A Cold Spell Read online

  I felt for her, and I wanted to take the case, even if I felt a little out of my league. Who else was going to help her?

  “I’ll do it,” I said, having no idea what I was actually in for.

  2

  “Gosh, I am so over exams,” I said, pacing in my living room as Vicky asked me yet another question about life in Swift Valley in 1878 and then got me to repeat back the facts that I had learned. Even though I was only applying for a job in the hard candy store, every single employee of Old Swift Town needed to have historical knowledge of the town in order for the experience to be authentic.

  I’d never been undercover before. I’d never even been to Old Swift Town before.

  “I had no idea there was such a crazy history to this town,” Vicky said as she read over the pamphlet, getting distracted from her tutoring duties as she opened her mouth in shock. “Did you know there was once a witch hunt in Swift Valley?”

  I spun around. “That can’t be right. Swift Valley has only existed since eighteen-seventy, and witch trials were more of a seventeenth century thing.”

  She looked impressed by my historical knowledge. “Looks like you are going to be just fine in the historical part of the exam,” she said, placing the pamphlet to one side before she picked up her guitar for a bit of an early morning practice session. “Maybe you ought to cram up on your sweets knowledge, though.”

  It smelled like sugar inside the Swift Sweet Shoppe. There were contrasting scents competing for attention, the strongest being the mint and aniseed. But if you concentrated, you could pick up the raspberry and the lemon drops as well. Hmm, I think there was even eucalyptus, which I was sure was popular years ago but wasn’t very appetizing now. There were rows and rows of rainbow-colored candy from the ground to the ceiling for customers to choose from. They were served either in glass jars or paper bags to the customers, and my job—if I got it—was to weigh each purchase carefully so that the customer was neither overcharged nor undercharged. But of course, there was no nice new electronic scale for accuracy. It was an old set of scales that had to be balanced with weights every time you used it. “It can be tricky,” the park manager, Marvin, said as he showed me around the shop. “But we have to be careful for our profit margins, you see.”

  I was trying to make the best first impression, so I was chipper and far too enthusiastic about the candies, which seemed like a dental hazard to me. “These all look and smell just delicious,” I said with a bright smile. “Must be fun to work with these candies all day long.”

  “All made from authentic ingredients that could have been purchased and used at the time,” Marvin explained as he pointed up to the top of the ceiling and asked me if I was sure I could use a ladder to reach the top shelves. I nodded. “Ladders and I actually have a bit of a special relationship.”

  He frowned. “Was does that mean?”

  “Er, nothing. Just a bit of an inside joke.” Yoinks. This guy took his candy very, very seriously, and he didn’t seem to have much of a sense of humor.

  He looked me up and down. “You have the right look for the time period.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “I look like I’m from eighteen-seventy-eight? I’m not sure whether to take that as a compliment or not.”

  Again, I was met with not much humor as he just explained that because I had no tattoos or piercings, that would be perfect. Apparently, those things were hard to find these days. “Hmm, maybe not with that hair dye, though. No one in eighteen-seventy-eight was using box dye to color their hair bright red. Can you return it to your natural color?”

  “Er, yeah, sure. Shouldn’t be a problem,” I said quickly and looked away, hoping we’d change the subject. I just needed the job. I could sort out the details later. Surely there must be SOME kind of instant dye that would cover up this bright red? Maybe I just needed to pour a jar of tar over my head.

  “When can you start?”

  I grinned at him. “Immediately.”

  I jumped as the fake gun went off somewhere at the other end of town. I’d been scooping out butterscotch candies and half of them spilled out of the scoop. “Geez,” I said, putting my hand over my heart. “How many times per day does that happen?”

  There was another assistant in the shop, Sarah, who I worked with. Well, technically, she was my manager—as she’d reminded me several times—because she had worked there for longer than I had. She was slightly younger than me, yet she had an attitude of superiority. She’d ben bossing me around all morning, making me do the cleaning and scooping while she greeted customers at the door and supervised.

  “Every two hours when the reenactment takes place,” she explained as she carefully weighed a customer’s purchase of humbugs. There were a few more fake gunshots, and I could hear a child crying somewhere outside. I started to pick up the butterscotch candies and tried to smile at the customers like nothing had happened.

  “You get used to it,” Sarah told me, looking dismissive as she tied a bow around a bag of mixed candies and told the woman that it came to $19.50. I supposed the prices weren’t exactly ‘authentic to the time period then.’ Also, there was an ATM machine, because no one actually carried cash—let alone 1878 currency—in 2018.

  Maybe I would get use to the shots. But one thing I was sure I would never get used to was the corsets. How did people ever wear these things on a day-to-day basis? I kept pulling at mine and feeling like I was short on breath, as though my lungs never actually filled properly.

  And then there was another problem. It kept confronting me every time I looked into a shiny surface. Taunting me, in fact.

  I had been unable to get my hair to return to a regular, natural color, so I had to cover it up in a different way. Luckily, bonnets were in style in 1878, so I had it all under control.

  “You aren’t supposed to wear those while you work,” Sarah pointed out. She nodded toward a hook for me to place it during working hours. I was only supposed to wear it while outside walking in the old dusty streets, apparently.

  Great. I untied it and just hoped that Marvin wouldn’t come in while I was on shift and spring me.

  Another mother and child came in and made a purchase. This one came to a whopping $22. But even with all the candy, the little boy had spotted one on the way out that he wanted—a bright green contraption. He plunged his hand in the jar and stuck the candy right in his mouth. He chomped down on it while I winced at the sound, because I just knew what had happened. When they called these things “hard candy,” they definitely were not lying.

  The mother squealed and then the child cried and then half of the child’s tooth came out of his mouth.

  Sarah looked up at me while she tried to comfort the kid and calm down the mother. “This happens about once a week,” she explained while other customers hurried out the door, not willing to risk their own teeth and dentures.

  “I will be sending you my son’s dental bills!”

  I looked at Sarah in horror once they hurried out of the store. She looked incredibly nonplussed about the whole situation and just went back to tying bows.

  “What do we do? Do we tell Marvin what happened? Explain it wasn’t our fault?”

  Sarah shrugged. “It’s not like it comes out of my paycheck. I’m not the one who designed the candy to be as hard as a ball bearing.” She told me to move that particular candy to the top of the shelf anyway, just in case.

  Gosh, there were a lot of trials and dangers back in the olden days, weren’t there? Would have been a tough time to be a witch, I thought. It wasn’t even a good time to be a plain old mortal woman back in 1878, let alone one with magical powers. I told myself I’d better be careful not to get caught out. Then realized that was ridiculous because I wasn’t actually in 1878.

  I got a half an hour break for lunch, which I had intended to use to try and round up some suspects—usual or otherwise—but I ended up getting distracted by a statue in one of the backstreets as I wandered around. It was of woman who looked like she�
�d led a hard life, bent over a scrubbing board, and I was reminded of Geri, who was still frozen and being hidden at Prudence’s house until someone could figure out how to reverse the spell.

  Hang on… I could have sworn I saw her move. Scrub just a little bit.

  No, that was crazy. Maybe even wishful thinking, considering what had happened. I was still getting passive aggressive text messages from Prudence, letting me know what a burden it was on her having to be the de facto leader of the coven while Geri was…well, wherever she was when people were frozen.

  It wasn’t just the one statue, I realized. There were a bunch of them lining the streets just back from the main street. Reading the plaques, I saw that most of them were people who had come over as convicts, served their time in the convict camps, and then been released. Only to find themselves in lives and conditions that were just as bad.

  I found myself transfixed as I stopped to watch the reenactment in the main street. It was of a robbery gone bad. A bushranger walked into the bank and took a hostage when the manager refused to hand over the cash, and then started to shoot at ‘passersby’ who were really just actors as well, even though they looked like they could just be anyone. It was captivating.

  In fact, I was so transfixed that I didn’t even notice that a young man had come right up to stand beside me. I jumped a little when the brim of his hat accidentally brushed against the top of my head. He was dressed for one of the parts, all right—cowboy hat, boots, and a badge. Unless he was just a very committed fan, I had to assume that he worked here.

  “You look fascinated…” he said with a laugh. “Is this your thing?”

  I laughed as well and tucked my hair behind my ear. He was kinda cute. Brown hair that was just a little floppy, brown eyes to match and dimples as well. “You know I never even visited this place before, in spite of how close to my house it is.”

  He looked very surprised by this. “Not even as a kid? On a school trip?”

  I shook my head. “I remember one time in third grade the class came here, but I had the chicken pox.”

  “Aww, you’ve been missing out.”

  I shrugged. It was no big deal. Historical stuff had never interested me, at least until now, when I was strangely feeling a draw toward it. Swift Valley had a very colorful backstory. One that I had never taken the time to learn.

  “I’m Dean,” he said with a lopsided smile that gave me a few butterflies.

  “I’m Ruby,” I said, and he raised an eyebrow.

  “Perfect name for this place.”

  “Oh, I suppose it is! Haha. I had never thought of it like that,” I said as he turned his attention back to the reenactment.

  “Did you know Teresa Orchard?” I asked him after a few moments, and he looked very taken aback at that being the first thing I asked. But I only had ten minutes left of my break and needed to use my time wisely.

  “I, uh, I wasn’t working here at the time,” he said, leaning on the fence with one arm outstretched while the scene continued to play behind us. “If that’s what you’re referring to. I only started here three weeks ago. I actually took the place of one of the…” He trailed off for a second. “One of the people who couldn’t, well, handle it any longer.”

  Hmm. He was cute enough, but it didn’t look like he was going to be much help to me in solving the case.

  So, it looked like Dean was a dead end. And the reenactment was over. The next one wouldn’t be for another hour. I was about to turn around and head back to the candy shop because my lunch break was just about up, but then I spun around and called out to Dean before I left. “Do you happen to know who she was closest to?”

  He nodded a little, even though he didn’t look entirely sure of himself. “I think her name was Sarah.”

  Funny, I thought as I walked into my detective agency later that day. Sarah had acted like she’d barley even known Teresa when I’d first brought it up with her. And now I find out that they went for breakfast together nearly every day before their shift started.

  Vicky was working on the case outside of the confines of Old Swift Town, and she had compiled a lot of notes while I had been at work. I’d taken her on as a detective’s assistant and though I had only had the resources to pay her part-time, she had been putting in almost full-time hours. She was super excited about the case we were working because of how juicy it was. Lost cats had never particularly interested her either. She was flipping through the case file and making notes of this breakfast detail.

  “Hmm… Well, maybe they had had a falling out close to her death,” Vicky mused as she tapped the pen on her chin.

  “That would give her a motive for murder,” I pointed out while I paced in front of her. “And it would be a reason that she hid the fact from me.” Even in the afternoon, with the knowledge that Dean had given me, Sarah still claimed that she had ‘barely known’ Teresa since they worked at completely different parts of the park.

  Vicky was still theorizing. “Or maybe she just KNOWS that her being close to Teresa makes her look suspicious…and so she lied just in case. Sort of innocently, you know.”

  “Possible. But it’s not like she knows that I’m really there because I’m investigating the case. She thinks I’m just a candy shop employee. She doesn’t know that she’s ‘supposed’ to be hiding her guilt from me.”

  Vicky looked up at me in sympathy. “It must be hard having to keep two secrets. One that you are a witch and one that you are a detective.”

  “I guess going undercover is all part of the job,” I said, shrugging it off. I was going to have to be a full-time actress if I was going to make a real go of being a PI.

  But the truth was those weren’t the only two secrets that I was keeping. I still hadn’t told Vicky that I was worried I was still under the influence of the hex. And then there was the secret I was keeping from my best mortal friend Akiro, who ran the local coffeeshop. We’d been getting closer lately, and there were so many things I felt like I couldn’t tell him. Ahem, just concerning the secret that I was a witch of course. Nothing else.

  Vicky looked up at me from the sofa and pouted a little. “I just wish I could be more involved. I feel like I’m missing out on all the fun on the outside.”

  “Trust me, I need you on the outside,” I said. “And you are not missing out on anything. Just keep doing what you are doing. I have a plan, and this is the best way forward.”

  3

  I was starting to feel as though I really had traveled back in time to 1878. My feet were killing me, and my ribs were bruised and felt like they were going to crack. And dust kept flying into my face. This must have been what it had felt like to be one of the early settlers, I thought, wandering through the burgeoning town carrying my bucket along the street. Of course, I only had the bucket because I needed to carry my personal items and had been told not to be seen with my modern 21st century purse.

  As I passed the saloon-style restaurant on the main street, I heard the sweet sounds of old music. There were banjos and a drum beat and several singers singing in harmony. Wow. It was so captivating that I had to stick my head in. And I noticed that there was a full band playing up on the stage. Or at least an 1878 version of one. One man on drums, one on fiddle.

  And one very familiar blonde female head tilted over the top of the banjo, strumming and bopping away.

  So much for her trusting me.

  “Vicky?” I called out in shock.

  She put down her banjo and climbed off the stage to run over to me. “Isn’t this great?” she asked me excitedly. “Not only do I get to help you investigate the case properly, I get to play authentic country music! From the time that it was actually invented!”

  “Yeah, it sounds great,” I said, not wanting to discourage her musical ambitions. That wasn’t the point. “But didn’t we agree that I would be here, and you would be in the office?”

  “Oh, it’s much better this way,” she said dismissively, swatting away my concerns. And I started to wond
er if she realized that I was the boss and she was my employee. But maybe that made me sound a little bit like Sarah, so I just bit my tongue. Even though I wasn’t sure that this was such a good idea, both being inside the alternate reality that was Old Swift Town. It was like a world within a world, removed from modern reality.

  But her band did sound amazing, and her dream was to be a musician, so I was hardly going to discourage her from taking a paying gig. I just wish she had at least run it by me first instead of springing it on me like this.

  Vicky reckoned that she’d already uncovered a clue during rehearsal.

  We walked away from the stage, and Vicky spoke quietly as she filled me on what she’d learned.

  “Okay, so the drummer, Campbell, told me that the acting jobs here are even more competitive than the music jobs. Which are also super competitive, so I was very lucky to get in, you see.”

  “Well, good work,” I said to her and told her I’d better hurry down to the candy shop to start my shift or I was going to get fired on my second day.

  “Ruby, I have something I need to admit to you!” Vicky called out, and I spun around.

  “Uh-oh,” I said. “This doesn’t sound good.” I took a step closer to her while she glanced nervously over her shoulder at the drummer she had just been talking about, Campbell.

  “Well, while I was trying to get into my cowboy boots earlier…and see, they wouldn’t fit me, no matter how hard I tried to squeeze them in. They were two sizes too small, and it just wasn’t going to happen.”

  Vicky did have large feet, I could see that.

  She whispered. “But I really, really wanted to wear them. They are so pretty.” She pointed down to her feet at the black boots with rhinestone, shining in silver and white.

  “Hang on, those are the same boots? The ones that wouldn’t fit? But how—” And suddenly I stopped talking because I knew exactly how she had gotten them to fit. “Vicky, please tell me you didn’t! Not in front of people?”