“I’m sure it is.” Becca rushed to reassure her potential client. “Do you have evidence you could share with me? Account books or surveillance tape?”
A huff of dismissal. “What do you think I am? The Pentagon? No, we’re a small business. I just know what I’m spending and what’s in the cash register at the end of the day.”
Becca took that in. “And you believe you know who the suspect is?”
“I do.” The woman sat back with a satisfied smirk. “It’s got to be the girl I hired. Gail—Gail Linquist.”
Becca jotted down the name and paused. But the question she asked wasn’t the one Clara expected. “And did you say you suspect your sister of collusion?”
“What? No.” Margaret waved her be-ringed hands like she was fanning away an odor. “Elizabeth’s nutty, but, no. I’m sure she’s not involved.”
Becca paused, pen in the air and a quizzical expression worthy of a cat on her face. “Then, Ms. Cross, may I ask what services you want from me?”
It was a reasonable question, but when Clara looked at her sealpoint sister in satisfaction, she saw Laurel’s nose quivering in concentration.
“I need you to catch her, of course.” The older woman spoke as if her objective was plain to see, her gruff voice ratcheting up in both tone and volume. “I want her punished, and I need you to figure out how she’s doing it and get the evidence. If you can catch her in the act, so much the better.”
Clara looked from her person to her sister. Surely, it wasn’t just the visitor’s volume that had set Laurel’s chocolate-brown ears back on her head.
“I understand that.” Becca spoke in that calming voice she used when the cats were upset, but Clara didn’t think she’d even noticed her pet’s distress. Indeed, she was looking down at her notes as she spoke, biting her lip like she was peeved at herself.
“And, believe me, I appreciate your interest, but I’m not sure I understand. You’re a small business owner and you believe one of your employees is, as they say, skimming off the top. This sounds like a matter for the police. Why did you come to me?”
“To you?” Finally unburdened, the visitor reached for a cookie. “I thought it would be obvious,” she said, taking a bite.
Becca waited, but Clara could feel her rising impatience.
“I figure you’ll blend in better than any fat old cop who comes snooping around,” the old woman said at last. “I own Charm and Cherish, where you hung your notice about being a witch detective. How do you think I found you?”
Chapter 3
“This is just too much of a coincidence,” Becca said as she washed her latest visitor’s mug. “Two clients, both with questionable cases, and they both know each other through Charm and Cherish?”
Clara, who sat at her feet, didn’t answer, but she was listening. Becca might not think her pets understood everything she said. Still, she’d gotten in the habit of talking to them. To Clara especially, the little cat knew. Which was why the calico remained in the kitchen, even after Laurel had retired for a nap and Harriet had harrumphed off in disgust once the cookies had been placed back in their tin. Something about her mixed-up coloring—the black patch over one eye, orange over the other—made her look approachable, Clara surmised as she gazed up at her person, green eyes wide.
“What do you think, Clara? Do you think something else is going on here? Some kind of personal vendetta? I swear you’d answer me if you could.”
The cat blinked, warmed by the acknowledgement.
Becca couldn’t know that her smallest cat was teased for her coloring—“Clara the calico? Clara the clown!” her sisters mocked—but if it made her person feel more comfortable confiding in her, she was content. Besides, her spotted coat, especially that whorl of gray on her side, made it easier for Clara to shade herself into near invisibility. This is the simplest cat magic, as anyone who has cohabited with a feline knows. But it was a skill at which Clara excelled, and one that proved particularly useful as Becca finished cleaning up and prepared to go out.
Although Becca had packed up her notes and slid her laptop into the messenger bag she usually carried, Clara knew she wasn’t heading to the library, her usual haunt, or even the city’s hall of records, where she did so much of her research. She had heard her call Maddy, her best friend, as soon as her second visitor had left. Clarification rituals were all well and good, but sometimes one needed to mull things over with a real person, she had explained to Clara as she donned her hat and coat. Saturday midday, that meant coffee and sweets at her favorite café.
Not that her friend was always as ready a listener as her cat. Or as prompt.
“Those people are crazy.” Maddy had been flustered when she’d finally burst into the crowded café a half hour after Becca had claimed a table. As if making up for lost time, she barely let Becca get to the end of her story before chiming in. “You don’t even have to finish. Let me guess. You took both cases?”
“Are you okay, Maddy?” Becca answered her friend with a question of her own.
“I’m fine.” Becca’s longtime friend pushed her normally neat-as-a-pin dark hair back from her round face. “Just bothered. There was some kind of an accident last night, and they’ve closed a lane on the bridge. I don’t know what they were looking for, but I was stuck on the number one bus forever.”
“I’m sorry.” Becca began to commiserate but her friend waved her off.
“It’s nothing—but it did give me time to think about what you told me on the phone. I really hope you told that Cross lady to get lost.” Maddy returned to her theme, still clearly aggravated. Clara, who had hunkered down beneath their table, kept a careful eye on her swinging foot. “Cross—appropriate name, huh? And that other one, too. What was her name?”
“Gaia. Gaia Linquist,” Becca answered, hoping to calm her friend. But not even the oversized chocolate chip cookie she had resisted breaking into while she waited for Maddy seemed to placate her longtime buddy, nor was the extra caffeine helping to clear the questions that kept rattling around her own head. “Or Gail, as her boss called her.”
She ate a piece of that cookie finally and pushed the plate toward her friend.
“Gaia?” Maddy only shook her head. “Crazy.”
“At first, I thought it was a coincidence.” Breaking off another piece of cookie, Becca circled back to the older woman’s visit. Maddy might have reached her own conclusions, but to Becca there were still loose ends. “I mean, okay, they both got my number from the card I put on the bulletin board at Charm and Cherish. That didn’t mean anything. After all, it makes sense that the clientele and the staff of a magic shop would be the most likely to hire a witch detective.”
Maddy’s raised eyebrows said it all, but as a true friend, she kept her skepticism silent. Becca, who had already heard tons from her old buddy about her new vocation, ignored it and moved on.
“And then, when the owner, Margaret, said she suspected her employee, I didn’t question it. I mean, I don’t know how many people work for her. But then when she started telling me about her sales associate Gail, I had to ask—”
“You had to know Gaia wasn’t her real name.” Maddy sipped her latte, but her eyes were on her friend.
“I assumed it was a name she chose.” Becca had a more generous attitude toward self-re-creation. “There’s nothing wrong with that, Maddy.”
“It’s pretentious.” With that, her friend succumbed, taking a Harriet-sized chunk of the cookie. “And silly. But enough about her name.”
This time, Becca ignored the interruption. “Anyway, when I realized that the woman Margaret suspected of stealing from her was the same woman who had come in to see me earlier, I had to wonder. And there’s that thing with the sister, too. Ms. Cross—Margaret—didn’t want to talk about it, but she brought it up. Something about how her sister urged her to hire Gaia. Only then she told me not to follow up with her sister, Elizabeth. But how can I not? I mean, it almost sounds like a setup, doesn’t it?”