The Magic of Murder Read Online Free Page B

check up on me.
    “I just heard the weather forecast for up there,” she said. “Are you all right?”
    “It’s snowing, Ma,” I said. “This is Niagara Falls. It snows here. Have you forgotten already?” Ten years before, my mother had traded the frozen north for the beaches of Naples.
    “Don’t bite my head off,” Mom said. “I worry about you.”
    “There’s nothing to worry about. I’m fine.”
    She was quiet for a minute before she said, “You don’t sound fine. What’s the matter?”
    “Nothing’s wrong!” I said too quickly, which, in the parlance of mothers and daughters, told her something was.
    “Tell me,” she insisted.
    I’ve never been able to resist that tone in my mother’s voice, so I told her all of it. The Black Cat, Elvira, the book, and what Rebecca Nurse told me about our family tree. When I finished, I heard her breathing hard.
    I sighed. “How ridiculous can anyone be, Ma?”
    I heard her light a cigarette and inhale the smoke.
    “Ma?” My stomach began to do a slow twist. I was afraid of what she was about to tell me.
     
    ***
     
    I had started out to write a short story about a woman using witchcraft to wreak vengeance on a man who mistreated her. I knew where the vengeance part came from—I wanted vengeance on the man I’d married and divorced three years later. It doesn’t matter that I call what I write fiction, there’s always a smattering of truth behind the storyline. The idea of smacking him with a spell popped into my head when I read the book about herbalism. Apparently, Rebecca was right about this thing being genetic.
    I’ve kept the books she sold me and bought a few others from her on the subject. More than a few, actually. Over the next three months she became a friend and helped me understand my family. She helped me with a bit more too—it seems that causing my ex-husband to go bankrupt was more than I could manage alone. With the two of us, though, chanting together over the right herbs―
    We’d just begun to work on what Elvira asked me to do— Ancestry.com led us to some descendants of Cotton Mather—when fate spun its head and stuck its tongue out at me. By which I mean my genetic bent was dragged into the middle of the Osborn murder.

Chapter Three
    Detective Frey
     
                   M arch brought a worse storm than the one we were hit with in December. It seems that’s how we celebrate St. Patrick’s Day around here. When it ended after four days, a reserve unit from the Niagara Falls Air Base declared war on the snow. With military precision, the reservists piled the stuff into dump trucks and carted it to Lake Ontario, Lake Erie, and the Canal. They might have hauled it to the top of the mountains if their trucks’ tires could get enough traction. Since they couldn’t, it appeared as though they shoved what was left to the shoulder of River Road and into my driveway. When I gazed through the kitchen window at gray heaps so high my mailbox was buried, I was certain the dunes would still be there in July. They weren’t, of course. In two days the streets had been plowed and salted, and cars crawled past. Thanks to my neighbor, Roger Frey, even my driveway had been cleared. In Western New York we know how to deal with the white stuff.
    My preferred way of dealing with it is to turn up the thermostat and remain inside, comfy and warm. At least until the sun pokes through the clouds. This is why, still in my robe and flannel pajamas with thermal socks pulled up to my knees, I was snuggled on the sofa under my grandmother’s grey wool afghan. I still wondered about the runes Grandma had sewn into the afghan. Maybe one day Rebecca Nurse would find a book to help me interpret them.
    From a corner of what had become her wingback chair, the hefty albino cat—Elvira detested it when I referred to her as fat—glared at me. She seemed annoyed I was wasting the morning on a made for TV movie.
    “What?” I said to her.
    She rolled