“He doesn’t seem to mind,” I said.
“He might if he realized they were wise to all his tricks,” said Charlie.
She had a point there.
We made our way toward the barn, doing our best to stay out of view.
We waited for an hour with no movement.
“This is boring,” complained Charlie.
“And creepy,” I said.
“And cold,” added Paws.
All three of us looked at the cat.
“What? It would be cold if I could feel temperature,” he defended himself.
“You have a fur coat,” said Greer.
“We could go inside and warm up,” I said.
“We don’t have a key,” Charlie reminded us.
“I do,” said a voice out of the darkness.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Charlie, Greer and I all screamed, and then a woman stepped out of the shadows. At first I thought she was brandishing a gun, but then I realized it was just a key.
“Ms. Sounds?” Charlie gasped.
“What are you doing here?” I asked her, just as she asked us the same question.
Charlie was the first to speak. “We came to check that everything was okay,” she said. Then she looked more closely at Ms. Sounds and asked, “What are those?”
Sticking out of one of the councilwoman’s jacket pockets were several small plastic tubes that looked suspiciously like colored markers. Out of another pocket peeked a round metal object that might have been the bottle of a can of spray paint.
“I use them for drawing,” said Ms. Sounds, narrowing her eyes but sounding defensive.
In the gloom she started to edge away from us, but she still couldn’t resist grasping for the upper hand. “Anyhow, don’t change the subject,” she snapped. “Tell me: what brought you here?”
“Charlie already told you, but we aren’t sure why you came yourself. Is it a good idea for you to be checking on this place all alone?” I said.
“Are you saying I’m old?” Ms. Sounds demanded.
Greer did a face palm.
I mean, yes, she was, but still.
“No, of course not. It’s just that you must have more important things to get to,” I said.
Charlie rolled her eyes, silently telling me that I hadn’t dug myself out of the hole just yet.
“I insist on knowing: exactly what do you think you’re doing here?” demanded Ms. Sounds again.
She was staring at us as if we had done something wrong, when she was the one breaking in! She did have nerve!
The irony that I myself had previously broken into the barn was not lost on me. To be fair, there had been no locks on the door back when I did it.
“We, um . . .” I started to say.
“Your grandmother was just the same,” ranted Ms. Sounds. “Horribly nosy all the time, about everything. I was sure that after the article appeared in the Gazette this morning, someone would come snooping around the barn late tonight. And I was right! What are you writing nonsense for, Charlie Silver? I wouldn’t have thought the person who showed up would be the very same young lady who wrote the article. The world is full of surprises!
“But now that we’re all here, we might as well go inside, and you can explain yourselves.” She pulled out a key (something we had been lacking when we decided on the evening’s adventure) and unlocked the door.
“Where did you get a key to the barn?” I asked incredulously.
“Mr. Wolf, Sr., wanted to make sure that someone responsible who lived close by could check on the place should anything strange happen, exactly as it has tonight. What was he going to do, ask that nightmare Moody girl to do it?”
“I bet he wasn’t counting on us,” said Charlie.
With that we followed Ms. Sounds inside. I thought wryly that I was getting more accustomed to seeing the barn in darkness than to being there with the lights on. I wondered what that said about me, then decided maybe I shouldn’t think about it too hard.
It wasn’t until we were through the door that it dawned on me that Ms. Sounds was dressed oddly. Every other time I had seen the woman she’d been wearing a suit, always a skirt and matching jacket. Tonight she was dressed in black slacks. Maybe it was her day off uniform, or maybe . . . she had wanted to be inconspicuous. I hoped to find out which it was before the evening was much older.
“I’m afraid you’ll now have to tell me exactly what you’re doing here,” said Ms. Sounds. “With the instances of vandalism we’ve been subjected to in this neighborhood, we can’t be too careful, and Mr. Wolf, Sr., trusts me to take care of the place.”
“We were just passing by,” I said, caught in the whirlwind of Ms. Sounds’ accusations. “Charlie thought that after her article was published, it would be good to check on the place.”
“She was trying to draw people here,” accused Ms. Sounds. “She was trying to make my job harder!”
“What is your job?” I asked.
“I’m making sure those horrible vandals don’t come back and ruin this beautiful barn any further,” said Ms. Sounds.
“You’re the barn guard,” Charlie supplied.
Ms. Sounds looked relieved that we understood.
“But if you’re the barn guard, why are you carrying a can of spray paint?” Greer asked.
Ms. Sounds suddenly turned very, very angry.
And I suddenly got very, very suspicious.
Maybe Ms. Sounds, pillar of the community that she was thought to be, had decided she didn’t want a new building going up across from her precious lake view. Whatever Hank Smith had wanted to put up, it would have been an eyesore compared to the beautiful old barn that Jasper had saved.
“Get out! All three of you! I’m going to tell Mr. Wolf what I discovered, and I’m going to make sure you leave here and don’t come back! The nerve of you, throwing around such accusations and insinuations!”
Sure enough, she quickly herded us out of the barn, making a shooing motion toward us as if we were cattle. We could hardly resist without getting into a physical altercation with the old woman.
But as we stepped out into the cold night, we walked smack dab into Horace Smith’s secretary, Julia. She had told us that she’d been with him from the beginning, and that she’d known Hank but had always worked for Horace. Her sister, Juliet, had worked for Hank, but her sister had passed away about five years ago from an illness.
Julia’s eyes went huge and she backed away. “Um, hi,” she said.
Ms. Sounds didn’t waste a beat. “Are you here to break in too?”
“Um . . .” said the secretary.
“You remember me, right?” Charlie said. “I’m the Gazette reporter?”
Instead of looking relieved, Julia looked even more alarmed. “Yeah, hi,” she said unhappily.
Suddenly everything fell into place in my mind. It wasn’t Ms. Sounds who had pushed Hank Smith into the silo; her transgressions didn’t rise to the level of murder. It was his secretary.
Julia’s sister hadn’t wanted Hank to buy the barn, and when she knew he was about to, she decided to kill him. Julia, who was still Horace Smith’s secretary after all these years, had read Charlie’s or Hansen’s article this morning and thought she recognized her sister’s old hair tie. That had raised the terrifying possibility that her sister had actually been guilty of murder.
Juliet hadn’t meant to push him that night, she said, but she accidentally did, and he fell and died. She’d confided this to her sister on her death bed, after keeping the secrets all these years.
“Your sister passed away, didn’t she?” I said gently. Julia’s eyes only got bigger.
“Yeah, a few of years ago,” she admitted.
“I’m sorry to hear that. Where was she buried?” I said.
“Why?” Julia hiccuped.
“Just curious,” I told her.
No, I’m not just curious, I’m trying to solve a murder!
“She’s buried in the Greaton family
plot. I visit her every other weekend,” she said.
I made a mental note to pay a visit to the Greaton family plot. In the meantime, Julia, looking ever more terrified, took a step back from me, then another. It was clear that she wanted to run away from all of us and never look back.
“What are you doing here tonight?” Charlie asked, not about to let her off the hook, and if Charlie hadn’t asked, Ms. Sounds would have. They were both staring formidably at Julia, who waited a split second, then burst into tears.
At the same moment, a truck came roaring around the corner, headlights weaving wildly before being abruptly shut off as the truck skidded to a halt. Jasper jumped out and came running over to us.
“What on earth is going on here?” he demanded, bracing his hands on his hips. “Charlie, did you really have to write that article?”
As Macy and Mildred slithered out of his truck and walked over to stand behind him, my heart fell out of my chest and went clattering to the pavement.
Jasper looked like he was about to explode with questions, all of them rooted in just why we had to be so difficult.
Honestly, I didn’t know. It just came naturally.
“Yes, I believe I did,” Charlie jutted out her chin. “It was excellent information.”
“What took you so long?” I said grumpily to Jasper.
“We had a meeting,” Macy answered for him, smirking.
“Don’t start with me! I asked you to stay out of trouble, and now I find you breaking into the barn! Again!” Jasper cried, ignoring Macy.
Ms. Sounds, Julia, Mildred, and Macy all looked at me curiously.
“I figured it wasn’t that big a deal if I broke into a place I already had broken into. I thought it was other places that were a bad idea,” I explained.
Just then I noticed a surreptitious movement from Ms. Sounds. She had tucked her hands into her pockets, but then pulled them out again to put the keys away. Now her hands were covered in spray paint.
When I pointed at them, she quickly tried to stuff them back into her pockets.
“Um no, not so fast,” said Greer, taking hold of her wrist hard enough to keep her from hiding her hands, but not hard enough to hurt her.
Jasper’s attention was sidetracked by the commotion, and he tore his eyes away from me to look at Ms. Sounds. When he saw her wrists his mouth fell open.
“You’re the vandal?” he gasped, shocked.
Ms. Sounds wrenched her arm free of Greer’s hold and quickly tucked it back into the folds of her jacket.
“I most certainly am not,” she said haughtily.
“You are too,” I said. “That’s why you have those markers and all that spray paint.”
“Fine! I don’t have anything to hide! I’m an important member of the community and I’ve lived on the lake my whole life! Besides, you thought I couldn’t be the vandal because I’m not as young as you ladies. Well, I’m not dead either! How dare this young whippersnapper come up and ruin my lake view!”
She pointed furiously at Jasper, who looked surprised. Ms. Sounds had lived on the lake her whole life because she had stolen the property out from under her sister’s nose when her parents had died, and everyone in Mintwood knew it.
“Those two useless blonds are helping him! They live on the lake too, yet they don’t care about what happens to it. Of course, because the builders of their house were foolish, the windows face in the wrong direction. Their view won’t be ruined the way mine will.”
“Hey!” cried Macy after a beat. It had taken her a minute to realize that Ms. Sounds had been talking about her.
I had never liked Ms. Sounds much, but her dislike of Macy and Mildred made me warm to her just a little bit.
Meanwhile, Jasper was making a valiant attempt to be reasonable. “I’m not tearing it down and rebuilding it differently,” he pointed out.
“But you’re trying to turn it into an event space! Noise carries over the water, and I’ll have to watch as you have all sorts of weddings and parties all summer,” the woman complained.
Jasper looked speechless. I had to agree with him, her logic was pretty faulty.
“You’re invited to most of the parties we have here! You helped with the fundraiser,” Jasper said, getting exasperated.
“Only so that I could try to sabotage you,” Ms. Sounds admitted simply.
“I can’t believe you tried to ruin everything I’ve worked so hard for!” cried Jasper.
Darn, now I didn’t like Ms. Sounds after all.
“Oh, get over it,” she muttered.
Jasper ignored her at last, and turned to gaze at me for a long moment, his face a study in conflicting emotions.
“How many culprits did you mean to catch tonight?” he asked me eventually.
I shrugged modestly.
“No, I didn’t think you meant to catch as many as you did,” he said.
While we waited for Detective Cutter to arrive, Jasper pulled me aside.
“We’ll watch her,” Charlie promised, eyeing Ms. Sounds.
The councilwoman sniffed in disdain. We couldn’t prove anything, and she and Detective Cutter were friends. We knew it and she knew it. There was no way she was going to get into trouble for any of this.
“I asked you to be careful,” said Jasper, looking at me intently as we stood between my car and his truck.
Sheesh. I had thought he was kidding. Was he serious?
“I was careful. I’m fine,” I said. “Do you really think I can’t take care of myself?” The idea irked me more than I was willing to admit.
“I don’t want you to get hurt, but the way you’re going it’s starting to feel inevitable! I don’t think it’s too much to ask that you not go on stake-outs or run around confronting criminals!”
“I’m an adult! I can do what I want,” I shot back.
Jasper’s protective streak was confusing me terribly. I didn’t know what to do about it other than that I knew I couldn’t stop investigating ghost mysteries.
“Just promise me you’ll stop stuff like tonight,” said Jasper.
“I can’t promise that,” I said. “I can help, so I do.”
“You’re putting yourself at unnecessary risk,” Jasper argued.
“Stop telling me what to do,” I said. “We aren’t even a couple!” My eyes went wide and my face went red. I couldn’t believe what had just come out of my mouth. I wished I could catch the words and reel them back in, but sadly, I couldn’t.
Jasper’s face lightened for a split second, then the frustration returned.
“You can’t keep putting yourself in danger,” he said, skating over the topic of us dating.
“I can put myself in harm’s way if I want to!” I shot back.
“Fine! You want to risk your neck! Fine!” He gave me one last inscrutable look, turned on his heel, and stormed away.
I blinked several times, watching him go. Jasper and I had just had a fight about my safety, in which I had told him that if I wanted to follow leads into dangerous situations I would. So there was that.
In all the hullabaloo, I hadn’t even had a chance to confront him about Macy and Mildred’s having arrived with him in his truck. What meeting had they had together? Maybe it wasn’t technically my business, but I never liked technicalities anyway.
Then I cringed at the realization that I had just brought up dating Jasper Wolf to Jasper Wolf. I couldn’t believe I’d done it, and I figured I’d regret it, but he was being so unreasonable it had just popped out. How bizarre was it that he acted that way when he wasn’t even my boyfriend? Pretty bizarre, if you asked me.
Chapter Twenty-Six
“I really wanted it to be Macy or Mildred,” I said, bemoaning their law-abiding ways on the drive home. “Someway, somehow, I wanted them to have broken the law.”
“Me too. I’d love to see Mildred get arrested,” sighed Greer.
“Macy as well,” added Charlie. “It would have been grand.”
“Maybe next time
there’s a murder, one of them will be the culprit,” said Greer hopefully. “Not that I’m actually rooting for another murder, of course.”
“I like how you’re turning my magic and my efforts to do good into a vehicle for private vendettas,” I said with a wink.
“Oh, come on, if one of them was after Jasper . . .” said Charlie.
“Macy as the culprit it is,” I said.
“She’s already guilty of hair fraud. That woman must wear a wig. I’ve never seen a blond with so much hair before,” said Charlie.
“Now the truth comes out, the real reason Charlie doesn’t like the interior decorators,” said Greer.
“I can’t believe Jasper, either,” I huffed after a minute of silent driving.
“He just wanted to make sure you were okay,” Charlie said.
“It’s none of his business! Who does he think he is, anyway?” I said.
“Your friend. I don’t see why you had to fight about it,” said Charlie.
“Friends fight,” I said. “He has to apologize and stop trying to convince me to stop investigating.”
“It’s not like he knows you’re the Witch of Mintwood,” said Greer.
“Yeah, it’s not like he knows your secret,” said Charlie.
But Jasper Wolf wasn’t going to be let off that easily. I would see to that.
When we got home, I was delighted to see everyone from the Tank and Gary to the tea ladies on the front lawn to greet us.
As we drove in, a cheer went up. Tomorrow was the last night we’d have ghost protection, but we had solved a murder and unmasked a vandal, so tonight we would celebrate.
“We have to have a serious conversation,” Charlie announced the next day.
Greer had just gotten out of bed and hadn’t had her cup of coffee yet. She gave her roommate a dirty look.
“It’s eleven o’clock in the morning. It’s nearly lunchtime,” said Charlie defensively.
Given all the stuff that had gone on recently, I thought Charlie’s request for a serious conversation was only fair. Maybe she wanted to discuss advanced protections against dark witches, or Hank Smith’s plight.
“What is it you want to talk about?” I asked.
“The cleaning chart. I think it’s important that we turn our attention to the rooms in the house that we don’t use, including the basement,” said Charlie.
Spell by Midnight (Witch of Mintwood Book 3) Page 17
