She still didn’t look up. “I don’t understand why you didn’t leave with her.”
“Did you consider the fact that maybe I wanted to spend some time with you?”
She flipped a magazine page. “Is that really why you stayed?”
“Yeah,” I said, not sure if I was lying. I did want to continue the reunion, but there was also the spirit of Jo Pressman influencing me. She had her own feelings about the castle, and now I was imbued with her emotions. Home sweet home. Or, to be more accurate, castle sweet castle. I leaned one forearm along the cool stone windowsill and rummaged around within our shared memories. Touching the castle wall seemed to help me “remember” Jo’s experience with the ancient building.
After the Pressman family home burned down in the late spring of that year, Jo had spent several weeks couch surfing with friends and acquaintances. People were generous at first. She was halfway to being an orphan, after all. But the sympathy and goodwill burned up quickly due to Jo’s propensity for draining resources. Her family had always called her a wizard, due to her ability to make money disappear. If she wasn’t actively spending money, she was always wasting it through carelessness, such as leaving whole containers of milk out on the counter to spoil. By midsummer, she’d run out of places to crash and was dangerously close to moving in with her batty mother when her luck finally changed. A family friend hooked her up with a job at the prestigious Castle Wyvern, up the coast from Wisteria, in Westwyrd. The job was menial and low paying, but it came with access to the female staff’s apartment. A few of the other girls crashed there during shift changes, but Jo mostly had the place to herself. Her first night in the castle was a revelation. For the first time in months, she slept straight through the night. No nightmares about walls crawling with shiny black insects. No terror sweats soaking the sheets. Had she finally found a place to call home? Why this place, of all places? It was just a grungy staff apartment in the basement, but it was the basement of a castle. Those thick stone walls did something for her. The solid rock kept away the thoughts and craziness of the world on the outside. She was insulated. She was safe.
She was safe, until she wasn’t.
Her memories churned and boiled up dusty clouds. Jo had made friends she thought she could trust, but then there had been the inevitable betrayal.
Betrayal? Now we were getting somewhere. If I could figure out who betrayed her, I could have this murder solved and Ghost Jo’s luggage packed by sundown. She could be gone by morning, before she had a chance to affect me much.
I poked around at her memories. I had no idea what I was doing. How do you make yourself remember something? You just sit there and try, which was what I did. And it worked, sort of. There were people she feared. I saw them, lurking just around the corners of her mind. I ran down dark hallways which resembled those of the castle. I’d see the heel of a shoe or an elbow, but the betrayers were always two steps ahead. The deeper I went, the more strongly I sensed her fear, her reluctance to let the creatures from her nightmares be seen in the light.
And then I was being evicted. Spat out.
My body ached all over, and I was fighting my way up through water, or something that was as thick and sticky as molasses.
I emerged with a gasp and opened my eyes to blinding brightness. My neck hurt. I glanced around, getting my bearings.
“Was it a good nap?” My mother was watching me over the top of her magazine. I was still sitting in the chair next to the window. “You looked so peaceful,” she said. “I would have moved you over to the bed, but you looked so peaceful.”
I tilted my neck to the side with a crack. “How long was I out?”
“Twenty-six minutes. The perfect amount of time for a power nap, according to NASA researchers, anyway. A short sleep between twenty and thirty minutes is optimal for sharpening motor skills.”
“Is that so? Since when did you become a fan of naps? You always said sleeping during daylight hours was for the weak, and children.”
She flicked her gaze back down to her magazine. “People are free to change their opinions.”
Movement outside the window caught my attention. The room was situated to have a lovely view of the ocean, but if I looked down, I could also see most of the parking lot at the side of the castle. A marked police car was pulling into the parking lot, followed by an ambulance.
“Finally,” I said. “The cops are just getting here now.”
My mother was suddenly at my side, standing next to my chair. We both watched as more vehicles arrived and more people. A group of three people walked over to a dark-gray car that had been in the parking lot since before my nap. One of the people was a man in a gray suit. He opened the trunk of the car and pulled out a dark case. He continued talking to the other two, who were both female officers in uniform. They were speaking in hushed tones, and I couldn’t make out what they were saying from three stories up. After a minute, the two women took the case from the man and walked away.
The man in the dark suit closed the trunk of his car with a loud bang. He turned around and looked right up at our window. The man was, to my absolute lack of surprise, Detective Bentley. He made eye contact with me and gave a little wave.
I waved back and gave him a grin that I hoped looked innocent. He would be suspicious of me, of course. And it wasn’t unreasonable of him, either. We Riddle women did have the strangest luck. My aunt and I were always turning up in the wrong places at the wrong times, getting ourselves listed as witnesses in police reports. By total coincidence, of course. My mother had stepped away from the window just in time to avoid being spotted. I backed away and looked around the room.
“Does this fancy-pants suite have a minibar?” I asked. My body was still depleted and heavy from my failed attempt to force life back into Josephine’s ravaged body.
My mother opened the wood panel on the front of a carved-wood armoire to reveal a standard minifridge.
Without further ado, I rampaged through the selection of treats. Since the castle was so fancy, there weren’t any candy bars or treats with brand names I recognized. Just “artisanal” stuff with coy labels that didn’t say much. I didn’t mind innovation in my snack foods, but it was hard to tell what things were before opening them up. For example, what exactly does a top-hat-wearing man on a unicycle signify? Chocolate-covered pretzels, apparently.
“Mom, do you want pretzels or nuts?”
“I don’t understand how you can eat at a time like this. I can still see that poor girl’s body when I close my eyes. Besides, you just had ice cream an hour ago.”
How had I lived these last five years without someone telling me when I should be hungry? Ignoring my mother’s judgment, I gathered three of the largest foil packs and popped all of them open. She watched me with dismay, so I opened two more.
“Magic burns calories,” I said around a mouthful of cheese-flavored, gluten-free crackers. “Energy doesn’t come from nothing. It’s physics.”
“Physics?” She looked intrigued.
“Yeah. The physics of witch stuff.” As I talked, a spray of cracker crumbs escaped my mouth. I caught the spray midair using simple telekinetic magic and directed them into my empty sundae dish. “Oops,” I said, spraying more crumbs and repeating the magic. I stared, dumbfounded for a moment by the surprising beauty. The spitty cracker crumbs in motion resembled an asteroid belt.
“I’d forgotten about that,” my mother said with a note of nostalgia. “I remember now. I used to get so hungry after spellwork.”
I held my hand over my mouth, but there was no stopping the crumbs from these weird gluten-free crackers. “Why’d you quit being a witch?” I magically folded the new crumbs into the midair asteroid belt. “I’d like to hear all about how you returned from the dead, of course, but we should start somewhere. Why did you give up magic?”
She turned her back to me and moved around the room, avoiding eye contact while she tidied up the sundae dishes. She moved on to fluffing the tiny pastel
throw pillows. I moved on to the bag of toasted almonds. The coating was sweet, not salty, which surprised my tongue. I munched merrily, happy to feel my strength returning.
Without looking at me, she said, “Tell me why you think I gave up magic.”
I had some ideas. Since I’d learned the news from my father, I had given the question plenty of consideration. There were a few reasons a person might renounce being a witch, but my mother had never been religious, so that ruled out many of them. That left only two things my mother abhorred: senseless danger or something not matching the decor, and everyone knows witchcraft matches any decor.
“Your witch specialty was dangerous,” I said, offering my best guess.
She punched a throw pillow repeatedly, still avoiding eye contact. “You tell me. You’re the one who’s got it now.”
“What? You were Spirit Charmed?”
“Spirit Cursed.”
“What’s wrong with that? It’s not so bad.” I slowed talking only to shove more sweet almonds into my mouth.
“Not so bad?” She scrunched her whole face in a blend of disgust and disbelief.
“Being Spirit Charmed is a gift. You get to help people, plus you pick up neat things. For example, I can tell you the differences between an income statement, a balance sheet, and a cash flow statement. That’s all thanks to my numbers guy, Perry Pressman. He was a real penny-pincher.”
“You talk about him like he’s still around.”
“In a way, he is. Long after we’re gone, the ripples of our work continue to spread.”
“Ripples, indeed.” She dropped the throw pillow onto the couch. “Perry Pressman made the kind of ripples that got his daughter murdered.” She finally met my eyes, and hers were blazing, the usual hazel shade bordering on orange. “Or perhaps the ripples came from you.”
I threw my hands in the air. “The choices we make affect other people. What are we supposed to do? Renounce everything and hide away from the world?”
“Don’t judge me.”
“I’m trying, but you make it hard not to.”
She nodded slowly. “And how is your spirit right now?”
I shrugged. “She’s been pretty quiet since we came upstairs.”
“Don’t you find it more unsettling when they’re quiet?”
“I’m a librarian.” I gave her a big smile. “Quiet doesn’t bother me.”
She forced out a weary-sounding chuckle. She took a seat on the edge of a chair and almost relaxed. “Congratulations on that, by the way. You must have worked very hard to achieve your dreams. You’ve got something most people don’t. Grit.”
“Grit or no grit, I can’t take all the credit. Full-time librarian positions are few and far between. I only got this job because certain people schemed to get me here just so they could use me for my witch skills.”
“True.” She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “And your story demonstrates exactly why I chose to stop practicing magic. I didn’t want to be anyone’s pawn. A woman with power is irresistible to those who crave power for themselves.”
I was inclined to agree. Vincent Wick came to mind. He bragged about having access to information and power. He probably wouldn’t think twice about using a witch or two as his own personal tools.
“You didn’t want to be anyone’s pawn,” I said. “I can understand that. But what about this?” I waved to her body and her black hair in particular. “If you’re against supernatural powers, why did you decide to become the undead?”
Her mouth curled into an enigmatic smile. “It beat the alternative.”
“You mean being fully dead, as opposed to kinda-sorta-dead.”
She abruptly got up, went to the minibar, swept out the remaining snack items, and dropped them on the sofa next to me.
“Eat. You’ll feel better soon.” She pressed her hand to my forehead. “You’re a bit warm. Don’t forget to hydrate.” She pulled her hand away from my forehead. I found myself leaning forward. I didn’t want to lose contact, but she was already gone, pacing the room again. I continued the lean, grabbing a bottle of water from the coffee table. The plastic cap snapped open with a satisfying pop.
“How’d they do it?” I asked. “Was it a spell? A ritual? Did they dip you in a pond of magical water that turned your hair black and peeled off your freckles?”
“Nothing like that.” She slowly returned to the sofa as though floating, and she sat next to me.
I leaned away, grinning. “Just tell me. Don’t show me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” She reached for my hand and then placed it on her chest, over her heart. “My heart,” she said. “Feel how it beats.”
I slowed my breathing and focused on feeling her heart. “It beats,” I said. “Just like a normal heart.”
“And so I live.”
“And so you do.” Where was this going?
She placed one of her hands over my heart. “Two hearts, one rhythm,” she said. “We are tied together, all of us Riddles. Each one of us is a story but not the full saga.”
“Being undead has made you poetic.”
She raised her dark eyebrows. “Dying has shown me how to live.”
I didn’t have a snappy comment. The gravity of the situation was still sinking in. My mother was alive. Four floors below, another woman was dead. At that very moment, investigators were sweeping the staff apartment for clues. If they took the entirety of my anonymous tip seriously, they would bag the wine glasses and bottle as evidence. Also happening at that very moment, Josephine’s mother, who’d just seen her ex-husband buried, would be finding out her only child was deceased. Mrs. Pressman was now the thing that had no name in the English language, the parent who survives the death of her child. There is a Sanskrit word, vilomah, which literally means “against a natural order.” The gray-haired should not bury the black-haired, as they say.
All of these facts hit me one after the other, until I thought my heart might break, but it didn’t.
My mother’s hazel eyes flicked down to my chest. “Your heart,” she said. “It’s different now.”
“It’s been through stuff.” It had been turned to granite and back again, among other things.
“You poor thing,” she said softly.
I stared into her eyes. The fire was gone, and only the gentleness remained. My mother is here. She will take care of me. She’s the one who holds me and makes everything better.
She lifted her cool hand from my chest and wrapped both arms around me. She pulled me into her bosom and hugged me. I resisted, keeping my body stiff, but gradually I let go, melting into her. My aunt had hugged me at times when I needed support, but it hadn’t been the same. This was my mother. Never mind what laws of nature she had broken to be there. She was my mother. I can let go. I don’t have to do everything for myself all the time.
I don’t know how long she’d been holding me before we were interrupted by a knock at the door. When I pulled away, my skin was damp from sweat where I’d been pressing against her. One side of her crisp white shirt collar was rumpled.
She straightened her shirt. “I suppose I should answer the door. It’s probably someone from the hotel staff informing guests about the incident.”
I jumped up, sending a spray of loose crumbs from my lap to the floor. “Mind if I use your washroom? I should clean up. I probably have food all over my face.”
She waved me away, and went to answer the door while I visited the washroom.
Through the closed washroom door, I heard the familiar voice of Detective Bentley. That didn’t take long. I listened, expecting to hear him ask my mother if she was hiding me in her suite. Except he didn’t ask about me.
He was talking to my mother in a soft tone that bordered on intimate.
“Don’t be scared,” I heard him say. “I’ll keep you safe, my blueberry muffin.”
My blueberry muffin? If there’d been a stiff breeze in the washroom, it might have knocked me over.
How could I be so obl
ivious? In the brief time that had passed since I’d been reunited with my mother, I had connected her to a few mysterious events. She’d confessed to being the boot-wearing person who’d visited the veterinary clinic to pay my father’s bill. She’d used a glamour to disguise herself—a portable one charmed by a witch. It was probably the cute necklace pendant she wore that day. Two points to me for figuring it out.
However, subtract five points for me not connecting her with the “indescribable” woman Detective Bentley had been seeing. How could I be so blind?
Perhaps the idea had scared me too much. Having your mother be a zombie is kind of upsetting. Having your mother actively dating people you know, however, is horrifying.
“You’re so brave,” I heard her coo. “I know you’ll keep me safe from whatever monster is on the loose.”
“Who said anything about a monster?”
She laughed. “It’s just an expression. I mean, honestly, anyone who would harm such a nice young woman must be a monster.”
“We still don’t know what happened to her. It might have been an accident.”
“Let’s hope so,” she said. “What time will you be free to relax?”
“I don’t know. I will see you in a few minutes, down in the ballroom for the official announcement.”
“Boo,” she said in a childish tone. “I don’t have to get herded in there with the rest of the sheep, do I? You already told me everything I need to know.”
“You have to go,” Bentley said stiffly. “Attendance is mandatory for all guests. Including you.”
She murmured something I couldn’t make out. Both were quiet. I pressed my ear to the washroom door. There was the unmistakable sound of lips smacking together. I pulled away from the door, but it was too late. I’d heard them smooching. Detective Theodore Bentley and my mother.
A childhood rhyme started playing in my head. Teddy and Zirconia, sitting in a tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G. First comes love, then comes marriage…
I quickly turned on the bathroom faucet full blast to drown out the horrifying sounds. Then I flushed the toilet for good measure.
Wisteria Wyverns Page 6
