Wild Secrets (A Wilder Witch Mystery Book 3)

by Jade Wolfe

  For some reason, Pete Shoemaker looked really, really familiar to me, but I knew I’d never met the man, and I couldn’t place where I might have seen him before.

  “Who is he talking to?” I wondered out loud.

  “Nobody local, that’s for sure.”

  Dad was right - the man beside Pete was way over-dressed for downtown Wilder. His shoes were probably worth more than my truck. But it wasn’t just the clothes, it was everything. The way he carried himself, the way his hair was slicked back. Mostly, it was the general expression of distaste on his face that said, ‘I don’t want to be here, and I’m leaving as soon as possible’.

  “There’s a spot.” Dad pointed to an open parking place just a few feet down the street.

  I drove by it without answering and parked in the gravel lot behind the building.

  “Why didn’t you park out front?” Dad asked as we walked down the sidewalk to the street again.

  “I can’t actually parallel park my truck,” I admitted.

  He laughed so hard he had to stop walking and lean against the brick wall.

  “Stop it. It’s just too big, and I need to practice,” I said.

  His laughter died down, but he was still smirking as we walked around the corner of the building to where Pete had been standing. He was gone.

  I looked around. So was the stranger. “Where did they go so fast?” I asked.

  “Maybe inside. I want a donut.”

  The store did smell heavenly, so I followed Dad into the shop. It was nearly deserted. No Pete, no stranger. “I changed my mind. I think I’ll wait for you outside,” I said. The store might smell great, but I was on a mission - confessions now, donuts later.

  Not that I thought Pete would just confess. He would have to be persuaded.

  If he did it. Which I thought he had. Bess was sneaky, but Pete was definitely hiding something, considering his crocodile tears at the library. Maybe they were in on it together.

  Dad grabbed my hand with is surprisingly strong grip and hauled me back to his side. “Oh, no you don’t. You wait for me right here.”

  “But what if they get away?” I asked.

  “They went back to the motel,” Sage said in my ear.

  I screeched and jumped. The clerk behind the counter looked at me. “I thought I saw a bug,” I said.

  Sage chuckled. “That never gets old,” she said. “Both men went to the hotel,” she repeated. “You need to go after them.”

  “I’m trying,” I muttered under my breath, jerking my head sideways toward Dad’s hand. “I’m a little bit trapped.”

  She faded out, then I saw Dad jump sideways. Sage had goosed him in the ribs. He didn’t respond. He just looked straight ahead, like it was the most natural thing on earth to twist sideways when one was standing in lines. It was my turn to chuckle.

  Dad glared at me as he paid and the clerk handed over a white paper bag. “Are you ready?” he asked.

  “Yes. Sage said they went to the hotel,” I told him.

  “Where Dante is talking to Bess?” he asked. “That hotel?”

  I realized what he was getting at and groaned. If Dante was there, he would see us, and then we wouldn’t get the chance to question Pete or the stranger. Or Bess. Or Lavinia, for that matter. “Well, this just sucks,” I muttered.

  Dad patted my shoulder absently, then dug a powdered sugar donut out of the bag and took a bite. “Maybe another time,” he said.

  I glanced at him. He was trying to be sympathetic. It wasn’t working. And he’d only bought the one donut.

  One way or another, I would find a way to question this bunch and figure out who killed Jasper Davenport. Whether he knew it or not, Dante was depending on my help.

  Chapter Ten

  “The guy in the suit was probably Jasper’s lawyer,” Dante said to my dad. It was after six and we were all gathered for supper in Sage’s big dining room. Well, all of us but Jason. I wasn’t sure where he was at the moment.

  “Why would Pete be arguing with him?” I asked. “He looked upset, if you don’t count the donut in his hand.”

  Dante grinned. “Well, I haven’t talked to the man, yet, but I bet I can guess.”

  I thought about it while I tore apart a dinner roll. “Money,” I said when it dawned on me. “If Pete was expecting some sort of inheritance, he’d be mad when the lawyer told him he wasn’t getting anything.”

  “Right.”

  “Would Pete really expect an inheritance?” Dad asked. “I mean, it wasn’t like Jasper was his dad or anything.”

  “People are weird,” Dante said with a shrug. “Bess thought she was getting everything.”

  “Everything?” My eyebrows came up. “Wow.”

  “I know. Like Jasper was just going to give her all of it.”

  “And like Lavinia would let that happen without a fight,” I added. “She really is naive, isn’t she?”

  “Either that, or she’s a really good actress. Remember, she did a number on Bill’s poor head,” Dante reminded me. “Speaking of Bill, they released him this afternoon.”

  “Really? So he’s OK?”

  “I guess.” Dante chuckled. “I mean, he’s still mad about those romance novels.”

  “I’ll bet. Bess better not show her face there anymore.” Something occurred to me. “Why didn’t you arrest her for assault?”

  Dante shrugged and frowned. “Bill didn’t want to press charges. He said it wasn’t worth the trouble.”

  “Well, he’s right,” Dad chimed in. “It’s not like she’s going to strike again.”

  “It’s not fair, though,” I said, knowing how juvenile I sounded.

  “Well, there is some consolation. If I can get a search warrant, I can possibly get Bill’s books back for him.”

  “Oh, yeah? I bet he’s happy about that,” I murmur.

  “He doesn’t know yet. I didn’t want to get his hopes up, in case she’s already shipped them off somewhere.”

  The thought of that made me mad all over again, but I kept it to myself and vowed to find Bess tomorrow and demand she give them back. Dante couldn’t be mean about it, but I could.

  Jason came in, sweaty and sucking hard for breath. We all looked up. “Hey,” he gasped. “I’ll be down to eat as soon as I shower.”

  “Is somebody chasing you?” Sage asked - from the corner this time. She didn’t scare me, thank goodness.

  “No.” His eyes slid to me. “Just going for a run.”

  Then he disappeared through the opposite door and I heard his footsteps pounding up the stairs. I immediately felt my stomach do a flip - I’d forgotten all about the favor he asked me. He was doing so well, that I didn’t want to put a damper on his progress.

  “What’s that about?” Dante asked.

  I turned to him. “He wants to be a cop,” I said. “He asked me to ask you to help him get into the police academy.”

  Dante frowned. “That’s confusing. He wanted you to ask me?”

  I nodded.

  “Why didn’t he just ask me himself?”

  I shrugged and finished my mashed potatoes. Favor done.

  By the time Jason came back, he was breathing normally again, if a little red in the face. He plopped down at his usual spot. “Man, I’m hungry. A mile is a long way.”

  “Tomorrow, try four,” Dante said to him. “And carry a backpack.”

  Jason looked at him like he’d lost his marbles. “Say what again?”

  “You heard me. You’ll have to be able to do that to qualify for the academy. Also, fifty push-ups, fifty sit-ups, and twenty pull-ups.”

  I would have sworn that Jason went as pale as my mother’s ghost. “All on the same day?” he asked in a weak voice.

  “Afraid so. Don’t worry, though. Once you’ve graduated, you probably won’t have to do it ever again.”

  Twenty minutes later, I walked Dante out to his car. We stood there a moment in the moonlight. “Does he really have to do all of that?”

&nbs
p; “Sure - unless things have changed, or they do things differently here in Virginia. I got my certification in Texas.”

  I decided after he left to get online and check it out myself - tomorrow. Tonight, I was beat.

  I helped Dad clean up the kitchen and went to bed. I was almost asleep when my cell phone rang.

  It was Dante. “What?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” he said, sounding almost as breathless as Jason had earlier. “So I took a walk. It’s a good night for it. Anyway, I ran into one of the library ghosts.”

  I say up and turned on my bedside lamp. “You’re kidding?”

  “Nope. He saw the person leaving the library the morning of Jasper’s murder. Did you know there were Union soldiers here? They’re stuck, apparently. They must have died in one of the prisoner camps. They aren’t happy about it, that’s for sure.”

  “OK..? And...? Who did it, Dante?” I was feeling a little breathless myself now. Whoever had killed Jasper had almost certainly left by that unlocked back door, otherwise Dwayne and Pete would have seen them leaving.

  “Well, the Southern soldiers, I guess. He’s still looking for them. Isn’t that nuts?”

  “I mean, who killed Jasper.”

  “Oh. Well, he didn’t know any names, of course, but he says it was definitely a man.”

  “Pete,” I whispered. “It has to be Pete.”

  “That’s what I thought, too. There just one problem with that.”

  “What?”

  “Pete has no motive, Clover. There was no reason for him to kill Jasper, and plenty of reasons for him not to.”

  “We’re missing something,” I muttered. “We’re missing something important.”

  “Oh, yeah? What?”

  “I don’t know yet.” I thought about our list. “Selfish, delays, lock.”

  “How does that tie in with him?”

  I huffed in frustration and repeated, “I don’t know. Yet.”

  “Well, when you figure it out, let me know,” he said. He suddenly sounded tired, too. “Until then, I have to look at the others. Bess could dress like a man if she wanted. Lavinia, too, I suppose.”

  “No - both of them have very feminine figures. They couldn’t pull it off. But Lavinia could have hired a hitman, I guess,” I said reluctantly. I wasn’t sure why I still thought it was Pete, but I did.

  “They could have pulled it off,” he argued. “With heavy layers and a ball cap to hide their hair.”

  “I guess. I just don’t think they did that.”

  “Well, keep an open mind,” he said. “Good night, Clover.”

  “Night.” I disconnected the call, turned off my lamp, and laid there in the dark, trying to imagine Lavinia meeting shady characters in a back alley somewhere and hiring them to kill her husband. I couldn’t make the images work in my head at all, so eventually I gave up and went to sleep.

  The next morning, after a night of tossing and turning, I woke up with a mission. Well, two missions, actually. The first one was boring - I still needed to get supplies for my furniture. The second was way more fun, so I decided to do that one first. I jumped up, dressed, and sneaked out of the house before Dad saw me, then headed to Bagly’s shop.

  To my surprise, he was there, even at that early hour. I opened the door and the tinkle of the bell made him look up.

  His eyes were red, and he still looked awfully worn down, but he smiled and greeted me with his usual mustache twitch and a hearty hello.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d be in today I said, scanning the store for what I wanted. I spotted it and headed that way.

  “Then why did you come in?” Bagly asked me, coming around his counter.

  I pointed. “I want this,” I said.

  He looked, then he looked back at me. Then he laughed. “For Heaven’s sake, why? Your dad sold that to me more than a decade ago.”

  “I know. I want it back.”

  The typewriter sat squat on a table in the back corner, a monster of a thing like Dad said. It was powder blue and looked as big as a compact car. I guessed it weighed about as much as a compact car, too.

  Bagly met me at the table and pulled off the dust cover. He clicked a key or two. “I had a lot of work done to this thing,” he said. “Your dad bought it used, and it wasn’t in great shape then. I had my guy take it completely apart and rebuild the whole contraption.”

  I held up a hand and smiled. “No haggling on this, Bill. What’s your price?”

  He looked all over it for a sticker, didn’t find one, so he thought for another minute and just threw out a number. I had it paid for, wrapped, and loaded into the passenger seat of the truck ten minutes later. I climbed into the driver’s seat and grinned at it. Dad’s birthday was in just a few days, and until he told me about the typewriter I had no idea what to get him. This would be perfect.

  Not that I expected him to actually write a book on the thing - that would be torture. I would get him a laptop for that. This was symbolic.

  Feeling pretty proud of myself, I pulled out of the lot and headed back across the bridge toward home. Hopefully Jason would be there - I needed to get this inside and hidden before I got caught with it. I was topping the arch on the bridge when I saw a lone, slim figure standing off to one side against the rail. It was a she, and she was wearing gray slacks and a peach colored sweater that mimicked the turning leaves in the distance. If I hadn’t been paying attention, I might have missed her completely.

  As I got closer, I realized that the person was Lavinia Davenport, and she was crying.

  She was also staring at the swift water below, like she was going to jump.

  I slammed on the brakes, nearly dumping the typewriter in the floor, and jumped out of the truck, calling her name as I ran.

  She didn’t move at first, but then she slowly turned my way. I skidded to a stop in front of her.

  Her makeup was leaving trails down her face in long dramatic rivulets, and her eyes were red from crying. Her porcelain skin was blotchy and ashen. She didn’t look happy to see me.

  “Lavinia, what are you doing?” I asked carefully.

  She glanced at me, then turned back to the water. “Nothing. I just want to be alone.”

  I reached out to touch her arm, worried that she would try to climb over the railing, even with me standing right there. “Please, let me help,” I said.”

  “Unless you can wipe Bess Gabriel off the face of the earth, you can’t help me.”

  I shook my head, not understanding. “Is she harassing you?”

  Lavinia let out a very unladylike snort. “No. Unfortunately, it’s quite the opposite. She’s my very best friend now.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Lavinia sighed, patted her perfect hair, and looked at me again. “Little Miss has finally figured out that her meal ticket is gone. She’s starting to panic. She thinks that becoming my friend will ensure her a continued paycheck - she’s even gone so far as to invent jobs for herself.”

  I bit back a laugh, but Lavinia didn’t. “Do you know what a life coach is, Clover? I don’t, but Bess wants to be mine.”

  “I think it just means you take her advice,” I offered.

  “Well, that’s not going to happen.”

  I nodded and smiled sympathetically, not sure if I was supposed to really answer or if she just wanted to vent.

  “It’s even worse that we can’t leave right now. I really just want to go home, mourn my husband, and forget any of this ever happened.”

  I understood that part. I still couldn’t help, though. “I’m sure Dante is doing his best to find the killer.”

  She sighed and turned to me. “Well, if he doesn’t hurry up, there’s liable to be another murder in this town - and this time I really will be guilty.”

  Chapter Eleven

  I wasn’t sure what to say about that, so I patted her arm. “Why don’t you come to my house for a while? She won’t bother you there. You can have a nice hot cup of tea while you fig
ure out what to do next?”

  She thought about that for a few beats before she nodded. I didn’t fully breathe until she was well away from the bridge railing.

  It took some wrangling, but I was able to move the big typewriter from the front seat to the bed, so that she could sit down. Honestly, I was pretty sure it would have been easier to carry her to my house on my shoulders. Or put her in the driver’s seat and push the truck home.

  When I pulled into the driveway, the first thing I did was check for Jason’s Jeep. It was there, so I asked Lavinia to come inside and then went to hunt him down and tell him what I wanted. By the time I got back to the living room, Lavinia was gone.

  “Drat,” I muttered, hoping she hadn’t made it too far, so that I could catch her. I was almost out the door when I heard noise from the kitchen. I stuck my head in to see her, in all her expensive clothes and sad makeup, making tea. “You seemed busy,” she explained when she turned and saw me.

  “I was, for a minute, there.” I came on into the room and got cups from a cupboard. “My father’s birthday present - I’m trying to sneak around, so he doesn’t catch me.”

  “Ahh, I understand,” she said. Then she chuckled softly. “Jasper hated surprises. Just hated them. He spent half the year trying to figure out what I was getting him for his birthday, and the other half trying to figure out his Christmas present. I practically had to rent a whole new house just to hide his gifts.”

  “That must have been frustrating,” I said. I reached into the fridge for milk and got the sugar out of another cupboard, then met her at the table with two steaming mugs of tea. Other than her makeup, she looked like she belonged in a fancy tearoom somewhere, not Aunt Sage’s nice but homespun kitchen. We sat across from each other.

  Aunt Sage appeared behind her right shoulder. I must have made some noise in my throat, because Lavinia looked up, then looked behind her. “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing.” I shook my head, just a tiny bit.