Masking for Trouble

by A J Maybe

  Masking For Trouble

  Piper Mars, Donut Witch Cozy Mystery #1

  A. J. Maybe

  Copyright © 2020 by A. J. Maybe

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, locations, businesses, and events are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner.

  Cover by Kim’s Covers.

  Editing by JS Editorial.

  For Sherry.

  “Life is a combination of magic and pasta.”

  Fellini

  Contents

  Author's Note

  1. Pink Beauty (Sunday)

  2. Masking for Trouble

  3. The Auction

  4. Buyer’s Remorse

  5. Death Mask

  6. That Particular Truck (Monday)

  7. Rex’s Law

  8. Witch Thing

  9. Questioning

  10. Dungeon Toe Holds

  11. A Deal

  12. The Bottles

  13. Slumber Party (Tuesday)

  14. A Donut is a Donut

  15. Dog in the Big House

  16. Binge

  17. The Park (Wednesday)

  18. Crossed Off

  19. Storming Off

  20. A Call

  21. Showdown

  22. A Leap

  23. Toe Hold

  24. The Truck (Saturday)

  Recipes!

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Author's Note

  This book follows Canadian English spelling and usage, including our signature mish-mash of Imperial and metric measurements. For example, long distances are measured in kilometers, often called ‘clicks’, while the height of a person is almost always feet and inches.

  Strange? Sure. But we also buy our milk in bags so what can I say?

  1

  Pink Beauty (Sunday)

  I pedalled to the auction on my lemon yellow cruiser-style bike. That way I couldn’t buy anything too extravagant, but only what would fit in the basket hanging from the handlebars. That’s what I told myself, anyway. Maybe I’d snag an old pendant or something neat like that, and maybe —just maybe— it’d be enchanted. I’d yet to find anything particularly magical after five years spent scouring all the auction sites, but witches seemed to be a secretive bunch.

  That was the consensus among the online Magic Seeker community, anyway.

  But, huffing and puffing up the long, stone driveway of Barry Bales’ rustic five acre homestead, my eyes snapped to the truck like they would snap to a twenty dollar bill lying on the ground. Even 200 metres away, obscured by the tables and tables of bric-a-brac, and tucked in behind the weathered grey barn, the truck was a beacon.

  Neither horsepower nor ground clearance piqued my interest, but would you look at that paint job. The truck shone with a lustrous, pearlized pink accented by purple and blue swirls. It was a big, blocky food truck, with an air filtration unit on top modified to look like a cupcake. Even better, the hood ornament had been replaced by a metre-long magenta spire, poking forward at a forty-five degree angle like the horn of a narwhal.

  It wasn’t quite the enchanted amulet or mystical tiara I was dreaming of, but it sure made a statement. The odds of that truck’s original owner having some connection to magic were much higher than average.

  “That’s my unicorn!” I gasped, breathless with excitement.

  Okay, I was breathless from the biking, too. I wasn’t eighteen anymore.

  Swoopy black letters named the pink and purple truck: Barry’s Cupcake Machine.

  As a visitor to Carterton Cove I didn’t know Barry, but I immediately loved his truck. It was older than my own 36 years, no doubt, and it showed in spots, but it looked like a winning lottery ticket to me. In that truck, I saw a way to finish the journey back to my hometown with my head high, a story to tell, and a plan for my future.

  Before discovering the Cupcake Machine, I had no real plan and I wouldn’t have dreamed of telling people the real story of why I was moving back to Saint Mauvais. I was slinking back home, after 15 years in the so-called mecca of southern Ontario, broke, disgraced, and soon to be begging for a job at my mom’s convenience store.

  I would play it off like I’d come back to let ole mumsy retire, but nobody would buy that story.

  But maybe, if I showed up driving that magical, whimsical truck, I could steer conversations away from my past and toward the future. I’d omit the potentially magical element, of course, since most people think only children believe in magic.

  Nearly everyone, however, knows you can make good money in the food truck business.

  I could picture the post on social media already: me, leaning against the Cupcake Machine with an “oh, it’s no big deal” smirk, neck twisted and chin lifted to make my jawline seem less squishy. I imagined all the notifications on my account too, that beautiful filled-in heart in the corner: 100+ Likes!

  And just think of the comments:

  “Congratz!”

  “So excited for your new biz!”

  “Living your best life!”

  We’d never have to talk about why I was coming back if I rolled into town piloting a freakin’ unicorn.

  I had to tone down my smile as I approached the auction site. In a little village like Carterton Cove, an estate auction was like an encore to the funeral — another chance to pay respects and tell each other how Barry was a good man who had led a good life. Nobody moped around in black mourning veils, but it wasn’t proper to roll up grinning like a chimp either.

  The rainbow Chuck Taylors on my feet were already pushing the limits of decorum, especially combined with my blazing tangerine coloured dress, an A-line with black cats prowling all over it. It was like Halloween and a fiery sunset, two of my favourite things, mixed into one dress. Amazing, but a little zippy for the post-funeral mood I could sense as soon as I rolled onto the Bales property.

  Out of respect, I didn’t rush straight to the truck, but paused to paw through the collected worldly possessions of one Mr. Barry Bales, his lifetime of memories spread out on the folding plastic tables.

  It was mostly weird stuff, honestly. Four long tables were nothing but action figures depicting professional wrestlers, grimacing and flexing forever. Most of them were in the original packaging, which had aged to varying shades of yellow.

  I didn’t know anything about the life Barry led, but apparently it involved a lot of online auctions. I knew a thing or two about those. My addiction to them had cost me my job and my apartment. They’d ruined my life.

  First, I’d gotten hooked on a documentary series following this excitable dude who looked just like my father. He bought storage lockers after the original owners defaulted on their payments and managed to find some sort of supposedly magical item in almost every episode.

  My job in the Seshman’s Brewing Co. warehouse in Guelph was so boring that the idea of finding real-life magic had completely captured my imagination. I’d started rooting around the corners of the internet and fallen in with a whole community of folks obsessed with hunting for charmed amulets and bewitched pendants. The group’s motto was “Everyone knows magic isn’t real… ” followed by a winky face. No one had ever found an item with provable magical properties, but we all knew they were out there, somewhere.

  We all had friends and family who thought we were crazy, but online we found nothing but support and high hopes.

  I took the ‘high volume’
approach, bidding aggressively on every auction item with a vague description and blurry photos, but my luck wasn’t great: the beat-up boxes that arrived in my apartment lobby were filled with trash, mostly, with just enough semi-valuable junk that I could flip it back on the auction sites and break even.

  Soon I was watching so many bids (and running so many of my own auctions) that I had to check on them during my lunch. I hunched over my phone through all my breaks, too, and even pretended to start smoking, just so I had an excuse to take extra breaks throughout the day.

  A single axe head pendant was the only real treasure I found. I still wear it every day, though it sure didn’t change my fortunes.

  I got so wrapped up in the hobby that I started driving my forklift with one hand, while keeping tabs on auctions with the other.

  You know those billboards: “Don’t Text and Drive”?

  Well, don’t text and operate a forklift either.

  Nobody died, but they could’ve. Easily. Long story short, thirty thousand bottles of India Pale Ale crashed down to a sloshing, foaming, reeking death and it was my fault. If anyone had even sliced a finger on a shard of glass, Seshman’s would’ve been forced to follow procedures, file incident reports, and hold meetings. Then I would’ve been in REAL trouble.

  I could’ve been arrested, but since no one was hurt the company was happy to look the other way and I was able to quietly resign with an off-the-record promise to get the heck out of Dodge.

  I couldn’t quite make rent with my piddly Employment Insurance cheques anyway, if they’d ever come through, and my landlord had no desire to cut me any slack. That’s why I’d been on my way back to Saint Mauvais, the northern town where I’d grown up.

  At Barry’s estate, leaning over an auction table for a better look at the figurines, I recognized the man’s drink before I even saw him. I could sniff out the hoppy bite of Seshman’s Gwillimbury IPA anywhere.

  “They’re not toys!” he said, smacking the table with his free hand and tilting his drink dangerously.

  “Never said they were,” I said. “And if you know the right buyer, I’m sure they’re highly valuable treasures.” I didn’t know anything about professional wrestling, but my hustler’s hunch told me that reselling these things online could net a small fortune. Somebody, somewhere, would be pretty darn excited about this collection.

  I caught myself. That was the old Piper Mars. That was my inner Addict Monster talking. The new Piper Mars did not run her own auctions. She didn’t even visit auction websites. In fact, I’d even ditched my old cell and picked up a flip phone with voice-only plan. No data, not even text, at the urging of my best friend Brennan.

  “And repeat after me,” Brennan had commanded during each of our hours-long phone calls: “Magic isn’t real.”

  I never gave up on magic but I repeated it anyway and, after a few dozen long phone calls with Brennan, I was cured of my auction habit.

  Basically.

  “They’re collectibles,” the guy insisted, pulling at his square, stubbly chin. “And they should be mine!”

  A reflexive smirk flashed across my face before I could contain it and I stepped back, since this guy was clearly looking for a fight. “Well, I won’t be bidding against you, chum.”

  “But no!” the man blustered. “Dear old dad thought the humane society needed the money more than I do!” He spit on the ground and rubbed at what remained of his salt-and-pepper hair. His eyes darted, assessing each action figure in turn. “The humane society! Can you believe that?!”

  I swept my gaze over the tables. Thirty-two feet of plastic men, all flexing their little muscles. “My condolences. He must’ve been quite a fan,” I said, raising an eyebrow at my own understatement.

  The guy snorted impatiently. “Not a fan. He was champion! He was the first to take really big bumps, you know… and then he gets done in by a stair spot.”

  “Stair spot?” I’d heard Barry’s life had ended with a tragic tumble to the basement, but that was a weird way to put it.

  “Took a bad bump,” Barry’s son said with a rueful shake of his head. “That’s how they say it in the wrasslin’ business.” He tapped a package. “Here,” he said, “this one.” He tapped another. “And this one too, from his younger days.”

  I bent down to admire the two figures. The older one lacked detail and had a strange mustard tone to the skin, but the golden mustache and proud snarl shone with a timeless quality. The newer figure had veins, more realistic colouring, a mullet, and a beer belly.

  “Are you for real?” Was I really browsing the estate of the former heavyweight champion of fake wrestling? It seemed less and less likely that I’d find anything truly magical here.

  “Course I am. Are you saying you don’t know Barry Bales? He’s a legend.”

  “In pro wrestling circles, I’m sure that’s true.”

  “Everyone in the Cove knows Barry Bales!”

  I shrugged. “Yeesh, bud. Not everyone here is from Carterton Cove,” I said, shaking my head as I deked around the guy and walked away.

  “Bridge trash!” he called after me. I’d only been in the Cove for a week, but I knew the term all too well. Carterton Cove was one of four villages on Familiar Island, and anyone who wasn’t born on Familiar was ‘bridge trash’, according to the more surly Covies.

  “I’m just visiting,” I muttered. That wasn’t totally accurate though. I was hiding out. Stalling. To me, crossing into the city limits of Saint Mauvais felt like entering a warzone, one I’d avoid as long as I could.

  My lips twitched, threatening to smile as I looked again toward the Cupcake Machine.

  If St. Moe was a warzone, maybe that food truck could be my Sherman tank.

  2

  Masking for Trouble

  I continued moving away from the lunatic, closer to the truck, and found a selection of wrestling masks. I’d seen them before, when I’d blown all my savings on a trip to Puerto Vallarta, and knew they were the masks that the luchadors of Mexico wore. With these, the colourful designs faded around the edges, the piping split open in places, and some of them had big tears in the fabric.

  “Wild,” I murmured to myself as I read the tabletop sign: “MASKS ARE NOT FOR TRYING ON!"

  “Right?! They’re deadly,” came a voice from behind me. “Ring-used lucha masks. These things’ll go for three, maybe four hundred a piece, easy.” It was an energetic and gregarious voice, but at the same time it was dragged out and slow as dripping syrup: the type of voice that belonged to a guy who had been in party mode since junior high. I felt a bop on my butt and whirled, furious.

  “Who do you think you—” I snapped, but then stopped. Oh. The perpetrator of the butt-boop stood on four legs, tongue lolling out between smiling black lips, panting amicably at the end of a leash. Or rather, a chain, thick enough to tow a truck. “Control your dog, would you?”

  “Haaaa, no worries brah, no worries,” the guy soothed as I sized him up. The sizing took a few seconds, since he was enormous. Up-sized like the soda at the movie theatre. His shining, freshly shaven skull must’ve been close to seven feet in the air. A spray of black hair in the center, spared from the razor and oiled into tight curls, flopped over one eye. His broad frame, made even thicker by muscles with that over-inflated-balloon look, was covered by a weathered black vest (with no shirt underneath, even in the still-chilled air of early spring) and pleather pants.

  A pewter blob hung off his neck on a black thong, bouncing as the man bobbed his head to a song no one else could hear. I assessed the pewter thing for magical potential, out of habit, but it really was just a blob.

  “Don’t ‘no worries’ me!” I said, feeling a little worried. Who walked around in a costume like that on a Sunday afternoon? “And don’t ‘bro’ me till you know me, dude.”

  He cocked his head and flashed a canine grin. “Listen, wrong foot, right? That’s how we got off. Sorry, let’s try this: I’m Luke “The Lion Tamer” Turner.” He paused like I should b
e impressed, but I gave him the same condescending nod I’d give a five year old telling me about Santa.

  “Piper Mars.”

  “Rad! ‘Mars’ like the candy bar?”

  “‘Mars’ like the god of war,” I snapped back.

  “Haaa! Yeah! Goddess of war, maybe.”

  “Sure, whatever. So is that your lion?” I asked, pointing my chin toward the huge dog. Its hulking head and thick black fur made its eyes seem too small by comparison. Some sort of Rottweiler/Newfoundlander mix, if I had to guess, but I couldn’t tell if she was friendly or not. Maybe the chain really was necessary. It latched to a wide, pink leather collar with pointy studs. I couldn’t make out the letters on the camouflage nametag. I noticed the dog’s tongue was pink, but had a curious constellation of black dots in the middle.

  Luke stared off for a second, as if my question about his ‘lion’ was confusing. “Hey,” he said, “you’re not here for the masks or the action figures, right?”

  “Oh, I’m just browsing,” I said. “Just, you know, a little Sunday afternoon lollygagging in camp country.”

  My tone made it sound like this was no big deal, a regular pastime of mine, but I could only afford to loiter around this barely-populated, woodsy part of Ontario because my best friend had offered me the use of his camp. After weeks of messaging about my moving-day jitters, Brennan had finally picked up my hints and sent a lifeline via email: