But before I could carefully determine my next move, Penny jumped in. “Did you try to kill your brother-in-law, The Miser, twice?” she blurted out. “Last night, someone tried to shoot him in the heart, and we think it was you! We found your shoe at the crime scene, Polly. Don’t try to lie your way out of this one! Detective Greene and I are two smart and savvy ladies, and you’re not going to pull a fast one on us. If you tried to shoot that poor man twice, you’d better just confess right here. Right now. It’s time to come clean, Polly.”
Polly swiveled her head around to Penny, her eyes wide with shock. “You think I tried to kill my brother-in-law?” Her frizzy hair quivered in the breeze. Her cheeks shook as she spoke. The dark circles under her eyes were even more pronounced than before, and her face looked pale.
Little droplets of spit spewed from her thin lips as she went on defensively. “I may not like my brother-in-law, but I would never murder him. And I most certainly didn’t leave my shoe at any crime scene. I can’t even find my special orthopedic shoes, so how could I leave one at a crime scene? I was nowhere near The Miser’s room last night! I had other matters to attend to—as you’ve just seen.”
Penny raised her hand up, and pointed her index finger ominously at Polly. I’d seen Penny shoot some pretty powerful bolts of energy through that index finger, so the sight of it pointed at Polly put me on edge.
“Why should we believe you?” Penny demanded, as she jabbed her finger toward Polly. “You could be lying just to save your hide. I’ve met plenty of no-good killers in my day, lady, and I gotta tell you, most of them just lie right through their teeth. I’m used to it. And I think I can recognize a murderer when I see one. You’re looking mighty guilty, I have to say. You look like you killed a man by accident and haven’t slept for nights because of your guilty conscience.”
Polly’s lip quivered and the corners wilted downward.
Penny’s words were getting to her, but not in the way I expected. She didn’t look at all like she wanted to fight. Her shoulders slumped down, her chest became concave and her back hunched. She looked thoroughly defeated.
Penny did not seem to notice Polly’s submissive body language. My friend went on in a loud, clear voice. “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t cuff you right now, and turn you into the authorities! A man died in our town, Polly. Marley and I have lived here our whole lives. I mean, that guy Two-Cats wasn’t, like, a great guy. His treatment of his animals was questionable. He sure liked to see his two cats work, and did they get treats? Sometimes, yes. But sometimes, no.”
Turkey, in Penny’s bag, gave a loud meow.
Penny paused for a moment and then said, “My cat Turkey says that more often than not, Old Two-Cats did not give his fur babies the appropriate compensation. Is that what you said, Turkey Werky? Did I get that right?”
She tilted her head, listening. Then she said. “Okay, now he’s going on a real rant about labor laws and minimum wage. Oh boy, he’s really up on his soapbox now.”
Polly looked slightly dazed.
Even I was having a hard time following Penny’s train of thought, and I’d been her friend for over twenty years.
I stepped forward. “I think what Penny is trying to say,” I said gently, “is that a man died in our town, and we can’t just sit by and let the killer get away with it. We have to find out who did it. Justice must be served. But Polly, I don’t think you did it... did you?”
She shook her head.
I felt sorry for her. She looked so exhausted. So worn out. So defeated. And I was pretty sure I knew why.
Polly said her special shoes were missing. That indicated that someone stole the shoes and planted one under The Miser’s window to try to frame her. And if that was the case, she was innocent. Her exhaustion was not due to guilt over murder. It was due to something else entirely.
I stepped forward. “It’s hard work, keeping a secret, isn’t it?” I asked.
She looked up at me with sad eyes.
“It’s okay,” I told her.
Then I looked over at Penny. “Penny, you can put your hand down. We’re not going to apprehend Polly. She didn’t try to shoot The Miser. She’s not the being that killed Two-Cats.”
“She’s not?”
I shook my head. “No. I’m certain of it. Polly is not a killer; she’s just a woman worn out by the secret that she’s keeping.”
Penny lowered her hand.
I stepped in closer to Polly. “You look tired,” I said. “Why don’t we all sit down for a minute? Maybe I can conjure up some tea.”
“That would be good,” Polly said warily. “I’ve been running all night. I shift so rarely; when I do, I have a lot of energy to burn off. It’s hard on my body.”
“I understand.” I said. I guided her over toward the large pine tree. Beside the shrubbery, there was a semi-flat area covered in moss. I sat down on the soft surface cross legged, and Penny followed suit. Polly folded her legs and sat amidst a few clumps of ferns.
Blueberry still seemed enraptured by Polly. She kept sniffing the hem of Polly’s pants and nuzzling against her legs.
Skili landed on my shoulder. Her weight felt comforting.
By focusing my energy, I was able to conjure up a little ceramic teapot and three cups. I passed around cups of tea, and Polly took one with clear appreciation.
“So, I don’t understand,” Penny said after taking a noisy slurp of her tea. “If Polly here didn’t kill Old Two-Cats, then who did?”
“We still have to figure that out,” I said. “Maybe Polly could tell us her story, first.” I looked at Polly. “I think it will feel good to you, to speak aloud about your shifting abilities. You’ve been keeping silent about it for so long. And this will be good practice for when you talk to your husband about being a shifter.”
I paused to let that sink in. Then I said, “You do have to talk to him about it, Polly. I know it’s going to be a difficult conversation to have, but it must happen. Keeping your abilities hidden isn’t healthy for you, and besides that, King Midas knows. I heard him talking to The Miser about it last night.”
“He knows?” she said. She pushed a clump of frizzy hair from her face. “Oh, goodness. I’ve known for quite some time that I’d have to tell him soon. But every day I just kept thinking: tomorrow, I’ll tell him tomorrow. I used the silliest excuses, too. If he had even a shred of bad news from the peanut factory, that was my excuse for weeks—I can’t tell him now, not while he’s so worried over the peanut factory.”
She sighed. “And then, once that passed, something else would come up. ‘I can’t tell him right before his fishing trip,’ I’d tell myself. Or his doctor's appointment. Or heaven forbid—if his mother was coming to town. I was almost relieved when The Miser told me he knew. He said that if I didn’t tell King Midas, he would. Part of me wanted to let it come to that. I thought—if The Miser tells him, I won’t have to.”
She paused, and took a sip of her tea. Some color was coming back to her cheeks. I wasn’t sure if it was due to the flowery, herbal blend of hydration tea I’d magically brewed up, or the fact that she was finally speaking her truth.
She swallowed her tea and went on. “But when I thought about it, another part of me seemed to rise up out of nowhere. All of a sudden, I felt so scared. I wondered: Is King Midas going to divorce me when he finds out I’m a werewolf? You know, his mother is very anti-shifter, and both of her boys picked up on her beliefs. I’ve heard my husband say some very nasty things about shifters—how unpredictable we can be; how wild. ‘Unfit for society,’ he said once.”
“I’m sure he just picked up all that garbage from his mother,” I said, as I gave Polly an encouraging pat to the shoulder. “He might not even really think those things. And why should he? Penny and I both have shifter friends who are upstanding citizens of Hillcrest.”
“Thank you,” Polly said softly.
“It must have been very difficult to hear him say those things, all while holding onto
your true identity,” I guessed.
She nodded. “Oh, yes. I felt so conflicted. I love my husband. I don’t love some of his opinions, but I do love him. I’m afraid of losing him. And when The Miser threatened to reveal my secret to my husband, well, I suppose all those fears surfaced. Yet another part of me desperately wants to be free from the awful burden I’ve been carrying. I want to be myself, all the time, every day. I want to be able to shift whenever the urge strikes me. I want to be able to transform into my wolf form and howl at the moon if I feel I need to, or run through the open cloud-meadows. In a way, I’m glad The Miser finally told him. At the same time, I’m worried about what my husband will have to say about it.”
She stopped there, and sipped her tea. “Isn’t it bizarre?” she said after a thoughtful pause. “How we can have so many parts to ourselves?”
I thought about the workshop that I’d attended the day before. While it had been strange to hear King Midas and The Miser talk about how two conflicting energies could reside in one being, I actually understood it perfectly—because I had many conflicting energies inside of me.
One such pair of warring parts fought tirelessly over whether to move to the Spirit Realm or not. I wasn’t sure if I would ever find a solution to that particular conflict.
“Maybe that’s what healing is,” I murmured. “It’s getting all of the parts of ourselves to work in harmony.”
Neither Penny nor Polly paid much attention to my statement. Instead, Polly looked at me quizzically and said, “I left the center around five yesterday evening, just after grabbing a bite from the buffet dinner. Are you telling me that The Miser was shot at again?”
I nodded. “Yes. Right in the chest. Luckily, he wore a bulletproof vest to bed and he wasn’t harmed.”
She shook her head in bewilderment. “Leave it to The Miser to think of wearing a vest to bed. I don’t like him, but he does have good instincts. I have to give him that much.”
Penny piped up. “Why don’t you like him?” she asked.
Polly sighed. “As long as we’re all being honest with each other—and it does feel good, I have to admit—I might as well talk about it openly. Ever since I married King Midas, his brother has handled the family finances. King Midas is under strict orders from our realm’s authority figures about how much gold he can create. He will be punished if he exceeds the limits, so he never does. My husband isn’t hearty enough to endure punishments, you see. He’s a bit of a coward in that regard. I’m not trying to be mean, I’m just trying to tell the truth.”
I nodded encouragement. “Go on,” I said. I sipped my tea. The blend of rose, black currant, and cloves was very nice.
Polly frowned as she continued. “Well, The Miser takes every single drop of gold, and invests it into the peanut factory that he and my husband founded about a decade back, Royalty Roasters. The Miser has a keen mind for business. He’s worked that darn factory up from nothing but a worn-out old warehouse, into the number one peanut supplier in the Spirit Realm. Royalty Roasters pulls in almost a billion in net profits a year, if we’re talking Earth Realm currency.”
My mouth dropped open. “What?” I said. “Then why were you complaining to me about how little spending money you had?” I couldn’t believe that Polly’s budget was that tight, what with the family’s billion-dollar company and all.
Polly frowned. “That’s the dreadful part of it all. The Miser is so stingy with our budget that he won’t even let us spend even the smallest amount of the profits from the peanut factory. He says that the best use of the profit is to invest it. He says that’s how we’ll get the highest return on investment. ROI. Goodness glory be, he’s always going on and on and on about the darn ROI.” She rolled her eyes.
The letters reminded me of something. “I just saw that acronym somewhere,” I said. “ROI... return on investment... oh yeah! It was on one of the papers that I photographed on The Miser’s desk. It was all these charts and numbers and stuff. I guess it’s financial info; his budgeting numbers.”
“The Miser is obsessed with numbers,” Polly said with a nod. Then she looked at me quizzically. “Why did you photograph papers on his desk?”
“I thought they might be a clue to our case,” I said. “Because this guy named Hal—well that’s not really his name, but—”
Penny took over. “But it’s a fake name.”
“And we don’t know his real name,” I supplied,
“But he’s very handsome,” Penny said.
“Totally hot,” I added.
“In a mysterious kind of way,” Penny said.
“Yeah, he’s mysterious because he lied,” I supplied. “Anyway, this guy, I’ll just call him Hal because that’s the name he gave me, I saw him break into The Miser’s room, and he was looking at these particular papers. So I figured if Hal was looking at them, they must be important to the case.”
“How so?” Polly asked.
I shrugged. “I don't know yet,” I said. “And I’m beginning to doubt that they are. I think Hal might be unrelated to the case. He might just be in the Earth Realm to recruit me. He might just be acting as a minion for this woman named Sarin. It’s a long story. But the bottom line is, he might not be involved in the case at all. After all, I was with him in the lobby when your brother-in-law was shot last night at ten. And the bullet that your brother was shot with last night looks really old fashioned to me, so I think it came out of the same gun that was used in the first attempt on his life.”
I fished around in my pocket and pulled out the silver, cone-shaped hunk of metal.
“Oh yeah,” Penny said as she scooted over and peered over my shoulder. “That looks totally old fashioned.”
Turkey strutted over to us and took a peek. After listening to her familiar for a moment Penny said, “Turkey says that bullet came from the Masked Bandit’s Colt Model 1855 revolver, which is usually housed at the Historical Society but was used in the reenactment, and has since gone missing. So the shooting last night was definitely related to the first one.”
Polly raised her brows. “How does your cat know so much?” she asked.
“He’s a genius,” I explained.
“And he studies a lot,” Penny added.
Turkey purred. Penny scooped him up, kissed his head, and then returned to her section of moss.
“So if Hal wasn’t the shooter last night, since I was with him, then he also probably wasn’t the shooter on Monday night,” I said.
“What were you doing with this Hal character at ten last night?” Polly asked, eyeing me over the rim of her cup just before she tipped some tea into her mouth.
“Yeah!” Penny said. “Marley, tell us why you were with this handsome stranger late last night, alone, in the lobby.” She turned to Polly. “He plays the piano. And Marley has always had a thing for musicians.”
“Alone in the lobby with a handsome musician...” Polly said, “While he serenaded you with music...”
I set down my tea cup. “He didn’t serenade me. And we were discussing his identity—which I figured was important because I thought he might be involved in all of this somehow.”
“But he’s not?” Polly said.
“Like I said,” I told her. “I was with him last night, so he’s not the one who tried to shoot The Miser. Someone else did—with the same kind of gun that killed Two-Cats, which totally points to the fact that it’s one shooter we’re after.”
“But then why in the world would this mysterious Hal character be snooping around in The Miser’s room?” Polly asked. “Why was he interested in the budget paperwork?”
I polished off my tea. “I don’t know,” I said. “But I guess we’d better get back down to the center and try to figure it out. All this talk about Hal is making me nervous. I haven’t seen him since last night, when we split up to search for the shooter.”
I stood up and brushed bits of moss from the backside of my leggings. “Polly, since you’re not the killer, that means someone else is and w
e still have lots of work to do to figure it out. To be honest—since that seems to be the theme this morning—you were number one on my suspect list. I’ve been pretty convinced you were behind all this, for the past few days. So now we’re back to the drawing board. Not to mention, I have a few massages lined up for this afternoon.”
“Ooo,” Penny said, after finishing off the last drops of her tea, too. “Is Hal going to be on your massage table?”
“I don’t know,” I told Penny. Color rose up in my cheeks at the mere thought of it.
I thought of the way it felt to be alone in the lobby with him, as he looked into my eyes and asked if he could trust me. I thought about how instinctive it had felt to say yes. But then I remembered the way he’d snapped into action at the sound of the gunshot.
What’s his deal? I wondered for the hundredth time.
I both wanted and didn’t want him to be on my massage table.
Talk about different parts of the self conflicting, I thought. I’m completely torn when it comes to my feelings about Hal.
“I guess only time will tell,” I said as we all headed for the trail that would take us back down to the Greene Center for Magical Living.
Chapter Seventeen
By the time we reached the center, Polly, Penny, and I had hashed out all of the details about how Polly would talk to her husband about her shifting abilities. She said she was feeling more confident about the conversation than ever before.
“No matter what happens,” I told her as I gave her a hug in the lobby, “I think this is a step in the right direction.”
“I think you’re right, Marley,” she told me, as she wiped a tear from her eye. She gave Penny a hug, too. “Thank you both for listening to me. You know, there is something about this place...”
Her voice trailed off as she looked up at the tree by our side, whose branches spread across the high ceiling. Sunlight trickled down on us through the skylights above. Ambient music, which magically floated through the lobby, played in harmony with the soft splashes of the waterfall to our right. “It’s a soothing atmosphere,” she said. “I don’t know if I’d have the courage to tell King Midas my news in any other setting. But here, I seem to feel peace about it.”
King Midas' Magic Page 13
