Alice in Murderland

by Samantha Silver

  “Drunk? Yes, definitely.”

  “You murdered her!” Denise shouted at no one in particular. “You murdered Edith because she disagreed with your stupid ideas about the new development.”

  “Denise,” Susan said sharply, like she was disciplining a student interrupting the middle of class. “This is a private meeting. Please, this is neither the time nor the place for baseless allegations.”

  Peaches and Cat were grinning at each other; this was obviously the drama they had come here for.

  “Of course that’s what you’d want people to think,” Denise slurred as she leaned against a chair at the back of the room to stay upright. “I thought the harlot with the purple hair did it. I told Chief Griffin she did it. But I was wrong! It was you, you conniving old hag. You had a meeting with Edith the day she was poisoned. And you brought her cupcakes from the purple one’s store!”

  Evidently Denise was too drunk to remember–or care about–Cat’s actual name, but that wasn’t what anyone was thinking about. Every single eye in the room was on Susan as her mouth opened and closed once or twice before finally, she spoke.

  “Yes, Edith and I had an appointment for that day. Edith texted me that morning, asking me to meet her urgently. I went to her house, despite the fact that I had to cut short a meeting with our mayor to do so, and she wasn’t there. I imagine it was a simple prank. End of story. I did not poison her, and Denise, you’re embarrassing yourself by going around causing scenes and accusing people of murder without any proof. Now please, leave before I’m forced to call Chase Griffin.”

  “Puh-lease,” Denise slurred. “I would love for you to call him, so he can arrest you! And the cupcake lady! You’re all murderers!”

  Frank suddenly got up from his seat and made his way over to Denise.

  “Frank,” she said, recognizing him. “What are you doing here?”

  “I was attending this meeting,” Frank replied. “Come on, Denise. I promise you, I’ll make sure Chase Griffin knows about this meeting. For now, let’s make sure you get home safely.”

  Denise looked like she wanted to protest, but eventually let herself be led off by Frank. They left the room, and everyone sat in mostly stunned silence for a minute, before Susan finally took over the microphone once more.

  “My apologies for the disruption,” she said. “Denise is obviously upset over the loss of her friend, and I think perhaps it would be wisest for all of us if we concluded this meeting here. We will see you all next week.”

  The low murmur of people talking amongst themselves began, as I looked at Peaches and Cat. “Looks like she still thinks you’re the murderer.”

  “Yeah,” Cat said darkly. “It’s annoying, too. I’ve had people come into the shop asking me if this is where the murderer works. It sounds like she’s getting into the ear of everyone in town. Hopefully now she’ll move onto Susan as her main suspect.”

  “Well it sounds like she’s a good suspect, if she was supposed to meet with Edith the day she was poisoned.”

  “No way,” Peaches said, shaking her head. “Mrs. McInnis is the community rock. Like, I hated her in high school, she kept confiscating my phone, but I definitely couldn’t see her killing anyone.”

  “Maybe,” I said, but as an outsider to the village, I didn’t have the emotional connection to the residents that my cousins did. I figured I could probably see things more impartially. Cat looked at me shrewdly.

  “You’re going to try and figure out who did it, aren’t you?”

  “What? No!” I replied, hoping my voice didn’t betray my total lie. Peaches grinned.

  “Of course she is. She’s lying, I can tell that from a mile away.”

  “Well, you’re not going to be able to figure it out without our help,” Cat said. I opened my mouth to protest, but she held up a hand.

  “Nope, you can’t say no to us. We’re your cousins.”

  “You’re a suspect in the murder!” I protested all the same. “You can’t try and solve it.”

  “That’s exactly why I should try and help you solve it.”

  “And I’m just coming along because this will make a hell of a story when we solve a murder!” Peaches exclaimed excitedly. “After Cat’s finished work tomorrow, we’re going to work together and we’re going to find out who killed that mean old woman.”

  I sighed. I supposed I had no choice. Peaches and Cat were definitely going to join me in my hunt for a murderer. I was suddenly wondering if maybe this wasn’t the best idea.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I woke up the next day knowing that late that afternoon, Peaches and Cat were coming over to help me figure out who had murdered Edith Chalmers, so people would stop thinking Cat did it after Denise’s rumor spreading.

  After sleeping on it, I decided maybe it wasn’t as bad of an idea as I’d initially thought. After all, Peaches and Cat both knew everyone in Sapphire Village, whereas I was brand new to the place. They also knew who had magical powers and who didn’t, whereas I would just completely be guessing.

  But first, when I heard the knock of the UPS guy at the front door, I smiled to myself. This was redecorating day!

  I signed for all of the packages and dragged them into the room. Muffin made an appearance, sniffing the boxes suspiciously. Suddenly, the white figure of Archibald popped out of nowhere, and I jumped about three feet high.

  “Oh my God!” I exclaimed. “Can you, I don’t know, warn me or something before you do that?”

  “Oh, I apologize, is my being dead inconveniencing your life?” he replied.

  “Well, you don’t have to appear out of nowhere like that. You could call out first, or something,” I grumbled in reply as I took out my keys and used them to cut the tape on the top of the boxes.

  I pulled out the bean bag chair from the first box and decided to place it on the right hand side of the room. Muffin sniffed it carefully, then pounced on it, sinking deep into the beans and lying there contentedly, his legs sticking out in every direction.

  “So I take it you approve,” I told Muffin with a smile.

  “What in the heavens is that monstrosity?” Archibald asked. “And what happened to the rest of the bookshelves?”

  “I took the rest of the bookshelves apart last night; I wanted to make the store look more open.”

  “What an incredible waste of space,” Archibald argued, shaking his head.

  “And that monstrosity, as you call it, is a bean bag chair.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s a round fabric chair filled with small beans that move around your body. It’s comfortable, it feels like you’re lying on a giant pillow.”

  “I weep for what humanity has become,” Archibald replied, shaking his head. “Sometimes I wish I wasn’t a ghost, so I could remain ignorant to the depths of depravity that our species has reached.”

  “Really? You… ghosted… through two world wars and bean bag chairs is where you draw the line that humanity is beyond saving?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “War! War always has a reason! Your second World War was started because of those French idiots forcing extreme reparations on the Prussians.”

  “We call them Germans now, and I think England was involved in that as well.”

  “Regardless, there was a reason for the wars. Someone did not wake up in the morning and simply decide to invade another country; there was always years of buildup and pressure. But this! This… beanbag chair, as you call it! There was no pressure. There was no need for this. It is a horrendous lump of fabric. A waste of valuable resources.”

  “All right, well, call it what you will, but it’s comfortable and it’s staying, and there’s nothing you can do about it,” I said. Archibald harrumphed, and floated off into a corner to sulk. I grinned to myself at the ghost who seemed to think bean bag chairs were the world’s worst invention while I assembled the other four chairs that I’d ordered. By the time I was finished, Muffin was still sleeping on the bean-bag chair, and th
e shop definitely looked a lot better.

  I took out the Edison coil bulbs, climbed up one of the ladders that ran along the bookshelves, and spent ten minutes replacing all of the existing bulbs. Apart from the ceiling bulbs there were a few exposed bulbs that had been put in the shelves, where there were no books. It was a cute look. When I was done, I gazed upon my handiwork and grinned. I had to admit, the store looked a lot friendlier. The bulbs cast a nice, warm glow over everything, and the chairs gave people a place to sit while they browsed. The place definitely hadn’t looked bad before, but now it was positively perfect!

  All I needed was the new shipment of books that I’d ordered.

  As if on cue, there was another knock at the door. I had no idea how long it was going to take for Francine’s supplier to send the books over, but I certainly wasn’t expecting it to be less than twenty-four hours. And I certainly wasn’t expecting the man who delivered them, either.

  I was thinking they’d come by FedEx or something, and a dude in his thirties wearing cargo pants and a bored expression on his face would be standing in front of the store with some cardboard boxes. But instead, when I opened the door, I got almost the complete opposite of that.

  The man standing in front of me was wearing a full three-piece, black and white suit. He looked to be at least in his seventies, with thinning grey hair gelled back against this scalp. His eyes were deep and black, his noise pointed, and as he smiled at me, his canines were so sharp I could barely stop looking at him. They were practically fangs.

  Suddenly, I realized the truth–he was a vampire! There was a vampire here, on my stoop, with a giant wooden box in front of him. No, you idiot. Vampires aren’t real. Then I remembered. I was a witch. I’d seen magic. Heck, I’d performed magic. I’d seen a werewolf. This man could very well be a vampire. Who was to say they didn’t exist?

  My next thought was what on earth do I do? I didn’t have any silver bullets or anything. Before I had a chance to shut the door and run away in panic, however, the man simply pulled out a clipboard.

  “You must be Alice,” he said with the slightest hint of an Eastern European accent. “Francine told me you would most likely be taking over the store when she died. I was sorry to hear of her passing, and thrilled that you are willing to take such good care of the store which she so loved. Here are the books that she ordered. If you could please sign the form, I shall be on my way.”

  “Oh,” I replied, staring at the box. It was full of the books that I’d ordered, presumably. Maybe this vampire wasn’t out to get me after all. “What’s your name?” I asked him.

  “I am Vasile. I have collected books for… years. I now sell the most precious versions of literary art to bookshops who appreciate good quality reading materials. I look forward to working with you, Alice. Do you need help getting the box into the shop?”

  “Ummm,” I started. The box was huge, and if it really did have all of the books I’d ordered the day before, it had to weigh a ton. A part of me wanted help, but at the same time, Vasile looked to be so old that I wanted to say no and struggle with it on my own rather than make the old man struggle to help me. But, before I had a chance to deny, Vasile laughed.

  “Do not worry, young Alice. I only appear to be weak.” Without another word, he leaned down and picked up the box with ease, carrying it into the store. I could only look on in awe; it had to weigh a ton! When he set the box back down, the floorboards underneath creaked in protest. I signed the clipboard to say that I’d received the books. Looking at the sheet, it seemed that Vasile had three other orders to deliver that day. And if I wasn’t mistaken, they were deliveries to Canada, South Africa and Japan. Surely that couldn’t be right?

  “Thank you,” I told him, still a little bit shocked.

  “You are very welcome,” he told me. “If you ever have any questions about the books, please, do not hesitate to ask. You can contact me through my website anytime. It is truly the greatest invention of the past six hundred years, the internet.”

  That seemed like an oddly specific number. “Thanks, I will,” I replied with a smile as I led Vasile back to the door. It was then that I suddenly noticed there was no delivery van or anything nearby. I wondered how on earth Vasile had gotten here, and how he was going to leave, when I saw him look up and down the street carefully. There was no one there, so he turned around, crossed his arms over his chest and winked at me, and suddenly disappeared! I gasped, then noticed the black bat flying off into the distance from the direction of the store.

  That couldn’t be… surely not. Surely Vasile couldn’t actually be a vampire. And yet, in the last few days, I’d learned magic was real. Werewolves were real. Half the things I’d been told as a child were false were actually true. I made a mental note to call my mom; I needed to know if she knew who my biological mother really was and had been hiding it from me for all these years. Because all of this was, quite frankly, a lot for someone who was closer to thirty than they’d like to admit to take in.

  I made my way back into the bookshop.

  “Is that zounderkite from the Romanian Country gone?” Archibald asked when I came back in.

  “If you mean Vasile, then yes. What on earth do you mean by zounderkite though?”

  Archibald harrumphed. “I suppose all of the good insults have gone out of use these days. A Zounderkite is an idiot whose conduct leads to stupid mistakes.”

  “I didn’t get that feeling from Vasile at all,” I replied.

  “Well, an Englishman would be able to do what he does better,” Archibald replied.

  “Ah,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Well, he brought over my book delivery.”

  “Well, so long as you ordered nothing by that idiot Byron,” Archibald muttered.

  “No, nothing like that. I got a whole number of newer books. Agatha Christie, JRR Tolkien, Jane Austen, that sort of thing.”

  “Literature in the English language peaked in the early nineteenth century,” Archibald sniffed. “I do not know why you would waste your time ordering inferior books. Your aunt knew much better.”

  “Yeah, well, my aunt doesn’t pay my bills,” I replied. “Besides, books nowadays can be pretty good. Tolkien is an absolute master.”

  “My day was the peak of literature,” Archibald replied.

  “Have you even read anything written in the last century?” I asked.

  “Why would I even want to?”

  I rolled my eyes. “How can you know it’s not good writing if you don’t even bother reading it?”

  “I simply know.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll load up some Agatha Christie novels on my iPad, and you can listen to them then.”

  “Listen to a book?”

  “Yes, it’s called an audiobook. Seeing as how you can’t turn the pages of the book yourself, that’s what you’re going to have to do.”

  “This idea gets more humiliating by the minute,” Archibald complained.

  “Oh come on, you can’t have read a book in hundreds of years, surely you miss it.”

  “Fine,” Archibald finally agreed. “I have missed the written word, although I am not convinced that there has been anything written after my death that is worth reading.”

  “Ok, let me set it up,” I told him. Ten minutes later, Archibald was floating on the counter while a nice voice began to read out “Murder on the Orient Express” to him while I shuffled books around, making space for my new additions. When I was finally finished, I looked at my handiwork with pride, Hercule Poirot having a conversation in the background. I checked the time on my phone and realized I was supposed to meet Cat and Peaches at Cat’s Cupcakes in fifteen minutes. We had a murder to solve!

  Archibald seemed pretty engrossed in his audiobook, so I put some food out for Muffin, who still hadn’t moved from his spot on the beanbag chair, and made my way back out into the street.

  Chapter Fourteen

  When I got to the cupcake shop, there were five minutes to go before closing;
the only people left in the place were Cat, Peaches, myself and a couple sitting next to the door just finishing off their coffee. Cat was behind the counter, and I couldn’t resist ordering a strawberry cheesecake cupcake. Cat put it on a plate for me and I took it to the corner table where Peaches was sitting, tapping away on her phone.

  “Oh, hey Alice,” she smiled at me as I sat down. “Are you excited for tonight? I know I am. I’ve never done anything like this before.”

  “That’s because you spend your entire life just sitting on your phone refreshing your Instagram feed,” Cat teased as she came over and slipped into a third chair at the table, wiping her hands on her apron. “Seriously, mom’s going to start bugging you to go back to college or something soon.”

  “What mom doesn’t understand is that this is the twenty first century, and that I use my social media accounts to make money,” Peaches sniffed. “It even pays my rent, most of the time.”

  “I think mom would like for that to become ‘all of the time’ pretty soon, seeing as you’re twenty-five now.”

  “It will. If you keep this up, when I’m making millions a year, I won’t share any of it with you.”

  Cat faked a pout, then leaned back in her chair. “So I was thinking we should go find out what Edith was doing the day she was poisoned.”

  “We already know what she was doing,” Peaches pointed out. “She had a meeting with Susan McInnis. She even admitted to it.”

  “Sure, but that meeting, if we believe Susan, was last minute. She surely had other things to do that day. If we find out what they were, we find out who else might have had the opportunity to kill her.”

  I nodded. “I think that’s a good idea. I think Susan is still the best suspect we have, but if we can show that she’s also the only person who had the opportunity to kill Edith, then that makes the case against her even stronger.”

  “Ok, so we just go knock on a grieving family’s door then and ask to interview them all about their dead relative’s movements the day she was murdered,” Peaches said, rolling her eyes.