Thank my Lucky Spells Read online

  And as much as my mom drove me insane, she also knew exactly how to make me feel better. After all, she was my mom.

  Chapter 19

  I wasn’t sure if there was something a little morbid about having to go to the Academy to let my sister know she was going to need to hire a new janitor. Well, okay, the fact that I had to question it meant there probably was, but a little tragedy didn’t mean I couldn’t give Diana a heads up.

  In a small town like ours, being the principal of the Academy was hard enough on its own, never mind the baggage of having been the town’s mayor and still getting the occasional phone call from the new incumbent asking for advice. She needed every bit of information she could get to stay on top of things.

  If that meant giving her an unofficial tip that one of her employees who was also an unofficial suspect in an unofficial investigation has been unofficially murdered, then that was just what I had to do.

  I waded through the sea of students through the familiar academy halls as they left for the day, magical flames hovering above metal sconces in the hallways and keeping the place bright and warm as it always was in the winter.

  Considering some of the circumstances in the past that I’d walked in on in Diana’s office, the relief of walking up to the door and seeing her bent over a bunch of ordinary, mundane-looking paperwork was palpable. I took a few deep breaths as I tried to compose myself before heading inside.

  I pushed the door open, and my sister raised her head to look at me.

  “Oh my god, who died?” she blurted after a single look at my face. Immediately, a calming sensation took over me, and I knew Diana was instinctively using her unique witch power – the ability to make everything around her calmer. I was very, very thankful for that.

  Still, I threw my hands up. “Are you kidding? Seriously? Am I that easy to read?”

  “We grew up together, Arti,” Diana said with a tired smile. “That’s the same look you had on your face before you told me my goldfish died in second grade.”

  Rest in peace, Goldy II.

  “You’ve also broken this kind of news to me what, two or three times now just in the past year?”

  “Yes, okay, thank you. “Message received, I don’t have a promising career as a poker player.”

  “Tell me it at least wasn’t one of my students, this time,” she asked, gesturing for me to take a seat across from her at her desk. Her expression was sombre now, and as I sat across from her I crossed my legs nervously.

  “No, it wasn’t a student.”

  “But you wouldn’t be here unless it was relevant to me,” Diana interrupted. “Moon help me, was it Mr. Lockheed? I knew Martine was talking about wanting to kill that man, but-”

  “I found Jackson Long dead in his house,” I broke in. Diana’s jaw dropped open.

  “You’re joking. My janitor?” She slumped on her desk, her brow furrowed in consternation. “Is there some feud going on that the Longs are involved in that I haven’t heard about? This is insane.”

  “I know,” I said. “I don’t think this is anything like that. My bet is whoever killed Arianna also killed Jackson, though. I don’t know why, yet.”

  “He was just a janitor. He always did a decent job, kept to himself, never really bothered anyone. I mean, I didn’t really know the man, but it wasn't the sort of thing you could see coming, you know? You don’t have any leads on it, do you?”

  My eyes widened, and a genuine smile crossed my face. “Di, you asked me first as if I were a real detective.”

  Diana’s expression was flat, though. “Honestly, I just figured you wouldn’t have come here unless you had a lead already.”

  My ego deflated faster than my face fell.

  “Well, I did have a lead, but that lead happened to be Jackson Long. I thought he had killed his sister.”

  “I’ll worry about hiring a new janitor later today. I’ve got a temp I can float in for now, but I think the school will survive if the floors go unswept for a few hours.”

  “Anyway, let’s go over this,” Diana said, leaning forward in her chair. “What would make you think that Jackson Long murdered his sister?”

  “I thought he was the one who robbed the jewelry store,” I said. “Actually, I’m still pretty sure he was the one who robbed it.”

  “Why?”

  “He had the opportunity.” I was staring at a snowglobe on Di’s desk to focus on something inanimate while I thought things through, but there were a couple of animated little people in there having a snowball fight. “He had no alibi the night it happened, and I found a receipt of his that showed he had a lot of money in his bank, more than he could have been making here.” I winced when Di raised an eyebrow. “No offense.”

  “I don’t set the salaries, actually,” she said. “Moon knows mine would look different if I did. That’s the school board’s job. But that aside, hold on, you weren’t digging through his trash, were you?”

  “Not his trash, exactly. Wow, that sounds a lot worse when I say it out loud,” I murmured. “Anyway, he dropped a receipt outside the bank.”

  Diana gave me a judgmental look before speaking. “Okay, so what else? Was he doing something with that money in his bank?”

  “He bought a watch,” I said triumphantly, but as soon as the words left my mouth, I realized why they didn’t sound half as convincing as they had in my head. Di’s expression confirmed that.

  “So, a couple holes in that line of thinking,” she said.

  “It was from that expensive watch place downtown,” I added lamely.

  “Having money doesn’t necessarily mean that he stole it. I put away a lot more into my savings account than most people do while I’m still young and healthy enough to afford it.”

  I could almost visualize the moths flying out of my empty savings account, but I didn’t say that out loud. The B&B was all the savings I needed, right?

  “Sure, but the way he was spending was a little odd, wasn't it?”

  “Maybe,” she admitted. “But again, don’t you think you need a little more proof than that to accuse someone of murder?”

  “I wasn’t just going to accuse him based on that,” I retorted. “I watched the video feed of the nightclub’s security camera while I was there the other day. He left right around the time of the robbery and came back fifteen minutes later.”

  Diana paused for a few seconds with her mouth open, and I felt triumphant. Then she cocked her head to the side with a totally different expression. “You broke into the nightclub to look at their security footage?”

  I was a deer in the headlights.

  “Well, ok, technically, yes. But, no one saw me, and I needed to know.”

  “So, ignoring the fact that you committed a felony in the course of your investigation, if he was leaving to rob the jewelry store, why would he come right back to the nightclub after?”

  I opened my mouth and closed it. Ok, that was a good point.

  “Maybe so he wouldn’t look suspicious?”

  “Arti, I can appreciate the way you’re thinking, but moving goods like that takes time, especially in a small town like Moonlight Cove. This isn’t Vegas, you’re not going to find anyone who’ll do anything for you in a matter of days, much less in enough time to already have all that cash in the bank just a week after the robbery.”

  “And how do you know about how all this shady stuff works?” I asked, crossing my arms. “Do you have a fencing ring under the table I don’t know about? If you do, I want a cut.”

  “I work with teenagers,” she said simply, but the words carried weight, and I nodded.

  “Fair enough.”

  “My point is, if you and I robbed the jewelry store, for example, we’d have to find someone who’s either from out of town and won’t be here long, or one who we trusted enough not to say anything, because gossip spreads like wildfire. And then there’s Morgan and Xander watching over everything like a hawk.”

  The thought of Xander arresting me for robb
ery drifted through my mind like an oddly pleasant daydream until I remembered that had almost literally happened on more than one occasion. The reality had been a little less, well, pleasant, than when it happened in my head.

  “Crime has to be careful in Moonlight Cove,” she finished, putting her hands on her hips. “You’ve got to think like someone who’d be able to work in that kind of environment, and a janitor spending some extra cash doesn’t fit the bill.”

  I let out a sigh. Diana had this annoying habit of being right a lot; I supposed it came with the territory of being super smart. “Well, regardless, I should get out of your hair and think things through.”

  “Thanks for letting me know about Jackson,” Diana said, pacing back to her desk and giving me a sincere smile. “If you have any sudden strokes of genius, give me a call.”

  “So you can just poke holes in them again? No thank you,” I teased, giving her a wink that she shot back at me with a wry grin. “See you, Di.”

  I shut the door behind me and let out a breath, slumping my shoulders.

  I felt like there was something Diana said in there that made my wheels turn, but I couldn’t quite get a grasp of what my brain was trying to tell me. But despite the discouraging conversation, this wasn’t going to be the end of my investigation. Not by a long shot.

  Chapter 20

  I strolled out of Diana’s office, my mind running in circles. There was just so much going on. How on earth was I supposed to piece it all together? I wracked my brain for answers. Nothing seemed to make much sense.

  Pulling my scarf more tightly around myself, I shivered in the snowy cold for a moment before casting another warming spell over myself. It was turning into one of those afternoons that just begged for me to crawl into bed with my cat and a good book, and pretend the world outside my window didn’t exist for the time being. This was “hot cocoa spiked with Irish cream” weather. “Sit in the bathtub and think about absolutely nothing at all but how steamy and aromatic the bubbles are” weather. “Dance around my kitchen in my fuzzy socks and an oversized sweater while cooking a luxurious herby, cozy dinner” weather.

  It definitely “go for a long walk and think about murder” weather, but here I was. I left my broom leaning against the big oak tree in the campus courtyard, and began my pensive stroll.

  The Academy was one of the largest properties in Moonlight Cove, and its buildings and fields sprawled across nearly four hundred acres of land. A large portion of that land was left mostly untouched, and it remained nearly pristine Washington forest. There was upkeep, of course. My sister kept a team of rangers and wildlife experts on retainer to make sure there were no environmental issues, to keep the wildlife contained in the forest and make sure the natural world and the inhabited portion of the property got along. When I was a teenager attending the Academy as a student, I had been totally enraptured by the forests and wildlife trails winding all over the vast property, and whenever I had needed a break from the stress of classes or just a place to be alone and think, I would wander out into the woods and just meander around for hours. Now, as an adult, I was doing the same thing.

  I began making my way toward one of my favorite spots in the whole forest. It was a somewhat spacious clearing in the midst of the dense Douglas firs, sitka spruces, and ponderosa pines. It took a good twenty minutes’ walk to reach, but it was such a lovely, scenic path that I hardly minded. This was one of my happy places, a world in which I felt small and simple, just a blip on the radar compared to the massive trees that had been standing here in the same places for hundreds of years. There was something humbling and awe-inspiring about ancient forests.

  The farther I walked, the clearer my head became. It was as if with every step another little chip of stress fell off my shoulders, and I had a feeling that if I just kept walking forward I could eventually shed my entire burden and just be free. Though I was pretty sure solving this case would help in that respect as well.

  The path wound like a snake through the forest, curving around boulder formations and babbling brooks. I smiled as I passed by a particular creek I used to visit often. When I was a young kid, my sister and I would head out to this creek to “go fishing” even though the only creatures that swam around in the water there were tadpoles and insects. One time, Diana and I had brought a glass mason jar to the creek and very carefully scooped a tadpole and some of the crystal-clear creek water into it. It was our very noble goal to take the tadpole home and raise it to be a pet frog. We even had a name picked out: Lily Pad. It wasn’t the most creative name for a pet frog, I admit, but in our defense, we were ten and twelve years old, respectively. At the time it sounded like a pretty clever moniker. Back then we were both too young to ride regular adult broomsticks on our own, so we had essentially the magical version of a tricycle. It was a broom with two cushy seats on it and a wide, fanned-out tail of hyper-sensitive bristles. At the front was a little wicker basket with a pink ribbon. That basket was where we stored Lily Pad on our ride home. We were jubilant, chatting about how fun it would be to teach our little tadpole tricks and show her off to the neighborhood kids.

  However, when we got home and showed Mom our precious new friend, she screamed and nearly threw the mason jar out the window. Needless to say, she was not thrilled about our little pet. Dad was a little more sympathetic, offering to help us find a more suitable terrarium for Lily Pad than just the little old mason jar she that made up her new home. But my mother was adamant that we take our little friend back to the creek and let her be a wild creature as nature intended. Of course, Di and I both wept inconsolably. We had bonded with Lily Pad pretty intensely during our trek home from the woods. But Mom patiently explained to us that Lily Pad already had a home and a bunch of little tadpole friends back at the creek, and that she would be lonely without them. That was enough to convince us. Dad put us on his broom and took us back to the campus woods, where we gently plopped Lily Pad back into her creek.

  To this day, I still sometimes thought about Lily Pad. I chose to believe that she was still out there somewhere, croaking away and living her best life. As I walked past the creek, I smiled to myself. “Hope you’re having a good day,” I called out. Thank the moon there was no one else around to witness me talking to the frog that had been my pet for all of three hours, over fifteen years ago.

  Finally, I ended up at my destination: the clearing. Through the mist I could make out dozens of twinkling multicolored lights floating and flitting about in the air. They were sprites and brownies, tiny little forest fairies approximately the size of a fingernail. The clearing was a sort of meeting place for them, and they congregated here regularly. Most forests these days were too overrun with lumber trucks and other habitat-destroyers to be a safe home for sprites. But Diana had been adamant about restoring the clearing as a sort of sanctuary for the tiny creatures. Nowadays, it was a fairly well-kept secret among veteran Moonlight Cove folks. We kept it quiet, even from most tourists, for fear of disrupting the delicate balance of the sprite community. Plus, sprites and brownies could be a little mischievous from time to time, and it was better for everyone if there was a certain degree of mutual detachment. I leaned against a tree and watched the lights darting around, my mind wandering back to the question at hand.

  I had a pretty good idea of who my main suspect was now. But I needed to be sure, especially since I had been so completely and embarrassingly wrong before already. This time, I had to think it all the way through. There was something small niggling at me in the back of my mind, an image seemingly so inconsequential that I had simply buried at first, assuming it didn’t make a difference to my case. But now, I wasn’t so sure. I fixated on one of the decorations back at Vince Bryant’s work shed. I thought back to that day, standing in the midst of the mess and disorder, listening to that greasy guy Nathaniel talk and talk. He was annoying, and I had zoned out a little, and I’d noticed something possibly interesting. On a coffee table in the middle of the room, surrounded by magazines an
d balled-up napkins, was a lovely, well-designed bowl. It had to have been one of Vince’s best works, smooth and symmetrical all around. And inside the bowl was something else very interesting, though at the time I hadn’t thought so.

  Rocks. But not just any rocks, the kind of rocks I remembered seeing in my geology and crystal studies textbooks back in school. Something my brain had promptly dumped right after taking the exams, much like most math equations and the state capitals. The rocks had resembled uncut diamonds.

  I hadn’t thought about those rocks at all. But then, what Marsha had said – under everything is beauty – maybe. Just maybe.

  Jackson had not been the one to steal those diamonds – assuming, of course, I was right about them having been diamonds. If he had, then why would they have been in a bowl at Vince Bryant’s workshop? Vince had claimed to be Jackson’s friend, despite what happened with Arianna. But maybe it was silly of me to assume that he was telling the truth. But why had Vince wanted to rob the jewelry store in the first place? Did he need money that badly? Then it dawned on me that he’d had tons of unsold pottery works lying around his shop. Business didn’t seem to be going well. And Arianna had been carrying that fancy, expensive purse. Maybe Vince had robbed the store to get enough money to impress her, win her back. And when it wasn’t enough, he killed her in a fit of rage.

  But then that left Jackson, who had witnessed Vince robbing the jewelry store. Maybe he had just gone out for a smoke or something, and happened to come across his best friend committing the robbery. After killing Arianna, all eyes were on her ex-boyfriend as a suspect, naturally. Vince probably panicked and decided he had to eliminate the only witness to save his own butt, even if that witness was his oldest, closest friend. And today when Vince was coming by to visit Jackson, maybe he wasn’t just checking in on a friend. Maybe he was just setting himself up as the innocent best friend who came by because he had no idea Vince was already dead, therefore throwing suspicion off of himself. Had I been face to face with the killer himself today? I took a deep breath.