Silenced by a Spell

by Fiona Grace

  “Wow,” Lacey gushed. “This is incredible!”

  Tom ruffled Chester’s head, then looked up and smiled warmly at Lacey. “Thank you, my dear. It’s for Ippledean’s Harvest Festival fete. They have a squash competition, and commission me to make one of these every year as part of the winner’s prize. It’s also a pretty good way of drumming up extra business.” He kissed her cheek. “And how are you?”

  Considering he was in such a chipper mood, Lacey guessed he was clueless as to that morning’s events.

  “You haven’t heard?” she asked.

  Tom frowned. “Heard what?”

  “Superintendent Turner made me a suspect. He came by this morning with a search warrant. Made quite a spectacle of it, too.”

  Tom looked perturbed. He took her hand and led her to a stool. Chester stuck close by, ever protective, before sinking down at her feet in his Sphinx pose.

  “What reason on earth do they have to suspect you?” Tom asked, fixing his earnest green eyes on her.

  “The grimoire was stolen,” Lacey admitted with a heavy exhalation. “So the cops turned up at my store to search for it. Obviously it wasn’t there. The closest they got was the complete works of Shakespeare. But it doesn’t matter. Everyone thinks I had something to do with Alaric’s murder now.”

  “Oh, Lacey,” Tom said. “I’m so sorry. What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to find out who killed him?” she said confidently. “After all, the only person who’s actually motivated to clear my name is me.”

  Tom flashed her a proud smile. In the past, he’d worried about her penchant for sleuthing, fearing she’d one day find herself in too deep. But he seemed to have finally accepted his future wife wasn’t the type to take things lying down.

  “Let me guess,” he said. “You’ve already drawn up a list of suspects?”

  “Not quite,” Lacey said. “But I have questioned the two most obvious suspects.”

  “You questioned two people already?” Tom said with a whistle. “It’s not even lunch time. You have been busy!”

  “I figured the quicker I solve this, the more of my reputation I’ll walk away with intact,” she explained.

  “So what did you find out?” Tom asked.

  “Well, both my lead suspects had alibis. Jeff Peters was getting his broken foot attended to in the hospital, and Eldritch Von Raven was drinking in the Drawing Room at the Lodge with the rest of his porcelain pals.”

  “Eldritch Von Raven?” Tom echoed, raising his astonished eyebrows. “What a name.”

  “He’s one of the out-of-towners,” Lacey explained. “He was at the Halloween party with the others. He went out of his way to try and circumvent the auction and buy the grimoire off me outright, so I figured he had the most compelling motive.”

  “And the other guy? Jeff Peters? Why was he on your list?”

  “He’s the pawnbroker from The Ducking Stool. He was the one who you overheard yelling at me after the auction.”

  “Ah,” Tom said with a nod of understanding. “I see why you made him a suspect.”

  “Exactly,” Lacey said. “But they both have alibis for the night of the murder. Which leaves me with nothing.” She felt her shoulders slump with frustration. “Gina’s theory that it was the curse that killed him is starting to look pretty plausible.”

  Tom gave his head an exasperated shake. “Is she still going on about the curse? She can’t really believe a supernatural force killed Alaric?”

  “She can and she does. And until I work out what really happened, she’s going to keep blaming herself.”

  Tom rubbed his chin contemplatively. “So who’s next?” he asked. “Who’s your next prime suspect?”

  Lacey sighed. “That’s where I’m stuck. No one obvious is jumping out at me now I’ve cleared Jeff and Eldritch, so I’ve no choice but to completely widen the net and look into every single person who came to the auction and bet on the grimoire. They all have a motive, technically speaking. I’ll question every single last one of those vampires if I need to.”

  Tom bestowed a kiss onto the crown of her head. “Good luck.”

  Fueled with motivation, Lacey stood. Chester jumped to attention, and together they headed from the back kitchen into the dining area of the patisserie. A large group of youngsters had entered while she’d been out back, and they were all crowded together in between the tables, blocking the route out. Lacey waved goodbye to Emmanuel and began to maneuver her way through. Chester was doing a much better job of it, weaving seamlessly between their legs almost unnoticed.

  As Lacey inched a path through the kids, her attention was caught by a poster on the wall. It was the ghost tour poster, the one that had been hanging beside her auction poster during the Halloween party. Curious to know when the tour was actually taking place, she searched for the date.

  To her surprise, she saw that Gina had been right about the date all along. The ghost tour was supposed to take place the night of her auction. The night of Alaric’s murder. Gina hadn’t messed up the dates after all.

  Her mind flashed back to the beach. When she, Tom, Gina, and the dogs had congregated on the beach at the correct meeting spot, they’d been the only ones there. She knew for certain they weren’t the only ones who’d planned to attend the event, and Gina had told her the tour was a highlight of the town’s calendar.

  The only explanation was that the operators had cancelled the event. She and her crew hadn’t bought tickets in advance, instead choosing to pay at the door, so to speak. If the event had indeed been cancelled there would’ve been no way for the organizers to contact them to let them know, since they hadn’t supplied any contact information. That would explain why the beach was empty when they arrived, if everyone else had prebooked and gotten the memo it was cancelled.

  Lacey pondered it, not quite knowing what—if any—significance the cancelled ghost tour held. But it had to mean something. The location of Alaric’s murder should’ve been swarming with visitors and tourists had the tour gone ahead. His killer wouldn’t have had a chance to strike, and the man would most likely still be alive today. Lacey needed to know why the tour had been cancelled. It might well be the key to unlocking this whole case.

  Determined, Lacey rushed out into the street and back toward her store.

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  Lacey hurried back to the antiques store. It felt even more quiet after the bustle of Tom’s patisserie.

  “Where’s Gina?” Lacey asked Finnbar. He was sitting behind the counter with his nose in one of his big PhD textbooks.

  “Out in the greenhouse,” he replied. “Singing to the zucchini. Again.” He put the book down. “I’m starting to worry about her.”

  “Don’t,” Lacey said. “I’ll handle her.”

  She headed through the auction room and out into the garden. She spotted Gina inside the greenhouse, swaying side to side on a stool beside a large zucchini plant as she sang a mournful little ditty. Boudica slept beside her feet.

  She really did make for a forlorn figure.

  Lacey knocked on the glass window. Gina flinched and turned around.

  “Oh. Lacey,” she said. “I didn’t see you there.”

  Lacey stepped inside the greenhouse. It was warm and smelled comfortingly earthy.

  “How’s your zucchini?” she asked.

  “Just in need of a bit of company,” Gina replied.

  Lacey gave her friend a sympathetic smile. “I’m sorry you’re going through so much at the moment, Gina. And I know reassuring you there’s no such thing as a curse isn’t going to help. Is there anything I can do?”

  Gina shook her frizzy gray hair and looked over the rim of her glasses. “There’s only one thing that can take this load from my mind—proof that someone killed Alaric. Until then, I won’t be able to stop thinking that I caused all this.”

  Lacey felt even more compelled to solve the case for her dear friend.

  “Then I’ll just have to find tha
t proof for you,” she said with determination. “And maybe you can help.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’ve been thinking about the ghost tour,” Lacey said. “I just found out you were right about the date all along. The tour must’ve been cancelled earlier in the day, but we didn’t find out because we didn’t have tickets. Do you know who runs it?”

  “Jens,” Gina told her.

  “Jens Johansson?” Lacey asked, surprised. “From the Coffee Nook?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Gina said. “You seem surprised.”

  “I am,” Lacey told her. “I assumed the tour would be run by a born and bred Wilfordshire local. A Violet Jourdemayne obsessive.”

  Gina gave her head a small shake. “Nope. Jens tried his hand at a lot of odd jobs when he first moved here from Denmark. The ghost tour stuck. It’s probably thanks to the tour that he was able to open the Coffee Nook, and support his sister and her family to move over here too.”

  Lacey gave the new information a moment to percolate. It didn’t fit in with her perception of the calm and intelligent Jens Johansson, being an odd-jobs man. But that was often the way with economic migrants. Jens could have a PhD in molecular science and he’d still be expected to graft his way back up from the bottom, just like Lacey herself had with her antiques store.

  She thought back to that morning in the Coffee Nook, when Freja had been dressed as a Teletubby and fudged Alaric’s order. Lacey herself had been enraged by the man screaming at a heavily pregnant woman and had stepped in to intervene. Was it possible that when Jens heard about the abusive treatment of his beloved sister, he’d snapped? Perhaps Alaric turned up for the ghost tour early, and Jens had seen red, rowing him out to the island alone to murder him. Why else would Jens have cancelled his lucrative ghost tour, one that was only growing in popularity as the years passed?

  Lacey could hardly believe it herself, but she had a new prime suspect. Jens.

  She hurried for the greenhouse exit.

  “Where are you going?” Gina queried.

  “I’ve had an idea,” Lacey said. “Mind the store for me, please. I’ve got a suspect to question.”

  And with that, she hurried away.

  *

  Lacey opened the door to the Coffee Nook, and stepped inside the small store. Jens was on the till today.

  “Lacey,” he said in his soft Danish accent. “How lovely to see you.”

  He must’ve been the only person in town who wasn’t annoyed at her for luring all the goths here. His lack of irritation only served to make her more suspicious.

  “No Freja today?” she asked.

  He smiled. “She’s at home resting up with the baby.”

  Despite her reason for being here, Lacey couldn’t help but feel a surge of excitement. “She had the baby?”

  “Yup. Take a look.”

  Jens showed her his cell phone. It was full of pictures of a frazzled but happy-looking Freja in a hospital bed, cradling the pink wriggly newborn. In some of the photos, her small daughters were also squidged up beside her posing for a family snap. In others, Freja’s husband was present. In others, Jens had used selfie mode to get the whole gang in together. They were joyous images. Images that showed a loving and united family enjoying one of life’s most precious moments. Not exactly the types of pictures you’d expect from a murderer.

  “She’s calling him Carl,” Jens said proudly. “And get this funny coincidence. He weighed seven pounds, two ounces, and was born at two minutes past seven!”

  Lacey suddenly realized something. “He was born during the ghost tour?”

  Jens laughed. “Yes. Typical, huh? The day I make the most money out of the year, and I have to cancel because my sister goes into labor. I don’t care though. My nephew is worth so much more than I would’ve earned that night!”

  Lacey let it all sink in.

  “Were you already down on the beach when you got the call?” she asked.

  If Jens had been down there early setting everything up, there was still a slim chance he’d murdered Alaric before getting the call from Freja. Of course that would’ve relied on Alaric also being early, and Jens being such a psychopath he was able to murder a man before driving his laboring sister to hospital, but stranger things had happened…

  “Luckily, no,” Jens replied. “It would’ve been so embarrassing if I’d had to cancel on the spot. As it was, I got the chance to contact everyone who’d prebooked and offer a new date or a refund. Most of them went for the refund, since they’re out-of-towners.”

  Lacey hadn’t prebooked. If she had, she would’ve gotten a call from Jens about the cancellation. She would never have been down on the beach that night, would never have gone to the island, and would never have been embroiled in this whole mess.

  So that was that. Jens had an iron-cast alibi. He wasn’t her guy. She’d hit another dead end.

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  Lacey returned to her quiet store. Finnbar was at the desk, looking at the computer.

  “Lacey, you should take a look at this,” he said.

  She went over and peered over his shoulder. He was on the Wilfordshire Weekly website. A large photograph of Alaric Moon filled the screen, beneath the headline: “Wilfordshire Wakes to Mysterious Murder of Spooky Stranger.”

  Lacey groaned at their sensationalism. “At least they’re good at alliteration.”

  “Did you know Alaric ran his own occult museum in London?” Finnbar said. He read from the screen. “The Macabre Museum, it’s called. I looked it up. It’s not a museum in the traditional sense of the word, it’s a business. I wonder if that’s why Alaric wanted the grimoire in the first place. To display at his museum. That might explain why and how he was willing to shell out so much for it, if it was a business expense he could write off for tax purposes. I mean, you saw how many people were lured to Wilfordshire because of it. Think of all those people paying an entrance fee to get inside Alaric’s museum to look at it. He’d turn quite a profit with the grimoire on display.”

  “You’re right,” Lacey said. “That makes a lot of sense.”

  It didn’t get her any closer to solving Alaric’s murder, but it certainly helped build up a picture of the man he’d been when he was still alive, the life he’d led, and his interests and motivations. She wasn’t sure whether it would prove useful in the future, so she filed the information away in her mind.

  “Thing is, Lacey,” Finnbar added. He bit down on his lip nervously and scrolled through the article, then began to read from it. “The man was murdered after attending an auction and putting down a huge sum of money on an antique spell book that was in fact a fake.”

  Lacey’s eyes widened with alarm.

  “A fake?” she repeated. “What do they mean? I mean it’s obviously not full of actual spells that work, but it’s definitely an antique.”

  “Keep reading,” Finnbar told her.

  “Jeff Peters of the Ducking Stool pawn store in Ippledean has confirmed the book was a replica, and was purchased from his store for twenty pounds. However, it was then sold on fraudulently as the real thing, for an exorbitant fee of seventy thousand pounds.”

  Lacey clenched her hands into fists. “That nasty little man! What a terrible thing to do. And there was me feeling sorry for him!”

  Finnbar swirled in his stool to face her. “People are going crazy about it online. They’re calling your entire business into question. I’ve been getting calls all day from people who attended auctions in the past asking for evidence their items weren’t faked.”

  “For goodness’ sake,” Lacey huffed.

  This was all getting out of hand. With the Wilfordshire Weekly reporting nonsense, things would only get worse for her and the store. She needed to solve this case and fast, before her entire business fell into disrepute.

  Just then, her phone rang. She looked down to see it was her mom.

  “Great!” she muttered. Just what she needed.

  She hurried away into th
e back office for some privacy and answered the call.

  “I’ve had the most wonderful idea for the wedding,” Shirley said as the call connected.

  “Oh?” Lacey asked, feeling her heart thumping in her chest.

  “A Celtic harp!”

  Lacey paused. “Huh?”

  “You should get a Celtic harp player. Imagine how ethereal it would be. A forest of spindly trees, a harp player in a gorgeous floaty dress, snow, icicles.”

  Despite the emotions rolling inside of her, Lacey was suddenly struck by the image her mother had painted. It would be beautiful.

  “I… love it,” she confessed.

  “You do? Great! Because I’ve drawn up a shortlist of harpists, and I’ve found an excellent forest location. Ashdown forest, in Sussex.”

  “Sussex?” Lacey repeated. That’s where she’d tried to trace her father to, to Rye in Sussex. Thinking of him sent a visceral pain through Lacey’s chest.

  “Yes,” her mom continued brightly, none the wiser. “They have these lodges, like proper wood cabins. You can hire out the hall for the reception, and the separate rooms for guests to stay in, and then everyone heads into the forest for the ceremony. I’ll email you the details.”

  “Thanks,” Lacey said, her mind suddenly elsewhere.

  “And you’ll be thrilled to know that they’ve already okayed the reindeer,” Shirley added.

  “Great,” Lacey murmured. She wasn’t listening anymore.

  The call ended.

  Lacey couldn’t let this sidetrack her. It would be too easy to get wrapped up in thoughts of her father and lose sight of the more pressing need to solve the case. She shook herself, trying to shake off the thoughts.

  It was time to make her next move.

  “Come on, Chester,” she said to her pup. “Let’s go.”

  *

  Evening fell, bringing cooler weather with it. The shop had been quiet all day, but Lacey had been rushed off her feet trying to solve Alaric’s murder.

  She yawned. “Are you ready to go home?” she asked Chester.