Ain't Love a Witch? (Witchless in Seattle Mysteries Book 6) Read online

I fought not to throw my phone across the vast parking lot of the station. But do insert a really bad word here, because I wanted to use the baddest word I could find to vent my frustration.

  “No! I mean, yes! He’s on the floor, Coco, but he’s also—”

  “Well then, help him the heck up, Lemon!” Quite suddenly, her voice boomed loudly, an indicator the line had cleared. At least for the moment. “Holy spitballs, Myron’s a hundred if he’s a day. His bones are well past the supple stage and deep into as brittle as the ends of my hair. You can’t just leave him there. You think it was a heart attack? Or maybe a stroke?”

  I shook my head as though Coco could see me, my lips sticking to my teeth. “Um, no. It wasn’t a heart attack or a stroke.”

  “So you’re Dr. Layne now? Did you get your medical license when I wasn’t looking? How do you know what’s wrong with him?”

  I groaned, my stomach in a tight knot. “Coco!”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Stand still and listen carefully. Koi George is fine. Myron Fairbanks isn’t on the floor because he fell. He’s on the floor because he’s dead.”

  So dead. I winced and shuddered.

  Coco gasped. Finally, I’d elicited a reaction worthy of this horrible news. I pictured her now, settling in at her desk at the local coroner’s office, her long, graceful fingers tugging at her lower lip. A telltale sign she was nervous and fretting.

  “How awful, Lemon. Oh, this is so tragic,” she moaned, her tone syrupy sweet with sympathy.

  Now that I’d vented, I remembered what needed to be done. “Coco, I really have to go. I have to call 9—”

  Noise from behind me sent shivers up my spine.

  Jessica. Oh, crud. She’d somehow managed to climb down off my shoulder while I was testing out the validity of Myron’s mortality, and I hadn’t even noticed. But in my defense, I’d just found a man with a chunk of his skull and brains missing. That would distract even the most focused.

  I whipped back around toward the bathroom door, moving the phone from my mouth. A rustling sound from the left side of the stall beside the toilet, and just beyond where Myron’s body lay, grew stronger.

  Horror stricken, I sputtered, “Nooo! Put that down! Please don’t!”

  “Lemon?” Coco belted out, alarm clear in her tone as she tapped the phone with her fingernail. “Hey! What’s wrong? What happened? Lemon, you answer me this second! You’re freaking me out with all this talk of dead people.” Then she gasped again, a wheezing intake of breath as she wound up. “Hold on. Dead plus not a heart attack or stroke equals… Sweet petunias! Did someone kill Myron? Oh, my giddy aunt! Is the killer there? Is he holding you hostage and forcing you to hang up? Is that why you have to go? Lemon Layne, you know our code word, the one we promised to use if we were ever taken hostage with no way out and we wanted to say one last goodbye. If there’s a murderer with a gun to your head, you’d better use it so I can save you!”

  Our code word was Twizzlers. We loved them. Cherry and cherry only. We made it up when we were eight after we snuck in to see Friday the 13th at the old Cineplex in the middle of downtown Fig. We were convinced Jason was going to snatch us up in our sleep for years after that.

  Plus, we thought if we used an odd, out-of-context word, it would throw a killer off long enough for us to possibly attempt escape and/or at least puzzle our captor so one of us could get help.

  “Lemon! Answer me!”

  Before I had the chance to respond to her properly, I looked at Myron’s body and promptly forgot Coco and our Twizzler farewells.

  “Leeeemon!”

  “Nooo! Twizzlers! Stop!” I managed to spout a jumble of words as they came to mind before I let the hand holding my phone fall to my side and looked down at the floor.

  A mound of toilet paper had begun to magically rise on the tiled floor beside Myron’s body.

  Courtesy of none other than my mischievous Jessica Fletcher.

  I’d been so caught off guard when I found Myron lying on his face, I’d been remiss about the warning I always repeated when we cleaned the bathrooms at the beginning of each day.

  No toilet paper, young lady.

  I was paying for that right now by way of an almost empty roll of Charmin she’d extracted from the dispenser. Toilet paper was JF’s crack—an addiction she’d been in Lemon’s Rehab for on more than one occasion. And my little beast of burden was quick and light of foot. The moment I became distracted was the moment she became a tiny maniacal terrorist of two-ply with ridges.

  “Leeemon! Are you still there? You keep fading in and out! What’s happening? Talk to me!” Coco paused briefly while I squeezed into the stall between the wall and the toilet like I was auditioning for Cirque De Soleil, in an effort to avoid touching Myron. That is of course before I remembered I was still contaminating the crime scene.

  But there was no going back now. As I reached for my ill-behaved precious, Coco yelped, “That’s it. I’m calling 9-1-1! The Coast Guard! Whoever! Just hang tight and stay on the line with me!”

  I ignored Coco and chastised, “Jessica Fletcher, don’t you dare make another move! Drop that now!”

  “Who has what? Does he have Jessica Fletcher, too?” Coco’s hysteria-riddled question was muffled against my thigh. “Aw, jeez! You’re cutting in and out again, Lemon, but if you can hear this, tell Jessica to bite that smarmy murderer’s face off! Get him, JF! Go all Planet of the Apes!” she bellowed, the frenzy in her voice growing.

  “No, Coco! There’s no murderer!” I yelled as loud as my lungs would allow in an attempt to reassure her.

  I didn’t have the chance to explain further. I was too busy trying to corner Jessica in the back of the stall behind the toilet like a sumo wrestler stalks his opponent, my knees bent with my arms and hands at three and nine o’clock.

  If I didn’t catch her, she’d royally screw up any possible evidence I hadn’t already screwed up.

  But JF happily danced beside the back of the toilet, squeaking and chirping her delight.

  So I stopped all motion and gave her the evil eye, the one that said I meant dire business. I held out my hand to encourage her to climb up my arm, trying not to touch Myron’s now thoroughly TP’d body because he looked like a tree on senior night at one of the high school cheerleaders’ houses.

  “Jessica… Come to Mama. Light of my life, center of my universe, please, please, pleeease come to Mama,” I cooed again good-naturedly, if not a bit desperately, hoping the tone of my voice would reassure her she wasn’t in too much trouble.

  I saw her toy with the idea of obeying me. It was in the quick cock of her tiny head and the dart of her eyes. And then she decided in favor of more shenanigans. So I opted to change tactics and glared at her—hard.

  My petite primate squealed her pleasure with high-pitched chirps and her customary hop from one foot to the other. I had to get her away from Myron’s body soon before she soiled something that could turn out to be important. Sometimes she has accidents if she’s too worked up, and on top of everything else, we didn’t need monkey excrement in the mix.

  Jessica draped a length of the toilet paper around her neck, fashioning it into a feather boa and holding it up proudly for me to see. JF loved to dress up, and today was no exception. Also, she was no stranger to improv. She could make a boa out of dental floss and a Popsicle stick, given some time.

  “Jessica that is not one of your boas. Put it down now,” I warned, letting my voice go low with authority.

  She finally stopped for a moment and looked up at me, all heart-meltingly adorable monkey eyes and brown, twitchy ears. As though I had an overdeveloped sense of chutzpa to even consider she not investigate this unusual turn of events in our morning routine with as much toilet paper as she could manage to unwind around poor Myron’s legs.

  I narrowed my gaze in her direction and shook my finger before I made a jerky, uncoordinated attempt to snatch her roll of booty away by bending at the knees and bracing myself on the toilet
seat with the heel of the hand I held my phone in.

  But instead of nabbing Jess, I slipped on some of the flimsy paper she’d decorated the body with and pitched sideways, hitting the side of my forehead on the edge of the metal dispenser.

  My head popped back up like a Whack-A-Mole at the sharp contact, and then a stream of blood began to drip down the side of my face, hot and wet, landing on the leg of my sweats in perfect crimson droplets.

  I saw a few stars before I was able to refocus enough to tsk my disapproval at Jessica Fletcher. “Blood! Perfect. Dang it, Jess! These were new sweats, and now I have blood on me—”

  “Blood?”

  Coco. Shoot, I’d forgotten she was still on the line. Naturally, now when chaos ensued, our connection was crystal clear.

  “Why am I hearing that noun? Did he hurt you, Lemon? If I get my hands on him… Just you hang on! Help is on the way!” I heard Coco scream—half a second before I lost the grip on my phone and dropped it in the toilet. The water splashed up and outward in a splooshy wave of blue, disinfected wetness.

  I leaned forward, bracing my elbows on the toilet seat, and let my head hang down in defeat.

  And that’s when the sensor to the toilet went off, successfully sucking my phone down the vortex of swirling blue water.

  With a groan, I lifted my head and shot Jessica a glare so hard, I thought for sure my eyes would fall out of my skull. “What would Angela Lansbury say if she could see how we’ve defiled this crime scene, miss?”

  Jessica squeaked a protest at me, throwing her makeshift paper boa over her tiny shoulder seconds before Justice Carver barreled his way through the bathroom’s door and pointed a gun into the stall right at me.

  His name really is Justice, and as Coco and I always joke, he really does do “justice” to such a big, rather imposing name.

  “Police! Don’t move! Put your hands where I can see them!” His handsome face, sharply angled, defined by high cheekbones, deep grooves on either side of his mouth and brown eyes the color of nutmeg, was a mask of fierce, hawk-like intensity. The frigid January wind blew his thick, dark hair around his face and made his cheeks ruddy with color.

  I threw my hands up as ordered. Jessica backed away and dropped the toilet paper roll in obvious guilt, putting her hands up, too. The little traitor.

  My breath came in panicked gasps for air. But I wasn’t one hundred percent sure whether it was because the barrel of a gun was pointed at my face or because of Justice himself.

  “Where is he?” Justice whispered, his eyes scanning the small interior of the bathroom with one sweep of a glance.

  My thighs were killing me, hunched down like I was. “Who? Myron?” I squeaked.

  “No, the murderer, Lemon!”

  “What murderer?”

  Justice sighed and rolled his eyes, his wide shoulders slouching to a more relaxed position. He sounded almost disappointed when he said, “There’s no murderer, is there?”

  Of that, I wasn’t quite sure. Myron certainly hadn’t cut a hole in his own head.

  My mind began to race, as it typically does when something needs solving, and Myron was definitely in need of a good solving. Instantly, I wondered if maybe a murderer really was on the loose and Justice knew something I didn’t know. I could conclusion hop just as well as Coco and her imaginary murderer. The difference being, I kept my outlandish theories on the inside.

  “Well, there’s no murderer here in the bathroom. What murderer are you talking about?” I hedged, hoping he’d offer up some secret police information the public at large wasn’t privy to just yet.

  “The one Coco called me about in hysterics. The one she said was holding you hostage, for Pete’s sake! She said something about Twizzlers and code words. I dunno. She was a wreck. Most of it was hard to make out except the part about a murderer holding you hostage here at the gas station.”

  I really, really love Coco, but sometimes her vivid imagination and penchant for taking a molehill and turning it into Mt. Rainer made me want to put duct tape over her mouth.

  “Can I put my hands down now?” Because I felt dizzy. Again, not entirely sure if that was because I’d hit my head or because the barrel of a gun was pointed at my face.

  He held out a strong, sun-browned hand to help me up. “’Course you can, Lemon. Coco made it sound like the guy had a gun to your head. The second she called, I raced right over here. I think I might have knocked over Dodie’s Donut Shop sandwich board, pulling out of her parking lot when I got the call. I know for sure I left a couple of stray surfers soaked from the puddles. I sped along the back road beside the beach like some maniac.” Justice holstered his gun, almost looking disappointed there was no rabid killer on the loose. “Backup should be here any second.”

  Jessica scooted past me and gripped the leg of Justice’s trousers, scurrying her way up along his body until she sat on his shoulder.

  She promptly began to groom him, using her long fingers to comb through his wet hair as he pumped some paper towels from the wall dispenser and handed them to me for my wound.

  JF especially loved Justice. Well, mostly all men, if I’m honest. She’s quite the Flirty-McFlirt. But whenever he came into the station’s store to order a chopped brisket sandwich for lunch, Jessica somehow finagled her way into his lap while he waited.

  “I flushed my phone down the toilet.”

  I’m not sure why I said that. Maybe because I always felt awkward and clumsy around Justice, who was like a gazelle, and I didn’t know what else to say.

  His lips lifted in a half-smile while he compliantly tilted his head to allow Jess to check his ears. “That could be why Coco thinks you’re dead. Though you are bleeding, Lemon. What happened?” Justice lifted a hand to move the hair from my face and examine my toilet paper dispenser mishap.

  “I’d like to tell you it was because I fought off a diabolical, senior-killing ninja like some kind of gladiator. Alas, not so much. I hit my head on the dispenser trying to get Jess out of the stall before she did any more damage.”

  Justice leaned in close to me, enough that I smelled his spicy cologne and his minty breath, and lifted the paper towels I compressed to my head. “Looks kinda deep, Lemon. I think you might need stitches.”

  I made myself as small as possible against the front of the stall and diverted his attention to Myron’s body. “Not as badly as Myron needs them.”

  Justice squatted beside Myron, using a pen from his pocket to shift some of the toilet paper around until he saw the very thing that had me puzzled from the moment I’d checked Myron for a pulse.

  I knew he’d seen it when he looked up at me because his brown eyes were perplexed. “What the blazes?”

  I shivered in response, clenching my hands together in my hoodie’s center pocket. “Yeah. That’s what I wondered, too.”

  “There’s a piece of…” He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing above the collar of his navy-blue uniform. “I mean, somebody…”

  “Cut a chunk of his skull out and took a piece of his brain when they murdered him?”

  Justice nodded, his face grim. “Yeah. That. Hey, didn’t your mom and Myron break up not long ago?”

  “About four months ago. Why?”

  He looked up at me then, one eyebrow raised. “Because as I recall, she threatened to kill him for cheating on her.”

  I swallowed hard.

  Yeah, that.

  Chapter 2

  As I stood outside the bathroom with Justice and Chief Ainsley Burrows, Coco pulled up in her little red Golf, screeching to a gravel-spitting halt. She flew at me the second her high-heeled feet hit the ground after exiting her car.

  “Lemon!” she cried, throwing her arms around my neck and burying me in a cloud of warm vanilla-sugar perfume and gray-and-pink scarf. “Oh, thank the stars you’re okay!” She lifted my chin, her green eyes widening when she caught sight of the cut on my forehead. “He hit you, didn’t he? That son of a dirty, rotten, Dumpster-diving slimeball! W
here is he? Is he in handcuffs? He’d better be! Ohhh, you can bet I’m going to let him have a good look at my fist just before I—”

  “Coco!” I gripped her shoulders and looked at her through the film of light rain that had begun to fall. “Easy, Holyfield. There is no murderer.”

  Or more accurately, there wasn’t one yet. No one scooped a decent enough man’s brains out of his head if murder wasn’t involved.

  Her pretty face fell when she let me out of her python-like grip. “What? But all that scuffling and blood…and you used code word Twizzlers, Lemon. You scared the ever-lovin’ stuffing out of me. Why would you let me get all worked up like that?”

  Coco never realized until much later that the working up she was talking about was almost always a solo effort. I admit, sometimes I can go along for one of her Mad Hatter rides, but today wasn’t one of them.

  “Coco, listen carefully. There was never a murderer. Not in the bathroom with me, anyway. All that scuffling was just me chasing after Jessica Fletcher because she was throwing toilet paper around like confetti,” I said, and explained what happened. “Anyway, I’m fine. But Myron? He’s not so fine.”

  My stomach lurched again, thinking about poor Myron. Okay, sure, he was a lying, cheating cheat, if you listened to one May Layne—a.k.a. my mother, by the by. And I’d agree, he’d done her so wrong. But he’d been a nice enough cheat, and he certainly didn’t deserve to end up dead.

  Coco gave a quick glance at the doorway of the bathroom and visibly gulped, wrapping her arm around my shoulders and turning me away. Soggy toilet paper was strewn from one end of the sidewalk to the other as the police combed the area where Myron still lay.

  Some of the officers had moved to the thickly wooded area hugging either side of our station, searching for evidence in Myron’s car parked just at the end of the station’s driveway, their voices muffled. I couldn’t believe I’d missed seeing his car, but I guess I wasn’t paying much attention so early in the morning.

  I looked over to the front of the station’s store, a rundown shack my dad had converted into a charming, almost shop-like façade, complete with brick on the upper half of the building and white siding on the lower portion.