Stop and Spell the Roses

by Stacey Alabaster

  She knew that I would object to it and tell her that she was wasting her money and her time. That it was pretty difficult to make money this way, and that I was worried about her.

  But looking down at the photos of Vicky that accompanied the invite, with her grinning and holding up the tubes of cream like they were first-place trophies, I could see that she was already heavily invested in Oasis Creams.

  This could only mean one thing—trouble.

  When Kaylan Moore wasn’t hacking, he worked as a painter, painting the interiors and exteriors of any house in the Swift Valley district that he could access by push bike.

  It was a little strange to see him in white overalls as I entered the house that he had given me the address to, where he was splattered with bright-colored paint. Bright rather than the dark he had been just a day before.

  He took his earphones out and told me that painting suited him, as the jobs were mostly solitary. There were some times when two or three other painters joined him if it was a big job, but a lot of times it was just him, alone. Gave him a chance to think and to listen to music.

  The house was old, over a hundred years, but was being renovated and fitted with a new kitchen and bathroom, both of which Kaylan had been tasked with painting. There was view of the side of the mountains through the curtainless windows.

  I asked Kaylan if he had any updates for me, since it had been a day. He did, he told me, but he was not totally at the bottom of the mystery yet.

  A bit annoying, considering his exorbitant price tag, but I also wasn’t that surprised that he hadn’t quite cracked it in twenty-four hours as promised. It didn’t seem to me like something that was simple enough to solve in just one day.

  Kaylan cleared his throat. “Whoever sent these messages is pretty slick,” he commented as he picked up a paintbrush and walked, very slowly, over to the wall. He started doing long, slow, languid brush strokes up and down the wall. It looked like he took as long to paint as he did to hack computers. I had to guess that he was being paid per hour, not per job, and so it would be to his financial advantage to make the job go for as long as possible.

  Was he doing the same to me?

  He stopped painting. Looked down at the ground. A drop of red paint hit the drop sheet below. “They might have put a curse on Jolene. That is why she died.”

  His voice was quiet. He just stared down at the drop of paint as it soaked into the white sheet.

  I knew that he was scared and reaching for the best superstitious explanation that he had for the horrible thing that had just happened. It was human nature. Perfectly understandable.

  But only witches had the power to place a curse on someone.

  “I don’t believe that is the case, Kaylan,” I said gently. “And I’m sure you don’t either, deep down.”

  “There are forces out there that you and I don’t even know about,” he said in a low, slightly sinister voice that I think was supposed to frighten me.

  Instead, I just stifled a laugh. Oh, I know all about them, buddy. Don’t you worry about that.

  “Are you starting to get scared about working on this case with me?” I asked, giving him the opportunity to back out of our arrangement, but Kaylan shook it off and assured me that he was fine to continue. That he had handled trickier situations than this before.

  “I received one of the messages as well,” I told him, and he spun around, eyes wide open.

  “You need to forward that message,” he said. “You need to do what it says.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that my plum tree had already been ruined, but he seemed to pick up on the fact that I was a little quiet and told me that I could reverse the curse if I forwarded the messages.

  “My friend Vicky already did,” I said.

  He shook his head. “No. You’ve got to do it. A friend standing in as a proxy isn’t going to work here.”

  I wanted to tell him that I had seen and done some crazy things over the past few months and that a few text messages were not going to scare me, but we were interrupted by a loud engine and the stomping of feet headed toward the old house.

  “It’s the cops.”

  I looked at Kaylan, confused. How did they even know anyone was in this old abandoned house? Kaylan only had a push bike parked out the front.

  It was me they were after. They had been tailing my car up the mountainside.

  I opened the door like it was my house and stared at the officer glowering back at me. “What do you want?” I asked him a bit defiantly. I wasn’t doing anything wrong.

  It was Constable Blue. I always got the feeling that he didn’t like me stepping on his turf, ever since I had started solving cases. Well, I wouldn’t have to if he was any good at his job, would I? When I first started Sparrow Investigations, I thought I’d be catching cheating spouses and finding lost pets. It had never been my original intention to take on the cases that the cops couldn’t handle.

  So now, we were having something of a standoff.

  “Do you have the victim’s phone?” he asked me

  It wasn’t the question I had been expecting, and I was a little thrown.

  “Oh, er, um.”

  I hadn’t even thought about that after Jolene had been killed. I’d kept the cell as part of the investigation for my chain letter case, not even thinking how bad it looked to have the phone of a murder victim.

  I handed it over and explained that it was just an oversight, but Blue turned it over and inspected it with suspicion. Then he stared back at me. “You tampered with this.”

  “No,” I said and started to explain about the text messages, but something stopped me.

  I realized then that not only was Kaylan not standing behind me, but he was no longer in the house at all. When I looked over my shoulder, I could just spot him through the window, grabbing his bike and hopping onto it.

  Kaylan made a dash for it down the hill before the cops even realized that he was there. It wasn’t until I met up with him later that evening that I was able to find out why

  “Do you know how much time in jail hackers can get?” he asked me as he started stuffing fries into his mouth. We were back at his favorite place, Han’s Burger Joint. “I could get up to ten years for some of the stuff I’ve hacked—including police databases.” He stopped to swallow and to finally take a breath. “And then, even if you do get released, there are always all these crazy conditions, like you can never touch a phone or the internet again.”

  He shook his head. “I am going to need more money.”

  “Kaylan, I am already paying you more than I can afford,” I said.

  “Then you are going to have to find someone else to track down this chain letter guy,” he said, looking worried. “’Cause I can’t afford to do this with all the risk involved. And to be honest, I don’t want to mess with this bad luck stuff any longer.” He looked at me and then tossed down his napkin. “And if you want my advice, I don’t think you should, either.”

  4

  I liked a party as much as the next person. I liked music and dancing and meeting new people and stuffing my face with chips and dip.

  I wasn’t, however, a huge fan of hand creams. In fact, I wasn’t sure that I had ever bought a tube of the stuff in my life. But Vicky was selling it to me like it was gold in a bottle, an elixir for the stresses of modern life, which could cure all my ills. She told me that with all the farm work I did, as well as all the time spent driving around as part of my case work, gripping steering wheels, it was important that I replenish the moisture that I lost.

  In her living room, Vicky was busy making up gift bags for her party the following day. Making the house look enticing. I unscrewed the lid of the cream to inspect it further.

  I took one sniff and recoiled. Sixty dollars for this? I would pay a smooth sixty bucks to never have to smell that stuff again in my life!

  It smelled a little bit like damp carpet, but there was also a strange spiciness to it, so it hit you right i
n the nostrils and stayed there. I quickly put the cap back on.

  “I know,” Vicky said, pulling a face that was half worry, half apology. “They have an . . . interesting scent, don’t they?”

  I grimaced. “That’s one way of putting it.”

  “An acquired smell.” She still looked worried. “Do you think this is going to put people off buying them?”

  I think she wanted me to reassure her or sugarcoat things for her, but I wasn’t willing to. “Yes, I do, Vicky. Who is going to pay sixty dollars for their hands to smell like carpet that hasn’t been cleaned or ventilated in twenty years?”

  Was that too harsh?

  She looked appalled. And hurt. “Ruby, I thought you would be supportive of this! This is important to me. I need to make some extra income to pay the bills. This is a job.”

  “But you already have a job,” I said, frustrated. “You work for me.”

  “Part-time,” she replied quietly as she looked down at the bowls of chips she had paid for and put out for the guests a day too early.

  Okay, that was fair enough. Until the business was a little more established, I only had enough in the budget to pay her on a part-time basis.

  “What about your music?” I asked gently. “That’s a second job. That’s your career, Vicky. Don’t let anything get in the way of your passion.”

  She glared at me. “And that hasn’t exactly been going well recently, has it? Or do I need to remind you that I lost the chance to tour with Ribeye Bandits and I got fired from the Old Swift Town Band? All within the past three months?”

  No, she didn’t need to remind me of those things. I had been right there with her. And yes, she had been facing a few setbacks lately. I started to second-guess myself. Maybe I should have been more supportive of the hand lotions endeavor. But then I decided that no, I shouldn’t back down. I felt like I was being a way better friend if I was honest with her. I didn’t want her to lose any more money buying these hand lotions that were virtually unsellable.

  “I’m sorry, Vicky. I just can’t support this scheme,” I said. “I think it’s stupid, and you will never be able to sell any of these creams.”

  “Then you are not invited to the party,” she said, and grabbed the basket of lotions and stomped off. “Or any party of mine ever again!”

  If I believed in bad luck, then I would have believed that my bad luck was continuing.

  “Knock, knock!” I called out.

  It was tradition for me to turn up at Lisa’s with a whole box of plums for her, and she would trade me for a few pallets of her strawberries in return. But this time, I was empty-handed. I apologized when she answered the door, saying that I hoped she would still let me in without a quid pro quo.

  She opened the door, looked down at my empty hands, and cocked her head in sympathy. “I heard about your troubles with the crows,” she said with a pout. “That is why I always keep my precious fruits under netting.” She raised a judgmental eyebrow. “Maybe it’s time for you to try the same.”

  Yeah, well, Lisa wasn’t a witch, was she? She was a nonmagical woman, only a few years older than me, who worked at a bakery in town. So she had no idea what she was talking about. Netting might be necessary for mortals, but I’d never had that problem before. Animals were my friends, not my enemies.

  She phrased her criticism as concern, of course, like she was offering me genuine advice. Like she would just hate for any more bad luck to befall me.

  Hmm. Except now her biggest competition had been entirely taken out of the running.

  I glanced up at the sky, on the lookout for any birds as she led me around the side of her house toward her strawberry patch.

  Her strawberries actually shone in the sun, like they had been polished. Lisa let me sample one. Not the best of the best, of course, but even her rejects were incredible.

  I had no idea how she got that unique flavor into them.

  “Do you know who will be taking over the judging?” I asked Lisa, who was lightly spritzing the patch with a dainty little water bottle.

  She shook her head. “No. I was afraid—I think we all were—that the show would be completely called off, but apparently they have found someone to step up and take Jolene’s place.”

  I frowned. “But we don’t know who yet?”

  “That is being kept under lock and key,” she replied. “Safety concerns, I would assume.”

  I nodded. I supposed it made sense. But I was going to have to get the name of that judge. Because they had just gone straight to the top of my suspects list.

  Lisa pouted at me again. “I really am sorry about what happened to your plums, Ruby. I always appreciate a good bit of friendly competition. And I wanted to compete against the best.”

  The wheel of fortune may have swung around on me, killing my plums and my friendships. But some other things had changed as well. Maybe my fortune really was turning around—in a good way, as well as a bad way.

  Maybe that was what balance was all about.

  I had a date. At least, I thought it was a date. For some reason, whenever Akiro asked me to go somewhere, I suddenly got all weirded out and too nervous to clarify whether it was a date date or just a friendly outing between two friends. My words seemed to stick in my chest, as though defining what we were would ruin everything.

  But the restaurant we were meeting at had a view of the lake. And even the entrees cost twenty dollars. That, at least, gave me a bit of a clue that this was a real date. I mean, it wasn’t the burger joint.

  I couldn’t even imagine what sort of person would date Kaylan Moore.

  “So, did you RSVP to Vicky’s party?” I asked Akiro after our wine had been poured. The moon was just coming out, and the reflection played on the lake to our left. It wasn’t really a topic I wanted to linger on, but because things felt a bit awkward, I thought it was one of the few topics we could discuss that wasn’t directly about either of us.

  He shrugged. “I don’t intend on buying anything, but I want to support her. I figured it can’t hurt, can it? So, I suppose I will see you there?”

  I didn’t tell him that he would definitely not be seeing me there.

  There was a period of silence that lingered too long, and I realized it was getting awkward. Akiro must have realized it as well, because he blurted something out.

  “I received the message,” he said, and at first I was confused about what he was talking about. I thought he was still talking about the invitation to Vicky’s hand lotion party and that he was having some memory problems again. Thanks to a spell that had been cast on him a few weeks earlier, his memories had gotten a little jumbled and confused.

  “No. I got one of those text messages. The chain letter message.”

  The waitress delivered our soup, but I was too stunned to really take notice.

  I had naively thought—hoped, I suppose—that the messages would slow down and stop, following the death of Jolene McGill. That whoever sent the first message had realized this was not stuff that should be messed with.

  “When?” I asked him, putting my spoon down.

  “Last night.”

  “Can I have a look at it?” I asked. “For the case, I mean. I just want to compare it.”

  Akiro hesitated for a moment, but then got his phone out. “I’ll just send it to you,” he said, and I quickly interrupted.

  “Whoa, whoa, no, don’t do that. You can’t send it to anyone.”

  He laughed very faintly. “I think that horse is already out of the station,” he said. “You would be twenty-first on the list of people that I sent it to.”

  I almost knocked over the glass of wine in front of me.

  “You passed it on?” I asked, appalled. I was also completely shocked. Akiro was the least superstitious person I had ever met in my life. Did he really believe that he was going to be cursed with bad luck if he didn’t pass on a lousy chain message?

  “I couldn’t risk it,” he said, sounding defensive. “It’s not lik
e any harm can come of just passing it on, right? I sent it to people I don’t really know that well,” he said, as though that justified it or made it better.

  “Akiro, I can’t believe this,” I said, shaking my head. I was very, very disappointed.

  He stared at me. “Well, look what happened to you. Look what happened to Jolene.”

  “What happened to Jolene had nothing to do with that chain message,” I said, almost banging the table with my fist in frustration. “You should know better than that, Akiro.”

  He was still trying to justify it, asking what harm could it have done, but by that stage, I couldn’t even listen to him. The harm that was done was that twenty more people had received that horrible message. And what if there really was a curse? It was spreading. Like a virus. Just like Vicky had warned me.

  Maybe worse than any of that, I felt like I didn’t even recognize or understand the man who was sitting across from me.

  “I just never pegged you as the superstitious type, Akiro.”

  He told me that he was no longer hungry and got up to pay the check before our main meals had even been ordered.

  So that was the end of the date, then, I supposed.

  Seems like my bad luck had struck again.

  And the wheel of fortune hadn’t budged at all.

  5

  “Oh, curses are very real, Ruby.”

  I hadn’t expected to hear anything less from the coven’s head witch, so I took her opinion on the matter with a grain of salt.

  It was a bright, sunny afternoon, and Geri, even though she was a witch, was not immune from the fever that was spreading through Swift Valley. Garden show fever. She intended to enter her squashes into the competition, and she was on a watering schedule, so I followed her out the front door and she led me down a path along the side of her path. I was having flashbacks to my visits to both Lisa and Jolene.