The Chakra Outline

by Angie Cabot

  He walked over and reached up to pull the window down. It didn’t budge.

  “Little help here?” he asked.

  I joined him at the open window, and together, we tugged on the window. It didn’t want to close.

  “Zen?”

  “It’s too cold in here,” she said.

  “Just come help.”

  “Like Carl said, we’re not paying the bill.”

  “But Balthazar and Diana have to sleep in here.”

  “So?”

  “Get over here and help us,” I said.

  She folded her arms, and looked to the side.

  “It’s going to get cold in your room, too, you know.”

  “Fine,” she said.

  When she reached the window, she backed up a few steps.

  “Do I have to be in the center? The snow blowing in is freezing. Carl, you should be in the center. You’re strongest.”

  “So because I’m a man, I should take the brunt of the blowing snow?”

  “You like it cold,” I said.

  “Two against one,” Zen said, and stepped to the side. She shoved him to the center.

  “Equality until it comes to getting cold,” he said.

  “You got it,” Zen said.

  With all three of us, we managed to get the window to budge. My fingers froze against the metal frame.

  “All together,” Carl said.

  We put all our weight into it. Ice splintered from the tracks and the window slammed shut.

  “That was loud,” Zen said.

  “Do a quick search.”

  We checked the dresser, nightstand, and a table. Nothing. Then I walked into their private bathroom, and sitting on the counter was an open black case.

  “Guys?” I said.

  They followed me in.

  “One of them is the killer,” Zen said.

  “Balthazar found the body. He could have stabbed Elizabeth then called us all.”

  “Doesn’t explain what happened to the knives you two had.”

  “Maybe Balthazar stole them.”

  “Or Diana.”

  “Tag-team killers,” Carl said.

  “That’s stupid,” I said.

  “Empty case. Knife in body. If the blade fits…”

  “Carl, you’re a moron,” Zen said. She stared at me. “Do we tell everyone about the empty case?”

  “Why wouldn’t we?” I asked.

  “Because if one of them killed your aunt, they may kill us, too.”

  “Good point,” Carl said. “Maybe we keep this to ourselves.”

  “But if one of them killed Aunt Liz, they need to be brought to justice,” I said.

  “Come on. Nobody liked Elizabeth. Can’t it be a no harm, no foul murder?” Carl asked.

  “Justifiable homicide?” Zen asked.

  “No,” I said. “Justice doesn’t work that way.”

  “Can we maybe leave the case, not mention it, and let the police handle it?” Zen asked.

  “Why risk the wrath of a killer when we can have the cops up here by noon. Am I right?” Carl asked.

  I didn’t like it, but if Balthazar or Diana had killed Aunt Liz, it might be good to not say anything about the case because we’d be one step ahead of them.

  “Fine,” I said.

  Both of them sighed with relief.

  We went downstairs again. Balthazar got up from the dining room table. “Well?” he asked.

  “Their blades are missing,” I said.

  “What do you mean missing?”

  “They aren’t there,” Carl said. “Someone stole them. It’s like they’re trying to frame us.”

  “But there’s only one athame in Elizabeth’s chest,” Balthazar said.

  “So they’re trying to throw us off the trail,” Carl said.

  “What trail?”

  “The one that leads to which knife is missing. If several are gone, we can’t determine whose knife is in Elizabeth.” Carl scratched his head. “That’s a sentence I never thought I’d utter.”

  Zen rolled her eyes. “Who uses the word utter?”

  “I do.”

  “You’re an utter moron,” Zen said.

  “Children,” I said. “Be nice.”

  “So how do we solve the case of the missing athames?” Diana asked without getting up.

  “Well, first, we should check on yours and Balthazar’s.”

  “Let me get my coat,” Balthazar said. “And after we verify the athames are in the glove compartment, we can drive down to the main road to call the police.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said. “I’ll get my coat as well.” I looked down at my feet, still in socks. “And boots.”

  Five minutes later, Balthazar and I were bundled up and ready to go.

  “Nobody touch the body,” Balthazar said.

  “Words that nobody even had to say,” Morgan said.

  Everyone nodded.

  “Saying things nobody needs to say is my specialty,” Balthazar said. “We want to preserve the scene as much as we can for the police. With a little luck we’ll have them up here in thirty minutes or so.”

  Then Balthazar and I opened the front door and stepped out into the cold. It was still snowing, but not as hard as last night. As we descended the steps to the buried walkway, I glanced to the right.

  Two black rectangles jutted out of the snow.

  “Hold on,” I said. I trudged through the snow and picked up the two cases. I glanced up at the windows, did some mental calculations. They could have been tossed out of Carl’s window. But based on where they were, and the angle of the cases, they could also have been tossed out of Balthazar and Diana’s window. Or Zen’s window, if she’d closed it, though her room was warm, so I eliminated that thought.

  “What do you have there?” Balthazar asked, trudging over.

  I held up the cases.

  “Empty or full?” he asked.

  I shook them, felt something rattle in each. “Full.”

  I opened each case to be certain, and sure enough, each held one of the bone-handled athames.

  “What are they doing out here?” he asked.

  “Someone tossed them out a window to throw us off,” I said.

  “Hmm. Maybe we should leave them out here,” Balthazar said, his eyes scanning the windows just as I had.

  “For the police, right?”

  He nodded. “That, and if the killer wants to get more blades, he or she will have to come out here to retrieve them.”

  “Or take one of the athames still in Sandra, Morgan, or my room.”

  “Maybe we should toss all of them outside. Sort of a just in case precaution. Or we could put them in the Jeep.”

  Balthazar was a lot taller and bigger than I realized, and he seemed to loom over me. Was that intentional, or did he always loom?

  “I think we let the police sort it out.”

  “You gonna put those back where you found them?” he asked, pointing at the cases in my hand.

  I was torn because if Balthazar was the killer, I didn’t want to put extra weapons in his Jeep. But if he wasn’t the killer, it might be good to have all the knives in one place. But if the police came, they’d cordon the entire place off as a crime scene. Our tracks in the snow would show we’d come over here, so it didn’t seem like it mattered that much, one way or the other.

  I stuck them back in the holes they’d made when they’d been thrown out one or two of the windows.

  We trudged over to the Jeep. Balthazar opened the passenger door, then popped the glove compartment.

  Inside, there was an insurance registration, a small book about the Jeep, a flashlight, half a roll of breath mints, and the two cases, each holding an athame.

  If Balthazar or Diana was the murderer, they’d used someone else’s weapon.

  “Shall we go make the call?” he asked as he closed the glove compartment.

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said, and climbed into the passenger seat. I fastened my sea
tbelt.

  Balthazar walked around the vehicle, hopped into the driver’s seat, and fired up the engine. Then he reached behind the seat to get an ice scraper with a brush on one end. “It won’t take long to warm up,” he said.

  He got out, and brushed snow from the windshield. By the time he’d worked his way around the Jeep, more snow had accumulated on the front, but he got in, twisted a knob and let the wipers clear it away.

  “Cold out there,” he said, tugging the seatbelt around himself.

  “A stunning observation,” I said.

  “I could be a detective myself,” he said with a grin.

  He put the Jeep in four-wheel drive, and stepped on the accelerator. A quick U-turn, and we headed down the drive toward the main road.

  Ahead of us, a massive snowdrift blocked the drive.

  I pointed. “That’s not good.”

  He laughed. “No worries. This baby will drive through anything.”

  He plowed into the drift, and we got stuck.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I’ve got this.” He put the Jeep in reverse, gunned the engine, and we backed out of the drift.

  He drove backward a ways, threw it into drive, and stomped on the gas.

  Again, we plowed into the drift. The Jeep went up and to the right, hung there for a long moment, then tipped to the right and toppled over in the snow bank.

  Balthazar fell partly on top of me, but held onto the steering wheel, and the seatbelt held. The center console took most of his weight so I hardly felt him there.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “I think so,” I said.

  “Well, that didn’t work. But at least the snow kept the impact light.”

  “What now?”

  “We climb out, and see if we can tip this baby right side up.”

  He released his seatbelt, then struggled to get his legs around. He planted one foot beside my head, and the other on the side of my seat. He pushed the driver’s side door open, but a moment later, gravity slammed it closed.

  “Okay, it’s not going to stay open,” he said. “I’ll climb out first, and hold the door for you.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “You’re a gentleman and a scholar.”

  He laughed. “That doesn’t make much sense, but you’re half right.”

  “Which half?”

  “You tell me,” he said, and pushed the door open again. He shoved off with his right foot, got his armpit over the body of the vehicle. The door rested on his head as he scrambled for purchase on the steering wheel.

  Clumps of snow fell on my face. I’m sure they fell elsewhere, too, but I felt it on my cheeks. I was already cold, and this made me even chillier.

  Balthazar managed to climb out.

  He stood on the side of the car, holding the door open with his left leg as he bent down into the Jeep, extending his right hand to me.

  “I’ll pull you up,” he said.

  I unfastened my seatbelt. I’m not all that coordinated to begin with, so trying to get up in the cramped space in a car lying on its side in the snow bank proved to be quite the challenge.

  “Roll to the left,” he said.

  I tried to follow his directions.

  “Your other left,” he said. “Oh, try not to stand directly on the window. Those babies are too easy to knock off the track, and they cost a fortune to fix.”

  Finally, I managed to roll and twist and push my way to my feet. I reached up, and Balthazar pulled me out of the Jeep.

  From the top of the vehicle, or maybe I should say from the driver’s side of the vehicle, we could look down the drive.

  The snowdrift was a lot bigger and deeper than it looked.

  “How could it get so deep so fast?” I asked.

  “Wind,” Balthazar said. “Perfect conditions for it to collect right here. We’re not going to be able to drive through this.”

  “So what do we do? It’s a good mile to the main road.”

  He snorted. “You’re not walking through that snow for a mile. Let’s get down and see if we can push the Jeep back onto its wheels.”

  We climbed down. The snowdrift was up to my shoulders. That put it chest-high on Balthazar.

  He helped me get to the path the Jeep had plowed. The snow wasn’t as deep going back to the mansion.

  Balthazar looked at me. Looked at the angle of the Jeep. Back at me.

  He shook his head.

  “I’ll have Carl come out to help rock it back over.”

  “You don’t think I can do it?” I asked.

  “If it’s any consolation, I don’t think Carl can do it, either,” he said. “But look at the drift. You’d be completely buried in there.”

  He was right. And more importantly, I was cold and frustrated, and didn’t want to try to right his stupid Jeep anyway.

  “Let’s head back,” he said.

  We trudged back to the mansion. “Maybe they have a snowmobile here,” he said as we climbed the porch steps.

  “Emma or Jenn will know,” I said.

  We kicked snow off our boots on the steps, then went back inside. My fingers felt like they were on fire. My feet burned, too.

  “Let’s not track snow through the manor,” Balthazar said.

  We pulled off our boots and set them off to the side in the foyer.

  My socks were wet, so I removed them, too. Then I unzipped my coat, and hung it in the closet.

  I clenched and unclenched my fingers, then rubbed my hands together, and blew on them, trying to warm them up. I caught a whiff of my breath, and winced. I needed to brush my teeth.

  Diana strolled into the hallway. “Back already?” she asked.

  “We had a bit of a mishap,” Balthazar said.

  “What kind of mishap?” Diana asked.

  “Let me warm up for a minute. I don’t want to tell the story twice, so let’s gather in the dining room.”

  Chapter Seven

  We gathered in the drawing room so no one would have to stare at Aunt Liz’s corpse. Balthazar told about the Jeep mishap, but didn’t mention the knives in the snow. Jenn told us there wasn’t a snowmobile, which meant there was no way to get to the main road to call for the police.

  I looked at each employee in turn. They didn’t look like bad people, but one of them was a murderer.

  “I’m hungry,” Balthazar said. “Since there’s no way to call the cops, I vote we move the body.”

  “Why aren’t we waiting for the police?” Zen asked.

  “Well, the police aren’t coming today, and we need access to stuff in the kitchen, so the body has to be moved.”

  “Where to?” she asked.

  Balthazar shrugged. “Out the back door? We can plop her in a snowdrift and she’ll be good to go when the cops get here. And that way we can get to the refrigerator.”

  “That’s heartless,” Sandra said.

  “You have a better idea? I’m just being practical.”

  I didn’t like the thought of Aunt Liz being tossed into a snowdrift. She deserved better. I forced my emotions down so I could deal with the situation. I was good at it.

  “What about all the evidence?” Zen asked.

  “The blade will still be in her.”

  “There’s more evidence than that,” I said. “We don’t even know what the police would look for under these circumstances.”

  “Based on the cop shows I’ve seen, I can get us started,” Carl said. “I can snap pictures with my cellphone to show the crime scene as it is. Capture shots from all angles and such.”

  “Then we can draw a chalk outline around the body,” Morgan said. “I have some rainbow chalk in my purse.”

  “Rainbow chalk?” I asked.

  “Multi-colored chalk,” she said. “It’s a diversity thing.”

  “And you just happen to have some in your purse?”

  “Of course,” she said. “I use it when I teach classes, so I always keep some on hand.” She pinched her lips for a moment. “But I don’t want to
touch the body, so someone else should trace the outline.” She pointed at Diana. “You’re the best artist, Diana. You should draw the chalk outline.”

  “I don’t think they do chalk outlines in real life,” Carl said.

  “Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.”

  Carl looked at Diana. “I’ll take the pictures if you’ll trace the body with the rainbow chalk.”

  “Does the chalk have glitter?” Diana asked.

  “No,” Morgan said.

  “Good. Because I hate glitter.”

  “Why would they put glitter in chalk?” I asked.

  “Why do they put glitter in anything?”

  “To appeal to teenage girls,” Zen said.

  “Can we get on with all this?” Balthazar asked. “I’m still hungry. The cereal should be in one of the cabinets, so I can get to that, but the milk is in the refrigerator. Can’t open the fridge while Elizabeth’s sprawled out in front of it.”

  “Your concern for my feelings is much appreciated,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said. “Sorry. Didn’t mean any offense, Kathy. But Elizabeth was a witch with a capital—”

  “So you’ve said.”

  “I’ll start taking pictures,” Carl said. “I just hope someone on Facebook doesn’t ask me to upload the third to last picture on my phone when I’m done.”

  “You can get on Facebook?” Sandra asked.

  “It was a joke, Sandra. None of us have signal.”

  “So you mean when we get back to town.”

  “Yeah, but explaining that before making the joke isn’t funny.”

  “To be fair, what you said wasn’t funny either.”

  Carl got up and dug his phone out of his pocket. “I thought it was funny,” he said under his breath.

  “You would,” Sandra said.

  I knew they were compensating for the death of my aunt, but it still bothered me. Aunt Liz was dead, and she deserved at least a modicum of respect.

  Balthazar got up and followed Carl. “Hey, Carl, after we eat, can you help me with the Jeep?”

  “I can try.”

  Jenn and Emma sat quietly. Emma raised her hand.

  “Yes, Emma?” I said.

  “Do we have to stay up here for this?”

  “No,” I said. “But in the interest of being thorough, maybe I should go down to your rooms to have a look around. I know you don’t have athames, but I would be remiss if I didn’t at least take a peek and ask a few questions.”