Spell or High Water

by Gina LaManna

  “It’s not only about the winning,” I said. “I mean, it’s sad she’s gone because — oh, you know — she’s a person.”

  Carl turned away from me and continued sobbing. I wanted to help the man, but he growled for me to get away from him. He seemed more upset with the loss of a crown than the loss of a life. Poor Mary. For that matter, poor Susanne. Poor Tarryn and Billie Jo and the whole lot of them. They were nothing but show toys for the rest of the world.

  “I need to talk to you.” I confronted Edwin, keeping my voice low as I left Carl to cry. “You ditched out on our conversation before. I wasn’t done talking to you.”

  “We’re done. I asked you not to say anything.” His eyes flashed in anger. “You don’t know what you’re dealing with — you should have listened to me and stayed out of this.”

  Hopefully Edwin wouldn’t commit murder — possibly for a second time — with Carl crying into his rumrunner on the disgusting steps. I felt vaguely more comfortable that we had a witness, though Carl’s eyes were so red he was probably seeing double and wouldn’t be considered reliable in court. Not that I’d be around to see the outcome, if Edwin got to me first.

  “It just so happens I heard another little spin on your story in the bar,” I told Edwin. “You asked Mary out repeatedly?”

  Edwin’s back stiffened. His fingers pinched the cigarette so tightly the ashes fell to the ground. I stepped back to avoid them getting on my shoes and gave a frustrated wrinkle of my nose.

  “Where’d you hear that?” He hissed. “I told you not to dig deeper into this, Evian. What makes you think this is your business?”

  “It’s not my business, it’s Mary’s,” I said. “And she deserves justice. She can’t get it for herself, so I’m trying to help. You killed her, didn’t you?”

  The crying stopped. Carl seemed to be listening intently, which didn’t stop me from pressing onward. The more witnesses the better, especially because I hadn’t thought ahead to what I might actually do when Edwin inevitably admitted his guilt.

  “You went over there to ask Mary to dinner and she refused — again. Isn’t that right?” I asked. “And isn’t it right that you just so happen to hate getting rejected? I mean, we all do, but not all of us commit murder over it.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “You got upset — maybe reached out and found your hands around her neck. When you squeezed, you began to see how easy it might be to go for just a second longer … .” I paused. “Was it an accident? Did you tussle, and then she fell into the pool and drowned? Or were you trying to disguise it as an accident?”

  “You.” Carl rose to his feet, his gaze murderous. “You killed my Marilyn?”

  “Your Marilyn?!” I spun around. “Wait a second. What’s going on here?”

  “I didn’t kill anyone.” Edwin raised his hands and let the cigarette drop to the ground. “If you’re looking for a murder of passion, look no further than that man. They were lovers. Mary admitted it to me the day she died. I hadn’t known she was a taken woman or I never would have asked her out in the first place.”

  “Why’d you ask her out so many times?”

  “I don’t know! I liked her. I thought she was special,” Edwin said. “And I thought she was single. But the whole time she’d been rejecting me for him. Carl!”

  “Is that true?” I turned to Carl. “Were you in a relationship with Marilyn?”

  “I loved her!” Carl growled, inching toward Edwin. “You killed her, didn’t you? She told you we were in a relationship that morning so you’d leave her alone.”

  “I thought you were married,” I said to Carl. “What about your wife?”

  “She divorced him a year ago,” Edwin said with a smirk. “She left him for a younger man.”

  “I didn’t want to be divorced,” Carl said. “I loved my wife and had always been faithful to her. She left me a year and a half ago, served me divorce papers six months later. Marilyn and I didn’t start up until three months ago, so yes, she was my girlfriend.”

  “But which one of you killed her?” I muttered this mostly to myself, but apparently it was loud enough for them to hear because they simultaneously pointed to one another and declared the other party guilty.

  “I went to the cottage to go over some plans with the girls,” Edwin said. “Mary confronted me out back and said she wanted to talk. She apologized for not being honest sooner about the reasons she’d rejected me and then explained about her relationship with Carl and why they’d wanted to keep it a secret.”

  “And then you killed her!” Carl shouted. “Out of jealousy!”

  “Of course I didn’t, you buffoon,” Edwin said. “I was surprised, yes. Maybe upset, but I turned around and left. I didn’t feel up to discussing plans with the girls, which is why I called a formal meeting the next day to go over that same itinerary. Next thingI knew, this one had stumbled over the body. I kept quiet because I knew how bad things looked for me.”

  “You should have been honest,” I said to him. “This looks horrible for you.”

  “But I didn’t kill her,” Edwin said. “She was alive when I left her. I wish I had proof for you, but ... I’ll submit to DNA testing. Heck, measure my hands against the prints found around her neck if that’s possible. I swear to every star in the sky that I would never hurt one of the girls. If anything, you need to look at him.”

  “I was planning to marry her,” Carl said. “We were going to win this competition and then she was going to announce her retirement. We were thinking a tropical island for a few years. Get away from the craziness of this life for a while. Between the two of us, we had plenty of money to live off of for some time.”

  “Wait.” I held up a hand. “I have one more suspect.”

  Both men looked for me to explain. I filled them in on Darren, the vendor, who still had a motive and opportunity to have silenced Mary for good. I explained about my race to the ferry and his subsequent ditch to the mainland, though I glossed over the fact that he was currently experiencing a deep emotional commitment to his hotel pillow.

  “That’s impossible,” Carl said when I finished my story. “I was talking to Darren all morning.”

  “But —.”

  “While I was waiting at Coconuts for Mary to show up and play the keyboard, he stumbled in all out of sorts. He was running late to set his table up and thought they might have served coffee.”

  “I thought Darren was at the cottage that morning,” I said. “He said he must have just missed the murderer.”

  “He was with me until eight fifteen,” Carl said. “Like I said, he was already running late. But he recognized me and apologized for the face cream that’d made Mary break out in a rash. I told him it wasn’t a huge deal. I even offered to help fine tune the product as a consultant if he wanted.”

  “So you and Mary weren’t on bad terms with Darren?” I asked. “Neither of you were planning to ruin his career?”

  “Of course not!” Carl recoiled, looking mortified. “I wouldn’t do that and neither would Mary. She was the sweetest thing, and neither of us cared about anything except winning this stupid pageant and getting out of Dodge. We were planning to elope and retire from the business altogether — neither of us cared about some beauty product.”

  “I knew it.” The soft, silky voice came from a third party — a shadowy figure that had managed to stay hidden in the darkness deeper in the alley. As the man spoke, he moved from behind a large Dumpster that’d hidden him from view. “I knew you were leaving me!”

  “John?” Carl spun on his heel and stared at his assistant. “You don’t know what we’re talking about. What are you doing here, anyway? You said you didn’t want to come tonight.”

  “I didn’t want to be here,” John said, moving under the thin glow of a nearby streetlamp. He wore jeans and a plain black T-shirt, which gave him a distinctly more relaxed look than his butler’s attire. “But I was forced to put a few things to rest.”

  At th
at, he raised a hand to reveal the metal glint of a gun.

  “John, what is this about?” Carl raised his hands slightly as he stepped toward his assistant. “Put that gun away. This doesn’t involve you.”

  “It does involve me. That’s the problem, Carl, you didn’t think about me. You haven’t in a while, not since your wife left and Marilyn turned her stupid blue eyes on you.”

  “Marilyn — what?” Carl shook his head, not following as quickly as necessary. “I don’t understand. Did you have something to do with Mary’s death?”

  “Everything to do with it.” John hissed, stepping closer. “And now I’ll have to finish it all in what will be the most awful murder spree in the history of Eternal Springs. Tragic, don’t you think? All this beauty shrouded in ugliness.”

  “It doesn’t have to be,” I said, eyeing the gun warily. Though I was a witch, my skin most certainly didn’t repel bullets. “Put the gun down. Nobody’s seen you but us, and we don’t have to say anything. You’ll be okay, John.”

  “Someone’s gonna turn me over to the cops.” He winced. “And I don’t look good in orange, so I’d prefer to shoot you.”

  “You’re not a killer,” I said. Carl seemed to have lost all capacity to speak. “Admit Marilyn’s death was an accident. You’ll get a lighter sentence. We’ll vouch for you.”

  I was babbling and didn’t mean a word that came out of my mouth, but I didn’t know what else to do. There was a gun pointed at me, and I was flanked by two men paralyzed into speechlessness. I’d do just about anything to keep him busy and prevent the gun from firing at my chest.

  “That’s a load of crock and you know it,” John spat. “The second I let you walk away from here you’re going straight to those no-good cops. If it weren’t for you, Evian, those cops would still be picking their noses with no clue that Mary’s death was anything but an accident.”

  “Wasn’t it an accident?” I coaxed. “Listen to me, John. I’m trying to help you. It looked like an accident — even the ME said so. There’s no reason you can’t claim that the two of you argued, things got out of hand and you panicked.”

  “Shut up,” he said. “I’m sick of you. Stand against the wall, all three of you.”

  I gave Carl a glance, but he couldn’t turn his eyes away from John. Resting a hand on the coach’s shoulder, I gently guided his back against the wall and stood next to him. Edwin came to stand at my other shoulder.

  “I told you I didn’t kill her,” Edwin said, surprisingly relaxed. He lit a new cigarette and took a pull. “But no, you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Is now the time?” I muttered. “We’ve got a psycho pointing a gun at us.”

  “He’s not angry with me.” Edwin shrugged. “You’re the nosy person who couldn’t leave this case alone.”

  “She shouldn’t have left it alone!” Carl burst, finally snapping back to reality. “Mary is dead! She didn’t deserve to die. John, how could you?”

  Carl lunged toward John, who merely flinched and raised the gun.

  I grasped Carl around the waist to hold him back and glared at Edwin. “A little help here?”

  Edwin gave me a smirk then raised his cigarette and put it in front of Carl’s face. “Step back, man. It’s not worth it. One more step and you’ll burn your eye out.”

  “Not exactly what I meant,” I growled. “You could be less threatening. We’re on the same team here.”

  “No, Edwin wasn’t on the team,” John said, straightening his shirt and resuming his stance after Carl’s rush. “We were the dream team — me and Carl. Did Carl tell you he was training me as his coaching assistant? Together we were going to rule the world.”

  “Through beauty pageants?” Edwin frowned. “I stake my life on beauty pageants, and I don’t think I’m taking over the world.”

  “If Marilyn had won that sixtieth pageant we could’ve gotten deals in any country. We would’ve coached girls from Milan to Paris to Rome to Budapest,” he said. “But no, Carl gave up on the dream.”

  “Murdering Mary didn’t help anything,” I said. “Now, you’re just two coaches with a dead client.”

  “She’s not just a client!” Carl said. “She was my love.”

  “Pipe down, Carl,” Edwin said, “or you’ll get us all killed. You do that and your jerk-faced assistant walks free. You think the cops are onto him? Nope. So shut your pie hole and listen.”

  John gave a shudder and a nod. “I can’t believe I’m agreeing with the worm, but he’s right. Shut up.”

  “Why?” I asked quickly. We needed to keep him talking. “Why kill her?”

  “The only way for us to succeed was for Mary to disappear.”

  “She could have quietly retired after winning,” I said. “You sabotaged yourselves by silencing her.”

  “I am a nobody!” John shouted. “What don’t you understand? Without Carl, there is no dream team. There’s just John, which doesn’t mean a thing. It needs to be John and Carl. If Mary stole Carl away to some stupid island, I would have been nothing. I would have been less than nothing — I wouldn’t have a job, let alone an empire. Together, we could have made millions, traveled the world, created a legacy. But he threw it all away.”

  “What’s the point of it all?” Carl asked, his eyes tearing up again despite the terror of being held at gunpoint. “What’s the point of making money, creating a legacy, traveling the world, if you don’t have someone by your side? If you don’t have love?”

  “You did have love, Carl!” John looked furious. “I have always been there for you. I was loyal to you. When your wife left, I was there. When you needed tampons for your clients in the middle of the night, who ran to buy them? When you found out Mary had died, who picked you up again?”

  “You wouldn’t have had to pick me up if you didn’t kill her!” Carl snarled. “You are not loyal to me, you pig! That wasn’t love — it was selfishness.”

  “What is love if not respect, patience, servitude? I was all those things to you for years! Then Mary comes along and I’m nothing but the assistant once again. I wasn’t getting walked on all over again.”

  “You were never just my assistant,” Carl said, his voice weak. “You were always my closest friend, confidant, supporter — and I was yours. Mary didn’t change any of that. She only enhanced it.”

  “Not in the way I liked.” John shifted uncomfortably.

  In an odd way, I suspected that John truly did have some sort of love, or at least deep sense of loyalty and friendship to Carl. It was a shame that something once so positive had manifested in such a horrible way.

  As John explained how Mary had ruined everything, I let my eyes flick shut for the briefest of moments. An idea floated into my head, put there by some little bit of magic. Tonight was a full moon, and under the full moon I had special talents. Nothing that would take down a psychotic killer with a flick of my finger, but I might be able to pull off something that would throw off his game enough to escape being shot.

  “Sprinkle water by the new full moon,” I murmured, splitting my attention between the precipitation in the nearby clouds and the man before us. “Then watch your garden grow and bloom!”

  “What’d you say?” John asked. “What did you — ah, no. You’ve got to be kidding me! What is this?”

  As the first drops of rain fell isolated on John, I glanced at the men next to me and shouted, “Move!”

  I raised my hands and concentrated harder, bringing the rain down with a vicious pelting motion that pummeled my target with hail-like drops. I disguised the movements of my hands as I leapt toward him, and Carl followed suit. I lost track of Edwin in the scuffle.

  “Drop the weapon,” I shouted, but John didn’t listen. “Drop it now!”

  John raised his hands to defend himself against the onslaught of rain blurring his vision and struck out with a kick. His foot flew at my face, and on pure reaction I swung out and gave his leg an extra shove.

  “You monster!” Carl landed the second
blow straight to John’s gut with a full-on football tackle.

  The two men tumbled to the ground, the gun clattering into the darkness down the alley. I chased after it, gave it another firm kick with my stiletto so it was completely masked by weeds and darkness, and then returned to help Carl.

  John had gotten in a few punches that had left Carl’s lip bloodied and his nose smeared red. The latter’s eye was already blackening. Carl wouldn’t be winning any beauty contests in the near future.

  I sized up the rolling duo and struck at my first opportunity. John rolled to his back and stared into the sky while Carl flopped onto his chest and pinned the murderer to the ground. I neatly pressed the heel of my stiletto against his private parts and smiled down at John.

  “Make one more move,” I said, “and the stiletto goes straight through your manhood.”

  I couldn’t be sure if Mason had rounded the corner in time to hear me deliver that line, but later he assured me that yes, he’d heard every last word of my terrifying threat. No wonder I could never hold onto a boyfriend.

  The cops rounded the corner shortly after, and before I knew it, John was in handcuffs and babbling a full confession. Edwin returned to his cigarette, Carl collapsed into a fit of despair, and Mason very carefully avoided any mention of my stilettos.

  Happily ever ... almost.

  Twenty-Four

  “I’m so sorry,” Mason said, for what must have been the twentieth time later that evening. “I am so sorry. I couldn’t leave Billie Jo’s side with all the funny stuff going on at the bar. Kenna finally came down and took her off my hands so I could look for you. I wouldn’t have let you go alone had I known … .”

  “Mason.” I smiled and cut him off with a wave of my hand. “None of this is your fault. I just appreciate you showing up when you did and calling the police.”

  “The police,” he said, his voice grim. “They should’ve been involved much sooner so you — a civilian — didn’t have to go through this. John had a gun, Evian. Pointed at you.”