Lipstick on a Pig (A Paranormal Cozy Mystery) (Willow Bay Witches Book 4) Read online

  Lipstick on a Pig

  Willow Bay Witches #4

  Samantha Silver

  Blueberry Books Press

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Also by Samantha Silver

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  “This is humiliating. I hate it, and I hate you,” Bee scowled. She was in prime form this morning. I sighed as I placed her bed on the little fold-out table where I was collecting donations for the petting zoo.

  It was summer festival time in Willow Bay. Taking place during the second and third weeks of August, the festival was the busiest time of the year. We even got food trucks from Portland to come down and line the streets, adding a little bit of variety to the eight or so places in town where you could normally get a meal.

  As the local vet clinic owner, every year I was the major sponsor for one of the prime family attractions—the petting zoo. That’s where I was now, setting up for the day, as I volunteered to help run the petting zoo every year. Not only was it good for the community, and the donations that people gave to have their children pet local farm animals all went to the local animal shelter, but this year there was an added bonus: my favorite Portland taco truck was parked right at the entrance to the Park, only about fifty feet from where our giant tent was set up. I couldn’t wait for them to open this morning.

  Every year, we normally had the local animal shelter bring down all the dogs and cats they had available for adoption as one of the major features of the petting zoo. And while this year we did have a handful of dogs, we also had the incredibly enviable position of all the local cats in the shelter having been adopted! So, to make sure all our animal friends were represented, I had volunteered Bee to come and sleep nicely in her bed at my table and let herself be pet by little kids who wanted to see all the animals.

  Unfortunately, Bee wasn’t quite as civic-minded as I was, and was making her opinions known.

  “Do you know how disgusting children are? Their hands are sticky. Why are they sticky?” I sighed. In twenty minutes other people were going to start showing up, to help with the petting zoo and the other attractions in the park, and Bee would stop huffing and pretend to be better than everyone else by ignoring everything going on around her—like she did every day at the vet clinic. Or so I hoped. Those twenty minutes couldn’t come soon enough. To think, it was only the first day of the festival. After today, I still had to deal with this for eleven more days.

  I guess I should explain a little bit. I’m a witch. I can cast spells, and like all witches, I have one power that’s unique to me. Mine is that I can speak to animals, and Bee is my little black cat. I like to say she has a lot of personality. It’s a polite way of saying she’s a completely narcissistic drama queen.

  “Remember to be nice today, Bee. You can ignore everyone, but no claws. Remember, if you try to scratch anyone, you’re not getting your sushi roll tonight.”

  Bee had managed to negotiate a roll of sushi, her favorite treat, as payment for each day that she had to sit there and let herself be pet. It might sound like a lot, but she started off by asking for a box each day, so I felt like I negotiated her down reasonably well. Or that was what I told myself, at least. I didn’t want to admit to myself, or to anyone else, that my cat was a better negotiator than I was.

  “You told me I have to be here, you didn’t say I had to behave.”

  “Well I’m telling you now.”

  “That’s not in my contract.”

  “You didn’t sign a contract.”

  “It was verbal.”

  “Fine, well, I’m amending the contract. You scratch anyone or you bite anyone and you don’t get any sushi.”

  Bee scowled at me, walked over to where I was getting the big sign that read Healthy Paws’ Petting Zoo to put along the front of the fold out table and deliberately knocked a pair of scissors onto the floor. I rolled my eyes. I loved Bee, but sometimes my little black cat could be infuriating.

  Before I had a chance to scold her, however, Sophie showed up driving a large pickup truck, which she parked about ten feet in front of the front of the tent. I could hear squealing in the back and I smiled.

  “Hey,” I said to my best friend as she got out of the cab, and we both went to the back of the truck. “What did you get for us this year?” I asked.

  “Well, this year we have four goats, including little ones, two sheep, six chickens, a rabbit who comes with his own hutch, and seven piglets.”

  Joe Clemens was a farmer on the outskirts of town. He made his money from the plentiful crops that he grew, and kept a bunch of animals on the farm as a hobby. Every year he outfitted the petting zoo with whatever cute little additions his farm had generated that spring.

  “Awwwwww,” I said, looking into the back of the truck at the big dog kennels that we used as makeshift farm animal carriers.

  “So Joe says everyone should be fine together, except we should probably separate the pigs from everyone else. Apparently they’re pretty high energy, and some of the other animals aren’t exactly fans.”

  I laughed as I heard snorting coming from the back of the truck.

  “We’re not high energy, it’s just that the goats are boring. It’s always the goats. They’re such whiners!” came a high pitched voice from the back of the truck. I had a feeling I knew which animals the pigs didn’t get along with.

  “Agreed. Down with the goats!” came another. I supressed a smile.

  “Please, keep us apart. You see what we have to deal with on a daily basis?” one of the goats replied.

  “But mommy, I’m friends with one of them,” came the whine from one of the little goats.

  “Don’t be friends with pigs. They’re disgusting, and you’re better than that.”

  Great. We had a racist goat on our hands. This was going to be an interesting eleven days.

  “All right guys, everyone hang tight. We’re just going to go set up the area here for you all so everyone’s comfortable,” I told the animals, hoping they’d all stop fighting long enough for us to get things sorted out.

  Sophie and I went past my little entrance table and into the tent. A three-foot-high fence was set up to keep the animals in, and we had extra fencing to be able to split the animals into different sections, just for situations like this one. We had four different troughs of water, some others that were currently empty for food, and the entire ground area was lined with hay. The tent that had been borrowed for the petting zoo was pretty big; the entire inside of the petting zoo measured around thirty feet by twenty feet, so there would be plenty of space for the animals to roam around.

  “Ok,” I told Sophie. “So, we need a separate area for the dogs that are coming later. I spoke to Emily at the shelter and she’s going to bring them over in about forty minutes. That way, the dogs will have about an hour to settle in before we open. There’s going to be eight of them, mostly medium and large dogs, and none that are so rowdy that they’re likely to try to escape. They’re all friendly and they
can all be in the same spot. We also need an area for the piglets, and one more for everyone else.”

  “I can’t believe we have to split up the animals because the goats don’t get along with the pigs. We should force them to hang out together and just be friends.”

  “You never know what’ll happen at the end of the eleven days,” I told her, laughing as I grabbed an extra piece of fencing to start splitting the place into three. It took Sophie and I about five minutes to decide how to best split up the area, and fifteen minutes later we had a beautifully set up petting zoo with three distinct sections where visitors and their children could come through and meet all the animals.

  I made my way back to the truck. “All right everyone, your homes for the next twelve days are all set!” I said enthusiastically, and was met with a cacophony of questions.

  “Awesome! A new home!”

  “Why can’t we just go back to the farm?”

  “Will there be hay?”

  “Can I get an area where I can’t see the pigs?”

  “How many people are coming to see us?”

  “Is there Wi-Fi? Also, what’s Wi-Fi?”

  Deciding I didn’t have the energy to answer all the questions, I opened the cage that held the chickens and carried them, two at a time, to their new home. Bee hissed as I walked past.

  “You didn’t say there’d be farm animals here,” she scowled at me. She had settled into her bed and was now curled up into a little ball. Her complaint took the form of her looking up at me from this position, and as a result her voice was slightly muffled, which made her complaints seem a little bit more pathetic.

  “Yes, Bee, what did you think a petting zoo was?”

  “I thought it was just going to be me and the shelter animals,” she muttered. “I didn’t realize I’d be sharing my space with them,” she continued, looking at the chickens.

  “Well, you can ignore them. Just like you do with everything else you don’t like.”

  “Farm animals are loud. And annoying. So uncouth. Why can’t they be dignified, like I am?”

  I rolled my eyes and forced myself not to answer that as I carried the chickens into their new enclosure.

  “What does the cat know about dignity?” one of them asked the other. “I bet she doesn’t even lay her eggs in a box.”

  I looked to make sure Bee hadn’t heard the comment, but thankfully it looked like she’d immediately gone to sleep after I’d walked away. Babysitting animals for twelve days was definitely not going to be a vacation, even though the vet clinic was closed during the festival. I still had my cell phone number up, in case of any emergencies. Sophie, having heard the conversation, grinned at me as she brought over two more of the chickens.

  “Are things not going perfectly in animal-land?”

  I sighed. “I swear, you are so lucky the only animal you can talk to is Sprinkles.”

  Sprinkles was Sophie’s dog that she’d adopted after his owner had been murdered. Sophie’s mom was a witch, and while we all believed for years that Sophie had no magical powers whatsoever, we discovered that she could speak with Sprinkles. That was though, as it turned out, the limit to her magical abilities.

  “All right, goats, your turn,” I said, moving toward their hutch.

  “Good, we should get to go first. You hear that, son?” asked a large brown goat with white patches to a little white kid standing between its legs. “Goats are the most important animal. We always go first.”

  The kid bleated his agreement, and I rolled my eyes. Obviously the mother goat hadn’t noticed that we had already loaded the chickens into the coop. This was going to be a long day.

  Chapter 2

  Three hours later we had all the animals ready to go in the petting zoo. Emily, from the animal shelter, had shown up with a half dozen dogs who were all much better behaved than the farm animals. Bee fell asleep and then promptly began to ignore everyone who came to the petting zoo, much to my relief. Even the cries of “look at the kitty!” from little kids couldn’t make her stir.

  Around eleven, my boyfriend Jason showed up with a vanilla latte from Betty’s café, the best coffee shop in town.

  “You’re amazing!” I told him as I grabbed the cup with gusto. It had been that kind of morning. I left Sophie in charge of collecting donations and letting people into the petting zoo, and walked along the side with Jason.

  “Are you talking to me, or the cup of coffee?” he asked, his face breaking into a giant grin. Jason had dark hair and eyes, and a smile that made my legs—as well as other parts of me—melt completely. He a shad over six feet tall, it was obvious he worked out, and I couldn’t help but notice the roaming eyes of a number of the women in the park were on him. Well, it was too bad for them. Jason was mine. We’d started dating a couple of months ago, and while I had initially found Jason to be incredibly infuriating to be around—it hadn’t helped that I’d suspected him of murder for a while—it turned out he was actually a pretty good guy. And funny, too. Who would have guessed?

  “Why can’t it be both?” I replied, happily taking the drink from him and closing my eyes while I enjoyed my first sip of the soothing drink. “You have no idea what kind of morning I’ve had.”

  “It was probably worse than mine, I spent the morning watching surfers on the beach and listening to tourists tell me how much they love Willow Bay for the articles I’m writing.” Jason worked for the local paper, the Willow Bay Whistler.

  “Show off. I spent the morning trying to convince my cat that she has to lie there and not claw people, then I had to split up some piglets and goats that really do not like each other. I’ve had two people complain they stepped in animal droppings and one kid who peed himself in the middle of the enclosure. And we’re not even halfway through the first day.”

  Jason laughed. “I hope all that’s on the record, I want to include it in my article.”

  “That is absolutely not on the record,” I replied, punching him lightly on the arm, “and you know it. Reporters. You’re all the same—always out for the story.”

  “You caught me,” he replied with a shrug, then wrapped his arm around my shoulder. I saw at least three women glaring at me. “Seriously though, do you want me to bring you anything? It’s not like interviewing people for a bunch of personal interest stories for the Whistler is exactly a taxing job. I could even help Sophie out for a little bit if you want a break.”

  “Thanks, I think we’ve got it covered, though. Hey, just out of curiosity, how many of the people that you interviewed this morning were women?”

  “I dunno, probably most of them? Why, am I not allowed talking to the opposite sex anymore?” he joked.

  “No, but seeing as how four women just glared at me when you put your arm around me, I was curious.”

  “Ah, well, that’s part and parcel of dating such a dashing specimen as myself. I generally have to fend women off with a stick.”

  I giggled as I took another sip of my coffee. “Well, I’m glad you decided to put your stick away when you saw me.”

  “How could I not? A woman who thinks I’m a murderer straight away? That’s a keeper!”

  “You’re never going to let that go, are you?”

  Jason laughed. “If by ‘let that go’ you mean ‘let you live that down’ then no, I’m not going to.”

  I stuck my tongue out at him before resting my head against his shoulder. He was so comfortable. His firm, muscular body just felt so safe and comforting when I rested against it; I closed my eyes and let the warm summer breeze brush my face. This was absolutely perfect.

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t take the whole afternoon off. A few minutes later I told Jason I had to get back. He promised to come back again later when we closed off the petting zoo, around five.

  “Thanks for coming,” I told him with a smile.

  “No problem,” he replied with a wink as he headed back out to find himself the big scoop of the festival. I made my way back to Sophie and plonked mysel
f back down on the chair next to her. In the petting zoo behind us I could hear two of the piglets behind us arguing about who had the biggest snout. I knew I wasn’t going to make it to the end of the day without getting a migraine.

  “Excuse me,” I heard a voice in front of me say. I looked up to see a young woman, probably around my age, holding a little girl’s hand. They both had exactly the same shade of blonde hair, the girl was dressed in pink from head to toe. The woman was carrying a Louis Vuitton purse, with Gucci sunglasses on her head, and a Hermes scarf around her neck. She was so not dressed for a petting zoo. The woman was frowning.

  “Yes, how can I help you?” I asked, plastering a smile on my face.

  “My niece came here expecting to see cows. There aren’t any cows.”

  “That’s right, every year we have a local farmer who generously creates the petting zoo out of his animals, he chooses what animals to send every year, and this year he doesn’t have any calves.”

  “Well we came here to see cows.”

  “I’m afraid there aren’t any calves at the petting zoo this year. But we do have goats, sheep, chickens—”

  “I want a refund. There are no cows.”

  “The petting zoo is by donation. I’m afraid we can’t give money back, as we don’t know how much you put in to begin with.”

  “Well I’ll tell you how much I put in; I gave twenty-five cents. A quarter for my niece, since she was the only one who was going to pet an animal. And she didn’t even get to see a cow.”

  I sighed. Twenty-five cents. Of course. I didn’t begrudge people not giving a lot of money. In fact, I knew that some people couldn’t pay anything at all, and that was fine. But the clothes this woman was wearing easily cost more than what I made in a month, so I knew that wasn’t her problem. And quite frankly, while twenty-five cents wasn’t much in the grand scheme of things, she was being rude and abrasive, and this was just not the day for that.

  “I’m sorry, there’s nothing we can do. We cannot refund donations, and the money goes to the local animal shelter, so it’s for a good cause.”