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He’d responded with a quick “yes” and no questions. For all I knew, he’d already heard a chunk of the story over his police scanner.
“Who would want to do that to your parents?” Hazel asked after taking a big swallow of mango margarita.
“I don’t know.” I drank some margarita as well, although mine was a classic on the rocks with an extra splash of Cuervo on top. Luckily, the restaurant was walking distance from my store…not that I was sure I even wanted to go in after lunch. Maybe it would be better to keep the store shut down, just in case Chief Lewis had additional questions for me or needed me to go back out to the mansion. “But it’s got to have something to do with the other people who wanted to buy the place.”
“Do you know who they are?”
I shook my head. “Unfortunately, no. That is, Josie told me it was a trust of some sort, and she gave me the name, but I haven’t been able to find out much more than that. Calvin said one of his guys was going to look into it for me. I don’t think it was top priority, though.”
“Well, maybe it should be now,” Hazel remarked as she reached for a tortilla chip and dunked it in some of the restaurant’s yummy, bright green cilantro salsa. “Considering these people are apparently okay with murder if it serves their agenda.”
Maybe that was why Calvin hadn’t been especially chatty when I texted him. He’d already instructed his hacker deputy to get on the problem and didn’t want to discuss the situation in depth until he had more information to give me.
We had plans to get together for dinner, but right now, seven o’clock felt awfully far off.
“I’m sure they’re working on it,” I said. “I guess about all I can do now is sit tight and see what develops. And I need to call my mom and let her know what’s going on.”
“What do you think she’s going to say?”
Good question. My mother was not the sort to lose her cool easily, but I thought even she might be taken aback to learn the Bigelow mansion was important enough to someone that they were willing to commit murder over it.
I suppose that was the one thing I couldn’t quite wrap my head around. Yes, it was a beautiful, historic house, but that still shouldn’t have been sufficient motivation.
Clearly, I was missing a piece of the puzzle…and I thought I’d better do what I could to figure out what that particular puzzle piece actually was.
Since Hazel was watching me, obviously expecting an answer, I shrugged and said, “I don’t know. I mean, I doubt she’ll be happy, but I don’t know whether this new information will make her want to dig in her heels about keeping the house, or whether she’ll be happy to let it go because it’s turning into way more trouble than she expected.”
My friend shivered a little and reached for another tortilla chip. “Personally, I’d want to get rid of it. I couldn’t imagine living in a house with that much baggage.”
While I completely understood Hazel’s position on the issue, the situation with my mother and Tom was a little more complicated. They’d never planned to make the Bigelow mansion their full-time home, and so maybe they were willing to put aside all the awful events of the recent past in order to have a historic house as their base of operations while they were visiting me in Globe a couple of weeks out of the year.
I only said, “I get that,” and reached for a chip of my own. While I was glad of the food and the margarita, I really wanted to get home so I could do a little digging of my own…hedgewitch style.
Since I’d popped in to feed Archie after I was done at the police station and before I went out to lunch with Hazel, he wasn’t too annoyed with me when I slipped into the apartment and headed to my office.
However, he still couldn’t let me pass by without making a comment. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”
“I’m the boss,” I replied in the overly sweet tones I often employed when talking to my cursed cat. “One of the perks is that I get to set my own hours.”
“Hmph,” he said, tail waving in disapproval. “Back in my day, people had a work ethic.”
“They had girdles, too,” I replied. “Not everything about the good old days was all that great.”
As I’d hoped, the mention of foundation garments was enough to get Archie to leave my office in disgust. He stalked off to the living room, clearly done with me.
Good. I preferred to do this sort of thing alone.
Just to be safe, I closed the door to my office. Then I went over to my altar.
The crystal ball there glimmered in the sunlight streaming through the window, and I hesitated. My Grandma Ellen had been a lot of help in the past when it came to solving these sorts of puzzles, and I wondered if I should just go straight to her for assistance. After all, the problem I faced now involved both her daughter and her granddaughter, and maybe that would make her more willing to lend a hand…so to speak.
But I hesitated. When Lilith Black was murdered, my grandmother had flat out told me I had all the necessary facts on hand to find her killer, and so she wasn’t going to tell me who the guilty party was, since I was perfectly capable of ferreting out that information on my own. There was every chance she’d do exactly the same thing in this instance.
Probably better to give it a go with some other methods first before I pulled her away from her afterlife cabana boys, or whatever she did with her time when she wasn’t dispensing advice from inside my crystal ball.
I reached for my Everyday Witch tarot cards, figuring that since this particular problem involved a house, a deck which focused on more domestic matters might be a better choice than some of the others. After shuffling it several times and focusing on the mystery of the boombox and the strange mallet contraption in the walls of the Bigelow mansion, I pulled three cards, figuring a simple spread was the best place to start.
Well, so much for that idea. I basically got what I called “minor arcana muddle,” a batch of cards that didn’t seem to have any relevance to the particular issue I needed clarified. Still, I tried pulling three more sets of three before I decided the Tarot cards just weren’t going to work.
