A change of subject I was grateful for, even though I knew why she was doing it.
“I did at that.” I bumped Harper with my elbow. “I thought you might like some copies of the bird photos as well, being the nature lover you are.”
I wanted her to make the connection that I had made . . . that the mourning dove was a Wishcrafter. If Harper did, she’d drop the photo and start running through every female Wishcrafter in the village to determine which one might be the Elder. “Isn’t it a pretty bird? Look at that blue around its eye. . . .”
As I said the words, I suddenly realized that the Elder was the reason the Lunumbra spell had been created. It was because I kept trying to take her picture, which would reveal she was a Wishcrafter. No wonder Ve cast the spell only on me—I was the reason the spell was needed in the first place. But the question still remained as to why the bird always seemed to be watching over me.
Harper glanced up at me as though not really listening, then back at the photo in her hand. She didn’t even look at the computer screen. “This isn’t Natasha,” she said, pointing at the woman in the picture.
“Oh, I know.” I grabbed the photo and tucked it into a pile on the table. “Baz apparently had lots of girlfriends. A regular Romeo.”
“Nick should look into that,” Harper said. “It opens a whole new door as to who might have killed Natasha and run him over. Maybe Vivienne’s innocent after all. She really doesn’t strike me as the murderous type.”
“How much do I owe you, Darcy?” Ivy asked, her voice tight.
I waved my hand. “You know what? Nothing. I truly didn’t do much, and ha! I even at one point thought you might have been the petnapper. So let’s just call it even.”
I couldn’t believe how she’d fooled me and I wondered now if she purposely planted clues that led me to believe she’d taken the animals . . . so I wouldn’t become suspicious about what she’d really done.
Harper riffled through the pictures on the table. “That silhouette looked familiar,” she said. “I might be able to tell who it is if I look at it a little more closely.”
Curse Harper and her love of forensics.
Ivy tucked her pen away. “The petnapper? That’s funny. I could never steal a pet.” She pulled out a plastic container of cookies and set them on the coffee table. “I brought you some cookies. As a thank-you. Double chocolate chunk.”
That got Harper’s attention. She reached for the container. “I’ve died and gone to heaven. You’re a lifesaver. I’m starving.” Lifting the lid, she pulled out a beautiful-looking cookie.
I slapped it out of her hands.
“Darcy!” she cried.
“You don’t want to eat that. Does she, Ivy?”
Ivy lifted an eyebrow. “So you have figured it out. The cookies are perfectly fine, by the way. I just wanted to see how you’d react to them, since you’ve been rambling uncomfortably since laying eyes on me.”
Missy hopped down from the couch and started pacing as though sensing the danger in the air.
I just needed to keep Ivy talking until the police arrived. I strained to hear any sirens, but heard none. I did hear the coo of the mourning dove, however, and looked over to see the bird bobbing along the windowsill.
“I was with you all along, Darcy.
“I’ll always be with you.”
With a little more confidence, I turned back to Ivy. “I didn’t know until a witness came forward today and said he saw you with a black wig on going into the back of Fairytails. After Baz had been hit by the car.”
“It’s your silhouette!” Harper said suddenly.
I sighed.
“Yes,” Ivy confirmed. “It looks to me that the picture was taken minutes before Baz told me he was marrying Natasha and leaving the village for good. I couldn’t let that happen. I had too much invested in our relationship.”
“Competition changes people. Trust me.”
I realized Ivy had been talking about herself, not Natasha.
Ivy glanced at me. “I thought you had figured it out yesterday, Darcy, but I see now your pointed questions were about the petnapping. My mistake.”
“Why’d you run him over if you wanted a relationship with him?” Harper asked.
It was a good question.
“I got scared when Darcy suggested that the police were looking to arrest Baz for Natasha’s murder. I needed someone else to take the blame. Vivienne was my next obvious choice, since framing Chip didn’t work out as planned. Thanks to you,” she said drolly.
“But you poisoned Chip,” I said. “How was that framing him?”
“After he was found dead, I was going to mail a typed suicide note to the police that confessed he killed Natasha and couldn’t live with himself. Darcy botched that plan by getting him medical help.”
She sounded thoroughly disgusted with me, but I didn’t think this was a good time to point out that she was the one who’d asked me to go to Chip’s apartment in the first place.
“How’d you even get into his apartment?” Harper asked.
“During one of my break-ins at Natasha’s, I stole her keys and had copies made. One of those keys belonged to Chip’s apartment. I used it to sneak in there the morning of the Extravaganza to poison his smoothie mix and bide my time. When that didn’t work out, I needed another scapegoat. Vivienne was the only one left. I was going to plant the cyanide at her house, but the police were there that morning. Then I saw her car at the Pixie Cottage and made a plan. By the way, that’s where I found Lady Catherine. At the Pixie Cottage. She was there getting a drink in the garden. For some reason, there were six bowls of water set out. I took Lady Catherine back to Marigold, and went home and got the wig and the car keys and set out to find Baz, which wasn’t hard, thanks to the GPS app I put on his phone a year ago.”
“You could have killed him,” I pointed out.
“If I wanted him dead, he’d be dead by now,” Ivy said succinctly. “I only clipped him.”
She was delusional. He absolutely could have died from his wound.
“Were you the one who hit Vivienne, too?” I asked. “A year and a half ago?”
Ivy smiled, cool, calm, and collected. Gone was her anxiety, her high energy. I suddenly preferred the latter. Because a calm Ivy was terrifying.
“You’re good,” she said. “I knew you were, but not many people would have put that together. I meant to kill her, but I wasn’t as skilled then as I am now. You’re not so smart, however, to have figured out that it was I who was behind the food poisoning incident last year. The salad Baz ate was meant for Vivienne. With her weakened immune system because of the accident, it would have killed her. But it didn’t matter much anyway. Baz kept coming back to me.”
Harper frowned. “Why’d you even hire Darcy in the first place?”
“An alibi, of course,” she said. “No one would think I’d hire someone to watch the woman I was about to get rid of. The second time I hired Darcy was purely to get information on the case that the police weren’t releasing to the general public, and her relationship to the chief of police paid off handsomely for me.”
I didn’t want to think about how I’d been used. How easily I’d fallen for her lies because I wanted to help.
No, I couldn’t think about that right now. I had to keep her talking until the police showed up. “How’d you and Baz meet? I thought it was because of Audrey, but it had to have been earlier than that if you ran over Vivienne.”
“A movie. We’d both gone to see a showing of Charade at the playhouse and struck up a conversation.”
He’d probably been there to see Audrey Hepburn, and she’d probably gone to get tips on being a psychopath.
“It was love at first sight,” she said. “On my part, at least. He made promises to me, and I intend to make him keep them.”
“How?” Harper
asked. “He’s going to know what you did.”
“How?”
“We’ll tell him,” she said.
Ivy lifted up a small gun. She must have pulled it out of her tote when she took out the cookies. “No, you won’t. You and your sister are going to have an argument, and one of you is going to kill the other, then turn the gun on herself. Now, which one of you is that going to be?” She waved the gun between us.
Missy started whining and raced past us, through the mudroom, and out her dog door. I was glad she’d be safe at least.
Annie hopped down from the back of the couch, onto my lap.
Harper took my hand.
I prayed for sirens.
“No volunteers?” Ivy said. “Fine. Harper first. Just because that’ll hurt Darcy more, and this is all her fault for figuring out the truth.”
Just as she aimed the gun, something slammed into the window—the mourning dove. Ivy turned and fired. Glass shattered. Annie dove off my lap, and I pulled Harper to her feet. “Run!”
Ivy jumped up. “No!”
We’d almost made it to the kitchen when she fired the second bullet. It hit the doorframe of the laundry room.
I glanced back and saw Ivy take aim again as she started after us. Annie darted in front of her, tripping her. Another bullet hit the ceiling. Harper screamed as I pushed her forward. I was right behind her until I slipped on the puddle of water I’d spilled earlier and went down hard. My breath wooshed out of me, and I was momentarily stunned as I fought for air.
Harper dropped next to me. “Darcy!”
“Go!” I managed to say, shoving her.
“No! Not without you.”
Ivy scrambled to her feet, laughing.
I managed to get to my knees, and as I slowly caught my breath, I looked for some sort of weapon, and saw nothing. Just the counter stools and dust bunnies. But . . . no. I was wrong. There was something. . . .
Samuel Beeson’s cloak. It was right where I’d left it earlier—draped over the back of the stool.
“Grab the cape,” I told Harper as Ivy took her time coming down the hallway.
Harper looked as though she wanted to argue, but grabbed the cape. I quickly opened it and pulled it over Harper’s and my heads, as if we were two little kids hiding in a fort we’d made out of bedsheets. I kept the seam of the cape gripped tightly. Here, within this mothball-scented fabric igloo, Ivy couldn’t see us.
Ivy’s footsteps stopped. “What the hell? Where’d you go?”
Harper looked at me, her eyes wide; then she smiled.
“Think like a Crafter,” I whispered, then added, “Now creep around in front of the counter.” We duck-walked that way.
Through the seam of the cape, I could see Ivy turning in a circle, looking every which way, the color draining from her face. She pressed on the floor where I’d been lying just moments ago as though testing for a trapdoor.
Sirens rose in the distance, and I wished Ivy would just leave. But she seemed intent on finding us as she walked back and forth, swinging the gun wildly.
Annie ran past her, keeping close to the wall, and ran straight toward Harper and me, meowing pitifully.
I’d forgotten that animals could see us, even with the cape.
Ivy focused on Annie. She aimed the gun at her. “I’ll kill the cat!” she yelled. “You have three seconds! One!”
I loosened the seam of the cape and said to Harper, “Grab Annie!”
She nodded, and in a flash, Annie was tight against Harper’s chest.
With a cry of alarm, Ivy’s mouth dropped open. For a split second it looked as though she didn’t know what to do—she was frozen, her eyes wide with fear. Then suddenly she bolted for the back door. I reached my hand out, grabbing her ankle as she passed, and she fell hard, hitting her head on the floor.
As she moaned and writhed, I hopped out of the cape and grabbed Missy’s leash from a hook in the mudroom. I quickly went to work trussing Ivy up like a Christmas roast and said to Harper, “Quick! We need to memory-cleanse her before the police get here. It’s up in my bedroom. Top drawer of my dresser.”
Harper darted up the steps two at a time.
She was back in seconds, the memory cleanse in one hand, the family portrait I’d been working on in the other. She tossed me the small bag of memory cleanse. I blew the powder into Ivy’s face and she went still, passing out cold in a cloud of glitter that would soon dissolve.
I sat back and took a deep breath of relief. Which didn’t last long. Harper sat on the bottom step of the back staircase, staring at the drawing. Her lower jaw was trembling as she turned the drawing toward me and pointed. “Is this Mom?”
As always, my gaze went straight to my mother’s face. This time, however, I zeroed in on my mother’s eye, at the vibrant blue eyeliner.
Eyeliner that suddenly reminded me so much of the blue that rimmed the mourning dove’s eye.
I sucked in a breath as the truth hit me hard and fast like a sucker punch.
“I’ll always be with you.”
In that moment, I immediately knew that the nightmare I’d had last night hadn’t been a nightmare at all.
It had been a memory.
That day at the scene of the crash, as paramedics kept her earthly body alive with chest compressions in an attempt to save her unborn baby, my mother’s spirit had already been released. Above the wreckage of twisted metal, she had become a familiar, taking the form of a mourning dove. She’d flown over to me, to try to comfort me even then.
“I’ll always be with you.”
I hadn’t put it together before, because I hadn’t been thinking like a Crafter. I hadn’t been thinking the impossible was possible. I had never even considered that the Elder might be a dead woman. A spirit. A familiar.
I jumped up, ran upstairs and grabbed my cape from my closet, then dashed back down the steps, going around Harper, who was still staring at the drawing. I quickly jotted a note and left it on the counter. I took the drawing from Harper and dropped it to the floor.
“Hey!” she protested. “What’re you doing? Have you lost your mind?”
I grabbed Harper’s hand and Samuel’s cloak from the floor. “Come on!”
“What? Darcy! We can’t just leave—”
I pulled her out the door. “We have to go right now!”
“Where?” she demanded.
“To see our mother.”
Chapter Thirty-one
Harper gripped my hand so tightly my fingers were going numb as we jogged down a wooded path that led to a place I’d been many times, but Harper had never seen at all.
“Why did she never say anything?” Harper said, her voice thick. She wore Samuel’s cloak.
“She couldn’t say anything. Craft law, remember? Witches have to live in the village a year before knowing the Elder’s true identity.”
“Family should trump Craft law.”
I personally agreed, because, well, she was our mother. “But that’s what makes her a good Elder, no? That she is safeguarding our heritage, even at the cost of her own personal happiness.”
Stubbornly, Harper said, “This is no time to get philosophical with me, Darcy. How much farther is it?”
“Not far,” I said.
“Do you think Aunt Ve knows?”
“She knows. It’s probably been killing her to keep the secret. A lot of our friends probably know. Like Archie and Godfrey and Pepe and Mrs. P. All were sworn to secrecy.”
“Craft law stinks.”
“Without it, our world would be chaos. It’s a small sacrifice to make for the greater good. You’re all about the greater good, remember?”
“Yeah, yeah,” she grumbled.
We walked in silence for a moment, before Harper said, “Do you think she’ll like me?”
I slowed t
o a stop and faced my sister, our hands still linking us together. My heart nearly broke in two at the tears shining in her eyes. “Like you? Yes, she’ll like you. She loves you.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do.”
“How?”
“Harper.” I jiggled our connected hands. “Please, just this once, don’t look for the explanation, the answers. Just feel, okay?”
“Aren’t you angry?” she asked, a cry of injustice in her voice. “She’s been gone all these years.”
“I’ll always be with you.”
Shaking my head, I said, “She hasn’t been gone. She’s been with us. We just didn’t know it. Not consciously, anyway.” I was beginning to suspect that there were going to be plenty of times I’d look back on my life and realize she’d been there all along.
“Same thing.”
“No, it’s not.”
Harper huffed. “It feels like the same thing.”
“It wasn’t her fault that she had to leave.”
Harper’s jaw worked side to side. “I know. I know. It’s just that . . . I missed her.”
I pulled her into a hug, and she squeezed me the way she used to do when she was scared of strange noises in the night. “Me, too.”
Her voice was muffled against my shoulder. “Do you think she’s mad because I don’t want to be a Crafter? I mean, she’s the Elder, for the love!”
“No, I don’t think she’ll be mad.”
“Are you sure?”
I pulled back and looked at her face. “Positive.”
“I’m choosing to trust you,” she said, her cheeks flushed.
“Have I ever lied to you? Well, about anything really important?”
Her bottom lip pushed out as she thought about it. “I seem to recall something about the Easter bunny. . . .”
I tugged her hand. “Come on.”
“Is she even going to be there? She might still be at the house. She . . . she saved our lives.”
She had. If she hadn’t banged that window . . . Emotion clogged my throat. “I’m sure she will be. She probably knows we’re on our way because she was watching us.”
Gone With the Witch Page 27
