Anna Denning Mystery Series Box Set: Books 1–3 Read online

  “I don’t care.”

  “Tell me about the text messages.”

  “I didn’t want to send them. I didn’t know what to do.”

  Anna glanced sideways at Jazmin. She was twirling a short strand of orange hair at her right temple and nervously chewing on her lower lip as she stared through the windshield. “Why did you do it, then?”

  “Because everyone was there, texting. They expected me to do it too.”

  “I thought you were walking your own path.”

  Jazmin shot Anna a wounded look.

  “Never mind. Whose idea was it to text the website?”

  “Jason’s and Darlene’s. They were joking about it. I didn’t think they were serious, but then they told us all to get our phones.”

  “Why did you send two text messages? Everyone else sent one.”

  “They were texting some other place about you and I didn’t want to, so I sent two to ElkNews.com.”

  Anna blinked. “What other place were they texting?”

  “I don’t know, I think a newspaper. But I didn’t want to do it, so I pretended to text it but I texted ElkNews.com again.”

  “Unbelievable!” Anna slapped the steering wheel with the palm of her hand.

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  Anna glared at Jazmin. “Don’t you say that. You have free will. You’re not ten years old.” She forced herself to look back to the road. She wasn’t going to get in an accident over this. “Don’t you dare say that to me.”

  “I thought it was the truth about them taking your license away. That’s what I heard.”

  Anna was silent.

  “You think I’m horrible, don’t you?”

  “No. I just think you’re . . .” She searched for the right word. “Deceived.”

  “By Darlene?” The pout Anna had come to know so well formed again on Jazmin’s face.

  “For starters, yes.”

  “Darlene’s not—” Jazmin stopped. Her lips pursed in frustration, she jammed her fingers through her bangs.

  “She’s not what?” Anna made a right into Faith Chapel’s parking lot and pulled into the first vacant space. She shut off her engine and threw her right arm over the seat back, facing Jazmin, waiting.

  “She’s not the bad person you think she is. You don’t know her like I do.”

  “True.” Anna couldn’t stand it anymore. Jazmin was full of admiration for Darlene. She refused to see the truth, and Anna had no patience for deliberate, willful ignorance. It was time to lay it on the line.

  “Here it is, Jazmin. You want to hear how I know Darlene? I know her as the person who used you so you could use me. She looked into my background so she could threaten me, she somehow forced Tom Muncy to appoint her as a governor’s committee liaison, and she went to the police yesterday and accused me of stealing the athame you found in your couch.”

  Jazmin gaped. “She went to the police?”

  Anna stared hard at Jazmin and the girl looked down at her hands, fidgeting with a hangnail on her thumb. Surely the important part of what she’d just said was that Darlene had accused her of stealing the athame, not that Darlene had gone to the police. Could it mean that Darlene told Jazmin the athame had been stolen and that Anna had taken it? Did Darlene also tell her that Anna was the one who broke into her apartment?

  “What did Darlene tell you about that athame?” Anna asked. Jazmin was quiet, still tugging at the hangnail. “You owe me the truth, Jazmin.”

  When Jazmin finally looked at Anna she seemed stricken. Some of the truth about Darlene was at long last hitting home. “You didn’t steal it?”

  “And break into your apartment and stick it in your couch, along with that note? Then come visit you?” Anna wanted to grab Jazmin by the shoulders and shake some sense into her. “Of course not, Jazmin, think.”

  Jazmin hesitated. She seemed to be casting about for excuses. “Then Darlene really thought you took it. That’s the only reason she’d say that.”

  “Why would she think I took it?”

  “I don’t know, but she must have a good reason.”

  “I met her for the first time the day before yesterday. I’ve only been in her store two times, and you stood right next to me both times. So when did I steal the athame and what’s Darlene’s good reason for thinking I did?”

  Jazmin sighed and dropped her hands into her laps. She was still looking for a way out, Anna realized, foraging through her memory and her stock phrases for a way to explain Darlene’s behavior, as much for her own sake as for Darlene’s.

  “She lied to you.” Anna spoke slowly and deliberately. “And she used you to hurt people.”

  “She cares about people, and she’s a good person.”

  “What does good mean to you?” Anna said sharply. “Good people don’t lie to their friends, file false police reports, and get a kick out of threatening people with their so-called power.”

  Anna wondered why she was hammering the point. Jazmin didn’t want to hear the truth. She had closed her ears to it. But Anna had once been a lonely kid like Jazmin, looking for fun and friendship—even for a little power over her own rudderless life. And Christ had called her, with great mercy, from darkness into the light.

  “I mean she cares about people when everybody else thinks they’re nothing,” Jazmin said firmly. “Like Rowan and me, and Jason. And she does have power.” She looked up at Anna, her face lined with sadness. “Maybe she lied, but she has power and she uses it.”

  Anna swallowed a grunt of disgust. It was time Jazmin knew everything. It was the only way to break the sick hold Darlene had on her. “Did Darlene say anything about a bird?”

  “What bird?”

  “Someone killed a small bird, nailed it to a branch, and left it on my doorstep last night as a Yule present.”

  Jazmin took a ragged breath and shut her eyes. When she inhaled again, her breath fluttered, motor-like. Dimples creased her chin as it quivered, and tears spilled onto her cheeks. “No,” she said, wiping them away with the heels of her hands.

  Jazmin was lost and afraid. She had clung to Darlene, her life preserver on pitching seas, and now Anna was taking that away from her. Anna forced herself to go on. “I need to ask you something,” she said. “Did you have something to do with the chalk pentacle on my doorstep night before last?”

  Jazmin turned a mournful eye to Anna. “Yes.” She wiped her eyes, already rimmed in red, with the sleeve of her jacket. “I drew it, I’m sorry.”

  “Was anyone with you?”

  “Rowan drove me. He stayed in the car.”

  “Whose car?”

  “Jason and Monica’s.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “Darlene was talking about how you didn’t believe in her power. She was mad and I wanted to do something for her. So I drew it and told her the next day at work.”

  “And was she pleased?”

  Jazmin looked away. “Yes.”

  “You scared me to death, Jazmin. Not because of witch power or any of that garbage. I thought someone was going to break into my house. Can you understand that?”

  “Yes.”

  Anna glanced at her rearview mirror as a car drove past and pulled into a parking space behind her. A woman got out, her chin down against the cold. She walked by the Jimmy and turned once to stare briefly but intently at Anna and Jazmin through the windshield before wrapping her coat around her and sprinting for the door. Faith Chapel was a small church, and Anna thought she knew every face. But not this woman.

  She again turned her attention to Jazmin, who was fingering the zipper on her jacket. “You don’t think it’s strange that Darlene would be pleased that you did that to me?”

  “I guess.”

  “Tell me the truth.” She paused, waiting for Jazmin to do her the courtesy of looking at her. “Who killed the bird?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t have any idea? No one talked about leaving me something for Yule?”


  Jazmin shook her head slowly from side to side. “No. I would’ve said something to stop them. I like birds. No one I know would kill a bird.”

  Anna studied Jazmin’s face. The girl’s emotions were genuine, but was she grieved over the bird’s cruel death or the certainty that someone she knew had killed it? “According to you, no one you know would try to scare you by breaking into your apartment and leaving an athame in your couch, either. I don’t think you know these people as well as you think you do.”

  Jazmin looked away again.

  Anna hoped that some of what she was saying was sinking in, but the look in Jazmin’s eye, her whole body, said she was fighting it, defending Darlene and the others in her mind. Anna wondered if she should tell Jazmin that she’d translated the note in the witch’s alphabet. But it was a threat—don’t betray us—and if Jazmin didn’t already know or suspect what was in the note, Anna wasn’t going to be party to passing it along to her.

  “Maybe the bird was already dead,” Jazmin said hopefully.

  “Sure, there are dead birds all over the place, just for the picking.” What was wrong with this girl? Anna had been foolish at her age, but nothing like this. “Find a dead bird, nail it to a branch, leave it at someone’s door. That’s perfectly normal.”

  Anna paused. Sarcasm was lost on Jazmin. Maybe if she asked Jazmin’s opinion instead of attacking her, the girl would relax and open up. “Let me ask you something else. Why do you think Darlene had you hire me to do Susan Muncy’s genealogy?”

  “I thought about that.” Jazmin drew her left knee up, planted her heel on the seat, and looked at Anna. “When we were looking at the genealogy you did, Darlene kept saying what a phony Susan was. She said Susan wasn’t hereditary and now she had the proof. She hired you to get the proof. So I think Susan was faking it. She wanted to prove to Darlene that her mother and grandmother and all the women in her family were in the craft so she could get into Darlene’s coven. All the witches in her coven are hereditary.”

  “You have to be hereditary to get into Darlene’s coven?”

  “Yeah, but you only need one witch ancestor. Not your mom—older than that. And only women witches. Darlene doesn’t believe in male witches. That’s why she doesn’t like wicca. She thinks men invented it to control women.”

  “That explains why Darlene was only interested in researching the female side of Susan’s family.” And it explained Hannah Gardner Wells. But Susan wasn’t pretending she was a hereditary witch, she was one. Her family tree was full of witches. Darlene must have known that, so why did she say otherwise? Did Tom know it? And what did he think about his wife wanting to join a coven? It couldn’t have sat very well with his political ambitions.

  “Nothing about this makes any sense,” Anna said, more to herself than to Jazmin. “Before the day Tom gave Darlene the names of Susan’s parents, had you ever seen him in the store before?”

  “No, he’s so tall and skinny I would’ve remembered. Why?”

  “I’m not sure.” Anna decided to play her cards close to her vest. Jazmin was opening up, but she still wasn’t being wholly honest, and the girl’s first loyalty was to Darlene. Anything Anna said to Jazmin would go straight to Darlene’s ear. “I think I need to have a talk with Darlene.”

  Jazmin reacted as though she’d been backhanded, at once offended and afraid. “You can’t. I wouldn’t have talked to you if I knew you’d do that. Leave her alone. She’s already used spells against you, she told me. If you keep bugging her she’ll use powerful magic—and she won’t stop.”

  “Don’t worry about me.” Anna reached behind Jazmin to the back seat, grabbing the box of church bulletins. Jazmin believed in witchcraft and magical powers, and arguments to the contrary would only make her dig in her heels.

  Anna sat the box on her lap. “Don’t worry about anything. I won’t tell Darlene we talked. After I take the bulletins to my pastor, I’ll drive you back and let you off a couple blocks away from the store. No one will know we spoke.”

  Jazmin gave Anna the sort of withering look a parent would give a stubborn child. “You don’t get it. She doesn’t believe in the wiccan rede.”

  “Neither do I.” Anna slid down from the Jimmy’s high seat, box in hand.

  “She thinks there’s no such thing as evil magic or good magic.” Jazmin raised her voice, desperate for Anna to believe her. “She thinks all the magic in the universe is for her to use any way she wants, and she has incredible power.”

  “What do you think power is?” Anna asked, leaning against the SUV’s door frame. “Threatening people to get them to do what you want? Walking around telling everyone how powerful you are so they’ll kowtow to you? That’s not power. Not even close.”

  Jazmin opened the car door and stepped down into the parking lot. “I’ll walk from here,” she said before shutting the door.

  “It’ll take you fifteen minutes or more,” Anna said, moving behind the car and looking Jazmin in the eye.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, I’ll bring everyone coffee and they’ll forget I was gone.”

  “Wait a minute.” Anna went back to her car, opened the glove compartment, and pulled out a five-dollar bill. “This will help,” she said, handing it to Jazmin. “Make Rowan pay for his latte. He’s the expensive one.”

  Jazmin contemplated the bill in her hand. She made a slight forward motion with her arm, as if she were going to give it back to Anna, but she closed her hand around the bill and stuck it in her jacket pocket. “Thanks. And thanks for not being mad.”

  She started to walk off then stopped and turned. “My name is Jazmin, but my mundane name is Hayley Todd. Hayley’s for Hayley Mills, the actress. My mom liked her.”

  13

  Anna pulled into the small employee parking lot behind What Ye Will, her stomach growling as she stepped out of the Jimmy. It seemed pointless to cook a full breakfast for one, but she’d have to start making an effort. Something more than the one egg and few sips of coffee she’d had this morning, anyway. She pushed her jacket from her watch and checked the time. Forty-five minutes before she had to meet Liz at the Buffalo—plenty of time.

  She glanced to her right and saw a slice of the rocky outcrop where Summit bent north. Except for the vertical faces, the outcrop was white with snow. The forecast was for more snow, but for now the sun was shining brightly, hinting falsely at a warm, sunny day. She walked around the building to the front of the store, entered, and stood just inside the doors, looking for Darlene. In a matter of seconds, Rowan was at her side, a scowl planted on his face.

  “Here to steal something else?” he said.

  “Knock it off, Rowan, you know I didn’t steal that athame.”

  He folded his arms across his chest, a defiant look in his eyes. “Yeah? Jazmin told me she found it stuck in her couch yesterday, the day you just happened to go to her apartment.”

  “The day you just happened to show up too. Did you steal the athame? Break into her apartment and stick it in her couch?”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “Exactly.” She hadn’t intended to get into an argument with Rowan, but she wasn’t going to let his accusations go unchallenged. It seemed to her that Rowan was rarely if ever challenged to think matters through, and that was his main problem. He was intelligent, but he saw the world as he wanted to see it, or as Darlene wanted him to see it. He had pagan blinders on, the size of eighteen-wheeler mudflaps.

  Rowan dropped his arms. “No one else would have stolen it or stuck it in Jazmin’s couch.” He wasn’t making a statement, he was hoping for confirmation from Anna, and he knew he wasn’t going to get it. “Nobody here would’ve done that, no way, and it couldn’t have been a customer.”

  “It could have been any number of people, Rowan. And remember, I didn’t know Jazmin’s address before Darlene told her to give it to me. I didn’t know anything about any of you until Darlene hired me to research Susan
Muncy’s family tree.” Anna heard a gasp of exasperation, then saw Darlene taking long strides in her direction, the wide legs of her black pants billowing as she walked.

  “You’ve got a lot of nerve,” Darlene said, stepping close to Anna, her hand to her breastbone.

  “You and I need to talk,” Anna said. “Here or in your office, it’s up to you.”

  Darlene took half a step forward and looked down her nose at Anna. “In my office.” She spun around and stomped for the back of the store, and Rowan, eyes wide, stared after her.

  Darlene was sitting behind her desk when Anna entered. She signaled for Anna to sit in a wooden chair against one wall, but Anna declined. She was going to face Darlene head on, and she was going to do it standing.

  “You don’t want to sit? That’s your choice. But I expect an apology from you before you say another word.”

  It was Darlene on the offense again, striking first. “An apology is what I came here for, Darlene. I want one from you. And then I want you to go to the police and tell them the truth. You know where the police department is, don’t you?”

  Darlene said nothing. She drummed the top of her desk with the nails of her right hand, her lips pinched in a strained smile.

  “I’m not playing your game,” Anna said.

  “Game?” Darlene stopped drumming. “I don’t know how to play games. Believe me, games are not in my nature.” She stared icily at Anna, all traces of a smile gone. “You steal from my store and—”

  “I thought you didn’t play games.”

  Without taking her eyes from Anna, Darlene reached for a cobalt blue mug on her desk. She made small circles with her hand, swirling the mug’s contents. “Would you like to see something?” Without waiting for an answer Darlene left her mug on the desk and walked to a tall, narrow cabinet next to the rear exit. “Since you’re interested in the accoutrements of the craft.”

  “Fascinated,” Anna said in a deadpan voice.

  When Darlene turned around she was holding a round black mirror the size of a teacup saucer. It was framed in a silver metal, and there were symbols engraved at the bottom. “Have you ever looked into one of these?”