Would-Be Witch (3 page)

“What was in the hidden safe?”

“The sheriff hasn’t said so far. But the thieves found it, so what does that tell you?” she asked in an urgent whisper.

“That they’ve chosen the right line of work?”

She giggled. “That too maybe, and the sheriff’s spitting mad. But how could they have found it? Unless they knew it was there? This was an inside job.”

The use of the word
job
made me feel like we were in a 1970s movie like
The Getaway
with Steve McQueen. I just love old movies.

I cocked my head. “ ‘Inside job’ means inside the house. You’re saying you think the sheriff or Miss Marlene set up a fake robbery?”

“What? Oh, of course not! No more liquor for you—”

“I haven’t had any,” I protested.

“By ‘inside,’ I mean inside the town. Must have been.”

“Hmm,” I said, chewing on the thought. The sheriff and his deputies were considered a pretty competent outfit. They didn’t always arrest people for causing trouble, but they always knew who deserved arresting. No one in town would be hot to tangle with the sheriff once he was good and pissed off.

“Why would someone from town steal the painting? Not like you can hang it or pawn it around here without someone knowing,” I said.

“That’s right. You’re absolutely right. See what good it did you being married to Zach? You guys should get remarried. You’re already sleeping with him again, for pete’s sake.”

“I don’t like being married to him. When we start fighting, I have to stay over at someone’s house, carting my pots and pans all over town, people shaking their heads at me like they saw it coming again. This way when he starts bossing me around too much, I can just throw his clothes on the front lawn and be done with it,” I said.

She giggled. “You know you love that man.”

“Love is most definitely beside the point,” I said. Married and divorced before we were twenty, Zach and I had probably set some kind of Duvall record.

I needed to stop messing around with him, but old habits die hard, and I’d been crazy in love with him since I was ten. Emphasis on crazy. I looked around, wondering if the reason he hadn’t shown up yet was because he was still busy with the case at the sheriff’s house.

I froze in place when I saw Edie. She was sitting on top of the armoire next to Georgia Sue and Kenny’s big-screen TV. She was wearing a large black-and-white hat and a drop-waist dress. She held a martini in one hand, looking flawless and elegant, and not at all out of place among the pinstripe-clad gangsters with plastic tommy guns hovering near the buffet table. She waved with her free hand, and I wondered: where did she get gin and olives in the afterlife?

“. . . and there’s going to be a big surprise later,” Georgia Sue was saying, giving my arm a squeeze.

I wondered if the party would turn into a murder mystery. She’d done that one year, and it had been fun. I’d gotten to play a gumshoe.

“. . . mingle and have a good time before Zach gets here and has a fit about that dress.”

I pursed my lips defiantly. “Zach can’t tell me what to wear. I’ll wear what I want to.”
Or whatever I’m forced to by a manipulative ghost and her sequin-sewing sidekick.

“Uh-huh,” she said, not sounding convinced. Then she was off to greet some more people.

“Hello, Tamara.”

The hair on the back of my neck rose, and I shivered. Very few people call me Tamara, and only one of them has a deep voice that’s sexy as sin and smooth as molasses. I turned to find Bryn Lyons. With his black hair, cobalt-colored eyes, and Edie’s martini as a prop, he could have passed for the real James Bond. Tonight, he was dressed as Zorro.

“Hi,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest, trying to cover up as gooseflesh rippled over my arms. “I’m surprised you’re not at the mayor’s party.”

“Care for a drink?” he asked, handing me one of Georgia Sue’s fancy wineglasses with magnolias hand-painted on the side. “Chambord margarita.”

I took a sip. Delicious raspberry flavor burst over my tongue, and then I felt a strange reverberation coming from Bryn’s direction.
Magic.
He’d been using tonight. I was surprised that I could tell since, as a nonpractitioner, I can’t usually detect magical energy.

“What have you been doing?” I said.

“Why do you ask?”

“Well—” I paused, leaning closer to him. He inclined his head, which I suppose was to let me whisper in his ear rather than to get closer to my barely covered body. Still, my heart hammered with sexual heat. Bryn had always been dangerously gorgeous, but he’d never sought me out. He tended to import his girlfriends in from Dallas. They were often tall, tan, and too perfect to have been born looking the way they did. I don’t think he worked any glamour on them, but maybe he paid for their plastic surgeons. He was certainly rich enough to afford it.

“I didn’t know you were active,” I said.

“Active in what way?” he asked. His teasing voice had that faint Irish lilt that I sometimes detected. I wondered again where he was from. He and his father had moved to Duvall when Bryn was around thirteen. Being six years younger, I didn’t meet him right off. Our paths crossed by accident for the first time when I was sixteen, and I’d been curious about him ever since. Momma, Aunt Mel, and Edie had immediately shut down my questions though and forbid me from talking to him, but I always listened with interest to anything they said about him and his father, Lennox.

I raised my eyebrows. “Never mind,” I said. “I really can’t talk to you.”

“Why is that?”

I took a gulp of my margarita to stall. I couldn’t tell the truth: that for reasons I didn’t understand, I’d been made to memorize Lenore McKenna’s List of Nine. Lenore was my great-great-grandma and Edie’s twin sister, and she’d written down nine last names that a McKenna girl was never supposed to associate with. Something to do with the family being destroyed for all eternity. On Lenore’s list, Lyons was smack-dab in the middle at number five. But since the list was a secret, I didn’t know what to say to Bryn about why I couldn’t talk to him.

I guess I could have blamed it on Zach, saying he’d get jealous, but Bryn would probably think my getting involved with Zach again was as stupid an idea as, well, it was.

“I can’t really say, but it was nice seeing you.”

“Why can’t you say?” he asked.

“Beautiful and deadly,” Edie said. I turned my head to find her standing next to me. “He’s a Lyons. Off-limits, and you know it. Too bad, too. I wouldn’t have minded the show. He’s spectacular out of those clothes.”

I gasped. How did she know what he looked like out of his clothes? Did she have Superman X-ray vision? Or had she haunted his house for fun?

I could forgive Edie being a ghost voyeur. After all, what was there to do after death besides people watch—and, apparently, drink martinis? But I did
not
want to hear about it if she watched me making love. And if she’d been kinky before she died, that was her own business and not mine.

Bryn’s cobalt blue eyes narrowed, and his gaze focused on the spot where Edie stood staring back at him. She smiled and blew him a kiss. He didn’t respond, but he didn’t look away either.

“What’s wrong?” I asked him, wondering if he could see her.

“There’s something here. Do you feel it?” he asked.

Uh-oh.
“No.”

He mumbled something.
A spell!
I felt his magic and a sudden rush as Edie slammed her way back into the locket. The only remnant of her was a faint bluish afterglow near my shoulder. I wondered if his spell had hurt her, and it upset me to think so.

“Well, if you’ll excuse me,” I said, backing up.

His eyes moved up one of the twin slits that kept showing flashes of thigh when I walked. “That dress suits you.”

“Oh, I hope not,” I said, escaping to the screened porch.

There were a dozen of us in the back room when Georgia’s surprise started: two guys dressed as old-timey bandits walked around collecting loot from everyone. I hoped I’d get to be part of the posse to hunt them down during the game.

I noticed that Elmer Fudd—Mr. Deutch—hesitated to let his wife, a cross-dressing Bugs Bunny, put her big canary diamond ring into the pillowcase the bandits were using as a sack.

“C’mon, Pops, get with the program,” the bandit with a red bandana over his face said as he grabbed Mrs. Deutch’s hand. He wrestled the ring off her finger and dropped it in the case.

Then he moved in front of me. I dropped my little beaded clutch purse into the sack.

“I’ll take that too,” he said, nodding to the locket.

“Oh, no,” I said. “I can’t take it off here.”

“This is a stickup, Birdie. Everything goes into the bag.”

“No.” I put my hand over the locket, pressing it against my chest.

Old-timey Red pointed his old pistol at the mounted head of a moose, which had already been shot once in Alaska by Kenny in 2003, and pulled the trigger. The pistol’s report startled us all into silence, and then Red pointed it at my head. “Put the necklace in the bag,” he said.

“A loaded gun? The sheriff will kill Georgia Sue,” I muttered.

The second bandit, who wore a green bandana over his face caught my arm and yanked it down. The locket pulled out of my hand, and Red snatched it and dragged it up and over my head.

“Wait,” I yelled and grabbed Red as he turned to leave. Red broke free, and both bandits waved their guns menacingly as they ran toward the door. “No,” I shouted, stumbling after them. Mr. Deutch grabbed me around the waist to stop me.

“Let go! They’ve got Edie,” I snapped.

“You named your locket?” Mrs. Deutch asked.

I jerked free of Mr. Deutch’s hold and rushed out of the room. The bandits had left the front door wide open, and I hurled myself through it. They were actually leaving, actually stealing the locket!

“Hey!” I sprinted toward the driveway, coming right out of my shoes when the heels got stuck in the lawn. “I’ll pay you for the locket. I’ll pay a lot!” I screamed as they peeled out in Councilwoman Faber’s brown Jaguar.

I ran after the car, pounding the pavement with my bare feet until it turned a corner and I lost sight of it.

“Oh no,” I whimpered, holding my head as I panted for breath.
How could you have let them get it? Why didn’t you hide it when you saw them taking things? You were supposed to keep her safe,
I shouted at myself in my head.

“I thought it was a game. Another murder mystery game,” I whispered to no one. “Oh, this is bad. This is so bad,” I mumbled. October twenty-fourth was only six days away. I had to get Edie back by then or she’d be destroyed forever. And what if she came out before that? What if she came out again tonight? She’d be lost without someone from the family to connect to and then she’d get sucked into whatever darkness had almost gotten her twenty years ago.

I turned and ran back to the house. Everyone was in an uproar. People were yelling at Georgia that she’d gone too far with this game, that letting the actors carry real guns was madness. I rubbed the tears off my cheeks with the heel of my hand, hoping the others were right: that it was a game, and that the bandits would bring the locket directly back.

“Just shut up!” Georgia Sue snapped in a voice that could’ve pierced armor. “I did not hire them! My surprise was a magician. Those men with the sack must be the same ones who robbed the sheriff. It’s a crime spree is what it is.”

“Oh dear Lord,” Mrs. Deutch wailed.

“They took my Jaguar. I’ve got to get it back,” Mrs. Faber said, her patrician nose turned up.

I stood numbly in the corner. I hung my head, looking at my pale pink toenails. I needed to do something, but I didn’t know what.

“Tamara, your feet,” Bryn said. “Come and sit down.”

I didn’t resist as he led me to a wingback chair at the edge of the foyer.

“They took my locket. It’s a family heirloom. It means the world to us,” I mumbled, sinking down. “Has someone called the sheriff?”

“Yes, the police are on the way,” he said, shaking his head as he looked at the bottom of my feet, which were dirty and skinned.

“Did they take anything of yours?”

“My Rolex. My fault. Zorro didn’t wear a wristwatch. I should have left it at home.”

“I’m sorry about your watch,” I said, but I didn’t really mean it. I was so preoccupied with my own trouble that I didn’t have a bit of sadness to share for someone else’s.

“Oh, don’t worry. I’ll be compensated when they’re found.”

I looked at him suddenly. Bryn Lyons knew magic and was rich. That combination meant he usually got whatever he wanted. If anyone could make sure the thieves were caught quickly, he could.

“I need my locket back as soon as possible. If you find them will you make sure that I get it? It can’t be stored in evidence or anything like that.”

“If I find them before the police, you’ll have it back immediately.”

“Thank you,” I said, clutching his arm. He was on one knee in front of me and looked suave enough for celluloid.

He smiled.

We heard sirens and both looked toward the door. “The cavalry,” he said.

“I should rinse my feet and put my shoes on.”

“I’ll get your shoes.” He stood. “It’ll be all right,” he added.

I nodded with a weak smile and limped off to the bathroom.

By the time my feet were clean, Zach and the others had arrived. The sheriff had a colicky look as he tried to calm folks down.

I grabbed Zach’s arm and pulled him toward the back room.

“Easy now,” he said, extracting himself. “I need to listen to the sheriff and so do you.”

“They got my locket, Zach. The Edie locket.”

“Well, good riddance,” he said, moving back toward the people crowded around the sheriff.

I felt like he’d dumped a pitcher of ice water over my head. I stood rigid as a steel beam and stared after him.

I would wait my turn to tell him and the sheriff what I’d had taken. And, for Edie’s sake, I would pester him as much as I could to get them to find the thieves, but, once I had her back, I wouldn’t bother to cross the street to talk to my cold-blooded bastard of an ex-husband. Good riddance, indeed.