Wedding Bells And Magic Spells Box Set

by A. R. Winters

Suzan shook her head. “No time.” She crossed her arms in front of her. “What else can you tell me about Zola?”

  “Umm, one of her dresses was featured in Vogue earlier this year, and—”

  Suzan was already shaking her head before she interrupted me. “Not that. I mean dirt! Did you see any signs that she was a cold-blooded murderer? What about the fact she’s a thief and a plagiarist? Did she try and steal anything from you?”

  Oh. Gossip. That’s the kind of ‘research’ she was after. Something which I didn’t trade in.

  “I’m afraid I can’t really help you with that kind of thing. I don’t know much about her personal problems.”

  “Did she leave anything here? Any journals or diaries? A computer or handbag? Anything at all?”

  Shocked, I shook my head. If Zola had left any of those things, I certainly wouldn’t be handing it over to a reporter. The police, maybe, but a muck-raking journalist? No way.

  “The only items in this shop of Zola’s are her dresses.”

  “Stolen dresses.”

  “Well, it does look like the designs were copied, yes. There was still a lot of work involved in actually putting them together though. Just because you plan to use a bit of lace here, a bit of chiffon there, doesn’t mean it turns out that way in the end—designs evolve as the dressmaker wo—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I get it.” She gave me a suspicious look. “Are you defending her?”

  “No! Well, I mean, maybe. I mean, no I’m not, I just don’t know! You seem very certain she killed Carrie, but I just don’t see it myself.”

  “No one saw that she was a design-stealing lowlife thief either,” Suzan pointed out.

  “You have uncovered a very compelling motive,” I offered. “But do you really think that’s enough to convict her in the public eye?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?” That’s it?

  “Yes. I do. Did you see the way she wouldn’t face my camera? I know what that means: a guilty conscience. Anyway, it doesn’t sound like you’re going to help me.”

  “I don’t think I can help you.” And I didn’t just mean with her story: this woman was vindictive beyond belief.

  “Interesting. I just hope Blue Moon Bridal wasn’t complicit in the murder. If there’s any kind of coverup involved, rest assured I will uncover it!”

  I was staring at her open-mouthed and wide-eyed as she spun on her heels and marched out of my shop with the determination of Napoleon leading a charge himself.

  When she exited, she pulled the door closed behind her entirely too firmly to be polite, causing it to slam and rattle on its hinges. This summoned Kiwi, who emerged from the stockroom in a flight of flapping feathers.

  “Did you save the shop’s reputation?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Don’t ask.”

  He made a sympathetic cooing.

  “I’ve got to follow up on this nail right away. If that leads anywhere, it better be fast, before that reporter drags us into this whole mess more than we already are.”

  “Can I come?” asked Kiwi.

  “Afraid not, little buddy. I doubt they allow parrots where I’m going.”

  “Great. The repeat of Dress Me For a Date is about to start!”

  While Kiwi hurried out the side door to head upstairs, I pulled my shoulders back, lifted my head up, and pulled out my phone.

  Let the investigation begin!

  Chapter 15

  Just before four in the afternoon, I pulled up outside Nailed It! and parked in the small lot in front. It was part of a small row of businesses, with a cupcake shop, a pizza delivery branch and a small-time lawyer’s office. It was on the edge of town in the newer part, a couple of miles from the more historic Main Street where my shop was located.

  As I approached the doors, they swooshed open automatically and I was greeted with the smell of nail polish mixed with a jasmine fragrance.

  “Hi there. Do you have an appointment?” asked a slim, dark-haired girl at the door with a perfect customer service smile.

  “I do indeed. Aria Whitmore.”

  “Oh yes, here you are. This is your first appointment, right?”

  “It is. Your shop was recommended to me.”

  “I see, I have you down to see Lyn. Is that right?”

  “Yes, that would be lovely, thanks.” When I made my appointment, I explained on the phone that I was friends with Patricia Bledsoe and I wanted to see whichever manicurist she usually saw, which had worked even better than I had expected.

  “If you’d like to help yourself to mint water, Lyn will be over to see you in two shakes.”

  Two shakes of what, I wondered.

  I was pleasantly surprised that they provided real glasses rather than paper cups for the customers, and I was soon sipping a cool glass of iced water with a sprig of fresh spearmint floating prettily on top.

  “Aria?”

  Looking up, I saw a smiling lady whom I deduced to be Lyn. I figured this out because she was wearing a large name tag with her name written across it.

  “Hi!” I stood up and followed Lyn to her station where she quickly got me seated, made sure I was comfortable, and got ready to begin.

  Lyn peered at my nails.

  “You haven’t been here before, have you?” she said, shaking her head.

  “No. That bad, huh?”

  “Oh, not too bad,” she admitted. This pleased me as generally I looked after my own nails, though I will confess to occasionally using a little witchcraft to help them along their way.

  “Do you know what you want?” she asked.

  “Well, do you know Patricia Bledsoe?”

  A hint of a frown began to appear before she managed to compose herself and plaster a professional smile back on her face.

  “Oh, yes. She’s a regular here. Every week.” The final two words were said with the barest hint of sadness that possibly only a witch could pick up.

  “Well, she’s more of an acquaintance than a friend,” I explained. “Her daughter is a customer in my bridal shop.”

  “Oh, good. You didn’t seem like you would be friends with her,” said Lyn with a sly smile.

  I didn’t bother to suppress a giggle. “I don’t know her well, but she’s quite a character. Quite demanding.”

  “Oh, I’ll say. You know we have the largest range of nail polishes in Northern California, but do you know what she does?”

  “What’s that?” I took a sip of my water while I waited for her to tell me.

  “She brings her own! It’s a great polish admittedly, coral pink, but we’ve got two others which are—and don’t let any other customers know I said this—exactly the same.”

  “Really? How fascinating. I actually noticed the color and asked her about that polish. That’s how I ended up getting the recommendation.”

  “I’m surprised she did recommend us, to be honest. Even though she comes in every week, she’s never satisfied. File more, file less. More glue, less glue. More polish, less polish. You know the type. While I believe in the customer always being right, she seems to prefer the corollary the staff is always wrong.”

  I giggled again. That did sound like her.

  While Lyn was holding my hands to examine them, I unleashed a little spell I had invoked but not cast before I arrived. It was only a suggestive little thing—I don’t like to make people do things they don’t want to do—but the ‘trust me’ charm I sent her way was just enough to make her as open with me, a new customer, as she would be with one of her closest regulars.

  “Did you know that she knew the poor girl who was murdered?” I knew full well that she knew that, but the idea was to lead her on and find out what she knew.

  Lyn nodded. “Oh yes, her daughter Brittany knew Carrie quite well. Patricia seemed to hate her though, especially the last six months or so.”

  “Oh?” I raised my eyebrows and leaned in, trying to copy what Priscilla Hart did when she was on the trail of some juicy gossip.

  �
��It started years ago. Brittany and Carrie were friends in high school, but Patricia never had any time for Carrie, or most of the rest of their little clique.”

  “No?”

  Lyn shook her head. “Patricia has a high opinion of her daughter. Very high, and so she thought all the other girls were second-rate in comparison. She thought they were hanging onto Brittany’s coattails. I think Patricia had a bit of a distorted view though. Brittany isn’t that special.”

  “But then something else happened?”

  “Oh yes. Both the girls, by coincidence, got engaged at roughly the same time. But what wasn’t a coincidence was the wedding date. Carrie deliberately chose the exact same date as Brittany for her wedding! Can you believe that? To say Brittany was furious would be an understatement. She wanted to kill Carrie according to Patricia, and she felt the same.”

  “Oh goodness, what a disaster,” I said. “Do you know why Carrie did that?”

  Lyn shrugged her shoulders. “Who knows? Maybe she was just fed up playing second fiddle to Brittany for all those years. But choosing the same wedding dates was just the start of it!”

  “The start?”

  Lyn nodded again as she finished her work with a file and held up the nail polish I had chosen again for a final confirmation. I nodded approval while she carried on talking.

  “After that, they battled over everything. They both wanted Sunflowers to do their arrangements, but due to another booking, they could only handle one more wedding on that day. And then they both wanted the Finca del Castro Winery, and Carrie managed to snag it first. And then there were the caterers, and last I heard there was a fight while they were waiting to get into a sample sale!”

  “Yes, I heard all about the fight,” I said. “Actually—that’s my bridal shop!”

  Lyn looked up at me wide-eyed. “Then you must have found the body, too!”

  With an unhappy nod, I confirmed what she said.

  “Is it true she was wearing the California Silver Sands beach wedding dress?”

  “Wow, you know your stuff. That is the dress she was wearing.”

  “See, that was Carrie at it again.”

  “At what?”

  Lyn paused a moment while she carefully unscrewed the nail polish cap and dabbed just the right amount onto the end of the brush.

  “Carrie won the venue fight. Brittany ended up booking that beach by the little hotel instead. Patricia tried to put a brave face on it—she told me it was actually more exclusive than the winery, but I knew she was just bluffing. She’d really wanted that venue and Carrie had snatched it up.

  “But of course for a beach wedding, you need a beach wedding dress, and I knew exactly which one Patricia and Brittany were after. She told me about it every week for the last six weeks! I had a running countdown to the sample sale courtesy of her on a week by week basis.”

  Lyn was shaking her head to herself as if traumatized by the memory of having to listen to Patricia babble on about wedding dresses for the last month and a half.

  “But then Carrie was found wearing that dress,” I said.

  Lyn nodded but kept her eyes down as she worked her magic with the brush.

  “I suppose she broke in that night and put it on to steal it, just so Brittany couldn’t have it. It’s unbelievable the lengths some people will go to, isn’t it? I bet that’s why she killed her.”

  Our eyes met across the counter.

  Lyn was looking at me deadpan, as if she accused people of being murderers every other day and twice on Sundays.

  “You think Brittany killed Carrie?”

  “Who else? The way those two had been going at it for the last six months, it was bound to end in tears. And I suppose it ended in something worse, didn’t it?”

  “It certainly did.” My nail stylist seemed to have strong opinions and know a lot about what was going on. I decided to change tack a little. “Did you see the news report yesterday, about Zola Cates?”

  “Oh yes, for sure. This stuff is better than reality TV, isn’t it? That reporter was really going after her! You’ve got to feel sorry for her though, don’t you?”

  “Perhaps. Don’t you think it’s more likely that she killed Carrie, to protect her dress designs?”

  Lyn gave me a thoughtful look. “I suppose it might look that way. If it wasn’t for the fact that I knew Brittany and her mother really had it in for Carrie already. You met Zola, right? Did she seem like a killer?”

  “Err, no. But then killers are always who you least expect, aren’t they? I mean Brittany doesn’t seem like a killer either.”

  “Oh, but those girls were nasty. I’m Team Brittany on this one.”

  Team Brittany? Team? It seemed like Lyn may actually be confusing the news for reality television. Maybe I should have brought Kiwi along with me.

  For a moment, we sat in companionable silence while Lyn started to paint the nails of my right hand, the first coat on the first hand now rapidly drying.

  “Here’s a question for you. How did you find out about the dress Carrie was wearing? I thought the police had kept that under wraps.”

  “Did they? I guess they do always try to hide the juiciest stuff from us, don’t they? It’s not fair. They work for us, they shouldn’t keep the fun stuff to themselves.”

  “I’m sure they have their reasons.”

  “Probably. No, I heard about it from someone else. Who was it…?” Lyn stopped working on my nails for a moment while she thought. “Oh I know! I was in the Black Cat Café. Do you know it?”

  “Intimately.”

  “They always know all the news in there. It’s better than the newspaper or TV. More up to date. One of the ladies who works there told me. You know, there’s two of them who run it, not the horrible one, the nice one.”

  My giggle could not be suppressed and Lyn joined me.

  “That would be Priscilla. The other one is Nora. I wonder where Priscilla heard that, though?”

  Lyn shrugged. “Everyone goes in there.”

  “They do, don’t they?”

  The question was—how did Priscilla know the supposedly secret information about how the victim was found? Had one of the police officers leaked the information? If it wasn’t the police, that left me, Sarah, Zola, and Mom. Unless I’d taken up sleep-blabbing, it wasn’t me, and I was sure it wasn’t Sarah—she simply didn’t care for the social cache that comes with being the ‘first’ with a new bit of small town gossip.

  That left Mom and Zola. Mom was a bit of a gossip, of course, but she wasn’t particularly interested in wedding dresses and I’m sure she didn’t know the name of that particular dress or what kind of wedding it was suited to. I would check with her later, but I was pretty sure who had spread this little tidbit of information.

  Zola.

  Now why would Zola have done that? To point the blame at Carrie. That had to be it. Unless she really did just want to gossip, but as she wasn’t a local resident that would be a rather brazen way to enter the local chattering scene.

  We had another lull in our conversation, though it was not uncomfortable.

  “So Patricia Bledsoe comes in every week?”

  “Yep. Sometimes more. I shouldn’t talk about customers like this, but she had to come in twice last week. One of the nails I’d just put on had come clean off! She said I hadn’t used enough glue, which was completely untrue. She must have been doing some yardwork or something.”

  “Yeah, or something,” I said. “Something indeed.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing, just talking to myself.”

  “There. How do they look?” she asked.

  Lyn lifted my hands up into the air and I peered at my new nails.

  “It’s an unusual color, but it suits you,” she told me.

  “Well it should,” I answered with a grin. “It’s my name after all, Aria.”

  Chapter 16

  I was pacing up and down the shop while my two most stalwart allies looked on, beginning to g
et quite fed up with me.

  “What should I do?” I asked again.

  Sarah hopped off the counter where she’d been sitting, came over to me, and grabbed me by the shoulders.

  “You’ve got two choices. You either call Zola Cates and confront her, or you don’t, right?”

  I nodded. “Right.”

  “And for the last hour you haven’t called her, right?”

  I nodded again. “Right.”

  “So, it’s obvious,” said Sarah.

  “Obvious!” mimicked Kiwi with a follow-up shriek.

  “Is it?”

  “Yes. You’ve tried not talking to Zola for the last hour, and it didn’t get you very far. So call her, get her here, and we’ll try talking to her. That way we’ll have tested both possibilities.”

  “That makes sense.” I said, freeing myself from Sarah’s shoulder-grasp. “We’ll just have to see what she says when she gets here.”

  “Snack time!” shrieked Kiwi from atop the bookcase before fluttering down onto the counter.

  “I’ll feed the parrot, you call Zola,” said Sarah.

  I nodded, pleased. I don’t like making difficult decisions so it was good when other people made them for me. Now all I had to do was what Sarah had told me to do. Call Zola, and then I could confront her about the key and just what on earth went on that fateful night.

  Half an hour later, Zola arrived. She was staying in the boutique hotel downtown so it was only a short walk for her to get back to the shop. It would have been really convenient for the sale that was probably never going to happen now.

  “Here you go,” I said, handing her a cup of sage tea. She hadn’t asked for it but everyone had been declining my offers of tea lately and I was getting fed up with it. That, and this tea had just a smidgeon of magical charm in it to encourage people to open up and tell the truth.

  Zola was sniffing at it, the steamy vapors entering her nose and opening up both her sinuses and hopefully her synapses to tell me what I needed to know.

  “So shall we start packing up?” asked Zola after a sip of the tea.

  I shook my head. “No. Actually, that’s not why I wanted you here.”