Wardens of Wisteria (Wisteria Witches Mysteries - Daybreak Book 1)

by Angela Pepper

  Ishmael Greyson.

  I’d never heard his name before that Saturday. It had sounded so strange at first, but now it was too familiar. His name wouldn’t stop echoing in my mind. I looked around Time Traveler Tattoos for the ghost with the bulging eyes and the skinny, glowing neck. I still couldn’t see or sense him.

  “Ishmael,” I whispered. “Ishmael Greyson, are you here?”

  There was no response.

  I decided to cast a threat detection spell I’d recently learned from my mentor, Aunt Zinnia. The spell revealed the invisible or hidden, within certain parameters that Zinnia hadn’t defined clearly. I suspected she’d been keeping me in the dark on some spells to prevent me from becoming overconfident. But I’d seen her cast the spell, and I’d kept pestering her about it until she taught it to me recently.

  To cast the spell, I waved my hand as though I was sprinkling powder in a circle around myself. The spell also came in powdered form, with the magic already built in, but we’d used up my aunt’s supply during lessons and she hadn’t yet made another batch. Zinnia told me the spell would work at least one time on a newly made ghost—one time only, then the spirit became inoculated against the spell. Until now, I hadn’t needed any spells to see ghosts, but there was something different about Ishmael. Or something different about me.

  The old house was quiet, yet an even deeper hush fell around me as the threat detection spell settled. I held very still and waited. No ghost.

  Darn.

  The spell hadn’t reveal anything new, and yet... the gleaming checkerboard floor did appear more dusty than it had seemed a moment before.

  I cast the spell once more for good measure, this time twitching my non-dominant fingers at the upper corners of the small waiting room.

  Still no ghost.

  I looked over at the jars of red candies. Those sugary candies are the only threat in this waiting area, I thought with a chuckle. My mouth watered. I forced my eyes down to the magazine. Zara is a good witch. Zara doesn’t help herself to delicious red candies that are for customers only.

  Cut to: twenty minutes later.

  Wouldn’t you know it, yours truly literally had her hand in the candy jar when Bentley returned to the waiting room.

  Busted.

  “I need your help,” he said, then shook his head. “I can’t leave you alone for a minute, can I?”

  I held out a handful of red jelly beans. “I was planning to share. Here. Take some.”

  “They look moist from your hand.”

  “So? Don’t tell me you’re a germaphobe.”

  “Just because I’m selective about what I put in my mouth, that doesn’t make me a germaphobe.” He hand went to something at his neck, a lump under his shirt collar.

  I stuffed the jelly beans in my mouth. He was right about my hand being moist. The candy coating left a red sheen on my palm that I had to lick clean, much to Bentley’s horror.

  Chapter 11

  The sticky candy clung to my teeth as I asked Bentley, “How’d it go?”

  “She took the news as well as could be expected.” He rubbed his chin. “I’d like to try the rest of the interview with you present. Since you’re here already, I might as well put you to use.”

  “You make me feel so special.”

  He nodded for me to follow him. “She formed a bond with your aunt when they worked together. Due to your similar appearances, I believe Miss Greyson may be more comfortable with you present. I’ve explained to her that you’re acting as a special behavioral consultant on the case.”

  “And she bought it? Wow. You’re good.”

  With no trace of humor whatsoever, he said, “I am good.”

  I followed him through the tattoo studio, past reclining black leather chairs that would look right at home in an edgy dentist practice, and then into a small office.

  Carrot Greyson was wiping her eyes with a crumpled tissue. Bentley and I sat on two guest chairs that were a bit too close together. We bumped arms until we each leaned to the outside.

  “Ms. Greyson, I’m so sorry to be meeting you under these circumstances,” I said, offering her my hand for the second time because I didn’t know her well enough to offer a hug. She shook it limply.

  “You look so much like Zinnia,” she said. “I feel like I know you already.”

  “If you know my aunt well, you may know more about me than most people do.” For example, she might know that the Riddles were witches.

  She frowned. “I don’t know her that well. We worked together for over a year, but she’s very private about her personal life.”

  “Ah,” I replied. Zinnia was private about her personal life. Carrot Greyson didn’t know my aunt was a witch.

  She went on. “I didn’t even know Zinnia was dating someone in our office until...” She trailed off, her weepy eyes unfocused. She seemed to stop breathing for a full moment before taking in a gasp of air and then gushing, “It’s all been so terrible lately. Everything. I thought I could get away from all of that death and start fresh by opening this place, but we can’t ever escape our fates, can we?”

  I glanced over at Bentley for permission to dive in with my questions. He gave me an almost imperceptible nod.

  “What do you mean by our fates?” I asked gently. “Do you think that whatever happened to your brother has something to do with you?”

  “I don’t know.” She scrunched her face. “Do you ever feel like you’re cursed?”

  “Yes,” I answered without hesitation. I’d been told I was Spirit Charmed, but it often felt more like Spirit Cursed.

  Bentley interjected. “It’s normal to feel that way after a string of bad luck. I’m sure you’re not cursed, Ms. Greyson.” He looked directly at me and explained, “Earlier this year, two of the people Carrot worked with at the Permits Department died by violent means. The cases have both been closed, and there’s no reason to believe those incidents are connected to what we’re talking about today.”

  I nodded. The cases had almost certainly been connected to my aunt, and I was dying to know how, but now wasn’t the time.

  “Let’s say you are cursed,” I said to the young woman with the skinny face and bright orange hair. Bentley groaned, but I went on. “Do you have any thoughts about who might have cursed you? Or why?”

  “I’m not crazy,” she said. “I know things like curses aren’t real.” She smacked herself lightly on the forehead. “Stupid Carrot.” She gave herself another smack before she dropped her pale hand away. “I shouldn’t even say stuff like that as a joke. People always tease me about my beliefs. My boyfriend hates it when I tell him about my dreams.”

  I leaned forward. “Your dreams?”

  “In my dreams, sometimes I’m myself, but other times I’m like a camera, or a silent passenger inside an animal.” She rubbed her collarbone, running her fingertips over the tattoo that marked her pale flesh there. It was the paw of an animal with sharp claws. “The Greyson family comes from a long line of psychics and monster hunters,” she said. Then she smacked her forehead again. “Stupid Carrot. I shouldn’t have said that. Now you both think I’m crazy.”

  In unison, Bentley and I both said, “Not at all.”

  Bentley took over. “There are many things in this world people don’t speak of, let alone understand. Did you have any of these dreams last night?”

  “No. It was so hot upstairs.” She dabbed her eyes dry and explained, “I live on the top floor of this place, and there’s no air conditioning, as you might have noticed.”

  “It’s not so bad on this level,” Bentley said.

  “No, but heat rises,” she said. “The heat must have knocked me out, because my dreams were only blackness, except for when I was watching a movie.” She smiled briefly through her tears. “I dreamed I was watching a movie that hasn’t been released yet. Isn’t that funny? My mind must have made it up from the trailer.”

  Bentley and I exchanged a look. Did Carrot have a psychic connection with her b
rother? Rather than wonder to myself without any answers, I went ahead and asked, “Did you and Ishmael share a bond? I’ve heard that some siblings can sense things about each other in ways that can’t be explained by science.”

  “We aren’t twins,” she said. “He’s a year older than me.” A tear sprung from one eye. She caught it with the crumpled tissue. “He was a year older, anyway. Now I’ll catch up to him, since he won’t be getting any older.”

  “Oh, sweetie.” I got up from my chair, leaned down next to her and gave her a firm hug. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said into her orange hair. She hugged me back, and I held tight on until she let go.

  When I returned to my seat, she was looking at me with her head cocked. “You’re different from Zinnia,” she said. “You look like her, but you’re not her.”

  “Thanks, I guess.”

  Bentley cleared his throat and tapped a short pencil on a notepad he’d produced from a jacket pocket. “Ms. Greyson, I’m afraid we must press on. In cases such as these, time is of the essence.”

  “Of course,” she said. “What else do you need to know? I already told you that my brother didn’t have any enemies or people who’d want to hurt him. He’s never even had a girlfriend, as far as I know. He doesn’t have any close friends in town. He likes to work and save his money for traveling.” She wrinkled her nose. “He lives for safaris. The kind where they shoot big game.”

  I picked up on her distaste easily. “You don’t approve of that,” I said.

  “I’m a vegetarian,” she said.

  “But your brother liked hunting,” I said. “Big game.”

  Under his breath, Bentley said, “The most dangerous game.”

  Carrot looked at Bentley and I looked at her. Judging by the confusion on the tattoo artist’s face, she didn’t understand what he’d meant by his comment. But I knew.

  “The Most Dangerous Game” was a famous short story by Richard Connell. It was first published in 1924, and became the basis for a number of film and television adaptations. In the tale, a big-game hunter in search of a jaguar in the Amazon finds himself on an isolated island in the Caribbean, where there’s a role reversal. He becomes the one being hunted for sport. Not by a big cat, but by another man who’s grown bored of hunting animals and moved on to man, the most dangerous game. Hence the title.

  Somewhere in the quiet studio, a phone began ringing noisily. Carrot jumped to her feet, excused herself, and ran to answer it.

  Once Bentley and I were alone, I said to him, “If Ishmael Greyson was hunted for sport, it wasn’t very sporting of the hunter to nab him on the sofa of his apartment.”

  “No,” Bentley said slowly. “The real sport would be an intellectual one.”

  “You think?”

  “Getting away with the perfect crime.” He flicked his gaze around the small office. The walls were a muted brown, unlike the bold red and black of the main showroom. The walls were decorated with more of the same vintage prints, including a few illustrations of jungle cats. “The victim had a print of a jaguar on his wall,” he said.

  “He did,” I said. “And Carrot has a tattoo of a big cat on her breastbone. A cougar, I believe.”

  Bentley gave me a perplexed look. “This must be why they don’t tell new detectives about all the magic in this town. Once you open your mind to the peculiar, it’s hard to think inside the box again. Look at me. I’m planning to look up a novel from the 1920s as part of my research for this case. I might be losing my mind.”

  “It was a short story,” I said. “Not a novel. ‘The Most Dangerous Game’ was a short story.”

  He shook his head. “You can take the librarian out of the library...”

  Carrot returned to the office looking even more pale. She waved her cell phone apologetically. “I’m going to turn this off for the rest of the day. The rumor mill is churning. People have seen all the police cars at Uncle Arden’s house.” She gasped and held her fingers to her lips. “Does my great-uncle know?”

  “He’s been informed,” Bentley said. He tapped the notepad again. “For my records, where did you say you were last night?”

  She pointed at the ceiling. “I was here, up in the apartment.”

  “When did you leave? Have you left the building this morning?”

  “Yes. At about ten o’clock this morning, when I drove to the discount warehouse to buy paper towels.” She pursed her lips. “You go through a lot of paper towels in the tattoo business.”

  “Were you alone last night?”

  Her cheeks flushed pink. “My boyfriend was here. He stays over sometimes.” She patted her cheeks with her hands. “He says I’ve been a source of comfort for him, ever since his father passed away recently. He won’t talk about it, but I get the feeling something bad happened.”

  “Violence?” Bentley asked. “Did his father live in town?”

  “No. Overseas. I never met him, unfortunately.” She patted her cheeks again. “It’s such a shame. I hear he was a great man. My boyfriend idolized his father.”

  Bentley tapped the paper again. Every time he tapped, Carrot’s posture relaxed and her focus returned. The tapping was not unlike a hypnotic suggestion.

  “And your boyfriend’s name is?”

  “Sefu Adebayo,” she said, and then spelled it.

  Bentley kept his gaze down on his pad and asked casually but carefully, “How did your brother feel about you dating Sefu?”

  She shrugged. “He was happy for me. They got along well enough when both of them were helping me paint and decorate this place.”

  “Did the two of them ever socialize without you being present?”

  “I don’t think so. Why? Sefu didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Ishmael. He’s the most gentle person you’d ever meet.”

  “And Sefu was here at the house with you the entire night?” Another tap on his notepad.

  Her cheeks flushed a deeper pink. “Of course he was. Is this what you call profiling? Are you suspicious of him because he’s black?”

  “I didn’t know he was black.”

  She crossed her tattooed arms. “It shouldn’t matter that he’s black. He told me he’s had problems with cops all his life, since coming to this country. I didn’t want to believe it, but now I see it.”

  “He’s new to this country?” Bentley looked at Carrot steadily. She didn’t answer. He flicked his gaze down to the notepad. “Adebayo. Is that an African name?”

  “Yes. He’s an American citizen. African American.” Carrot reached for a paper takeout coffee cup on her desk, took a gulp, grimaced, and then spat into a garbage can next to the desk. “Sorry,” she sputtered. “That was yesterday’s coffee.”

  I jumped up, went to her side, and patted her back as she spat the sour remnants into the wastebasket. The container was full of takeout cups with names written on the side in black felt pen. Half of the cups had the name CARROT written on them in bold block letters, and the other half had a variety of names. I reached in and fished out a few of the cups she hadn’t spat on.

  “Are these cups from customers?” I asked. The name FISHTAIL caught my eye. “There’s one here for Fishtail. That’s an odd name. Fishtail.” I shrugged. “But I suppose this is a tattoo studio. You probably get some unique people in here.”

  “That was Ishmael’s coffee cup,” Carrot said sadly. “The woman at the coffee shop never got his name right. Look.” She fished out more paper cups and showed us the names. There were cups for GMAIL, ISHTAR, SCHLOMO, and a dozen other variations or misinterpretations of Ishmael.

  “Cute,” I said. “I guess it was a running gag?”

  Carrot shook her head. “Ishmael hated it. He only kept going there because they make the best coffee in town.”

  I looked over at Bentley. He had his poker face on, but it hadn’t escaped his notice that the coffee cups were all from Dreamland Coffee.

  I swallowed down a lump of excitement and asked, “Was it the owner who always misspelled yo
ur brother’s name? A woman named Maisy Nix?”

  Carrot said, “I don’t know. He would stop by there after work and bring me a coffee. I mostly work evenings these days.” Her eyes glistened with a fresh batch of tears. “Since I opened the studio, my brother and I were closer than ever, closer than we were as kids.”

  I picked at the cup from her desk, the one she’d referred to as yesterday’s cup. I took a sniff and gave it a swirl. I didn’t have my daughter’s keen shifter-sense of smell, but I could tell the difference between day-old and multi-day-old coffee. Half a lifetime of surviving on leftover takeout food had honed certain skills.

  “This is yesterday’s coffee,” I said, as much to Bentley as to Carrot. “Does that mean Ishmael went to Dreamland Coffee yesterday?”

  Carrot nodded. “Around six o’clock,” she said. Her forehead wrinkled. “Now that I think about it, he was really steamed up last night. Whatever they wrote on his cup made him so mad that he threw it out and had them make him a fresh latte.”

  I heard Bentley’s chair squeak as he leaned forward. “And what was it they wrote on your brother’s cup yesterday?”

  “He didn’t say. When he got here, the cup he had was blank.” She dug through the wastebasket and pulled out a cup with no name.

  Bentley whipped a plastic evidence bag from his pocket with a flourish. “I’ll take that,” he said, popping the cup into the bag with practiced ease.

  Carrot stared at him in horror. “You think he was poisoned? Before they killed him?”

  “It would explain why there was no sign of a struggle,” he said.

  She continued to stare at him with her mouth open. She snapped it shut and swallowed audibly. “When can I see him?”

  “Soon,” he said. “Someone from my office will be in touch.” He glanced at me and gave me a look that seemed to say, as soon as they fasten the guy’s head back on.