Stop and Spell the Roses

by Stacey Alabaster

  Lisa turned back toward me slowly. “One day, Jolene and I were taking a small charter flight out to an island just off the coast. Just a short twenty-minute ride. Tanner has his pilot’s license, you know,” she said a little smugly. I tried not to get caught up on that detail, even though Lisa always liked to remind everyone that she was part of the Swift Valley elite. Just like Jolene had been.

  I remained silent so she would tell the rest of her story. “We took a slightly different route than our usual one, and we were flying over the valley. I looked down and gasped at all this unusual foliage below. So many colors. Such rich greens as well. And this spectacular maze surrounding it. I’ve never seen anything like it.” She had this amazed look on her face as she remembered seeing the garden for the first time. It was probably the same look I’d had when Geri first showed it to me.

  “Jolene knew about the garden?” I asked, my heart stopping for a moment. This was the proof I had been looking for all this time. “Lisa, did she know that you were growing your strawberries there?”

  Lisa didn’t answer, but the guilt was written all over her face.

  “Oh my gosh, Lisa . . .”

  “I didn’t kill her!” Lisa exclaimed and stood up like she was about to race out of my kitchen. But I wasn’t about to let her go that easily.

  The moon had ducked behind the sudden cloud coverage. Maybe good luck was on my side again, at long last. Lisa couldn’t see her way down the hill clearly and thought I couldn’t either. I was familiar with the ground there, so I chased her down the hill and closed in on her.

  But her car was only a few meters up ahead, and she was going to reach it before I could catch her.

  The crows had been watching the entire scene, and they knew just what to do as they flocked toward the car, blocking the way and squawking and flapping their wings, frightening Lisa away from the car, lest she get her eyes pecked out.

  “Argh!” she screamed and ducked down like she was the heroine from The Birds.

  “Enough!” I called out to the crows, who were starting to flap their wings in her face. “Stop, please.” I thanked them breathlessly for their help as I raced over to make sure that Lisa had just been scared and not actually hurt.

  They flew back to their trees, looking happy with themselves, yet slightly disappointed that they hadn’t got to have all their fun.

  I glanced back over my shoulder at the crows, who were staring at me intently from the fence where they had settled, and I got the feeling they were expecting a quid pro quo. “Yes, okay, I will take down the scarecrow,” I said. Then I added, “I knew that it scared you just a little, even if you pretended to be brave.”

  Lisa was still trying to catch her breath. “What is with them?” she asked me, shaking as she brushed herself off.

  “Payback for framing them for destroying my plums,” I said, reaching out a hand so that I could help her back to her feet.

  She straightened up and pulled down her blouse that had gotten ruffled up in the fight. “I should have forwarded that message,” she said, glaring at me and the birds. “It’s been nothing but bad luck ever since.”

  “Are you talking about that chain letter text?” I asked her, spinning around to face her, as I had been focused on making sure the crows behaved themselves.

  She nodded and gritted her teeth. “Yes. Part of me wanted to pass it on, of course. As if I could do with any more bad luck coming my way! But there was no way I was going to pay that outrageous amount, after the last time I got scammed out of money.”

  I wasn’t quite following. “What last time?” I asked her.

  She shook her head. “It was a whole nasty business.”

  When I’d been woken up by the sound of creaking earlier that morning, I never would have imagined that by the time the sun rose, Lisa Spears would be my unlikely ally in solving the murder of Jolene McGill.

  Lisa tapped her foot and looked up at the sky. “A few months ago, Tanner and I received one of those messages and stupidly gave the person one thousand dollars, believing that we would actually be the recipients of money ourselves,” she said, looking embarrassed as she recalled the event. “Chain letters usually promise to get a lot more money for those who send money out. We misunderstood the fact that all the money was going to the same single person, no matter who had forwarded the message.”

  I nodded.

  “I told Jolene about it,” she said. “And she decided that it was an interesting cover story for her magazine, a local scandal that had rocked people related to the gardening world. So, she asked me not to tell anyone about it until she had looked into it.”

  “But . . . but Jolene hired me to look into it,” I said in complete shock.

  Lisa raised her eyebrows. “Really?” She laughed a little bit. “Well, maybe she decided that she could use the extra help. She was doing a lot of research herself before her death, though.”

  Yeah. Research that I had never known about. I felt duped.

  “Can you show me?” I asked Lisa.

  12

  “Jolene may have looked like your typical out-of-touch fashion model, but she was actually very technologically savvy,” Lisa said as she opened up Jolene’s laptop. She glanced around Jolene’s deserted living room like we were trespassing, which I supposed we kinda were, but the maid had let us into the house.

  Lisa opened up a few documents until she found what she was searching for. “Jolene kept me up to date with the whole investigation, as I was the first local victim of this scammer, so to speak,” she said. She brought up a photo of Lisa on the screen, where she was holding a basket of strawberries in one hand and a smart phone in the other one. “This was going to be the cover story once it was finally printed. Jolene was excited about the whole thing. She’d been sick of having the same old covers and the same stories about gardening for all these years. She thought this would finally give her publication a bit of respect.”

  “Jolene never told me that she was doing any of this,” I said, frowning as I looked at the screen. Partly because I wasn’t sure if Lisa was lying to me, and partly because I was beginning to think that Jolene had been using me all along. Acting scared when really, she just wanted to use whatever resources I had to get the scoop on her story. She’d probably never planned on crediting me with any of it, either.

  Lisa brought up the main text document that Jolene had been typing her info into. She had some pretty good leads about who the scammer was, apparently. She’d even been pretty close to cracking the case before her death. Lisa clicked on a few things. “I wonder if Jolene would want me to publish this for her now,” she murmured. “Might put me back in the good books with the townspeople if I exposed the person scamming them all.”

  I sat back in the sofa. “I suppose I had wondered why Jolene was hiring a detective agency to look into a few text messages,” I said with a sigh. “But I’d taken her at her word that it was stressing her out too much before the garden show. That it was a big deal, and she wanted it stopped.”

  Lisa bit her lip. “I know that Jolene would have done whatever she had to in order to find this guy. I’m sorry, Ruby, I had no idea that she’d even hired you, or I would have told you about all this sooner.”

  I gave Lisa a looking-over and decided that I trusted her now. At least for the time being.

  “But I suppose it makes more sense that she just wanted me to help her write her exposé,” I said, turning my attention back to the screen.

  “She wanted to help me, as well, to get back all my money,” Lisa explained. “So, you have to believe me when I say that I didn’t want to kill Jolene. All my troubles started the day that she was killed. And the bad luck just got worse from there.”

  “Yeah, well, we are making our own luck from now on,” I said, grabbing the computer and picking it up so that it was on my lap this time. I wanted to see what Jolene had discovered for myself.

  Whoa. She had managed to locate the IP address of the place that the very first text me
ssage—sent via email—had been sent from. It was just a string of numbers on the screen, so it didn’t mean anything to me, but I assumed it would match up with the Onyx’s IP address, just as Kaylan had discovered.

  “She did know what she was doing,” I said, impressed. “Now I’m wondering why she needed me at all.”

  Lisa shrugged. “She might have been doing well, but she was still having trouble finding the name of the perpetrator. Maybe she thought because you were younger and hipper, that you would have an advantage.”

  Hmm, well, I did feel a little guilty about how tech savvy I wasn’t. I’d certainly given the impression to Jolene that I could help her.

  And maybe I still could solve this. I didn’t need Kaylan for this one. I’d learned a few tricks myself. I steadied the laptop, copied the IP address and put it into an IP finder. “I’m sure I already know what the result is going to be,” I said to Lisa while she watched. “But just to double check.”

  I had been wrong. I froze when I looked at the computer screen and saw the result. Not the Onyx.

  The IP address came from the local burger place.

  Han’s Burger Joint.

  I felt a little faint.

  Kaylan.

  “I need to call my best friend,” I said, tossing the laptop back down onto the sofa before I pulled my phone frantically out of my pocked and hit dial on Vicky’s number.

  Their first date had gone incredibly well. So well, in fact, that they had met up a couple of times since and had even planned to go away for a few days together, passing by Vicky’s dad’s farm up high in the mountains. She had wanted to introduce this guy to her father already, for crying out loud!

  I tried and tried to get the call to connect.

  But there was no reception that far up in the mountains.

  My best friend was trapped with a killer.

  Tanner took his hoodie down and replaced it with his pilot’s cap.

  “Are you sure you’re prepared to fly in such a small plane?” he asked me while Lisa jumped in and found a seat. He was looking me up and down like I was a delicate flower.

  Under my breath, I said, “Buddy, I have flown on a broomstick before. This is nothing to me.” But I just smiled and said I was sure I could handle it. “This is the fastest way to get to Yinnara, and believe me, we need to be fast. My best friend’s life is at stake.” We would get there before the police, who would have to take the long route up the hill.

  Okay, I could feel the wind knocking us around, I’ll admit it. And I did feel a bit airsick. But it was going to take less than fifteen minutes to reach the top of the hill where Vicky’s dad’s farm was, and so I just sucked it up.

  Lisa had her face pressed against the window. “There it is!” she screamed out, pointing down to Vicky’s green truck.

  Of course, she had to drive. Kaylan only had a push bike.

  I closed my eyes and braced for impact as Tanner landed the plane in one of the long, empty crop fields of the farm. Lisa was off and running right away, but I needed a few seconds to adjust to being back on solid ground.

  Maybe I could take a broomstick back, I thought, trying not to trip as I made my way to the farmhouse. Vicky and Kaylan were inside. Both of them looked shocked to see that a charter plane had landed on the property.

  I caught Vicky’s eyes through the window, and she shot me a What on earth are you doing here? look.

  I glanced to the guy in the hoodie beside her and nodded, a grave look on my face.

  She froze. She understood. There was hurt and disappointment on her face, but I saw her say something to Kaylan and then leave the room. She gestured to me, and I ran to the front door of the farmhouse, telling Lisa and Tanner to stay back.

  She cracked open the door and looked scared.

  “It’s okay, the police are on their way,” I told her, nodding at her to stay calm. “What did you say to him?”

  Vicky glanced over her shoulder where Kaylan was coming into the hallway, carrying a tube of hand cream. Vicky looked back at me. “I asked him to take a smell of one of my hand creams and tell him if it seems off to him,” she whispered, her eyes wide. “But I put a special ingredient in it.”

  “What is this?” Kaylan asked, taking a sniff as the fumes wafted up into his face.

  When he tried to take a step forward, he couldn’t. He was frozen completely still.

  We had him.

  Kaylan toppled to the floor, and I raced over to see just how frozen he was before Constable Blue arrived. I wasn’t quite sure how we were going to explain this to him. I could already hear the sirens.

  “Don’t worry. It’s going to wear off in three, two, one . . .”

  The door burst open, and Blue came in with the cuffs at the ready.

  Kaylan was dazed when he came around, and in shock when he saw me.

  “That’s why he was so scared of them the first time we ran into the cops,” I said as he was led out the door. “Not because he was a hacker, but because he was a murderer.”

  Lisa came up and thanked me for figuring it out. And essentially clearing her name. “Thank you, Ruby. Kaylan must have realized that Jolene was onto him.”

  I nodded. “And by killing Jolene, he managed to make it look like the bad luck curse was real. He got very rich off it. At least temporarily. And he must have ‘helped’ me to slow me down and keep me from solving the case. Also, another way to get rich.

  Vicky sighed, and I realized how sad she looked.

  “There’s always online dating. You won’t managed to find anyone worse than this guy,” I pointed out

  We walked out into the fresh air where the plane was waiting to take us home. I took my time to catch up to the others, glancing down at the ground. Something caught my eye.

  A four-leaf clover.

  I reached down and took it. For good luck.

  Epilogue

  I held up the trophy and smiled for the camera as the bright bulbs went off in my face. I didn’t quite take first place. That went to Maeve Brewer. And runner-up had gone to Akiro, yet again.

  But I was very pleased with third. I still got to have my photo in the paper, but no prize money. I figured that was a good result for me and my probably-magic plums.

  “Can I have a look?” I asked the photographer.

  Oh gosh. My hair had photographed brighter than fire in the photo. I asked if he could take another one, but he said he had places to be, and popped the cap back on the lens and rushed off.

  I had someplace to be as well.

  A secret place.

  The garden was still in ruin.

  But with all of us gathered in one place, we had powers that none of us had separately. Life-giving powers. The herbs wouldn’t grow back immediately, but if every witch in the coven volunteered for even just an hour a day, within a couple of weeks, the garden would start to look like its old self again.

  Geri was about to step through the golden gate when she paused and frowned at Vicky. “Strange that the storm blew into your kitchen and swept away all that yarrow you picked,” she said. “And yet left everything else untouched.”

  “Yep,” Vicky said with an exaggerated shrug and a “What can you do about it?” expression on her face. “I suppose that was just plain old bad luck.”

  Geri still had her eyes narrowed, but she shrugged it off and stepped into the garden with the other witches.

  Vicky pulled me aside and asked if I was interested in a money-making idea that she had come up with.

  “Oh no,” I said. “Not another business idea.”

  But Vicky assured me that this time it was legitimate, and there would be no more tricking people with magical ingredients.

  “I’m going to give music lessons,” she said proudly.

  “Vicky, that is such a good idea!” I said, high-fiving her. “That’s something you are actually passionate about, and it’s something people want to buy.”

  She nodded. “You were right about the creams, Ruby. I should have
listened to you.”

  I still didn’t believe in any bad-luck curse. But I had to admit that things had settled down since Kaylan’s arrest. Now that he’d been caught, his victims would be getting their money back. I looked up and saw a rainbow settling over the valley of the Secret Garden. Colors everywhere.

  The wheel of fortune had spun once again.

  Thanks for reading Stop and Spell the Roses. I hope you enjoyed this story, and all the stories in the Private Eye Witch Cozy Mystery series. If you could take a minute and leave a review for me, that would be really awesome.

  The next story in the series is called This Spells Doom and will be available soon. Keep an eye out for it on Amazon.

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