It Takes a Witch: A Wishcraft Mystery (29 page)

“Welcome to the Magic Wand Salon,” she said. “May I help you?”

She wasn’t exactly staring at my uneven bangs, but I could tell she knew they were self-­inflicted. “I have an appointment with Ramona at five.”

She
tap-­tap
ped into a touch-­screen computer system. “She’ll be right along. Would you care for a beverage while you wait? Coffee, tea, tonic, wine?”

Wine sounded great after the day I’d had, but I passed with a “No, thank you.” I sat on a black sofa and tapped my foot nervously on the marble floor. I kept thinking about Marcus Debrowski, and my mind was conjuring all kinds of nefarious plots.

What if Marcus killed Alex? Then, if he defended Sylar badly, and Sylar went to prison, no one would ever be the wiser.

But Marcus seemed like a nice guy. Too nice to kill someone. Besides, why would he kill Alex? She was bringing him a lot of business. Unless there was more to their relationship than met the eye.

I shook my head. I couldn’t see it. At all.

Sighing, I took out Alex’s calendar to distract myself from my thoughts. I flipped through its pages. I kept staring at that funky little music-­note symbol. It appeared the night before she died, the Monday before, and many times before that—­usually every other day or so, at varying times, late evening being the most common. I narrowed down the first time the symbol appeared to a month and a half ago.

More interesting was all the private consultation meetings she had penciled in. Alex had been a busy woman. I noted all the familiar names, including Ramona
Todd’s last Monday. Evan. Griffin. Marcus Debrowski—­were those legal appointments or consultations? I saw Mimi’s name written a few times but never spotted Nick’s.

On average, Alex had three to four consults a week. Which made me wonder why she didn’t have more money in her bank account.

I was flipping pages through past entries, looking for any kind of clue as to who might have killed Alex, when Ramona came strolling out from behind an opaque glass partition.

With a smile on her face, she said, “Darcy, I’m glad you made it! Come on back.”

She walked me through a maze of occupied styling stations and motioned me into a cushioned chair.

I sat and looked at her in the reflection of the mirror as she examined my hair and said, “Have you thought about highlights?”

I nodded. “I thought I was ready, but the bangs were a big enough change.”

We talked about various shades and finally settled on keeping my natural color but adding a gloss treatment to make my natural hair color shinier. Baby steps, I told myself.

“Nervous?” she asked.

“Terribly.”

She laughed. “Don’t be. You’re in good hands.”

I glanced around, my gaze hopping from face to face. Everyone was busy, chatting and laughing. I liked the feel of the salon. Even though it was ultramodern, it had a friendly atmosphere.

Ramona reached for a pair of gloves. It was then that I noticed the rash on her hands, arms, and neck.

“Have you tried cortisone cream?” I asked, inquiring about the rash.

“I’ve tried everything,” she said as she started buttering my hair with what looked like a basting brush. “My
doctor thinks it’s just a bad case of poison ivy. Vince thinks Evan was contagious and has infected the whole village.”

“I heard.”

“Vince says a lot of things that aren’t true, though,” she added, a sad undertone in her voice. The undertone of someone who’d had her heart broken—­I recognized it well.

“Are the two of you…dating?” I didn’t want to let on that I knew about their breakup.

She brushed gloss mix onto my hair. “We were. We’re not now. Thanks to Alex Shively.”

I tipped my head, confused. “But Vince said he didn’t even know Alex that well.”

“Ha!” She snorted. Her backbone seemed to melt before my eyes and she slumped, bracing her hands on the back of my chair for support. She met my eyes in the mirror. “If you call sleeping with someone barely knowing them.”

Feeling a little queasy, I said, “He was dating her?”

“He’s so stupid. So, so stupid.”

Said like a woman still in love with Mr. Stupid.

Drawing in a deep breath, she straightened. Confession must be like a jolt of caffeine, because suddenly she was talking so fast I could barely keep up. “So, we were dating like five months, right? And I’m thinking it’s getting serious. I’m ready for a big commitment. Okay, he never said he loved me, but I could tell. I just wanted to hear it. Instead all he ever talked about was witchcraft this, witchcraft that. And it’s true he barely knew Alex—­at first. She’d come into the shop for books. On witchcraft. My God, the conversations they’d have—­for hours—­over witches. Nothing flirtatious at all. At first. But
witch this
,
witch that
. Then he starts telling me all about how Alex is a witch. And he wanted to be one, too. Well, a warlock. Is that what they call them?”

I shrugged. Ve told us male witches were never called
warlocks, which was insulting. Just witches. But I didn’t correct Ramona—­that might steer us into another conversation, and I really wanted to hear what she had to say about Vince.

“Anyway, he says that Alex is going to teach him everything she knows. Make him her
apprentice
.”

“How long ago was this?” I asked.

Her head bobbed side to side as she calculated. “Maybe a month ago? A little more? He was happier than I’ve ever seen him. So, I’m starting to get nervous, right? I mean, Alex is way older than I am, but she’s still a knockout, and he’s still a man.”

I smiled. Alex was probably only ten years older or so.

“Plus, she’s a witch. Or at least that’s what stupid-­head thinks, and he finds that more attractive than how pretty she is. Was.”

More gloss on my hair.

“So, I’m trying to think fast. What can I do? How do I get him to turn his attention back to me?”

At this point I was wondering why she wanted to.

“I decided to go on the offensive. So, a week ago I make an appointment with Alex. She is absolutely clueless as to who I am. Vince hasn’t mentioned me at all, of course, so I make sure I drop his name a time or two or twenty. I’m there trying to find out if she’s a real witch or not. If I can prove she’s a fake, then maybe, just maybe, I can get Vince to see reason. So, I ask her for a love potion. Explain how I’ve been waiting for Vince to say ‘I love you.’ The whole time I’m talking, I’m giving off warning vibes. You know what I mean? Like, you-­better-­keep-­your-­shiny-­fingernails-­off-­my-­man kind of thing, right?”

I nodded and thanked my lucky stars she’d run out of gloss. I could only imagine if there’d been an endless pot. Was there a fine line between glossy and greasy?

She set a timer and carried on. “She says she has the perfect thing—­something she’d been working on. She
gives me this lotion, a love lotion. It’s pink; it smells good. I’m game. But of course Vince is busy that night. With her. Apprenticing. So I don’t get a chance to use the lotion until the next night. I’m supposed to use the lotion on just me, but I think it might be stronger if I use it on both of us.” She waggled her eyebrows. “I gave him the best massage he’s ever had.”

Vince was keeping lots of secrets. I’d bet money he was
covered
in that rash—­not just his arms and back. No wonder he was going out of his mind, looking for a cure.

Looking for a cure
…enough to break into Lotions and Potions to steal the recipe box? He was the right size and had a very good motivation. I also recalled that Harper said he hadn’t been at work that afternoon—­he’d supposedly been at the hospital seeking treatment. I’d bet every last hair on my glossy head that he was the one who’d broken into Alex’s building the day Evan and I had. He’d been seeking treatment, all right, but not from a hospital.

“After, I’m waiting patiently. And waiting. And waiting. No ‘I love you.’ I’m getting madder and madder. Still nothing. The next morning, he gets up, leaves, suddenly in a hurry to get to work. Then he calls and tells me he’ll be with Alex that night,
apprenticing
. So I decide I need to find out what this apprentice thing is all about.”

I nodded again. Sounded perfectly rational to me.

“And just so you know, I’m not really proud of this next part. I should be stronger, more secure, blah, blah.…Let’s just say I’m not proud. I parked down the street from the bookshop and waited for him to leave work. I followed him to Lotions and Potions and parked so I could see inside the shop. Imagine my surprise when they didn’t stay. When I saw them walking toward Vince’s car, I was stunned. I followed them into the city. And when I saw them go into this adorable little restaurant and sit there and cuddle and kiss and coo at each other,
I thought I was going to throw up. I couldn’t even make myself confront them—­I felt so sick. I ended up going home and crying myself to sleep. The next day, though, whoa! I was ticked. I went to see Alex at her shop, and we end up having this huge fight in the back alley.” She shook her head. “It got pretty nasty. Basically, she told me she loved him, and that he would be hers, and that I just better back off now or I’d get more hurt in the process.”

I bit my lip. I wondered if Ramona knew how incriminating all this sounded.

“And you know what? I decided right then and there she could have him. Now, I’m not saying it didn’t hurt, but who needs a creep like that in their life? I don’t. I just can’t believe how long it took me to see it. I figured I’d just sit back and see how long it took her to realize that he didn’t love her. He loved what she could teach him.”

“About witchcraft?”

She nodded, deflating again. “I don’t think he loves anyone or anything more. At the village meeting, he tried to act like nothing had happened at all, like everything was status quo. I set him straight, and I even tried to warn him about how Alex was a fake. But he wouldn’t listen.”

I said, “If he really thought he’d been tricked by her, would he be mad?”

“Oh, definitely. He was—­he is—­obsessed with witchcraft.”

My gaze met hers. “Do you think he’d be mad enough to kill her?”

Her mouth dropped open. Her throat bobbed as she swallowed. “I…I don’t know. You don’t think Sylar did it?”

I shook my head.

“Or the thief killed her? Stole her watch?”

“I doubt it.”

She let out a whoosh of air. “I just don’t know, Darcy. But I have to say I wish I could find that watch. I saw the reward Velma posted for it—­that’s a lot of cash.”

My nerves tingled. I surreptitiously covered my mouth, faked a yawn, and cast the spell. Ramona was lucky—­my penalty for breaking the Wishcraft Law had expired a couple of hours ago.

The timer dinged. As she led me back to the washbowl, she said, “This is so crazy, but suddenly I have this vision of where that watch might be. So weird.”

“Really?” I asked, hopeful.

“Yeah, but it doesn’t make sense.”

“Why?” I asked.

She frowned. “I keep seeing it in the bookshop. In a box on Vince’s desk.” She laughed. “Isn’t that silly? I mean, why on earth would it be there?”

My heart pounded. I could think of a reason. A deadly one.

A
n hour later, my hair looked better than it had in years, and I still didn’t know what to do with the information I’d learned from Ramona. Antsy, I was jittery and couldn’t make a decision.

I started for home, then spun around and headed for the bookstore. It couldn’t hurt to look, could it?

One little peek to see if granting Ramona’s wish had caused her to see the vision of the watch.

I bit my fingernail, lingering near Mrs. P’s bench on the green. What if someone caught me? What if Vince caught me? If he had Alex’s watch, he was most likely Alex’s killer. Would he kill me, too? To keep his secret?

I should call the police.

But no. What if Vince was perfectly innocent? And there was a really good reason why he was hiding Alex’s watch in his office?

I tried to think of a single good one but failed.

I bit another nail. I sat on the bench. Stood. Sat. I realized now that the little awkward music-­note symbol had to relate to Vince. Pulling out the calendar, I looked at it again. And as if a lightbulb went off, I turned the book upside down. The symbol was a melding of a
V
and a
P
. Vincent Paxton.

Why, I wondered, had she been so secretive about her meetings with him?

I tucked the calendar back into my purse and stared at the bookshop. Harper was still working—­I could see her moving about inside the store. Gayle, too. I didn’t see Vince, however, and that made me more nervous for some reason. Where was he? What was he doing?

Had he killed Alex?

If so, why?

“Darcy?”

I let out a little
“eee!”
and scrambled to my feet.

With a smile Nick said, “We definitely need to work on that.”

I told myself not to be charmed by his smile. I was still upset with him for suspecting Harper was a pickpocket, even though Harper was right—­he’d only been doing his job. Besides, the anger was a good way to put distance between us. “If you’d stop scaring me, it wouldn’t be an issue.”

His tucked his hands into his pockets and rocked on his heels. He was dressed for work—­dark jeans, spiffy shoes, button-­down shirt. He was on the job. Was he here to rehash the conversation we’d had this morning? If so, I really wasn’t in the mood. I looked back to the bookstore. I had more important things on my mind.

“I want to apologize,” he said.

“For?” I asked.

He fidgeted. “This morning.”

“Why? You were just doing your job,” I stated.

His eyebrows dipped, and the faint lines around his eyes deepened. “True.”

I kind of enjoyed watching him squirm. It was rather cute.

“But I went about it the wrong way. I let personal issues get mixed up with business. It won’t happen again.”

“What do you mean, personal issues?”

He looked away, over my shoulder, not really focusing on anything. Again his eyebrows dipped. “I, ah…”

He had my full attention now. “What?”