Wishful Wisteria (Wisteria Witches Mysteries - Daybreak Book 3)

by Angela Pepper

  Aghast, I said, “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  “But you did tamper with the Pressman body, at Castle Wyvern.”

  “Did I?” I feigned confusion. “Tamper is such an ugly word.”

  He stared at me, those pale eyes bulging expectantly.

  I threw my hands in the air. “All I wanted was a sample of her hair, for testing. You, of all people, should understand. I didn’t know she was going to, you know...” I made a sound effect with my tongue.

  “Yes, well, sometimes a corpse that’s been killed by poison will go...” He made the same raspberry noise, imitating me. “And since Blackstone was poisoned, it is a concern.”

  My hands flew to my heart. “You think Blackstone was poisoned?”

  “I know he was poisoned.”

  My mouth went as dry as a bag of chalk dust.

  “But not in the same manner as the Pressman girl,” Lund said. “I believe it was a series of poisonings that slowly built to a fatal dose.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I can smell it on the chair. Can’t you?”

  I shook my head. “Your sense of smell must be much better than mine.” I tilted my head. “Why is that, Dr. Lund?”

  “Aren’t we a curious one today.” He glanced around. “Well, since you asked, I’ll show you.”

  Lund cocked his head, dropped his jaw, and flicked a long, prehensile tongue into the space between us. The tip of it missed my chin by less than an inch. I felt the moist heat on the lower part of my face. He flicked the tongue left and right. And then, just as quickly as the tongue had appeared, it reeled back into his mouth. His mouth was large, but there was no way the whole tongue could have coiled back inside there without magic. He was a sprite.

  I noted with pride that I hadn’t flinched. I might have screamed in a very uncool way if I hadn’t already seen my sprite coworker, Kathy, do the same tongue trick more than once.

  “You’re a sprite,” I said.

  He chuckled. “That is what we’re calling ourselves these days.”

  We chatted for a few minutes about the challenges of being a sprite, and special dietary concerns for their kind. When the conversation ebbed, we both found ourselves looking at Harry’s empty chair.

  “You’re sure it was poison?” I asked.

  “Positive.”

  “Any idea what kind? I’d like to avoid the same fate.”

  “A type of vegetable, I’d guess. People think plants are simply food, but plants do not wish to be harmed, let alone eaten. Every plant alive today is a survivor. And, since they can’t run away from predators, plants must resort to other means. They make themselves toxic. People worry so much about the sprays that are put on the outsides of their leafy greens and sweet fruits, but they don’t consider the neurotoxins, protease inhibitors, and sharp crystals produced by the plants themselves.”

  “Ah. The paradox of the plant-based diet. We’ve been getting a lot more of those books lately. You’re talking about the oxylates, phytates, and lectins. Not to mention all the magical compounds that aren’t in the books for the public.”

  Lund rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I don’t believe it was an overdose of any of the well-known antinutrients that killed Harry. I believe it was something novel—possibly magical, or perhaps a new, lab-designed compound.”

  “Harry did mention something about having heartburn from eating peppers.”

  Lund practically jumped with glee. “Peppers! That’s exactly what I smelled. Thank you for helping me place the aroma.” He shook his head. “Always the nightshades living up to their name.”

  “You’re welcome for the tip. Remember to make a note in your case file that one of the local wicked witches was very helpful today. Unfortunately, Harry didn’t tell me where he was getting his deadly nightshades.”

  “At least the detectives will have a lead,” Lund said.

  “The detectives? You’re saying this is a homicide? Harry could have poisoned himself by accident. People do it all the time on those wacky juice cleanses.”

  “Harry was smarter than that. His death was no accident.” The Medical Examiner gave me a deadly serious look and said, “The perpetrator picked a peck of poisoned peppers.”

  Chapter 14

  Wednesday Morning

  Wisteria Public Library

  The woman’s voice was high and irritating, like the buzz of a mosquito in a hot bedroom after the lights go off.

  “They should give people some notice about these things, so that people can change their plans and not take a bus halfway across town only to have to bus right back again!” The woman thrust her small, white-haired head forward, her chin lifted as though she was looking down through bifocals, though she wasn’t wearing any glasses. The tendons on her neck strained visibly. She’d apparently come by the previous afternoon, only to find the library closed due to “unforeseen circumstances.”

  The woman’s name was Helen Highbury, and this wasn’t the first time we’d tangled. She had last given me a hard time the month before, after one of our Mexican Hat Dance incidents. That particular afternoon, she’d given me a long lecture about the public computers, and how the people using them ought to be given more supervision. I explained that several other libraries had also been hacked by the same entity, and the Mexican Hat Dance virus had likely infected our system through remote access over the internet, not within the facility. She had replied “Exactly!” as though I had unwittingly proven her point.

  Now Helen was back, with a new bone to pick about yesterday’s closure.

  Rather than use facts and logic, which she’d only wield against me with her verbal judo, I played dumb.

  I glanced behind me, then back at Helen. “I’m sorry,” I said, sounding mystified. “Were you talking to me?”

  She repeated herself, almost verbatim, but slower, and with a lot of emphasis on key words. “They should give people notice. Some people might change their plans. Some people don’t want to take a bus halfway across town only to—”

  I twitched my baby finger and cast a micro spell. I was breaking my rule about casting magic at work, but heaven help me, the woman was asking for a bite on the buttocks. Begging for it.

  Helen jerked her head upright and blinked three times. Had I bitten too hard?

  The woman recovered, continuing her tirade. “Only to have to, er, take the bus, uh, back home again.” She coughed, and then dropped both of her clenched hands, which she’d been flailing for emphasis, from my view. I couldn’t see what she was doing on the other side of the circulation desk. I assumed she was checking to see if her underwear had ridden up, and if the underwear was the cause of the discomfort she’d just experienced. She would never guess in a million years that the nip on her butt had been a spell, cast by the woman she was unjustly castigating.

  As her cheeks flushed, I almost felt bad. In my defense, not only had Helen Highbury been asking for it, but I’d shown great restraint by casting a micro dose of the spell. At that power level, the effects were quite subtle. Barely a nibble.

  I felt eyes on me. I glanced over to find my boss, Kathy, watching the interaction with interest.

  Floopy doops, as my aunt would say. Busted.

  The head librarian was often watching with her owlish eyes whenever I did something naughty. Kath was a sprite, like Dr. Lund, but being a sprite didn’t give Kathy psychic powers—that I knew of. Yet she had quite the knack for catching me whenever I was the slightest bit rude to a library patron.

  I returned my attention to the woman before me. The woman I had bitten, technically.

  Helen Highbury, apparently satisfied that her underwear wasn’t attacking her hiney, resumed her diatribe. “The library should not have been closed for the entire afternoon! It was raining. What kind of a library is closed when it’s raining?”

  “Ms. Highbury,” I said patiently. “On behalf of the entire Wisteria Public Library, I apologize for any inconvenience our unscheduled closure caused you yesterday.
”

  “I’m not looking for an apology.” Helen’s small head strained up and forward, bobbing like the head of a pigeon. “What I want is an explanation.”

  “There was a medical emergency,” I said, holding out open palms.

  “Medical emergency? What does that mean?” She gasped. “Did someone die? On the premises?” She stopped thrusting her head forward, and it rose up by an inch. The tendons at her neck strained. “I thought I saw the Medical Examiner’s van pull up outside.”

  I shot a look over at Kathy. Kathy raised her eyebrows knowingly. We both understood exactly what was happening. Helen Highbury was only feigning outrage about yesterday’s inconvenience. Her real mission was to rustle up information that she could report to the other busybodies who spread rumors around the town.

  Kathy tilted her head, as though giving me permission to do as I pleased with Ms. Highbury, then walked away. Kathy didn’t have time for gossip, unless it was gossip she didn’t already know about—which technically made her a perfectly normal person.

  Nosy Helen was bobbing her pigeon head in anticipation of my response.

  “It was a medical emergency, and I really shouldn’t comment further,” I said. “Thank you for understanding.”

  Helen sputtered, “That’s it?”

  The life seemed to go straight out of her. Her head drooped, and she clutched the edge of the counter tiredly. I noticed the swelling in the joints of her fingers. I hadn’t cast a magic spell to allow me to feel her pain, and yet I caught a wave of it all the same. That was the power of empathy. I felt the ache of her hands in my own joints.

  Poor dear, I thought. Finding out the cause of yesterday’s library closure had given her some purpose, some distraction from her personal pain and worries. I was also happier when I had a mission. Helen Highbury and I were not so different.

  I looked left and right, though I already knew the coast was clear, and gestured for her to lean in. I would give her a little more distraction. She’d put in the effort, after all. Not many patrons riled me to the point of biting them.

  “Yes?” Her cheeks grew rosy. She clasped her bony fingers together.

  “Someone did pass away on the premises,” I said in a gossipy, breathless tone.

  “Ooh!”

  “A man. He died peacefully, while napping.”

  She gasped, as though she’d misheard me say something much more interesting.

  “How shocking that must have been,” she said.

  “It did surprise a few of the junior staff members.”

  “Yes, yes,” she said excitedly. “How very unusual to have someone pass away in your midst.”

  “Very unusual,” I said. It wasn’t unusual for me, but I couldn’t tell her that.

  “Is there more?” Her mouth remained open, as though she might better suck in gossip that way, like a sturdy vacuum cleaner.

  “Hmm.” I gave it some thought, or at least pretended to. “Now that I think about it, the poor fellow did say something odd before he passed.”

  “Something odd?” She all but stopped breathing.

  I savored what I was about to do, pausing for dramatic effect. “Before his nap, the man complained of... a strange pain in the buttocks.”

  She completely stopped breathing.

  I waved one hand casually. “I’m sure it was nothing. It was probably natural causes, and not that new virus that’s going around. The one that starts off with tiny cramps in the gluteus maximus.”

  Once she started breathing again, it took all of ten seconds for Helen Highbury to abandon her reference materials and exit the library at top speed, using her elbows on the door handle so she didn’t touch anything with her bare hands.

  That’ll keep you busy for the day, I thought happily. You’re welcome, Helen!

  I sensed that I had an audience again. I turned to my right, smiling, expecting to see Frank Wonder offering a silent golf clap.

  Except Frank wasn’t there.

  No one was.

  Eerie.

  * * *

  The feeling I was being watched lasted all morning and through lunch.

  It could have been nerves from having had a death on the premises the day before, or it could have been something new. Specifically, it could have been Harry’s ghost. If Lund’s theory was right, and Harry had been murdered, his spirit would be around for a while.

  I didn’t see Harry, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t there.

  For the next hour, I cast several spells to reveal concealed secrets, hexes, curses, and pesky jinxes.

  I found very little out of the ordinary. There were some plastic slabs of fake bacon, hidden in books as bookmarks, and placed where Kathy would eventually find them and freak out—the work of Mr. Frank Wonder—but nothing more sinister than that.

  Mid-afternoon, I was performing the the 2:00 pm patrol, The Nap O’Clock Wakeup, when I noticed that someone was sleeping in Harry’s chair, by Harry’s window.

  It was a man with thick, dark, bushy hair. He wore neutral-colored clothes, and mismatched socks.

  “Harry!” I exclaimed, a little too loudly for a library. I coughed and muttered an apology in case anyone was listening.

  I approached the sleeping ghost. The streaky gray light from the rain-soaked window disguised his wispiness, making him look so lifelike and solid.

  Excitement flared in my chest, the way Helen’s excitement must have flared when I’d offered gossip. Life was better when it had purpose, no matter what that purpose was. My ghost business over the last month had been slow, but now it appeared business was picking up again.

  I knelt at the man’s ghostly feet, by his mismatched socks, and pretended to be adjusting my shoelaces.

  “Mr. Blackstone? It’s me,” I said, whispering now. “Zara Riddle. You wanted to see me about something?”

  His eyes remained closed. He was as still as he had been the day before, when he’d been a lifeless corpse.

  Was he sleeping?

  Did ghosts even sleep?

  I didn’t have a lot of experience with “free range ghosts.” My early encounters with the deceased had quickly escalated into possessions. It was only thanks to my clever rezoning spell that I had eventually gained some degree of control over my Spirit Charmed specialty. Even so, things didn’t always go as planned. Communication was a big challenge. Direct contact through spellwork could cause a flowback of energy from the noncorporeal realm. Even chatting with them in a normal, albeit one-sided—ghosts were mute—conversation was dangerous. If there was one thing you didn’t want to ever tell a ghost, it was the key fact they were a ghost.

  “Psst,” I said. “Wake up, Harry.”

  I was careful to be gentle. Ghosts had difficulties with time and space. My aunt had told me to always be patient, because it had to be so confusing for the spirits, finding themselves somewhere, repeating some pattern from their former life, but not understanding why the living—besides some witches—couldn’t see them.

  “Harry? Mr. Blackstone?” I waved my hand in front of his face.

  When that did nothing, I waved my hand through his face. Then through his brain. I used one hand to make a fist, and I squeezed the area where his heart would have been.

  Ghost-Harry continued sleeping.

  Behind me, someone hissed, “Zara, not when we’re open to the public!”

  I turned to find the head librarian looking horrified, her golden-brown eyes wide behind her round glasses. Her tight brown curls trembled as she continued admonishing me. “If you absolutely must do one of your rituals, at least wait until we’re closed for the day.”

  “I was just...” I gestured at the ghost, as though doing so might make her able to see him, but she couldn’t. In fact, when I looked back to the chair, the ghost was gone.

  Kathy said, “You could have taken today off to recover from yesterday’s events. I told you we could adjust your schedule.”

  “Thanks for that, but I’m fine, honestly.”

 
She scrunched her lips, then said, “My cousin told me about the poisoned peppers.”

  “Your cousin?”

  “Lund,” she said. “The Medical Examiner.”

  “I didn’t know Lund was your cousin. You have a lot of cousins.”

  “I do.”

  “Are all of them...?” Sprites?

  “Not all of them.” She shook her curls, then eyed the empty chair warily. “What was in Harry’s chair?”

  “Harry.”

  She jerked her folded arms in a flapping gesture. “That’s not good.”

  We had been speaking in a hushed tone, but because whispers traveled surprisingly well in a quiet library, I cast a sound bubble around us.

  Then I told her exactly what I’d seen. Harry Blackstone, napping.

  Kathy had not been well acquainted with Mr. Blackstone, but she did agree that the presence of his ghost supported the idea that the death had not been accidental.

  “You must need to help Harry,” she said. “To avenge him.”

  “That’s my plan.”

  “But not during your shift,” she said quickly. “No shenanigans when you’re clocked in.”

  “Me? Shenanigans? Never,” I swore vehemently.

  Since when did I get up to shenanigans while I was clocked in? Besides all the time.

  Chapter 15

  For the rest of that rainy week following his death, the ghost of Harry Blackstone manifested repeatedly throughout the library.

  Sometimes it was me who saw him napping in his favorite chair, but other times it was a patron who reported a chilly breeze, or the sensation of being followed, or even a book falling off the shelf as they walked by.

  I was off all weekend, but the staff reported multiple strange occurrences.

  The following Monday, I expected to see Harry haunting around the place. And he did appear.

  I was surprised to find the library was also visited by several unfamiliar faces. The were all living people, at least, but not our regular crowd.

  It didn’t take long for Kathy, who monitored the numbers closely, due to how they affected our budgets, to notice our foot traffic had doubled.

  The mysterious newcomers were outsiders, not Wisterians. Judging by the unchanged circulation numbers, they weren’t visiting to get library cards or check out books.