Page 128 of The Hearth Witch’s Guide to Spite & Spellwork

The wind out of his sails, Lahiri slumped. “I’ll question the sentinels outside and call in a unit to look around Patricia’s apartment, see if anyone saw someone watching her.”

“The inside of her abode should be ransacked.”

“Should?”

“We know something was stolen from each of the homes of the previous victims. Given that her keys appear to be missing and the pristine nature of this flat, she did not bring it with her. Perhaps a neighbor saw something.”

Charged with an assignment, the detective set back out the door.

“I should have let you two fight in the car,” Avery muttered, turning to find Saga kneeling by the body.

“I’m sure that would have solved it,” Saga agreed in a voice that clearly did not agree at all.

“He is not upset about the case, he is projecting—that was…family things.” Avery watched the way the woman examined Patricia’s fingernails. “You have that look, did you find something?”

“I don’t think this went down as easily as the other two.”

“You are referring to the skin and blood under the nails? I am afraid Luna—or Betsey, if you prefer—had that too. It is not the killer’s but her own.”

“I’m referring to these.” She pointed to a few stray fibers caught beneath the grime. “It’s like she dug her fingers into the carpet—maybe trying to pull herself away from her attacker?”

Avery leaned back, taking in the beige room that suspiciously resembled the tedium charm that made up the facade of Hygge’s London entrance. “There is no sign of forced entry, so either Patricia Aldridge let someone in or they had the means to let themselves in. Perhaps someone she knew?”

“It has to be Elizabeth,” Saga concluded.

“Does it?”

“If John Hingley was killed by his mistress and her accomplices got off with just being bound, that feels like a revenge motive. If not his son, then it has to be Elizabeth. Who else would be out for revenge on these women?”

“I am not asking who you think killed her, I am asking who you think she’d let into her home. Especially given that at this point, she knew she was in danger.”

Saga’s face twisted in thought, and she looked down at the woman collapsed on the bathroom floor. “Maybe one of the officers?”

“Perhaps.” Avery drew in shadows to form two faint silhouettes at the door to help them visualize what might have happened. “But we also know what Patricia wanted more than anything in the world was to get her magic back. Magic she lost due to her part in the original case. Now for the sake of argument, who, out of anyone, is she most likely to open that door for?”

A sadness washed over Saga’s expression as the answer dawned on her. “The Court Justice she’s been petitioning.”

Avery watched the silhouettes move from the door to sit around the coffee table. “They would have kept up the charade for long enough to lock the door and probably come here to the couch. If the mirror was concealed inside a dummy file, it would have been simple to fool Patricia into looking at it.”

“The compact would have been pretty bulky, but maybe if he removed it?” Saga asked.

“He wouldn’t need to. He had others,” Avery realized. “Oh, it’s so irritatingly obvious now. Iona said she never found all the pieces—probably because Abigail gave them to her friends in order to hide them. That was what was in Betsey Paris’s shoebox, and that was what was buried in Theresa Abernathy’s backyard.”

“I understand how it was found by overturning Betsey’s apartment, but how the hell would the killer know it was buried in the backyard?”

“An excellent question.”

“Well, I try.”

“The thing to remember is these are not separate mirrors. These are shards of one magical object. The shards in the Erlking were drawn out because of the sword. They all derived from the same source. Magical things don’t tend to like to be apart from themselves, it weakens them. So there is almost always a low-frequency energy pulsing out to try to bring them back together and reunite them into one. I suspect this is why Theresa covered it in thyme. It logically follows that one might be able to use that energy, when close enough, to locate the other pieces, as it should intensify as you get closer.”

Saga let this process. “So our killer essentially played a magical relic equivalent of Hide the Thimble?”

It was remarkable what sort of colloquialisms Avery found every day that had persevered through her two-hundred-year absence. “Quite.” She paused, examining the silhouettes. “But if Patricia was presented with the file, the very thing she has been desperate to get her hands on, how did she end up trying to crawl away to the…” The hagstone. She would have wanted to verify the documents—this was someone who had carried a hagstone on her person at all times; it was even in her pocket at the ritual. She was paranoid. “Could you check her pockets?”

Saga frowned but obliged. “I’m not finding anything, what am I looking for?”

The shadow silhouette of Patricia produced the hagstone to verify the documents. She was right-handed. If she brought it to her eye, she also ran the chance of seeing her guest though it.