Witch One Dunnit? (Rachael Penzra mystery) (31 page)

       “Well, that’s ... ah ... interesting,” I said politely.  “You, um, didn’t hit it off?”

       “Not really.  To tell you the truth, I think she asked me out to make her mother crazy,” he said, reddening.

       “Why would dating you have made Lucinda crazy?” I asked.  I hadn’t thought that Lucinda was aware of Percy’s sexual preferences.

       “Lucinda doesn’t seem to like me.  She’s always a little rude to me, critical-like.  But then again, I don’t think she likes many people.”

       That was probably true.  I wasn’t quite brave enough to ask about the gory details of the date, the mental image I had of the two of them together was enough to make me shudder.

       He filled me in on the most important part.  “It didn’t work out, but it was no big deal.  She’d never paid much attention to me before, and our ...
date
didn’t seem to change that in the least.  To tell you the truth, I was glad she didn’t want to go out again.  She really wasn’t my type.  She was a little ... scary, I guess.

   “I know I’m a little ... different,” he continued when I couldn’t think of anything to say.  “But I wouldn’t be at all out of place in New York City or someplace like that, someplace where you don’t have to hunt and fish and own a four-wheel drive to be considered manly.  I just happen to be sensitive to art and beauty.  And I’m quite brilliant, you know, high up on the genius graft.  Maybe I should get away from here, go somewhere more compatible with my interests, but I’ve got Mother to consider.  I know it seems silly for a man my age to be living with his mother, but she’s not strong.  She’s artistic, too, almost too much so.  She can’t ...
handle
everyday life like most of us.  She’s too sensitive.  And my father was a brute.  The best day of my life was when he walked out, but Mother ... Well, her generation, you know ...”

       I thought it best to refrain from comment.  Mother, it seemed, lived perilously close to the edge of the knife blade we all walk on in life.  It must be a nightmare for her son, always worried, not knowing what to do.  I thought of suggesting a psychologist, but assumed that she was either already using one or refused to see one.

       “You do something with computers, don’t you?” I cowardly changed the subject, trying to make it sound as though I were simply following his train of thought.  “You can do that from anywhere, can’t you?”

       “Oh, yes.  I run my own business.”  He made it sound as though every man could do it successfully.  One probably could if one were a motivated genius.  “It’s a catch-22 situation.  It gives me the freedom to stay at home, but it also takes away my incentive to find someone to stay with Mother so I can get away every now and then.”

       “Maybe you should compromise,” I suggested.  “Find someone who is willing to keep your mother company sometimes, and take some extended vacations.  It would be good for your creative talents to stimulate your mind with fresh interests.”

       “Mother doesn’t really like having strangers around,” he said.  “And for the most part I’m happy here.  I have the Internet and friends like Robert to take little jaunts with.  We went to the North Shore last spring.  Karyn was fit to be tied at being left behind, but I’d located some tremendous, old hand-made furniture for him.  It wasn’t junk, either.  This stuff was top of the line artisan work.  I bought a piece for myself, a small table.  I offered to buy it from him, after he got it to his shop, but he just laughed at me and told me not to be silly, to just buy it there.  We had a great couple of days.  We watched the ice breaking up on one of the lakes.  The wind piled it at least ten feet high.”

       “I’ve always wanted to see that,” I said, but my mind was on bringing him back to the subject of murder.  I didn’t want him unwittingly telling me about his “secret,” or what he thought was his secret, though it was interesting that even a genius could be so blind to the obvious.  “Sad to think that Shelly will never have her chance at anything like that.”

       “I don’t know what other people have been telling you,” he told me, with strong emphasis on the “other.”  “But she wasn’t very nice.  I know it’s not nice to speak ill of the dead, but really ... and I don’t think that’s fair.  Wicca teaches us that we get back thrice.  Good or bad.  So I don't think I’m wrong in telling the truth, do you?

       “I hadn’t thought of it like that,” I admitted.

       “Lucinda’s a bitch too,” he assured me, apparently deciding that since I could handle the truth he’d give me plenty of it.  No wonder he had trouble with his social life.  It wasn’t just his buried sexual preference.  He simply had never defined the line between being truthful and being tactful.  We all have a lot of opinions that deep down we accept as the truth, but we’d never be so foolish as to blurt them out to others.  Some things are prejudices, some are social no-no’s.

       “But she still loved her daughter,” I reminded him gently.  He wasn’t being cruel, or even unfeeling.  He just didn’t realize this particular opinion was not something to be shared indiscriminately with people.

       He looked a little sulky, catching the implied reprimand.  “Maybe,” he allowed.  “But she probably just loved her because she was
hers
.  Lucinda thinks that everything of hers is better than what anyone else has. 
My
cloak is handmade by
me. 
Anyone can hire someone to make something.  I even made my own atheme.  There’s a real blacksmith outside of town who helped me and let me use his forge. 
My
Wiccan ceremonial things are much more authentic than hers. And I don’t believe Shelly ever did really know any secrets.”

       “Er… What secrets was Shelly supposed to know?” He’d caught me off completely off guard, dropping the one piece of information I wanted to hear into the middle of his harangue.

       “Oh nothing, probably. She was always going on about knowing things about people they’d be glad she kept quiet about. She was like that even when she was a kid, always snooping around the grown-ups, trying to overhear something.”

       “Did she mention anything lately about knowing something about someone?”

       “I don’t think so, nothing definite,” he said, and dropped the subject for one he was more interested in.  “That was just talk.  She did it to make her mom mad.  That’s why she was always chasing after Robert, too.  Not that he’d ever have anything to do with
her.
  He likes more intellectual people.  Last year I went with him on an antique run.  I’d found an old couple who had lived in their house forever. They were thinking of moving.  They had some wonderful old stuff.  Antiques would look perfect in the store here.  Robert was
so
grateful to me for finding out about their moving. We ate dinner in a fabulous restaurant.  He insisted on paying for the meal, too, as thanks.”

       No wonder he was infatuated by the charming, kind-hearted Robert, who was definitely just as self-centered as the rest of us.  The antique dealer automatically responded to any form of adulation.  Don’t we all? Robert obviously had quite the fan club going, devotees who would do anything for him.

       And Percy might be pushing out Karyn as the president.

         ....

       That evening I finally sat down and looked into Aunt Josie’s Book of Shadows and her private journals.  I silently apologized to her spirit, and then got down to business.  Her private Book of Shadows was just that, her spells, some recipes, her beliefs.  I had only to scan the contents to know there was nothing helpful there, and I closed the file with relief.

       Her journal, on the other hand, told of her day to day life and her feelings.  My own name was mentioned quite often, and always in a flattering manner.  She was proud of me and my fight to regain a sense of my self, and even said she thought that my psychic abilities surpassed her own!

       Oh, if only she could see how I was floundering now.  My psychic abilities had done nothing but confuse me so far.

       The last few weeks’ entries gave me a sick feeling in my stomach.  Aunt Josie had been feeling the same waves of hatred I had been feeling.  She was convinced the source of the feeling was someone in the coven, and she’d been planning to retire from her membership.

       She’d been upset, vaguely frightened.

       Unfortunately there wasn’t a single clue other than the suspicion it was a coven member to help me on my quest, which was no longer strictly for Lucinda’s benefit.  Finding the murderer had become a personal matter.  I hated feeling that my beloved aunt had spent her last days in fear.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

From the Wiccan Rede:

When the wind begins to turn

Let the Belatine fires burn.

We were all in a good mood the next day, despite an early visit from the sheriff.  The news from the vet was that George could be brought home the following day.  The receptionist spoke in an infatuated tone when she said his name, and she was full of comical tales of his lovable behavior.  I was tempted to ask if she knew of anyone who’d like him as a pet, but drew back at the last moment.  She sounded a little too ready to take him herself.  So much for the idea I was willing to part with him.  I’d no doubt have many years ahead to regret my decision.

       If I lived that long.

       The sheriff reviewed everything we’d gone through before, now insinuating he was also looking somewhat belatedly into Aunt Josie’s death.  The only difference in the interrogation was how he asked a few questions about my dead husband, and touched on how nice it was for me to go from cleaning work to a posh position as the owner of a thriving retail store.  He didn’t put it quite so crudely, but the idea was there.  I didn’t pull any punches.  There was no sense in pretending I’d been anything but delighted at the news of my inheritance.  It hadn’t, though, been worth the loss of Aunt Josie.  Nothing had been worth that.  Material things only obsess us when nothing
real
is threatened.  I wasn’t above mentioning how I’d hesitated at first to give up my own newly developed company, one which was just starting to make real money, money allowing me to send out other people to do the actual cleaning instead of doing it myself.

       I also reminded him I didn’t have any reason to want
Shelly
dead, and how someone had tried to kill me
and
my dog.  I really wasn’t the best suspect in the world.

He grunted in response. 

       That didn’t auger well for the success of finding the murderer.  Deep inside I’d been counting on him to save the day, triumphantly producing handcuffs and evidence to use against the killer.  Instead he was trying to make gold out of lead.  I suppose I should have been thankful he didn’t seem to be
seriously
considering me, or Patsy, as the killer.  He was grasping at straws and he knew it.  Motive
had
to play an important part in any investigation, and we simply didn’t have adequate ones.

       At least not for killing Shelly.  Apparently the coven members were no longer the only ones who suspected the hit and run accident that had killed Aunt Josie had been no accident.  Sheriff Alberts was now quite obviously
connecting
the two deaths.  He’d probably checked to see what I’d been doing at the time.  Most likely he’d checked airline passenger lists.

       Aunt Josie and Shelly had been killed.  Someone had tried to kill me.  What was the connection?  We all worked at the same place, but what would that matter to anyone around here?  My will left everything to my children, and whatever their faults, matricide wasn’t one of them.  So what other connection was there between the three of us?  The fact we were all witches?

       Our Wiccan religion had to be the connection, and if that were the case, it would seem the entire coven was in danger.

       That thought process was making my brain ache.  Talk about unused muscles!

       David, who’d arrived a few minutes early, was there before the sheriff left.  He came with a fortunate, well-timed piece of news.  Elena, it seemed, remembered that when Aunt Josie had finished with the renovation work she’d had done, she’d mentioned to Elena that she was glad she was only short two keys.  She’d laughed about it. It seemed she’d had half a dozen cut for workmen, friends coming to help move things, deliveries, etc.

       The sheriff treated the missing clues as a valuable new clue, scolding poor Elena, through David, for not thinking of telling him earlier.  David took it calmly enough, simply waiting for the mini-tirade to end.  I think we both had the idea the sheriff wasn’t any too ready to try tearing into Elena in person.  I imagine she could stop any tirade of his with a single stare from her amber eyes.

       When he finally left, David grinned at us.  “A bit grumpy, wasn’t he?”

       Patsy laughed out loud.  “Joe says he’s like a bear with a bee up his butt.”

       “I imagine it’s frustrating,” I felt one of us should behave like an adult.  “It’s hardly his usual line of work.  And of course this is the middle of the tourist season when everything’s crazy anyway. I suppose the last thing he needs is an unsolved murder on his hands.”

       I told them my theory about Aunt Josie having received bad vibes – and that it was from the killer.  They didn’t seem impressed.

       It turned out to be one of those days.  When I’d awakened in the morning, I’d been in a really good mood, despite my foray into Aunt Josie’s journals, or perhaps because of them.  Somehow knowing she had been feeling the same hateful vibes that I was feeling gave me a little confidence in my psychic abilities, which I badly needed at the moment.  The Chief’s visit, and the thought of the entire coven being in danger, had soured the day slightly, but my good mood still seemed salvageable.

Moondance took care of that.

       Fortunately it was almost time for my lunch break when she arrived.  We were quite busy, experiencing one of those tricks of human nature when everyone in town seemed to want to come to our store and shop.  All at once, of course, not spread reasonably throughout the day.  It was to the point of pushing and shoving to just get around the store when she breezed in, her clear
loud
voice rising easily over the murmur and chatter of the crowd of happy shoppers.

       “I’ve come to be questioned about the murder!” she announced.  Heads, not surprisingly, snapped around to stare.  She pretended not to notice her audience.  “The spirits came when summoned and told me to go to you immediately.  I am here.”

       The split was about half and half.  One half edged towards the door once she moved away from it.  The other half surged in around her, anxious not to miss a word of this impromptu performance.  I would have been furious if I’d thought all those people were in a buying mood, but they weren’t.  I still wasn’t the least bit happy with her.  It was one of those moments when you understand the pleasing concept of shaking someone until their teeth rattled.  It was incumbent on me to rise above my anger, though, so I swallowed bile, tasted bitter gall, and smiled. 

   “We’re busy right now, Moondance,” I said in my best kindergarten teacher’s voice.  “Perhaps you could come back later, after we close the store.”

       “No, I was sent
now!”
she declared dramatically, completely missing the meaning of my tone.  That’s one of the most irritating things about stupid people.  They just don’t get it.  I could be sarcastic to Moondance from sunrise to sunset and only get more infuriated myself.  It wouldn’t faze her a bit.  

       Patsy jerked her head towards the kitchen.  I surrendered to the inevitable.

       “Come on back, then,” I said, sounding cheerful.  (Look, Folks!  I’m being nice to a crazy lady.  See how rational
I
am?  Don’t pay any attention to what she says.)

       “Yes,” she somehow managed to push past me and take the lead into the kitchen.  “Come!  We will talk!”

       I badly needed my sense of humor, but it had apparently taken one look at the situation and decided it was beyond its ability to cope.  It had deserted me.

       “This is hardly the time!” I snarled at her, automatically turning the gas on under the tea kettle.  She looked so hurt and surprised at my tone that my anger evaporated a little.  My sense of humor, apparently just hiding, not really AWOL, peeked out.

       “Didn’t you want to talk to me about the murder?” she asked.  “I kept waiting for you to call.  I mean ... you were interviewing everyone else, so ...”

       She won, all the way around.  “I was saving you for later,” I told her.  “I wanted to gather a lot of ideas from other people before I heard your thoughts.”  There!  That was about as ambiguous as I could make it without choking. 

   Of course, she interpreted it to suit herself.  “Oh, now I understand.  I didn’t think of it like that.  I always like to save the best for last, too.  But now the spirits have sent me.  There has to be a reason.  You must have something specific to ask me.”

       I turned off the tea kettle, though it wasn’t quite to a boil, and poured her some water while handing her a tea bag.  Not a fancy cuppa, but it would have to do.  I wasn’t in the mood for playing hostess and was about to miss my lunch on top of everything else.  In case I haven’t mentioned it before, meals are important to me.

       “All right, why don’t you start by telling me what you thought of Shelly,” I told her.

       She choked a bit on her first sip of tea.  I wondered how she could possibly be surprised by the obvious question.  What the heck did she think I was going to ask her?  What she thought of the weather?

       She cleared her throat, and nodded slowly, obviously giving serious consideration as to how she should answer the question.  Unlike Percy, she understood the social mores about slandering the dead.  Yet in her own strange way, she was honest.  I’d presented her with a nasty dilemma.  “Well, she was very young to die,” she told me. “And she was really smart, you know.  She always got good grades in school.”

       “Did you like her?”

       Another long sip of tea, hoping perhaps that I’d forget the question.  A sly glance at my face persuaded her I hadn’t.  “She always made fun of me.  She thought just because Lucinda was her mother she could say anything she wanted, no matter how cruel it was.  She ... she even made fun of my poetry.”

       Unfortunately, I could understand why only too well.  Moondance had gifted me with a book of her poetry when I moved in, and I had felt obligated to read it from cover to cover.  As a rule, I love to read and will happily read just about anything from cereal boxes to milk cartons.  But her poetry…  Suffice to say that if there were a law against really bad poetry, Moondance would be doing hard time.

       “And she was like that to everyone, Rachael.  She was just plain
mean
.”

       My psychic powers chose this particular moment to kick in, and I got a mental picture of Moondance, obviously chanting before an altar.  “Did you ever put a spell on her?”  I asked, trying to keep my voice gentle.

       Apparently I didn’t succeed too well.  She looked as though she was going to jump up and make a run for it, rolling her eyes at me like a terrified horse.  I must not have looked too frightening, because she calmed down a little, finally admitting, “Just a little one.”

       “What did you want from it?”

       She glanced at my face again, and apparently decided that she’d better stick fairly close to the truth.  “I just wanted her to do something really stupid, or say something really dumb, in front of the whole coven.  And I wanted to be the one to correct her.”

       “That’s all you said in the spell?”  I demanded. 

       “Well ... I might have wished a good case of acne on her.”

       I almost burst out laughing.  My sense of humor had returned.  But she was perfectly serious.  She had thought about the things would really have upset her, and she’d cast a spell towards Shelly with those same painful miseries.  Childish on Moondance’s part, but probably extremely accurate about what would cause the worst agonies for someone Shelly’s age.

       “You didn’t wish her dead, did you?” I pushed.  “Or badly hurt?  It wouldn’t mean you really meant it, you know.  The spirits would understand that, don’t you think?”

       She was vehement in her protests.  No, of course she hadn’t wished anything terrible on the girl.  Her guardian angel wouldn’t tolerate such a spell. She just wanted Shelley to see what it felt like to be made fun of all the time.  She
never
asked for violence against anyone.  That wouldn’t be nice.  A little public humiliation, on the other hand ...