Wedding Bells And Magic Spells Box Set

by A. R. Winters

  “Do you have any idea who she is?” asked Jack.

  “Yes,” said Zola, and my ears perked up.

  “You do? Who is she?”

  “I saw her yesterday. I was outside the shop, looking at the line of customers waiting to get in. This is my first sample sale and I was extremely excited—and proud—to have so many people waiting to get in. But at the front of the line, two women started fighting. One of them was this woman,” she said, pointing a finger at the corpse.

  I glanced back over at the body with a start. Zola was right! This was the younger of the two women who had been fighting before Jack and the other members of the crowd had broken them up.

  Jack walked over to the body and leaned over it, peering down.

  “I didn’t really get a good look at her yesterday, but you know what, I think you’re right,” he said with a thoughtful tone in his voice. “This does look like one of the women who was fighting. We’ll have to find out who she is, and who the woman she was fighting with is.”

  There was another rattling at the door. With a sigh, I walked over to have a look to see who it was.

  Peering outside, I could see the line from yesterday had started to reform, this time with the members clutching the little numbered tickets we had dished out the day before.

  At the front was a particularly pushy middle-aged woman. I unlocked the door and opened it just a crack, keeping a foot behind it to make sure it wouldn’t easily be pushed open.

  “I’m sorry but the sale will be delayed. We’ve had an... incident. We won’t be starting it this morning.” I tried to keep my words professional, though I’m sure there was still an undercurrent of sadness and disappointment in my tone.

  “What do you mean?” said the woman. “That’s unacceptable! Un. Accept. Able!”

  I tilted my head as I peered at her. “Excuse me, but were you... at the front yesterday?”

  “I most certainly was, before you gave us these stupid tickets and that crazy girl attacked me. Now listen very carefully, dear,” said the woman, somehow making dear into an insult. “My name is Patricia Bledsoe and you would know that already if you knew anything. My daughter, Brittany,” she said, pulling on the arm of the young lady next to her, “is getting married and we need to choose her dress first. We are not regular customers and we don’t intend to be treated as such!”

  “Right. But you were here yesterday, fighting, right?” I confirmed.

  The woman gave me a scowl. “I was attacked because you completely failed in your duty to protect your most valued customers, yes.”

  “Good. The police want to talk to you.”

  Her mouth opened and closed while she considered how to respond to my outrageous statement.

  It was still opening and closing while I popped back inside.

  “Jack!” I said. “The woman the dead girl was fighting with is outside!”

  “Really? Interesting.” Jack turned to a dark-haired female police officer. “Jackson, why don’t you have a word with her and see if we need to take her down to the station?”

  “Sir!” said the woman with a pleased grin.

  I wanted to say something about criminals returning to the scene of the crime but decided against it; it didn’t seem right since the crime had happened in my shop.

  As the police officer opened the door to leave, Kiwi squawked. I looked up at him and he ducked his head down in my direction and then tilted on its side, while he pointed a wing toward the door. I understood what he meant immediately.

  Yes! Go and spy on the police officer and eavesdrop on her conversation, please! I said in response, though the method of saying it was a near-imperceptible nod of my chin. Kiwi and I understood each other well.

  “Aria, walk with me,” said Jack.

  “Umm, okay.” I couldn’t imagine we were actually going to go for a walk, so what were we going to do?

  Following Jack’s lead, we walked a single step, back to the front door of the shop. As he gently pulled it open, Kiwi flew out the door like a rocket.

  “Don’t worry, he’ll be back,” I said when Jack gave me a worried look. He nodded that he understood.

  “Is there anything strange about your front door today, Aria?” he asked.

  After examining the door, I shook my head. “Looks fine to me.”

  “That’s what I thought,” he said. “Come.”

  We walked back through the shop and next we went to the side door, which was at the bottom of the stairs that led to my apartment.

  “What about this one?” he asked.

  I examined it again, but there was nothing special about it. It was still locked from the night before and there was no damage.

  “Looks fine and dandy to me,” I said. Fine and dandy, Aria? Really?

  Finally, Jack took us into the stockroom, which had the final door that led to the small yard behind the building with my potted herb garden.

  “And this door?” he said, eyebrows raised.

  “Nope. Nothing wrong with this one either.”

  “And they were all locked, this morning?”

  “Yep. This is the first time unlocking the two back doors. I opened the front door when Zola arrived earlier, but it was definitely locked as well.”

  Jack nodded, thoughtfully.

  “So,” he said.

  “So?” I asked.

  “So, what does that tell us?”

  “Umm. Well, somehow the woman who was killed got in through a locked door, I suppose.”

  “Indeed. As did the murderer.”

  “Right,” I said, clenching and unclenching my hands.

  “So I see two possibilities.”

  “Which are?”

  “A key—either the murderer, or the victim, had a key and let themselves in.”

  I frowned at that. Not many people had keys to the shop. “Or?”

  “Or someone let them in.”

  Someone. The only someone who could have done that would have been me—since I live here, I was the last one in the shop last night. There was only one spare key to the shop, and I’d loaned it out to the one person who would never use it or give it to someone else to use. Zola stands to lose as much as I do—if not more—in this fiasco, so playing fast and loose with my key makes absolutely no sense.

  “Well, that certainly didn’t happen!”

  Jack nodded in understanding. “No, I guessed not. They got in some other way. Leaving aside the fact that I know you’re not a… you know, it would be an odd decision to just leave the body there! No, this was someone from outside.”

  Jack continued his stroll around the premises, and we left the stockroom to go back into the shop. The body now had a sheet over it, thank goodness.

  “Unless of course…” said Jack thoughtfully. I waited for him to finish but he kept walking toward the dressing room.

  I followed after him and we entered the large room. Unlike a regular clothing store’s little booths, the dressing room for my shop was almost as big as the main shop itself. Brides needed a lot of room for assistance and assistants when getting into their dream dresses.

  “What’s that?” he asked, pointing across to the other side of the room.

  I paused before answering. Not because I didn’t know the answer, but because he was obviously asking a different question than what he’d actually said.

  “A… window?” I finally answered.

  He grunted in agreement and made his way over to it. The frosted glass window faced the side alley of the building. It was almost never opened, the only exception being if we had a really hot day in the summer, which almost never happened with Sequoia Bay’s mild microclimate.

  “An unlocked window,” he said, sliding the glass back to demonstrate. We were greeted with the view of the small alley outside that ran down the side of the building. The window wasn’t big, but then again neither was the dead girl.

  “That’s very odd,” I said. “That window is always locked.”

  “Always locke
d, apart from days with murders in them?”

  I almost laughed. Almost.

  “I don’t know what to say,” I said.

  “You just did.”

  This time I did giggle, just a little. My whole life and business were collapsing, but at least Jack was being nice to me.

  “We’ll get the forensics team to dust the window for prints or loose threads and so on when they come to deal with the… with the situation in the shop.”

  I was grateful that Jack was avoiding the words like body, or corpse, or murder victim, or any of the other myriad of ways the unfortunate situation could be described.

  Jack turned and ran his eyes over the room again. There was a large table in front of a mirror, with a chair in front of it. He paused, and then fixed his gaze on a black leather backpack-style bag that was under the chair.

  “What’s that?” he asked. Without waiting for an answer, he lifted the bag up and emptied its contents out onto the table.

  From inside the bag, a pair of ladies’ jeans, a white blouse, and some expensive sneakers tumbled out, along with a purse.

  “Whose are these?” he asked with a frown.

  “I have no idea.”

  Jack examined the items one by one, lifting them up into the light and turning each one around to look at it from every angle. The clothing items seemed to belong to a young woman of a similar build to the lady on the floor in the shop. When he opened the purse, he gave a low whistle.

  “These belonged to Carrie Mallory,” he said. “It seems she was having a private fitting of her own, until she was rudely interrupted.”

  I bit my lip. “How awful.”

  “How awful indeed.”

  Chapter 5

  The police were surprisingly efficient. It surprised me, anyway. The forensics team arrived before noon and got to work dusting for prints and searching for other pieces of trace evidence. I had been worried that it would take multiple days, but they had assured me that it wouldn’t take anywhere near that long. With “only one body,” as they put it, and none of the “splatter and gore” you get with gunshots, it wouldn’t take long at all.

  While they were doing their duty, I retreated upstairs to my living room and opened the window.

  Sure enough, as soon as I lifted the heavy wooden window frame, Kiwi fluttered in with a grin on his face. Well, perhaps not a grin since parrot mouths don’t work like that, but he had an air of a grin about him.

  “Hear anything good?” I asked my familiar.

  Before deigning to answer, Kiwi flapped his wings to tidy up the feathers, puffed up his chest, shook his head, and stood up tall and proud on the windowsill. Tall for a parrot, anyway.

  “I did,” he said, finally.

  Oh. So it was going to be like that, was it? Well, I knew just what was needed to get the story out of him. He needed a bribe.

  “Here you go,” I said after a quick journey to the kitchen.

  I handed him a bag of cheese puffs, resulting in a delighted squawk and a violent tearing at the bag until it was laid out in front of him like a plastic tablecloth, the cheese puffs piled in a pyramid in the center. With the snack feast in front of him, Kiwi was ready to tell me what he had learned.

  “The old woman,” began Kiwi.

  “You mean Patricia? The mother of Brittany?”

  He gave an angry shriek.

  “What? I was there! She told me that! And she isn’t old, she’s middle-aged.”

  “But I bet she hates being called old,” said Kiwi with a wicked cackle.

  I grinned at him. “Yes, probably.”

  “Her daughter, Brittany, went to high school with Carrie. The dead girl in the dress.”

  “Makes sense.” Sequoia Bay only had one high school so if they were from around here, that’s where they would have gone.

  “Patricia said the girls were friendly in high school. But she never approved, and now she can see why. Carrie was nothing but trouble. She was a hanger-on to Brittany—less pretty, less popular, less intelligent, and so on.”

  “Right. So did Patricia just stand out there badmouthing the dead? Or was there something else to it?”

  Kiwi hopped back uncomfortably. “Don’t know.”

  “Don’t know?”

  “Nora!” he shrieked.

  I cocked my head at him and raised my eyebrows.

  “She came out of the Black Cat Café with a broom and tried to kill me!”

  Nora. That was twice in two days. First, she upset my line of customers, and now she attacked my parrot with a broom.

  Kiwi gave out another angry shriek.

  “Just try and stay away from her. She’s bad news,” I said.

  “Aria? Are you talking to yourself again?” came a voice I recognized.

  Uh-oh. Had she heard me talking to Kiwi? Goodness knows what she’d do with the knowledge if she found out exactly what Kiwi was.

  I got up from the chair to see my mother standing by the door. “Hi, Mom! Did you forget how to knock?”

  “Knock? It was open, so I assumed,” she said without finishing her sentence.

  I gave her a sickly-sweet smile. “You’re probably getting forgetful. Tends to happen after so long, Mom.”

  If there’s one thing Mom hated, it was being reminded of her age, and she did everything she could to stop those reminders—from plumping up her lips with collagen to dying her gray hair blond, and even casting glamour spells to hide the wrinkles around her Botoxed eyes.

  “At least I’m not talking to myself,” she said with a sniff. “When I came in, it looked like the police were about to pack up and head off. The forensics team have gone and so has the body. The rest were just leaving.”

  “And Jack left hours ago.”

  She raised her eyebrows at me. “The body wasn’t just a trick to get him back in your shop, was it?”

  “Ha ha. Very funny. I can think of about a million better ways, and none of them involve getting my shop shut down because of a murder.”

  Mom gave a little nod, accepting my statement as true. Despite the fact I never—well, almost never—lied, Mom often assumed I was lying because she did so much of it herself. She thought everyone was always keeping something hidden or covering something else up, even when they were doing nothing of the sort.

  “You should consider yourself lucky, I suppose,” said Mom as she began to wander around my apartment, nosy eyes and fingers looking and touching with every step.

  “You think? The greatest day of my life ruined, another poor girl’s life ended, and I should consider myself lucky?”

  “Now, now, settle down. I’m just trying to help you see the positive in it all, dear. I was just saying you’re lucky there wasn’t more damage done to the shop. As deaths go, a strangulation isn’t too bad, is it?”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Oh yes. Imagine if she’d been blasted with a shotgun. You’d have to get the decorators in, and a lot more than one dress would have been ruined.” Mom nodded to herself in apparent pleasure at the thought. “And the murderer didn’t really do any damage to the place, did they?”

  “They destroyed my bath bombs!”

  I’d spent a long time putting those together and then charming them. If it hadn’t been for the even worse crime committed by the criminal, I would have been distraught over their loss. Instead, I was distraught over the death of a bride and the ruination of my first ever sample sale.

  “Yes, yes. Come on, the police have gone now. Let’s see how it all looks.”

  With a frown, I followed my mother downstairs to the shop.

  When we got inside, I just wanted to clutch my head in my hands, fall to the floor, and wait for a fairy godmother to appear and fix everything. Or better yet, take me back to the way things were before.

  But I didn’t have a fairy godmother. I had a non-fairy mother instead. The only thing she had in common with a fairy godmother was the ability to work magic, though when Mom did that it was very rarely for my benefit.


  The police hadn’t done too much damage to the shop, fortunately. The floor would need a good clean, and of course the displays would have to be rebuilt. One of the wedding dresses was now in police custody and would no doubt be gone for good.

  “Come in the fitting room, dear,” said Mom “Help me figure out what they were doing in here.”

  With nothing better to do, I followed Mom.

  “The police were doing something around the window frame,” she said.

  “Yep. For some reason, that window was open. It’s almost never open. We think maybe Carrie or the murderer came in that way.”

  Mom shook her head. “Nope.”

  “No?”

  “I was listening when they were in here. Now, let me see…” she said, peering at the still open window. “Yes, there it is. Just as I heard.”

  I crept up close behind Mom, peering over her shoulder.

  “What did they find?” I asked her.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? Then what are you looking at?”

  I peered where Mom was looking to try and figure out what she meant. She of course had the advantage of having heard the police discussions—unlike me, she had no qualms about eavesdropping.

  “Do you see, now?” she said.

  “Go on, tell me,” I said with a sigh. Mom could have this little victory if she wanted. I was too fed up to care.

  “Because you never open this window, you never clean this windowsill,” she said, a hint of reproach coming through. She was right; I didn’t open the window to clean the outside sill because no one, including me, ever saw it.

  “And?”

  “Look. It’s still covered in muck.”

  I peered at it. She was grossly exaggerating, of course, but I could see what she meant.

  There was indeed a relatively thick, undisturbed layer of dust on the outside of the window frame. There was no way someone could have climbed through the window; the dust would have been disturbed.

  “That means someone else must have opened the window,” I said, thoughtfully.

  “Indeed. I suppose it could have been one of the policemen. It was probably getting stuffy with all the hubbub.”