My witchy sixth sense told me I needed to get a real dinner together, so after I said goodbye to Hazel and Athene, I headed over to Walmart and got a whole chicken and some fresh veggies, along with what looked like a nice bottle of pinot noir from Washington State. I already had rice on hand, and I figured I’d make a pilaf from the recipe my mother had passed down from my Grandma Ellen.
Some tidying up — and a quick check of my Tarot, the two of cups telling me that yes, playing Suzy Homemaker had been the right call — and a little after six o’clock, the buzzer for the back entrance to the shop sounded.
Perfect.
I hurried downstairs and opened the door. Calvin Standingbear stood outside, looking diffident.
“Right on time,” I told him.
“What?”
“Come on in.”
Expression even more nonplussed, he came into the little space that served as the back entrance’s foyer. “We need to talk,” he said.
“I know,” I replied. “Come upstairs. Dinner is almost ready.”
“Dinner?”
“You’re hungry, aren’t you?”
“Well — ”
“Exactly.”
Without waiting for a reply, I made my way up the stairs. The sound of his quiet, heavy tread told me he’d decided to follow without argument.
When we went inside, the warm aromas of roasting chicken and rice pilaf with almonds greeted us.
“You weren’t joking, were you?” Calvin said.
“I never joke about food.” Which was only the truth. I didn’t know if I could classify myself as a full-on kitchen witch, but I liked to cook and to bake. The soothing routines of following recipes and adding my own personal touches really weren’t all that different from performing a ritual or crafting a spell jar, when you got right down to it.
I went into the kitchen and sneaked a peek at the rice. It looked ready to go, fluffy and luscious, and so I turned off the gas and left it to sit with the lid in place. Calvin glanced past me to the table, already set and with the bottle of wine open and airing.
“Please tell me you’re not still on duty,” I said, noting where his gaze had landed. “I mean, you can’t be on duty all the time, can you?”
“Technically, I’m off duty,” he allowed. “But we have a small department, so I’m still on call if something important comes up.”
“Well, a glass of wine won’t kill you.”
He made an amused sound, not quite a snort, but to my relief, he didn’t argue with me. Instead, he asked, “Can I help with anything?”
“We’re about ready to go,” I replied. “You could get the chicken out of the oven for me, though. The pot holders are in that drawer.”
I pointed, and he got out a pair of oven mitts decorated with bees and flowers. They looked so incongruous against his muscular forearms that I wanted to laugh. Somehow, though, I held it together while he knelt down and extricated the roasting pan and the golden-brown bird it held.
“You can set it down on the stovetop,” I said, and he put the pan in place on the section of stove not occupied by the pot of pilaf. “And then carve once it’s time to eat, because I’m actually terrible at that.”
He grinned at my confession, and I sent him over to sit down at the dining table so I could get everything dished up. Within a few minutes, we were both seated and ready to go, candles flickering at the center of the table and from the narrow buffet I used as a sideboard. As I was setting everything up, I’d thought about putting on some soft music to play in the background but had decided against it. I was probably already pushing things enough with the wine.
He’d already poured some pinot noir for both of us, so there wasn’t much to do except raise our glasses and clink them against one another.
“You got all this from a psychic flash?” Calvin asked after he took a sip.
“Well, it wasn’t all a psychic flash,” I replied, then sipped some of my wine. Not bad. I didn’t really care for white wine with dinner, which was why I’d decided on the pinot noir instead of chardonnay or something. “That stink-eye you were giving me at Hazel’s house told me you wanted to talk, so I figured we might as well have our discussion over food.”
“It wasn’t a stink-eye,” he objected, and I tilted my head at him.
“I was on the receiving end of it,” I said. “It was totally a stink-eye.”
He just shook his head and concentrated for a moment on carving the chicken and laying a lush slice of breast on my plate. Next, he did the same for himself, then cut a small piece off one end. Before he popped it in his mouth, he said, “All right, possibly I was slightly irked that you’d interfered with the investigation again when I expressly told you not to.”
I paused. Archie had made himself scarce during my dinner preparations, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t lurking down the hall, listening to everything Calvin and I said. Actually, for a man in cat form, Archie didn’t show much interest in human food. I asked him about it once, and he’d given the cat equivalent of a shrug and told me he didn’t want to torture himself with “real” food when there was so little chance of him becoming a human being again any time soon.
Those words had sent a spurt of guilt through me — I knew I hadn’t devoted as much time to solving his problem as I probably should have — but I’d only shrugged and said that made some sense, and left it there.
But since Calvin was staring at me, fork in one hand, obviously waiting for me to make some sort of a response, I knew I had to say something.
“Well, I probably wouldn’t have done anything, except Josie told me Athene had checked out of her Airbnb — one of Josie’s friends owns it — and because I was worried that something might happen to her, I tried checking around. It was just coincidence that she’d ended up renting a room from Hazel. I didn’t even know she was thinking about doing that.”
As I spoke, though, I remembered Hazel making an off-hand comment about investigating alternative ways of earning some cash, since the money her art brought in tended to be sort of hit or miss. The commission to paint the ceiling of my store had brought in a nice chunk for her, but jobs like that didn’t come along all the time, and although her paintings were in galleries all over Arizona, again, those sales weren’t what you could call steady income.
But she’d never mentioned renting out her spare room, and so I figured I was telling the truth when I said I had no idea about those plans.
“Hmm,” was all Calvin said, which could have meant anything. Or maybe that was his way of letting me know he still wasn’t happy about what I’d done, but he also wasn’t going to do anything about it.
“Still no sign of Lucien’s missing car?” I asked, and he shook his head. Now his expression was resigned, as if he knew he couldn’t keep me from talking about the case no matter what he did.
“None,” he replied. He lifted his glass of pinot and took a sip. I waited, trying to seem casual, when in reality, I found myself almost mesmerized by the movement of his throat as he swallowed, the faint kiss of wine on his sculpted lips. The guy was seriously distracting. “It’s strange, just because a car like that isn’t exactly common around here. Also, Mercedes are some of the most difficult cars to break into. It’s almost as though whoever took it had their own key fob.”
“Couldn’t someone, I don’t know, have hacked the car’s computer?” I seemed to remember reading something like that a while back, although I had to admit that Globe didn’t seem like a hotbed of computer-hacking car thieves.
“I suppose it’s possible, but it’s not very likely.” Calvin set down his wine glass. “We’ll figure it out eventually.”
“What about Violet?”
His shoulders lifted. No uniform this time, only a dark button-up shirt, faded jeans, and scuffed black cowboy boots. I’d already gotten used to the cowboy boots and turquoise jewelry that many of the town’s denizens tended to sport, but on him, the boots didn’t look silly but downright sexy.
Of course, Calvin could probably manage to look sexy in a pink bunny suit.
He said, “Someone at a gas station on Highway 70 thought they saw a young woman matching her description heading east. I don’t know why she’d be going that way — there isn’t much out there.”
That did sound strange. You’d think if Violet was trying to get out of town, she would have been going in the opposite direction, heading west toward California. “Did she say anything about where she was going?”
Calvin shook his head as he took a bite of rice pilaf. “No. She went inside the convenience store because she paid cash for the gas and bought a bottle of water, but she didn’t say much. The attendant remembered her because he thought she seemed young to be driving out there by herself, and also because you don’t see many red BMW convertibles around here.”
No, that particular part of the world was pretty short on fancy German cars, my own Beetle notwithstanding. It was definitely the land of the pickup — Ford, Chevy, or Dodge — or the SUV, in those same flavors but with some Jeeps thrown in for variety. You’d think a bright blonde nineteen-year-old in a red convertible would stick out like a sore thumb.
If it had been someone else, I might have thought she was headed out to meet up with relatives or friends, but I knew Violet was from Southern California, just like me…or Lucien.
“So…what’s next?”
Calvin lifted an eyebrow. “I’ll see what the lab has to say about the medallion — and your knives. They should be released to me by the end of the day tomorrow.”
Well, that was something. Not that I’d planned any rituals where I needed the athame, but I didn’t like having it and its companion missing from my altar. I had a particular order to the items I placed there, and with two of them gone, it felt like there was a huge hole in that part of my life.
“That’s good to hear,” I said, and figured I might as well leave it there. “Any other leads?”
“Dinner’s great,” he said distinctly, and I grinned. Not subtle at all, but I got the point.
“Thanks,” I said. “The pilaf’s an old family recipe.”
“It’s delicious.” He ate some more, then went on, “I wasn’t expecting you to cook for me, but thanks for this.”
Oh, I’d love to do a lot more than just cook for him. For the moment, though, I was happy enough to see the way he enjoyed the food. “I like to cook. Usually what I do is make a big batch of something so I can sort of live off that for the week and supplement it with salads or takeout or whatever. Do you cook?”
“Not really. Cops tend to live on takeout. Once a week, my mother sends a care package home with me so I don’t starve.”
His comment made me wonder why he had that gourmet kitchen if he never really used it. Asking seemed a bit too personal, though, so I decided to let it go for the moment. Anyway, considering how his biceps bulged against his shirt sleeves every time he lifted his fork or reached for his glass of wine, he didn’t look as though he was too in danger of starving. And I didn’t know why his comment about his mother startled me. After all, I guessed he was probably no more than five years or so older than I, which meant his parents were most likely still around.
“Does your mother live in San Ramon?”
He nodded. “The whole family does. Parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins…my brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews.”
Growing up with just my mother as my family, I’d always wondered what it would be like to be part of such a big clan. “How many brothers and sisters?”
He grinned with a flash of white teeth. “Four. I’m the middle one of five.”
Five kids. It was hard for me to imagine being one of so many siblings. I’d had friends in high school who were one of three, and that had seemed like a lot to me. “That must have been fun.”
He chuckled and shook his head. “Well, I suppose that depends on your definition of ‘fun.’ There was always something going on, that’s for sure. My mother might have a different word for it.”
“And no one felt like leaving San Ramon?”
For some reason, his expression darkened. However, his tone was light enough as he said, “No, we’re tied to this land. It’s part of us.” He paused, then went on, “I suppose that might be hard for a city girl like you to understand.”
I wanted to protest that epithet — I didn’t really feel like a city girl — but I knew he was right. Coming from Southern California, I didn’t have any real connection to the land…what there was of it, buried under miles and miles of concrete and asphalt. That might have been part of the reason why I hadn’t fought too hard against this destiny-driven move to Globe. So much of magical practice had a lot to do with nature, and it was far more difficult to pursue that part of the craft when you had to drive miles to get to any kind of open land. I couldn’t even count the beach, since it was always swarming with people and didn’t allow any kind of opportunity for quietly communing with nature.
“It sounds nice, actually,” I said. “There’s not much sense of history in L.A. Everyone seems to be from someplace else.”
“And now you’re the one from someplace else,” he commented, although now he looked slightly amused, as though he wondered what I thought of my current situation.
“I’m not the only one, though,” I told him. “I mean, Hazel’s from Iowa.”
“But she’s been here for years.”
True. Maybe after you passed some sort of imaginary milestone, you were granted true resident status in Globe. I hoped it wouldn’t take seven years, though.
We were both quiet for a little while as we ate our way through our first helpings of food. Calvin asked if I’d like him to carve me another piece of breast, and I said I would. He snagged one of the drumsticks for himself, then said, “How’s the shop going?”
“Fine,” I replied. “I mean, I’ve only been open one day, but I got more customers than I thought I would. I might actually break even on this whole gig.”
The look he gave me then was deadly serious. “Are you going to be okay?”
Was that actual concern I saw in his expression? I thought it might be. Maybe Archie wasn’t the only person in Globe who would be upset if I couldn’t stay around.
“Oh, sure,” I said lightly. “I can operate in the red for a while since I have a pretty big cushion.”
“Even after paying cash for this place?”
I reflected that there didn’t seem to be too many people Josie hadn’t blabbed to. But that was all right; while I might have some secrets, my finances weren’t one of them. “Even then. I won the lottery back in California.”
He’d just swallowed some wine, and seemed to choke a bit as I relayed that piece of information, although he recovered himself quickly enough. “You won the lottery?”
“Yes,” I replied. “Not a huge one. I mean, I can’t afford a yacht or anything…not that I’d want one. But it’s enough to keep me going for a long time even if this shop doesn’t make a cent — although obviously, I don’t want that to happen. So far, I think it’s going to be all right.”
For a moment, Calvin was silent, appearing to absorb those latest bits of data. “Do you think that’s part of the reason why Lucien came after you?”
“My money?”
“Yes.”
“I doubt it,” I said frankly. “My little nest egg is peanuts compared to his net worth. His house alone is probably worth at least five or six million.”
Surprise flickered in Calvin’s eyes. Not for the first time, I noticed the lashes that shaded them, straight and silky and inky black as his hair. That magnificent mane of his was still severely confined to a ponytail, and I had to wonder what it would look like when freed of the leather cord that held it back away from his face.
“I had no idea Lucien had that kind of money.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, reaching for my glass of wine.
“Maybe that’s why he was murdered.”
“For his money?”
Calvin nodded.
I sipped some pinot and pondered his suggestion. Honestly, I didn’t know why I hadn’t considered that aspect of the situation before this, except that when someone was in Lucien’s line of work, you tended to think any foul play had to be supernatural in nature. It wouldn’t be the first time someone who’d dabbled in the wrong kind of spells or messed with the wrong entity met a nasty — and untimely — end. Honestly, that made a lot more sense than thinking fragile little Violet Clarke had anything to do with his death.
“Who was Lucien’s heir?” Calvin inquired next.
Good question. “I’m not sure,” I said slowly. “I mean, Athene was his right-hand woman, so you’d think he’d leave something to her, but I don’t know that. He didn’t have any children. His parents are still alive, and he has a younger brother, but I don’t think they were close.”
“Still,” Calvin said, “it’s a line of inquiry I’d better look into. Money’s often a very powerful motive.”
I couldn’t argue with that, not when the majority of my clients had wanted me to use my powers of divination to see if their futures would be prosperous, if I could guide them to deals or investments or opportunities that would help fatten their wallets. Of course, I also had many clients who wanted to know about their love lives or their health, but money always seemed to come first.
“Definitely,” I agreed. I hesitated for a second, then decided I’d better go ahead and ask the question anyway. “So…am I still a suspect?”
“Do you think I’d be having dinner with you if you were?”
When he put it that way….
Relief spread through me, even as I asked, “Then why are you having the lab check my knives?”
“Because that way I can show I did my due diligence,” he said. “It was always a long shot. I can tell you’re not a murderer.”
“Thanks…I guess.”
His eyes crinkled in amusement, and he took a bite of his drumstick before setting it back down. “And I’m not getting that vibe from Athene, either, which is why I told her it was all right to head back to L.A. Of course, with my two main suspects ruled out, that means I’m back to square one.”
Yes, that was kind of a problem. But I was glad he hadn’t tried to take the easy way out by pinning the murder on the likely suspects — not only because I really didn’t want to be arraigned for first-degree murder, but because it also told me Calvin Standingbear was a man with integrity.
After some of my experiences in Los Angeles, that was a welcome change.
Dinner wended down after that. I hadn’t had time to bake anything, and so I didn’t have much to offer for dessert except some rocky road ice cream I’d bought at Walmart. He declined, saying he wasn’t into sweets.
And then came the awkward after-dinner moment as we both got up from the table. Calvin helped me take the dishes into the kitchen, and then we both turned and looked at each other.
“Thanks for dinner,” he said. “It was really nice to have some home cooking.”
“Any time,” I managed. My heart was beating irrationally fast, and I told it to chill out. There was no reason to believe this dinner would end with anything more than a simple goodbye, with maybe a promise that he’d be back to return my knives to me once the lab was done with them.
He paused, gazing down into my face. “You’re making this really hard for me,” he said.
“I am?”
“I think you know that. In general, I don’t have dinner with murder suspects.”
“I thought you said I wasn’t a suspect.”
“True. It’s just….” The words trailed off, and he shook his head. “This isn’t where I’d intended to be.”
“Me, neither,” I said. “Globe, that is.”
The image of the Lovers card from my Tarot deck flashed into my mind. Back in L.A. when I’d pulled that card, I’d wondered if it meant I had some kind of love life waiting for me in Arizona. Now, with the way Calvin stared down into my face, the intensity in those night-dark eyes of his, I thought maybe the universe was just about to prove to me that, once again, it had been right.
And I was more than fine with that. I’d been waiting longer than I wanted to admit for the right man to cross my path.
Calvin’s phone buzzed in his pocket, and he started, backing away from me slightly. “I’ll need to take this,” he said, tone apologetic but also somehow relieved, as if he was glad of the interruption.
“Sure,” I replied, my tone resigned.
Thanks, universe.
He lifted the phone to his ear. “Standingbear here.” At once, his expression went almost too still, as if he was trying his best to keep me from guessing what might be passing through his mind. “Yes. Got it. I’ll be right there.”
Well, he had warned me he was always on call, although I wanted to groan at the timing of this one. If it had come through even a minute later….
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
Calvin nodded, expression stony. “I’m afraid so. That was Ned, one of my deputies. Athene Kappas was just killed in a car crash.”