Wedding Bells And Magic Spells Box Set

by A. R. Winters

  A happy medium is not what I had imagined.

  The shop had nearly a dozen people in it, eight of whom were future brides, and sales were now, happily, ‘steady.’ There weren’t mobs of people, but there were small groups, and they had open wallets.

  Ding!

  The front door opened again and a girl with an angry face marched in, right up to me, and poked me firmly in the chest.

  “Hi, Sarah,” I said with a grin.

  “I can’t believe you did it without me!” Her voice was mock angry but the bride just to my side didn’t know that. She stepped aside and then went and hid behind the other side of a dress rail. Sarah could be quite intimidating, even when she was kidding around.

  “I’m sorry, but we just couldn’t put it off. You were off on your date, and Kiwi and I just couldn’t wait.”

  She giggled. “You talk about that bird like he’s a person.”

  I nodded my head thoughtfully. “I do, don’t I? Anyway, sorry you missed out on all the fun. If you call coming face to face with a cold-blooded murderer fun, anyway.”

  “I do! You know I do!” said Sarah giving me another poke. “Looks like the sale is a success, though.”

  “Kind of. I mean, it’s not exactly what we were first hoping it would be...”

  “Oh, I don’t know. You’ve got a nice little crowd in here.”

  “Yeah, but they’re,” I lowered my voice, “bargain hunters.”

  Since it had been revealed that Zola’s designs were copies of Carrie’s, their values had fallen dramatically. The dresses still weren’t cheap, of course—wedding dresses never are—but they weren’t carrying the designer-price-tag-premium that they used to. I suppose we should have just been grateful we had anything to sell. But Carrie’s family had thought the sale would be a way to honor her memory, and of course they were going to get a big cut of the sales too.

  “Bargain hunters are better than nothing,” said Sarah. “Money isn’t everything.”

  “I know, I know.” I did agree with her, in theory, but it wasn’t her that the bills and rent payment were addressed to every month. I would love to have nothing to do with money, but the world unfortunately didn’t agree.

  Ding!

  I looked up, saw who it was, and turned back to Sarah but she was already on her way to the stock room. If I didn’t know for a fact it wasn’t true, I would have come to the conclusion that Sarah didn’t like Detective Jack Bowers. But no, she just didn’t want to ‘cramp my style’ as she insisted on putting it. Which was ridiculous, because Jack and I weren’t even an item. At least I didn’t think we were.

  “Hello, Aria. Everything running smoothly, I trust?” He ran his eyes around the room as if looking for troublemakers and murderers, and then turned back to me with a satisfied smile. “Looks like it is.”

  “Yep. The Carrie and Zola sample sale is going reasonably well. I won’t get rich off it, but I should be able to keep Kiwi in cheese puffs for another month or two.”

  “Glad to hear it.” He laughed, a deep chortling sound. “You’ll be glad to know that everything is progressing smoothly,” he said with a nod and a wink.

  “Good to hear. Zola was very relieved, you know. We had a very long chat after Suzan was arrested.”

  “I expect she was. You didn’t hear this from me, but the mayor was furious.”

  “Oh?” I said, suppressing a manic grin. It wasn’t that I disliked the mayor, but he was Mom’s boyfriend and anything that got her worked up was enough to cheer me up at least a little bit.

  “Oh yes. Just before I got your text, he was in the television studio. He was announcing that the arrest of Zola Cates was imminent and he was sure the whole town would be relieved.”

  “And then you arrested Suzan!”

  Jack was quashing a smile of his own as he nodded. “I’d put off arresting Zola as long as I could—we didn’t have enough concrete evidence, in my opinion—but with the word coming down from on high, I wasn’t going to be able to delay it any longer. I think the mayor was in his town car on the way home when we announced the arrest, right after he’d triumphantly announced it was Zola!”

  “She could probably sue him,” I said thoughtfully.

  “Probably. Do you think she would?” he asked with a frown.

  I shook my head “No. She’s been having to rethink her whole life. She’s gone on a retreat in the mountains somewhere. A year of silence, supposedly. I guess we’ll see about that.”

  “So she’s not even here for the sale?”

  “Nope, she’s completely gone. Said she’d be back to collect her share of the proceeds in a year.”

  “Strange,” he said, shaking his head. “I couldn’t imagine doing something like that.”

  “Sometimes I wouldn’t mind escaping Kiwi’s chatter for a year.”

  Jack laughed. “You shouldn’t teach him so many words, then. I’m sure that parrot most know near a hundred!”

  “Yeah. Maybe even more.” Like, five thousand more! “He gets most of them from the television. Those awful reality television shows.”

  Jack frowned at me. “If they’re so awful, why do you watch them?”

  “I...” Oops. Nearly said too much. I couldn’t very well say the parrot made me put them on, could I? “I know I shouldn’t. But sometimes something mindless drivel in the background fills the silences.” Great. Now I sounded like a sad old spinster.

  “I know what you mean. It can be... quiet in the evening. If you live alone.”

  We both stood there nodding like idiots.

  “Perhaps we could get together for an evening sometime.”

  I nodded at him. “Yes. Perhaps we could. I expect I’d enjoy that more than reality television.”

  “I don’t claim to be the best company, but I think I could top that,” said Jack with a grin.

  “Oh. One other thing.” Jack’s voice had suddenly become deeper and more serious. It was back to Officer Jack, not Date Jack.

  “Yes?”

  “The captain wanted me to have a word with you.”

  “I bet I can guess what about.”

  “Yes, I bet you can. But I better do as I’m told. For the record.”

  “For the record.” I nodded in reluctant agreement.

  “Next time you want to lay a trap for a murderer, could you possibly let us know in advance? Give us a bit of a heads up? And maybe, possibly, not even do it at all—just give us the information instead?”

  “Next time?”

  “Well, you never know...”

  “There isn’t going to be a next time. So, sure. No problem. I promise not to lure any murderers into my shop. Is that what your boss wanted me to say?”

  He nodded at my malicious compliance. “Umm, yes, I suppose that will do. Sorry, Aria. I had to say it though.”

  “Yes, yes, I know. You do everything by the book.”

  He nodded agreement. “I suppose I do. Speaking of which, my lunch break is just about over.”

  “No rest for the wicked,” I said.

  “No more than an hour at a time!”

  We both laughed as I bade him farewell with the promise to do something, sometime one evening, fairly soon. And you can’t get more romantic than that. At least I seemingly can’t.

  Like magic, Sarah appeared by my side as soon as he was gone. “You’ve got a date!”

  “Have not!”

  “Really?”

  “Well, maybe I do. We didn’t fix a time, or a place. But we have an...” I held out my hands palms up in front of me. “Understanding.”

  “An understanding huh? Well, that’s something, I suppose.” Something caught Sarah’s eye and her face turned into a grimace. “Uh-oh.”

  I turned to see my two favorite women approaching. Well, my two favorite if you exclude every other woman on the planet bar Suzan Clark.

  “Mrs. Bledsoe, Miss Bledsoe. So nice to see you,” I lied with a plastic smile on my face.

  “We’ve come to talk to you,” s
aid Patricia.

  “About the wedding dress you gave us,” said Brittany.

  The wedding dress you stole last time you were in here, I didn’t say. Instead, I just kept on smiling.

  “We were thinking...” began Brittany.

  “That we might forgive you,” continued her mother.

  “You might forgive me? How... very kind,” I said, idly wondering whether there was some kind of glue I could use to maintain a fake smile for customers like these. Or ‘customers’ rather. They hardly counted as real, valued patrons since all they had done was upset me, destroy my bath bombs, and rob me and Zola of a wedding dress.

  “It was a very confusing time, and you are only a shopkeeper, so perhaps it wasn’t entirely your fault—everything that happened. Anyway, we were thinking, as a gesture, we would like to pay for the wedding dress.”

  I blinked in surprise and for a moment my smile was genuine.

  “Great... that’s great.” The pleasant surprise was quite cheering, even if it had come with a large dose of insults and backhanded compliments.

  “Good. Send us a bill and we’ll settle it after the wedding,” said the senior Bledsoe.

  “It is a lovely dress,” said Brittany.

  “Good enough to pay for!” said Sarah in mock enthusiasm, clapping her hands like a little girl who had been ordered to clap enthusiastically by an adult.

  The two Bledsoes looked at her like she had a screw loose, which to be fair, she probably did.

  “Good luck, with all this,” said Brittany, before linking her arm with her mother’s and heading back out of the shop, seemingly proud at the ‘charity’ they had offered me.

  “You should demand the dress back and burn it in front of them.”

  I laughed. “Good plan, but I’m not sure my accountant would approve.”

  “I’ve told you before to ignore him. All he cares about is money.”

  I laughed again. “I know, I know.”

  SQUAWK!

  The warning shriek was like an alarm. I, and every other person in the shop, stared up at the bookcase where Kiwi had been sitting in silence. Until now. He was staring at the door and so that’s where I turned my gaze.

  “I’ll leave you to it!” said Sarah cheerily before quickly scurrying away.

  The front door of the shop was open, but for some reason the bell hadn’t rung. It was Hazel Crane, the flame-haired, tan-skinned dark witch and she was walking toward me like there was no one else in the room but us. Brides scattered out of her away as if forced aside, and ended up with confused looks on their faces.

  “Aria Whitmore.”

  “Hazel Crane.”

  Having established that we knew each other’s names, I wondered what was coming up next. Had Patricia sent her after me?

  “Is this about the Bledsoes?”

  Hazel Crane slowly shook her head, but her red hair seemed to whip around much faster than it should have.

  “No. I am done with the Bledsoes. They have served my purposes for now.”

  “Wedding dress?” I offered.

  I made her smile! Well, not quite, but there was definitely the faintest hint of an upturn at the corners of Hazel’s mouth.

  “I have a gift for you.”

  There’s a phrase: don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. It should have an addendum: unless it’s being offered by a dark witch, in which case shoot it in the head or run away or at least check its mouth really, really thoroughly.

  “Oh?”

  Hazel held out her right hand, which contained a plain manila envelope. If you’d asked me if she’d been holding anything when she came in I would have sworn she hadn’t been, but she also hadn’t reached into her jacket and she wasn’t carrying any kind of bag. She must have been holding it all along.

  “What’s this?”

  “That is called an envelope, Aria Whitmore. Open it.”

  My fingers automatically tore it open before I’d even decided whether I wanted to or not. I reached inside and felt a single piece of plasticky paper. It was a photo. I pulled it out and held it up.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  I stared at the photo and it looked familiar, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. It was a photo of a middle-aged man, dressed in a cream-colored suit, standing on a sandy beach with the ocean behind him. He was smiling, but not at the camera, at something else that had seemingly caught his eye. There was a timestamp at the bottom right corner of the photo, indicating that it had been taken two days ago.

  “You don’t know.” She said it as a statement of fact, but as if it was a fact that she had just discovered.

  “No. I don’t know. Have I met him before? He looks familiar.”

  “Annabelle will know who it is, when you show it to her.”

  “You mean my Mom?”

  Hazel nodded slowly. “At least, I would hope she would remember.”

  I stared into Hazel’s eyes. My eyebrows arched up.

  “No!”

  “Yes. That, my dear, is your father.”

  In Hot Fudge And Cold Blood

  Chapter 1

  Standing at the front counter of my currently empty bridal shop was my employee and dearest friend, Sarah, staring intently into the eyes of my parrot.

  “Scrapbook,” said Sarah slowly. “Scrap. Book.”

  “Fudge!” said Kiwi, my parrot and familiar, though Sarah wasn’t privy to that second detail.

  I couldn’t help but giggle listening to the two of them ‘talking’ to each other. Sarah had been at it for several minutes now, trying to no avail to get Kiwi to acknowledge her latest passion-slash-hobby: scrapbooking.

  “When he’s obsessed with something, there’s no helping it,” I explained to Sarah, though I could have just as well said the exact same thing to Kiwi about her.

  “But I’ve taught him lots of words before.” There was an air of beleaguered complaint in Sarah’s tone.

  Actually, she hadn’t taught him any words at all. Kiwi already had a remarkably large vocabulary but he didn’t share most of it with anyone but me. With everyone else, he pretended to be a regular ‘dumb’ parrot instead of the hyper-intelligent magical familiar that he actually was. But sometimes, Kiwi humored Sarah and pretended to learn a new word for her—usually because she was offering a snack as a reward.

  “Maybe he’s just not as interested in scrapbooking as he is in, well, fudge.” As I finished speaking, Kiwi turned his head toward me and there was a brief flash of acknowledgment in his eyes. Yep, I was right. Scrapbooking wasn’t doing it for him.

  Sarah nodded her head slowly, sending her brown braids bouncing around her shoulders.

  “Do you have any pictures of Kiwi from when he was little? I’d love one for my scrapbook.”

  I shook my head. “Nope. He was pretty much fully grown when I found him.”

  “I bet he was adorable.”

  “Hmmm,” I said. “Perhaps.”

  Kiwi let out a loud squawk, and then, bored with us, hopped off the counter into the air and with a couple of flaps soared up, landing on top of the bookcase I kept along the right wall of the shop, from where he could look down on us all.

  “I can’t believe you don’t have a scrapbook,” said Sarah, shaking her head as if the very idea of not having one was mind-boggling.

  “You’ve only had one for two minutes!”

  Sarah waggled a finger at me.

  “You know that’s not true. I bought it yesterday,” she said with a sniff.

  “I didn’t literally mean two minutes.”

  “But seriously, Aria, I think scrapbooking would be good for you.” Her earnest eyes and open face always brightened my day, and I found myself smiling along with her even though I had no intention of starting a scrapbook of my own. “Ooh!”

  She intoned her exclamation as if a brilliant thought had just struck her.

  “What?”

  “I’ve got a great idea! You should make a scrapbook about your father!”
/>   My father. The father I didn’t know existed until a certain dark witch—Hazel Crane —had shoved a picture of him in my face and let me know of his existence a few weeks earlier.

  “I don’t know anything about my father. All I’ve got is that picture. One single picture.”

  “And your birth certificate. I bet we can dig up all sorts of stuff! We’ll ask your Mom and some of the older people around town. I bet they’ve got pictures or something. Maybe we can even track him down!”

  “Wait. Hold on. This scrapbooking seems to have gone to your head.” I squeezed Sarah’s upper arm, as though that would help my words to get through to her. “Slow down a minute. I only just found out he existed and now you want me to... make a book about him?”

  “Not a real book, a scrapbook! It’s fun! Look, in mine I’ve got a picture of me with the designer Zola Cates, there’s a receipt from the man I used to buy my water from, there’s a scrap of hair from that annoying cust—”

  “Wait, WHAT!?”

  Sarah shrugged her shoulders. “I like to keep all memories, good and bad.”

  “Don’t tell me how you got it,” I said to her sternly.

  She responded with the sweetest, most innocent smile she could manage, which left her looking, at best, mischievous.

  “You can see it’s fun, right?” She pulled open a plastic bag that had been sitting on the counter. “Look, I’ve got glitter, glue sticks, stars, string, wool, and everything else!”

  Goodness. It was like a kindergarten craft station in my shop.

  “And what do you do with it when it’s finished?”

  She cocked her head at me. “Finished?”

  “Yeah. When the book’s full, what do you do?”

  I knew the question would be moot anyway. Sarah was excellent at starting hobbies, with all the enthusiasm you could want, but after a few days or weeks—or just hours, sometimes—she would become distracted by something new and shiny instead. Skydiving to crocheting, Indian cooking to snorkeling, kites to whittling. This week, it was scrapbooking and she was going all in.