Once again, he reminded me of Archie, with his theatrical litanies. But if Baz was looking for an encore, he was not going to get it from me.
“Did you kill Natasha?” I asked.
He wasn’t wearing his glasses, and he squinted as if trying to read my facial features to determine if I was kidding. “No! Why would I?”
I wasn’t sure I believed him. His dramatics hinted that he was an actor, and he’d probably picked up a lot of tips being the movie buff that he was. “That remains to be seen. One theory is that you wanted revenge because Natasha might have been responsible for your food poisoning at last year’s Extravaganza.”
“What? That’s nonsense. Why would she do such a thing?”
“Why? So you’d have to withdraw Audrey from the competition, and Titania could win.”
“You’re joking.”
I shook my head. “Like I said, it’s a theory.”
“It’s a ridiculous one.”
“Why do you think so?”
“Natasha wouldn’t have stooped to such a level. Yes, she liked to win, but not by cheating. She had self-respect, which was why . . .”
“Why what?”
“Nothing. It does not matter now. Natasha did not slip anything into my food or drink. How would she have even known Audrey would be popular? It was only Audrey’s first year in the event, and I had to pull strings with Ivy to even get a booth. Unless you’re suggesting Natasha intended to poison any person whose pet she deemed competition? If so, you must believe her to be a sociopath, in which case I would start to question your sanity.”
It wouldn’t be the first time.
“She was kindhearted and misunderstood, not a sociopath.”
Kindhearted? For a moment, I wondered if we were speaking of the same person.
He had, however, made a good point about Natasha and the food poisoning. Had she intended to poison whoever was the top competition?
There were too many variables in that situation. The timing alone would have been a nightmare with determining front-runners, what time their owners were scheduled to eat, and how to even tamper with their lunch, especially if they’d brought it from home and not bought it at the event.
It seemed a stretch, as Glinda would say.
Suddenly, I questioned if Ivy had been wrong about Natasha altogether. Had the accidents she’d been so worried about simply been accidents? Not sabotage at all? I almost groaned thinking about it. All the time I’d spent on this case, all the snooping . . . I could have enjoyed the Extravaganza as a guest instead of a competitor. I certainly wouldn’t be standing here with Baz wondering if he was a killer.
I shouldn’t have taken the case.
The thought flitted through my head, and I shoved it aside, hating hindsight with all my heart.
When was I ever going to learn to say no?
“To be honest,” Baz said glumly, “I have always suspected Vivienne had something to do with my illness that day.”
“Vivienne?” I adjusted my backpack, shifting the weight from one shoulder to the other. “Why would she?”
“We’d had a huge row the night before after she accused me of cheating on her.”
“Were you cheating?”
“Irrelevant.”
“Totally relevant.”
He looked at his hands, stretched at his fingers, and frowned at their ragged condition. “No, it is not.”
I was growing weary of him. “I’m going to ascertain from your nonanswer that you were.”
“That is your prerogative. On the matter, you will not hear otherwise from me.”
“Because of the prenup?” I asked.
His dirty fingers curled into fists. “I curse the day I signed that paper.”
I was sure Vivienne was cursing the day she married him, so I considered it a wash between them.
I recalled how two days ago, Vivienne had sat in the front parlor of As You Wish and told me how desperately she wanted Audrey to win the Extravaganza. “Would she really have sacrificed the chance for Audrey to win the grand prize to seek revenge on you?”
He ran a hand through his hair. “Have you ever seen Vivienne angry?”
“No.”
“The term she-devil comes to mind. If her desire that day was to punish me, she would have had tunnel vision. The competition would not exist next to my suffering.”
With that, I crossed off any notion of a reconciliation between the two of them. There was no love lost on Baz’s part, and my empathy increased for Vivienne that she’d been living with his apathy for so long.
At this point, I wanted to give him food poisoning.
“She denies tampering with my food, but what else would she say?”
“So, you were cheating on her, you suspect she gave you food poisoning, and you’ve compared her to a she-devil. Why did you stay married?”
“Divorces are costly.”
My head was starting to ache. “I suppose that leads me to the second theory as to why you might kill Natasha: You wanted to be rid of Natasha before Vivienne found out that you were cheating. Again, that prenup was in play.”
Drawing his shoulders back, he puffed his chest in self-righteous indignation. “Natasha was merely a friend. An acquaintance, rather.”
“Yes,” I said dryly. “I saw how friendly you were with her in the hallway of the Wisp yesterday afternoon when the two of you stepped out from the storage closet together. I seem to recall you declaring your love and promising that you two would be together forever very soon. That’s a level of acquaintance I could do without from you, by the way, so don’t get any ideas.”
A vein pulsed in his forehead and sweat popped up on his brow. “You were spying on me?”
“No,” I corrected. “I was spying on Natasha. Glinda, however, was spying on you, if that makes you feel better.”
“Glinda?”
“She’s a PI now, did you know?”
Swallowing hard, he nodded. “Did Vivienne hire her? I’ve seen them together quite a bit lately.”
“It’s not for me to say.” Two could play his game of nonanswering.
With a heavy sigh, he sat on the curb. He set his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. “I don’t know what is happening.”
I sat next to him. “Did you love her?”
“Natasha?”
“Yes, Natasha.”
Fat tears filled his eyes and he blinked them away. “More than anything. It was a whirlwind relationship. We’d only been seeing each other for a month. I fell so fast for her. So hard and fast. She wasn’t like the others.”
The others . . . the other women. I clenched my teeth.
“Natasha was . . . special,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do without her.”
On one hand, I felt bad for him, for losing someone he clearly loved. On the other hand, he was a lying, cheating slime. It was that hand that wanted to reach out and smack him upside his head.
He could have divorced Vivienne long ago and dated Natasha on the up-and-up, yet he had chosen money over happiness.
And look where it had gotten him.
“At Natasha’s urging, I decided it was finally time to leave Vivienne. My lawyer has been working on drawing up the papers. Natasha and I were planning to get married and move out of the village. . . . The divorce has been a long time coming,” he said, sliding me a wounded-puppy-dog look. “I tried to make it work, time and again, but Vivienne wasn’t the same after her accident.”
“Baz?” I said, talking through my clenched teeth.
“Yes?”
“Let me give you a tip, okay?”
“Sure,” he said reluctantly.
My jaw started to ache. I made myself relax. “If you want me to feel even an ounce of sympathy for your current predicament, do not, and I re
peat, do not in any way, shape, or form tell me that you broke your wedding vows—time and time again from what I hear—because of something your wife has done. Understand?”
His Adam’s apple bobbed as he nodded.
“Do you know anyone who’d want to hurt Natasha?” I asked.
“Enough to kill her? No.”
“Did anyone else know of your affair?”
“Chip Goldman apparently did. He was going to blackmail me, and I’d have paid him, too, to keep him quiet, but he collapsed. . . . I think the cops are trying to pin his death on me.”
“You did leave him for dead.”
“’Twas only because I thought he was already dead! I should not be held responsible. I did not place the cyanide in that repulsive green liquid he was consuming.” He patted his pocket, where I saw the outline of a phone. “My lawyer’s been calling all morning, telling me that the police want to interview me again. I have a bad feeling about all of this. A very bad feeling. I will not be railroaded. I’ll find who killed Natasha myself and make them pay! I’ll cast locust upon their house! Vengeance will be mi—” His eyes went wide.
Nick’s black-and-yellow police car had turned the corner and pulled up to the curb next to us. He hadn’t even stepped out of the car when Baz jumped to his feet and took off running down the middle of the street.
In a flash, Nick’s door flew open. He’d just jumped out when a white car roared to life from where it had been parked at the end of the street. The motor revved as the driver gunned the engine, leaving skid marks behind along with the scent of burning rubber.
“Nick!” I screamed.
He glanced back over his shoulder and dove out of the way just as the car zoomed past. He landed with a grunt on the asphalt and rolled toward the curb.
“Baz!” I yelled. “Look out!”
Baz turned around, but it was too late. The car clipped him, sending him flying into the front lawn of a house nearby. The car kept on going, skidding around the corner and out of sight.
I was dialing for help as I ran first to Nick’s side. “Are you okay?” I asked him, not wanting to touch him in case he was seriously hurt, yet at the same time wanting to grab him and hold him tight.
“Fine,” he huffed, clearly winded. He tried to sit up, couldn’t. “Go. Baz.”
I didn’t want to leave his side, but I knew I had to see if Baz was okay. I gave Nick my phone to talk to the emergency dispatcher and sprinted down the street. Baz was flat on his back, moaning in pain. I took one glance at the bone sticking out of his upper leg and nearly passed out.
Blood and I didn’t get along.
Dizzy, I focused on Baz’s face, where—thank the heavens above—there was no blood to be seen.
“Baz?”
He groaned.
“Help’s coming.”
“Car,” he said through chattering teeth. “Hit.”
“I know. I saw.”
“Vivie—,” he mumbled.
“Vivienne?” I repeated. “Was she the one driving?”
He nodded, his eyelids fluttering, then closing.
Vivienne was the one who’d hit him? I hadn’t been able to see anyone in the driver’s seat. The car had gone by too quickly. But now that I thought about it, Vivienne did drive a white car. . . .
I glanced at Baz and saw how pale he had become and wished with all my might for help to arrive soon, because I knew that broken bone in his leg had been his femur, and all that blood suggested that he might have severed an artery as well. It was a deadly injury. Until help came, there was only me. I was definitely not the right witch for this job, but I would do my best to keep him alive.
I slipped off my backpack and pulled off my T-shirt, grateful to be wearing a tank top beneath it. I didn’t know how to make a tourniquet—had only seen them applied in movies—but I knew Baz needed one or he’d die from blood loss. Finding the side seam of the shirt, I yanked for all I was worth and the material split, creating one long cloth strip.
Summoning all the inner strength I possessed, I slipped a length of that cloth under Baz’s leg.
Woozy, I swayed as blood oozed over my hands. Tears streamed from my eyes, making everything blurry.
I heard the coo of the mourning dove above my head, but it brought me no solace at this moment.
I thought I might be sick.
Fighting nausea, I sucked in some air and had just grabbed hold of both ends of the shirt material when I felt someone drop down next to me.
“I’ll do it.”
Nick’s strong hands nudged mine aside and took hold of the cloth. He quickly fashioned the material into a tourniquet, slipping a nearby stick into the knot he’d made. Then he twisted the stick. It was the last thing I remembered before I passed out.
Chapter Twenty-two
An hour and a half later, I sat on a bench outside the front entrance of the Wisp, soaking in air heavily scented with pending rain. I hadn’t budged from this spot in nearly twenty minutes, mostly because I was afraid to move in fear the nausea would return.
The time between the accident and now had passed in a blur. Baz had been taken to the hospital, but Nick had declined any treatment. He was banged and bruised and stubborn but okay. He was currently searching the village for any sign of Vivienne Lucas.
Voices rose and fell all around me as a steady stream of people trooped in and out of the Wisp. It had reopened an hour ago, which was why Nick had been running late for our meeting in the first place. He’d been taking one last look at the reports before giving the okay for Extravaganzers to return to collect their belongings.
“It’s chaos in there,” Harper said, sliding onto the bench next to me. She handed me the spy pen and a bottle of water. “Here.”
“Thanks.”
“You should see Ivy. She’s rushing around like a crazy woman, alternately apologizing about the delay and barking at people to clean up after themselves. Her head might pop clean off by the end of the day.”
“Honestly, I’m surprised it hasn’t already.”
“We should start a betting pool on when it will happen.” Her golden brown eyes flared with humor, then softened as she asked, “Are you feeling any better?”
“Some.”
“You’re not green anymore. That was disturbing, I’m not even going to lie.”
Our upper arms were touching, as she sat a little closer to me than usual. It appeared my little sister had a bit of a mother hen in her as well.
Her gaze swept over my face. “I’ve never seen someone actually turn green before.”
“The whole incident was disturbing.” I took a quick look at my fingers and battled a terrible case of the heebie-jeebies before I cracked the seal on the water.
The paramedics had thoroughly cleansed the blood from my hands, but I wanted nothing more than to go home to soak them in hot soapy water. I wondered if I could possibly douse them with bleach without burning the skin straight off my fingers.
I doubted it. Harsh chemicals tended to have that effect on skin.
“Has Nick found Vivienne yet?” she asked.
The cool water soothed my parched throat. “Not that I know of. Last I heard, she wasn’t at the Pixie Cottage, where she’d been staying with Harmony and Angela, or at home. No sign of her car, either. She could be in Maine right now for all we know.”
I capped the bottle, set it next to me, and rolled the spy pen between two fingers. At this point Vivienne was going to need a good criminal defense lawyer, rather than a divorce attorney.
The good news for her was that it appeared Baz would survive his injuries.
The bad news was that she was now the lead suspect in Natasha’s death.
Perhaps the footage on this pen would help her case. Proving temporary insanity or some such.
Unfortunately, I had the feeling it would do
more harm than good. This little pen provided an undeniable motive.
“I’m on Vivienne’s side in all this,” Harper said. “I might have buttons made up. Team Vivienne. Baz had it coming. If Marcus had cheated on me with anything that walks and talks, then I might have run him over, too. I’d have finished the job, though, and not just left him with a broken leg. Bye-bye. See ya later. Adios.”
My sister had a vigilante streak a mile wide. “I’m glad you don’t own a car.”
Harper hadn’t yet realized that Vivienne was now a suspect in Natasha’s death, and I didn’t inform her, for one simple reason: I didn’t want to talk about it. Didn’t even want to think that somehow Vivienne had fooled me so completely. I’d felt so sorry for her.
I supposed I still did. In a way.
“Come on,” Harper said. “Like you never wanted to run over Troy?”
My ex-husband. “Maybe so, but there’s a big difference between thinking about hurting someone versus actually running them down.”
“Yeah, courage.” Harper waved away a fly buzzing near her face. “The guts to actually go through with it.”
I seriously hoped she never bought a car.
“No,” I countered. “Self-control. If I’d run over Troy, I’d be in jail. I wouldn’t be sitting here with you. I wouldn’t have Nick. I wouldn’t have Mimi. I wouldn’t have . . . this life I love so much. As much as Troy broke my heart at the time, I had enough control over emotions not to let that situation destroy my life. Not to let a white-hot moment of hurt and anger rob me of my future. It took time, but I picked up the pieces of that broken marriage, and now I can see that he actually did me a favor.”
“I suppose if you put it that way,” she grumbled as she snaked her arm around my elbow and reached down to entwine her fingers with mine. “You’re such a sap. The sappiest.”
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