The Good, the Bad, and the Witchy: A Wishcraft Mystery
Page 1
Praise for Heather Blake’s Wishcraft Mystery Series
A Witch Before Dying
“A Witch Before Dying by Heather Blake is quite simply a fantastic read from cover to cover. It’s a magical tale, but it’s also a very human one, and it’s a perfect companion for the lazy, magical, seemingly endless days of summer.”
—The Season for Romance (top pick)
“A Witch Before Dying is a fun twist on typical witchy mysteries . . . with a delightful cast of characters magical, human, and animal.”
—The Mystery Reader
“Four magic wands for A Witch Before Dying—get your copy today!”
—MyShelf.com
It Takes a Witch
“Blending magic, romance, and mystery, this is a charming story.”
—New York Times bestselling author Denise Swanson
“Magic and murder . . . what could be better? It’s exactly the book you’ve been wishing for!”
—Casey Daniels, author of Supernatural Born Killers
“Blake successfully blends crime, magic, romance, and self-discovery in her lively debut. . . . Fans of paranormal cozies will look forward to the sequel.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Wow! Ms. Blake has taken the paranormal mystery to a whole new fun yet intriguing level. . . . This story is . . . mysterious, whimsical, [and] delightful. . . . Heather Blake makes it work!”
—Once Upon a Romance
“Heather Blake has created a wonderful new spin on witches in Salem that is both lighthearted and serious. An all-around wonderful read.”
—The Hive
“Heather Blake casts a spell on her audience.”
—The Mystery Gazette
“A good quick, breezy read.”
—Pagan Newswire Collective
“This stellar, standout series debut has set the bar. High. Extremely high! . . . Wickedly delicious.”
—Blogcritics
Also by Heather Blake
A Witch Before Dying
It Takes a Witch
The Good, the Bad, and the Witchy
A WISHCRAFT MYSTERY
HEATHER BLAKE
OBSIDIAN
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, USA
USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China
Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com.
First published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Heather Webber, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
OBSIDIAN and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
ISBN 978-1-101-60957-6
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I have the best readers ever, whose creativity never ceases to amaze me. So it’s no wonder that when I asked for help on social media with certain names for this book, there were so many suggestions that it was hard to choose which to use.
I ended up picking Jennifer W.’s suggestion, via Twitter, of “Stiffington” for Hot Rod’s surname and Zuzana U.’s recommendation, via my Facebook page, of “Boo Manor” for the name of the festival’s family-friendly haunted house. A big thank-you to both!
If you’d like to follow me (and perhaps help me with another book!) I can be found on Facebook at www.facebook.com/heatherblakebooks and @booksbyheather on Twitter.
CONTENTS
Praise for Heather Blake
Also by Heather Blake
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Epilogue
Special Extract from A Potion to Die For
Tis the witching hour of night,
Orbed is the moon and bright,
And the stars they glisten, glisten,
Seeming with bright eyes to listen
For what listen they?
John Keats
Chapter One
The longer I lived in the Enchanted Village, the more I realized that not only did magic live here, but also the truly eccentric.
There were some strange, strange people in this neighborhood.
Including eighty-year-old gothic maven Harriette Harkette, who was throwing herself a girls-only birthday party to celebrate the big day. She had hired As You Wish, my aunt Ve’s personal concierge service, to plan the black-and-white-themed party—which was taking place tonight.
Ve shouted to be heard above the thumping music. “Are you sure you hired a stripper, Darcy?” She adjusted the black rose floral arrangement on the refreshments table.
The flowers, named Witching Hour roses, were quite stunning. They were midnight black—Harriette’s favorite color—and had recently won international awards and acclaim from elite rose societies for being the first naturally black flower ever cultivated. However, the roses still seemed a little morbid to me, the dark color reminding me more of a funeral than a celebration.
Trying to ignore Ve’s question, I checked the food platters. There were plenty of hors d’oeuvres, but the birthday cake, the centerpiece, hadn’t yet arrived. I’d give it ten more minutes, then make a call to Evan Sullivan, owner of the local bakery, to see what was holding up the delivery.
A handful of fine lines around Ve’s eyes crinkled as she tipped her head and assessed me shrewdly, complete with a narrowed squint and raised coppery eyebrows. The look was softened only by a few long strands of hair that had escaped her ever-present hair clip and framed her round face. “Darcy? The stripper?”
The open bar, across the room, was stacked three to four deep with women waiting for refills. Suddenly, I wanted to join them but instead gave Ve a saucy look. “Don’t you trust me?”
Appearance-wise, the only thing my aunt and I had in common was
our eye color—blue with gold flecks. I was taller, slimmer, with long dark hair and an oval face. But as for personality? Our stubbornness, evasiveness, and sassiness were a perfect match.
“No,” Ve said drily.
She was a smart witch.
The stripper had been a source of contention between us, and I hadn’t exactly followed orders as I should have. There was going to be a stripper, yes, but perhaps not the kind of stripper everyone was expecting. . . .
Ve and I were two of the very many women in the party room of the Cauldron, the village’s pub. I wasn’t sure which was rowdier—the Friday night crowd at the long mahogany bar top or Harriette’s group of nearest and dearest girlfriends.
The floor vibrated beneath my feet, a result of the bass being emitted from the deejay’s enormous speakers. He looked a little scared as he played “I Will Survive” and women sang along at the top of their lungs while giving him dirty looks, he being the sole man in the room. He tried not to make eye contact as he shouldered the anger of every woman-done-wrong on the dance floor. I noticed Harriette’s three best friends (the four women were collectively known as the Wicked Widows–or the Wickeds for short) were singing the loudest, and I suddenly wondered if it was no mistake that they were widowed and not divorced.
But no. That was probably just paranoia whispering in my ear. It had been doing that a lot since the recent murder investigations. Happily, it had been months since I’d been mixed up in a homicide, and personally, I wanted to keep that trend going.
Why this was a girls-only party, I had no idea. Not even Harriette’s mysterious new fiancé had been invited. But that may have been because Harriette had insisted we hire a stripper for the party and not—as everyone in the village suspected—that the fiancé was a figment of Harriette’s eccentric imagination.
The event definitely had more the feel of a bachelorette party than a birthday bash, which made me question whether Harriette had a surprise wedding planned in the near future. Was this birthday celebration only a ruse to throw herself a bachelorette party without coming out and saying so?
The recent announcement of her engagement had set town tongues wagging. At my sister, Harper’s, bookstore, Spellbound Bookshop, a betting pool placed the odds that Harriette had fabricated the existence of the man at three to one. Exactly why she would do such a thing remained a mystery, except she was eccentric, but that seemed to be reason enough.
Dressed head to toe in black, one of Harriette’s two daughters, Lydia, glowered in the corner, her arms crossed tightly. She didn’t appear to be having a good time, but that might have had more to do with the bachelorette-party vibe than anything. Lydia Harkette Wentworth had been quite vocal in her displeasure of her mother’s remarriage—and it showed in every deep-set frown line on her face.
I wondered why she’d even come tonight if she was just going to be a sourpuss. It probably wasn’t to see the stripper.
Adjusting the belt on a black wrap dress that hugged her many curves, Aunt Ve said, “What are you up to, Darcy Merriweather?”
I fussed with the napkins and checked on my dog, Missy, who was watching the dance floor with anxious eyes, carefully guarding her puppy paws from drunken stilettos. “I don’t know what you mean, Ve. I hired a stripper. He’ll be here soon.”
I hadn’t wanted to hire him at all, considering Harriette’s age. A twenty-something gyrating exotic dancer might send her right over the hill and into an early grave.
Ve heartily disagreed, and dare I say it? There had been a gleam in her eye that made me suspect she’d been storing up wads of one-dollar bills for tonight’s big event.
My aunt also qualified as one of the village’s eccentrics.
I set a small dish of water on the floor for Missy. This probably wasn’t the best place for her, but with the crowds in the village for the opening night of the Harvest Festival taking place on the public green, I didn’t dare leave her home alone. She, a small gray and white Schnoodle (she was a mix of a miniature schnauzer and toy poodle), was the Harry Houdini of dogs, able to shed her collar and escape any enclosure, tether, or cage I put her in. I had yet to figure out how she did it. Tonight, she was better off here, with me, where I could keep an eye on her. The last thing I wanted was for some tourist to think she was a stray and wander off with her.
“How soon?” Ve adjusted her fringed purple scarf and looked around as if she hoped the stripper would stroll through the door at that very minute, thrusting this way and that.
I checked my watch. “Soon.”
“Doesn’t he need time to oil himself up?” She patted her head, noticed the escaped tresses, and tucked them back into her fancy clip. “I could help with that.”
“There’s oil involved?” I shuddered. “Wouldn’t that make a big mess? Leave stains?”
“This is not the time to be worrying about laundry.” Ve laughed. “You’ve led a sheltered life, Darcy dear.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.” But I couldn’t argue that it was true. Up until I moved to the village in June, I had lived a sheltered life—an unhappy divorcée and the office manager for my father’s dental practice in Ohio, I had spent most of my free time keeping tabs on my slightly felonious sister, Harper, and had absolutely no idea I was a witch. And that Harper was, too.
All that changed with a visit from Aunt Ve after my father died. And before you could say, “Bippity boppity boo,” Harper and I had moved almost a thousand miles to the tourist hot spot of the Enchanted Village, a themed neighborhood of Salem, Massachusetts. A place where magic lived.
Magic, in the form of witches. Or “Crafters” as we’re called around these parts (not that mortals knew we existed). Ve, Harper, and I were Wishcrafters—witches with the ability to grant wishes using a special spell. However, there were limitations to our magic, including dozens of rules and regulations we had to follow—the Wishcraft Laws—which were governed by the Craft’s secret Elder.
I’d been called before the Elder several times in the past few months for violations. I was really hoping to make it through to New Year’s without having to visit with her again. A witch could hope.
I played with long black strands of my dark ponytail as I glanced around at everyone gathered. There was no way to tell mortal from Crafter at first glance—just a telltale eye twitch and village word of mouth. Even after five months of living here, I was still learning who was who, but I knew a good many women in this room had Crafting abilities.
Birthday girl Harriette, a Floracrafter (she’d grown the amazing black roses herself), had yet to arrive.
“It’s not necessarily a good thing,” Ve said, grabbing my hands. “Especially when you don’t know how to throw a party. Alcohol, cake, and a stripper. Done.” She twirled me around in a dizzying move. “Oh, and dancing.”
Missy barked as if in agreement. The traitor.
I smiled. “You brought a wad of one-dollar bills, didn’t you?”
Ve winked. “Of course.”
“What would Terry say?”
Terry Goodwin was her new (and old) love interest. They’d once been married; now they dated casually. Terry was pushing for exclusivity, but Ve was in no rush to be tied down again.
My aunt had monogamy issues.
Ve made a scrunched-up face. “Probably to enjoy myself.”
I rolled my eyes. “Since when are strippers part of a birthday party, anyway?”
“Since Harriette requested one, and we always grant our clients’ wishes. What time is he supposed to arrive?”
“Nine.” It was only eight thirty. I glanced around. The room looked amazing. Black fabric with white rosettes draped the walls, and high pub tables were cloaked with black-and-white floral-printed cloths. White candles decorated with delicate hand-drawn flowers flickered in the dimly lit room. It all looked amazing. Modern. Elegant. And very much like Harriette.
Ve narrowed her eyes. “You’re up to something. I can tell.”
The pulsing music vibrated m
y vertebrae. “Harriette Harkette is eighty years old. Don’t you think a stripper might send her into cardiac arrest? I really don’t want that on my conscience, do you?”
Ve tipped her head side to side. “Depends on how hot the stripper is.”
“Ve!”
“What?” she asked innocently. “Eighty? Harriette’s lived a good, long life.”
“You’re horrible,” I said with a smile.
Ve wagged a finger. Her nails had been painted black tonight in honor of the party girl.
The—heaven help me—stripper would be arriving soon. The cake, however, was starting to worry me. It should have been here more than an hour ago. I pulled out my cell phone and sent a quick text message to my good friend Evan Sullivan, owner of the Gingerbread Shack, asking how soon till delivery of the beautiful three-tiered cake he’d made.
As I did so, the deejay played a dramatic drumroll, and I looked up as the door to the party room slowly opened.
All smiles, Harriette slinked in. The women, except for Lydia, went wild.
I’d never seen anyone who slinked before, but Harriette did. One long stride after another—she looked ready to launch into a tango at any moment. She threw her arms in the air. “Let the party begin!”
“Staying Alive” started playing, which I thought was the deejay’s form of retribution for all the glares he received during “I Will Survive,” and Harriette speared him with a glowering look.
He pretended to ignore her. Wise man.
In my opinion, Harriette possessed a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde complex. One minute, she was happy as could be, the life of the party, and the next minute . . . viper. I hoped tonight her fangs would stay sheathed.
“Velma! The place looks glorious!” Harriette kissed both of Ve’s cheeks and then mine.
She cast a dubious glance at Missy, who growled low in her throat.
Harriette leaned down and growled right back.