Wisteria Witches Mysteries Box Set 3

by Angela Pepper

  “You two don’t need to humor me,” Krinkle said. “My mother didn’t raise any fools. I would never waste your time looking for a two-inch-tall wooden doll.”

  “You wouldn’t?” He gave her a sidelong look.

  “It will make more sense if I show you,” she said.

  Krinkle waved us over to a shelving unit. She whipped the dust covers off three more dollhouses of a similar scale.

  “I made all of these months ago,” she said.

  The first two were crime scenes that I recognized immediately. The third was a location I wasn’t familiar with, but guessing by the puddle of fake blood—I hoped it was fake—on the carpet, it was also a crime scene.

  I kept my mouth shut. I snuck a peek over at the iron chair. The amethyst glow was all but gone.

  Bentley said, “You made these months ago?”

  “Yes,” she said, then stepped back to give us space.

  Bentley pulled a flashlight from his pocket, and shone it over the dollhouses. The attic was dim where we stood, and the bright beam of the flashlight passing over the tiny homicide scenes made them only more gruesome.

  First, there was a replica of a single room—a bathroom. In it was a picture that told the story of a crime. A woman lay motionless in an old-fashioned clawfoot bath tub, a toaster next to her in the water. I touched the water carefully. It was hard. A clear resin.

  Next, there was a stand-alone garage with a car inside the garage, and an apartment on the upper floor. In the apartment, sitting on the tiny black leather sofa was another doll. It wore a man’s clothes, and had no head. The top of the cut neck had been painted red.

  The third model was an office interior with several desks, and a dark-haired woman in a green dress lying in a pool of blood.

  “I know the first two,” I murmured to Bentley. “The first one’s my house, and the second is the Greyson case.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know the third one? You don’t suppose it’s something that’s going to happen, do you? We have to stop it. We have to save that lady.”

  “It’s too late,” he murmured back. “That one has already happened. I told you I read the whole report. It was the one your aunt—”

  Krinkle interrupted, speaking sharply. “You do understand what this means, don’t you?”

  We did? I didn’t.

  Bentley, with a poker face, said, “I’d like to hear it in your own words, if you don’t mind.”

  Mrs. Krinkle spoke as she folded the dust covers. “The images come to me in dreams. I can’t sleep or focus on anything else until I’ve built the models that show the images from my dreams. It’s a psychic gift I have, the one that runs in my family. You’ll remember I told you about my mother, and her journals.”

  Bentley nodded for her to go on.

  She explained further, enunciating each word carefully, almost as though she was giving us a rehearsed speech, or lines from a play.

  “I built the first model, of the woman on the office floor, and then, a few days later, I read in the newspaper that someone actually was murdered in one of the offices at City Hall. I told myself it just a coincidence. But then I build the second one, and it happened again. And the third.” She squinted, squeezing out a single tear that gleamed down her wrinkled cheek. “Oh, Detective Bentley! You simply must do something. You have to stop the fourth one from happening. I couldn’t live with myself if it came true.”

  Bentley and I wordlessly returned our attention to the dollhouse with the allegedly missing woman.

  “This isn’t like the others,” I said. “There’s no body. It doesn’t even imply that a crime has happened. There are three living people in this house, and no body. No blood.”

  “My partner is right,” Bentley said to Krinkle. “By the logic of the other models, if something were to happen to the woman from this family, you would have built a model showing that.”

  “But magic isn’t logical,” Krinkle said. “Don’t you know? Magic has a mind of its own.” She looked directly at me. “That’s something my mother used to tell me. I didn’t believe her, of course. Not until now. Not until I finally became old enough and wise enough to understand that she was right about everything.” She patted her chest with one wrinkled hand. “Magic is real, and it uses all of us as its agents.”

  Bentley stared at the dollhouse a solid minute before asking, “How long do we have? When will this woman go missing?”

  “Soon,” Krinkle said faintly. “It’s just a feeling, like my dreams, but I believe she’ll be taken soon.”

  “I’ll put a crime scene team on the case,” he said. “Our first step will be identifying the residence and the potential victim.” He reached for the base of the model.

  Krinkle shrieked and put her small body between Bentley and the dollhouse. “This can’t leave the attic. Please don’t ask me to explain how I know. I just do.”

  He looked at me.

  I shrugged.

  He frowned. Some help I was.

  I shrugged again. Magic dollhouses were way out of my areas of expertise.

  Krinkle asked sweetly, “Can the crime scene people come here?”

  “They’ll have to,” Bentley said. “I’ll tell them they have to keep the dollhouse here, in the attic.”

  She looked at her watch again. “How soon can they get here?”

  Chapter 9

  TWO HOURS LATER

  Once again, Bentley and I sat with Temperance Krinkle in her dining room. The gingersnaps were all gone. I was getting really tired of looking at glued-together jigsaw puzzles.

  Two floors above us, a forensics team of three people—one who knew about magic, plus two junior investigators fresh out of school—did their work. The two who didn’t know about magic had been told the dollhouse was a training exercise to teach them lateral thinking. The person leading the team, the one who knew about magic, was Dr. Jeremiah Lund, a coroner with the DWM.

  Dr. Lund had set up the on-site testing equipment in the attic, then left the other two to work while he gave Mrs. Krinkle a brief physical exam. He had declared the elderly widow to be in sound physical condition. She’d taken this as good news, happily proclaiming herself fit to begin her world travels. Lund was eager to continue testing the woman. A little too eager. He had pulled out an enormous needle to draw blood when Bentley put a stop to Lund’s plans.

  I was left wondering if Bentley’s objection was about the drawing of blood in his presence, or that taking such physical samples was far beyond standard protocol for examining a witness who’d allegedly witnessed a future crime in her dreams and built a dollhouse to tell the story.

  Krinkle refilled my tea cup. The pot had gone cold, but we were both sipping it anyway. Bentley hadn’t touched his.

  “What an odd little man,” Krinkle commented about Lund. “Or do you suppose all doctors are like that these days? I wouldn’t know. I haven’t been to a doctor in decades. ‘Stay away from hospitals,’ my mother always told me. ‘That’s where they keep the diseases.’” She took a dainty sip of her cold herbal tea. “I do calisthenics every morning to keep my bones strong. It works. You heard the odd little doctor. I have very healthy bones. Not one single break.”

  Bentley shifted in his chair. An ugly expression crossed his face.

  “I would hate to break a bone,” Krinkle said, as though answering a question, though one hadn’t been asked. “It must hurt terribly. I can’t even imagine.”

  Bentley picked up his tea cup, which looked even more delicate when encased in his big hand, and slurped back the cold tea in one swallow. “Broken bones are no picnic,” he said, setting the cup on its saucer with a soft clink.

  He would know. My stomach twisted at the memory. He’d gotten nearly every bone in his arms and legs busted by a rampaging iguammit. The vial of blood he’d taken to give him supernatural strength had fixed the breaks, yet it hadn’t erased the memory of the pain. It must have been excruciating. I almost felt sorry for the guy.

&n
bsp; There was a loud clatter in the attic, then the sound of Lund yelling at his underlings to be more careful.

  If the clatter had come from my attic, I would have run upstairs to find out what was ruined, as well as which animal—fox, wyvern, or hellhound—was responsible for the damages.

  Krinkle, however, seemed unconcerned. If anything, she appeared pleased to have so many visitors within her house. She had greeted Dr. Lund and the CSI techs warmly, as though she was running a Bed and Breakfast and they were day guests, arriving right on time as per their reservation.

  Bentley leaned forward and sniffed his empty tea cup. “Were there rose petals in the tea?”

  “No.” Krinkle fanned her face with one hand.

  “I smell roses.”

  Krinkle’s magnified green eye twitched behind her thick eyeglass lens. “That must be my perfume you smell.”

  “It smells familiar,” he said. “There must be someone at my office who wears the same brand.”

  “That’s not possible,” she said, laughing haughtily. “It’s a custom blend given to me by my dear friend, Queenie Gilbert, rest her soul. It’s a blend of rose, magnolia, bergamot, and something she claimed to be otherworldly.”

  The doorbell rang.

  Both of Krinkle’s hands flew to her cheeks. “Oh, dear! That must be my friend, Louis. In all the fuss, I completely forgot! He must be here to take me to the meeting.”

  She excused herself and went to the front door, moving quickly for a woman her age.

  Bentley and I followed, in case the visitor was another crime scene technician, or someone there to tie up loose ends from a kidnapping.

  Standing on the front step was a tall man in his sixties. I didn’t know him. He had a long, leathery face, and a bulbous, pockmarked nose. He had jet black hair, worn back in a low ponytail, and an equally dark goatee. He wore black trousers and a black shirt, despite the summer weather.

  He looked at us with surprise and said, “Temperance, you have company!”

  “It has been quite the morning,” she said. “These are the police. I called them about my visions, the ones I told you about. Now they’re conducting a very important investigation, thanks to me.”

  He winced. “Temperance, you didn’t.”

  “Louis, I told you. My visions are real!”

  The man looked past her, at Bentley, and said, “I apologize on behalf of my friend. I’ve been taking her to meetings at the community center to get her out of the house and away from that imagination of hers. I hope she hasn’t wasted too much of your time.”

  He hadn’t been addressing me, but I cut in, asking, “What meetings?”

  He looked down and shuffled his feet. “It’s, uh, sort of a group for people going through life changes.”

  “The Awakenlings,” I said.

  All three of them jerked their heads and stared at me.

  “I hear things,” I said enigmatically.

  Bentley fixed his silver-eyed gaze on me. “How do you know about this group?”

  “One of the library patrons invited me. A woman named Jasmine Carter-Pressman.”

  His nostrils flared. “Pressman?”

  Louis said, “I know Jasmine. She’s a good woman. Been through a lot this year. She makes my problems look like nothing at all.” He rubbed his black goatee and glanced over his shoulder at a black car that was double-parked in the street. “Temperance, let me park the car, then I’ll come in and help straighten things out.”

  “No, no, no!” She pushed him out of the doorway. “Don’t you dare trouble yourself with my business, Louis. You go ahead to the meeting. Say hello to everyone for me. I’ll be fine here on my own. Trust me.”

  He tried to get into the house despite her protests, but she playfully swatted him on the arms until he agreed to leave.

  We went back inside with Krinkle, sat at the table, and went over the same questions. She still didn’t know any more about the missing woman than when we’d arrived.

  After a while, my phone buzzed. I checked the screen, and all my thoughts about Krinkle and the dollhouse left my head. My mom priorities completely took over.

  Bentley, leaning over to look at my phone, asked, “What is it?”

  I held the phone to my chest. “Nothing to do with our current business.”

  “You made a noise when you read the message. What does it say?”

  I showed him the screen. “It’s just my daughter. Asking about the spare tire for Foxy Pumpkin.”

  “She’s got a flat tire?”

  I patted him on the shoulder. “You figured that out from my clues? I can see why they made you a detective.”

  He groaned.

  “I’ll be fine here on my own,” Krinkle said. “You should go and see about that... Did you say pumpkin?”

  Bentley wagged a finger at the woman as he stood. “You have my card and all my numbers,” he said. “Don’t let Dr. Lund examine you again, and don’t go anywhere with him. Do you understand?”

  She giggled, as though it had been a joke. Krinkle didn’t know how serious Lund could be about the research aspects of his career. I’d heard him talk excitedly about taking apart bodies to see what made them “tick.” He was looking for physical connections to magic abilities. I secretly hoped he wouldn’t succeed.

  We said goodbye to Krinkle, and left the house.

  Zoey’s flat tire had happened near the museum, so I told Bentley, and we headed there.

  “Don’t think I forgot about your promise of lunch,” I said once we were driving.

  “I would never think you forgot about lunch,” he said.

  Or a promise you made, I thought.

  Chapter 10

  CHET MOORE

  MOORE RESIDENCE

  Inside his kitchen, Chet Moore placed a glass of chilly orange juice on a serving tray. He wiped the condensation from the glass off his fingers with a tea towel. The meal was almost perfect. All it needed was a finishing touch.

  He stepped out to his back yard, walked over to the flower garden, and selected the loveliest peony blossom. He’d forgotten to bring the pruning shears from his potting shed, so he glanced around to make sure nobody was watching, then shook his hand to shift two fingers into sharp claws. He rotated one finger, forming scissors, and neatly clipped the blossom. A bird screeched overhead. A snail shell crushed beneath his shoe.

  He returned to the kitchen, where he nestled the short stem into a bud vase. Peonies were not Chessa’s absolute favorite—she preferred the crisp symmetry and pointed petals of white dahlias—but she would appreciate the peony because she loved all white flowers. And she loved Chet. Or so she said.

  It was funny, how she’d never felt so distant from him as she did now, after her return. Perhaps she had been gone too long, and everything that wasn’t Chessa had changed too much while she stayed the same. He, Chet, her loving fiancé, had changed too much. He had changed in spite of holding on so tight, making himself so rigid against change while he waited for her to return.

  Chet’s upper back ached as he rearranged all the items on the tray, swapping the position of the orange juice and the bud vase with the peony, and then swapping them back again.

  He held one hand over the waffles. They had been steaming, emitting a delicate vanilla scent, but now they had grown cool. Not distant and cool, like Chessa, but cool nonetheless.

  He looked over at the bowl of batter and the still-steaming waffle iron. He decided to make another batch of fresh waffles.

  Ten minutes later, he once again found himself rearranging the items on the tray. The waffles were cooling. He was stalling.

  Get it together, he told himself. She needs you to be strong for her. Don’t wimp out now. Not when life is finally almost good again.

  He picked up the tray, and felt the creak of stiffness in his neck as he did, along with the rigidity in his rib cage.

  Breathe, he told himself. At his age, his body should have known to keep moving his diaphragm, to keep working his lun
gs, to keep bringing fresh oxygen into his body without him having to think about it. And yet, a dozen times a day or more, Chet Moore felt the dimness creeping up his head. It was like a long shadow falling over his mind. Before passing out, he would realize the dimness and the long shadow was from lack of oxygen. Then he would order himself to breathe. He would tell himself to relax—not that it did much good. How could he relax, knowing as much about life as he did? The only people walking around happy and relaxed were the ones who had no clue what was actually going on.

  The fools.

  The damn lucky fools.

  With the tray in his hands, he marched up the stairs and into the master bedroom.

  The love of his life lay crumpled within the bed linens, folded into herself like clean but forgotten laundry. Her platinum hair looked heavy, as though soaked with water.

  Chessa appeared to be fast asleep, but as soon as he drew near the bed, her ocean-blue eyes flashed open. She pushed herself upright at once.

  “I thought I smelled breakfast,” she said sleepily.

  “More like brunch,” he said.

  They both glanced over at the room’s clock.

  “You shouldn’t have let me sleep in,” she gently scolded.

  He started to say she’d looked like she needed more sleep, but he bit his tongue. He had learned not to speak about her sleeping habits. It was far better to suffer through her yawning and grumpiness. It was easier for everyone if Chet pretended that it was reasonable for her to cut short her sleep every night as a way of stealing back the time that had been taken from her during her year in a coma.

  “I made waffles,” he said, stupid though it was to state the obvious.

  She pushed herself further up the bed, until her back was resting against the tufted headboard. She licked her lips and looked over the food as Chet folded down the tray’s legs at the sides and placed the tray over her legs.

  “That peony is lovely,” she said.