Magick & Mayhem

by Sharon Pape

  Tilly finally remembered we were there for answers, not chicken. “Everyone knows you were smitten with him, but he rejected you,” she said, clearly taking more pleasure than she should have in needling her.

  “I don’t know if I’d characterize it quite that way,” Beverly said huffily. “Plenty of women have loved and lost, or suffered unrequited love. If that were a reason to commit murder, there’d be more dead men than living ones.” Beads of sweat were percolating on her forehead and upper lip. She was certainly afraid, but of what? Being found out? Being wrongly accused?

  Being a topic of gossip herself?

  I threw my aunt a stern look. We didn’t want to give the woman a heart attack or a stroke. At least I didn’t. I took Beverly’s hand. It was cool and damp with sweat. “Please, try to calm down,” I said in a soothing tone. The last thing Tilly and I needed was another body to report to the police.

  “Calm down?” she squeaked. “How can I calm down? It’s not every day someone tells me I’m a suspect in a murder case.”

  “It was probably idle speculation by gossips,” I said.

  “Think back to the day Jim was murdered,” Tilly said, “do you remember what you were doing between four and five in the afternoon?”

  Beverly stared at the floor for a minute. “Okay . . . I think . . . I think I was working in my garden.” She looked up triumphantly. “Yes, that’s what I was doing. It was a hot day, so I waited until the sun was lower in the sky.”

  “Did anyone see you out there during that hour?” I asked. Beverly shook her head. “Maybe a neighbor walking a dog? The mailman or a delivery service? The ice cream truck?” I’d run out of options, and she was still wagging her head.

  “There’s no one who can vouch for me,” she said forlornly. “How am I supposed to prove what I’m saying if I live alone?”

  “I think your chicken is burning,” Tilly said, sniffing the air. Beverly’s eyes widened and she took off for the kitchen. We heard the banging and clanging of cookware, followed by the vent fan roaring to life, after which she returned to the foyer where she’d left us.

  “Is everything okay?” Tilly asked sweetly.

  “Of course not,” she said. “I’ve burned my dinner and I might wind up in jail.”

  “I think we should get out of your way,” I said, taking Tilly firmly by the arm.

  Once we were back in the car, I turned to my aunt. “You didn’t have to be so hard on her.”

  “Why not?” she asked petulantly. “She’s a malicious gossip. You don’t know the half of it.”

  I turned on the engine. “I don’t doubt that, but she’s not a killer. You saw how she reacted. She would have had a heart attack before she could pull the trigger. For that matter, can you see her breaking into Elise’s house to steal the gun?”

  Tilly snorted. “I suppose you’re right. But you can’t blame a girl for hoping.”

  Chapter 29

  I sat up in bed, wrenched from a deep sleep. The red digital numbers on the clock-radio bored through the darkness—1:33 a.m. My head felt fuzzy, wisps of a dream evaporating beyond my reach. I couldn’t figure out what had awakened me. The cats were all up too, looking as confused as I was. Then I felt the vibrations in the air, wave after wave of troughs and crests like the ripple effect of a stone cast into a pond. They were subtle. Most people wouldn’t have noticed them, but the cats and I are more sensitive to disruptions in the plane. Something had disturbed the wards around my property. I grabbed the cotton robe from the closet and punched my arms into the sleeves as I ran down the stairs, flipping on lights as I went. I wasn’t worried about coming face to face with an intruder. If someone had actually managed to get inside, I would have been feeling a lot more than slight vibrations from the wards. For that matter, the electronic security system Morgana had had installed would have tripped an ear-shattering siren by now too. Tying my bathrobe closed around me, I unlocked the front door, hit the switch for the porch light and stepped outside. I didn’t realize I was barefoot until I felt the spongy grass beneath my feet and the cool dew seeping up between my toes. In seconds I was able to home in on the source of the vibrations. In the amber glow of the streetlamp there was a rock roughly the size of a baseball. The good news was that the wards had worked as intended, stopping the object before it could reach my property. The bad news was that someone had hurled that rock at my house, no doubt intending to break a window and frighten me. It wasn’t until I picked up the rock that I saw the paper tied to it with twine. The twine had loosened enough for me to maneuver the note free and leave the rock where it had landed.

  I padded back inside and sat on the bottom step of the staircase to read it. I expected it to be in the same cheesy genre as the first one and I wasn’t disappointed: IF YOU INSIST ON PLAYING WITH FIRE, YOU’RE GOING TO WIND UP BURNED. My first instinct was to call the police, but I stopped myself before picking up the phone. It might be a whole lot more useful to report the incident to Duggan in person, to see his reaction up close and personal. In spite of the detective’s absence from the video footage, I hadn’t eliminated him from my list of suspects. It occurred to me that I should bring along the rock to have it tested for prints. Since I didn’t have the thin latex gloves police used in crime scene investigations, I did the next best thing. I grabbed a gallon plastic bag and went back outside. I stuck my hand into the bag, picked up the rock and pulled the bag inside out, freeing my hand and leaving the rock inside. Since I’d touched it briefly, I’d have to ask Duggan to take my prints in order to eliminate them from the results.

  After resetting the security system, I went upstairs, hoping for a few more hours of sleep. I crawled back into bed, but the cats remained restless for a while longer. When they finally resumed their places on the bed, they were sound asleep in seconds. I was less successful. My brain, still on an adrenalin high from my little adventure, refused to quiet down. It was busy coming up with a workable, if not foolproof, plan to find out if Westfield had been to see the dentist the day Jim was murdered. A dental alibi at the right time could mean he hadn’t been in the building for nefarious purposes.

  * * *

  Sashkatu and I went to my shop an hour before it was time to open. I brought the evidence along in a small shopping bag and locked it in my desk drawer behind the counter. Then I made the first of two phone calls. I didn’t know what time Dr. Silver started seeing patients, but I waited until nine, figuring that most of his staff would be in by then, and things should be humming along. The busier the office, the better my chance of wangling private patient information.

  “This is Monica, how may I help you?” asked a cheerful voice, after I’d made my way through the maze of their automated menu.

  “Good morning,” I said, “I’m calling from Dr.Westfield’s office. He asked me to schedule his next appointment for a cleaning. He forgot to do it when he was there. He said his hygienist gets booked so far in advance, he was concerned she wouldn’t be available if he waited too long.”

  “I’ll be happy to take care of that for you,” she said. “When did he want to come in?”

  “Well, that’s the only problem. He doesn’t recall exactly when he was last in, and when I looked back on his calendar, I couldn’t find it. You know how it is with these geniuses,” I said with a low, conspiratorial laugh. “My boss can pinpoint the exact cause of any death, but at times he can’t tie his own shoelaces.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t discuss his last appointment or any other private patient information with anyone other than the patient or his authorized representative,” she said, clearly not taken in by my attempt at camaraderie.

  “Right. That would be me.”

  “Authorized representative,” she repeated, her cheery tone dialed down a few notches. “I’d need a signed waiver or verbal okay from him along with his social security number.”

  “He’s in the middle of performing an autopsy,” I explained. “He can’t possibly come to the phone.”

  “We�
��ll be happy to accommodate him when he’s available. Have a good—”

  “If Dr. Westfield didn’t authorize me to call you,” I interrupted her, “how would I have known which dentist to call?” Monica didn’t answer for a moment. Maybe they hadn’t covered that question in her privacy training. I could only hope. “Look, I’m not trying to be difficult. We’re both working girls. I don’t know what kind of boss Dr. Silver is, but I can tell you that Dr. Westfield has no tolerance for the words didn’t or couldn’t. He’s gone through four secretaries in two months. I’m a single mom and I really need this job.” I managed to say it with a catch in my voice. I was getting disturbingly good at lying. But it was either lie or use a little of Merlin’s “gray magick.” One way or the other, I wasn’t getting a gold star in ethics for this conversation.

  Monica whispered a date so softly that I barely heard her, then resumed her normal volume. “Six months brings us to December 8th. Would you like me to schedule him with his usual hygienist, Carol?”

  “That would be great.” Maybe I should have taken up acting.

  “Same time?” she asked.

  “Four o’clock, right?”

  That was the time he was clocked in on the video.

  “Yes. He’s all set then.”

  I thanked her and clicked off the call. I decided I couldn’t cross the ME off my list quite yet. Although he had been in the building to see the dentist, I could hardly count it as a perfect alibi, because he’d apparently left during the time the camera was down. I had no way to figure out exactly how much time he’d had between seeing Carol and getting back in his car. For all I knew, he could have hidden out in the bathroom in the shared hallway, waiting for the safest moment to walk into Jim’s office, kill him, and then leave without being seen. It would have been a difficult way to plan a murder though. He would have had to know that Ronnie generally left early every Wednesday and that was the easy part. What if the dentist was running behind that day? What if the procedure took longer than he expected? A killer would have needed nerves of steel to deal with the stress from all those ifs. It was a good thing I’d never contemplated a life of crime. I would have folded from the pressure before I ever left home.

  My last call of the morning was to Detective Duggan. He seemed surprised to hear from me. But then I was somewhat amazed to be making the call. Up until last night, I couldn’t have imagined a reason why I would want to speak to him again.

  “I need to see you as soon as possible,” I said after identifying myself. “It’s about the case.” As if it could have been about anything else.

  “Aw, and for a moment I thought you were asking me out.”

  “This is important.”

  “Okay, talk to me.”

  “I have some evidence for you.” I was determined to play this by my rules. I wanted to see his reaction, read it in his eyes and his body language, not try to judge it from the tone of his voice.

  “I don’t have time for games.”

  “Believe me, it’s no game. I’ll drive over to see you in Watkins Glen, if you prefer.”

  “I’m on the road, trying to do my job,” he snapped, clearly exasperated with me. He didn’t say anything for the next few moments. I waited for him to go on. There was nothing to be gained by pushing harder. You have to know your adversary. “I’m not too far from New Camel,” he said finally. “I’ll stop by your shop within the hour. This better be good.” He hung up without a goodbye, his warning hanging over me. I didn’t have long to worry about it, though. No sooner had I put down the phone than the first customers of the day walked in.

  Unless we were a stop on a bus tour, there were generally lulls between customers. That morning there were no lulls. Locals came in, needing refills of cosmetics and potions. Our products did seem to be working better since Merlin was around. Newcomers were arriving by the minute too. A lot of families with children. After a brief appraisal of the merchandise, a good deal of which was breakable, most of the parents chose to park younger kids outside with husbands or friends. The few who’d come alone with kids spent more time scolding them than looking at the products. I kept expecting to hear the crash of glass onto the hardwood.

  One intrepid mother brought her three-year-old along, without benefit of a stroller or tether. She looked vaguely familiar to me, but before I could figure out if I knew her from somewhere, her son pulled his hand free of hers and took off. She chased him all over the shop without success, until a sympathetic patron and I joined forces with her. We blocked his access to the aisles, but that made him head for the hallway. I caught up to him where the closed storeroom door had him stymied. I plucked him off the floor, before he could double back and passed him to his embarrassed mother, who was a few steps behind me. She thanked me, apologized, and promptly exited the shop, her son launching a tantrum in her arms.

  Although I was thrilled to have so many customers, the timing could hardly have been worse. Duggan would be arriving any minute. I poked my head into Tilly’s shop to beg for help. She listened to my predicament, beaming like a car with its brights on. Merlin stood beside her wearing a sly smile that made me nervous.

  “I’ll be happy to help,” she said.

  “I as well,” he echoed.

  “What is it with the two of you? You look like the cats that ate the canary and the goldfish.” I must have been rattled by the upcoming visit with Duggan, to have missed the signs from the get-go. “Okay, what exactly have you been up to?”

  “Some harmless advertising, my dear,” Tilly said. “Merlin wanted to help your business, so I explained what a billboard was and in no time at all, he whipped up a great ad.”

  I had a lot more questions, but I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to hear the answers. The noise issuing from my shop was growing in volume. “We’ll talk about this later,” I said. “Now I need you in there to help with the results of your advertising campaign. And Merlin, no more magick!”

  Duggan arrived in the middle of the chaos. He stood in the doorway, clearly bewildered by the number of people in the shop. I was standing at the counter, watching for him. When I spied him, I waved for him to follow me past the crowded aisles to the storeroom. I closed the door behind us to drown out some of the noise.

  “What’s going on here today?” he grumbled.

  “My Aunt Tilly’s been trying her hand at marketing,” I said.

  “From the looks of the place, she has a knack for it.” He pulled a little pad and pen out of his shirt pocket. “Okay, now that you got me here, where’s this so-called evidence?”

  “Let me start at the beginning. Someone’s been threatening me.” I watched for his reaction and didn’t see any signs of surprise. But then cops probably dealt with threats all the time and knew they were rarely carried out.

  “How?” He sounded bored.

  “The first time it was a note slipped under my door when I wasn’t home.”

  “The first time? How many incidents have there been?”

  “Two so far. The second was last night. Someone threw a large rock at my house with a note tied to it.”

  Duggan’s brow gathered into a frown, the sharp lines on the bridge of his nose digging in deeper. “Do any damage?” He was either a fine actor or he wasn’t the person behind the threats.

  “No, fortunately.” I didn’t mention that the wards had stopped the rock before it could reach my property. Adding magick to the mix would only have muddied the waters.

  He paused to write in his pad. Flipping it closed, he retired it and the pen to his pocket.

  “I have the notes and the rock with me. Do you want to see them?”

  “Wasn’t that the whole point of my coming down here, Ms. Wilde?” he asked with a sigh of forbearance.

  “Yes, yes of course,” I said, tripping over my words. “I meant, did you want to see them right now?” Not a great save. I’d been so busy monitoring his reactions, I wasn’t paying enough attention to my own words.

  “Now would be terrific
, unless you were going to offer me tea and crumpets first.”

  “I’ll run inside and grab them,” I said, turning on my heel and squelching a less polite rejoinder.

  I was only gone a minute, two tops. In that time, I must have fielded ten questions from customers. Tilly and Merlin were doing their best to help everyone, but Tilly looked frazzled, and Merlin’s face told me he was reaching the limits of his tolerance. I had to get back out there before he took control of the situation in his own, inimitable fashion.

  I did a slalom run around my patrons and found Duggan leaning against the wall in the hallway. I handed him the shopping bag with the evidence.

  “I’ll send this over to forensics, see if they can come up with anything,” he said taking it from me. “You’ll need to stop by the local substation and have them take your prints,” he said, exactly as I’d expected. He started to walk past me to the sales floor.

  “Wait. Will you let me know what they find?”

  He stopped and turned back to me. “I can’t promise anything that could compromise the investigation.” I was about to argue the point, but the grim set of his mouth warned me to let it go. “And in case I didn’t make it clear before, Miss Wilde, I’ll tell you one more time. Keep your nose out of police business.” He enunciated each syllable like my mother had when I was a kid and she’d caught me doing something expressly forbidden. “Got it?”

  “Yes, I’ve got it,” I said with a healthy dash of attitude myself.

  “Good. Because it’s obvious you don’t take orders well.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  He skewered me with a parting glare and strode off, telling everyone in the shop to make way. Following in his wake, I couldn’t resist calling out to him in a lilting tone, “have a nice day now!”

  Chapter 30

  After Merlin “took down” the billboard, business in my shop returned to its usual level of highs and lows. I didn’t even have to tell him to do it. He’d come to that sensible conclusion himself, after the Commissioner of the New York State Department of Transportation announced in a TV news bulletin that the perpetrators were being sought and, when found, would face a hefty fine and possible jail time. It seems Merlin had magickally “installed” the ad over an official transportation department sign on the thruway. He’d also infused it with properties similar to post-hypnotic suggestion. He could never be accused of doing things by half measure.