Page 6 of Witch and Tell

“So we checked places they might hide a body,” Buffy said.

“You what?” I didn’t want to speculate whotheymight be.

“That was my smart idea,” Thor said. “Not Buffy’s. We searched the stacking house, Lyndon’s compost heap, and the dumpsters behind the Empress and the café.”

“He might be in the millpond,” Buffy added. Some-how she’d gotten hold of my iced tea after all and took a deep swig. “We looked around the edges but didn’t see anything.”

“Except Roz and Lyndon holding hands.” Thor snickered.

“They’re in love, dummy,” Buffy said. She replaced my iced tea on the table and pulled a drumstick from my plate to crunch through its buttermilk crust.

“And the other lady, the one at the retreat center,” Thor said.

The visitor Wanda had mentioned this afternoon at the This-N-That. Her arrival had roughly coincided with Ian’s disappearance. I made a mental note to follow up. “What was she doing?”

Thor shrugged. “I don’t know. Looking around, I guess.”

“She didn’t have a murder weapon, unless it was poison. Like, in a tiny jar.” Buffy set the chicken bone, stripped clean, on my plate. “If you’d like us to continue looking, it will cost you. We take tips, too.”

“That’s enough for now,” I told them. Their investigation had certainly taken a grisly turn. “Your tip is the half of my dinner you’ve eaten.”

After they left, I picked up the remaining piece of chicken, now cold. For whatever reason, Ian had skipped town.

How much heartache could one tiny town hold? My pain alone was enough to cloud the valley. Add La lena’s sadness over Ian’s disappearance, and together we could fill the millpond with tears.

“Here you go, honey.” Darla deposited a slice of pie on my table, but my appetite was gone.

Chapter Four

“Everything will look better in the morning,” goes the old saying, and in my case, it was true. The library was due to open in half an hour, and I made my rounds, basking in how lucky I was to work in such a magnificent place.

The library was housed in Thurston Wilfred’s Italian ate Victorian mansion. Thurston—known these days as Old Man Thurston—had left his home to his youngest daughter, Marilyn, who repurposed it into a library and left it to the town when she died almost thirty years ago.

Marilyn had converted the third-floor servants’ quar ters into an apartment, where I now lived. The rest of the mansion’s rooms, including a conservatory, ranged around a central atrium topped with a stained-glass cupola. An open-air tower loomed above the mansion’s front porch. Over the years, the library’s Persian rugs had worn and leaded glass windows become wavy, but for me, it only added to the charm. Old Man Thurston’s son built Big House across the garden, beyond the caretaker’s cottage. As the last surviving Wilfred, Sam now lived there.

I started my rounds on the library’s second floor, pulling open the faded brocade curtains in the old mansion’s bedrooms, now full of books. Low morning sun flooded the rooms, washing the marble fireplaces with light and creating puddles of warmth on armchairs where Rodney had staked out a rotating selection of napping spots.

“Good morning, books,” I said.

The books yawned and serenaded me with greetings. Birdsong escaped from a shelf in Natural History, and I heard a faraway disco beat and shouts tofeel the burn!from Physical Fitness. My shoulders relaxed. The books talked to me this morning, and their voices were refreshingly loud and clear. Maybe the glitches in my magic had passed and were merely due to sunspots or some other energetic firestorm.

The only flaw I foresaw in my day was how I was going to tell Lalena I’d made zero progress finding Ian. That, and missing Sam, of course. Would I ever get used to it?

Downstairs, I started a pot of coffee in the kitchen. Most library regulars entered through the kitchen door, stopping for a chat and cup of coffee at the long wooden table. Some patrons never made it past the kitchen. I opened the casement window in my office off the kitchen—the mansion’s former pantry under the main staircase—and let the breeze off the Kirby River fill the tiny space. I was happy not to see the crows that had been following me lately.

From there, I moved to the mansion’s former drawing and dining rooms. Sun glinted off their chipped chandeliers. I opened the French doors in Circulation and couldn’t help looking across the lawn. No sign of Sam.

Before opening for business, I stopped by the conservatory to say hello to Roz. Afternoons, she was assistant librarian, but mornings she kept for writing romance novels under her pen name, Eliza Chatterly Windsor. This one featured pirates.

“How’s the new house coming?” I asked her. She and her husband Lyndon Forster, the library’s caretaker, were building a home. Roz was happy to be getting a dedicated writing space, and Lyndon had already mapped out vegetable beds and a plumbed garden shed. I’d miss seeing her on weekday mornings.

“All right,” Roz said, without lifting her fingers from her laptop’s keyboard. I’d leave her be to her world of buccaneers—the romantic lead would likely be called Captain Forster Lyndon or another variation of her husband’s name—and maidens, or dukes and orphaned spinsters, or whatever it was this time.

I unlocked the front door and settled at Circulation to greet the day’s patrons, from the children’s reading hour in Old Man Thurston’s former office, to Mrs. Garlington’s organ students in the late afternoon, to the knitting club members in the conservatory.

Before I could even start sorting returns, Lalena appeared through the open French doors. She glanced meaningfully toward Sam’s empty driveway, then back to me. I looked away to hide my disappointment.

Her expression softened in sympathy. “No Sam yet?”