“Don’t get smart with me girly, or I’ll have you arrested.”
I definitely didn’t like this guy.
“Tell me what happened today.”
“I was called out to look at Touch of Frost, who was lethargic and not eating. I came to the farm, and Susan took me to Corey, who brought me into the stables. I looked over Touch of Frost with Corey, and found a tick that he must have gotten in Arizona a couple days ago. I got rid of the tick, and Corey and I headed out of the stables to take me back to my car. As soon as Corey opened the stable door we saw the body. I checked for a pulse, but she was obviously dead. I called 9-1-1, and then Corey told Susan to be ready for you on the radio. Philippe and Tony heard the radio call and came over, then a few minutes later you arrived.”
The whole time I spoke Hawthorne took down some notes.
“Were you alone at all during your time on the farm?”
“Yes. Corey got a call from Philippe that he needed a hand with one of the horses, so Corey went out there for about fifteen minutes.”
“So you were alone for fifteen minutes, is what you’re telling me,” he said, writing furiously.
“Y-yes,” I said, feeling my heart rate rise. Was this guy honestly thinking that I might have had something to do with the murder?
“Did you know Caroline Gibson at all?”
“I met her for about two minutes, as I was walking to the stables. She told her daughter to come with us, but Ellie left as soon as we reached the stables.”
“What did you think of the woman?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t really speak to her for long enough to make an impression,” I said. Sure, I was lying. But this guy already seemed to be thinking I might be responsible for the murder, and I didn’t want to give him even more ammunition. Plus, I really wanted to emphasize that I barely knew Caroline Gibson, which was completely true.
“Alright, missy. Since you don’t have an alibi for the time of the murder, I want you to know that you’re officially a person of interest in the crime, and you’re not to leave the state. I also need your contact information in case we need to speak to you again.”
Mutely, I handed over a business card. A person of interest? In a murder?
“I must say, I find it highly suspicious that you’ve now been involved in three murders in just a few months. What do you have to say about that?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Coincidence,” I replied, trying to keep my voice steady. Person of interest. I was a person of interest. Oh my God, how was this happening to me?
“I’ll stay in the state,” I said, getting up off the chair. I couldn’t wait to get out of this house and into the fresh air. I really needed some fresh air. This was not good. This was not good at all.
Three minutes later I was standing in front of my car, inhaling the night air. There were cops everywhere; there had to be at least seven or eight cars and vans with POLICE, MEDICAL EXAMINER, CRIME SCENE TECHNICIANS and other official sounding titles on the sides. I got into the car and left the property. I had a look for Jason’s car, but it wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
About a mile away from the house I pulled over to the side of the road, put my head on the steering wheel and started crying my eyes out. I’d seen a dead person today, and now I was a major suspect in her murder. They weren’t even tears of anything in particular, just the stress of the day.
After about five minutes I pulled myself together and continued the drive home.
Sophie and Charlotte, my sister, were expecting news about my date with Jason. Boy were they in for a surprise.
Chapter 4
I opened the front door and immediately heard a plate smash in the kitchen. Uh oh, what was going on? Rushing through to the kitchen, I found my sister Charlotte grabbing the broom while my best friend Sophie looked both sheepish and frustrated.
Sophie’s dog Sprinkles and my cat Bee were both in the living room, both of them watching what was happening over the top of the couch cushions, out of the line of fire of any spare glass. Sprinkles and Bee, together in harmony? Something was definitely going on here.
“Hey guys,” I greeted. “What are you doing?”
“They’ve decided to see if Sophie is actually a witch, and it’s not going well. Sprinkles and I are fearing for our lives. Our lives!” Bee howled from her spot on the couch, and I had to supress a smile. My little black domestic shorthair definitely had a flair for the dramatic. But at the same time, really?
“Seriously?” I asked Charlotte, who simply shrugged her shoulders.
“What?”
“Is Bee telling the truth? Are you trying to see if Sophie has magical powers?”
“Of course we are,” Charlotte replied. “After all, it’s obvious she does. She can talk to Sprinkles.”
“So what exactly was this?” I asked, motioning to the poor fragments of what had formerly been a desert plate, now lying shattered on the ground.
“Well I was trying to see if Sophie could do a simple floating spell,” Charlotte started.
“And?” I asked, actually curious about the result.
“Do you really need to ask that?” Sophie asked. “It failed, so Charlotte floated the plate in the air and tried to see if I could keep it hovering instead of having to start the spell from scratch.”
“And you can see how well it went for them,” Bee added unhelpfully from her spot on the couch.
“Wow. Well, I can honestly say that I was not expecting this when I came back here.”
“Our other option was to come and spy on you and Jason on your date, so you should probably be pretty thankful Charlotte came up with this idea,” Sophie offered, and I laughed hollowly.
“Well, you would have been disappointed,” I replied.
“No!” Sophie said. “Was it you? It’s always you. Oh my God, you two are perfect for each other, stop sabotaging everything good that ever happens to you.”
Did I mention that Sophie also had a flair for the dramatic? I laughed and shook my head.
“No. Nothing like that. Although I’m pretty sure I should be insulted. But the date didn’t happen at all.”
I explained my afternoon to Sophie and Charlotte and watched as their mouths dropped open more and more.
“I can’t believe you’re actually a suspect in a murder!” Sophie exclaimed. “What kind of moron would suspect you?”
I shrugged. “I have no idea. I mean, I didn’t even know her!”
Charlotte shivered suddenly. “But so it means that someone who was on the property at the time of the murder is definitely the person who did it?”
“I mean, it has to be. Unless there was some super James Bond style plot to get onto the grounds undetected, but from what Susan told me, that would be pretty much impossible.”
Sophie grabbed her phone and started texting frantically.
“So chances are you’ve met who it is.”
I shrugged. “Well, maybe. I don’t know who else was on the property. But I imagine I met most of the people around.”
“You have got to stop getting into these situations, Angela,” Charlotte scolded suddenly, putting her hands on her hips. I threw my hands up in the air.
“Do you think I asked for this? I was just supposed to go in, take care of Touch of Frost, and get out, then go on my date with Jason. Which was cancelled while he desperately tries to get a story into the paper tomorrow, and I get interrogated by some cop.”
“And that cop is a class-A ass, apparently,” Sophie added, looking up from her phone. “I just asked Taylor about him.” Taylor Shaw was a police officer here in Willow Bay. Sophie had been dating him for a couple of months now, which by her standards made it one of her longer-term relationships. “Taylor can’t stand him. Says they guy’s full of himself, doesn’t listen to anyone else, and pretty much should have retired ages ago. But Wawnee can’t force him out. Taylor says if anyone’s going to screw up a murder investigation, it’s him.”
I put my head in my hands
. “Great, this means I’m definitely going to jail. He’s going to think I did it for some dumb reason, and that’s going to be it for me.”
“Good,” said Bee from her spot on the couch. “You should be in jail, you lied to me about the dog staying here forever.” Apparently the truce between her and Sprinkles was over now that the magic experimentation had ended for the night.
“If I go to jail, Bee, then there won’t be anyone to feed you,” I retorted. “Then what will you do? You can’t operate the can opener on your own.”
“Charlotte won’t let me starve. Or I’ll find a different family. A better family, that doesn’t betray me by bringing a dog into the household.”
I rolled my eyes. “I told you, Bee, Sprinkles isn’t my dog. You’re still my pet, my only cat. Sprinkles is Sophie’s. And you’re lucky anyone wants you at all, you big drama queen.”
Bee replied by jumping onto the desk and knocking over a glass of water that had been sitting on it.
“Evaporao,”I said quickly, pointing at the water, focusing every ounce of mental power I had on the liquid falling towards the floor. In a flash, it disappeared. You learn to master the evaporation spell when you live with a cat. Bee glared at me, and I glared back at her.
“I’m so sorry to be a bother,” Sprinkles said shyly from his spot on the couch. “I don’t mean to intrude.” He was the sweetest dog on the planet.
“It’s alright, Sprinkles,” I told him, going over to the couch and giving him a pat. “You’re not intruding, Sophie invited you to live here with us, and you are very welcome here,” I told him. “No matter what someone else might tell you.”
Bee huffed her disapproval and went to hide inside the little box on top of her scratching post.
“Anyway, this isn’t about you,” I shot at her. “I’m the one in trouble here.”
Sophie came over and gave me a hug. “Don’t worry, Angie. You’re not going to jail. I won’t let him put you there. We can always poison him.”
I couldn’t keep myself from laughing at Sophie’s suggestion. She was always the type to go from zero to one hundred, with no in between.
“Or,” Charlotte added, “rather than actually committing murder, we can figure out who did it. After all, Angela’s getting pretty good at that sort of thing now.”
Sophie and I both looked up at Charlotte in surprise. Charlotte, actually suggesting that we investigate a crime? That was unheard of! Charlotte was the one who always thought Sophie and I were ridiculous, that we were putting ourselves in way too much danger.
“What?” Charlotte asked, noticing our looks of obvious disbelief.
“Well if you’re suggesting it, we definitely have to do it,” Sophie said.
“Yeah, for sure,” I agreed.
“I’m just looking at this logically,” Charlotte argued. “If there’s no way that police chief is going to figure it out on his own, and there’s a chance that Angela might get caught up in this when she’s completely innocent, well, the best way to fight is by finding out who the killer actually is.”
“We don’t disagree with you, Charlotte, we’re just surprised that you actually agree that this is the right course of action,” I told her. “Anyway, if you two don’t mind, I’m going to bed,” I said. “I’m way too tired to deal with anything right now. I’m starving and I don’t even have the energy to eat.”
I made it to my room, shut the door and was asleep before my head even hit the pillow.
Chapter 5
I woke up the next day the way almost all cat owners do: with a pair of fuzzy paws booping my nose.
“Wake up, Angela, there’s an emergency!” Bee was screeching at me.
“Wuh… what?” I asked groggily, pushing the cat off the bed.
“You have to get up, now!”
I reached over for my phone and saw it was quarter to six. “What’s going on Bee?” I asked, my heart starting to pound in my chest as Bee’s calls for help started to make their way to my brain.
“I’m hungry, and no one’s awake to feed me!” my cat howled. I groaned, grabbed my pillow and threw it over my head.
“Bee, it’s not even six o’clock in the morning. I’ll feed you when I wake up.”
“But you’re awake now! I made sure of that,” Bee replied.
I closed my eyes in a desperate attempt to go back to sleep, but as soon as I felt the four little paws crawling up my back, I knew it was hopeless. Bee wasn’t going to let me sleep until she got fed.
Throwing the covers off me, I forced myself out of bed. “I hate you so much,” I muttered at my ingrate of a cat, who happily jumped off the bed and began pacing the floor as she waited for me to throw on some clothes and go to the kitchen.
Bee began to purr at me while doing figure eights between my legs while I opened the can of cat food, muttering angrily under my breath about being woken up so early just to feed the cat.
I was going to have to start locking my door at night, since Bee had evidently figured out how to open it on her own.
Of course, as soon as there was any kind of movement in the kitchen, Sprinkles was up too. Being a dog, his sixth sense was knowing instinctively whenever anything remotely relating to food was happening in the house. So I grabbed his food bowl off the ground and filled it up as well.
Just as I grabbed my phone to check the time, wondering if I could possibly grab a little bit more of a snooze before I actually had to get up and go to work, it buzzed with a text from a number I didn’t recognize.
Wawnee police chief here. Be at Wawnee Police Station 8am. More questions.
I sighed. This meant I was going to have to reschedule the first few appointments for the day, at the very least. Crawling back to bed I threw the covers over my head and went back to sleep, trying not to think about the nightmare of a day I was about to have.
When my alarm went off what felt like 30 seconds later, I already had the first inklings of a headache. I asked Sophie if she could go to work and deal with helping Karen reschedule appointments, and to my relief, she did.
“Take care of yourself, ok? You should probably get a lawyer.”
I shook my head. “No, it’s ok. I don’t think I need one, yet. I won’t answer anything I’m not comfortable answering, don’t worry. Besides, I didn’t do anything, remember?”
“Yeah, but people like that don’t always care about the truth,” Sophie told me, concern in her eyes. I smiled. Sophie and I might fight like children about 99 percent of the time, but it was when things got tough that I knew she always had my back. I reassured her that I’d be fine, and headed out the door to drive to Wawnee.
On the way I stopped by Betty’s Café to grab a vanilla latte to go. I was definitely going to need the energy today. I parked the car in front of the store, and as I opened the door I just about ran into a guy leaving.
“Oh!” I exclaimed. “I’m so sorry!”
The guy managed to keep the two coffees and bag of cookies he was holding upright, then smiled at me. He was tall, with light brown hair and a clean shaven face, and strangely for Willow Bay, was wearing a full suit in the middle of summer. Willow Bay as a whole had a business-casual-at-most kind of dress code, even among professionals. This guy must have come down from Portland.
“No problem,” he told me, flashing me a smile. “Always good to get run into by a pretty lady first thing in the morning.”
Maybe it was because I was already in a bad mood, but I had absolutely no desire to be hit on by a random stranger this early in the morning, so I just smiled blankly back at him and went into the café.
“Hi, Angela,” Betty greeted me, far too cheerfully for this early in the morning. “What can I get you?”
“The biggest vanilla latte you can make me to go, please,” I ordered.
“That kind of day, is it?” Betty asked, stepping over to the coffee machine while I grabbed some cash out of my wallet.
“Definitely that kind of day.”
“Well, I hope it get
s better for you,” Betty told me as I traded her my cash for the coffee. She handed me back my change and I said goodbye, heading back to my car, ready for the twenty minute drive to Wawnee for another interrogation.
* * *
When I got to the police station, I introduced myself to the bored-looking receptionist, who motioned for me to sit down on one of the plastic chairs on the other side of the room. I saw Ellie there, her eyes red, and her hand being held by someone I didn’t recognize. As soon as Ellie saw me, though, she gave me a small smile, motioning for me to come sit with her.
“How are you holding up?” I asked her. “I’m so sorry about your mom.”
“Thanks,” Ellie replied. “I’m doing ok. It’s hard though, you know? I mean, I knew her health wasn’t great, and I knew the doctor didn’t want her to keep eating the way she did, but at the same time, you’re never really prepared for this sort of thing.”
“I know,” I told her softly. “Believe me, I understand completely.” I was very young when my parents died, but the knowledge that they were ripped away from Charlotte and I so suddenly still stayed with me to this day.
“I just don’t know how to go on,” Ellie continued. “Mom did everything for me. I know it’s embarrassing to admit. After all, I’m nineteen years old. But she wouldn’t let me do a lot of things. I don’t even know how to do a load of laundry, for God’s sake, how am I supposed to go on?” Ellie started to cry, and the woman next to her stroked her hand while making soft, comforting noises.
“It’s ok Ellie, it’s going to be ok. I’ll help you get through this.”
“Thanks, Polly,” Ellie told the woman. Suddenly, she realized the two of us didn’t know each other.
“Oh, Angela, this is Polly. She was my mom’s best friend. She was at the house yesterday, too, but she stayed inside the whole time.”
I shook the lady’s hand. It was a soft handshake. Polly had a nice, slightly haggard face; she had obviously led a life of hard work with more than her fair share of disappointment, but I felt like despite all that she was still a happy person.
Just Horsing Around (Willow Bay Witches 3) Page 3