Casting Spells (19 page)
Authors: Barbara Bretton
Tags: #General, #ROMANCE, #Fiction, #Police Procedural, #Police, #Charms, #Mystery & Detective, #Body; Mind & Spirit, #Contemporary, #Magick Studies, #Vermont, #Fantasy, #Suspense, #Magic, #Women Merchants, #Knitting Shops, #Paranormal
I dialed Pam at Sugar Maple Assisted Living.
“I know this sounds crazy, Pam, but has anyone ... left us in the last day or two?”
“Nobody’s left us since Sorcha, and you know how long ago that was. They fade in, they fade out, but when all is said and done, everyone’s still here.”
Assuming they even existed, there had to be a statute of limitations on banshee wails. If you heard a banshee on the first Thursday in January and your Great-Uncle Harry died on the last Friday in March, did the banshee really deserve props or was it just coincidence at work? I came down on the side of coincidence.
Just thinking about the whole mess made my head hurt.
But then again, so did breathing.
No more Barolo. No more brandy.
Ever.
I opened a can of Fancy Feast for Penny. I searched three of the storage closets for the Book of Spells and came up empty each time.
Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer and I went back up front to spy on him.
But there was one small problem: he wasn’t there.
I opened the door and stepped outside. He wasn’t on the sidewalk. He wasn’t in the pet shop. I looked up the street toward Town Hall then down toward Snow Lake but there wasn’t a sign of him anywhere.
Not that he had to check in with me or anything, but a quick “I’m off to look for some crime” might have been nice.
Lynette popped in around eleven thirty with sandwiches from the coffee shop on the corner.
“Where’s Janice?” I asked, tucking into a huge tuna salad on rye.
“She shooed me out. The cop is on his way over to question her about that night.”
We grabbed our sandwiches and took up our positions at the front window.
“Look,” I said, gesturing with my garlic dill. “Is that him in the chair?”
“She’s giving him a haircut,” Lynette said. “I swear that woman could sell conditioner to a bald man.”
“I would have figured him for a barber shop kind of guy,” I said, watching as Janice drew a comb through his thick, dark hair.
“When in Rome,” Lynette said with a laugh. “I wonder if I could convince him to understudy the Ghost of Christmas Present. We wouldn’t have to worry about alterations. He’s almost as tall as Gus Ekstrom.”
We bantered back and forth as we watched Janice talk his ears off.
“She’s finished,” I said. “Do you think she’ll charge him?”
“He’ll be lucky if she doesn’t tack on a surcharge for the Q and A.”
My cell phone rang as Janice started to brush the back of his neck and unwind the protective collar.
Joe Randazzo. The last person I wanted to talk to.
“What’s up, Joe?” I sounded easygoing, friendly, totally phony.
“Didn’t MacKenzie give you my message? I’ve been waiting for your call.”
“I haven’t seen him since he stepped outside to take your call.” I didn’t have a good feeling about where this was going.
“I need those death certs yesterday.”
“Listen, Joe, about those records. We started storing everything off-site a few years ago, but unfortunately the head of our Bureau of... Vital Statistics is the one with the information.”
“So ask him.”
“Ask her,” I corrected him. “Lilith is on a religious retreat in India and can’t be reached.” I was making it up as I went along, praying Joe would swallow it whole.
“There must be some way to reach her. What if there was a family emergency?”
“That’s the point of the retreat, Joe. You step away from the world and refresh your soul. No phones. No mail. No Internet. Just you and your consciousness.”
“And when does Gandhi come home?”
“After the New Year.” I knew enough about governmental bureaucracies to know that emergencies usually faded away after a few weeks. And if this one didn’t, my fabrication would give me time to come up with a new excuse.
He wasn’t entirely receptive, but at least he didn’t threaten us with the National Guard for noncompliance.
“Not bad,” Lynette said as I disconnected. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”
“Neither did I.” I looked toward Cut & Curl. “He’s gone!”
“And he didn’t look happy,” Lynette said. “She probably suggested highlights.”
“Which way did he go?” I sounded like the sheriff in a bad Western.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I turned away to see what Penny was doing, and when I turned back, he was gone.” She patted my arm. “Honey, you can’t keep your eyes on him every second. He lives here now. You can’t lock him up next door for the next few months.”
“There you go reading my mind again.”
We both laughed but Lynette was right. I couldn’t track him 24/7, but as de facto mayor and resident human, I owed it to the town to give it my best shot.
“I’d better tell Lilith she’s at an ashram in India before Randazzo tracks her down and blows our cover.”
“Go,” Lynette said. “I’ll watch the store.”
See what I mean? My friends always had my back.
Lilith looked up as I burst into the library and beamed the kind of smile that made you feel good for hours. I know trolls don’t have the greatest reputation for hospitality and good manners, but Lilith, with her Norwegian background, was definitely the exception.
Sometimes I wondered if I had a little troll lurking in my DNA along with the (clearly recessive) sorceress gene. I didn’t even take a second to say hello.
“Lilith, I don’t know how to tell you this, but if Joe Randazzo from the County Seat calls, you’re not here.”
She blinked. “Where am I?”
“You’re at an ashram in India and you won’t be back until after New Year’s.”
“If I’m in India, who’s answering the phone?”
It was my turn to blink. “I don’t know. I haven’t had time to think that far ahead.”
“Any particular reason I’m in India?”
“You went to raise your consciousness and connect with a higher power.”
“I mean is there any particular reason why you want Joe Randazzo to
think
I’m in India?”
think
I’m in India?”
Bless Lilith, she got it before I was halfway through the story.
“No problem.” She closed her eyes for a second, opened them, and started speaking in a rhythm and accent I had never heard before. “My Norse grandmother Dyrfinna will be happy to handle all phone calls.”
It was all I could do to keep from leaping across the desk and grabbing her in a bear hug.
I was starting to think that maybe we would make it through this turmoil in one piece when Lilith gestured toward the Archive Room at the rear of the library. “Our new policeman has been back there for an hour. He’s quite the cutie, isn’t he?”
“Lilith!” I struggled to keep from shouting. “Are you crazy?”
“What choice did I have? He’s the law, honey.”
“How could you let him go back there alone?”
She leaned across the desk and drew me closer. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “I ran a spell-check before I unlocked the door and it’s in full force. He won’t be able to see anything more than old newspaper clippings, census reports, some maps, that sort of thing.”
In Sugar Maple,
spell-check
meant something Bill Gates had never dreamed of.
spell-check
meant something Bill Gates had never dreamed of.
If you wanted to find out everything you needed to know about Sugar Maple, the library was where you’d do it. Giving Luke access to the original Town Charter (not the one we post for public consumption) and the List of Passages that contained records of every village birth and leave-taking was like striking a match next to a leaky gas line.
They say that in times of danger your entire life passes before your eyes, and at that moment, it was true. I was treated to a highlight reel of my thirty years on the planet as I raced down the hall to the Archive Room, praying Aerynn’s spell would keep us safe a little bit longer.
14
LUKE
I heard Chloe before I saw her. In less than two days the sound of her footsteps had imprinted itself on me. She walked with a syncopated rhythm that was as unique to her as the smell of her skin or those huge, deep gold eyes.
Or the way her hair felt like spun silk between my fingers ... or the warmth of her mouth or—
If there had been an ice bucket handy, I would have dumped it over my head.
She appeared in the doorway looking a lot less friendly than she had a few hours ago, and I felt the molecules beginning to rearrange themselves around us.
“Why didn’t you give me Joe Randazzo’s message?” she demanded.
“Sorry,” I said. “It slipped my mind.”
“If you’re looking for Sugar Maple’s records, they’re not here.” She walked over to the table where I was sitting and glanced down at the array of books and papers spread out in front of me. “And you won’t find birth or marriage records either.” She gave me a wide, totally fake smile. “Just in case you were looking for them too.”
“I wasn’t but now you’ve got me curious. If they’re not here, where are they?”
“They’re being digitized at an off-site storage facility.”
“Randazzo seems to have a bug up his ass about them.”
“I know,” she said, fingering the diagram of the cemetery I hadn’t gotten to yet, “but he’ll have to wait awhile longer. All these years and nobody ever once questioned our record-keeping abilities. Now he wants them yesterday.”
Randazzo had learned his people skills at the Idi Amin School of Diplomacy. Splotches of high color stained her cheeks. Her voice was tighter than usual. She kept twisting the gold band on her right index finger. A body language expert would have a field day with her.
I almost felt guilty for knocking her off-balance with my question. “Do you ice skate?”
“Not if I can help it. Where did that question come from?”
“Did you know that there had never been an accident of any kind at Snow Lake before Suzanne?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I guess I never really thought about it.”
That seemed to be the default answer to most questions around Sugar Maple.
“It sees a lot of traffic. Kids, hockey games, figure skaters practicing their spins. But until the other night, nobody so much as twisted an ankle on the ice. What’s up with that?”
“Maybe we’re amazingly agile.”
“You don’t think it’s strange?”
“Whoa,” she said, taking a step back. “You mean you really want an answer?”
“I’m a cop. I always want an answer.”
“We’ve taken our share of tumbles,” she said, watching me closely. “We just don’t feel the need to record them for posterity.”
“Anything else you don’t feel the need to record for posterity?”
“More questions, Detective?” She said it lightly but there was no denying the sharp edge behind her words. “Listen, I know what this is about. No judgment, but your friend was seeing a married politician and you’ve been sent here to clean up his mess so he can run for governor. I get it. But don’t try to blame us for something that was clearly an accident.”
“Where the hell did you hear that?” More to the point, how had she got it so right?
“Cops aren’t the only ones with sources. We might be a small town but we have a long reach.”
There was a cynicism to her words that stung, and I found myself wanting to explain myself to her.
“I don’t know what else you heard, but I didn’t come here to help Sieverts,” I said. “I came here because it was Suzanne.”
We looked at each other and the desire to take her right there on the cluttered tabletop started to burn away brain cells.
“I know that too.”
“What else do you know?” I asked.
“That you’ll be gone as soon as you wind up the investigation.”
“Temporary’s good,” I said, “as long as everyone understands the rules.”
“I don’t do temporary,” she said. “That’s
my
rule.”
my
rule.”
Her hands were braced against the table. I placed my right hand on top of hers, and a quick burst of silver-gold sparks appeared right on schedule.
“Try to explain that,” I challenged her.
She pulled her hand away. “Long winters, dry heat. I told you that last time.”
“And I’m still not buying it.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“That you know something’s happening between us.”
“How would that make a difference?”
“It would make me feel like I wasn’t going nuts.”
She was silent for a moment, then: “You’re not going nuts.”
I waited for the sense of vindication but it didn’t come. Instead the room seemed to be growing smaller, bringing us closer together in a way I didn’t understand.
“This isn’t what I want,” she said.
“Me neither.”
“Then what are we doing? Why do we keep ending up—”
I stood and pulled her into my arms. “Like this?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “Exactly like this.”
CHLOE
I tried to tell myself this was another diversionary tactic, like taking the offense or tackling him to the ground, that I had designed to draw his attention away from digging deeper into Sugar Maple’s secrets, but even I wasn’t buying it.
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