The Innocent Dead: A Witch Cozy Mystery (The Maid, Mother, and Crone Paranormal Mystery Series Book 1) Read online

  “Lolloping lizard lips! Get off me.” She stomped to the kitchen where she kept a tub under the sink to soak her feet after a day of too much standing. “Go away, William. I don’t want you. The dead should be dead. They shouldn’t continue walking around to harass the living.”

  Despite her protest, he trailed after her. “Are you sure you don’t believe I killed those people? That was why you made the ward, wasn’t it? And now you’re trying to make a new one.”

  “No, I never believed it, even though my mother and grandmother did. We had bitter fights about you.” She placed the foot bath under the hot water tap and turned it on, testing the water with her hand as she said, “Help me find your body, William. When I find it, it can lay all those old rumors to rest. I’ll prove you weren’t a killer who ran away, that you were dead before the final murder. Once that’s done, I’ll help you pass to the Summerlands. You’ll have your peace, and I’ll have mine. Now go! I don’t have the patience for this today.”

  He reached a hand out to caress her face as he had done hundreds of times when he was alive. All she felt was a chill; there was no substance. Her neutral expression insisted it didn’t mean a thing to her. Then, he was gone.

  Natalie stood for a while with her eyes closed before raising a hand to her cheek, a sad smile on her face, while the stream of hot water she’d forgotten about dissolved the last of her mineral salts and overflowed with them down the drain.

  ***

  There was no way Taniqua “Twink” Johnson was going to go live in boring old Giles with her mean old aunt. No way. Did any normal people even live in Giles? She sure hadn’t seen any during visits. Even the names of the stores were weird. You’d have to be a freak to buy your food at a store called the Decent Food Mart, which was the only grocery store for miles. Too bad her opinion couldn’t stop her cousin’s car from driving steadily onward with Twink captive in the passenger seat.

  She finished putting a final coat of gloss on her already shiny lips and shoved the visor mirror back up flat against the roof of the car. It’s not like the sunset would blind her—the sun hadn’t bothered to come out from behind the clouds all day, pretty much like every late March in Massachusetts. She’d rather have ear plugs than eye protection, though. Her cousin Daria, who used to be cool, had been lecturing her nonstop since her mother had shoved her into Daria’s tiny toy car and hustled back into the house without even saying goodbye.

  Things had been bad, but she didn’t think they’d been that bad. And it wasn’t her fault. She hadn’t meant to start the fire. It was like the flame had jumped out of the lighter and lit whatever it wanted to light instead of the candlewick she’d been aiming for. And who cared if a bunch of stupid silk flowers got burned up anyway? She’d stopped it from getting to the couch.

  Plus, she hadn’t broken any of the things her mother said she had. It was like stuff decided to commit suicide when she walked in a room. Why else would a brand new 50-inch plasma TV screen crack all the way down its face when she wasn’t anywhere near it? She’d been with Marcus when she’d heard the sound of fracturing glass from the living room. She’d had nothing to do with it.

  But she couldn’t tell her mother she’d been sitting on her bed, leaning in for her first kiss when the new TV—the thing her mother seemed to care the most about, more than she cared about Twink, that’s for sure—bit the dust. It wasn’t anybody’s business what she and Marcus did. He was the one person who always knew when she was in the room, and she wasn’t going to let anyone interfere.

  “Are you listening, Twink?” Daria asked, taking her eyes off the road as they passed the green sign for Corey Woods Campgrounds. Whatever she was looking for from Twink, Twink didn’t think she’d found it. Daria turned back to the road as she asked, “Well?”

  “How could I avoid hearing you?” Twink answered. “It’s a small car. It’s not like I had time to grab earplugs while my mother was shoving me out of the apartment.”

  Daria kept going on and on the same way she had been for the last half an hour. It was getting old. “I’m telling you, my mama doesn’t put up with anything. Anything! If you pull what you’ve been pulling with your mama, you’ll find yourself out on the street. I’d put you up if I had a bigger place, but my efficiency isn’t even efficient enough for me. So it’s not an option. You . . . you gotta behave, Twink. Where you gonna go if mama throws you out? Keisha, maybe? No, that wouldn’t work. She got a roommate for her extra room. Oh, I just . . .”

  Twink tuned her out and looked out the window again, taking in the last of the woods and the tidy, older houses on the edge of town. Great. Out in the boonies. Livin’ large. Land of split rail fences and lawn jockeys.

  Wait a minute . . . was that a sheep in that yard? Or just a really big, fluffy dog? And did it even matter? It was all too rural for her. She’d never even had a cat because their place was so small, and who wanted to trap a cat the way she was trapped, anyway?

  Twink pretended to be fascinated by the scenery passing by on her left. She didn’t want to risk Daria catching her eye again, not when there was a big, fat tear in it. It was the same old, same old. Nobody wanted her. How could the stupid little town of Giles be any kind of place for a girl like her?

  ***

  Cassie was drowsy and needed a nap after one of Tom’s amazing dinners that would probably someday make her as chubby as Gillian. Not that Tom cared. He loved Cassie’s appetite—all of her appetites. Plus, even though his marriage to Gillian had ended when he’d been trapped inside the store’s cat for over four decades because she’d thought he’d abandoned her, Cassie knew he still thought Gillian looked great the way she was. Nothing to get jealous about though. That was ancient history. Tom had only aged by a couple of years while enslaved. He was way too young for his ex now. They were good friends and cared about each other, but there wasn’t any chance of romance between them.

  She snuggled closer to him on the only modern piece of furniture they’d bought since Tom had won the Stanford mansion in the town raffle. It was comfortable too, but not comfortable enough for her to ignore the sound she heard in the hall. She startled and sat up abruptly. “What was that?”

  Tom pulled her back, but she resisted him. “No. Didn’t you hear it?” She stood up and walked across the large sitting room full of well-maintained furniture that was the height of fashion in the late 1800s. “Something fell over in the hall.”

  He smiled at her invitingly from the couch, patting the place beside him that she’d just vacated. “Stop jumping at every sound. This is an old house—they make their own music. Learn to groove with the beat and you’ll be fine.”

  Cassie looked into the hall and then darted out, returning quickly with an old-fashioned letter opener in her hand. “See? I told you. This fell off the hall table.” She shook it at him. “It’s heavy. It didn’t leap off that table on its own. We need to get Natalie in here to check it out. Do a clearing or something. This place is too spooky.”

  Tom moved to her, gently pushing her brown hair out of the way behind her ears so that it fell down her back in a long cascade, then placed his hands on her shoulders. “Sure,” he murmured as he bent to sweep his lips along her neck. “We’ll have the place checked.”

  Most days, she would melt and forget everything else when Tom’s lips met her skin, but not today. She ignored the invitation and said, “Especially the kid’s room at the end of the hall upstairs. It’s so . . . I don’t know. Sad. And creepy. It’s like everything is waiting for a lost little one to come home. I mean, leaving the house to the town in furnished condition is one thing, but leaving everything in place for the kid to return . . .” She shuddered, dislodging his lips.

  “I can see there’s no distracting you tonight,” he said. “So, should I tell you the story about that room? Everybody knew about it when I was in high school. It was the town’s campfire story. If you’d gone to school in Giles when you were young, I bet you would have heard it too.”

  “There�
�s a story about it?”

  He took her hand and led her back to the couch. Watching his tight backside, she almost wished she’d given in earlier. It didn’t help the situation that his messy, wavy, longish brown hair made him look like he’d just gotten out of bed and would be totally willing to return. Maybe she should let him take her . . . No! She wanted to know about the creepy room. She might be bringing a baby into this house soon, and she had to learn everything about the place.

  When she sat next to him on the couch again, she turned toward him with her bare feet in front of her and her arms snugged around her crossed her legs, subtly putting up a block to prevent any stealth moves he might try. He’d have no choice but to tell her about the house.

  “There are lots of stories about the Stanford place. Why do you think the town was so happy to get rid of it? Who knows which ones are true. But old lady Stanford was one weird chickadee, the last of her line after her brother William disappeared. And William . . . now there’s a story. Apparently, he was one bad guy. He’d make our old buddy Kevin look like a sweetheart.”

  Cassie winced. “Don’t bring Kevin up. Just don’t. He’s not worth mentioning. If William Stanford was worse than a guy who poisoned people, he must have been really bad. Even Robert never mentions Kevin.”

  Tom shrugged. “He does, but not around you. He understands how you feel, and he respects it. But he was the guy’s father, so he’s not going to never talk about him. So I get that. There’s something strong between fathers and sons, for good or for bad. That’s just how it is.”

  Cassie hid her smile, musing about how Tom might be a father soon. But it was too early to tell him the good news based solely on the assessment of elderly witches. It’s not like they were infallible. Natalie especially had been scatterbrained since the Witching Faire. And she always had an excuse whenever they invited her to the new place. It was hard to read her, but Cassie was pretty sure something was wonky in Natalieville; Nat never refused a hand of poker or a free meal or a free anything really, but she was doing all kinds of refusing lately. Gillian even said she’d caught her arguing with herself out loud at the shop when she thought Gillian was out of the room. But even if there was something wrong, Nat would never accept anyone’s help. It wasn’t in her to admit weakness.

  “Yeah, I know,” she said. “Robert’s the best. He really is. It’s hard to understand how such a good man got such a big fail at parenting.” She clutched at her tummy protectively but caught herself, immediately moving her hand to her side. “Just . . . tell me about the room upstairs.”

  “I dunno . . . you might want to turn a few more lights on. It could get intense in here.”

  She leaned forward to slap him playfully on the shoulder, then lay back against the pillowed arm of the couch and put her bare feet in his lap. He rubbed them as he dropped into storyteller mode.

  “The first body turned up right inside the tree line by the lake in Corey Woods. Not drowned. Strangled. They were all strangled.”

  “All?” Cassie asked. Her shoulders tensed.

  “There were three of them that year. Each of them done in with a long length of rope that the killer left behind. And each of them was found with a plastic toy in their hand. And how did the Stanfords make their money? They owned a chain of upscale department stores in the Boston area. William had recently stepped into the job of buyer for the toy departments.”

  “Oh, that’s why there are so many toys. It wasn’t a kid’s room, was it?”

  “No. That was his room upstairs. I’ve checked. There are still undershirts lined up in the drawer with his name sewn into the tags. They must have been from when he was still in school. He was the younger of the two kids, but he was in his twenties when he disappeared. My mother gave my father a good tongue-lashing a couple of times for scaring me with stories about how William had a special toy in his room for me if I didn’t behave . . . and let me tell you, even though I was in my teens, that was a much scarier threat than a lump of coal in my stocking had ever been.”

  Cassie pulled her feet out of his soothing grasp and sat up, leaning in to him. She settled a kiss on his cheek. “Poor thing.” She pulled back and laughed. “Now finish the story! Don’t get me all worked up just to leave me wanting more.”

  “Like there’s any danger of that.” Tom grinned, adding of pinch of bedroom eyes.

  Cassie rolled her own eyes in response. And tingled a little. Not enough to want to interrupt the story. But maybe enough to want to hurry it up. “Just go on.”

  “It was an open and shut case. They found an identical rope in one of the outbuildings behind the house and all those toys in William’s room. It wasn’t hard to put it together. And he didn’t have an alibi for any of the nights the bodies were found. His sister Letitia said he was here all night, but the servants sang another tune. He was out of the house each of the nights there was a murder.”

  “So, they left his room that way when he went to prison?”

  “He didn’t go to prison. He disappeared. There was never a trial. I bet he’s still out there somewhere, picking off victims one by one.” Tom leaned closer. “In fact, he could be out in that hallway right now.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Stalking us. Waiting until we’ve fallen asleep . . .”

  Cassie breathed in with a small, sharp intake of breath. She forgot to breathe again when he continued.

  “. . . dragging his toy train behind him on a string . . . ready to railroad us to hell on the end of a wet rope . . .”

  “A wet rope?” she squeaked.

  “Yeah. A wet rope. No one ever figured that one out.” He moved his head quickly, cocking one ear toward the doorway. “Did you hear that?”

  Cassie’s eyes grew round. “Hear what?”

  “It was like a . . . a wet rope dragging along the floor . . .”

  Cassie hit him a little harder on the shoulder than she’d meant to. She didn’t feel the least bit tingly anymore.

  2

  Rain sheeted down the plate glass windows of Cat’s Magical Shoppe, shadowing the bottles of colored potions that lined the display window shelves. Despite the rain, the sun tried to shine through the clouds and made a dappled effect on the polished wooden floor. Cat leapt from one patch of light to the next, trying to catch the shimmering spot that always disappeared when he landed.

  Natalie was glad of the weather. She hoped it would prevent marauding tourists from spoiling her plan to enlist her friends’ help for a second day in a row.

  “It isn’t about young or old, being the Maid,” she told Cassie. “It’s about being open to the big world that’s out there before your options close around a man and children.”

  Cassie looked at her sideways, her head askew at a disbelieving angle as she passed her hand over the charms she was preparing. “Still can’t see how that’s you, Nat. Other than avoiding the marriage and kids thing.”

  “Can’t you? The Maid gathers the makings of life. She sees the dreams, the ideas, the wanting. But she’s impatient. There’s so much to learn and do. So she gets things started and moves on.”

  Cassie grinned. “Okay, I can see it now. The impatient part for sure.”

  Gillian opened the front door and stuck her head in before Natalie had time to fire back. Her yellow rain hat and slicker dripped onto the entryway floor. “Be there in a tick. This had better be important, Nat, to make me come in early when it’s pouring down rain like this.” Gillian propped the door open with her body as she shook off her wet things.

  Cassie followed up with Natalie while they waited. “What does the Mother represent?”

  Gillian butted in with the answer as she hustled in, her umbrella and yellow Mac now stowed away. “She bakes the bread, sweetheart. Quite literally. But figuratively as well. She has the strength to take all the things she’s been handed and make something new from them. She completes things, then feeds and protects them.”

  “That sounds nice. Although bread-making is more Tom’s department than mine.
I think I’d like being the Mother, even if it turns out that I don’t really have a bun in the oven.”

  “Oh ye of little faith,” Gillian said, rolling her eyes.

  “And the Crone?” Cassie asked.

  Natalie snatched the lesson back while Gillian was still looking thoughtful, preparing her response. “The Crone’s stories are about endings. She’s accepted that all things will pass with time. She sees beyond the passing, helps others accept it, and comforts the ones who are left behind.”

  “But,” Cassie looked at her, her brow crunched up, “you can manipulate the magic of the afterlife. Wouldn’t that make you more Crone-like? Don’t witches with death magic help people pass beyond if they get stuck?”

  “Yes, they do,” Natalie snapped. “But I don’t. And my grandmother would not be proud of me because of that.” She took the basket of teas she’d been bagging and moved it roughly to the end of the counter, taking conspicuous care to rearrange its contents just so. “Things might have turned out differently. I’d have moved to the role of the Mother, then the Crone, in time.” Her lips tightened, shriveling up around the words. “There’s no point musing on it now. And anyone who disagrees can hold their tongue.”

  “Wow,” Cassie said. “I wasn’t going to object. Were you, Gilly?”

  “Argue with Nat when she gets like this?” Gillian replied, shaking her head. “I don’t think so.”

  Natalie jumped in with, “Good. Because it takes a Maid, a Mother, and a Crone to create a ward against ghosts.”

  She joined Cassie behind the counter and retrieved the white cardboard box, setting it up on the counter. The others looked on curiously until she unwrapped the tissue paper and brought the contents out.

  “Cool, Nat!” Cassie said, “That bag looks exactly like your old one. I know how much you loved it. It’s been weird to see you without it.”

  “I certainly paid a premium for it. And I’ll need to spend another long evening cleansing it again before it’s ready, thanks to the shop’s curious kitten. While the ritual obviously doesn’t require this particular bag, an effective ward to keep the dead away needs to be red. And, my dears, a woman must sometimes bow to style.”