Alice in Murderland

by Samantha Silver

  “This is a police station in Sapphire Village. There are cameras in the holding cells, but none in the main part of the building.”

  Great. This was not looking good for me. My heart began to race as reality was starting to set in. Len Forbes was about to murder me. He pulled a Swiss Army Knife from his pocket and popped it open. The blade was small, but I was well aware it was big enough to kill me. As he stepped threateningly toward me, I took a step backwards, heading deeper into the building. Maybe if I led him far enough back I could run away, or something.

  Anything.

  Before I got a chance to think through a plan, however, Len lunged at me. I let out a squeal as I stumbled backwards, desperately trying to avoid his knife. My eyes were fixed on the blade as it slid past me, only inches away from my abdomen. I turned around and began to run, but immediately my foot caught on the leg of a chair and I fell to the floor, hard.

  Pain radiated from my ankle; I was reasonably sure I’d sprained it. Len’s lips curled into another creepy smile as he made his way toward me. I began to scamper backwards, mainly using my hands, but I knew it was useless. I was completely trapped. There was no way I’d be able to put pressure on my foot; I wasn’t going to be able to run away from him.

  I was finished, for sure.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “It’s pointless to try and get away,” Len said, coming toward me. He was taking his time with this, like he was enjoying it. This guy was a straight-up psychopath.

  I tried to think of how I could get away. If I pulled out my phone to call for help, not only would I be putting someone else in danger, but I knew Len would immediately attack me. That wasn’t an option. I could try and get up and see how far I could run on my sprained ankle, but looking down at it I could already see it swelling; given that fact and how much pain was radiating up my leg, my bet was it wasn’t weight-bearing.

  I was out of options. Len suddenly let out a cry and lunged down toward me with his knife. I rolled out of the way and he swore loudly as his knife made contact with the linoleum floor rather than my skin. I started to crawl back toward the door as quickly as I could, but Len quickly got up and ran in front of me, blocking my way.

  He brought the knife down toward me; in a second he’d stab me in the back, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  I closed my eyes. This was it. Ellie Price had been right; we shouldn’t have tried to find the murderer. I was going to miss my mom. And yet, I realized, as I sat there knowing I was about to die, I realized I didn’t regret coming to Sapphire Village. Despite the fact that it had led me to my death, I actually liked this place. I liked Cat, and Peaches, and Sage, and even Grandma Cee.

  Suddenly my eyes widened. I was a witch! In the panic that can only come with knowing you’re about to die, I’d completely forgotten about my magical powers.

  I looked up and focused on the knife. I imagined with every ounce of my being that it was about a hundred times smaller, no bigger than a thumbtack. A rush of energy flew from my fingers and an instant later the knife that Len had been holding so threateningly fell from his grasp and to the floor, now completely useless for murdering anything bigger than an ant.

  “What on earth?” Len stammered, looking down at the knife, confusedly. “What did you do?” he said, coming toward me threateningly. I couldn’t help but notice a small gleam of fear in his eyes, however.

  “What?” I asked innocently. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Good,” he replied. “Well, there’s more than one way to kill you.”

  He came toward me, his arms extended. He obviously meant to strangle me to death. I smiled this time. I had a secret weapon. He could try and kill me all he wanted, but as long as I still had use of one finger, I could always use magic.

  For a split second, he looked unsure. Maybe it was my smile; whereas a minute ago I’d been running for my life as best I could, now I was holding my ground and looking ready to fight back, despite the fact that I was still on my knees; unable to hold up my own body weight on both feet.

  I pictured the desk next to Len sweeping over and hitting him, then pointed at the desk, focusing on that image as hard as I could. He let out a cry of horror as the desk immediately swept to the side around two meters, hitting him in the hip and knocking him to the ground.

  “What are you doing? How did you do that?” Len asked in horror as he got up off the ground. He started coming toward me again, but this time, he looked more apprehensive about it. I just smiled.

  “I’m not doing anything. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You’re crazy!” he shouted, pointing at me. “You’re completely insane! You’re a witch, or something. I don’t know how you’re doing this, but you are. That’s enough!” he shouted, lunging toward me. I moved to the side and with a single fluid motion pointed to a computer monitor, which flew up into the air and hit Len Forbes on the back of the head. He fell to the ground, unconscious.

  “What’s going on here?” I heard a voice say from the front of the room. I turned and saw Chase Griffin standing in the doorway, his hand on his gun in its holster. I had never been so happy to see someone before in my life.

  “Oh thank God!” I exclaimed, and before I could say or do anything else, I burst into tears.

  “Alice, what happened?” Chase asked, making his way toward me. He saw Len Forbes lying unconscious on the ground, and his eyes widened.

  “He tried to kill me,” I said through tears. “He killed Edith Chalmers. I figured it out, and I came over here to tell you. He saw me coming in, and he tried to kill me.”

  I began to shake as reality began to set in and my body started to process just how close I’d come to being killed today.

  “Ok,” Chase said, taking out his handcuffs and cuffing the unconscious mayor in front of us. He then sprang into action, making his way to a cabinet on the other side of the room and pulling out a blanket, wrapping it around me. “I need an ambulance at the Sapphire Village police station, now,” he said into his radio, then looked me up and down.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “My ankle is sprained, I think,” I said, motioning down to my leg. Chase bent down hurriedly and had a look; despite the size of his hands his touch was gentle, his fingers like velvet against my skin. I inhaled sharply as he touched the swelling; I could see a faint outline of a purple bruise already developing on my ankle.

  “That’s definitely a sprain, at least,” he said. “There’s a medical clinic a few blocks away, you’ll have to get X-rays done there. Can you tell me what happened?”

  I nodded, and recounted the events of the previous few minutes–looking at the clock, it had all taken less than fifteen minutes. It had felt like an eternity though. Chase’s eyes were filled with concern. As soon as I got to the part about the magic, I stopped. What was I going to do? I couldn’t tell Jake that I was actually a witch.

  I closed my eyes and pictured the shrunken Swiss Army knife. I imagined it being back to normal size, felt that now-familiar rush of energy flowing through me, and when I opened my eyes again it was back to normal.

  “Are you all right?” Chase asked, and I nodded.

  “Yeah. Sorry, I just felt a bit light-headed there for a second.” I then explained how I managed to hit the knife out of Len Forbes’ hand, how he pushed the desk to block my way out of the building and eventually I managed to get behind him and hit him over the head with the monitor.

  Chase nodded and wrote the whole thing down, luckily believing my story completely. Just then the paramedics arrived. Chase motioned them over, and I immediately had my blood pressure and heart rate taken.

  “I think she’s slightly in shock, and she needs a doctor to look at her ankle. It’s likely a bad sprain, but it might be broken,” Chase told the EMTs, one of whom nodded. At that moment, Andi, the receptionist, walked into the room, carrying one of those brown boxes that salad bars use, and sipping from a bottle of Pepsi. She had obviously been out fo
r lunch, which was why no one had been in the police station.

  “Thanks, Chase,” the man told him, and the next thing I knew I was being loaded up into the back of the ambulance and whisked down to the tiny hospital in Sapphire Village that was usually–going by the number of skis and snowboards I saw out the front–used for ski related injuries.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  I was taken into the main room for triage. It really was a small hospital; there were about a dozen beds against the wall, and a nurse came in, took my vital signs, checked me over to make sure I hadn’t been stabbed without noticing, or something, and then told me someone would be by shortly to take me to get X-rays done on my ankle.

  As soon as she closed the privacy curtain and left me alone with my thoughts again, I felt the tears well up in my eyes. I had come so close to dying. If I hadn’t remembered at the last second that I was a witch… heck, if I hadn’t been a witch at all, I wouldn’t be lying in this hospital bed with just an ankle that hurt.

  Suddenly, the privacy curtain was pulled back and Peaches and Cat both came straight in.

  “Are you ok?”

  “You’re not dead are you?”

  “What happened?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me who it was before you left?”

  I held up my hands and despite everything, couldn’t help but laugh. Cat and Peaches were so incredibly concerned, each one of them had come to one side of my bed and were now looking at me like I was about to die at any minute.

  “I’m fine,” I replied. “My ankle is sprained, and Chase thinks I might have gone into a bit of shock. But don’t worry, I’m not going to die on you anytime soon.”

  “Good, Grandma Cee will probably try and make me take over the bookstore if you do,” Peaches joked, and Cat reached across the bed and punched her.

  “Ow!”

  “Don’t joke about that! Alice almost died! Chase said the mayor tried to kill you?”

  “Yup,” I nodded, and spent the next ten minutes recounting once again what had happened, lowering my voice to just a whisper when I told my cousins about the magic.

  “Wow,” Cat said, shaking her head when I was finished. “I can’t believe it.”

  “I know,” I replied. “And to think I thought you were trying to kill me when you picked me up from the airport. I had no idea that an actual murderer was going to try and murder me instead.”

  “I just can’t believe it was Len,” Peaches said thoughtfully. “I mean, he was actually a decent mayor. And a decent guy, I thought. Apart from the whole murdering people part.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “I thought he seemed like a good mayor as well.”

  Just then a technician opened the curtain, holding a wheelchair. “Sorry ladies, I’m going to have to take Alice here for a trip down to the X-ray machine, I’ll have her back for you in a few minutes.”

  Half an hour later it was confirmed that my ankle was just sprained and not broken, I had orders to ice it, stay off my feet and rest, as well as a brand new pair of crutches that I had to use for at least a few days.

  Cat drove Peaches and I back to the bookshop. As soon as we entered, Archibald appeared.

  “It’s after regular business hours in this century, you’re late!” he announced in a huff.

  “Sorry, Archibald. Did my almost getting murdered get in the way of your Agatha Christie listening time?” I replied.

  “I’ll have you know that it did. For the previous seventy-two minutes I could have been enjoying the dulcet tones of the narrator as she leads me through a quaint mystery. But alas, you were not here as promised to set up the strange contraption that reads the book to me.”

  “I was busy solving a real-life murder.”

  “That is of no interest to me,” Archibald replied.

  “No, obviously not,” I muttered as I made my way to the back counter and found the iPad. I pressed play on the book for him, and Archibald happily floated around the iPad like it was a sacred shrine.

  “You’re a horrible ghost, Archie,” Cat shot at him, but he ignored her, absorbed in his new book, as the three of us headed back to the apartment. It took what felt like fifteen minutes to get up the steps and into the apartment. When I finally made it up to the top I was sweating profusely and panting.

  “Well, I guess I’ll live in this apartment until I can walk again,” I announced, and Cat laughed.

  “You can slide back down the stairs on your butt, that’s probably easier than trying to use the crutches.”

  “Yeah, but if that happens, I’ll never make it back up the stairs without having a heart attack.”

  “Ok,” Peaches said. “You hang out here. I’ll go out and get some pizza. I think if there was ever a reason to get pizza, catching a murderer and almost being killed by him is a pretty good one.”

  “Agreed,” I laughed. “Thanks, Peaches.”

  Cat helped settle me down on the couch and turned on the TV, leaving an old repeat of How I Met Your Mother on while we chatted about the events of the day.

  “I wish you would have called me before going to see Chase,” Cat said.

  “Oh, you wouldn’t even have wanted to go tell him,” I replied, sticking my tongue out at her. “You would totally have tried to convince me to go confront Len Forbes and then we would have been in exactly the same situation.”

  “Maybe,” Cat grinned. “But at least then it would have been two against one.”

  “Yeah, it’s a good thing I remembered I was a witch in time. Hey, what is the policy on doing magic in front of non-witches?” I asked.

  “Generally, don’t do it. Unless it’s life-or-death, which this obviously was. You managed to come up with a good story, if you hadn’t, there are wizards out there from the Paranormal Protection Unit who would have come in and erased or changed memories enough so that none of the non-magical folk would remember the magic being used.”

  “Cool, so witches have like, their own version of the cops.”

  “Yeah, but they’re not nice people. We like to avoid bringing in the PPU as much as possible.”

  “So, I’m not going to get in trouble for using magic in front of Len?”

  Cat shook her head. “No, definitely not. Don’t worry about that.”

  Just then the door to the apartment opened. “Hey, guess who I found,” Peaches announced coming into the room, the aroma of pizza wafting toward us. Standing behind her, still in his work uniform, was Chase.

  “Hey,” he said, smiling. “I ran into Peaches on the way back from the pizza place and she insisted that I come back here and join you guys for a slice of pizza.”

  I shot Peaches, who was conveniently avoiding my eyes, a look. “Yeah, of course,” I replied. “Help yourself.”

  “I won’t stay for long, I just wanted to see if you’re doing ok.”

  “I am, thanks. The ankle isn’t broken, just a bad sprain.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. Len’s in the holding cell, he’ll be taken down to Portland tomorrow where he’ll stay until the trial. When he woke up he started raving about you making his knife shrink, and pushing the desk into him. He started calling you a witch.” My face went pale. “I think he might try for an insanity defense. It won’t work though. He admitted to everything when I told him what you’d said. He’s going away for a long, long time.”

  “Great,” I said, the blood coming back to my face. Of course, Chase wasn’t going to believe Len’s stories about the magic.

  “Anyway, I’m sure I’ll see you around. Since you’ve been here you’ve found a dead body, had a customer complain you set her on fire, and were almost murdered inside the empty police station.”

  “That’s me, I bring excitement everywhere I go,” I deadpanned, and Chase laughed.

  “Well, try to avoid dead bodies in the future. Finding, or becoming them. Setting annoying people on fire I can live with.”

  I laughed, and a few minutes later Chase said good night and left the way he came. “By the way, why is y
our iPad on and reading Agatha Christie downstairs?” he asked.

  “Oh, Muffin, the cat, likes it. Make sure not to let him out when you leave,” I said.

  Chase shook his head in disbelief and headed down the stairs. Peaches and Cat were both grinning at me as he left.

  “What?” I asked.

  “He totally likes you.”

  “He does not. I bet you basically forced him to come here.”

  “Nuh-uh! I did not!”

  “Yeah, right. Besides, I’ve told you both before, I’m not interested.”

  “Sure,” Cat grinned, grabbing another slice of pizza.

  I knew that there was no convincing them, and we settled in to watch a bit of TV before Cat and Peaches left, promising to be back first thing in the morning. As I settled into bed that night, Muffin making his way into the room and snuggling up next to me, I realized that I truly belonged here in Sapphire Village. Sure, I had loved Miami. But this place was special. Despite the fact that I’d almost been murdered today, this place really, truly felt like home.

  Also by Samantha Silver

  First of all, I wanted to thank you for reading my book. I well and truly hope you enjoyed reading this book as much as I loved writing it.

  If you did enjoy Alice in Murderland I’d really appreciate it if you could take a moment and leave a review for the book on Amazon, to help other readers find the book as well.

  Want to be the first to find out about new releases? Sign up for my newsletter by clicking here now.

  Want more of Alice’s adventures? The second Magical Bookshop mystery, Murder on the Oregon Express, is now available on Amazon by clicking here.

  Other Magical Bookshop Mysteries

  Murder on the Oregon Express (Magical Bookshop Mystery #2)

  The Very Killer Caterpillar (Magical Bookshop Mystery #3)

  Willow Bay Witches Mysteries:

  The Purr-fect Crime (Willow Bay Witches #1)