A Maze of Murder

by Kate Krake

  “The hedge has grown so much faster than we expected it would, better than we ever could have hoped.” Neville was beaming, looking down at the field where the town’s new money spinner was spread out. “Boxwoods. Mrs. Jacques said they were, good for hedges.”

  I stopped and looked again at the maze, carefully noting the shape and color of the bushes, the twists and turns, the dead ends and false boundaries. This was a vast, complex puzzle, enough to send a person into delirium if they spent too long trying to solve it. I swallowed hard, my brow furrowing, and looked again. Delirium wouldn’t be the worst thing that could happen to someone in this maze. The air shimmered with the tingle of magic.

  I had to be sure before I said anything to Neville, but there was no mistaking what was before me.

  “I can’t believe this is the first time you’ve come out here,” Neville said.

  “Yes, I definitely should have seen this a lot sooner, I think,” I said. Like, before it was even designed, I added in my mind.

  The maze was a circular pattern, common enough for hedge mazes of this type, stretching a good hundred and fifty feet in diameter. The way it twisted in the center into a warped teardrop caught my eye. A longtime passion for games and puzzles had naturally led me to mazes. I would fill in maze book after maze book as a child and had read about their history at length. I knew mazes had been used for centuries in spellcraft too, though I had obviously never had the skills to even think about casting a maze spell myself.

  This maze I was looking down on now was a definite spell maze.

  “And you say Mrs. Jacques designed this?” I said, my words hoarse.

  “She did. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? I think people are really going to love it.”

  “Yes, it’s lovely. And, um, did you say Mrs. Jacques also chose the plants? Boxwoods?”

  Neville nodded, still smiling down on the maze as if it were a work of art of his very own creation.

  I couldn’t say anything until I had a closer look.

  The path down to the maze was hewn into the side of the hill, rough timbers marking the steps. “We designed it like this to give it an old-world charm,” Neville said as we stepped our way carefully down.

  When we came closer to the maze, there was no denying my suspicions. Up close, the magic radiated out of it like heat from a furnace. If an untrained witch could feel the juice in this charm, it was seriously concentrated.

  “And how quickly did you say this thing grew?” I said, peering up at the top of the hedge, a good two feet taller than my head.

  “We planted it three months ago, if you can believe it. Obviously, they were on the large size when they all went in, but for it to grow so thick and wonderful so quickly—well, I guess this is just meant to be. They love our soil and are obviously thriving. All thanks to Mrs. Jacques’s expert horticultural skills.”

  I plucked a leaf off the hedge closest to me, confirming my final suspicion completely and without question.

  “Mr. Norton, I—”

  “Please, call me Neville.”

  “Okay, Neville. I have something to tell you about this maze, and you’re not going to like it.”

  The smile fell from the old man’s face and was replaced by a line of concern.

  “This isn’t boxwood.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “No, it’s yew. A silver blood yew, to be exact.”

  How did I know anything about plants? I didn’t, not really. But when I’d gone mad looking at death curses after the stuff with Quentin, references to silver blood yew, a rare tree, kept coming up time and time again. And that’s what I was looking at here.

  “Oh,” he said. His puzzlement deepened. “Does that matter?”

  I knew next to nothing about what other kinds of spells yew could be used for but knew it had been synonymous with witchcraft for centuries. I did know something else about yew, though.

  “Yew is poisonous, this variety especially,” I said.

  Yew hedges were common around the world and safe enough unless they were ingested, but toxicity was a line I thought Neville might be able to grasp more easily than “Sorry, Mr. Norton, you’ve accidentally built a magic maze out of witch trees.”

  “Oh dear,” Neville said softly.

  I nodded quickly. “That’s right, silver blood yew is deadly. Has anyone been in the maze yet?”

  “Only the groundskeepers who planted it, and as you can see, it needs quite a lot of trimming, so I’m sure no one has come back into it for a while.”

  I thought hard. I didn’t know exactly what kind of spell it was weaving, but all the signs pointed to nothing good. If no one had come to grief from this charm yet, then there might still be time to disarm it. But that would be a massive spell. I wondered if it was something Lila might be able to do or if it would need to be a witch. A real one.

  “I’m not sure of all the details, Neville, but I think to be safe, we should keep the maze off-limits until we learn more about it.”

  Neville’s demeanor had fallen from bright sunny excitement to dark and worrisome. This was his big project for Blackthorn Springs, and Mrs. Jacques and her magical yew might have ruined it for him for good, and a lot more than that.

  We drove back to town in silence. The whole way back, I thought that Edie Jacques, together with Jackfort and Conri O’Farrell, was now another very good suspect in the murder of Kenny Langdel.

  8

  Neville dropped me off at my front door, and I was happy he didn’t try to invite himself in for tea and a chat. I had a long night of solitary thinking planned.

  I went upstairs, missing Hemlock’s usual greeting at the door—a soft meow to say hello but careful not to let on how much he had missed me. I ran a bath and went into the bedroom.

  What possible plan could anyone, especially an old woman like Edie Jacques, have for a maze like that? I didn’t know much about horticulture, but I still knew there had to be witchcraft involved for it to grow as quickly as it had. But was there a connection between Edie and Kenny? Might Jackfort be part of this maze too? He had always liked big showy spells.

  I pulled the already-closed curtains tighter before getting undressed.

  You’re being ridiculous, I thought. Rowan Jackfort is not a stick-to-the-shadows kind of guy.

  He needed to be seen, so if he was watching me, he would want me to know. It would be a part of his sick game. This whole maze thing could, rationally, be a coincidence. Jackfort had probably looked me up and found my details through the business directory; most likely he wasn’t actually in town. In typical Jackfort style, he was only trying to scare me. I hated that it was working.

  I sank into the tub and tried, with little success, to relax. What I really needed right then was a moon cleanse, a forest bathing ritual I had invented myself. It wasn’t magic, just a mind-clearing meditation I found worked best in a natural place in the light of the full moon. But with a few days until the full moon, a hot bath in a quiet house and lots of wine would have to suffice.

  The night without Hemlock was a lonely one. Without his little body on my bed, where he had cuddled into me since the night I had first brought him into my life, I could not sleep.

  Around two a.m., I padded into the living room and selected a well-worn volume from the overstuffed bookshelf.

  A Secret History of the Labyrinth.

  I sank into the armchair. Hemlock would always come to snuggle in beside me whenever I sat in this chair. Here I was, warm and cozy in his favorite seat while he was in some cold hard cage in a strange place, sicker than sick, and probably terrified.

  “You’re not helping anyone by getting so upset,” I said aloud. “He’s going to be fine, and he’s in the best place for that to happen.”

  I tried to push Hemlock to the back of my thoughts with the increasingly colossal muddle of things I couldn’t fix at that moment and focus on the task at hand.

  I thumbed through pages, a pool of golden lamplight the only light in the house. I read t
hrough legends of the Minotaur, stories of the hidden depths of the Chartres labyrinth, and the real history of the Hampton Court maze, until I came across the image I had half remembered while standing above Blackthorn’s newest and most deadly tourist attraction. A medieval woodcut of a maze with a string of ghosts and ghouls rising from its middle. I had been right about the way the path twisted into the curved teardrop. Edie Jacques had definitely designed a talisman. A ghost maze.

  But why?

  Laying the book aside, I opened my laptop and searched for anything and everything on silver blood yew. As I already knew, yew, and in particular the silver blood yew, was one of the oldest magical plants around. But what I hadn’t realized until then was it had been used for centuries in spells particularly concerning the dead and passage to the other world after this life. A ghost maze planted in silver blood yew? No wonder it had felt so potent.

  When I did eventually fall into a light sleep in the small hours of the cold night, still sitting in the armchair, I dreamed I was running through a maze. Conri O’Farrell ran after me. I couldn’t see him, but I could hear his footfalls, the huff of his breath. Whenever I turned around to see if he was still there, I found I had rounded another corner and was blind to anything behind or in front of me.

  * * *

  “You look terrible,” Lila said. The fairy was waiting for me outside the shop before opening, a rare and mysterious event in itself.

  “I hardly slept. Again. But that’s not important,” I said. “Do you know Edie Jacques?”

  “She’s owned the nursery on Alba Road for about a hundred years, I think,” she said. She handed me a very welcome coffee. I noted it was a cup from Tom Jenkins’s diner.

  “This is the only place to get a takeout caffeine hit now that BrewHaHa has closed,” she explained. “Until Bar Armadillo or the tea house start serving coffee.”

  Tom’s coffee was drinkable—nowhere near as good as Kenny’s, but on this little sleep, I would have found any muddy brew to be the finest blend in the world.

  “Edie’s a witch?” I asked, unlocking the door.

  Lila shrugged. “I’ve got no idea. I guess it would make sense, all those plants and everything. If she were, she’d be well into herb lore, I guess.”

  “Yes, that’s what I’m suspecting,” I said. I filled Lila in about everything I had seen at the hedge maze the day before.

  “You’re serious? That’s serious.”

  “I know. But the question is why? What does she want it for? And what does this have to do with the rest of it?”

  “Why does it all need to be connected?” Lila said.

  I stopped and sipped my coffee. “Because…” I started. There wasn’t much of a link save a dark hex and a dark spell maze. I would have to talk to Edie to find out that part. “It seems a bit out of the ordinary, don’t you think? I don’t really believe in coincidence, as much as I’d like to sometimes.”

  “I keep telling you, Adela is the one you need to be talking to, not me,” Lila said.

  “I don’t want to get anyone else involved.”

  “Trust me, Adela knows pretty much everything about everything, and not just what happens in this town.”

  “That’s what worries me. With the way gossip works in this place…”

  “She’s no busybody, she’s just wise. Go and talk to her. Trust me, you’ll see.”

  “Are you going to come with me?” I said, hopeful.

  “Gee, Belinda, she’s not going to bite you. I know she’s working today. I saw her this morning. I’ll watch the shop, do the dusting and stuff.”

  “So, this Adela is a Naarin demon, did you say?”

  Lila nodded.

  “Then how can we not put her on the list of murder suspects?”

  “Naarin. Do you really not know anything about Naarins? They couldn’t kill anyone, even if they wanted, unless it were another of their kind. It’s just the way things are with them. She’s probably the only person in town you can safely assume isn’t the killer.”

  The store telephone rang.

  “Thank you for calling Blackthorn Book Nook, Lila speaking,” Lila said in her professional voice she only ever used when she answered the shop line. “Oh, yes, she’s right here.” Lila passed me the phone.

  “Hello?” I said, cringing as I expected to hear Neville Norton’s voice on the other end.

  “Belinda, er… Ms. Drake. It’s Conri. Doctor O’Farrell. The vet.”

  He sounded strange, too polite, too nervous to be the tempest I had encountered the day before. It must be bad news.

  “We’ve got Hemlock’s tests back. I’ll explain the results when you come to pick him up today.”

  “He can come home? Today?” I was ecstatic. For such a small little being, Hemlock’s absence had left a mountain-sized hole in my home, and I couldn’t wait to see him again. Even Lila said she missed him, even though she was always yelling at him to stop tickling her with his tail. I’d always suspected he was doing it on purpose.

  “He’s fine,” the vet said. “Or at least he will be after he finishes the medication. We can discuss the details when we see each other. I mean, when you come in. Today. For the cat.”

  “Sure, thanks,” I said, thinking this vet might have worse conversational skills than I did. I hung up, picked up my bag and headed to the door.

  “Naarin demons will have to wait until later,” I said.

  “You want me to come with you to, you know…?”

  A couple, newlyweds judging by the sheen on their golden rings, entered the store.

  “You’re open, right?” the woman said. “I’ve seen your shop online, and I’m just so excited to be in the actual, real-life Blackthorn Book Nook.”

  I smiled, genuinely complimented, but not sure what the fuss was all about.

  “Yes. Please, look around and take your time,” I said. I leaned in close to Lila.

  “Maybe next time. For now, I just need to get my cat home.”

  * * *

  As I hurried out of the store, eager to get my familiar back by my side, I noticed a sleek black SUV parked outside the shop. With blacked-out windows making it look like a sci-fi space shuttle, the vehicle stood out in a place like Blackthorn Springs that was full of nice sensible cars for a nice sensible town.

  It was likely nothing. There were plenty of tourists with all kinds of vehicles in these parts, though not that many this time of year. Still, something niggled at me, and I eyed it with cold suspicion.

  It’s not Jackfort, I thought, reminding myself of all of the justifications I’d already reasoned a million times over. He’s not here; he was just trying to scare you.

  It certainly didn’t look like the kind of car any of the Bloodfire would drive, but I made a note of the license plate, just in case.

  Maureen greeted me with an icy nod and told me to go straight through. I waited in the brightly lit room, oddly nervous. I had experienced two sides of the vet so far, and I didn’t much care to see that first one again.

  Conri came into the room cradling Hemlock in his arms like a baby. I immediately thought of his placidness as a terrible sign. But Hemlock was purring, simply enjoying being held against the vet’s broad chest.

  Can that cat be bought by anyone? I wondered.

  “It’s nice to see you again,” Conri said. A strange curl flickered at the edge of his mouth. Was that a smile?

  I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.

  “It’s good and bad news,” the vet said. He lowered Hemlock toward me, and the cat happily left his arms for mine with a contented meow.

  The vet was different. He stood differently, more erect. He had shaved off the messy beard, and it even looked like he had done his hair with gel. Underneath his white coat, I could see his clothes were freshly pressed. It seemed like he was making an effort to look nice. And it was sort of working. With his deep eyes and square jaw, he was even kind of hot, now that he wasn’t scowling or yelling.

  “The
blood tests showed toxicity. Has your cat been in contact with lily flowers lately?”

  “Lilies?” I said. My heart clenched.

  “It’s all too common to see cats poisoned by lilies. Those things are deadly to felines.”

  “Oh dear,” I said.

  “Most cat owners know this and manage to keep their pets safe.”

  I bristled. “What are you implying?”

  “I’m saying having a pet is a privilege. Keeping them out of harm’s way, keeping them away from star lilies in this case, is one cost of that.”

  “For your information, someone sent me a bunch of flowers,” I said. My voice quivered around the giant lump stuck in my throat. “I knew the danger they presented and threw them straight into the trash.” It was true enough, even though the danger I’d known they presented had nothing to do with floral toxicity, and Hemlock had taken a big noseful of them before that.

  “Not soon enough, evidently,” he said. “With a name like Hemlock, maybe whoever it was that sent you those flowers did it on purpose.”

  I fumed. Was he trying to be funny or clever? Or was he having a go at something about me personally? Who would’ve thought I could go from hating someone to thinking he might be tolerable after all, even kind of sexy, and then right back to hating him again so quickly?

  “So, he looks okay,” I said, trying to keep my cool. “Is he okay?”

  “He’s been administered drugs, and you’ll have to give him these.” He handed me three small vials of tablets in a Ziplock bag.

  “Something so serious, I thought he would be in a lot longer,” I said.

  “Often with cats and lily poisoning, that would be correct. But we’ve got some tricks up our sleeve,” he said.

  Magic tricks?

  “A tablet of each a day until they’re all finished,” he said. “You don’t look like an irresponsible woman, Ms. Drake, but you never can tell with cat owners. Just keep him inside. Away from any new flowers.”