The Witching Hour

by Anina Collins

  Chucking Alex on the shoulder, Derek said, “Good. You’re going to have to keep working with Craig too. I forgot to mention that.”

  “I knew there would be some catch,” Alex said with a laugh. “I’ll see you back at the station first thing tomorrow morning.”

  After Derek left, I walked up to Alex and wrapped my arms around his waist to hug him. Looking up, I saw he was happy with how things had turned out too. “All’s well that ends well, right?”

  “I guess, but we still don’t know who murdered Amy Perkins, so the case hasn’t ended yet.” He pressed a light kiss onto my lips and continued, “But we can leave that for tomorrow. Tonight, I thought we’d have a date night instead of me cooking lemon chicken. Dinner at Diamanti’s and maybe a movie sound good?”

  Holding his face in my hands, I smiled. “It sounds perfect to me.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Dinner at Diamanti’s impressed as always, with Alex claiming the chef made his bourbon pork chops better than ever before as he pushed the plate away from him. My entrée choice of roast beef with red wine gravy tasted delicious, and both Alex and I raved about the garlic mashed potatoes and steamed green beans served with our meals.

  I finished my Cosmo and considered having another one, but as Alex drank the last of his scotch neat and placed the glass next to his plate, I saw the clock behind the bar said it was nearly seven-thirty. If we had another drink, we might be late.

  “We better get going. The movie starts at eight, and I’m worried there might be a huge crowd tonight.”

  Alex narrowed his eyes in disbelief and leaned back against his chair. “A huge crowd? Poppy, if all of Sunset Ridge decided to go to the movies tonight, The Colonnade would still only be half full. The place is the biggest theater I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something since I lived in an actual city before.”

  The Colonnade was large, especially for a small town movie theater. Built in the 1950s, it had shown movies every day, except for holidays, since its grand opening when a movie ticket cost something like twenty-five cents and people drove cars the size of the QE2. My father liked to tell the story about when he was just a kid and snuck into the movies with his friends to see a special showing of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho when he was thirteen years old. The group was caught halfway through the movie crouched down in one of the four loges at the top of the theater and thrown out after the manager called each of their parents.

  Why The Colonnade had been built so large always baffled people outside of Sunset Ridge, but for those of us who’d always lived here, we never thought about it. It was just The Colonnade, the place to see movies.

  “Well, I don’t want to miss the previews. And I love that old timey thing they have with the dancing hot dog jumping into the bun.”

  Alex shook his head and smiled. “I’ve always thought that whole thing was very sexual.”

  Sometimes he said the strangest yet most intriguing things that I had to wonder what else he kept locked up in that mind of his. As I stood from the table to leave, I grabbed my purse and said, “I may never look at that cartoon the same way again, you know.”

  He found my reaction amusing, like he often did when he said things that caught me off guard. On our way to his car, he ribbed me about never picking up on the sexual aspect of the dancing hot dog cartoon, not believing I’d never noticed not even once that it had to be more than just a hot dog jumping into a bun.

  “You know, Poppy, of all the people in this world, I would have thought you would have seen that,” Alex said as he slid into the driver’s seat and turned the key in the ignition.

  “Why? Why on Earth would you think I, of all people, would see that in a children’s cartoon?”

  He stopped at the corner and turned left to head toward The Colonnade. “Because you always see things that aren’t there.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked, quickly becoming annoyed that I didn’t understand him.

  “Don’t get angry. I’m complimenting you. Whenever everyone else sees the surface of something or someone, you see what’s below, the truth of the situation.”

  Flattered by his assessment of me, I gave him a love tap on the upper arm. “Oh, well, that I’ll admit to. But I think it’s more a female thing than it is a me thing. Females tend to overanalyze everything, so it’s second nature for us.”

  Alex glanced over at me and smirked. “Then why didn’t you pick up on the hot dog and the bun thing?”

  “Because I’m not a perv.”

  Throwing his head back, he laughed out loud. “A perv? I think I object to that.”

  He pulled the car into the parking spot and turned off the car. Leaning over, I kissed him sweetly and said, “Well, object all you want. The overanalyzer didn’t see all that sexy stuff in the hot dog cartoon. Ready to go?”

  For one of the first times in public, Alex and I walked hand in hand down the street to the front door of the theater. Like earlier in the afternoon, people saw us and had no response whatsoever.

  Being ignored never felt so good.

  The Colonnade had an old fashioned ticket booth in the front of the building, and thankfully, the line to buy tickets wasn’t long since the previews would be starting at any minute. We reached the window within five minutes of arriving and saw a man sitting there. His dark hair hung in his eyes even though it had been cut short everywhere but on the top of his head. It had a very eighties look to it.

  He seemed engrossed in a card he was reading and didn’t see us waiting, so Alex tapped on the glass to get his attention, startling him. Looking up, his eyes flashed shock at being interrupted.

  “Can I help you?” he asked in an irritated voice, like we’d done something wrong by wanting to be waited on.

  “Hi, Richard. Didn’t mean to scare you. We’d like two tickets to the eight o’clock show,” Alex said in a tone far nicer than the man had given us.

  I wondered for a moment if Alex knew him, but then I saw his nametag pinned to his shirt said Richard with the words How Can I Help You Today? just below his name. Too bad he wasn’t as friendly as what was hanging off his clothes.

  Alex turned toward me and whispered, “I think we interrupted him just as he was reading a love letter. See the card? It says, ‘Love, M.’”

  Craning my neck, I tried to see what he was talking about, but the movie clerk had covered it with his arm. Sorry we broke up your romantic moment, Richard.

  He shoved the tickets out to us through the hole in the window and gruffly said, “That’ll be fifteen dollars.”

  For a moment, Alex did nothing. He didn’t say a word or even reach for his wallet. He just stared into the booth.

  “I think he wants us to pay,” I joked as I nudged his arm. “Do you want me to get this?”

  As if my touching him pulled him out of a daydream, he looked over at me blankly and shook his head as he hurried to get out the money to pay for the movie. “No, I’m fine. I got this.”

  We walked into the theater, and I had the sense something was off with Alex. I asked him what was wrong, but he just put a smile on and told me he’d been deep in thought, but he wouldn’t say about what, so I didn’t ask.

  He’d tell me when he wanted to.

  “That still stands as one of the best movies ever,” I declared as we stood to leave the theater. “I don’t usually go for scary movies, but Rosemary’s Baby is one of the greats. I’m so glad The Colonnade does these oldies movie nights.”

  Alex shrugged as we hit the outside and the lights from the lobby suddenly seemed too bright compared to what we’d been used to for the past two hours. Squinting, he looked at me and said, “It’s not one of my favorites, but as long as one of us enjoyed it.”

  He preferred action flicks to oldies and the chick flick rom-coms I liked, so his blasé attitude toward the film didn’t surprise me. Taking his hand in mine, I said, “Next time, we’ll find a theater playing something you like if this place is showing something you don’t want to see
.”

  Although I never expected a lot of talk from Alex, knowing the type of man he was, his lack of any response surprised me. Clearly distracted, he didn’t even look over at me to acknowledge he’d heard me speak.

  Just as I went to ask him what was wrong, in my peripheral vision appeared Amy’s boyfriend Kellen and a young blond woman in a pink sundress practically hanging off him walking into the theater. I tugged on Alex’s arm and discreetly pointed toward the couple.

  “I’d heard pink is the new black. He sure looks like he’s in mourning, doesn’t he?” I mumbled.

  Instead of avoiding us, Kellen directed the girl toward where we stood and walked right up to us. Wearing what looked like a gloating expression, he flashed a smarmy smile and pulled the girl to his body so there was no wondering if they were on a date.

  “Officer Montero, I didn’t realize someone like you would like a horror movie like Rosemary’s Baby. I pegged you for more of a serious flick kind of guy,” he said, almost taunting Alex.

  Refusing to take the bait, he smiled and said in his most professional voice, “I don’t. My partner does, though, and she got to pick the movie tonight. I prefer films that involve bad guys ending up in cuffs and in the back of a police cruiser.”

  The blond girl in the pink sundress with a tan I worried would one day end up in a horrible case of skin cancer cooed at Alex’s description of his kind of movie. “Oooooh, I love those movies too. Kellen says they’re bour…bourgee…”

  Turning to look at him for help with the word she wanted to say, she waved her hand as if to cue his help. “What do you call those movies, Kellen?”

  “Bourgeois,” he answered smugly, adding more information ostensibly for her benefit and anyone else’s who didn’t understand his insult. “Pedestrian and common.”

  Her face lit up like being talked down to thrilled her. “Yes, that’s it! Bourgeois. Kellen knows all about movies, don’t you?”

  No longer even focusing on her, he stared directly at Alex and answered, “I have always enjoyed films. It’s one of the things I know a lot about.”

  Disgusted by him and his new girlfriend, I asked, “Did you see a lot of films with Amy?”

  His smug façade slipped for a just a moment when he glared at me before turning his attention back to Alex without even answering my question. “Are you making any progress finding out who your murderer is?”

  I so wanted to slap him for how callously he acted regarding everything about Amy. What would it take to show a little compassion for someone who he’d spent time with?

  “We’re getting closer and closer every moment, Kellen. I expect to have a break in the case any time now,” Alex said with a confident, full smile I knew hid the truth.

  We hadn’t even worked on the case all day. How could he truthfully claim we were close to anything like a break?

  Kellen’s eyes grew wide in surprise at Alex’s news. “Really? You guys work fast. I figured it would take the Sunset Ridge police weeks to solve it. I mean, these local yokels aren’t exactly crack investigators.”

  This guy was infuriating! Could he be any ruder? For the second time in this conversation alone, I wanted to smack his smug face.

  Alex said nothing to his taunt, but I couldn’t let it just pass, so I said, “You underestimate the police in our town, Kellen. And Alex here isn’t from Sunset Ridge. He cut his teeth in solving crimes in Baltimore, so he’s no local yokel.”

  For a split second, I thought I saw concern creep into smug Kellen’s eyes, but he simply plastered a smile on his face as his girlfriend began to explain to no one in particular how much she loved the club scene in Baltimore. Nobody was listening to her, though.

  “Well, good luck with that whole thing, Officer Montero. I’m going to enjoy a good film with Candy here, so have a nice night.”

  And with that, he turned on his heels and pulled Candy, the blond girl with an IQ I suspected hovered around that of a houseplant, toward the theater. We watched them walk away and then began to walk to Alex’s car.

  “Please tell me he’s our murderer. I want to see him hauled away in handcuffs and forced to wipe that self-satisfied expression off his face before someone else does it for him. I was barely able to stop myself from smacking him.”

  With a shrug, Alex kept my hopes alive that one day that guy would get his comeuppance. But he said nothing more about Kellen, so I asked, “Why did you tell him you expect to see a break in the case at any moment when we haven’t done a single thing on the case all day? You were bluffing, right?”

  We reached the car and Alex opened the passenger door for me, still not answering. I looked up at him for some kind of answer before he closed the door, but he simply said, “You know better than anyone else that we don’t have to be actively discussing the case to be working on it.”

  Intrigued, I waited for him to get into the car and put his seat belt on before I said, “I’m serious, Alex. Is something happening on the Amy Perkins case that I don’t know about?”

  After a moment of suspense, he admitted what I already knew, sadly. “No, there isn’t. You’re right. We haven’t worked on the case all day because we’ve been preoccupied with relaxing.” Tapping his finger to his forehead, he added, “But just because we haven’t spent all day running around looking for clues or sitting in my office doesn’t mean we haven’t been working on it. Much of investigative work takes place right up here.”

  I had spent a lot of the time thinking when we were supposed to be binge watching episode after episode of whatever that show was that afternoon, but I hadn’t found any real answers to who had killed Amy Perkins. Stephen and the three tarot readers from the convention had been cleared, so that left Kellen and Tamara.

  “But nothing points to either one of them, other than the fact that they’re both pretty awful people.”

  Alex turned to face me with a look of confusion. “What?”

  “Sorry. I was just thinking about our suspects and no matter what I do, it always comes back to those two awful people—Kellen, Amy’s heartless boyfriend, and Tamara, the shrew who also dated her and had a problem with Amy not calling herself a witch. But neither one seems to really have had a reason to stab her in the heart out there in the woods.”

  “Ah. Okay. Well, on that subject, let’s take a ride over to Kellen’s parents’ house while we know he’s at the movies. Maybe they can give us a little insight into their son we’ve been missing so far.”

  As we drove there, I tried to imagine what kind of people they were to have brought up a child to be such a thoughtless and rude person. Before I even met them, I disliked them for what their son had already shown himself to be.

  Alex once again knocked on their front door, and while we waited for someone to answer, I leaned close to him and said in a low voice, “How much are we betting one or both of them is as obnoxious as their kid?”

  “Sometimes kids just turn out bad, Poppy. It isn’t always the parents’ fault.”

  I waved away his excuse and shook my head. “You can’t plant peas and get corn.”

  The porch light came on and the door opened just as I finished talking, and there stood a woman I guessed may have been around my father’s age. The early signs of crow’s feet around her eyes said she may have been in her late forties, but the deep creases like parentheses coming down from her nose and the lines that extended from the edges of her mouth making her look like she was permanently frowning said she had to be at least in her mid-fifties.

  “Can I help you?” she asked in a voice laced with fear.

  Alex quickly showed her his badge and worked to allay her worries. “My name is Officer Montero, ma’am. This is my partner Poppy McGuire. We need to ask you a few questions about a case we’re investigating.”

  Her round eyes opened wide, and she pressed her face to the screen. “Is it about Kellen? Is my son in trouble? He’s okay, isn’t he?”

  “He’s fine, ma’am. In fact, we just saw him at The Colonnade. No,
the case involves his ex-girlfriend, Amy Perkins. Do you have a few minutes for our questions?” Alex asked.

  She stepped out onto the porch and folded her arms across her chest. “I can’t imagine who would have wanted to hurt that girl. She was just the nicest thing.”

  While Alex fished out his notepad and pen from his pants pocket, I took the opportunity to ask a question I’d wanted the answer to since the first time I met her son. “Mrs. Martin, how serious was their relationship? They weren’t going out that long.”

  She thought about her answer for a moment and said, “Not too long, but Kellen was crazy about her. She was older, you know, so I think he might have been more infatuated with her than she was with him. She was only around for a little while, but we liked her almost as much as Kellen did.”

  Alex looked over at me and subtly raised his eyebrows before turning to ask Mrs. Martin a question. “Kellen says he was home alone with no one else who can verify that the night Amy was killed. Is there anyone who can help us eliminate him as a suspect?”

  “He’s a suspect? That’s impossible! Kellen would never hurt Amy. Never!” she shrieked.

  “Unfortunately, when we spoke to him, he didn’t seem very bothered by the fact that she had been killed, and since we just saw him at the movies with another young woman, it doesn’t seem like he’s missing her much.”

  Alex wasn’t usually so blunt with people’s mothers, but either Mrs. Martin had no idea of the kind of person her son was or she was intentionally portraying him as a much nicer person than we’d experienced in the two times we’d spoken to him. For whatever it was worth, I didn’t feel like she was lying. At least not intentionally. I had a sense that she believed her son had truly cared for Amy.

  “Oh, that’s not proof that he isn’t missing her. He’s just like that.” She turned to face me and continued. “You know how men are. They don’t like to show their real feelings. I promise you he’s heartbroken, even if it doesn’t seem like it.”