Mis-Spelled Read online

  Mis-Spelled

  Private Eye Witch Cozy Mystery, Book 7

  Stacey Alabaster

  Fairfield Publishing

  Copyright © 2020 Stacey Alabaster

  All Rights Reserved

  Except for review quotes, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the written consent of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. All people, places, names, and events are products of the author’s imagination and / or used fictitiously. Any similarities to actual people, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Cover Design by Tina Adams

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Epilogue

  Thank You!

  1

  I didn’t know what was more terrifying—the white-tailed spider crawling across the desk, or meeting my mum for the first time in an eon.

  Smack!

  Because that’s what she felt like—a stranger. We hadn’t spoken at all since she had taken off to Peru seven months earlier to undertake an “inward journey.” Well, apart from one email message where she told me that there was no phone reception out there and that even if there was, she was on a technology cleanse. She wanted no contact with the outside world.

  It was her way of becoming a better witch. Finding her true nature.

  But she was currently in the air. On her way back to civilization. On her way back to me.

  I had to be at the airport to pick her up by four-thirty. Our detective agency, Sparrow Investigations, was shutting early that afternoon. I was cleaning up the mess on my desk, and I noticed that my hands were shaking just a little. Weird. My mum had never made me nervous before.

  But maybe it was because this was the first time I was seeing her since I had found out The Truth. That I was a witch.

  That she was a witch.

  “I don’t understand why she isn’t just flying via broomstick,” Vicky, who was half distracted by some app on her phone, murmured. She seemed to be swiftly swiping across the screen from side to side, but I couldn’t see the screen. I assumed it was some new addictive phone game app.

  “Flying all the way from Peru on a broomstick would be pretty tiring,” I commented as I glanced out the window, and Vicky just shrugged. Still distracted by her phone while I packed up and went to lock the front door, so that we could escape out the back. Of course, being witches, we could just teleport ourselves out of the building if we really needed to, but we had new rules about performing witchcraft in public—especially when we were at work. At the moment, we were on a magic shutdown.

  There was a woman with dark hair cut into a short blunt bob standing at the doorway, staring in at me with eyes as black as her hair. May. Vicky looked up from her phone for the first time in twenty minutes and gasped. She and May weren’t on the best of terms, to put it bluntly. None of the coven were. They called her an “enemy of the coven” because she was a witch who didn’t belong to any group and did things her own way, not following any rules. I dunno—part of me admired that about her. May was charismatic and exciting to be around. But I also got the feeling that she was dangerous if you got too close to her.

  “I need your help, Ruby,” she said, getting out her checkbook before she had even entered the office. “There is an important case that I need you to solve.”

  I almost closed the door on May’s foot, but at the last moment let her take one step inside. I heard out her story. She told me that she was having some legal problems with a will and needed to track down a long-lost relative so that things could be resolved. “I can pay you more than your usual rate. It’s a rather time-sensitive issue,” she said, carefully pronouncing each word in her clipped accent.

  “We are not taking any new clients at the moment,” I said, but she just waved her hand dismissively.

  “Oh, I am not a new client. We have an existing relationship, remember? You’ve solved a case for me before.”

  And never again.

  “No new cases, then,” I said through gritted teeth. It was three-thirty. Time to go. Mum was about to land. My hands were still shaking.

  May tried to object, but Vicky was glaring at her to get out. Seeing she was unwelcome, she sighed, shook her head, and slunk back into the shadows

  My mum wasn’t the typical-looking witch—if there was such a thing. Her hair was always quite short, in a blonde bob that was carefully styled, and she had always been a little bit plump. That is why I did not recognize the rail-thin women with the long, braided hair that was down to her hips coming toward me, at least not at first. Especially not with the long flowing dress that she wore and the beads that were jangling off her. Not her typical style at all. And she was bare-faced, when in the past she had always worn a lot of makeup. Now, she just had heavy tan to make up for it. It made her look younger. Certainly different.

  “Wow, Mum, talk about a makeover,” I said, my jaw dropping as I reached out to give her a hug. She felt thinner even to the touch, not how I remembered her. I could feel her ribs as she drew me in for a mother-daughter hug.

  “Oh, I guess I am just embracing my true nature,” she said with a smile and a wink.

  I pulled back from our embrace.

  “Yeah. Guess you’re not the only one.”

  Oops. Hadn’t meant to sound quite so bitter, so soon into our reunion. It was just that I hadn’t had much choice in the matter—I’d been forced to embrace the fact that I was a witch all on my own, without my mum there to help me through it. And pretty late in life, as well. Most witch parents told their children the truth when they were small so that they could grow up in control of their powers, with the support of others who were like them. Now I felt on the outside of the coven, and on the outside of the regular human world as well. At least I had Vicky. She understood.

  Mum wiggled a little bit and adjusted the strap of her carry-on bag. Maybe her hands were shaking as well.

  There was a silence between us. Needing to cut the tension, I figured this was as good a time as any to come out and ask her the burning question. The one that had been on my mind for months.

  “Why didn’t you tell me the truth, Mum?”

  She yawned a little like it was no big deal, as though I had just asked her why she had chosen to fly economy instead of first class.

  “Can we talk about this later . . . ? I’ve got massive jet lag about to set in, and I’m dying to eat. I’d love to go to my favorite place—The Dark Horse. Seriously, I couldn’t touch anything on the plane. I asked for organic, and I could practically see the chemicals crawling all over the processed garbage they put down in front of me!”

  I nodded and grabbed her bags for her. It had been a long trip. Some food for both of us sounded like a great idea.

  I pulled my car up in front of The Dark Horse and saw a familiar face sitting in the window, toward the back near the bar. Her dirty blonde hair was pulled up so that her freckled face was visible, and she was in animated conversation with a man sitting in front of her who had very spiky dark blonde hair and was wearing a brightly-colored Hawaiian-shirt. Not typical date attire, I didn’t think, but hey, I suppose people have different tastes.

  “Is that Vicky?” I asked, peering in through the window. She’d never told me she was going on a date that evening. Now, all the time she had been spent looking at apps on her phone made sense. All the swiping.

  “Back in my day, we used to flip through the personal pages in a magazine,” Mum mused. She told me that there wer
e no photos included in the old school dating apps. Just text. “Now, it’s all just out there for everyone to see, isn’t it?” She took a step closer to the door of the restaurant.

  “I think we should go somewhere else,” I said. “I don’t want to intrude.”

  Mum tried to argue with me, as The Dark Horse was her favorite place in all of Swift Valley, but we agreed on the place next door. This was an Indian restaurant that had amazing décor, with pink walls that were hand-painted with green leaf designs all over. I ordered the deep-fried veggies and cheese entrée, but the waiter had barely poured our water when I heard my phone buzzing inside my purse. Usually I wouldn’t check my phone when I was out to dinner and had company, but my psychic vibes kicked in. I just knew that something was off. There was trouble somewhere, and so I checked it sneakily under the table.

  It was Vicky. I apologized to mum and told her that Vicky would not be phoning me in the middle of her date unless it was really important.

  “Hello?” I said. She had no idea that I was in the restaurant right next door and didn’t even let me explain that before she launched into a spiel about what a weirdo her date Eamon was. “Okay, okay, slow down,” I told her, but she didn’t. She told me that he looked nothing like his photos and that he had been talking about conspiracy theories the whole time. And that he didn’t even listen to country music. “Not even folk music, Ruby. He listens to metal.”

  Didn’t sound too bad to me, and I tried to tell her to calm down and ride it out, but her voice was frantic. She wanted to get out of there, but she was hiding in the bathroom and couldn’t figure out a way to leave the restaurant without making it awkward. As much as she was clashing with the guy, she didn’t want to have to actually hurt his feelings.

  “I need you to rescue me. Fake some kind of emergency,” she hissed into the phone. When I tried to tell her that was bad luck, she said, “Ruby! This is the worst date of all time!”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll call back with something,” I said and ended the call after we had made a plan to wait three minutes until she was back at the table, sitting down. Then I would call her with my “emergency.” I briefly filled mum in on what was happening, and she found the whole thing highly amusing. Telling me again that back in her day, they didn’t have the option to use cell phones to get out of bad dates. They used to have to get their friend to call the restaurant, and then the waiter would come to the table and deliver the bad news, and she would have to pretend to be shocked and so sorry to have to leave.

  I interrupted her and told her it was time for my performance. I was going to call and tell Vicky that her pet turtle and familiar, Warren, had been in an accident, and that she needed to come home immediately. I didn’t like to lie—it felt like I was putting a jinx out into the universe—but I knew that would get an honest emotional reaction from her, seeing as Warren was Vicky’s favorite creature in the whole world.

  But when I called, there was silence at the end of the line.

  “Ruby . . .” Vicky finally whispered. “He is dead. Eamon is dead.”

  Talk about the worst date of all time.

  2

  Vicky was shaking under the light of the street lamp as the rest of the restaurant was evacuated, and the police started asking questions. I had a few of my own. This wasn’t an official case for Sparrow Investigations, but I had a feeling we would be the ones solving it, even if we had to step on a few toes.

  “Sorry,” I said to Constable Blue as I stepped past him and caught his foot with the heel of my boots. I was around the side of the restaurant where Eamon had met his unfortunate demise. A blow to the back of the head.

  No one had seen it happen. The side door to the restaurant was still hanging open, blowing a little in the late evening breeze. Mum was still in the Indian restaurant finishing up her vegetarian curry.

  “I mean, it was a bad date, but I didn’t want him to end up dead,” she said as she stared back at the door where it had happened, shivering even with the blanket over her shoulders.

  She’d given me the details in little spurts. No one had seen what happened to Eamon, because he had used a side exit that was meant for only staff. It even had a sign saying that it was the staff exit. None of the staff had been around at that moment, either. They’d all been in the kitchen at once. The restaurant had been only half full on a Tuesday night, and none of the customers had noticed that anything was wrong or amiss.

  I wondered if maybe Eamon had had the same idea as Vicky—that things weren’t going very well, and he was trying to escape the date. But she kept telling me that he’d been super keen. He had asked her for details about her dating history, tried to find out if she was seeing anyone else, and tried to suss out whether she was looking for something long-term. He even mentioned a friend’s wedding coming up in a couple of months that he’d be needing a date for, implying that Vicky would make a perfect plus-one for him.

  Something didn’t add up.

  “How did you even meet this guy?”

  She pulled out her phone and showed me this dating app called Activate. “It’s meant to be one of the safest ones,” she said, explaining a feature that allowed total privacy and anonymity if the user wanted it. There was no way for a user to know the other person’s exact location, unlike most other apps, which would tell you the exact distance away that the other person was. And there was even a setting where you could hide photos and just match on personality, only unlocking the photo feature later. Sounded like something from Mum’s old-school days.

  “Well, it didn’t turn out to be quite so safe for Eamon, did it?” I asked with a sigh as I looked around for clues. Vicky burst into tears again. “Sorry,” I said, putting my arms around her shoulder. “Sometimes I forget that I need to be less of a detective and more of a friend in these situations.” I still had one eye locked on the side door, though. No security camera up above it. If Eamon had wanted to escape a bad date, why hadn’t he just gone out the front door while Vicky had been in the bathroom?

  Vicky glanced up at me with trembling lips. “We have to find out who did this to Eamon. They have to be brought to justice for this.”

  I nodded. I was already on the case.

  “So, you didn’t see anything at all?” I asked her a little later while I help Vicky settle on the couch in my living room. My mum was making tea for Vicky in the kitchen to try and soothe her very battered nerves. Vicky shook her head while I considered this. “I know you said you didn’t, but I was just wondering if maybe the shock had settled a bit and something might have come back to you.”

  “It must have happened while I was on the phone to you,” she said, still sniffling a little as she reached over to the coffee table for a tissue. “By the time I got back to the table, he was gone. He was . . . dead.”

  At least she could finally say the word.

  I nodded and put my arm around her shoulder again, still at a loss for what might have happened. I wanted to press Vicky, but she was crying and emotional, and I wasn’t sure her word was that reliable at the moment. I had no leads at all on the case, seeing as there had been no witnesses, and all I knew about Eamon Barnes was that he liked conspiracy theories and Hawaiian shirts. But now, I was wishing I’d listened to my mum and gone into The Dark Horse for dinner. Maybe I would have seen something. Or maybe Eamon wouldn’t have died at all. What did they say about always listening to your mother?

  Mum passed Vicky a cup of her special chai tea and told Vicky that she should stay the night, that it wasn’t good for her to be on her own after what she had just been through.

  “But you’re staying in the spare room,” I said to Mum, looking up at her. Mum hadn’t even unpacked her bags yet. In fact, I wasn’t even sure she had brought them in from the car. Was she planning on staying somewhere else and just hadn’t told me yet?

  “Oh, I don’t mind sharing,” she said with a sweet, motherly smile and added that the king-sized bed in the spare room would easily fit two. “After all, I have s
pent the past seven months sleeping on a very thin sheet of plastic in the middle of the rainforest,” she said.

  Vicky smiled for the first time that evening and said that would be nice. That it would be like having a little sleepover. She rang her housemate Shu to ask if she could feed Warren that night while I fetched some spare blankets out of the closet. It was the first week of fall, and the leaves had started to come loose from the trees. The nights had a chill to them now.

  I raised my eyebrows. A sleepover for some, but I was the one who was going to have to round up all these people like cattle. With Taylor, my housemate, in his room at the back of the house, it was going to be a bit of a full house for a few days.

  The following morning, I really felt the impact of that when I got up and entered the bathroom for my morning shower. I planned to wash my hair, but I got a nasty surprise. Not a white-tailed spider, thank goodness. But something just as unpleasant first thing in the morning. I was about to lather up my hair, and I squealed when the water turned icy cold. I jumped out and reached for my towel.

  “Muuummm!” I called out, stomping down the hall, elongating all the vowels like I was a sullen teenager again. “Did you use all the hot water?”

  “Sorry, love, it’s all this extra-long hair,” she said. She sat back all relaxed at the kitchen table with a cup of tea in her hands and a towel wrapped around her head. “Takes a lot of extra washing.”

  “At least you got to wash your hair,” I said with a pout, and she glanced over.

  “What is up with that new color, by the way?” she asked me. “I’ve never seen you with red before. I never would have thought that it was a color that suited you.”