Library Cat Magical Mysteries Box Set (Books 1-3), page 3
“You can’t leave town,” he said. “No one can. Including the killer.”
That was a chilling thought. He was right, though. Our town is completely sealed, just the one small opening in or out—the birth canal, the locals call it. And it was surely magically sealed by now, ensuring the killer couldn’t get away.
“You know it wasn’t me, right?” I asked him.
He grunted again, managing to make one nonverbal noise contain so much multifaceted meaning.
“Who do you think it was?” Whitney whispered.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But stop whispering. It makes us look guilty.”
I stayed for a little longer, but decided to take Rend up on his offer to lock up. My younger sister Lizzie was at my house watching Sophie, and I needed to get back.
But before I left, I retreated into my office for a moment. There was something I had wanted to do before the day got derailed.
I closed the door, not caring if it made me look guilty. In the bottom drawer was the box from Uncle Arthur. I pulled it out and opened it up. I took out the scrap of paper inside. It was a mostly blank sheet of paper, only a few inches on each side, ragged edges where it had been hastily torn from a book. Uncle Arthur loves books as much as I do. What had driven him to this frantic, desperate act of book desecration?
Five words were all he wrote. I kept turning the paper over in my hands, as if the mechanical rotation would cause more words to spring forth. But no. One sentence, a simple imperative.
Destroy the six cursed books.
Gee, thanks Uncle Arthur.
You’d think if it was that important, he’d have gone into a little more detail.
Unless he couldn’t.
Maybe something had kept him from going into more detail.
Six cursed books? I don’t know a lot about the world, but I know a lot about books. Folklore’s full of tales of cursed books, but as far as I knew, there wasn’t any truth to it.
It was possible, too, that Uncle Arthur was crazy. Too much time alone in the wilds stewed his brain.
Except. The package had been positively bursting with energy when I opened it.
And what was with that crazy flash of covetousness that overtook me when Penny wanted to look at the pendant?
Something weird was going on in town, that much was obvious. I just hoped that the pendant hadn’t caused it. I didn’t think that defense could hold up in court. It wasn’t me, Your Honor, it was the pendant!
If that didn’t get me a one-way ticket to the Funny Farm, nothing would.
Chapter 5
When I finally trudged home well after dark, the lights were on in my house and I could see my sister Lizzie bustling around the kitchen. For once, I was grateful for her culinary meddling. I didn’t have the energy to feed myself—let alone Sophie.
I unlocked my front door, but when I tried to push it open, it didn’t budge. “Lizzie?” I called.
“Who is it?” Lizzie’s voice.
“Me,” I said.
“Who’s ‘me?’” she asked.
“For crying out loud,” I said. “The person who gave Betsy a haircut when you were five.”
Betsy was her favorite doll. I was seven, and while I knew doll hair wouldn’t grow back, I figured Betsy would have a sleek, short haircut like Janet from Three’s Company. I hadn’t imagined the doll would look more like Mr. Roper when I was done.
The door opened and Lizzie stood there with one hand on her hip and a knife in her other one.
“Hold on now,” I said, raising my arms in a conciliatory gesture. “You’re not still mad about the doll, are you?”
She realized she was brandishing a deadly weapon and lowered it. “Sorry,” she said. “There is a killer on the loose. I warded all the doors and windows.”
“Good thinking,” I said. Especially with Sophie under our care this week, we had to be extra careful. Sophie was lounging on the couch with Kong in her lap. My familiar didn’t even bother to open his eyes when I came in.
“Dinner’s almost ready,” she said. “Joe got a pizza for him and the boys already, so I thought I’d come here and make something healthy for us girls.”
Sophie shot me a pleading look. I could tell my thirteen-year-old niece would rather be eating a few slices of pepperoni pizza with her cousins.
That made two of us.
“Smells great in here,” I said. “Thanks for helping out. I thought the Werewolves would never let me leave.”
Lizzie hurried back into the kitchen and traded her knife for a wooden spatula. “They don’t think you had anything to do with it, do they?”
“I hope not,” I said. “But Rend Redclaw was treating me like Public Enemy Number One.”
“Probably just using it as an excuse to sniff you,” Lizzie said.
“Not in front of the child,” I said.
“Hey, I’m thirteen,” Sophie protested.
“Less talk, more petting,” Kong grumbled.
“Sorry,” Sophie said.
“Don’t apologize to the cat,” I told her.
“And why not?” Kong asked, but I ignored him. I took a look at what my sister was cooking. She’d used a grill-pan to fry up some chicken breast. She took the lid off a stock pot and the kitchen turned into a broccoli sauna.
“Dinner’s ready!” she called.
I plopped down in a chair and let her put some chicken and broccoli on my plate.
Sophie sat down and Kong jumped into his customary chair. “Excuse me, there’s been a mistake,” Kong said. “You forgot the sauce.”
“No sauce,” Lizzie said.
“No? Sauce?” Kong repeated, more confused than anything. “What about a nice fig and balsamic reduction? Or a quick apricot glaze?”
“Oooh, apricot sounds good,” Sophie said.
“Nothing but sugar and corn syrup,” my sister said. “I need to shave off a few pounds after the holidays.”
“Come on, Lizzie,” I said. “You look great for your age.”
Uh-oh. I hadn’t meant to say that.
“For my age?” she said. “You mean, for an over-the-hill matron?”
“You know what I meant,” I said. “You had two kids. It must take a lot out of you to raise them.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean? That I’ve got bags under my eyes and gray hairs?”
“Good grief,” I said. “Take it in the spirit in which it’s intended. You are a stunning woman of forty-three. But no, you are not a stunning woman of twenty-three.”
My sister looked at her plate and returned her second piece of chicken back to the pan.
“Don’t do that,” I said. “You need sustenance.”
While Kong was distracted pawing at his meal, I surreptitiously got one of the hairball tablets out of the box. I popped open a can of abalone and took out one of the slimy things.
“What did you just open up?” Kong asked. “I heard a can open.”
“Mind your own business and eat your dinner,” I told him.
“Cans are my business,” he said. He twitched his little pink nose, wiggling his whiskers back and forth. “Seafood? Mussels? Clams?”
“Quiet,” I said.
“Mom looked great for her age,” Lizzie said. “Remember?” Lizzie is the youngest of the three Vespertine sisters and our father’s favorite, so she took it the hardest when they got divorced. She hated Whitney with a burning passion, seeing her half-sister as her replacement.
“Mom also worked 60-hour weeks at WitchFlix,” I said. “Remember?” While I’m absolutely in favor of women having interesting and fulfilling careers, I’m more in favor of people (both men and women) spending time with their family and prioritizing their loved ones over trivial career achievements.
I might have some of my own issues too. Not going to pretend I don’t.
Kong meowed loudly to get my attention. “I’ll just have some unagi or seabass, if you don’t mind,” he said. “If I wanted to eat steamed broccoli, I’d go live in the old folks’ home.”
“Last time we were there,” I reminded him, “I seem to remember that you ate a low-sodium lunch tray with steamed broccoli.”
“I was dangerously low on my B-12 levels,” he said. “I had no choice.”
“Just eat the chicken and I’ll give you a treat afterward,” I said. I showed him the piece of abalone.
“Abalone,” he said. “The good stuff, too.” He wasn’t wrong. Abalone was expensive. When I was a kid, it seemed every family had an old abalone shell on the coffee table to be used as an ashtray. But it turned out the stuff was primo shellfish.
“Tell me about it,” I said. I set it down on his plate, next to the broccoli.
He licked it and was about to sink his little white fangs into it when he stopped cold.
“Abalone? Out of the goodness of your heart?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said. “Why not? Can’t I bring my favorite cat a treat?”
“No, you can’t,” he said. He pawed it open and found the hairball tablet. “Ah-ha! Trying to poison me? Lizzie, raise the Werewolf Law Enforcement Brigade, posthaste! We’ve got a murderer in our midst!”
“It’s not poison,” I said. “It’s a hairball remedy.”
“Might as well be poison,” he said. “You do not have my informed consent for treatment. I refuse.”
“You’ve got one in there,” I said. “You’ve been puking every day trying to get it out.”
“And I always clean it up,” he said indignantly.
“Yeah, but not before I step in it.”
“You’d deny an old cat a bit of fun?” he asked.
He used his paw to gently push the hairball tablet off the edge of the table onto the floor. Only then was he content to eat the abalone. “Sophie, be a dear and get out the apricot preserves, Worcestershire sauce and garlic.” Sophie pushed back her chair and set to it, eager as Kong to have a sauce for the chicken. I was too tired to bother and dispassionately shoveled the food into my mouth the same way you feed branches into a woodchipper.
Kong directed Sophie to make the apricot glaze while I ate with my sister.
“Are you ready for the Spelling Bee?” Lizzie asked Sophie.
“I’ve been practicing every day,” she answered.
“Focus on the task at hand,” Kong chided her. “Stir it continuously or it will burn.”
The annual Spelling Bee is a competition where pre-Academy students from all over come to display their magical talents. The young witches prove their skills in potions, transfiguration and basic spellcast. The winners get a scholarship to the Academy. My older sister, Maggie, lives in a small town called Hell For Certain, Kentucky. Her husband is a regular old human who works on an assembly line at a hog slaughtering plant. This Spelling Bee was their only chance to get Sophie accepted into the Academy with a scholarship.
“What about the murder?” Lizzie asked me. “What happened?” She’d already finished her chicken and broccoli. I didn’t know how she deprived herself, but I made it my personal mission to get her to eat a donut by the end of the week.
“It was terrible,” I said. I told her how I’d found him dead when I returned from picking up Sophie.
“Good thing you had her wait in the lobby,” Lizzie said. “I’d have hated for her to see it.”
“I know,” I said. “Rend said they were going to seal the Birth Canal so the murderer can’t escape.”
“Great, now we’re all trapped in this town with the killer,” Lizzie said. “Nothing more dangerous than a cornered animal.”
“Whitney thinks that if we found the killer, then—”
“Don’t mention her name in my presence,” Lizzie said.
“It’s been twenty years,” I reminded her. “You can’t hold a grudge forever.”
“Watch me,” she said.
“You know that you have issues, right?” I asked.
“I am in tune with my emotions,” she said. “I don’t repress them, like you do.”
“I don’t repress my emotions,” I countered.
“If you go butting into the investigation, it’s only going to make you look more guilty,” Lizzie said. “That’s what the killers always do. They stand around the crime scene, trying to blend in with the onlookers. Or they show up to the memorial service for the victim. It’s how they get their jollies.”
“Wait,” I said. “What do you mean make me look more guilty?”
“You gotta admit, you look pretty guilty,” she said.
“Is that why you answered the door with a knife in your hand?”
“I answered the door with a knife in my hand because anyone could have been out there using a spell to imitate your voice. But everyone knows you banned Florian from the archives. And half the town saw you arguing this afternoon.”
“It was not half the town,” I protested. “There were five or six people tops.”
“You know how people are.” She shrugged. “By tomorrow, it will be a hundred people who’d swear on their family grimoire that they witnessed your argument.”
“So you think I’d bludgeon him for that?”
“No,” she said. “But maybe you had a fight and had to defend yourself.”
“Are you wearing a wire?” I asked. “This sounds like entrapment.”
“I did just watch a documentary on WitchFlix about the Dark Wand Killer back in the 80s.”
“I didn’t kill him,” I said.
“I know that, but you do look guilty,” Lizzie said. She stood up and gathered our plates and took them to the sink. Kong and Sophie sat back down and ladled the apricot glaze onto their chicken.
“Not bad for a first attempt, Sophie. I’ll make a proper chef out of you yet,” Kong said, licking the spoon. “We can follow it up with black truffle mushrooms and a wedge of Camembert cheese with fig chutney for dessert.”
“Um, do you have ice cream instead?” Sophie asked.
He sighed and shook his head. “I think Francie has some in the freezer, but she was saving it for a stress binge-eat.”
“Hey!” I said. “And besides, I’m accused of a murder I didn’t commit. If that’s not an occasion to eat a pint of ice cream, I don’t know what is.”
“You can’t eat your problems, Francie,” my sister said.
“You can’t starve your problems either,” I said.
“I’m not starving myself,” she said. We stared at each other for one tense, silent moment.
Then her stomach growled.
We all laughed and the tension dissolved.
“Okay,” she said. “Maybe I’ll have that second piece of chicken. And just a little bit of ice cream, since I ate good today and exercised.”
“That’s the spirit,” I said.
We split the ice cream between the three of us while Kong enjoyed his cheese and fig chutney.
While I did the dishes, Lizzie helped Sophie practice her spells. Maggie, the eldest Vespertine sister, excelled in Earth magic, and she was chosen to guard the rift out in that small Kentucky town. Lizzie is the youngest and a great all-around witch and has the greenest thumb in town. She can grow anything, even in the middle of the desert.
Me? My magic’s just as liable to backfire as it is to succeed. I’ve gotten good at using my magic to mend books, and my locator spell comes in handy finding books among the massive Archives.
Basically, I’ve got classic Middle Child Syndrome and I never outgrew it, even at age forty-five. No one in my family views my appointment at the Archives as a success—they would never say so, but they see it as a perfect place to stash a witch who’s no good at magic. A place where I don’t need much magic and can’t do much damage.
It should bother me more, but it doesn’t because I love the Archives. Even as a small child, it’s always been my favorite place to be.
I rinsed the last plate and had just set it into the dish rack to dry when I heard it. The sound stopped me cold and turned my stomach into a churning pit of dread.
“Yeowwwwww…”
It was Kong. His pre-hairball mewling. He meowls like a bent trombone before letting loose. I ran around the house trying to find him.
“No!” Sophie yelled.
That was when I saw him, perched on the end table next to the couch. He bent over and opened his mouth and puked right onto Sophie’s open grimoire.
“See!” I shouted. “You’ve got to get that hairball out. It’s ruining your digestion.”
“Hardly,” he said. He jumped off the table, delicately licking his chops. “I think we can safely attribute my digestive upsets to this evening’s ghastly cooking.”
Chapter 6
I arrived at the Archives early the next morning to tidy up. With the townspeople already starting to talk, I wanted to make sure the Archives were beyond reproach.
I busied myself straightening the shelves and polishing the window glass, and I even used a dust-gathering spell to complete success. Last time I tried one of those, I ended up with a small tornado and Kong had to intervene.
“Lassie! Take heed!” I spun around and found Captain Ahab tromping down the aisle. His whale-bone leg clonked loudly on the floor.
Unsure how to respond, I said, “What be the problem, Captain?”
“Tis a grave danger,” he said. My heart sank. If there was another dead body in my beloved library, I was going to lose it.
“What?” I asked. I approached him and instinctively grabbed the ragged lapels of his coat, but my hands pushed right through his spirit form, unable to land on anything physical.
“Horrible, it is, I dare say far too wretched for a woman’s ears,” he said.
“I need to know,” I said.
“Yar, ye be a good solid wench,” he said.
“Gee thanks.”
“But I warn you, brace ye beating heart for a shock liable to stop it cold.”
“What is it?”
“If there’d been any luck left in this sad old soul, I would have used me peg-leg. But the sea has wrung every bit of good fortune bestowed upon me, and alas I was left to step in the vile mess with my boot.”
“Mess?”
“Terrible it was,” he said. “Full of kibble and figs. We are dealing with a fell beast indeed, lass.”
