Witch One Dunnit? (Rachael Penzra mystery) (15 page)

       We sat in companionable silence and comforted ourselves like pigs.

       Like all good things, our food-fest came to an end.  Moondance stuffed the last Peanut Butter Ball into her mouth and spoke around it.  “Aren’t you going to look at the stuff?”  She looked like a hurt puppy with her big brown eyes fixed on me.

       “Of course I am,” I assured her, using the nauseatingly hearty voice of a used car salesman.  “I wanted to get us both fed and comfortable so I can concentrate.  This is a lot, though,” I said, thumbing through the pages.  “I might have to study it alone before I can get much use out of it.  I’m not good at memorizing things quickly.  And I read slowly.”  That was an out and out lie, but I didn’t want to be impolite about getting her to go home.  Soon.  If she thought I was going through all of those pages with her word by word, starting at nine-thirty at night, she was loonier than she appeared.

       Thankfully, she wasn’t.  “Oh, I don’t want to think about it anymore,” she admitted.  “I’m sick of using that stupid spellchecker.  I had to stop every page and use it.  It’s like being back in school and doing homework.  I hated school.”

       “So did I.” No lie, although I’m sure we had different reasons.  “You shouldn’t have worried about the spelling.  I just can’t believe you got this much done.  You must be a good typist.”

       “I am,” she agreed.  “If I don’t have to think about writing something, just copy it, I’m really fast and accurate.  If I hadn’t met my Jimbo, I would have been a secretary somewhere.”  Jimbo, I knew from gossip, was as sharp mentally as Moondance was slow.  Not a bad idea for a marriage.  No conflict, opposites attract, and all the other bologna we tell ourselves when searching for the perfect mate. 

       I managed to herd her out the door after giving her ten minutes to rave about her Jimbo.  At least from her point of view, they had a great marriage. It had to be nice, sometimes, to be so completely uncritical.  It probably didn’t hurt to have someone adore you, either.  Having no experience either way, I was polite, but not terribly enthusiastic. 

       When she was gone and my door was again securely locked, I sat down and paged through the sheets with interest.  Moondance might be a little slow mentally, but she could gossip with the best of them.  I really would have to destroy the evidence after I had copied it.  Some of it had to be highly libelous.

       Moondance (Edith) Parker: (she’d conscientiously started with herself and she actually did have real names) 42 years old (first lie), high school graduate (she’d stuck it out), born and raised in Brainerd, Minnesota. Married to James, no children.  From there on I plowed through a resume of Jimbo’s career.  His life seemed to be hers, although she did mention becoming a witch and joining the coven.  I was surprised to read that Wicca seemed to comprise of only a segment of her life, despite the fact she seemed almost obsessed with it.  But she mentioned singing in the community choir, playing Bridge twice weekly, volunteering twenty hours a week at the nursing home...  When did she find the time to fit it all in? 

       She also listed “likes and dislikes”, as though we were running a beauty pageant.  Moondance loved animals and children and old people.  Hated snakes and bullies and “mean” people.  I wondered who rated as “mean” in her mind.

       Apparently Lucinda did, although I could tell she was trying to hide the fact.  No doubt Lucinda was short on patience with Moondance’s nonsense, and let it show.  Well, Moondance was having her little revenge on paper.

       She listed Lucinda as 54, two years older than Lucinda publicly laid claim to (adding that she had
heard
rumors that sixty was closer to the truth), and she’d had several years of college (depicting, it was mentioned, an MRS. degree) before she dropped out of school and married “the unfortunate” Rudy Dewitt.  Rudy (who was “richer than Midas”) died when Shelly was only ten, leaving the girl under her mother’s care (“he left most of his money to his daughter.  Does that tell you anything?”)  The rest was mainly rumor and gossip.  Lucinda had once had a lover, but he’d dropped her for a younger woman.  She often went to Boston or New York to meet men, pretending to go to concerts and such, but everyone knew what she was
really
up to.  She bossed people around “when it really wasn’t her business to.”

       There was one point of real interest.  It seemed the unfortunate Rudy had left the main chunk of his money to Shelly, who in another year or so, would have come of age and gained control of it.  I wondered if there had been a proviso for her turning twenty-one, or if it was left to the more modern eighteen years.  She was older than eighteen, I belatedly remembered, so it must have been twenty-one.  She obviously hadn’t had her hands on the money before she died.

   Would she have been likely to have made a will?  Maybe, with all that money.  Still, who would she have been bound to leave it to?  Her mother was the simplest answer.  In a few years Shelly would have been apt to fall in love, or take up a Cause.  Then there would be danger of the will being changed.  For that matter, it could be the will held the money until she reached a certain age and if she died before that time, the money might automatically revert to Lucinda.  I had a lot to find out.  Wills, I had a vague idea, are probated and become public property soon after death.  I wondered how long it normally took, especially in a case of murder.

       Janice Barker, the great performer, only got a side-note in Moondance’s unauthorized biography of the coven members.  She, apparently, was spending the summer in Europe, and had been gone for two weeks before Shelly was murdered.  Nevertheless, it seemed she belonged to the inner circle Moondance connected with my aunt and Shelly.  She, too, I recalled, had insisted Aunt Josie was murdered.

       Robert Court, the handsome owner of Balgrove, was heaped with praise.  Even his patience with “that Perkins girl” was considered a sign of his innate goodness.  I’d rather liked the little I’d seen of him – until I read Moondance’s glowing opinion of him.  There’s nothing like hearing somebody highly lauded to make you look at him a little skeptically.  He was 38.  That surprised me.  I’d thought he looked younger (men so often do, don’t they?  The bastards!) although when I thought about it, he was extremely poised.  He had a college degree in the less than practical field of History, with emphasis on English history.  If he didn’t want to teach, I thought he’d put his interests and knowledge to good use.  He had been born and raised somewhere in the Midwest.  I wonder how he ended up in the Northeast.

       And right after him was Karyn Perkins’ background, as if the two of them were some sort of package deal.  Karyn, it turned out, worked part time at the local grade school office and occasionally did substitute teaching.  Ugh!  Poor thing.  I couldn’t imagine times had changed so much that subbing was a pleasure, even at the grade school level.  At best you were a highly-qualified baby-sitter.  I’ve never cared for baby-sitting, myself.  During the summers she, of course, worked at the Balgrove.  Moondance added a few catty comments about the young woman’s obvious crush on her boss, and questioned the true color of her hair.  “I don’t think she’s a true redhead
.
”
 
If that was supposed to be a subtle hint letting me know Karyn might be hiding
other things as well,
and I had a sneaking suspicion it was, it didn’t work.  If every woman who dyed her hair was hiding the fact she was a murderer, half the female population of the country would be in jail.

       Cheryl, whom I wasn’t very interested in, wasn’t very interesting.  Other than a habit of mixing her religions, she was rather dull.  At the moment she belonged, as a member, to the Lutheran Church.  Apparently it was a form of a “born-to” church in her case.  She attended it fairly regularly.  Then she held a position as a Sister of Peace in a church on the Internet.  She had her own web page for Wicca.  She was studying Buddhism through the mail.  And she belonged to the local coven.  Outside of her religions she didn’t seem to exist. 

       Ronnie Pfeiffer was a college student, working for his dad in real estate when he wasn’t in school. He seemed to be a typical male of college age.  His main interest appeared to be sex.  Aunt Josie had told me she thought he had the idea that witches, if you got in well enough with them, would allow you to join them in wild orgies.  On the other hand, he seemed good-natured enough about his failure to score on this point.  Although, who was I to know he had?  Nevertheless, I didn’t think he’d indulged in any coven-related orgies.  If he had, this was a far different group than I’d been led to believe.  Moondance noted that he was Shelly’s cousin, her only cousin, and they had never seemed to be terribly close, but they probably had more of a sibling relationship – and it doesn’t always appear pretty to the onlooker.  On the other hand, look at Cain and Abel.

Percy, in his middle thirties, seemed satisfied just to be able to mingle with witches.  His mother, Moondance wrote indignantly, was dead set against his being around such heathens, but he continued to meet with them, with or without his mother’s knowledge.  (I’d guess without.)  There wasn’t so much as a hint about his sexual preferences, although it was mentioned that Shelley was mean to him.

       Elena Farthing.  Even her name sounded exotic.  I really needed to talk to her about Lucinda’s request for psychic help.  She seemed far more capable of finding a killer through her psychic powers than I was through mine.  Even the report on her was unsatisfying.   Middle European background, maybe, or possibly French or Russian or something.  Moondance just
knew
the woman was foreign.  She’d come to town about ten years earlier, buying a small cabin on the edge of town.  She worked as an accountant, mostly from her home. 
An accountant?  That exotic woman?
  And there she was, in our midst, with no past.  Interesting.  Not my business, of course, but that has rarely stopped snoopy people like myself.  It tends to stimulate our nosiness.   

       Moondance had done a good job, but her material was scant.  She just added a lot more words to her report than I needed.  She’d included Ronnie’s dad, Peter Pfeiffer.  What a name to hang on a child.  Pfetter Pfeiffer Pficked a Pfeck of Pfickled Pfeppers ...  You can bet that’s what he heard throughout his childhood. Moondance thought his interest in Wicca was only for Lucinda’s and Ronnie’s sake.  Lucinda, his sister-in-law, had helped set him up in business, and he repaid her with a lot of attention and respect.  His wife had died in a car accident several years earlier, leaving Lucinda, Shelly, Peter and Ronnie as the only surviving relatives of one another.  Coming from a large, complicated family myself, I always have a difficult time understanding there were many people with little or no family.  I don’t know whether to feel sorry for them, or to envy them.  Peter’s main fault seemed to be that he was overly protective of his son, and he might be a gambler.  Moondance based the last surmise on the fact she’d once seen him at a slot machine (a quarter one, mind you, rather than a nickel machine) and he seemed to be winning.  She wasn’t.

       The report was helpful, I guess, as it put these people a little more in perspective.  Unfortunately, it didn’t give me a clue as to who would want Shelly dead, if any of them.  Poor Moondance.  She’d put a lot of work into it.  She could have saved herself a lot of trouble by sticking to the bare facts.  I put it aside, took a quick shower, climbed into bed with a mystery novel and told myself I was actually letting everything percolate in my subconscious.

       Something percolated, all right.  I woke up about two in the morning, panting and on the verge of a scream.  As soon as I calmed down enough I tried to recall what had frightened me.  Dreams escape so quickly, and this one had a head start.  It had frightened me so much I hadn’t been able to think rationally until it had faded almost entirely.  It had blood in it, a lot of blood.  More than that, it had evil. 

       I hate evil.  That sounds simplistic, doesn’t it?  Most people don’t even believe it exists, but I
know
it does.  Maybe we all have it in us at one moment or another in life.  Some people, though thankfully only a few,
are
evil.  It is one of the things that can leap from them into my mind at odd moments.  Many years ago, while walking down a busy street, I felt a surge of absolute evil engulf me.  The sensation was so strong I could actually smell it.  I was so terrified, felt so helpless, that I did everything in my power to close off the sensation.  I didn’t
want
to locate the source of the feeling and I never did.  Just a stranger passing by…

       Usually my dreams, those that aren’t routine, are busy dreams.  I don’t normally have nightmares.  My version of a nightmare, since I’ve been older, has been to spend the night working away at some piddling busy job, exhausting myself by morning.  They’re more annoying than anything.  I’ve learned, these past years, not to allow them to get into my head too far.

       But I’ll take annoyance over fear any day.  Or night.