Murder Most Witchy (Wendy Lightower Mystery) Read Free Page A

there?"
    Charlie lifted one paw to his mouth and licked it.
    "Cleaning yourself. What else?"
    Her words sparked some action in the cat. He moved towards one end of the tub and shoved at the small opening in the sliding doors. The problem was that Charlie weighed approximately fourteen pounds, and the opening he tried to slip through was only four inches wide. He knocked his head against the glass and landed back in the tub.
    "That isn't going to happen," Wendy told him.
    He tried again anyway.
    After the third attempt, she took pity on the cat and slid the door open the rest of the way.
    "What I want to know," she commented at his retreating figure, "is how you got in there in the first place."
    Charlie's tail swished back and forth as he disappeared through an open doorway. His offended dignity was palpable. She probably wouldn't see him for again for another three days. She refilled his food and water bowl, knowing that the only way she would know that he hadn't abandoned her completely would be from seeing those empty containers each morning.
    Having taken care of her feline's dietary needs, Wendy decided she probably think about taking care of her own. She went into her kitchen and began thumbing through a stack of take out menus. Pictures of greasy Chinese food and inauthentic Thai cuisine followed the standard photos of pizza and breadsticks. The glossy staged pictures served only to make her stomach turn backflips. As much as she didn't want to cook, neither did she want anything she saw in the images displayed on the tri-fold menus in her junk drawer. She finally gave up, shoving the menus back into the darkness of the drawer and pulling open her freezer.
    A bag of frozen shrimp paired with a head of broccoli from the vegetable drawer made a decent enough stir-fry. After the french fries at the bar, it was at least enough to make her feel comfortably full.
    As she ate perched on a stool at her breakfast bar, her eyes kept drifting towards the small, unobtrusive closet near the front door. It was smaller than a regular door, and assuming it was for storage, no one ever tried to open it. Lucky for her. Someone might start asking questions if, after trying to open it, they found it was locked with the most expensive deadbolt available. Anybody with a grain of intelligence would wonder what exactly she wanted to keep so secret and protected from prying eyes.
    It was a pretty safe bet, however, that no one would ever guess what was actually inside.
    Though she hadn't opened it in months, Wendy realized it was the second time in a single day that her thoughts had centered on that closet and its contents. She knew better than most that coincidences were non-existent and were, in fact, only a coping mechanism for the unimaginative. She pulled the key off from the hook and approached the door with a certain unjustified trepidation. She had been in and out of that closet innumerable times, and everything in it had been placed and organized by her own hand. There was the sense, however, of walking backwards even as she moved towards the door. That closet represented her past, a time in her life that had largely ended by her own volition.
    Yet something drew her onward.
    The key slid into the lock as easily as though she had been using it daily. It rotated noiselessly, and the door swung open on freshly oiled hinges, which was impossible since Wendy had never oiled a hinge in her life.
    She held her breath as the low door moved across her line of vision and the contents of the closet came into view.
    Everything was exactly where she had left it. Nothing had changed. The bags of visually unidentifiable powders and herbs hung neatly on their hooks. A miniature black cauldron sat in the center of the single shelf. Her eyes were immediately drawn to the right hand wall of the closet. Only when she saw that the book was securely in place did she actually exhale.
    The cover was worn and faded. To her trained eye, it showed its age in