Wildes Witches Cozy Mysteries Box Set 2

by Mara Webb

  I made a mental note to try and get back into his office to speak with his ghost in the mirror again, he had blurted out a few distressed words when he had appeared last and they brought me no closer to apprehending a murderer.

  I rewound all of the cameras to the same point, an hour and a half before I had sat down to review the tapes. I pressed play and watched Ryan and I dive confidently into the ocean, almost straight away I was impressed with how good my legs seemed to look on the way down.

  It was distracting to see myself like that, I was usually the one with the camera, so I always have a million pictures of everyone else and never one of me. It was a little grainy, but still, I liked it. You could see on the camera that the two of us splashed about on the surface for a few minutes before going under.

  My eyes scanned across the other squares on the monitors.

  I could see Rose and Monty enjoying a glass of champagne on the top deck, they were lay out on sun loungers and when I squinted, I could see that they were both reading trashy romance novels, the type that are sold in airports for a dollar.

  I wouldn’t have thought Monty was the type to enjoy that sort of thing, but they were both deeply immersed in what they were doing.

  I scanned across to find Leslie and Jonny leaning over the side of the yacht while holding each other’s hands, they were facing out on the opposite side to where Ryan and I were swimming. Hand holding quickly became kissing and as Leslie ran her hands through Jonny’s hair I turned to look elsewhere.

  I couldn’t see Stephanie anywhere. I had to assume she was resting at the time we were out in the water.

  Kimberly wandered in and out of the camera that was facing Monty and Rose with drink refills and Sean appeared with a broom at one point to sweep away some dirt.

  Dominic, however, suddenly walked out of the glass doors on the murder deck with a knife between his teeth and a weight clip in each hand before diving into the sea. I gasped and watched the next few seconds with bated breath. Dominic soon ascended the ladder back onto the yacht and ran back inside.

  I turned to look over my shoulder to see if Rick had been watching the screens too, he was inspecting a map and looking at a weather report. I wondered if he had reviewed any of the footage himself, or if I was the first one to see it.

  I couldn’t understand why Dominic would want me dead, I hadn’t really found out anything overly incriminating about him when I was looking through Nicholas’s office. Dom had smoked in a stupid place on site and potentially contaminated a bunch of stock, was that a secret worth killing over?

  Had he killed Nicholas and was worried that I was too close to the truth? It was now clear that he had come after me, but the motive was not so obvious. I wanted to speak with Ryan about it but waiting to see what Dominic’s next move would be might shed some light onto his intentions.

  A knock on the door of the bridge made me jump and I quickly leapt up and away from the monitors, switching each camera back to real time with a large green button. Rick approached the door and opened it just enough to peep out to see who was there. I heard Sean’s voice.

  “They are all begging for food out there, just letting you know we will be serving some food out in about an hour.” Rick nodded and then closed the door.

  “I have lactose intolerance,” he said to me. “Gotta take my pills ahead of eating so that I don’t explode after a slice of pizza. You ever been on a yacht before this then?”

  The change of topic threw me. “No,” I replied.

  “I did all my training on regular ships, I fancied working as an admiral in the Navy, but it didn’t work out. Turns out it is pretty hard to do. I bumped into Nicholas one day at a golfing event, he was on a golf cart as we were all waiting for Monty to take his shot.

  “He spotted me and came to chat, turns out he was interested in buying a few yachts for himself and needed someone to operate them, big pay. Bit less impressive than Navy admiral but I earn a good living, not really sure what I’ll do after this trip, any chance you have any friends that need a captain for a private yacht? Can’t imagine anyone from this family will want to take this boat at after the drama we’ve had.”

  “Most of my friends are cats,” I said. He shrugged and turned back to the map he was inspecting.

  “We’ll set off again after everyone has eaten. Try not to fall overboard, someone is clearly after you,” he smiled.

  I wandered out of the bridge and back into the labyrinth of corridors on my way to the murder deck. There was a folded scrap of paper on the ground, I picked it up and opened it up to see what it was. It seemed to be a list of items requested for room service, Sean must have dropped it when he came to tell Rick about the upcoming meal. I didn’t want to leave it lying about littering the floor, so I kept hold of it.

  Ryan was waiting for me by the bar and grabbed my hand as soon as he saw me.

  “Come on, quickly,” he said. He almost dragged me as he was walking too fast. I held onto the rail to steady myself as we hurried down the stairs towards the cabins. He swiped his access card against the lock for our room and pulled me inside. “Lock the door behind you,” he urged. I turned back and pushed the bolt across, it seemed a little pointless as the yacht was filled with witches and wizards so if anyone was desperate enough to want to get in here it wouldn’t be difficult.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. I put the folded piece of paper down on my nightstand and sat next to Ryan on the edge of the bed.

  “I bumped into Dominic upstairs, his hair was wet, but he was wearing the same clothes we had seen him in at breakfast,” Ryan said. I wasn’t sure if I should interrupt him to say that I already knew who had tried to kill me. “Anyway, we physically bumped into each other and when he walked away, I realized he had dropped his wallet. I opened it up and guess what…? He has a membership card to the United States Freediving Federation right in the picture part of his wallet.”

  “Freediving?” I said.

  “Yeah, so he would be the perfect person to have dived into the water without any equipment and attack you. His hair was wet too, it adds up.”

  “I know it was Dominic, Rick showed me CCTV that covers the outside of the yacht and I watched him dive in after us,” I confessed.

  “You knew? Why didn’t you say anything? Why would he do that? What happens next, we should call the police, right?” Ryan had stood up and was pacing the floor around the bed.

  “I only just saw the footage. I think we should wait it out, I don’t understand the reason behind it but perhaps there is more to be discovered, more paperwork in the office or maybe even something in the will, that would help us understand. All I have so far is that he was a dog’s body at work and that he had been caught smoking near a bunch of stock and was in trouble, it doesn’t seem worth killing me over though.”

  “What’s that?” Ryan asked, pointing at the paper that I had put down on the nightstand.

  “Oh, Sean dropped it, I was just going to hand it back when I saw him later. It’s a room service request for a bunch of random stuff, no idea what it was all being used for. But hey, I did get a billion Easter eggs delivered to the room on our first night so it’s nice to know I’m not the weirdest one here,” I replied. I handed Ryan the paper. “Makes no sense to me.”

  Ryan unfolded the note and I watched his eyes flicker left and right as he read through the list once, twice and then a third time. He finally looked up at me with astonishment.

  “Who is in room five?” Ryan asked. “Nora, who?”

  “I don’t know, Jonny, I think. Why are you so fired up?” I couldn’t understand what Ryan had read that had changed his mood so quickly, it looked like a request for a bunch of random items to me.

  “Nora, this is a list of things you would need to create the distraction magic spell that caused all of us to be swept up in our own tailor-made nightmare while Stephanie was stabbed. If this is the list of things to go to room five, then that means Jonny is the one that attacked Steph. We have to act
on this now, he is dangerous. He might be Nicholas’s killer too, we can’t have Jonny and Dominic running around this yacht freely for the next few days, there’ll be no one left alive!”

  I leaned against the door of our cabin and watched silently as Ryan picked up the phone to call up to Rick. I listened as he explained the significance of the list and how this suggested that Jonny was Stephanie’s mystery attacker, they both agreed that he needed to be questioned by the justice department of magic and Ryan hung up. “He is making the call now,” he said, referring to Rick.

  “Just like that?” I asked. “We don’t know for sure; I don’t feel right about this.”

  “Nora, they can get to the bottom of this, they have more resources than us. All we know is that Jonny seemed to have ordered all of the things he needed for the spell to his room, his sister was attacked, and a man has been killed on this yacht already,” Ryan explained. He waved his arms about to punctuate his points.

  “According to Kim, he has been faking his alcoholism as well, I don’t know if that is relevant,” I said. Noise outside the room caught our attention, the sound of raised voices and shuffling feet. I opened the door and was surprised to see two uniformed men from the magic justice department dragging Jonny down the hallway, other cabin doors opened and soon we were all watching him resisting his arrest.

  “I didn’t do anything, please! No, I didn’t do—”

  The officers and Jonny suddenly disappeared into a room that I hadn’t previously noticed. I looked down the hall to see another figure leaning out of room five. Leslie had been in the room with him and she was crying heavily.

  My intuition was telling me that this wasn’t over.

  15

  I closed the door again and stepped back into the room with Ryan. The room that appeared out of nowhere was weird, but weird things seem to happen all the time now. I needed some sugar-based therapy.

  “I don’t feel good about this, why would he want to harm his sister?” I asked. I walked over to the wall with all of the windows and grabbed another Cadbury egg from the shelves. It was a large Easter egg with bunnies printed all over the cardboard box that it came in, I tore through the packaging quickly, ripped the purple foil away and sunk my teeth into the creamy, milky chocolate.

  I closed my eyes as the flavor melted onto my tongue and, for a brief moment, completely forgot what I was upset about. Chocolate was its own kind of magic.

  “What makes you so sure?” Ryan asked. “I mean, you’re an only child so it makes total sense to me that you wouldn’t understand how annoying a sibling can be. I have never personally tried to stab my sister, but I’ve been tempted a few times. You said he was lying about being an alcoholic?”

  I snapped out of my dairy trance and stared at the ceiling.

  “Kimberly said that he gave her and Sean some potion recipe that was to be prepared and given to him whenever he drank alcohol, it neutralized the effects of all the whisky, gin, vodka and whatever else and then he could just pretend to be passed out. I don’t understand what he was doing all that for, but that’s what she said.”

  “Well if people think you are incapable of remembering what you say or do then they might be a little looser lipped around you I guess,” Ryan said.

  That was an interesting idea, I wonder if he had overheard anything useful during his ‘unconscious episodes’. A knock on the door made me jump, not before taking another huge bite of chocolate though. As Ryan open the door I was still chewing and the sound of the food in my own mouth was muffling what was said until the person in the hallway barged in.

  It was Stephanie.

  “Listen, I don’t really know what you two are doing, or who you are, or why you are here. I know that daddy needed a lawyer and you turned out to be a good one, so I need you to help my brother,” she said.

  “It’s probably worth mentioning that we found the evidence that has him under arrest right now,” Ryan replied.

  “I know that. With the two of you sniffing around doing, whatever it is you are doing, I assumed that you called the justice department. The problem is that you are the only lawyer on this yacht, and I need someone to provide him with legal advice, name your price.”

  Ryan and Stephanie continued to bicker over the practicalities of legal representation and the strange circumstances they were in. He tried to explain that is wasn’t about the money and that he had his reservations about it no matter how much she offered to pay him. Stephanie didn’t seem to understand words like ‘no’ or ‘conflict of interest.’

  I continued to work my way through the chocolate and hoped that Stephanie would listen to what Ryan was trying to say to her and leave. During this chocolate-absence it seemed that Ryan must have caved and when he turned back to me, he was gesturing for me to follow him.

  “What? Why do I need to be involved? This seems like a Ryan thing. All of these chocolate eggs seem like more of a Nora thing and I think you would do a great job in there without me.”

  “If I have to get tangled up in this then so do you!” he laughed. “This is a romantic holiday, so we are going to go in there as a couple and interrogate this violent liar as a couple.”

  We both laughed and he walked over to take a bite out of the chunk of chocolate egg in my hand. He bit into it and turned to walk towards the door.

  “Wow, there might be another stabbing on this boat if you touch my chocolate again!” I checked my reflection quickly in the mirror to see how much melted food I had smeared across my face and caught sight of my beautifully curly hair. “Oh, I’ve been meaning to ask about this shampoo of yours because it is wild how nice my hair looks right now.”

  I looked back into the room and saw that Ryan had already left. He was in a crime-fighting zone and he had clearly forgotten to wait until I ready. I laughed as I grabbed a dress from the closet and changed into it quickly so that I looked a little bit more professional than a woman in a wet bikini that had just been, literally, dragged out of the sea.

  The dress was ankle-length and white, large pineapples were scattered over the skirt part in a jaunty pattern and I considered changing into something else, but I was already wasting time and I had only packed novelty summer dresses.

  I walked out of the bedroom into the corridor, pulled our door closed and walked over towards the door that had appeared when the justice department arrived. I could only assume that Ryan had gone in here as he wasn’t out in the hallway. I twisted the handle and walked inside; it was not what I was expecting.

  The room was much larger than any of the cabin suites, large windows ran along the wall opposite the door that allowed the daylight to pour in and shine upon the carpeting and walls.

  “Shoes off!” an officer instructed me from the other side of the room. I kicked off my sandals and crouched down to place them into a wicker basket beside the door, each occupant of the room seemed to have their own wicker basket so no one’s shoes were touching each other. There was a queen-sized bed with white linens and a small pile of folded towels at the foot as if this was part of a luxury hotel.

  Along the right wall there was a number of exercise machines, a television and a small kitchenette.

  The left wall was largely blank apart from one door which was slightly ajar and seemed to lead into a bathroom. A wooden table stood a few feet in front of me and Jonathon was seated at it, facing me. Ryan had taken a seat opposite Jonathon and they were both pouring whisky out of a large crystal decanter into short glasses, they were laughing with each other.

  “Ryan?” I said inquisitively.

  “Oh hey! Grab a chair, we were just having a drink and talking about football,” Ryan said. “We’re both huge fans.”

  “Oh yeah?” I replied, already smiling. “You just love the sport don’t you, all of the sport. Hey, what’s your favorite football team again? The one that you always talk about because you love football so much?”

  “Oh, you know, Tennessee Tigers.”

  “Is that a college team?” J
onathon asked with a note of confusion.

  “Yeah Ryan, are they?”

  Ryan coughed. “Sure. Anyway. I was thinking we should knuckle down, ask about Stephanie being stabbed and establish a timeline,” he replied. I could see the twinkle in his eye as we both acknowledged that he had no interest in football at all. I sat down next to Ryan and a legal pad appeared on the table in front of me.

  “This is the brig huh?” I said, looking around. “This is nicer than our room!”

  “It was supposed to be one of the suites, Steph and I argued about who got to stay in it so much that our father had it hidden, used magic to mask it so that we might forget it was here altogether. I didn’t realize he had turned it into the little yacht jail. I figured that he had it as a private bedroom for himself, not that room one isn’t posh enough, but he likes to have more than everyone else,” Jonathon said.

  “You argue with Stephanie a lot?” I asked.

  “I didn’t stab her,” he snapped. “She is the most entitled, spoiled, obnoxious, arrogant specimen on this planet but I wouldn’t physically attack her. She wouldn’t hurt me either, both of us prefer emotional blackmail and psychological warfare.” He laughed but I kept my face rigid, I was trying to establish some authority.

  “Where were you when Stephanie was attacked?” Ryan prodded. “I don’t remember seeing you during the chaos.” I tried to think back and remember who I did see that night. Rose had been there to help almost straight away, Dominic had been there panicking, Monty had been there also. I didn’t see Jonny anywhere.

  “Anything I tell you is a secret right? You can’t go and tell everybody because it’s a secret,” Jonathon asked, looking at Ryan for conformation.

  “It remains confidential unless someone is in danger,” he replied.