Any Witch Way You Can (21 page)

“You gave him a $10 tip for walking food three buildings down?” Landon looked incredulous.

“So?”

“Well, that’s just stupid,” he sputtered. “Why couldn’t you just walk down the street to get the food?”

“We were busy looking through the file,” I said with mock innocence.

“This place . . . “ Landon started.

“This place what?” I narrowed my eyes at him dangerously. I just dared him to say something about Hemlock Cove.

“This place would make a compelling psych experiment,” he said finally.

“Says the guy I found creeping around the corn maze in the middle of the night,” I shot back.

Landon stared at me hard for a few moments. He seemed unsure of what to say. When he did finally speak, it wasn’t at all what I was expecting. “Are you this unpleasant with everyone? Or do I just bring out the worst in you?”

“Oh, she’s always like this when she likes a guy,” Clove answered indifferently. “At least at first. She’ll calm down in a few days.”

I slid a sideways glance at Clove. If I could have grown an invisible hand to smack her with – I would have.

Clove immediately realized what she’d done. “Not that she likes you,” she amended lamely. She shifted slightly as she tried to take a step away from me. “In fact, if I had to guess, she really hates you.”

Thistle met her gaze with a disappointed look and clucked softly. “Now I think you’re dead to her,” she offered.

Landon looked pretty pleased with himself when he left a few minutes later – despite my attempts to pretend that Clove was on some serious medications that made her mentally unbalanced.

When he was gone, I realized he had managed to squeeze information from us but he hadn’t given us anything in return. Again.

“He really is hot,” Clove said after a few minutes, when we’d doled out all the food.

I pretended I didn’t hear her.

“You’re still dead to her,” Thistle informed Clove. “It’s probably going to take homemade cookies to get her to talk to you again.”

Clove looked genuinely sad.

“If I were you, I’d steal some of my mom’s pot to put in them,” Thistle laughed. “It really couldn’t hurt at this point.”

Twenty-Two

I was stuck at Hypnotic for the rest of the afternoon, so I made a few calls and emailed my story back to the office. Since The Whistler was a weekly, everything would be old news for the readers by the time it printed, but there was no way I could print an edition without at least mentioning the murders. I would never hear the end of it.

By mid-afternoon, though, I was starting to go stir crazy. “I should have driven to work myself.”

“Stop your whining,” Thistle said, not looking up from the handmade candles she was dipping at the table in the corner. She’s the craftiest of the three of us. Her candles were actually really big sellers – especially the ones she infused with herbs for scent and glitter for decoration.

“I’m bored, and I want to go out the inn and ask if they remember these other cases.” Although why they wouldn’t have mentioned them was beyond me.

“Call them,” Clove offered, tossing the black cordless phone onto the couch next to me.

“No, I’d rather do it in person.”

“Walk out there,” Thistle said evilly.

I shot her a dirty look. “Bite me.”

“I’m a little busy, why don’t you see what Landon is doing,” she shot back. “He looked like he wanted to sample you for lunch.”

Clove giggled from behind the counter. When she caught my dark look, though, she immediately stifled it. She knew she was still in the doghouse from earlier.

I tried to get comfortable on the couch – but without anything to distract me, that was a losing proposition.

“Doesn’t someone want to drive me out to the inn?” I figured if I badgered them long enough, one of them would cave. Probably Clove, if I had to guess.

“Not particularly,” Thistle answered dryly.

Clove tried to look busy for a second and then sighed heavily. “I’ll take you.” I knew it would be her.

“You’re only taking her because you’re hoping she won’t be mad at you anymore,” Thistle scoffed.

“I am not,” Clove said indignantly. “She’s injured. She needs help.”

“She’s fine,” Thistle countered. “She can sit there for another two hours until we close and then we can all go up to the inn together. They’ll be thrilled to see us. Another dinner to torture us over.”

Clove was caught. “Can you wait?”

I sighed dramatically.  “Not really.”

Thistle gritted out what sounded like a growl. She stalked into the back room and came out with a huge box, which she proceeded to drag over to me and drop at my feet.

“We just got a new shipment of incense,” she announced. “Why don’t you sort it? Make sure that you only put like scents together.”

“You want me to do actual work?”

“Rather than sitting there and bitching? Yeah.”

I grumbled a few choice words under my breath, but I proceeded to tackle the task put before me. If I was stuck here, I might as well do something. Anything was better than sitting here and staring at the walls. They really needed a television in here or something.

Surprisingly, the next two hours went relatively quickly. Even Thistle was impressed with my work ethic. “Good job,” she patted me on the head when she took the last stack of incense from me and placed it on the shelves.

“I’m not a dog,” I mumbled.

“No, a dog is easier to take care of.”

“And friendlier,” Clove said under her breath.

“I heard that.”

“I think she meant for you to.”

When we got out to the inn, Thistle parked in guest parking at the front of the inn so it would be easier for me to be able to maneuver through the main door. When we got inside, Marnie was checking a middle-aged couple in at the front desk. She seemed surprised when she saw us.

“Why are you limping?”

“I fell.” I didn’t think telling her how I sustained the injury would be a good way to start out this visit. Damn. I should have thought of a lie ahead of time. They were bound to sniff out the truth.

“She was trying to make Clove eat dirt again and things got out of hand.” Thistle had obviously done my thinking for me. I shot her a grateful look.

Marnie seemed to accept the explanation without complaint. I had made Clove eat more dirt than was probably healthy. In return, Clove had ripped more chunks of hair out of my head than was necessary to fill a full wig.

We left Marnie to finish checking the couple in and made our way through the formal dining room and into the communal kitchen. My mom and Twila were both chopping vegetables at the center island. They had been engrossed in conversation that stilled the moment we walked through the door.

“Wow, what a nice surprise,” Twila enthused.

“We can hardly believe it ourselves,” Thistle deadpanned.

Twila paused what she was doing and took in her daughter’s appearance for a second. She shook her head slightly but didn’t say anything.

“What?” Thistle already sounded exasperated, and her mother hadn’t even insulted her yet.

“Nothing, dear, it’s just that . . . it’s nothing.”

“You might as well say it.”

“It’s just that, well, makeup is meant to enhance, not cake on. You shouldn’t look like a human coloring book.”

“This is the style,” Thistle argued.

“You look like a rainbow raccoon.”

“Yeah, well you look like . . .”

“You’re working hard,” I cut Thistle off. I didn’t need things to devolve into World War III before I had some answers. After I had my answers, they could verbally smack the shit out of each other to their hearts content.

“Yes, vegetable soup and sandwiches,” Twila said obliviously.

They did make good soup. I guess we could stay for dinner.

I shuffled over to the small desk in the corner of the kitchen, trying to hide my hobble as much as possible. I saw my mom eying me suspiciously. Nothing got past her.

“What happened to you?”

“She was trying to make me eat dirt and I tripped her and she sprained her ankle,” Clove lied smoothly. I saw the lie was now growing.

“Really? I thought maybe you tripped when you were out in the corn maze last night.”

“How could you possibly know that?” I protested.

“Chief Terry was out here for lunch.” My mom was keeping her hands busy. I had a sneaking suspicion it was so she wouldn’t reach over and smack me.

“How could he possibly know that?” Thistle asked dryly.

That was a good question.

“He didn’t say.” I could tell by my mom’s tone of voice that a righteous rant was heading my way. “He just thought that maybe we should give you a good talking to about walking around crime scenes in the dead of night. I told him that was common sense, and we shouldn’t have to tell you things like that, but he seemed to think you might be lacking common sense.”

And here we go.

“What were you thinking!” My mom practically exploded.

Best just to lie and get it over with at this point. “I wasn’t.”

“And it will never happen again,” Thistle supplied for me.

“She’ll never be that stupid ever again in her life,” Clove chimed in.

I shot a pained smiled at my cousins. What a great help they were being.

“You may have a general disdain for life, young lady, but this is just ridiculous.” She was apparently still wound up – and since she was wrapped pretty tight on a normal day – this was going to last for a while. I sighed as I sat back to listen to what I was sure was going to be a ridiculously long diatribe.

After about twenty minutes of being told how lucky I was that I wasn’t raped, murdered and robbed blind – and what if someone had seen me in my pajamas -- she finally began to taper off. Throughout her lengthy speech, she never once paused from cutting up vegetables and shifting them over to Twila. They were like a well-oiled kitchen machine. It was fairly impressive.

Marnie had come in halfway through. When my mom was done yelling, she turned to Thistle. “And you need to stop lying,” she added.

“She lied?” Twila asked in disbelief.

“She said Bay got hurt wrestling with Clove.”

“They tried that on us when they first came in,” Twila clucked.

“They lie to us all the time,” my mom said. “I don’t see why you guys act like this is such a big surprise.”

Cripes.

“We actually came out here for a reason,” Thistle prodded me.

Oh, right. “Yeah, we . . .”

“Just seeing your poor mothers isn’t enough?”

“Well, as much of a bonus as that is, we do have something we want to ask you,” I said sweetly.

“Fine, what is it?”

I pulled the file of newspaper clippings out of my purse and handed them to Thistle. She pushed them across the counter towards my mom and Twila.

“What’s this?” My mom opened the envelope. We watched her read for a few minutes, but she didn’t belie what she was feeling as she did so. Finally, she looked up at us expectantly.

“So?”

“So? Don’t you think that’s a little, I don’t know, coincidental?”

Twila and Marnie were looking at the clippings now, too.

“Oh, I remember this,” Marnie said. “This was a big deal when it happened.”

‘I don’t really remember it,” Twila said.

I was dumbfounded. “Two teenagers, a boy and girl, who had their hearts ripped out and were left in area barns? You don’t think that bears mentioning given what has happened here?”

My mom shrugged. “I didn’t really think about it. You could have a point, though.”

“About what?”

Great, Aunt Tillie was here.

Marnie showed her the articles. Aunt Tillie wasn’t impressed either. “That’s from like thirty years ago.”

“Yes, but it’s the same thing that’s happening now.”

“But it happened like forty miles away,” she countered.

“That’s really not that far.”

Thistle and Clove seemed surprised by their reactions, too. “You don’t think those murders have a lot in common with the murders of Shane and Sophie?”

“I guess,” Marnie hedged. “Isn’t it unheard of for a serial killer to have such a long cooling off period, though?”

“How do you know about cooling off periods,” Clove asked incredulously.

“She watches all those
Dateline
shows whenever they’re on,” my mom answered for her. “She’s quite knowledgeable about serial killers.”

What a great expertise to have.

“They never caught the killer, right?” Clove asked.

“No, I don’t think so. I just think people forgot about it after awhile,” Marnie said.

“You don’t find that weird? That would have been one of the biggest things to ever happen around here.”

“Eh, it wasn’t happening here so people really didn’t care,” Aunt Tillie said, absently waving her hand.

“You didn’t care that teenagers were getting their hearts ripped out?”

Aunt Tillie swung on me. “Don’t you use that tone of voice with me, young lady. I’ve had just about enough of you lately.”

“Enough of me? What did I do?”

“All three of you are so full of yourselves,” she said. “You act like you’re so much smarter than us. Where do you think you got those brains you’re so proud of, missy?”

“Um, college.”

Aunt Tillie made a move to smack me, but even with an injured ankle I managed to get out of her way. “Hey!”

“You need to learn to respect your elders.”

“I do respect my elders. I just don’t understand how they don’t see how this is relevant!”

“I didn’t say it wasn’t relevant,” she seethed. “I said that it wasn’t that big of a deal at the time. “

I turned to Marnie for help. She seemed to be the only one that understood the importance of the previous case. She obviously wasn’t willing to take a stand against Aunt Tillie, though.

She handed the envelope with the articles in it back to me and smiled brightly. “I hope they find the killer.”

This was really unbelievable.

Twenty-Three

I woke up the next morning with what felt like an alcohol hangover  -- which was impossible, since I hadn’t had anything to drink the night before, besides about a quart of mom and aunt instilled guilt, that is.