Beat Around the Broom

by Samantha Silver

  He was the kind of guy who had such a strong, silent exterior that he was hard to get to know. The fact that he had only recently gotten back to Moonlight Cove after a few years in the human world’s military added to that fact. I had always assumed he just had a firm grasp of the world around him and took charge behind the scenes, and to some extent, he did. But the more we got to know each other, the more hints I got here and there that he was almost as much of an awkward fish out of water as I was.

  And coming from a guy almost a head taller than me and biceps more than twice as thick, that was kind of endearing, if I did say so myself.

  “Hey! It’s, um, it’s a morning,” I said with an anxious laugh. I had to hold myself back from letting a finger wander up to my hair and start twirling a lock nervously. Lara was already snickering, so I waved her off as I hurried to the back door and stepped out onto the deck overlooking the water. “But I managed to pull off an apparently half-decent lobster omelette out of it all, so I’m counting the morning as a net win.”

  “Lobster on an off-day? You don’t run out of impressive surprises, do you?” he replied, and I grinned. He was normally such a reserved guy that hearing him be more open with his compliments made me feel, well, kind of nice. Kind of really nice.

  “Well, the guests and Lara gave it their seal of approval, so I’ll take that as a win,” I said. “And I might have picked up a few extra ingredients, too, so maybe I’ll experiment on you a little.”

  “I don’t think I’d mind that one bit,” Xander chuckled, and the dreamy tone in his voice gave me butterflies in my stomach.

  Okay, so I had a giant crush on him. The whole town knew it at this point, I was fairly certain. That was one of the big drawbacks of small town life - everyone knew everyone else’s business, and you just had to get used to that. It could certainly be worse, of course; there were just a handful of people I wished I could keep things hidden from for just a little longer.

  Lara teased, but she was nothing compared to my mother.

  After a few moments of grinning silence as I stared out to the gently rolling waves of the water far below me, I realized we were dangerously close to an awkward silence, so I cleared my throat. “So! What are you up to this morning, besides pining for shellfish?”

  “I’m always pining for shellfish,” he chuckled, but he then cleared his throat too. Two cleared throats meant it was time for serious business.

  “Anyway, another body has turned up,” he said, and I could almost hear him pacing as he spoke. “Thought you would want to get a heads up.”

  “Another?” I said, raising my eyebrows. “How recently?”

  “Just now. I’m on site. I’ll text you the address, if you’re interested in following up.” He knew perfectly well that I was, and I smiled. It was strange to think of how relatively recently it had been that I was tailing him for clues while he threatened to arrest me for interfering.

  I supposed I was technically still interfering. Okay, maybe not technically anymore, since it was now more like police-sanctioned snooping.

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d say it sounds like someone is looking for help.” I couldn’t help but tease, leaning against the railing and crossing my legs.

  “Well, you got me there,” he chuckled. “My sister might be getting hesitant about turning too much of a blind eye, but she can’t argue with the results when we’re getting to the bottom of things faster together.”

  “She always did have a good head on her shoulders. Must be hereditary,” I added, and I was unbelievably grateful Lara couldn’t see my cherry-red face. Moon, I was the worst at flirting, but that wasn’t going to stop me, apparently. “Anyway, sure - I’ll get things cleaned up here as fast as I can and head down there.”

  “Great. See you soon, Arti,” he said in that gruff tone of his, and he ended the call.

  I turned around and nearly jumped out of my skin at the sight of Lara, face grinning, her head sticking out the door she’d opened without me noticing, somehow.

  “What the? Were you eavesdropping?!”

  “You two are adorable,” she whispered, and I rolled my eyes.

  “Get back in there and finish your lobster. I’ve got another murder to get to.”

  About fifteen minutes later, I was bringing my broom to a slow halt in front of the address Xander gave me. I had to triple-check it, because this was the last kind of place I’d imagine a murder would have taken place. Then again, I had thought the exact same thing back when a body turned up in my front yard, so I had no room to talk.

  Xander made his way out front to greet me while Morgan finished setting up the bright yellow crime scene tape around the perimeter. He hailed me with a wave as I got off my broomstick and carried it across the yard to meet him, looking up at the house.

  “Little boxes made of ticky-tacky, right?” he chuckled. The reference to a folk song about suburbia wasn’t entirely wrong. Moonlight Cove prided itself on being a fairly cozy, personalized small town, but since we were a resort town when it was all said and done, it was inevitable that some of the people who moved here wanted to bring their old lives with them. This street couldn’t exactly be called a neighborhood, but it was a cluster of houses built relatively recently by those kinds of people. The house in front of us was no different.

  It wasn’t that it was an ugly house, per se, it just didn’t have much personality, I didn’t think. It was a boxy white house with a dark gray roof and a nice little white picket fence lining the yard that made Morgan’s job a little easier. The lawn was well manicured, the paved walkway to the steps leading to the front door was pristine, and it looked like the paint job had already been touched up even though the house couldn’t have been more than ten years old.

  Looking left and right down the lane, it struck me that most of the other houses looked almost exactly the same, with a few variations. One was green, another was blue, another was eggshell white instead of this snowy-white in front of me, and so on.

  I didn’t really like or dislike the suburban vibe. I was just happy I had the B&B and didn’t have to worry about having opinions about this sort of thing.

  “The murderer wasn’t a garden gnome, was it?” I suggested, smirking as we made our way up to the house.

  “You joke,” Xander replied, “but I’ve heard stories about enchanted garden gnome statues going horribly awry.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I wish.”

  We’d barely approached the door when Xander pulled me aside to make room for the two paramedics who were making their way out of it. They were carrying a stretcher loaded with a middle-aged woman with dark hair and bangs with sharp features that were twisted into a pained expression. She was holding her stomach and groaning, whimpering as the paramedics carried her by. I felt sorry for her as I watched them go, and I looked to Xander with a quirked brow.

  “I’ll explain inside,” Xander said, beckoning for me to follow.

  We stepped inside to a fairly cozy interior with wooden floors and high ceilings, and I immediately felt like I was visiting the house of a distant aunt and uncle who were well off but didn’t come to family gatherings much. It was a very specific feeling, but I thought it was appropriate. Everything was tidy, and there were pictures of a couple on various bookshelves, along with a few respectable classic titles that almost definitely never got read.

  “Our guy’s in the kitchen,” Xander said, leading me through the living room to a spacious kitchen with white tile floors and granite countertops. I had to admit, for the size of the house, it was a nicer kitchen than I had expected, except for the dead body lying in the middle of it, not far from the oven.

  I was getting more used to seeing dead bodies now, and at risk of sounding disrespectful, I thought this particular one was one of the less offensive ones I’d laid eyes on. It was a middle-aged man with dark hair that was just starting to show flecks of gray and white. Average height and looks, black sweater, jeans, and loafers.

&nb
sp; “Sure he’s dead?” I asked without thinking, and Xander gave me a puzzled look. “Sorry. I mean, he’s obviously dead, this place just doesn't look very…”

  “Is ‘murdery’ on the tip of your tongue?”

  “You said it, not me.”

  Xander smirked.

  “Yeah, I have to agree. The victim’s name is Arnold Klein, and you just saw his wife Florence get carried out the front door. The scene doesn’t look violent because we think Arnold was poisoned.”

  “Poison?” I repeated, blinking. “How do you know already?”

  “Ran a quick test,” he said, holding up his finger and wiggling it at me. “Nothing as in-depth as what the doctors will be able to do, but enough to tell me that he has poison in his system. Same test on his wife showed the same results. She must have gotten a lower dose of it.”

  “Poor thing. That wasn’t shock?”

  “No, she was poisoned too, I’m sure of it,” Xander explained. “She called us saying her husband was on the floor and she felt like there were daggers inside of her, too. Whatever it was, she must have gotten lucky and not gotten as strong a dose as him. She couldn’t stand up when we got here, but we had those medics on site almost immediately.”

  “Who was he?” I asked, pacing around the kitchen and looking at the body from different angles. All in all, he looked like an otherwise healthy man.

  “He owned a furniture business in town,” Xander said. “You can probably tell by all the snazzy furniture around this place. Couches that always stay free of lumps and pet odor, chairs that never creak or get wobbly, rugs that scoot their way outside and beat themselves clean, you get the idea. Magical furniture.”

  “Those things are expensive,” I said, putting my hands on my hips. “Believe me, I know.”

  “I would have thought the B&B would be all over that kind of thing,” Xander said.

  “Well, I would, but I’m not made of gold,” I murmured with a small smile. Magical furniture was a lucrative business, any way you diced it. My B&B was by no means cheap, but furnishing an entire manor like that with fancy-pants magic stuff that had to be carefully treated with the right wood and touched up regularly with the right enchantments and inscriptions... that was the kind of thing you couldn’t do unless you were born into money, or ran one of those hundred-year-old businesses in a more central part of the world.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean it like that,” Xander backpedaled with a smile. “Your place is fabulous as it is.”

  “Nice save,” I said, smirking. “Mind if I look at the body?”

  Xander tossed me a pair of gloves before pulling on his own, and I set about checking out the body. I crouched down and turned his head, wincing at the cold look on his face. The stare of a dead man was something you didn’t get used to, no matter how many bodies you looked at. At least, I certainly didn’t. I searched him top to bottom with Xander, but we couldn’t find any markings on him at all, no signs of struggle. It seemed like he even went down to the ground slowly. I tried not to let the mental image of the guy slowly losing his strength as he clung to the counter stick around too long.

  “Any chance it was suicide?” I ventured.

  “Well, that would be odd, but not something to rule out.”

  “Is it that odd? Men in middle age get depressed pretty often.”

  “Maybe, but the Kleins are - or were - pretty well off, unless there’s some mysterious mafia debt I don’t know about yet lurking out there. I’ll try to get statements from his friends and family about whether there are any signs, but what really makes me doubt it is the fact that his wife was poisoned too. Doesn’t fit the profile of most male suicides, and if it was some kind of thing the two of them were in on together that she just botched, I think we’d know by now.”

  “That’s a wrench in it, yeah,” I admitted, sighing. “So, it’s sounding like we can at least narrow things down to either an accident or someone trying to poison both of them. It’ll be good to get Florence’s statement as soon as we can, just in case…” I trailed off, not wanting to finish the sentence: in case she died. “Any idea how this all happened in the first place?”

  As I spoke, I started to take a step back, and I watched Xander’s eyes widen suddenly.

  “Stop!”

  I followed his gaze and looked down to see I’d almost stepped in something we hadn’t noticed on the ground, nearly completely under one of the counter cabinets. I stepped away and crouched back down to peer at the little object that was just a foot or so away from Arnold’s outstretched arm.

  It was a half-eaten cinnamon bun with a few bites missing from it.

  “Well, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that’s important,” I said.

  Chapter 3

  As I stood there with my hands on my hips, hovering over the body of a dead man, all I could pay attention to was the fact that there was what looked to be a partially-eaten cinnamon bun lying on the floor nearby. I had to wonder what on earth was up with my priorities that my brain would hone in on something so seemingly inconsequential as an abandoned baked good, but of course, if Arnie had been poisoned, there was a very good chance that this was the “murder weapon”, so to speak.

  Careful to avoid getting too close to the body on the floor, I slowly knelt down and pointed to the cinnamon bun, frowning up at Xander. “Okay, call me crazy if you want, but do you think this could be how he ingested the poison? Or am I just reading into this too much because I really, really like cinnamon buns?” I asked, a little sheepishly.

  Xander grinned and nodded. “Yes. You’re right on the money, actually. Make sure you don’t actually touch that, because I think it’s vital to the investigation,” he said, kneeling down beside me.

  “Oh, that’s good to hear, because I was going to feel really stupid if I pointed this out for no good reason,” I said, a little relieved. “So, what’s the protocol here? Do we bag it up or what? That’s what they always do on those cop procedural TV shows.”

  Xander arched an eyebrow at me, amused. “You watch a lot of cop dramas, huh?” he teased as I felt my cheeks start to burn.

  “I mean, not a lot of cop dramas. Just a few. When they’re on. I’m not obsessed or anything. In fact, some of the gritty details kind of freak me out. My familiar, Luna, is really addicted to true crime. She’s even got me listening to podcasts about it when I’m doing a big cleaning day back at the B&B,” I rambled, admittedly shifting a wee bit more of the blame onto Luna than was rightly deserved, but oh well. She wasn’t here to defend herself, and I was the only one who understood her anyway. I’d apologize to her for the offense later.

  “Huh. Interesting. And here I was starting to worry you might only be into me for the badge or something,” Xander chuckled, keeping his voice low so that the other crime scene techs moving in and out of the area wouldn’t hear him.

  I bit my lip, trying not to smile too broadly and risk looking insensitive. After all, we were literally crouched down next to a dead body. There was a certain level of solemnity and decorum we probably needed to maintain, even if we were a little preoccupied with flirtation. We both worked so much and our careers soaked up so much of our time that we didn’t get a lot of opportunities to go on real dates like normal people, so this was the closest to a date we’d had in a while. Morbid? Maybe. Inappropriate? Oh, for sure. But I couldn’t help it. Xander just looked so handsome in his uniform with his artfully-tousled hair and those clear, ocean-blue eyes. How could I not swoon over him? Even if we were discussing a literal murder.

  “Nah. The badge doesn’t do much for me, honestly,” I lied, giving him a shrug. “I’m more interested in that special magical notepad and quill you use.”

  “Oh, that’s what you’re into, huh?” he teased. “Seems a little freaky, if you ask me.”

  “Well, then, good thing I didn’t ask you, hmm?” I shot back with a wink. Xander accidentally let a good, hearty laugh slip out and he hastily clapped a hand over his mouth, his blue eyes going wide. He looke
d around to make sure none of the others around - including his sister - had noticed, and then cleared his throat.

  “Anyway,” he went on, clearly a little embarrassed, “I ran some preliminary magical testing on the cinnamon bun to see what would come up before you got here.”

  “And? Did you get anything interesting?” I asked, already making a mental note to ask him for more info on that magical testing later when we got a chance to shoot the breeze.

  He nodded. “Yes. Definitely. There were signs indicating that the pastries are what killed the victim and poisoned his wife. I’m sure the doctors will be able to give us a more specific idea of what kind of poison it was, later. That, I don’t have a spell for.”

  “Wait. Pastries, as in plural?” I asked, tilting my head to one side.

  “Yup,” he replied, standing up and walking over to the refrigerator. I followed him as he tugged the door open and a blast of cool air came radiating out. He gestured to a shimmery white box that I recognized with a sinking heart as being one of the takeout boxes used at my favorite coffee shop run by my best friend, Elisa.

  “Oh no,” I murmured. “The pastries came from this box?”

  Xander frowned, confused by my mournful tone. “Yes. Why?”

  “I sighed. “It’s from my friend’s cafe. The Magic Bean.”

  “Oh, right. Elisa and Bella Andhrimir’s place, isn’t it?” Xander said.

  I nodded and then quickly closed the fridge door, turning back and leaning close to him. I lowered my voice before asking a question. “Hey, could you do me a big favor?”

  Xander looked a little apprehensive as he replied. “Uh, sure. Unless of course you’re the perpetrator of this crime, in which case not even my vote of good faith can save you.”