The Witching Hour

by Anina Collins

  I made a beeline to Alex’s office and found him talking to Derek, the two of them long-faced and serious. The chief left immediately without saying a word to me, and I wondered if that was because this problem with Stephen had gotten to a point that it meant that the arrangement allowing me to investigate crimes would have to end.

  Worried that had already happened, I sat down in my usual seat in front of Alex’s desk and looked over at him still wearing that expression that made my stomach knot. “Are you okay?”

  Alex’s face looked like pure anguish and I wanted to make him feel better, but he merely nodded and said in a low voice, “I’m the lead officer on the case now.”

  Ordinarily, this would be a reason to congratulate him, but I knew that wasn’t the case now. Before I could say anything, he picked up the phone and called Craig to tell him he needed to speak to him and please come to his office.

  He hung up, and I finally asked, “What happened out there?”

  Drawing his eyebrows in, he frowned but pressed his lips together as if to stop himself from talking. I knew Alex well enough to understand how much this whole thing bothered him. If only there was a way to get him to talk.

  While I tried to think of something to say, Craig showed up and knocked on the Alex’s door. “What’s up?” he asked in a forced chipper voice.

  Alex held out his arm toward me and pressed a smile on his face. “Take a seat, Craig.”

  The junior officer did as he was told and looked over at me with such fear in his eyes that I thought he might break down at any minute. I didn’t know if he had heard about what just happened between his former partner and his new partner or if he was just terrified about this whole thing of being promoted to more than traffic control.

  Far more sternly than I knew he intended, Alex began explaining what we would do from now on with the case. “You’ll be working with Poppy and me from now on, so here’s a rundown of what we know so far. Tamara Ridgeway out at the Third Eye Mind and Body Center seemed to have an issue with our victim because she wouldn’t say she was a witch. We spoke to three other witches at the tarot convention in Caston this morning who knew Amy Perkins because they attended meetings with her every Tuesday until last month at the Third Eye Center. Poppy will clue you in on all we learned. A friend of Amy’s named Crystal Sendona was the one who clued us into Stephen being an ex-boyfriend Amy used to see.”

  Alex took a deep breath after that last part of his speech and looked away for a moment before continuing. “Finally, we spoke to a co-worker of Amy’s named Marie Dondel who seemed to think there might be some problems between Amy and her current boyfriend, a guy named Kellen Martin. That’s what we have so far. Poppy will give you all the details, and we’ll meet up again here in my office in an hour.”

  Poor Craig had begun writing down everything Alex was saying just about the time he mentioned the tarot readers convention, but his attempt was futile. No matter how feverishly he moved the pen across the piece of paper he took from his shirt pocket, Alex simply spoke too fast. Even the pause after mentioning Stephen’s part in the case didn’t help Craig, so by the time Alex had finished speaking, all he’d gotten down were some badly misspelled versions of the names and the words tarro cards.

  I sensed Alex wanted to be left alone for the hour, so I nudged Craig’s arm as he tried to write and said, “Hey, it’s okay. We’ll hash it all out and you’ll have a chance to get it all down.”

  Craig slumped down in his seat and shook his head. “I can’t believe Stephen lied to all of us. I mean, I get why he lied to me, but you and the chief, Alex?”

  Alex said nothing, but I didn’t want Craig to go on thinking any of it had been acceptable. “It’s not okay that he lied to you either. Now you get to see how a real team works together.”

  “Thank you so much. I won’t let you guys down. I swear.”

  Somber and still unhappy from what had happened outside, Alex said, “I don’t know all of what Stephen found out, so I’m going to have to check that out now, but I want you to find out everything you can about the three witches from the tarot convention. Poppy will run it all down for you.”

  I got up and motioned for Craig to follow me. “Let’s get a cup of coffee and talk over the case like we always do.”

  “Coffee? In this heat?” he asked, as if the heatwave should stop anyone from drinking the best drink in the world.

  “Sure! How do you take your coffee?”

  Quietly, Craig admitted a sorry truth. “I don’t drink coffee.”

  With a smile, I tugged on his arm to leave. “Well, we need to change that right now. Let’s go to The Grounds and get you started on your caffeine addiction.”

  After letting me get him his first coffee, Craig grabbed a handful of creamers and sat down with me at the table Alex and I liked to refer to as ours. I watched him pour one after another creamer into his coffee until it looked like watered down chocolate milk in his cup.

  “So you and Alex drink this all the time when you guys are working on a case?” Craig asked, hesitating as he lifted the coffee cup to his lips.

  I lifted my cup of French Roast in the air as if to make a toast to one of mankind’s greatest creations. “I have coffee from the minute I wake up in the morning. It’s literally what keeps me going. I bet if a doctor drew blood these days, they’d find coffee in my veins.”

  My nectar of the gods tasted delicious as it hit my tongue, and I savored the flavor as I watched Craig gingerly take a tiny sip of his first ever coffee. “Alex drinks his black most of the time these days.”

  As he swallowed that sip, Craig grimaced. “Black? I can’t even imagine. I’m having a hard time getting this down, and it’s more cream than anything else. I guess I’m just not a coffee drinker.”

  “Oh, I don’t buy that. Everyone is a coffee drinker. Some people just don’t know it yet,” I said with a smile.

  He gave me a tepid smile I suspected was an indication of how this case made him feel more than his apparent dislike for my favorite drink. Craig deserved better than to be kept in the dark, as Stephen had done to him. I needed him to know that and how real partners treated one another.

  “So now that we have our coffee, we can start talking about the case. Alex and I do this for every case. It helps to talk things out.”

  “You two are so great together. Even though you’re complete opposites, you work together so well.”

  I took a drink of coffee and chuckled at how right Craig was. “Opposites is exactly right. I think he could go an entire day without saying a word, and you know me. I’m always talking. I’m a regular chatty Cathy.”

  He nodded and tilted his head, staring at me like he used to back in high school. “You’ve always been that way, but that’s one of the reasons why everyone likes you. You have a way of making people feel comfortable around you.”

  “You’re like that too, though, Craig. We’re a lot alike. I think you’re going to find that when you start talking to people in cases that you do fine.”

  He looked across the table at me, and I saw worry in his eyes. “I hope so.”

  Reaching over, I touched his hand, hoping to comfort him. “You have to believe in yourself. Trust me. You believe in you and others will too.”

  Craig looked down at where my fingers rested on his hand and then smiled up at me. “I always had a crush on you, but you knew that. I used to watch you when we were in high school.”

  What I knew was that Craig had always been staring at me with puppy dog eyes back then. I’d catch him near my locker, hanging around like he belonged there when his grade’s lockers were a floor below in Sunset Ridge High School. Sometimes I’d see him at lunchtime giving me moony eyes from across the cafeteria. I never had to doubt what he thought of me. He was a younger boy who had a crush, and at that time, I didn’t see him as anything but a boy.

  However, now that he sat across from me in The Grounds about to discuss his first big case with the Sunset Ridge police department,
Craig was all grown up. He wasn’t just that boy with the big blue eyes who liked me anymore.

  “I didn’t have to be a detective to know that. You were pretty obvious with how much you liked me,” I answered with respect for how sweet he’d always been, even back then when he was a teenage boy three years younger than me with romantic ideas.

  His cheeks got pink from blushing. Looking down at his cup of coffee, he said, “You know, you were never rude or nasty to me, even though I was so much younger than you and always running around giving you googly eyes. You always gave me a smile, even though I was practically stalking you. I never thanked you for that, but it was a nice thing to do.”

  “I’ve always believed no matter what, if a person likes you and lets you know about it, you have a responsibility to be gracious. You were too young for me, but that didn’t mean you didn’t have feelings.”

  “I did, and I wore them right on my sleeve. Other girls would have had a field day with me, but you didn’t. And then I found Katy and she didn’t either, thank God.”

  Katy, the woman he married right after she turned twenty-one, was a petite girl two years younger than Craig when they met in his senior year of high school long after I’d graduated. She had big blue eyes just like his, and I imagined if they ever had any kids that they’d be the most adorable things ever with beautiful eyes just like the two of them. Unfortunately, fate hadn’t decided to bless them with any children, despite the fact that they’d been married for years.

  “Katy must be thrilled that you’ve been promoted.”

  “Well, she worries. You know how she is. I told her I couldn’t stay as traffic officer forever, but she’s concerned that working real cases will put me in danger.”

  I knew what he meant. My father had worried from the moment I began working with Alex. “As I told my father, this is Sunset Ridge. You’ll be fine.”

  “I said that to her, but she said a murder case is a murder case, no matter where you are.”

  “Well, tell her not to worry because you’re working with Alex and me now, and we watch out for our partners.”

  Craig fell quiet, and I sensed he was more worried than he wanted to let on. “I’m serious. We take care of one another, and that includes you now. You’re partners with us, Craig.”

  “I just don’t want to let you two down. I know you’d be okay with me, but Alex is so serious, and I’d hate to fail on the very first case I get,” he said with a deep frown etching into his handsome features.

  “No way. You and I are going to talk about the facts of the case, and when we’re done here, you’re going to know exactly as much as I know about the case. Trust me. Alex doesn’t expect anything but your best. That’s all he looks for in people.”

  Craig’s shoulders relaxed. “You really do look up to him, don’t you?”

  Without even thinking of how to answer, I said, “I do. He’s so intelligent and cares so much about right and wrong and the truth. I find that so incredibly good. I mean, truly good.”

  “I see that. I want people to look up to me like that, Poppy. I want to do a good job starting with this case.”

  Putting my coffee down, I reached across the table and took his hands in mine. “Then let’s get down to business.”

  Craig took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay. Alex said he wanted me to find out everything I could about the three witches? Are they real witches? Like witches from Halloween?”

  I couldn’t help but chuckle at the way he said that. He’d likely be disappointed by the reality of the three witches. No brooms. No pointy hats. Just different religious beliefs than others.

  “No, not those kinds of witches. The three women we met at the tarot readers convention looked very much like me and you. Well, more me, but the point is, they looked perfectly normal, like anyone you’d see on the street. They just happen to believe in a goddess instead of the God Christians believe in and do spells and read tarot cards to tell the future.”

  “Is that for real? Can they really see into the future?” Craig asked, obviously curious about the idea of seeing into the future.

  I shrugged, unsure what witches could actually do. “I don’t know. I had my cards read this morning, though, and a lot of what the woman said made sense.”

  “Hmmm…”

  “Let’s get to the facts. First off, we spoke to three women there. The first was a woman named Susie Mitchell. She spoke to Alex alone, and he said she had nothing to really say about the victim. The second woman was named Jerilyn Fox. She didn’t know much about Amy because she didn’t really know her, except from the witches’ circle meetings every Tuesday at the Third Eye Center. She did say she heard Amy and Tamara Ridgeway, the woman from the Third Eye Center, fighting one time. She didn’t know what they were fighting about.”

  “So we’re thinking this Tamara Ridgeway is a suspect?”

  “Good question. I would say yes. Alex tends not to make those kinds of pronouncements this early, though.”

  “Would he have a problem with me saying she was a suspect?” Craig asked, worry filling his eyes once again.

  I quickly moved to quash that concern. Holding my hand up as if to stop any worry from festering, I shook my head. “No, don’t worry about that. I proclaim people to be suspects way before Alex ever does. He likes hearing opposing views. He may not always agree with what I say, but he respects it.”

  Craig let himself smile and relaxed in his seat. “Oh, okay. I don’t want to start out on the wrong foot with him.”

  Waving off his fears, I said, “Don’t worry. It’s all good.”

  I reached into my bag and dug out the pamphlet I picked up from Melody as I was leaving the tarot readers convention. Handing it to him, I said, “Now onto the third woman from the convention. Her name was Melody Chamberlain. She also was around when Tamara and Amy had an argument. So that’s a second person who says she saw them fighting. Now, Tamara doesn’t claim to be Amy’s biggest fan, but she never mentioned this particular fight these other two women are talking about, so we’re going to have to look into that.”

  Craig remained quiet for a moment and then said, “I noticed you didn’t describe her like the first two. Is she a suspect?”

  His picking up on that impressed me. “That’s good. I don’t know if I consider her one, but I can say that Alex asked her if she had an alibi for last night.”

  Leaning forward slightly, Craig looked at me like he couldn’t wait to hear about that alibi. “Did she?”

  “She did. She went to see a movie and says she was back home by eleven.”

  Instead of being deflated by her having a valid alibi, Craig moved on to another great question. “What was this fight everyone seems to be talking about? Do we know why Tamara and Amy fought?”

  “I’m very impressed, Craig. That’s a first-rate question. From what we’ve found out, Tamara and Amy had been dating before she began dating Stephen. When Tamara found out Amy was dating a cop, she told her that he would bring trouble to the Third Eye Center.”

  The mention of his former partner made his shoulders slump, like merely hearing his name deflated his enthusiasm. “I still can’t believe he lied, Poppy. Is Stephen a suspect?”

  That was the question, wasn’t it? I had no idea how to answer it, though.

  “I’m not sure, Craig. There’s nothing so far to say that he was involved in Amy’s murder, so I would say no right now.”

  “Do you have a favorite suspect?”

  His question threw me a little. Normally, I would have no problem proclaiming which suspect stood out to me more than the others. But this whole Stephen thing made my thinking muddled.

  “I don’t have anyone in mind right now. I would say we shouldn’t jump to conclusions.”

  He nodded his agreement, even as I knew it was pretty hypocritical of me to warn against jumping to conclusions since I routinely did just that. But the difference between Craig and me is that he needed to know how a real officer worked.

  I knew
I should act more like that too, though.

  After I drank the last gulp of my coffee, I stood up from the table and said, “We better get back.”

  Craig tossed his nearly full cup of coffee in the garbage as we walked out of The Grounds, and as we crossed the street to the police station, I asked, “How was your first coffee?”

  He smiled and said, “I feel as jumpy as a cat on a hot tin roof, but maybe that’s because I’m on my first official case.”

  Poor guy. He barely took three sips of his watered down coffee and already he felt jumpy from the caffeine.

  I looked at him and gave him my best supportive smile. “You’ll be fine with the coffee drinking and the investigating. I believe it and so should you.”

  “Thanks, Poppy. I hope you’re right.”

  He didn’t have to hope. Craig may have spent nearly all his time on the Sunset Ridge police force as the traffic cop and the officer responsible for crowd control, but things had changed. He’d do fine, and I knew Alex would make sure to show him the ropes the right way, like a fellow officer should.

  Chapter Thirteen

  We got back to Alex’s office in time to hear him talking on the phone with Donny. I’d hoped in the nearly hour we were gone that his mood would have improved, but if his tense expression was any indication, things had only gotten worse, not better.

  I listened as he asked Donny, “Are you sure of that time? This isn’t something you might be off a couple hours with?”

  As he heard the coroner’s answer, his somber face morphed into one that told anyone seeing him that the news wasn’t good. This case was going to make those worry lines between his eyebrows permanent.

  Alex frowned and mumbled, “Okay. Call me if you get anything new.”

  With that, he hung up the phone and sighed like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. He didn’t seem to notice Craig or me standing in front of him for a moment, but when he did, he pressed a smile onto his lips that fooled nobody.

  “Craig, after you find out everything you can about those tarot reading witches, text me with what each one of them was doing between eight and ten last night. Make sure you take notes on everything.”