Magickal Mystery Lore

by Sharon Pape

  Although there was a single menu for all the rooms, it changed with the actual seasons. If the food was as wonderful as I’d heard, customers were likely to return again and again to partake of all four.

  I’d noticed that the tables in all the rooms were far enough apart to allow for quiet conversation. Our table, tucked into a corner of summer, could almost be called secluded. If this was the newest restaurant trend, I was an instant fan.

  Everything on the menu sounded delicious and since neither of us had been there before, we asked the waitress for suggestions. She said it was all awesome, but diners were raving about the cold berry soup, served with a dollop of sour cream; and both the pork osso bucco and the rainbow trout with mango salsa. We each ordered the soup; Travis went for the pork, while I chose the trout.

  We were enjoying the soup, which was like having dessert before dinner, when we heard a woman’s voice raised above the soft murmur of the other conversations. “I don’t believe it!” The sound was so loud and unexpected that it gave me a start and made other diners turn to see who was so inconsiderate. I also looked up to find the source, but I didn’t have to search far. The owner of the voice was headed straight for our table. It took me a moment to place her—the impeccably attired Whitney Reynolds, interior designer for the Waverly Hotel. She’d visited my shop once and bought three hundred dollars’ worth of products. Sales like that are memorable. I remembered liking her too. But that one encounter could hardly be the reason for her cry of joyful surprise at seeing me again. Travis solved the mystery by bumping the table in his rush to stand up. He took two steps toward her and opened his arms. After the hug, they exchanged cheek kisses.

  “How long has it been?” he said at a volume that was more in keeping with the other voices in the room.

  Whitney lowered her voice. “Ten, twelve years at least.” She stepped back and gave him an appraising look. “You haven’t changed at all—no fair.”

  “Not true, but talk about time standing still—I’d recognize you anywhere.” I was beginning to feel invisible—no spell required.

  “Hello, Whitney,” I said instead of waiting for Travis to remember I was there.

  She turned her smile on me. “Kailyn, right?” I saw her glance down at my hands—looking for a ring perhaps?

  “You two know each other?” Travis said, sounding more incredulous than he should have, given that I owned a popular shop in town. Maybe he was still in a state of shock from Whitney’s appearance.

  “I went into Abracadabra the last time I was up here.” She took a few steps closer to me. “I have to tell you—the things I bought at your shop are remarkable. They’re much better than the finest products on the market, and I’ve tried them all. What’s your secret?”

  “It must be the magick,” I said with a laugh. I’d learned that if I joked about magick, no one took it seriously, yet I was being completely honest.

  “You’re not going to tell me. Well I can’t say that I blame you. Did you ever consider marketing your products nationally—hell, globally? You’d rake in millions, become a business tycoon.” The very last thing we Wildes ever aspired to be. I’d be hunted and hounded for my powers by governments and criminals alike.

  Travis shook his head. “Whitney never did think small.” Our waitress appeared to inquire if we’d like another chair brought to our table. It wouldn’t be any trouble because it was a four-top. Whitney started to decline, but Travis insisted she join us if she was dining alone. “Right, Kailyn?” he asked, assuming I’d be all for it.

  I liked Whitney a lot, but I didn’t wait three weeks and buy the red dress so I could share the evening with a third wheel who seemed to share a strong history with my guy. “Of course,” I said. Many women would have caught the slight demur in my words, but Whitney didn’t seem to be one of them. Or she wanted more time with Travis despite how I felt about it. Watch your step, Miss Reynolds, magick also has a dark side. And there were times it was awfully tempting to cross that line.

  With our guest settled in her chair and another soup on its way, Travis asked what brought her upstate. After a ten-minute answer, she asked him the same thing. I could have given them a more succinct version of both stories, having heard them before, but I just ate my soup.

  At the first pause in their conversation, I asked the question that had been on my tongue since Whitney arrived. “So—how do you know each other?” I was rooting for them to say they were cousins, but I knew in my bones it was a different kind of closeness they’d shared.

  “We went to high school together,” Travis said, spooning up the last bit of his soup.

  “Yeah, that’s all it was,” she chided him. “The way I remember it, Kailyn, we dated exclusively for the last two years of high school. Everyone thought we’d get married. There was even a pool to pick the date he’d propose.” Travis looked like he wanted to crawl under the table.

  “What happened?”

  Travis jumped on the question. “We went off to different colleges, met new people, did some growing up and by Christmas break of our sophomore year, things were different between us.”

  “You bet they were.” The playfulness was gone from Whitney’s tone. “One of those new people you met was sharing your bed. That’s what changed between us.” Still happy you insisted she join us, Travis?

  “C’mon,” he said. “We were kids. Feelings change.” He was trying to put a better spin on it, but I could tell from Whitney’s face that there wasn’t enough spin in the world to fix how he’d treated her.

  “Your feelings may have changed, but mine didn’t.” Her words were charged with emotion. For a moment, I thought her voice was going to crack. But she remained dry-eyed and in control.

  “I didn’t know,” Travis murmured.

  “Let’s be honest—you didn’t want to know.” She sighed, and her mouth turned up in a weak smile. “But that was all a long time ago and skeletons are best kept in their closets. Just kick me if I say another word about the past.” She turned to me. “Kailyn, tell me how you two met.” I rattled off a quick capsule about Travis’s first time in my shop, omitting our contentious dialogue about magick. It was pretty sketchy, but she didn’t seem to notice. For the remainder of the meal, we all worked to keep the conversation light, but the undercurrent of emotions buzzed in my head, making it difficult to enjoy the food. Whitney picked at her chicken. Only Travis cleaned his plate. Keeping his mouth full was a good way to keep from stuffing his big foot in it again.

  Whitney left before dessert, claiming she had work to finish. We went through the social ritual of goodbye—the embrace, the air kiss, along with the declaration that we should get together again, insincere on my part if not on theirs.

  “I’m sorry about all that,” Travis said once we were alone. He reached across the table for my hand. I placed mine in it. “I hope you realize I’m no longer the clueless kid she was describing.”

  “You did sound pretty clueless, even heartless.” I couldn’t resist a little teasing payback for his having ruined the evening. The waitress appeared to ask if we’d like to see the dessert tray. Before I could decline, Travis said, “Absolutely.” He squeezed my hand when she went off to fetch it. “We are going to salvage part of this dinner.”

  I can skip desserts I read about on a menu, but I have a harder time turning down a tray of delectables right there before my eyes. Spring being prime time for strawberries, many of the desserts made use of them. Travis chose the strawberry short cake and I fell hard for a plate of chocolate-covered strawberries and almond biscotti. He regaled me with funny behind-the-scenes stories from the newsroom and between the laughter and the sugar rush, I was able to put Whitney out of my mind.

  Chapter 24

  “Men compartmentalize much better than women do,” Tilly said when I told her the whole sordid tale the next morning. She’d just pulled a tray of blueberry scones out of the oven in h
er shop and insisted we sit down to taste them. I pointed out that we had only five minutes before opening our doors to customers, so she told me to eat fast or save the rest for later. I sat down next to Merlin, who’d already installed himself at a table as soon as he heard the word taste. Pavlov would have loved him.

  Tilly handed out scones and napkins and took her seat. “I guarantee you, as soon as Travis dropped you off last night, he shoved any uncomfortable thoughts and feelings about the incident into a closet and slammed the door shut. You, on the other hand, have probably been reliving every moment of that dinner in a never-ending loop.”

  Wise Tilly was at the top of her game. I plucked a warm blueberry out of my scone and popped it into my mouth with a sigh. “So what do you suggest I do about it?”

  “Let it go,” Merlin said, spraying bits of scone as he tried to talk around a mouthful of the pastry. “Let it go, let it go, let it go.”

  “Frozen?” I asked.

  “He watched it three times this week,” Tilly replied. “But it’s not bad advice. Travis is a good man who’s crazy about you. Of course I don’t know Whitney. You might want to keep an eye on her.” I had no idea how to simultaneously “let it go” and yet keep an eye on her, but our five minutes were up. Tilly’s first client was knocking on the door.

  I wrapped my uneaten scone in a napkin and headed back to Abracadabra. Unfortunately no one was at my door to distract me. Sashki was deep into his first nap of the day. I busied myself by doing inventory in my storeroom and making a list of supplies I needed to reorder. Not my favorite chore. I was more than ready for a break when Travis called. He’d heard back from his contact in Buffalo. According to the biometric hand scanner in Liam’s office, he was at work in Buffalo the day his sister was killed, hours away in Watkins Glen.

  When lunchtime crawled around, I decided to get outside for some fresh air and pop in on a few more of the shopkeepers to see if they could add anything useful to my knowledge about Ava. The mild spring air was soft against my face. It lifted my spirits with every breath. I passed the shops I’d already visited and went into Fido & Friends, the specialty pet store, Blooming Bags, where every purse was handmade by the Finnegan twins, and the Gatwick Gallery, which focused on artists from the surrounding areas. The first two stops didn’t net me any new information. None of the shopkeepers had heard of Ava until after she was murdered. I stayed long enough to be sociable, asking after their families and catching up on small town gossip that was more kind than malicious in spite of Beverly’s influence.

  I entered the art gallery with half my lunch hour spent. The gallery owner, Tina Gatwick, came out of her backroom when she heard the door open. She was holding half a sandwich, tuna by the smell of it. Like most of New Camel’s merchants, she was informal with her clientele. It was no big deal for her to welcome visitors with her lunch in hand. She was a forty-something graphic artist who’d left Boston and the rat race behind to live a gentler life in rural New York. She supplemented her income by illustrating children’s books. Computers had made it possible for her to live the life she envisioned.

  “It’s been a long time since you’ve brightened my doorstep,” Tina said, hugging me with her empty hand. “What can I do for you today?”

  “You may have heard that I’m investigating Ava Duncan’s death.” I’d stopped carrying her newspaper photo with me. Her image had appeared on TV, online and in the papers so often that most people could recognize her faster than an uncle they only saw at weddings and funerals. “I’ve been canvassing the shops, hoping to find out as much as I can about her.”

  Tina shook her head and sighed. “I hung out with her from time to time, because I was friends with Angie—I was the old lady of the group,” she chuckled. “The three of us would have dinner together or see a movie. And now they’re both gone.”

  “Both? What happened to Angie?” I might have hit the shopkeeper information jackpot.

  “That’s the weird part—no one seems to know. Come in the back and sit.” I followed her into an all-purpose room with a desk and laptop, a small fridge, a microwave and a table and chairs that had seen better days.

  “Can I offer you water or coffee?” Tina asked as we sat across from each other. She was still holding onto her half a sandwich. The bread was sagging from gravity.

  “Thanks, I’m good. Please go ahead and finish your lunch.”

  Tina looked at the sandwich in her hand as if she’d forgotten she was holding it. She took a bite and washed it down with the bottle of water on the table. “Although I knew Angie longer than I knew Ava, most of what I know about her disappearance came from Ava. They both worked at Monroe Enterprises and lived in the same apartment house in the Glen, plus they were close in age. It was easy for them to become tight quickly.” It struck me that she was reassuring herself about why Angie became closer to Ava, as much as she was explaining their relationship to me, but I didn’t hear ill will or jealousy in her tone.

  “What did she have to say about Angie’s disappearance?”

  “One day Angie didn’t show up for work. She didn’t answer her landline or her cell. Ava went upstairs and rang her bell, but there was no answer. She spoke to Jorge, the building’s super. He didn’t have much to add. He said he was used to seeing her and the kids every day, so after a few days went by, he rang their bell too. Then he checked in the basement for their suitcases. All the tenants have a space there for storage. When he saw they were gone, he figured the family went on vacation. Only it was the first time Angie hadn’t mentioned it to him beforehand.

  “Ava convinced him to use his key to check the apartment—just in case. She could be very persuasive.” Tina took another bite. It took a lot of self-control for me to wait quietly until she was ready to continue. “The place looked exactly the way it did when they were living there. Neat as a pin. All that was missing was their clothing and personal items.”

  “Something might have happened while they were on vacation,” I said, not believing it myself. Any abduction or tragic accident involving a family would have made the news.

  Tina finished the last of her sandwich. “I’m sure she would have mentioned a vacation to me or Ava. It just doesn’t track. And it’s even harder to believe that she uprooted her kids, left the job she was married to and disappeared. That job paid her enough to take good care of her kids, including medical benefits. What mother in her right mind would walk away from that?”

  “Maybe she wasn’t in her right mind. People sometimes snap from all the responsibility on their shoulders.”

  “Not Angie. I’ve never met a more centered woman. And where her kids were concerned, she was a regular wolverine.”

  Cue the Twilight Zone music, I thought dismally. Instead of getting information on Ava, I’d stumbled onto another mystery. And I had the feeling that Angie’s disappearance was somehow linked to Ava’s death. I asked Tina if she knew where Angie’s family lived.

  “I’m not sure. She grew up in New Jersey, but I don’t think her folks still live there.”

  “What is Angie’s last name?”

  “She took her maiden name back after her divorce—Neumann.”

  I stayed and chatted a while longer, until I checked my watch and realized it was time to get back to my shop. I headed back at a jog and found Lolly trying to open my door.

  When we were inside, I gave her cheek a kiss and we held onto each other for a few extra heartbeats. She smelled like she’d taken a bath in chocolate. “Best perfume ever,” I said, releasing her. “Is this a quickie visit, or can you stay for a while?”

  “Dani’s watching the store. Everyone in the family is keeping an annoyingly close eye on me. They’re driving me daft.”

  I escorted her to the customer chair and hopped up on the counter. “Tell me how you’re doing.”

  “I suppose things could be worse. Business has been better than usual for this time o
f year, although that probably says less about my candy and more about my notoriety.”

  “Trust me—it’s about the candy. How’s the arthritis?”

  “What can I say—it’s very devoted. The medicine you gave me is a blessing though. I don’t think I could manage without it.”

  I made a mental note to whip up a new batch for her with a double dose of magick. “Unfortunately, stress is bad for arthritis.”

  Lolly smiled her dimpled smile that pushed up her cheeks and instantly erased twenty years. “Hold on—you mean stress is good for some things?” That sounded more like the Lolly I knew and loved. She rummaged in the pockets of her denim skirt and came away with a little white bag which she held out to me. “Fruits of my labor.” I peeked inside—dark chocolate butter crunch, one of my favorites. I thanked her, but she held up her hand to stop me. “Wait, I come bearing information too.”

  I arched an eyebrow at her. “What have you been up to, lady?”

  “With all the foot traffic in my shop lately, I figured I should at least be trying to ferret out something useful for my case. And I did! You’ve been trying to find the address of that company where Ava worked, right? Well, I not only have that for you, but I also found out that Monroe Enterprises recently changed its name to Eagle Enterprises!”

  “You’re unbelievable!” I said, hopping down from my perch to hug her again. She pulled a piece of note paper from her apron pocket and handed it to me. “Eagle Enterprises, One Comstock Lane.” I wondered if my navigation app would have it. If not, Travis and I were back to square one.

  “What’s wrong?” Lolly asked.

  “I still have no idea where this is.”

  “Nelson mentioned it was a couple of miles south of town if that helps.”

  “Knowing the general area is a big help. Is that Nelson Biddle?” I asked, as if there were any number of Nelsons in our tiny town.

  “Yes. I hadn’t seen him in a dog’s age. He ambled into my shop the other day and said he came to visit—to shore up old acquaintances. Said he got the idea from the girl in the magick shop.” I guess I hadn’t asked him the right questions when I stopped in there. But it was nice to know that my lunchtime visits were paying off in investigative gold and encouraging more camaraderie among the shopkeepers.