Something wicked, p.14
Something Wicked, page 14
Again, I speculated about what had brought Ox to her backdoor that night.
Maybe it wasn’t an expensive or fancy thing he’d been looking for. Maybe what he’d really been trying to find that night was hope.
And death found him instead.
Thinking about death and about my aunt, I thought of something else Honey might be able to help me with. I raised my hand to the necklace around my throat and squeezed the cold stone. “Can I ask you something a bit strange?”
“Sweetie, we’re talking about magic and stopping time. If you think you can get weirder, I welcome it.”
“I think Eudora might be haunting me?”
Honey sipped her wine and waited for me to say more. When I didn’t immediately, she said, “No.”
“No? Just no?”
“Well, hon, I could pretend like witches are just one group in an all-star lineup of Monster Mash favorites, but I hate to tell you: ghosts aren’t real. Not in a haunting way, at least. I think what people often believe are ghosts are just lingering memories. And please, don’t think I’m dismissing you. Those memories can often be so strong and tangible that for sensitive people it can feel like a real person being in the room with them. But your aunt isn’t haunting you. Everything you’re feeling in that big old house of hers is just decades of memories and energy. Not a spirit.”
“You’re sure? I swear I can hear her sometimes. And my power went out. And this necklace just came out of nowhere. Oh. Oh. And I heard someone knocking on my door, but no one was there.”
To this last one, Honey snort-laughed into her glass, and needed to wipe a few drops of wine from her cheeks.
“Let me tackle those all in order, because the last one is my favorite. First, you can hear her because you’re immersed in everything that was once hers. I promise you, Phoebe, it’s memory, not magic. Not ghosts. Your power went out because that house is ancient and sat unused for almost two months. Three, the necklace? Well, that probably is magic. Eudora might have cast a spell to shield it. It was probably sitting right in front of your face, but you couldn’t see it until you were ready.”
“That’s possible?”
“Lots of things are possible with magic.”
“What about the knocking?”
At this, Honey grinned at me. “No ghosts. No magic. Next time it happens, run to the back door instead.”
“Why?”
“Because the kids in the neighborhood still love to challenge each other to knock on the witch’s door, and I’m sure most of them are whispering ghost stories about her now too. Eudora figured it out years ago after one too many knocks on her front door in the middle of the night. They don’t run back toward town, they run around the back of the house and into the woods where all their little friends are waiting.” She chuckled. “Little terrors.”
I recalled how scared I had been that night when I opened the door and no one was there, and now I felt so incredibly foolish.
“Just kids?”
“Not everything is supernatural, Phoebe. Usually just the good stuff.”
Chapter Thirty-One
The breeze had taken on a colder feel by the time I made my way back to Main Street. I’d barely touched the wine Honey had offered me, but all the same, my head was buzzing, and I felt like the world around me had taken on a surreal, gauzy quality. I could barely focus.
A lot of my questions had been answered tonight, and I had Honey’s number in my phone if, and inevitably when, more came up, but I was just as flummoxed as ever about the murder and what exactly had driven Ox to try so desperately to get inside Eudora’s shop. All this time I’d assumed he’d been looking for something valuable to steal, but now I wasn’t so sure.
I returned to the shop, which was now closed for the night, Imogen probably long gone, and rather than unlocking it just to pass through, I ducked into the small alley between Rich’s apartment entrance and the plant store. It was a lot easier to get to the back lane this way, instead of going all the way to the end of the block and back.
I was lazy and a good shortcut was never a bad idea.
As I neared the end of the alley, I heard voices and came up short. It wasn’t even eight o’clock yet, definitely not too late for people to be out and about, but I was still surprised to hear a conversation happening so close to my parking spot. It was also dark enough now that I couldn’t quite make out the faces of the people who were talking.
Politeness told me the right thing to do would be to pop out now and show myself to those who were standing near my car, but once again the not-so-quiet voice of Eudora in the back of my head cautioned me not to move.
My eyes adjusted to the uneven light in the back lane. There was an overhead streetlight near the vacant lot behind my shop, but its light didn’t quite fill the space, so the people who were talking remained in the shadows.
“We have to do something about this, and soon,” a woman’s voice declared. I’d know it anywhere, even though I hadn’t known the speaker long. Dierdre. There was no mistaking her high-pitched intensity.
“I don’t know what you expect me to do now—there’s too much attention on the place.” This was spoken by a man, but I wasn’t sure I recognized the voice.
“Maybe you should have thought of that earlier.”
“Well excuse me but I don’t see any of your efforts getting you anywhere.”
Dierdre let out a haughty huffing noise. “You have no idea how difficult she’s been. This would have been a lot easier if we had worked things out with Eudora.”
The man snorted. “If you think she would have been any less pig-headed than the girl, you clearly don’t remember at all what she was like.”
“Well, where does that leave us?” Dierdre asked.
“We need to get inside the house, obviously.”
They were talking about my house, there was no mistaking it. This brought me all the way back to my first question upon arriving here: What was in the house that Dierdre wanted so badly? This man, whoever he was, was in on her plan as well.
A cold breeze flowed down the alley, picking at my too light coat and sending leaves scattering over my feet. The whistle of the wind muddled whatever the pair were talking about, but I briefly caught him saying, “Friday night.”
Friday was the one night a week The Earl’s Study was open late. Imogen and I would both be here until eight. Normally, I’d bring in our other part-timer, Daphne, to help Imogen on Friday nights, but for this first week I wanted to get a feel for the volume of the late-evening crowd and the much-discussed Knit and Sip crew, so I’d offered to do a split shift that would let me open and close with some time off in between.
It also meant I’d be away from the house in the evening, which I’m guessing was what these two had in mind with their plan. Whatever that plan was. They wanted to get into my house, and I had until Friday to figure out what the heck they were hoping to find in there.
Eudora owned an awful lot of things, but none of them were what I would consider to be especially valuable, with the possible exception of the Picasso painting in the bathroom that she’d mentioned. But surely they weren’t going to go to such efforts just to steal a little painting?
Maybe they were. It probably was worth a little something.
I reversed track out of the alley, back to Main Street, and planned to just cut through the shop, in the hopes that the noise of my activity inside would spook them away from hanging around my car. As I passed the entrance to Rich’s apartment, I stopped, something catching my eye.
Hanging inside the door, visible from the outside, was a khaki-colored trench coat.
Exactly like the coat I’d seen on the figure that had chased me during my run.
I froze on the spot, staring at the coat.
A lot of people owned trench coats; it wasn’t weird. It was even in line with what he did for a living as a private investigator. Every good private eye would need a quality trench coat, right? Can’t be Sam Spade wearing a bomber jacket.
I was so caught up in staring at the coat through the window that when I turned back toward my shop, I collided with a man walking down the street.
“Hey now, careful.” He was a big man in every sense of the word, tall, broad, a little meaty. In a way he reminded me a lot of Ox, who had also commanded a big presence when he’d been alive.
This man had a vaguely familiar quality to him, but I couldn’t put my finger on why he seemed like someone I ought to know. I hadn’t been in town long and hadn’t met very many people, and I felt pretty confident our paths hadn’t crossed up until this point. Maybe I’d just seen him around. He was certainly large enough to leave a peripheral impression.
“You okay?” He placed a big hand on my shoulder, and out of instinct I flinched away. “Sorry, sorry—didn’t mean to spook you.” He lifted his hands apologetically and then put them in his jacket pockets, as if to appease me.
“I’m okay.”
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I have.” I’d certainly seen something that would be haunting me for a while.
“You’re Eudora’s niece, right?”
Had someone sent around a photo of me along with a press release that I’d be coming? It felt like absolutely everyone in town knew who I was at first glance, and that always put me at a disadvantage. They all knew me, but everyone I met was a stranger from my point of view.
“Yeah, hi. Phoebe.” I offered him my hand, and he briefly pulled his back out of his jacket pocket to give me a friendly shake.
“I’m Leo.” Again, the name jangled something in me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. “Leo Lansing?” He offered his last name in the form of a question, as if he could see me struggling to place him.
Lansing. Of course!
Much like my brain had been forced to work in reverse in order to place Rich, I stared at Leo and imagined him a hundred and fifty pounds lighter and with a lot less facial hair. What I got was a round-cheeked, chubby boy who spent summer days working at his father’s grocery store and summer nights riding bikes around town with Rich and me.
“Leo!” Without thinking I immediately launched myself at him, wrapping him in a big hug. He struggled to get his hands out of his pockets and hugged me back, then eased me onto the sidewalk. Sometimes people describe others as a “teddy bear,” which before now had seemed like a strange description of an adult, but in Leo’s presence, I suddenly understood what they meant.
“It’s been a long time,” he said. “Wasn’t sure if you’d remember me.”
“Having a lot of throwback moments this week. Ricky is apparently my tenant now. And also apparently isn’t called Ricky anymore.”
“Yeah, I heard about him and Melody. That was never going to last.” He gave a little shrug. “But you can’t tell that to people in love.”
Didn’t I know it.
“Do you guys still spend time together?” I asked, wondering if Leo might give me something to go on that would tell me one way or another if I could trust Rich. I glanced over my shoulder to where the coat was visible through the window and tried to swallow the lump in my throat.
Did I have the worst taste in men, or what?
“Sometimes. He’s a bit of a hard dude to make plans with. Weird schedule.”
This wasn’t exactly the damning condemnation I needed, but I decided not to press Leo more, since he might tell Rich I was asking a bunch of weird questions about him. “What brings you down this way?” I asked. I hadn’t seen him near the store at all this week, so I didn’t think this was his regular route.
He flushed and suddenly his demeanor changed from open and friendly to closed off in the blink of an eye—it was wild. “I was just getting some air.”
That didn’t have the slightest ring of truth to it. For one thing, it was turning into a brisk night, where the threat of snow clung to every breath. It certainly wasn’t the kind of night where you go out for a casual walk to get some air. If anything, it was a night to bundle up under a blanket, light a fire, and drink a nice cup of orange pekoe.
All things I would rather be doing right now.
Leo looked uneasy and gave me a forced smile. “It was good to see you, Phoebe. We’ll have to get together. You, me, and Rich. Like old times.” It was obvious he was eyeing the street behind me, either looking for someone or just wanting to escape this conversation.
“Yeah,” I agreed noncommittally. “We should do that.”
He gave me a final wave and then walked past me, moving down the sidewalk with impressive speed for a big dude.
As soon as he was gone, a question popped into my mind.
What were the odds of Leo just appearing on the sidewalk seconds after a mysterious man had been making plans with Dierdre? Sure, it could have been a coincidence, but there weren’t many people around, with all the stores being closed, and Lansing’s home was a good ten blocks in the opposite direction, so this wasn’t exactly a convenient place for him to go for a stroll.
I turned, watching the form of his body get smaller and smaller.
If it had been Leo in the alley, what was his involvement with Dierdre, and how did he fit into this whole mystery?
Chapter Thirty-Two
Back at Lane End House, I was greeted by an apoplectic Bob, who began to meow up a storm the moment I locked the door behind me.
“MEOW,” he howled.
A quick glance at my watch told me I was almost three hours overdue for his nightly feeding, and as best I could translate from cat to human, he was screaming, “How dare you use these starvation tactics? I will report you to the UN commission on fair treatment of prisoners.”
“Okay, okay, okay.” I dropped my purse at the base of the stairs and shucked off my coat as we headed for the kitchen.
Seeing that his demands were about to be met, Bob ran ahead of me at top speed and then began howling again when he realized he had gotten to the food dish, and it was still empty.
“I can hear you,” I said.
“MEOWOWOWOW,” he replied, clearly not believing me.
I hastily filled his wet food dish and topped up his dry food—which definitely still had food in it, but since the bottom of the dish was visible, clearly starvation was moments away. “You’re a drama queen.”
He was too busy loudly inhaling his food to bother answering me. But I was secretly gratified to hear his loud purrs as he ate.
Because I’d had an early dinner, I wasn’t hungry, which meant a night off from thinking about what the heck I was going to cook myself. A true blessing for someone whose regular recipe rotation was pretty much limited to bagged salads and Hamburger Helper.
In the meantime, with my head buzzing and a timer ticking away between now and Friday, I decided to start going through the house to see if there was a secret safe or a giant diamond, or really anything that might explain why so many people were interested in this house.
I also had two new mysteries lingering over me, and I couldn’t figure where they slotted in, in terms of the murder and the planned house break-in. Dierdre and her mystery conspirator were obviously up to something, but I had believed Dierdre when she said she didn’t know Ox, which might have been silly of me, but I just didn’t think she’d killed him. Not to mention I wasn’t sure a dainty, middle-aged woman like Dierdre could have killed a big guy like Ox.
Leo, on the other hand, was almost the exact build of Ox and probably would have had no problem taking him out in a one-on-one confrontation. It felt a little unfair, adding Leo to my list of suspects only minutes after being reintroduced to him, but the coincidences were just a bit too coincidental.
I wasn’t a hundred percent sure he’d been the man talking to Dierdre in the back lane, but I also couldn’t rule it out, which meant there was a chance he was connected to all of this.
And then there was Rich. Handsome, charming, wonderful Rich. I didn’t want to believe he was the bad guy, but was that because I actually trusted him, or because social conditioning made me subconsciously believe attractive people were the good guys? It was hard to ignore that he’d had that coat at his back door, and while there might be no connection between him and the person who had chased me, it was still setting off all my alarm bells.
I wandered into the living room, and was immediately overwhelmed by all the bookshelves, the boxes of trinkets, the hanging art that could potentially be hiding a safe. I had two days until Friday, and this house was so burdened with stuff, it could take me twenty years to get through it all.
Just call the police. This voice was definitely my own because Eudora’s advice rarely ever involved law enforcement.
Even if I did call the police, what would I tell them? “Yes, hello officer, I think Dierdre Miller and a mystery man who could be anyone are planning to break into my house to look for something. No, I don’t know what. No, I don’t know why.”
I would be laughed right out of town. No, thank you.
I approached one of the overloaded bookshelves and started to scan the titles. Eudora had an incredible selection of books, which shouldn’t have been a big surprise for someone who owned a bookstore. Books had always been an enormous part of her life, and the eclectic collection she’d developed was a testament to that.
The shelves were crammed full, stacked two rows deep, with no apparent rhyme or reason to their order.
At least at the shop things were categorized by genre, and then within the genre put in rough alphabetical order by author last name. The used books could sometimes become a bit of a disaster, especially with the bargain bin, but on Eudora’s own shelves, it was nothing short of catastrophic.
Travel books sat side by side with Jane Austen novels. Nonfiction adventure stories were beside young adult romances. It was a mess, and the worst part of it, at least as I remembered from my childhood experience, was wanting to read it all immediately. Even now, with a specific goal in mind, all I wanted to do was pull books off the shelf and build myself a reading stack.
