Dewitched (Witchless In Seattle Mysteries Book 3) (14 page)

All motion stopped as one Bat boy hovered and Uncle Ding swooped to land on the banister of the staircase, his tiny eyes blinking in surprise. My mother snapped her fingers to turn the music off then froze in place, teetering slightly on the chair she perched upon.

“You two?” I hissed, pointing at Com and Uncle Ding. “Get your butts down here now and knock it off. If you can’t be respectful of your surroundings, you’re going to end up in a dark closet for the remainder of your stay!”

“Awww,” Wom complained from the kitchen. “Why you gotta be so mean, Stevie? We’re bored!”

“I’m telling you, Wom, get out of that container or I’ll put the lid on it and seal it up tight.
Cool Whip
is not for playing!”

That’s not what Uncle Ding says,” he leered on a giggle.

“Get over here
now
!” I pointed to my secondhand pink Coach purse, where Belfry peeked out of the top edge.

Wom swooped over and tipped his whipped-cream-covered body over the edge of my handbag, but Com was more reluctant.

“I don’t have to do what you tell me, Stevie. You’re not the boss of me!”

I originally raised my hand to scold him with a well-pointed finger, but what I ended up doing left us all gasping.

I zapped him.

Yep. By all that’s holy, my finger swizzled a weak but steady current of electricity, making him drop like a fly hitting a bug zapper. Lucky for him, I caught him in my hand and plopped him in my purse.

“Stevie! This is bloody enormous!” Win said, his tone congratulatory.

I looked at my finger and shook my head. “I don’t get it…?”

Why all these stalls and starts? Was it some kind of residual magic? Was someone taunting me?

No. I couldn’t go there. I’d never sleep at night if I thought the person who’d stolen my powers, the almighty warlock Adam Westfield, was stalking me from the great beyond.

“What does it matter, Dove? You used magic!”

I grinned from ear to ear. I had. It was only another blip, but it was certainly less of a stretch of time between uses.

“You singed my butt, Stevie!” Com complained from inside the dark confines of my purse.

I looked down into the interior and wrinkled my nose at him. “You’ll get more than a butt singeing if you don’t knock it off. This is Win’s home. You absolutely cannot behave like you’re some wild animal on a rampage. Save that for outside, buddy!”

Com blew me a raspberry but nestled quietly against his brother.

Then I looked up at the target of all my discontent. I held out my hand to Dita, my temper almost in check. “Mother, get down from that chair now.”

She placed her fine-boned fingers in mine and stepped down, swishing her scarf over her shoulder before dropping the broom. “I was just trying to get them to behave,” she said, obviously affronted.

I cornered her next, right up against the entryway hall, and narrowed my eyes. “Did I tell you to stay inside and keep your mouth closed? I did. I distinctly remember telling you to talk to no one and not to leave the house. So what do you do? You get on the local news and offer a reward for Bart’s killer? Where are you getting this reward, and what about being on the local news is ‘laying low’?”

My mother gave me the best charm-your-britches-off smile she had in her arsenal and shrugged her shoulders. “I was trying to drum up some sympathy. You never know what that can bring. And you’re not poor. We
do
want to catch Bart’s killer, don’t we?”

“Not with Win’s money, we don’t! Mom, you can’t just offer something that isn’t yours. Bart hasn’t even been dead twenty-four hours and already you’re offering up
someone else’s money
for information leading to the arrest of the killer.”

“Please stop calling it my money, Stevie. I gave it to you,” Win interrupted, clearly aggravated.

“Your money, my money, whosever’s. That’s not the point, Win!”

My mother cringed as though Attila the Hun had arrived. “Is
he
here?”

“Yes, Mom, he’s always here. He’s my friend, and he stays. End of. Back to the topic at hand. What possessed you to call up the local news? How is that keeping you out of the spotlight? Now every crackpot who ever saw Bart, and plenty who didn’t, are going to be calling the police station with their crackpot tips! Don’t you think about the repercussions before you do things like this?”

Straightening her spine, she put her fingers to my shoulder and pushed me back. “Of course I do, Stephania. There’s already a Kickstarter fund for Bart’s funeral in progress.”

My eyebrow rose. I knew exactly what this was about, and it had nothing to do with giving Bart a proper burial. “You do realize you have to use that money for an actual funeral? Not a shopping trip in Milan, don’t you?”

Mom sucked her cheeks inward and gave me a haughty look. “Oh.”

“Yeah. Oh,” I said, deadpan.

Mom then tried the cute act, putting her hands behind her back and smiling sweetly. “So you’re angry then?”

“If you call breaking her skinny bird arms ‘angry’,” Win quipped.

“Oh no. Don’t play cute and coy with me. I’m not one of your boyfriends, Mom. I’m the person who’s trying to keep you from making a spectacle of yourself, because from the sounds of it, there are a lot of people who had a reason to want to whack Bart.”

I decided against telling her about the number for the penitentiary for the moment. She knew so little about Bart already, I was almost certain she wouldn’t know anything about that phone number he had.

Mom made a reproachful face, as though she’d been taking acting lessons from my father. “What a horrible thing to say, Stephania!”

“More horrible than a Kickstarter fund for a funeral you never planned to have for him?”

She gave me the silent glare, stepping around me and moving toward the kitchen. As she went to the fridge, I chased after her, setting my purse on the counter.

“Hey, ease up there, Boss!” Bel squeaked in protest.

“You cannot run away from me, Mom. No more running away. Now you get on my computer and you cancel that Kickstarter. When the coroner’s ready to release Bart’s body, we’ll pay for the funeral.”

“Fine,” she huffed, taking the Perrier I’d had delivered for her and slamming it on the counter.

“Now, we have some things to talk about. Sit at the table.
Please
.”

Mom opened her peachy glossed lips to protest, but I stood firm. “Not a word. Sit.”

Strolling to the chair at the kitchen table, she dropped down in it and crossed her legs, her face petulant and defiant.

I grabbed a regular old water, though what I really needed was a martini with
two
olives. “So, mind explaining to me why I keep hearing about Bart and his penchant for taking things that aren’t his? And I’m not talking about just money.”

She twirled her hair around her index finger and bristled in her seat. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean that not one, but two people now have had run-ins with Bart, and they’ve both involved Bart taking something that wasn’t his or saying something he shouldn’t have. First it was one of the acrobats at the party. The one in the champagne glass. Apparently, Bart said something inappropriate about her body parts. Then it was Hardy Clemmons, who had a bit of an altercation with him at the party over something that happened years ago.”

She sighed and flicked the flowers in the vase on the table, as though I were once again boring her. “Well, don’t make me guess, Stephania. What happened?”

“Hardy says he stole his fiancée. You’ll probably know her. She was a Rawlings. Clara, to be exact. And rich. Very rich. It happened twenty years ago, but clearly the leopard’s spots never changed.”

I watched my mother with close attention to her eyes. I could always tell when she was lying by watching the color of her eyes change. But nothing happened.

“I know the name, of course. I grew up here in Washington. But I know nothing of Clara and Bart.”

She was definitely telling the truth. She might know Bart had been a bit of a perv, but she didn’t know about that particular incident when he was especially shady. “Well, do you know anything about his behavior with the acrobat at our party?”

Suddenly, her shoulders sagged, and I wasn’t sure if she was doing some more acting or she really felt defeated. “I didn’t know about that, no. But Bart wasn’t above shenanigans.”

“Shenanigans how?” If she said open marriage had been on the table, I was out.

“He was very flirtatious, just the way I am, Stephania. I might be conniving. That’s the word you used once, right? But I’m not blind.”

Okay, yes. I admit I called her conniving
once
. It was after my fifth-grade vocabulary test, where I’d learned what it meant. The definition fit her to a T, so when she made me angry, I flung the word at her like an arrow because she’d hurt my feelings.

How was it that she could remember an argument from when I was all of ten, but she couldn’t remember my birthday? Good gravy.

“So let me get this straight. The grifter hooked up with the grifter but the grifters didn’t know they were grifting each other?” Perfect. The sanctity of marriage was beyond my mother’s comprehension. Marriage was just a rung on the ladder to her. A way to climb the totem pole until she reached the top.

“That sounds so callous,” she murmured.

My gaze was one of disbelief. “That’s because it
is
, Mom. What you do, tricking people into believing you love them, is callous. If you knew Bart was a dirty bird, why did you marry him in the first place?”

I shouldn’t have asked the question unless I wanted the real answer.

“Because he had money, of course! Listen to me, Stephania, and listen well. I’m going to be on this earth for a very long time. A
very
long time. I don’t want to be on it alone and poor.”

“Well, here’s a crazy concept. Get a J-O-B! Those are the pesky things that earn you money for the long haul here on Earth. Imagine the satisfaction you’ll discover when you don’t have to bat your eyelashes to pay your light bill.”

“Listen to you preach when you have all this!” Mom swept her hand around the room as though I’d made “all this” magically appear.

My chair legs scraped the floor as I rose to wrap my hands around her long, swan-like neck, but Win and Bel stopped me.

“Nooo!” they both yelped in unison.

“Stevie, she doesn’t have the depth to understand what you’ve been through. I implore you to keep your hands to yourself,” Win urged.

“So no jumper cables?” I asked from a clenched jaw with equally clenched fists.

“We have rules, Stevie!” Win reminded.

“But that was pertaining to you. We had no rules about
me
using the jumper cables,” I muttered in a whisper-yell.

“Boss! Back off. As your familiar, I’m warning you. I’ll pluck your eyebrows razor thin if you touch her. You’ll look ridiculous. Promise! Winterbutt’s right. She doesn’t know any better, and seeing as you’re not taking the time to teach her to
be
better, you’ll have to suffer her piss-poor behavior. We’ve talked about this, Stevie.”

What Bel said was true. Because I avoided confronting my mother about how crummy she treated me—and everyone else, for that matter—I enabled the poor behavior.

Win began the mantra. “And we’re counting, Stevie. One-two-three, and breathe. And again, one-two-three. Solving this by mutilating her fingers isn’t the way, Dove. The way is to confront her with direct and precise terms—which you’ve chosen to avoid. This is what happens when you allow a situation to go unhandled.”

My mother gave me that innocent blink as though I were some wild animal just let out of its cage, so I closed my eyes, blocking her out.

Counting in my head, I slowed my breathing and sat back down, gathering myself before I said, “Mom, before I had all this—and I’ll remind you that when I came into all this, I was on my last leg after being kicked out of Paris—I
worked
. Remember? As a 9-1-1 operator. I paid my own bills and I took care of myself. I didn’t do that by marrying hordes of rich men.”

Dita was one of the reasons I was so fiercely independent, because she’d always been so dependent on men to provide for her—and our lives had always been up in the air because of it.

“Then more’s the pity. If we brushed your hair and spruced you up, you’d be able to find a rich husband.” She reached for a strand of my hair, a helpful smile on her face.

But I batted her away and looked heavenward while internally, I seethed. “How about the cigar cutter? Just one little finger.”

“Stevie!” both Win and Bel yelped.

I rolled my head on my neck to loosen up the strain between my shoulder blades and tried to find my sorely lacking patience. I gentled my tone and futilely went back in. “Mom? That was a low blow.”

Mom sighed. “I’m just trying to help, Stephania. I want you to find happiness.”

“Um, yeah. I don’t need that kind of help or that kind of happiness. It’s insulting. So here’s the deal: I don’t want to find a rich husband. Even if I didn’t have all this because of Win, I wouldn’t want to find a rich husband to pay my bills. I’m in charge of my own ship, and that’s the way I like it. You know what else that affords me? I’ll tell you what that affords me. A life free of worrying about finding the next millionaire. A life free of a man who was more than a little shady. A life free of a man who is now likely dead because of that shady behavior. See what I mean?”

She waved a dismissive hand at me, but her eyes flashed something new—something I’d never seen from Dita—or maybe I’d just never looked for it.

Sorrow.

It was there and it was real, but it only lasted for a mere second before she put her vapid coat back on. “Fine. I can’t sit and listen to this nonsense anymore because I have a mani/pedi scheduled at three. Now, if you’re done badgering me with your speeches of empowerment, may I go?”

“No!” we all bellowed, including Wom, and Com.

“Mother, this isn’t a party! There’s a murder investigation going on surrounding your
husband
. You’re not to be out sprucing up for your next coup! Now, from here on out, you stay put. You don’t go out. You don’t call the press. You don’t talk on the phone to anyone but me. You don’t
talk
. Period. If I have to say it again, I’ll wash my hands of the whole thing. Clear?”