Unbaked Croakies: A Magical Cozy Mystery with Talking Animals (Enchanting Inquiries Book 1)

by Sam Cheever

  “The magic is drawn to your energy, Naida,” Lea told me gently. “The only thing you need in order to succeed is for you to embrace your own power.”

  “What are you telling me?” I asked, my mind reluctant to grasp her meaning.

  “I’m telling you that you are magical, Naida. You’re actually a strong sorceress. And that, however you came to be at Croakies, you’re in the right place.”

  She leaned closer and smiled. “You were born to be a Keeper of the Artifacts. This is your legacy magic. And I predict that you’re going to be very good at it once you accept the magic your heredity has given you.”

  I stared at the book of spells, wondering why anyone would want to perform spells to make bunions appear on someone’s feet. “I hope you’re right.”

  Lea stood up. “I’m not only right…” She plucked her bag off the spare chair. “I think you know that what I’m saying is true.” She headed for the door. “Why don’t you stop by the shop tomorrow afternoon? We’ll have tea.”

  “I’d love that.”

  “Good.” She pulled the door open, setting the bell to jangling. “I’m looking forward to chatting some more.”

  A man in a green uniform held the door for Lea and then came into the bookstore as she left. He was holding a metal clipboard with a thick sheaf of papers clipped to its surface. He looked at the top sheet and then at me. “Naida Griffith?”

  I read the emblem embroidered on the pocket of his shirt. GMM, which I knew stood for Glasswart’s Magical Movers. I knew that because I’d called them. “I’m Naida Griffith,” I told him, eagerly.

  He handed me the clipboard. “I just need you to sign on the bottom to accept delivery.”

  Using the pen he’d clipped to the board, I signed my name across the top sheet.

  “Where would you like your stuff?” he asked.

  “Actually, if you could pull around to the back, there’s a bigger door. I’d like you to bring it through there.”

  “We can certainly do that.”

  I grinned widely. “Awesome sauce! I’ll meet you back there.”

  9

  I’ll Be Darned Like The Goddess’s Favorite Socks

  I settled the last pillow into place and grinned. The spot I’d chosen was deep inside the artifact library, in a shadowed corner beneath a high window that allowed a narrow beam of sunlight to paint the colorful rag rug at the center of the space.

  Along with the rug, I’d brought my twin-sized bed, one dresser, and my grandma’s favorite recliner for reading, as well as splurging on the television from Grandma’s sitting room. I’d placed the TV on an old trunk that had once belonged to my mother, according to Grandma Neely. I’d sifted through the stuff inside the trunk after Grandma had died, finding nothing more interesting than a couple of hand-knitted throws, a mirror and brush set, and a yellowed white porcelain teapot, which was chipped in a couple of spots.

  I left everything except the throws in the trunk and asked the GMM guys to place the television on it. Eying the antenna Grandma had used to avoid paying for cable or satellite services, I decided I might be able to set it on top of one of the shelves with a direct line of sight to a window.

  That should work well enough to get me the shows I liked.

  It wasn’t a lovely spot. But it was cozy. And, filled with my own stuff, it felt like home.

  The bookstore bell jangled, the sound a soft chime that somehow filled the entire library space. Rubbing my hands over my dusty jeans, I hurried back to the front. It had to be Alice returning from her artifact wrangling. I’d locked the door to customers an hour earlier.

  My stomach rumbled as I thought of the promised tacos, and the thought made me walk faster.

  Throwing the dividing door open, I found Alice standing in the opening of the front door, listening to a certain grim-faced detective on the sidewalk. Pun intended.

  “…body was dumped in Enchanted Park.”

  My ears perked at that little bit of partial information. “What body?” I asked.

  Alice turned with a scowl, though her eyes looked more worried than mad. “Don’t worry, Naida. It has nothing to do with us,” she told me in a firm voice.

  I couldn’t help wondering if Alice was trying to convince me, or the eagle-eyed detective on the sidewalk.

  “Can I come inside?” Grym asked, his gaze sliding to mine.

  I nodded, even as Alice shook her head. “Sorry, we’re closed for the night. I’ve told you all I know.”

  Grym’s jaw tightened. “Would you rather I return with a search warrant?”

  “For what?” Alice asked, shoving her ugly square glasses up her short nose.

  “For being generally uncooperative,” Grym responded, his jaw tightening with irritation. His expression was murderous, and he was leaning aggressively forward as if he was considering giving her a pop on the pug nose.

  I could appreciate his apparent desire to pummel Alice about the head and shoulders. Goddess knew I’d been there a few times already in my extremely short tenure at Croakies. But I didn’t think a rage-induced pummeling would be in anybody’s best interests. “Would you like some tea, Detective?” I asked, determinedly avoiding Alice’s gaze.

  “That would be nice,” he said through gritted teeth.

  Alice finally turned and stomped away from the door. “I’ll make it.”

  I indicated the nearby table. “Please, have a seat. What’s going on, Detective Grym?”

  He sat, crossing one leg over the other at the ankle, and expelled a weary breath. “I’m afraid we’ve found the body of a man not too far from here.”

  I frowned. “Do you know who it is?”

  He shook his dark head, his gaze sliding to Alice and taking on a speculative glint. “No. Only that he’s not human. He’s a gnome.”

  Alice’s narrow shoulders stiffened as she poured hot water into a mug.

  “A gnome?” I didn’t want to tell the detective that I hadn’t even known such creatures existed, so I asked another question. “What did he die of?”

  His speculative glance slid in my direction. “He was murdered.”

  I hadn’t been expecting that. “Yikes!”

  Alice settled a steaming mug in front of Detective Grym and crossed her arms. Apparently, she and I weren’t having tea. I bit back a sigh.

  “My feelings exactly.” Grym said, sipping his tea. “The victim was last seen here. At Croakies.”

  I glanced toward Alice. She flinched, her lips pinching tightly together. “I told you, Detective, I barely knew Gido. He came to offer security services, and I told him no. He left. End of story.”

  Grym sipped tea as silence throbbed through the room.

  Having zero impulse control when it comes to filling an uncomfortable silence, I attempted to fill it after what felt like an excruciatingly long moment. “If he was walking the neighborhood trying to sell his services, he must have visited several shops along this street,” I offered helpfully.

  Grym nodded. “He certainly did. From the small grocer to the travel agent. I’ve spoken to just about all of them. The problem is, I have several witnesses who insist they saw Alice and Gido arguing in front of Croakies.” His gaze narrowed. “A few of them also reported seeing Alice smack him in the head with a broom.”

  Alice suddenly found her fingernails very interesting. I winced when I looked at them. I had the sudden thought that she should have found them interesting a few weeks earlier. They were a dry, ragged, and unadorned mess. “It was just a slight disagreement,” she finally said.

  “Slight?” Grym said, his voice dripping with warning. “You knocked him out.”

  Alice shrugged. “Who knew gnome’s heads were so delicate. I figured it was made of concrete or something.”

  Alice gave up staring at her long-neglected fingernails and crossed her arms. “I can assure you that he walked away under his own steam as soon as he woke up.”

  “You’re sure about that?” Grym asked.

  “I
am. I watched him leave.”

  “And exactly where were you when he scraped himself up off the sidewalk and left?” the detective demanded with a wry lift of an eyebrow.

  Alice didn’t hesitate. She pointed to the large window at the front of the store. “Standing right there in the window.”

  Grym jotted notes in a small notebook as she talked. “Which direction did he go when he left?” he asked.

  “South,” Alice said, pointing in the direction that led to downtown Enchanted.

  “Did he get into a car?”

  She shrugged. “Not within a couple of blocks. After I saw that he wasn’t going to bother any more of my neighbors, I left him to himself.”

  Grym’s dark-caramel gaze filled with suspicion. “Why did you fight with the gnome, Ms. Parker?”

  She tapped one foot on the ground, her jaw jutting in a way that made her look downright pugnacious. For a long moment, I thought she wasn’t going to answer. But she finally sighed, her jaw losing some of its mulish slant. “Are you familiar with Gnomish Security Services?” she asked the detective.

  Grym lifted his chin, choosing not to respond.

  She nodded, apparently taking that as verification. “Then you know why. Gido wasn’t selling protection from an unlucky happenstance. He was offering me a chance not to get shaken down by Gnomish itself. It’s a protection racket, Detective. You know that and I know it. I was just letting him know that he wasn’t going to get any business on this street. This is my berg, Detective Grym. And I’m not letting it be subjugated to a violent element.”

  Well, I’ll be darned like the goddess’s favorite socks. “Seriously? That stuff doesn’t just happen on TV?” I asked, appalled.

  Alice skimmed me a look. “I’m being perfectly serious. They start out asking you to pay a reasonable fee for their services. Then someone in the neighborhood gets robbed. Then a couple more. And suddenly everybody is paying a lot more for services they can’t cancel under a not-so-veiled threat from Gnomish.” She shook her head. “I’ve lived in a neighborhood that was ‘protected’ by those thugs once. I’m not doing it again.”

  Grym sighed. “You’re not wrong. The Enchanted PD has been trying to catch them in an active case of defrauding customers, but they’re good and they’re careful.” He eyed Alice carefully. “But none of that makes it okay to take the law into your own hands,” he told Alice.

  She held his gaze, not backing down. I respected that about her. “I give you my word that Gido got up and walked away under his own steam. I would have liked to do worse to him,” she said. “But I didn’t.”

  Grym stood up and headed for the door. “I might need to ask you some more questions,” he told Alice as he opened it. “Don’t leave Enchanted.”

  We watched in silence as he left, closing the door quietly behind him. Alice hurried over and locked the door, flipping the sign to Closed.

  She started pacing back and forth in the open space in front of the door. I watched her pace for a long moment, wondering if I was looking at the panic of a woman guilty of murder. I didn’t think Alice was capable of such a thing. But then I’d only known her a couple of days. Not long enough to really know her at all.

  I stood up, intending to say goodnight and flee back to my cozy little nook in the artifact library.

  Unfortunately, my movement caught Alice’s eye. Her head jerked around and her small eyes behind the enormous glasses locked onto me. “We need to figure out what happened to Gido.”

  I blinked in surprise. Of all the things I’d thought she might say, that hadn’t been on the list. “Excuse me?”

  She wrung her hands and started pacing again. “It’s my only chance.”

  Ice slipped along my spine, making me shiver. “What do you mean, Alice? If you didn’t kill him…”

  Her head whipped around, her expression a mix of panic and anger. “I didn’t kill anybody!”

  Gilded gopher garters, the woman was a titch high strung. I lifted my hands. “I wasn’t suggesting you had. I was just going to say that, if you didn’t kill him you have nothing to worry about, right?”

  Alice expelled a harsh breath. “Wrong. Oh, so wrong.” She stopped in front of me, grabbing my hands in a painful grip. “I didn’t kill him. But Gnomish is going to think I did. Which means we’re in danger from them…”

  The icy fear spread through my organs, turning me into a Naida-shaped popsicle from the inside out. “We?” I squeaked. “Why am I in danger?”

  “You don’t think they’re going to just leave a witness behind when they murder me and slice me up into a thousand tiny pieces, do you?”

  I grimaced at the gory visual. “Ugh!”

  Alice nodded as if pleased that I’d finally grasped the situation in all of its ugly entirety. “Grym is going to keep digging into this, and he’s going to find out…” She stopped suddenly, blinking rapidly, and then turned away from me and returned to pacing.

  “Find out what?” I asked, my gaze narrowing.

  “Nothing. We need to come up with a plan for figuring out how Gido was killed.”

  I dropped back into the chair I’d been trying to vacate. I didn’t say anything because there was nothing I could say. If I’d thought I was untrained to be a KoA, I was triple that amount untrained to solve a murder. Then I had a thought. “Do you want me to work with Detective Grym…”

  “No!” Alice screamed, slicing my question off like a hot knife through melted butter. “He’s going to pin this on me if he can. We need to find the killer and hand him to the detective. It’s the only way.”

  I didn’t share her suspicion that Grym was incompetent. In fact, I believed he was really sharp. But she’d known him longer than I had. Maybe I was wrong. “I don’t know how to investigate a murder,” I told her.

  She blew air through her lips, flapping a dismissive hand in my direction. “How hard can it be?”

  I thought of Lea almost dying when we’d tried to discover how one large artifact had been taken out of the shop from under our noses. “Hard,” I said.

  “Are you telling me you won’t even try?” Alice put her hands on her hips and glared at me.

  I embraced a sudden wish that I’d been a bit faster in my escape. All I wanted to do was play with magical artifacts. It had never occurred to me that we’d be dealing with killers and deadly hexes. I took a deep breath and expelled it, shaking my head. “I’m telling you that I don’t know how much assistance I’m going to be. But I’ll be happy to help in any way I can.”

  That seemed to calm Alice down, which in turn calmed me down. “Good. That’s good. Thanks, sweetums.” She headed toward the tea counter and I relaxed, thinking we were finally going to have our tea. But she walked past it to the closet. “Get your things. We’re going out.”

  Even better! “Where are we going?”

  Alice’s smile was brittle and a bit scary. “To the scene of the crime. We’re going to figure out how Gido was killed before that detective throws me in jail.”

  10

  What a Gnish

  We stood at the edge of a small park in the middle of Arcane Avenue, four blocks up from Croakies. Yellow crime scene tape was wrapped around a spot that was about ten by twenty yards, which started at the sidewalk and stretched to a spot about three feet from the play structure at the center of the small park.

  The grass inside the tape was well-trampled, but one area, in particular, was mashed beyond mere footsteps. From where we stood, it appeared to be a rectangular spot, about three feet long and two feet wide. “We need to get closer,” Alice said, shoving her glasses up her nose.

  Oliver, the tree frog, sat on her shoulder, peering hopefully at the nearby trees. I’d never seen him outside of Alice’s ratty nest of brown hair, and wondered if the colorful little frog would make a hop for it if he saw an opening.

  “Meow,” Fenwick informed us from his location near our feet.

  Alice gave him a speculative look. “Hmm…I wonder…”

  �
��Ma’am, you need to keep that animal outside the tape.”

  I could almost hear Alice’s thought processes grinding to a halt. She looked up and threw a vacant smile at the young Enchanted cop standing near the play structure. I hadn’t noticed him when we arrived at the scene. But he was definitely there now.

  As Fenwald batted at the yellow tape, the young cop put his hand on the butt of his gun. “I’ll shoot him if he steps one paw on that grass.”

  The small crowd around us, who were also busily staring at the scene of the crime, gasped with outrage at his threat.

  Despite the intimidating glare on his young face, I highly doubted the cop would shoot Fenwald. The public outcry would be more than the police would want to deal with just to protect a crime scene they’d probably already processed.

  But, just in case, I reached down and scooped up the massive feline, groaning under his prodigious weight. “I think Fenny needs a diet,” I told Alice.

  She didn’t seem to hear me. Her gaze had locked onto the tree a couple of feet from where we stood. “I could send Oliver up…”

  I blinked. “Can you see what he sees?” I asked, my eyes going wide. The whole magical thing was just too cool. And fraught with so many icy possibilities.

  “Don’t be silly,” Alice told me, rolling her eyes. “He’d have to tell me what he saw.” She frowned. “But frogs don’t interpret things like we do. I doubt Olly would tell us what we need to know.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “Bother.”

  I thought about how a frog might see the scene we were scrutinizing. He’d probably give her the fly and spider report.

  “You’re the Keeper, aren’t you? From Croakies?”

  Alice and I turned to find a woman about my height and age, with waist-length fire-red hair which she wore in two braids, gorgeous green eyes that shimmered with magic, and a full crop of freckles that painted her long, thin face and spilled down her throat into the high, straight neckline of her bright orange dress. The dress had long sleeves that covered her freckled hands in wide bells of fabric and fell below the knees of two skinny legs encased in green and white striped socks. The socks fit her like support stockings, emphasizing the skinniness of her legs, and were tall enough to disappear beneath the hem of the dress.