For a moment, I considered leaving and going to the Home Depot in the next town. But I was already there, and I didn’t need much.
So I ignored her and made my way deeper into the store. I hoped that I would find someone else who worked in the store so I could ask them where they kept the trash cans and gloves, but no one else materialized. They were either on a break or the cashier was the only person working in the whole store. I wasn’t going to ask her, and I wondered how unpleasant she was going to make my checkout experience.
I did manage to wander past another customer. Two, actually. There was a couple shopping in the light fixture aisle. They didn’t look very happy, but I didn’t need anything in that section. So the source of their discontent had to remain a mystery.
After walking through the store twice, I finally remembered that I was a witch. I didn’t think that using my magic to find the trash cans should count as using it for personal gain, so I closed my eyes for a second and imagined a little beam of blue light leading from me to the trash cans. I could see in my mind’s eye where it went. Then I opened my eyes and found to my delight that it was still there. It lead me right to the trash cans and then vanished.
For a moment, I thought it would be an awesome skill to have. That was before a wave of dizziness hit me. My head swooned and my stomach roiled. I had to put my arm out and steady myself against the shelf. After a minute that felt like an eternity, it passed. That was my first lesson in using my magic for personal gain, and I vowed to be far more careful in the future.
But once I was feeling better, it was time to select a garbage can. The store was smaller than Home Depot or Lowe’s, so there were only a few choices.
I’d just about decided on the ones with the wheels and large black handles when the cashier I’d seen earlier turned down the aisle and made a beeline for me.
“Can I help you with anything, ma’am?” she asked in a snide tone.
“I’m just here to buy some trash bins and gloves,” I said.
I had hoped to avoid a confrontation I knew was coming. The problem was that I had no idea why the woman, Karen, according to her name tag, was so peeved at me.
“There’s a lot of talk about you around town. Some people are saying you killed a woman. I just don’t think you belong here in Coventry,” she sniped.
“Really? That’s what Langoria said too. Were you two friends?”
“Gloves are in aisle eight. I suggest you get them and be on your way.”
Aisle eight was close enough to where the couple was shopping for me to overhear what they were bickering about. I’d like to say that I didn’t linger over choosing between the plain yellow gardening gloves and the white ones with a little fern pattern just so I could listen in, but I did.
I’m not proud of being an eavesdropper, but for some reason, I just could not tune them out. That reason became apparent quickly.
“You’re not even trying to help me pick the right lights for the remodel,” the woman complained. “It’s obvious you don’t want to be here.”
“It’s obvious because it’s true,” the man retorted. “You could handle this on your own. I don’t care what lights you pick, and I have work to do at home. This is a waste of my time.”
“You don’t care?” he hissed. “This is a waste of your time?”
“I just mean that I’ll be happy with whatever you pick, Drusilla. I trust you to do this. And you know I’ve got paperwork to get ready for my attorney. I need it done as soon as possible.”
“You’ve got paperwork to finish for your attorney because you dragged your feet while she was alive. If you’d taken care of things, you wouldn’t need to rush home and finish paperwork for your precious Langoria.”
“Please don’t call her that,” the man said. “She’s my ex-wife. I’ve just got some forms to get to my attorney to stop the alimony from being withdrawn from my account. I thought that would make you happy for once.”
“I would have been happy if you’d tried harder to get the alimony stopped without her having to die to do it. I would be happy if you weren’t sulking about her death like you still loved her. You’re supposed to be moving on with your life with me, but all I see you do is getting all sad because Langoria died,” the woman said, and I heard what I thought was her stomping her foot on the store’s concrete floor. “You still loved her and that’s why you never fought hard enough to get the alimony stopped. You were still taking care of her because you wanted to.”
“You know what…” The man started to say something, but he just let out a loud sigh.
I thought I heard him walking away, and I was afraid he’d catch me listening from the other aisle. So I grabbed a pair of gloves quickly and made my way to Karen’s register.
Fortunately for me, she didn’t say anything else while I checked out. She did glare at me the entire time, but I saw a man who might have been her manager standing at the customer service desk. His presence seemed to keep her from sniping at me again.
I left the store with my new trash bins, gloves, and a new clue as to who might have killed Langoria. At the very least, her ex-husband seemed to have benefited from her death. While I couldn’t be sure, the way his girlfriend was talking about it seemed to imply that he might have had a hand in her untimely demise.
Chapter Eight
Not sure of what to do next, I went home and put the trash bins next to the house. Once I’d cut the tags off the gloves, I was ready to work. I figured if I went over to the cemetery and pulled more weeds, something would come to me.
And boy, did something come to me. A couple of hours into my work, the temperature in the air around me felt as though it had dropped thirty degrees. Suddenly, I could see my breath and a disconcerting buzz filled the cemetery. The hair on my arms and the back of my neck stood up.
A rustling in the trees behind me caught my attention. I’d been kneeling down to pull weeds, but I jumped up and spun around. Langoria’s specter was behind me. She looked exactly as she had in my living room except that instead of holding a bouquet of flowers, she held a pair of gardening gloves. I’d chosen the white pair with the fern pattern, but Langoria held the yellow pair in her hand.
It had to mean something, but before I could figure it out, her face morphed from calm to a mask of fury. Her hands shot above her head, and suddenly, dark clouds swirled in the sky. They’d blown in from the east faster than I’d ever seen a front move. Langoria’s ghost had called them.
Thunder crashed and the wind howled. The first fat drops of ice cold rain splashed on my cheeks moments later.
“Langoria, why are you doing this?” I called out over the sudden maelstrom. “You don’t have to do this. I’ll help.”
She didn’t speak, but instead shook her fist at me. Thunder rumbled like an earthquake and I screamed when lightning struck right next to me. It was so close that I felt a few of the hairs on my arms sizzle.
Trying to reason with her further would only have gotten me killed. Instead, I turned and ran. The trash bag I was holding snagged on the fence as I tried to get over it. Lightning struck the tree closest to me as I tried to free it, and I had to just let it drop.
I ran across the road without thinking or looking. The sound of brakes squealing and a horn honking froze me in place. The pickup truck I’d run out in front of swerved to miss me and almost slid off the road thanks to the water pooling on the asphalt.
My hand shot out and I somehow used my magic to correct its course. The driver was none the wiser that it was me who’d kept him from sliding into the ditch. He honked and drove around me with his middle finger up and stuck out the window he’d rolled down in the rain just to flip me off. I supposed I couldn’t expect any thanks considering it was me who’d almost caused the accident in the first place.
“Sorry,” I called after him as I started to run toward the house again.
His only reply was another long honk.
Back at home, I was itching to solve Langoria’s murder.
I paced back and forth across the living room as Meri watched. I hadn’t even changed out of my wet clothes.
What I needed was an idea of how I could get more information. I had a lead, but I had to figure out how to use it.
Then it hit me.
“I’ll break into Langoria’s house. I bet there are clues there,” I said as I stopped my pacing.
“That’s a terrible idea,” Meri countered.
“No, it isn’t,” I said and restarted walking from one side of the room to the other. “I’m sure there is a ton of information in her place. I just have to get in there and find it.”
“You’re going to end up on the wrong side of the Skeenbauer witches if you do that,” Meri said. “Or, you know, her ghost is going to show up at her house and clock you.”
“Not if I take a Skeenbauer with me, and we don’t get caught.”
“You’re going to get yourself killed.”
“No, I’m not. I’ll just wait until tonight to go. I’ll get Annika to go. She will want to solve another mystery, and you can go too. You can help protect us. That’s what you’re here for, right?”
“This is a terrible idea,” Meri said.
“Is that a yes?”
“Whatever,” he said.
“Whatever,” I responded.
“Normally, I’d say that was a terrible idea,” Annika said when I called her.
“Normally?”
“Well, tonight is Langoria’s funeral,” she said. “The whole town will probably be there, including Thorn, and no one will question it that you’re not there.”
“I’ve seen her ghost twice now, Annika. That storm a little while ago, that was her.”
“Yeah, that make sense. It did come from out of nowhere. But she’ll probably be at her funeral too. That’s just the kind of witch she was.”
“That means you can’t go with me.”
“You’d think that,” Annika said. “But as long as I make an appearance and Granny sees me, I can slip out after. There will be so many people there, no one would be able to keep track of me anyway.”
“Won’t you have to sit with your family?”
“More than half of this town is my family. I promise, they won’t be able to keep track of me. Wait at home, and I’ll come get you as soon as I can slip out.”
“Will you have a car?”
“I’ll borrow Remy’s. He won’t even notice, and I’ll have it back before the funeral is over,” she said.
That evening, I waited for Annika’s call. She texted instead.
Just made my escape. On my way. Be ready to go.
So I got ready and waited for her on the front porch. Sure enough, five minutes later, she pulled up in front of my house in Remy’s car.
Remy wasn’t with her, so I could only assume that she’d really borrowed, or stolen, it. When Annika pulled up to the house, she slammed on the brakes and slid a little, kicking up some dust and small rocks. I watched as she leaned over, threw the passenger door open, and yelled:
“Get in witch! We gotta go.”
I crossed the lawn quickly and jumped into the car. “Were you followed or something?” I asked as she stomped on the gas and we peeled out.
“Nope. I’m just bored and I thought I’d try and make this as exciting as possible. But we do need to hurry. I didn’t tell Remy that I was borrowing his car or what we were doing.”
“You didn’t think breaking and entering was exciting enough?”
“Who has to break in? I have a key,” Annika said.
“Well, that will make things much easier.”
“I didn’t say that,” Annika said as she pulled the car to a stop along the curb of a tree-lined street. “We still have to get through her protection spells. Getting through a dead witch’s spells is not easy.”
“I can help with that,” Meri said and climbed out of my bag.
“Is this her street?” I asked.
Annika began to get out of the car. “Nope, she lived three streets over. But we can’t just park in front of her house. It’s too obvious.”
“All right, let’s get going then.”
“Just remember, a dead witch’s spells are nothing to mess with. Be careful. I doubt anything would hurt me since I’m a Skeenbauer, but you and Meri are prime targets.”
Suddenly, I started to feel like breaking into Langoria’s house was a bad idea even if we had a key. But we’d already come so far. Meri hadn’t told me to stop again, so either he’d given up on warning me away from danger or he thought we’d be okay.
We walked quickly to our destination, and snuck up the gravel alley behind Langoria’s house. Though it did seem that, at least while we were on the outside, we were being overly cautious. Everyone was at Langoria’s funeral. It was like a ghost town in her neighborhood.
“Okay, here goes nothing.” Annika reached for the back gate. “Oh,” she exclaimed when it opened with ease.
“There’s no magic?” I asked.
“Doesn’t appear to be,” she said and walked through.
I followed and nothing stopped me. “This is too easy.”
“Let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth, okay?” she said and we proceeded as fast as we could to the back door of the house.
Annika knelt down and retrieved a key from under a flowerpot. She put the key in the lock and opened the back door before replacing it under the pot.
“I thought you said you had a key?” I whispered.
“Well, I meant I knew where one was, and I was right,” she said and walked in.
Again, we met with no wards or other protection magic. “It shouldn’t be this easy to get in,” I said but followed her anyway.
“Maybe it’s because nobody in their right mind would break into Langoria Skeenbauer’s house,” Meri offered. “Even if you survived her magic, you’d have the whole Skeenbauer Coven after you. That’s probably enough to keep people with half a brain cell left away.”
“He’s right,” I said. “This is probably a trap.”
“Well, if it is, the trap’s not going to spring while I’m with you. Let’s just do what we came here to do, and then get the heck out. What are we looking for?”
“I wanted to see if she has anything about her alimony from her ex-husband,” I said.
“Oooohhh. You think Maximillian might have killed her over the alimony payments?” Annika asked.
“It’s my working theory right now. I overheard him and his new wife…”
“Girlfriend,” Annika corrected. “Much, much younger girlfriend.”
“I heard them arguing at Nailed It. She was mad because she didn’t think he’d done enough while Langoria was alive to stop the alimony payments.”
“Well, she’d probably have stuff like that in her office. Follow me.”
She led me through the mudroom we’d come into, through the kitchen, and down the hallway to an office with a huge window that overlooked the back yard. A large black desk stood in the center of the room. One of the things that struck me was that there was no computer on it, but I thought that perhaps she had a laptop stashed somewhere.
It didn’t matter, there was a stack of papers on top of her desk under a cauldron-shaped paperweight. They were on the top, right-hand corner of the desk. There was a handwritten letter and a bunch of legal papers.
The letter was from Maximillian, and it threatened to find a way to cut Langoria off from the alimony “legally or otherwise.” He must have been furious when he wrote it because the handwriting was shaky, and it was a pretty stupid thing to put down on paper. Perhaps it was because he didn’t think she’d end up dead? But he had threatened her openly and in writing. That was brazen, and it told me that he had a temper. Maximillian had a temper, a motive, and a younger, impatient girlfriend egging him on.
Next in the stack were the court filings where Maximillian was trying to prove that he should no longer be responsible for Langoria financially. Below that was an order from the court dismissing his case. H
e’d lost, and if Langoria had lived, he’d have had to keep paying her alimony for who knows how long.
A crash sounded from downstairs, and Annika screamed. I almost tripped over Meri as I tried to run to her. He’d been right by my feet, and in the cat way of doing things, he nearly killed me as I tried to exit the room.
I righted myself and rushed down the stairs. What I found nearly put me on my butt with shock. Langoria’s spirit was there, and she was hurling items at Annika. Annika had her hands in front of her, and she ducked and dodged as best she could.
“What are you doing?” I shrieked. “She’s your niece.”
With that, Langoria’s ghost turned her attention to me. She began to hurl even larger objects at me. It became obvious that the shots she took at Annika were warnings, but me she intended to maim horribly.
I dove to the floor as a heavy metal sphere left a shelf and nearly struck me in the head. If it had, it probably would have killed me. As it was, I only suffered skinned elbows and a knock on the chin.
As I stood up, I caught a glimpse out the front window. Thorn’s cruiser had pulled into the driveway.
“Thorn’s coming,” I said. “He’s getting out of the car.”
When I turned around, Langoria’s ghost was gone. Annika had scooped Meri up into her arms.
“Let’s go,” she said, and we hurried toward the back door.
Unfortunately, when we reached it, the door would not budge. The knob wouldn’t turn, but the one on the front door was not stuck. I heard it turning as Thorn came into the house.
“Do something,” I said in a panic.
Meri jumped down from Annika’s arms and swished his tail as he wiggled his nose. Thankfully, the knob turned, and the door opened.
We all spilled out onto the back porch and ran down the short stairs. As we fled across the yard, Langoria’s specter began to appear. Meri hissed at it, and we kept moving. I closed the gate behind me and threw a glance back at the house. Thorn’s face appeared in the back door’s window, but I could only hope that he didn’t see me.
Wicked Witches of Coventry- The Collection Page 15
