by Blythe Baker
A Dangerous Deceit in Faerywood Falls
Blythe Baker
Copyright © 2019 by Blythe Baker
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Created with Vellum
Contents
Description
Newsletter Invitation
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
About the Author
In Faerywood Falls, magic is the curse that keeps on giving.
Marianne’s investigation into her past has stalled. The only person who seems to have the answers she needs is a manipulative spell singer – and she’s not talking. To make matters worse, Marianne is accidentally stealing other magic users’ gifts again, and she can’t seem to stop herself.
When yet another hunter turns up dead in Faerywood Forest, Marianne can’t ignore the mysterious danger plaguing the woods anymore. Not even if the trail of clues leads her to a trusted friend with something to hide.
With the evidence implicating a man she cares for, can Marianne get to the bottom of a string of killings, before the murderer strikes again?
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1
The first hints of autumn appeared in Faerywood Falls a lot earlier than I’d expected. The daylight hours were still long and warm; kids still swam in the lake, and the park in the middle of downtown was bustling with people, including a farmers market every Saturday morning and a family movie night on Wednesday evenings.
The nights, however, were cooler. There was a bite to the air that hadn’t been there since I’d first moved into the area.
The mountains in the far distance were capped with fresh snow, and every day it looked as if it was slowly making its way down the mountains. I heard visitors to the shops discussing when their children would be back in school, and how nice it would be to get back to some sort of regular schedule.
The people in Faerywood Falls were perking up, as well. Fall meant the tourists started to head home. At least the ones that had been here for the whole summer. The change of the leaves and the chill in the air in the months to come would bring a different breed of visitor.
I thought I could figure out what that kind was, exactly…what with Halloween just around the corner.
Life had been quiet for the majority of the summer. I worked at Abe’s Antiques for five days out of the week (he insisted I take another day off, and told me I was working too hard). On most evenings, I’d go see my aunt and cousin at their lodge up on the hill overlooking the lake. I’d help clean rooms, prepare meals, and enjoy time with my family.
Things in Faerywood Falls had been peaceful.
Even among the magical, Gifted population.
Bliss, my cousin who was just over a year younger than I was, kept me up to date with all of the information within the magical sphere. The spell weavers were enjoying the fact they could study the night sky, and many were working furiously to dry herbs and flowers for their potions in the winter when they couldn’t get the ingredients fresh.
I heard very little about the werewolves or vampires, and I was okay with that…for the most part. To my own confusion and embarrassment, I found my mind drifting toward the tall, dark, and handsome Cain Blackburn, the head of the vampire clan that lived in Faerywood Falls. He was flirtatious and charming, and I never knew if he actually meant what he said.
I’d only run into him a few times in the last few weeks, one of which was when he’d wandered into a café I’d discovered late one night, all mysterious smiles and glances.
He wasn’t the only one who kept appearing in my thoughts. Dr. Lucan Valerio, the town’s noted bank owner and leader of the werewolf pack, also captivated my thoughts from time to time. He visited the antique store almost every week, and he’d linger and talk to me about anything and everything. Even though I knew he was a werewolf, something in me seemed to trust him more than Cain…whose entire species lived on the lifeblood pumping through the veins of humans like me.
The curious string of murders in Faerywood Falls had led me to the doorsteps of these men, and into their lives. Whether or not they wanted me to be there, I had no idea, but I knew for sure that they both were well out of my league, both in stature and in Cain’s case, probably age.
Even still…there was no harm in admiring them from afar, right?
They weren’t the only mystery I was attempting to unravel. Since moving to Faerywood Falls, I’d discovered that I was not only adopted but also a faery. And no one had any idea who my biological parents were. My mom had found me in a basket in the forest near my aunt’s place, and had adopted me.
If I was going to ever figure out the faery part of me, then I was going to have to discover who my birth parents were. And the only hint I’d gotten about them was by meeting a ghost earlier in the summer who had commented that I looked a lot like my mother.
This mystery had brought me to city hall in the middle of downtown Faerywood Falls.
Downtown really may have been a bit of a stretch. It was more like a row of densely arranged buildings along a couple of streets. The town’s local grocery store was here, along with the bank, the elementary and high schools , and the town’s only gas station.
It also boasted a government building with the statue out front of a T. Michael Forest, who apparently was the person who founded the town not long after the United States started heading west in its earlier days. This building housed not only the city hall, but also the tax collector, courthouse, and jail all in one.
It was here that I found myself pouring over documents on a perfectly nice Friday afternoon.
The sun was on its descent toward the horizon, filling the small, dull room I was sitting in with long shadows that stretched out from the floor to ceiling bookcases, filing cabinets, and the solitary table and rickety chair I was using.
A stack of examined documents and folders were stacked on the far side of the table. Newspapers from years gone by were well organized in some plastic bins behind me, but the idea of combing through years of weekly newspapers was enough to give me a headache.
It was more like a last resort than anything.
Like in most other government buildings, I found that a lot of the records here had not yet been digitalized. Names, dates, places, events…all those things were documented from about 2005 and on, but almost everything before that was still kept in physical form in this room; the room with no pictures hanging on the drab beige walls, where dust motes floated in the air, suspended in the streams of sunlight piercing its way through the venetian blinds.
Unfortunately for me, those records before 2005 were the things I was looking for, and while the categorized system may have made sense to someone who’d made it, I felt like I would’ve had more luck just pulling things off the shelf at random.
I was just making my way through a folder deemed Noteworthy Accolades when the room’s metal door that was painted the same color as the rest of the walls swung open, and a frail, pasty woman squeezed in.
I looked up from a
long list of people who’d won the annual award for the town’s log carving competition to see the woman staring down at me with beady eyes behind her jeweled glasses. The gold chain attached to her frames swung as she pulled them off her face.
“I’m sorry, Miss, what did you say were the names of the people you’re looking for?”
She was one of the clerks that worked at city hall and had allowed me to look through the public records in this room. I didn’t think that anyone had actually been in here for some time, considering the musty smell and layers of dust on everything.
I sighed as I closed the book of achievements and pushed it away. “I didn’t,” I said. “That’s the problem. I don’t know what their names were.”
“I see,” the woman said in her mousy voice. “I was wondering if you might’ve had a revelation while sitting here cooped up all afternoon.”
“Not yet, no,” I said. “Unfortunately.”
“You said they lived here in Faerywood Falls at one point in time, right?” the woman asked, stepping toward one of the filing cabinets.
I nodded. “At least they did when I was born.”
“But no one has seen these people since then?” the woman asked.
“Not that I know of, no,” I said.
I hadn’t been brave enough to ask anyone outside of my own family if they knew who my father or mother had been. If I did, then it might give away my identity as a faery. According to my cousin, faeries hadn’t been seen in Faerywood Falls for many, many years. If anyone were to find out that I was one, it might be dangerous for me. I wasn’t sure if people would try to take advantage of the powers that I had hardly any knowledge of, or if they’d see me as a threat in some way. Either possibility, though, was bad. No one aside from my cousin, my aunt, and my pet fox Athena knew the truth.
“Have you considered looking at the death records?” the woman asked, turning to me. There was a streak of grey hair near her temples that was hardly noticeable among all her pale blonde hair, but the sunlight caught it just right, making it look silver.
I paused, considering. “No, I hadn’t,” I said. “I guess it’s possible…”
What if my mother somehow died the year I was born? It would explain her absence, and maybe even the reason why she’d left me out in the forest to begin with. Had she hoped someone would find me?
Or what about my father? Maybe he’d been the one to leave my basket out.
Regardless of who left me in the forest, it was a good place to start.
“Sure, why don’t we try…the year I was born?” I said.
I rattled the year off to her, and she wandered over to another set of charcoal grey filing cabinets. I watched as she pulled the middle drawer open and deftly flicked through file after file, muttering underneath her breath as she worked.
“Ah, yes, here it is,” she said, plucking a manila card from the drawer. She flipped it over and scanned the back before replacing it back in the drawer.
She turned and headed back through the bookshelves behind me.
A few minutes later, she returned with a reinforced cardboard box in her arms, which she set down directly in front of me.
I looked up at her. “Is this all from that year?” I asked, my heart sinking.
“Oh, heavens, no,” the woman said, popping the top off the box. She reached inside and pulled out a yellow spiral bound book. She set it down in front of me. “These are the death records from that year.”
I frowned. “There are so many pages in this book.”
The woman shrugged.
I flipped open the book. I opened it to a death certificate for an Aaron Anderson. “Well, at least they’re alphabetical,” I said.
The man’s picture was in the top left corner of the document as well, along with important information about him; social security number, address, and living kin at the time of his death.
“It’s kind of sad, seeing a life summed up like this…” I said, flipping to the next page, for an Alice Anderson. She was apparently Aaron’s cousin.
“Yes, well, I’m sure you won’t feel quite so nostalgic when you’ve looked through all those pages,” the clerk with the jeweled glasses said. She started toward the door, and then stopped just as she was turning the handle. “So…who were these people to you, if you don’t mind me asking?”
I looked up from Andrew Anderson’s page. That poor family had lost three people in one year. “My parents,” I said.
The woman’s brow furrowed. “And you don’t know their names?” she asked.
“I was adopted as an infant,” I said. “And my mom doesn’t know who my birth parents were.”
The woman’s eyes narrowed. “Interesting. Well, I hope you find the answers to what you’re looking for,” she said. “If you need me, I’ll be up front at the desk.”
“Alright, thank you,” I said.
I sighed as she closed the door behind herself.
I poured over the book for the better part of an hour before I opened up to a page somewhere in the middle of the book; I’d lost count of how many deaths I’d read about.
Tucked into the tight spiral of the book’s spine, I saw the perforated edges of what looked like the remnants of a page. I ran my finger across it.
A page had been here once, but had been hastily torn out.
I quickly flipped through the rest of the records, wondering if this had happened again. I didn’t find any evidence of any other pages being ripped out.
Standing, I scooped the book off the table and made my way back out to the front of the city hall.
The room was warm. There were polished wood beams along the walls and paintings hung between the tall windows. The floor was an old travertine tile, but whoever cleaned the building did such a good job that everything looked brand new.
The clerk who’d helped me find the records was talking on the phone behind her desk. A line of people sat in chairs nearby, scrolling through their cell phones or staring blankly into the distance.
I walked up to the clerk’s desk, feeling the angry glare of the woman sitting in the seat closest, as if I were cutting her space in line.
“Yes…mhmm. Of course, Mr. Blake. Yes. I’ll take care of it. Mhmm, buh-bye.”
She hung up the phone and looked up at me.
“Is something wrong?” she asked. “Please make it quick. As you can see we have quite the line today.”
“It won’t take a minute,” I said, setting the book down on the desk in front of her. I turned it around so she could see it the way I had.
I pressed my finger against the torn edge of the paper.
“Someone ripped a page out,” I said.
The clerk lowered her glasses, peering over the jeweled frames. Pulling the book closer to her, she squinted at the page. “You sure?” she asked.
“Pretty positive,” I said.
The woman set the book down. “Okay? And?” she asked.
“Well…I’d like to know what page is missing,” I said. “That might be the page I was looking for.”
“Honey, the chances of that being the page you need are slim to none,” the clerk said, spinning in her swivel chair away from me.
If only you knew the truth about what’s happened to me since moving here, I thought to myself. Then you wouldn’t think that it was just a coincidence. “Even still, is there any way for you to look this up in a database or something?” I asked. “I imagine that death records would probably be kept on a digital file.”
The clerk arched an eyebrow at me, and I thought I heard her mutter something about “impertinent” under her breath. “I’ll check,” she said, spinning again in her chair toward her computer. She did some swift typing, staring at her screen underneath her glasses. I was starting to wonder if she wore them for looks when she leaned in close to the screen, her nose wrinkling as she squinted at it. “Can I see the book again?” she asked.
I passed it closer to her.
After a few frustratingly silent minutes, the
woman pulled her glasses off and looked up at me.
“The records are gone,” she said.
“What do you mean gone?” I asked.
She shrugged, staring at the screen. “Just that. The ones missing from the book don’t exist in the database, either.”
I frowned. “That’s odd,” I said. “Is there any way to find those lost files?”
“I’m sorry, no…” the clerk said. “Someone with really high access would be the only ones who could get to these files, and that’s not me.”
I sighed. “Great…” I said. “So there’s nothing else you can do? Nowhere else you can look for them?”
“To be very honest with you, I just took this job about a year ago,” the clerk said. “The woman who worked here before me was the one who set up the whole system, and she periodically comes in to do checks on it. She was quite insistent that everything stayed exactly like she left it. Not that I’m complaining, of course. She was probably the most organized person I ever met. Paranoid, sure, but she’s made my job easier.”
“Would she have the access needed to delete those files?” I asked. “Or be able to figure out who could’ve done it?”
“I don’t know,” the clerk said with another shrug. “I mean, I guess she’d be the one to ask. But she’s retired, and from what I hear, she doesn’t like to be bothered in her retirement.”
“What’s her name?” I asked, already opening my phone to get her contact information.
“Ruth Cunningham,” the clerk said, scratching her cheek.
“And where does she live?” I asked.
“Whoa, you want to go visit her?” the clerk asked. “Bad idea, honey, bad idea.”