Bobby Sparks Witch Detective: Pet Shop Puzzle ( A Paranormal Cozy Mystery)

by Stacey Fields

  He led her to the end of the narrow pathway and quickly turned to the left, walking along the back of the building. They walked past two heavy, metal doors and stopped at the third.

  “This should be the one,” Don said.

  “Good,” Bobby replied, reaching into her purse and pulling out her wand.

  “What are you going to do with that?”

  “I’m getting us into that shop.”

  Chapter 29: Breaking Rules and Breaking In

  Bobby reached for the doorknob, turning it a time to two to confirm her assumption. The door wasn’t locked. The handle spun around freely in her hand. But still, she couldn’t open it.

  "You're going to break into a man's home?" Don asked, leaning back on his heels and crossing his arms over his chest.

  “Are you going to try to stop me?” Bobby asked, glancing back at him.

  “No,” he said with a chuckle, “I’m just surprised. And, slightly impressed.”

  “Oh yeah. Why is that?”

  “I always took you for a rule follower. You know, one of those people that only ever did things by the book. You’re proving me wrong. First, you go against your boss’ orders and continue investigating a case he blatantly told you was finished, and now you’re breaking and entering.”

  “I’m not proud of what I’m doing,” Bobby muttered, turning back to face the door.

  “Well, I’m proud of you,” Don said. “You’re following your gut. You’re doing what you believe is right. That’s what makes a good inspector, Ms. Sparks.”

  “Save the compliments for when we prove Laura’s innocence,” Bobby replied.

  “Fair enough,” Don replied. He leaned forward, careful not to get too close, and watched as she directed all her energy and power towards the door.

  Her first try didn’t work. She was still rusty, and her powers were still on the fritz, but she wasn’t going to give up. Shaking the wand in her hand, she started the spell over again. To her surprise, on her second attempt, the door popped open.

  “I did it!” she exclaimed, perhaps a little too excitedly.

  Don stepped forward and pushed his way into the shop. “I thought you said spells and potions weren’t your specialty,” he said as he scanned the area.

  “They’re not,” Bobby agreed as she followed him in. “But there are a few advanced ones we’re required to learn during PPI training. That one took me six months to perfect.”

  The animals in the shop were still going crazy in their cages. It was clear someone was still feeding them, at least some of the time because they weren't dead. The dust built up on the shelves, however, had increased significantly.

  “Well, someone’s definitely still hanging out around here,” Bobby said, “but not enough to worry about cleaning.”

  “Obviously someone’s still hanging around here,” Don replied. “Barry still lives here.”

  “At least part time,” Bobby muttered.

  “How can you live somewhere part time?”

  “It’s easy,” Bobby replied. “You spend most of your time in one place, and just some time in the other.”

  “And which of those two do you think this place is for Barry?”

  Bobby walked over to the hidden door leading up to Barry and Holly’s apartment. “Let’s figure that out.”

  They walked up the stairs, slowly at first, listening for movement. When they reached the top, Don stepped forward. He inhaled deeply before quickly opening the door separating them from Holly and Barry’s kitchen. It banged open, and when no one came around the corner yelling, they assumed it was safe to go in.

  Bobby remained in the kitchen to look around while Don headed past her to inspect the rest of the place. There were still a few plates piled in the sink, some with food crusted on them, probably a few days old. Not enough plates to indicate that someone had been eating and too depressed to clean, though. But, just enough to indicate that someone didn’t spend enough time in that place to worry about doing dishes regularly.

  Her first stop on her inspection of Barry’s kitchen was the fridge. She pulled the door open to reveal that it was very sparsely stocked. She then moved to the trash. Wrinkling her nose, she began digging through the contents.

  “Whoa,” she said under her breath to herself, “there is milk.”

  “What’d you say?” Don asked, coming back into the kitchen.

  “There is milk. He said he didn't have milk."

  "In the trash?" Don asked, walking up and inspecting the carton she found buried under crumpled up balls of napkins and newspaper. "So? It probably just went bad or something."

  Bobby leaned forward and squinted. “The expiration date is for three days from now; it didn’t go bad. And, there’s still some left. It’s not empty.”

  “Why would he throw away milk that hadn’t gone bad yet?” Don asked.

  “I don’t know. But, it’s clear that he didn’t want us to know that he had milk in the house.”

  “Why would he lie about that?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” Bobby said. She quickly tossed the other items back into the trashcan, once again covering up the half-empty milk carton.

  “Well, nothing’s changed in here since our last visit, either,” Don said, turning to walk back to the family room. “Pillows, blankets—they’re all still scattered around.”

  Bobby followed Don, scanning the room quickly. “They’re not just scattered around,” she began.

  “They’re in the exact same place they were when we were here, I know,” Don finished her thought for her.

  It was obvious that the items hadn’t been moved. There was even still an indent in one of the pillows from where Barry stepped on it when he handed her her coffee without milk or cream.

  “The TV is still on,” she noted as she watched the images flash across the screen.

  “Yeah,” Don nodded. “Maybe he really wasn’t here last night when we walked by.”

  “The condition of this room seems to suggest that.”

  “It’s not just that,” Don said, motioning for her to follow him down the hallway. “He’s been sleeping in the bed.”

  Again, there was clear evidence for Don’s assumption. The bed wasn’t made. It wasn’t even close to being made. The comforter was thrown loosely over the mattress, and the only pillow still in that room was indented and positioned in the center of the bed.

  “Clearly he’s not too distraught to sleep in his bed anymore,” Bobby muttered as she turned to walk out of the room.

  “So, this is his lesser part-time home?” Don assumed, following her back into the kitchen.

  “It seems like it,” Bobby said. “He comes here to sleep, and he eats here, at least some of the time. He feeds the animals downstairs just enough to get them to shut up and not disturb him, but doesn’t bother with keeping the shop tidy because, well, why would he?”

  "So, what are we saying?" Don asked. "Are we really saying that Barry killed his wife then staged a break-in at his own home to move the items he used to kill her to Laura's shop and frame her?"

  “It sounds a little far-fetched, doesn’t it?”

  "The only thing that makes any sense is that he's the only one who could have gotten into Holly's lab to get the items, and then move them to Laura's unprotected shop. The fact that he hasn't been staying here doesn't really prove anything."

  “Not yet, at least,” Bobby said. “There’s still something we’re missing.”

  “Obviously,” Don replied. “But, what is it?”

  “Barry couldn’t have made that potion,” Bobby replied. “He’s not a warlock. We know that Holly bought the dragon’s tooth. She was the one planning to use it. Maybe she was planning on killing Barry and he got to her first? He waited until she made the potion, then used it against her.”

  “Why, though? Why would Holly want to kill her husband? They fought for years to be together. Why go through all of that just to be married for a year and then off him?”

  “I bet
if we figure out where he is now, or at least where his other part-time home is, we’ll get the answer to that question,” Bobby replied.

  “How are we going to find him?”

  “I don’t know, you’re part wolf, right? Can’t you smell him or something? Like, track his scent?”

  Don raised his eyebrows as he stared at her.

  “It’s a reasonable question,” she added quickly.

  “It’s really not,” he said rolling his eyes.

  “I’ll take that as a ‘no’ you can’t track him,” Bobby replied, as she walked towards the door. “Well, let’s at least get out of here. He’s not here now, but there’s no telling when he’ll be back.”

  They returned to her hotel room, where they sat in silence for a while, trying to figure out their next move. It was safer going there than the station because they couldn't have anyone asking what they were up to. For one, it could lead to someone somehow tipping off Barry that they were onto him. And for another, if the word got back to her bosses at the Witch Council, she would surely lose her job.

  “What about the woods?” Bobby asked, sitting next to Don on the bed.

  “The woods?”

  “Yeah, Barry himself said that he went out there to run around the night the shop supposedly got broken into,” Bobby explained. “Maybe he said that because it was somewhat true, and he couldn’t think of a better lie.”

  “It’s worth a shot,” Don said as he pushed himself up.

  They hurried out of the hotel together, bursting excitedly into the warm August evening. Don took the lead, his long, determined strides forcing Bobby to nearly run to keep up.

  “The woods are this way,” Don said, directing Bobby down a side street she had never been on before.

  “How big are these woods?” Bobby asked as she followed behind him.

  “Pretty big,” he said as he quickened his pace. “They extend out from the town for about a mile.”

  “A mile?” Bobby asked, huffing slightly.

  “That a problem?”

  “One mile? No. A mile thick forest stretching out and surrounding an entire town, yes. How do we even know where to begin?”

  “Well, the dwarves have claimed one part of the woods, they like to hike and mine and do dwarf things out there. The ogres have their own little section, where they…” his voice trailed off, “I don’t actually know what they do out there, but I know that it’s unofficially theirs.”

  “So, how does that help us? You’re talking about a small portion of a very large wood.”

  “You didn’t let me finish,” he said, slowing down to let her catch up. “The shifters have their own little section as well. It’s where we go when we want to hunt, run, or do ‘shifter things’.”

  “Oh,” Bobby said, nodding slowly. “And you know where this section is?”

  “You remember that I’m a shifter right? That thing you’ve been making fun of me for since the day you arrived?”

  “I haven’t made fun…”

  “Let’s get going,” Don said turning and walking down the street again, “we’re losing daylight.”

  He was right. The sun was almost completely set in the distance. Not only were they running out of light, Bobby thought, they were running out of time. The hours were ticking away quickly, and she had to be back in her own realm a lot sooner than she would have liked.

  Chapter 30: A Walk Through The Woods

  “He’s not out here,” Bobby said after they had spent over two hours searching the woods. “It’s hopeless.”

  Don was walking up ahead of her, staring at the ground as he moved between the trees. “We can’t just give up,” he said.

  “We’re wasting our time, though,” Bobby interjected. “We have less than twelve hours before I need to be back at Headquarters. We need to rethink this. He has to be somewhere else. Maybe he’s home already.”

  “No,” Don said, kneeling down and feeling at the dirt. “This has to be it. He has to be out here. Where else would he be? Where else would he go?”

  “There has to be somewhere.”

  “There are fresh tracks,” Don replied, just as she was turning to walk back towards the town.

  Bobby stopped and turned around slowly. “Are they Barry’s?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted, pushing himself up and wiping his hands on his pants.

  “So, we’re going to waste the rest of the night, out here, following tracks that might not even belong to the person we’re looking for?”

  “Do you have any better ideas?” he replied.

  “No,” she admitted. “But I don’t know this town the way you do. Is there anywhere around here someone can go to hide?”

  “There are plenty of places to hide,” Don said, “but he’s not hiding. We arrested Laura. He thinks he’s in the clear. If anything, he’s celebrating.”

  Don turned and walked deeper into the woods. Bobby followed behind him, trying to keep her steps as quiet as possible. “Maybe he’s at the butcher’s shop?” she offered.

  “He might have been, earlier, when we were at his house. But the butcher closed hours ago.”

  “Then he’s probably at home!”

  “Did you see that house? You yourself said that it was his lesser part-time home. If that’s so, he wouldn’t have gone to his other part-time home when he got off work?”

  “You think his other part-time home is out here in the woods?”

  “It’s nowhere in town,” he replied bluntly. “If it were, people would have definitely been talking about that. In case you didn’t notice, people in this town like to gossip.”

  They continued walking, the darkness growing thicker around them. “This doesn’t look like a place for a home,” Bobby remarked.

  Don looked at her over his shoulder. “Like I said, it’s the only option we have.”

  “Wait,” Bobby said, reaching out to grab his arm. “Do you smell that?”

  “I already told you, just because I’m a werewolf…”

  “You don’t have to be a wolf to smell that,” she said, sticking her nose in the air and sniffing a few times. “Ugh,” she said, releasing her hold on his arm and covering her nose with her hand, “how can you not smell that?”

  Don turned his face into the breeze and inhaled slowly. “Oh, God,” he said, quickly turning back around to face her. “What is that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, walking around him, still sniffing the air and following the smell.

  “You want to get closer to that?”

  “That’s what Barry smelled like the day he stumbled into the station to report the robbery,” she said, still moving forward. “I’ll never be able to forget that horrid smell.”

  The stench was getting stronger. So strong that it made her eyes begin to water. The brush around them grew thicker, and it became more difficult to continue moving forward. Bobby was on the brink of giving up. The challenge of pushing through bushes filled with thorns and branches that reached out and scratched at her arms was not worth enduring the torture of that smell.

  But she forced herself forward, just a few more steps until she found her way to a large clearing. The relief of being out of the thick was quickly pulled away from her when the smell nearly knocked her off her feet.

  “Whoa,” Don exclaimed as he emerged behind her. His shirt was pulled up over his nose and his brow was scrunched in an expression of disgust.

  “This is it,” Bobby choked. “This is where he went that day.”

  She looked out at the scene in front of them. There was a swamp filled with a green liquid that bubbled up and sent the horrible smell bursting into the air.

  Bobby’s eyes teared, but not enough to blur her vision completely. She shifted her gaze further into the distance. On the other side of the marsh were more trees, but between them, she could see a light. It was faint, but it was definitely there.

  “That’s it!” she exclaimed. “It’s over there! Do you see it?”

  Don
leaned forward, hesitantly, not wanting to get any closer to the marsh than he needed to, and followed the line she drew with her finger, signaling the direction of the light.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “I bet it’s our grieving widower’s other part-time home,” she said, turning around squealing with excitement. “We’ve found it! We found it, Don!”

  “We haven’t found anything yet,” he said, stepping back into the brush. “We need to go check it out.”

  It took them another hour to walk around the marsh. Bobby’s heart was racing the entire time. She sensed that Don, too, was excited about the prospect of finally getting to the bottom of their case. Although, he didn’t express it openly like she did. As they walked, she continued to ramble on about what they could possibly find there. A drug ring. A mistress. A stash of money he had secretly been stealing from Holly. The possibilities were endless.

  She could hardly contain herself as they crept up towards the source of the light. Just as she had assumed, it was a house. It was small, but it appeared to be well-kept. There were no vehicles parked out front, and the surrounding area was nothing but thick, heavy wood.

  “Obviously, this is somewhere only someone with abilities to run through the woods freely can access,” Bobby said quietly as they simultaneously lowered into a crouch.

  A figure passed by one of the windows. “That’s Barry,” Don said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive,” Don replied. “Same hair, same shoulders, same everything.”

  “You seem to be very familiar with Barry’s characteristics,” Bobby said jokingly, “maybe you’re his mistress.”

  “Jealous?” Don asked, not missing a beat.

  “No,” Bobby said defensively.

  She was searching her mind for a quick comeback when another person passed by the window. They were only able to see the person’s back, but instantly Bobby knew who it was.

  “Oh, my God,” Bobby said, backing up quickly, pulling Don into the brush with her. “I figured it out! I got it!”

  “Got what? Who was that?”

  “Tammy!” she said, trying to keep her voice low despite the rush of excitement that was sitting heavily on her chest.