“Clarity, come to me…” Becca murmured to herself, before dousing the bundle. She’d learned the hard way how sensitive her smoke alarm could be. The faint incense that remained didn’t quite mask the stench of that root, not to a cat, and Clara considered joining her sisters in the bedroom. But when Becca settled into her meditative pose, Clara’s whiskers perked up. Her person couldn’t tell—not yet—but her brief break was about to be interrupted.
Not thirty seconds later, the doorbell rang. “What the…?” A startled Becca exclaimed, rising to her feet. “Hello?” She opened the door to a short, stout woman, old enough to be her mother, dressed in what looked like a vintage double-knit suit.
“You’re the witch detective, right?” The woman, whose wiry black hair came up to Becca’s nose, pushed in. “That’s what your flier says, right?”
“Yes. I’m Becca Colwin.” She stepped back, blinking. “May I help you?”
“I hope so.” The woman deposited two full shopping bags on the floor and turned to face her host. “I need your services—and fast! Someone has been stealing from me, and I have a good idea who the nasty little thief is.”
“Okay…” Becca drew out the word, a furrow of concern creasing her forehead. “Please, why don’t you have a seat and we’ll start at the beginning.”
“The beginning? I don’t even know when that was.” Despite her exasperation, the woman plopped onto the sofa, right in Harriet’s favorite spot.
“Would you like some tea?” Becca responded. “I find that it helps me think things through .”
A loud sigh was her only answer, and so under her calico’s watchful eye Becca began her usual routine, retreating to the kitchen to make tea as well as to give her visitor—and herself—a chance to gather her wits. If she took a bit longer brewing the tea—Becca didn’t always warm the teapot with boiling water before adding the mint blend she preferred—her pet approved. While neither Clara nor her sisters believed in training pets, they all understood that humans could be encouraged into more civil behavior with a few simple tricks.
Sure enough, by the time Becca had re-entered the living room, tray in hand, her latest visitor had settled down. Her mood, however, had not improved.
“What’s that?” She squinted at the pot, which Becca had left to steep.
“My special mixture.” Becca smiled as she answered, but then, seeing the scowl on the older woman’s face, tried again. “It’s a mint blend,” she explained. “Peppermint, mostly. All organic, and it has no caffeine.”
“Huh.” The visitor sniffed as she reached for a sugar cookie.
“So, I don’t believe you told me your name.” Becca pulled her yellow legal pad toward her. She hadn’t had a chance to put it away, so she flipped over to a fresh page as she took up her pencil.
“Margaret.” The woman looked at the cookie and then, apparently thinking better of it, put it down. “Margaret Cross.”
“Margaret Cross.” As Becca repeated the name, her pencil scratched across the paper with an intriguing noise that drew Laurel back into the living room.
“What’s going on?” She nuzzled her younger sibling. Becca, meanwhile, was asking her visitor to detail her complaint.
“Another client,” Clara murmured. “But something’s weird about her, too. Can you hear what’s on her mind?”
It was risky, asking Laurel to use her special powers. Vain about her own lustrous coat, the middle sister tended to focus on Becca’s looks—and her romantic prospects. Clara wasn’t sure what she’d make of another female, and an older, rather unkempt one at that.
Laurel must have picked up on some of her sister’s anxiety, because she turned to glare at the little calico and even showed a bit of fang. “Of course I can,” she growled.
“Sorry.” Clara dipped her head in a gesture of submission. Laurel, even more than Harriet, could be a stickler about status.
“What’s going on with your cats?” The wiry-haired woman was staring down at them, brows like angry caterpillars butting heads over her pronounced nose.
Becca bit her lip. “They’re littermates,” she said. “Sisters. They fight sometimes.”
“Sisters.” Her laugh sounded like a bark. “Tell me about it. Where were we?”
“You were telling me what you brought you here today.” Becca spoke with an exaggerated formality. It didn’t take Laurel’s sensitivity to know she felt somewhat uncomfortable with this newcomer and her singularly ungracious attitude. “I’d asked you to start at the beginning.”
“You could say my sister is behind it. Behind everything, usually.” The client, Margaret, shuffled slightly in her seat. Rather like Harriet did, thought Clara, when she was getting comfortable. “Or when she’s ready to tell a lie,” Laurel hissed, her voice barely audible even to her sister’s sensitive ears.
“A lie?” Clara turned toward her sister, intrigued, if a little disconcerted. Had her sister just read the calico’s own thoughts? But a brown paw batted away her question, as just then, the newcomer began to tell her tale.
“She’s the one who wanted to open the shop. She’s the one with the interest, but then she unloaded it on me.”
She glared at Becca as if her host were responsible. Becca, Clara was pleased to see, sat still and waited, much as she or her sisters would when stalking a mouse.
“She’s flighty like that,” the visitor started talking again. “I should’ve known it was a stupid idea. When she said ‘hire this girl,’ I should’ve known something was up, like maybe they’re in on it. But that makes no sense.” She paused, lips pursing like she’d bit into a lemon.
“Anyway, at first, I thought it was an error.” As she spoke, she picked up her mug. Becca had filled it with the fragrant tea, which would surely rinse the bad taste out of her mouth, her cat thought. But the sour-faced woman didn’t appear to even taste it. “You know, in retail, there’s always a little loss. The silver dollar given out instead of a quarter. The odd mistake in math.”
The mug went back down to the tray as she leaned forward. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m no pushover. I can’t afford the latest equipment, but I keep a calculator right by the register, and everyone is supposed to double-check their totals, especially if it’s a large order.”
Becca murmured something that could have been agreement. If she had other thoughts about busy clerks being asked to do the same tasks twice, she kept them to herself.
“I told the girl that she had to be careful. That I was going to start deducting from her paycheck if it kept up.” Another scowl, one not even a cookie could have sweetened. “Usually, that brings them back in line.”
Laurel tilted her head at that, but Clara was busy watching her person. Becca clearly wanted to respond to her visitor—or, at least, to her visitor’s ideas about management—but she kept quiet. Only her cat could see the strain in the skin around her lips. If she had whiskers they would be bristling.
“Then I realized it was following a pattern.” The client leaned forward again, but not for a cookie. “Every day, it was a little more. But it was never more than twenty bucks. Until this weekend, that is. Last night, Friday, when we closed, the total was fifty bucks off.”
“Fifty...” Becca jotted down the number. “And this has been going on for how long?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t put up with it for that long. Three weeks, I’ve been aware of it.” The woman nodded to herself, setting her wiry hair bobbing. “So nearly five hundred bucks. Five hundred bucks!”
Becca’s eyes widened in surprise, though whether because of the older woman’s sudden vehemence or some other factor, her cat couldn’t tell.
In response, the woman scowled again. “That’s a lot to a small business owner like me.”