The Witch is in the Details

by Constance Barker

  “Definitely made by someone who can sew. That lets me off the hook.” She looked at the doll at different angles.

  “Beyond the obvious, how are these made?” Gynther pressed her.

  “You need to attach personal items. A lock of hair—I think the Brock Miller doll has his actual hair. Fingernail clippings, like that. Swatches from clothes they wore, especially clothes worn close to the body would work well. Small jewelry. A used tissue or band aid is kinda standard for some reason, or tiny toilet paper wads from shaving nicks.”

  “Blood, then,” Gynther said.

  Nann suppressed an expression and handed the poppet back. “Do these have blood in them? That’s pretty dark stuff, magic-wise, and powerful. And yucky, really. Maybe even more than a used tissue.”

  “What do you make of this?” Keith Schwenk handed her another photo. This looked like an autopsy on the voodoo doll in Roger Paine’s possession. The doll had been undressed. Lines were drawn on the white fabric in red and black ink.

  “Scars, I’d guess, or tattoos; birthmarks. In order to get this personal, to collect personal items, it would have to be someone who really knew the board members.”

  “Or someone working at the B&Bs they’re staying at. It wouldn’t be too tough to get the items you mentioned. They could be fished out of the bathroom trash, for instance,” Gynther said.

  Nann knew he was just trying to head her off. How would a person playing hotel maid know where Roger Paine had scars? On the one hand, she thought that only a person very close to the board would have this kind of knowledge. Many of them, it seemed, had grown up together around here. On the other hand, there was an effigy for every board member. That spoke to an outsider being the spell-caster. Making a functioning poppet of yourself could be a dangerous thing. Nann still had no clue who the local witches or sorcerers were.

  “The person who made these really know what they’re doing. These poppets are the real deal, black magic.” Maybe if she saw all the dolls dissected, she could figure out who knew what about whom and thus, who the maker was.

  She noted the cops sharing wry looks. Of course. Real deal black magic didn’t fall into police parlance. They certainly weren’t going to share any information with her.

  “Are you sure you don’t know who could make these?” Keith asked.

  “I don’t have a clue,” Nann said. She wished she did.

  Chapter 6

  Next morning, she took the usual circuitous route to the store, but stepped on the brakes when she passed Tinker’s Auto. Her little lot was jammed with police cars. Nann was pretty sure they didn’t use her shop for maintenance. Cricket pulled herself into an empty lot across the street and Nann hurried back.

  “Hey! Easy!” Tink exclaimed, Her hands were cuffed behind her. Two deputies led her to a car.

  Nann wildly looked around, and found Keith. “What are you doing?”

  “One of Miss Tinker’s customers reported seeing voodoo dolls in her shop,” Keith said. “We need to question her.”

  “Tink can’t—” What could she tell the police, that elves couldn’t perform sympathetic magic? Her brain finally caught up to her mouth. “—Can’t be responsible.”

  “You tell ’em, Nann!” Tink shouted before they closed the car door on her.

  “Can’t?” Keith’s expression turned inquisitive.

  Think, Nann, think, you’ve had half a pot of coffee already. “No, she can’t, because she doesn’t own a sewing machine.”

  Deputy Schwenk’s brows fell. “That’s the best you can do?”

  “The dolls you showed me, the stitches looked too regular to be hand-stitching. Did you find a sewing machine?”

  A couple other deputies wandered over. “We weren’t looking for one.”

  “Is it on your warrant?” Nann didn’t know if that mattered or not.

  “She could’ve ditched the machine after she made the dolls,” one of the deputies she didn’t know said.

  “And then left the poppets in plain sight?” She looked from cop, to cop, to Keith. “Who else knows about the poppets? The board, and the person who constructed the poppets. That person could be on the board, I guess. But who else would report seeing little dolls in an auto repair shop?”

  “I’m being framed!” Tink called out the cracked rear window of the prowl car. “I’m a victim of the Police State!”

  “Vadoma Tinker has been arrested several times regarding the mill,” one of the deputies said. “At several protests, some violent. She fits as a suspect.”

  “That is such BS!” Tink was on the verge of giving her true identity away. How could she possibly overhear a conversation from that distance, with the window open an inch? Things could go seriously sideways if they got a load of her pointy-ass ears. Nann shot her a shut-up look so fierce, her eyes nearly crossed.

  “Dowhen, Olson, you tossed the place pretty good, both shop and house. Any sign of a sewing machine? Fabric?”

  The deputies eyed each other.

  “Sewing kit? Thread? Anything?” Keith seemed to be on verge of pleading. “A stray button?”

  Olson (Nann guessed) shook his head. “Dolls were in plain sight near the office cash register. We bagged ’em and tagged ’em.”

  Keith’s radio made a bunch of squawks. The cops seemed to understand. Nann didn’t speak Dispatch. “What?”

  “Autopsy on Roger Paine indicates natural causes. Congenital heart disease. There’s no murder case.” Keith took a deep breath.

  “Are you letting Tink off the hook?”

  “Without more evidence, yeah, cut her loose,” he said to the deputies.

  “We still have her on making terrorist threats,” the other one, Dowhen (probably) protested.

  “Cut her loose. I don’t think the DA will press, unless something more turns up.” Schwenk gave Nann a nod and walked to his car. Did the man every have any time off? When the other deputies opened the door, Tink handed over the cuffs. Nann tried to suppress a sigh. Did the shop goblin really want to give herself away?

  “Thanks for coming to my rescue. I was just about to magic up the security locks and get away,” Tink walked over.

  One by one, the police cars rolled out of Tink’s lot. “You really want them to know you have magic, Tink?”

  She waved her hand and blew a raspberry. “Cops don’t believe in magic. They just make stuff up. ‘Look at those ears!’” She made her voice deeper in an impression. “‘Some kinda freaky body mod. What do you expect from a girl mechanic?’”

  “You still might be in trouble, Tink. How did the poppets get in your shop? Who reported them?”

  Tink shrugged. “You got me. I haven’t even had a flat tire today. Not one job since I opened this morning. Since no one pulled in, I was working on that sweet ’68 Chevelle hardtop coupe. Thing’s gonna bring me some money after body and paint. All of a sudden, it was, ding-ding, ding-ding, ding-ding, a regular cop parking lot out front.”

  “You’re just lucky they dropped the murder investigation.” Nann gave her own words some thought.

  “You still think it was murder, don’t you Nancy Druid.”

  “Stop calling me that.” She raised her brows in surrender. “Yeah, from the placement of that hat pin, right through the heart, I gotta go with homicide.”

  “Even though your Keith said congenital heart disease?”

  Nann scowled. “My Keith?”

  “You know congenital means you’re born with it, right?”

  “Yes.” Nann wanted to huff. Tink’s logic made it tough. But just like the lines on the naked dolls, birth marks or scars, only a person who knew Roger Paine well might know about a bum ticker he’d carried around his whole life. “I still think it was magic. Those poppets are for real. But until I know what Roger Paine was going to announce, I have to find a way to figure out who wanted him dead.”

  “The cops haven’t found the note cards yet?” Tink’s head angled in thought. “Well, he must’ve had them on a laptop, or maybe hi
s cell phone.”

  Nann shook her head. “He dropped his cell phone in the toilet.”

  Even the usually reserved Tink looked impressed. “How do you know that?”

  Nann slapped her forehead. “Because he rented one of my computers to go on the internet.”

  “YOU’RE SURE HE USED this machine?” Tink sat on the bookstore floor, removing the case from the computer.

  “That’s the one.” Nann knew little to nothing about computers. “Are you gonna hack it?”

  “I speak a few machine languages, but not enough to hack into someone’s private e-mail. And given how sneaky Nationwide Paper is, I’m sure their communications are encrypted.”

  “How are we going to look at his e-mail, then?”

  Tink pulled a tiny screwdriver from a pocket. Even without her Athame, Nann could sense the magic.

  “Not in any conventional way.” She sat at the keyboard, accessed the computer’s clock function, and turned back time. “You’d better get a pen and some paper. I’m not sure how this will manifest.”

  Nann pulled a sheet from the printer and found a pen on the check-out stand. “Manifest?”

  “I don’t usually work on computers, so I don’t know how they respond to magic. Magnets, yes, magic, no.”

  “How do they respond to magnets?”

  “Not well. Get ready. If this goes right, the message will just print out. Since I have no clue what I’m doing—”

  “Wait. What?”

  Tink maneuvered the screwdriver, then stuck her other hand in the machine works. “Okay, that should do it. What’s happening?”

  “Nothing.” Nann heard a sound. It sounded like typing on a keyboard. Holy schmoly, the keyboard was typing by itself. “I can’t catch the letters that fast. Can you slow it down?”

  Tink jumped up. “Um. No. Here, I’ll read them to you. C. K. Space bar. P. L...”

  It took a while, but finally, the keyboard went silent. Nann read over what she had, making slashes between what she suspected the words were. She and Tink read it over.

  ...ck plan, I suspect you-know-who will tilt the balance of the shares with the employees’ for a hostile takeover. As a minority shareholder, I will be ousted as CEO, and your position will also be in question. Our only shot at retaining control relies in holding the announcement over until January, when the employee shares are vested in TX and LA. We either buy out the employees or convince them to vote our way. Get this in motion ASAP.

  Nann gave a squinting double-take. “Does this even help us?”

  “Who is you-know-who?” Tink asked.

  “You-know-who must be the person making the poppets. And someone who can sway the vote. But we still don’t know which way, pro-mill, or anti-mill? Can we run it again? I missed the first part. It might be an email address with a name.”

  Tink sat in front of the keyboard and mouse and set the clock back again. “I’ll give it a try.” She plopped back down on the floor, brandishing the screwdriver.

  Nann stared at the keyboard, pen poised. She smelled ozone. Then smoke. Yellow puffs of it appeared, seeping from between the keys. “Hold it, hold it, the keyboard’s on fire!”

  “Oops.”

  Nann ran over to the check-out and grabbed the extinguisher. In a second, the fire was out. She and Tink as well as the computer were covered in dry ice snow and fog filled the room. Tink coughed and waved a hand in front of her face. “Well. So much for that.”

  Nann’s page of deciphered words was frozen to the desk. She peeled it off. “There still has to be a clue here. Tilt the balance of shares must mean someone has more stock than someone else, right?”

  “Sure. I guess. No. Wait. I have no clue.” Tink shrugged.

  “It might lead us to a suspect.”

  “If we knew who owned how many shares we might be able to figure it out.” Tink pocketed the tool. “But we don’t.”

  “We might know someone who knows. Zinnia.”

  ZINNIA’S GALLERY WAS as wide open as Nann’s store, the layout opposite. Walls were painted white instead of the rainbow of Greenpoint Books and most of the fixtures were easels. She mostly featured the work of local photographers, although there were a few oils, watercolors and ceramics in the mix. Behind a dividing wall, she taught art classes.

  Half-asleep, Zinnia sat behind the check-out counter. “S’up?”

  “Do you know how many shares each board member owns?” Tink got to the point.

  Nann politely wandered, looking at the works on display.

  “I have a copy of the share register. When we started putting our business plan together for the employee buy-out program, I requested it. They’re a publicly held company, but nearly all the shares are in the hands of the board. Watch the store. I’ll go up and get it.”

  Of course, no customers came in. Tink browsed with Nann. “Hey, isn’t this Zinnia’s work?”

  Nann had seen some of it up in Zinnia’s apartment. It was from her Pizza Landscape series. “Very realistic,” Nann said.

  “Hyper-realistic,” Tink agreed. “It’s making me hungry. The nearest pizza joint is in Port Argent, and they don’t deliver to Amity Corners. Not even if you bribe them.”

  Nann made a face. “I know that place. They won’t deliver to me, and I live in Port Argent.”

  “You live in the woods on a bluff.” Tink frowned. “It’s probably some kinda artisan pizza anyway, knowing the snobs in Port Argent.”

  Nann couldn’t argue. “Snobs with an aversion to orange grease.”

  “Stop it or I’ll have to make a run all the way to Oswego.”

  Zinnia returned with a large ring binder. The pages looked well-thumbed. “Why do you need to know this stuff?”

  “Nancy Druid here thinks one of the board members croaked Roger Paine,” Tink said.

  “Really?” Zinnia eyed Nann. “Which one?”

  “We’re hoping the numbers will tell us,” Nann said.

  “Well, here’s the breakdown. Maybe we should get some paper. Is there going to be math involved? We can use a cellphone app if we need to.” Zinnia found some paper and a pen. She squinted at Nann’s drooping sheet. “What’s that?”

  “An email Roger Paine sent. I thought we’d be looking at his speech, but we got this instead. It could be—” She gave Tink the I-dare-you-to-say-it look. “—A clue.”

  Zinnia ran her finger along a page. “Here we go, Roger Paine owns, owned, eighteen percent of the stock. The other board members owned sixteen percent each. Let me find that app.”

  “That’s eighty-two percent,” Tink said without thinking.

  Nann and Zinnia raised their brows at her.

  “What?”

  “Anyway, she’s right, because the remaining eighteen percent is held by individuals, but mostly in stock options,” Zinnia read on.

  “How much stock do the mill employees own?” Nann asked.

  “Two percent, if we all vote as a block.”

  Tink pursed her lips. “Maybe enough to swing a vote, depending how the board members voted.”

  “Ah, but there’s the catch: while the plants in Texas and Louisiana have more employees, and thus a larger percentage, they haven’t been around as long as the mill here. Our shares have vested. Theirs haven’t. Technically, until the employee shares vest down south, the Amity Corners employees control an eighteen percent vote.”

  Nann scribbled some figures. It wasn’t working out. “Let’s say one of the board members is pro-mill. Even with the local shareholders, the votes add up to only thirty-eight percent. If two board members lean pro-mill along with the local guys, it works out a tie. Fifty percent. So it wouldn’t be in any board member’s interest to kill Roger Paine.”

  Zinnia looked at Nann’ figures, added them up on her phone. “She’s right.”

  “So we know who the murderer must be then, right?” Tink said.

  “We do?” Nann’s brow wrinkled. “How do we?”

  “The numbers give it away. Roger Paine control
led eighteen percent. Who controls those shares now? His daughter, right? She would inherit. If you combine her shares, Roger’s shares, and the vote from the mill guys, that’s fifty-two percent. She would have control in the mill vote.”

  “Aww.” Nann sighed. “I don’t want Cindy to be a murderer. She’s nice. I like her.”

  “We still don’t know if Roger was accepting the employee plan,” Zinnia said. “If he was pro-mill, another board member must’ve known that he and Cindy could swing it, along with the employee shares vote.”

  “I gotta go with the numbers,” Tink said. “Simple math, easy peasy. Plus, most murderers are family members. At least, that’s what they say on TV.”

  Nann thought it over. “Cindy also mentioned her father having no heart conditions, even though that’s what the official autopsy says.”

  “It’s too common a thing,” Zinnia said. “And since we don’t have Roger’s will, we don’t really know that Cindy inherits. It’s all circumstantial at best, and maybe not even true at all.”

  “Cindy does have an interest in occult books,” Nann said.

  “She does?” Tink asked. Her eyes went wide.

  “Yeah, why?”

  Tink pressed her lips together for a moment. “I didn’t really put it together until just now. I got a good look at the poppets before the cops busted in on me. Most of them were just plain white gingerbread figures. One was dressed. When I saw it I thought it was Cindy. You know, dark hair, blue eyes. But I’m pretty sure the thing was dressed in sneakers, yoga pants, an oversized green blouse, and a big purse.”

  “You think one of the poppets was for Nann?” Zinnia’s mouth hung open.

  Nann’s brows lowered. “I don’t always dress like that.”

  “Yeah, you do,” Zinnia said, “since the first day we met. I just figured it was Druid-wear.”

  “I have dresses. I have skirts. Some nice sweater dresses, a swing coat, really cute boots, some hats, even.”

  “But you never wear any of that to work,” Tink said. “I think Cindy’s the one to watch. That, and you need to watch your back, Nann.”