The Old Witcheroo (3 page)

“Now that does rankle a little,” I replied in mock disappointment. “I can’t believe he got his grimy hands on it before I was able to figure out where you’ve been hiding it all this time. So back to the Aston Martin. How do you even know it’s yours, anyway?”

“How many 2014 sixtieth-anniversary edition Aston Martin Vanquish convertibles, black with yellow rims, do you see zooming about here? None, I say—because it’s a custom paint job I commissioned.”

“I don’t know any Aston Martins at all, but la-de-da. Aren’t you fancy, Mr. Custom Paint Job? Maybe he’ll get a ticket for driving too fast in your fancy European sports car.”

“Not the point, Stephania,” he growled as I finally caught sight of our private dock in the distance.

“Which is exactly
my
point, Win. Your possessions aren’t what’re important here. Who cares about your Neanderthal rich-boy-spy car and your garish decorating skills when we’re about to lose our house to Fakebottom?” I shouted, making my way over the rocks toward the spot where Dana Nelson had left our small rowboat tied to the dock, exactly where I always left it.

He’d borrowed it for a very hot date just last night. Dana—or Officer Rigid, as I called him—was head over heels in love with Sophia Fleming, a newer resident to Ebenezer Falls of only eight months or so, I’m told.

She worked at the library and she was positively lovely. Not just her personality, which was quiet and maybe even a little introverted, but physically, she was a knockout. More dark, thick hair than a Pantene commercial and beautiful almond-shaped green eyes in a tiny heart-shaped face.

I envied the way she moved; her petite frame floated, rather than walked like the rest of us average Joes, and she always had a smile on her face for all her patrons.

Chester, my surrogate granddad of sorts, often opined if he were thirty years younger, Dana Nelson wouldn’t stand a cow’s chance at a fasting, because Chester would’ve locked her down with a ring by now.

To say Sophia was as crazy about Officer Nelson as he was about her was an understatement. Every time their eyes met, and they often did, as Dana had become a frequent visitor of the library these days, I mentally heard angels sing.

Their sweet courtship was that powerful, and it often made me yearn for someone who felt that way about me. It also made me wonder how Eleanor Brown felt…

Eleanor worked at the Ebenezer Falls Diner as a waitress for her aunt, and it was beyond obvious she secretly crushed on Officer Nelson. From the way she made sure his eggs were specifically over medium to the care she took in demanding Baron, the short-order cook, make Dana’s bacon crisp.

Hers was an unrequited love—one she was either too shy or too hurt by his relationship with Sophia to pursue, and in more ways than one, I understood her predicament.

Eyeing the boat off in the distance, I sighed. The rowboat wasn’t much to look at, truthfully, with its peeling paint and battered oars. But it was fun to hop in with Bel and Whiskey, and anchor to the dock and row in circles while we shared a picnic lunch.

Anyway, Officer Nelson had asked to borrow it to take Sophia out last night. He didn’t say what he was planning, but Win, Bel, and I were almost certain he was going to propose, from the look of his sharp suit and the twinkle in his usually stern eyes.

“Stevie?” Win prodded.

“Sorry. Lost in thought there. I think the sun fried my brain. Which monetary item were you kvetching about again?”

I was rethinking this little venture I’d proposed on a day like today. I guess I’ve acclimated again to the cooler weather of the Pacific Northwest after leaving the relentless heat of Texas, because just the few steps I’d taken had me sweaty and uncomfortable.

“The Aston Martin.”

“Right. The unimportant item in comparison to a roof over our heads.”

“Bah! How can you possibly say my Aston Martin isn’t important, Stevie?”

“Because we can’t live in the Aston Martin, Win.”

“I don’t know. I think I could manage,” he teased with less tension in his tone.

Wiping the sweat from my brow, I clenched my teeth. He couldn’t just sweep this under the carpet anymore. We couldn’t pretend it never happened, like we had these last couple of months because we’d figured Fakebottom had disappeared after we didn’t hear from him. Now that he was back, I was the one here on this plane that had to deal with him.

“Listen, I need you to tell me what we’re going to do about this, Win. We need to take action. We need a plan. I have to go to Seattle next week to meet with him and his lawyers. This isn’t the time to be worried about your car. What you
should
be worried about is that ridiculously expensive wood-fire oven in our kitchen. So let me give you a visual.”

“A visual?”

“Uh-huh. It’s the one where Fakebottom is cooking frozen pizzas in it while he admires his view from the kitchen that took you almost two weeks to decide on the color of the fixtures alone.”

“Fixtures are important, Stevie. They’re the backdrop, the
coup de grâce
of the bigger picture,” he said sheepishly.

“They’re going to be your swan song if you don’t tell me what to do next. Talk to me about who this guy could possibly be. Have any theories? Ideas?”

Win sighed. “Well, it’s obvious he’s an imposter, Dove.”

“Yeah, you’ve said that, but that’s
all
you’ve said. You haven’t theorized, you haven’t said boo about this guy coming out of nowhere and laying claim to your riches.”

“That’s because I have no answer, Stephania. None. I admit, he looks exactly like me, and I don’t know why or how—or how he could possibly prove he’s me in a court of law. I’m confounded, and that’s not something I feel very good about.”

I sighed in sympathy, hoisting the picnic basket I carried with our light lunch higher, knowing how hard it was for Win to watch this all play out without being able to do a dang thing to intervene.

“Well, that’s at least a deeper insight than the complaining you’ve been doing over the state of your car. So what do we do about this meeting?”

“You contact Luis Lipton to represent you, of course. You tell him what’s going on. He knows you. He knows how you came about all this money. You also contact Davis Monroe, who handled my will and such. He has my death certificate and all the pertinent details of my will. That’s all the proof you need.”

Luis was the attorney who’d represented me when I was accused of Madam Zoltar’s murder, and Davis was the attorney who’d handled all of Win’s assets after his death. “Isn’t Luis a defense attorney? How can he represent me in a property dispute?”

“Lipton is an everything attorney because his large retainer says such.”

Right. I always forget how rich Win is—er, I am, and how that appears to make all things possible.

“How is it remotely imaginable this guy can prove he’s you? Didn’t you once tell me a Google search would only tell me you were a mild-mannered grade-school teacher? Wasn’t that your online cover or something? Did he assume that identity? If he’s pretending to be you, how does he explain a schoolteacher driving an Aston Martin? I mean, assuming that’s the identity he’s stolen. Wait! Did you use your real name as your spy name?”

“When I signed up, of course I did. I had a code name, though.”

As the sun beat down on me in all its sizzling heat, I began to poke him for more answers to add to this compartment of puzzle pieces I’ve been collecting where he’s concerned. “Really? Like what? Popsicle? Icebox? No, I bet it was something really distinguished, like Crushed Ice, right?”

“Crushed Ice, Stevie? How is that at all distinguished? It sounds like a bloody rapper.”

My shoulders slumped. “I was riffing on your last name. You know,
Winter-
bottom—popsicle. Like things that are cold.”

“Zero Below,” he muttered with a hangdog tone. “Zero for short.”

I giggled and spun around, almost tripping over my flip-flops. “Hah! So, Zero—or do you prefer Below?”

“Stevie…”

“Okay, sorry. So the question was, did he assume your average everyday fake online persona?”

“How could he? It was strictly on paper. Had anyone checked those credentials, they’d find there
were
no real credentials. It’s all made up. I have no certificate stating I’m a school teacher—my online persona just claims I do. It’s rather like the supermodel in an online chat room. She can claim she’s a supermodel all she likes when no one can see her, but were one to actually research to see if she has any valid
proof
she’s a supermodel, they’d find nothing. But MI6 handles everything. I’m sure they were careful.”

Closing my eyes, I stopped walking for a moment, turning away from the sun. “Well, whether you like it or not, we have a mystery to solve, pal, and we need to figure it out before next week, when I have to face the firing squad. Imagine me explaining to a bunch of suits how I came upon eleventy-billion dollars virtually hand-delivered by you. ‘It went like this, Mr. Attorney. I met a ghost, and that ghost needed my help. He offered me stacks of cash if I’d help him find who killed his medium buddy, Madam Zoltar.’”

I puffed out my chest to depict one of those stodgy lawyers. “‘A
ghost
, Miss Cartwright? A ghost left you eleventy-billion dollars?’”

Now I nodded my head, keeping my eyes wide and innocent. “‘Uh-huh, Mr. Attorney. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, a ghost? Is she bonkers? But here’s the rub. See, I’m an ex-witch who used to be able to communicate with the dead—’”

“Oh, enough, Stephania!” Win always called me that when he was annoyed with me. “I get the picture. We’ll address this, I assure you.”

“Whiskey! Slow down, buddy!” I heard Bel holler from up ahead of us, where they’d been playing in the water. “Heel, you cretin! Heel!”

Whiskey came barreling down the shoreline with Bel on his back, water flying everywhere, his thick mahogany and white coat drenched, his enormous paws skipping over the rocks like they were glass.

And he had something in his mouth.

Ugh. I prayed to the goddess it wasn’t another pair of underwear. Whiskey loves to bring me presents. It’s his way of showing his love, his devotion. He brings me mice, and to his credit, he tries not to mutilate them with his big slobbery jaw before he leaves them on my pillow. He often brings me shoes, and again, to his credit, sometimes they’re even mine.

My boy Whiskey gifts me with all sorts of thing. But the last time we’d been here for a picnic, he’d found some soggy underwear in the sand and had proudly presented them to me by dropping them in my plate of chicken salad.

Yeah. Gross.

But that sure didn’t look like a pair of underwear in his mouth. Hiking the heavy picnic basket over the crook of my elbow, I ran toward him, worried whatever he had he’d end up eating, and then we’d have to have his stomach pumped or something.

“Oh, Whiskey, what have you done, chap?” Win chastised as I met Whiskey and Bel just a few feet from the boat.

Whiskey wagged his big thumping tail at me, splashing up more water the moment I said, “Drop it.” He panted at me, pride in his wide, soft eyes as I knelt to look closer at the item. “It’s a purse.”

“That’s not all it is,” Bel commented, his tone dry, yet almost oddly coming across as resigned.

“Whaddya mean, Bel?” I asked as the contents of the rectangular peachy clutch spilled out of the purse and fell about the rocks. I stooped and began to pick them up when I saw a postcard from our own store.

It was one of my favorites, in fact—a picture of the steamboat that took people on a dinner cruise around the Sound, with the mountains rising up majestically behind it, their snow-covered peeks like dollops of icing.

I picked it up and turned it over to snoop, because I don’t know how to stop myself. I mean, the person who’d lost the purse would surely want it back, right? I couldn’t find out whom it belonged to if I didn’t snoop at the contents.

As I quickly read the back, Win stopped me with his hiss of a gasp, making me jump as my hands grew sweaty.

“What?” But he didn’t have to explain. As I looked up, that’s when I saw it, too.

Just the mere glimpse of a peachy, soft piece of material, hanging over the side of our rowboat.

My heart began thumping in my chest, but I inched my way over to the high side of the rowboat where it sat moored crookedly on the rocks, and held my breath, leaning over the edge with closed eyes so I could send up a prayer before I opened them.

Please let this be old man Hinkle passed out after his old lady Neelie pitched him out the door for coming home drunk.

He lived up the road about a mile from our house. Sometimes he came here to our stretch of beach to sleep off his binge before going home to beg forgiveness.

In my head, I heard the question Win would surely ask if I’d spoken the request out loud. “Would old man Hinkle be in a peach sweater with a matching clutch? Come now, Stephania,” he’d chastise.

I pushed my eyes open and forced myself to look at who was in our rowboat.

And then I swallowed hard, tears stinging my eyes as sorrow filled my chest until I almost couldn’t breathe.

“Oh, Dove. How tragic,” Win whispered in my ear, his warm aura instantly cloaking me in sympathy.

“Yeah,” I whispered back, as I dropped the picnic basket and inhaled a gulp of steamy air to keep from passing out.

Almost on auto drive, I flipped the top of the basket open and felt for my cell to dial 9-1-1. Wrapping my shaky fingers around it, I yanked it out, ran my finger over the screen, hitting the appropriate numbers, my heart so heavy I thought it would drop out at my feet.

As the ugly-hot sun beat down on my head like a bongo player wailing on his drums, I heard the operator say, “9-1-1. What’s your emergency?”

Licking my dry lips, I answered, forcing my voice to remain steady, my information clear and concise. “This is Stevie Cartwright. I live at 711 Samantha Lane. I’m on my private beach as we speak. I’m not in any danger, but I’ve happened upon a dead body as I was taking a walk along the shore with my dog. It’s Sophia Fleming.”