This whole situation was going from ‘terrifying’ to ‘pretty darn cool’ very quickly.
“Now, I want you to try it again,” Aunt Debbie said. “I know it’s a simple spell, but the more you practice, the better you’re going to get.”
I nodded and focused once more. This time, I changed the candle from yellow to green. I then cast the spell again and went from green to red. The more I cast the spell, the more I felt like I had just gone for a long run. After the fourth time I cast the spell, I was definitely starting to feel tired.
“Alright, that’s enough,” Aunt Debbie said to me with a smile. “You’re obviously getting tired.”
“Is that how quickly magical energy runs out?” I asked. “But you send all the food and dishes flying over to the dinner table and it looks like it doesn’t take anything out of you.”
“Your magical powers are like a muscle. It’s going to take time for them to grow. I’ve been using my magic for decades now, whereas this is your first time. Keep practicing, and you’re going to get there. I promise.”
“Ok,” I said, handing Aunt Debbie the wand, but she took my hand and pushed it gently back toward me.
“This is yours now. You need to hang onto it. You might only know this one spell, but practice it. Whenever you’re alone, or around family, feel free to practice this spell on whatever tickles your fancy. The more you work at it, the better you’re going to get. And tomorrow I’ll show you another spell. Slowly but surely you’ll catch up, and you’ll be using magic like it’s second nature to you in no time. Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s taco night, and I need to get everything ready.”
“Thanks for the lesson,” I said, waving my wand around aimlessly, pretending to do magic. I had literally just changed the color of a candle! That was pretty awesome.
Chapter 15
As it turned out, taco Sunday took place as a celebration for making it through another work week, as Cackling Witch Coffee was closed on Mondays and Tuesdays.
I woke up late the next morning, lazed around in bed for a few extra minutes while enjoying the beauty of not having to be at work at six in the morning, and eventually managed to drag myself out of bed to the kitchen.
I was pleasantly surprised to see a giant stack of pancakes waiting for me, complete with fresh berries, syrup and whipped cream to pour on top.
“Wow, this looks amazing,” I said to Aunt Debbie, who was still standing in front of the stove.
“Help yourself,” she said, motioning to everything. “I’m going to go into town later if you’d like a ride. Or, if you’d like, you can see where your cousins live if you’d prefer to live with them. Don’t worry, I won’t be insulted if you do. You are welcome to stay here for as long as you’d like, of course.”
“Thank you,” I said warmly as I grabbed three pancakes and doused them in syrup. “I really appreciate how nice you’ve all been to me.”
“That’s what family is for. Now, why don’t you finish those off, and before you get going we can do a quick magic lesson? I was thinking I might show you how to change the size of that candle today.”
“Great,” I said as I made my way to the breakfast bar. “I’m looking forward to that.” My attitude toward magical lessons had changed since yesterday. Rather than dreading it, I was starting to finally embrace this new side of my life.
Two hours later I was feeling drained once more, and decided to go into town to explore. I wanted to stop by the hardware store and see if I could have a chat with Don Kilmer, who had walked past Leonard’s table when it was empty. Frankly, I figured he had the best opportunity to poison Leonard, since all he would have had to do was slip the poison into the coffee. Leonard wouldn’t have been able to see it happen.
I was ecstatic about my improvements on the magical front. I had managed to make the candle bigger and smaller, and I was looking forward to getting to practice my magic further later on in the day. I started keeping my wand inside my purse at all times, since, as Aunt Debbie reminded me, a witch had to be ready one hundred percent of the time. You never knew when you were going to need to use magic.
Aunt Debbie drove me into town. “Where would you like to be dropped off?” she asked kindly.
“Oh, just on Main Street,” I replied. “Can you point out the hardware store for me?”
Aunt Debbie gave me a curious look, but did as I asked. She pointed out a low brick building, painted blue, with “Kilmer Hardware” printed on an old, faded wooden sign.
“That’s the place,” she said. “Don is a nice guy. He’ll help you find anything you need.”
“Thanks,” I said with a smile, jumping out. “Don’t worry about giving me a ride back home. I’ll find my way.”
Aunt Debbie nodded at me with a smile as I jumped out of the car and made my way to the store. It was a gorgeous spring morning; a little bit on the colder side for me, being used to San Francisco weather, but the sun shone high in the sky and the first birds of the season – or perhaps a few that didn’t fly south for the winter in the first place - flew between the trees on either side of the road, chirping away.
I stepped into the store and an old-fashioned bell above me rang out, announcing my entrance. This was everything I had expected a small-town hardware store to look like: shelves packed tightly together, every single inch of available space from floor to ceiling displaying something that local homeowners might need but didn’t want to go to the mainland to retrieve. To my right was a single counter, with the man I was looking for organizing a display of batteries next to it. He turned when he heard the bell.
“Hi there,” he said. “You’re the new girl who works at the coffee shop, aren’t you?”
“That’s me,” I said with a smile. “I’m Eliza.”
“Don,” he replied, holding out a hand, which I shook. “Nice to meet you. I hear you’re Daniel Emory’s daughter.”
“Correct,” I said. “Listen, I was wondering if you could tell me about Leonard, the man who died in the coffee shop the other day. I was told you knew him.”
Don nodded. “I did, yeah. For a man who hated people so much, he sure knew a lot of them.”
“So you agree with the others that he wasn’t a very nice man?”
“Oh, he definitely wasn’t,” Don said with a dry laugh. “The man was hellish to deal with. His brother too, but at least his brother was on the right side of things.”
“The right side of things?” I asked.
“There’s a developer in town who’s looking to buy the empty parcel of land adjacent to the property Leonard and his brother live on. The brothers own the land; it used to belong to their mother.”
“Joe Cleeves? I heard about him.”
“That’s the one. He wants to build waterfront condos on the land, which is a fantastic idea. They’ll bring a handful more visitors to the island, who will go ahead and spend their money here, and the spot is beautiful. It’s right on the Pacific Ocean. Roman, the sensible of the two brothers, was all for it. As far as he was concerned that piece of land was useless, and with land prices the way they are on the island, he was absolutely willing to sell. But Leonard didn’t want to. He said there was a pod of sea lions that used that part of the beach as their home, and he was worried that they would be driven off.”
“So his objection was all about land use?”
“That’s right,” Don said. “As far as I could tell, anyway. Last time I spoke with Joe he was quite annoyed about it. He kept telling me how Leonard was just being an old hippie, and how times had changed, and the sea lions would find somewhere else to live.”
“Do you think the project will go through now?”
“I don’t see why not,” Don replied with a shrug. “It might take some time, since the estate will have to officially pass to Roman, but after it’s his free and clear, I’m sure he’s going to sell it on to Joe like he’d planned.”
“Do you know Joe well?”
“Sure,” Don nodded. “I consider him a fr
iend. He’s a good guy. Because of what he does he’s in here quite a bit, so I see him on a weekly basis.”
“Alright, thanks,” I said.
“No problem. Anything I can help you find?”
“No, I just wanted to find out some more about Leonard.”
“Fair enough. I imagine it must have been quite a shock for you, getting to town and having Leonard die on your first day at work.”
“It was,” I admitted. “A lot of people seem to think I’m the one who killed him.”
Don shook his head. “That’s ridiculous. If anyone in town had no reason to off the guy it was you. You didn’t even know him, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, hopefully Chief Ronald manages to get his head out of his butt for fifteen whole seconds and manages to solve this thing. I didn’t like Leonard, and I thought he was on the wrong side of the deal with Joe, but there was no reason to kill the guy.” Don shook his head. “I can’t imagine who might have done it. I guess Roman is probably the only person I could see being angry enough to do it.”
That seemed to be the consensus here in town.
“Alright, well, thanks for the help.”
“No problem.”
I made my way back out onto the street, thinking over what Don had told me. It hit me as I was walking that there was one person with a reason to want Leonard dead that I hadn’t considered before: Don himself. After all, Joe was a customer of his, and if he worked as a property developer, I assumed a fairly big one. If Joe managed to buy the land and develop the property, I assumed he would be buying at least a few things from Don’s hardware store. After all, the major stuff would almost certainly be ordered in bulk from the mainland and shipped in, but projects like that always had last-minute items that needed to be purchased, and it would be much easier for him to do it by buying from his local friend than going all the way back to the mainland.
Of course, Joe was the even better suspect. The project would be worth millions of dollars to him, potentially, whereas I assumed Don would only get a few grand in extra purchases, tops. I might have been wrong about that, though.
Then of course, Don mentioned that he and Joe were good friends. What if they were really good friends, and that Joe hired Don to kill Leonard? That was also a possibility.
As I made my way down the street, I was convinced: Don was at the top of my suspect list. He was the only one with the opportunity and reason to kill Leonard.
I was going to be focusing on him in the future.
Chapter 16
I decided I needed to go back and find some information about Don. After all, if he was the killer, I had to prove it. Maybe he still had some of the poison he had used to murder Leonard in the store. After all, that was probably where he had kept it.
Hardware stores were full of poisons. I didn’t know what he had used, but it had to be incredibly fast-acting to have killed Leonard so quickly. The man must have only had a sip or two of the coffee after coming back from the bathroom before he was found dead. I assumed if he’d simply given Leonard one of the poisons commonly found in the shop, like rat poison, it would have taken quite a bit longer to take effect.
That meant I was looking for something different. Maybe something along the lines of some poisonous mushroom powder, or belladonna, or something. I didn’t really know all that much about poisons, on the basis that I wasn’t a complete and total psychopath. Basically everything I knew about poisoning people came from TV shows and movies.
But how on earth was I going to manage it? I needed to get back into the store without him seeing me, and somehow have a look around. It wasn’t like Don was going to just let me peek through every little inch of his store.
That meant I was going to have to wait until the store was closed, and sneak around after dark, hoping that I didn’t get caught. Great. I was going to have to commit one crime to prove that I didn’t commit a second crime.
“Hey, Eliza,” a voice called out from behind me, and I turned to see Leanne and Kaillie waving at me from up ahead. “What are you doing in town?”
“Oh, you know, just running through some errands,” I answered, shrugging my shoulders nonchalantly. “And you guys?”
“I have to stop at the bank, and then we were going to get lunch,” Kaillie answered. “Why don’t you come with us? You still have to open a bank account here, right? I mean, I know you could keep your account from San Francisco, but First Enchanted Bank is the only branch in town, and it’s going to be handy long-term if you at least open an account here.”
“Yeah, ok,” I said. “That’s a good idea.”
The three of us made our way to what was hands-down the biggest building on Main Street. Three stories high and built of brick, it looked like what I always imagined the old-school original buildings for banks back on the East Coast would have looked like. It was like stepping back into the 1800s as we walked into the building. A giant chandelier hung down from the ceiling, casting a warm light throughout the space. White and black tiles lined the floor that led to the wooden teller counters, which was where Leanne and Kaillie immediately walked, with me following after them.
Dianne Mulgrew noticed us then, her teller space open, and waved us over.
“Well if it isn’t my three favorite cackling witches,” she said with a wink as we walked to her station. “Though I don’t get to see nearly enough of you, Kaillie, what with you always out the back baking.”
“Well, I’m better at baking than making coffee,” Kaillie laughed. “That’s more Leanne’s domain. I always end up burning the beans.”
“Hey, if you keep making those blueberry scones, I’m not going to complain,” Dianne replied. “What can I help you with today?”
“Well, I just need to get a money order for mom, but Eliza needs to open a new bank account.”
“Oh, sure, I can do that for you,” Dianne said. “Come on over here to one of the offices where we can sit down.”
Dianne tapped away at the computer for a minute, presumably logging herself out, then motioned for us to follow her to a small, private room with a few chairs in front of a desk. “Alright, let’s do the money order first,” she said, and Leanne handed her over a slip of paper with the information she needed.
“I know you need your days off as well, but I must say, it makes Mondays that much worse when I don’t get to have my coffee,” Dianne said with a laugh.
“Well, you come in on the weekends, which are your days off, so that makes up for it,” Leanne replied. “You should start drinking iced coffee, then you can just keep it in the fridge until the next day.”
“Now there’s an idea,” Dianne said with a wink. “I’m just glad you weren’t forced to close for longer than that afternoon. I was talking to my mother the other day and she said years ago, when someone was killed at the pool back in the seventies, they kept the place shut for a whole week. Right in the middle of summer, too.”
Kaillie shuddered. “Who would possibly want to swim in a pool where they found a body, though?”
“Oh, the body wasn’t actually in the pool. The woman had been killed in the showers. She’d had an argument with another woman about something, I can’t remember the details anymore. But she was shoved, slipped over, and hit her head on the tiles on the way down. A big shame, but an accident. Not like this. I heard from Lucy’s Floozies that he was killed with wolfsbane,” Dianne said. “They were all in here earlier.”
“Where did that name come from, anyway?” I asked.
“Aunt Lucy decided she wanted to reclaim it, and that there was nothing wrong with a woman deciding to be a floozy,” Leanne replied. “You saw my mom?” she continued, looking at Dianne.
“Your mom is one of Lucy’s Floozies?” I asked, and Leanne nodded.
“Yeah. It drives dad insane, since the two of them have been divorced for about five years. He doesn’t understand how his ex-wife can be one of his sister’s best friends, but there you have it.”
I
laughed. “That sounds about right. It must make Thanksgiving dinner fun.”
“Oh, you can’t even imagine Thanksgiving at Aunt Debbie’s,” Leanne said.
Dianne laughed. “Yes, your family isn’t exactly known for being the most normal in town.”
“Wait,” Kaillie said. “Let’s go back to the wolfsbane. Was that Dorothy who got that information?”
“Yes,” Dianne said. “One of the detectives – I just can’t imagine it having been Ron – told the medical examiner to put a rush on the toxicology results, and apparently that’s what killed him.”
“Ground wolfsbane,” I repeated, my mind whirring with possibilities. That wasn’t the sort of thing that was ordinarily sold at a hardware store, which meant if Don Kilmer hadn’t gotten rid of it yet, it would have to be hidden somewhere. I still figured inside the store would be the most likely; he would have come from the store to the coffee shop, so presumably he kept the poison there rather than at his home.
“It creeps me out to think that happened here,” Kaillie said. “And in our coffee shop.”
“I agree,” Dianne said. “Frankly, I’d be happier if they found who did it as soon as possible. I don’t like knowing someone willing to do that is walking around town unchecked. After all, I have a daughter who lives here. I’d feel a lot better if I knew the murderer wasn’t running free. I really do hope it’s not someone from here. I don’t like the idea that someone willing to do this has been here around us all this time.” She looked at me, as if realizing what she’d said, and quickly stammered on. “Not you, of course, Eliza. You’re obviously not the killer. You had no reason to want Leonard dead.”
Presumably neither would anyone else who was new to town, I thought to myself, but I didn’t reply. My heart sank as I was once again made aware of just how much of an outsider I was here, and how I knew that if the killer wasn’t found, people would always be asking questions about how much of a coincidence it was that Leonard was killed immediately after I showed up.
A Cauldron of Hot Coffee: Enchanted Enclave Mysteries Books 1-3 Page 9
