Playing With Magic

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Eight

“It’s cat day!” I announced to Amy as I flounced into Sugarplum Fairy. I was carrying a damp bouquet of flowers that I had cut from my garden that morning and arranged in a spare mason jar I’d found in the basement. I placed the jar on the counter and did an enthusiastic little dance-shuffle.

“Wow, I haven’t seen you this excited about something since that time you found out there was a Christmas cat pageant and you got to make Bob wear one of those sweaters the knitting ladies made for him.”

“What isn’t exciting about a Christmas cat pageant?” I asked.

“I don’t have an answer to that question.”

Amy was not a cat person. It wasn’t that she didn’t like cats, she had assured me, but she didn’t particularly trust any animals that were that self-sufficient. She had grown up in a family that owned dogs, and I knew that if it weren’t for her grueling schedule at the bakery, she would probably own about ten Scotties.

She did appreciate that I had become a bit of a crazy cat person since adopting Bob. If someone had asked me five years ago if I’d ever be a cat person, I would have laughed them out of the room. Blaine and I hadn’t owned any pets; we both worked long hours, and he was so rigidly opposed to being responsible for something that we couldn’t even discuss a pet, let alone children.

I wasn’t sorry, in retrospect, that we didn’t have children. It wasn’t that I didn’t like kids, but as I’d gotten older, I’d realized that I liked my life without them, and I was also happy we hadn’t had to force any young children to endure our less-than-amicable divorce.

Amy smelled the flowers I had brought her. “These are beautiful, thank you. Now, be honest, is it only the cats that have you in a good mood?”

“Isn’t that enough?” I asked.

She raised a brow at me, her lips quirking into an all-too-knowing smile. “I saw you and Rich together at the street party.”

While I assumed she meant she had just seen us in the same place at the same time, I was immediately brought back to our scintillating and unexpected kiss, and my entire face turned red. Not the smoothest way to deny things.

“I mean, we hung out.”

“Oh my goodness, you two are exhausting. It has been months . Just admit you’re crazy about each other and put the town out of its misery.”

“The whole town knows about me and Rich?” I could have died and been buried under a rock and never shown my face again.

“Of course the whole town knows. How do you think we keep ourselves occupied? We certainly can’t look inward at our own problems; we need to spend all our time talking about what everyone else is doing. And everyone has been waiting for you two to stop lollygagging and just get on with it.” She grinned. “So get on with it.”

I didn’t ask what it entailed to our apparently townwide audience. But after the events of the Independence Day street party, it did feel like Rich and I had finally burst the will-they-or-won’t-they bubble. Still, we hadn’t talked about it since, and I hadn’t even had much of a chance to think about my own feelings regarding how it had all gone down.

As first kisses go, it might not have been romantic, but it was memorable.

“Don’t push me,” I said, rubbing my cheeks to chase away some of the redness. I probably only made it worse. “I need to take it slow.”

“If you take it much slower, you’ll be going backwards, just keep that in mind.” She handed me my usual boxes and an iced latte. “I think I’ve finally got the iced version nailed down, so tell me what you think.”

I took a sip and, without even meaning to, let out a long mmmmmm sound before I’d even swallowed it. I wasn’t sure what she’d done, but this was different and better than her previous efforts, even though those had all been delicious as well.

“This is incredible .”

Amy did a fist pump in the air. “Yes! I knew this one was the winner.”

“What’s different? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I loved all the other ones, but this is just amazing.” I took another sip, closing my eyes as the flavor washed over me. I was going to gain twenty pounds this summer drinking these.

“It still has the Nutella, of course, but I used a different kind of espresso, technically a ristretto. Then I used a hazelnut creamer instead of the hazelnut syrup I put in the other one, and that really seemed to do the trick in terms of the flavor. If your reaction is anything to go by.” She laughed.

“Yeah, this is amazing.”

“Thank you for being the guinea pig for it. I knew you’d be kind but honest.”

“I’m happy to test anything you ever want to throw my way.”

“Noted. And have a very happy cat day. I hope they don’t last long because people are so excited to adopt.”

I hoped the very same. We were a small town, and it was difficult to get to a shelter with any ease unless you wanted to drive over thirty minutes each direction to get to Barneswood, which was our next closest “big” town. My goal was that in bringing the cats to people and eliminating a lot of the distractions from the bigger shelter, these sweet kitties would more easily find new homes. Now we were going to see if my little gamble paid off.

I took my pastries and my already half-finished iced coffee and headed back to the store, where Bob had made himself comfortable in his usual spot and the empty cat condos looked ready for their new tenants. I’d rechecked the emails from the shelter about ten times already this morning, and the cats were scheduled to be delivered before noon, so it could really happen anytime this morning.

After unloading all of Amy’s delicious-looking goodies and getting my own cookies baking, I did some nervous tidying, too excited for the arrival of the cats to really do much of anything else. When Imogen arrived a couple of hours later, she took a look around the store and then at the feather duster in my hand. “I see.”

“Don’t look at me like that.”

“Uh-huh.” She took her coat to the office and returned a moment later with more cookies to put on the empty tray in the display case. We’d had better luck with customers this morning than yesterday; either it wasn’t raining as badly, or people had just accepted that the bad weather wasn’t going away and decided it shouldn’t hold them back. “Give me that,” she said, snatching the dusting wand out of my hand. “The store is spotless. You’re being a weirdo.”

“Dusting never hurt anyone.”

“Tell that to the poor disenfranchised dust bunnies you’re making homeless. For shame.”

I rolled my eyes and got off the little stepstool I was on, which Imogen folded up and put away.

“I tried to tell her she didn’t need to do it,” Mr. Loughery said with a chuckle from his usual chair.

“Don’t you two start ganging up on me.”

“It’s not my fault he knows who’s right.” Imogen winked at the old man, who blushed furiously.

A car pulled up in front of the store as I was about to head into the kitchen, and all three of us peered through the window to watch a young woman in khaki pants get out, then open her umbrella in a precise routine. She must have seen us watching, because she waved.

“I think your new children are here,” Imogen announced.

“Oh, how exciting,” Mr. Loughery said. “I was hoping I’d be here to meet them.”

“You thinking of getting another one already, Mr. L?” Imogen asked.

He chuckled again. “No, no, Frodo is definitely enough work for an old codger like me. But I am sure curious.”

“Grab the door for me,” I said to Imogen, running outside so I could help the woman with her umbrella as she struggled with something in the back seat of her car.

“You must be Phoebe Winchester?” she said. She was in her midtwenties with an explosion of freckles across her cheeks and muted red-brown hair that was curly and had probably doubled in volume thanks to all the humidity. “I’m Iris Keller from the Barneswood shelter. We’ve only met through email—it’s nice to finally meet you face-to-face.”

“Ditto. I’d shake your hand, but then we’d all get soaked.”

Iris laughed. “Yeah, don’t worry about it. You’ve got everything ready for these guys?”

She had sent me a very detailed list of their requirements ahead of time. “And then some,” I confirmed.

“Awesome.” She pulled two carriers out at the same time, and I followed after her with the umbrella. I definitely got wet, but she and the cats were covered as we all went into the open door where Imogen was waiting.

I shook off and closed the umbrella, then showed Iris over to the cat condos.

“Oh my goodness, you really went all out. This is so exciting.” She looked up at the sign that said Bob’s Place . “Family memorial, I assume?”

I coughed a little, my cheeks growing flushed. “Uh, no.” I pointed to the orange lump, who was so tightly wrapped up in his chair it didn’t even look like he had a head. “Bob.”

“The name was my idea. He inspired me to get a cat myself,” Mr. Loughery said proudly. “I’m the first one on the board.” He pointed to the little bulletin board I’d put next to the kennels where I hoped to feature all our success stories. Sure enough, there was a photo of Mr. Loughery and Frodo right in the middle.

“I love it.” She set the two carriers down on the floor and the reached into an interior pocket of her jacket, handing me two laminated pieces of paper. “Little fact sheets on your newest residents.”

I didn’t have time to look the sheets over before Iris opened up the first of the carriers. From inside she pulled a handsome tuxedo cat, more black than white, with a half-white and half-black face. The cat had striking green eyes that were already taking in the room.

“This is Indigo. He’s seven and was an owner surrender. They unfortunately moved states and couldn’t bring him with them. He’s been with us almost a year.”

“ Mowwwwww ,” said Indigo.

Bob immediately uncurled from his ball and stared wide-eyed in the direction of the new arrival. The second he laid eyes on Indigo, he pinned his ears back in a pose lovingly referred to by cat owners as “airplane ears.”

I saw his move toward being a grouch and clucked my tongue at him. “Bobert, put those ears away. You have not been cleared for takeoff.”

He blinked at me a few times and stared at Indigo with open uncertainty, but at least he stopped hissing. He was going to need to get used to having cats around here if he wanted to keep coming to the shop with me every day.

Iris helped Indigo into one of the top condos, where he started to sniff out his surroundings before hiding inside his covered cat bed.

“Don’t worry about him. He’ll come around in no time. He’s a big lovebug. I think people are just put off because of his age, and also we have a lot of trouble rehoming black cats. Superstitions and whatnot.” She shook her head sadly.

I caught a glimpse of Mr. Loughery adjusting in his chair, and I knew he was dying to tell Iris that Frodo was a tuxie, but he seemed to decide better of it and sat back in his chair.

“Mr. Loughery knows all about how great tuxedo cats are, isn’t that right?” I offered for him.

“The best. They’re just the best.”

Iris smiled at him in agreement, then took the next new arrival from its carrier. This one was a striking-looking calico, much smaller than Indigo was. She blinked her almost-yellow eyes at me and wriggled in Iris’s grasp. “And this is Coco. Coco came in to us with a litter of kittens, and she’s basically just a baby herself, poor thing. The kittens all got adopted, and she just couldn’t find a home. She gets a bit stressed out at the shelter, so we thought this might be a better environment for her to thrive in.”

The small cat twisted like she might make a run for it at any moment, so Iris hustled to get her placed in one of the lower condos. Without even a pause to smell anything, she jumped into the litter box and cowered there.

“Oh, that poor baby,” I said, crouching down to look at her.

“Yeah, she’ll need to decompress a little. Don’t be surprised if she never becomes really warm . I don’t know what happened to her before she came to us, but she really doesn’t trust people. Especially male people.”

“That makes two of us,” I heard Imogen say from behind a bookshelf. I think she was pretending not to be interested, but I kept seeing her peek around the corner to catch a look at the cats.

“And that’s it. We’ll have these guys with you for a month, depending on what happens. If they get adopted before then, awesome, and if not, we will look at rotating them to fosters or back into the shelter. You can remind people we’re no-kill, so the cats will stay with us until they’re adopted, no matter what. There’s an online application form you can direct them to if they want to adopt, and we usually process those in twenty-four hours when we’re able to. We will email you all the paperwork they need if they’re approved. We also talked to Mr. Bravebird at the pet store—thanks for putting us in touch with him—and anyone who adopts from you will get a twenty-five-percent-off deal to get everything they need from him.”

“Wow, that’s so generous of him.” Perhaps the hundreds of dollars I’d spent there since taking ownership of Bob had made him warm to me.

“Everyone just wants to see these cats find homes.” She smiled at the two now-occupied condos. “Let’s hope this plan works. It was a real pleasure to meet you, Phoebe. You have my email and my number if you have any questions or need anything at all. Keep me updated.”

“Of course.”

And like that, Iris was gone, toting two empty cat carriers and an umbrella back to her waiting car.

Mr. Loughery, Imogen, and I all gathered round the condos, peering into the suites Indigo and Coco would call home temporarily. Indigo’s green eyes shone out from inside the cat house. Beneath him, at my feet, Bob had plopped himself in front of Coco’s space. Unlike how he’d reacted to Indigo, he seemed curious about her as opposed to enraged. She was still hiding in her litter box, her little black ears sticking up over the lip.

“Let’s give them a little breathing room to get settled,” I suggested. While I could have stood there all day myself, just waiting to see if the cats would emerge, I knew it had to be scary for them to be in a foreign environment and they needed time to adjust.

The three human observers moved off, Mr. Loughery reclaiming his chair and picking up his current John Grisham. Imogen and I returned to work, but Bob staunchly refused to be moved and turned himself into a ginger loaf in front of Coco’s cage.

I was going to shoo him away, but I noticed that once the humans were gone, she cautiously raised her head over the side of the litter box and sniffed the air in Bob’s direction. There was no flattening of ears and no hissing from either of them. A good sign, perhaps. I decided to just leave him be for now, thinking maybe he could help coax the mistrusting calico out of her hiding spot. I’d love for her to at least start hiding in her cat bed instead of the litter box.

I watched Bob a little longer, transfixed by his steadfast devotion to Coco, like he was a guard ensuring no one bothered her. Was this a sign, perhaps, that he was a little smitten with the new arrival?

You don’t need another cat, Phoebe , I told myself.

But maybe Bob needs another cat.

The lunch hour rush was soon upon us, though it wasn’t as busy as it might be on a normal day. While more people were braving the bad weather today, it was still quieter than I’d like for midweek in the summer.

Imogen was drinking a cup of the new Gra-tea-tude tea blend I had made. I’d brought some samples for the staff, figuring they deserved some thanks as well. “Phoebe, this is really good. I think this needs to go into our regular rotation.”

I had tried my hand at one or two other blends for seasonal offerings, but I had left them as one-offs, never remaking them once they were gone. Imogen’s suggesting that Gra-tea-tude was good enough to stay around permanently made me flush with excitement. “You think so?”

“Definitely. You have the knack. Eudora would have loved this.”

Her mention of my aunt brought me reeling back to the previous night in my living room. I wished I could understand what had happened to me during Karma and Honey’s spell. I wanted to believe I’d spoken to my aunt, but Honey herself had assured me ghosts didn’t exist. So if I hadn’t been speaking to my aunt’s spirit, was there another way it could have been her, or should I just listen to what the voice had told me and believe it was my own mind offering me comfort in the form of something familiar?

No, I couldn’t just downplay it like that. I knew somewhere deep in the pit of my stomach and in my blood that I had been speaking to my aunt, my real aunt. Whether that meant she was a ghost, an angel—I had no idea, but I believed what she’d told me.

Maybe I should have been scared by the prospect of having spiritual conversations with a dead woman, but quite the opposite was true. I felt relieved, lighter, and more prepared to take on this weirdness that was happening to me and my magic.

It also made me believe that once I’d restored balance, I might be better able to control the powers that until this point had largely controlled me. And that wasn’t just a relief, it was exciting .

On some level, I’d resisted the knowledge of my witchy skills. I had played with a spell here or there but never really dived deep to find out what I was capable of. It was time for that to change. Me being a witch wasn’t going anywhere, and hiding from my powers had only given them an opportunity to take over. No, I wanted to see what could happen when I was in the driver’s seat.

Imogen and I handed out packets of the tea to customers buying both tea and books, thanking them for making the trip in in such bad weather. The extra sample seemed to encourage and delight people, and at least one customer set their bags down to go buy more things.

Had I accidentally made the tea magical?

I shook my head, reminding myself that none of these people had actually drunk the tea yet and this was just the happy result of good customer service.

People who came in for lunch or to shop all gravitated toward the cat condos, and there were cooing sounds as people put their fingers through the bars. Indigo, as Iris had promised, warmed up quickly. He would butt his head into people’s hands and rub against the bars when people went by. He was also a real ham. He would roll over on his back and show his white belly whenever anyone stayed near him for more than a minute, and he also liked to show off how his new toys worked if anyone was watching him.

Coco, on the other hand, was as shy as—if not shier than—advertised. Bob had stayed by her cage, however, and at some point when we weren’t looking had managed to make her feel secure enough to move from the litter box into her actual bed area. Now we could see only an orange-and-black tail sticking out of the covered bed, but I would call it good progress for the first few hours.

When I looked up again after clearing away a few empty plates from the tearoom tables, I noticed someone near the cat cages who looked vaguely familiar. It took me a second, but once he pulled out his camera phone and bent himself backward at an awkward angle to get a better view of the cages with his lens, it dawned on me.

It was Connor. He appeared to be by himself and looked slightly less polished than he had the last few times I’d seen him.

I’d gotten a little information on him from Daphne after their coffee meeting, but there was something nagging me about Connor, and I didn’t want to miss an opportunity to speak to him directly. Tucking the plates onto the kitchen counter, I casually walked over to where he was standing.

“Connor?” I asked.

He jumped, startled by the interruption.

“Sorry, sorry.” I held my hands up in an I mean you no harm gesture. “It’s just me, Phoebe. I own the store, remember?” Like he might have somehow forgotten in the few days since we’d last spoken.

“Oh, yeah. Hi.”

Close up, he looked even more exhausted and disheveled than he had from a distance. It had obviously been several days since he’d last shaved, and there were deep-purple circles under his eyes. It reminded me of the way Deacon had looked the morning we’d learned about Sebastian’s murder.

“How are you holding up?”

For a second, I thought he might cry. His face crumpled, his expression giving away just how not okay he was. He rallied himself quickly, though, schooling his expression and taking a long, quivering breath before he answered.

“Had better weeks, y’know?”

I nodded, patting him gently on the arm. “We were so sorry to hear about Sebastian. And then Andrew too. It was shocking. Did you know him?” I tried to keep my tone casual and friendly, like I was only curious, but I was desperate to know if there was any connection between the two men.

“You mean the lawyer?” Connor asked.

“Yeah.”

“No. I mean, I might have talked to him in the halls at the B and B or something, but I never met him before that.”

“Had Sebastian?”

Connor gave me a weird look, and I knew immediately I’d taken my questioning a step too far. He slipped his phone into his jacket pocket and sidestepped me, an eye on the door. I thought he might have come hoping to bump into Daphne but hadn’t counted on being pestered by the owner.

“How is Melody doing? She was so upset the day they found Sebastian. I haven’t seen her around, and I wanted to check on her.”

This question was going to go one of two ways. It would either push him over the line and he’d leave here and never come back—which I figured might happen anyway, given how touchy he already was—or it might swing him in the opposite direction. It all depended on what his feelings toward Melody were.

I waited one second, then two. Connor wheeled around, a finger in the air pointed in my direction, and my pulse skipped a beat as I prepared for him to yell at me for overstepping.

Instead, he said, “Melody, ha! Like she’s even been here. She went out two nights ago, and I haven’t heard a single damned word from her since. Some freaking business manager. She’s supposed to be the one taking care of everything, answering all these questions, helping , but instead she just has one of her little drama-queen moments and can’t be bothered to do her job . Just because Sebastian died doesn’t mean the work stops.”

I would have assumed that was exactly what it meant. It wasn’t like they could make content anymore.

“I’m the one left dealing with the emails, the fans, all these horrible comments on social media. I’m the one texting Sebastian’s mom because Laurel can’t get ahold of Melody. Me. Me . I’m just the social media coordinator, Phoebe. I’m not a trauma counselor. What do you even say to someone in that situation?” He threw his hands up in the air. “I know things got a little weird with the whole Deacon situation, but this wouldn’t have ever happened if Deacon was still in charge. Deacon wouldn’t just leave . Deacon wouldn’t do a lot of the things Melody has done.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that, because in my very limited experience with Deacon, he had proven himself very good at leaving.

“Did you say Melody has done this kind of thing before?”

“Like, flaked?”

I nodded.

“Oh yeah, all the time. She would show up hours late for things. Leave work early constantly. To be honest, I think Sebastian was planning to fire her, but then all that stuff with Deacon went down and there was no one else who knew all of Sebastian’s needs like Melody did. But he told her before we came on the trip that it was her last chance to prove herself.”

“Melody knew Sebastian was planning to fire her?”

“He wasn’t shy about telling us where we stood. If someone wasn’t pulling their weight, he’d let them know. And he let. Her. Know.”

Well, well, that was interesting.

“And between us, I think there was a lot more she was hiding.”

Before I could ask him for clarity, he spotted Daphne, who gave him an enthusiastic wave and stole his attention completely.

I had thought Deacon had the most obvious motive to murder Sebastian, but if Melody had known her career was on the line, it explained a lot about her behavior at the signing—acting like a hypervigilant den mother—and also might have given her the best reason to kill him. Although killing him wouldn’t exactly secure her job futures, I imagined it would help her explain why she’d been released from her last position and couldn’t easily provide a reference.

Was self-preservation enough to kill for?

Backed into a corner, people could do incredible things. It didn’t explain the lawyer, though.

Unless the lawyer had seen too much.

I wondered if Detective Martin knew about this possible motive. Certainly she had to have been looking for Melody regardless, because it sounded like no one had seen her since the street party.

If she’d skipped town, surely there would be a record of her using a credit card or her cell phone, wouldn’t there? So maybe she was still in Raven Creek, just biding her time.

But was she hiding from a killer, or because she was the killer?

I was about to urge Connor to give me more details about Melody when Rich burst into the shop, his hair dripping wet, looking like he’d just run a marathon.

“Phoebe, we gotta go.” He waved me toward the door.

“What’s going on?” Everyone in the shop was staring at him, so there was absolutely no way for him to keep whatever he was going to say a secret. But based on his ashen skin and shell-shocked expression, I didn’t think he was about to make a declaration of love.

“They just arrested Leo.”