Murder on the Backswing

by ReGina Welling

  “Because she’s a member of our coven. Good Goddess, Maggie, what happened to your memory anyway? Do I need to start growing some ginkgo biloba in the backyard?” Clara retorted, exasperated.

  “So which one screams murderer to you? I refuse to finger Perry Weatherall for another murder after last time, and I don’t think we’ve met anyone named Miriam.” Mag argued.

  “You haven’t, but I’ve met her at book club.” Clara retorted. “She’s the one who picked the book this month. Maude said Miriam ended up with her cart, and you’d know the girl from the coven if you saw her. She’s part of that contingent of young witches who don’t know their brooms from a hole in the ground. But nice enough.”

  “Young equals capable, but again, why?” Mag asked.

  “I have no idea, but at least we know more than we did before we came here. Come on, let’s get back to the VW and find ourselves some lunch.”

  Chapter Eight

  “Funny, isn’t it, how it always seems to be the most intriguing and complicated people who get murdered. Of course, those very qualities often speak to motive in the first place. First Marsha, whose voracious curiosity helped her stumble upon information that had long been buried, and now Taylor, who managed to inspire a variety of conflicting assumptions about his character.”

  Clara knew when Mag became philosophical, it meant she was deep in investigative mode.

  “And it all comes down to motive, doesn’t it?” A rhetorical question, so Clara maneuvered the VW bus back to Harmony’s town center and continued to maintain her silence while her sister worked through the tangled web of clues and impressions they’d gathered so far.

  “Mail tampering and theft, that’s all we’ve got—and really, I’m surprised we know this much considering we’ve only lived in town for a few months. Taylor’s been a mail carrier for years; he’s probably stolen from half the town. Doesn’t exactly narrow down our suspect pool. Which means we have to do something I really don’t want to do.”

  “What’s that?” Clara asked with trepidation.

  “Be sociable and see what else we can dig up. Speaking of which, pull over in front of the post office. We still haven’t received our fruit of the month basket, and I intend to lodge a complaint. I was quite looking forward to the figs and Tosca pears from Italy. It’s a treat to get them this early in the season.”

  Clara did as she was instructed, and followed Mag inside the post office, where she demanded to speak to the postmaster who, even though the two-hour lunch break had long ago ended, had to be called away from his turkey sandwich.

  He didn’t look pleased when he realized the interruption involved placating an irritated old woman but brightened considerably at Clara’s megawatt smile.

  Affably pleasant, he was attractive enough, she supposed. His hazel eyes looked slightly magnified by a pair of round, wire-framed glasses, but their expression remained warm and friendly.

  A feat, considering his job probably came with plenty of dealing-with-the-public angst. If she’d been in the mood for a man, he might do nicely.

  “As I said, the shipment wasn’t insured, so my hands are tied, but if you contact the vendor and explain what happened, it’s possible you’ll get a credit, or they might reship.” The postmaster apologized. “You’ve probably heard we lost our mail carrier, which is no excuse, but we’re short-handed at the moment.”

  “Thank you for taking the time to look into it, and we’re sorry for your loss. We’re new in town, so we didn’t know Taylor except as our mail carrier.” Clara pasted on a sympathetic smile.

  “It’s his poor wife who’ll feel it the most. Taylor took real good care of that woman, and it wasn’t just because she’s delicate. I can’t imagine what she’ll do now. Anyhow, life goes on, so they say.”

  “They certainly do,” Clara replied. “You know we saw Mr. Dean on the day of the murder. Not too long before it happened.” She showed him her sympathetic face but kept her eyes trained on his to gauge his response.

  “No, I wasn’t aware of that.” Nothing there but sorrow.

  “He was talking to Reggie Blackthorne, and it looked like they might have been arguing, but we’ve heard Reggie isn’t considered a suspect.”

  “Oh, I can tell you what that was all about. Reggie was hot-dogging up the dirt road in that truck of his and kicked up a good-sized stone. Cracked the side window of the mail truck. Taylor called me with the news as soon as Reggie left. I was the last person to speak to him before he died.”

  The misery on his face caused Clara to reach out and squeeze his hand. That and a genuine smile turned his thoughts away from the pain of Taylor’s death.

  “I can’t offer you exotic fruits, but if you’d give me your number, I’d love to take you to dinner sometime.” His hopeful smile only made him more attractive, but Clara regretfully declined. To her way of thinking, this was not the time for romance.

  “Why did you do that, Clarie?” Mag burst out as soon as the door swung shut behind her.

  “Do what?”

  “Brush him off like that. He was the sexiest postmaster I’ve ever seen. What gives?”

  “Hecate’s petticoats, Maggie, you’re still the boy-crazy teenager I used to share a bedroom with, aren’t you?”

  “In my defense, you were always a bit of a prude, so I had to make up for the both of us. I thought you’d outgrown that, but apparently not.”

  Clara sighed, “And in mine, you have always mistaken my unwillingness to settle as a character flaw. It took me two hundred years to find a man I wanted to make babies with, and it didn’t exactly turn out to be all sunshine and roses. Pardon me if I don’t feel like spending the next fifty-odd years filled with pain and regret.”

  She left out the phrase like I’ve spent the last fifty, but both she and Mag knew it was implied.

  “He asked you out to dinner, not for your hand in marriage. A little perspective might be in order. A date wouldn’t hurt you.” And a roll in the hay might smooth out your nerves—Mag kept the last to herself since ticking off her sister wasn’t the goal.

  “Not happening.” Clenched teeth flattened the words a bit.

  Mag held up her hands. “It’s your business. I’ll stay out of it.” She closed her mouth and kept it locked tight. She was treading into dangerous territory and knew when to wave the white flag.

  Or not.

  She pushed anyway. “Fine, if you want to drag your emotional baggage around, who am I to judge? But you’re living like you’re still stuck in stone, watching the world go by.”

  “That might be the meanest thing you’ve ever said to me. Do you have any idea how hard it was to watch my granddaughter grow up thinking her mother and grandmother had murdered each other? Knowing I couldn’t kiss and make it better if she fell, or guide her in the ways of our kind? Even arms made from dead stone ache with emptiness.”

  “Then why? Why are you shutting yourself away from life again?”

  While Clara considered herself openly honest and could count empathy as one of her greatest strengths, confronting her own hangups was just as difficult for her as anyone else.

  She heaved a sigh, and Mag could sense the sadness behind it. “I failed so miserably with my daughter and again with my granddaughter, though for different reasons.”

  "You didn't," Mag insisted. "Sylvana's not dead and you visit Lexi every other day."

  "You don't understand. No witch has ever come back from a total stoning to tell the tale. I had no idea, still don't come to that, if being awake and aware is part of the punishment. I thought Sylvana dead by my hand."

  "The whole time?" A consideration Mag hadn't thought of before. "But she wasn't and it's all over now."

  "Not entirely. I meant to stop her at any cost. I would have killed her if that was what it took." Admitting one of her deepest secrets left Clara feeling vulnerable.

  “Then you’re paying penance by not going to dinner with the nice man?”

  Clara was done with the convers
ation. “Get your head out of your hormones. Better yet, get it out of mine,” she snapped.

  “Maybe you should have asked for a hair shirt and a good flogging for your birthday.”

  Clara’s burning look of response carried just enough magic to set the tips of Mag’s fingers tingling.

  She flapped her hand, dismissing Clara’s concerns. “Lexi’s fine. She had a bit of a bump in her emotional road is all. But she came through it like a Balefire, with flair if not dignity or grace. We pop over to Port Harbor at least three times a week, and this is the last time you can trot out that tired excuse for why you’re holding back. But I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings.” For Mag, the admission came with difficulty.

  “It’s okay, water under the bridge. You might as well head on home. I’ll walk back after my book club meeting which, as it happens, starts in fifteen minutes.”

  Somewhere along the line, Clara had learned to shut down her emotions—learned to live in that numb place between pleasure and pain—and though she was sure it would happen at some point, she wasn’t quite ready for romantic feelings to bubble their way back up to the surface. Grateful that her sister let it go this time, Clara sent up a silent thank you to the Goddess and vowed to try and be more open to the conversation next time Mag brought it up.

  Mag watched her sister in the rear-view mirror as she pulled away and made a vow of her own: to ferret out whatever haunted Clara and expose the specter to the light of truth. Because Mag would bet her best spell, it had nothing to do with Lexi or Sylvana.

  With no idea her past was about to become Mag’s new obsession, Clara strolled down the sidewalk and made an effort to shrug off the difficult conversation.

  Meandering down the sidewalk in the middle of her reverie, Clara failed to see Angela Sinclair, who in typical New England small-town fashion, bustled over to say hello.

  “Hi there, remember me? I was in your shop the other morning. That face cream of yours is amazing. My cheeks feel like a baby’s bottom.”

  It took a second for Clara to place Angela, but when she did it all came flooding back. Her promise to attend a garden club meeting that was curtailed by the discovery of a dead body.

  “Hi Angela, of course, I remember you.” Clara offered a convincing smile. “I’m glad you’re enjoying the cream, and I intended to make it to your garden club but, well, things have been a bit hectic lately. How are you all doing with the hummingbird problem?”

  She knew darned well they hadn’t been able to banish the little beasts and hoped the pixies were laying low enough to escape discovery until she and Mag managed to figure out how to convince Hagatha to return them to the Faelands.

  Angela explained that the ornithological association still hadn’t returned the garden club’s phone call, setting Clara’s mind at ease for the time being. After a few more pleasantries, the woman bade her goodbye and headed on down Main Street, leaving her to her own thoughts.

  The scent of freshly brewed coffee wafted out of the window of Evelyn’s bakery and, combined with that of the lightest, airiest yeast donuts in existence, set Clara’s mouth to watering. While she was waiting for her splurge order of a large iced caramel macchiato, she spotted Leanne Snow at a window seat, furiously scanning her copy of Fifty Shades of Grey in preparation for book club.

  “Hey, Leanne, are you enjoying the book?” Clara asked with a grin and slid into the seat across the table.

  Fresh-faced now that she’d given up her habit of plastering on a mask of makeup, Leanne looked at least a decade younger than she had a couple of months before. One benefit, Clara supposed, of a near-death experience is learning what’s most important in life, and Leanne certainly seemed different after hers.

  Disgusted, Leanne threw the book down on the table between them, “To be perfectly honest, BDSM doesn’t really light my fire the way it seems to do for everyone else. But forget about book club, how are you doing?”

  Pausing to take a bite of sugary, fried perfection, Clara wondered what Leanne would say if she gave her a perfectly honest answer. Since any such insight would contain more than a kernel of her magical truth, Clara concentrated on recent events only.

  “All right. Though I have to say, it’s more than a little disconcerting to have discovered two dead bodies since moving to town.”

  Leanne’s mouth dropped open in surprise, “You found Taylor Dean’s body? How did I miss out on that detail? I was there, you know. At the club that day, I mean.” She shuddered. “While it was happening.”

  A happy coincidence. Clara thought and capitalized on the opportunity placed in her path and pumped Leanne for details.

  “Did you see anything?”

  Leanne put down her coffee, picked up a paper napkin, and began to tear it into shreds. “I’ve gone over and over it in my mind in case there was some detail I missed, but no. I saw nothing out of the ordinary.”

  “You know the police are looking at Babette for this, right? Do you think she’s capable of murder?”

  “If you asked me six months ago, I’d have said no one in this town was capable of murder, but we both know how wrong I would have been.” Leanne raised one eyebrow and studied Clara’s face, “And no, I didn’t know she was the prime suspect.”

  Thinking, Leanne paused, and a second napkin turned to confetti between her fingers before she answered. “Not Babette. It doesn’t play for me at all. The cops are way off base.”

  “I think so, too. Who do you think might have had a motive?”

  “You’re investigating again, aren’t you? Okay, here’s what I know: Babette couldn’t have done it. Not unless she’s hiding some serious skills. She’d have to be a magician, or a witch, or something.”

  Clara jolted at the word witch, and then forced herself to think of the gravity of the situation to keep a smile from sliding across her lips, “And why is that?”

  “She was at the spa the whole time. I know because I watched her go in after I helped her pick up the scattered contents of her purse. She’d dropped it while trying to find her key card, and stuff was strewn all over the place. Did you know she carries an entire medicine cabinet around with her? Everything from bandages to some pretty potent painkillers. The woman is a menace to polite society, but not because she’s a killer; she’s a klutz.”

  Having seen Babette in action, Clara nodded her agreement and took another bite of donut.

  “That’s what she told the police—that she was in the steam room at the time of the murder. Staff confirm she went in, but Ma—my mother and I—checked it out, and she could have gone out the back exit, jumped in a handy golf cart, killed Taylor, and then slipped back in.”

  “Not possible. You see, right after I talked to Babette, I got a text saying my tennis lesson was canceled, and since it was such a nice day, I walked through the gardens and sat at that little picnic table near that back door. I had just picked this up”—Leanne indicated the copy of Fifty Shades still lying on the table—“and I figured I’d get a head start before my massage.”

  Leanne tilted her head slightly, looking up while she pulled the scene out of her memory. “She’d have had to go right past me, and nobody did. Not on foot or in a golf cart.”

  “If you saw her there, why didn’t you tell the police?” One word would have put an end to that line of questioning and saved Babette days of panic and heartache.

  “They never asked, but that’s probably because nobody knew I was there. I forgot my key card and never checked in at the front desk. Missed my massage, but I was sitting in plain sight of the back door while Taylor Dean got himself killed not a mile away.”

  Another shudder rippled down Leanne’s body, but all Clara could think about was the fact that apparently, the security at Rolling Hills was lax enough that people could come and go without notice.

  “I left before the police arrived at the club, and before you ask, I heard the sirens, but there’s a speed trap just the other side of the main exit.” She lifted a shoulder. “People get pul
led over all the time, so I didn’t think anything of it. I heard the news when I got back here, but it never occurred to me that I might know anything valuable.”

  Making a mental note to warn her lead-footed sister about the speed trap, Clara offered Leanne a sage piece of advice.

  “You really should speak to Chief Cobb, or maybe call that nice young detective, Lynn Nye. Get them off Babette’s scent before the poor woman keels over from a heart attack. Though, what she could have been doing in the steam room for an hour is beyond me.”

  “That I can’t speak to, but I will talk to the police, Clara. As soon as book club is over, I promise. Now, tell me how this thing ends so I don’t look like the biggest prude in Harmony.”

  Clara wondered why that word kept coming up in conversation and lamented the fact that an unwillingness to give it up to every Tom, Dick, and Harry was considered a character flaw in this day and age. Most particularly by her own sister.

  Book club, Clara discovered when she arrived, had divided itself into three camps. The progressive group who had lobbied hard to add such a titillating book to the roster squared off against the opposition who pressed their lips together and glared. And then there were the leftovers who preferred to hide their true feelings under a discussion of symbolism and pretension.

  Spearheading the first group was Miriam May, a buxom brunette with a less-is-more philosophy when it came to clothes. In her case, however, less wasn’t nearly enough to provide adequate coverage in all areas. A fact Clara learned when Miriam bent over to retrieve a dropped pen and flashed half an inch of rear cleavage below a beautifully inked tattoo.

  Chapter Nine

  While Clara turned to the type of solace some women seek when they’re stressed out—scrubbing and dusting every surface in the shop, sans magic—Mag ensconced herself in the back room alchemy lab in an attempt to thwart Hagatha’s pixie plot once and for all.

  With Leanne having removed the last vestiges of suspicion from Babette Dean, they were no closer to solving the murder, and the thought of being the subjects of an investigation was more than a little disconcerting.