I knew that Cassie hadn’t murdered Peg. But the issue with the missing till money was a different issue altogether. I couldn’t imagine Cassie stealing from the till but at the same time, she made minimum wage and relied on tips to get her through. With her current family situation and the financial hardship they were under, it wasn’t that out of the question that she might have done something rash under the terrible pressure. Peg continually refused to give her a promotion. Maybe she had decided to take matters into her own hands and skim a little off the top…
I shook my head, banishing the thought. Hot guilt ran over me as I realized how far I’d fallen down the rabbit hole. I knew better! No, there was no way that Cassie stole the money and she definitely did not kill Peg.
But then who did? This Phillip Tanner? What was the connection there?
I picked up the contracts again. They were calling to me for some reason. I was halfway through a second pass when a loud bang sounded from the alley. I jumped and my hand brought up a stunning spell, ready to fire at whatever the source of the noise was.
Outside, it sounded as though something large crashed into the metal dumpsters. Then my spine went ramrod straight at what sounded like a bear growling.
Adam!
CHAPTER TWELVE
“ADAM?” I BOLTED back through the shop, nearly slipping on the slick floors, and crashed into a solid form.
“Holly?” A flashlight beam hit me in the face and temporarily blinded me.
Nick? I blinked the fuzzy spots from my view and backed up a step. When my eyes could focus again, I narrowed them at the dark outline in front of me. “Bat wings…Nick, what are you doing here?”
Nick’s flashlight illuminated the space between us. “What are you doing here? This is a crime scene, Holly. You might have noticed the tape out front.”
I crossed my arms. “Uh huh, and where’s your badge, Mr. Rivers?”
He grimaced. “Fine. You’re here, I’m here, we might as well work together. Afterward, I’ll walk you home, there’s a massive stray on the loose out there!”
I bristled at his commanding tone. “He’s not a stray. His name is Adam.”
“You have a dog?” He glanced over his shoulder, back into the alley.
Bat wings! I pressed my eyes closed and wished I’d stayed home. “No. I mean…he’s not my dog. But I know of him.” Yeesh, this was going to be complicated if Nick and Adam ever met when Adam was…not a dog.
Sometimes being a supernatural was a real pain in the tush.
Nick stepped inside and I backed up to make room for him. The door closed softly behind him. “Well, I scared him off for now, but I’ll still walk you home when this is done.”
I blinked. “And by this, you mean…?”
He circled the flashlight around the room. “Investigating.”
“I thought you already knew everything?” I arched a skeptical brow at him.
Nick smiled. “I came up with some new questions. So, come on, Holly. Let’s compare notes. What have you found so far?”
“Why do you even care, Nick? You didn’t even know Peg. I get that you’re a PI but what’s in this for you? Did someone hire you to investigate this case?”
Nick considered me for a long moment. “The truth?”
“That would be preferable.” Although, I could whip up a Truth be Told potion if the occasion called for it…
Nick heaved a sigh. “All right. The truth is, I’m new in town and looking to establish my own business here. No one’s hired me to take the case but I’m hoping that if I can get in good with Chief Lincoln and his officers, that maybe they will hire me as a consultant or even send business my way. You know, the things that fall outside their scope but still need someone to look into.”
“And the paranormal tours are what then? A side gig?”
Nick shrugged and started looking around the back room. “Something like that. More of a personal hobby that brings in a little cash when the chips are down.”
“Aha.” I nodded and shifted my weight back into my heels. I glanced past Nick, out the open door, and wondered where Adam had gone. I halfway expected him to come through the back door, sloppily dressed, wearing a mischievous grin that would make Nick wonder what I’d really been doing.
“What’s in it for me?” I asked, dragging my eyes back to Nick.
He rounded back to face me, guiding his light beam off a pile of cardboard boxes stacked against the back wall. He smiled in a way that made me think he would have puffed out his chest and straightened his bow tie if he had been wearing one. “You get me.”
“Gee, what a prize…”
His smile dialed back a smidgen. “I’ll help you solve the case and prove that it wasn’t your friend Cassie.”
I sighed. That was the one thing he could pull. “Without the tour?
He frowned but then inclined his head. “One night. Then I’ll never come back to the manor.”
I studied his eyes for a moment. Cassie needed my help. I could figure out the tour later. “All right. Fine. What do you know?”
Nick flashed a triumphant grin and held out his hand to seal the deal.
My fingers twitched, aching to hex him.
Instead, I swallowed hard and set aside the havoc that would come my way once Posy found out that for one night she was going to be hosting a spook-a-thon. It was almost comical. Except it wasn’t. Adam and Lacey were going to kill me.
“One night, Nick. That’s all I’m giving you.”
He chuckled and I ground my teeth at the double meaning of my statement. “You know what I mean.”
He got it together long enough to answer, “Yup. One night at your place, Holly.”
He all but wiggled his eyebrows at me.
I huffed and started to push past him for the door. I’d had enough.
“Come on,” he said, his laughter dying off. He snagged my arm and reeled me back in.
I balled my hands into tight fists and planted them on my hips. “Spill what you know or I’m out of here, and I’ll spend the next six months making your life so miserable that you’ll fly out of town fast enough to make the street signs spin around in your wake.”
He blinked hard at my threat. Apparently, I could be scary even without magic flinging from my hands. Good to know. With what I’d gathered about Nick, it likely wasn’t the last time I would need to shake him up.
He held up his hands. “Okay. You win. The forensics team found a pair of shoes in the dumpster two doors down from here. They were coated in peppermint syrup.” Nick tiptoed away and started poking around again. “And of course, that was the murder weapon.”
I grimaced. “I still can’t believe someone really smashed one of those bottles into Peg’s head hard enough to kill her.”
“Yup. Pretty gruesome way to go if you ask me.”
I shuddered. “Not to mention smelly…”
Nick stifled a laugh and started toward Peg’s office. I gasped, suddenly remembering that my magic orb of light was still hanging inside. Nick turned back at my gasp. “What? Did you see something?”
“Ummm…no. But I remembered that yesterday, Peg got a phone call before I left for the day. She wrote some notes on the pad we keep by the phone. Maybe that has something to do with it…”
“Let’s go look!” Nick took off down the short hall, heading for the front of the shop. I found it funny that he was set on leading the way when I was the one who had worked in the shop for four months. Whatever. It worked. I hung back as he disappeared around the corner and then bolted back to snap my fingers at the orb. The light vanished in a soft poof and I heaved a sigh of relief.
That would have been hard to explain away.
“I really need to work on my memory charms,” I reminded myself as I jogged to catch up with Nick.
When I rounded the corner, he was standing at the cordless phone base. “This pad?” He gestured with the tip of his finger, careful not to touch the neon blue pad that was shaped like a coffee cup.<
br />
“Yup.” I peered over his shoulder and caught a whiff of his cologne. “Oh, thank the stars! I can smell again!”
Nick frowned and glanced over at me. “What?”
“After the peppermint exposure I haven’t been able to smell anything but mint all day! But I can smell your…your cologne.”
Nick flashed a grin. “Oh yeah? You like it? It’s new?”
His face was inches from mine and with the flashlight providing the only light it was a little too cozy. I took a step back and put the proper amount of space between us. “Yeah. It’s fantastic.” I rolled my eyes.
I pointed at the pad. “Anyways, yes, that’s the pad I was talking about. Although, it looks like she took the note when she left. Bats…”
“What’s the deal with you and bats? You’re not a vampire or something, are you?” Nick laughed at his own suggestion and I bristled, highly offended. No, I was most certainly not a vampiress! Thank the stars!
Nick elbowed me. “Come on, Holly. Laugh. Smile. Something. I was just teasing you.”
I flashed a sarcastic smile. “Happy?”
He groaned.
I put my fists back on my hips and scanned the softly lit room. The chairs were all stacked on the tables, left there from when Cassie and Frankie, a part timer, would have gone through and cleaned up. It looked so different at night. Outside, the patio glowed with solar powered lanterns. As I stared out into the quiet night, the exhaustion of the day caught up with me. I gestured at the counter. “Well, the notepad’s a bust.”
“Not necessarily,” he said, slipping back into PI mode. He fished in his jacket and retrieved a plastic bag. “I have all my forensic stuff in the car. I have this sand stuff that can fill in what was on the note by using the indents from the pen when she wrote it. Most people push hard enough to leave marks on the page beneath. The sand will show us what she wrote down.”
“That’s fantastic!” A genuine smile spread across my face.
Nick returned my smile and nodded. “It might help. What else should we search?” He slipped the pad into the bag and pocketed it in his jacket. “Were you in the office?”
I nodded. “Yeah. I didn’t find much. Well…” I gave him a sidelong glance.
“Holly? We’re partners now, remember?”
I sighed. “Okay. Come on.”
I led him to the office and showed him the contracts I found earlier. Nick poured over them page by page, his expression getting more grim with each new chunk of text. “This is bad…”
I nodded and tucked a strand of hair back behind my ear. “Yeah. I thought so too. The investigators didn’t say anything about this?”
Nick shook his head and set the papers down, once he’d tapped them back into an orderly stack against the desk. “No. To be honest with you, once they found those shoes, Chief Lincoln went back to the station and the crew shut this place down.”
My brow furrowed. “I don’t understand. Why would the shoes crack the case?”
“They were coated in the syrup, like someone standing beneath a shower of that vile peppermint stuff. The murderer obviously used a weapon of convenience, the bottle, and in the process they would have ended up covered in that stuff. So, think about it, if they were your shoes, would you wear them into your car? Or would you dump them?”
He had a point. “How do they know they were thrown away today? Maybe it was from a while ago. Those dumpsters only get emptied every other week. Bottles get broken from time to time. Things spill. A coffee shop isn’t a clean environment.”
“It was fresh, Holly. And once they found out about the argument with Cassie, they kind of called it a day.”
I wrinkled my nose. “I’m still not following.”
Nick flashed me a pitying look. “Holly, the shoes…they were Cassie’s.”
“How do they know who they belong to?”
“Frankie Jensen ID’ed them as the ones she’d been wearing the night before.”
I sucked in a sharp breath and covered my mouth. “Oh, no!”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“CASSIE DIDN’T DO this. It has to be a coincidence.”
Nick frowned. “I don’t know, Holly. Between the testimony about the heated argument and the shoes, it seems pretty damning. They’ll probably get a search warrant and look through her house for signs of more syrup and blood.”
“There has to be another explanation…” I shook my head slowly, still trying to process everything Nick was dumping onto me.
My eyes flashed to him. “Why are you trying to help me prove she’s innocent? You’re like a cop. So, that means you think she did it too. Right?”
Nick shook his head and then shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t like to jump to conclusions. That’s why I wanted to come here myself and see what I could find. The first answer isn’t always the right one. In fact, from my experience, it’s rarely the right one.”
“How long have you been a PI?”
“About four years,” he said, scratching his jaw. “I went to college in California in the hopes of becoming a big time, first-on-the-scene, kind of news reporter. You know, right there in the action. The face people look to when there’s a crisis.” He paused, a flurry of memories dancing behind his eyes. “Anyways, I got my degree in journalism and made sure to take a whole heap of broadcasting and communications courses. After I graduated, I spent ten years working for a small paper in LA, waiting on my big break in the City of Angels. Cheesy, huh?”
I shook my head. “No. Not at all.”
Nick gave me a soft smile. “Well, it turned out to be a big waste of time. The most exciting story I ever covered was a ring of shoplifting housewives from Beverly Hills.”
“What on earth were they shoplifting? Diamonds and solid gold coins?” Women in Beverly Hills wanted for nothing. I couldn’t imagine them resorting to shoplifting.
Nick laughed. “No. That was the weird part. Everything was really simple. Clothes, cheap jewelry, boxes of cookies from grocery stores. It was surreal. When they got busted, they said they did it for the thrill.”
“Wow. What did they call them? Kleptos in Stilettos?”
Nick dropped his head back and laughed loudly, the sound filling the small office. I smiled, begrudgingly admitting to myself that I liked the way he laughed, and even more, I liked being the one who made him laugh.
“Kleptos in Stilettos. I like that. If I ever write a book that’ll be the title.”
“Happy to help. All I ask is for my name to appear on the dedication page.”
Nick grinned like a happy golden retriever. “You got it.”
“So, how did that story make you jump from reporting to being a PI?” I asked, picking up the thread of his story again. We’d been at Siren’s Song for a long time. I was starting to get nervous that someone would report the ruckus in the alley following Adam’s quick exit. The last thing we needed was Chief Lincoln showing up.
“Right.” Nick rubbed the back of his neck. “There wasn’t anything about that story in particular. It was more of a culmination of all the other lame stories I’d covered in my career. The last straw, I guess. I remember sitting at my desk and it hit me right between the eyes. I could see it all so clearly. If I stayed at the paper, that was what my legacy would be. Half page spreads on Beverly Hills soccer moms who got bored and went on a misdemeanor crime spree. I mean, they were out of the slammer two hours later. It was so nothing. Like cotton candy.”
I nodded. “That makes sense.”
“One of the perks of working at a small paper is you do all your own fact checking, running down lead, and over time, I made connections at the local police station. I knew all of the officers and we had a rapport with each other. One of them suggested I get into PI work if I wanted a bigger piece of the action. So that’s what I did. It’s odd how similar it is to reporting. You still have to identify the key players, get to know them, track down leads, shake a lot of trees to get information. Then you sit down and try to piece it all tog
ether and it starts to fit and the story unfolds naturally.”
“You make it sound so easy,” I said, grinning at him.
“I don’t mean to. It’s not easy. I’ve had a few cases that I couldn’t crack. But, those years spent working for the paper definitely helped.”
“And this was all in LA?”
“The first four years, yeah. I moved up here to get a little piece and quiet. The city was getting too loud.”
I cocked my head. “But what made you pick a small town like Beechwood Harbor? Sure, it’s all exciting right now, what with the murder. But normally, the biggest scoop you’re going to find here is idle, small town gossip about who’s on the rocks, who’s hooking up, or what’s on sale down at Thistle.”
Nick laughed. “Thistle?”
“The natural food store.”
“Ah. To answer your question, a few months ago I was working a runaway case. A couple hired me to find their nineteen-year-old daughter. The police wouldn’t touch it because she was legally an adult and there were no signs of foul play. My trail of clues led me here and I guess I just kinda fell in love with it. It’s a beautiful town and a drastic change from LA, which is exactly what I wanted. I’m not normally an impulsive guy, but on my way out, once the case was solved, I saw a rental sign and figured what the heck.”
“And on the plus side, there’s a spooky house that the neighbors like to talk about…” I quipped, glancing down at my boots.
“That’s not what—”
“You’re a complicated man, Nick. Reporter, PI, and paranormal tour guide to the delusional and paranoid.”
He reared back, his expression quickly shifting from casual to irritated. “Delusional and paranoid? Ouch.”
I shrugged. “It is what it is. Vampires and ghosts don’t really exist. What next? You’ll start hunting for witches? Maybe toss a few into the river and see if they float or drown?”
Murder's a Witch: A Beechwood Harbor Magic Mystery (Beechwood Harbor Magic Mysteries Book 1) Page 9
