Undercover Coven (Sister Witchcraft Book 3) Read online

  I sat in her bedroom, not out in the living room, because I’d fully expected her to crawl into the window and pretend she’d been here the whole time. When you’re her age, you have this odd expectation that everybody around you is just as stupid as you need them to be, at any given time.

  I am not stupid, except in so far as I trusted my little sister.

  What I’d wanted to do was to give old Grand-Mere’s personal spell-book a run through. Set up alarms all over the house for when Lucy tried to get in anywhere. Then maybe enchant the hair clippers Sibyl kept for cutting her husband Gary’s hair, and with that spell give Lucy a good inverse-mohawk as a reminder that… that at the moment, I was very mad.

  But Gary didn’t know anything about magic, and Sibyl was determined that it was going to stay that way, so I couldn’t do anything to obvious to the family. Gary and daughters Cathy and Molly didn’t know a thing about the family legacy (or Sibyl’s own dalliances with fighting the forces of darkness when she was a teenager — but that’s a completely other story.) They were to remain ignorant—which was a shame, because our family has a great legacy, something to be proud of. It bothered me to think we would let Grand-Mere’s contributions to the community slip away like this.

  But as long as I was under Sibyl’s roof, I’d abide by those rules. Which meant I needed to get my own place, soon. Which was about to become easier, since as the clock ticked by I was getting closer and closer to being ready to murder my little sister.

  So I wouldn’t need a second bedroom. My rent was going down.

  She tricked me, though, by not trying to sneak into her bedroom at all. Instead, I heard her key rattling in the front door, a sound that in the cold and quiet night reverberated down the hall like she was playing some bizarre rattling percussion instrument.

  I was in the living room the second she stepped inside. Were I in the mood, I would have laughed at the expression on her face. She looked like a burglar caught in a spotlight. Her eyes glanced back outside, as if she was going to step back out, close the door, and just go away.

  “What in the world are you thinking?” I said, my voice a harsh whisper, trying to yell at her without waking up anyone else in the house.

  “Um,” she said, eloquently.

  “Oh, of course. My mistake. You’re not thinking. You’re just doing. Doing whatever you want to do at any minute of the day, making the one person who sticks up for you look like and feel like an idiot for trying.”

  “But—”

  “No buts, no excuses. No nothing from you until you explain to me why you left your phone off. Why you weren’t studying at school like you said.”

  “I didn’t say—”

  “It doesn’t matter what you say if you don’t tell the truth anyway!”

  I might have been flapping my arms up and down. I couldn’t tell, I was so apoplectic. I just know they were up at my sides when a hand touched my shoulder, so when I whipped around I nearly chopped Sibyl in the throat.

  “Mimi, calm down, lower your voice,” she said in a calm, soothing tone like you might use with an upset camel.

  “Calm down?” I said.

  “Yes,” Sibyl said. Lucy tried to sneak by us, but Sibyl, who kept one hand on my shoulder, whipped out her other arm and grabbed Lucy in a death grip.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” she said to our younger sister.

  Lucy smiled, with a bit of snarky triumph. “Bed. It’s late and I’ve got…”

  Sibyl had one distinct advantage over me (well, two — her grip was like some kind of crazy monkey. I was going to have bruises where she grabbed me.) That advantage was she was a mom. She had mom moves.

  And her ace number one mom move was a glare that could shame a hardened criminal. Lucy’s triumphant look was like a balloon, and Sibyl’s expression was a shotgun blast. She didn’t deflate, she disappeared.

  Lucy sat on one of the oversized chairs that faced the glass coffee table in the middle of Sibyl’s aggressively middle-class living room. I opted for the couch opposite her, so I could bring her down if she bolted.

  Sibyl stood between us, our mediator. Or our ref. I didn’t wait for the bell to ring.

  “You lied to me,” I said, trying to keep emotion out of my voice, which just made it crack.

  Lucy looked away from me. She was lucky she didn’t roll those eyes. I’d have turned her into a newt.

  “Lucy,” Sibyl said, “You didn’t come home when you said you would.”

  “Well, no, I couldn’t because I had other stuff I needed to do!” she said, looking at our faces as if what she’d said were an argument, and a compelling one.

  “What stuff?” I said, hurling the words at her.

  “Well… I’m not going to talk about it if you’re just going to be all mad.” Lucy crossed her arms and looked to the side, as if she were the offended party.

  “I have every right to be mad,” I said.

  Lucy glanced at me out of the corner of her eye, then hmphed.

  “Lucy, whatever you had to do, you needed to call one of us and tell us,” Sibyl said. She was being way nicer to Lucy now that she had been to me this afternoon.

  “Then you would have made me come home. Which you have no right to do. Neither of you are my mom.”

  “Oh, have you been raising yourself?” I said, getting out of my seat. “Paying your own bills? Your own rent?”

  “If I was doing that, I’d have never left Los Angeles,” she said.

  I wanted to let loose on her then, to bring all the force of my anger and personality to bear against her. But she hadn’t said it in a snotty way. It was matter of fact, and somehow that made it more hurtful.

  “Well, you turn 18 in a few months. Then you can go and do whatever you want.”

  “I’ll still need money, though. Do you think the tea shop will be getting enough business by then that I can save some up?” she said, her eyes brightening.

  “Lucy…” I said, feeling a little confused. Did she not understand how angry we were at her? How she’d taken advantage? “Lucy, you’re in trouble. We’re not discussing your future right now, we’re figuring out how to punish you.”

  “But I explained—”

  “No,” Sibyl cut in, firmly. “You didn’t explain. You just said you had ‘other things to do’. After what happened at school, picking today to stay out half the night was a particularly dumb thing to do, Lucy. And tomorrow I’ll be picking you up right from school, right when it lets out.”

  “You’ll be waiting an hour, I’ve got detention.”

  “Right from school,” Sibyl said.

  Lucy sighed, gave me a baleful look. “I thought you’d be happy I was with friends,” she said.

  She walked by Sibyl, who stopped her to give her a firm hug. Then Lucy wandered off to her room, yawning and stretching like we hadn’t just given her a talking-to.

  “She couldn’t even storm off, or swear,” I said, when her door had closed. “She’s been bad… and she should feel bad about it! I’m going to find some spell, something that will force her to feel bad.”

  “Mimi,” Sibyl said, in a warning tone.

  “I’ll cast it at work, not here. Maybe give her warts, too. So she can look at them and remember she should feel bad.”

  “You are not going to be cursing your sister,” Sibyl said.

  “No? Well, like the girl whose side you’ve inexplicably taken in this fight, let me tell you: you’re not Mom. You can’t tell me what to do.”

  “I can tell you what decent people do, and it’s not magic,” she said, lowering her voice on the last word so only I could hear it.

  “Why didn’t you let me let her have it?” I said.

  “Because it wouldn’t have worked. Number one, because you’re not in charge of her, not really. Number two, because you saw how she is. It would bounce right off of her. We need to find a way to let her understand that her actions will have consequences. Such as a loss of cell phone privileges,” Sibyl said,
her hand coming out of her pocket, Lucy’s cell phone hidden in her palm.

  “Holy cats, you’re a pick pocket!” I said between laughs.

  “Just a mom. Do you know her passcode?” she said, turning the phone on. “Let’s find out who she was with.”

  Chapter 5

  Neither of us did, though, know her passcode, or any way to try and get into it, so we had to let the fact that we got it away from her be punishment enough. She was furious when she’d discovered the theft at the breakfast table, and Sibyl’s bland, unemotional defense of her actions made her even angrier. She looked at me for an appeal, but I just grinned. She fumed for the rest of breakfast, plunging her spoon into her oatmeal like she was spearing a boar.

  Sibyl insisted on driving her to school, and I left for the morning shift with a heart light as a feather. I was still singing to myself when the first customers arrived — (yes, the Groves, this time wearing sweaters with chickens on them, of various numbers in a pattern I couldn’t figure out.)

  But while their chickens looked fun and funny, the sisters had gloomy faces. They were quiet and pensive looking, as if afraid of saying the wrong thing.

  I looked at them as they shuffled into the tea room, and finally said, “What, did the gin rummy game break out into a fight?”

  “Almost,” Beth said, with a ghost of a smile that soon flitted from her face. Something was wrong.

  “Okay, no tea until I hear what’s bothering y’all. I’m in a good mood this morning, and I don’t aim to have you ruin it. Who died?” I said, and then the smile came off my face when they all flinched at once.

  “Uh-oh,” I said. “Now you really have to tell me. Did something happen, is somebody sick, or—”

  “We don’t like to gossip,” Lana Groves said, and it was a wonder lightning didn’t strike her down right on the spot for telling such an obvious fib. “And you didn’t hear it from us, but…”

  She stopped, and looked at her sisters. “There’s a vacancy on the high school teaching staff.”

  My eyebrows flew up. “Wait, what—”

  “Yes, Mrs. Higginbottom, bless her soul, died last night.”

  I nodded, like I was pretending to understand a foreign language, and it took a second, a long second, before the information actually reached the processing part of my brain.

  And, shamefully, my first thought was, I guess that means Lucy’s out of detention.

  In order to banish that unkind bit of thinking I said, “Oh my goodness, she was one of my teachers. My younger sister has her, too.”

  “Oh, dear,” Lana said. She reached over, and patted me on the shoulder, and said close to my ear, in a kind of stage whisper. “You don’t have to pretend for us.”

  “Pretend what?” I said, maybe a little too loudly.

  “That you’re sad. Nobody in town liked her. There’ve been at least three petitions in the last five years to get her off the staff of the high school, or at least out as the head of the English department. But the teacher’s unions, it’s like…”

  “Going against the politburo in Stalin’s Soviet Union,” Tina said, gravely.

  The Groves all nodded at that ridiculous comparison, as if they’d all been red diaper babies who knew just what it was to go against the party. To me, it seemed a very strange conversation.

  “Um, but… you all seem sad, and…” I didn’t find a way to finish my sentence without accusing them of being liars, or hypocrites, or something.

  “Well, you have to seem sad, don’t you?” Lana said, and all the sisters nodded in unison. “What if her husband were to come around the corner? Even if he hated her as much as everybody else, it would be… uncouth to seem happy about someone’s passing.”

  “Uncouth,” Kari echoed, who was the first of the Groves to sit down.

  There was way too much to think or say here, so I immediately begged off to the kitchen to catch my breath. It was in that moment, the breath catching moment, that some disparate thoughts finally came together. That woman I saw yesterday, that nasty woman I’d really disliked, was dead.

  Completely unbidden, like a poison pen letter from an awful former friend, words that I’d heard the night before came into my mind.

  “I thought you’d be happy,” Lucy said.

  But that was crazy. Even pretending to think that she had something to do with this was the craziest thing.

  It was a wild, horrible coincidence that she’d disappeared for hours on the night when she’d had a big confrontation with a woman who had ended up dead the next day. Just dead, by the way, I reminded myself. None of the Secret Angels had said anything about a murder. That was my own imagination running away with itself. Because I was secretly still very angry with my little sister. Even so, surely my imagination isn’t… vindictive enough to accuse her of a murder. A murder that hadn’t even happened.

  I came out with a tray full of tea, and there were more people in my shop. People, chattering with each other. Including, a little unhappily for my purposes, Martin Tanner. Behind his glasses and hairstyle from 20 years ago, maybe he was cute, but that was the least important thing about him. Because he was my brother-in-law’s brother.

  I didn’t know if Gary had told him anything about the trouble with Lucy. I didn’t think so, because they were brothers, not sisters. With sisters when something happens some sort of magic intuition brings a phone right to our ears so we can tell each other immediately. When Sibyl and I were “too busy” for one another, that meant we’d only talk on the phone every other day.

  Gary and Martin lived within a few blocks of each other, and I do not think that Martin had visited Gary’s house more than once in the months we’d been living there. They weren’t estranged. Brothers just do things differently. A little wrong, if you ask me.

  What I didn’t want was to have to talk about Lucy while these dark thoughts were going through my head. It was bad enough I was making up these associations (out of thin air, mind you.) To have to say something about them might make them kind of real.

  “Hey, Mimi. I guess you heard?” Martin said.

  “Heard?” I said, not giving anything away.

  “Yeah, about old Mrs. Higginbottom. God, it still floors me that she got married. Who, what, on what bet…” Martin was practically sputtering.

  “Now, now, Mr. Tanner,” Lana Groves said, sipping her tea as punctuation. “Do not speak ill of the dead. So loudly, at least.”

  I smiled, then pulled Martin aside. I wasn’t getting away with just a nod and a by your leave, so I needed to buttonhole him and get everything I could.

  “What have you heard? What happened?” I said.

  “Haven’t heard much. I was just setting up my shop to open when I heard it over the police band.”

  “Does every guy spend his time doing that?” I said. I know my special friend Max Ransom on the newspaper regularly monitored the police band, but he had a professional interest. Martin was just a little weird. “Isn’t the equipment expensive?”

  “I have an app on my phone that can listen in over the police scanners. Hear the cops talking,” he said, with a twinkle in his eye like he was really getting away with something.

  “That’s not illegal?” I said, feeling a little scandalized.

  “Radio waves travel in the air. The government doesn’t own the air. Yet,” he said, and he looked like he was going to go into a detailed discussion of just what the government did own, or thought it owned, a discussion I wanted nothing to do with.

  “But what did they say? Why would the police come?” I said.

  “926 at 423 Rochemon Street. 926 is code for body. If somebody’s found dead, the ambulance, the cops, and a fire truck usually respond. That’s standard,” Martin said, pushing his glasses back on his face and looking a little like a professor. It was a good look for him, and something he should pursue. He ran a gaming store just a couple of doors over from the tea shop, and he hadn’t fallen into the trap of looking like the sort of guy who ran a gami
ng shop… yet. But he needed maintenance and grooming and a girlfriend, stat, or he might go that way.

  “So, if that was all standard, that could mean anything. She could have fallen down the stairs, or had a heart attack,” I said, feeling a pressure I didn’t know had been building up in me suddenly released.

  Until Martin put his hand up. “Only, what they don’t do in those cases is call in for backup, rope off the house, and begin talking to witnesses. But that’s what happened five minutes after the cops arrived.”

  “Oh,” I said, and I swallowed.

  “You look all shaken up. You didn’t like her anymore than anybody,” he said.

  “You don’t have to like a person to be sad they’re dead,” I said. “You don’t have to like them to be upset if somebody killed them, which is what you’re saying happened.”

  Martin put both hands up, in a surrender. “Okay, okay. Hey, I’ll take Earl Grey when you get the chance. And… egg and bacon sandwich. I’ll be in the corner.”

  I was totally confused by the last thing he said. Who could think about eating at a time like this? And Earl Grey, what… then I remembered I was in a tea shop. Serving tea and breakfast and I was the one being silly, not him.

  While I was preparing Martin’s order, trying not to think about anything in particular, the shop phone rang. I picked it up, and forced all the niceness in the world that I did not feel into my voice: “Auclair Tea, making a reservation?” I said.

  A man spoke on the other end. “Hmm? I’m sorry, I might have the wrong number. I’m calling from Lafay High, trying to get in touch with the guardian of Lucy Auclair. Can I speak to— ?”

  “That’s me! That’s me, I’m Mimi, I’m her guardian. Is something wrong? Is Lucy okay?” I said, setting the tray in my hands back down on the counter so that I didn’t drop it on the floor in my flustered state.

  “Okay, hello, Miss Auclair… wait a minute. Mimi Auclair? As in Mimi, Mimi?” he said.

  “What? I don’t understand. Lucy…”

  “It’s me, Mimi. Heh. It’s Brent Wergen. Hey, don’t you remember me? We… irony of ironies, I suppose. We were both in Mrs. Higginbottom’s English together our junior year,” he said.