“Oh, so I’m a guinea pig now?” I said with a smile. “Well, there are worse things to be at this place, I suppose.”
“Yeah, this is the fun kind of guinea pig,” she said with a wink as she tapped the cup with her finger and muttered a spell, the cup flashing with a charm for a moment. “There’s a little pep enchantment for you, too. We’re not supposed to sell those, so don’t tell anyone.”
“I mean, coffee’s a bit like a pep enchantment on its own, right?” I said as I accepted the gorgeous-looking cup, topped with honey-colored whipped cream and crushed nuts, the aroma of fresh banana nut bread and chocolate chips wafting from it. I joked, but pep enchantments had come under fire from the police since it came out that students were using them on themselves to go several days without sleep while studying for exams.
“Anyway, what did I come here for?” I thought for a moment, distracted by the sudden temptations of creative coffees. Ever since I’d helped Elisa figure out what had happened to her aunt Susanna, I’d gotten a free coffee just about every time I walked through the doors. “Oh! Weird question, actually. You don’t know where Lara Lancaster is staying, do you?”
I asked in a low tone, but Elisa just laughed. “You make it sound like she’s staying at a hotel. Nah, she has a log cabin right on the water, just down Elm street. It’s the one with the mailbox shaped like a cat.”
I giggled at that. “Thanks, Elisa. Her cat took a field trip to my place, so I wanted to let her know she’s at the B&B. Are you sure I can’t pay you for this?”
“Absolutely not!” Elisa said firmly. “And don’t you think about touching that tip jar, either!” My hand was already halfway to my purse.
“Oh,” I said, taking my drink and taking a few steps back, trying to look casual. “That’s fine, I suppose... denaris reddoroa!” I snapped quickly, pointing from my purse to the tip jar on the bar. Immediately, four coins flew out and zipped toward Elisa, but she was ready for me. She had her own finger at the ready.
“Renumeroa!” she barked and the coins were intercepted halfway through the air as if they’d hit a wall, and they bounced back in a high arc. Three landed squarely in my purse, while the other bounced off my head and landed in my palm.
A scattered round of laughter and light applause came from the customers who’d noticed, and Elisa gave them a proud bow as I playfully scowled at her, laughing as I finished up the coffee and headed out the door.
A few minutes later, I brought my broom to a stop outside the cat mailbox and looked up at the cabin. Elisa had used the term log cabin lightly. It was a two-story building made of logs, but it stood on stilts, presumably to keep it from getting drafty or flooding, with two massive cottonwood trees growing on either side of the house, curved to hug the cabin and help support it. The branches that grew out of the trees twisted inward further up, and I realized that the living tree branches were the balcony railings.
“Wow,” I heard myself breathe, impressed. And I thought the B&B looked impressive. It had absolutely nothing on this place.
Making my way to the little staircase leading up to the deck that encircled the cabin, I made sure to stomp around a bit to make myself known. I didn’t want to seem like paparazzi, or some kind of deranged fan sneaking up on her.
Approaching the ornate front door, I knocked gently, then stood back, wondering just how much a place like this really cost. If only I’d stuck with the drama team in high school, maybe this could have been me!
About thirty seconds passed with no answer. Furrowing my brow, I knocked a little harder this time, then stalked around the building, wondering if she was even home. She wouldn’t just abandon her cat like that though, would she?
Plus, there would have to be servants here, right? I imagined a rich and famous celebrity like Lara Lancaster would have an entire household, like she lived at Downton Abbey or something. Right?
A large window took up part of the east wall, and I tilted my head as I peered inside, raising my hand and gently knocking on the glass as I looked in.
Inside was a big, comfy chair, a fireplace with a few coals in it, a table with a book, and…
My heart dropped at the sight of a dark form on the floor. Her hair covered her face, but there was no question about who it was. I’d have recognized that silky, gorgeous blonde hair anywhere. Lara Lancaster was sprawled out on the floor of her cabin.
I rushed to the door and jabbed my finger at it.
“Reseraroa!” I shouted, trying to unlock it, but the lock just jiggled in place and glowed briefly before shaking the whole door. I blinked, taken aback. It had been a while since that had happened. I put my hand on the handle and pressed down. The door swung open for me easily.
It had already been unlocked. What on earth?
Rushing in, I made my way to Lara’s side, turning her face upwards and putting my fingers to her neck. “Moon help me, you’d better not be dead!” I muttered to Lara, my heart in my throat.
She had a pulse. Relief washed over me like a wave, and I took deep breaths while pulling my phone out. As the phone rang, I looked around the room.
A wine bottle lay on the floor not far from Lara, a dark red stain on its side. My face went pale just before I heard Xander Forsetti’s voice on the line.
“Moonlight Cove Police Department, what’s your emergency?”
“Xander!” I said hurriedly. “Xander, I need an ambulance. And you, here, now!”
“Artemis?” he said, and I could hear him standing up from his heavy desk. “Arti, where are you? Are you safe?”
“Lara Lancaster’s cabin!” I replied. “She’s been attacked!”
Barely five minutes later, Lara’s house looked like a scene out of CSI or something.
Two EMTs were in the process of getting Lara onto a backboard using a spell they carefully coordinated, allowing her to float up into the air without any pressure anywhere on her body. One of them pushed her hair gently to the side as they laid her down, then used the same spell on the backboard to move it to the ambulance. The ambulance was something like a carriage compartment suspended between two large broomsticks. Two EMTs flew the brooms, two tended to the patient in the box.
I twisted my hair around my fingers as I watched them load up Lara and zip off toward the big doctor’s office that passed for a hospital in Moonlight Cove. I didn’t really know Lara – or much of her work, I was often too busy to watch TV – but she had seemed nice, from the one time I’d spoken to her.
“Trouble seems drawn to you, doesn’t it?” Xander said as he watched them leave over my shoulder. I shot him a look, and he held up a hand inoffensively.
“Hey, you know how this goes by now. You called it in, so I’ve got the usual round of questions for you. Besides,” he added, glancing over to Morgan before lowering his voice. “Things have been a little tense since the robbery at the jewelry store recently. You know how Morgan gets.”
Xander and Morgan Forsetti were the town’s police force. At least, they were the majority of the police force. They occasionally had to hire someone to help with paperwork, but it wasn’t like Moonlight Cove was a hotbed of crime that required a large police presence. However, even with the two murders in two months the town had seen recently, Xander found himself turning down the young bucks who were applying to join the force. He was picky about who he thought could handle things, and he and his sister Morgan worked best as a two-person team.
Morgan was in the process of inspecting the house, her wand illuminated as she stalked around the premises. The wine bottle had already been bagged as evidence.
As for Xander, I’d had my share of run-ins with him, thanks to my investigations. He called it snooping, but I saw things differently. I thought of it more as “unofficial helping”. I liked to think that we were able to work together a little more easily after the past couple of investigations, but Xander could be hard to read. He’d spent a lot of time in the human world before coming back home and taking over as head of police, so he could b
e a little strict about certain things.
Sure, in theory, anyone would be strict about a B&B host deciding to get involved in murder investigations, but I hadn’t been arrested yet, so I took that as a good sign!
“I just found her like this,” I explained, my eyes watching Morgan’s hard gaze finish surveying the bottom floor before she headed upstairs. “Her cat showed up at my house and said she didn’t know where Lara was - the cat’s her familiar. I didn’t want to leave the cat outside by itself, so I asked Elisa where Lara lived, I came here, and I found her lying there,” I said, gesturing to the spot where I’d found her.
As I spoke, Xander jotted notes down on a small pad. “Have you and Miss Lancaster known each other long?”
“No longer than anyone else in town,” I said honestly. “We’ve met for coffee once, that’s about it.” Lara being the celebrity she was, I hadn’t really thought about our relationship that much. Were we friends? Did one coffee together count as a friendship? Or was I just trying to pretend it did so I could say I had a famous friend. “Our familiars don’t like each other much, but you know how cats can be.”
I trailed off, but I regretted dropping that detail. Xander raised an eyebrow at me, but the barrage of vaguely accusatory questions I was expecting never came. “Well, thanks for reporting this immediately. To be honest, I was worried about something like this happening as soon as I heard a celebrity was moving into town. Big fishes in small ponds tend to attract attention.”
“You don’t like Lara?” I asked, tilting my head.
“Don’t know her well enough to say,” he replied, putting down his notepad and frowning. “It’s just that people like her can result in drama, whether they intend for it to happen or not, and that’s the last thing the town needs right now.”
I opened my mouth to respond, but Morgan’s voice calling from the second floor interrupted me.
“Xan! I got something up here. You’re going to want to see this.” Her voice sounded foreboding, and we exchanged a glance before hurrying up the stairs. To my relief, Xander didn’t stop me from following him.
“In here,” Morgan called from a room at the end of the long hallway. We moved down it, and my eyes went wide as I followed behind Xander to see what Morgan needed to show us.
It was a bedroom full of warm, autumn colors, with red rugs on the floor and a set of orange sheets and blankets on a bed in the middle of the room. The bedframe was made of wild-looking woodwork that looked like it was fresh from a tree, with a matching dresser and mirror frame.
And lying on her back on those rich orange blankets was the body of a woman about my age, her eyes open and glassy, staring up at the ceiling, lifeless. She was dead.
Chapter 3
“Who on earth is that?” Morgan mumured. “Do you recognize her?”
My heart beat so loudly I could feel it in my ears. It made a rushing sound, like the waves crashing over the beach here in Moonlight Cove. I was frozen in place, my eyes wide and round. It was like I couldn’t force myself to blink, even as my eyes started to burn and water. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her.
Off of the body.
The girl was stretched out on the bed, almost as though she was asleep, but more awkward. Unnatural. Her limbs sprawled out over the sheets, and there was a stiffness to her shape that made my stomach turn. Somehow this was worse than the body on my front lawn months ago. They were both horrible, but something about this one in front of me right now was making me ill.
Perhaps it was the fact that she was lying in a bed. A cozy bed in a cozy bedroom, meticulously decorated, lovingly arranged. This was supposed to be a happy place, a safe place. My bed was the one place in the universe where I really, truly felt like I could breathe freely and be myself, without fear. I was certain that this girl, this dead young woman, probably felt the same way about her bed, too. But instead of safety and comfort, a warm place to rest and hide from the world, her bed had become a tomb. A final resting place. There was nothing peaceful about it, though. Everything about this awful scene was wrong. Off.
The young woman was about my height and weight, similar body structure and shape. She somehow looked both young and old at the same time, but I figured that was probably just because, well, she was no longer alive. Her face was pale, her brown eyes wide as she stared blankly up at the ceiling. Her blonde hair was spread out in a fan on the pillow, crowning her paper-white face with dull gold. She was well-dressed, in the kind of outfit I could never figure out the logistics of. It was apparent that in life she knew exactly how to dress herself. Maybe she was a fashion student or something. If she was a friend of Lara Lancaster’s, it made perfect sense that she could be a style icon of some sort.
But the strangest thing of all?
“I recognize her,” I mumbled, barely louder than a whisper. Both Forsetti siblings looked over at me, their eyes wide.
“What? You know the victim?” Morgan asked, taking a step closer to me.
I nodded, biting my lip.
“Well? Who is she?”
“Her name is Arianna Long.” I answered, my voice sounding a little crackly.
“Okay. And how do you know her? Are you sure?” Morgan pressed me, always the eager one, the forceful one. Xander shot her a warning glance.
“I went to school with her, at the academy. We were only a year apart, I think,” I told them.
“You think?” Morgan repeated.
“Morgan, chill,” Xander said, his tone surprisingly relaxed. It was weird to see these little fleeting moments of familiarity between them. After all, they were brother and sister. But usually, they were both so impeccably professional that you couldn’t tell. Except for the physical resemblance, of course.
“Sorry, I wish I could remember better,” I told her, genuinely apologetic. “I’m sadly getting old enough that I can’t remember for sure. But I remember her name.”
“How long has it been since you last saw her or interacted with her? Do you - sorry, did you talk regularly? Were you friends in school? Were you close?” Morgan went on, listing off questions before I could even open my mouth to answer them. She was fiery, that much was for certain. But that was probably a good thing for a cop. She was determined. Fierce.
“I was never really friends with her,” I said, shaking my head.
“Why not? Was there something the matter with her? A reason why people didn’t like her?”
“No. We just didn’t have anything in common, I guess. We didn’t have classes together, since she wasn’t exactly my age. But I saw her at the academy a fair bit.”
“Okay,” Xander interrupted, stepping in before Morgan could fire a hail of questions at me again. “So you were never close. But what can you tell us about what she was like?”
“Uh, not much. I’m sorry,” I told him earnestly. “And anything I did remember would have been from back when we were in high school. That said though, I think she used to work as a nanny for some families in town.”
“Oh yeah?” Morgan asked, her pen at the ready to jot down anything I said.
“Yeah. I mean, it’s just one of those things you hear through the grapevine. Not gossip or anything, just a random fact. Elisa probably told me once. Or my father.”
“So you and the victim - Arianna Long, you said?”
“Yeah.”
“You and Miss Long didn’t keep in touch after high school, right?”
“No. We never even had a conversation, I don’t think. Even when we were in school. I mean, I saw her around town sometimes. At the grocery store, stuff like that. But we never met up or talked or anything,” I told him, shrugging.
“Okay. And the last you knew, she was working as a nanny? A caretaker?”
“As far as I knew.” Then I frowned, looking at another detail of the horrific scene before us. “That is weird, though.”
“What’s weird?” Morgan asked.
I pointed to the bag sitting on the bed next to Arianna’s lifeless body. “She has one of
those.”
“One of what? A purse?” Morgan asked, raising an eyebrow. “She’s a young woman. Of course she has a purse. Why would that be odd?”
I looked at her, almost amused. Did she really know even less about fashion than I did?
“Well, it’s not just any purse,” I said slowly. “It’s a Louis Vuitton, and it looks real.”
“A Louie-what? Baton?” Morgan asked, confused, and I hid a smile. She really did know less about fashion than I did. Plus, she had spent her whole life in Moonlight Cove; it wasn’t like there were luxury stores on Main Street here.
“Louis Vuitton. It’s a famous designer brand. Really expensive,” I explained.
“And you’re totally sure that her bag is a real Vuitton?” Xander asked, putting his hand on my arm. I could feel a slight tingly zing through my body at his touch and almost physically backed away from him. My moon, it was almost like being electrocuted. But in a nice way.
“I’m pretty sure,” I said. “I mean, I suppose it could be a fake. But I was pretty obsessed with those bags back in high school. I never had one, of course. They’re too expensive. But I used to drool over them in my sister’s fashion magazines. And that bag right there looks a lot like the real thing. If it’s a fake, it’s a really convincing one.”
“Sounds good to me,” Xander said. Morgan crossed her arms over her chest, looking less accepting of my assessment. I didn’t know what her issue with me was, but she always seemed very suspicious of anything I said or did. And I didn’t know her well enough to determine whether it was just me or if she treated everybody this way. Then again, I remembered that back before Xander came back to Moonlight Cove, when he was off playing cops and robbers in the non-magical world, there was a brief time when Morgan Forsetti was sheriff.
Thank my Lucky Spells: A Paranormal Cozy Mystery (Moonlight Cove Mystery Book 3) Page 2