Wisteria Warned

by Angela Pepper

  The white-haired woman looked at her watch, then gave us a sweet smile. “That’s right. A missing person. She’s a woman with two young boys.” She pursed her wrinkled lips. “But I’m afraid I don’t know her name.”

  Bentley gave me another look. I gave him a small shrug. It was a nuisance call, all right, but at least the cookies, tea, and conversation had been pleasant enough.

  In the silence, Temperance Krinkle reached across the table and stroked one finger across the top of my hand. I was startled, but didn’t jerk my hand away. Her fingertip felt dry and smooth, more like a pink eraser than a finger.

  She looked straight at me, with her one magnified green eye that looked twice the size of the other, and asked, “Tell me, dear, are you friends with the Gilberts?”

  “Sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t know any Gilberts.”

  “Are you sure? They’re a very old family who have lived here for many generations. Everyone knows a Gilbert.”

  “I’m not from around here. I’m new in town, just like Bentley. I got here in March, and I’ve been busy with work ever since.” Busy with work, and magic, and all sorts of things.

  “Oh,” she said, sounding disappointed. “Then it wasn’t you I saw last month—no, back in May, it was—at Queenie Gilbert’s memorial. I could have sworn you were there. Not many women have your beautiful fine features and stunning red hair.”

  I grinned at Bentley. This visit hadn’t been a waste of time at all.

  The woman murmured, “I could have sworn you were there.”

  “You must be thinking of Zara’s aunt,” Bentley said. “The two are what you English folks would call the spitting image of each other. You’d think someone put Zinnia Riddle in a copy machine and made a duplicate.”

  “A younger duplicate,” I said. “Much younger. And more fun.”

  Temperance Krinkle rubbed her chin, which was covered in a soft-looking white fuzz. “That must be it. My old eyes are not what they used to be.” She waved her finger at me. “But I can still spot a stunning woman, and both you and your aunt are very special, indeed.”

  I fanned my face with my hand. “Why, thank you. Now, as much as I’d love to sit in your charming dining room all day, eating gingersnaps and getting accurate compliments, we should probably get on the case of this missing woman you called about. If she’s a mother, her children must be missing her. Is there anything you can tell us that might be helpful? If not her name, then maybe a detailed description? Or the location where she was last seen?”

  Mrs. Krinkle pushed her chair back and stood. “The location question is easy,” she said. “She was last seen in my attic. I’ll take you there now.”

  She turned and led the way out of the dining room.

  Bentley looked at me.

  I mimed both of us being stabbed by a giant knife in the attic.

  Bentley stared at me, wide-eyed.

  I mimed both of us being shot at point-blank range.

  Bentley shook his head, then nodded for me to follow him up to the attic.

  I mimed calling for backup on the radio.

  He stopped and said, “We’ll go for lunch soon enough, Zara. Do you ever stop eating?”

  “This is the radio,” I said, holding up the mimed object in my hand. “As in, should we call for backup?”

  “Backup to go into a sweet old widow’s attic? What’s she going to do? Bore us to death with more stories? I’ll take my chances. Come on.”

  I held up both hands. “All right, but if she does anything alarming, promise you’ll bite her on the neck.”

  He grimaced, pretended to gag, then turned and led the way.

  Chapter 8

  As I followed Bentley up the creaky, narrow, seldom-used attic stairs, I silently cast a threat-detection spell. Bentley had his backup, and I had mine.

  The spell was the magical equivalent of entering a scary, dark room and calling out, “Hello? Is anyone there?” It didn’t detect much, but it was better than nothing. The spell would highlight the most basic traps or monsters.

  In fact, as the spell spread out in its wave, it highlighted the form of Detective Bentley with an eerie red glow. Monster detected.

  He paused on the steps and peered back at me. “Did you say something?” He narrowed his silver eyes. “Or do something?”

  “Nothing to be concerned about.” I waved him onward. The red glow would only be visible to me, the caster.

  My head popped above the floor of the attic, and I immediately saw another object glowing. It was an oversized metal chair. I guess it was either a rustic throne or a fancy garden chair. It glowed amethyst.

  Neither Bentley nor Krinkle showed any sign of having seen the glow on the chair.

  When an object glowed amethyst after a threat-detection spell, it meant the object had magical properties. If the properties were strong, it was called an? Animus. My aunt had demonstrated the spell on a special writing pen she wouldn’t let me touch. This chair’s glow was less than one-quarter the brightness I’d seen on the pen.

  If an object had magical properties, that didn’t mean the object itself was good or bad. But any object could be used in good or bad ways—like the jinxed table that Maisy Nix had stuck my hands to.

  Krinkle flipped a light switch, and multiple strings of festive patio lanterns flickered on, lighting the dusty attic. The edges of the space were lined with storage boxes, of the type you’d expect to find in an attic. In the center of the room were two ping-pong tables next to each other, holding up a miniature town.

  “This is neat,” Bentley exclaimed, looking over the miniature town. “It’s so lifelike!”

  Krinkle let out a knowing chuckle. “Even the most mature man turns into a little boy when he sees a train set.” She leaned over the table and clicked something. “Wait until you see this.”

  A model train emerged from a cave, and noisily wound its way through what appeared to be a scale replica of the town of Wisteria, albeit a version that was over a hundred years old. The buildings were old fashioned, and the space where the City Hall building would eventually be constructed was still an untouched patch of forest.

  I leaned over the town, looking for what any woman in my kitten heels would have looked for: my own house.

  And there it was, standing on its corner, painted a cheerful shade of red.

  Bentley, who’d apparently forgotten our search for the missing woman who was last seen in the attic, said, “This model should be on display somewhere.”

  “In a museum,” I said.

  “Or somewhere nicer than a museum,” he said. “This model is amazing. Someone worked very hard on this.”

  “My husband built the whole thing,” Krinkle said. “I helped with a few details, learning as I went, but he was the one who spent many a happy hour up here. Do you really think it’s amazing?”

  “It’s the finest town I’ve ever seen,” Bentley said. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. Krinkle was right about the toy houses bringing out the little boy in him.

  Krinkle said, “Some of our friends felt my husband should have made a contemporary version, even updating it as new buildings sprang up. But my husband, rest his soul, stuck to his vision. He wanted to hold onto a time period that represented the best of our beloved town, back when it was more wholesome and pure.”

  Wholesome and pure? Bentley and I exchanged a look across the model. He flashed his eyes at me, as if to warn me not to ask the old woman what she meant by pure.

  “What do you mean by pure?” I asked.

  Bentley slapped his hand to his forehead.

  “Before television, of course,” she said. “Television, the internet, video games, Polaroid pictures.”

  “Right.” I didn’t point out that Polaroid pictures had been replaced by the powerful cameras everyone carried around as part of their phones.

  We talked about the model for a while, with Krinkle pointing out town landmarks, and Bentley admiring the detailed craftsmanship. They
reset the train and ran it through its whole course several times.

  Eventually, begrudgingly, Bentley brought the conversation back around to the missing persons report.

  “She didn’t go missing from this town model, if that’s what you’re implying,” Krinkle said, sounding offended.

  “Of course not,” Bentley said. “That would be crazy. You’re a fine, upstanding citizen, Mrs. Krinkle, and you wouldn’t waste police time looking for a tiny wooden model.”

  “Of course not,” she repeated, indignant. “The woman didn’t disappear from the town model. All of those people are glued down, and they’re so small you can barely tell if they’re male or female.” Krinkle stepped back from the two ping-pong tables, and turned toward a dark corner of the attic. “She went missing from this house over here.”

  Krinkle whipped a dust sheet off another model. This one was on a larger scale, and only a single house. It was a classic dollhouse, with one wall missing so that all the rooms were visible.

  Bentley and I joined her in the dark corner to get a closer look. Mrs. Krinkle was not playing with a full deck of cards, so to speak, but if the dollhouse was as well crafted as the town, we both wanted to see it.

  The house had three bedrooms and two bathrooms over three levels. Unlike the town model, the house was contemporary. Inside it were scale model furniture as well as three dolls. There was a man—the father, presumably—and two small children. The father stood by the front door, as though greeting a visitor. Deeper inside the house, one child sat at the dining room table, next to a stack of books. He appeared to be doing homework. The other child stood in the kitchen, rummaging in the refrigerator, which had a working hinge on the door. Upstairs in the master bedroom, there were female clothes shown in the closet—not actual clothes, but a drawing of dresses and feminine outfits, glued to the closet wall. There was no female doll present.

  “You’re right,” I said to Krinkle in a professional tone. I was, after all, a “special consultant” who worked with the detective. “The mother has gone missing.”

  Bentley gave the dollhouse a serious inspection, poking his finger into dark spaces and opening the doors with hinges. “Ma’am, I can’t promise it will be a top priority, but I will look into the matter of your missing person.” He managed to keep a straight face.

  “You two don’t need to humor me,” Krinkle said. “My mother didn’t raise any fools. I would never waste your time looking for a two-inch-tall wooden doll.”

  “You wouldn’t?” He gave her a sidelong look.

  “It will make more sense if I show you,” she said.

  Krinkle waved us over to a shelving unit. She whipped the dust covers off three more dollhouses of a similar scale.

  “I made all of these months ago,” she said.

  The first two were crime scenes that I recognized immediately. The third was a location I wasn’t familiar with, but guessing by the puddle of fake blood—I hoped it was fake—on the carpet, it was also a crime scene.

  I kept my mouth shut. I snuck a peek over at the iron chair. The amethyst glow was all but gone.

  Bentley said, “You made these months ago?”

  “Yes,” she said, then stepped back to give us space.

  Bentley pulled a flashlight from his pocket, and shone it over the dollhouses. The attic was dim where we stood, and the bright beam of the flashlight passing over the tiny homicide scenes made them only more gruesome.

  First, there was a replica of a single room—a bathroom. In it was a picture that told the story of a crime. A woman lay motionless in an old-fashioned clawfoot bath tub, a toaster next to her in the water. I touched the water carefully. It was hard. A clear resin.

  Next, there was a stand-alone garage with a car inside the garage, and an apartment on the upper floor. In the apartment, sitting on the tiny black leather sofa was another doll. It wore a man’s clothes, and had no head. The top of the cut neck had been painted red.

  The third model was an office interior with several desks, and a dark-haired woman in a green dress lying in a pool of blood.

  “I know the first two,” I murmured to Bentley. “The first one’s my house, and the second is the Greyson case.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know the third one? You don’t suppose it’s something that’s going to happen, do you? We have to stop it. We have to save that lady.”

  “It’s too late,” he murmured back. “That one has already happened. I told you I read the whole report. It was the one your aunt—”

  Krinkle interrupted, speaking sharply. “You do understand what this means, don’t you?”

  We did? I didn’t.

  Bentley, with a poker face, said, “I’d like to hear it in your own words, if you don’t mind.”

  Mrs. Krinkle spoke as she folded the dust covers. “The images come to me in dreams. I can’t sleep or focus on anything else until I’ve built the models that show the images from my dreams. It’s a psychic gift I have, the one that runs in my family. You’ll remember I told you about my mother, and her journals.”

  Bentley nodded for her to go on.

  She explained further, enunciating each word carefully, almost as though she was giving us a rehearsed speech, or lines from a play.

  “I built the first model, of the woman on the office floor, and then, a few days later, I read in the newspaper that someone actually was murdered in one of the offices at City Hall. I told myself it just a coincidence. But then I build the second one, and it happened again. And the third.” She squinted, squeezing out a single tear that gleamed down her wrinkled cheek. “Oh, Detective Bentley! You simply must do something. You have to stop the fourth one from happening. I couldn’t live with myself if it came true.”

  Bentley and I wordlessly returned our attention to the dollhouse with the allegedly missing woman.

  “This isn’t like the others,” I said. “There’s no body. It doesn’t even imply that a crime has happened. There are three living people in this house, and no body. No blood.”

  “My partner is right,” Bentley said to Krinkle. “By the logic of the other models, if something were to happen to the woman from this family, you would have built a model showing that.”

  “But magic isn’t logical,” Krinkle said. “Don’t you know? Magic has a mind of its own.” She looked directly at me. “That’s something my mother used to tell me. I didn’t believe her, of course. Not until now. Not until I finally became old enough and wise enough to understand that she was right about everything.” She patted her chest with one wrinkled hand. “Magic is real, and it uses all of us as its agents.”

  Bentley stared at the dollhouse a solid minute before asking, “How long do we have? When will this woman go missing?”

  “Soon,” Krinkle said faintly. “It’s just a feeling, like my dreams, but I believe she’ll be taken soon.”

  “I’ll put a crime scene team on the case,” he said. “Our first step will be identifying the residence and the potential victim.” He reached for the base of the model.

  Krinkle shrieked and put her small body between Bentley and the dollhouse. “This can’t leave the attic. Please don’t ask me to explain how I know. I just do.”

  He looked at me.

  I shrugged.

  He frowned. Some help I was.

  I shrugged again. Magic dollhouses were way out of my areas of expertise.

  Krinkle asked sweetly, “Can the crime scene people come here?”

  “They’ll have to,” Bentley said. “I’ll tell them they have to keep the dollhouse here, in the attic.”

  She looked at her watch again. “How soon can they get here?”

  Chapter 9

  TWO HOURS LATER

  Once again, Bentley and I sat with Temperance Krinkle in her dining room. The gingersnaps were all gone. I was getting really tired of looking at glued-together jigsaw puzzles.

  Two floors above us, a forensics team of three people—one who knew about magic, plus two junio
r investigators fresh out of school—did their work. The two who didn’t know about magic had been told the dollhouse was a training exercise to teach them lateral thinking. The person leading the team, the one who knew about magic, was Dr. Jeremiah Lund, a coroner with the DWM.

  Dr. Lund had set up the on-site testing equipment in the attic, then left the other two to work while he gave Mrs. Krinkle a brief physical exam. He had declared the elderly widow to be in sound physical condition. She’d taken this as good news, happily proclaiming herself fit to begin her world travels. Lund was eager to continue testing the woman. A little too eager. He had pulled out an enormous needle to draw blood when Bentley put a stop to Lund’s plans.

  I was left wondering if Bentley’s objection was about the drawing of blood in his presence, or that taking such physical samples was far beyond standard protocol for examining a witness who’d allegedly witnessed a future crime in her dreams and built a dollhouse to tell the story.

  Krinkle refilled my tea cup. The pot had gone cold, but we were both sipping it anyway. Bentley hadn’t touched his.

  “What an odd little man,” Krinkle commented about Lund. “Or do you suppose all doctors are like that these days? I wouldn’t know. I haven’t been to a doctor in decades. ‘Stay away from hospitals,’ my mother always told me. ‘That’s where they keep the diseases.’” She took a dainty sip of her cold herbal tea. “I do calisthenics every morning to keep my bones strong. It works. You heard the odd little doctor. I have very healthy bones. Not one single break.”

  Bentley shifted in his chair. An ugly expression crossed his face.

  “I would hate to break a bone,” Krinkle said, as though answering a question, though one hadn’t been asked. “It must hurt terribly. I can’t even imagine.”

  Bentley picked up his tea cup, which looked even more delicate when encased in his big hand, and slurped back the cold tea in one swallow. “Broken bones are no picnic,” he said, setting the cup on its saucer with a soft clink.

  He would know. My stomach twisted at the memory. He’d gotten nearly every bone in his arms and legs busted by a rampaging iguammit. The vial of blood he’d taken to give him supernatural strength had fixed the breaks, yet it hadn’t erased the memory of the pain. It must have been excruciating. I almost felt sorry for the guy.