Just Horsing Around (Willow Bay Witches 3)

by Silver, Samantha

  “I can see that,” I replied. Charlotte had one of her giant spell books out, and was frantically scanning through the pages.

  “You do realize that the witches and wizards that wrote those books were like, the biggest racists against non-witches ever, right?” I told Charlotte. “They were like, inches away from actually inventing slurs. They weren’t exactly into helping humans get magical powers.”

  “I know that,” Charlotte replied. “But at the same time, there has to be something in here about finding out how your magical powers work.”

  “Yeah, and it’s by trying spells and having them work.”

  “Well obviously Sophie is different. She has the powers, she just hasn’t figured out how to unlock them yet.”

  “And what if I don’t have the powers?” Sophie asked. “What then?”

  “You’re the one who’s always complaining that she can’t be a witch like us,” Charlotte shot back.

  “Well right now I’m complaining that you’re making me float in the middle of the living room like some kind of fake Aladdin without a magic carpet.”

  Suddenly Sophie let out a squeal as she fell hard to the ground, hitting the rug on the floor with a thud.

  “Ow! Why would you do that?” she cried out. “I think I’ve broken my leg! You’re supposed to be a doctor! What happened to ‘first do no harm’? This is the opposite of that!”

  I knew I was this close to a bad case of the giggles as Sophie lay on the floor complaining. For someone who supposedly had a broken leg, she sure complained a lot. Sprinkles ran over to her, wagging his tail, helping out by giving Sophie as many kisses as he could.

  “Oh, Sophie, it’s ok, I’ll take care of you if you’re hurt,” he told her. “Are you hurt? Is this going to affect our walking schedule?”

  “No, no, Sprinkles, I think I might be alright. Despite Charlotte’s best efforts to kill me.”

  “What?” Charlotte asked. “You said you were tired of floating there. Besides, I thought maybe if you didn’t see it coming, if you had any sort of magical powers, your body would use them automatically to save you from the fall.”

  I had an intense suspicion that Charlotte was simply using these ‘tests’ to secretly torture Sophie for fun.

  “Alright, well, I think we can now say with confidence that Sophie is not, in fact, a witch,” I said. “She can speak to Sprinkles, and let’s just assume that’s all she’ll ever be able to do.”

  “But I want to be able to do the cool spells like you guys do,” Sophie muttered. “It’s so unfair that I can’t.”

  “Yeah, well, do you want to do the cool spells more than you want my sister to drop you on your butt in the middle of the living room?” I asked. “Anyway, I’ve confirmed my hypothesis, and so I can share it now. And it’s a big one.”

  “What is it?” Charlotte asked from where she was in the kitchen preparing what looked like an omelette for dinner.

  “Ok. So basically, in horses, eye color is linked to coat color. They don’t have a separate gene for their eyes. And both Amazing Grace and Touch of Frost were pure black and chestnut. It’s obvious when you look at them that there aren’t any hidden white patches or anything on them. But Touch of Midnight has blue eyes, which in Thoroughbreds is most common when they have the gene known as ‘splashed white’, an overo coat pattern.”

  “But neither one of the parents are white?” Charlotte asked.

  “No. And granted, they don’t have to be. Sometimes the white on a splashed white horse can be tiny, especially if they’re heterozygous, which means they have one dominant gene and one recessive gene, instead of two dominant or two recessive genes.”

  “But you said both parents were perfectly solid coloured, which means…” Sophie started, but Charlotte cut her off.

  “One of Touch of Midnight’s parents isn’t his parent!”

  “Exactly!” I said. “And it’s not the mare. She’s definitely his mother. Touch of Midnight had to get his blue eyes from the splashed white gene. And yet, seemingly neither one of his ‘parents’ have the gene.”

  “So some guy spent half a million dollars on sperm that didn’t belong to Touch of Frost.”

  “I think that’s a pretty good motive for murder, don’t you?” I said triumphantly.

  “Wow,” Sophie said. “You were right, that is big.”

  “So you think Caroline Gibson was killed because she sold the sperm of a different horse and passed it off as Touch Frost’s?”

  “Yes. And Corey, too. He was the head of the stables. He definitely would have known what was going on. That must have been why he was murdered, too.”

  “But then there’s a problem. The horse you saw, the one you gave medicine to. Was that Touch of Frost? Or was that the impostor? Because if it was Touch of Frost, then why not just give the real sperm?” Charlotte asked.

  I shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know for sure. All I know is that there’s no way Touch of Frost – the real one, wherever he is – is the sire of Touch of Midnight.”

  “Do you have a guess?” Sophie asked.

  “If I had to guess, I would say that for some reason, Touch of Frost is no longer available. I don’t know why. Maybe he got sick and passed away. That would be my best guess, but I honestly have no idea.”

  “But if they have an impostor horse pretending to be Touch of Frost, how come no one has noticed he’s different? And why doesn’t he have the blue eyes or the white patches on him?”

  “Well, despite the name, splashed white doesn’t necessarily mean the horse has to have a lot of white on him. In some cases, it can be as little as just a sliver of white on the nose, or something like that. If I had to guess, I’d say they found a horse that looked passably like Touch of Frost and dyed the white sliver on him black.”

  “But hold on,” Sophie said. “We still run into a problem: no one who was on the farm that day would have been linked to Touch of Midnight’s people, right? You have the jockey, the trainer, the housekeeper, the daughter and the mom’s best friend.”

  I threw myself back on the couch, somewhat dejected. Sprinkles, spotting the opportunity, jumped up onto me and happily licked my face while I scratched his back for a minute, before continuing to speak. “I know it has to be this, though. That was our problem before, we didn’t really have motive. Sure, Tony openly hated Caroline, but it’s still pretty rare for someone to just snap and murder their boss out of the blue like that. This is a real motive. It has to be one of them.”

  “My money’s on that Susan girl, if it has to be one of them. She was so shaken up when we flew over to see them, I feel like it wasn’t natural,” Sophie volunteered.

  “Maybe. She’s only been working there for a little while. Maybe she was a plant.”

  “Well speaking of plants, how about Philippe? After all, you did say that the owner of Touch of Midnight was a reclusive Swiss billionaire, right?”

  “Oh my God,” Charlotte said from her spot on the kitchen. “Please do not tell me that I have to explain to you that France and Switzerland are two different countries.”

  “Well duh, but they’re right next to each other. And they speak the same language.”

  “They do not. In Switzerland they speak German, French, Italian and Romansh.”

  “I’m pretty sure I heard French in there.”

  “You did, but you also heard the names of three other languages, smart-ass.”

  Something in that conversation triggered the memory of Betty not understanding the Swedish couple in my brain. It was like my brain was trying to tell me something. Like it was this close to figuring out something that would break the whole case for me, but there was a single missing link.

  Suddenly, I figured it out.

  “Genf!” I cried out.

  “What?” Charlotte and Sophie both asked at once.

  “She’s lost it! She’s finally lost it completely!” Bee announced from where she’d been idly watching us, sitting on the back of the couch. “The i
diot who didn’t realize Switzerland and France spoke different languages has finally broken her!”

  “Quiet Bee,” I snapped at the cat. “I haven’t lost it. In fact, I’ve just got it.”

  I jumped up and ran to my purse that I’d left by the door and grabbed my phone. Quickly opening up Google, I typed in “Genf”, hoping my memory wasn’t failing me.

  As soon as I hit enter, I knew I had it.

  “Nailed it!” I announced, fist bumping the air.

  “Nailed what?” Charlotte asked. I took the phone over to her and showed her the results. The top result for Genf: Geneva – Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.

  Genf was the German word for the Swiss city of Geneva.

  “When I was listening in on Tony and Philippe’s conversation, he mentioned that he had a bad job in Genf. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, since there are a thousand cities in the world, and being French it wouldn’t be super weird for him to be working in Germany or Austria or somewhere, especially with the EU making that stuff so easy,” I said. Then I explained to them the conversation with the Swedish couple at the restaurant.

  “That, combined with your talking about the one country having multiple languages made me think. Shouldn’t I at least look it up? What if Genf was a German name for another city. And of course it is.”

  “But why is Genf important? As you say, he could be French and work in Geneva,” Sophie said, confused. Charlotte rolled her eyes.

  “You know, for someone who was smart enough to be a vet tech, you sure can be dumb sometimes,” she shot at Sophie.

  “Hey!” Sophie retorted back, but not before Charlotte continued.

  “No French person would ever refer to Geneva by its German name. Especially since Geneva is in the French speaking part of Switzerland. If he really was French, he would have said Genève. So Philippe is lying about his nationality. If I had to guess, he’s Swiss German, working for the billionaire, and the man responsible for the deaths.”

  “Exactly!” I said to Charlotte, who walked over and high-fived me.

  “Great. So you guys solved the case. Now what do we do?”

  “We have to call Chief Hawthorne,” I said. “We have to tell him straight away.”

  “Yeah, you can call him. I’m not talking to that dude again ever, if I have my way,” Sophie said.

  “Fine. I’ll call him and let him know.”

  I took my phone into the other room. My heart was racing with adrenaline. We knew who the murderer was! Now the police could go over there and stop him. I dug the card with Chief Hawthorne’s number out of my purse. I was lucky; it had his cell phone number on it. I dialled and I recognized that wheezy, disgusting voice pick up on the third ring.

  “Yeah?” came his greeting. I was fairly certain he was talking with his mouth full, and I cringed, despite not being able to see the man.

  “Chief Hawthorne, it’s Angela Martin here.”

  “Uhhhh ok.”

  “You know? From the Caroline Gibson case?”

  “Ah yeah. The vet or whatever. Sure missy, what do you want?”

  “I know who the murder is.”

  I spent five minutes explaining as succinctly and easily as possible exactly what Charlotte, Sophie and I had been discussing. I laid it all out for him, and when I was finally finished, there was silence on the line for about ten seconds. I expected him to thank me for helping out and telling me he’d go get a warrant or something to pick up Philippe straight away. I certainly didn’t expect what he replied with.

  “Well girlie, that’s an awful nice theory and all, but why don’t you let the real detectives do this job?”

  “What?” I practically shrieked into the phone. “I just told you exactly how and why he did it. How is that not enough for you?”

  “Why don’t you let us policemen do our jobs. I promise you, we’re going to catch this killer.”

  “You can catch the killer. I just told you who it is, and why he did it.”

  “I’m sure you think that, but just because you watch a lot of CSI and think you know how crime works, doesn’t mean you’re going to be right about it. There’s a lot you don’t understand about things.”

  “Oh what, you think my lady brain is going to get confused about all the things you big strong men have to think about?” I snapped, channelling my inner Sophie for a minute. This guy was infuriating.

  “Now this is why girls don’t make good cops, you’re getting emotional here,” Chief Hawthorne told me.

  “I’m going to emotional my foot up your ass,” I muttered to myself, realizing this conversation was getting nowhere. “That’s because I just handed you a murderer on a platter and you don’t believe me because I happened to be born with a vagina,” I replied.

  “That’s not true at all. I don’t believe you because your theory doesn’t tie all the dots together.”

  “Oh, really? What about it wasn’t clear?”

  “I don’t have to explain myself to you. You obviously don’t understand how police work works. I promise you, you don’t need to worry about more murders. We hope to have this case solved soon.”

  It took every ounce of willpower in my soul not to throw the phone at the wall as hard as I could as soon as I hung up. How could one man be so pig-headed?

  “What a fricking imbecile,” Sophie said when I went back out and told them what happened.

  “So what do we do now?” Charlotte asked. “I mean, what do you do when you know there’s a murderer out there, and you know who it is, but the police don’t believe you?”

  That was a really, really good question.

  Chapter 18

  “So, uh, what are we supposed to do now?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Sophie said. “Do we go and confront Philippe, like we were going to with Corey?”

  I shook my head. “If he’s really close to that Swiss billionaire it won’t be easy to find out where he lives like it was with Corey. But I think you’re right, of course. We have to get him to admit it. That’s how it works in books, isn’t it? You confront the murderer with all the facts, and they admit to everything.”

  “I have a feeling that just because that’s how it works in books doesn’t necessarily mean that’s how it works in real life,” Charlotte said, giving me a you-should-totally-know-better look.

  “Yeah, well, have you got any better ideas?” I shot back.

  “Why don’t you ask Chief Gary what you should do? If you lay it all out for him, I’m sure he’ll give you his honest opinion.”

  Shoot. Of course Charlotte would end up having a perfectly reasonable idea, instead of Sophie and my plan to find out where Philippe lived and convince him to confess to two murders.

  “He’ll just tell us the same thing as Chief Hawthorne, or say it’s not his jurisdiction,” I tried to argue, mainly for the sake of arguing. I knew Charlotte was right, and I knew that was what we’d end up doing.

  “Maybe, maybe not. And we both know Chief Gary is a lot smarter a man than Hawthorne. It’s at least worth a shot.”

  “Fine,” I conceded. “Tomorrow morning, first thing, I’ll go see Chief Gary, before the vet clinic opens.”

  “Good,” Charlotte said, walking over and patting Bee, who purred contentedly. “I really think it’s the best thing to do.”

  “Me too,” Bee murmured as she rolled over to get her belly scratched. I rolled my eyes at Bee and tried to put the whole murder case out of my head. After all, Charlotte was right. Chief Gary would know what to do. And in twelve hours, I was going to see him, and we’d have our answer.

  * * *

  I woke up the next day to Charlotte standing over my bed.

  “Angela! Wake up!” she hissed.

  “Wurrghhh?” I asked in reply, the perfect image of elegance. “Wattimeerrrssit?”

  “It’s five thirty. Listen, are you awake? It’s important.”

  “Sure,” I replied, mostly lying. It turns out when you’re aware of a murderer being o
n the loose and can’t do anything about it until morning, it’s pretty hard to sleep. I was tossing and turning until well after one in the morning, according to my phone, despite having gone to bed around eleven.

  “I was thinking, why doesn’t Philippe just leave?”

  “What?” I asked, totally not understanding. Philippe? Leave? What?

  “Listen to me. Philippe is not American. He’s not under arrest. He can leave anytime he wants. All he has to do is say he had urgent business back in France, or something. Whatever lie he wants. So why stay here when he could be arrested at any moment?”

  “I don’t know Charlotte,” I replied, wanting nothing more than to roll over, cover my face with the blanket and go back to sleep. “Why?”

  “Because he’s not done killing people yet,” Charlotte finished. Well that certainly got my attention.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, sitting up and rubbing the sleep from my eyes.

  “Think about it. He’s obviously not an American, and he’s killed two people. Why not just leave? He killed Corey a few days ago now. If he got on a flight back to Europe and just stayed there, there would be literally no way to build a case against him. There’s no way his fingerprints would be on file, or his DNA, since he’s not American, so even if they found that sort of thing, they’d have no way of confirming its his. And since he’s not under arrest, he can leave the country as he wants.”

  “But wouldn’t it look suspicious?” I asked.

  “Why would he care? They can’t prove he murdered anyone, especially if he’s not in the country, and Switzerland or France or whatever wouldn’t extradite someone without a warrant, just for questioning. Which means that if he’s stayed here, chances are he’s not done killing yet.”

  “But who’s left to kill?” I asked.

  “Think about it. He killed Caroline, the owner of the horse that was supposed to give the sperm, and Corey, the stable manager who would have likely collected the sperm and handed it over. Who else that was on the farm that day is likely to know what had happened?”

  I gasped. “Ellie! She grew up with Touch of Frost, she would have recognized an impostor immediately! So she would have had to know, her mom would have told her.”