Eastwind Witches Volume 1: Books 1-3: Paranormal Cozy Mystery Page 16

  Or, good paws?

  As I ran a wet rag over the countertop, Deputy Stu Manchester sauntered in and straddled a stool at the counter.

  “You’re in a little later than usual today,” I said. His routine consisted of arriving at the diner around ten or eleven in the morning, at which time I’d throw a hot coffee and a piece of apple pie his way without him asking. I’d had regulars like him before, back home. Cops, day laborers, high-powered CEOs—all those whose job varied so dramatically from one day to the next that having a predictable routine to follow work was the small bit of stability they could count on.

  For Stu Manchester, it was coffee and apple pie. Not a bad choice, if I do say so.

  “Yeah, late call.” He shook his head slowly. “But that’s how it goes. Crime doesn’t stick to a schedule.”

  “Ahh,” I said, recognizing his self-important tone as a precursor to a recap of the night’s events. “Some drunk hooligan spray-paint naughty bits on a stone wall in Erin Park?”

  He grunted and adjusted his belt while I poured him a coffee and plated a piece of pie from the display at the end of the counter. “I wish. But no, much grimmer.”

  “Huh? What? Someone say my name?” My familiar (not pet; he was firm on that point), Grim, an enormous, shaggy, depressive hound, perked his head up from his favorite spot underneath the counter, where he painstakingly maintained his strict regimen of sleeping twenty hours a day.

  “No, go back to sleep,” I replied telepathically.

  “Grimmer than vandalism?” I said, pretending to be aghast at the thought.

  “Suicide,” he said flatly. “Some werewolf up in Hightower Gardens.”

  I wasn’t expecting that. “Oh, holy spell,” I said, borrowing a term Tanner had used when he’d forgotten there was a pie in the oven and only found it once it was little more than a black wafer. “Hightower Gardens? Really?”

  He chuckled morbidly. “What, didn’t think the wealthiest of Eastwind would kill themselves? Let me tell you, it’s all the same when it comes to people with money. Either they’re born into it or they work hard to make it, but once they become Hightower Gardens rich, they don’t have to lift a finger if they don’t feel like it. And that doesn’t make people want to keep living.” He shook his head reproachfully. “Everyone wants to think they’re different, that they’re the exception.”

  I leaned forward to avoid being overheard by the entire restaurant. After all, the Hightower Gardens neighborhood was almost entirely werewolves—the old families of Eastwind that used to run the town—meaning there was a high likelihood that one of the regular weres at Medium Rare either knew the deceased or was kin. “Who was the victim?” I asked.

  He puffed up and rolled his eyes. “Ha! Victim. That’s an interesting way of looking at suicide. I’d say Ted was the only victim, since he had to deal with her body.”

  Sheriff Bloom had once argued that Deputy Manchester had a good heart and that’s why she kept him on. But I wasn’t too impressed with the way he was talking about someone who’d been so low she would end it all. “You’re sure it’s a suicide?” I asked. I was unsure why I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt or why it would seem less unpleasant if it were murder rather than a suicide. Maybe it was just Stu’s scorn. It ate at me.

  “Positive,” he said, adding cream and sugar to his coffee. “Silver poisoning. That’s usually how the bitches do it.”

  I flinched, still not big on Eastwind’s word for female werewolves. “And you’re sure someone else didn’t poison her?”

  He tipped back his coffee cautiously, taking a trial sip and arching a brow at me over the lip of his mug. “Yeah. I’m sure.”

  “But how do you know?”

  He groaned. “Because I’ve been a cop a long while and I’ve seen it a hundred times. Woman thinks money buys happiness, turns out it doesn’t. She feels like she’s alone in the world, blah, blah, blah … and she ends it.”

  I cringed, realizing his harsh assessment of the deceased would’ve applied to me four months ago. Except for the suicide part, of course, but, well, I can’t say the thought had never crossed my mind when I was alone in my condo on a Friday night, surrounded by silence, not a single invite to go out from any one of my “friends.”

  “I just think it’s good practice to explore all angles,” I said. “Maybe it was staged to look like a typical suicide so that you would let your guard down and the murderer would get away with it scot-free.”

  He paused in his chewing to stare bemusedly at me with tired eyes. Then he swallowed, wiped off a bit of apple from his mustache, and said firmly, “It’s not a murder.”

  I could tell it was his final word on the subject, so I conceded and went on with my side work, hoping I could wrap it up and be out of here in time for a nap before dinner.

  But as I rolled silverware, I couldn’t get past the inkling that the victim hadn’t killed herself. Was it my reluctance to admit how sad and lonely I’d been before I came to Eastwind? Or was it that new sense that had awoken inside me over the last few months: intuition?

  My landlord, Ruby True, had been training me to listen to that soft voice because, while I couldn’t wave a wand around and cast traditional spells like the other witches, I was gifted with Insight. And my intuition about this felt like more than just the typical version everyone experiences, the kind that tells you not to go on another date with someone or that your next-door neighbor might’ve served some hard time.

  “Imagine shutting your eyes,” Ruby had told me months ago, “and rubbing your fingertips over a smooth piece of silk. Then you hit a small crease. It’s not much, and if you’re distracted, you might miss it, but that crease is something. You have to learn to investigate the small wrinkles you feel. That’s how you unlock your gift.”

  That was it.

  I’d felt a small wrinkle as soon as Deputy Manchester had mentioned the suicide in Hightower Gardens. I didn’t know why the crease was there or what it meant, but I was determined to find out.

  Chapter Two

  Grim followed me down the claustrophobic staircase at Ruby True’s house following our afternoon nap. Since Grim had surrendered to weekly baths, he was allowed inside, and I’d used a small bit of my savings from work to buy him a comfortable dog bed.

  As nice as it would be to have a fluffy dog that big snuggle me on the bed, it was out of the question for a number of reasons. Chief among them was Grim would do it over his dead body, which, of course, is a figure of speech, since he’d technically died once already before discovering he was a grim. But also, it was June, and the third floor of Ruby’s townhouse was like a sweat lodge already without adding a heavy hound as a blanket.

  Eastwind, as it turned out, had this thing called seasons. I’d learned about the concept when I lived in Texas, but it’d seemed even more unbelievable than werewolves and elves. In Texas, the closest thing we had to seasons was summer and a random cold front. So, while the June heat was unpleasant, it was at least familiar.

  When we emerged into the small first floor of Ruby’s townhouse, which consisted of a single large space she referred to as a parlor with a kitchen set-up in one corner, a reading nook in another, and a bathroom just off the main room. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the dozens of objects hanging from the low ceiling, some of which hung so low I had to duck to avoid taking them between the eyes. Some were metal chimes, others were dreamcatchers, many contained feathers, and all of them in concert was entirely unsettling. It was like the old wooden boards on the ceiling were reaching out with dozens of tiny, misshapen fingers to give the home’s inhabitants an unwanted scalp massage. The heebie-jeebies factor of it had lessened somewhat since I first set foot in Ruby’s home months before, but if I’d been given decorative control of the place, I couldn’t see myself sticking with the talisman-chic vibe she had going, even though I knew now that each one served a protective purpose for the old Fifth Wind witch.

  Ruby stirred a cast-iron pot of som
ething delicious on the small wood-burning stove in the kitchen, her back to me. Her familiar, Clifford, a hound the size of Grim but with fiery red hair where he hadn’t yet gone gray, was curled up by the blue flames in the fireplace, snoring gently. You might be wondering why a dog would want to sleep by a fireplace in the summer, or why she would have a fire going at all.

  But contrary to what blue flames meant in my old world, in Eastwind, they were used to cool the place down. If you ran your hand through them, which I did because I’m the experience-it-to-believe-it type (doesn’t always work out for the best, let me tell you), it feels like sticking your hand into an ice bath. While I don’t understand the physics of how cold fire manages to cool off a room so effectively, during the hot June afternoons, I didn’t care. It could be evil, dark magic, and I’d probably still say, Count me in!

  “Might want to clean yourself up,” Ruby said without turning around. “We have a guest coming over for dinner.”

  “Oh.” I looked down at myself. I wasn’t exactly disheveled, but I was in no condition to greet a guest. I’d been forced to invest in a few new outfits lately, thanks to the heat. Though I’d dreaded clothes shopping in Eastwind, it turned out to be much better than I’d thought.

  Using magic to make the loathed changing room experience tolerable? Sign me up. All I’d had to do was pick the fabrics I loved, and a friendly stylist helped me imagine the exact outfit I wanted. And then there it was.

  It was pricey (more like highway robbery), yes, but as a big advocate for simplifying one’s life, I would much rather have five outfits that fit perfectly than fifty that don’t.

  Today I was wearing a white boat-neckline tee and charcoal gray cotton capris.

  Oh, did you think I would go high-style just because there was magic?

  No, I much preferred casual and functional, and now that I worked at a diner rather than Chez Coeur, I could go casual, and no one thought twice about it.

  “Who’s coming over?” I asked.

  “Tanner Culpepper.”

  I nearly choked on my spit. “Tanner? But why?”

  Ruby spared a furtive glance over her shoulder. “I thought you’d be excited to see him outside of work.”

  “Why would you think that?!” My brain was in full-on panic mode. But why? Why did I want to spring out of the house at the mere mention of a man, who I spent most of my waking hours around, showing up unexpectedly? Maybe it was the suddenness of the announcement. We’d done an admirable job so far of keeping all the sexual tension contained within the walls of Medium Rare. I never saw him outside of work, mostly because all either of us did was work, sleep, then work some more. It felt safe keeping Tanner isolated in that facet of my life. Having him over for dinner was a wrecking ball smashing down the carefully erected wall I’d built between work and personal life. I was a fantastic emotional mason. Always had been. When I’d read “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost in high school, I remember seeing the line, “Good fences make good neighbors,” and thinking, They also make good friends. And as I grew up, I decided the same held true for boyfriends.

  “You’re not the only one with the gift of Insight around here, Nora. Don’t forget, I’ve been doing this a long time.”

  I hurried to the bathroom to stand under the showerhead and freshen up. As the magic sprinkled down on me where water might have been, I managed to pull myself together, and when I stepped out and examined myself in the mirror, I felt much more in control. My clothes were now pressed, my hair uniform in its straightness, and my face was fresh and radiant rather than post-nap greasy.

  “You shouldn’t be so anxious,” Grim said. He was flopped next to Clifford by the fire. “I can smell the pheromones wafting from that guy the second he lays eyes on you.”

  “Yeah, and that’s half the problem,” I replied.

  “The problem is that you have the hots for Tanner and the feeling is mutual?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I fail to see how that’s a problem for anyone other than me, since I’ll have to witness the disgusting sappiness of it.”

  I couldn’t believe I was about to explain this to a dog, but I did anyway. “It’s a problem because I have absolutely no earthly idea how to date a nice guy. I don’t even know what to do with one! I’ll probably just crush his soul or something!”

  When Clifford stirred slightly, lifting his head to scent the air, Grim locked eyes with him. “I tell you, Cliff. Witches be crazy.”

  A sharp knock at the door made my stomach jump into my chest.

  Tanner was here for dinner.

  “Here we are,” said Ruby, pouring tea for both Tanner and me. She set the kettle down and wiped her forehead. “That fire’s hardly doing anything after that hot stew,” she said. “Why don’t you two take your tea out onto the porch swing and get a little breeze while I clean up?”

  Dinner had gone smoothly, largely to Ruby’s incredible ability to steer the conversation to comfortable territory. I was amazed by how she’d managed to make the whole affair seem casual, natural, not at all like she was secretly trying to set up Tanner and me.

  Although that was obviously her intention.

  Spending dinner chatting with Tanner and Ruby was nice. It was easy. I felt relaxed yet invigorated as the three of us took turns telling stories and jumping into each other’s tales with questions and jokes. There was no pretense, no, er, wand measuring contests like there used to be when I’d get together with my high-powered and status-driven friends back home. I didn’t feel worse about myself as the conversation progressed. In fact, I felt less of myself. Not less myself, let’s be clear. Less of myself. Meaning my self-awareness faded away, and I felt present in the moment, able to focus on the things around me. And dare I say it? I felt a part of something, rather than a separate element or an interloper. It was a strange sensation I’d experienced in bursts since I arrived in Eastwind. But I felt it for the entirety of our dinner.

  I hadn’t seen Tanner this relaxed in months, either. His high-strung baseline was sexy enough, but Tanner relaxed, his arm slung over the back of his chair as he threw his head back and laughed at Ruby’s stories of young Deputy Manchester and the one time she caught the stylish Echo Chambers stumble drunkenly to his home in nothing but an oversized grease-stained sweatshirt made to fit a literal giant (she clarified that giants didn’t live within the city limits, so I needn’t worry about running into one), that version of Tanner was nothing short of divine.

  Maybe it helped his nerves that he’d brought with him Monster, a black and white munchkin cat who was not only the cutest thing I’d ever laid eyes on but also Tanner’s familiar.

  Because Monster was so little and Tanner worked in a predominantly werewolf part of town, he almost never brought his familiar around. She remained a house cat most of the time, and the way he told it, she was fine with that. But she and Grim had met once and instantly hit it off because, apparently, Monster’s cute demeanor was mostly unintentional and she had quite the forked tongue and wasn’t afraid to call it like she saw it.

  I only knew about that from second-hand knowledge. While Tanner could communicate with her, and other familiars could communicate amongst themselves, I was left out of the loop. But Tanner had mentioned it before, and Grim confirmed it. If I didn’t know better, I would say my familiar had a slight crush on Monster, but I would never bring it up because Grim might murder me in my sleep for suggesting he could have the hots for a feline.

  Tanner and I stood from the table, tea in hand, and I considered calling to Grim to go out but decided against it when I saw him huddled in a tight circle by the fire with Monster snuggled up in the middle of him. She was almost impossible to see among the long black fur surrounding her.

  A warm breeze swept across Ruby’s covered front porch as we both sat on the wooden swing. I cupped my tea tightly in both hands as the proximity to Tanner stirred nervousness in my chest.

  I was being stupid. Tanner and I were in close proximity to each other all
the time at work.

  But, no, this was different.

  Forcing myself to get over it and not ruin the casual atmosphere Ruby had done so well to create inside, I said, “Good tea.”

  Which, obviously, was stupid and immediately made it abundantly clear that I was nervous and resorting to the world’s worst small-talk.

  His eyes locked onto mine and that goofy half-grin appeared. “Yeah. It is.” He sipped his then added, “I’m glad you invited me over.”

  He was glad I invited him over?

  Okay, Ruby was playing games, clearly. She’d probably sent an owl and signed it as me. Wouldn’t put it past her.

  I forced myself not to look away from his hazel eyes. “I’m glad you came.”

  “Taking over Medium Rare has meant neglecting everything that’s not work lately. Monster’s been making passive-aggressive comments about it for a month straight. My social life is pretty much dead in the water at this point.” He frowned, but all I could think about was, Tanner has a social life? I mean, of course he did, but for some reason I’d never considered it. Did he have a girlfriend, too?

  “It’s weird,” he continued, “seeing you at work all the time and never seeing you outside of it.” He brightened. “Have you ever been down to Sheehan’s Pub, or …” He let the sentence hang half-finished in the air. He was fishing.

  Fine, I’d bite. “No, I’ve never made it down there. Showing up in a new bar by myself isn’t my style.”

  “Oh, Sheehan’s is great, though,” he said. “It’s a come-one-come-all kind of place. We should go sometime soon. I’ll show you around.” As he turned his attention out to the street beyond the porch, I tried not to celebrate in any visible way.

  Going to Sheehan’s with Tanner was this ridiculous fantasy I’d held close to the vest since I first heard about a pub in Eastwind. And suddenly it might happen.