Authors: Raven Snow
In Town Square’s large parking lot, a stage had been set up to host all the festivities. Most of the time, this area was littered with tour buses, ready to take moneybag tourists to all the haunted places and magic shops around town.
Just behind the stage was a small, empty office building that had belonged to my accountant— a man who’d been ritualistically killed by his mother a few weeks ago. Since Matt hadn’t left it to anyone and it was vacant, the town council had decided to use it as dressing rooms and a backstage area for the festivities.
Though it wasn’t even noon yet, the whole town was packed into the space in front of the stage, joined by at least one hundred tourists. Vendors from the local restaurants were set up in a large square around the people, a heady mix of smells surrounded us on all sides.
There was music playing, filling a non-existent silence as townspeople chatted with the tourists about who they were supporting in the Witch of the Year competition. It wasn’t the kind of quality jams that you could find at the Funky Wheel, but I swayed to it as I waited for Wyatt to get back with our corndogs.
“Are they going to hex each other?” Cooper, who looked like a mini Wyatt, asked.
“No, they’re just going to argue over whose boobs are bigger.”
His eyes widened. “Dad says I can’t say ‘boobs.’ ”
“Did he say that I couldn’t say ‘boobs?’ ” I asked.
Cooper mulled it over a minute. “I guess not...”
Whew. What a relief.
I scanned the crowd, looking for Oliver— my best friend— or my grandmother— my worst nightmare. Neither showed themselves amongst the throngs of people, but I knew they were there. Oliver would never miss an event this large, for gossip purposes, and Grandma was too wary of other witches to stay away.
“Do you like my dad?”
I ruffled his dark hair, which his father had spent a good chunk of time getting to lay flat. “Not as much as you do, Coop. But then again, it’s physically impossible for anyone to love him that much.”
A smug look crossed the little twerp’s face. “I didn’t say ‘love.’ ”
“And neither did I.” Flicking his nose, I said, “And if you don’t want an atomic wedgie, you won’t mention the L word to your father.”
“Mention what to me?” Wyatt asked, appearing from behind us and making Cooper and I jump.
We said “Nothing!” simultaneously, and then guiltily grabbed a corndog. But while Cooper wolfed his down, I ate like a lady— if only to prove that I wasn’t completely on the same wavelength as a ten-year-old boy.
Wyatt chuckled, not pressing, and wrapped his arm around my waist. His fingers tucked into the pocket of my jeans and we all looked up at the stage as a blonde woman almost as tall as me came on.
Well, two of us watched the stage. When I glanced to my left at Cooper, his eyes were on me, a hunger in them that was tempered by a bit of sadness. He swiftly shifted his gaze back to the stage.
I wanted to put my hand on his shoulder and squeeze, but I didn’t, because I knew that look all too well. My dad had never been a part of my life, and I’d spent most of my childhood wishing for that second parent, the other half to complete my mom. It wasn’t till I’d inherited the Funky Wheel that I’d gotten that second parent, but it was almost a couple decades too late.
Like me, Cooper wanted another parent to fill the hole his mother had left when she took off when he was five and never came back. Unfortunately, I’d only been dating his dad for a few weeks. And even though— or maybe
because
— I liked Cooper a lot, I couldn’t be his mother.
Not if I might have to take it all away.
The bubbly blonde interrupted my thoughts. “Good morning, witches and wizards!” She beamed down at us. “As most of you know, I’m Belinda Clearwater, last year’s Witch of the Year!”
Her voice grated on my nerves, and it was then that I recognized her from the previous festivities. On one of the nights when there’d been no competitions, she’d come into the Funky Wheel for all of twenty minutes. The witch screamed at me about the state of the bathrooms and over the fact that there wasn’t a salad on the menu.
For the record, I knew the bathrooms were disgusting, and we didn’t serve salads because I didn’t trust dishes with lettuce as the main ingredient.
Still, she’d left a bad taste in my mouth and a scrape on my fist when I’d clocked her in the jaw.
“Her bruise has healed nicely,” I muttered, earning a puzzled glance from Wyatt.
Belinda opened the ceremony with a flourish of her curvy body and everyone applauded. On principle, I crossed my arms over my chest, but I was just as excited for the contests and entertainment to begin the next week. That night, there was going to be a local rock band playing onstage. They were a bunch of teenagers and were sure to make me feel old, but still.
As Belinda walked off the stage, a pink, bedazzled phone dropped out of the back of her cowboy boots. There was no point in shouting, as she wouldn’t hear me over the crowd, so I just watched, seeing if anyone was going to pick it up.
When she disappeared into the office building and everyone started to dissipate to get ready for tonight’s party, I sighed.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” I yelled in Wyatt’s ear, slipping away from the two.
I grabbed the phone off the stage and followed Belinda back into the building. While my accountant had owned it, the offices had been filled with gray and hardwood. Now, each one was customized to each contestant, like personal trailers in Hollywood. Never let it be said that Waresville didn’t take its Witch Week seriously.
Belinda’s room wasn’t hard to find, as it was the only one that looked like the color pink had been sick all over it. She was sitting in her chair, slightly slouched over her vanity.
Frowning, I walked up to her, thinking she didn’t seem like the type of woman to have bad posture. “Belinda?”
I touched her shoulder, and she flopped down onto the floor like there wasn’t a bone in her entire body. Sprawled out, her eyes looked up at me, blank and seeing nothing. No breath escaped her lips; her body was completely motionless.
Realizing she was dead, I emitted a little squeak. “Crap. I need to stop finding dead bodies.”
Then, as I watched, dumbstruck, her skin began to change colors. Her ashy tan turned to a Granny Smith apple and then to a grassy shade right before my eyes. Still just as dead, the fallen witch was now greener around the gills than anyone had a right to be.
“Double crap.”
While the police closed off the scene and took pictures, I sat next to Cooper, our legs swinging off the stage. Our eyes went left to right, left to right, tracing the invisible line in front of the stage that Wyatt was pacing.
“Why does it always have to be you?” he asked.
Though it was probably meant to be rhetorical, I said, “Just lucky, I guess.”
The second phone in my back pocket, Belinda’s, seemed to weigh a metric ton. Like usual, I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t given it to the police, yet. They hadn’t asked for it because they hadn’t taken my statement, but still. I was like a raccoon with a shiny object; I just had to hang onto it.
As the crime scene officer exited the building, Wyatt practically ran over to him, pumping him for information. No matter how mad he was at me for inadvertently getting involved, he couldn’t resist the lure of a good mystery.
Neither could I.
“Do me a solid and don’t tell your dad about this,” I told Cooper, pulling out the dead witch’s phone and scrolling through it.
The pictures were mostly of cats and Belinda herself, but the log of calls proved interesting. Though the history only went back a month, I saw an inordinate amount of calls from the same number, but it wasn’t listed in her contacts.
I knew from the bio she gave that she hadn’t been married, so it had to be a boyfriend. Whoever he was, he’d be the police’s first suspect, and mine. Making a mental note of Belinda’s number and her lover’s, I pushed the phone back into my pocket.
Cooper said nothing, though he looked at me with disapproving eyes, just like his father would have. Unlike his father, he didn’t yell at me to stay out of it and confiscate the phone.
Some days, he was my favorite Bennett.
The other Bennett waved me over, and I hopped off the stage. Realizing what he wanted a moment too late, I stopped a few yards from where he was, leaving him to cross the rest of the distance.
“Hand over the phone, Harper,” Wyatt said, stopping in front of me with his hand outstretched.
“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Though I’d been planning to hand it over, now that the moment had come, I didn’t want to part ways with my only evidence.
Quicker and more slippery than an eel, his arm flashed around my side, fishing the phone out of my back pocket. His fingers lingered for a fruitful millisecond.
Squealing, I punched him in the shoulder, ignoring the way his smug grin made my stomach flip-flop.
Waving the cell phone in front of my nose, he said, “Thank you, Miss Beck.”
While he walked off to register the phone into evidence, I resumed my perch next to Cooper. “Your dad’s a real piece of work.”
His head snapped over to look at me. “Why are you mad at him?”
Blowing the hair out of my eyes, I said, “I’m not mad, but if I was, it’d be because he snatched the evidence before I could properly look at it.”
Fishing in my bag for the keys to my newly-repaired bug, I bade Cooper goodbye. He seemed a little stressed that I was leaving, which was odd, but he was an odd kid— something I could still relate to all these years later. I didn’t give it much thought.
The rusty, orange bug roared to life under me, and I chugged away. The streets were full of people going into color magic shops with cauldrons in the windows and boarding trollies with fake cobwebs and conductors that spoke in spooky voices.
One of the stops on their route would, no doubt, be where I was going: my grandma’s house. The oldest home in Waresville, it was also rumored to have once been the home of an evil witch and a plethora of ghosts. Both were true, only that evil witch hadn’t gone anywhere. She stilled lived in the house, telling me I was a disgrace to witches everywhere and trying to get me to give her grandchildren.
The light-colored plantation style house loomed on a large hill. The lawn was in disarray, and moss grew up and down the siding. It almost surprised me, as if I was seeing it as an old, shabby house for the first time. I’d never really realized how much work the building needed.
“Grandma?” I called out when I stepped through the front door.
More announcing my presence than trying to bring her out of hiding, I called again. Grandma had a nasty habit of taking offense when people stopped by announced— especially me.
I found her in the kitchen she never used, wearing a bright red robe and a grimace. The robe confused me, though she usually wore it around the house.
“Didn’t you go to the opening ceremony?”
“Why?” she asked, like she hadn’t attended it every year since the beginning of time. “There’s no magic till later.”
“Because you’re paranoid,” I said slowly, as if speaking to a dim child. Walking over to the cupboards, I grabbed a glass to fill with water. “And man, did you pick the wrong one to miss, Gran.”
Her eyes narrowed in on the glass. Clearly, I was sullying it by putting my lips on it. “What happened?”
“Last year’s winner was found dead.”
Grandma made an unflattering noise. “More boobs than magic.”
“That’s what I said!”
Taking a sip from her tea, she asked, “Who found her?”
“Uh— that would be me,” I admitted.
An eyebrow shot up in the air, which was surprising, considering how much condemnation was on her face. “That’s turning into a bad habit of yours.”
“Maybe I’ll take up smoking instead,” I said. “But get this, Gran, she turned green.”
That got her attention. “Green?”
“Green.” I nodded. “That, coupled with the fact that she was a witch and there were no visible wounds, I’m thinking it was magic.”
“So, you came to me, an expert on killing useless young witches.” Her brows were furrowed, and I got the distinct feeling she was offended.
“Well, that,” I said slowly, trying to digest the thought of Grandma caring what I thought, “and you’re the most experienced witch I know. So, know any spells or concoctions that’d kill a witch and turn her green?”
“Thousands, though none come to mind at the moment,” she said. “I’ll consult the books.”
I knew a dismissal when I heard one, and this one, for my grandma, was pretty common. Often, she talked about reading her spell books like they were people whispering the answers in her ears. Preposterous, but it wouldn’t do any good to push the old bat; she’d only turn me into something unpleasant.
Around nightfall, I climbed back into my car and headed over to Wyatt’s house for dinner. I was practically trembling with excited and impatient feelings, needing to know more about the case.
This, unfortunately, made seeing Wyatt all the harder, because I knew he wasn’t going to want to even mention it. But since all I could do was wait for word from grandma or hope something would slip from Wyatt’s reluctant mouth, I could at least try to enjoy the evening with my frustrating boyfriend.