The Witching on the Wall: A Cozy Mystery (The Witchy Women of Coven Grove Book 1)

by Constance Barker

  “So how are you to getting on?” Chloe asked, eyeing them both, her hands on her hips behind her batter-dusted apron.

  “Just fine, Chloe,” Bailey said. “We’re just talking.” Having the three ladies looking after her did make the hole that Wendy had left behind when she passed seem a bit less painful; Chloe especially had become a sort of second mom, or at least a watchful older sister, in the last couple of years. Her suspicion regarding this handsome older man was obvious. She didn’t bother to hide it from either Bailey or Trevor.

  “Bailey’s assisting us with the documentary at the Caves,” Trevor explained. “I’m giving her a bit of the low-down on working with Martha Tells.”

  “Martha,” Chloe sighed. “She’s a piece of work.” She relaxed somewhat. “I knew her before she was famous, but you’d think she always thought she was.”

  “Less so now,” Trevor muttered.

  Chloe pursed her lips, and then glanced back at the counter. “Well, I’ve got customers to tend. You two be good.”

  When she left, Trevor let out a slow breathe. “I wouldn’t want to make Chloe angry,” he said. “I remember her from school. She wasn’t quite so… forceful then.”

  Bailey giggled. “Well, you best watch what you say to me, then. Chloe, Frances, and Aria are all pretty protective of me. Especially now.”

  “I’m glad you have them,” Trevor said quietly. “It’s good to have a big family, a tight community. One of the things I always missed about Coven Grove, actually.”

  “That so?” Bailey bit into her tester cupcake. Her eyes lit up when she did. “Mm, this ith really good,” she murmured around the mouthful, covering her mouth with one hand as she did.

  Trevor chuckled, and went on. “Yes. I moved to Stinton, where both CBC and ATC are based. Same building, actually, just different floors. Oh, you got a little something…” He reached out, and swiped a bit of frosting off of Bailey’s cheek. He looked for a moment like he might put it in his mouth, but then wiped it on a napkin instead.

  Still, the little gesture gave Bailey a brief flutter. Well, what they said about him was all true, wasn’t it? Quite the flirt indeed. She pretended it hadn’t happened. “Well, I should go see about this carpet before it gets too late,” she said. She popped the rest of the cupcake in her mouth, savoring the once-in-a-lifetime taste of it. Chloe rarely put these experimental varieties on the menu; for all Bailey knew she made them just for her.

  “I wouldn’t bother,” Trevor said. “Honestly, Martha’s so desperate for the spotlight, she’d do the documentary barefoot in a burlap sack.”

  Bailey burst out laughing, and then covered her mouth to keep from spitting out cupcake. The image of Martha Tells in a burlap sack, red-faced and raging but pointing at the cave paintings while she gabbed on about whatever she thought she knew about them was just too amusing.

  Trevor laughed with her, and the three ladies behind the counter, as well as several patrons, gave them curious looks. “It’s true, though,” Trevor said as they calmed down again. “The reality is, Martha is done. She has been for a while. The only reason the studio took her up on the proposal to do the piece is that she’s broke. She hasn’t had work since she was here in the Grove, honestly, and she’s barely making anything for this. It’s all about exposure for her. She’s got a lot of bark, don’t get me wrong, but she’s got no teeth to bite with anymore. She’s convinced this place is going to change all that, but I’m not so sure yet.”

  “Why would she think that?” Bailey asked. That Martha had achieved any fame at all before leaving Coven Grove was a miracle in itself; doing it twice seemed unlikely, regardless of what she planned to reveal about the caves. Not unless she was a secret archaeologist looking to get a paper published and that wasn’t the kind of fame Bailey thought would appeal to a woman like Martha.

  “My guess?” Trevor said. “She’s desperate and a little delusional. Grasping at straws, trying to find something that can dig her out of this hole she’s in.”

  “A little old for her, isn’t he?”

  Bailey blinked, and glanced over her shoulder. Not that gossip didn’t happen in Coven Grove, but it wasn’t usually so overt and in the open like that; the people here were polite in public, at least. No one seemed to be looking at them, though. That headache again… maybe she should see if Chloe had something for it behind the counter. “You alright?” Trevor asked. He was getting to be genuinely concerned.

  The din of whispers in Bailey’s head was getting louder. She probably ought to go, and maybe even make an appointment with someone to get checked out. She tried not to look as worried as she really felt. “I’m okay,” she told Trevor. “Just feeling the time. I’m going to go at least check on the carpet. After all, if I can make the whole thing more to Martha’s liking then at the very least she might be in a better mood—and that’s good for everyone, right?”

  “You may have a point there,” Trevor admitted. “Alright. Well, I’ve got some writing to get done, and some preparations with Martha and her assistant, so… I guess I’ll let you go. I’ll see you a bit later, I’m sure.”

  “Definitely,” Bailey agreed. “Um… thanks for bringing me here. I needed it. It was… nice.”

  “Likewise,” Trevor said, his eyes crinkled with his smile. Boy, but he had some white, straight teeth. No wonder he did so well on TV.

  “Alright,” Bailey said as she stood. “Well… then I’ll see you later.”

  “Will do,” Trevor said, still smiling.

  Bailey left, breaking off the long good-bye before they ended up here all day. She waved to Chloe, Frances, and Aria as she did, and all three ladies chimed good-bye’s and come-back-soon’s as Bailey pushed through the door to the porch, and made her way to the library to get her car and check on the possibility of Martha’s red carpet.

  Maybe the whole affair wouldn’t be all that bad after all. Except, all the way to the first carpet shop, Bailey heard those distant whispers and tried desperately to ignore them, to ground herself in her senses; but if she really was starting to lose her mind, could she even trust them?

  Chapter 5

  The feel of the steering wheel under her fingers. The smell of her car. The breeze on her face with the window down. The music playing through the radio, something popular that she’d heard so many times she could sing along without really thinking about it. The taste of the salt in the air.

  Focusing on these things to the exclusion of all else helped calm the whispering down until it was a distant, far away background noise—like the ever present sound of the ocean throughout town, so constant and far away that no one even really heard it anymore unless they tried to. So, that was good.

  On the other hand, she passed the Rigby’s Carpeting Depot twice before she managed to get parked in front of it.

  Her visit was urgent, but polite, and she managed to secure a little under half of what Martha wanted; though whether it would be ready by tomorrow was a question of how much AVT would be willing to spend.

  Hitch-Morgan’s Flooring didn’t think they could make up the other half, but Bailey told them to just get whatever they could together and she would make do. Maybe, she figured, they could just re-lay the carpeting from the entrance of the Caves into the back. Surely they could just edit it to look continuous, right?

  That done, and Bailey’s mind thoroughly occupied with the logistics of the whole affair, she barely heard the whispers in the back of her mind any more. Maybe it was just the stress. Crazy people were crazy all the time, right? Maybe it was a little early to call in the shrink.

  She pulled into the tour office to give Poppy the updates on what was happening, but found the place empty. Maybe she was at the Caves, speaking with Martha. It was getting on into the afternoon.

  So Bailey left her car there and walked back down the long path to the Caves, trying to calculate the best way to cut the carpets so they could keep a lead on the camera crew. That seemed like the best way to do it, and if they had maybe fo
ur of five sections they could stay out of sight around the next bend; plus one straight ream of carpet wasn’t going to do it—the Caves had odd angles and turns that would bunch it up and she suspected Martha wanted it to be smoothed out, the way it was for big events like the Oscars or other celebrity award ceremonies.

  She rolled her eyes a little at that thought. What exactly did Martha think this event was going to do for her? AVT did some well-done documentaries, there was no doubt about that; Bailey loved them, but then she was a bit of a self-admitted nerd when it came to history and the odd, interesting bits of archaeological lore that AVT was particular focused on. Ten million viewers, this documentary was not likely to have.

  And the whole idea of ‘revealing the secret of the Seven Caves’ seemed almost silly. What could Martha possibly know that Bailey didn’t? Not to toot her own horn, but Bailey figured she knew about all there was to know about the Caves.

  When she arrived, the lights were set up, along with tripods and tracks for cameras, and there were locked boxes of equipment strewn about. Not even a guard was there to watch over all of it—not that one was really needed. Coven Grove did have a sheriff, but at this point Sheriff Tim Larson would probably hold the office until he retired or died, and it was practically an honorary title in any case. The crime rate in town was more of a footnote than an actual number. Probably something like ‘too small to calculate’. Other than the occasional teenage vandals or a drunk driver—both still rare—Coven Grove just didn’t have crime. There’d have been no way to get away with it. Everyone knew everyone else.

  Well, she had measurements to make anyway. She’d brought a tape measure with her, so she wandered into the entrance to the Caves.

  Every time she came here, she felt the same sense of familiar comfort. Being in the Caves felt as natural as being in her own home, and had that same sense of welcoming warmth and brightness even though the caves themselves were dim, lit only by the occasional shaft of light filtering down through holes in the cave ceiling.

  They were entirely natural caves, though the floor was worn from centuries of feet walking over them and in places had been smoothed out a little bit in the last two hundred years. Like any natural cave, the canvas upon which the various paintings and writing had been authored was uneven; but whoever had laid it all out in the first place seemed to have taken care to use that unevenness rather than trying to compensate for it. So the wide sections of murals had a certain quality of three dimensional intelligence to them.

  The cave paintings were a marvel of cultural cross-pollination. Some ancient explorer, she imagined, had probably been responsible for them, or a whole slew of them. Around ancient pictures of animals and figures of people, drawn in curling, winding sequences that put her in mind of Native American paintings she’d seen pictures of from elsewhere in the US, were letters in Greek, Arabic, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Norse runes—not Germanic; Bailey had taken an interest in them and learned the differences when she was only thirteen—and even long, winding lines of Ogham script that was historically reserved for marking on long branches but apparently had been transcribed here.

  It was like a travel journal, she’d often thought. She dared not touch them, but she trailed her fingers around them, fascinated as ever and desperately curious about what they meant. Maybe Martha really did know. If she did, that alone made it worth dealing with her.

  The most interesting thing about the odd collection of scripts and letters was that they didn’t actually translate. They were like gibberish. To Bailey, this was evidence that the author hadn’t actually spoken these languages; that maybe they had simply seen bits and pieces, copied letters down, and then decorated with them. When she was just turning twelve, she’d copied down every line and letter and worked tirelessly at the library digging through books on languages and symbols, trying to piece out what they’d meant.

  She and Avery had done it together, imagining themselves intrepid junior archaeologists on the verge of a great discovery—the sort that would launch them into world fame. “Twelve Year-Old Genius Researchers Discover Meaning of Ancient Cave Paintings,” the headline would have said. “World in Awe.”

  She smiled, remembering those long afternoons after school spent shoulder to shoulder, arguing about the letters, and running back and forth to the Caves to compare notes and pose their child-like hypotheses. Bailey had supposed, at one time, that they were actually magic spells, preserved here by ancient wizards or shamans who had traveled the world on the wind collecting the wisdom of dozens of cultures and concentrating it in this one place. In fact, she’d believed it so strongly that she and Avery got into screaming matches about who was right: her, with her ancient sorcerer theory, or Avery with his hypothesis that it was just mimicry.

  Eventually she’d grown out of the belief that there was anything magical about the paintings than what was inherent to the place itself—which was to say, only it’s mysterious nature. Avery’s theory made more sense after they’d failed to translate a single line. On the other hand, both of them had learned a great deal about these ancient languages. She’d aced Latin in high school without working up a sweat.

  In particular, her favorite painting was in the fifth Cave. Each of the seven Caves was defined by an apparent theme, and by the narrow passages that connected the wider caverns. The fifth cave’s wall was one of the most bare, but it had the most complex art. It was unmistakably a woman, almost eight feet tall, her arms spread wide and angled slightly down as though to embrace the observer. The mounds of the cave wall served to give the impression that her arms were in fact reaching out from the wall, and the curvature of the whole mural was such that no matter where in the cavern you were, her simple, expressionless eyes seemed to follow you.

  Except, Bailey had never really felt that her face was exactly expressionless. The artist had not given her a mouth, and only a spiraling mix of letters for eyes, two of them, each with different script, and yet she somehow seemed always to be smiling in Bailey’s opinion. She couldn’t have said why she thought so, other than this is what she felt when she looked at it. Perhaps that was the point—this was all the work of some early abstractionist who’s goal was to make you feel the work, rather than just look at it. Whoever it was had been centuries ahead of their time.

  Bailey watched the ancient goddess, enchanted by the whorls of fine lettering that made up her eyes. Above her head was a tribal depiction of the Sun, along with a star that she had long ago decided was meant to be Venus in the morning sky. There were several of these throughout the caves, though not all of them were as obvious—constellations and recreations of the heavens were a typical theme in many cave paintings the world over. Mankind had, Bailey imagined, always been fascinated by the regularity of those pinpricks of light in the heavens.

  She shook off her fascination. She could gaze at the paintings and swim in the comfort the caves gave her any time she wanted. Now, she was at work and had a job to do. One that she’d hear no end of grief about if she was slow to complete it. She sighed, and got to work measuring and noting down the numbers and adjusting her mental calculations. They’d need at least seven different sections of the carpet, but two of the caves had roughly the same dimensions so maybe only five would be required.

  She proceeded through the sixth cave, confirmed her suspicion of what was needed, and then walked toward the threshold of the seventh and final cave.

  Something stopped her. The whispers in her head were gone now, driven off perhaps by the

  isolation of the caves, influenced by the near total silence of the place and calmed by the dull white noise of the ocean echoing through the place that had the strange effect of dampening all other noise entirely. Somehow, though, the lack of those whispers made her feel suddenly very alone and very small. The caves seemed to close in around her.

  Bailey was not claustrophobic, and had never feared being in the caves. Now, though, she had a horrible, creeping feeling in her spine, as though something was watching h
er. It didn’t feel exactly malevolent, whatever it was—her own stress, very likely, manifested in the dimness of the caves—but it felt… what was it?

  Like a warning, she realized. Go no further, it seemed to urge her. Turn around, leave. The feeling started as merely a fleeting instinct, but as she pushed through the narrow passage it became more and more insistent, until she couldn’t stop her own mind from chanting at her, “Go back, go back, go back…”

  It was unnerving, and her hands trembled against the cave wall as she guided herself through the unlit tunnel, following the illumination of some stage lighting that was tuned down to almost nothing ahead. Her shoe brushed an orange extension cord on the ground, and she nearly jumped at the sudden instinct that it was some brightly colored serpent before her eyes focused on it properly.

  She sighed. The tiny burst of adrenaline seemed to have cleared her mind a bit and she laughed at herself a little, which helped even more. One more cave to go, and she’d run back to the carpet shop to give them the specs.

  The final cave was undoubtedly of a lunar theme. The moon in its various phases, broken down into sevenths from the full moon to the new in a great circle that spanned the full width of the cave’s perimeter near the ceiling—but with one missing spot, as though the artist had meant to divine the upper wall into eighths but had, perhaps, never finished the work. It was a gap that made the moon paintings, each connected and encircled by letters and swirling lines, look like a circlet of white seen from inside some king or queen’s skull. Where the missing phase of the moon was, if that’s what was meant to have been there in the first place, there was one of the most fascinating paintings in the whole system. One that made no sense, other than perhaps as someone’s fancy.

  It was, seemingly, a door. It arched gracefully up, and was on one of the flattest planes on the walls. The lines of it were made up entirely of letters and figures, drawn so tiny that without good light and a magnifying glass it was impossible to parse them out. It must have taken ages to finish with only the tools of whatever ancient artist had undertaken it. She gazed at the door, and then sighed when she saw a crumpled pile of something at the base of it. A dress?