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  Sit a Spell

  Private Eye Witch Cozy, Book 4

  Stacey Alabaster

  Fairfield Publishing

  Copyright © 2020 Fairfield Publishing

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

  This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, places, or events is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Epilogue

  Thank You!

  1

  I wasn’t sure what was worse—the fact that my car sounded like it was about to break down or going without my morning coffee.

  Actually, I knew exactly which was worse. The latter. Being a witch, I could always use a broomstick instead of a car. But there was nothing that could replace my latte from the Onyx.

  The insides of the Onyx Coffee House looked dead.

  “Closed?” I brought the gurgling car to a complete stop and double-checked the sign, sure that I had got it wrong. Akiro’s coffee house was one of the few businesses in town that opened every day of the year. Yep, even Sundays and Christmas.

  But there was no mistake. A crowd of unhappy customers (or was that non-customers?) stood in front of the Onyx with dropped jaws and disappointed looks on their faces. Some of them had skipped disappointment and gone straight to fury. One woman was so outraged that she actually looked teary. A teenager kicked a garbage can on the curb. Another man was storming away and muttering to himself. “They’re not going to like the review I leave about this!” Uh-oh. You take people’s morning coffee away from them, and you’ve got a riot on your hands, buddy. Or at least a mildly disgruntled mob.

  I got a little closer so that I could read the sign properly as there was something scrawled underneath the Closed part. I was hoping it was a case of “Back in ten minutes.” I could wait ten minutes for coffee. Plus, it wouldn’t seem right to start the day without saying hi to Akiro. His was often the first human face I saw in the morning.

  “Closed due to unforeseen circumstances.”

  I pressed my nose against the glass of the coffee house window. No signs of life. Not so much as a light on. All the chairs were still upside down on the table. The water in the coffee machines took a while to warm up. Even if Akiro was coming back, I wasn’t going to get my coffee before I had to be at work at my PI business, Sparrow Investigations.

  I dragged my feet back to my car, pouting a little, feeling out of gas. I tried to start my engine.

  I kept thinking about that sign as the car finally started.

  There was a strange jabbing feeling in my chest. I realized I felt a little hurt. Like I should have been the one who knew what these “unforeseen circumstances” were. I was the only one who Akiro confided in about things in his life—or at least, I thought I was. Yet, for some reason, I hadn’t been important enough to tell this news to.

  I tried his phone, but it didn’t even ring, it just dropped out. Akiro had never been a big one for talking on the phone, so that wasn’t necessarily the biggest deal.

  And there was a shortcut anyway. PIs needed to use phones to communicate.

  But witches didn’t.

  See, I had psychic powers. I just didn’t like to use them. Especially when it came to two things: my business and my friends.

  Akiro was my friend.

  But that might be even more reason why I needed to use them right then.

  What are these unforeseen circumstances?

  Still sitting in my parked car with the sick engine, I closed my eyes and slowly let go of the guard I put up to keep these thoughts out. I tried to focus on Akiro specifically, even though I had no idea where he was. The easiest way to read someone’s mind was if they were right in front of you. The second easiest way was if you could tune into exactly where they were in your mind’s eye.

  It was difficult to get a clear string of words or thoughts from Akiro that morn. It seemed like he was maybe far away. Like it was a fuzzy radio signal coming from the next town, and my antenna wasn’t strong enough.

  Then one word suddenly shot into my head, a little like a bullet.

  And my eyes sprang open.

  Danger.

  I closed my eyes again and tried to get more.

  But when I tried to focus, it was like trying to grip a handful of sand. It all slipped away.

  Danger? What sort of danger??

  I cleared my mind and entered the front door of my private eye office, ready for another day of people asking me to find their lost pets. The business was three months old, and we had already gained a strong reputation in town. Still, most of my clientele were walk-ins who, as I say, had lost a pet and didn’t know where else to turn. Like the gentlemen with the straw hat who was looking extremely distressed.

  I hoped I would be able to help him. I stood up and extended my hand.

  “Ruby Sparrow. What can I help you with?”

  “I’ve lost my pet lamb,” he said. “I accidentally left the gate to my property open last night, and when I woke up this morning, she had wandered off . . .”

  I gently cut him off, and I asked if he had checked the local council website for the impounded animals. Alongside the regular cats and dogs, there were often farm animals like chickens, cows, and sheep. They ended up in the lost animal pages after either a neighbor or a police officer found them.

  “Oh, I didn’t know about that,” he said.

  That usually cleared things up. I always thought that maybe I should charge for these interactions anyway, seeing as I was actually “solving the case” for them in the simplest of terms. If I really had no scruples, I would have told the client that I would look into the case, fiddle around for a day or two, and then charge my full fee after I’d rescued the pet from the local pound.

  But that was something I’d never do.

  Not all pets were on the council website, of course. Actually, I had never taken a lost pet case officially, because I considered them to be boring and a waste of my resources when I had the ability to find thieves and killers.

  But I needed a distraction that day. Both the lack of my triple shot latte and the “Danger” thing were getting to me.

  So, I decided that the next lost pet case that walked in and couldn’t be found on the council website, I would actually investigate. Right on cue, there was the jingle jangle of the door opening. I popped my head up greet whoever it was who had lost their budgie.

  “Akiro!”

  I was pleased and relieved to see him. To know that these “unforeseen circumstances” actual weren’t that dire after all, and maybe he was here to explain them to me. I laughed in relief. I still didn’t know where that “Danger” message came from. I even started to think that my psychic powers were on the fritz. Maybe they were fading.

  He’d probably just run short of beans that morning. A problem with the supplier.

  Everything was just as it always was between us, I reassured myself, as Akiro walked towards me and offered me a weak half-smile. I was never sure what we were, exactly. Friends, yes. We had never quite dated.

  One thing I could rely on was that he would always be there for me when I needed him.

  But I never expected what he said next.

  “I’m your new client.”

  I only had one big desk that was swamped by the empty space surrounding it. The office was really four times larger than it needed to be for my operation. But I liked all the space.

  Gave me
space to think without other people’s thoughts, or energies, crowding it.

  Akiro was on one side of the desk waiting for me to do my magic on the other side. But I didn’t have spells and potions. I only had a notepad and a pen.

  I felt my fingers tense up as I picked up the pen and tried to write down the date. I felt self-conscious for some reason, being watched up-close like this by someone I knew so well. It was intimate and foreign at the same time. Akiro had never seen me at work like this. It wasn’t like he had come into the classroom while I was teaching third grade and sat on one of the desks in the back and watched what I was doing.

  I had my pen at the ready to take notes.

  “You closed the shop today,” I said.

  “That’s the reason I am here now,” he said quietly.

  I nodded.

  “Well, if the mystery is whether or not you should open and serve coffee again, then I can solve that right now. The answer is yes, you should!”

  He frowned.

  Okay, okay, not a time for jokes, I could see.

  Akiro dipped his head and said something quietly that sounded like, “If only it were that simple.”

  He looked pale. The knuckles of his hands were white as he gripped the edge of his side of the desk. He looked around, paranoid, like someone might be lurking there over his shoulder. Then he turned back to me and asked me if I ever went anywhere else for coffee.

  “No!” I gasped, half in a joking manner, like I had taken grave offense to such a serious accusation. But it was also the truth. “I am a loyal customer, Akiro. I never so much as looked in the windows of Red Annex.” The closest other coffee shop—which wasn’t actually that close.

  He still didn’t look convinced. “Not even today? Not even while I was closed?”

  “No, I’m just dealing with the withdrawal symptoms,” I said with a grin, trying to ease the tension a little. I did have a bit of a headache due to my lack of morning latte. But I mean, we could all survive a day or two until the Onyx reopened. Possibly.

  He still looked on edge. Dipped his head. “Not everyone will be so loyal. They’ll crack and jump ship in a day or two. Even you.”

  I tried not to laugh at how serious he was being about the whole thing. But it did seem a little silly to me. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I knew that coffee was serious business. Better than anyone, I knew. I had my triple shot each morning, and then I regularly followed it up with another triple shot in the afternoon. But he was acting like this was a matter of life and death.

  Danger.

  The word came to me again, and I sat up straight.

  “So, Akiro,” I said, trying to get him to focus again. “What brings you in here today?”

  It took him a few moments to answer me.

  “I received a threat,” he said.

  “A threat?”

  I tried not to look too worried. Tried to stay professional. If this was any other client, I wouldn’t feel a stab in my heart like this, so I just had to ignore it.

  Akiro looked a little ashamed as he gazed down at the letter he had pulled out of the back pocket of his jeans. He didn’t want to pass it over to me.

  “You’d better show me. If you want me to solve the case,” I said.

  “Please don’t think that I am so weak that I would back down and close my shop after one small threat,” he said, before passing it over.

  “I would never think that,” I said reassuringly. I unfolded the letter and braced myself for what it might say. I was aware of Akiro staring at me while I read the whole thing.

  I read the last bit out loud. “If you so much as serve one cup of coffee, someone will be hurt.” I frowned and read back over the handwritten note another time.

  “Hmm,” I said. “In my official opinion, you don’t have anything to worry about. This is a handwritten note. It’s too easy to trace back to someone to count as a real threat.”

  Akiro looked both unsure and a little embarrassed as I handed it back to him. “So, you don’t think this person meant it?”

  “Well, I do think whoever wrote it doesn’t want you to serve coffee,” I said. “For whatever random reason they have. But there is no real danger here.”

  There was that word again.

  Gulp.

  But I shot him a reassuring smile. “I will look into it for you. But trust me, there is no reason to lose sleep over this.”

  He stood up. “Do you think it’s safe for me to open backup tomorrow?” he asked me.

  “That’s a call you’ll have to make yourself. But either way, I will be there for backup, first thing.”

  Backup. I pulled up to the curb and felt powerful, even though my car betrayed me by coming to a spluttering halt.

  It’s not like as private investigator, I was allowed to be armed. It wasn’t like I knew how to use a weapon anyway. But as a witch, I did have a certain amount of protection. And a certain amount of power. That was one of the appeals of becoming a full witch. Even though I was still on probation, over the past few months, I had picked up a few tricks of the trade. I could make inanimate objects move, and I could freeze things at will. Well, at will might be overstating it. But if I really needed to do it, I could.

  So, if there was any real threat at the Onyx—which I didn’t believe there was—Akiro and I would be safe.

  Vicky, my best witch friend and detective assistant, didn’t sound so confident when I filled her in on the case that morning over the phone. She wanted to know if I needed her to come with me to play backup to my backup.

  “I’ll be fine,” I reassured her before I took off that morning. I was still certain that Akiro was worrying over nothing. There was no chance that anyone in Swift Valley cared about coffee that much to actually hurt someone over it.

  The car was rattling, and I was worried it might not make it to the bottom of the hill. But I supposed that gravity might do the job, even if the engine couldn’t.

  Hang on. Maybe it wasn’t the engine that was making that noise.

  I spotted a black tail.

  My black cat and familiar, Indy, stuck her head out from underneath the passenger seat and grinned up at me slyly.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked her in slight annoyance as I made my way into town. It was too late to open the door and let her out, as we were already at the bottom of the mountain.

  “Just had the feeling you were going to need me today.”

  Yeah. Well, my cat wasn’t the only creature who didn’t seem to think that I could handle this on my own. I was certain, however, that I could.

  I brought the car to a stop outside the coffee house. “Unless you’re ordering a cappuccino, I think your trip is going to be a waste of time.”

  Indy stared up at me. “Actually, I prefer chai. And I’m not sure that I trust you to put my order in correctly. It’s full cream milk, of course, and no sweetener.”

  She smiled sweetly, and I wasn’t sure if she was being serious or not, but I made her stay in the car. It was going to be a pain taking her back up the mountain when I was done. Maybe she can teleport herself back home.

  I suspected she had that power but just kept it secret from me. In fact, I suspected that Indy kept a lot of things secret from me.

  Oh, wow. The “Closed due to unforeseen circumstances” sign had been taken down, and I could see that there were people inside already.

  It was good to see the door of the Onyx open, and I could already smell that coffee was being made inside. Ah, I must not have been needed after all, I thought, grinning. I was thinking it was a good thing that the coffee shop was already open and that it appears to be business as usual.

  “Akiro!” I called out. “I’ll take my regular triple shot. Thank you very much.” Maybe there was really no case at all. That letter must have just been a disgruntled customer or someone’s stupid idea of a joke.

  But Akiro was walking backwards slowly. He didn’t even turn around when I called out to him a second time. I thought there had be
en a spill on the ground or something, and so I pushed past him to see how bad it was. I was willing to grab a mop and help out if it meant that I was going to get my coffee quicker. Twenty-four hours was a long time to go without coffee.

  But it was not a spill that Akiro was staring at. There was a jug of spilt milk on the floor, white liquid puddled and frothy on the gray tiles. But that was not what any of us were crying over that day.

  I gasped.

  “Who . . . who is that?” I asked, pointing to the body lying on the floor. Lifeless.

  “Candace. She is . . . was . . . one of my new employees,” Akiro said in a choked voice.

  Akiro turned to me and stated something with utter conviction.

  “There is a Coffee Killer on the loose.”

  2

  “Who cares about coffee this much?” Vicky asked as we sat in her kitchen. She dunked a tea bag into a cup of hot water. “Tea is where it’s at.” She took a big gulp and sighed in satisfaction. It was a chamomile and lemon concoction which had a sickly-sweet smell to it that I couldn’t quite stomach. I preferred a more bitter drink. A stronger drink. One with more of a kick. I wanted my triple shot latte.

  Most witches preferred tea. And they liked to brew their own.

  I was the exception to the rule, though. Tea always tasted like hot leaves to me. All the little bit and bobs that floated in it made me suspicious. All the flavors and herbs. Maybe that was the appeal to the witches. It was like putting together a spell, the way they collected the leaves and spices, then stirred them into a hot pot of water.

  “Well, someone clearly doesn’t want Akiro selling coffee,” I stated. “And they have gone to extreme lengths to see that it doesn’t happen.”