It Never Rhines but It Pours (27 page)

“Deal,” Cecily said a little too cheerfully for my liking. She held her hand out to shake. I grudgingly shook it and stomped back to the kitchen.

“We’ve got it all worked out,” I said with false cheer. “You and Harry can stay at Cecily’s for a few days until we get all cleaned up.”

Annabeth didn’t look as happy as I would have hoped. “Cecily’s?” she asked.

“Yes!”

“Why can’t we stay here?”

“Because …” why was everyone in the world trying to pick a fight with me? “You would have to sleep on the floor and my husband doesn’t know about … people like us.”

“Cecily is a vampire,” Annabeth said flatly.

“Standing right here in the room!” Cecily announced loudly.

Annabeth ignored her and kept her eyes on me. “She’s a
vampire.
”

“Yeah?” I was starting to feel belligerent. “And you’re a skunk ape! I’m the only human in the room, and I say, if you want a place to stay, you’ll stay at Cecily’s.”

Annabeth looked worriedly at Cecily. “Will you promise not to take blood from either Harry or me?”

“Take blood!” It was Cecily’s turn to get offended. “Take blood from a monkey? I think not!” She made a disgusted face.

“Promise,” Annabeth said firmly.

Cecily shot her a look that could peel paint, “I promise not to touch a hair on your head, or on your son’s head.”

Annabeth sighed and relaxed. “Okay, then we would be very grateful for the offer of your hospitality.”

“My pleasure,” Cecily flashed her some fang.

“Great!” I brushed my hands off, “We’ve got all that settled. Now, if you don’t mind, perhaps Cecily could show you around and then she and I have some work we need to do.”

“Work?” Annabeth asked.

“Yes,” I explained. “We have a murder suspect that we need to interview.”

“Someone is going to be killed?” Annabeth was puzzled.

“No,” I fumbled for the right words. I just wasn’t used to using the word “murder” in a normal conversation. “I mean, a murderer suspect. Oh, dang it! A person who we suspect might be a murderer. We have to talk to that person.”

“Right,” Cecily headed for the door. “I’ll show you my house and then Piper and I have to hit the road.”

“Can we come with you?” Annabeth asked.

“No,” Cecily and I said together.

“Why not?”

“Because,” I looked at Cecily. “The person might be a murderer!”

“I could help!” she said stubbornly.

“What about Harry?” I pointed out. I wouldn’t want to take my kids to interview a possible killer.

“He can stay in the car.”

Cecily made a wry face. “Sure, why not?” she said.

“Cecily!”

“Why not, Piper? She’s right, she could help.”

I looked around the room at all the crazy people. It must just be my day for crazy people.

“Fine!” I snapped. “But I’m driving.”

Of course, it wasn’t that easy. It never is. Harry had to go to the bathroom. Annabeth wanted to move her luggage over to Cecily’s. Cecily had to put on sunscreen and get her floppy hat and shades. A quick brush through my hair, a dab of powder on my nose and I was ready. I sat on the barstool and waited for everyone else, kicking my feet aimlessly in the air. This was worse than trying to get Megan and Cassidy ready to go.

While I was waiting, I decided to give Sarah a call.

“Hey,” she said, sounding tired.

“How’s it going?”

She sighed. “She’s taking a nap.”

“Any more craziness?”

“Not unless you count using food coloring on all the food to make it pink. You probably didn’t know, but aliens won’t eat pink food. She wanted to make sure we weren’t all aliens without knowing that we were.”

“Like the Cylons,” I said.

“What?”

“Never mind, I guess you all passed the test?”

“Yeah, Nana had a fit, but I tried to convince her that Mom had just had too much to drink and to humor her until it wore off.”

“Oh, great!” I cried. “Mom’s going to kill us when this is over! You know Nana will never let her live this down!”

“Aha,” Sarah chortled evilly, “You forget, dear sister, ‘after this is over,’ no one is going to remember a thing!”

“I guess,” I said uneasily.

“Don’t worry, big sis. I’ve got it covered.”

“Okay. By the way, Cecily and I are going to hit the last suspect this afternoon.”

“Without me!”

“Yeah, you’re on mom-sitting duty.”

“That’s not fair!”

“Well,” I pulled my best big sister voice. “Whose fault is it that Mom is crazy?”

“Pravus’?” she suggested.

“Well,” I amended. “Yeah. But who wanted to stop and who
tackled
that person?”

“Whatever,” Sarah huffed. “Fine. I’ll watch Mom, but I want to hear all about it afterwards.”

“I’ll give you all the gory details,” I promised, sincerely hoping that there would
be
no gory details. I hung up and went back to kicking my heels against the counter.

After what seemed like hours, but was probably only fifteen minutes or so, we were all finally loaded into my minivan. Carolyn had moved the girls’ car-seats to her car which meant that Annabeth and Harry didn’t have to sit in the way-back. No way was Cecily sitting in the back of the car. It must be some kind of control freak thing. Maybe she felt safer knowing she could grab the steering wheel if I had a heart attack and died.

I backed out of the garage and stopped in the driveway to enter the address into the minivan’s GPS. When we’d bought our Honda Odyssey, I hadn’t wanted the navigation system and backup camera. I’d thought they were ridiculous extravagances. Now I couldn’t imagine life without them. I had yet to back my van into something, which had everything to do with the backup camera and nothing to do with my backing skills, which were minimal.

The address was in St. Cloud, the city just to the east of Kissimmee, where the murders had taken place. It was a straight shot over on 192, a two-lane highway that ran through the middle of nowhere. People often wondered why cities on the east coast of Florida crammed themselves between the ocean and I-95. It was because, once you got west of the interstate, the land turned into low lying swamp. The cost of bringing in fill dirt in order to build far outweighed the benefits of more land.

My gas tank was only half filled so I stopped at the last 7-Eleven on the outskirts of town. “Anybody want a slurpee?” I offered, craving one myself. I knew it was 500 calories of sugar but in the sweltering heat nothing could hit the spot better than a frozen coke.

“No thanks, I’m fine,” Cecily smirked. I realized that “slurpee” meant something else to her, and gave her a don’t-freak-out-the-kid-in-the-backseat look.

“What’s a slurpee?” Harry asked.

“What’s a slurpee!?” I was shocked. How could you grow up in Florida and not know what a slurpee was? “Well, you are in for a treat,” I promised. “That is, if your mom says it’s okay.”

Annabeth smiled but shook her head no when I asked if she wanted one. I started the gas going and headed in for the store. Cecily followed and ultimately decided on a huge bananas foster cappuccino. I’d tried one once and found them to be so delicious that I never tried it again. Anything that tasted that good had to have at least a week’s worth of calories in it. And even if I did want to gain ten pounds, I wouldn’t want to drink a scalding hot beverage when the heat index was at 105.

Harry was thrilled with his slurpee. I had briefly considered getting him one of the electric blue slurpees that my little girls love, but decided that, for a first time experience, it was better to go with the classic. He could always expand his taste buds later. Gas tank filled, and all happily sipping and slurping away, we headed out of town to meet suspect number two.

Finding Nemo
was still in the car’s DVD player so I passed back a set of headphones and set the sound system so that Harry could watch the movie without bothering the rest of us. More importantly, we could all talk about death and mayhem without having to worry about little ears hearing things they shouldn’t.

“Who are we going to talk to?” I asked Cecily, after explaining the situation to Annabeth. She wasn’t too thrilled to find that she had been our first suspect, but I assured her that we had total faith in her innocence.

“Patrick Schultz,” Cecily said. “He’s a witch, or maybe a warlock, I’m not sure of how they rank themselves. Anyways, he’s young and was Pravus’ student for awhile. Rumor has it that they parted on less than friendly terms.”

“Unfriendly enough to set your teacher up for murder?”

Cecily shook her head. “I don’t know. Things got really heated between them and Pravus has prevented him from rising in the WAND ranks.”

“Wand?” Annabeth asked.

“Witches and Necromancers Deputation. Stupid name, but they wanted a cool acronym.” Cecily was openly disdainful.

“And what?” I asked, “Pravus wouldn’t let him get his next witch badge?”

Cecily smiled evilly, “A little more than that. He had him knocked back to beginner status and he’s not allowed to cast spells without a senior witch present.” She snickered.

“Is that bad?” I asked, having no clue.

“It’s like if I took away your driver’s license and said you could only ride a tricycle, and then only if I was there to make sure you didn’t ride into the street.”

I had to laugh. “I guess that might make someone a little ticked off.”

“Especially if that someone was already an egotistical, power hungry, witch.”

“Which is kind of the personality requirements to be a witch in the first place,” I added snidely.

“Aren’t witches human?” Annabeth asked.

“No,” Cecily replied. “They look human, and they taste human,” she licked her lips. “But they’re not. Something to do with DNA and blood chemistry. Humans and witches can reproduce, but their offspring will be either one or the other. Humans can’t work magic, witches can. That’s pretty much the biggest difference between the two.”

“They smell different too,” Annabeth added.

“Do they?” I asked.

“Yes. At least, Pravus did.” She cocked her head to one side remembering. “He smelled of grave rot.”

“Eww!”

“You smell like sunshine and …” she sniffed deeply, then said apologetically, “diaper chemicals.”

I grimaced. Figures I would smell like a diaper pail. I sure spent enough time around diapers. Clean diapers, wet diapers, dirty diapers, you name it. Call me the diaper queen.

“You’re offended,” Annabeth said worriedly.

“No,” I lied. “It makes sense.”

“It’s better than grave rot!” Cecily chimed in. She was right. It was. I would just focus on the sunshine smell. That sounded nice.

The GPS started flashing images to show that we were nearing our destination. I had turned off the annoying voice that prompted you every seven seconds. We had entered St. Cloud and were, according to my Honda, a few minutes away from our destination.

“Are we going to his house?” I asked, noticing that we were in a commercial area.

“No,” Cecily said. “I couldn’t find his home address, but I did find where he works. He’s a manager at Checker’s.” She looked up hopefully, “Maybe we can get a banana milkshake!”

“You’re a vampire,” I pointed out sourly. Life just wasn’t fair.

“So? Taste is taste!”

I pulled onto a slightly less busy road and read from the screen that we were eight hundred yards away. It started to count down, silently.

“Umm, Cecily?” I peered through the front window as traffic slowed. “Is that where we’re going?”

Up ahead there was a large Checker’s sign on the side of the road. One might safely assume that a Checker’s building would be under said sign. That wasn’t what was confusing me. It was the myriad of flashing lights and official vehicles parked around the building. And the miles of yellow crime scene tape that were fluttering in the wind throughout the entire parking lot. Things were not looking good.

Chapter Twenty-eight:

A Dead, Dead End

I parked in the strip-mall parking lot just past all the police excitement. There was no getting into the Checker’s parking lot. Not without a police badge. “What do you think is going on?” I asked, trying to see past all the flashing lights.

Annabeth took a deep sniff of the air. “Rotting meat,” she said succinctly.

“I’m guessing you’re going to have to wait on your milkshake, Cecily,” I quipped.

She frowned. “We need to find out what is going on. Go and see, Piper.”

“Me? Why me?”

“Because you have the Voice. You can get past the crime tape and no one will bother you. And,” she looked significantly up out the window. “You don’t mind the sun.”

“Fine. Whatever, Miss Bossy Pants,” I grumbled and swung out of the car. The heat and humidity hit me like a splash of boiling water. “Ugh,” I groaned and slammed the car door behind me. I left the car running so everyone would still be alive, or at least, in Cecily’s case, undead, when I came back. On a summer afternoon in Florida, the inside temperature of a car can reach 150 degrees in minutes.