Cast a Spell Read online

  Did she have to go rubbing my nose in it like that?

  “Vicky, this would be like me turning up at one of your gigs with a guitar in my hand, getting up on stage, and playing a perfect guitar solo.”

  “Well. It’s not exactly like that,” she said as she glanced over the room service menu. “I never thought you would be such a sore loser, Ruby.”

  So that just confirmed that I was a loser, then.

  We both heard the screams at the same time and raced over to the window to see what was happening down below.

  I saw a shock of long dark hair. Someone darting around, looking horrified in the dim light as the sun was setting. I leaned over the balcony to try and see if that was who the screams were coming from. But the person, whoever she was, dashed away at lightning speed before I could get a look at her face.

  But I did see one other person. A body, lying on the ground.

  Eddie was dead.

  2

  In theory, we all had our first real-life case to solve.

  And it should have been our greatest opportunity.

  But we were also still students. Students who were sitting in a classroom with no teacher up the front. Wiggling our thumbs. Some of us were occasionally throwing suspicious glances at each other, wondering where each of us had been the night before. We were only on our second day of class, but the detective instincts had already been awoken.

  A head popped in through the door, and all of us sat up straighter, thinking that our new teacher may have arrived. But it was Donna from admin, looking like she was working a bit above her pay grade at having to come in and address us that morning.

  “Eddie is dead, so there is no instructor.” Wow. Donna really cut to the point there. She told us all to sit tight, and a replacement would be organized as soon as possible. Students who were local had mostly dropped out. But the ones who had come from a few hours away, like Vicky and I, and even further, such as Maddie, who was from interstate, were sticking around to see what happened, given that we had already paid for travel and accommodation.

  Everyone was eyeing each other. Some were getting antsy. “I suppose, since there is no teacher, we get to leave early, right?” Savannah was already reaching down to grab her bag, and another student, a guy called Brett, was nodding and agreeing with her that we should be allowed to leave.

  I was a little concerned about this attitude. This wasn’t high school. We were all there because we wanted to be there. We needed to be there. And I had taken a full month out of my schedule to do this the second time around. Even though I had thought this was going to be a vacation, I didn’t actually want to just lounge around and sip cocktails by the hotel pool. I had come there for my certification, and I was going to get it. One way or another.

  I leaned over and whispered to Vicky, “Maybe I should get up and teach the class.” After all, I had experience. Before I was a PI, I was a third-grade teacher. And it wasn’t like I didn’t know this subject matter inside and out.

  She raised an eyebrow and looked at me as though I was joking, but I was deadly serious. “I know more about the subject than everyone else in the class combined.”

  “Oh, gosh, Ruby . . .”

  I cleared my throat, stood up and made an announcement while Vicky covered her face with her hands like she was dying with embarrassment. “I don’t even know her,” I thought I heard her mumble to Brett, who was sitting on the other side of her.

  “We need someone to step up and take leadership, right?” I asked the class. Most of them shrugged and weren’t paying all that much attention. That was okay, though—I knew how to win over a reluctant class. Though telling them they could have twenty minutes of painting time might not work on people who weren’t eight years old.

  Everyone was talking over me. And everyone seemed to have a different opinion on what we should do, going forward.

  “Well, we all have this amazing case to solve now, right?” Maddie asked as she looked around at the rest of the students for confirmation. They all murmured to themselves and started to nod as she convinced them that we should be trying to figure out who killed Eddie. And then she stood up. “And what is better than practical on-the-job experience, right?”

  Hang on, standing up and taking over the class was my move, not hers!

  But suddenly, I found myself sitting back down in my seat when everyone seemed to be paying attention to Maddie over me. Didn’t anyone care that I was an actual licensed detective? Well, you know what I mean. It was only due to a technicality that my license had been revoked. I’d been doing this for over half a year.

  Maddie was smiling at the rest of the class in an almost flirtatious manner. “So, what better way for us to get top marks than to investigate the death of Eddie Ian? I say we go for it, even if it’s not officially a part of the curriculum.”

  I glanced over at Vicky. I didn’t think this was such a bright idea—the class needed to learn exactly what was in the coursework. And this was going completely off-book. Quite literally.

  “We should split into groups of four,” Maddie said and put all our names on slips of paper, and then drew them at random out of an empty coffee mug on Eddie’s old desk so that the teams would be “fair.” My teammates were Brett, Savannah, and another girl called Lucy.

  Oh, great. So now I was stuck with Savannah, the nervous wreck, and Vicky was on a completely different team with Maddie, of all people.

  “Right. So, what are we all doing sitting around and staring, then?” Maddie asked, clapping her hands together as if to say, “Let’s all get to it.” Fieldwork had officially started.

  Most of us had already left the classroom and were making our ways to the parking lot when I realized I had forgotten my notebook. I doubled back to the classroom. Maddie was the only person still there.

  She didn’t realize that I was standing at the door. She was staring down at Eddie’s desk with a trance-like look on her face, which was strange enough in itself.

  But it was what she did next that was really strange.

  Maddie was staring down at the desk drawer, which was locked and had no visible key. Certainly not one in her hands. But she stared at it with all her might, and suddenly it sprang open. I jumped out of the way, ducking back around the corner of the door so she wouldn’t know I was there watching.

  Whoa. I slowed down my breathing and peeked back, just to make sure that I had really seen what I had seen. The lock to the desk drawer was completely snapped off. Maddie hadn’t used her hands or anything. There was no way someone who was a pure human would be able to do something like that.

  Just when I thought I had left the world of witchcraft behind, hey?

  “Maddie is a witch!” Those were my first words as we entered the hotel that evening after a fairly fruitless afternoon with my useless teammates. I took off my shoes and lay down on my bed, which was the only area of the motel that didn’t have Vicky’s clothes, towels, or guitar thrown over it. She wasn’t the tidiest person to live with, but she was my best friend, so I put up with it. She was strumming her guitar already.

  She stopped playing and looked up at me like I had lost all my marbles.

  “I think you just don’t like Maddie, and so you are accusing her of witchcraft. Just because someone is a better student than you does not mean they are a witch.” A small smile crossed her lips. “Well, myself excluded,” she added.

  I chose to ignore that comment.

  “That’s not what it is about,” I said, sitting up. “Believe me, I didn’t want to get involved with any witchcraft stuff while we are here, so it’s not as though I went looking for it.” I stared at Vicky. “But Maddie has an agenda here. I just know it. She is mixing witchcraft with the death of Eddie Ian, and I don’t trust her motives.”

  Vicky shrugged and went back to playing.

  But I knew that I was right. And I was going to prove it.

  Maddie and Vicky were giggling together about something the following morning when I walked i
nto class, a little bit late because I’d had to stop for coffee. What was Vicky doing getting so chummy with a secret witch? I told myself I wasn’t jealous and got out my notebook, straightening it up and hoping for the best. We were still without an instructor. I could barely stomach the idea of Maddie teaching an entire class again.

  My phone rang, and Akiro’s name sprung up on the screen. I whispered as I answered it.

  “I can’t talk now. I am in class.”

  He sounded a little hurt on the other end of the line. “You haven’t been texting as much as you usually do. And last night, when I rang, you said that you were too tired to talk.”

  I knew that four weeks apart was a long time, especially at the beginning stages of a budding relationship. I should have been putting more effort in. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I really miss you.”

  Akiro brightened up a little when he heard that.

  “Why don’t I come down and visit you for a few days next week?”

  I brightened up a little as well. We didn’t have class on the weekends, and I was pretty sure I wouldn’t need to do any homework or extra study. “That sounds great,” I said. “I really want to check out the new ancient Egypt exhibit at the Melbourne Museum. And we can do to the IMAX theater. And we can go for brunch and get mushrooms and bacon . . .”

  Akiro laughed and said that all sounded great. “And Melbourne has the best coffee in the country.”

  “Nah, not as good as yours,” I said and only vaguely noticed that a man in his fifties with large, bulging arm muscles had strolled into the room and was introducing himself in a deep stern voice that would make paint peel off the walls. I was still chatting away to Akiro, arranging our little getaway plans.

  “ALL PHONES AWAY,” the voice boomed, and I jumped in my seat, dropping the phone before I could even turn it off.

  I stared down at my phone and wondered if I was allowed to reach down to pick it up. I just left it for the moment. My coffee had gone cold on my desk. I was pretty sure drinking was forbidden as well, though.

  “Joe London,” he introduced himself, his arms tucked behind his back as he stared us all down, biceps bulging out of his tight gray T-shirt. He told us all that he had done stints in both the army and the police force, and that he had worked as a PI for over a decade after retiring from the force. Impressive stats. At least all this was putting Maddie in her place—she had sunk into her chair, and no one was paying any attention to her any longer while Joe laid down the law, telling us what he expected of us. Perfect attendance. At least a pass on every test. And the tests would be daily to make sure we were retaining the information that he taught us. Good, I thought. We needed a serious instructor at last. One that was not scared to take the tight line, and to tell us all how it was.

  I was pleased. The rest of the class, not so much. Especially Savannah, who got teary when Joe called her out a little later in the morning for not paying attention and checking her phone. “I’m not sure you should be in my class,” he said, sterling. I wondered when she would finally decide the course was not for her and drop out. It would surely only be a matter of time. I could not even imagine someone as sensitive as she was trying to make it as a detective in the outside world.

  Maddie, on the other hand, was scrawling down everything that Joe told her, putting her hand up constantly to impress him, and was trying to become top pupil. Hmm. Maybe she would be able to weave a spell on him to gain approval—probably her only shot at this point. Every time she put her hand up, she just embarrassed herself by giving a wildly wrong answer.

  Joe eventually stopped calling on Maddie, and she eventually stopped putting her hand up. It gave me a chance to show my expertise off. I answered a question about reading body language during an interview with a suspect. “When they can’t keep eye contact, they are probably lying.” He was a tough cookie to crack and even harder to impress, but he gave me a little nod of approval, and I sat up straighter. “Good job, Ruby.” That was like the highest praise ever coming from him. I beamed and glanced around the class, looking for Maddie’s reaction especially. She was glaring at me but tried to straighten her face when I looked right at her.

  Vicky leaned over during the break and asked me, “Where did this Joe fellow even come from?” Like most of the students, Vicky was having trouble warming to his harsh personality.

  I knew that her feelings were hurt because she was no longer the star student. I was back in my rightful place and feeling very confident again.

  But that was before I actually got my grade back for that day’s test. It had been on body language, so I was sure I was going to ace it.

  “I got a D?” I asked, aghast as I looked down at the grade. No. Surely that could not be right. Joe must have written the wrong grade, or maybe he had gotten my grade messed up with another student’s—and when I looked over and saw that Vicky had received an A+, I knew where the mistake had been made. The only hard part would be breaking it to her. Oh, no.

  I took both the tests back up to the front and cleared my throat to get Joe’s attention as he was staring down at the next day’s lesson plan. “Sometimes people do mix the two of us up, even though we don’t look alike,” I said with an understanding smile to make sure he knew that I still respected his authority, even though he had made a mistake.

  He stared back up at me. “I don’t make mistakes. That is part of the job. In the detective world, if you make a mistake, you are dead.”

  That sounded a little dramatic. “It’s not a big mistake,” I hastened to point out as I showed him the two tests. “I think you just gave my grade to Vicky and Vicky’s grade to me.”

  “Oh, there is a mistake here,” he said and roughly took my D paper off me and changed it to an F.

  “What?” I asked as I took it back and stared down at the red letter that sealed my fate.

  “You need to learn how to respect authority, Ruby Sparrow.”

  I slunk back into my seat.

  Now, not only was I not the head of the class . . . I was flunking.

  There was only one way to become the star pupil again. To get my number-one place back as the head of the class. I needed extra credit. I was going to have to prove who killed Eddie Ian.

  We waited until Joe had taken off for the evening, and then hung back, finding each other and getting back into our teams of four a little unsurely. But I was sure there was nothing to worry about. Even though Joe hadn’t directly told us to work on the case—or even indirectly—I think we all knew that if one of us actually solved it, then we would get insane amounts of extra credit.

  My teammates were huddled together just outside the classroom in the outdoor eating area. But Savannah looked at me with disgust when I walked over to the three of them and tried to give my opinion of what we should do next. I told them that we should retrace his last steps before he had been attacked. “Why should we take the advice of someone who got an F on the test?”

  I was aghast. “Because I am an actual detective!”

  But none of them were listening to me. Savannah had somehow become the de facto leader, even though she was the worst detective of all time.

  “I have solved more murder cases than the three of you have had hot dinners,” I said and crossed my arms. “And if you don’t want to help me, then maybe I should just work on my own to solve this crime.”

  Brett and Savannah shrugged. But it was Lucy who spoke up. “Good idea.”

  I stomped off to get my backpack. By the time I got back to the empty classroom, I was fully convinced that I was better off on my own without them cramping my style.

  I noticed that Eddie’s desk drawer was locked again. I glanced over my shoulder before wandering over to it and thinking, Well, if it is good enough for Maddie, it is good enough for me. I used all my concentration until the lock sprang open.

  “What is that?” I asked as I leaned forward, kinda forgetting that I was all by myself as I rifled through the desk contents. I didn’t miss my team, but I did
miss Vicky being there by my side as my assistant. I found a small stick which didn’t, on the face of it, seem to be a big clue at all. But my psychic senses were tingling. Telling me that this was something important.

  I picked it up and looked it over. A clue that the police seemed to have missed. Well, of course they would. The police didn’t have the powers I did.

  And Maddie mustn’t have, either. There would have been a reason that she was drawn to the desk. And yet she had missed this.

  It was an ice cream stick. The brand, printed on the stick in brown lettering, was “Original Gelato.”

  I placed it in my pocket.

  3

  Day four of our course, and we were up to the “missing persons” part of the curriculum. This was the part of the job I’d had the least practical experience in, and so I avoided eye contact when Joe glanced around the room and asked for volunteers to explain the best practices for finding someone who was missing. Maddie had her hands firmly planted on her desk.

  “Why don’t I get Vicky to explain it?” Joe said when no one had volunteered. He let a beaming Vicky stand up in front of the rest of the class and tell us all how to use specialized databases and credit checking notifications to find people who had skipped town. Well, some of that she learnt from me, I thought, but I prided myself on the fact that I kept that to myself and let Vicky have her time to shine. I shot her a wink when she sat down in her seat again, and Joe gave her a nod of approval.

  In fact, she was having a lot of time to shine in the days that followed Eddie Ian’s death. She had come top on the driving exercise and had pretty much remained the star pupil ever since. Not that Maddie and I hadn’t been there to try and give her a run for her money. It was okay by me, though—if someone had to beat me, I didn’t mind it being my best friend. And I had decided not to be a sore loser going forward.

  Vicky was still beaming as she picked her pen back up and started that day’s test. She was starting to get a little resentment from the rest of the class, but Joe loved her. It reminded me of how I had been the first go-round—I had been a little resented by the rest of the class, but John had loved me, and so, I hadn’t cared.