabs. “Weasel!” I said as I pulled out the file. I flipped it open. “This is it. He wanted Ve to find Baby Boy Babbage. A child he’d had with . . . Dorothy. There’s a dozen exclamation points after that last part.”
“Whoa,” Mimi said.
Harper set her spoon on the counter. “If Dorothy knew that Ve knew . . .”
Archie said, “Then she would’ve gone to great lengths to make sure Ve unlearned that information.”
“The memory cleanse.” It made perfect sense. Dorothy had to erase the knowledge of the baby from Ve’s memory . . . and in doing so she’d also taken away all Ve’s memories of Miles.
Dorothy, I realized, had also given herself away yesterday, but I’d been too preoccupied to catch it.
Pepe had told me how Ve had told only a trusted few that she hadn’t been able to recall the wedding. Yet Dorothy had taunted me during our altercation that Ve might not remember that she’d killed Miles.
Dorothy wasn’t one of Ve’s trusted few; she shouldn’t have known that Ve had no memories of that time. Unless she’d been the one to erase them in the first place.
The things people did to protect themselves. It baffled me.
As I stood up, the front doorbell rang. Higgins looked conflicted. Stay and hope someone shared ice cream? Or greet the visitor?
When the doorbell rang a second time, he couldn’t resist the lure of its magical tone. He let out sonic woofs and ran for the door.
Starla moaned at the sound.
Glinda said, “I’m calling Cherise.”
Missy yapped and wiggled in Mimi’s lap, but she kept a firm hold on the dog.
It was utter chaos.
It was home.
I peeked out the sidelight and saw Steve Winstead on the porch. Instead of inviting him into the bedlam, I slipped past Higgins and wiggled out the door, closing it firmly behind me.
It wasn’t late, not even five yet, but there was a chill in the air, and I was instantly cold. “Steve?”
He paced. “I didn’t tell you everything yesterday.”
“About?” As he paced my way, I caught the scent of alcohol. He’d been drinking.
“I was so stupid, thinking she loved me, too, all this time.”
“Steve,” I said softly. “Maybe you should come back tomorrow.”
“No.” He stopped, shook his head. “No. I’ve been keeping this secret all these years, trying to protect her.” His voice cracked. “To protect the woman I loved, because I thought she loved me, too. . . . So stupid.”
He might have been drinking, but he was too lucid to be drunk. He knew what he was saying and why.
“What secret?” I asked, rubbing chill bumps on my arms.
“Penelope might have been whisked away to the Cape by her family after that fight I had with Miles, but she found a way back. I saw her two nights later, at Wickedly Creative. She’d just come running out of Miles’ bunkhouse. She was crying.” His shattered gaze lifted to meet my eyes. “I went to see what was wrong. She had blood on her hands.”
I leaned against a porch column. “Blood?”
“She told me . . . she told me she cut herself on a sculpting blade. I brought her inside the studio, helped her clean up, and made sure she got home safely.” He held my gaze. “I knew the whole time she’d been lying to me about the blood.”
“How did you know for sure?”
“Darcy, there wasn’t a scratch on her. The blood wasn’t hers.”
“Did you check on Miles?”
“Not right away. I drove Penelope home first. By the time I went back to the bunkhouse, the door was ajar. I went in. There was no sign of any blood. And no sign of Miles, either. He was gone.”
Gone? Where? “What did you do?”
A tear leaked from the corner of his eye. “I closed the door and went home to
wait for Penelope to come back to me. I’ve been waiting for thirty years. Today . . . today I realized she was never coming back. And that I needed to finally tell the truth.”
* * *
Half an hour later, the side door opened, and Nick’s voice came from the mudroom. “Darcy?”
“In here,” I said in a stage whisper from the living room.
Starla and I were on the sectional, watching Toy Story.
We’d needed something light after the day we’d had.
Well, I was watching. Starla was sound asleep, thanks to a little magic from Cherise Goodwin. Starla’s headache was history. For now. I had the feeling that as she sorted through her feelings for Vince it would return.
As soon as Harper heard what Steve had told me, she had set off to find Marcus, and Glinda had gone home. Once Starla had drifted off, and I kept shushing Archie and Mimi, they headed out to fill Ve in on what had happened today.
It had been a lot.
But despite all I’d learned, I still had no clue what had happened to Miles.
If Penelope had killed him, what had happened to his body in the time Steve had driven her home? Had she used the Special Delivery Spell to move Miles to Ve’s garage?
“I went to the playhouse, but it was”—Nick stepped into the kitchen, took note of Starla and me huddled on the couch—“dark. What’s happened?”
Higgins and Missy went to greet him as he set a briefcase on the island.
Trying not to disturb Starla, I dislodged Annie, who’d been snoozing on my lap, and carefully stood up and motioned for him to follow me.
Higgins took my warm spot on the couch, and Missy trotted behind Nick and me. In my office, I slid the doors closed behind us.
“What didn’t happen?” I asked, holding up a hand. I began to tick off fingers. “Penelope has no powers. Vince and Oliver got into a fistfight. Dorothy is Vince’s mother. Steve saw Penelope with blood on her hands. Thirty years ago,” I amended. “Not today.”
Nick held up both hands, palms out. “Hold up. Dorothy?”
“Long story,” I said, dropping onto the sofa and drawing up my legs to tuck beneath me. “And I’ll tell you, but first tell me what you learned from the ME’s office.”
He sat next to me and pushed his palms into his eyes. It had been a long day for us all. “The death has been ruled a homicide. The postmortem exam revealed that a small bone in Miles’ neck was broken. The hyoid. It usually only breaks when someone is strangled to death.”
“What about the blood in the bunkhouse?” And on Penelope’s hands . . .
“No way to know,” he said. “Could be related somehow. Maybe not. Now tell me what happened today.”
I spent the next half hour filling him in. He just kept shaking his head as though he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
I said, “Are you going to go talk to Penelope?”
“I’ll call, but any questioning will likely have to be tomorrow. There’s no way she or Oliver would agree to meet with me without counsel present.”
Counsel would be hard to come by this late. Unless they turned to Marcus, which was always a possibility. Especially if he dropped Ve as a client.
“It’s amazing, isn’t it? That one little amulet caused so much grief. Though, really, it wasn’t the amulet’s fault, was it?” I couldn’t stop thinking about Miles. His life. His choices. And all the choices that had been made for him by his father.
“It seems to me that there are a lot of factors at play where Miles is concerned. And about that amulet . . .”
I didn’t like the warning in his tone. “Oh no. What? Is the ME’s office refusing to let us see it? Surely they understand that we won’t—”
“Darcy,” he cut me off. “They can’t let us look at it because they don’t have it. The amulet isn’t part of Miles’ belongings. There’s no record of it.”
I processed what he was saying. “So he wasn’t wearing it when he died?”
Nick shook his head. “Again, I’m feeling as though this case is full of question marks,” he said. “The more we dig, the more questions come up.”
“We can’t rule out Dorothy. If she was trying to keep Miles from learning about their baby’s new family, she definitely had motive to kill him.”
“We can’t rule out anyone at this point,” Nick said. “And if we don’t get a big break soon, this cold case might stay cold forever.”
Chapter Twenty-three
I awoke Sunday morning to bright sunshine streaming in the windows and Annie sleeping in Nick’s spot on the bed. Sleepily, she looked at me, and I patted her head until her eyes closed again.
Leaning up on my elbow, I glanced at the clock on my nightstand. It was after eight in the morning. Way past my usual wake-up time. I yawned, stretched, grabbed my glasses from where they sat on a stack of three sketchbooks on my nightstand, and eyed the one made of leather, wishing I’d been able to find that four-leaf clover. In the grand scheme of life, it was such a silly thing to want back, but to me it represented so much more than a gift from Mimi.
It represented family.
My family.
I sighed and told myself to let it go. I had the family, and that was all that mattered. I lifted the charm bracelet Mimi and Nick had given me for my last birthday. Three charms dangled from the sterling silver band. Two of which Mimi had made at Wickedly Creative: a paintbrush to represent my art and a book to remind me that I’d first met Nick in front of Spellbound. Nick had bought a sun charm to add to the collection. He’d said it represented the light I brought into their lives.
Just remembering the moment filled me with such love that I sat there staring at the charms for a long moment, thanking my lucky stars.
And that clover.
Wherever it might be.
Annie stayed in bed as I brushed my teeth, pulled my hair into a high knot, put on my robe and slippers, and went in search of Nick. And for Higgins, too, since he hadn’t greeted me with his usual slobbery morning kisses. I knelt on the window bench that looked out over the village square to see if Nick was walking the dogs on the green. And though the paths were busy, I didn’t see them.
Down the hall, I peeked in on Mimi. She was sound asleep, her pillow over the top half of her face. Missy’s tail wiggled when she spotted me, and she leaped off the bed and ran to the door.
I picked her up and let her give me slobbery morning kisses. In all honesty, I’d missed them. I couldn’t fault her for loving Mimi the way she did, however. I knew the feeling. “I don’t suppose you know where Nick and Higgins are?”
Her tail stopped wagging.
I took that as a no.
In the kitchen, I checked for a note from Nick, found none. No confetti, either, which told me that Annie hadn’t stolen it before I had the chance to read it. The coffee carafe was full, and Nick had set a mug out for me. It was from the Witch’s Brew and was in the shape of a cauldron. I checked the pets’ food dishes. Annie’s and Missy’s were full—because Nick had left them on top of the washing machine. Higgins’ bowl was on the floor and licked clean. I set Missy and her bowl on the floor, and she happily dug in.
I took my cup of coffee and opened the French doors leading out to the back patio. It was a beautiful, balmy morning. I breathed deeply, hoping to catch a whiff of the magical scent that I loved so much, but it wasn’t in the air.
The bad juju was lingering, and I wished it would just go away already.
A moment later, a mourning dove landed before me, then disappeared into a glittery white cloud that dissipated, revealing my mother floating there. She was dressed in white jeans and a white cashmere sweater. Her hair flowed over shoulders, and I wanted to know her secret to keeping stray strands from sticking to her clothes. My hair tended to shed like crazy, which was why I shied away from white outfits.
“Good morning,” Mom sai
d as she kissed my cheek.
I gave her a hug and wondered if seeing her every morning was going to become a routine. I rather hoped so. “Coffee?”
She shook her head. “I can’t stay. I have a meeting with Dorothy.”
“How’s Vince?” I asked as I walked over to the porch swing that hung from a trellis that ran along the back of the house. “I assume he’s been told by now that he’s a witch?”
She sat next to me, lifting her feet up to tuck beneath her. “He has. He’s processing. It’s a lot to take in.”
He’d wanted so badly to know who his mother was, and also to be a witch. He’d gotten those wishes, but at what cost? “Has he met you?”
Missy toddled out, saw my mother, and picked up her pace. With a not so graceful leap, she joined us on the swing. I patted her head, and she settled in between us.
“Not yet. Dorothy will take him under her wing for now. I’ll be keeping in close touch with her.”
“Lucky you.”
She laughed and the sound filled my soul. “The luckiest.”
The sun lit the dazzling leaves on the trees beyond the fence. The reds, oranges, and golds appeared to be glowing. We swayed. “Did Dorothy really not know that Vince was her son?”
“She hadn’t a clue.”
Birds chattered from the woods, and a squirrel ran along the fence pickets. “But you knew. . . .”
“Yes,” she admitted.
“Did you know Dorothy had memory-cleansed Ve?”
“No. I wish I did. It would have saved me a lot of worry over the years about what had taken place that weekend.”
“Seems dangerous, Crafters being able to cleanse anyone they please without consequence, yet I have to admit, it is handy at times.” I’d had to use it myself more than once.
She smiled. “Whether to limit the usage of the memory cleanse is one of those things that has been brought up time and again at Coven of Seven gatherings. No one can ever agree on limitations, however, so it remains ungoverned for the most part.”
I gave us a push with my slippered toe. “Who, exactly, is in the Coven of Seven?”
The Witch and the Dead Page 21