Casting Spells (13 page)

 

According to the posts I read online, Chloe was Elvis and Sticks & Strings was Graceland, which I would probably chalk up to being a suburban legend if it weren’t for the fact that the noise level at the front of the store could cause hearing loss.

Definitely Elvis.

Headphones sounded like a good idea.

I photocopied a simple map of Sugar Maple and had started overlaying Suzanne’s actions on the grid when Margaret Hansen, one of the Pennsylvania sisters, returned my call.

“How terrible,” Margaret said when I told her about the accident. “She looked just like Sharon Stone.”

“Did she say or do anything out of the ordinary?”

“You mean besides wearing a red carpet kind of dress in the middle of winter? Let me think... well, she said she had skis and skates in her car.” She laughed. “Skis and skates! I mean, you should have seen her. She looked like the type who would hire other people to ski for her.”

I asked a few more questions but mostly the woman kept circling back to Suzanne’s dazzling good looks. I thanked her for her help and was making a few notes in my log when I heard a knock on the door jamb.

“You can come out now.” Chloe poked her head into the room. I had left the door ajar after her last visit. “They’re gone.”

I stood up and stretched. “It sounded like a revival meeting out there. I thought knitters were a quiet bunch.”

“You have a lot to learn about knitters, Detective.”

“So what happens after they leave here? Do their sweaters unravel or something?”

She gave me an odd look. “Nothing happens,” she said. “They go home and build on their new skills.”

I fished around on the makeshift desk for the faxed contract. “The paperwork came through.” I handed her a copy.

“Great.” She glanced at it quickly then folded it in half. “We’re going to try and have the place usable by Monday morning.”

“Don’t bother,” I said. “Paul and his sons are going to help me.” We planned to start first thing in the morning and power through.

She looked startled. “We’ll take care of it for you. I don’t think disinfecting your office is in your job description, do you?”

“I like working with my hands,” I said. “It helps me think.”

“I get some of my best ideas while I’m knitting.”

“I get my best ideas when I’m installing a new transmission.”

“Same difference,” she said with her first real smile of the evening.

“I have help. Paul’s kids want to earn some extra cash and Paul said he wouldn’t mind pumping up his bottom line.”

“And how much will this cost the town?”

“It’s not going to cost the town anything. The state picks up the tab.”

“I’m liking this more every second.”

“So where’s the best place to eat around here?” I asked as I followed her out the back door.

“The Inn,” she said as she locked the flimsy glass door behind us. “No contest.”

“How about joining me?”

She shook her head. “Thanks but all I want to do is go home and crash.”

“You’re not hungry?”

“I’m too tired to be hungry.”

“You still have to eat sometime.”

She stifled a yawn. “I’ll warm up some soup.”

“It’s a business dinner. You get a good meal, I get some answers about Suzanne. Win-win.”

“Suzanne?” I had her attention. “Did you know her?”

A smarter cop would have lied. “We grew up together.”

She had one of those faces that broadcast every emotion. Surprise, sympathy, and a fleeting wariness that seemed out of character for a woman who lived in a town without crime.

“I’m sorry,” she said finally. “Were you close?”

“We were friends,” I said carefully. “She was married to my brother-in-law for a little while.”

She nodded, deep in thought. “If the offer still holds, I’d like to join you at the Inn.”

A fierce wind smacked us in the face as soon as we rounded the corner of the building.

“My truck’s in the lot across town,” I said. “Where’s yours?”

“In my driveway.” She gave a little laugh. “I walked to work.”

“You Vermonters are tough.”

“Tougher than you Massachusetts types, definitely.”

“Ouch,” I said as we navigated our way around a huge patch of ice. “We hold our own.”

We fell into step together. I’m usually pretty good at reading people but Chloe Hobbs kept eluding me. She was smart, beautiful, and funny. She ran a successful business that she seemed to love, and she was loved in return by her customers and friends. No arrests, no DUIs, not even a parking ticket. As far as I could tell, she was a model citizen living in a postcard-perfect town.

But something didn’t fit. There was a puzzle piece missing, and I was determined to find out what it was.

10

CHLOE

 

I experienced a momentary jolt of apprehension when it looked like Renate was steering us toward one of the cozy lovers’ tables, but I should have known better. She quickly gauged the situation and found us a table near the window.

“Perfect,” I said as she handed us our menus. “Thanks, Renny.”

“What’s good?” Luke asked me after Renate went back to her station up front.

“Everything,” I said then laughed. “I know that’s not much help but it’s true.”

Neither one of us spent much time poring over the menu. We ordered quickly then settled down to the reason why we were there.

He leaned back in his chair and settled his gaze on me. “So tell me how you met Suzanne.”

There wasn’t much to tell. It sounded like nothing more than another adventure in retail but with a very unhappy ending.

“She locked herself out of her car?”

“That’s what she told us,” I said carefully. “Why else would she be walking around town in a cocktail dress and no coat?”

“Was she drunk?”

“I don’t think so.” I told him that she had planned to wait at the bar for her boyfriend but the Inn didn’t open early for anyone.

“Did you smell alcohol on her breath?”

“I’m not sure.”

“How did she get her car open?”

“She was going to phone Triple A but Lynette—” I stopped and regrouped. “This is going to sound terrible but Lynette volunteered her daughter Vonnie to open Suzanne’s car for her. She said Triple A would take forever and Vonnie could do it in a flash.”

“Lynette’s daughter opens locked cars for a living?”

I couldn’t help smiling. “Vonnie’s a senior at Sugar Maple High. She just happens to have a talent for mechanical objects.”

“Like locks.”

“Yes,” I said. “Like locks.” I explained about the Sugar Maple Arts Playhouse and how the Pendragon kids had grown up knowing how to do a little bit of just about everything, same as their parents.

I also congratulated myself on leaving out the fact that the “everything” included shapeshifting, psychokinesis, and just plain screwing around with electronic equipment for the hell of it.

“So Vonnie Pendragon opened the car door for Suzanne?”

“I guess so. I don’t really know. I never saw Suzanne again and I never thought to ask Lynette.”

Death had taken everything else off the table.

“Take me through the whole thing, Chloe, from the moment you first saw her until the moment she disappeared from your sight.”

“Shouldn’t you be writing this down or taping it or something?”

“People are more comfortable if you’re not playing court reporter.”

“TV cops write everything down.”

“TV cops do a lot of things real cops don’t always do.”

“Like take a witness out to dinner?”

“An efficient use of time and resources.”

I looked down at my beautiful (and expensive) plate of Caesar salad then back over at him. “Whatever you say, Detective.”

I told him everything I remembered, from the first sight of her face at the window to the last sight of her, draped in my Orenburg shawl, as she dashed down the salted street on her stilettos toward the Inn.

“Can you characterize her mood for me?” Luke asked. “Happy, sad, pensive?”

“Happy,” I said. “Excited. A little annoyed that her boyfriend was running late but nothing serious.”

“Would you say she was suicidal?”

“God, no! Absolutely not! I mean, I didn’t know her or anything, but there is no way she was contemplating suicide. Not that night. Definitely not.”

“Why do you think that?”

“I don’t know,” I said finally. “Women’s intuition maybe. She seemed too strong a woman to take her life just because some guy didn’t show up for dinner.”

There was something in his eyes, a kind of acknowledgment that swiftly came and went.

“Did you know what kind of car she was driving?”

I shook my head. “I think she told Lynette the model and year but I don’t remember.”

“Did she mention where she was staying?”

“Not here,” I said. “That’s all I know for sure.”

“Can you think of anyone else she might have spoken with?”

“She probably spoke to Renate and the wait staff. Beyond that—” I shrugged.

“Anything else you want to tell me?”

I hesitated. I hadn’t told him about my little side trip to the Inn that night or how Gunnar had caught me peering through the window like one of the orphans in
Oliver!
It was embarrassing, pathetic, and as far as I was concerned, totally irrelevant.

“No,” I said. “That’s it.” I felt a little guilty but that was okay. I could live with guilt.

Renate’s cousin Felix delivered our entrees and a complimentary bottle of Barollo, which he opened for us with a great flourish.

Suddenly I saw myself standing outside in the snow two nights ago, peering through the window at the happy humans breaking bread together. Now here I was, sitting where I had imagined Suzanne would sit, across from a man who lived in the real world. If you ignored the fact that we had spent most of our time discussing Suzanne Marsden’s accidental death, you might even think it looked like a date.

Which it wasn’t. I swear to you my subconscious leaped up and hit me in the head in its eagerness to remind me of that fact.

No problem. I knew it. I got it. I wasn’t about to forget it.

On the short list of impossible soul mates for a sorcerer’s daughter, a human cop was right there at the top.

But it felt so good to be connected to someone who was exactly what he seemed to be. No magick. No spells. No tricks. Someone who was like me in ways nobody in Sugar Maple could ever be. I didn’t even care that it wouldn’t last beyond the time it took us to eat dinner. I could live off the memory for a very long time.

I’ve been lonely for most of my life. After my parents died, Sorcha had done her best to keep me from feeling the full weight of my separateness, but as I grew older, the truth of it had become unmistakable.

And with it came the kind of loneliness that sometimes took my breath away.

If the pharmaceutical companies really wanted to pump up their bottom line, they would create a pill to eradicate loneliness. Even though I had been raised by Sorcha, a healer who took her cures from the natural world around us, I would be their first customer.

Tonight, however, I didn’t need a magic pill to make the loneliness disappear.

I didn’t care that the only reason we were sharing a meal was so he could interrogate me about Suzanne Marsden’s death. I wanted the night to never end.

Luke asked about the town and I had just launched into the Chamber of Commerce version of our history when I realized he wasn’t listening.

“Hey,” I said, “you’re the one who wanted the history lesson.”

He gestured with his wineglass. “I think someone is trying to get your attention.”

I swiveled around in my chair and saw Gunnar walking slowly in our direction. For a second I wasn’t sure if it was Gunnar or Dane—they had both been banged up pretty badly last night—but then he smiled and I knew.

The poor guy looked terrible. A dark bruise decorated his right cheek. The circles beneath his eyes were darker than they had been yesterday and that was saying something. He seemed frail, breakable in a way he had never seemed to me before.

“Renate said you were here.” He bent down, wincing with the movement, and kissed me on my cheek. He aimed an easy smile in Luke’s direction. “I’m Chloe’s friend Gunnar.”

Luke clasped his hand. “Luke MacKenzie. Good to meet you.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I got my wires crossed,” he said with a self-deprecating laugh. “I thought tonight was the Green Mountain Lawyers Association Christmas party.”

“You’re a lawyer?” Luke asked.

Both Gunnar and I laughed out loud at the question.

“I help out in the kitchen,” Gunnar said.

“So you’re a chef.” Luke was a cop. Cops needed to find labels for people.