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It was entirely possible the judge — an old, cantankerous sort — had taken one look at her bright blonde hair and big blue eyes, and decided someone who looked like that couldn’t possibly have committed such a heinous crime.
Once again, I had to scoop the bail money out of one of my accounts, but I knew that was no big deal. I’d get it back once Victoria went to trial…or sooner, I hoped. After all, the evidence seemed pretty circumstantial. For all any of us knew, the man hadn’t been poisoned after all, and had actually dropped dead of a sudden heart attack or stroke. True, that quick glimpse I’d gotten of him seemed to show he was way too young for something like that to have happened, but otherwise healthy-looking people passed all the time from those same causes.
We’d just have to wait for the report from the medical examiner.
Archie — once he’d gotten past the initial shock of discovering his lady love had been accused of first-degree murder — looked as though he wanted to roast both Calvin and me alive. “How could you not have told me what was going on?” he demanded while we sat in the waiting area at Globe’s police station and waited for the deputies to finish processing Victoria’s paperwork. “I deserved to know!”
“Victoria made us promise not to tell you,” I said, which was only a slight embellishment of the truth. She hadn’t exactly come out and said so, but it was pretty clear she’d been hoping to get the blackmailer handled so Archie wouldn’t have to learn anything about him or his nefarious demands. “She didn’t want you to get upset.”
“Well, that worked out just perfectly, didn’t it?” he shot back, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
All right, this whole thing had gone completely sideways, but obviously, having the man drop dead in Victoria’s studio wasn’t an outcome any of us had been expecting. “We’ll get it worked out,” Calvin said calmly. “Right now, the most important thing is to get Victoria sprung and then try to figure out what really happened.”
Truer words had never been spoken. At the same time, I couldn’t quite hold back a creeping sense of unease. In the past, I’d dived pretty much headfirst into the assorted murder investigations that had come my way, sure that I’d be able to solve them with the help of my Tarot cards and my intuition…and also, maybe with a little extra assistance in the form of my grandmother Ellen, who’d passed on decades ago but who sometimes appeared in my crystal ball to offer her own otherworldly advice.
Now, though, with my gift of seeing auras gone and a general uncertainty whether my gut instincts were at all accurate anymore, I wasn’t sure how much help I would be.
What if I’d lost the ability to see through to the heart of a matter, to discover the secrets a murderer might have been hiding?
I really didn’t want to answer that question. Especially now, when the person wrongly accused was one of my dearest friends, and Archie’s one and only love.
The last thing I wanted was for either Archie or Calvin to guess how uneasy I currently felt. Although neither one of them had come right out and said it — and although Calvin would never put that kind of pressure on me when I was carrying his child — I could practically feel the unspoken assumption that I’d sail in and save the day, just as I had for both of them in the not-so-distant past.
Victoria appeared then, accompanied by Loretta Stillman, the deputy who usually worked at the Globe P.D.’s reception desk and who’d probably been chosen for this duty because she was friendly and low-key. To my relief — and Archie’s and Calvin’s as well, I guessed — Victoria wasn’t wearing handcuffs, and actually appeared to have survived the brief ordeal with her usual aplomb.
“I’m fine,” she told Archie in response to his urgent question, and smiled as he bent to kiss her and take her hands in his. “This is all just a misunderstanding. Or at least, I’m not surprised Chief Lewis arrested me, but I’m sure they’ll drop the charges once they really start investigating the case.”
A sunny view of the situation, but I understood why she’d want to look at it that way. If Henry Lewis — and the judge — really thought she was capable of such a crime, I doubted they would have given her such a low bail amount, or even allowed her to post bail at all. No, she’d still be cooling her high heels in a jail cell, just like poor Josie had last November, when Henry Lewis was convinced she’d slipped that arsenic into Pastor Galloway’s backstage cup of coffee.
“Let’s get you home,” Archie said, and Victoria stared up at him as if he’d just suggested that they go hot-air ballooning.
“I’m not going home,” she protested. “I’ve got a mountain of work to do.”
At once, his jaw set. “You can’t seriously be thinking of going back to the studio.”
“Why not?” she said.
“Because a man just died there.”
Victoria disentangled her fingers from his. “And that’s why I have to act normal,” she told him. “I have to act like I’m not guilty and everything is proceeding as if this is a perfectly typical day. If nothing else, I’ve got a ton of work to get through before the wedding, especially since I’m going to be gone for ten days afterward.”
A small silence followed that pronouncement. I could almost see Archie turning various counter-arguments over in his head, wondering if any of them would be persuasive enough to convince Victoria that going back to her office right after a supposed crime had been committed there would be a terrible look.
“Maybe you should work from home today,” I said gently. “You have an office there, too, right?”
She nodded, expression dubious.
“Yes, that would be much better,” Archie said at once. “Just give yourself a little space.”
“I suppose so,” she began, then paused. “It’s not like I have any other meetings today, so it’s okay for me to be at the house. But I can’t stay away from my office indefinitely.”
“You won’t have to,” I promised her. A sudden thought came to me, and I added, “I’ll go through and cleanse the space so there aren’t any negative energies left behind. Then I think it will be safe for you to go back to work.”
A hopeful light shone in Victoria’s clear blue eyes. “You’d do that?”
“Of course,” I assured her. “Let’s go to your office and pack up the stuff you need to work from home today, and then I’ll handle cleansing the place. It’ll be in much better shape for you to go back tomorrow.”
And that was why the four of us headed over to Victoria’s studio space — Calvin had already contacted his deputies to let them know he’d be late — and packed up her things and walked her back to her car. Archie offered to drive Calvin to get his police-issue SUV from our house once he got Victoria settled at their own place, and I finally headed back into Once in a Blue Moon nearly two hours after I’d left it.
