Familiar Magic (Tabby Kitten Mystery Series Book 1)

by Constance Barker

  When she finally got to the topic of Ashley, Pippa visibly balked.

  “You think she’s capable of killing her sister?” Pippa asked, clearly alarmed.

  “I don’t know for sure,” Thea said. “But I’d venture a guess and say there was no love lost there. You should have seen how she was.”

  “Sure. But doesn’t grief manifest in all kinds of ways?” Pippa suggested. “Particularly if there were complicated feelings involved. That can just leave everything feeling so unresolved.”

  Thea cocked an eyebrow. “So I’m guessing you aren’t interested in helping me run surveillance on Ashley, then?”

  Pippa smirked cheekily. “Now, I didn’t say that. What’ll it be? What am I looking for?”

  “Just a general shadowing, if that’s all right,” Thea said. “I figured you could go in your fox form when you get off work. Follow her around, see what she does. I feel like I need a better picture of this woman’s life.”

  “You’ve got it.” Pippa was practically squirming with happiness.

  Thea grinned at her friend’s antics. Pippa never failed to brighten her day.

  “And in the meantime, while you’re trailing her....” Thea began.

  Pippa leaned in and listened to Thea share her plans for sneaking into Ashley’s place and looking around for clues. Pippa’s eyes were round with scandalized excitement, but she never cried out against the plan. And when Thea was done, Pippa only nodded and gave a small salute.

  “Aye-aye. And here I was thinking Ardensville was a snore! This is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me.”

  “All right,” Thea said. “Well, can I help you put these books away? I figured I might as well hang around until you close up here. Then we can walk over to Ashley’s place together.”

  TOGETHER, THEA AND Pippa shelved all of the recently acquired books and counted up the end-of-day till totals. All the while, they kept up a steady chatter, but Thea’s mind was elsewhere.

  Finally, she couldn’t hold the question in any longer.

  “Pip, your family history here in Ardensville stretches back pretty far, doesn’t it?”

  Pippa cocked her head at Thea. “I mean, no further than yours does. But, yeah. I guess back to the town’s founding. Why?”

  “I was just wondering... the whole part of this case about the family feud between the Beals and the Smiths.”

  Pippa’s eyes lit up. “Oh, yeah, isn’t it fascinating? It feels like such a relic.”

  “So family feuds aren’t a real thing anymore?”

  “Well, I don’t know about that. What I do know is that they were really popular back in the day. Probably any serious feud would have started ages ago, out of something small. You know... someone steals someone else’s wife. Someone kicked someone else’s sheep. Someone cursed someone else’s milk and it spoiled. That sort of thing.”

  “Is there anything like that from around here that you know of?”

  “Sure!” Pippa agreed eagerly. “I know of at least three from about a century back.”

  “What families were involved?”

  Pippa screwed up her face in thought. “I’m sorry, I can’t remember the specific names anymore. I’m not even sure where I read about them, or else I’d try to hook you up with the book I read about them in. This would have been years back now.”

  Thea sighed. It was heartening to know that Pippa had a little more familiarity with this strange topic than Thea herself did. But right now she felt like she was at a dead end.

  “You know, you might go to the library for census records,” Pippa offered.

  “Census records? What would those even tell me?”

  “Maybe nothing at first, but you’d at least see who were the major families around Ardensville way back,” Pippa suggested. “Who was in the Smith family and the Beal family and all that. If the feud caused any deaths, then the census might hint at that, too—you know, people disappearing off the lists at suspiciously young ages and all that.”

  Pippa’s advice was starting to sound more and more solid. Thea felt the wheels in her head turning.

  “And aren’t there other kinds of archival files at the library, too?” Thea asked. “Old historical town happenings, that sort of thing?”

  “I’m not familiar enough with the history of the press in this area, but there’s probably old periodicals with varying degrees of official status,” Pippa agreed. “But you know what would be a really helpful resource.”

  Thea did know. “Granny,” she said, nodding.

  Granny had been the most central figure at the Ardensville Public Library for decades. This position had allowed her to get to know everyone and everything in town, one way or another.

  Even retiring a few years back hadn’t stopped her reign there. She had tried her best to settle down into retirement and embrace a restful life, but after a few bored months of kicking her feet up and reading just about every mystery, romance, and Western novel ever written, Granny had signed up to work at the library again in a part-time, volunteer capacity.

  Pippa nodded sharply. “You just ask your grandma about this whole feud situation. If anyone can help you find answers, I know she can.”

  Thea knew Pippa was right. But still, if Granny had wanted to let Thea know about the blood feud, wouldn’t she have told her in all the years she had raised her?

  Chapter 10

  “So.” Pippa turned the key to A Novel Idea with a decisive click and then swiveled to face Thea. “Where are we heading?”

  Thea told Pippa where Ashley lived. It wasn’t far from the bookshop, and it was a nice enough evening for a walk, if a little nippy. They both bundled up and headed toward the apartment complex.

  “How do you know where she lives, anyway?”

  “Granny,” Thea admitted.

  “See?” Pippa grinned. “Freya knows everything.”

  The two friends chatted amicably until they reached the apartment complex, at which point by silent agreement they went quiet in anticipation. As quickly as they could, they made their way through the network of parking lots and passed a sequence of identical buildings until they reached the one that contained Ashley’s apartment.

  They walked up to the wall and pressed themselves against it as casually as they could, hoping that they were close enough not to be visible from any of the windows.

  “What do we do now? Just wait for her to leave?” Pippa asked.

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Which car is hers?”

  Thea scanned the section of the lot they could see from their vantage point. She pointed to a junky sedan she recognized from the parking lot of the fast food joint where she’d spoken with Ashley.

  “That one, I think.”

  “Yeesh,” Pippa said. “I’m not sure I would trust that one on any major roads. Or minor ones, either.”

  Just then, the door to the apartment complex breezed open, and a few voices sounded, mid-conversation. Thea put a finger to her lips, and she and Pippa both fell quiet, listening. It was a man and woman chatting.

  “Ashley?” Pippa mouthed.

  Thea shook her head.

  The man and woman climbed into a car nearby and drove off. They didn’t seem to take any notice of Thea and Pippa. Thea hoped that meant the evening’s shadows had grown dark enough that they weren’t particularly noticeable.

  Of course, night falling meant that it was getting colder, too. Since they were no longer walking, the women were starting to feel the bite of the autumn evening settling into their bones.

  Luckily, they didn’t have to wait long for Ashley to step out of her apartment building. She was the next person to come through.

  Even more luckily, she didn’t walk toward her beat-up car, but seemed to be headed off the property on foot.

  “I’m on it,” Pippa whispered, and before Thea could even tell her what to do, Pippa was changing shape. Shrinking, growing shorter and more compact, fur sprouting and face elongating, until within
a second it wasn’t a human woman standing in front of Thea on two legs but rather a small, bright orange fox with black-bead eyes and a full, white-tipped tail.

  The fox didn’t pause, but whipped off into the night and after Ashley.

  Thea didn’t pause either. Who knew what Ashley was up to? She might be stepping out for an hour, or for a couple minutes. Either way, Thea didn’t want to waste any time.

  The door to the apartment complex was locked. Luckily for Thea, she was good with locks. Her magic wasn’t very extensive, but she could manipulate and control small objects. Which meant that the delicate internal mechanisms of simple locks were easy enough to nudge into place.

  She didn’t even need to whisper the spell’s incantation. Her will was enough. She breezed into the building.

  The locks on Ashley’s apartment were a little more complex, but even they took only a couple seconds to work through.

  “Bingo,” Thea muttered, letting herself in as quickly and quietly as she could.

  Ashley’s apartment was depressingly small, with low ceilings and hideous beige carpeting and bleak lighting fixtures. These, Thea ignored, electing instead to light up the dim room with a little light-bauble spell, one that cast a faint golden glow that was wide enough to illuminate the whole space. She wanted to be able to extinguish the light at a moment’s notice if necessary.

  There wasn’t much interest in the apartment. Thea found Ashley’s laptop and paged through its open files and history, running searches of Rebecca’s name and finding nothing communicative at all. Ashley’s shelves were mostly bare, and what books they did hold looked like battered used textbooks.

  Beyond that everything Ashley owned seemed to be brittle, broken, or unattractively aged. Thea imagined Ashley did all her shopping at discount prices.

  Only once Thea entered the bedroom did she find an item of interest. Between Ashley’s bed and headboard, she had tucked a journal. It was the kind with gilt-edged pages and a soft leather cover and ribbon bookmark.

  Nearly all the pages were crammed with untidy handwriting. Thea held the light over the pages and flipped through quickly, skimming.

  Most of them were pretty quotidien. When she did mention Rebecca, though, the tone was distinctly embittered. Rebecca was the favorite child, the talented one, the popular one. Ashley was tired of Rebecca’s interventions in her life, what Ashley claimed were her petty manipulations.

  She’s always getting my boyfriends to dump me and date her instead, Ashley griped in a recent entry. I thought Zach was different but I guess he fell for it too.

  Thea was startled out of her reading by the sharp, high sound of a fox’s yip outside.

  She clutched her fist and the lighting spell went out like a blink. She crossed the dark room and glanced out the bedroom window to see that Pippa in her fox form was running around in frantic circles.

  Then, suddenly, she heard the distinct sound of footsteps down the hall.

  Ashley was back.

  Thea didn’t hesitate. Using all of her focus, and the breathing technique Aunt Tiegen had shown her, she reached with her magic down the hall and, on an exhale, raised up the knocker of the apartment door down the hall.

  “Hello?” The voice was faint and muffled, but carried to where Thea was standing. “Oh, Ashley, hello. What do you want?”

  “Huh?” Ashley’s voice carried, too. “No, I don’t want anything.”

  “But you knocked?”

  “Sorry, I’m... I don’t know what happened....”

  Meanwhile, Thea pried open the bedroom window and slipped out to where Pippa was waiting.

  Chapter 11

  The next day, A Stitch in Time was closed. Under normal circumstances, Thea would have happily stayed at home on her day off to spend some time with Granny, and Jesse would have used the day to get some of his schoolwork done.

  However, these were not normal circumstances. There had been a murder, and everyone in Thea’s social circle seemed eager to talk the case over.

  So they arranged to meet at a local café, one with terrace seating so that Sybil could join in without causing a health hazard. Luckily, the morning was cool enough that nobody else was seated outside, so Sybil could even pipe up and join in on the conversation.

  Thea waited at their table with Sybil curled tight in her lap as Jesse and Pippa went inside to buy their drinks.

  “Jesse insisted on paying,” Pippa said when she and Jesse walked back out. She handed Thea her money back.

  Thea smiled knowingly at Jesse. She got a feeling it was really Pippa whose drink Jesse had been eager to pay for. He had been harboring the most obvious, long-suffering crush on her ever since Thea had first introduced the two.

  They settled down around the table and started to talk through the facts of the murder. The air was crisp but pleasant, and Thea, Pippa, and Jesse all warmed their fingers around mugs of hot cocoa and coffee as they chatted.

  “I’m not sure about Zach,” Thea confessed. “But it is awfully nice of him to be working on that mural for Rebecca. He seems like he really cared about her.”

  “Yeah,” Jesse agreed. “He looked really cut up about the whole thing when he came in with his friends.”

  “Zach was there when Eric blew up at Rebecca, wasn’t he?” Pippa asked. “How did he react?”

  “I’d say it was pretty clear he had zero idea what was going on,” Sybil answered. “He had this surprised fish-face and everything. I don’t think he knew anything about this whole blood feud business.”

  “Of course, I don’t know anything about this whole blood feud business either, and I’m supposedly in one of the feuding families,” Thea cut in.

  “What do we think about Eric?” Pippa raised her eyebrows in query and sipped at her latte.

  “Scary.” Jesse counted off on his fingers. “Big, burly, resting angry face.”

  “I wouldn’t cross him if I didn’t have to,” Thea admitted.

  “But do we think he’s a killer? Or that he’d really kill for this whole feud thing?” Pippa pressed.

  “I think it would take a certain amount of off-the-rails to be that dedicated to something so ancient,” Jesse answered. Then, with a nod at Thea, “And, presumably, so obscure that even people from the family haven’t heard of it.”

  “No, it might not be obscure at all to other Beals,” Thea acknowledged. “I mean, other than Aunt Tiegen, I haven’t had all that much to do with that side of the family since my parents died.”

  It was always tough for Thea to bring up her parents’ death, not so much because of grief as because of how people reacted when she mentioned it. After all, her grief was nearly as old as Thea herself was. But the looks on people’s faces when she reminded them that she was an orphan... those never lost their sting.

  Luckily, her friends knew better than to give their condolences.

  “I don’t like the look of Ashley,” Jesse asserted, confidently changing the subject. “She seems awfully suspicious to me.”

  “I don’t know,” Pippa said. “She certainly didn’t get up to anything suspicious last night. I followed her around, and all she did was walk out to the park and sit on the swings for a while, staring out at the gazebo.”

  “Returning to the scene of the crime?” Jesse suggested.

  “And not to mention the journal,” Sybil said.

  Thea had already told her friends about all the hateful things Ashley had written about Rebecca, and particularly about her bitterness surrounding the string of stolen boyfriends.

  “I wonder if someone could murder their own sibling,” Thea mused.

  “Somehow I just can’t bring myself to believe it,” Pippa said.

  “I don’t know,” Thea replied, petting Sybil in her lap. “Jealousy can be poisonous.”

  Behind them, there was a sudden, loud sound of a throat clearing.

  Thea and all her friends, Sybil included, jumped in their seats and turned to face the noise.

  It was Ashley standing the
re, arms crossed and fuming.

  “I thought my ears were burning,” Ashley hissed, sounding positively mutinous. “Just kicking up a little friendly gossip about me murdering my sister, are you? Good, harmless fun.”

  Thea felt a little lick of shame deep in her stomach, but she refused to let it take control of her. Instad, she stuck out her chin in stubborn defiance.

  “Can we help you?”

  “Yes,” Ashley said. “Actually you can. You can never set foot in my house, ever again.”

  Thea and Pippa exchanged a quick, panicked look.

  “What do you mean?”

  Ashley scoffed. “You don’t get very far in life playing dumb, you know. My door was unlocked when I got home. And there was loose glitter near my bed and windowsill.”

  She said the word glitter like it was a curse word.

  Mental note, Thea thought. Check your clothes before sneaking into anyone’s home Sherlock.

  Thea tried to look innocent, but Ashley pointed to Thea’s sweater. In the sunlight, it sparkled damningly with stray glitter shards it had picked up from the shop. Busted!

  Thea cleared her throat and straightened in her seat. “I run a craft store. There’s always glitter on me. That doesn’t mean I’m the only person in Ardensville who might shed some glitter around. Maybe the glitter was from your own makeup?”

  Ashley rolled her eyes elaborately but refused to concede the point.

  “If you come near me again,” she said, seething, “I’m going to call the police, you get me?” Then, she flashed a wicked smile. “Besides... if you do run a craft store, then doesn’t that mean you would have been pretty angry to hear about Rebecca’s little planned business venture? Little town like this... I doubt it could have supported two craft stores. Who’s to say you didn’t take it on yourself to kill the competition?”

  Pippa laughed. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Oh yeah? Want to see if the cops feel the same way?” Ashley snapped. Then, with a final glare at Thea, she said, “You stay away from me and you won’t have to find out.”