A Witch In Time (17 page)

I phoned Liss first.

“Enchantments Antiques and Fine—”

“You have no idea how much I wish I had just gone into work this morning as usual,” I interjected before she could complete the usual greeting. “No idea.”

“Maggie! Darling! How’s the ankle? Oh, you poor thing. It must be absolutely excruciating.”

“I don’t feel a thing,” I told her breezily. “They gave me a shot of something that took it all away. Now, I don’t know how long that’s going to last, so I’m enjoying it while I can.” I sighed. “I feel so guilty, being away from the store today. I know we have a million things going on.”

“All of which will be going on tomorrow and the next day and the day after that and the day after that . . .”

“I get the picture. Are you telling me don’t worry?”

“Precisely.”

“Hm. Well, I’ll try.”

“The girls have promised to come in after school to help out. Including Evie.” Liss laughed. “It seems our little psychic angel is far more rebellious than she has been given credit for. It is always the quiet ones, it seems. Is there anything I can do for you, darling?”

“Well . . . that just so happens to be one of the reasons I’m calling. The other being to keep myself sane while being mired in the trenches with my mother and sister.”

“I heard about the babies. I really must be getting old. I didn’t remember that your sister was having twins.”

“Neither did I. But that’s a story for another day.”

Liss chuckled. “Wonderful. I do love a good story.”

I had a feeling we were both going to love this one. And I would tell it, just as soon as I had all of the details myself, straight from the source. To Do Number Three.

“Okay,” I said, getting back down to business. “It seems that one of the minor annoyances of having a broken ankle is having this massive, weighty lump on the end of your leg. It’s called . . . a cast.”

“I have actually heard of that, yes.” Her humor crackled over the airwaves.

“Yes, well, it occurs to me that I live in a basement apartment. Down a dirty concrete stairwell that catches lawn debris every time it storms, and I will be on crutches.”

“Hm. I think I see your predicament.”

“And it’s a doozy.”

“It doesn’t have to be, you know.”

“My mother wants me to move into the garage with my grandfather,” I told her. “I love my grandpa, but living anywhere near my mother after having worked so hard to get out from under her thumb does not sound like my idea of moving forward in my life.”

“I knew I should have insisted that Geoffrey install an elevator at the house when we built it,” Liss remarked, referring to her late husband. “Of course, he thought I was being dramatic. It would certainly solve your current dilemma.”

Too bad for me. Sigh. Living at Liss’s for a time would have been heaven compared to Ye Olde Homestead.

“Don’t give up too soon,” Liss said soothingly. “I’m sure we’ll be able to find a solution if we put our heads together, and of course you’re welcome to sleep on one of the sofas downstairs as a last resort. Let me do a bit of calling around and I’ll ring you back.”

I wanted to believe that an acceptable solution could be found, but I had a sinking feeling that tomorrow I would find myself waking up on the creaky old fold-out bed back home, listening to my mother plan her day around her church activities, Grandpa G, and Mel, while Grandpa G acted up with gusto and my father and I shrank into the fading wallpaper, hoping not to be noticed. It was either that or learn how to get really good on crutches really fast and hope that my mother’s prediction of a tumble was just her usual pessimism run amok. I’d rather stay in this unpadded wheelchair in a dark corner of Mel’s hospital room for the duration of her stay than to move back home for any length of time.

I wondered if anyone would notice a woman with a bright yellow lump of a cast?

Hm. Perhaps I should have gone with basic black after all.

 

 

 

 

Another text message came in as I held my phone in my hand, weighing my next move. Distracted, I clicked through the screens:

Mags, I did a little digging for you. There were 2 deaths at hospital last night. Call when you get off the phone.
Steff, digging? I had to call.

Locating a set of crutches was going to have to wait while I gave in to curiosity. I dialed Steff’s cell phone.

“Two?” I asked, just as soon as she answered. Two, the same night Mel’s twins were born. Two for two. I shook my head at the irony.

“Two,” she confirmed. “Now it could be nothing, coincidence, nothing more. And it probably is just that. But in light of what you overheard, I just thought I’d do a little quick check with a friend of mine who handles the paperwork for the morgue. And our hospital’s so small and all of the truly complicated things usually go to the big hospitals in the city, and two separate deaths on the same night . . . well, it just doesn’t happen too often.”

Two. Could it be? I wondered. Could one of them actually be related to the now infamous-in-my-mind elevator conversation? And, I hated to even think it, but I didn’t know if Jordan Everett’s death had been accidental or suspicious. It couldn’t be related, could it? Was there a killer on the loose? I shivered.

“Do you know the situations?” I asked her. “I mean, the deaths occurred in the hospital. There was nothing about what I overheard that could guarantee that whatever it was that they intended to do would happen at the hospital itself, so they might not even be connected.”

“One was in the ER. Heart failure, I think, with a possibility of it being drug related. The other was a woman on my floor who’d been sick quite a while with cancer. You’re right, they don’t sound incredibly suspicious. One sudden, one lingering. And with the possible drug-related one, well . . . I don’t know, Maggie. I don’t think they’re what you’re looking for, but I thought I’d mention it anyway.”

After my initial excitement—not that two people had died (never that!), but that perhaps I was not merely imagining things due to the stress of the situation—I felt my optimism slip.

Steff went on. “Well, it was a thought, anyway. Maggie . . . you don’t think there was any way that you could have been hearing . . . spirit voices, do you? Not real, live people?”

“I’m positive,” I told her firmly. I mean, give me a little credit to understand the difference between daydreams and reality, please. “They were definitely not of the otherworldly variety.” Even if they
were
hollow sounding and faraway and . . . Oy, continue on that line of thinking and I’d start to wonder myself!

“Okay. I’ll keep my ears to the ground,” Steff assured me. “Just in case.”

“All right. You’ll tell me what you find out?”

“Well . . . actually no.”

I frowned into thin air. “What do you mean?”

“I’ve got to be careful, Maggie. In this day and age of patient confidentiality? I’m not supposed to be digging at all because I have no legal right to the information and no sanctioned need to know.”

She was right about that much at least, and I knew it. “I don’t want you to get into trouble over this.”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t look into it a
little
more. Just in case. Rachel down at the morgue does owe me for the time I caught her smoking, um, shall we say ‘Martian cigarettes’ down there.
Not
that I would use that against her, really, but these things do come in handy sometimes.” She paused delicately. “However, what that does mean is that I am absolutely not going to be telling you anything specific.”

A little exasperated, I asked, “Well, could you blink once for yes, twice for no? Put a lantern in the window? Anything?” I was the one who overheard the conversation in the first place. It seemed only fair.

“If there is anything suspicious about either death, anything at all in the coroner’s report,
someone
in the appropriate channels will hear about it, Maggie. I promise you that. But that’s all I can promise.” She cleared her throat. “And by the way? That does not include Danny, so please don’t be mentioning anything about this to him.”

Keeping something from Dan? That didn’t sound like Steff.

“I don’t like keeping secrets from him,” she said, echoing my thoughts, “but he’s too close to finishing his residency. I absolutely will not risk his involvement in any way.”

Her lioness approach to preserving Dan’s integrity was nothing short of vintage Steff, champion of the underdog, in the same way that she had always protected the nerdy kid on the playground when someone threatened to break his glasses. “Okay, not a problem,” I promised. “Danny won’t hear a thing from me.”

“Thank you.”

“Oh, by the way,” I said, wanting to change the subject to something a little less touchy, “my mom is trying to make me move in with them while my ankle heals. I may need you to kill me before she can take me home. Nothing fancy or dramatic. A simple, old-fashioned draught of poison in my tea will suffice.”

Steff laughed, which is exactly the reaction I was hoping for. “Self-fulfillment of a death prophecy is not allowed, Mags. That’s kind of, you know, cheating.”

“Ha-ha.”

“Well, when Danny breaks up with me, you can always move in with me,” she said, gloomy again.

“He’s most definitely not going to break up with you, silly girl. And you’re on the third floor. How is that supposed to help?”

She laughed, too. “I guess you’re right. About that at least.”

We hung up then with a promise from Steff to check in with me soon . . . just to be sure I hadn’t rolled my wheelchair off the most convenient cliff face. Which wasn’t even an option, since we live in flat-ass Indiana. Presumably that meant I was screwed, if Liss’s secret notion didn’t work out. I was afraid to cross my fingers for fear of jinxing the whole deal. Ol’ Murphy had been riding my tail far too close for comfort lately. I was going to have to do something about that.

I tried to reach Marcus but instead received the canned message that
the cell phone user could not be reached at this time, please try your call again later.
Wherever he’d gone with Uncle Lou, he must be in and out of service areas. As an afterthought, I took a picture of my cast with my cell phone and sent it through as a photo text with the caption, “Ow.”

Sighing, I reached over to unplug my cell phone charger from the wall. It wasn’t easy. The cast weighed about five hundred pounds (my mother wasn’t the only one who liked to get her hyperbole on when the situation called for it) and wouldn’t cooperate. I was forced to roll halfway over in the chair, wrangle one knee up beneath me on the collapsible seat, and try to stretch that way. Admittedly, this probably wasn’t the safest posture, but without anyone to do my reaching for me, and without any way of wheeling the chair closer to the wall, I did what I had to do.

Everything would have been all right if the weight on my ankle hadn’t suddenly shifted sideways, throwing me completely off balance. I caught myself from falling entirely, thank goodness—ow—but couldn’t figure out how to get myself back upright.

This was going to take some maneuvering.

The door to the waiting room opened. In scuffed a young woman in a fluffy pink bathrobe, her rounded tummy suggesting that she was a recent maternity patient. She saw me leaning over the arm of my wheelchair and froze.

“Oh my goodness. Are you all right?”

She hurried over, her flip-flops flapping, concern written on her brow and in her dark eyes. Or at least it looked like concern. It was kind of hard to tell from my upside-down vantage point. Heck, I was lucky I even took the time to register they were brown.

“Uh, hi,” I said.

“Can I help you with that? Here, let me get you up.”

She extended a hand, waiting until I took it and allowed her to pull me upright.

Her long dark hair had fallen forward into her face, a straight, thick sheaf of it. It was the kind of hair I’d always dreamed of, a wish made more poignant by the fact that it was a style my light brown waves could never in a million years emulate. Only after years of tears and drama had I at long last come to terms with that sad truth.

“Thanks,” I told her, a little embarrassed. “I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to get myself out of that one. I was just trying to unplug my charger. Guess this thing is going to take some getting used to.” Wryly, I reached down and rapped my knuckles on my lovely new boon companion.

“Oh, did you just break it?” she asked.

I nodded. “I was here with my sister, Melanie. She just had twins.”

“Oh, she’s the one!” the young woman exclaimed. “I had my son right before her, I guess. And I’m right down the hall from her. I heard her little ones crying just a little while ago. She’s got her hands full with two.”

“Congratulations on your new baby.” I smiled. “I think we sat with your in-laws in the waiting room. The Watkins?”

She nodded. “Uh-huh.”

“Nice folks, Joyce and Harold,” I added, but I could tell that I was losing her. Her attention was starting to veer off around the room. “Joyce seemed so happy to have her first grandchild, signed, sealed, and delivered. Very proud.”

“You didn’t happen to see a magazine in here, did you?” she said, completely off the original topic as she scanned table and countertops.

“Um, well, no.” Actually, now that I looked around, I did notice that the bevy of magazines that had been on the tables while we were waiting for Mel to pop had since disappeared. “Gosh, there were loads of them in here last night.” And then in my mind flashed a memory: a stack—well, a former stack once I was done with it—of glossy periodicals on the floor by the bed in Mel’s room. “You know, it’s possible I might know where to start the search.”

“I am actually looking for one in particular,” she offered as I started wheeling myself toward the door. “I thought maybe my mother-in-law might have walked off with it accidentally when I wasn’t looking. I was really hoping to get it back.”