Witches' Brew: Paranormal Cozy Mystery Series (Vampires and Wine Book 1)

by Morgana Best

  The room was stiflingly dreary, and I suspected that even if I were to open the drapes, it wouldn’t make a significant difference. A thick, dark carpet covered most of the floor, seemingly draining what little light managed to filter into the room.

  “The police will be here soon,” the man said as he strode into the room and sat, uninvited, on an armchair. It was an old wooden antique, upholstered in beige and olive green stripes. It was also undoubtedly expensive.

  “Not a good start to your vacation,” Aunt Agnes said, clearly trying to make an effort. “We can’t give you a refund.” Okay, maybe not.

  He waved one hand in the air in dismissal. “I don’t require a refund. I’m not on vacation. I’ve just inherited the Ambrosia Winery.” His words were as clipped as his manner. I could tell he was tense, but he was trying to hide it. I suppose he could be forgiven for that, given the circumstances. I just didn’t like the man.

  My aunts gasped and clutched each other. The electric jolt that ran through the air was tangible. Agnes recovered first. “But Henry’s surname was different.”

  “Henry was my mother’s brother, not my father’s,” he said patiently, too patiently, as if he were explaining to a child. There was more than a hint of condescension in his tone. “Hence I have my father’s name.”

  It made no sense to me, but my aunts were nodding. Their faces were pale and drawn. They were staring at Lucas O’Callaghan with shock, and was that fear?

  Agnes stood up suddenly. “I’ll go outside and wait for the police,” she said, but before she was halfway to the foyer, the doorbell rang.

  Agnes picked up speed, and the rest of us followed her. I hung back a little, not wanting to look at the body.

  A male police officer stood over the body and spoke into his phone, while a female police officer ushered us back into the living room. “I’m Constable Walker,” she said. “All of you wait here for Sergeant Carteron while I have a quick look outside. Did any of you see anybody else around before the incident?”

  We all shook our heads, and she walked away, after casting a hungry backwards glance at Lucas O’Callaghan.

  Sergeant Carteron hurried into the room and introduced himself. He flipped open his notepad and asked us to identify ourselves. I at once noticed the good sergeant wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, and he was awfully attractive. I thought it rather strange that I had seen two good looking men within hours of my arrival in a small town. I wasn’t complaining, of course, and I must admit it was an idle thought to distract myself from the gruesome scene of minutes earlier. Still, I couldn’t help thinking that while Lucas O’Callaghan had a most unpleasant manner, the sergeant did not appear to suffer any personality defects. What’s more, he was talented; he was doing a good job getting my aunts to speak one at a time rather than over the top of each other.

  “It’s just like we already told you,” Agnes said. “We heard the doorbell, and when we went out, our niece, Valkyrie, was standing there with this gentleman who had previously booked.”

  “And did the two of you arrive together?” The sergeant addressed the question to me.

  I shook my head. “No, we’ve never met. I caught a taxi from the airport, and was carrying my suitcases to the door when this man arrived.”

  The sergeant turned to Lucas O’Callaghan. “Is that your car outside?”

  “It’s my hire car,” O’Callaghan said. “I normally ride a motorbike.”

  Of course you do, I thought, while wondering if I had heard the sergeant’s name before.

  Constable Walker returned at that moment. “No sign of anyone outside,” she said to the sergeant.

  “The Forensics team will be here soon,” Carteron said. “I didn’t recognise the victim, so I doubt he’s from around these parts. You’re sure he wasn’t one of your paying guests?”

  “Quite sure,” Agnes said abruptly.

  The sergeant nodded. “Well, we’ll know more once we have a positive identification. It seems strange that he fell through the stained-glass window in the roof.”

  That had to be the understatement of the century. The stained-glass window depicted, or rather had depicted, an image of a dragon slaying St George. My aunts had explained to me more than once over the years that our ancestors had been animal lovers.

  The sergeant said something in a low tone to Constable Walker, but she was off in a world of her own, staring at Lucas O’Callaghan. Perhaps she was more susceptible to his animal magnetism than I was, because she couldn’t seem to take her eyes off him. The sergeant had to repeat his question before she responded.

  “How long before police will remove the, um, man?” Agnes pointed into the foyer as if there was some doubt as to what she was talking about.

  “We won’t have to shut down the business, will we?” Dorothy asked.

  “I very much doubt that it will come to that,” the sergeant said. “The detectives will be here presently. It will be their call, but my guess is that they’ll just cordon off the lobby and you can go about your business. Just don’t go anywhere near the crime scene.”

  “Crime scene?” Dorothy repeated. “You don’t think it was an accident?”

  I stared at her in shock. “How could someone accidentally fall through a stained-glass window?” Agnes asked her, mirroring my thoughts.

  “Perhaps he was on the roof looking for a view of the lighthouse, or the ocean,” Dorothy said reasonably.

  “If you were wearing your glasses, perhaps you would have seen the full extent of his injuries,” Agnes said, none too kindly. “He had bruises around his neck. He’d been strangled.”

  Dorothy’s hand flew to her mouth, and she gasped loudly. She trembled violently, while Maude did her best to comfort her.

  I silently berated myself for not looking too hard, but then again, I hadn’t wanted to look at the body. I had assumed his injuries could be attributed to his fall through the skylight. After all, it was a two storey house and he had fallen through glass onto a hard parquetry floor, but there had been scratches, deep gouges even, on him.

  What sort of weapon could do that? Some sort of bizarre pitchfork? I shuddered. No, it looked like he had been attacked by a wild animal. I knew male red kangaroos would attack if they felt threatened, and could inflict serious injuries, but there would hardly be any kangaroos on top of the roof. Besides, kangaroos rarely came into towns. Australians knew the legend of the Bushland Panthers, large black cats, sightings of which had been reported all over Australia for the past one hundred years, but I had never heard of one in this area. And surely those injuries were inflicted before the man was on the roof. Yet if they were, how had he managed to climb up there? And why?

  I gripped the edge of the couch and forced myself to take a deep breath. These were questions for the police to answer, not me. Still, if there was some sort of legendary panther or giant angry bird attacking people and dropping them onto the tops of houses, then I wasn’t too keen to stay in Lighthouse Bay, penniless or not.

  “Has anything like this ever happened around here before?” I asked the sergeant.

  “I was about to ask the same thing.” The voice was Lucas O’Callaghan’s.

  Constable Walker walked over to him, and stood there, smiling at him. I almost threw up at the look on her face. Had she never seen a reasonably good looking man before? Her partner was strikingly attractive, so I wondered why she wasn’t making googly eyes at him.

  “No, nothing like this has ever happened before,” she said. “This is a quiet little town.”

  The sergeant appeared discomforted, so I decided to press him for information. “You’ve heard of incidents like this before, haven’t you?”

  He shifted from one foot to the other. “I only recently moved to town, but no, this is certainly the first time anyone has fallen through a stained glass window to their death.”

  I felt he was avoiding the question, but I pushed on regardless. “Has anyone had that type of injury before? It looks like some kind of wild anim
al did it.”

  A slow red flush worked its way up the sergeant’s face. “That’s up to the detectives to investigate. I don’t know how familiar you are with small towns, Miss Jasper, but there are only a few police officers here, all uniformed, and the detectives have to come from the nearest city.”

  I nodded. I didn’t know that, but it made sense. I’d never had occasion to think of it before.

  I looked up to see that the constable had taken Lucas away and was standing with him by the window. She was writing his contact details in her notepad. She was giggling and flirting, leaning against the window frame. To my surprise, he was not reciprocating in the slightest. I had taken him to be a bad boy; perhaps I was wrong.

  As she leaned ever closer to him, he took a step backward.

  “So do we have to wait here for the detectives?” Aunt Agnes said.

  The sergeant appeared a little puzzled by the question. “You shouldn’t leave the vicinity until you’re questioned by the detectives, so I suggest you do stay in the house.”

  “I meant, is Mr O’Callaghan allowed to go to his cottage?”

  The sergeant looked doubtful and hesitated before answering. “No, I’d rather you all stay here, together. If there is someone outside, and there probably isn’t,”—he held up his hands in a gesture of reassurance—“there’s safety in numbers. Mind you, I’m sure there’s no further danger, but I’d rather leave it to the detectives to make that call. I want you all to remain in this room until you hear from the detectives.”

  “But I need a bathroom break,” Dorothy complained.

  “Me too,” the other aunts said in unison.

  The sergeant looked a little exasperated. “Do you need to pass through the lobby in order to get to the bathroom?”

  The three of them nodded.

  He wiped one hand across his brow. “All right then, but all of you go together. Constable Walker, would you stand at the crime scene while they’re away?”

  The constable frowned, clearly dismayed to be drawn away from Lucas O’Callaghan.

  After she left, Lucas returned to his position on the chair. The sergeant turned his attention to me. “Valkyrie—if I may call you that?—what are you doing in town? Just visiting your aunts?”

  “My name’s Pepper,” I said. “Please call me Pepper. I’ve actually moved back to town to help my aunts with their business.”

  “You have experience in the hospitality industry?”

  “Um, no, I have a degree in Classical Literature,” I said defensively.

  His eyebrows shot skyward. “Oh, a useless degree,” he said, and then his face flushed. “Oh, forgive me. I meant no offence. So this is permanent?”

  I sure hope not! I thought, stinging from his unkind remark. Aloud I said, “Well, maybe permanent is going too far, but certainly for the foreseeable future.”

  The sergeant smiled. “Welcome to Lighthouse Bay!”

  Was he flirting with me? Lucas cleared his throat, and I shot him a glance. He seemed amused. I glared at him by way of response.

  “And Mr O’Callaghan, what are you doing here?”

  “I recently inherited the Ambrosia Winery, so I’m staying in town until I’m satisfied that the business is running just how I’d like it to run.”

  I watched the sergeant’s face carefully, but he did not show the surprise that my aunts had earlier. “So sorry to hear about your uncle. You can’t stay at the property itself?”

  Lucas shook his head. “No, there’s only one house at the vineyard, the managers’ house—a husband and wife couple—so I could hardly intrude.”

  “Quite so.” The sergeant tapped his pen on his chin. “And you two didn’t see anything when you arrived? Not another car, not a person?” We both shook our heads. “Nothing at all that was out of the ordinary, even something you didn’t consider important?”

  I shook my head again, and then remembered something. “There was something, but it was probably just my imagination.”

  The sergeant nodded encouragingly. “Go on.”

  “I heard growling in the bushes right next to me, just before Mr O’Callaghan drove up. It sounded like a wild animal. It was the sort of noise a possum makes, but this animal sounded a lot bigger.”

  Lucas flinched.

  Chapter 3

  I looked at Lucas O’Callaghan, but his face wasn’t giving anything away. Did he know something? It seemed more than a coincidence that this bizarre accident had happened the very day that Lucas arrived. Still, he had been standing with me when the man had fallen through the roof, so obviously he wasn’t the one who had done it.

  The sergeant scratched his chin. “Could it have been a dog or a feral cat? Are you sure it wasn’t two possums fighting? They sound vicious.”

  I shook my head. “Quite sure. I know the sound of possums fighting. It was that type of sound, but it sounded like a much larger animal.”

  “And you didn’t see anything?” he asked again.

  “No, but that was exactly when Mr O’Callaghan drove up. Have any animals escaped from a zoo or a circus, perhaps while being transported? The highway isn’t far from here.”

  Sergeant Carteron shook his head. “I’m sure the detectives will check that out, but that would normally be called straight through to the local police, and there haven’t been any such reports.”

  The constable walked back in, ushering my three aunts in front of her. I suspected they had pretended that they needed to go to the bathroom simply to get a closer look at the victim, although why they would want to do so was quite beyond me. They looked dishevelled and were breathing heavily, as if they had been doing hard exercise. Aunt Agnes’s bright red hair was sticking out at all angles. Perhaps it was the shock.

  The constable walked over to stand near Lucas. She scrawled something on a piece of paper and handed it to him. “Here’s my home phone number. Give me a call if you remember anything else.” I couldn’t be sure, but I think she actually winked at him.

  At that very moment, a sleek black cat appeared as if from nowhere. She walked over to sit in front of the fireplace, and then proceeded to lick her paws.

  “Perhaps you should lock the cat in a room, away from the crime scene,” the sergeant said. “We can’t have a cat contaminating the crime scene.”

  “We can’t lock her up,” Maude said. “She doesn’t live here.”

  “Who does she belong to?” the constable asked.

  “She belongs to herself, of course,” Maude said, raising her eyebrows.

  “Well then, why is she in your house?” The sergeant was unable to keep the exasperation out of his voice.

  “She comes over to watch the Gilmore Girls on TV,” Maude said.

  “And we feed her, too,” Dorothy added.

  I bent down to stroke her. “What’s her name?”

  No one spoke, so I looked up at the aunts.

  “She hasn’t told us,” Dorothy said.

  Oh gosh, I was in a mad house. Of course, I knew that my aunts were eccentric, but I hadn’t remembered until now just how eccentric they were. The sergeant’s phone rang, and he hurried to the door. I couldn’t hear what the other party was saying, but I could hear noise outside. I assumed it was the detectives and the Forensics team arriving.

  And I was right. Soon the foyer was bustling with activity. After five or so minutes, the detectives came into the room. Constable Walker had been with us the whole time, and she could still hardly take her eyes off Lucas O’Callaghan.

  The detectives introduced themselves as Banks and Anderson. I had expected they would take us away separately and question us, but they didn’t. They did, however, tell us that we would have to go down to the local police station and make a full witness statement at some point that day. They didn’t seem to have any sense of urgency about it.

  “I’d like you all to stay put for just a few more moments, please.” Detective Banks nodded to his partner and to the constable, and they all left the room, the constable casting a
longing glance at Lucas over her shoulder.

  I at once turned to my aunts. “What on earth could’ve happened? Did you see his injuries? That wasn’t just from falling through the roof. It looked like he was attacked by a wild animal.”

  “Now don’t talk about such things in front of our guest,” Agnes said firmly, nodding to Mr O’Callaghan. “I’ll ask the policewoman if I can fetch us all something to eat and drink.”

  She hurried out of the room. I noticed that the other two aunts were knitting furiously. The black cat had her eye on one of the balls of wool on the floor. I thought I would try to get some sense out of the guest. “Mr O’Callaghan, what do you think happened?”

  “He was strangled, obviously.” His reply was curt.

  “Yes, I know,” I said through gritted teeth. “I was asking why he fell through the roof.”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” he said unhelpfully. “What do you think happened?”

  My aunts made an attempt to shush me, but I ignored them. “As nobody was meant to be working on the roof, it’s a mystery that he was up there in the first place. It’s also a mystery that he had those injuries—unless he was skydiving and fell from a plane, but there were no signs of a parachute, and he would have been, um, more squashed. It just seems to defy reason. Sure, he was strangled, but he had serious injuries, more than falling through glass should do. I can’t think of a single logical explanation for it.”

  “Nor can I,” Mr O’Callaghan said. “Perhaps the detectives will be able to come up with one.”

  “Are you still going to stay here?” Maude asked him from over her knitting. “Or will you stay at a different B&B? One without dead bodies, and things like that.” Her voice trailed away uncertainly.

  “I’m happy to stay here,” he said, “although I think we should all remain vigilant. I don’t want to scare anyone, but if there’s some sort of wild animal on the loose, perhaps we should all make sure we keep our doors and windows locked and not go out at night.”