The Blackthorn Springs Tourist Board Hedge Maze Committee met weekly in the Annex, a small white-clad building beside the town hall at the top of Main Street. The hall was run down and practically in ruins, but even in its disarray, it was stately and grand, while the little squat building stood out like a bucktooth, as if it didn’t belong there. It was exactly how I felt about myself as I ascended the rickety steps to my sentence. Neville walked too close behind, as if he was making sure I didn’t escape.
The committee members were already gathered around a long wooden table, ready to start.
“Guess who’s finally decided to join us today,” Neville beamed. There was a murmur of polite laughter and mumbled hellos as I took my seat behind a laminated card with my name on it. This was more official than I had expected it to be, and I felt guilt and embarrassment that I had been absent from every meeting when I would have been so conspicuously missed.
I recognized some of my fellow committee members. Tom Jenkins stared at a pen in front of him as if he was trying to bore a hole in it with his eyes, turning it over and over in his hands. Hattie Winthrop, Mayor Frederick Winthrop’s wife, sat beside him, her hands neatly folded on the table. Abbi Flannagan’s chair was empty.
Next to Abbi’s vacant place sat a woman I didn’t know. I guessed she would have been approaching seventy. Her face was deeply lined, her hands coarse and rough, a line of black dirt under each fingernail. She wore blue overalls, and a grey cotton hat was crumpled on the table in front of her. Edie Jacques, her name tag read. This must have the old lady who owned Jacques Nursery on Alba Road leading up into the woods. Edie had apparently organized the boxwoods for the maze and had overseen the planting of the shrubs months before. Her weathered face was set with worry, her eyes darting up and down to Neville, to Hattie and then back to her grizzled hands.
“What a terrible, terrible business in our town yesterday,” Neville said, addressing the committee from his chair at the head of the table. “Let’s all take a moment to remember poor Mr. Langdel and mark his passing.”
“Do they know any further details?” Tom asked.
“Heart attack, they’re saying,” Neville said.
“I heard it was a stroke,” Hattie said.
“I heard that too,” a woman spoke up. Her name was Camille Arden. I remembered Lila mentioning this was the woman who apparently had a crush on Conri O’Farrell. I wondered if Camille had ever witnessed the temper I had seen in him. Did she know anything about his involvement with supernaturals? I looked her up and down. She was ordinary-looking, her strawberry-blond hair tied back into a tight bun. She certainly didn’t look like a witch, but then again, I had never thought I looked like a witch either.
“Do the police investigate if they say natural causes?” Tom asked.
“I spoke with the sheriff this morning,” Neville said. “There doesn’t seem to be any further investigation happening.”
Was the sheriff even allowed to give those details out to the public? Neville spoke with an air of importance at having this privileged information, so I guessed they weren’t.
“But as far as this concerns our business,” Neville added, “it doesn’t. The grand opening of the maze will go ahead as scheduled. We’ll have to fill Kenny’s spot and find someone else to provide coffee and other refreshments for the event.”
“Don’t care for coffee myself,” Hattie interjected. “It’s bad for the soul, if you ask me.”
No one did.
“And anything made by that lout?” Hattie continued. “I wouldn’t put it past my lips if you paid me. The one time I did go in there, it was for the Heritage Foundation meeting. We thought we’d treat ourselves to a nice dessert as we did our business. Well, that man was so rude, it nearly curled my hair. We ended up walking out without finishing. And the scones were a day old. Can you believe that? Stale, hard as bricks they were. Of course, I complained, and I won’t repeat the words that loathsome man said to me; they’re not fit for polite society. I wanted Frederick to shut down that place for good.” She added with a smug sneer, “I guess I got my wish.”
Another person with little love for Kenny Langdel. Anyone in town could be a suspect if I went by the number of people Kenny had insulted, even just in this last month.
“Thank you, Hattie, but let’s turn our conversation to business if we could,” Neville interjected. “Mr. Langdel’s passing is unfortunate and inconvenient for our catering, but we’ll find a solution.”
“Even dead he’s rude,” Hattie said.
Neville looked at Tom. “Mr. Jenkins, is this something you might be interested in helping us with? I don’t want to impose, you’ve done so much for us already, but we really do need food services for the visitors, and we would like to stick with using a local business. You can use the equipment we had arranged for Kenny, so there’d be no cost to you, apart from any signage you might want to use for promotion during the event.”
“I would be honored,” Tom said. “Though I do feel awkward profiting off such a grisly situation.”
“Take what you can from Langdel while you can get it,” Hattie said.
Was Hattie’s attitude simply the toxic gall of a spoiled old biddy, or was there a killer’s voice lurking in her callousness?
“Excellent, that solves that problem. What a relief.” Neville ticked a note off on his clipboard. “Now, Hattie, you were going to Conri O’Farrell about an enclosure for the children to come and pet lambs, chickens, or the like. How did that turn out?”
Hattie puffed up like a furious rooster. “And speaking of boorish men,” she said, “I don’t care if that man is a vet—it’s not like a vet is a real doctor anyway. He was so rude to me, I hung up on him. And now that secretary of his—what a bitter soul she is—won’t put any of my calls through to him. Can you imagine?”
I suppressed a smirk. Who wasn’t on Mrs. Winthrop’s wrong side? Though from what I’d seen of Conri O’Farrell, it didn’t surprise me in the least.
“Oh yes, he’s a piece of work,” Tom added. “I don’t think I’ve heard one good thing about him since he moved into town.”
I watched Camille closely for any sign of a reaction. She didn’t move, not even a sideways glance. Maybe it was the world’s greatest poker face, or maybe she really didn’t have an opinion about the vet one way or the other. Either way, going by Hattie and Tom, it seemed Conri O’Farrell was as hated as Kenny had been. Though that didn’t automatically give him murderous intent, did it? And what connection could the vet have had with Kenny? Killers needed motives, didn’t they? Why would a vet kill a barista? Maybe Kenny was mistreating an animal. Though I had lived next door to him for months and hadn’t seen hide nor hair of a pet in his house. Maybe it was something else—something more personal.
“Ms. Drake?”
“Huh?” I had been so busy sizing up my growing list of potential suspects that I was caught completely off guard. “Sorry, what did you say?”
“I just asked if you had given any more thought to your inclusion to the event?”
“Um… yes?” I said.
“Excellent. Can we hear your ideas? They will have to be approved by the committee, after all, and we’re running out of time with every passing second.”
“Er… I…” I fumbled for something to say. When I had agreed to be on the committee, Neville had asked me to put together something fun, a kid’s games station with a maze theme. I had given it precisely two minutes thought before trying to think of how I could get out of it. Wasn’t coming to this silly meeting enough?
“Well, I’m working on a little something,” I said, wondering how good Neville was at seeing through a liar. “But I can’t tell you anything at this stage. I have to survey the maze first, you know, just to make sure it all works out thematically.” It sounded plausible enough, and it would give me a few extra days to figure something out.
“That sounds marvelous,” Neville said. “I’ll take you there myself this afternoon, and we can chat about your ideas on the way.”
Marvelous indeed.
Blackthorn Springs’ new hedge maze and tourist park had been constructed on the road out of town on a former pasture that had been donated to the council by the late John Norton, Neville’s older brother. Neville told me all about it on the way out to the site. It was a short drive in terms physical distance, but the longest ten minutes I had ever spent in a car.
The afternoon had worn into what promised to be a cold night, and I could think of nothing better than going home to snuggle up with Hemlock and a good book and the rest of the merlot. The sudden remembrance that Hemlock wouldn’t be there brought a fresh pang of misery and a sting of hot tears. I blinked them away and tried to listen to Neville talk about how great this attraction was going to be for the town and how it would bring even more tourists come summer.
“And that’s good for everyone too, you know. Even you. I can’t imagine you sell a lot of books from day to day.”
“I do okay,” I said. I wasn’t about to start discussing the details of my dwindling earnings with Neville Norton and then hear Hattie Winthrop and the rest of the town talking about them next week.
“Not a lot of retail doing well anywhere these days with all that internet shopping stuff.”
“I have an online store too.”
“Yes, but that’s not real business, now is it?”
It brings in real money, I thought, but I didn’t feel like debating the merits of the digital economy with someone who probably still thought of the internet as one of those newfangled things that would see its end, and the world could go back to normal like it was in the good old days.
We pulled into the newly built driveway, fresh gravel crunching under the tires of Neville’s silver sedan. The parking lot was built on top of the rise, the field with the maze below it. The mayor’s enormous white house sat on the opposite hill like a specter. A blustering wind nearly lifted my skirt.
“The hedge has grown so much faster than we expected it would, better than we ever could have hoped.” Neville was beaming, looking down at the field where the town’s new money spinner was spread out. “Boxwoods. Mrs. Jacques said they were, good for hedges.”
I stopped and looked again at the maze, carefully noting the shape and color of the bushes, the twists and turns, the dead ends and false boundaries. This was a vast, complex puzzle, enough to send a person into delirium if they spent too long trying to solve it. I swallowed hard, my brow furrowing, and looked again. Delirium wouldn’t be the worst thing that could happen to someone in this maze. The air shimmered with the tingle of magic.
I had to be sure before I said anything to Neville, but there was no mistaking what was before me.
“I can’t believe this is the first time you’ve come out here,” Neville said.
“Yes, I definitely should have seen this a lot sooner, I think,” I said. Like, before it was even designed, I added in my mind.
The maze was a circular pattern, common enough for hedge mazes of this type, stretching a good hundred and fifty feet in diameter. The way it twisted in the center into a warped teardrop caught my eye. A longtime passion for games and puzzles had naturally led me to mazes. I would fill in maze book after maze book as a child and had read about their history at length. I knew mazes had been used for centuries in spellcraft too, though I had obviously never had the skills to even think about casting a maze spell myself.
This maze I was looking down on now was a definite spell maze.
“And you say Mrs. Jacques designed this?” I said, my words hoarse.
“She did. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? I think people are really going to love it.”
“Yes, it’s lovely. And, um, did you say Mrs. Jacques also chose the plants? Boxwoods?”
Neville nodded, still smiling down on the maze as if it were a work of art of his very own creation.
I couldn’t say anything until I had a closer look.
The path down to the maze was hewn into the side of the hill, rough timbers marking the steps. “We designed it like this to give it an old-world charm,” Neville said as we stepped our way carefully down.
When we came closer to the maze, there was no denying my suspicions. Up close, the magic radiated out of it like heat from a furnace. If an untrained witch could feel the juice in this charm, it was seriously concentrated.
“And how quickly did you say this thing grew?” I said, peering up at the top of the hedge, a good two feet taller than my head.
“We planted it three months ago, if you can believe it. Obviously, they were on the large size when they all went in, but for it to grow so thick and wonderful so quickly—well, I guess this is just meant to be. They love our soil and are obviously thriving. All thanks to Mrs. Jacques’s expert horticultural skills.”
I plucked a leaf off the hedge closest to me, confirming my final suspicion completely and without question.
“Mr. Norton, I—”
“Please, call me Neville.”
“Okay, Neville. I have something to tell you about this maze, and you’re not going to like it.”
The smile fell from the old man’s face and was replaced by a line of concern.
“This isn’t boxwood.”
“It isn’t?”
“No, it’s yew. A silver blood yew, to be exact.”
How did I know anything about plants? I didn’t, not really. But when I’d gone mad looking at death curses after the stuff with Quentin, references to silver blood yew, a rare tree, kept coming up time and time again. And that’s what I was looking at here.
“Oh,” he said. His puzzlement deepened. “Does that matter?”
I knew next to nothing about what other kinds of spells yew could be used for but knew it had been synonymous with witchcraft for centuries. I did know something else about yew, though.
“Yew is poisonous, this variety especially,” I said.
Yew hedges were common around the world and safe enough unless they were ingested, but toxicity was a line I thought Neville might be able to grasp more easily than “Sorry, Mr. Norton, you’ve accidentally built a magic maze out of witch trees.”
“Oh dear,” Neville said softly.
I nodded quickly. “That’s right, silver blood yew is deadly. Has anyone been in the maze yet?”
“Only the groundskeepers who planted it, and as you can see, it needs quite a lot of trimming, so I’m sure no one has come back into it for a while.”
I thought hard. I didn’t know exactly what kind of spell it was weaving, but all the signs pointed to nothing good. If no one had come to grief from this charm yet, then there might still be time to disarm it. But that would be a massive spell. I wondered if it was something Lila might be able to do or if it would need to be a witch. A real one.
“I’m not sure of all the details, Neville, but I think to be safe, we should keep the maze off-limits until we learn more about it.”
Neville’s demeanor had fallen from bright sunny excitement to dark and worrisome. This was his big project for Blackthorn Springs, and Mrs. Jacques and her magical yew might have ruined it for him for good, and a lot more than that.
We drove back to town in silence. The whole way back, I thought that Edie Jacques, together with Jackfort and Conri O’Farrell, was now another very good suspect in the murder of Kenny Langdel.