Bewitched, Bothered, and Biscotti: A Magical Bakery Mystery (33 page)

“Who are you?” Victor Powers rumbled.

Taite looked at me.

I sighed. “Everyone, meet Detective Franklin Taite. He’s a witch-hunter. Detective
Taite, meet…everyone.”

“Oh, I know you all by now, by reputation if not in person.” He peered at Nel blinking
with bleary eyes from the steps of the burial chamber. Steve closed his hand around
one of her wrists, but she didn’t seem inclined to run. “And I’m not just a witch-hunter,
Ms. Lightfoot. I hunt black magic of all kinds.”

I remembered the word Lucy had used:
discerning
. So did that mean Detective Taite was on our side?

“What are you going to do?” Jaida asked. “Arrest us for trespassing in the cemetery?
Because nothing else we’ve done here is illegal.”

His attention turned to her. “Ah. Even the lawyer is a witch. Actually, I’m not in
the least interested in punishing you. Um, mind if I come in?” He gestured at the
salt at his feet. “I have a murderer to arrest.”

Mimsey clasped her hands. “Excellent. Lucy? Shall we?”

Together they circled the clearing widdershins, sweeping aside the salt with a tree
branch and remembering to thank the elements and archangels as they gathered the cold
candles along the way. As they worked, Franklin Taite kept staring at me.

“Will you stop that?” I asked. “You make me feel like a bug under a microscope.”

“Oh, but you fascinate me. I knew this group was involved with Lawrence Eastmore’s
murder somehow, and you in particular, but I had no idea what you were.”

“Could have fooled me,” I scoffed.

“No, I knew you were a witch. Just not what type.”

I shrugged. “Hedgewitchery is pretty tame. We don’t garner the attention of the police
much.”

His face went slack for a moment, and then he laughed. “Oh, my. You don’t know?” He
looked around at the others. “None of you know what she is?”

Lucy finished opening the circle and gestured Taite into the clearing. “She’s a catalyst.”
There was pride in her voice.

“Oh, I bet she is, yes indeed,” he said without moving. “But I’m talking about the
fact that your niece is a
candela
. A lightwitch.”

“Detective Taite, of course I’m a light witch. I don’t have any desire to practice
dark magic.”

“Well, that’s good, because you
can’t
practice dark magic. You are incapable of it.”

Cookie’s head tipped to the side. Brandon put his arm around her, but she was much
more interested in what the good detective was saying than in her new
boyfriend’s attentions. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Heinrich slowly nodding.
I glanced over at him and was disconcerted to see deep respect on his face.

“How could you be unaware of your calling?” Taite stepped into the circle.

“Calling?” Surely I’d know if I had a calling by now.

“You are here to battle black magic. As a candela you can never be tempted by the
darkness, only work for the good. A tricky business, that, given all the gray magic
out there. But your power comes from the whitest of magic. And my dear, you do indeed
seem to possess a great deal of it.”

Oh, brother. This guy was really something. At least he didn’t want to burn us at
the stake or something equally melodramatic.

Still, all eyes turned toward me as if he weren’t talking nonsense. I turned my palms
up. “I’m just glad we stopped the summoning of Zesh.”

Detective Taite froze. “Zesh?” He strode the last few steps to Nel. “You were going
to summon Zesh? That’s why you killed Eastmore?”

“For the Spell of Necretius,” I explained.

“Do you have any idea what could have happened if you’d been successful?” he demanded,
inches from her face. “To you? To everyone?”

“I would have proved that I’m powerful enough to be a Dragoh,” she replied, glaring
at me again. “I would have broken the patriarchal ranks and taken my rightful inheritance
as a member of the society.” She distributed a sneer among the druids. “I’m more powerful
than any of you individually. More powerful than my father, even. When he told me
about the society, I mocked the idea that you wouldn’t let me in. At first. But he
was
convinced it could never happen. I was determined to prove him wrong.”

Andersen, cowed after almost losing the poppet, had found his glasses and put them
back on. Now he moved to the steps and leaned in beside Taite. Nel flinched. He said,
“You killed my friend because you wanted to prove you were good enough to be a Dragoh?
You would have risked the summoning spell not because you actually wanted to summon
the spirit, but because you wanted to prove something?”

She nodded, uncertainty crossing her features for the first time.

His hand drew back as if to strike her, but Taite caught it. “You stripped her power,”
the detective said. “Secular justice is my department. Back off.”

Taite pulled what looked like an oversized plastic zip tie out of his pocket and gestured
Nel to her feet. “You are under arrest for the murder of Lawrence Eastmore. Anything
you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.” As he turned her around
I saw a flash.

“Knife!” I yelled.

He dodged as she feinted right, but the blade she had pulled from the wide sleeve
of her cloak was in her left hand. He caught her wrist, and the knife dropped to the
stone below with a metallic clang. His eyes bored into hers. “Take the cloak off.”

Nel was tired, and the battle of wills was short. With a sigh, she unclasped the robe
and let it fall to the ground. I’d been afraid she might be au naturel underneath,
but she wore the same red caftan she’d worn at the gallery. Taite continued with her
Miranda rights as he cuffed her. She didn’t struggle again, and when he
asked if she understood she said she did. He began to march her toward the path that
led from the northern entrance.

“Detective?” I asked. He paused. Turned. “Did you follow us here?”

He shook his head. “I took over the stakeout on this one, after she’d already arrived.
We’ve had eyes on her all along.”

I gaped. “You always knew she was the killer?”

“Not at all. But she’s been in this since the beginning,” he said. “First at the scene
in Johnson Square, and then hanging around your bakery, and finally working there.
Her background check turned out a little iffy.”

“Tell me about it,” I grumbled. “Greer Eastmore pretended to be her former employer.
He fooled me, all right.”

Taite’s eyebrows arched. “Is that why you called him?”

Curious eyes turned my way, and I nodded, relieved to have an explanation.

Taite continued. “Then yesterday we matched her prints, which were in the system from
decades back when she applied to be a substitute teacher, to some we found in Lawrence
Eastmore’s home.”

Hard evidence that she’d murdered Dr. Eastmore. My attention returned to something
Taite had said. “Wait. Nel, you were in Johnson Square?”

She lifted her chin in one last show of defiance. “I went back to Lawrence’s the night
after I’d hit him. I needed one more book, to make sure no one could create a counterspell.”

“
The 33 Curses
,” I said, glancing at Andersen.

She nodded. “Yes. I thought I’d killed him, but there he was, staggering down the
street at midnight. I saw him heading for the square, but there were people around.
I couldn’t do anything. I saw him fall. So I waited.”

I gaped. “You could have saved him.”

“Why would I do that?” she asked.

I ran my hand over my face. Evidently, Nel’s need to be in the Dragoh Society had
driven her far beyond the edge of sanity. I could only hope she wasn’t beyond help
altogether. My hand dropped as I remembered. “You were on the bench. Reading the paper.
In front of the bank on Bryan Street,” I said.

She smiled.

“Why did you want to work at the Honeybee so badly?” I asked. “You went to a lot of
trouble, and you had to know we’d find out you lied sooner or later.”

Her head ticked to the side. “You found him. You saw the tattoo. I could tell what
you were—magically, I mean—even from across the street. I wanted to keep an eye on
you.” Her laugh held no humor. “I sure didn’t expect a whole coven working out of
that silly bakery.”

Taite took a step, tugging at her arm.

“Just one more thing.”

He stopped and turned halfway back.

“Greer, Nel. What happened to Greer?” The spellbook club and druids gathered around
me.

“He died,” Nel said, looking around at all of us. “He was the one who told me about
the summoning spell in the first place, when we were together in Greece.”

I shot a questioning look at Taite. He nodded in response. “We found out about their
connection just this evening.”

“Oh, don’t look so surprised,” Nel said to me. “I’m a little older than he is, but
we had a good time for a few years. Then after he came back for the funeral and saw
me, he guessed that I’d killed his father. Poor man wasn’t very interested in magic,
but I needed a power source, and he fit the bill.”

I was afraid to ask. “Power source.”

“When I attacked you. I couldn’t afford to use my power for that. I had to be ready
for tonight. Heck, I had to be ready to come into the Honeybee and cover for
you
. We had an old connection, Greer and I, and so I used him.”

Steve took a step forward. “You
used
him?”

I put my hand on his shoulder. “I’m afraid she used him up. It killed him.”

“He always was weak,” she said.

“Detective,” Steve growled, “you’d better get this woman out of here before she says
another word.”

Taite took her by the arm. “Done.”

“I’ll go with you,” Victor said, looking around at all of us. “So she doesn’t try
anything stupid.”

I looked around at the clearing. “We’ll clean up here.”

 * * *

The ladies sat in the mismatched chairs in the gazebo, sipping sweet tea and keeping
me company while I dug a hole on the north side of the structure. It was early evening;
after a long day at the bakery, I’d met the spellbook club back at my carriage house
for some heavy smudging. Once again it stank to high heaven of sage and juniper. They’d
also helped me cast a deep cleansing spell and re-up the standard protections around
the place. A new spell bottle sat on the
bookshelf, courtesy of Lucy. Even Mungo was content with the work we’d done.

Steve’s ring still hung from the chain around my neck. While the others packed up
our magical paraphernalia the night before and swept away what salt they could, Steve
and I went into the Drayton mausoleum to see what Nel had left there. We made a grisly
discovery.

Nel had created an altar on a stone sarcophagus on the north side of the room. We
lit a couple of the candles there so we could see, and found that her working space
held a lot of familiar items as well as a few oddities: a jar containing a black sticky
substance that smelled like Limburger cheese, a perfectly preserved skin of a copperhead
snake, and…human finger bones.

She’d broken into one of the burial vaults and removed them for the summoning spell.
I’d called the police precinct and asked them to track down Detective Taite. He’d
called Quinn back in, and they were both interviewing Nel—I had to wonder how that
conversation went. When he came on the line I told him about the bones, and he said
he’d add a charge of grave robbing to the list. But he couldn’t charge her with Greer’s
death, which appeared to be a straightforward heart attack.

On the altar, Steve and I also found the Spell of Necretius, the actual volume Nel
had stolen from Dr. Eastmore. It was much smaller than I’d expected, a quarter of
the size of
The 33 Curses
. Thin—maybe ten pages, bound in leather and gilded with gold. It smelled ancient.
I couldn’t resist flipping it open. The ink on the yellowed pages had faded so it
was hard to read, and from what I could see the language was barely
recognizable as English. More like something Chaucer might have written.

“You take it, Katie.”

“I don’t want it!” I shoved it at him.

He ignored my outstretched hand. “If what Taite says is true, you won’t be tempted.
Anyone else might be.”

“Pfft. That lightwitch stuff? Please. I’m just as bad as anyone else.”

“Maybe. But not when it comes to magic. Katie,
you glowed in the dark
. I believe him.”

You glowed in the dark.

But my mind shunted away from the thought. I didn’t want to have a calling, be a lightwitch
or a candela or whatever. To suffer the onus of always having to be good. Darn it,
I wanted to try a new recipe for lavender vanilla biscotti and grow my little spells
in the backyard.

“Fine,” I grumped and stuffed the little book into my bra. He grinned. “I don’t have
any pockets,” I said defensively.

“Okay.”

“And while I’m thinking about it—” I reached behind my neck to unclasp the chain.
“Here’s your ring.”

He held up his hand. “Keep it. I can get another one.”

I paused, then lowered my arms. Eyed the tattoo on the inside of his arm. “Are you
an actual member of the society now?”

He nodded slowly. “They decided to make an exception. Greer had no children, and Lawrence’s
sister didn’t, either. At least I’m here, and…ready. We need six.”

I didn’t ask why.

“Nel’s cousin is joining us from Kentucky,” he said.

“So they made an exception for you, but not for Nel, even after her father’s death.
That’s pretty crappy, you know.”

“I know. But I’m glad she didn’t become our first female member.”

“Yeah.” I had to agree with that. “You have a point there.”

Now as I shoveled dirt out of the hole by the gazebo, I thought about Lawrence Eastmore
planting the Savannah holly tree in his backyard. About how there were six of them,
just as there were six members in the Dragoh Society. And I knew about them. Enough
about them, in fact, that I didn’t like the idea of being involved with one of them,
no matter how he made me feel.