The Witch's Strength_Cozy Witch Mystery Read online

  *****

  Joy Radcliffe paced the length of her small apartment living room. Gemma took note of the furnishings and decor—this woman was scrimping to get by.

  “Neil and I, we used to have this great life. We’d go on vacations twice a year. We bought new clothes all the time, anything we wanted. Leather jackets. Designer stuff. And we had this great house. You’ve probably been over to it. Nice house, huh? I decorated it myself.”

  “It’s lovely. But your ex-husband mentioned that his business wasn’t doing so well anymore?” Gemma asked.

  “Business was doing great. I mean, the two of them had it figured out. All kinds of imports. Being able to control the business online. It was a dream come true. And Neil would show me these quarterly profit statements on Excel spreadsheets. They were raking in the dough. Making over a hundred thousand dollars a year each.

  “But then, one day, Neil tells me that the money is all gone. At first, the story is that the business dried up. But that was just a story. I finally got the truth out of him. Zander stole the company money. Right under Neil’s nose. Gave him some hooey about needing to borrow it for a quick investment, and that he planned on returning it.

  “Of course, we never got it back. But what I couldn’t stand was that Neil wouldn’t do anything about it. He wouldn’t sue Zander. He wouldn’t turn him in. So, we just lost our last dime, and that was the end of it. That was pretty much why we got divorced. I was so ticked off.”

  “We just got done talking to Neil, and this never came up,” Finn said.

  “No. He would never say a bad word about his friend. But I’ll bet he had plenty to say about me, didn’t he? So, here I am, slumming it in 400 square feet. How do you like that? But there’s no way that Zander should have left that money to Hugo. Because it belongs to us, and I want my half. I’m going to get a lawyer, I swear I will. There’s got to be business accounts, offshore accounts, real estate somewhere. I want to look into it. I want to get what’s mine. If I had known he was going to leave that money to Hugo . . .”

  Gemma and Finn waited for her to finish that thought, but Joy appeared to think better of it.

  “Appreciate your time, Ms. Radcliffe,” Finn said.

  “It’s a beautiful 400 square feet,” Gemma assured her. “You have a really good eye.”

  Joy looked somewhat mollified. But still, litigious as all get out.

  *****

  Neil Donovan was still at home, and uneasy to see that his interrogators had returned so soon.

  “Why didn’t you tell us that your friend Zander stole your business money?”

  “Oh, I see you did make it over to Joy’s. She’s never gonna let that go.”

  “She’s got a legitimate beef,” Gemma said. “Zander Knox stole your family income. And whether the two of you are married or not, half of it belongs to her. And she also holds that theft responsible for the end of your marriage. So, yeah, she’s not quite over it.”

  “Back to my question. Why didn’t you tell us?” Finn repeated.

  “Zander’s family and mine have known each other since grade school. Our friends coming up were all the same people. I know he wasn’t a saint, and I know a lot of people didn’t show up for his memorial service. I think that was partly due to the fact that there was no body to view. Anyhow, I feel his reputation is in my hands. And I can turn people against his memory and have them think of him forever as a liar and a thief. Or I can let them remember the good things. When I think of our friendship, I like to think about only the good things. Because he’s gone. No need to drag his name through the mud.”

  “What are you going to do about your business? About your income, if you don’t mind my asking?” Finn asked.

  “I’ve always known how to land on my feet. I’ll come up with something,” Neil said.

  They left him for the second time that day.

  “Are you getting any murderer vibes?” Finn asked.

  “I’m no expert on human psychology. But I understood Joy’s anger at losing her security. This guy has a big house, and I’m thinking, a big mortgage, and he’s just so incredibly calm.”

  “Excellent point. Well, time for you to get back on Hugo detail.”

  “I have a date tonight.”

  “Oh, really? Then let me see what I can do about Hugo. You have yourself a good time and tell me all the juicy details.”

  “What makes you think that I would tell you any juicy details?”

  “You tell Lorna, Lorna tells Margo, Margo tells me . . . you know how it goes.”

  “I do now. As it so happens, I really don’t think there are going to be any juicy details.”

  “Hmmph. Sounds like the wrong guy.”

  *****

  The restaurant had a wonderful beer garden patio up front. Gemma thought it was a charming place to settle down for the evening, filled with potted plants and old-fashioned oak barrels. But Otto suggested that they go inside.

  Gemma soon discovered why. There was a bar that stretched all the way across the main wall, and above and behind it were about twelve flat-screen TVs, all on sports channels. The bartender and several patrons shouted hello to Otto and looked at Gemma appreciatively.

  “For a single guy, this place is like a home away from home. You know, we don’t feel like watching the game alone in our apartments by ourselves. So, I come here. good food. Good company. People know my name. It’s nice to have a place like that.”

  Like Cheers. Gemma realized that this was very close to being the first bar that she had ever been in. Her turning twenty-one years had been part of the long, dark nightmare. This was how most adults socialized and had fun, and she should certainly give it a chance. And Otto really was a sincerely nice guy.

  “Do you like sports?”

  “My cat does. He likes basketball and Ping-Pong. And crocodiles hunting for wildebeests. But I guess we’re not counting that as a sport.”

  Otto laughed. “You’re funny.”

  Am I? Leading up to this evening, Gemma had been feeling some serious nerves. It had, after all, been eleven years since her last date. But Otto was going a long way toward helping her feel at ease. He really was kind of a catch. Who cared if he didn’t love books or sound like Daniel Craig?

  *****

  As Hugo Shipley came out of the church confessional, he took no notice of the young woman sitting quietly in the middle pew. But as soon as he left, Gemma leapt up from her seat and moved quickly to intercept the priest that Hugo had been speaking with.

  “Father, might I have a word? My name is Gemma Keating. I’m working with the Oyster Cove Police Department. I’m sure that you saw the incident on the news with the car that exploded—the one with the bomb attached?”

  “Good heavens. That was terrible. So terrible.”

  “All the more terrible because it was probably murder. That was Hugo Shipley who just left you. Hugo is an old friend of the victim, Zander Knox.”

  “I’ve known both of them for many years. I feel the loss of Zander terribly. And of course, Hugo is deeply affected. Both of them were . . .”

  “Full of secrets. I know you’ve got some pretty tight moral guidelines about people confessing to you. A really sacred vow of confidentiality, right?”

  “I know what you’re about to ask. But this is a place where all sins can be freely confessed, and all sins will be forgiven.”

  “So . . . Hugo’s sins? On a scale of one to ten?”

  “Over the years, I’ve heard a great many things that would interest the police. And I have never broken my vow of confidence.”

  “Not even if someone had confessed a murder to you?”

  “No. I would not.”

  He nodded to let her know that he’d said all that he was prepared to say. But halfway back to his office, he turned around and threw up his hands. “What’s done is done.”

  Gemma couldn’t fault the man for his code of ethics. But she also couldn’t rest until she actually found out what had been “don
e.”

  *****

  Just as Gemma was ready to call Finn to fill him in on her afternoon, she got a call from him.

  “Guess what? Another bomb. This one didn’t have a chance to explode. It was found by Ty Santos, that guy who was with Zander’s girlfriend, Erica Jewell. He checked on his car, and he found the bomb all rigged up.”

  “What made him check his car?”

  “Great minds think alike. I was just wondering that very same thing. Meet me at Erica Jewell’s house.”

  Of course, they couldn’t meet directly at the house because it was crawling with a bomb squad and a wide perimeter of safety had been established. Several neighbors had to evacuate their homes. No one went far, though. Most people were congregating just on the very next block.

  Gemma and Finn approached Erica Jewell and Ty Santos. Erica’s son, Edison, was nearby. Finn approached him first.

  “May I ask, what exactly is the relationship between Ty Santos and your family?”

  Edison rolled his eyes. “He’s my mother’s other boyfriend. She met him and Zander at about the same time.” It wasn’t exactly something for a teenage boy to take pride in, but it was clearly a reality that he had adapted to.

  “Mr. Santos. You were the one who discovered the bomb on your brakes, I understand,” Finn said.

  “I did. I can’t believe that today could’ve been my last day on this earth.”

  Erica held him even tighter. “I can’t bear it. I can’t bear the thought of losing both of you. It would have been too terrible. What a blessing for us all that you found that bomb.”

  “That is what you would call a blessing,” Finn said. “By the way, what made you check your brakes?”

  “Well, because of what happened to Zander, of course. We have the same mechanic, you know.”

  “No, I did not know. But that is very interesting, Mr. Santos. I’m going to need the name and address of your mechanic, please.” As Ty Santos checked his phone to get the information, Finn added quietly to Gemma, “Any yahoo can build a bomb. But to rig it to the brakes, to detonate at a precise speed—that does have mechanic written all over it.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The mechanic’s name was Milo Stamp, and he was not at all happy to have the bomb squad crawling over his facilities and alarming his customers. His face was familiar to Gemma and Finn—he had been the mechanic at Zander Knox’s memorial service, trying to drag his grieving daughter away from the services.

  The girl, Carly Stamp, was again fussing and arguing with her father, and then she darted away when Finn and Gemma approached.

  Milo was fuming. “You’re going to make my customers think that I’ve done something wrong.”

  “I’m afraid we can’t leave any stone left unturned, Mr. Stamp. This is a real public safety issue.”

  “I have so much work to do today. So many cars to work on. I hate to let my customers down.”

  One of those customers approached Milo. “Hey, Milo, I can see you’ve got quite a thing going on, but all I need is an oil change. Can’t you get one of your interns to do that for me?”

  “My intern left last week, for greener pastures. He don’t want to be a mechanic. But I’ll give my students a call tonight—have a new guy by tomorrow. No problem.” He turned back to Gemma and Finn. “I teach two mechanic classes. The students need lots of practice, so they come here and get it at my shop.”

  Finn nodded understandingly. “Free labor—very nice. Mr. Stamp, can you tell me what you and your daughter were doing at Zander Knox’s memorial service?”

  “We were paying our respects, just like everyone else.”

  “It looked as if you were trying to get your daughter to leave,” Gemma challenged him. “I think your daughter came to pay her respects, but Zander Knox wasn’t a friend of yours, was he?”

  Milo pondered the question for a moment, then grudgingly replied, “He was a thirty-five-year-old man. Flirting with my daughter. Asking her to go to the movies with him. She is seventeen. And she is going to turn eighteen in one month, and I knew . . . I just knew that he was waiting for that eighteenth birthday. Guys like that are pure scum.”

  “How about you other customer, Ty Santos? Any thoughts on Ty?”

  Milo grimaced. “I don’t like him. I stepped outside the garage a few weeks ago. He’d come to pick his car. He was telling jokes to my daughter, and she was laughing her head off. I don’t think that’s very appropriate, to be flirting with a seventeen-year-old girl.”

  “So, you disliked both of them?”

  “It is my duty to protect my daughter.”

  “And both of them had bombs put in their cars. And you are mechanic for both of them. I’m sure you can see why we needed to have your garage checked out.”

  Milo bristled. Out of the corner of her eye, Gemma saw a quick movement that appeared to be Milo’s daughter, Carly, listening in on the conversation. After about an hour, the bomb squad gave the facility the all-clear, and Milo was able to shoo everyone off his property.

  As Finn and Gemma drove away, the sidewalks and streets were still full of curious onlookers, so they made a point of going very slowly. Which made it a lot easier for Carly Stamp to catch up to them on her bicycle and signal for them to stop, which they gladly did.

  Carly was fidgety and anxious. She had overheard Finn grilling her father, and she knew that Milo must be a prime suspect.

  “He’s not like that. He doesn’t have a violent bone in his body. I know he talks tough, but he’s never hit anyone in his life. Much less killed anyone. And when I was younger, he and I never fought about anything. It’s only now, that I’m dating age, that we’re having some problems. But he’s a good guy. He really is.”

  “He sounded pretty angry at Zander,” Gemma reminded her. “I guess most fathers also would have been, in the same circumstances.”

  “Yeah, fathers do get upset, but not as much as girlfriends. That’s who you ought to be looking at—Zander Knox’s girlfriend—that Erica.”

  “What do you know about Erica Jewell?” Finn asked.

  “Zander had asked me out to the movies. And why shouldn’t I go? It was a horror movie and my father hates those kinds of movies. Most of my girlfriends do too, so I had no one to go with. I didn’t want to go alone. So, Zander volunteered to take me, and it was really, really nice of him. Yeah, I knew that he was too old for me. But it was just a movie, so what’s wrong with that?

  “Anyway, before the movie, I stopped at the store and bought myself a dress. And I still had the bag with me. So, we come out of the movie, and we run smack into Erica. And she has an absolute fit. She starts screaming at him that he’s dating me behind her back, and she looked at my shopping bag, and she accused him of spending money on me. Money that he should be spending on her and her son.

  “I tried to tell her that I bought my own dress, but she just screamed that we were liars. She told him that he could just come over and get his things and get out of her house. She was just hysterical. And probably drunk, too.

  “Well, I know that they stayed together after that, so somehow, they worked it out. But she’s really capable of some serious rage. And I wasn’t the only girl Zander was flirting with. You want to find a murderer, you start with her.”

  It was an interesting revelation. Erica had been grieving so openly and deeply about Zander, there had been little reason to suspect trouble in paradise. Now they knew that she very well may have engaged in an act of passion, and in Ty Santos, she had a backup boyfriend to boot.

  Of course, Carly was so desperate to divert attention away from her father that she may have exaggerated Erica’s potential as a murder suspect. Still, it was time to have a sit-down with that very modern family and figure out if it contained Zander’s killer.

  *****

  Erica and Ty both had nine-to-fives, so a visit was scheduled for the following evening. In the meantime, Gemma had a bunch of shopping errands to do on Bethany’s behalf while her roommate was at work.
It was the least she could do, and she was happy to contribute to the household in any way.

  Fortuitously, Gemma crossed paths with two of her favorite people in the hardware store, Roland and Dax. It was just about an hour or so before lunch, which they might as well all have together. But before then, Roland had to stop at his school office and pick up some books. Dax squirmed with boredom at the very thought of it, and Gemma volunteered to take him to the park, where they could have a good time until Roland rejoined them.

  Passing a 7-Eleven, Gemma was reminded how nice a frosty cold peach nectarine fizzy drink would be, and Dax quickly concurred. Stepping into the store, she was greeted with the sight of a furious cashier screaming, “Put that down! Thief! Thief!” And the fast blur of a young man running toward the exit, right into her. Dax was right behind her, and there was no way that the shoplifter was going anywhere. Gemma put her arm out against his chest, and as much as he pushed and struggled, he was essentially confined to the spot. In a panic, he dropped his stolen goods. Gemma caught the eye of the cashier, who waved the man away angrily. “Get out of here, and don’t let me ever see your face again. Or it’s jail for you. You hear me?”

  With a warning glance, Gemma pulled her hand back, scooped Dax into her arms, and let the shoplifter flee. The cashier shrugged, picking up the nearly stolen goods. “Maybe he’ll straighten out. I was once young and stupid like that. Nice job, Miss. He’ll certainly think twice before he tries that again.”

  Gemma and Dax continued down the street, with complementary fizzy drinks in hand. Dax was highly impressed with the scene and what he had just witnessed.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  What an unexpected question. “No, as a matter of fact, I don’t.”

  This appeared to be good news. “Okay, maybe I could be your boyfriend when I get older, and then we could get married.”

  Gemma was almost at a loss for words. “Dax, this is a big surprise. What made you think of marrying me?”

  “Well, in your movie, you had this boyfriend, didn’t you? Only he died. So, I guess that you must need a new boyfriend. And you are really, really pretty. But it was back in olden times. And then, when it’s today, you’re still really, really pretty. You didn’t get old. So, if you never get old, and by the time I grow up, you’ll still be really pretty, and we can get married. That would be really cool. Don’t you think?”