That night, Cassy lined up the thirty-two vials of clear liquid along the edge of her kitchen table and sat looking at them as if inspiration was going to come to her suddenly. It was too late now but she was going to have to do some tests on the contents. Checking if they were really water was easy enough. But if something else was contained within, Cassy had no way of determining exactly what it might be.
The vials looked like soldiers all lined up in a row; an army of duplicitous little bottles promising so much but delivering nothing.
Cassy had promised to take Dot to Leena Donnahue’s for her weekly beauty consultation the following day. Dot’s reasoning was that she couldn’t drive herself because she didn’t want to spoil her nails driving back. It wasn’t that Cassy minded so much, she’d always be there for a friend, but having to control Dot’s temperamental car almost made her regret agreeing to help out.
“She has this new face pack,” said Dot, leaning back in the passenger seat as if she was receiving treatment there and then. “It’s the best thing. Very relaxing, and it works too. Your skin feels fuller, plumper.”
That didn’t sound like something you’d want your skin to be to Cassy. Plump skin?
“Whatever makes you happy,” said Cassy.
“Someone’s still in a foul mood I see,” said Dot.
“I’m not. Just distracted.” The car coughed and spluttered as she shifted the gear stick.
“Don’t tell me you’re still obsessed with that rival store. Hon, you have to let it go. You’re not your usual self. Mrs. Grouch is what you are.”
“Am not!”
The car didn’t agree and lurched forward.
“Well maybe a little grouchy,” she conceded.
“You know what you need?”
“Don’t you dare say a man.” Cassy took her eyes off the road to stare Dot down, but she wasn’t looking her way.
“I won’t say anything,” said Dot with a wry smile.
The trip to the Donnahue’s wasn’t far so there was no rush. Even so, Cassy put the pedal to the metal. She had no intention of hanging around once Dot had been dropped off; she had better things to be doing. The car rattled and complained as the speedometer nudged past thirty.
“Steady,” advised Dot, gripping the handle on the door.
The siren wasn’t the first thing that Cassy noticed, but the red and blue light in her rearview mirror was. Then the wailing of the approaching police vehicle snapped her out of her grumpy fog.
“Now you’ve done it, Cassandra. I warned you, didn’t I? Never mind that you’re going to push my car to the limits, now you’re getting a ticket for it.”
Cassy slowed immediately and let the cruiser pass by, quietly praying that it wouldn’t stop in front of her. A ticket was the last thing she needed right now.
The car did stop just ahead and Cassy slowed to a standstill. She waited for the officer to get out and prepared a credible sounding excuse for speeding.
“I’m not even insured on this car, Dot. I’m in trouble. Couldn’t you have walked? It’s not that far, is it?”
Through the windshield, Cassy watched the door swing open. It remained that way without anyone getting out for a prolonged moment. Dot found Cassy’s hand and held it.
Then from the police vehicle came Deputy James Jones. Cassy wasn’t sure if this was a good thing or a bad thing. He might be lenient on her but he was a man of integrity and might not let their relationship, such as it was, impact his professional duty.
But he didn’t come over to the driver side window. He didn’t even seem to acknowledge the car at all. With a crackle of noise, he activated his breast-mounted walkie-talkie. Cassy managed to pick the word’s ‘approaching the property.’ Immediately she looked to where James was now headed. Without realizing it, they had arrived at their destination.
“We’re here,” said Cassy, passively.
“What do you mean, Hon?”
“This is our stop.”
The engine spluttered to a standstill and Cassy tossed the keys to Dot. She fumbled with them in mid-air and they fell into the footwell. “That can’t be right, Cassy. This is Leena’s house.”
“I know, that’s what I mean.”
“He can’t be going in there. That’s Leena’s house. I have an appointment, Cass! Why’s he going in there?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out.” In a flash, Cassy was out of the car and marching up to the house as Dot searched for the car keys. She came up behind the Deputy who acknowledged her arrival with a silent nod.
“Please don’t tell me something bad happened,” said Cassy. The problem was that cops didn’t just show up when everything was going fine.
“What are you doing here, Cassandra?” Everyone always called her by her full name when they were serious.
“We have an appointment here.”
James looked around and on seeing that Cassy was alone, looked concerned. Then as if to answer his query, Dot fell out of the car, her hand raised in triumph as she clutched the keys.
“Found them!” Dot got to her feet and quickly joined Cassy.
“I don’t need back up,” said James. “Especially from you two.”
“But we have an appointment,” Dot said as if that made everything all right.
Cassy nodded in agreement. “That’s what I said.”
Before the three of them reached the house, the front door opened and out stepped William Donnahue, sometimes known as Willy. When Cassy had last seen him, she had been more than a little rude to him, something that she regretted, doubly so now as she saw the distraught look on his face.
Deputy James asked Dot and Cassy to wait outside but Willy let them in anyway.
“It’s Leena,” he sobbed, one hand clenching Cassy on the upper arm with a gloved hand as if he was about to fall. “I don’t know what to do. She was everything to me.” The man was diminished, smaller somehow than the last time Cassy had seen him in the Spicery.
He led them through the well-appointed hallway to the immaculate kitchen where he made them coffee as if on auto-pilot. No one had asked, nor had he offered. Immediately Cassy recognized the behavior; returning to daily routines to impose some kind of normalcy in the face of extraordinary events. Cassy knew in her heart what had happened even if Willy hadn’t said what it was, hadn’t dared vocalize what had put him into shock.
James had continued into the house, towards the bedroom. Now he returned grim-faced.
“I’m glad you two came along when you did,” he said to Cassy. “Do you think you can stay with Mr. Donnahue while I sort things out?”
Cassy nodded but Dot looked on, confused.
“Where’s Leena?” she asked. “She does know I have an appointment, doesn’t she?”
The deputy didn’t know how to deal with the absurd question and asked Cassy for assistance.
Whether Dot was being deliberately dumb or not was hard to tell, though Cassy could probably guess.
On the kitchen table, a shiny metallic box had been opened. It segmented out into several trays, each with a selection of beauty products; nail gloss, false nails, cleansing creams and the like, though it was one item in particular that grabbed Cassy’s attention. It mocked her with its little grinning cartoon face peeking over the edge of the plastic tray; a smiling cauldron.
“Do you take cream?”
Cassy was taken aback by the innocent question but swiftly answered. Taking her mug, Cassy noticed that Donnahue’s hands were shaking ever so slightly. Drips of coffee splashed over the side.
“She’d been feeling unwell for days but I never thought anything of it. You know Leena. She’s a trooper. She doesn’t let anything slow her down. But just last night—”
Dot looked to William Donnahue, perplexed. “Is she all right?”
With an unbelieving groan, James left the kitchen once more and retreated to call an ambulance. His tone was grim but efficient.
“She’d dead, Dorothy,” he said plainly. There w
as a stoic bravery in him now, as if Dot’s flippant misunderstanding of the situation had resolved him to come to terms with the truth.
Cassy knew that Willy Donnahue was used to being in control. If she remembered correctly from the idle chit-chat in her store (when he used to frequent it, pre-Hocus Pocus) he was high on the corporate ladder in a nearby metalworks. Or at least he had been until his recent retirement. It saddened Cassy to think that he now had to spend his well-earned retirement alone.
Dorothy was furious. This was such a rare thing that in all truth, Cassy couldn’t remember the last time she had ever seen Dot so wound up. She had insisted on driving back home, which she now did with short-sighted zeal. More than a few times Cassy had reflexively ducked as they came dangerously close to other traffic, shrinking into the passenger seat as if that would have any effect on the outcome of a disastrous crash.
“Why did you let me make a fool of myself back there?” demanded Dot. “No one said that Leena was dead.”
“I thought that it was clear.”
“Not to me it wasn’t. Unless someone says ‘so and so is dead’, I’m going to assume that they’re alive.”
It was useless to argue with her. Once Dot had a version of events in her mind it was an uphill battle to get her to reconsider. It was impossible for her to accept that perhaps she hadn’t been picking up on the clues and not, as she believed, that everyone else was trying to hide it from her. For a moment Cassy even thought that Dot was more annoyed about her appointment being canceled until she went quiet. Against the rattling quake of the aging engine, Cassy heard soft sobs.
“You okay?”
Dot took her eyes off the road for an instant and Cassy saw that they were rimmed with red.
“She was a friend,” said Dot. “I never really went to her for a beauty treatment. Look at me, do you think I really need it?” Dot was being a hundred percent serious when she said it. “It was an excuse more than anything.”
Cassy realized now that Dot hadn’t been oblivious to what was going on earlier but rather she had been blocking out the truth as a kind of defense. Her mind simply couldn’t compute that her friend was dead.
“You’ll solve it, won’t you?” asked Dot suddenly.
“We don’t even know the cause of death yet, Dot. She wasn’t exactly young, you know.”
“Younger than me.” There was no reply to that so Cassy kept quiet. “I saw you looking around back there. I saw your mind going into overtime. You suspect something, don’t you? What did you see?”
Maybe Cassy hadn’t been as discrete as she had intended, or maybe it was simply that Dot was just used to Cassy’s ways. They had spent a lot of time together over the last few years. There was no point in denying it. Cassy had immediately started to loom for the telltale signs as soon as it had become apparent that Leena had met her end. It was a well-known fact that the primary suspects in most domestic murders were immediate family. In this case, it was Willy Donnahue. His trembling hands could have been down to shock, but his composure seemed to suggest otherwise. Another explanation was increased adrenaline in the blood, which the body produced in times of stress when focus was needed.
These were just little things, which on their own meant nothing and only gained meaning had there been other things to back them up. But there were other things. He had been wearing gloves, the kind that you might put on to do the dishes; bright yellow rubber ones. Only Mr. Donnahue hadn’t been doing the dishes. His gloves were dry and the kitchen had been free of clutter.
On their way out, Deputy Jones had led them past the room where Leena was. Cassy caught a glimpse through a crack in the door and had spied an oddly tranquil scene. Leena had been laid on the couch and had Cassy not known otherwise would have assumed that she was asleep. An odd detail had been that her arms were crossed, not as if relaxing, but in the manner of someone prepared for burial.
But none of this meant anything. No sooner had she conjured the elements in her mind than she dismissed them. They were a distraction from the one thing clawing for her undivided attention. Leena Donnahue had bought items from Hocus Pocus. In her professional and well-stocked beautician’s case there had been at least two things with the distinctive logo adorned on them.
It was not a smoking gun. Far from it. But it was the very start of something.
“It won’t be possible but I’d love to have another look around the house.” Or in the garbage outside, she was about to say. The amount of clues to someone’s life, or death, that could be found in household waste was extraordinary. “What I really want to do is get back to Patty to see if she’s managed to dig anything up on the Sisters.”
“You’re obsessed, you know that?” asked Dot who seemed to have composed herself. Her driving had certainly improved.
“Obsessed is good,” said Cassy. Dot plunged the gas to the floor.
Word of Leena’s death had spread fast. By the time Cassy and Dot returned, Patty was ready with questions, none of which could be answered satisfactorily. She kept to what she knew. Leena Donnahue had been found dead by her husband earlier that morning. Cause of death unknown.
That, Cassy had to admit, was the full extent of the facts. There was nothing more to go on, except…
Except that something was making her skin crawl, making her itch. No matter what she did to distract herself, the sensation persisted.
“You okay, Hon?” came the frequent refrain throughout the day, often accompanied by a fresh cup of tea as Dot did her best to tend to Cassy.
There was no avoiding the elephant in the room, however. That unspoken thing was increasingly occupying Cassy’s thoughts. She knew that Hocus Pocus was responsible in some way for both Leena’s death and the girl at the lakeside. It was no coincidence that their products were associated in each instance. The only real problem was one of motive. This wasn’t so much a case of working out who had done it, but why they had done it. Until she could figure that out, there was nothing she could do. Any evidence was purely circumstantial.
It was Patty’s afternoon off, but she came into the Spicery anyway with good news. It was exactly what Cassy had been hoping for.
“I did a bit of digging around online, just as you asked,” said Patty who cleared a space on the table where Cassy would normally prepare some of her signature blends. The old wood table was stained with years’ worth of ingredients that streaked the surface with a muted rainbow. “You were right, Hocus Pocus does have stores in other locations—or rather, they did.”
Cassy pored over the website Patty had brought up on-screen. It was a simple thing with a map and not much else. Clearly it hadn’t been maintained for some time and reminded Cassy of her own.
“What am I looking at here, Patty?” asked Cassy. As far as she could tell, there was nothing strikingly important. No smoking gun.
“Okay, so the site’s old. It hasn’t been maintained and none of the links work anymore,” said Patty. She dragged the cursor over to the map and clicked. “But the map still works.” A more detailed image came up showing the location of what Cassy had to assume was a previous business venture by the three sisters. Information appeared next to the address in a little pop-up window. “This is the very first Hocus Pocus store.”
Cassy looked blankly at the screen. She saw everything but couldn’t decipher what Patty was getting at. She looked to the younger girl, pleading to be enlightened.
“Don’t you see? There’s nothing there! The location isn’t a location.”
Patty was right. The map indicated what must have been a section of empty docklands somewhere upstate.
“So it was a front for something. A shell company.” Cassy pulled back from the screen and rubbed her eyes. There was nothing illegal about this revelation, but it was suspicious. Very often, companies based themselves in particular regions for tax reasons, even if they didn’t operate out of there.
With a dexterous flurry of clicks, Patty moved to the next thing she had uncovered. It was a local n
ews article about the grand opening of a new store. It was merely a few column inches long, but it was the image that came with it that caught Cassy’s attention. Once again there was that grinning cauldron mocking her. The design was the same as it is now, though it was more fussy and less professional, but it still managed to make bile rise in Cassy’s stomach. It adorned the front of a small shop, a real shop in some place called Newton, according to the caption. Standing proudly below the sign were the three sisters, beaming into the camera.
“So this is the real first store. Am I right?”
Patty nodded but just kept looking at Cassy as if expecting something. Cassy looked back at the photo and saw that her initial assumptions were wrong. These weren’t the three sisters—or rather, two of them were present and correct. Circe and Morgana stood on either side of someone Cassy didn’t recognize. A fourth sister?
“Who is that?” Cassy scrolled through the adjoining article, scanning for keywords, and found what she was looking for. Amanda Beal was the woman in question.
“First franchisee,” said Patty. In a separate window she brought up Amanda Beal’s Facebook page. It was all kitten photos interspersed with stories of women’s marches. Standard stuff.
“There’s nothing about Hocus Pocus on here,” said Cassy as she gazed lovingly at a cat sitting on a dog’s head.
“Exactly—I looked too. Had to go back two years to find any mention of it. There’s this article of course, but after that, it’s bare.”
“Is it still open? New management?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nada. Closed down shortly after Amanda Beal left town. No new ownership. Seems like the other two just moved on.”
Patty showed the rest of her research and Cassy saw a pattern emerging. Circe and Morgana had opened four more stores since that first one and each had closed shortly after, the longest lasting a whole year. The previous one didn’t make it past a week. In each instance, Circe and Morgana (the more Cassy thought about it, she realized that these had to be assumed names) had completely cut themselves off from the franchise and moved on to a new town. It seemed like they were steadily heading down the East Coast. Their latest endeavor had taken them to Havenholm and Cassy had to wonder if it had only been chosen because it was next in line on their journey south.
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