Cast a Spell

by Stacey Alabaster

  It was after lunch break, and we were all spilling lazily back into the classroom for that afternoon’s lesson. I still had half my sausage roll left but quickly shoved it into my mouth when I saw Joe was still at his desk and hadn’t even left for a break. I knew he wouldn’t be a fan of crumbs on the desks. I quickly brushed them to the ground when he wasn’t looking.

  But when he stood up and glared at all of us, clearing his throat, I wondered if he had seen the crumbs on the carpet. Everyone got a little nervous from the way he was standing over us all. It was clear that something had made him unimpressed. Maybe even a little angry.

  “I have an announcement to make . . . I have heard from a little birdie that some of you have been investigating the death of Eddie Ian.”

  All of us shifted a little uncomfortably in our chairs, and no one said anything. Joe had a way of making us all feel like we had done something wrong most of the time, but this was on another level of silent interrogation. The tension in the room grew as everyone ducked their heads and tried to avoid eye contact while he moved from student to student. His eyes landed straight on me. And I felt like I could not pull mine away from his.

  “All of you are forbidden from working on the Eddie Ian case. You are to concentrate on your coursework instead. Is that understood?”

  I covertly glanced around the room to see what the general consensus was to this. We were forbidden? Did he even have the right to enforce a rule like that? Surely, he couldn’t tell us what we could and couldn’t do in our own spare time, right?

  But most of the class was nodding and making little murmurs of agreement.

  Vicky was nodding the strongest of all, wanting Joe’s approval. Jeez, she was turning into such a teacher’s pet. And what was with everyone just bowing to his authority so quickly? I was really starting to think that no one else in the class had the stomach for this line of work if they could be dissuaded from investigating so easily.

  Well, not me. I was going to stand my ground and tell him that we couldn’t abide by this rule.

  But Joe was glaring at me, and so I quickly nodded that I understood and kept my head down.

  “So, we are not really going to give up on this case, right?” Vicky asked me as soon as we were on our final break of the afternoon. We’d met up at the vending machine. She’d gotten a Snickers, and I’d chosen a Kit Kat for the late afternoon sugar rush.

  I grinned at her in relief. “No way. And I’m glad we are on the same page. And working together again.” We bumped our candy bars together like they were champagne flutes and we were saying “Cheers” at the end of a toast.

  We were going to need each other if we were the only two still working on the case. I was pretty sure no one else would have the guts to go against Joe’s direct rules. But I had a smug little spring in my step as we re-entered the classroom and walked past a sullen-looking Maddie, who was taking the news the worst of anyone.

  “I kinda feel bad about cutting Maddie out. She was on my team, and we were getting along so well,” Vicky said, her voice laden with guilt when we got back to our hotel later that evening. We were wasting no time in investigating. There was no extra credit to be had any longer, but once the two of us were on a case, that was it—we were committed.

  “She can’t be trusted anyway, Vicky, so this is a good thing,” I reassured her as we walked into the lobby. Eddie had been staying in the same hotel as us, so we had the advantage there over the other classmates. That was if the other students were also breaking the rules and investigating. We would know when we saw them snooping around.

  It wouldn’t be easy to gain access to Eddie’s room. This was one of the rare occasions I was going to have to break out of my own rules. “Right,” I said to Vicky, giving her the nod. “You are going to have to say the magic words to get us to the other side of the door.”

  Some of Eddie’s personal belonging were still strewn around his room. His laptop was still on the bench, open to his emails. What were the police in this city thinking?

  Eddie had been flown in from NSW for the duration of the course, which was why he had been staying in the hotel instead of just his own house. “Kinda strange that they didn’t get a local instructor, isn’t it?” Vicky asked as we started to look through his emails. He had clearly been checking them right before he died out on the street. I recalled that long brunette hair that I had seen running away from the scene of the crime. That could have been anyone, though—brunette hair was hardly rare. We had no real suspect, and potentially anyone in the entire city could have done it.

  I shrugged. “Maybe they just wanted to get the best after John was exposed. You know, to reassure the students that they were still the best training college in the state.” Actually, they had the reputation for teaching the best PI course in the whole of the country.

  But how much longer was that going to last if teachers keep meeting these sorts of fates? Fired. Killed. What was next?

  Joe had better watch his back.

  We searched through . . .

  “Wow. It looks like a lot of students really blamed him for them having to repeat the class.” Vicky was reading through the emails, and even though they were all directed to his professional college address, the tone of them was anything but professional. Students calling him nasty names. Asking him to reimburse them for travel expenses.

  I frowned and shook my head, as I couldn’t quite make sense of that. “But it wasn’t Eddie who was the cause of the course needing to be repeated! It was John who was in the wrong. Why would anyone blame Eddie for this?” I gently pushed her out of the way so that I could understand why Eddie was getting all of these nasty messages.

  We had to read more closely to figure out what was going on.

  I looked at Vicky when I finally understood. In an email from someone named Sam, the truth came out. “It was Eddie who turned John in to the licensing board.”

  Vicky raised an eyebrow. “A motive for murder?”

  I nodded a little and read over her shoulder. “Any former student could have had a grudge against Eddie. Even if it was John who was really to blame. Maybe they had no way of contacting him, and so Eddie was the easy target. Even though he was doing the right thing. Kind of like shooting the messenger.” Or attacking him in the street in the night.

  “Or John himself could be the one with the massive grudge,” Vicky said knowingly as she glanced at me over her shoulder.

  Very good point. Did we know where John Cassidy had been on the night of Eddie’s murder? Or any time, actually? Up until then, he hadn’t even been on my radar as a suspect. But now . . .

  “Hmm. Looks like John Cassidy is our number one suspect,” Vicky said, taking notes.

  I was feeling enthused. “And we are one step ahead of the rest of the class, if they are still investigating! Because none of them will know this about Eddie. So, we are top of the class yet again!” I went to high-five Vicky, who was still staring at the screen.

  “Hey—maybe not,” Vicky said slowly as she pointed to the screen and showed me an email. It was addressed to Savannah from Donna, informing her that the college had attempted to phone her several times with some important information about her certification. Then there was a reply message from Savannah, outraged that she had to repeat the course and demanding to know who exactly was responsible for this happening. She had forwarded the entire correspondence to Eddie and demanded that he give her the certificate without making her repeat the class.

  Savannah was a former student of ECL College? “But she told us that this was the first time that she had taken the course.” I scoffed a little. “And from the way she has been carrying on over everything, you’d never guess that she has taken this course before, let alone worked out in the real world as a real detective!”

  Vicky glanced up at me with a solemn look on her face. “Well, maybe there was a reason she didn’t want us to know that this is her second time around.”

  Lunch break. Vicky was hanging out w
ith Maddie and Lucy, and I was walking around the small canteen all alone with my tray, feeling like I was back in high school and no one wanted to sit with me.

  But part of me still wanted to prove that I was the best. The best student, the best detective. And that meant sucking up the teacher. It would probably make me even less popular, but I found an empty seat next to Joe’s table and sat down.

  Joe was eating his lunch, a tuna salad with no dressing. Super healthy and pretty gross. For a moment before I sat, I actually considered asking if he wanted company. But he was eating all alone. Figuring he probably preferred it that way, I put my tray down pretty noisily so that I would get his attention.

  “Guess we are the two unpopular ones, hey?” he said.

  Speak for yourself, I wanted to say. Then I wondered if he was right—it did seem as though my fellow classmates were avoiding me. He looked over at me and asked if I wanted to join him. That had been my plan all along

  I shrugged and moved over to Joe’s table like it was no big deal. For a few moments, we ate together in silence, though something was gnawing at me.

  “Why did you give me that F?” I asked him as I munched on my sausage roll. “It wasn’t exactly fair.”

  He just looked at me over the top of a forkful of tuna salad. “And who said anything about this line of work being fair?” he asked me.

  “Hey, I know plenty about this line of work,” I told him as I dipped my sausage roll into a generous pile of ketchup. And I wanted to tell him more than that—I wasn’t just any old detective. I was a detective who was also a witch, and I had advantages that others didn’t have, even though I used my powers sparingly and only when I absolutely had to. I knew that this line of work wasn’t your normal nine-to-five. These things didn’t follow normal rules, and no, things were not always fair. But I didn’t deserve to fail that test just for talking back to him.

  “Look. I’ll let you re-sit that exam. Something tells me that you weren’t happy with the D, either.”

  He was right. Getting a D wasn’t much better than getting an F. And I knew that if I retook it, I could ace it, so I gratefully agreed to the re-sit.

  We made small talk for a bit. He told me that he was a Melbourne native and a supporter of the Bulldogs football club. I said I didn’t follow football that closely but that my team were the Magpies, because I had a strong affinity with birds. He just snorted a little and told me that was a flimsy reason to choose a football team to support. “Well, that’s my reason, and I’m sticking to it,” I said as I took another bite of my sausage roll. He laughed a bit and told me that I was keeping the local sausage roll factory in production with my strong support.

  Hmm. We were getting along. See? I thought. He wasn’t as tough and mean as everybody thought. More like a great big softy underneath all that grumpy exterior.

  “Did you know Eddie very well?” I asked him, thinking that now we were getting along, I could slip in a few questions. You know, totally innocent questions. Just trying to see if he was in any way connected to the murder. That kind of thing.

  He looked up at me sharply. “What makes you think that I knew him at all?”

  I shrugged. “I just assumed that all instructors at this college knew each other—or at least knew of each other.”

  “Never met the guy in my life.” Joe put down the final forkful of his tuna salad and pushed it away. “And if you ask me, he sounds like a complete flake. Who would want to learn PI work from a detective who could get himself killed so easily?”

  “It is not Eddie’s fault that he was killed . . .” I put the final piece of my sausage roll down, losing my appetite a little. “And he deserves justice. His killer deserves to get caught.”

  “Leave that to the cops,” Joe said, and got up and left the table.

  Hmm. He could claim all he liked that he didn’t want us to investigate because it would distract us from our coursework.

  But why did he really not want us investigating this case?

  Maddie gave Vicky a hug goodbye when class was done that day, and they giggled and promised to snap each other during the evening. And I really had to swallow down that awful high school feeling where you feel like you are losing your best friend to the more popular, prettier girl. Oh, well, Maddie lived in NSW, and so we’d never have to see her again in three weeks’ time.

  But when Vicky left ahead of me, I pretended I needed to stay back at the college to use the on-campus library to study. But really, what I was doing was spying on Maddie. She was the only one left in the classroom, and she was being drawn towards the desk drawers again.

  I got my phone out, turned on the camera, and hit “film” as she performed her magic lock-breaking trick again. There was no denying it this time, and Vicky would have to believe me as well, now that I had proof. It wasn’t just me being jealous. Maddie was a witch.

  That was it. I had her.

  4

  Class was difficult the following day. We were covering how to take witness statements, and there was a lot of legal stuff to take in. After my F, I couldn’t afford to slack off—even if I was allowed to retake the test. But added to that was the fact that I was distracted by the footage that was sitting in my phone, and I kept waiting for a chance to get Maddie on her own so that I could ask her to come clean. But she was the most popular girl in class, and everyone wanted her attention during every break. So, it wasn’t until we had been let out for the day that I finally had a chance to confront her about what I knew—she was a witch. Just like me.

  Joe eyed me warily as I tried to escape at five-thirty and told me that I’d better do some extra homework that night to keep up with the rest of the class.

  “Cool. Thanks. Will do.”

  I chased after Maddie and tapped her on the shoulder. She had been about to catch up with Brett on what appeared to be a date, and so she seemed annoyed at the interruption.

  I had my phone out and said that I had something to show her that she would be very interested in seeing.

  “I’ve already seen that detective meme on Tuesday,” Maddie said with a roll of her eyes. “Everyone was talking about it then.”

  “Please, I don’t show people three-day-old memes,” I said, even though I had no idea what she was even talking about and made a mental note to look it up afterwards so that I wouldn’t be left out of the joke.

  I showed her the video, expecting her to flinch. To beg me not to show it to anyone. Or at least, to explain herself to me.

  She watched it with little emotion, as though she was watching a video of a cat doing something cute but goofy. And then she looked up at me and shrugged. “Yeah. So why are you showing me this?”

  “Because I want you to know that I know.”

  “Know what?”

  Why was she being so cavalier about this? I lowered my voice, assuming that she would not want anyone overhearing this very delicate conversation. “Know that you are a witch,” I whispered and put my phone away. I intended to delete the video later. I wasn’t going to hold it over her or threaten to show anyone or anything like that. I’d just needed it as proof so that she couldn’t deny it when I confronted her about it. If she was a witch, I needed to know.

  “Fine. Yes. I am a witch.” She smiled at me and didn’t seem to have any shame about it, either. “And I intend on using it to my advantage when I get my PI license.”

  I was aghast. “You are going to use witchcraft to solve cases?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Yeah. What’s the big deal?”

  “The big deal is that it is an ethical dilemma. Clients pay you for your qualifications. And they trust you not to cheat them, but to solve cases the honest way.”

  She pulled a face. “Um, isn’t it the other way around? Shouldn’t you be using any means necessary to get the results that your clients are paying for?”

  I adjusted the strap of my backpack and started to walk off. I wasn’t about to take advice from someone who wasn’t even a real detective yet and w
ho had no idea about how these things worked.

  She rolled her eyes a little. “Please, I could tell you and Vicky were witches the moment you walked into the classroom.” She raised her eyes at me when I stopped and turned back. I was stunned. “The difference is that I am not ashamed of what I am. Are you?”

  I knew that people could get angry when the truth was exposed. Sometimes people deserved the things they had coming to them. But Eddie had seemed like a pretty good guy. For someone to have a grudge against him just for exposing a lie wasn’t fair. In spite of everything, I was determined to get to the bottom of what had happened to him that night outside the hotel.

  “Hey, Donna,” I said with a smile as I approached the college reception desk. I noticed how tired she looked, with massive bags under her eyes. “Long day?” I asked her sympathetically.

  She pushed her hair out of her face and shot me a half-smile as she rearranged some paperwork, but it quickly dropped back to a non-smile as she explained what she had been dealing with. “Eddie dying and hiring a new instructor has caused loads of paperwork. And all the admin work is on me.”

  I frowned. “It must make a huge mess for the college when one instructor fakes their qualifications and the next one gets killed.”

  She nodded sullenly. “Student numbers have gone down a lot in the PI course. It’s going to be a struggle for this department for a while. I hope it can stay open.”

  Hmm.

  “Do you know what happened to John Cassidy after he was fired from the college?” I asked as casually as I could.

  Donna looked up at me in surprise. “You’re the only person who has asked after him since the scandal broke . . . I don’t think anyone else much cares what he is up to these days. They are just happy that he is no longer on this campus.” She stopped and looked at me with a little bit of fondness. “But the two of you always got along, didn’t you? You were one of his star students.”