“She wasn’t a witch.” She had said what felt like a dozen separate things to annoy me, but that one was just wrong. If she had been a witch, maybe she would have been able to protect herself a little better from this awful woman.
“Maybe I was thinking of something that rhymes with it,” she said with a shudder at the thought of the impropriety of speaking so ill of the dead.
“Go on,” I said, my voice so cold I was surprised I couldn’t see my breath.
Kiwi let out a mean sounding screech in support and fluttered his wings like he was preparing to launch himself. Patricia looked up at him warily, before carrying on.
“I went in and confronted her. Of course, being the awful little thing she was, she denied everything. She denied that you gave her the key. She started to tell me that someone else had given it to her but I didn’t want to listen to any more of her lies. I called her some things that perhaps a lady normally wouldn’t, and she said things that were ten times worse.”
And so, you killed her. Hurry up and get on with it so I don’t have to listen to more of your nastiness.
“After I told her that she and her pathetic fiancé didn’t deserve the Finca del Castro and I was surprised she could afford it anyway, she went insane. She attacked me!” Patricia held out her hand. She had replaced the broken nail but she was staring at it like an old war wound, recalling her days on the field of battle.
“That horrible little minx scratched at me, she pulled my cashmere sweater, she pushed me. And there were no police this time to stop the crazy witch. I only got her off me, and saved my life, when I hit her with that ugly basket you had on the counter.”
“Eh?”
“There was a basket right there.” She pointed at the counter. “It was only wicker but it had a solid base in it. It was full of those funny little bath bombs. Anyway, I whacked her on the head with the basket and she had to sit down. The bath bombs went everywhere...”
Patricia had her eyes closed now and a faint smile on her lips as if recalling a happy dream.
“They rolled all over this area, and we started picking them up and throwing them at each other.”
“Do you know how long I spent making those!?”
She opened her eyes again long enough to frown at me. “I should have known they were homemade. You might have gotten Zola Cates in here, but you can’t afford to stock real products—it’s like a hobby shop, isn’t it?”
Kiwi sensed my anger and let out a loud screech that caused Patricia to cover her ears. She was the most insulting woman I’d ever met in my life. I made the bath bombs myself because mine are better than the ones sold by any supplier, whether with a designer name plastered on or not.
“And then the strangest thing happened. Carrie and I... we...” she paused, frowning, as if unsure of her memory. “We were throwing those bath bombs at each other, and I think the exhaustion overcame us. We started giggling. I felt really quite strange. I suddenly came to a rather stupid conclusion. I forgot how important our wedding was, and I decided to just leave and go home. I didn’t want to fight anymore. I just wanted to get back to my family. So I left that conniving little she-devil here and, well, whatever happened to her happened to her.”
“So you had a bath bomb fight and then you left? That’s it?”
She nodded.
“Well, isn’t that just convenient? You were here the night of the murder, but you didn’t kill her—you just had a cute girly bath bomb fight instead? Do you know what that sounds like?”
It sounded completely ridiculous. The idea that this horrible woman would just give up after catching Carrie in here choosing a dress. That would have been completely out of character for her. She would have made sure Carrie was out of the shop before her for certain. And to throw bath bombs at each other like they were snowballs? Smashing them open and releasing the charmed ingredients...
Oh...
The bath bombs had been designed to relax and improve people’s moods. But you were only supposed to soak in it, and you were only supposed to use one at a time. If the two women had smashed them open and inhaled some of the enchanted ingredients, that would explain why they had stopped fighting and Patricia had gone home. Except for the fact that Carrie had still somehow ended up dead.
“And you just went home?” My voice was small now. I had been so sure earlier, but now that there was a chance I was wrong I lost my confidence.
“And I took the last bath bomb, to give to my Brittany. I thought she deserved it.”
“And you didn’t kill Brittany?”
“Of course I didn’t kill her, you ignorant, foolish, useless girl. I was home by eleven o’clock. I gave that bath bomb to Brittany. She’ll be able to confirm it. And her boyfriend—or should I say, fiancé,” she said saying the final word with a surprisingly convincing French accent.
Ding!
“Did I hear my name?” said Brittany as she walked in. She eyed the scene. “What’s going on here?”
“This awful shopkeeper was insulting us,” said Patricia Bledsoe with a wicked glare.
“I... I’m sorry,” I said. “But you shouldn’t have been here that night, and the fact you were looked awfully suspicious.”
Brittany put her hands on her hips and stared.
“Tell her,” said Patricia.
“Tell her what?”
“That I came home about eleven o’clock and I gave you a bath bomb on the night Carrie was... the center of attention.”
Brittany gave me a quizzical look. “Mom came home about eleven o’clock and she gave me one of your bath bombs. I used it that night.” She turned to her mother. “Why? What has she been saying?”
I shook my head, about to try and explain to Brittany but Patricia beat me to it.
“Oh, she was just accusing me of MURDERING Carrie.”
“WHAT!?” Brittany glared at me like she was about to kill me.
“Your mother broke in here after we were closed!” My voice was loud and shaking and I could feel my face turning red.
“I didn’t break in—I came in after Carrie because you gave her the key,” said Patricia. “And now you’ve invented some crazy scenario with me being some kind of psychopathic murderer!”
“I can’t believe you said that about my mother!” Brittany stepped over to me so her face was mere inches from mine. “And who else have you been saying this to? Have you been starting rumors? What will happen to us if your crazy stories start getting spread around, huh?” She pushed her face in even closer. “What will my fiancé say when he hears about this? That his future mother-in-law is being accused of murder by some shopkeeper! We’re already under enough strain as it is! Goodness knows it’s tough enough keeping him from fighting with Mom, and now you’re making up these stories?”
“I’m sorry!” I said in a panic.
“What if he calls off the wedding? What if the venue hears this crazy rumor and decides to cancel on us? Did you think about anything before you went down this crazy path?”
Patricia came up behind her daughter and wrapped her arms around her, gently pulling her away from me. “There, there. It’ll be all right. Nothing is going to upset the wedding. We’ll make sure of it.”
“She can’t do this to us!” said Brittany to her mother, face flushed red in anger. Her mother squeezed her tighter.
“I know, honey. Don’t worry, we’ll punish her. We’ll ruin her awful little business.”
“Hey,” I said. “Please, don’t try and do anything like that. Please. I’m having a hard enough—”
“You should have thought of that before you accused my mom of being a murderer!”
“It’s too late now, honeybunch. Your awful little shop will be shut down before the end of the month if I have anything to do with it. I should have listened to Hazel Crane. She warned me about you. She said to me that if I went to your shop, it would lead to trouble. I should have listened to her. Just wait until she hears what you’ve accused me of! She’ll eat you aliv
e, sweet cheeks.” Patricia gave me a final glare after her tirade and then interlocked her arm with her daughter’s. “We’ll be going now. Don’t you dare interfere with us again.”
As they were leaving, Patricia reached out and snagged the wedding dress they had been after off the rail. I just watched as they carried it out of the shop, not even being able to summon up the energy or confidence to shout after them. If Zola ever got out of her predicament, she could chase them down for payment, I decided.
BANG.
The door shut hard behind them. Kiwi let out a long, low, mournful cry and shook his head sympathetically at me.
“They didn’t confess, I take it?” said Sarah, emerging from the stock room.
I shook my head at her.
“No. And worse than that, I think I believe her. I just accused a rich, powerful, crazy woman of being a murderer. And now she’s planning to murder my business.” I clutched my head in my hands.
Sarah wrapped an arm around me and gave me a squeeze. She didn’t say anything. She knew there were no words that would work.
What was I going to do now?
Chapter 19
Upstairs in my living room, I was slumped into my armchair. I called it my granny chair because it seemed like the kind of chair an old grandmother would sit in while doing some crocheting or telling a story to a grandchild planted in her lap. Right then the name seemed particularly appropriate because I felt as energetic as a hundred-year-old grandmother. An unhealthy hundred-year-old grandmother, that is, not one of those super-energetic ones.
“What’s the time?” asked Kiwi.
“Don’t know, don’t care.” I figured he probably had some trashy reality show to watch. Dress Me Like a Moron! or Loser Island or some other mind-melting television cotton candy.
“No… try again…” Kiwi was hopping from one taloned foot to the other while he awaited my answer with a funny look on his face. When he wasn’t watching TV, he liked to keep an eye on what was going on outside, but right now he was just staring at me instead. Like he had a little secret or was planning some form of mischief.
I pulled out my phone with a sigh and looked at the clock. “It’s seven o’clock.”
“Nope.”
I glared at the parrot. He was almost smirking.
“Fine. I give up. What time is it in Kiwi Land?”
“It’s...” He stopped after that one single word to prompt me. I briefly wondered whether he was prompting me to shoo him out the window.
“What!?”
“Ice cream time!” he said and gave a squawk as he launched himself into the air to fly toward the kitchen.
With initial reluctance, but increasing enthusiasm at the thought of ice cream, I pulled myself to my feet and followed Kiwi into the kitchen.
He was sitting patiently on the counter waiting to be served. I couldn’t help but smile to see the little feathered creature waiting to be fed a bowl of ice cream.
I yanked open the freezer door and pulled out a pint of lavender ice cream. This wasn’t a kind you could get in the shops; it was my own special recipe. Loaded with cream, sugar, and charmed lavender, it soothed the soul at heights nothing else could reach. It was basically medicine. Fatty, highly-calorific, delightful-tasting medicine.
I put a couple of small scoops into a bowl for Kiwi—he was only small, after all—and took the rest of the tub back out to the living room with me, followed by a flapping and squawking Kiwi. I set his bowl down by the window while I sat back down in the armchair with my personal tub.
Amused, I watched as Kiwi bobbed his head up and down into his bowl.
“You should have been a woodpecker,”
“No way!” he said between pecks. “They eat insects!”
“So do parrots!”
He cocked his head at me. “Not this one.” He followed it up with a cackle before burying his head back in the bowl.
“Speaking of you and insects, do you think Hazel Crane has really got it in for us?”
Kiwi squawked at her mention. He’d met her a number of times and she’d either freaked him out or annoyed him each and every one of them, perhaps the worst offense being when she ‘helpfully’ turned a bowl of his cheese puffs into a bowl of spiders and insects which she claimed to be a more suitable diet for a parrot. Kiwi had not agreed with her.
“Probably.”
What was it that Patricia Bledsoe had actually said? According to her, Hazel Crane had warned her about me, that there would be trouble if they came into my shop. But to be fair, Hazel Crane was correct. Had she meant it in a mean way, or had she simply been fortune telling?
One of the problems with fortune telling is that the recipient hears what they want to hear. So if Hazel Crane told Patricia that there would be trouble, which obviously there consequently was with Carrie’s death, then what Patricia heard was ‘Aria is going to cause you trouble.’ When of course her death wasn’t my fault in the slightest.
Unless it was.
“Is it my fault Carrie is dead, Ki?” I asked after swallowing an overloaded spoon of too-cold and almost-but-not-quite too-delicious ice cream.
“No!” he squawked from his ice cream-covered beak.
“If I’d never invited Zola here... if I’d never tried to charm her into coming... perhaps Carrie would still be alive.”
“If you never opened your shop, she would be alive. If you’d punched her in the face the first time you saw her, she’d still be alive. If she had gone to college instead of listening to Brittany, she’d still be alive...”
“Is that supposed to help? You’re making it sound very avoidable.”
Kiwi shrugged his wings and shook his head. “You can’t blame yourself for unforeseen consequences. Especially impossible to foresee consequences.”
I ate two more spoons of the ice cream while I thought about it. I supposed he was kind of right. Maybe I shouldn’t feel guilty for things I couldn’t possibly have known were going to happen. Not because I didn’t do due diligence but because they literally were impossible to know.
Then again, maybe I shouldn’t take advice from a parrot.
“What do you think Hazel will do?”
Kiwi let out a long, angry screech before he deigned to respond in words.
“Who cares? She’s just a silly old witch. You could take her!”
Although his confidence was appreciated, I wasn’t sure how much faith I should put in it. Hazel Crane had a couple of advantages over me in terms of the magical arts: first, she was at least half a century older than me and had much more raw power, and second, she wasn’t averse to practicing the powerful dark arts, which I stridently avoided.
“I do wonder how close they are as friends,” I mused. “Hazel Crane doesn’t seem the type to have friends. Patricia’s faith in using Hazel to get revenge may be ill-judged.”
Kiwi nodded his head in firm agreement.
“Don’t worry about her. She’s just one customer anyway.”
“But word of mouth...”
“You’ve got plenty of word of mouth working in your favor,” he pointed out.
And I supposed he was right. Most of my customers did come through referrals these days, which meant previously satisfied customers. If I didn’t make a habit of accusing my customers of being murderers, maybe I could ride this storm out.
“So you don’t think we need to shut the shop and skip the country? We shouldn’t flee to Australia just yet?”
Ki gave me his answer with an agitated squawk.
“No way! Australia has giant spiders! And sharks!”
“You don’t go in the ocean,” I pointed out.
“Because it’s full of sharks!”
I giggled and ate some more ice cream. It was perhaps a silly thought. But I wouldn’t have been the first person in my family to try it. After finding out that my mother was pregnant, my father had tried to run from his responsibilities and disappear off to Australia but died en route. Something for which Mom was still resentful
.
“What about Brittany’s wedding?”
“Who cares?”
I snorted. My familiar was a lot less empathetic than me.
“Well, she does, I suppose. Do you think her fiancé would really dump her over some rumors? Rumors that haven’t even started yet?”
“He should. Because of her mother!”
I giggled. He sure was a brave man, whoever he was, to marry Brittany and knowingly take on Patricia as a mother-in-law.
I peered into my tub of ice cream with disappointment. There must have been some magic afoot, because it had become near-empty in record time. Inexplicable, I thought as I quickly spooned up two more mouthfuls before it all disappeared.
“I was so sure it was Patricia who killed Carrie. Or maybe Brittany. But now...”
“Trap them!”
“What?”
“The murderer. Trap them. Like they do on television. On Dress Me For a Date last night, they found Starla’s boyfriend Joe was cheating on her!”
“Oh?” I asked with a frown.
“Yeah. They got another girl to secretly ask him out, and he said yes, but it was a trap!”
“And what does that have to do with anything?”
Kiwi shrugged his wings. “Bring another girl in here and see if the murderer comes back!”
I giggled. It was perhaps a little mean to laugh at, but the idea that the murderer killed Carrie just because she was there made no sense at all, so the idea of dropping another girl into the shop late at night to bring the murderer back was beyond silly. However...
“I don’t think that’s going to work, Ki—”
He interrupted me with an angry shriek.
“—but you have given me an idea.”
He made a questioning cooing sound.
“We do need a trap, but the bait has to be a little more sophisticated than dropping a Carrie-lookalike into the shop overnight.”
Kiwi flew across the room and landed on the arm of the chair to peer into my ice cream tub. He’d finished his own bowl and was now looking into mine. He screeched a tone of complaint at seeing it empty.
Wedding Bells And Magic Spells Box Set Page 33