A Hillcrest Witch Mystery Collection Read online

  “Warrior!” I say out loud

  The sound of my own voice jolts me, and I start tipping backwards on my Swiss Ball. Then I fall backwards off the exercise ball, and land with a thud on the floor, my dress up around my waist. I am so glad that didn’t happen when Mayor Haywater was in the room.

  I silently curse Jumper Strongheart and his ‘Strong Spine—Strong Life’ protocol, which forbids chair-sitting.

  I prop myself up onto my elbows. My feet are still high up on the ball. From down here, I can see the yarn that I tossed onto the floor, along with the empty mechanical pencil. It reminds me of how pitifully I handled the ‘intake’ of my new client.

  I am cringing as I struggle to my feet. On the blank piece of paper, I jot down a few notes to myself, so that I can learn from the situation.

  Improve my client intake skills. How to look more professional? Clean desk! Plant in the office?

  Work on core stability. Sit-ups every morning? Reread Jumper’s strong spine protocol. Must be able to balance on ball!

  Don’t take husband-wife cases. Too sad!

  There. I think that about covers it. I think I’m about done for the day. I’ll tackle this again in the morning, when I feel fresh.

  Though it’s been a rough day—a learning experience, as Jumper would call it—there is one good thing that happened. I have three hundred dollars! I can pay my rent.

  I happily stuff the cash into my wallet, and then go about emptying coffee mugs.

  The supply closet has one little window, which opens and doesn’t have a screen. When I poke my head out of it, I can see down to the sidewalk below. I pour mug after mug of stale coffee and tea out onto the empty sidewalk, where there’s always a brown stain in between rain storms (thanks to me).

  Once this is done, I stuff three of the empty mugs, into my cross-body messenger bag. Then I carefully don my bag and head for the door.

  Soon I’m at home, scrubbing coffee stains out of mugs. I’m elbow deep in suds when I hear a knock on the door.

  I have a feeling it’s Chris, and I’m right.

  When I open the door, he’s standing there. He immediately leans in and gives me a kiss on the cheek.

  I’m wearing bright yellow rubber dishwashing gloves that are dripping with soap suds, so I don’t wrap my arms around his neck like I want to. Instead I grin and accept the kiss.

  Chris Wagner is my boyfriend. He’s also a police captain for the Hillcrest Police Department. It's a small department of four, and he’s a star player.

  It’s a position he’s good at.

  In fact, when I first developed a crush on Christopher Wagner, he was the captain of the Hillcrest High School Boys Basketball team. I was a girl four years younger than him, drooling from the bleachers. All these years later, he’s still handsome as heck, and I’m still his biggest fan.

  Chris is tall and in great shape, with blue-grey eyes and sandy blonde hair. Tonight, he’s dressed in basketball shorts and a black tee shirt. Best of all, he has a six pack of beer in one hand, and a pizza in the other.

  “Hungry?” he asks, as I reach for the pizza.

  “Starving!” I say. “I was about to pour a bowl of cereal. This is so much better!”

  Chris laughs. As he enters the apartment, I smell his body wash. I see now that his hair is also still a bit wet, like he just stepped out of the shower. I know what that means.

  “Did you just get home from work?” I ask.

  Chris has two looks: either he’s dressed in his police uniform, or he’s just peeled it off, and is unwinding so that he can perform well in his next shift. His life is totally centered around his work. He loves being a police officer.

  I don’t blame him. I wanted to be one, too. I went to college for my criminal justice degree, and then entered Hillcrest’s police academy immediately after. That’s actually when Chris and I first hooked up. He was the trainer of my academy class. We kissed on day one, and in the days that followed, we did more than kiss.

  A lot more.

  Looking back now, I see what a mistake it was. I should have ignored my feelings for Chris, and tried to get through the academy without bedding my instructor. Maybe then, Academy would have gone better for me. As it was, I was an emotional mess, and I failed out of it. Not long after that, Chris and I broke up.

  Needless to say, I thought my life was over.

  I had to say goodbye to my dream career and my dream guy, all within one week. I was crushed.

  However, the saying is true: Every dark cloud does have a silver lining.

  In the months and years after I hit rock bottom, I found Zumba, knitting, and my PI program. And look at me now! I’m running my own not-so-successful PI business, and almost-knitting an Icelandic sweater! Plus, Chris and I got back together—sort of—a few months back. We’re taking it slow; maybe things aren’t as passionate as they were the first time around, but we’ve gotten into a comfortable sort of groove. Does it get any better than that?

  You don’t really have to answer that.

  With a hissing sound, Chris cracks open a beer and hands it to me.

  “Thanks,” I say, accepting it. “How was work? Did you just get off?”

  He nods, and then opens a beer for himself and takes a swig. “Twenty minutes ago,” he says. He opens the pizza box and a cloud of steam billows upwards.

  “That was fast,” I say, trying to calculate in my head how in the world Chris managed to ride his mountain bike home from the police station, pick up cold beers, order a pizza, take a shower, and make it over to my place (which is right next door) in twenty minutes. Sometimes it takes me that long just to wash my hair.

  I do have really long, thick hair, while Chris’s is only slightly longer than a buzz cut, but still.

  “I’m getting the routine, down,” Chris says, grinning as he pulls a slice of the pie towards him. A long string of cheese stretches out from the slice, and he has to sever it with his fingers.

  “I ordered the pizza before I jumped in the shower,” he explains. “Plus, I started getting a few six packs each time I’m at the store, so that I don’t have to run out every time.”

  “You’re a wise man,” I say, reaching for a slice myself.

  Chris laughs. “How was your day?” he asks.

  “Good,” I say. Then, before I think too much about it, I say, “Mayor Haywater visited me, at my office.”

  “Was he lost?” Chris asks.

  I glare at him, while chewing my pizza. Yes, I thought the same thing, but that doesn’t mean he can think it.

  “No,” I say, once I swallow the pizza and wash it down with beer. “You really have no respect for my PI career, do you? He wanted to see me. He wants me to spy on his wife,” I say. “She ordered a one-way ticket to Hawaii, but never went. He’s worried.”

  Chris gulps down some beer. Then, after a minute of thought he says, “Be careful with that, Penny. It sounds messy. He might think he wants to know what’s going on with Melanie, but I doubt he’s going to be happy when you present him with the facts. People tend to shoot the messenger.”

  “I know.” My shoulders slump. “It’s not good. But he offered cash, and I couldn’t pass it up.”

  We eat in silence for a bit. Turkey, my calico cat, joins us and I toss him occasional bits of cheese, which he scoops up with his tongue while his tail twitches happily.

  As I eat, I’m thinking about my conversation with Cliff. “Hey, Chris,” I say. “Remember how Joe Gallant was found in the walk-in freezer, at The Place?”

  “How could I forget?” Chris asks. He stops eating. “It was horrible.” He places his piece of pizza down on the box top, which reminds me that I didn’t get out plates for us.

  I hop off of my barstool and round the counter to grab some plates.

  The cupboards are empty. Did I forget to run the dishwasher again?

  I reach for paper napkins instead, and push a few over towards Chris. Then, I search the cupboards for glasses. I find one clean recycled
mason jar, and one juice glass. I fill each with water and carry them back towards my stool. I’ve learned long ago that if I’m going to drink beer up here in the mountains, I need to drink water along with it.

  “How did he get stuck in there?” I ask.

  Chris shrugs. “It was an old freezer. The handle from the inside jammed, and the thermostat was all screwy as well. When we got there, the thing was at negative two. My chief thinks, that’s what made the handle jam—maybe the lower temperature froze the release mechanism.”

  “Why did the temperature go down so low?” I ask.

  “Who knows?” Chris says. “Old machines malfunction all the time. It’s hard to say.”

  “What if someone turned it down,” I say.

  Chris shoots me a warning look. “Penny, don’t go imagining things,” he says. “We checked out the security footage, from The Place. No one out of the ordinary went in or out of the restaurant.”

  “Who did, then?” I ask.

  Chris looks reluctant to tell me, so I ask again. “Come on, Chris, you can tell me. Who went into the restaurant that day?” I ask.

  He’s still thinking.

  I ask a third time.

  I think that there’s a reason for that saying, ‘the third time’s the charm,’ because this time he answers me.

  “Let’s see...” he says, looking up and to one side as he recalls the footage. “Joe went into the kitchen first, around ten A.M. Then there was Ralph, Cliff’s assistant, at about eleven. Then, Glenn, the assistant cook. He was in and out a few times. After that, Cliff, at about two thirty. Last, there was Melanie. She went in at around three. That was it. The medics and police were called in at about three thirty, when the body was discovered.”

  “Did the medics say how long he’d been dead for?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “They couldn’t determine that, without performing an autopsy. We didn’t think that was necessary.”

  “Chris... what if....? What if one of those people murdered Joe Gallant, and made it look like an accident? And what if that’s connected, somehow, to Melanie’s one-way ticket?”

  “How could the death of Joe be connected to Melanie’s trip to Hawaii?” Chris asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. But I’m going to find out.

  Chapter Three

  When I wake up the next morning, I have a slight headache. It turns out, drinking three beers can’t be mitigated with one eight-ounce glass of water.

  Sure, Chris and I had fun playing our favorite card game and listening to O.A.R. until eleven P.M., but was it worth this hangover?

  I smile to myself, remembering how good it felt to laugh with him, and then kiss on the couch with playing cards scattered all around us.

  Yep. Definitely worth it.

  I shower, dress in all black (a habit of mine these days), and then make my way to the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee. Turkey, already up, is sitting on a barstool, peering over the edge of the countertop to a Hillcrest Crier that is spread out before him.

  “You would look so cute with a pair of reading glasses on,” I say telepathically to Turkey, as I walk up to him and petting him on the top of the head.

  That’s right... I can talk to my cat, inside my head.

  I’m not imagining things.

  It’s real.

  He shakes off my affection. “I don’t need reading glasses,” he responds.

  “Neither do I,” I transmit. “But I wear them, because Jumper Strongheart says you can—”

  “Wear an accessory to help you feel like the person you want to become. I know, I know. Fake it ‘til you make it. You’ve told me a thousand times.”

  “Sheesh,” I say, rummaging through the fridge in search of some orange juice. “Someone’s in a bad mood.”

  “Well, that’s what happens when I have to listen to loud music that hasn’t been popular since 2004, until almost midnight,” Turkey grumbles.

  “Oh, don’t be dramatic. Chris left at eleven,” I say.

  “Still,” my cat transmits. “It was late. And that music is awful. Every song sounds the same.”

  “I love O.A.R.!” I protest. I haven’t found any orange juice, so I settled on tap water. It’s less than refreshing, but I make myself gulp it down. The coffee sizzles into the pot, and smells delicious.

  I ready a travel mug, and then look for creamer in the fridge. Again, I come up empty handed. Black it is.

  I really need to go grocery shopping.

  “You’re seriously telling me you don’t like O.A.R.?” I ask. I swear, sometimes I think my cat and I got along better before I learned telepathy.

  I picked up the skill about three months ago, when I started practicing witchcraft.

  Let me back up a bit.

  This past July, an elderly woman named Claudine Terra died. In a roundabout way, I inherited a book from her, called ‘The Art and Science of Becoming a Witch, or ASBW, as I like to call it.

  All of a sudden, after reading the book, I had all kinds of magical abilities. I learned how to perform the Love Spell, and I started talking to my cat. I even pulled off levitating once, though I haven’t been able to do it since.

  I also shared the book with my knitting group. All the ladies loved it. We’ve been studying it every Wednesday night, for the past three months, though we haven’t gotten super far. In fact, out of thirteen cycles (which are pretty much like chapters), we’re still on cycle one.

  Anyhow, now that I can communicate with Turkey, I’m finding out all these things about him that honestly, I’d rather not know.

  Case in point? His dislike of O.A.R.—one of my favorite bands.

  Don’t get me wrong. I love my cat. I’d do anything for him. It’s just that—If I’m being honest—it was easier being his roommate before all these words were exchanged between us.

  Back then, we communicated with pats on the head and kisses on the nose.

  “Turkey, remember when you were a kitten?” I say, smiling as I think back to those simpler times. “You used to curl up in my palms. You were this big!” I hold my hands up, showing him his size.

  “Why do you insist on calling me Turkey?” he asks. “You know I prefer Thomas Edison Fullbright.”

  I pour hot coffee into my mug. “You’re always going to be Turkey to me,” I say, as I carry my travel mug towards the living room. When I pass by Turkey, I lean down and give him a kiss on the top of the head. This time, he doesn’t shake it off. Progress.

  “It’s too hard of a habit to break. You know I tried...” I scan the living room. “Have you seen ASBW? I have knitting circle tonight.”

  “Yes...” Turkey gracefully leaps off his stool and struts over towards the couch. He paws at the thin, hardbound ASBW, which is jammed between two couch cushions.

  “I was reading the section on familiars yesterday, while you were out,” he says, while he bats at the book’s spine. “It started falling into the cracks. I couldn’t get it out. Everytime I tried, it just went further in.”

  “Oh, you poor thing,” I say sincerely. I’ve honestly never felt more grateful for my opposable thumbs than when I talk to Turkey. He points out so many inconveniences of having paws.

  I pull the book from between the cushions, and stuff it into my bag. Then I head for the door. I wish I could take Turkey out with me, but since I know it’s going to be a long and busy day, I think he will be more comfortable at home, where he can nap.

  “Have a good day!” I call out, before he can say anything else negative, to bring down my mood.

  It’s essential that I stay positive this morning.

  I have to approach this investigation into Melanie’s unfulfilled travel plans with an open, optimistic outlook, if I hope to make any progress at all.

  I stuff my closed coffee mug into my bag and get on my bike. As I start to pedal, my thoughts kick into a higher gear. I swear, I do some of my best detective work while I ride my bike. Once, I was riding to work, when I realized who was stealing Payday ca
ndy bars from the Hillcrest Market.

  You might not think it to be an issue, but for a little store with a very narrow profit margin, the loss of fifty candy bars a month was surprisingly harmful to their bottom line.

  I make it to my office without having one brilliant idea. Not one.

  The day takes another turn for the worst when I spot a figure, walking down the street towards me. He is all too familiar.

  I feel my heart beginning to pound, and my palms begin to sweat.

  Doctor Maxwell Shire.

  I met Max this past July, around the same time that I inherited ASBW. It wasn’t a mere coincidence. Max actually came to town, specifically looking to buy the book from me. Apparently, it’s very rare and valuable. I didn’t give up the copy, but I don’t think Max ever gave up trying to get his hands on it. Or me.

  There’s that, too. He seems to have a bit of a thing for me.

  I have to admit, I kind of have a thing for him, too. I mean, I am with Chris, but I can’t help it if I find this guy attractive, can I?

  Oh, and did I mention he’s a vampire!?

  “Penny!” Max calls out. “Penny Banks. It’s so good to see you!”

  “You too,” I say, blushing profusely as he approaches.

  I get off my bike, careful not to flash too much leg, and then lock it up along with the others in a rack outside. Max lingers around me as I fumble with my bike lock.

  When he stands close to me like this, my fine motor skills get all out of whack. I’ve learned that it has something to do with vampires’ high testosterone levels, given all the wild game they consume. It reacts with the high estrogen levels of witches, or something like that. I don’t exactly have the science down. All I know is that the man affects me.

  Finally, I’m able to lock my bike. As I straighten up, he’s staring at me, grinning. He is well aware of the effect he has on me, and he always seems to enjoy it.