Dewitched (Witchless In Seattle Mysteries Book 3) (6 page)

“You look great, Elias. It’s good to see you, too.”

He leaned in as though he were going to share a secret (also, he still smelled like band practice—resin and a hint of sweaty, secondhand band uniform, to be precise). “So, wanna give a guy a scoop?”

“Scoop?”

“Yeah. All this.” He spread his arm, covered in a brown tweed jacket, and waved it at the house. “Didn’t just happen, did it? I mean, you had to get the money from somewhere, right? So I was hoping to do a feature on you in the
Herald
. You know, hometown girl makes good while she reads your mind or something? There’s gotta be a story there, Stevie—there always is.”

I snickered. “I don’t read minds, Elias. I speak to the dead on behalf of the living.”

He gave me the skeptical look everyone gives me, the dimples on either side of his mouth fading. “Riiight. A medium. Either way, I’d love to feature you in my column. Whaddya say?”

Just as I was about to politely decline, I heard a scream—a scream that chilled me to the bone, slicing right through me.

Oddly, it was a familiar scream.

One I swear I’d heard before.

In that moment, I wondered if the Bats had disobeyed orders to stay put in my room.

But then I saw my mother—on the top step of the porch stairs—her face riddled with horror and disbelief, the light shawl she wore falling about her slender shoulders as she clutched it to her breast.

My stomach sank right to the bottom of my sparkly shoes when she cried out, “Bart! It’s Bart! He’s dead!”

I
ran for the front steps, my ridiculously high heels sinking into the brand-new sod. Grabbing the wrought iron and wood banister, I pulled myself upward just in time to keep her from falling on the porch floor in a graceful heap.

I tapped her face with my fingertips, brushing them across her flushed cheeks. “Mom? Mom!”

She crumpled against me, heaving a long sigh as Sandwich and Officer Nelson plowed up the steps and forced me to move out of the way.

“Put a call into the paramedics, Paddington!” Officer Nelson ordered, scooping my mother up to lay her flat on the porch and check her breathing.

As everyone began gathering around, their curious eyes on us, what my mother had yelled before collapsing finally registered and had me pushing my way past one of our local doctors, who’d come to help.

I stepped into the entryway, my heart throbbing in my chest. There was plenty of activity still going on in the kitchen as the French chef shouted orders to his staff and loud music played amidst the chaos, so wherever Bart was, it wasn’t in there.

Closing my eyes, I swallowed hard and opened them again. Turning to my right, I looked into the dining room, ablaze with a rustic candle chandelier and a table full of housewarming gifts we’d asked everyone to forgo, but had somehow managed to amass anyway. I saw nothing.

I took a deep breath and decided to venture to the parlor. There was a loud thump before I entered, making me wary, but I went in cautiously anyway, and that’s when I saw him.

Bart, in a heap on the floor, the sheet from the cirque acrobat wrapped around his neck.

Instantly my eyes went to the pulley above him—the one the engineer had said wouldn’t fall down in an earthquake, after I’d mentioned my misgivings—but nothing looked out of place or askew.

And what would Bart be doing climbing an acrobat’s sheet, anyway? He looked like he took great care of himself, and I wasn’t sure if that was due to the fact that he was a warlock, or because he worked out. But he sure didn’t look like the kind of guy who’d want to float around in the air on one of those silky sheets.

Now I doubted myself.
Was
he a warlock? (I can’t tell who’s human and who isn’t, since I lost my powers.) I couldn’t remember if my mother had said one way or the other…?

No, wait. Now I remembered. Yes. Yes, he was definitely a warlock.

Rooted to the floor, I could only gape at my poor stepfather, his body twisted at an odd angle as though someone had hoisted him up toward the ceiling and let him crash to the floor. By the looks of it, he’d broken his left leg from the impact, given the way it was twisted awkwardly behind him.

There’d been a struggle, of that I was sure. The gorgeous crystal vases housing calla lilies and hydrangeas were smashed on the new hardwood floor of deep walnut. The lamp on top of the chest of drawers was tipped over and one drawer was crooked.

“Dove?”

I sighed in relief when I heard Win in my ear. “Yes?” I managed on a squeak, wrapping my arms around my waist.

“Come away. Don’t linger.”

“As if. You know me better. I can’t just walk away. I never walk away.”

“I
do
know you, but this is quite personal.”

“More personal than my favorite tacos in the whole world?” I asked, referring to how we’d solved the mystery of my favorite taco man’s death.

“He was your stepfather, Stevie.”

“But…I didn’t even know him. I knew Tito better than I did this man my mother married.”

My first thought about that statement was how crazy it sounded. Bart had been married to my mother for quite some time now, and I didn’t know a single thing about him.

“Regardless, it’s still jarring. Come away now, Dove. The police are on their way and your mother will need you when she awakens.”

I nodded, numb from the scene sprawled out before me. “Do me a favor, Win?”

“Anything.”

“See if you can locate Hugh. I haven’t seen him all night, since I left him in the parlor. You don’t think…”

“Don’t jump to conclusions, we don’t know anything at this point,” Win said.

“You know what we
do
know?”

“I’m afraid to ask, but I’m going to face that fear. Is it the tingle?”

Nodding, I winced. I didn’t have to say another word for Win to understand. Whenever foul play was involved, I always got a tingle up my spine.

It didn’t necessarily have to equate to murder, though the last two times I’d been right on the money. Sometimes it could be an event as simple as someone shoplifting or lying. It was once a much stronger tingle, when I was still a witch, but it never failed me, and I was getting it now about Bart.

“I’ll attempt to locate The Huge Granite posthaste then.”

Carlito and Liza were the next to get to me, pulling me from the entry of the parlor and toward the kitchen.

Sirens sounded and lights flashed outside the big picture window as members of the Ebenezer Falls Police Department rushed in, along with the two detectives I jokingly called Simone and Sipowicz, their serious faces in place.

“You all right, Stevie?” Liza, asked, her wide eyes filled with concern.

Carlito handed me a water bottle, his handsome face grim. “I’m sorry you had to see that, Miss Cartwright.”

As Carlito and Liza brought me back into focus, I heard my mother calling for me in that sweetly pleading tone.

“Where’s my baby girl?”

Inhaling, I smiled at Carlito’s and Liza’s sympathetic gazes. This certainly wasn’t the first dead body I’d seen. I could do this. “I’m fine. Promise. I’d better go see if she’s okay.” I patted Liza on the arm, only vaguely noticing how beautiful she looked tonight in her emerald-green slip dress.

“I’m here, Mom,” I called, stepping back out onto the porch, where she sat while the doctor hovered over her frail form.

Pretty as a picture, she sat on the bench swing that Win, Belfry, Whiskey and I sat on every night while chatting about the day’s events, her hair mussed beautifully around her flushed cheeks.

Pushing my way through the throng of people, I sat down beside her. “What happened, Mom?”

Her full lower lip, the one she used for the trademark Cartwright pout I just couldn’t perfect, trembled. “I don’t know. I went to see where Bart was. I…I couldn’t find him anywhere and then…” She began to openly sob, tears streaming down her face and falling to her gold lamé lap.

I did what I’ve always done when my mother’s upset. I wrapped an arm around her shoulder and squeezed her trembling form close. She always looked so helpless, so frail when she wept, that all my defenses fell away. “I’m so sorry, Mom. I don’t know what to say. Tell me what I can do to help.”

“Miss Cartwright?”

Both our heads shot upward (I didn’t know if my mother had changed her name this last marriage or not), and I encountered one half of my favorite pair of detectives. Simone and Sipowicz—or Simone, to be precise, better known to Ebenezer Fall-ers as Ward Montgomery. He was good cop to his partner’s bad cop. If anyone was going to question my mother, better him than his partner the yeller.

I’d had an encounter with these two, where one smiled at me while the other pounded his fists against the desk like he was Fred Flintstone.

Under the porch lights, Detective Montgomery’s hard face didn’t give anything away, but I knew he’d want a statement. “We need to ask you some questions,” he said gruffly.

Mom’s slender shoulders shook harder as she clung to me.

“Can we do that a little later? You can see how upset she is,” I said, trying for those Thumper eyes my mother was so good at.

But he never blinked. “I’m afraid we can’t. I’ll be as gentle as possible, but we really need her impressions of tonight.”

Well, at least my record for failing miserably at flirting was still intact.

“So if you’d please let me take your mother’s statement,
Sipowicz
will get yours over there,” he said with a hint of sarcasm as he pointed to the other detective, who was leaning against the doorframe, just shy of rubbing his hands together in devilish glee.

Enter bad cop. Detective Sean Moore. He was the one who was supposed to put the screws to you while his other half held your hair back and let you vomit your tale of insidious doings.

Rolling my eyes, I rose and smoothed my hands over my dress. “It was just a joke,” I retorted before heading toward my second-least favorite cop.

He motioned me inside the house and pointed to the dining room, pulling out one of the high-backed chairs for me. “You know,
Stevie,
I noticed something tonight.”

Lifting my chin, I gazed into his eyes, hard as ice chips. “Did you? What’s that, Detective Sean Moore?”

“Murder follows you around. This is the second body you’ve been in contact with.”

Ya think? “
Phew.
A for astute.”

He poised his pen over his notepad. “Where were you all night, Miss Cartwright?”

“Sunning in Aruba. I just got in on the redeye. Wanna see my tan lines?”

“Funny. Answer the question.
Please
.” If Officer Nelson was a walnut, this guy was a brick.

So I lifted my shoulders and shrugged, gripping my temples with two fingers to ease the oncoming ache. “Where do you think I was? This is my party. I was all over the place with my guests.”

“Did you see Mr. Hathaway go inside?”

I cocked my head and bit the inside of my cheek. “Is that his last name?”

Detective Moore raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t know his last name?”

“I didn’t.” Sweet Pete on the beach. I didn’t know my stepfather’s last name.

“How could you not know your own stepfather’s last name?”

Because I’ve had so many? “I guess it just slipped my mind. Tonight was the first time I’ve actually met Bart. My mother…she’s been traveling with him since they eloped and they only just got back to Seattle this evening.”

He scribbled on his small spiral notepad, his lips thin. “You know if there was any trouble between them?”

“As far as I know, they were very happy with each other.” I think. I didn’t know…

“Did they argue tonight?”

Suddenly I was defensive on my mother’s behalf. She was capable of many things, but murder wasn’t one of them, and if that’s the avenue he was taking, I was going to throw up a big roadblock.

I held up a hand. “Okay, hold the phone here, Sipowicz. I have to ask myself, are you seriously considering my mom had something to do with this? Look at her. She weighs a hundred pounds soaking wet. How do you think she could have hauled Bart up on that pulley with her skinny little stick arms? They’d have cracked like toothpicks. And did you happen to see the size of Bart? He’s two hundred pounds easily. You’re barking up the wrong tree here, Detective Sipowicz. Maybe Bart committed suicide. Have you thought about that angle? Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

“How do you know he was pulled upward by the pulley?”

Oh, right. There was that. “I just assumed that’s how he was killed,” I said—then cringed.

Gosh, I never knew when to shut up. No one had mentioned the word “murder” in association with Bart.

Detective Montgomery stopped scribbling. “Who said he was killed?”

“Oh, no one said he was killed, all right? It just seems kind of fishy that he’s got a sheet wrapped around his neck and he’s a crumpled mess on the floor.”

“I thought you said maybe it was suicide?”

I rolled my eyes. “Stop trying to catch me in a lie that doesn’t exist. I was theorizing, is all.” Out loud. With my big mouth.

Moore leaned back against the wall and smiled like a Cheshire Cat. “I hear you do that a lot.”

“Well, to be fair, I
have
solved two murders, haven’t I?”

“Testy, testy tonight, aren’t you?”

You bet I was. There was a dead man in my parlor and I didn’t even know his last name. I couldn’t very well continue to blame my mother for not being involved in my life if I didn’t even try to get involved in hers.
Do unto others, Stevie Cartwright
.

She’d been married to Bart for over a year now and I’d made no effort to contact her, other than perfunctory congratulations when she texted to tell me they’d tied the knot.

But I decided I was better off staying on the defensive. “Sure I’m testy. Wouldn’t
you
be testy if someone died at your housewarming party? You know, I wish you guys were as diligent about those jerky kids who keep ding-dong-ditching me because I stole their favorite drinking spot.”

I’d been ding-dong-ditched five times since I’d moved in, and when I’d mentioned it to Sandwich, he’d given me that boys-will-be-boys speech.