He answered on the third ring. “Hey, gorgeous.” He sounded tired but the hint of a smile warmed my heart and I found myself missing him. As much as I’d wanted the peace and quiet, I suddenly wanted the chaos and noise: Adam and Lacey taking shots at each other, Posy trying to break up the argument, Evangeline peppering me with questions about a new potion she wanted to attempt.
“Hey stranger,” I replied with a wistful smile as I removed my simmering soup from the heat. “How was the day?”
Adam answered my question by rattling off some string of words that all sounded like English, but with the amount of techy mumbo-gumbo mixed it, it may as well have been Swahili.
I laughed softly. “So … good?”
Adam chuckled. “Making progress.”
I poured the soup into a deep ceramic bowl, grabbed a sleeve of crackers from Adam’s snack cupboard, and made my way to the table. “How much longer are you going to be in Seattle?”
Adam heaved a sigh. “At least another day. They want me to double—and then triple—check the security to make sure this can’t happen again.”
“All right. Well try to hurry back,” I said.
“You getting lonely over there?” he asked flirtatiously. I pictured his face, the half-cocked smile he was sure to be wearing, and missed him all over again.
I threw on my best Scarlet O’Hara voice and said, “Oh, desperately! I do declare, I don’t know what to do with myself without you by my side.”
Adam laughed. “You’re impossible.”
“Just answer one question, what do you miss more? Me or the bakery?”
“Hmm. That’s a tough one—”
“Adam!”
“Come on, gorgeous,” he said, laughing. “That’s easy. Obviously, I miss Boots the most.”
I rolled my eyes and lounged back in my chair. “Who is this? And what have you done with my boyfriend?”
“He’ll be fine. You can have him back in exchange for two cinnamon rolls with extra frosting.”
I laughed under my breath. “That sounds more like the Adam I know.”
He joined in my easy laughter and I relaxed against the chair. “You know I miss you like crazy.”
“But you still want the cinnamon rolls,” I quipped.
“Well …”
“Listen, there’s actually something I wanted to ask you,” I said, leaning forward. I propped my elbows on the edge of the table and twirled my spoon through my rapidly cooling soup. “Off the topic of pastries.”
Adam chuckled and then replied, “Fire when ready.”
“What do you know about the Molder family?”
“Vamps?”
“Yeah.”
He sighed and asked warily, “Why?”.
I frowned into my soup. He really wasn’t going to like the second part of my question. “Let’s just say, hypothetically of course, that I may need to know exactly what they’re capable of in case I need to talk to a few of them.”
“And why would you need to talk to them?” Adam asked, his irritation rising.
“I said it was hypothetical.”
“Holly …”
I squeezed my eyes closed and rattled off the facts as though the speed of delivery would somehow soften the blow. “Because I think Nick’s client might be one—or was married to one—till he ended up dead in a hotel room bathtub. Oh, and the woman he was last seen with has gone missing.”
At the end of my explanation, Adam groaned. “Holly …”
“I know, I know. Trust me, I don’t go looking for these situations. I just always seem to land in the middle of them.” I really needed to figure out why that was. “But Adam, if this is really something to do with the Molder family, I can’t just let Nick figure it out on his own. He’s no match for any of them, and you know it. I know you and Nick have your differences, but you don’t want him to end up getting taken down by some vampire on a binge.”
A long moment of silence stretched out between us.
“Adam?”
“Okay, okay. Fine,” he growled. “But Holly, you have to promise me that you’ll stay far away from the Molders. You might think you have an inkling as to how dangerous they are, but I can assure you, the stories you’ve heard are not only true, but just the tip of the iceberg. If you don’t believe me, just ask Lacey.”
I glanced up at the ceiling and trained my eyes in the general direction of Lacey’s room. She was likely already out of the house for the night but I made a mental note to corner her as soon as she got back. “I promise I won’t go looking for trouble. But I have to keep Nick safe.”
Adam didn’t say anything, but his silence relayed his disapproval loud and clear.
The rest of the conversation was tense, and no matter how I tried to wiggle back into his good graces, I wasn’t able to recapture the ease and flirtation it started with. After a few more false starts, we wrapped up the call and said goodnight. I ended the call and set it on the table beside my bowl of soup, then glanced down at Boots. “Be thankful you’re a cat, Bootsie.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
A knock on the front door interrupted my miserable dinner as I sulked over my bowl of soup, regretting the frosty conversation with Adam. Boots was asleep on the tufted cat bed by the back door and didn’t raise his head at the sound. The manor was still quiet, and after the second knock I decided that I was home alone. I could normally count on Posy to float through the kitchen wall and tell me who was out on the porch waiting to be let in, but even she was absent. I shoved up from my place at the table, abandoned my now-cold soup, and went to answer the door.
Chief Lincoln was waiting on the front steps. He was dressed casually in a pair of dark jeans and a puffy waterproof coat. He reached up and tipped the bill of his ball cap. “Evening, Holly.”
“Hello, Chief.” I glanced behind me, unsure if I should let him in. The coast still looked clear and without Adam around to provoke Lacey, things would likely remain quiet. As long as Harvey didn’t come wandering through, we should be safe. Harvey, unlike the rest of my supernatural roomies, would be harder to explain. Lacey could hide her fangs, Evangeline could keep her magic wand stowed out of sight, and humans couldn’t see Posy, but a three-and-a-half-foot-tall goblin-hybrid with sharp teeth and a grouchy disposition would be harder to explain away. “Did you want to come inside?” I asked, turning back to face him. It wasn’t the kind of night for a talk on the front porch. While the rain had stopped, it was still bitterly cold and a wind was whipping through the trees that enclosed the property.
Chief Lincoln nodded and I took a step back to allow him entrance. “Thank you.”
“We can go into the sitting room.”
He nodded and then followed my lead. “I take it you already know what this visit is in regards to.”
We entered the sitting room and I waited for him to sit down on the loveseat before I took my place on the couch. I nodded. “Nick came by the shop today. He told me you had some questions for me.”
“Okay. Good.” Chief Lincoln unzipped his jacket and dug out the small moleskin notebook he always had on him. I’d once asked Cassie if he took it to bed with him. She’d gone a splendid shade of maroon and ignored the question.
“He didn’t give me any details,” I hurried to add. The last thing I wanted to do was get Nick in trouble. “Just that Mr. Banks was found dead and that the woman we saw him with was nowhere to be found.”
Chief Lincoln flipped to a fresh page. “Well, as you likely know, I can’t provide much more information than what you already know. It’s an open investigation but there’s no question that this was a murder. As such, I need to get your official statement as to what you saw last night.”
I laced my fingers together and anchored them in my lap to keep them from twitching. “Nick was taking me home from work and got the call from his client, Mrs. Banks, and I volunteered to go with him to the hotel—”
“And how is it that Mr. Rivers knew where the victim would be?”
I
blinked, assuming Nick had already provided that detail. “Um, Georgia—Mrs. Banks—gave him the address. I think she texted it to him and he put it into the GPS.”
Chief Lincoln rolled his fingers through the air. “Right, but where did she get that information?”
I swallowed hard. “Nick said she put an app on his phone. It tracked him. She thought he was cheating on her and she wanted to get proof. Something about breaking a pre-nup. It sounded messy.”
Chief Lincoln didn’t say anything as he continued to scribble notes down. “Go on. What happened when you got to the hotel?”
I shifted in my seat. It was time to downplay the entire scene. “Mr. Banks was there, in the parking lot, with a brunette. I don’t know who she was, but it was definitely not Mrs. Banks.”
“How did they seem?”
I shrugged a shoulder. “Happy. Carefree. Passionate. If I’d just seen them, and didn’t know the background, I would have thought they were a long-term couple.”
Chief Lincoln glanced up from his note-taking. “Did you overhear any of their conversation?
“No.” I shook my head. “To be blunt, Chief, it didn’t look like they were there to talk if you know what I mean …” My cheeks warmed. I didn’t want to fill in the blanks. Detailing how the victims were philandering in the shadows of the hotel wasn’t exactly a play-by-play I wanted to give to Chief Lincoln.
“Right.” He leaned forward, as though preparing to push up from his seat. “And after they went inside, you didn’t see anything else? Anyone else in the lot or going into the hotel?”
“No. Well—”
“What?”
“When Nick was getting the camera, I thought they’d gone inside. The door was swinging shut like someone had just gone in. But then they came out from the shadows along the side of the hotel. So someone else must have gone in. Or out, I suppose. But I didn’t see them.”
Chief Lincoln frowned. “We’re pulling the security footage so if someone else was there, we’ll find out.”
I nodded. “Smart. Do you think this was a random attack?”
Chief Lincoln set his pen down in the binding of his notebook. “We’re not sure. It has a personal feel to it. A crime of passion, if you will.”
“So you think it was the woman he was with?”
“Honestly? Considering the nature of the attack, I would be surprised if it was a woman. There was a struggle. A nasty one, from what we can gather. Judging by the photographs Nick provided, Paul Banks had a good fifty pounds on his date and at least three inches.”
“Probably more,” I interjected. Chief Lincoln raised his brows and I shrugged sheepishly. “She was wearing killer heels. I have a thing for shoes …”
He picked up his pen and took down another note. “In any case, unless she had some kind of adrenaline-fueled moment of super strength, I don’t think she could have held her own in a physical fight with the victim and managed to do as much damage as the murderer did.”
I shuddered. I didn’t want to dwell on the crime scene, especially if my suspicion about vampires being involved was true. After all, they have a thing for blood.
“Is there anything else that you think might help?”
I considered his question and then shook my head. “Not really. Nick took some pictures before they went inside. It was cold and getting late. So he drove me home, dropped me off here, and that was it.”
Chief Lincoln wedged his pen between the notebook’s pages and tucked it back into his jacket’s interior pocket. He zipped his jacket up to the neck and offered a polite smile. “Thank you, Holly. By now you know the drill, if I have any other questions—”
“You’ll let me know.”
He smiled and gave me a nod. “That’s right.”
We stood and I escorted him back to the front door. A blast of cold air greeted us as I opened the door and Chief Lincoln frowned as he looked out into the night.
“You all right, Chief?”
He hesitated for a moment before bringing his gaze back to mine. “It’s just been a long day, that’s all.” Something about the way he said it made me think there was more going on inside his head. I paused, not sure if it was my place to pry. He was dating my best friend, but he also struck me as an extremely private person and a man of few words. After another long moment, he sighed. “I’ve never seen anything like the crime scene today. It was something out of a horror movie, Holly. These things aren’t supposed to happen here in Beechwood Harbor or our neighboring communities.”
I nodded, agreeing with his grim assessment. “Trust me, Chief, this isn’t exactly what I signed up for when I moved here either.”
A slight smile tugged at his lips. “I’ll bet.”
“It’s a good thing we have good cops, like you and your deputies. I know you’ll find out who did this and make sure that justice is served.”
“Thank you, Holly.” The emotion in his eyes almost startled me. I’d never seen him look so raw. Whatever had been waiting on the other side of that hotel room’s door had rattled him. Big time.
The realization sank deep into the pit of my stomach and ignited the urgency to figure out who was behind the attack and why. Chief Lincoln was a good cop—and an excellent shot as I’d learned months before—but if the Molder family was involved … he wouldn’t stand a chance.
“Goodnight, Holly. Thank you for your time.”
“Anytime, Chief. Let me know if there is anything else I can do to help.”
He looked ready to argue, to give me the same speech he’d given me on two other occasions—stay out of it—but at the last moment, he appeared to have a change of heart and swallowed the warning. He smiled, tipped his hat, and left the manor.
I watched as he walked down the path leading to the sidewalk where his unmarked car was parked. Once he was behind the wheel, I shut the front door and dragged in a deep breath. The people of Beechwood Harbor had all become like family to me and I would go to the Otherworld and back if that’s what it took to keep them all safe. Despite Adam’s warnings and worrying, despite the danger, and likely despite my own better judgment, I wasn’t going to stand by and let anyone I loved get hurt.
“What was that about?”
My heart leapt into my throat at the sound of Harvey’s gravelly voice and I whipped around to find him standing at the base of the staircase. His arms were crossed and his beady eyes were narrowed in my direction, giving him a menacing look. I wrapped my own arms around myself and returned his harsh glare. “Spying on me now?”
Harvey didn’t so much as blink. “Why was the police chief here?”
I didn’t even waste my breath asking how he knew who Chief Lincoln was. “It’s none of your business, Harvey. It’s a town matter.”
I considered asking him what he knew about the Molder family, and briefly wondered if they had anything to do with his arrival in town. But before I could ask, he snapped his fingers and vanished right in front of my eyes.
I stared, open-mouthed, at the place he’d just stood. “I did not know he could do that,” I said to the empty room.
CHAPTER NINE
The following morning I wandered into town and made my way to Siren’s Song even though I wasn’t on the schedule. I needed a caffeine fix and a pastry the size of my head. Siren’s Song could provide both, and a visit would give me an excuse to hang around, listen to the town gossip, and see if anyone had anything to say that might be helpful. Surely by now, everyone knew that a grisly murder had been committed just outside of town, and there was no doubt that everyone would have an opinion and half-cocked theory. If I was lucky, some of the chit-chat might prove to be valuable.
Cassie turned to greet me as I stumbled inside. “Morning, Holly.”
“Morning.” I shuffled to the counter. “Coffee. Bear claw. Stat.”
“Perfecting your Walking Dead audition?” Cassie asked with a laugh. She picked up a pair of tongs and snagged a pastry from the front case. “You’d think you would be more of a morni
ng person. You’ve been working here for almost a year now.”
I shrugged. “My body rebels and goes back to its true nature on my days off.”
She handed the pastry over and then went to work pouring a large coffee. “What’s on your agenda for the day?” she asked. Cassie didn’t know about my side business and when I’d asked to cut back my hours at the coffee shop, I’d had to convince her that I was taking some online classes. Which was only half a lie. I’d been studying potion work and spending more time with textbooks and ancient scrolls than I had since my academy days.
“Not too much today,” I replied. I cast a glance around the shop and frowned as I realized there were only three other customers in the seating area. All of them were wearing earbuds and didn’t look like they were likely to launch into a lively discussion of a recent murder case anytime soon. The Lucky Lady Salon would be the place to go for fresh gossip. All the older, retired ladies in Beechwood Harbor liked to gather there and they always had the best dirt. But it would take hours to glean anything useful, and I’d have to endure their nosing and prodding about my relationship with Adam. No, it would be best to have Posy flag down Gwen later and get the scoop. Gwen was a permanent fixture at the salon and would be able to give me the rundown. Ghosts really had it easy—endless eavesdropping and the freedom to leave at any time, without the pressure of making up an excuse when the conversation got boring.
“If you want, you could come over tonight after we close. Kirra, Paisley, and I are doing a movie and manicure night.” Cassie set my coffee in front of me. “Jeffery’s working some big case and had to cancel our normal date, so I’ve declared it girl’s night.”
“Sounds fun. I’ll have to see what’s going on with Adam. He’s supposed to be coming home. Hopefully tonight.”
“Oh, yeah!” Cassie’s sapphire eyes sparkled. “When are his parents coming into town?”
Witch Slapped: A Beechwood Harbor Magic Mystery (Beechwood Harbor Magic Mysteries Book 3) Page 6
