Whole Latte Magic Read online

  “Truly spoken like a witch who has never spent much time here,” Tina said, smiling. “But I agree; while we’re here, we might as well help.”

  “It’s a good thing Amy didn’t come after all,” Sara said with a laugh. “She’d love to tell us all about how this is a terrible idea, and that butting our noses into things in Western Woods was bad enough, but doing it in the human world is worse.”

  “She sounds like she’d get along really well with Kaillie,” Leanne joked, earning herself a scowl from her cousin.

  “Why don’t the two of us go and check out Karen’s place?” I suggested to Tina. “We can continue our chat while committing felonies.”

  “My favorite late Sunday activity,” she replied with a wink.

  “Good plan,” Leanne said. “I’ll take Sara and we can go speak with Gary Vanderchuck. He’s at the gym every Sunday night, so we’ll be able to “accidentally” run into him there.”

  “That leaves Kaillie and me to go see Andrew,” Ellie said.

  “That works for me. Only one rule though: no magic.”

  “Well that’s no fun,” Ellie replied.

  “You’re not the one whose family was banished from the paranormal world. I don’t want to do anything that could get us more on the bad side of those in charge than we already are.”

  “Fine,” Ellie finally conceded. “We won’t use any magic. It’ll be like an adventure, pretending to be a human investigator for a day.”

  I laughed at the excitement Ellie seemed to feel about it. What must it have been like growing up in the paranormal world, where not using magic was some sort of strange exotic life she couldn’t even imagine?

  “Hey, some of us don’t have any choice,” Leanne said.

  “We’ll meet back at the house when we’re all done,” Kaillie added. “We can compare notes and maybe we’ll have a better idea as to who the killer might be.”

  “Sounds good,” I replied with a nod. “Let’s do it.”

  The six of us finished off our meals, then headed off in pairs to investigate the murder.

  “So where is Karen’s house?” Tina asked.

  “I got the address off Ellie earlier, it’s down this way,” I said. “It should only be a ten minute walk, if you don’t mind.”

  “Sure. I got really used to walking around Western Woods, since I’m not the most comfortable witch on a broom, and there are no cars there.”

  “I feel you there,” I replied. “I actually found out I was a witch when I grabbed a broom for the first time and it dragged me all the way around a mall. I couldn’t control it at all, and I had no idea what was happening.”

  Tina laughed gently. “My first time on a broom was equally traumatizing. Someone paid a dragon to scare me off, to try and get me to leave town by making me fall off my broom when I was about a hundred feet in the air. Luckily, Sara managed to save me. That’s how we got the swimming pool.”

  I gasped. “An actual, honest-to-goodness dragon?”

  “Oh yes,” Tina said, nodding. “They exist in the paranormal world. Although, they’re shifters. They can easily take a human form as well. And to be fair to this dragon, he eventually apologized to me, and we’re on good terms now. He’s actually quite nice.”

  “Dragons,” I muttered to myself, shaking my head. “I’m not sure I’d be able to handle dragons.”

  “Well, hopefully one day you will,” Tina said. “I know your family is banished from the paranormal world right now, but you never know. A long time has passed since then, maybe Kaillie will be able to make an application to be let back in, or something. I don’t really know how any of this stuff works, myself.”

  “Hopefully. That’s the number one thing she wants in the world, to be able to go to the paranormal world and meet the rest of our coven. She loves her family, that’s obvious, but she really wants to belong to that bigger group.”

  “I can understand that, I think,” Tina said slowly. “It must be very frustrating to be denied access to a group you want to be a part of because of something someone else did.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “Honestly, if there was something I could do to help her get there, I would do it. Kaillie has been so helpful. She’s taught me most of the spells I know.”

  “I’m really glad you’ve got some nice people helping you,” Tina said. “I’d give it a shot, but the spells I’ve learned are all from the coven of Jupiter.”

  “So if I tried them they wouldn’t work?” I asked.

  “They might work, but it would be more difficult, and they wouldn’t act nearly as well as if you cast the same spell, but with the incantation that belongs to your coven.”

  “How many covens are there in the paranormal world?”

  “Oh, goodness, dozens. At least. To be honest, I don’t even know. Maybe even hundreds.”

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s so many more than I expected.”

  “There are a lot out there,” Tina said. “More than I had expected at first, too. The paranormal world seems pretty small initially, compared to this one. But then, you get to realizing that it’s a lot bigger than you think.”

  “Interesting,” I replied, before stopping. “Ok, that should be it there. Ellie said it’s a little red bungalow with a black roof.” I pointed to a house about thirty feet back from the street, surrounded by woods.

  Tina looked around. “It’s fairly isolated, but this looks like the kind of place where if a nosy neighbor catches us sneaking around they’re going to come at us with a shotgun.”

  “Yeah, I don’t have great experiences with guns on this island,” I replied. “Any chance you know a spell that can turn us invisible?”

  Tina grinned. “That was one of the first ones I learned.” She whipped out her wand and pointed it at me, and I gasped as I disappeared.

  “You didn’t say a spell,” I said.

  “You can say them in your head,” Tina replied.

  “Can you really? I was always told you have to say the spells.”

  “Most witches do. I should have thought of that and said the words, but I’ve taken to casting my spells silently and forgot; I just did that one out of habit.”

  “So how do you do it? Cast the spell without saying the words, I mean.”

  “Well, you need to still think the words. But if you think the words, and your intention and power as a witch is strong enough, the spell will still cast. It turned out I had some pretty powerful magical genes, so I manage it. Don’t feel bad if you can’t do it, though. Most witches can’t. The only ones I know who can are myself and Amy.”

  “Ok,” I said. “Well, you’re up.”

  Tina pointed the wand at herself and a second later she disappeared as well. “Good. Now we can break and enter in peace.”

  “Hopefully with the help of magic it’s just going to be ‘enter’ without the ‘break’,” I replied.

  “I should be able to manage that,” Tina said. The two of us made our way to the front door. This time, when Tina cast the spell, she muttered some words first, and I heard the deadbolt of the lock click open. We slipped into the house, closing the door quickly behind us. We were in.

  Chapter 12

  The inside of the bungalow looked like, well, what I imagined any house with a family of five, of which three were boys under six would look like. The entrance was littered with shoes, socks and jackets. To the right was a large living room, with toys scattered all around the carpet. To the left was a laundry room, with multiple baskets overflowing with clothes, some folded up nicely in the basket obviously ready to be taken back to the bedrooms, while others were evidently waiting to be washed and dried.

  I moved deeper into the house to the kitchen, where plastic dishes and cutlery in all colors outnumbered the regular adult ones.

  Down the hallway were three bedrooms. One of them was the master, Karen and Kyle’s room, and the other for the boys, with the third being used as another playroom. I made my way into the master bedroom, calling out to Ti
na that was what I was doing.

  “Cool, I’ll take the living room,” she replied.

  The master bedroom was decently-sized, and in one corner was a small desk that held what appeared to be all of the family’s important papers. I figured this was the place to be, and sat down, trying not to feel icky about the fact that I was about to rummage through someone else’s personal information. After all, I was trying to find a killer. This was important.

  The first folder I found contained all of the family’s bank statements, and I looked through them carefully. After all, financial stress could cause a lot of strain on a relationship, and on a person. And while money was definitely tight for the family – they often only had around twenty or thirty dollars left in their bank account the day before Karen was paid – they did seem to be getting by. There were a couple of credit card statements, but none of them had more than a couple hundred dollars on the balance, and there were no statements for any large loans or anything of the sort. There hadn’t been a car in the driveway, but I also didn’t see any paperwork from a dealership, or any automatic payments coming out from their monthly accounts, so I assumed they owned their car free and clear.

  Nothing in the financials seemed the least bit dodgy, so I looked around further. There was a laptop on the desk, and I opened it up. I groaned when I saw the password protection.

  “Hey, Tina,” I shouted towards the living room.

  “Yeah?”

  “How easy is it for a witch to unlock a computer’s password?”

  “Easy peasy,” Tina replied. “Give me one second and I’ll be right there.”

  I heard her footsteps coming down the hall, and a moment later she spoke.

  “Jupiter, god of thunder, reveal the password of which we wonder.”

  I gasped as floating letters appeared above the laptop. Kikikiki8686. “Thanks,” I grinned, typing the letters into the password field. The desktop burst to life, and I was in.

  “No problem,” Tina replied. “I haven’t really found anything in the living room or the kitchen that might help us.”

  “Why don’t you stay here and look through the laptop with me?” I suggested. “There might be a few more passwords we need to enter.”

  “Sure,” Tina said, nodding. “Let me just go grab a chair from the kitchen.”

  A moment later a chair from the dining room began floating over, placed itself down on the floor next to mine, and the wood groaned slightly under Tina’s weight as she sat down on it.

  “Ok,” I said. “Let’s see what Karen was up to here.”

  Tina and I spent at least forty minutes going through all the files we could find on the computer, but it was all hunky-dory. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary at all. Most of the files were things a schoolteacher would print out for her students. We managed to log into her email account with some more magical help from Tina, but everything there looked normal as well. Just emails from parents thanking Karen for taking such good care of their children, asking about what time to come by for a meeting, that sort of thing.

  “Wow, this lady led an impressively boring life,” Tina said. “There doesn’t seem to be a skeleton in any of the closets.”

  “Frankly, if I had three twin boys under the age of seven I’d probably be pretty boring too,” I replied. “I imagine she doesn’t have much time to do anything shady under the table.”

  “That’s a good point,” Tina replied. “Might as well check the trash, just in case.”

  I clicked on the icon for deleted emails, and Tina and I scanned through the list. Spam, spam, more spam, a couple of newsletters, but nothing strange.

  “Hold on, what’s that?” Tina asked suddenly.

  “What’s what?” I asked. “If you’re pointing to it, I can’t see.”

  “Whoops,” Tina replied sheepishly. “I always forget that. The third one from the bottom, the appointment confirmation. What’s that?”

  My eyes scanned the page until they landed on the email Tina mentioned. I clicked on it, and the screen popped open the email.

  Karen had made an appointment for that Saturday, the day after she was stabbed, at two in the afternoon. An appointment with a law firm.

  “McKinney and Associates,” I read aloud. “Enchanted Enclave, Washington.”

  “Do you know who they are?” Tina asked.

  “No, I haven’t heard of them. Actually, I think I’ve seen a sign for their office, they’re in one of the fancy buildings on Main Street, but I don’t know what they do.”

  “Google them,” Tina suggested, and I did exactly that.

  “McKinney and Associates is a firm of experienced divorce, family law and personal injury attorneys who have been practicing in Washington State for over twenty-five years.” I read aloud. “Wow. I wonder if Karen was considering getting a divorce.”

  “Now there’s a reason to stab someone if I’ve ever heard one,” Tina replied.

  “No kidding,” I muttered.

  “Are there any other emails from the law firm?”

  I typed in the email address in the search bar. “No, nothing.”

  “Well, there’s a good lead to follow up on,” Tina said. “What associate was Karen seeing?”

  “Jean McKinney,” I replied. “I’m guessing she won’t know a lot, but we might as well go and speak with her.”

  Before Tina had a chance to reply, however, a noise from the front door reached my ears. I instinctively looked over to where Tina was sitting, even though I couldn’t see her.

  “Hear that?” I asked in a hushed whisper.

  “Yeah,” she replied, her voice equally quiet. I quickly closed the computer programs and shut the lid, not entirely sure what to do. We could always go back out into the hallway to see what was going on, but then if whoever this was came into the hallway, we had limited options for not getting caught.

  We could also just go out the window and into the backyard. This was my instinct, but at the same time, that meant we would never find out who was in this house. And frankly, a part of me suspected that if someone had just broken in, there was a reasonably good chance they were the person who had tried to murder Karen.

  Of course, there was a chance that whoever had come in was allowed. It might have been Kyle returning home, or possibly Karen’s parents arriving ahead of time. It might even have been a friendly neighbor who had been given a key checking in on things.

  Tina grabbed me and pulled me towards the en suite bathroom. It was a good idea; an intruder was probably less likely to go into the bathroom than anywhere else in the house.

  “Stupid idiot,” I heard the person mutter as he made his way into the bedroom. “The stuff’s got to be here somewhere.”

  Tina grabbed my arm gently as the intruder entered the bedroom. The two of us were standing in the middle of the bathroom, looking out into the bedroom as a man who looked to be in his late forties, with greying brown hair and a bit of a beer belly sticking out from his polo shirt and jeans looked furtively around.

  Eventually, his eyes settled on the desk and he rushed over there, doing a much sloppier job than I had when it came to looking through the documents. Luckily, he didn’t seem the least bit interested in the fact that there was a second chair at the desk. Instead of carefully having a look and putting everything back as he found it, the man simply tore through everything as fast as he could. He was obviously looking for something specific, and wasn’t finding it.

  Finally, he looked at the laptop. He looked around furtively, as though he was checking to make sure no one was watching him, then he unplugged the laptop and headed back out into the night.

  When I heard the front door close behind him, I waited a solid fifteen, maybe twenty seconds before I finally spoke.

  “Wow,” was all I managed. My legs felt like jelly and my heart was beating at a million miles a minute.

  “Yeah,” Tina replied. “He just… took that laptop.”

  “I wonder what he wanted with it.”

&nb
sp; “Do you know who he was?”

  I shook my head. “No. But then, if he wasn’t a coffee shop regular, I wouldn’t know him. I haven’t lived here for long enough to get to know a lot of people. For all I know it could have been Kyle.”

  “It wasn’t him,” Tina replied. “There were a few pictures of the family in the living room. Kyle is thinner, with black hair. I don’t know who that was, either.”

  “Ok, well, I suggest we get right on out of here in case one of the neighbors spotted this guy and decided to call the cops,” I said. “Besides, I’m pretty sure we had a good look at everything.”

  “Right,” Tina said.

  The two of us left via the back door and headed back home. My heart was still racing from the scene we’d just seen. Who was the man who had been rummaging through Karen and Kyle’s things? Was he the one who had stabbed her? The odds had to be pretty good.

  Chapter 13

  Twenty minutes later Tina and I were sitting in the living room, after having made it back home and fed Cleopawtra, who insisted that she’d been starving and that had it not been for my timely arrival she would have surely succumbed to a painful death.

  Now she was happily munching away at her food in the kitchen while Tina and I enjoyed a glass of wine waiting for the others to appear.

  “Why don’t you show me one of the spells you’ve learned?” Tina suggested. “Just a simple one. No pressure, obviously. If you don’t want to do it, then don’t.”

  “No, it’s a good idea, I need the practice,” I replied, pulling out my wand. “Saturn, god of plenty, make this lamp float with grace aplenty.”

  I pointed the wand at the floor lamp in the corner. It immediately began to hover about six inches off the ground, and as I waved my wand around the lamp followed. I made sure not to let it wander around too far; as it was still plugged in I figured things might end badly if the electrical cord got too taut. But after a moment I put it back down and dropped my wand, breaking the spell.