A Witch Before Dying: A Wishcraft Mystery (5 page)

Nick came back inside. “Find anything missing?”

Connor shook his head. “No.”

I shivered. “Why is it so cold in here?”

Connor said, “The air-conditioning is broken. Only runs at one temp, and we can’t afford to get it fixed.”

I glanced at it. It was one of those enormous seventies-era thermostats. The little plastic piece you pushed to adjust the temperature was gone. “Why not shut it off?” I asked. It seemed like a reasonable question.

“Elodie wouldn’t hear of it. Some of the things in here need to be temperature controlled. Artwork and stuff.”

Looking at the walls, I inventoried the art in the room. Beside the shadowboxes, there were several hanging tapestries, a couple of oil paintings, and a wall of antique portraits.

I was feeling light-headed as Yvonne said, “Patrice would hate this. People in her home, the police involved. Elodie should never have hired anyone to clean this place out. What if Patrice comes home and finds all her things gone?”

None of us said anything. I was touched and humbled that Yvonne still held faith that Patrice would be back.

Yvonne shuddered. “I just wish we knew where Patrice was.”

Nick’s gaze shifted to me. He knew that I, as a Wishcrafter, was obligated to grant the wish.

I turned under the pretense of examining the extent of the clutter behind me (which was monumental) and mouthed the wishing spell under my breath. “Wish I might, wish I may, grant this wish without delay.”

“We may never know, Mom,” Connor said.

Missy suddenly barked as the orange tabby we’d seen outside earlier streaked into the house. Missy chased after her, dodging through our legs as the tabby dove on top of the piles of clutter. Missy found an opening in the mess and went under.

I had a bad feeling. That feeling escalated into a vibration. The mountains were starting to crumble. I held out my hands to brace myself.

“Watch out!” Nick yelled, pulling me back toward him.

One of the piles wobbled in slow motion, swaying left. Swaying right. I felt the thudding of Nick’s heart against my back as the mountain gave one final lurch and toppled. An avalanche of clutter crashed down around us. Dust plumed like a mushroom cloud.

Nick held me tightly (I didn’t mind that part so much) while the dust settled. When the floor stopped shaking, I glanced around. Connor and Yvonne stood unscathed on the other side of the room. My heart beat in my throat as I looked for Missy, and I could feel my pulse pounding in my ears. If something happened to her…I couldn’t even think about it. I had to find her.

I coughed at dust lingering in the air and frantically started moving boxes. “Missy!” I called out.

Nick helped me look, lifting some of the heavier objects. “Missy!” he echoed.

I heard a bark and breathed in relief when, after moving a box aside, I found Missy sitting atop some rubble next to a vintage leather suitcase. She was whimpering. At first I thought she was injured, but then I saw
it
.

A mummified hand was sticking out of the suitcase.

“Is that…,” I whispered to Nick, unable to finish my sentence. My vocal cords had frozen in sheer terror.

He stepped forward and carefully undid the suitcase straps. Slowly, he lifted its top, then lowered it again. He
looked at us, his face ashen, and said, “There’s a body in there.”

Yvonne started screaming.

My hand went to my mouth as I tried to absorb this shock, knowing
I
had done this. Granting Yvonne’s wish had led to this discovery.

Patrice Keaton had been found.

I
was sitting in a rattan rocker on Yvonne’s front porch, watching police officers mill about the crime scene.

The crime scene
.

I could hardly believe I was involved in another murder case.

And I had no doubt it was murder. Suicidal people didn’t contort themselves into suitcases, secure the straps, then cover themselves with tons of clutter.

I shuddered at the memory of that corpse as Yvonne handed me a glass of water and then sat in the matching chair next to me. Her hand shook as it held her glass. Water sloshed over the rim, but she didn’t seem to notice.

Missy sat at the edge of the walkway, her head turning back and forth as she took in all that was going on. Nick had told us to wait at Yvonne’s house until the scene was under control and our statements could be taken.

He currently stood in the doorway of Patrice’s house, talking to someone from the medical examiner’s office. I was hoping he’d share some details with me later—Harper was going to have tons of questions, and if I didn’t have the answers she was going to nag until I did.

I watched Nick carefully, feeling a pang of empathy. Nothing like trial by fire. This was the first week of his
new job—everyone was going to be watching to see how he handled this case. Watching to see if he could find a killer. He was going to be under a lot of pressure.

Connor and Elodie were somewhere inside Patrice’s house. Elodie had been oddly quiet about the discovery. Not so much as a tear when Connor had broken the news.

Maybe she’s in shock
, I reasoned.

I knew I was.

Neighbors gathered beyond the orange cones that had been set up to block off the street. Several brightly hued MINI Coopers, a van from the medical examiner’s office, a fire engine, and an ambulance lined both sides of the road.

News that a body had been found would spread fast.

I bit the inside of my cheek and thought about that mummified hand. It looked like it had been reaching out…grasping for something. Someone.

Was it possible that Patrice had been alive when put in that suitcase? How long had she tried to escape? How long had she been buried alive in her own house?

I shuddered again and couldn’t help but wonder why someone hadn’t made a wish to find Patrice long ago. Not Elodie—that was impossible because she was a Wishcrafter. But why not someone else? It made me consider whether the people closest to Patrice hadn’t really wanted her found before now—or if they simply hadn’t considered the possibility that a Wishcrafter could have helped locate Patrice.

“This is more shocking than any episode of
Law & Order
,” Yvonne mumbled. A breeze stirred a hanging fern. “Even the one where Claire Kincaid dies. And that was up there.”

The technician from the medical examiner’s office took something out of the back of his van. My stomach rolled at the sight of the empty body bag. I tore my gaze from the
tech as he went into Patrice’s house. I forced myself to focus on Yvonne. “Had you known Patrice long?”

“Almost my whole life.” She rocked slowly. “We went to high school together, got married around the same time, right after graduation, bought houses across from each other, had babies the same year.”

I wondered at what she
didn’t
say. No mention of being friends. I pressed for clarification. “You were the best of friends, then?”

I didn’t know why I was being so pushy. Maybe I’d been hanging out with forensics-happy Harper too long. Maybe the last murder investigation I was mixed up in had whetted my appetite for solving crimes.

I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that I had the sudden hunger to find out who killed Patrice. And why. No one deserved to die the way she had, stuffed in that suitcase, reaching out for help.

Help I couldn’t give her then, but I could possibly give her now by assisting Nick in figuring out who had killed her. Which would also help Nick…and I liked that thought very much.

Yvonne must have noticed her hands were shaking because she suddenly gripped her glass so tight I was afraid it might shatter. “We were close once. Not so much by the time she disappeared…” Her voice trailed off. Softly she said, “By the time she died. Do you think she’s been in there the whole time she was missing?”

The question had gone through my head, too. “I’m not sure.” The autopsy would probably be able to provide the answer.

Two more police officers went into the house. Rocking faster, Yvonne watched them and said, “Patrice would hate her house being trampled through.”

“Why?” I asked. It wasn’t the first time Yvonne had said so.

“In public, she was very outgoing and friendly, but in
reality, she was a very private person. Because of that, very few people were allowed into her home.”

“Not because of the clutter?”

“Patrice called it her treasure, and wasn’t embarrassed by it at all. However, she’d hate the thought of people touching things, moving stuff around.” She slowed to take a sip of water. “Patrice was very particular. It might look like chaos to us in there, but she knew where everything was. Down to every last mineral she ever collected.”

“Who was allowed in her house?” I asked, again pushing for some answers.

In my head I’d already started a suspect list. As of right now, there was no one on it. Harper, undoubtedly, would laugh if she knew I hadn’t come up with a single possible perpetrator.

Thankfully, Yvonne was a talker and didn’t mind my nosiness. “Well, Elodie, of course. Connor. Me. My husband, Roger.” Her voice dropped when she said her husband’s name, and she picked at the loose rattan on the arm of her chair. “Roger kind of took over the man-of-the-house duties when Patrice’s husband, Geer, died. Fixed the broken gutter, helped plant the vegetable garden, that kind of thing.”

Yvonne jumped onto my suspect list. There was a melancholy in her voice that told me she suspected Roger did more than just help around Patrice’s house.

Had he cheated on her with Patrice?

Was that why Patrice and Yvonne had stopped being friends?

“If only we hadn’t let Patrice leave the Sorcerer’s Stove alone that night,” Yvonne said.

Stunned, I rocked faster. “You were at the Stove with her the night she disappeared?” Neither Ve nor Marcus had mentioned that little fact.

Missy loped up the steps and jumped onto my lap. I petted her head as she sniffed Yvonne’s arm.

Her rocker came to a stop. Yvonne stretched out her legs and nodded. “A double date. Me and Roger and Patrice and Mr. Macabre.”

For a second I thought I heard her wrong. “Mr. Macabre?”

Yvonne smiled mischievously. “My pet name for Andreus Woodshall. He’s a Charmcrafter, and one of the most popular vendors with the Roving Stones. Every time the fair was in town, Andreus wooed Patrice. But he was only interested in her for one thing.”

“Sex?” I asked in a whisper.

“Worse,” Yvonne said.

Worse
? What kind of marriage did she and Roger have?

“All Mr. Macabre wanted was the Anicula.”

Missy barked, one short yap. I rubbed her ears and realized what Yvonne was saying. Charmcrafters. The Anicula…She knew about the witchcraft in the village.

There was no way to tell at first sight if someone was a Crafter. The only ways of knowing were from word spread among Crafters about who was who, or if their powers were revealed through the double twitch of the left eye—a sure sign a spell had been cast. And since revealing powers to a mortal, even accidentally, could cause Crafters to lose their powers forever…people didn’t tend to talk about it openly.

She must have heard through the Craft grapevine that I was a Wishcrafter. Which meant that Yvonne had to be some sort of Crafter, too.

“I can see your thoughts spinning,” Yvonne said, eyeing me carefully. “We’re Halfcrafters. My husband, Roger, used to be a Geocrafter before he married little ol’ mortal me. I’m president of the neighborhood association of Halfcrafters as well.”

She’d taken quite a risk in telling me. The punishment
for a Halfcrafter who revealed anything about the Craft to a mortal was to be turned into a frog.

When a Crafter married a mortal, in accordance with Craft Law he or she had two options. One was to reveal the Craft to the spouse. In that case, the Crafter forfeited his or her powers (the Craft really frowned upon such unions) and became a Halfcrafter (the loss of powers essentially turned a Crafter into a mortal). My mind automatically filled in the blanks. In this case, Connor had to be a full-fledged Geocrafter like his father had been since his mother once had been fully mortal.

The other option was, of course, to keep the Craft a secret from a spouse, thus leading a difficult life of lies and magical subterfuge, but retaining the ability to perform magic. The clueless spouse in that instance did not become a Halfcrafter, and held no knowledge of the Craft at all.

Within the Craft community, Halfcrafters were still treated as Crafters. They still had to attend Craft meetings (and apparently held their own), had to answer to the Elder, and were held to Craft laws. And when the marriage ended for whatever reason (death, divorce), the Crafter could petition the Elder to have powers restored. That request wasn’t always granted, however.

The Craft-mortal marriage laws were a bit harsh, in my opinion. But I supposed there was a reason why our heritage had been able to thrive without exposure all these centuries.

I was still trying to process the fact that there was a neighborhood association of Halfcrafters—and wondering if Nick was part of it—when I spotted, across the street, a stretcher being brought into the house from the ME’s van. Elodie and Connor still hadn’t come out. And now Nick was nowhere to be seen.

“I’ve said too much, haven’t I?” Yvonne said, putting
her hand on my arm. “It’s just that sometimes I get carried away. Plus, the shock of seeing that hand…I tend to babble when I’m stressed. Am I babbling?”

Missy barked.

I agreed.

Yvonne sighed as if she had already known the answer. “I should be more distraught, I know. And I am. Deep down. I’ll miss Patrice—our old friendship at least—but I think…I think I knew this day would eventually come. Patrice never would have left Elodie willingly. I can’t say she always had Elodie’s best interests at heart, but she wouldn’t have walked away on her own.”

There was so much to ask, I was having trouble figuring out what to say first. “She didn’t have Elodie’s best interests at heart?”

Yvonne waved a hand in dismissal. “It was nothing.”