Cast a Spell

by Stacey Alabaster

  I sighed. In spite of what he’d done, I did still hold a bit of a soft spot for John, it was true. But that soft spot would disappear if I got any proof that he had been the one who had killed Eddie.

  “So,” I said with a smile, pressing my question again. “I’m sure you’re the one to ask—the one with all the gossip and the insider knowledge. Do you know where John is now?”

  Donna bit her lip and shook her head. “He hasn’t been in contact with anyone from the college since it all happened. But the rumor that I heard is that he moved up north—somewhere near Byron.”

  Well, that was nowhere near Melbourne. But rumors could be false. “Is there any proof that he actually moved to Byron?” I asked Donna, who suddenly looked suspicious and guarded, and as though she didn’t want to be pressed on what she had said.

  “Why are you asking these questions?” she said in a gruff manner, and then told me that she was extremely busy with all the extra admin and that she needed to get back to work.

  “I just thought it would be nice to reach out to him. You know, offer some friendly words. It might be nice for him to hear, considering the fact that most people would not have such nice things to say to him at the moment. And the only contact detail I have for him is his college email address—which I assume he no longer has access to, right?”

  Donna nodded and softened up a little. And then she told me that if I kept this to myself, she’d see if she had his last known phone number. “But he may have changed his number, so no promises that this will work,” she said.

  I was so grateful. But after twenty minutes, she came back from the files saying she couldn’t find anything. She frowned at me, and I thought she must have changed her mind. I didn’t know that we had another student lurking nearby and listening in on the entire conversation! Donna looked past me with suspicion, and I jumped when I heard the footsteps and saw the mop of brunette hair standing beside me.

  Savannah was open-mouthed. She had heard what Donna had said to me, and she looked furious with me. “I thought we were supposed to be on the same team! But you are investigating this case behind my back, on your own!”

  I straightened up the bag on my shoulder. “Hey, you are the one who agreed it would be best if I went solo, remember?”

  She crossed her arms. “But that was before.” She looked genuinely hurt. “It’s still not cool to go behind our backs like this. To go behind my back.”

  “Look, I just didn’t want to get you into trouble,” I said, kinda stretching the truth there. It wasn’t like I had cut her out of the investigation because of any personal reason. “Joe banned us from working on the case, and I didn’t want to put anyone else’s place in the course at risk.”

  She shrugged and softened a little. “I guess that makes sense.”

  I was about to ask her right then and there why she hadn’t told me that this wasn’t her first time taking the course—but I changed my mind at the last moment and instead asked her, “How would you feel about joining up and being a team again?”

  That way, I would be able to keep a closer eye on her.

  “I feel kinda bad about breaking and entering.” Savannah’s voice was shaking as we headed towards the now-empty classroom. It was well after hours, and we were the only two students there.

  I didn’t think it was breaking and entering if the door to the classroom had been left wide open. Joe hadn’t been at the college long enough to accumulate too much stuff, but if there was a reason that Maddie kept looking through the desk drawers, I wanted to have a better look myself.

  It was a little strange to be there after hours when the sun had set. The street lights came in through the window, the light on a slant, and there was an eerie feel to it. This had been John’s classroom before it was Eddie’s. I had spent a few evenings in here at a similar time, back in the day. John had often stayed late, and I had as well. Just getting some extra credit, or asking in-depth questions about what life as a PI would be like. I had been one of the few students who had taken that kind of initiative, and John had loved it. I thought I’d been doing the right thing. But maybe my choice of mentor had been questionable

  I had to wonder if maybe, deep down, I just wanted to clear John’s name. Maybe he had fudged a qualification, but I really didn’t want to believe that he was a killer.

  “You don’t have to take this risk if you don’t want to, Savannah. I can do this all by myself . . .” It was my way of testing her, to see if she would go forward with the plan. Well, almost everything I said to her was some kind of test to try and trip her up. Get her to admit that this was not the first time she was doing the course—and if I could prove that Savannah was the killer whilst also clearing John’s name, all the better.

  Savannah straightened up and re-asserted herself. “No. I can do this.” She nodded at me and added, “We are a team, and you can count on me.”

  She sounded like she actually meant it—about the two of us being a team, that is.

  I started to feel a little guilty as we looked through the desk. Most things on it now belonged to Joe, but he was a bit of a minimalist and hadn’t tried to personalize the desk at all. Savannah glanced around and shivered a little.

  I was going to have to hide a key piece of evidence from her, and that was the fact that she was a former student, and I knew it. I also knew that she had been extremely unhappy about having to repeat the course and all but threatened Eddie for being the cause. I kept one eye on her as I searched through the desk, wondering if she would come clean to me about this fact at any stage.

  Maybe I could trip her up.

  “What did you think of Eddie as a teacher?” I called out casually as we looked through the stacks of paper left on his desk from the first day of class. They weren’t anything too personal. Future assignments that had been printed out, blank test sheets, that kind of thing.

  She just shrugged and said he was a little too cool. “You know, trying to be more like a friend than a teacher.”

  “Unlike Joe,” I muttered a little. He was not interested in being anyone’s friend. Hey, I had even tried having lunch with him, and he’d still managed to be gruff with me and stormed off before he had finished his salad.

  “And unlike Joh—” She stopped suddenly as she realized she’d been about to give herself away. Slipped up and almost revealed that she’d known the teacher at the college on her first go around.

  I just stared at her. I knew she had been about to say “John.”

  “Unlike who? John?” I asked, pretending to be confused about how she could know who John was. I even added a little laugh at the end, to show that she was in a safe zone if she wanted to admit the truth to me.

  But she didn’t.

  She shook her head quickly. “No, no, I said Joe.” She tried to laugh it off. “I was just agreeing with you. Just repeating what you said.”

  Yeah, right. She had plausible deniability, though. She’d stopped saying the name just before the n had slipped out.

  And so we worked in silence for a little while. When I pulled on the desk drawer, this time it came open easily. “Huh!” I said and pulled it all the way out.

  Another ice cream cone stick. Original Gelato again. Hmm. How did it get there? Joe was a health freak. I didn’t think anyone who ate tuna salad and had biceps like him was eating an ice cream every afternoon.

  Just as I was about to reach down to inspect it further, there was a scream from somewhere down the hall. “Is that Donna?” I asked, straightening up. The school was empty of students, but there were a few lingering people, such as Donna and the janitor and—apparently Joe, in the staff room, who had stayed back until the sun had started to set. Trying to keep the college afloat in these tough times.

  We ran out into the hallway and saw Donna huddled over Joe, who was lying on the ground clutching his abdomen.

  Someone had attacked Joe on his way out of the staff room.

  I glanced over at Savannah. Darn. My number two suspect had
just been crossed off my list. She’d been with me the entire time.

  We may have been the first on the scene, but the following day, we had been pushed to the side by some of the more domineering classmates who were already calling for people to take a lie detector test. No one trusted anyone after the attack on Joe.

  Maddie was the most vocal of all. And as per usual, she was leading the team and calling all the shots. I pushed through and went over to Joe to check that he was okay, sitting all alone at his desk, keeping his head down that morning. I was the closest person he had to a friend in the classroom. He hadn’t needed to spend the night in hospital, but he had taken a nasty hit to the abdomen and was still feeling a little dizzy and wounded.

  “You could have taken the day off,” I told him kindly. “We all would have understood.”

  “You guys need me.” He looked up at me with heavy eyes. “You’ve already lost enough instructors. It’s important to have some stability. To have me around.” He stood up and tried to take a step towards the whiteboard but stumbled over.

  “Whoa!” I said and caught him—well sort of, he was a big guy—before he hit the ground. I could have sworn that I saw Maddie smirking. She covered her mouth with her hand to try and hide it while I led Joe to the sick bay so that he could get checked out. Maybe a trip to the hospital wouldn’t have been such a bad idea after all.

  “I’ll be back in there teaching after lunch,” Joe said. He tried to pull himself up again, but he was still pretty lightheaded and Donna—who was watching him until the first aid nurse could get there—shot him a look telling him to stay seated.

  “I don’t know,” I said wryly. “Is it good for us to be taking career advice from a detective who almost got himself killed?”

  I’d been trying to lighten the mood a little bit, but I could see that he wasn’t finding it funny at all. “I didn’t almost get myself killed,” he muttered gruffly as he stood up again and started to move towards the exit of the sick bay. “As this should prove to you all—I know how to take care of myself.”

  Maybe, but I could tell that the guy was shaken by what had happened the night before. This was the first time that his age had shown, and he definitely looked all of his fifty-one years.

  He looked over his shoulder at me and told me that I should be getting back to class as well. But I had another plan in mind.

  “You need to take the afternoon off,” I said rather sternly. If I didn’t tell him the cold hard truth, who was going to? The guy clearly had too much pride to admit to any weaknesses. But that didn’t mean that he didn’t have them.

  “Who is going to teach the class, then?”

  I grinned at him. “I am.”

  5

  I’d thought that putting my teacher’s hat back on again was going to be a piece of cake. But by the second day of teaching, the pressure was starting to get to me, and I checked my red hair in the mirror, wondering if any gray would be starting to show. This was harder than John, Eddie, and Joe had made it seem—no wonder they were all getting fired or dropping dead or being punched in the guts.

  But at least I had some teaching experience. Five years as a third-grade teacher had given me good training and toughened me up, and yet teaching adults was harder in a way I hadn’t expected. Children automatically gave you a sense of authority and respect just because you were older than they were, and they trusted you implicitly. The dozen people sitting in front of me were all my age and definitely didn’t automatically respect me. They were constantly testing me and trying to get me to prove myself to them over and over again.

  But I stood my ground and delivered all the info with confidence, constantly reaffirming to them that I had on-the-job experience and bringing it all back to cases I had actually worked on, which slowly got them to take me seriously. Maddie was the hardest one of all, but by mid-afternoon, even she had come around a little, and I was starting to relax into my role. Even enjoy it. And I wondered if a return to teaching might be in the cards for me. Not as a third-grade teacher again, of course—but I didn’t see any reason why I couldn’t become a PI trainer when this was all over. I had a lot to offer.

  So, I was confident. But it had taken longer to get through the curriculum than I had thought, and we were already five minutes over time when I noticed how late it was.

  Uh-oh. Akiro’s train got into Southern Cross station at five-thirty, and I had promised him I would be there to greet him. He didn’t know the city at all and didn’t like to be around crowds of people, especially on his own. Plus, it had been over a week since we had seen each other, and I knew he was keen to give me a big hug and a kiss as soon as possible.

  “Sorry, I didn’t realize we had gone over time,” I said to the class, thinking they would all grab their bags and run gratefully out the door.

  “That’s okay,” Maddie called out. “I’m sure the rest of the class doesn’t mind staying back. I don’t.”

  They all murmured in agreement.

  What kind of students were these? Wanting to stay back past the final bell? I mean, we didn’t have a bell at the college, but you get what I mean.

  I picked my notes back up and tried to read through the remaining material for the day. But I was rushing, and the more eagle-eyed students realized it and pulled me up on it when I made a mistake. I couldn’t even send a text to Akiro because I had implemented a strict rule in the classroom that no cell phones were allowed to be out and visible, and so I couldn’t be a hypocrite and use mine.

  It was after six by the time I finally made it to Southern Cross Station. I ran through the gates and found the platform where the Swift Valley line would have made a stop forty-five minutes earlier. There he was, head down, looking sullen like a child whose parent had forgotten to pick them up after school.

  “I’m so sorry!” I said, running to meet him at the platform where he was still standing with a bag slung over his shoulder for his four-day trip.

  He tried to look pleased to see me, but there was a look of irritation there that he just couldn’t hide.

  “Class ran over,” I said, without explaining that I was teaching the class and thus was in charge of how over or under it went. I suppose the implication was that we had a strict teacher who wouldn’t let us leave on time, and I had suffered through it, when really it had been the tough students who hadn’t let the teacher get away on time. “I’ve been really looking forward to seeing you. I couldn’t wait to get away. Just one of those long days, you know?”

  “Sorry,” he said. “That must have been tough. And I know how much this means to you.”

  “It does. It means so much. I am so glad that you are here.”

  I leaned into his embrace and let him hug me. I was so tired of keeping secrets from him—even the little white lies like this were starting to add up.

  But would he still want to be with me if he knew what I really was?

  Maddie was coming up the steps of Southern Cross Station right as we were exiting. She had her bag slung over her shoulder but smiled when she saw us and told us that she was just catching the train home on the North line. I introduced her to Akiro and said that Maddie was a fellow student at the college.

  He smiled at her and said that he had heard a lot about the college and was looking forward to checking it out.

  “Oh, are you a new student?” she asked, looking him up and down. And then with a wink, she added, “Or are you an instructor?”

  “Er, no. I am just here to visit Ruby.”

  She looked disappointed but kept eyeing him in a flirtatious manner.

  Couldn’t she see that I was holding hands with him? Oh, I just realized that we weren’t actually holding hands any longer. And she was still flirting with him using her eyes.

  I wondered what else she was capable of. She was rogue—if she was willing to mix magic with work, then what else was she capable of mixing it with?

  She used magic in public. Was seamless about being a witch. About mixing her powers and her
career. Did she not care about being careful at all? She kept eyeing Akiro up and down like he was a snack that she was just dying to eat. She did have a sort of magnetic presence—and I was worried that my boyfriend was about to fall under her spell

  “She seems like a nice girl,” Akiro said as we exited the station at long last.

  I was about to scoff and disagree, but instead I just smiled and nodded as though I agreed with him. “Oh, yes, she’s lovely. And one of the best students in the class.”

  “Sounds like you have some competition.”

  And he didn’t know the half of it.

  If I wasn’t careful, Maddie was going to blow my cover. My boyfriend didn’t know I was a witch, and I didn’t want him finding out. I just had to keep her as far away from Akiro as I possibly could.

  The weekend was supposed to be time for relaxation. There were no classes scheduled, and Joe had banned all of us from investigating the Eddie case, which was being handled very well by the police, according to him. But I felt like Eddie had been forgotten in the rush of the city. This wasn’t a small town where there were only one or two cases to handle at a time. The police would have been overwhelmed with dozens of similar cases, and so Eddie Ian would be only a number to them.

  He needed us to find justice for him.

  But I had to try and put that out of my head, at least for the morning. This was our first date in Melbourne and our first morning together in a week, and we were making the most of it by going to the Melbourne Museum. There was a new exhibit on that promised to deliver the secrets of ancient Egypt with never-before-seen relics. The paranormal aspects were particularly interesting to me. Akiro, on the other hand, said that the exhibit was only interesting to him because of the history aspects of it.