A Hiss-tory of Magic: A Wonder Cats Mystery Book 1 (4 page)

T
he next morning
, Marshmallow was too sick to get up. We weren’t sure if Bea would make it worse by using magical healing for what could be a symptom of magic burnout, so Bea took her to the vet, and I took Bea’s claim letter to the insurance company’s office after Bea told me we’d gotten clearance from the fire inspector. I was still feeling tired too, and delivering a letter sounded like less trouble.

Oh, if I’d only known!

The rain that had threatened to break the day before had passed. That day, the sun blazed in an uninterrupted expanse of blue sky, and the wind blew just enough to keep the day cool.

Most of the townspeople seemed to be in a great mood that day, whether they were in Old Wonder Falls with the cobblestones and mom-and-pop shops or in the town square with the asphalt and the view of the franchise grocery store and the falls. The same chipper cheer, I imagined, would be prevailing in the fisheries and farms and where the fruit orchards met the forest.

That day, it would have been so nice to be one of those ordinary people instead of pretending to be one, even if I was just filing an insurance claim.

Inside the insurance office, I bumped into Nadia and Naomi LaChance, twin sisters who had been Bea’s friends in high school: from mathletes and drama club, respectively. Nadia spoke at a much lower register than Naomi. Nadia had dyed steel-blue hair and a tattoo of a waterfall that blossomed over one shoulder and ran down the length of her arm, all the way to her knuckles.

Naomi—who used wooden pencils to keep her black hair in a bun and wore oversized button-down shirts belted around the waist as if they were dresses (hmm, I should try that out sometime)—was there to get money to repair her car.

Old Mr. Leary, who had driven into the headlight of Naomi’s ladybug-patterned Volkswagen Bug the week before, was in the office with Mrs. Sutherland, the insurance agent—well, one of the insurance agents.

I asked if I could talk to someone who wasn’t already with a client, and the office assistant—a lanky, swarthy boy in his late teens named Cody, very soft-spoken and formal—directed me to the office of Mr. Nguyen instead.

Cody knocked on the half-open door. “It’s Miss Greenstone, sir.”

Mr. Nguyen, a hefty man about Aunt Astrid’s age, seemed momentarily relieved then tried to muster up some anger, but he wasn’t a good actor. He craned his neck past his desk and past the man in the long, dark coat standing in front of him. “Cody, I thought I told you I was in a meeting!”

A familiar, gravelly voice replied, “Oh, no, this is a lucky coincidence. I should be asking you these questions directly”—the figure turned to reveal Blake Samberg—“Cath, isn’t it?”

“What are you doing here?” I asked, too tired to be irritated.

“I was just asking Mr. Nungooyen—”

“‘Ngwhen,’” Mr. Nguyen interjected.

“—what you stood to gain from a fire at the Brew-Ha-Ha.”

I gave him a slow, disdainful blink. “Lost time. Days, maybe weeks, without customers to keep our business going—when, I might add, it was going great—”

“It
was
a very successful business,” Mr. Nguyen said, backing me up.

“There goes your insurance fraud theory, Detective.” Sarcastically, I added, “What a shrewd use of human resources too, killing our star chef. Great way to run a food business!”

Blake nodded to Mr. Nguyen. “Right.” Then he nodded to me. “Thank you both for your time.” He made for the door.

As he passed by, I asked, “What, that’s it?”

“I believe you.” Blake shrugged his shoulders, palms up and out toward me. “We’re following every lead in this investigation. I just had to make sure this wasn’t one.”

And he left.

“Now, you wait just one hot minute!” I left Bea’s letter on Mr. Nguyen’s desk as Mr. Nguyen signaled desperately at Cody to send the next client in.

Blake Samberg just rubbed me the wrong way. He was presumptuous and insensitive. He wasn’t the most unpleasant person I’d ever met, but he sure could find a spot in the top three. I couldn’t have been more relieved that he would be out of my sight.

So why was I following him? Why was I stopping him?

Well, I still had questions. “Would you care to update a surviving victim of this crime? What other leads are you talking about?”

Cody lent an arm to old Mr. Cartwright, who had a prosthetic leg—the real one had been lost decades before in a mountain-lion attack—and they hobbled slowly into Mr. Nguyen’s office. When the door shut behind them, Blake spared a glance at the LaChance sisters, who tried to look uninterested in our conversation.

“It wasn’t asphyxiation,” Blake murmured. “No, he burned. The fire started in the oven, and someone made sure that Ted was right in front of it.”

I took that information in and exhaled the shock and horror. “Who would do that? Ted was a big, buff guy—who
could
do that?”

“He had a concussion before the fire started. That’s a mercy. But someone really wanted to make sure that he was dead. Jake’s running a background check on the victim as we speak, to see if he had any enemies back in… Quebec, was it?”

“Or his hometown in France. Only his dad was Canadian. His mother was from… I forgot the name, somewhere in France.”
No
.
This couldn’t be personal.
I could only think that Ted had come in early and caught the thief in action. The fire was just a way to get rid of a witness.
Oh, Ted, I’m so sorry you got caught up in this.
“Do you think that someone from his past could have found him without anybody in this town noticing?”

“We have a prime suspect,” Blake told me.

“You do?” Every intuitive fiber in my body screamed that he was on the wrong track.

“Does the name Min Park ring a bell?”

The Park family managed the big grocery store that had the view of the falls. Min had gone away for university, and life just got in the way of letter writing. His mother had been at the café on the morning of the fire, making sure that Aunt Astrid and I were okay.

“He’s in town?” I hadn’t known that.

We used to be very close. My intuition clouded over, embarrassed, and curled up in the corner of my mind like a cat that had missed a mouse.

“In police custody by now—or should be. I got the text message from Jake while I was in Mr. Nguyen’s office. Witnesses saw him at the scene of the crime, before the fire.”

“No,” I said. “No, there must be some mistake. Min Park left Wonder Falls fifteen years ago for university. Ted came to town a couple of years after. They couldn’t have met—not here, at least.”

Blake got a notebook and pen out of his coat pocket. “Would you testify to his character, then?”

“What’s relevant to the case?” I asked. “The Min Park that I knew couldn’t wrestle his way out of a wet paper bag. I know this because some schoolyard bullies”—more physical than Darla had been—“once trapped Min in a giant paper bag and threw him into the pool beside the gym. I can’t even remember how that happened or why he literally couldn’t punch his way out. It was so long ago.”

“It was a long time ago,” Blake agreed, scribbling something on his notepad.

I insisted, “Min didn’t do this. I knew him in grade school. He’s a good person.”

“Well,” Blake said as he folded his notepad again and pocketed it, “most people are good people in grade school. I’m not saying there aren’t bad seeds, but life is hard for everybody.”

I couldn’t imagine Ted and Min facing each other down—what, in some gun duel at high noon, somewhere in the Mexican desert, with their cowboy hats on?
Ted’s bullet grazes Min, who falls with a shout and plays dead as Ted saunters away in his chaps and boots. Min’s fallen cowboy hat rolls away like the tumbleweed in the breeze, and then when he’s sure Ted’s gone, he picks himself up, clutching his wound, looks to the sky, and swears vengeance—

Okay, maybe I could imagine it, but obviously that didn’t mean anything like it could have really happened. It just meant I was weird and crazy.

“I have to interrogate him anyway, now—just to be sure.” Blake said, bringing me back to earth. “You’ve convinced me of your innocence. That only works on you. Do you understand?”

He delivered the last line with such grimness that I had to meet the sharpness and challenge of his gaze, and I wondered when I would get sick of our staring contests. “No,” I answered. “This is about my family, my friends, in my hometown and my life. I don’t fight just for my own innocence and protection. I fight for everyone’s!”

“Good,” Blake said, with a shade of… disappointment or maybe worry. “I’ll just make sure that they’re worthy of your loyalty.”

“How can you possibly make sure of that?”

“It’s my job. I work with the proof.” He turned to walk out.

I almost stopped him, but I caught sight of Nadia’s girlfriend coming down the hall. It was Ruby Connors, who’d been Darla’s best friend at school, and—judging by her tailored blazer, hot-pink plaid A-line skirt, and stiletto heels—they still went shopping together.

I couldn’t conceive of Min holding a grudge against Ted, but some people did hold grudges.

“Did you know about this?” I demanded, striding toward the three of them.

The twins began to deny too loudly, but Ruby objected at just the right volume for someone who’d just come in and had no idea what was going on.

“Min Park.” I told them, “He’s back in town, and he’s under arrest—or under interrogation, whatever—for burning down the Brew-Ha-Ha.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Ruby said. Her manners always came off as just a touch too deliberate. She had a wide-eyed, expressive face and coquettish mannerisms that showed up in tiny ways: the way she walked, the way she flipped her hair. She had always gotten on my nerves. “I mean, you’re like his best friend.” Oh, and her presumptuous blanket statements.

“And your brother,” I told Ruby, “was Min’s worst bully. You’d think after fifteen years, Reuben would have given up on it and moved on, but if the first thing he does—”

Nadia got between us, saying, “Now hold on a minute—”

“—is call the cops on Min for some trumped-up charge. If he’s still got Min in his crosshairs as if we all haven’t grown the hell up—”

“I saw him!” Cody exclaimed, as if he’d been saying it in his own soft voice the whole time I was railing at Ruby. “I was at the Brew-Ha-Ha before the fire. I saw him. I told Detective Samberg yesterday.”

I turned to Cody and tried to calm down. He was just a kid, after all. “How did you know it was Min Park?”

Cody twisted his fingers together nervously. “I didn’t know. I just said who I saw: this tall Asian man in a three-piece suit and classy shoes. It didn’t look like someone who’d caused an accident. It looked like he knew what he was doing.”

I didn’t want to call Cody a liar, but my tone might have been on the sarcastic, incredulous side. “What were you doing up and about at that time?”

“I was coming back from the lake.”

“And why were you at the lake?”

“I was doing some research on glow-in-the-dark jellyfish and algae.” Without my asking, Cody supplied, “Not for school. I just like it, even though I knew I had work today.”

Glow-in-the-dark jellyfish and algae?
I was sure that Ontario wasn’t the climate for those things, even if they did exist, but I’d have to ask Bea later on.

Naomi hummed in the way she did when she wanted to call attention to herself without people realizing. “I was at the Parks’ grocery store that morning, and Mrs. Park was saying something about heading over to the Brew-Ha-Ha to talk sense into her son.” She flinched when I glowered at her. “I told Detective Samberg that yesterday, too. He asked who could have been there so early, and I answered! I’m sorry, I thought you already knew he was in town.”

Ruby cleared her throat. “Can we get back to the part where you chewed me out for something my brother did? I am really not involved with his life anymore.”

“Or any of her family,” Nadia added, taking Ruby’s hand.

“Not that that’s any of your business,” Ruby added primly. “You shouldn’t just jump to conclusions and yell at people, Cath.”

I felt like a jerk all of a sudden. “I’m sorry. It’s been a really awful couple of days, and—that’s no excuse, I’m sorry. It’s just that nobody’s telling me anything.”

Ruby seemed to accept my apology. “After the stuff’s been filed for Naomi’s car, why don’t you come with us for lunch? It doesn’t have as many kinds of tea and coffee as the Brew-Ha-Ha, but there’s the Night Owl café—you know, part of the Night Owl bookstore? And their shepherd’s pie is pretty good.”

“Thanks,” I told them, “but that sounds more like Bea’s thing, and she’s taken my aunt’s cat to the vet, where I’m supposed to meet her after this. Maybe next time?”

“Just call us when things settle down,” Naomi said.

When I left the town square, the sun was still out. I pulled out my cell and called Bea.

“Mission accomplished,” I droned. “How’s Marshmallow?”

Bea answered, “I looked into healing her, but it just looked bad enough that I wasn’t even going to try, so the vet just put her on a drip and started a round of antibiotics. Maybe all the stress yesterday lowered her natural immunity or something. She’s an old cat.”

“Guess who I ran into?”

“Oh! Umm, uh… Min Park!”

I was startled. How did everybody else know these things? “How did you know that he was back?”

“Internet. You should really get on a social network, Cath—any social network. Any at all.”

“Well,” I said, feeling in my pocket for the chain and triangular pendant. Most of the soot had rubbed off, showing symbols on the faces of the pendant. I rubbed my fingers along the chain to shine it even more. “Some welcome-home he got—Detective Samberg was at the insurance office, and he told me that Min’s being taken in for interrogation.”

Her first response was low, loud, and long with Bea’s disbelief. “No!” The next was a chirrup. “Seriously?”

“I’ve got to go over there,” I told Bea. “Would you check in on your mother for me after you’re done at the vet’s?”

“Of course I will.”

“Great. I’m going to get to the bottom of this.” I ended the call and stood up, then I sat right back down. Bea could explain better the connection among the physical, the mental, and the magical when it comes to health. Magic burnout had left me feeling dizzy if I moved too fast.