Wisteria Warned

by Angela Pepper

  Bentley wasn’t listening. “My car,” he said, his eyes unfocused. “I remember you using a spell when we were chasing the genie. You used it to locate my car, through me.”

  “That’s right. I guess all of your memories have come back.” When we’d worked together on the Greyson case, his memories of the events at Castle Wyvern had been foggy. But then he’d bitten into that vial of blood, and everything had changed.

  He said, “But you can’t use the spell to locate people.” It was a statement of fact, yet he gave me a hopeful look.

  “Sadly, no. If I could, the Tate woman wouldn’t still be missing.” Neither would Corvin. “There is a spell for locating an evil presence, but it requires at least two witches, and the evil thing’s true name. I’ve never done it, but my aunt has. Oh, and there’s a way to locate the place where something tragic happened, if you have a ghost plus some physical remains such as bones—neither of which we have.”

  “But you can locate objects.”

  “Not just any object. It has to be something strongly connected to a person. The object must believe it has a master. Your car is a good car. It believes you are its master, as we found out.”

  Bentley, still looking like he was only hearing about a third of what I was saying, picked up a salt shaker from the counter. “I’ve got an idea,” he said.

  “Involving a shaker of salt? I like where you’re going with this, but it’s too early in the day for tequila shots. You can only drink tequila for breakfast if a gorgon is present.”

  He ignored my joke—as he should have—and explained what he’d been thinking.

  It was a very good idea, I had to admit.

  I couldn’t use magic to locate Mrs. Tate or Corvin, but something else had gone missing. The tiny doll from the miniature Tate residence.

  How had Bentley thought of it?

  He explained that my salt shaker caught the light from the window in just the right way that it had made him think of the dollhouse figurines.

  “Brilliant,” I said. “If the dollhouse does have Animata energy, I may be able to tap into that energy and locate the doll version of Veronica Tate.”

  “Might it direct you instead to the woman the doll represents?”

  “It’s a long shot, but it can’t hurt to try,” I said to the detective. “If the dollhouse is the master to the doll, something could happen.”

  “Get ready to go,” he said.

  I patted my purse, which was already at my side. “Don’t I look ready?”

  He winced. “I’m no expert on fashion, but I believe you’re wearing pajama bottoms.”

  I looked down. He was right. I was dressed on top, wearing a cute blouse over my distracting bra, but I’d only gotten halfway dressed that morning.

  “Good eye,” I said. “I was testing you.” The vow I’d made to tell him the truth had a bit of wiggle room when it came to joking around.

  “You’re always testing me,” he said, raising one eyebrow. “The pajamas look comfortable. It’s interesting seeing this casual side of you.”

  “If you like seeing these pajamas, you should drop in for breakfast more often.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  And, just like that, we were back to flirting again.

  When I went upstairs, a pair of jeans were flying out of my closet and settling onto my bed.

  Chapter 20

  Bentley’s idea about using the dollhouse to locate the missing woman was a magnificent one. As we set out, I had high hopes. If our plan worked, my daughter would return home from her first day of work to find Corvin waiting to swap adventure stories with her.

  The detective and I arrived at Temperance Krinkle’s residence to find no outward signs of trouble at the cream-colored house. The DWM knew how to keep a low profile.

  I almost expected to see Temperance Krinkle’s face when the front door opened, but it was a humorless agent in sunglasses. Krinkle was not in the house. According to the agent, she’d been taken elsewhere for questioning, but she was “perfectly safe.”

  Bentley explained the reason for our visit. The agent’s lip curled even higher at each mention of magic.

  *

  After getting the run-around from multiple levels of DWM agents, none of whom I knew personally, we finally got access to the attic around noon.

  The attic didn’t look much different from how it had been during our previous visit, except the giant model of Wisteria had been pushed to the side of the space. We squeezed past stacks of boxes to get into the main space, and Bentley tripped over something low and dark—a heavy toolbox.

  “Mr. Clumsy Feet,” I teased him.

  “Why is there a toolbox right where a person would be walking?”

  I sighed. “Why is there always a fluffy cat right where a person would be walking?”

  He gave me a puzzled look.

  I explained, “Since getting a cat, I’ve become much more aware of the space directly in front of my feet. You could call it my Sixth Sense.”

  “Sure,” he said dismissively, and then he went to where the model of the Tate house should have been.

  He cursed under his breath.

  I joined him and looked down at the bad news.

  Unfortunately, the model of the Tate house wasn’t a house at all. It was a pile of pieces.

  “What happened?” I asked. “Is this standard WPD procedure? Destroy all evidence?”

  Bentley shook his head. “The junior technicians believed the model was a training exercise. They must have decided that dismantling it for hidden clues would get them full marks.”

  “I’m giving them an F. Bring those ding-dongs up here and I’ll give them a piece of my mind.”

  “What’s done is done. Let’s focus on what we can do.” He sifted through the loose pieces. “Everything’s still here. Run your spell on this.”

  I put my hands into the mess and tried, but the energy was all wrong.

  I broke the news that we needed to put the house back together to give the spell a shot at working.

  We got to work, only to discover we needed glue. And glue was the type of everyday item the crime scene technicians and agents guarding the residence didn’t have. Whatever glue Krinkle had used to make the houses in the first place had been taken elsewhere for testing. What a bunch of ding-dongs!

  Off to the hobby store we went, to buy glue.

  Then back to the Krinkle residence.

  When we came in, one of the more cooperative agents gave Bentley an update. Still no breaks in the case. Still no ransom call.

  We were coming up on twenty-four hours.

  It didn’t look good.

  I focused on putting the house puzzle back together. I had to keep my mind off the heartbreak and worry Chet must have been going through. I wondered how Chessa was feeling. She hadn’t been part of adopting the dog who later turned out to be a hellhound shifter, but she was engaged to Chet Moore. She would be the kid’s stepmother soon.

  Something troubled me. Chessa had more powers than either of her gorgon sisters. If my senses were correct, she had more power than every supernatural person in Wisteria put together. Why hadn’t she located the kid?

  As I glued together tiny bricks to form a tiny chimney, I had to wonder, could Chessa have something to do with Corvin’s disappearance? Was it possible she wanted him out of the picture? That would explain why she hadn’t used her goddess powers to find him yet.

  When I talked through my worries with Bentley, he had a different take on things.

  “She has the power to destroy worlds, right?”

  I shuddered. “Something like that.”

  “But power isn’t everything. You can put the biggest, toughest guy in front of a pile of hay, and he won’t find the needle before the skinny guy with the magnet.”

  “You’ve made your point,” I admitted with a sigh. “Speaking of magnets, I wish my powers were more useful sometimes. A lot of witch spells are focused on boring domestic activities. Cooking t
hings. Ironing things. Dusting the tops of shelves where nobody can even see.”

  “This object location trick of yours is going to work. It has to.” He picked up the miniature telephone between his thumb and forefinger. “But just in case it doesn’t, what else can you do besides the domestic stuff?”

  “There’s the whole Spirit Charmed aspect, which you know about already.” I listed items on my fingers. “Plus, I can zap people with blue lightning balls, make a human being as light as a feather, and then there are even more amazing things, such as the spell to detect the most perfectly ripe cantaloupe from a pyramid at the grocery store.”

  “Handy.”

  “I can also animate things to some degree. For example, I can animate a houseplant to grab passing pets, or I can trip the pets with an invisible tripwire—but not too much, because it’s only funny the first dozen times.” I listed off more spells, then added, “And don’t forget the spell for making perfectly round melon balls.”

  “A lot of your spells are connected to melons,” he noted. “If only our missing persons had gone missing with a grocery bag full of cantaloupes.”

  “If only.”

  Bentley scratched his stubbly chin. “You could always talk to Chessa about her powers. Maybe the two of you could work together.”

  I winced. “I prefer to keep my distance from that woman. I’d rather not have my skull used as an ashtray.”

  He gave me a sidelong look. “Why would she use your skull as an ashtray? She doesn’t even smoke.”

  “Maybe it’s a candy bowl she wants my skull for. I can’t explain it, but I feel a bad energy whenever I’m near her. My whole skull tingles.”

  Bentley didn’t comment.

  I went on. “You know how women are. Men don’t necessarily get it.”

  He arched an eyebrow.

  “There’s this lingering jealousy she feels toward me,” I said. “Both of her sisters were eager to adopt me as her replacement. Like, super-eager. And let’s not forget, her fiancé was flirting with me like crazy while she was lying helpless in a coma, having her—” I paused, making a connection in my mind.

  Bentley seemed to pick up on the same connection. “You think that what happened to Chessa might be connected to Corvin’s disappearance? I thought that case was closed?”

  I looked down at the tiny bricks in my hand. The pieces weren’t fitting together as neatly as I’d hoped. I had something backwards.

  “Corvin isn’t her genetic offspring,” I said slowly. “So, it’s different. Never mind me. I was just grasping at straws.” I shook my head. “That poor woman. What they did to her. And she took it all in with that ethereal grace of hers, like it was just some unfortunate thing, like getting stuck in the rain when you’re wearing a new suede jacket. Like it wasn’t a big deal.”

  “People are not always how they appear.”

  “You can say that again! Under that pretty platinum blonde hair of hers, there’s a lot of destruction inside that woman. Woman? I meant to say goddess. She’s got a direct bloodline to some seriously ancient powers. I don’t know why, but her powers aren’t watered down like most of ours. She could turn you inside out without breaking a nail.”

  Bentley chortled, as though he’d like to see her try. He had no idea. He hadn’t seen her like I had.

  I told him, “After what happened to her, we’re lucky she hasn’t burned this whole town to the ground just to be free of the reminders.”

  “Speaking of lucky, it’s good that the DWM was able to locate the material that was harvested from her.”

  I jerked my head up and looked at the detective. “They did?” I had a million questions, starting with why didn’t anyone tell me?

  “She destroyed the materials herself,” he said. “We don’t have to worry about an army of genetically engineered godlike creatures coming of age in about eighteen years and waging war against humanity.”

  “I hadn’t been worried about that. Until now.” I swallowed hard. Whenever I thought about what happened to Chessa, I’d only felt the ache in my heart of a mother not knowing where her children were.

  Now I felt a new ache. The one of a mother who had destroyed part of herself.

  Bentley continued, his tone grave. “Zara, I’m not sure if my intel is correct, but I believe Chessa had surgery to be remove the potential of being targeted again.”

  The ache in my chest was replaced by a sharp pain. “Are you saying she won’t be able to have her own kids?”

  He shook his head. “All the more reason we have to get Corvin back home, safe and sound.”

  I swore under my breath.

  Talk about raising the stakes.

  Where was that hellhound?

  *

  We had the house model reassembled by two o’clock.

  I finished performing the object-location spell by five minutes past two. It would have gone faster, but Bentley kept asking questions.

  By two-fifteen, we’d ruled the attempt a failure. So much for Bentley’s magnificent idea.

  For a hopeful moment, I had detected a possible pull, but the direction kept changing. It was faint enough that it could have simply been wishful thinking.

  Bentley asked more questions, and I explained that there were a few ways the spell could be cast. If the object were nearby, and it was safe to use levitation, I could summon the object toward myself. That was how I usually grabbed my purse before I left the house.

  Another method, with larger objects in particular, was to get a magical reading on where the item was, and then draw myself toward it. I had to rely on the physical sensations, felt as a pull of attraction within my body.

  “Like a dowsing rod,” Bentley said. “It sounds like how pioneer settlers used those Y-shaped branches to find the best spot to dig a well.”

  “Some of those settlers may have had powers,” I said. “They don’t call it water witching for nothing.”

  He gave me a thoughtful look.

  “There’s another way the spell works that I didn’t explain. If you’re a ghost, floating around without your body, you can use it to ground your spirit to an object.”

  “What?”

  “It happened to me once, when my aunt killed me.”

  “What?”

  “It’s kind of a funny story. I was trying to listen in on a conversation, and I didn’t have my sound tunnel spell figured out yet, and—”

  Bentley cleared his throat and tapped the container of glue with one finger. “Are you getting anything now?”

  “Still nothing,” I reported.

  He couldn’t hide his disappointment.

  “It was still a good idea,” I said. “And sometimes there’s a delay on the spell. It could kick in after a few hours.”

  He made the face that said he didn’t believe me. He leaned over, peered into the open-backed house, and adjusted the remaining dolls. “This little guy was sitting on the other side of the table when we showed up,” he said, putting the boy on a chair at the table. “It’s not a perfect recreation of what we saw yesterday when we got to the house.”

  “Because the crime happened earlier that day. The boy might have been on the other side of the table then. Remember how William Tate was so sure we were salespeople? He must have had visitors earlier in the day.”

  “You do weave a compelling narrative.”

  He switched the boy to the other chair, then back again.

  “The clothes look right,” I said.

  He agreed that they did.

  “And the phone is exactly like the one we saw on the hall table,” I said.

  “Krinkle could have seen all those things from the view at the community center.”

  “What did she say about that, anyway? Has she admitted she’s seen the house before? Or why she lied to us about not knowing where it was?”

  Bentley pointed to his eyes. “She blames her poor eyesight. Claims she never noticed the unusual home, despite looking out that window multiple times.”

&nbs
p; “I’d love to question her in more depth.” I made a hand gesture similar to cracking my knuckles, but released a puff of pink smoke instead. “There’s a confession hex my aunt told me about.”

  “Do you mean Trinada’s Confession Hex?” He smirked, looking proud of himself for knowing the name of a spell. “I happen to know you need three witches for that. All the Trinada spells require a trio.”

  We stared at each other. He was so cute when he thought he’d tripped me up on some minor detail.

  “Look at you with your spell talk,” I said. “Memorizing things to whip out on me. Aren’t you clever?”

  “I’m thorough and detail-oriented.”

  “I bet you are.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  I looked down quickly and changed the subject. “I could still do the confession hex. I could get two more witches together in a heartbeat.” Zinnia wasn’t available, but there were the two Nixes. One wasn’t very sharp, and the other was way too sharp for her own good, but together they might balance out.

  “As much as I’d love to see you in action, my understanding is the spell makes people confess, whether they did something or not. It tangles anxiety with guilt, and amplifies both. They confess for relief. The last thing any case needs is a false confession.”

  “Right. Plus I’d need something called koodzuberry enzyme to cast the spell, and now that our local supplier of magical herbs is a pile of bones, supplies of certain compounds have dried up.”

  “I’m sure Vincent Wick could be of help, if need be.”

  I nodded, mulling over the suggestion. Vincent Wick had inherited the property his sister had used to grow magical plants, and was working on getting things growing again. It was no ordinary nursery, though. Some of the plants were extremely dangerous—as his sister, Tansy, found out the hard way.

  Bentley said, “Speaking of the Wick disappearance, whatever happened to those animals that were recovered? The ones that tried to eat you?”

  “Animals? They were plants. I thought you were up to speed? They were plants, called Droserakops.”

  “I read the report. They had beating hearts. Wouldn’t that make them animals?”