Murder on the Backswing Read online

  After several bangs followed by what would have been a string of profanities if not for the anti-cussing charm old Haggie placed on the house, Mag stomped back through the connecting door, leaving a sticky trail behind her.

  “Honestly, I think that woman believes she was the inspiration for the character of Hagrid. Next thing you know, she’ll be hatching up a dragon’s egg, and the whole town will be burnt to cinders. Those pixies are kind of cute though. I have to give her that.”

  “What exactly did you do to the poor thing?”

  “Really, Clarie?” Exasperated, Mag shook her head. “I didn’t hurt her. I just tried to get her to talk, but I think she signed a Pentagon-level non-disclosure agreement, and she won’t budge.”

  Mag paced the room and ran a crooked finger over the aged patina of a Pennsylvania Dutch porch bench before stopping in front of the writing box Taylor Dean stole from her.

  “You’d think after all my years, the depravity of humanity wouldn’t bother me anymore. Especially considering the things I’ve seen people do to one another. This guy was clearly not one of the good guys if such a thing can be quantified, but his crimes were too petty for someone to want to murder him. Seems like he kept his indiscretions a secret from his poor wife.”

  Clara watched her sister’s face go blank, then frowned as Mag ran her hands over the writing box. Mag let out a low whistle and bustled into the back room to return with a paper clip.

  “What are you going to do with that?”

  “Writing boxes of this era almost always have a secret compartment for hiding sensitive documents. With everything going on, I'd forgotten to check before, and I just found the hidden latch on this one. It’s spring-loaded, so I can use the paper clip to pop it open.” Since it was early in the morning and no one was in the shop to see her do it, Mag conjured an over-sized magnifying glass from her cottage in the backyard.

  Bending the paper clip open, Mag gently thrust the tip into a hole that looked like part of the wood grain. She gave the tool a wiggle, then a jiggle, pulled it out and tried again.

  “Just got to get the right angle, and then a little push.” Clara leaned in for a better look.

  A soft click sounded from inside the box, and with delight in her eyes, Mag let out a cackle worthy of the wicked witch of the West. Using her fingernail, she eased the hidden drawer from the space.

  “Jackpot,” Mag declared triumphantly, waving a tattered manila envelope in the air. “Probably a bunch of old receipts, but you never know. Could be letters from some historical figure and worth a bundle.”

  But when she opened the envelope, it turned out she could not have been more wrong. A handful of modern photographs and a small notebook tumbled out onto the counter.

  Clara crowed in for a peek at the first picture, “And you said you didn’t want to see any more x-rated photos. The girls in my book club would love these. Speaking of which, I recognize that woman.”

  “Which one?” Mag exclaimed. “And how? All you can see is her backside.”

  “Trust me, it’s Miriam May. Unless there are two women in town with the same butterfly tattoo. Thing is, that’s not Gregory, the man she introduced as her husband when he picked her up last time.”

  Miriam’s husband had dark, curly hair, a rather prominent nose, and wore his eyebrows plucked into a feminine-looking arch. The man with his face buried between Miriam’s breasts was blond, and his eyebrows—that was all Clara could see if his face—had never known the touch of a tweezer.

  Mag tsked. “It just gets more and more interesting, doesn’t it? Taylor Dean was a pervert and a peeping Pete.”

  “You mean Tom,” Clara corrected.

  “Whatever. What do you want to bet he was blackmailing her?” Mag retorted before flipping to the next photo in the stack and letting out a low whistle. “Ding, ding, ding. Got his face in this one and you’ll never guess who it is.” She waved the photo in front of Clara’s face.

  “It can’t be!” Snatching the photo, Clara took a closer look. “Well, I’ll be a hot cauldron on a cold day. That’s our neighbor, Leonard Wayland, getting a piece of Mrs. May. They’re having an affair.” Scandalized, Clara almost whispered.

  “And the mailman knew about it, so we finally have a solid lead.” Mag flipped through the rest of the short stack of photos. “Mrs. May certainly is limber.”

  “I’d give her a 9.3 if she can stick the landing.”

  “Eww.” Grossing out Mag took effort, but every so often, Clara managed to zing one in under the radar.

  “This explains the conversation between Leonard and Taylor that day on the street. I thought their encounter smelled a little like rotten tuna.” Mag’s brow furrowed at the memory.

  “Don’t say tuna too loud; you’ll have Jinx begging for sushi,” Clara warned. “And let’s not forget, Miriam May checked out a golf cart the day of the murder. Leonard Wayland isn’t the only one with something to lose, and he has an airtight alibi.”

  “It could just as easily been Miriam who did the deed, I agree.” Putting down the photos, Mag picked up the palm-sized spiral bound notebook and flipped it open.

  “Huh. I thought there’d be something interesting, but it’s blank.” She slid it across to Clara. “What a letdown.”

  Pointing to the torn edge of a sheet caught in the wire binding, Clara said, “I wonder if—” And without another word, she dashed into the back room and returned with a glowing cinder cradled in the palm of her hand. The air chilled a few degrees and gusts of frosty mist billowed from her lips as she blew on it until the piece of charcoal was cold enough to use.

  With gentle care, she slid the inky chunk over the paper with just enough force to leave a bit of residue behind.

  “It’s working.” Clara chortled as the words began to appear. “It’s a list of names. Miriam and Leonard are on there, but it looks like they were crossed out. Same with their spouses, and these two are unreadable, but look what we have here.”

  “Reggie Blackthorne.” Mag pounded her fist against the countertop.

  “Looks like he had more going with Taylor than cracking a window with the tribute-to-testosterone truck. Blackmail is a good motive for murder.”

  “Convenient, too, given he was there the day of the murder. Cops ruled him out, but that’s no guarantee he’s innocent. I wonder what Taylor had on him. Does it say anything else? Try another page, maybe there are more details.”

  There weren’t. Only the name.

  “I’m just telling you now, if I have to see naked pictures of him, I want you to be ready with a memory charm.” A delicate shudder made Clara’s shoulders twitch.

  “Who do you want to investigate first?”

  While she thought about it, Mag flipped the sign from Closed to Open and unlocked the shop door with a sense of anticipation. Surly as she might seem, the art of the haggle set her juices flowing. Not as much as investigating a murder, but enough to look forward to the day.

  “Flip a coin.” She meant to say it didn’t matter to her but focused instead on the familiar figure moving toward the shop. “Nix the murder talk and get those photos under wraps, here comes the fuzz.”

  “Honestly, Mag, no one has used that term since the early eighties,” but Clara slid the envelope under the counter as Chester Cobb and his faithful sidekick pushed open the door.

  Chapter Ten

  As if it were second nature, Cobb scanned the shop on entry, his flat gaze taking in the contents without giving away an iota of reaction. In response, Clara maintained her unflappable cool and welcomed the pair with the offer of a pitcher of freshly squeezed lemonade. The chief declined, but young Deputy Nye accepted a glass. Her cop-stare would need a few years of seasoning before it reached any level of intimidation, Clara decided.

  “It has come to our attention that you had a vendetta against Taylor Dean.” Chief Cobb seemed to have grown a pair since the last Harmony murder and didn’t bother beating around the bush.

  Mag pierced the chief
with a glare that could have sliced in half a four-foot-wide ice sculpture, and put on her loftiest tone. “The same could be said for any of the unfortunate souls who were cursed to have been included on his delivery route.”

  Cobb’s chagrined expression told Mag he had, indeed, also been a victim of the mailman’s negligence, though he declined to trash talk the victim. A point in his favor as far as she was concerned, but Mag would always press against the boundaries.

  “Then again, if doing a lousy job was a solid motive for murder, you’d be knee-deep in dead bodies any given day of the week.” More nimble than she looked, Mag avoided the kick Clara sent toward her shins and moved farther down the length of the counter just as the bell over the door signaled another shopper entering the store.

  “Is the offer still open for that greenhouse tour? I’ve a hankering to whip up some herbal seasoning blends, and I wanted to see what you have in stock.” Maude Prescott had no idea how bad her timing was.

  “Go ahead, Ms. Balefire.” Cobb irritated Clara by dismissing her in her own store. “I’ll speak with your mother first.”

  “It’s fine, Clarie. Don’t you worry about a thing.” Mag never took her eyes off the chief of police when she said it, which did nothing to reassure her sister. But it seemed she had no other choice.

  As Maude followed Clara out the back, they heard the chief’s voice harden. “Mr. Dean’s job performance is not the issue here, and it certainly isn’t justification for his death. You sound quite bitter, Ms. Balefire, and you were at the scene of the crime. If you’re trying to further implicate yourself, you’re succeeding.”

  Torn between the need to get Maude out of earshot and staying where she was needed, Clara made a choice and called upon her magic. Power rippled out from her center, through the alchemy lab/storage room, and out into the backyard.

  Cauldrons shimmered and turned into cardboard boxes, the balefire went from flames of cheerful pink to traditional orange. Exotic plantings faded behind an impenetrable glamour in both greenhouse and gardens.

  “Just through the back door, Maude, feel free to start without me, and I’ll join you shortly.” That crisis handled, Clara shot Mag a pointed look, silently willing her sister to shut her blasted mouth for once in her life.

  “First poor Babette, and now me. I won’t pretend to have liked the man, but killing someone because he didn’t properly deliver my mail is a little over the top. Do I look capable of taking down a man half again my size?” Cane tapping on the floor, Mag rounded the end of the sales counter and went toe to toe with Chief Cobb.

  The top of her head came roughly to the lower line of his shirt pocket, and her posture seemed even more hunched over when she cocked her head to look up at him. Anyone looking at the pair of them would find the notion laughable. Unless they were familiar with Mag’s work, and then, maybe not so much.

  “Mrs. Dean has established an ironclad alibi.” Officer Nye spoke up for the first time and earned herself a quelling glance from her superior for airing police business in front of a suspect. Leanne must have come through. Good for her.

  Declining to comment on her physicality, Cobb stated, “There are many motives for murder, but I wouldn’t be a very good cop if I didn’t question the person who had an altercation with the victim less than twenty-four hours prior to his death, now would I?”

  Knowing that if she said anything, it would come out as a snide comment about what it would take to make Chester Cobb a good cop, Mag sucked back the retort and merely pierced him with another withering glare.

  “Now, with all due respect, Chief Cobb, my mother is clearly an ailing, elderly woman, and it’s highly unlikely that she could have inflicted the amount of damage done to Taylor Dean. If you had any actual evidence to that end, you’d be cuffing her and reading her rights by now.” Clara’s voice dripped honey but carried the ability to sting like a bee.

  Lynn Nye emitted a noise that could have been construed as a cough to a less discerning ear.

  “Maybe not, but you look quite capable to me, and as far as I’m concerned, you two are a package deal.” It was Clara’s turn in the hot seat.

  “Maybe so, but unless you intend to arrest one of us, I think we’ve already told you everything we know.” Mag shot a pointed look at the door and stood in stony silence while Clara ushered the pair toward the door.

  “Please call us if you think of anything else, and don’t—”

  “Leave town. Yeah, we know the drill.” Clara finished Lynn’s sentence for her, but there was no malice in her tone. She had nothing against the young cop, even if she had a boob for a partner.

  “Don’t talk to me right now,” she directed at Mag after she closed the door behind them. She brushed past her sister on the way to join Maude in the greenhouse. “You made it worse. Develop some people skills.”

  Just outside the door, Clara paused, closed her eyes, inhaled and exhaled rhythmically until the rant bubbling up in her throat drifted away. Mag tried her patience like no one else.

  Centered and calm again, she lifted her chin, plastered on a smile that only felt a little bit fake, and sailed out into the garden to find Maude hastily striding away down the mulched path.

  “Is this sweet cicely?” A little out of breath, the older woman ran a gentle finger of the fern-like fronds and bent to sniff the cluster of white blooms. “Myrrhis odorata. Sweet to the taste, with a hint of licorice flavor. Great in medicinal teas for the digestion, but even better in apple pie. Would you be willing to sell a cutting?”

  At this point, Clara would give her a handful of them if it got Maude out of her hair, so she could go back in and deal with the fallout from Chief Cobb’s visit.

  “Of course, let me—”

  “Oh, no need,” Maude assured and pulled a pair of scissors out of the woven bag she carried for a purse. “I’m always prepared for such occasions.” Clara put the avid gleam in her eye down to gardener’s greed.

  It took almost an hour before Maude settled up her bill and toddled off with a purse stuffed full of fragrant greenery, leaving Clara feeling like a fleeced sheep.

  Mag, denied the benefit of a head-clearing walk through the garden, was doing her best to pace a rut in the floor behind the sales counter when Clara returned. Cheap shoes applied at speed to the carpet had turned her already fuzzy hairdo into a static-laden halo above her pink scalp.

  “I swear to Circe, I’m going to turn that man into a toad one of these days. No, not a toad, a flea. Actually, a male praying mantis. It’ll be fun to watch his head get bitten off—literally.”

  “And you wonder why he thinks you might be responsible. Come on, Maggie, can’t you at least try to fit in? We’re supposed to be blending in here. Wasn’t that the point? Keep to ourselves, tone down the magic, maintain the status quo?”

  To give her mind an outlet, Clara retrieved a basket of fragrant dried herbs and a handful of paper cones to make potpourri sachets while Mag ranted and paced.

  “What if I don’t want to maintain the status quo, Clarie?” Mag’s eyebrows scrunched together as she griped on. “I told you there was a seedy underbelly. No wonder, a name like Harmony. Sounds innocuous, but of course nothing is ever as it seems.”

  The rant continued. Hagatha had the right of it, to Mag’s way of thinking. The witches in this town were a bunch of snivelers. They’d abandoned the ways of their mothers before them, and were a disgrace to all witchkind.

  Clara’s only outward response to her sister’s display of temper was to twist the top of each cone with more force until she finally overstepped the boundaries of the paper and popped the top right off of one. Potpourri flew, and she tossed the torn cone back into the basket and swept the crumbs off the counter.

  Head tilted, Clara waited until the steam had stopped pouring from Mag’s ears before allowing herself to speak.

  “Are you done, now that you’ve descended to your unhappy place? You’re not even speaking in complete sentences anymore. Get it together, Maggie! You
cannot keep tap dancing on Chief Cobb’s last nerve, whether you like him or not. To be perfectly honest, I’m getting tired of being the only one of us capable of keeping a level head.”

  Just as Clara had expected, Mag’s surly mood deflated, and after a few deep breaths, she had nearly returned to what passed for balanced.

  “I’m sorry, Clarie. Really. I don’t want to make things any harder on you than they already are. You have to understand that I’m simply not capable of keeping my nose out of things—especially not when there’s an innocent on the line. It’s just part of who I am. If that puts me in the line of fire, it’s my version of normal.”

  “And I love who you are. I would just prefer not to have to memory charm everyone in town—particularly not the police. Rides the fine edge of our oath to cause no harm.” Elbow leaning on the counter, Clara held up a finger, “And don’t bother trotting out the it’s for the greater good excuse because I’m not buying. Not in this case, anyway.”

  Mag’s tone turned to one of determination, “Then we need to solve this murder post-haste, pardon the pun, so that I can get that man off my back once and for all.”

  “The naughty couple. I say we tail Mrs. May, insert ourselves into a situation where we can gather information, and find some proof. You game?” Mag asked, a mischievous twinkle in her eye.

  “You know I am. Jinx! Pye! Wake your lazy tails up.” Clara’s shout was followed by a yowl that turned into a yawn as the pitter-patter of paws on stairs turned to heavy footsteps when both familiars took human form to answer their master’s command.

  Pye turned wide eyes on Clara, and geared up for a major guilt trip, “I didn’t realize we were going to be used for slave labor when you proposed the plan to open this place.” Pye grumbled.

  “I’m guessing our mailman didn’t realize he was going to be whacked to death with a golf club when he signed on for the job, either.” Clara admonished, though she couldn’t really blame Pyewacket for being annoyed. “And if we don’t figure out who did the whacking, your next assignment will be breaking us out of jail. I promise, once this is over we’ll take a little trip upstate to that stream with the salmon you like, and we’ll let the magics flow free.”