Wedding Bells And Magic Spells Box Set

by A. R. Winters

  “It’s here somewhere...”

  “Is it?” I asked him, dubiously.

  Despite the mess, I could see across the room and something the size of Sandra’s scrapbook should have been clearly visible.

  Kiwi suddenly gave a loud, frustrated shriek.

  “It’s not here, is it?” I said.

  “It’s gone! Robbed! We’ve been robbed!” he screeched.

  “You probably just forgot where you put it,” I said calmly. “You ate far too much fudge that day, remember? All you did was sleep and complain for the next couple of days.”

  “I was sick!” he complained.

  “Sick of fudge,” I answered. “I think you were too zonked to realize where you put the thing.”

  Kiwi made another angry caw but didn’t answer again. He knew I was right.

  “Do you remember anything about the scrapbook? Anything that might help us?”

  “No,” he said sullenly.

  “No, you don’t remember, or no, there was nothing helpful?”

  “It was boring. Except for the fudge pictures.”

  “So, nothing? It looked like you were reading something when I saw you in the house.”

  “Oh. Yeah. It was a story about some fudging couple.”

  “Kiwi!”

  He screeched loudly in my ear and then flew back over to the craft table. “Really! It was some couple and their family run fudge company!”

  “I see. What else?”

  “It was about their super secret fudge recipe, and how they and Sandra had won an award.”

  “Sandra?”

  He nodded his little head up and down authoritatively. “Yep. It was the three of them. The fudge company couple, and Sandra was their worker. Small company.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “Very interesting.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” said Kiwi with a shake of his wings. “It was boring, boring, boring. Just recipes and boring newspaper articles.”

  “Recipes are boring, are they?”

  Kiwi took half a second to consider before replying with another firm nod of his little head.

  “You know, if we had Sandra’s recipes, we could make her fudge at home. Then we wouldn’t have to worry about Randi at all.”

  Kiwi blinked several times. He opened his beak. He closed his beak. He jumped into the air, shook his wings out, landed back down.

  “I’ve got to find it!” he said and jumped off the table, landing atop a six-month-old copy of Pregnant Celebrity Secrets and started running around like a manic whirlwind.

  “I’ll leave you to it,” I said. “When you find it, let me know.”

  “Got to find it, got to find it...” Kiwi was saying to himself when I closed the door behind him.

  Despite not yet having the scrapbook in hand, what Kiwi had told me had given me an idea.

  One of the best ways to work on an idea is to let it develop—let it ferment—while you do something relatively mindless. So I decided to tidy up the rest of the apartment while I thought through my plans.

  And you never know, I thought, maybe the scrapbook will turn up in some corner.

  Chapter 20

  The next day, I went down to the shop about half an hour before opening, but I was not accompanied by Kiwi. The thought that he may’ve lost the chance at getting an unlimited supply of Sandra’s fudge without ever having to leave his own home was too much for him.

  He’d spent the whole night tearing his room apart, making such a racket I had to put in earplugs to get some sleep, and now he was planning on carrying on with the rest of the apartment. I’d told him as sternly as I could that he’d better not make a mess, but I suspected it was in vain.

  I called Sarah when I got there and asked her to come in early. I had a few things I wanted to do that day. You know, just little things. Like solving the murder of Sandra, finding out what happened to my mother, and just what exactly Hazel Crane was playing at.

  “I’ll be there in two minutes!” said Sarah on the phone.

  Much to my surprise, she was, and she was carrying two coffees.

  “That was quick,” I said to her once she’d arrived and settled down with her coffee into one of the chairs.

  “Well, I was already nearly here,” she said.

  “Why?”

  Sarah gave me a quizzical look.

  “I’m never late. I make a point of it. My guru said that a late guest is an unwanted one.” She looked wistful. “He’s so wise.”

  “Is he? Is he? And anyway, you’re not a guest. You’re an employee.”

  She tilted her head. “Oh. I suppose you’re right. Then, it doesn’t matter if I’m late or not!”

  “That’s not...” I shook my head. I didn’t have time for Sarah-logic. “I need you to mind the shop this morning. I’ve got a few things to do.”

  “I don’t mind at all,” she said with a smile.

  “Oh, and if you have any quiet moments, I want you to look up some fudge recipes.”

  “Fudge recipes?” she asked wrinkling her nose.

  “Yep. Fudge recipes. Good ones. Go online and find the best fudge recipes you can. I’m working on a plan.

  “Are you going to open a fudge shop?”

  I grinned at her. “I’ve already got a shop. But you’re not far off the mark. All will be revealed...”

  “Ooh, that sounds exciting. I’ll find the best gosh-darned fudge recipes there are. Better than Sandra’s, even.”

  “Excellent, you do that.”

  Leaving her in a good mood, I left my shop to try and solve a few of the mysteries that had been plaguing us.

  The first order of business?

  My mother.

  I knew my mother, vain as she was, wouldn’t have completely abandoned her home, even if she was in hiding. She’d need to go back to grab her jewelry and makeup at least, and probably some of her magic supplies too.

  I drove over to her home as quickly as I could. She lived a couple of miles away from downtown Sequoia Bay in a modern suburb that was popular with ‘women who lunch’ and other members of her country club.

  The driveway was paved with red-bricks and lined with a variety of bushes that looked ornamental along the sides. The bushes were not purely for decoration though; each of them had some use as a reagent in a witch’s spell. In the backyard, she had an impressive herb garden too. She had the second most impressive collection of plants for magical purposes in all of Sequoia Bay. The most impressive was, of course, Hazel Crane’s.

  There was no obvious sign of Mom when I arrived.

  Her car wasn’t in the driveway, and even though she had a garage I knew it wouldn’t be in there — it was full of old furniture and boxes of clothes which were currently out of style, but which my mother assured me would be the in-thing again before I knew it.

  The front door was painted bright white and, like the rest of the house, was well-maintained. Mom wasn’t just proud of her own appearance; it extended to everything she owned.

  Using my spare key, I quickly let myself in and closed the door quickly behind me.

  I knew Mom wasn’t home immediately. Call it witch’s intuition or just good old-fashioned human intuition, but I can always tell when a house is empty. There’s an air to it, a feeling of slightly resentful abandonment emanating from the very walls.

  A no-one-home silence is different, too. It doesn’t matter whether an occupant is sitting reading completely quietly, it still affects the air in a different way, giving the house a homier feel to it if there is someone present, than if it’s silent due to no one being home.

  “Hello?” I called out, just to be sure.

  Of course there was no response. My intuition hadn’t let me down yet.

  The hallway floor was hardwood, and my shoes click-clacked with every step, sending echoes bouncing down the hall.

  The walls were mostly undecorated, with the exception of several large photographs.

  The first was of Mom as prom queen in high school, and it st
ood in pride of place near the front door. It was blown up to a giant size and displayed in a gilded frame.

  They say some people peak in high school. Mom claims that she peaked—but never dropped down again.

  She’s still peaking, she says, though I suspect Donovan Charlston is the only person in town who’d honestly agree with her.

  There were several more photos of her along the entire length of the hall; pregnant with me, at a summer gala, wearing a ridiculous hat at a wedding, on the stage after earning a Sequoia Bay Citizen of the Year award presented—and judged—by Donovan in his mayoral role, and an enlarged version of the cover of California Country Magazine from when she was featured on the cover.

  You could quickly count the number of pictures she kept of me on her wall-of-fame: none.

  The hallway was Mom’s tribute to herself, a kind of mini-gallery dedicated to the accomplishments of Annabelle Whitmore. Well, not so much her accomplishments, more her various ‘looks’ over the years. Most of Mom’s accomplishments weren’t exactly the kind that drove the nation forward or helped alleviate the pains of the suffering.

  I headed over to her bedroom; that was where I was likely to find some clue about where she’d gone, and what she had been cooking up with Hazel Crane.

  Mom’s bedroom was less a place for sleeping, and more a place for self-beautification and self-adulation.

  Everything in it was pink and frilly or sparkly and glittery, with most of the bling being provided by glass mirrors and genuine diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and other assorted gems. On one wall were three floor-to-ceiling mirrors, with another three on the opposing side so that she could admire herself from every angle. Sometimes she made me go in there so that she could critique me from every angle without having to move.

  The bed was a massive four-poster, complete with hanging curtains around the side. When Mom had first had it delivered, I’d told her it was a princess bed. She had claimed that it was purely for practical reasons though; the curtains around the side were mosquito netting. Not that I’d ever seen a mosquito around Mom’s house — she had perfectly decent magic spells to keep the little pests away.

  Mom’s usually perfectly arranged room was in turmoil today. Although she wasn’t the tidiest person, she had a housekeeper who came in a couple of times a week to keep everything in order. It looked like she hadn’t been in for quite a while though.

  There were three empty suitcases on the floor, all of which had been dragged out of her massive walk-in closet. If a normal person had done that, I would have thought something had gone wrong, but with Mom, I knew exactly what had happened—she’d taken all her suitcases out, and then decided which one looked the best, or at least matched her outfit in the most flattering way. The others had been abandoned on the floor for Esmerelda the housekeeper to deal with.

  The doors to the walk-in closet were also open, and much of the contents had been tossed into a heap on the floor, still on its hangers, while others were just missing, presumably in the missing suitcase.

  It looked like it was mainly the bulky winter jackets that had gone missing. Most of Mom’s other clothes wouldn’t fit her in her current state. The other clothes must have been thrown on the floor in a rage when she realized she didn’t fit in them anymore.

  “Nothing too incriminating here,” I said to myself. “And no clues as to where she’s gone either.”

  If the bedroom wasn’t going to help, then perhaps another room would: her workshop.

  It wasn’t a workshop full of hammers and saws and drills and the like—it was a magic workshop and it was located in the basement of the house.

  I left Mom’s bedroom and went to the kitchen, where the door to the basement was located. It was still ajar, as if someone had left it in a hurry. Or they were just untidy. It could have been either, in Mom’s case.

  The light switch was located right at the top of the stairs, so I flicked it on and made my way down to what was literally her witch’s den.

  The third step down creaked just as it was supposed to, and so did the seventh. It was designed that way to stop people from sneaking up on her when she was immersed in crafting a spell.

  “Hello?” I called again, pointlessly.

  Of course there was no answer.

  The room was divided into three parts with head-height partitions from an office supply store. The first section was a kind of vestibule and storage area. Behind it, through a little opening in the partition on the right-hand side was her main ‘workspace’ for performing spells, and behind that in the final section was her magical library.

  She kept all this stuff in the basement because, by its nature, a lot of magical accouterments are kind of ugly, or at least don’t match Mom’s taste in home decor.

  When I got to the bottom of the stairs my eye was first caught by her large dragon-eye box. It was sitting on top of a worktable against the left-hand side of the room, and its lid was fully open, leaning against the wall.

  The dragon-eye box was where Mom kept all of her most valuable and powerful magical artifacts. And unless she was actually working on something, the box was kept locked with both a key and a magical spell.

  The fact that the box had been left open sent my hackles up. The outside of the box was decorated with tiny fragments of mother-of-pearl, all arranged in a mosaic to create the image of a giant dragon’s eye. Presumably, the maker couldn’t actually find a genuine dragon’s eye; they’re quite hard to get a hold of these days.

  As I stepped toward it, the inside was revealed too. It was notable for two reasons. Firstly, it was lined with gorgeous royal purple velvet. Anything dropped into the box would land with the gentlest of thuds, almost silently. It was the kind of material that you could happily sit and stroke like it was a cat, and I couldn’t help but take a moment to do so.

  But the other reason the interior of the box was notable was unique to today, and the reason was this: it was completely empty.

  It should never be completely empty. You took things out of it when you needed them, and you’d never need, for example, a hickory wand and an ebony one at the same time. No, it was filled with different tools for different purposes, and you wouldn’t ever need them all at once.

  Unless...

  With a shake of my head, I pulled the lid of the box forward and then let it drop down. The box closed with a soft thud and then a click as the lock automatically engaged.

  Moving on, I was going to look deeper in, to see what else I could find of interest.

  Passing around the partition, I reached the main part of Mom’s witch’s den. The actual workshop itself.

  “What in magic’s name...”

  The workshop was a mess. The center of it was dominated by a massive mahogany table. There was usually a large crystal ball right in the middle of the table, but it was gone.

  The table itself had several black burn marks on it that I was fairly certain hadn’t been there before, and at the end of the table was a large book and a big plastic container of something.

  Stepping around the edge of the table I made my way to the book. It was open, so using my finger to mark the page I lifted it up by the cover to see what it was.

  “You have got to be kidding me.”

  On the front of the book, was a drawing of what looked like a large ink bottle, except instead of a label reading ‘Ink’ there was a picture of a skull and crossbones. Above it, in large capital letters was the title: The Murderer’s Guide to Poisons.

  That couldn’t be real, could it? I flicked through the book to the introduction.

  Crime writers and their fans have been fascinated by poisons as long as they have been putting pen to paper and eyes to pages. From the stories of ancient Greek philosophers meeting their fate with hemlock to modern poisonings with polonium tea, humans have been fascinated with poison since time immemorial…

  The writer went on to explain that he’d put the book together as a kind of companion for anyone who was interested in common pois
ons, particularly people who loved television mystery shows or read mystery books.

  It was some small relief to me that the book wasn’t literally what it said on the cover, but not much.

  Why would Mom be consulting a book about poisons?

  Next to the book, the big plastic tub was still sitting menacingly. Well, as menacingly as a plastic container can look. The label on the front read: Strychnine.

  “Strychnine, strychnine, strychnine,” I said to myself, trying to think. I’d heard of that before but I couldn’t quite remember where. It didn’t take a genius though to figure out what it might be.

  I lifted my finger to open the poison book back to the page it had been at when I entered.

  Yep. Sure enough, it was a chapter titled, unsurprisingly, “Strychnine.”

  Skimming through it I gathered the important facts. It was, indeed, a poison, and a relatively common one, its most common usage being the killing of rats. The book also went on to explain how it had been used to kill people too, how it was possible to build up an immunity to it, and how some people even consumed it deliberately in a show of religious faith which not infrequently led to serious illness and even death.

  “Well, this is just great,” I said to myself.

  Not only had Mom been in the murder victim’s house, but there was now also some very convincing circumstantial evidence that she had poisoned Sandra.

  I shut the book and left it on the table. I didn’t exactly want to walk out of the house with a big tub of poison and a book on poisoning people. I was about ninety-five percent certain that Mom hadn’t actually poisoned Sandra, but this was going to look very incriminating. Clearly, someone wanted to blame my mother for the murder. But who?

  And if the police got a warrant to search her house, they’d probably jump to the most obvious conclusion too. I couldn’t let that happen.

  The third section of Mom’s basement just about topped everything off.

  As I stepped around to the library area I was greeted with massive disarray. Her books were in their proper places—the shelves were neatly filled with various reference books and magical tomes, spines out, lined up just as they should have been.