Playing with magic, p.15
Playing with Magic, page 15
“Are you here with the police?” she asked me, and looked at Rich to see if he might confirm.
Rich shook his head. “Phoebe had some professional guests staying here, and we were just in the area and wanted to see what was going on.”
This, as vague as it was, seemed to satisfy the woman, who gave a nod and gestured toward the back bedroom. “One of the guests had received a call.” She held up the phone like perhaps she wanted to prove this point. “I went and knocked, but he didn’t answer. I tried again, and normally I’d just leave it, but the caller did say it was quite urgent, so I tried the door, and it wasn’t locked. I called his name, and when he didn’t answer, I looked into the room, and . . .” Her voice drifted off and was replaced by an unexpectedly loud sob.
“Hey now, Audrey, it’s okay.” Rich took her gently by the arm and guided her toward the library area, helping to settle her onto one of the overstuffed couches and taking the phone from her hand.
“I just can’t believe this has happened twice. I’m going to be ruined.”
I wanted to allay her concerns, but I’d heard what people outside were whispering, and it was hard to blame them for not wanting to continue to stay at the inn. I probably wouldn’t want to spend the night somewhere that two people had been recently murdered either. Not when the police hadn’t tracked down who had done the first killing.
Were the two deaths connected?
“Can you tell me what you saw?” Rich asked Audrey in a calm, steady tone.
“Someone had . . . someone had st-st-sta . . .” Her voice drifted into a fit of hiccups and incomprehensible crying sounds. I had heard enough to gather that the victim, like Sebastian, had been stabbed.
Not a natural death, then.
If the murders were similar, there was a very real chance they were connected. What else could explain two men being killed in the same inn within forty-eight hours of each other? Unless the killer had a vendetta against Audrey or the B and B, the target was the guests involved and not the inn itself.
“Who was staying in the room?” I asked. I had been certain when I saw the ambulance that something had happened to Melody. She was the one who’d been skulking around all night. Perhaps trouble had followed her home. But Audrey kept saying him, which meant Melody wasn’t the one lying dead in the main floor bedroom.
“Andrew Bachman. The lawyer. The one who was here asking everyone about their property.”
A hundred thoughts went through my head at once, but the one that was blaring in my mind’s eye in bright-red neon was a single name: LEO.
At least twenty people had been in Lansing Grocery to witness the fight between Leo and the lawyer, and I hadn’t been the only one to hear the threats he had made. That was going to stand out to people, especially because of how out of character it was for my friend.
He’d been so mad on Amy’s behalf at the shop earlier today. I didn’t think he would actually have done anything, but his name was going to be connected to this, I felt certain. I also couldn’t see how his death was connected to Sebastian’s, unless Andrew had been the target all along.
Sebastian had swapped rooms, and even though his room had been assigned to Melody in my notes, maybe it had originally been meant for Andrew? I was beginning to believe that Sebastian hadn’t been the killer’s intended victim at all.
“Rich,” I whispered. “We should go.”
“When you just got here?” came a voice from behind us. “Why would you want to leave so soon?”
I turned to see that the voice did indeed belong to Detective Patsy Martin, who was wearing an expression somewhere between annoyed and amused, which she was trying her darndest to show as nothing at all.
I gave her a guilty smile and half wave. “Evening, Detective Martin.”
“Mm-hmm,” was all she said.
“Patsy,” Rich added by way of greeting, going to give his former colleague a quick handshake. She allowed it, so I didn’t think we were in too much trouble.
“Dare I ask what brings you two to the scene of a murder before even the police could get here?” She looked directly at me rather than Rich, and I knew she was going to think this had all been my idea no matter what Rich said.
“Let’s have a quick chat,” Rich offered. “Somewhere private.”
Detective Martin sighed, then led us to the same small dining room where I had so recently seen the lawyer—Andrew—alive. When we were all seated around the table, Rich and I gave her the breakdown, from the argument I’d overheard to my discoveries from earlier that afternoon about the gloves to following Melody to the sanctuary, right up to the moment we’d seen the ambulance come to the inn.
Martin listened, her expression shifting between interested, surprised, and frequently very, very annoyed, especially after I detailed going through Melody’s room. “You should have come to me immediately after hearing that initial argument so we could have had Melody on our radar,” she said, sighing. “I appreciate that you are so keen to help find out what happened to Sebastian, and I know I asked you to keep an eye open to things going on, but I also specifically told you not to get yourself into any trouble.”
“In fairness, I didn’t actually get into any trouble,” I said.
She cleared her throat. “Semantics aren’t going to be your friend here, Ms. Winchester. And you.” She pointed dramatically at Rich. “Of anyone, you should have known better.”
“Well, now, we didn’t actually know if Melody had any involvement. We followed her just to gauge if she might be involved.”
“The two of you deserve each other. Wait here and don’t touch anything.” She got up and went into the hall, where I heard her giving someone directions to go to the sanctuary.
“Do you think Melody is involved in this murder too?” I asked Rich.
He craned his neck to see if Martin was coming back in. “I don’t know. Did you get the sense that she had any connection to this lawyer guy?”
I shook my head. “Aside from them staying at the same place, there’s nothing. As far as I can tell, I don’t think they ever spoke to each other.” Melody hadn’t been in the room when I’d spoken to Connor and Travis after Sebastian’s death; she had been outside.
“Do you know what Audrey was talking about, about him asking people about their properties?”
“Yeah, that’s the other thing you should know about. He’s apparently representing some big megacorporation who wants to buy up property in town to milk the tourist industry by making everything cookie-cutter. I guess he went to Lansing’s to talk to Leo about selling the store, and things got . . . heated.”
“Things with Leo got heated.” Rich clearly didn’t believe me.
“If I hadn’t seen it with my own two eyes, I’d call me a liar too. But I swear to you, Leo was on the verge of knocking this guy’s head off. I’ve never seen him so mad.”
“Why didn’t you say anything to Patsy?” he asked.
“Well, she didn’t ask me if I knew anyone who had been in an argument with the lawyer, did she? And I’m not about to throw Leo under a bus. You and I both know there’s no way he did this.”
Rich thought about this briefly, for a moment longer than I would have liked him to.
“Rich. Leo didn’t kill anyone.”
Rich shook off whatever had stretched out his contemplation. “No, of course. There’s no way. But you have to tell Patsy. She’s going to find out about this one way or another, and it’s better to come from you, who can vouch for his character, than some random person who might blow the whole thing out of proportion.”
I groaned. “Yes, you’re right. I know you’re right.”
With timing so perfect she might have a magical gift of her own, Detective Martin returned to the room and stood in the doorway with one hand propped on her hip. “I’ve got a team going out to scour the sanctuary, see if there’s anything there. It would have been helpful for us to know everything earlier; we might have been able to get her in the act of doing something. As it is, we have an APB out for her, and one way or another we’ll have ourselves a little chat with Melody Fairbanks soon enough. Now I heard my name, so I suspect you might have a little more to tell me?” She raised a brow in my direction.
“You might want to talk to Leo Lansing about the lawyer. He didn’t do anything, I guarantee you that, but you’re going to hear about a bit of a scuffle at the grocery store the other day between Leo and the dead man.”
“A scuffle? Like a physical fight?”
I shook my head. “No, though I think Leo probably felt like fighting him. It was a pretty loud disagreement, and I broke it up. The lawyer, Andrew, left, but it was a scene, and I wasn’t the only one there. So best you know about it now.”
“And do you happen to know if Leo Lansing has an alibi for this evening?” Detective Martin asked.
“I know the store was open later than usual; there’s a chance he was still there tonight,” I offered.
“Mm-hmm.”
I’d been around the detective enough to know she made that particular noise when someone was trying to sell her something she didn’t want to buy.
I hoped for Leo’s sake he’d been on the sales floor all night with plenty of people to see him, because otherwise I might have just gotten my dear friend into a heaping pile of trouble.
Twenty-Three
The dust from the street party had barely settled when news of the second murder began its rapid-fire spread through town. By the time I arrived at Sugarplum Fairy the next morning, Amy was stooped over a newspaper at the front counter.
“Can you believe this?” She shook her head to indicate that she did not believe it, whatever this was.
“Hmm?” I hadn’t had enough caffeine to participate in guessing games this morning. It had been a long night and I had barely managed to get four hours of sleep. I was going to be a very grump bear today.
Holding up the paper, I saw the headline Murder Times Two with a lede that read Sleepy Raven Creek struck by second homicide in a week. Is anywhere safe?
While the conjecture was a bit over-the-top for me, they had a point. If two murders could happen in less than five days in our little town, then it might be time to see if the sky was falling, because things were looking pretty grim.
“I mean, I didn’t like the guy, but I wanted him to leave town. I didn’t want him to die,” Amy said, largely to herself.
I was especially unsettled by the death of Andrew, because I still couldn’t come up with a single way he was connected to Sebastian. Two connected murders in a small town was bad but explainable. Two unconnected murders in a small town was going to have people locking their doors at night.
“Oh yeah, I heard about that.” I was impressed the newspaper had managed to get an early edition out with the news. We had left the inn at around midnight, and the paper hit porches sometime between four and five.
Someone was burning the midnight oil at the local press office.
Since nothing usually happened in Raven Creek at night, I suspected the more likely case was that the editor of the paper had someone on the inside at the police department. Unless their lead reporter was the killer, which was unlikely but a more fun theory for me to latch on to than worrying about Leo being the new prime suspect.
I scanned the newspaper article upside down as best I could, not wanting Amy to feel I was overly interested. If she asked me questions, I knew I’d be unable to resist telling her the whole truth, and I didn’t need anyone other than Rich and Detective Martin knowing I’d been around the inn for both murders. I might start getting a reputation.
Well, I already had a reputation, but I didn’t need one as a weirdo who stalked crime scenes. Better to be thought of as that eccentric lady with the cat who might be a witch.
If it was good enough for Eudora, it was good enough for me.
I grabbed my boxes of pastries, leaving Amy to read up on all the latest information on the crimes. Thankfully, Andrew Bachman hadn’t been internet famous, so I didn’t think we’d have a big wave of customers in this morning looking for obscure law books. There was likely still going to be some trickle-down interest in Sebastian, but I also knew that word of a second slaying was going to scare quite a few visitors into leaving town earlier than they’d planned.
Sebastian had wanted to put Raven Creek on the map as the home ground of a rare bird species, and the lawyer had wanted to take advantage of our popularity to turn us into a booming tourist mecca for his clients. So far the only thing they had in common was that their deaths had managed to completely undermine what their goals in life had been for my sleepy little mountain town.
A cleaning crew was out in the streets with massive brooms, sweeping up confetti, discarded glow sticks, and more red plastic cups than I could count. The party had been a huge success, but it had certainly left behind one of the biggest messes I could ever recall seeing. Funny how people could come here and enjoy everything we had to offer but not care if they were leaving things behind worse than when they arrived.
I was glad my property money was going to help keep our streets clean.
I waved to the cleaners, only one of whom noticed—he doffed an imaginary cap in my direction. Back inside the store, I took a moment to appreciate past me and my staff for taking care to keep everything tidy even after the melee it had felt like in here yesterday.
There were plenty of empty spaces on the shelves, though, so I needed to focus on getting those taken care of. And since it was Tuesday, I also needed to get the new releases out on the shelves. I’d come in extra early to get as much of this done as I could before the store opened.
First things first. I put Amy’s pastries on display in the cooled pastry cabinet, then got my own baked goods in the oven. I started with the Earl Grey shortbread, knowing it was going to be in demand as soon as we opened. I also double-checked to make sure we had plenty of iced tea on hand and made a quick list of things I’d need to order to start keeping extra stock at Amy’s place.
Then I headed into the shop’s basement. While on paper, it was nice to have the extra storage, the basement under the Earl’s Study was not what I would call inviting. A narrow passage led to the extra-large storage room that had once been two separate storage spaces, as our shop had once been two individual buildings that were later merged into one. This was also where the shop’s bathroom was, and I had gone more than one day simply not using the bathroom and rushing home after just to avoid coming down here.
It was tidy enough, with aging yellow laminate flooring, some peeling back from floods in the past, and the walls were lined with unfortunate wood paneling that had probably been here since the seventies. It too showed signs of water damage at the bottom, but nothing was moldy or needed to be immediately replaced, so any kind of basement upgrades had been put on the way, way back burner.
A couple of months earlier I had been able to get an enormous collection of books from an estate sale, and we were still slowly adding them to the upstairs collection as needed. All the boxes were piled up on wooden pallets just in case the copious amounts of Washington rain caused anything to back up. The lot of books had cost me thousands of dollars, and while I had already recouped those costs in resale, I wasn’t about to risk losing the remaining stock to an act of God. No thank you.
Since the books were all a random mix—intentionally—I just grabbed the first box I could see and brought it to the bottom of the stairs. We’d gone through quite a bit of stock the last few days, and I expected we’d need about three boxes just to fill the holes in the used-books section. The only problem with our basement stock system was that none of the books down here were entered in our online database. This was by design, because we didn’t want any online orders to come in for a book that we had no idea how to find. But it also meant that every time we opened a new box of stock, we needed to catalog it all from scratch. That was going to take time. I was grateful that I had entered all our new-release stock into the system ahead of time.
After dragging the three hefty boxes upstairs, I piled them up next to the cash desk so I could work on them while we were open if need be. I swapped out one tray off cookies for another, then dragged the new-release stock out of the office and up to the new-release wall.
I left a few hot-selling titles where they were and moved anything that was a couple of weeks old to the front table—which had been completely picked over by rabid Sebastian Marlow fans. I made them look as neat as possible and added one of our frequently used signs that read New and Noteworthy.
For the new-release wall, we had thankfully cultivated an air of chaos that people were accustomed to. Alphabet? We didn’t need no stinking alphabet. At least not on this wall.
I unloaded the seven boxes of new-release stock in record time, thanks to my ability to take a slapdash approach. The wall could use a little tweaking later to make the style a bit more cohesive, but for now it was full, and anyone looking for a new book that had come out today wasn’t going to leave disappointed.
A few of the new releases were special orders, and I put those aside on the cash desk to have Imogen do the calls and emails later letting people know their books had arrived. I had just enough time to haul the cardboard boxes out to recycling before the store opened to customers.
With a big stack of cardboard in front of my face, I almost didn’t notice the thick manila envelope sitting on the back step of the shop. I’d driven in today—rain was in the forecast—so I knew it hadn’t been there when I came, and there were only a few darkened raindrops on it from a new wave of bad weather that was just starting.
Someone must have just put it there.
I glanced around me to see if there was anyone around, but there was no sign of whoever had delivered this. Cautiously I tossed the boxes in the recycle bin and collected the envelope before retreating into the store. My curiosity would need to wait, however, because I was two minutes late to open the front door and there was already someone outside, huddling in on themselves against the weather.
