The Witching Hour

by Anina Collins

  “I don’t think she was. I think they broke up a while ago. That was the only time I ever heard Tamara and Amy talk about him, though.”

  Alex jotted down a few things about her answers and said, “One last question. Well, two, Miss Chamberlain. When was the last time you saw Amy Perkins and do you have any idea why anyone would want to kill her?”

  Melody answered his questions quickly. “I saw her last at the meeting on July eighteenth. As for why someone would want to hurt her, I have no idea. Even Tamara’s disagreement with her never seemed to be more than a philosophical difference of opinions to me. I mean, I could be totally wrong about that, but I just can’t imagine a fellow witch hurting her. It’s just inconceivable to me.”

  “And where were you last night, Miss Chamberlain?”

  “Am I a suspect?”

  Alex didn’t answer immediately, but then he said, “We just need to know where anyone who knew Amy was last night.”

  “Oh. Well, I went to the movies to see An Affair to Remember at The Colonnade and I was back home by eleven since the movie started at nine.”

  A woman peeked her head around me and asked in a frantic voice, “Are you available for a reading? I have a question I must have answered today and every other reader is all booked up!”

  A look of relief washed over Melody’s face, and she smiled to the woman as she motioned for her to come around the table to join her. “Please, come here. We will start immediately.”

  The woman hurried around me to Melody’s makeshift inner sanctum and sat down in one of the metal folding chairs that flanked a tiny TV tray table. Melody looked back at her and then turned her attention back to Alex and me, now much happier that she had a paying customer.

  “You’ll have to excuse me, Officer Montero. Destiny calls.”

  Alex stuffed his notepad into his shirt pocket and gave me a side eye look. “Certainly. If we have any more questions, we’ll need to speak to you again. Please give my partner your number and address.”

  With that, he spun on his heels and walked away, leaving me with Melody and a very desperate woman dying to hear what the future held and practically shooting daggers from her eyes to let me know it was time for me to go. Melody seemed less upset by my continued presence and smiled as she picked up one of her flyers from the table in between us.

  “My number is on there, so if you or your partner have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to call,” she said as she jotted down her address. Handing me the flyer, she added, “And if you ever want a reading, please don’t hesitate to call. I can tell you have the right frame of mind for tarot, even if your partner doesn’t.”

  I fought back a chuckle about how Alex truly felt about what Melody and her fellow tarot card readers did and thanked her as I took the pamphlet from her. “I’ll definitely keep the reading idea in mind. I had one from Madame Cassandra earlier, though.”

  She looked across the hall toward her competition and wrinkled her nose. “Oh, she’s good, but I think I’d be able to give you a clearer picture about how to get through to a man like yours.”

  “A man like mine? How do you know that’s what I’d want a reading about?” I asked, surprised she had zeroed in on my concern without my even mentioning anything.

  Melody looked over toward the door and then back at me. “It’s quite obvious. Call me if you want to know the answers.”

  With that, she turned her back and began talking to the woman who sat impatiently waiting for her to tell her what the future held. Still a bit stunned that she’d known what worried me enough to have a tarot card reading, I headed out of the hall into the heat and found Alex standing near the car reading through his notes.

  “Well, that was interesting, don’t you think?” I asked as I joined him.

  “Interesting? I guess you could say that,” he answered without looking at me.

  Using Melody’s pamphlet as a fan, I tried to get some air moving around my head as perspiration began to form along my hairline. “She thinks you and I have problems.”

  That made him look up from his tablet, and he raised one eyebrow like he always did when he heard something he didn’t appreciate. “Who? The woman who did your reading?”

  “No. Melody Chamberlain. After you walked away, she said she could give me a reading and let me know how to get through to a man like you.”

  Now the second eyebrow joined the first up in his forehead. “Really? A man like me, huh? What kind of man would that be?”

  I didn’t want to get into this discussion there outside the tarot readers convention, so I waved the issue off and instead said, “I thought that part of what she said about Amy and Tamara having a problem over a guy interesting. I knew there’d be a man involved in this case somehow.”

  My change of topic caught him off guard for a moment, but when it became apparent I didn’t plan to answer his question, he simply turned back to his notes. “Are we thinking they were both with him or something else?”

  The memory of Tamara Ridgeway made me shudder. I shook my head at the thought of any man dating both her and Amy. “No way. Amy and Tamara aren’t even in the same league. I’m not even sure they’re from the same planet dating-wise.”

  Alex looked up at my assessment of the two women and smiled. “Have I ever told you how I love the way you describe things? Nobody pins it down as colorfully as you do, Poppy.”

  When he said things like that, I couldn’t help but be happy. Even though they were small compliments, I knew he meant them, and that’s why they made me feel so good.

  “Just think of me as the color commentary portion of the investigation. I bring the whole thing to life, so to speak.”

  “Colorful and punny. Cute. So no to the idea of both women attracting the same man?”

  “So much no I need a different word. Never. Impossible. Couldn’t happen. No way, Jose.”

  My answer made him laugh. “Okay. Got it. So what do you think the problem was between Tamara and Amy concerning this man if it wasn’t that they both were dating him?”

  “Jealousy? Tamara liked him, but he was out of her league and she resented Amy dating him?” I suggested.

  “Maybe. Jealousy is often a reason for murder. Until we know any more, that makes Tamara our prime suspect so far.”

  After our experience with her, I didn’t mind the idea of Tamara Ridgeway being our main suspect. What an obnoxious woman she was! In truth, I could see her better as a victim than a murderer, though. That personality of hers could rub anyone the wrong way. I’d only spent a few minutes with her and she’d succeeded in insulting me more than once and making me wish I’d never have to speak to her again.

  “What did you think of the three women from the convention here? They all knew Amy through being witches and spending time at the Third Eye Mind and Body Center, along with Tamara.”

  Reading off his notes, he said, “Susie Mitchell, interview number one, says she knew very little of Amy. She just joined the witches’ circle in June and she didn’t attend regularly until early July, so she never really got a chance to know the victim. She seemed genuinely upset when I told her about Amy’s death, like she hadn’t known before.”

  I stopped him as I remembered something Melody said. “Wait a second. Melody Chamberlain gave the impression that Tamara had alerted everyone to the news, so why didn’t Susie seem to know?”

  He quickly flipped through the pages of his notepad until he came to his notes on Melody and in big letters he’d written CLAIMS TAMARA TOLD THE GROUP—NO ONE ELSE SAID THAT.

  “Interesting. So did Tamara tell everyone else and they didn’t feel it was worth mentioning? And if so, that means Susie Mitchell was pretending for my benefit, but I didn’t get that feeling.”

  I instantly regretted going to Madame Cassandra for my reading instead of helping Alex with the interviews. “I’m sorry. I might have been able to help with that if I wasn’t off getting a tarot card reading.”

  He didn’t say anything i
n response to my apology and continued with his explanation of what had happened while I was absent. “The second woman, Jerilyn Fox, you met just before my questioning ended.”

  “Big earrings that I worry are going to someday rip right through her earlobes,” I said, remembering those enormous hoops dangling from her head.

  Alex cringed. “So colorful. Sometimes too colorful.”

  “Sorry.”

  Recovered from my graphic description, he said, “She heard Tamara and Amy fighting but assumed it was over the witch thing. She didn’t really know Amy, but what she knew she liked. Said she brought coconut macaroons to the Tuesday night meetings a few times. She claims to have seen Amy last at the July eighteenth meeting.”

  “Another one who says she hasn’t seen her for weeks. That begs the question of what Amy’s been doing for the past few weeks, don’t you think?”

  Alex nodded and sighed. “Yes, and I’m beginning to think that’s going to be the key to this case. The woman’s been doing something since the eighteenth of July, yet none of the people who used to see her regularly knows what. We need to find that out.”

  “I agree,” I said as a group of five women walked past us on their way into the convention. “And last, but not least, is Melody Chamberlain, who looks less like a witch and tarot reader than she does an office manager at a law firm. What did you think of her?”

  “I think she’s lying about something. What, I have no idea yet, but my gut says she’s lying,” he said as he watched the crowd of women walk into Jacob’s Hall.

  “Did you catch the way she nearly pulled those necklaces off her neck when you asked her if she’d stopped attending the meetings? I thought she’d either rip them apart or cut right through her skin.”

  He cringed again and then smiled. “I did notice that. Not exactly that way, but she seemed uncomfortable about something. And the way she said she attended the witches’ circle meetings, like it doesn’t happen anymore.”

  “I don’t think asking Tamara about it will get us anywhere,” I said, sure I didn’t want to see her again anytime soon. “Maybe we should go back in and ask Susie and Jerilyn.”

  “No, I think we got all we could from them, but I will be asking the other one on the list when we speak to them if Melody has stopped attending the meetings. For now, I think we’re done with the tarot readers convention.”

  “Where are we off to now?” I asked as he walked around the car to get into the driver’s seat.

  “I want to see how Stephen and Craig are doing on the private life of Amy Perkins. Maybe they found out something about this boyfriend Melody mentioned her having. Let’s head back to the station and meet up with them, if we can.”

  Alex pulled away from the front of Jacob’s Hall and turned the car around to head back to Sunset Ridge. We said nothing for a long time, Alex because he tended not to talk too much and myself because my mind was full of what we’d learned from the witches who spent time with Amy on Tuesday nights and what I’d found out in my reading with Madame Cassandra. I didn’t know if anything she’d told me was true, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to try to see things from a different perspective.

  “You’re unusually quiet over there, Poppy. Did your chi get all thrown out of whack being around all those soothsayers?” Alex asked as he turned onto Main Street.

  Sometimes even when he was being sarcastic he could be cute. “I don’t think that’s how chi works, but I’m fine. Just thinking about the case and enjoying the cool air over here.”

  He said nothing in response, but as he turned off the car in front of the police station, he looked over at me and gave me a smile. “You already know how to get through to a man like me, just so you know. You don’t need those people to tell you how to do that, Poppy.”

  Chapter Eight

  Even though we still had one more name to investigate from Tamara Ridgeway’s list, I had a feeling Alex had other things he wanted to check out. He hadn’t overtly acted like he didn’t believe Stephen and Craig could handle their part of the case, but his desire to return to the station instead of going to find our final person on the list told me he wasn’t completely comfortable with the way the four of us had to work together.

  Not that I was fond of this arrangement myself. While I didn’t tend to be a lone wolf like Alex, four was definitely a crowd when it came to investigating crimes. And that didn’t even factor in how uncomfortable just being around Stephen made me.

  Alex held the glass door to the station open for me, and as soon as I stepped one foot into the building, my stomach began twisting into a tight, painful knot. It was ridiculous and I knew it, but there it was.

  I literally dragged my feet, dreading the place I’d grown to call almost a second home since Alex and I began working together over a year ago. He ran into the back of me coming through the door, and I turned around to see a surprised look on his face.

  “Sorry, Poppy. I must not have been paying attention there,” he said as he gently pressed his hand to the small of my back to urge me down the hall.

  “It wasn’t you. I was just walking a little slowly,” I whispered as we walked past the receptionist.

  Leaning down, he said in a low voice, “Why are we whispering?”

  He’d made it perfectly clear that he didn’t care what his fellow officer thought of me, but I couldn’t shake my insecurity about this whole Stephen thing. I wanted so much to prove that I was truly an asset to Alex’s work on this case, but so far I’d done very little. What if he asked him about it? What would Alex say?

  We reached his office, and as he sat down behind his desk, I shut the door. I needed to get this off my chest now.

  The door closed with a click, making him look up from whatever he was looking at on his computer screen. With a sly smile, he asked, “Have something planned that requires the door being closed?”

  “I need to talk to you,” I said, pressing my back to the door in desperate need of something to steady me.

  The twinkle in his eye that had been there a few seconds before disappeared as he drew his eyebrows in. “Okay. What’s wrong, Poppy? You’ve been acting strange all day. Is something going on?”

  I took a deep breath and tried to keep myself measured even as everything I felt began to unravel in my brain. Taking a few steps away from the security of the door, I stopped behind one of the chairs in front of his desk and gripped the hard plastic in my hands.

  “I know you said the whole Stephen thing doesn’t matter to you, but it matters to me. I’m happy that you don’t pay attention to the things he does, but I do and they bother me. Now we’re working with him on this case, and it’s brought all the issues he and I seem to have with each other into sharpened focus.”

  He watched me carefully as I explained what was on my mind, his gaze never wavering as I spoke. Alex had likely thought this problem was solved by what he’d said earlier, but it wasn’t for me. I could pretend for only so long, and my ability to ignore the fact that one of his fellow officers had no respect for me whatsoever had run out.

  “Poppy, I don’t care—” he began to say, but I cut him off by raising my hand and continuing.

  “I do care, Alex. I care a great deal, in fact. I’ve tried to understand how you can be so comfortable with the fact that one of the people you work closely with is so disrespectful towards me, but I’m going to be honest here. I don’t get it. Not in the least. He’s been rude to me on virtually every occasion we’re in the same location, even after you had a talk with him. It got better for a little while, but I can still see the disgust he has for me every time I’m near him, and he doesn’t even pretend to hide it. How are you perfectly okay with that?”

  “I’m not,” Alex said quietly as a look of pain came over him, like what I said had hurt him.

  Flopping down in the chair in front of him, I felt deflated by his answer. “Then why does it seem like you do?”

  “What do you want me to do, Poppy? I’d give my life for you, but I can�
��t make people like you. I know it bothers you that he’s like he is, but he’s nobody. Derek doesn’t think much of him as a cop, and nobody really likes him on the force. Maybe that’s why he dislikes you so much. In his mind, he’s a real cop and we don’t like him, but you’re not and everyone here likes you. Well, everyone but him.”

  Now I felt stupid.

  “You make it sound like I’m some fragile little thing who gets her feelings hurt all the time, Alex. I’m not. I’ve had to grow a tough skin living in this town with all its gossipy biddies looking at me like I was some loser, but I don’t think I should have to defend myself to someone I’ve never done anything wrong to.”

  Slowly, the corners of his mouth turned up into a sexy smile and he folded his arms behind his head. “So what you’re saying is you want me to kick his ass? You want me to go all Alpha male on him?”

  “Now you’re making fun of me, aren’t you?”

  “Only a tiny bit, but I just want you to remember that if anyone ever tried to truly harm you in any way, Poppy, I’d lay down my life to protect you. You know that, right?”

  “I know. I just want to be respected for what I do with you, and nothing I’ve ever done seems to be enough for him.”

  “Why do you care what he thinks? He’s one person who means very little to everyone around you.”

  I hung my head and spoke the words even I hated to admit were the truth. “Because I’m not a cop. I’m allowed to play at being one because the police chief is a friend from childhood and I’m dating a cop. Stephen’s dislike of that makes me feel like a fraud.”

  Alex stood up and came around the desk to stand behind me. Putting his hands on my shoulders, he leaned down and kissed me softly on the cheek. I turned my head to see him looking at me with those dark eyes of his in that way that said he wished we weren’t there in his office at that moment.

  “Poppy, out of all the cops I know here and in Baltimore, you were the only one who was able to solve the case of Bethany’s murder and Helena’s. When everyone else thought I was guilty, you never gave up. You did as good a job investigating and clearing me as any cop or detective I’ve ever met. Your police work is the reason I’m standing here today. Don’t let what one person thinks change the reality of what you’ve done.”