Witch One Dunnit? (Rachael Penzra mystery) (8 page)

       My niece is normally a polite enough girl, but she
does
like people to say what they’re thinking.  She interrupted my rambling discourse in excitement.  “Were we robbed?  Nothing got broken, did it?”  She had her eye on a few of the more expensive items we carried, I knew, hoping to have saved enough money by the end of summer, when with her discount, she could afford to buy some of them.

       “No,” I thought about it.  Did you call a ruined body broken?  “Well, nothing like that.  It’s Shelly ...”

       “
Shelly
robbed us?”  She sounded skeptical.  “How do you know it was
her
?  I mean, she’s a little weird, but ...”

       “She didn’t
rob
us!”  My voice was becoming a little sharp, too.  I turned to the young deputy for help.  Surely he must have some idea of how to break such horrific news.  Unfortunately, he was still staring at my niece and paying no attention whatsoever to me.  Maybe the young man was color-blind and didn’t notice the newly refreshed shades of red and purple.  Or the nose-ring.  Or the black lipstick.

       He must have felt my look after a moment because he belatedly entered the conversation.  “Your aunt found the body of a young woman in one of the front rooms,” he told her, still staring.  “She’s identified her as an employee named Shelly . . .” He glanced at his notebook.  “Dewitt.  Did you know the deceased?”

       She gave the muscle-bound deputy a look that made him blush.  Her look told him, quite clearly, to quit showing off with all the legal jargon and to speak plain English.  “Of course I knew her,” she scoffed.  “I work with her just about every day.”  She turned to me.  “Is this really true?  What happened to her?”

       “She was stabbed,” he told her, dropping the officialese.  “At least that’s what it looks like.”  He was too involved in Patsy to be careful about what he said.

       All our attention was diverted at the sound of a slamming car door.  Deputy Johnson stood up and brushed at his uniform to clear away any stray, telltale donut crumbs.  Patsy swung her head towards the door, her nose ring flashing.  I sat there, probably looking extremely undignified with my mouth hanging open.  I swear there was ominous music in the background and we could hear the sidewalk vibrate as we turned our undivided attention to the door.  The sheriff, I was to find, somehow demanded a response, even at a distance.

       The man who knocked sharply on the door and then entered at his deputy’s call to “come in,” was large.  Large is a relative term, of course, but the sheriff seemed large compared to ceilings, doorways and/or small mountains.  He even dwarfed the young deputy, whom I had thought of as huge.  His voice, though, was of a smaller man, gentle and smooth rather than the rumble (or maybe
roar
is a better term) one expected to emerge from such a giant of a man.

       He politely introduced himself to Patsy and me, and then motioned his deputy into the hallway leading to the front of the house.  They paused there, briefly, to confer before continuing to the library.  In the whole time, Patsy and I had barely managed to croak brief hellos to his introduction.  The man had force.

       “Man, is he big!” Patsy whispered to me.  She poured herself a cup of coffee and joined me at the table.  “Now, what happened?  Really.  Was she actually stabbed, do you think?  What was she doing here?”

       I had been worried that the traumatic experience would reduce my niece to tears and hysterics.  Well, perhaps those would occur later. At the moment, she seemed morbidly fascinated by the murder of her co-worker, rather than upset.       But then, she hadn’t seen the body.  I hoped to keep it that way. 

   “I think she
must
have been stabbed,” I said.  “She was quite bloody, and we would have heard shooting.  Besides, one of the cuts looked like a ... well, like she was sliced.”  That sounded terrible.  “It didn’t look anything like a gunshot wound.”  Like I knew, and as if being stabbed rather than shot would make it all better.  Lucky Shelly.  She was stabbed to death, but thank goodness she hadn’t been
shot.

       She looked a little pale at my incredibly stupid description.  “I really can’t believe this,” she conceded.  “Of all the people you can’t imagine dying, she’s at the top of the list.  She was too ...” she hesitated.  Even at her age she understood the law of never speaking ill of the dead.  She knew it, but didn’t feel obligated to obey it.  “Bossy.  And how could she have gotten stabbed
here? 
She must have caught a burglar, but what was she
doing
here in the first place?”

       “I’m
sure
I set the alarm.” I mumbled, shuffling back into my own thoughts.  “I’m so paranoid about it.  I can’t imagine how anyone could have gotten into the house without setting it off.”

       The two men returned to the kitchen.  Deputy Johnson went right on through the kitchen and out the door, apparently to make more calls.  Sheriff Alberts accepted my offer of coffee.  He held the large mug in his huge paw, er,
hand
, making him look like an adult at a child’s tea party.  He sucked in the last two donuts when they were offered and then turned the full force of his personality on me.  “Why don’t you tell me everything about the murdered woman that you can think of,” he crooned.  (His suave voice sat
so
oddly with his looks.)  “Did she have any enemies?  Had anyone been bothering her lately? 
Anything
you can think of.”

       “What about her mother?” was what popped out of my mouth.  “I don’t think I can stand to tell her, but she’s got to know.  Is someone telling her?”  I felt the first tears spring into my eyes.  The rest was like a story happening to someone else, but the effect of this tragedy on Motherhood I couldn’t hide from.

       “Her family will be notified,” he assured me.  “We’ll handle it.”  He must have seen the relief I’m sure washed over my face.  “It’ll be easier coming from an official stranger.  We’re supposedly trained in handling this sort of thing, or so they tell us. Are you close to her mother?”

       “No,” I said slowly, trying to figure out how to explain my relationship with Lucinda Dewitt.  Should I tell him that she was a local witch who wanted me to join her coven?  Should I tell him I found her to be pushy and annoying?  That might be honest, but I decided to settle for being just a little more conservative with the truth.  “She was a good friend and customer of my aunt’s.  I inherited the store from Aunt Josie, and Lucinda was one of the first people to call on me.  She’s been a good customer for me, too, and she occasionally stops in for a quick cup of coffee.”

       “Okay. Tell me about the dead woman,” he said, not realizing how impersonal his words sounded.  Or maybe he understood
exactly
how impersonal they sounded, and was trying to remove us a step from the macabre scene in the other room.

       I wanted to be honest. I tried to explain how Shelly had been a real help to me, but she was a little off-putting to the customers with her manner.  I stumbled and stammered, torn between truth and fairness.  “That really sounds terrible,” I told him, finally.  “I’m making her sound horrible.  She wasn’t.  I’m just trying to let you see what her personality was like.  She was rather a strange
girl in some ways, yet absolutely normal in others.”

       “She wasn’t very likable,” Patsy told him bluntly.  “She sometimes seemed to go out of her way to act superior to the rest of the world.  But she always did her share of the work, and she could relax and be a lot of fun when she forgot about the weird ‘persona’ she was trying so hard to achieve.”  He glanced at her hair when she said that, but she didn’t seem to notice.  “She was really involved in developing her personality in a certain manner – mainly to gain power over people, I think.  Kind of like you, in a way.”

       He looked thoroughly startled by this comment, then frowned, and finally ended up laughing loudly, with all the gusto in his voice his body seemed to demand from him.  He was a sharp man, I realized.  He’d caught onto exactly what my niece, with her uncomfortable bluntness, meant.  At some time in his life, he’d decided what face he wanted to present to the world.  He was, in a manner, a work of art. “You’re right,” he told her. 

       I rubbed my aching head and wondered how Shelly’s murder had turned into a discussion of psychology between the sheriff and my psychedelic niece. 

       “What about drugs?  Did she do drugs?” he asked, changing the subject without batting the proverbial eye.

       “How would I know?” I asked, thoroughly confused.

       “Well, did she ever act like she was stoned?  Did you ever smell marijuana?” 

       I shot Patsy a helpless look.  To be honest, I don’t know what marijuana smells like.  My own children had never given me a reason to be familiar with the aroma or appearance of illegal drugs.  At least I hoped not. And if I was wrong, my ignorance had spared me many hours of anguished worry.

       “Nope,” Patsy said with a firm shake of her head.  “I’d have known if she used, and there’s no way she did.  She was weird
without
pharmaceutical help.”

       I shrugged helplessly.  “You’ll have to take her word for it.  I wouldn’t know one way or another.”

       Another car pulled into the driveway, followed by the sound of several more vehicles pulling up in the street.  My thoughts turned, for the first time, to what to do about the store.  I’d have to put some sort of sign on the door since we obviously wouldn’t be open for business.  I mentioned the problem to the sheriff before he got sidetracked in giving orders to the group of various official-looking people now arriving to invade my house. 

       “Don't worry about it,” he told me.  “My people will take care of everything.  Nobody will be coming in here.  I’d like the two of you to come with me and look around to check if anything is missing.  Then if you’ll give us time to check on your rooms upstairs, we’ll leave you the freedom of the kitchen and your living quarters until we’re through.”

       We did as he asked, following him dutifully from room to room.  He made sure neither of us entered the library, stopping in the doorway just long enough for me to look over and around the men in there, glancing to see if anything was missing.  Patsy was shielded from the sight of Shelly’s dead body by the sheriff’s massive body, and I couldn’t see the corpse either.  There were too many people blocking my view, and I didn’t try to look.  I’d already seen Shelly’s body twice, and that was two too many times.

   Idon’t suppose there were more than four people in the room, but they seemed to fill every square inch of the room.  Auras were one of the things I was trying to develop an awareness of.  The law officers exuded bright reds and dark, strong colors.  They emitted shades of power, mixed with the dark shades created by the sight before them.  I shivered and turned away to shake my head.  No, there was nothing missing in the room as far as I could see – except one young life.

       None of the other rooms showed any overt signs of burglary or damage.  The small amount of money I’d left in the cash drawer was still there, right to the penny.  Perhaps Shelly had surprised the burglar and he’d been so scared after killing her that he’d forgotten to steal anything.  By then, nothing seemed too ridiculous to be possible. There was no sign of forced entry I could see.

   We were sent back to the kitchen.  I still couldn’t accept the insinuation that I’d forgotten to turn the alarm system on, so I believed the would-be-burglar must have cut the wires to disable the system.  Then, apparently, he picked the locks.  The knowledge that someone could do such a thing wasn’t the least bit comforting, but the thought I hadn’t forgotten to turn the alarm system on gave me a little relief from the guilt slowly but surely creeping up on me.

       It was so set in my mind that someone had put the system out of operation, I flicked the switch to “on”, fully expecting nothing to happen. 

       Oops.

       “Good Lord!” Patsy gasped, spilling coffee.  I recognized one of her mother’s sayings, complete with intonation.  She turned to look at me as I stood aghast, staring at my hand which was still on the switch. 

       The kitchen filled with law officers, several with drawn guns.  The sheriff’s voice cut through the bedlam.  “What are you doing, Ms Penzra?”

       “I ... ah ... I guess I thought whoever broke in had cut the wires.  I thought the alarm was broken now, and if I turned it on ... Well, I certainly wasn’t expecting any sound ...” I was babbling.  I was tired.  And I was a little scared.  It wasn’t even nine o’clock in the morning.