Stop and Spell the Roses

by Stacey Alabaster

  Stop and Spell the Roses

  Private Eye Witch Cozy, Book 5

  Stacey Alabaster

  Fairfield Publishing

  Copyright © 2020 Fairfield Publishing

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Except for review quotes, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the written consent of the author.

  This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Epilogue

  Thank You!

  1

  I really didn’t know which was worse—not winning first prize in the Swift Valley Garden Show, or not looking like myself when I took the trophy. The rose show brought people in, but the real competition was for fruits and vegetables, and that was my realm.

  Time to take a peek. I checked—well, admired—myself in the front camera of my phone. I tried a few poses with the large, white straw hat that I had just purchased to cover up my hair, which was still bright red and not very “garden show.” Pretty good, I thought, checking my reflection. Quite model-esque. Very vogue. Squawk, squawk. I took off the hat and put my phone down before the birds above me caught me taking a selfie.

  Or the person in the car coming up the hill. Oh, shoot. I had forgotten that Violet was coming to see me that morning.

  She wanted plums. Many plums.

  I’m a witch, by the way. Well, a new one. Still learning. Able to perform spells, though. But my plums? They were the one thing I did not need a spell for. They thrived under my magic all on their own. They had a first-prize quality magic.

  Violet stopped her car and jumped out with a huge empty basket.

  “Sorry!” I called out to her, slapping my palm against my forehead. “I should have called and told you that I’m keeping all these babies to myself until after the garden show. I need to keep my very best for the competition.”

  Violet looked a little disappointed, but like everyone in Swift Valley, she knew how the garden show worked. And how seriously all the farmers took it. “Well, you just have to promise me that I get to try one of the winning plums.”

  I grinned at her and said that she could have a whole basket. But the judges needed to try them first!

  Every morning was the same routine. I got up, practiced my latest magic spell, made porridge, fed my cat Indy her breakfast, and then I tended to my farm. I looked after the cows and the chickens, and of course, the plum trees. But by nine o’clock, I was always in the office, turning the sign around to “Open.”

  I’ve been meaning to try meditation, but I’m not sure where I would fit it in!

  Sparrow Investigations. Named after me, Ruby Sparrow. But also because I had an affinity for birds, as they were close allies of mine. Not my familiars; not exactly. I had Indy for that. But I felt like we shared a secret understanding.

  And I also liked to think that Vicky and I kept a bird’s eye view over the town, so it was a fitting name on several levels.

  I was waiting for my assistant, Vicky, to arrive, and thinking over the latest case that we had been given. It was going to be a tricky one to navigate given the fact that Vicky and I were both witches.

  The evening before, I had received a very troubling visit to my house. A client in need. She had an urgent matter that she believed only I could solve.

  There was a warm breeze blowing through the window as I remembered the house visit.

  Having clients to my house was not that professional, to be honest. But this had been after hours, and the client had been frightened, so I made an exception.

  Going forward, it was time to run this detective agency in a more professional manner. That included the way we handled the cases.

  And the separation we needed to keep between our magical powers and our human detective work. There would be no psychic spying and no listening to the birds for clues this time. I had learned to block all that, and I would use purely human abilities to solve this case.

  I checked the time as Vicky pulled up in her small green truck. It was ten minutes past nine. She opened the door, stepped out uneasily, and immediately stumbled over the curb. Not a great start to our new super-professional era. When she walked in, I simply sat down at my desk and told her we had a new case that we needed to look over at once. I could address the fact that she was tardy a little later.

  “What is it?” Vicky sat down on the other side of the desk with a look of anticipation on her face. Her long, dusty hair, which was always straight as a poker, had been all ruffled up by the winds.

  “This is about Jolene,” I said to her, using my very serious detective voice. No emotion whatsoever.

  “Ooh, Jolene! Cool name,” Vicky said before launching into the Dolly Parton song. I smiled to myself because I’d knew she’d make that connection, being the huge country music fan that she is.

  See? Very professional office.

  I let her get to verse two before I interrupted.

  “You know Jolene McGill, right?” I asked. Jolene was well known to the community, but I wanted to make sure before I explained the rest of the case.

  Vicky nodded, still tapping her feet to the melody while she spoke. “She’s the editor of Garden and Grass and the judge of the Garden Show.” Vicky frowned. “And she always wears that white hat. Very glamorous.” Yes, Jolene had been a model in her younger days, and even though she was nearing sixty now, she still had a model’s frame and glamor.

  “She came in to see me yesterday evening.” I didn’t mention that it was at my house—I didn’t think that part mattered. It was the next part that was important.

  And tricky.

  I knew I was going to have to explain to Vicky what had happened in a calm, professional manner, because I could already predict what her reaction was going to be. And not just because I’m psychic. She was going to jump to the conclusion that there were real paranormal forces at work—potentially—so I knew I had to preemptively shut all talk of that down.

  “Now, I don’t want you to jump to any conclusions about what I’m about to show you,” I said calmly. “I want us to approach this case in a logical and rational manner.”

  I had taken screenshots of Jolene’s phone the night before and saved them to my computer, which I had in front of me. I brought them up on the screen, full-size, then swung it around to show them to Vicky.

  She squinted a little and leant forward, and I wondered if she needed to get her eyesight checked, the way that she was struggling to read the text message.

  Her lips moved and she mumbled as she read it half out loud and half to herself.

  I leaned back and waited. I already knew exactly what the text said. “. . . Pass this on to twenty people immediately or a bad luck curse is going to befall you.”

  It was my turn to speak.

  Vicky had only read the end of the message. At the beginning, there were instructions to send fifty dollars to an anonymous bank account. Unless both sets of instructions were adhered to, the recipient would supposedly fall into serious misfortune.

  “A chain letter, but in the form of a text message,” I said. “I remember when I was a kid on the playground, they passed these around in physical form. Our primary school banned them, and anyone seen writing one or passing one on got a lunch-time detention and a phone call to their parents.”

  Vicky’s face had turned so pale that her skin was almost translu
cent, making her freckles stand out even more than usual. “Oh, this is very serious.”

  I knew she was ramping up to go on a long rant.

  “Yes, it is,” I said, interrupting her. “But not for the reasons you are about to claim. Someone is scamming innocent people and terrorizing them at the same time. So yes, this is very serious indeed.”

  Vicky leaned away from me and gulped, never breaking eye contact with me. She shook her head. “No, no, Ruby. Listen. Curses and bad luck are nothing to be taken lightly.” She leaned forward, and her eyes bulged out of her head. “Do you know anything about bad luck? It’s like a disease . . .” She lowered her voice so that it sounded entirely creepy. “Once it infects you, it takes over your whole soul, your whole life, and there’s nothing that you can do about it.” She glanced around us. “As good witches, we have a duty to protect mortals from the forces of darkness. And bad luck is one of those forces.”

  I had to stand my ground there. “Vicky, I need to remind you that we work at a mortal detective agency. Not a witch one. We have to catch this perpetrator before these messages get out of hand.” Also, Jolene was paying me a handsome sum to find whoever had sent the original message. “I promised Jolene that we would sort this out for her before the garden show. She has enough on her plate at the moment. Quite literally, I suppose.” I took a deep breath. “So, we have to solve this case the good old-fashioned way. The professional way. You know what that means, don’t you?”

  Her face dropped. “No witchcraft at all?”

  “No witchcraft at all.”

  Not this time.

  Jolene called out in a sing-song voice and opened the door for us. White straw hat on, as usual, tall and slim. She looked a little surprised to see Vicky with me that afternoon. Vicky had come from her dad’s farm and was still dressed in overalls and a straw hat, but not a glamorous designer one like Jolene’s. More like the one on the scarecrow from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. She quickly snatched off the hat, but in her overalls and messy hair, she still looked like the scarecrow, to be honest.

  Jolene herself was dressed like she always was, like she had just stepped off the cover of Garden and Grass, all in white flowy material and her hair perfectly blown out underneath her hat. Not only was she the editor of the magazine, she was frequently the front cover model.

  She asked us inside and told us we could take a seat in the living room, which overlooked her back garden. Of course, the garden was large and green and looked like the perfect English garden, filled with roses and lemon trees. The whole house smelled like lemon, actually, with the breeze blowing through the shutters. She offered us a scone and told us that she had been troubled by the message ever since she had received it and wasn’t sure what she should do.

  “I like to consider myself a rational person, but there is a part of me that just wonders . . . well, what if, you know?”

  I nodded, but tried to keep things in perspective. I didn’t want her to freak out and make things worse by forwarding the message. Or by paying the money that had been demanded. “This needs to be contained as much as possible. Especially if we want to find the original sender.”

  I took a scone and carefully buttered it.

  “Well, I think you should pass it on!” Vicky blurted out, and I knew that she had been like a blown-up balloon all this time, just ready to burst. She took a deep breath, almost looking relieved. Her expression wasn’t even guilty as she looked at me.

  “Vicky . . .” I pulled her aside as Jolene left to take the empty dishes to the kitchen. “What are you doing? That is terrible advice! And not why we are here. We are trying to figure out who is behind this, not make matters worse.”

  “I am doing this to help her avoid a curse.” Vicky was indignant, totally getting up on her high horse now. She crossed her arms and got all huffy, like I was the one who was being difficult.

  “By cursing twenty more people? By your logic, I mean.” I didn’t believe there was any such thing as a bad luck curse, but even if I did believe in it, I didn’t see how passing on the message would prevent bad luck. Wouldn’t it only spread it?

  But Vicky had an answer to that.

  “Not if they all pass it on, and they all pass it on, and they all . . .”

  Hmm. The logic didn’t quite add up there. “There still needs to be someone at the end of the chain that winds up with the curse. Whoever has no money to pay the sender.” Again, by her own logic. Of course, I didn’t believe there was any curse to pass on, but if Vicky did believe that, then she was going to have to come up with an argument that actually made sense, not just a fear-based, superstitious one.

  “Don’t listen to her,” I said to Jolene firmly as she reappeared in the living room. “I will find out who sent this, I promise.” Even though I had no idea how to actually trace a message and wasn’t very tech-savvy. Still. I had confidence. I stared her straight in the eyes. “And there is no such thing as bad luck. So you can sleep soundly tonight.”

  Jolene was still staring down at her phone like it was a bomb that could go off, but she did thank me and said she appreciated how much attention we were showing to the case. “The sooner this is all cleared up, the better.”

  Agreed.

  “I think it would be best if I took your phone,” I said, and then I saw the look on Jolene’s face. “Don’t worry, it’s not because I don’t trust you. And I’m certainly not trying to spy on you or invade your privacy. I just need it so that I can trace where the original text came from. I have some special equipment back at the office that I can use to run some diagnostics.”

  Vicky cast me a suspicious look. Okay, so full disclosure. I didn’t really have any special equipment back at the office. Or any tech stuff at all, really. But I was hoping that I at least sounded like I did. Maybe not, though, judging by the look on Vicky’s face. But Jolene was a little older and more trusting, and so she agreed to hand her phone over to me for the duration of the case.

  “I suppose I feel a little safer without that thing,” she said, shivering as she showed us to the door and looking around like some bad curse could befall her at any second. Like something might be about to fall out of the sky and crush her.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” I said hastily. I’d had no idea that she was so superstitious. “There’s no such thing as bad luck, Jolene. Try and get some sleep. You’ve got a lot of fruits and vegetables to judge!”

  Even though the garden show was called the Swift Valley Garden Show, it was open to people from the surrounding towns as well, including Yinnara and Mayfield. There would be over a thousand entrants, so it wasn’t like we were lacking for competition.

  But I had the ripest, juiciest plums in the entire district. Everyone had always said so. I was quietly confident that my plums were going to take first place that year. Yes, I was a little worried about how much contact I’d had with the main judge in the days leading up to the competition, and how that would look to other people when I won. But Jolene had special connections with half the people in the town, so I didn’t believe that was going to make any difference.

  The next morning, Vicky’s truck made its way up the hill and stopped right in front of my plum tree. I had to swat her hand away when she tried to pick one. She pouted and asked if I had heard from Jolene.

  “I was up all night worrying about this curse,” Vicky said. That explained why she was up and about at eight a.m., early for the first time since I had known her.

  “I can’t phone her,” I said, holding up Jolene’s cell phone that I had tucked in my pocket. “So, we are going to have to do things the old-fashioned way and check up on her in person.”

  Jolene wasn’t answering the doorbell when we got there at roughly eight-thirty. Being a keen gardener herself, I knew that she would be up early watering all the lawns and plants before the heat of the day hit. But when we looked over the gate, we couldn’t see her in her main garden with the lemon trees. “She’s probably around the side in what she calls
the ‘Secret Garden,’” I said and caught this funny look on Vicky’s face. “It’s just a reference to the book,” I told her as we unlatched the gate and wandered in.

  The Secret Garden was just an area around the side of Jolene’s house that was behind a large fence on three sides and the side of the house on the fourth, so it couldn’t be seen from the front. Unless she showed it to them, visitors would not know that it was there. Jolene had shown it to me several times. It was shady, so not everything grew as well there, but she had rows of foxgloves that flourished on that side of the house. They were stunning in their pinks and purples.

  But it wasn’t the foxgloves that stopped us dead in our tracks that morning when we entered the Secret Garden.

  It was Jolene McGill’s lifeless body, still holding her shears.

  “I hate to say I told you so,” Vicky said. “But I definitely told you so.”

  2

  I glanced in through the door of Han’s Burger Joint and tried to locate my target. Hmm. Didn’t seem to be in there yet. I’d been told to meet a man with dark hair who would be wearing dark clothes and who was around five foot nine, but the only people in there were a family of five with three young kids. I supposed the dad did have dark hair. Hard to judge his height while he was sitting down helping his three-year-old daughter figure out the maze that was on her placemat, using a crayon to go down the wrong path and then doubling back to try again.

  Somehow, I doubted he was my hacker.

  I was looking for someone named Kaylan Moore, who was, apparently, the best hacker in all of the Swift Valley district. If there was a competition for hacking, he would receive the first prize trophy. I wasn’t sure he would pose for a photo.