Wonder Wand Way (Witch of Mintwood Book 10) Read online

  Greer looked appalled. “No way. They can’t have them. They aren’t fit to have a kitten. Not even a wild, nasty kitten.”

  “All the cats went to good homes. I assume Charlie told you?” I said.

  Greer confirmed that she had. “It sounds like we have a lot to do today. I wanted to stick around and fill you in on the gala, and I’m glad I don’t have to work. Charlie said she’s going to take the afternoon off and meet us at Bright Lights. I think you might be onto something with that film festival murder idea. High time we try to find a schedule for that weekend,” said Greer.

  I nodded in agreement. “It doesn’t make sense that someone would want to get rid of Mr. Curtain; the town loved the movie theater. What might make sense is that he was about to do something that somebody didn’t like. That’s what’s been on my mind.

  “Maybe he didn’t even know it. We might never be able to prove he was murdered, but it would be interesting to seek out some of the other ghosts from that time. A visit to the cemetery might be in order.”

  “You mean people who were alive at the time but are ghosts now?” said Greer.

  “Right, Mr. Curtain’s contemporaries,” I said.

  “Who do you have in mind?” Greer said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We might try to find the owners of the other establishments around the theater. He said he went to the diner every day for breakfast. Maybe some of the people who worked there at the time have passed away and were buried in the cemetery.

  “The mayor from that era has also been mentioned several times. If we can find his ghost, he might be able to give us a good picture of what was going on in town at the time. But that’s a big ‘if,’ since I have no idea where he’s buried.”

  What we were proposing to do was going to be a challenge. Some of the people who had lived around here when Mr. Curtain was alive but had now passed away weren’t buried around here. Some had been “from away,” as we say in Maine, and were probably buried where they had come from. Others were cremated and their ashes scattered, so their ghosts wouldn’t be around.

  The first thing we had to do was to get back to the theater and look around for information about the festival. That might help us make a list of ghosts to track down. Honey was the only person from that time who was still alive to talk to, as far as we knew.

  That at least was known.

  Everything else was still a mystery.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Greer and I decided it would be best to start sorting paperwork in one of the offices, while Charlie decided to go do a bit of exploring. From her point of view, it was difficult to make a proper cleaning chart without knowing all the spaces that needed to be cleaned.

  “Do you think if we bought all the paper in Mintwood she wouldn’t be able to make a chart for this project?” Greer asked.

  She didn’t expect a reply, and I didn’t bother to make one.

  We went into one of the offices as Charlie disappeared, and Greer looked around and muttered, “I can’t believe how much junk is in here.”

  “Whose office was this?” I asked.

  “Pretty sure it was another one of Mr. Curtain’s. Looks like he processed film in here,” said Greer. She looked over her shoulder and noted, “We’re much closer to the entrance here. I bet he used this office when he was the only one in the building.”

  “So he could be close to the door in case customers arrived,” I said, nodding. That made about as much sense as anything else I could think of.

  We looked around for a few minutes, then I gathered several fistfuls of papers and tried to stack them in an orderly fashion. That turned out to be more difficult than I expected, because they were so old they stuck together in clumps. From a combination of dust and hot summers, they had undergone a decades-long gluing process.

  “Look at these old film cans,” said Greer. She had moved the desk aside to reveal a huge chest of film canisters.

  “That’s crazy,” I said. “I had no idea those were still here. It’s amazing how much we’re still discovering about the place. I wonder if Honey knows.”

  “She probably doesn’t remember, if she ever did know in the first place,” said Greer. “This doesn’t look like a space where the employees worked.”

  I chewed my lip. “That’s true. Maybe sometime we can put a film on while we work. I’d love to see what they used to show at the picture house.”

  I meant what I said. This case and this project had brought up a lot of memories for me of when I used to watch movies with my grandmother, who loved them. That’s probably why there was a picture of her hanging on the wall of this very cinema. She loved the theater and was as charismatic as anyone in town.

  Somehow along the way I had lost her love of storytelling.

  Helping clear the cinema building was helping me get it back.

  Suddenly pang of guilt ran through me at the reminder that my grandmother had a case of her own, which I kept putting off, even though I kept meaning to look into it. The fact that her ghost had been unable to stick around had raised suspicions about whether her death had been entirely from natural causes, and I knew I had to find out the truth eventually.

  The trouble was, I didn’t know where to start.

  And I was desperately afraid of what I might find if I did start.

  I promised myself I’d speak to Paws about it soon and see what the ghost cat thought. If he thought I should pursue an inquiry, I would do so. If not, not.

  For once, I would listen to him.

  He’d be so pleased . . . maybe.

  We were just starting to look at the rolls of film when we heard yelling from down the hall. Charlie sounded desperate. Before we could even get out of our seats to go see what was the matter, Charlie came running back to us, her face paper white.

  “You might want to come and take a look at this. I found blood.”

  Greer and I hurried to follow her back to one of the control rooms, a small space at the back of the theater. Sure enough, streaked along the floor was something that looked like the dried remains of old blood.

  “I thought Mr. Curtain didn’t show any signs of injury when he died. Was whoever found him lying?” Greer asked.

  “I doubt it. Honey was the one who found him, and she seemed sincere in her description. Maybe this is traces of something else?” I wondered.

  “If someone else was bleeding in the control room window, why didn’t Mr. Curtain mention it?” Charlie asked.

  I bit my lip, thinking. Then inspiration dawned on me. “Charlie, you may have just cracked the case wide open. You’re amazing.”

  “I know all of that. But what are you talking about in this particular instance?” She looked nonplussed.

  I left the control room and hurried to the lobby, my two friends following me while they tried to figure out what I was up to. Then I stopped short. I really didn’t know what to do next, so I looked around the theater and hoped for inspiration. The huge posters were peeling off the walls and the floor was covered in a layer of dust, but somehow the place still sparkled.

  “Here’s what I’m thinking,” I said at last. “Mr. Curtain had a fight with someone, probably the night he died. He had no outward signs of injury, so maybe whoever he fought with left and then came back later with poison. I don’t know. Maybe the person he fought with was the one who was injured,” I said.

  “So you’re saying that somebody killed him soon after the fight. It makes sense. It’s just that all we’ve heard is that everybody loved the movie theater and nobody could possibly have wanted to hurt Mr. Curtain,” said Greer.

  “Somebody wanted to hurt him. Somebody wanted to kill him,” I said.

  Our next step was to search out the ghost of Mr. Curtain in his hidden office so that we could ask him about the blood. Maybe there was an innocent explanation for it, but I doubted it.

  “There are signs of blood in the control room. Do you remember anything about that?” I asked him.

  He fro
wned and then his face cleared.

  “I forgot to mention that. I saw it when I was floating around here after I first became a ghost all those years ago. At first I thought it was kids who had caused it. You know, people have broken in here more than once since the cinema was closed down. Sometimes they’ve done random damage, that sort of thing. That’s what I thought it was.

  “Later I thought about it a bit more and decided I was wrong. Something tells me I know what that blood is from, if only I could piece together the memories,” he said.

  Then he looked down at his hands. For the most part they were smooth and slightly shimmering, but there was a small cut along one of his knuckles. The only way it would still look like a cut was if he had gotten it close to when he died.

  “You know how you got that?” I asked him.

  It hadn’t healed terribly well. I wondered if maybe that was because he had gotten it when he was very old and had died soon after.

  He shook his head. “You’d think I would know where it’s from, wouldn’t you. It’s on my own finger, after all.”

  “I think you got it fighting with somebody in the control room,” I told him.

  “Do you, now? I suppose that’s possible. At my age it probably wasn’t much of a fight,” he observed.

  “Would you have had a fight with someone?” I asked him. There were, after all, people who didn’t get into fistfights at all, ever. I was one of them. I just kicked dark witches out of my town, like a boss.

  “I would like to think I’d stand up for myself. I wasn’t naturally a person who would do that sort of thing, mind, but I’m sure that under the right circumstances I’d have given him the old left right,” he said. He made jabbing motions with his hands. It looked kind of funny, but I would never have said so.

  “I’m sure you would have put up a fight if someone was threatening you or doing something destructive,” I told him.

  “I just wish I knew what I was fighting about,” he said.

  “So do I,” I murmured, lost in thought.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Mrs. Cook and Liam were coming over to the farmhouse that night to discuss what to do with the furniture in Bright Lights Cinema.

  Liam was also hoping to advocate for opening the space again as a theater. It was only a matter of money, he said.

  A little while after dinner we were sitting in my living room waiting for Mrs. Cook; Liam had already arrived. The evening was chilly, and we had a fire going to combat the nip in the air. I had made a pot of tea.

  Paws was sitting in the window keeping a close eye on who knows what, and pretending to ignore us as usual.

  “It’s always a matter of money,” said Charlie, responding to Liam’s enthusiasm.

  “We just need somebody rich to buy it, open it, and want to run it,” Liam said excitedly.

  “What if it was a clothing shop instead?” Greer wondered.

  “Mintwood Museum Clothing Shop. They wouldn’t compete with me because I’m flashier and more original. I like it,” said Liam.

  “Is that a thing?” I asked. A museum clothing shop was not a familiar concept to me.

  “Of course it’s a thing,” said Charlie. She had been a bit snappy all day.

  I couldn’t figure out why, so I asked her.

  She refused to tell me what was wrong, so Greer answered for her. “She and Hansen had a fight.”

  “Oh, the drama,” said Liam.

  “What did you two fight about?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” said Charlie.

  “They fought about dinner,” said Greer.

  “Don’t you eat it?” Liam said.

  Just then there was a knock at the door, and Charlie mumbled something about eating it but not with him, and that’s all we got out of her about it.

  I had debated getting more dressed up, but in the end I decided that if Liam and Mrs. Cook were going to be the only ones who saw me, I didn’t really care how I looked. I ended up putting on old jeans and a blue sweater and sweeping my hair up into a messy ponytail. I was home for the night and I had already washed my hair, plus I didn’t like it on my neck when it was wet and I wanted to let it air dry. A messy updo was my compromise.

  I got up to let Mrs. Cook in.

  When I opened the door, I was in for a shock.

  It wasn’t Mrs. Cook on my porch, it was Jasper Wolf.

  I wished I could disappear, because I looked a mess and he looked amazing.

  When someone said to me that they’d forgotten how good-looking somebody was, I never believed it. It’s always like, how do you forget that?

  I knew exactly how good-looking Jasper Wolf was.

  But that wasn’t exactly the point. In this moment, when the green-eyed man stood in front of me looking slightly surprised, that’s not what I was thinking about. What I was thinking about was how badly the wind had just been knocked out of me. If I had tried to breathe and walk at the same time, for example, it would have been difficult.

  I hoped that my reaction was due in part to how dramatic our relationship had been recently.

  “What do you look surprised for? You’re here to see me, surely, since I’m the one who lives here,” I said, as a fabulously welcoming start to our conversation.

  He only looked more surprised at that.

  I hunched my shoulders a bit and mumbled an apology to him. I supposed that was rude.

  All I could think about was my wet hair and his green eyes staring at me like he’d never seen anything so pretty.

  “Sorry. Hi. I thought you were Mrs. Cook,” I said.

  At that, those green eyes sparked. Like grass on a summer day with a ray of sunshine bursting down on them, the damned beautiful things were twinkling at me.

  “A common misconception. Did you know I dye my hair this dark color? It’s really gray curls on top of my head all the way,” he smiled.

  He had an easy smile, while I was in turmoil! The nerve of the man!

  “That’s really funny,” Liam yelled from the living room.

  I really had to stop having traitors for friends.

  “Is that Liam? Hi, Liam,” Jasper called out.

  “And Charlie and Greer,” Charlie yelled.

  “Hi to you both of you as well,” Jasper yelled.

  I merely looked at him. I was trying to act competent. Hopefully I looked competent, but I surely didn’t feel it.

  If someone had told me that I’d be seeing Jasper that night, I would have taken at least an hour to get ready. Revenge looking cute and that sort of thing, whether I should have or not. It was just a fact. It would’ve happened. Like night follows day.

  “You left this book at the Babbling Brook Barn. I thought you might be missing it,” he said.

  He handed me one of my grandmother’s recipe books. Surely I had not been missing it. A few weeks back there had been about a five-day period when I actually thought I was going to cook regularly and had figured I’d look at Evenlyn’s cookbooks for inspiration/hope/proof I could do it.

  I had given up any notion of cooking pretty quickly. Why would I bother when Greer was such an excellent chef?

  Also, I was terrible at it. Maybe not as bad as Charlie—nobody was as bad as Charlie—but still not good. Okay, if worse came to worst I could definitely feed myself. I just wasn’t going to make anybody fall in love with me over spaghetti.

  Greer could probably make somebody fall in love with her over squid and seaweed if she wanted to. Luckily for her, she was already spoken for.

  “Thank you for bringing it back. I was kind of wondering where it was,” I lied.

  “You’re welcome. I did call first. As usual it didn’t work,” he said.

  Inspiration dawned on me. Maybe that was why he had said he needed a break from us. He couldn’t reach me by phone. I quickly told myself to stop being an awkward idiot.

  Easier said than done.

  Hopefully I’d stop talking to myself soon. I reminded myself one last time that Jasper was the one w
ho had come to see me and not the other way around.

  “I should get going,” he said.

  “Thanks for coming by,” I said. The words nearly stuck in my throat. He looked like he was about to say something else, then thought better of it.

  He walked toward the porch steps. Then he turned to look at me. “I hear you’re working on Bright Lights. That’s exciting. There’s nobody better for the job.”

  “There’s nobody else who would do the job,” came Paws’ voice from the top of the crate.

  Jasper looked right at the cat.

  He had never done that before.

  He smiled slightly.

  Then he did something incredible.

  He winked.

  For once I wasn’t the only one who was speechless.

  Jasper continued on his way to his black truck. As he left, I turned and gaped at Paws. He, in turn, was staring at the retreating figure of my . . . boyfriend?

  Just as Jasper was driving away, another car came up the driveway. It had to be Mrs. Cook this time.

  I could hear the chattering of voices behind me as I stepped back inside, careful to leave the door open so Mrs. Cook would know to come in. It was too chilly to stand on the porch without a jacket, and I hadn’t grabbed one because I had never expected to be outside in the first place.

  I had no idea what my face looked like, but luckily everyone interpreted my expression as shock at seeing Jasper instead of shock at Jasper seeing Paws.

  “Did you know he was coming?” Liam asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Did you order him never to come back?” Charlie demanded.

  I shook my head.

  “Do you have any intention of using your words?” Greer asked.

  “He wanted to return my book,” I said. I feebly held out the book.

  “He missed you and wanted to see you. He also wanted to see if you hated him,” said Charlie. “I see you didn’t set him straight on that score.”

  “Because she doesn’t hate him. She loves him and wants it all to work out. It’s so romantic,” said Liam.