Murder So Magical Page 3

  My pastries weren't anything nearly as complicated. They just tasted amazing—if sales were any indication—and maybe passed on a bit of the happiness I felt when I was making them, too.

  At any rate, she was selling them almost faster than I could make them and insisted that I keep every penny of the sales. The more popular the shop became, the more requests for special, large-batch orders I received from the public, but I wasn't interested in opening full-time. I'd considered it, but didn't want to turn something I loved into something I had to do. Thus, the concept for Reimagined was born.

  So, getting back on topic, when my alarm clock went off at five, I hit snooze and buried my head under my pillow for another seven minutes of sleep. Yes, I realize seven minutes seems random, but it was the factory setting on my phone, so I just went with it. At 5:07, though, I rolled out, puffy-eyed and cranky. That was my typical morning self until I'd caffeinated no matter what time I rolled out, though.

  I pulled on a pair of jeans and one of Rae's new Brew t-shirts and shuffled to the bathroom to splash some water on my face and apply some eyeliner. That was as beautified as I was going to get. I slipped into my sneakers and pulled my hair into a ponytail on my way out the door.

  When I stumbled into Brew ten minutes later carrying five boxes of muffins, turnovers, and danishes, Rae was already there setting up the register. She slid a cup of drinking-temperature Lively Latte into my hand and sat down beside me with her own cup at the end of the shiny black, faux-marble coffee bar.

  She flipped the top box open and pilfered a pastry. "Ooh. You made raspberry danishes," she said as she pulled out two and handed me one.

  I took a big sip of my coffee and smiled at her enthusiasm. She was one of those freakish people who woke up chipper no matter how little sleep she got or how early it was. Since it was really her only flaw, I overlooked it. "Yeah, I hadn't made them in a while and I know they're your favorite."

  She bit into it and groaned. I tipped up a corner of my mouth. "Who needs a man, right?"

  I teased her a little because to say she had bad luck with men was the understatement of the century. Her most recent boyfriend had literally tried to kill us, so she's sworn off the opposite sex—with the exception of an occasional date with a nice doctor she’d met—in favor of girls' nights out and pastries. Fortunately, high metabolisms run in our families or she'd be in trouble. For that matter, so would I.

  "No kidding. At least I know this isn't going to blow up or shove me out of an airplane." She took another couple bites and we enjoyed our treat in the semi-dark, using just the light of the stand-up coolers so that people wouldn't stand outside and stare in, waiting for us to open. The customers are awesome, but not before I've had coffee.

  "So how'd the treasure hunt go yesterday?"

  "Good, eventually. It took us three sales before we found it, though." I thought of the ring and pulled my purse toward me. "I even got you something!"

  I pulled out the bag and slid it toward her. When she dumped it out, she laughed. "Other than the one Addy always wore, I haven't seen one of these in ages!" She slipped it on her thumb, then held it out. "I love the stones. I've never seen one with them added. And they're purple!"

  I held mine out. "Yeah, there were four of them. Mine's blue, Shelby took the pink one, and Emma got a green one. They were in the drawer of an end table I bought."

  Looking past our hands to the clock, I noticed it was a quarter ’til six, so I waved my hand sideways to open the pastry case, floated the pastries from the boxes into the case, then closed it. I wasn't usually lazy about stuff like that, but I just didn't feel like doing it manually.

  "You ready for the masses?" I asked Rae.

  "Almost." She did a quick final count of the drawer, wiped imaginary crumbs off the counter, and double-checked the condiment station. Once she was satisfied all was well, she flipped over the sign and turned on the lights.

  We hustled all morning and before I knew it, it was past lunch. Brew was only open 'til four, so I usually left right after the lunch rush. I was relieved to see that there were enough pastries left to get us through the next day. Good, because I really didn't feel like baking again that night.

  While I was divvying the tips, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I got that weird feeling that somebody was watching me. I turned around casually and looked at the few remaining customers from my peripheral while I counted the bills. There was a well-kept lady of about forty in a red dress sipping from a cappuccino cup and pretending to read something on her phone. I say pretending because I caught her staring at me once she was sure—or thought she was sure—I wasn't paying any attention to her.

  She didn't look like a weirdo or anything, but I'm probably not the best judge of that. I was pretty sure she wasn't a witch, though I couldn't be 100 percent certain from that distance.

  She looked back down at her phone and didn't glance my way again, so I shrugged and figured she was just people watching. I did it all the time. I handed Rae her half of the tips.

  My phone chimed with a text as I was gathering my things and I was surprised to see Camille's name pop up. Camille's a bit complicated to explain. She started out as Shelby's MOC, or Magical Oversight Committee, case worker. Shelby's powers had apparently been blocked but had been breaking through sporadically, and when that happened, things had tended to blow up. Not big things—for example, a couple of times she waved her hand to the side and dishes flew off tables twenty feet away.

  So, though not physically catastrophic, it didn't bode well for social appearances. Even though most folks had been gossiping about the witch status of my family for decades, not many knew for sure. And we wanted to keep it that way. So did the Council of Witches, and they didn't mess around. They'd strip you of your powers faster than you could say "Bob's your uncle" and there wasn't jack you could do about it.

  They weren't heartless though. Unless things got completely out of hand, they were willing to offer help; thus, the MOC was created. That's how we first met Camille. In the beginning, she was about as friendly as a grizzly with a thorn in its paw, but she came around. We later learned that during that period, she'd been going through a nasty custody battle for Emma.

  I got it, but it still took some time for us to warm up to her because she had given me so many verbal face punches about how I raised Shelby before she got over herself. I was, in essence, a single mom working two jobs. It's not like I could have hired a babysitter for my sixteen-year-old sister, not that I could have afforded one to begin with.

  At any rate, when they'd moved to Keyhole Lake several months ago and Shelby met Emma at school, that pretty much sealed the deal. The weird thing was that we didn't even know Camille had a kid, much less that Shelby was friends with her, for almost a month after they moved there. We found out when Camille showed up for a lesson with Shelby, and Emma was at the farm.

  All the smart-ass comments that she'd made to me about not keeping track of Shelby rushed to the front of my mind, but for once in my life, my brain actually filtered my thoughts before just letting them fall out of my mouth. I was glad they had, because it would have been awkward to be on bad terms with both Shelby's counselor and her best friend's mom.

  Yet another thing to love about small towns.

  The reason I was surprised to see her number was that she'd been out of town for almost three months on a case. Emma'd been staying with us since she came home from her dad's, but we'd heard very little from Camille, and when she did manage to call, it was always brief and never informative. Just, "I'll be home when I can get there."

  I unlocked my phone and pulled up the message.

  C: Finally back in town. Emma's not answering her phone.

  N: They're out on the horses. She probably has it in the saddle bag.

  C: Oh. Wanna grab lunch?

  N: Sure. Meet you at the Cat in ten?

  C: Great.

  By the Cat, I meant the Cheshire Cat, a little pub not too far from the sho
p that served the coldest beer and the best sandwiches in town.

  I turned to Rae, who was checking the specialty blends.

  "Camille just texted and wants to have lunch at the Cat. Can you get away?"

  "Nah," she said. "Angel has an appointment at the community college this afternoon so I'm stuck. Have fun, though. And call me with any details if she finally decides to clue us in on what she's been doing for the last three months."

  "Right?" I said. "I'm dying to know. Surely it can't be that top secret. I mean, c'mon. Aside from people getting brained with toilet tank lids, nothing ever happens here, and that only happened once."

  "Just let me know. The suspense is killing me." We'd been speculating for almost three months about where there was a magical emergency bad enough to keep her away from home almost the entire summer.

  "Will do. Lemme know if the ladies have anything interesting to share." I snorted. Like leaving Clip N Curl without some form of information that you neither needed nor wanted to know was an option.

  I pointed the truck in that direction and by the time I got there, Camille's sleek little Audi was already in the lot. I pulled in beside it and grabbed my purse before heading inside. It took my eyes a second to adjust to the darkness, but when they did, Camille was waving to me from a booth in the back.

  I squinted, then blinked because I could hardly believe what I was seeing. Camille was one of the most put-together women I'd ever met. Even if she showed up at our house at three in the morning, she was dressed to the nines without a hair out of place. Catch her in the middle of the day and she'd give any runway model a run for her money.

  The woman in front of me was anything but. She was dressed down a little in jeans and a silk blouse, but that's not what caught my eye. She had dark circles under her eyes, her cheeks were gaunt, and her hair was pulled into a messy twist.

  In short, for the first time since I'd met her, Camille looked like hammered crap.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I tried to hide my shock, but subtlety's never really been a strong suit of mine. I was better than Shelby, but that wasn't saying much.

  "Wow, sugar, you look like you been rode hard and put away wet. What happened to you?"

  She arched a brow and tilted her mouth up into a ghost smile while she turned the near-empty beer glass in her hands. "Tell me what you really think, why don’t you?" She furrowed her brow just a little bit. "I'm so glad to see you, and to just be home." She said it so softly I almost didn't hear her.

  I slid into the booth across from her and motioned for Monty to bring me my usual. Since he'd already been pouring it, it was in my hand ten seconds later. Once he walked away, I evaluated her a little closer. Overall, she looked like she was running on empty.

  "It's good to see you, too. But seriously, are you okay?"

  She nodded and even that seemed to take effort. "I will be. I just need to get some sleep and a few decent meals in me. A couple days home and I'll be right as rain."

  "Can you at least say where you've been? If I had to guess, it'd be some third-world country where they restricted access to the two hundred items in your beauty regimen," I tried to joke. She was a maniac about taking care of her skin. Said it was never too early to start fighting the aging process.

  She smiled a real, honest-to-god smile and it took a little of the haggard look away.

  "See, I knew I was right to text you. I feel better already. I can't tell you where I was at, but trust me when I say it was not a fun case to be on. I always wanted more action and felt like they were punishing me by assigning me the babysitting job with the MOC, but now I'm perfectly happy to go back to whiny teenage witches and bitchy older sisters."

  I grinned at the jab. "See, I knew you loved us and just didn't know it."

  "Oh, I know it now," she said as Monty sat food in front of us.

  "We didn't even order yet," I said.

  Monty grunted. "Yeah, like you ever order anything other than exactly what's in front of you. Bacon cheeseburger, blue cheese, hold the onions, extra pickles, crispy fries, and a side of ranch."

  I scowled and he put his hands on his hips. "What, for the first time in a dozen years, you were gonna change it up?" I'd known Monty since I was just a kid. Uncle Calvin used to bring me and Shelby here for lunch when we'd come to town for feed on Saturdays, and Monty always put ketchup smiley faces on our burgers.

  "Maybe I wanted Swiss."

  "Now you're just bein' ornery. Eat your burger before it gets cold, Miss Priss." He ruffled my hair like I was still ten and lumbered back behind the bar.

  And another benefit of living in a small town, except this time I'm not being sarcastic.

  Camille had ordered a burger and fries too, and I quirked up a brow. "Should I film this?"

  She shrugged. "No need. I plan on doing a lot more of it. I learned this week that tomorrow ain't guaranteed, honey, and if I want a burger, I'm gonna eat a burger." There were so many things wrong with that sentence that I didn't even know where to start.

  Camille didn't eat burgers because they were fattening and unhealthy. Same went for ice cream, cake, and pretty much anything that came out of my oven. She'd never so much as tasted one of my pastries even though she'd stood right there and watched me ice them. Bread was a stretch for her. And I'd never heard her use slang or improper grammar, ever.

  Cultured, put-together, and reserved, she was the epitome of southern lady. I'd never seen the red-meat-eating, beer-swilling redneck girl sitting across from me in my life. I smiled as burger juices ran down her arms and wondered if this was Camille 2.0 or if she'd just had a temporary lapse in sanity.

  I tore into my fries—unlike the person who usually lives in the body sitting across from me, I've never had anything against a good plate of fried food. I ate while I waited for her to continue. Somehow, this didn't feel like one of those things you could rush. She'd tell me about it in her own good time.

  When she'd downed half the burger and most of the fries, she pulled her napkin from her lap and leaned back, looking much better than she had just thirty minutes before.

  "So now are you going to tell me what's been going on?"

  She started fiddling with her napkin, pressing it flat, then folding it. "I'm not really allowed to talk about it."

  "Yeah, so you've been saying for the last three months."

  "And so I'm gonna have to say again." She wadded the napkin up and tossed it on her plate. "Look, I'm not allowed to talk about it, and to be honest, I don't want to talk about it. It was a crap couple months and I'm not even sure I succeeded. So, why don't you catch me up on what's been going on around here?"

  I drew my brows together for a minute, but decided to let that particular dog lie for now. She looked whipped and cheering her up seemed the better thing to do than argue with her. At some point, we were going to have to discuss Shelby's testing too, but that could wait until she wasn't in some sort of existential crisis. Eyeing the remains of a plate of food she wouldn't have touched three months ago, I thought it might even be an existential transformation. I hoped so.

  "Well, Anna Mae got her odds-n-ends shop open. She calls it Things Remembered. I went yesterday and got the first couple of pieces of furniture for my new business, and have decided to name it Reimagined, I think. Oh, and Coralee says Ms. Schumacher is hangin' her hooker panties on her clothesline again." That got a smile. "I told you about Max Wheeler dyin', and besides that, things are about the same as they were when you left."

  "You have no idea what a good thing that is," she said. "We all sit around and hope for change, or complain this town's too backwoods, but it beats a big city hands-down. Folks know each other and help each other. Shoot, most of 'em don't even lock their doors at night. Once that's gone, there's no getting it back."

  I listened and watched her face. She wasn't just talkin' to hear her head roar; her words were targeted. "I suppose you're right. When I was in Atlanta for college, I felt like I lived in a cage. I was never so glad to
be home in my life as I was the day after I graduated and knew I didn't have to go back."

  "These little towns, though. They're different. They're still mostly good, or at least when they're bad, it's an honest bad," she said. "There's always at least a touch of order and manners, even when it comes to crime."

  "Yeah, that's right, for the most part anyway," I agreed. "Max Wheeler'd probably disagree." Max had been killed when somebody bashed his head in with a toilet tank lid a month or so before.

  "So," she said, sitting up straighter and pushing the shadows from her face. "Where did you go to find your first two pieces?"

  "Eagle Gap," I replied. "The first two places we went were a bust, then Emma found a great door and end table at the third place right when Shelby and I were ready to give up the ghost."

  Her eyes snapped to me. "Eagle Gap? You took Emma to Eagle Gap?"

  "Uh ... yeah," I said, bewildered. She was looking at me like I'd offered her kid up as a virgin sacrifice. "Was I not supposed to?"

  She took a deep breath and raked her fingers through her hair. "No. No, it's fine. Sorry. I guess I'm just worn to the bone. I feel like one big bundle of nerves. What did you think of the place?"

  My mind drifted back to the family at the restaurant, and, of course, Kirsten. "It was okay. Weird, though."

  "Weird how?" she said as she dunked her fry in ranch dressing. I had to give her credit for going whole-hog on the food thing but I was still having problems wrapping my head around that.

  "Just weird." I described both incidents to her and she drew her eyebrows together in thought.

  "The incident with the girl could have been exactly what y'all came up with." I was a little worried that she'd be upset that Shelby had used her persuasion, but I figured if anything came of it, it was better to have it out sooner rather than later.