Some Like It Witchy (4 page)

“He did have a bit of an ego,” Ve agreed.

“Do we know for certain that the diamonds are in the house?” I asked.

“There wasn't much time for Sebastian to hide the diamonds somewhere else before being turned in by the tipster. He'd gone straight from the heist to Eleta's,” Cherise said.

“He could have stopped on the way . . . Left the diamonds with the accomplice. . . .” I speculated.

“When some Crafters started freaking out that the diamonds might have fallen into the wrong hands, or be found by someone who didn't know their worth, the Elder reluctantly confirmed they're on the Tavistock property,” Ve said. “But I know that even she does not know where they are exactly.”

“Why hasn't anyone wished to find the diamonds before now?” In a village of Crafters, it seemed the logical thing to do. After all, the Elder's rule about other Crafters not abusing the power of Wishcrafters hadn't gone into effect until last year. Now all wishes made by other Crafters went through the Elder first, in some sort of magical filtering system. Wishes could either be granted immediately or the Crafter had to meet with the Elder to plead the case for the wish made. We Wishcrafters never knew which it would be when we cast the spell.

A wish made by a mortal, however, was granted immediately unless it fell into an unauthorized category under Wishcraft Law. For example, we can't grant wishes that ask for someone to fall in love with the wishee. Or bring people back from the dead. Or grant wishes for money—without that money having to come from somewhere else. There were also restrictions on the way wishes had to be phrased.

It was complicated, and I was still learning the ins and outs.

“After the heist, the Elder stated straight off that the diamonds were not to be found using Craft magic of any form,” Cherise said.

Ve nodded. “Doing so had the ability to tear the Craft apart.”

“How?” I asked.

“Competition,” Ve said. “Greed. Power-hungriness. If one Crafter found those diamonds, it was bound that another would want them and might go to an extreme length to take them. The Elder felt it best to leave the diamonds' whereabouts a mystery, though,” she added, “I do not think anyone suspected they'd still be hidden all this time later.”

“I venture to guess that Andreus is keen to pick up where his father left off,” Cherise said. “Which explains his interest in the Tavistock house.”

It wouldn't be the first time Andreus sought out unlimited powers. When I first met him, he'd been seeking a charm that granted unlimited wishes. I wondered now if he'd wanted that charm so he could find the diamonds. . . .

Charms were held in a different category from Craft magic, and I doubted the Elder would have been able to intervene had Andreus gotten his hands on the wish charm. Fortunately, I'd thwarted his plan, so I didn't have to worry about that.

I just had to worry if he'd killed Raina.

H
alf an hour after Ve and Cherise dropped the bombshell about the Circe diamonds, one thing had become crystal clear.

I was going to have to track down Andreus Woodshall sooner rather than later.

The thought alone had given me the heebies and sent me into the house to tidy As You Wish's office. Cleaning had always been the best way to clear my mind.

I wasn't usually one to procrastinate, but I needed time to figure out how I was going to approach Andreus. And how I was going to get him to be truthful—something he rarely was. As I filed invoices, I wondered if there was a spell for that. Honesty. A magical truth serum.

I didn't know of one off the top of my head, but it didn't mean a spell didn't exist. There was still a lot for me to learn about my craft. Fortunately, I had help in the form of Melina Sawyer's diary, in which she had recorded hundreds of spells. Mimi's mom had left the book behind after she died, and Mimi and I had been learning so much from it.

Missy lay on the floor in the doorway, watching me zip back and forth across the office, from desk to filing cabinet. Aunt Ve's Himalayan, Tilda, sat atop a bookcase staring down at me, judgment shining in her clear blue eyes.

Ve had gone off to collect a batch of campaign buttons
she'd ordered from the local print shop, and Cherise had set out to uncover the status of the Tavistock house's sale.

I wasn't sure who she planned to ask. Kent was occupied with the police, and Calliope's fiancé, Finn Reardon, had taken her home to rest. I glanced at her binder and phone, which sat on the edge of the desk. In the aftermath of finding Raina's body, I'd never returned them after she handed them to me this morning. I planned to get them back to her later but had to confess I'd already snooped through the papers for any info regarding the Tavistock house. There was nothing there but blank real estate forms.

That had been disappointing.

I'd been hoping for a list of potential buyers . . . and their bids.

I told myself it was to help Cherise, but truly I'd just been curious. I'd stopped short at trying to access Calliope's phone, but don't think for a second the thought hadn't gone through my head.

I'd also done a quick search on the Circe Heist online. In October 1979, the diamonds, which had been part of a traveling gemstone exhibit, were being delivered to the Museum of Fine Arts for a Halloween display when a Back Bay Armory guard was approached by a uniformed police officer who said he was there to accompany the guard inside. Bing, bang, boom, the guard had been knocked out and the diamonds stolen, never to be seen again.

The “police officer” had been Sebastian Woodshall.

He'd been forty-one years old, newly engaged to Eleta, and dead within hours of the heist.

I needed more time to sort through it all, but a couple of tidbits jumped out right away. The tipster who'd turned in Sebastian mentioned the accomplice was named Phillip, someone who had never been fully identified or located. The tipster had never been identified either, other than one detail: it had been a female.

Who was she? How did she know about the heist? And why
had she turned in Sebastian? The reward money—which now topped two million dollars and explained the bevy of treasure hunters interested in finding the diamonds—had never been claimed, so it hadn't been a financial decision. . . . Online sources were of no help whatsoever with those questions, so I was going to have to ask the Enchanted Village's resident historian for more information. I added a trip to see my mouse friend Pepe to my to-do list.

Because of the loose paneling I'd seen this morning when I found Raina, I had to assume that she had interrupted a burglary. However, that's all I knew, and I had a couple of big glaring questions about the case.

Was the burglar a mortal treasure hunter who finally got the chance to break in?

Or a Crafter, like Andreus, who was after unlimited powers?

Even more concerning . . .

Had the burglar found the diamonds?

I had no way of knowing.

The office phone rang as I stuck another file in the cabinet drawer. I'd been letting calls go to voice mail since coming inside, but decided I couldn't keep putting off the inevitable.

Especially since it was the same person calling over and over again, both the office line and my cell.

Hurrying across the room, I grabbed the handset before it rang again. “As You Wish, this is Darcy. What is the wish you wish today?” I asked out of pure habit.

“I wish you'd stop finding dead bodies without me.”

Smiling, I closed a folder and reached for another. “Hi, Harper.”

My sister knew quite well I couldn't grant her wish—one of the Wishcraft laws was that we couldn't grant one another's wishes. Right now I was incredibly grateful for such guidelines. What Harper didn't know would allow her to sleep tonight.

“Don't you ‘hi' me, Darcy. For the love! What does this make? Five bodies?”

Ah, trust Harper to keep a correct tally. “Don't remind me.”

“Where have you been? I've been calling for the past hour.”

Smiling, I wondered when we'd switched roles. She now sounded like she was mothering
me
. “Dealing with the fallout of finding Raina.”

Excitement colored her words as she said, “Tell me everything.”

I was actually surprised she wasn't here, standing before me with her big brown elfish eyes. She knew I had trouble saying no to her when she gave me her “pitiful” look. It was much easier denying her on the phone. “No.”

“Don't make me come over there. I'll close the shop if I have to.”

Ah. That's why she wasn't already here—she must be the only one manning the bookshop today. She had a couple of part-time employees, but it wasn't unusual for her to work alone, especially during weekdays when the tourist trade was slower than on weekends. She couldn't yet afford to hire full-time help.

She went on. “I'll close it right up. I might not be able to pay my electric bill next month, mind you. . . .”

“Okay,” I said, calling her bluff.

She huffed. “Darcy.”

I smiled as I set a stack of folders atop the filing cabinet and went about finding their appropriate alphabetical slot inside the drawer.

“Oh, come on,” she said quickly. “You have to give me something. I heard the Elder gave you the case to investigate. Does that mean the Craft is involved? What do you know so far?”

It never ceased to amaze me how fast news traveled in this village. “Who told you?”

“Archie. I saw him in the alley when I took out the trash.”

He had a big beak, that bird.

Wait. “In the alley?” Archie was most definitely not the kind of bird to hang out in an alleyway. Last I heard, he'd been snooping at the Tavistock house. “Why was he there?”

“He was perched on the fence behind the building, spying on Magickal Realty,” she said.

I couldn't help but wonder what the cocky bird had overheard. The real estate office was a couple of doors down from Harper's place, and Raina and Kent lived in the second-floor apartment above their business.

Had Archie followed Kent back to the office? If so, Kent hadn't spent much time with Nick at all.
Interesting.
“Archie told
me
Raina and Kent had a big fight outside Spellbound a week or so ago. Did you happen to overhear it?” I reached for a file and accidentally knocked the stack off the cabinet. Two of the folders fell behind the cabinet while the others sent papers flying over the office floor.

No good deed.

As I crouched down, I glanced upward at Tilda. I swear she looked amused.

Harper said, “I'm surprised you couldn't hear it at As You Wish. They were really going at it.”

Sighing, I set about cleaning up. “What were they fighting about?”

“I'll tell you if you tell me about this morning, Darcy,” she said. “How did Raina die?”

I recalled stepping in the puddle of Raina's blood and goose bumps rose on my skin again. Fighting a feeling of wooziness, I set aside files and pumped hand sanitizer from a container on the desk into my palm and rubbed it over my foot. At this point I was beginning to think it would never feel clean again. “I'm not sure,” I said truthfully. Harper didn't need to know the gory details. She tended to focus intensely on them. For days. So I gave her as little information as possible. “She had a head wound. Now, about that fight . . .”

Seemingly appeased for the moment, she said, “Kent was angry because Raina turned down an offer to be the exclusive listing agent for the new neighborhood should it get approved. Kent felt as her husband and partner that he should have been consulted first. He ranted. He raved. He said this could have been a life changer for them. She silenced him by saying that he'd made plenty of decisions lately without her, and it was her business and her word was final. Then she walked off.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah,” Harper said. “I felt like they were arguing about much more than the development.”

He'd made decisions without her . . . What kind?

“Did you know the agency was Raina's alone?” I asked. Although Raina had definitely been the driving force behind the agency, I always thought it was owned by both of them.

“Not until that fight. Makes you wonder what will happen to it now, doesn't it?”

It did. With Raina out of the way, Kent was free to take on any real estate projects he wanted. Maybe he could make a go of the company on his own, after all. Especially if he could get that contract for the new neighborhood. “Did the developer already contract with another real estate agent?”

“Not yet, but Noelle Quinlan's been gloating all over
town for the past week that she's the top choice for the job if the neighborhood gets approved. Haven't you noticed?”

“No,” I said, smiling.

Noelle Quinlan—who'd always lurked in the shadows of Raina and Magickal Realty. With Raina's death Noelle had just become the top agent in the village . . . and that put her on my suspect list.

Because the more I thought about it, the more I realized that maybe, just maybe, Raina's killer had used the diamonds for a cover-up. . . .

Her killer could have been
pretending
to burgle, but in reality was lying in wait for Raina to show up.

It was rather brilliant.

Because once police caught wind of the possibility of diamonds being in the house, they would focus on treasure hunters and the like, and not someone a little closer to the situation. Like Noelle. Or Kent.

If that theory was true, then I was looking for someone who knew about a connection between Raina and Andreus—because I didn't think it was a coincidence that she had an amulet in her hand when I'd found her or that there had been a letter
A
written in blood on the wall.

It was entirely possible someone was framing Andreus.

Someone who knew that Andreus's father had stolen the diamonds in the first place.

Which, according to Ve and Cherise, was most of the village, mortals and Crafters alike. I had no idea how to narrow it down.

Or, I realized with a silent groan,
Andreus
had set that scene in the closet, hoping the police believed he was being framed and wouldn't consider him a suspect.

He was absolutely sneaky enough to do such a thing.

And just like that, I was back at square one. Well, almost. I felt I could at least rule out random treasure hunters as the killer because of that charm in Raina's hand. A stranger
wouldn't know Andreus from Adam. The killer had to be someone who knew Raina well.

“You need to get out more,” Harper said.

“I get out plenty.”

Harper harrumphed, then expertly returned to the topic of how Raina had died. “I heard there was blood,” she said. “Lots of it.”

Ugh.
I didn't need the reminder. I tried to reach the files that fell behind the cabinet, but the opening was too narrow. And the wooden cabinet was much too heavy to move. The folders were going to have to wait until I could outsource some muscle. “Archie tell you that, too?”

“No. Finn Reardon told me. I ran into him as he was walking by the shop.”

“
Ran
into him? Or
forcefully
grabbed
him?”

“I don't think he'll press charges,” Harper said, and I could hear the smile in her voice.

“How's Calliope doing?” I asked. “Did he say?”

“Resting. She's pretty shaken,” Harper said. “Finn was on his way to the Sorcerer's Stove to pick up some soup for her.”

The restaurant had reopened recently under new management, and the village couldn't have been happier to have it back.

“I don't know about her,” Harper said after a pause.

“Who?”

“Calliope. Aren't you paying attention?”

I frowned at the phone.

“Now, if I'd been with you,” Harper said, not waiting for me to answer, “I can assure you that
I
wouldn't have been upchucking.”

True. Harper would have been taking pictures and notes. “Cut Calliope some slack,” I said. “It was traumatic.”

“For Raina.”

“You're being harsh.”

“I think it was a bit of an exaggerated response, don't
you?” Harper asked. “Maybe one produced to make her seem like she was shocked by the scene.”

“The scene was shocking.”

“
You
didn't get sick or even faint. It couldn't have been that bad.”

“It was that bad. I think I'm building up a tolerance to death and blood,” I said.

“I'm not sure whether that's a good or bad thing.”

“Me neither.”

I finished tucking the remaining folders into the filing cabinet and looked around. The office space had been a source of contention between Ve and me over the past year. She liked organized chaos. I just liked organized.