Moonshine & Murder: Moonshine Hollow Series #1

by Brooks, Kathleen

  Zoey groaned as she sat back on her heels and brushed her skinned palms off on her thighs before looking behind her. Zoey opened her mouth on a silent gasp. There, lying across the sidewalk outside of Peach’s house was Tim Hildebrand, the recipe master at Moonshine Distillery.

  Tim lay with his head turned at a weird angle, his eyes open, locked in surprise and staring at her. Zoey’s breath came in shallow little gasps as she inched closer to Tim’s body on her hands and knees. Her body tingled with fear as she reached out with shaking fingers to check his pulse . . . but she never got the chance. Something that felt like fire shooting from her fingertips made her fingers burn and then poof, Tim was gone.

  “What the . . .?” Zoey looked frantically around. Where did Tim go?

  Zoey was on her hands and knees looking under Peach’s azalea bush when she heard a man chuckle behind her.

  “Tim?” Zoey asked, slightly panicked as she whipped around. “I’m going to kill you. What a horrible prank . . . Oh, Luke. Um, hi?” Zoey sat back on her heels and pulled an azalea branch from her hair.

  Luke had a smile across his face as he looked down at her. “Care to tell me what you’re doing digging around under Peach’s bush and why you thought I was Tim?”

  Zoey let out a huff of air to get the hair away from her eyes. “I think I’m seeing things. Maybe Vilma and Agnes were right, maybe I do need to see a doctor.”

  Luke raised an eyebrow. “Why would you need to see a doctor?”

  “I fell last night and hit my head. I’ve been seeing things that aren’t there ever since. Like a man going up in flames. Or a dead person lying across the sidewalk,” Zoey told him.

  The smile fell from Luke’s face. “I think they’re right. Let me take you to see the doctor.”

  Zoey wrinkled her nose. “But Dr. Thurman is like ninety years old and smells of mothballs and antiseptic. And he doesn’t do anything except tell you to put an icepack on everything from cuts to heart attacks,” Zoey complained.

  “Too bad, I’m taking you,” Luke said seriously as he reached down and helped her up.

  Zoey let herself be helped up and escorted to the cruiser. It took all of two minutes to get to Dr. Thurman’s office, located a block off Main Street. Doris Bleacher was the secretary. She sat in the same olive green vinyl chair she’d been sitting in since the 1970s and wore a disapproving look on her pinched face. Her gray hair was pulled into a bun on the top of her head.

  The office and its occupants were stuck in the wrong decade. Neither Doris nor Dr. Thurman looked as if they realized time had passed since bellbottoms and burnt colors went out of fashion. Dr. Thurman wore either polyester or seersucker and usually in dark gold, maroon, or puke green. Doris wasn’t any better with her large paisley dresses and cat’s eye bejeweled glasses.

  “Can I help you?” Doris asked in her nasally voice. She sounded annoyed anyone would actually dare come into the doctor’s office.

  “Yes, this is Zoey Mathers. She fell and hit her head last night and has been seeing things ever since. I was hoping Doc Thurman was in to take a look at her,” Luke said as he helped Zoey into a burnt gold plastic love seat.

  “I’ll see if he has an opening,” Doris said before getting up and walking through a door to the back office.

  Luke took a seat next to Zoey and looked at her with concern in his eyes. “Is there anything I can help you with? Are you feeling okay?”

  “I’m really feeling fine, I’m just seeing things is all,” Zoey said with a shake of her head. Could today get any weirder?

  The back door opened and Doris looked mad at having to show them back to the exam room. The olive green exam table was covered in stiff paper so old it was turning yellow. Zoey sat on the edge of the table and cringed as the paper crackled loud through the room. Luke took a cautious seat in the plastic chair with rusted legs.

  The sound of a thumping cane had them turning toward the door. The end of the cane came into view first, followed by Dr. Thurman’s shuffling feet. Today he was in burnt orange, gold, and olive green plaid pants with a mustard yellow shirt and brown suspenders. He headed over to Luke and bent down to look into his eye.

  “Eh, you don’t look like you have a concussion. Here, put an ice pack on your head for twenty minutes and you’ll be right as rain.”

  “Um, I’m not the one who is injured,” Luke said as he pointed to Zoey.

  “Eh? Oh, oh, okay,” Dr. Thurmond turned to shuffle over to Zoey and looked into her eyes before yanking the ice pack from Luke’s hand and shoving it into hers. “Twenty minutes and you’ll be right as rain. You can pay Doris on the way out.”

  Zoey put the ice pack to her head and sighed. “Well, I might as well get my money’s worth.”

  5

  Zoey put the key into the back door of her shop and unlocked it. She hated to admit it, but the ice pack had made her feel better. Luke had dropped her at the bakery and headed to the sheriff’s office. Zoey was way behind on work. It would be a very busy day since she was already late opening for the day. Luckily the town was also running late, having partied well into the night. Luke had told her the food fight finally ended when free drinks of the moonshine entries were handed out.

  Zoey pushed the back door open, flipped on the light, and screamed. Tim Hildebrand was lying on her prep table. His glassy eyes stared at her and his neck was twisted in the same odd angle as it had been when she saw him on the sidewalk.

  Zoey closed her eyes. “This isn’t real. This isn’t real,” she chanted. When she slowly opened her eyes Tim was still there. Okay, maybe this was real. He sure did look real. Maybe she should run down to the sheriff’s department?

  Zoey took a tentative step forward to get a closer look at Tim’s body. He had been choked and his neck was possibly broken. It appeared Tim had put up a struggle. Zoey took in the bruises around his neck, the way his nails on his hands were chipped and knuckles bruised, and the fact that his suit jacket pocket was torn open. A small torn off corner of a piece of paper was stuck in the stitching of the pocket.

  Bending down, Zoey reached out to see what was on the paper. Her fingers warmed and the second Zoey touched Tim, poof! He was gone.

  “Not again!” Zoey yelled as she slammed her hands onto the bare prep table. “No, I’m not crazy,” she said to the baking equipment she had sitting out around the kitchen.

  Pulling out her phone she searched for Tim’s phone number and paced the kitchen as the phone rang and rang. Voicemail picked up and Zoey hung up. She was scared she was going crazy and there was one way to prove she wasn’t. She was going to find Tim Hildebrand, but it would have to wait until after her marathon baking session.

  The front door opened an hour later and Zoey hurried out from the back to find Vilma and Agnes perusing the freshly stocked displays. “Hey ladies,” Zoey wiped her hands on her apron and opened the display.

  “There are too many choices, dear,” Agnes said as she kept her nose plastered to the glass in order to get a close look at the desserts.

  “How are you feeling?” Vilma asked.

  “Hey, do you all know Tim Hildebrand?” Zoey asked instead of answering.

  “Of course we do,” Agnes said from her place of dessert inspection.

  “He’s the recipe holder at the distillery,” Vilma added. “It’s his job to hold on to the recipes for all the moonshine ever made. Last night, he was the one all the groups gave their moonshine flavor of the year recipes to for judging. Tim compares them to all the previous recipes and all the flavors other distilleries produce to make sure the special flavor isn’t already taken. Then we vote. Why?”

  “Has anyone seen him since last night?” Zoey asked them.

  “I don’t know. He lives alone over on Double Run,” Agnes said into the glass. “I’ll take the chocolate raspberry brownie.”

  “There is something very strange going on,” Zoey said as she reached for the brownie but then froze in thought. “If I tell you, you’ll think I’m crazy. Heck,
I think I’m crazy.”

  Vilma and Agnes gasped.

  “What?” Zoey asked as the women stared wide eyed. “Don’t tell me Tim is standing behind me.”

  The women didn’t need to answer for she saw it a second later. A pink plate with a brownie and fork on it was floating over the display case straight into Agnes’s hands. “Nope, that’s not real. I’m just seeing things,” Zoey said out loud to herself as she closed her eyes and shook her head.

  “Um,” Vilma started to say but Zoey cut her off.

  “Please don’t tell me to go see Dr. Thurmond,” Zoey groaned. “I think I need to see someone in Knoxville. I only hope they don’t lock me away. First I see a dead body and when I reach for it, it disappears. That happened not once, but twice. I found the dead body in my kitchen. Poof, gone again the second I touch it. Don’t know where Tim is now. And then I see a brownie floating. I need help.”

  “Oh, dear,” Vilma muttered.

  “We need to tell her,” Agnes said softly.

  “You don’t need to tell me I’m crazy. I know it,” Zoey cried as she flung her hands up into the air.

  “Um, actually, you’re not,” Agnes hedged.

  “You saw it?” Zoey asked quickly.

  “I am eating the brownie, aren’t I?” Agnes smiled.

  “Maybe you should come over here and sit down,” Vilma suggested.

  Zoey couldn’t believe it. They saw the brownie. The brownie had floated out of the display case, onto a plate, gotten a fork, and floated over to Agnes. Zoey had thought about getting the brownie and doing just that, but she had been in the middle of her worried rant and hadn’t actually done it. Now that she thought about it, she had felt her fingers warming when she reached toward the display before stopping. And she’d felt her fingers turn hot when she had reached for Tim both times. Zoey raised her hands and stared at her fingers. They appeared to be okay. No burns, no flames, nothing. Just normal fingers. And why wasn’t Agnes and Vilma freaking out like she was?

  “Come on, dear,” Agnes said softly. The duo had come behind the counter and were pulling Zoey into the back kitchen.

  “Have a seat.” Vilma pushed her onto the stool she kept for long hours decorating her concoctions. “There’s something we need to tell you.”

  “Just rip it off, like a Band-Aid,” Agnes instructed.

  “It’s not that easy,” Vilma hissed back.

  “Sure it is.” Agnes stepped forward and stood in front of Zoey. “Dear, you’re a witch now. See? Easy peasy.”

  Zoey blinked. She opened her mouth then closed it again. Was she hearing things? “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?”

  Agnes looked annoyed. “Witch. You’re a finger wiggling, all-powerful witch.”

  Nope, Zoey hadn’t misheard her. Maybe she wasn’t the crazy one. “So, you’re like Wiccan and want to convert me?”

  Vilma snorted. “We’re not Wiccan. We’re older than those youngsters. We are the Claritase.”

  Agnes patted Zoey’s hands and drew her attention back to her. “See, back in the ancient world, witches were healers. The Goddess imparted the gift to a select few men and women to heal the pains of a growing new world. Over the millennium, some were killed off during various famines, wars, and disasters. And of course we lost quite a few during the witch hunts. We went into hiding after that terrible time. The man you saw us with last night is one of the Tenebris hunters. They are a group of men imbued with the power of the Goddess, just like us, but five hundred years ago they got a new leader, and since then they are no longer content sharing that power. See, if you kill a witch, you can consume the power of that witch.”

  Zoey blinked again. She felt her head shaking as Agnes rolled on with her story.

  “Tenebris hunters roam the world trying to find the few remaining Claritase to take our powers so they can grow stronger. Vilma was using the power of Earth to defeat him. The hunter, with the pale blue light, had the power of Air.”

  Zoey increased the pace of her headshaking. “This is crazy! You aren’t ancient witches. You’re two little old ladies.”

  “Ladies, yes,” Agnes agreed.

  “Witches, definitely. Old, definitely. Thousands of years or so.” Vilma wiggled her fingers and every appliance turned on. She wiggled them again and poof, cupcakes lined the prep table. “Do you need more examples? I can pop us over to Tuscany real fast. It’s beautiful this time of year.”

  “You can’t . . .” Poof! Zoey looked around. Vilma was gone. Just like that, she disappeared. Poof. Zoey was standing with Vilma in front of her again with a bottle of red wine being shoved into her hand.

  Zoey stared down at the bottle as Agnes gave a little flick of her fingers and the cork popped out. So Zoey did the only thing she could think of. She put the bottle to her lips and drank until her body tingled with alcohol.

  She set the bottle down on the counter and took a deep breath. Her mind was going in twenty different directions at once and none of them led to anything that made sense. “Okay, so you two are thousands of years old witches with powers derived from a goddess, and you’re being hunted by bad guys who want to steal your powers. Where in all of this did I suddenly become a witch?”

  “Well, it may sound a little strange . . .” Vilma started.

  “Oh, yeah, it’s only going to sound strange now,” Zoey snorted.

  Vilma ignored her. “As I said, there are few of us left—less than two hundred all over the world. The Tenebris somehow found Agnes and me and sent a hunter to take our powers. The only way to take our power is to use the strength from the elements and pull their powers from their bodies. It was the light you saw coming from the hunter. It will go where directed, which was supposed to be the urn, but when you doused us with water my powers temporarily sputtered since I was drawing on Earth power, not Water power. Therefore, the man’s powers went to the nearest open object—your open, screaming mouth,” Vilma said not too pleased.

  “So, water stops your power?”

  “Not really. When we draw our powers, we draw from one of the elements—Earth, Water, Fire, or Air. Opposing elements can temporarily interfere until we redirect our powers to handle that new element. It’s physically and mentally exhausting having one of these struggles for power,” Vilma explained.

  “And now I have this guy’s power?” Zoey asked, struggling to believe any of this.

  The two women nodded. “But it doesn’t make sense that you can actually use it,” Vilma told her.

  Agnes shook her head. “We’ll have to look into that. But you’ll need to learn to control these powers,” Agnes warned.

  “I don’t want to control it. Take it back. You said you wanted to take that guy’s powers, so take them from me.” Zoey jumped off the stool. This was the perfect answer, because right now she was beyond freaked out. An ancient battle of good versus evil, people living over a thousand years, wiggling fingers to move objects . . . no. She didn’t want this.

  “I’m sorry, dear,” Vilma told her and she leaned forward and patted her hand. “But to take someone’s powers means killing them. That’s what happened to the man you saw before we burnt him and gave his ashes back to the Goddess.”

  “See?” Agnes asked softly. “If we take the powers from you, you will die.”

  And then, for the second time in twenty-four hours, Zoey fainted.

  6

  Water splashed over Zoey’s face again. When she sputtered and opened her eyes she almost wished she hadn’t. One of her mixing bowls was floating in the air with drops of water plunking on the floor from where it had just magically dumped water on her.

  “I’m a witch,” Zoey stated seriously.

  The two old lady heads bobbed.

  “And I don’t mean to diminish the importance of this discovery, especially since you’ll now become hunted as a member of Claritase, but did you mention a dead body?” Agnes reminded her.

  Zoey took a deep breath. She was going to do what she did best as a lawyer—she was
going to compartmentalize. Zoey would pretend all this witch stuff didn’t exist, and she’d deal with it later. “Yes. I tripped over Tim Hildebrand this morning outside Peach’s house. He was dead. It looked as if he’d been choked and I think his neck was broken. I went to feel for a pulse but my fingers warmed and poof, Tim disappeared only to reappear in my kitchen.”

  Zoey saw Vilma and Agnes share a look of surprise. Although, Zoey didn’t think the look of surprise was over Tim’s dead body. “What?” Zoey asked finally.

  “Um, it’s just that being new to your powers you shouldn’t be able to move something as big as a body. Snap and light a candle, sure. Move a pencil, sure. But a two hundred pound man? That usually takes newbies decades to master,” Vilma said with confusion.

  Agnes nibbled on her lip. “She didn’t just move him, Vilma, she transported him to where she was thinking.”

  “What does that mean?” Zoey asked, not knowing if she really wanted an answer.

  “It means you’re way more powerful than the average witch, especially when you shouldn’t have the powers to begin with. We’ll need to look into this. But first, tell us more about Tim,” Vilma said.

  “I noticed a ripped edge of a piece of paper in his torn coat pocket and I noticed he had defensive wounds. His nails were broken and bloody. He had fought back,” Zoey told them.

  “When you were reaching for him,” Agnes hedged, “what exactly were you thinking?”

  Zoey thought back as if Tim was in front of her. She reached her fingers forward remembering. “I was thinking I wanted to see what the paper was before I called the sheriff.”

  Vilma and Agnes groaned.

  “What?”

  “The way transport works is if you send energy while thinking of a location, that’s where the object will go,” Agnes told her.

  Zoey gasped. “You’re telling me I poofed Tim to the sheriff’s office?”

  She didn’t wait for a response before throwing open the back door and dashed her way down Main Street. She noticed but didn’t want to think about the fact that Vilma and Agnes were easily keeping up with her. Could her life get anymore messed up?