The Case of the Wayward Witch Read online

  A

  Katy Kramer

  Cozy Mystery

  ≈

  No. 1:

  The Case of the

  Wayward Witch

  by A.A. Albright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organisations, places, events and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © A.A. Albright 2019

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.

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  Website: https://aaalbright.com

  Table of Contents

  1. The Bad Guys

  2. A Few Days Earlier

  3. Women Don’t Get the Gene

  4. Among Us

  5. The Tools for the Job

  6. As They Really Are

  7. Clear as Müd

  8. Knowing I’m on the Street Where I Die

  9. Dead Like Ned

  10. The Negg-ative Effects of Uncle Faster

  11. The Wild and Rabid Weredog

  12. Dead Tasty

  13. Those Stupid Wayfarers!

  14. The Katy and Hamish Show

  15. The Scary Door

  16. Hat’s Off

  17. My Thoughts on Hunting

  18. Demon Detector

  19. It Runs in the Genes

  20. The Angelic Sister

  21. Chasing Our Tails

  22. Part of the Furniture

  23. Snoring Beauty

  24. Agent Idiot

  26. Not Your Typical Aurameter

  Extract from the Compendium of Supernatural Beings

  1. The Bad Guys

  Witches are supposed to be the bad guys, right? I mean, that’s what my uncle taught me. Witches hurt people. They have hearts as cold as ice.

  But if that were really true, then how come the ones I’d gotten to know seemed, well … kind of all right?

  And as for the one I was about to kill? I might not know her, but I was getting a strong and unignorable feeling in my gut, a feeling that everything I knew about this woman was wrong …

  2. A Few Days Earlier

  It all began the day we collected Uncle Faster from hospital. It was a sweltering July morning, and I could have thought of, oh, about a hundred other things I would rather be doing. Lying on a towel on the beach. Lying on a lounger in the back garden. Lying on a cute little plaid blanket in the park …

  Well, you get the picture. I wanted to take advantage of this rare spell of good weather by lying around on any soft surface that would have me. Instead, I was facing the prospect of the most miserable few weeks of my life.

  ‘I think you should have consulted me before you volunteered me for this,’ I complained. ‘Why does it have to be me?’

  ‘Firstly, because you’ve just lost yet another job and you have nothing better to do. Secondly, because he’s your uncle. Your father’s brother. Your family. You do whatever you can for family.’

  I stared at my mother. ‘You only ever talk about family doing for family when you want me to do something unpleasant. Like the time you wanted me to pop that zit for you, or the time you wanted me to help you get that spider out of the bath.’

  ‘Well, I always say it because it’s true, Katy. Uncle Faster is family, and he needs someone to look after him.’

  ‘Except that Uncle Faster is Dad’s brother, not yours. I haven’t seen my dad since I was five, and I’m now twenty-five. Twenty years is a whole lot of time for a loser from a has-been boyband to spend on the road, don’t you think? So why would I want to waste my valuable time helping out one of his relatives?’

  She was about to answer, but she cut off whatever she would have said when a garda waved her arms to stop the traffic. My mother braked and blessed herself swiftly, muttering, ‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen,’ as she moved her hands swiftly in the sign of the cross. She always blessed herself when she passed a church, an ambulance, or an accident. I sat to attention, wondering which of the three was ahead.

  This time, the cause of her blessing herself was a traffic accident. The lights of a garda car and an ambulance were flashing, and a small car was wrapped around a lamppost. There were paramedics on the ground, surrounding a young man who looked almost as mangled as the car.

  I wound down my window and craned my neck to look out. I wasn’t normally the kind of person who gawked at car crashes, but this one was oddly fascinating. It was eleven a.m. on a bright summer’s day. A strange time to crash into a lamppost, if you asked me. But unlikely accidents were happening everywhere today. My uncle had just had one himself, which was why my mother and I were on the way to the hospital.

  It seemed like the man on the stretcher was the only person hurt in this car crash – presumably the driver of the car – and he was doing his best to sit up.

  ‘Calm down,’ one of the paramedics told him, gently pressing him back down. ‘We’re just going to wheel you onto the ambulance and then you’ll be right as rain.’ There was a lack of conviction to the paramedic’s voice, and I couldn’t say I blamed him. The guy on the stretcher looked like he was just a few minutes away from his arrival at the Pearly Gates.

  ‘It doesn’t matter where you take me,’ said the injured guy, coughing and writhing. ‘If I don’t die on the way to hospital, then I’ll be killed as soon as I arrive. I’m going to be murdered. I was always going to be murdered. That’s what happens when you go out with a woman like Diane. I should have listened to the warning. She was trying to kill me all along.’

  The paramedic gave him a reassuring smile and said, ‘No one’s trying to kill you, Freddy. You’ve been in a single-vehicle collision. There was just you and the lamppost. No one else involved. Come on now, let’s get you to hospital.’

  They wheeled a protesting Freddy on board and closed the door.

  ‘Finished your nosy staring?’ questioned my mother as the traffic crept forward.

  ‘I wasn’t staring nosily,’ I lied. ‘I was being a concerned citizen, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, save some of that concern for when you’re looking after your uncle, will you? He’s nothing like your dad and you know it. He sticks around, and there’s a lot to be said for that.’

  She had me there. Whereas my dad had absconded to places unknown, my uncle had always been there for me and my mother. ‘I know all that, Mam, but he’s so … so … so …’

  ‘Yes, he is a bit,’ my mother agreed. ‘But don’t worry. He’s hired someone from one of those home help agencies as well, so you won’t have to do too much. He said he mainly wants you to run a few errands for him.’

  We were only a few vehicles behind the ambulance, and I couldn’t help but notice that the lights had stopped flashing and the siren had turned off. To distract myself from the fact that a guy had probably just died a few feet away from me, I turned in my seat to face my mother.

  ‘Hey, how did Uncle Faster break his leg again?’

  ‘He broke two legs, actually. And I told you all about it already, Katy. He was chasing after someone for that silly job of his.’

  ‘Well, being a private investigator is a high-risk occupation,’ I commented. ‘And if you ask me, his job is the only interesting thing about Uncle Faster.’ And maybe, I thought, the errands my mother had mentioned might involve me getting to do some investigating. It was certainly more interesting than the other jobs I’d had this year. And if I was going to look after him for the next few weeks, then it would also be one o
f my most long-lasting jobs, too.

  Beside me, my mother let out a theatrical shiver. She was a theatrical woman, in general. She was a member of the local Dramatic Society, two dance troupes, two choirs, and she’d even been in a short-lived Irish soap-opera at one time. She always prayed I’d follow in her footsteps, but I hated the idea of being on stage. And – if my mother and her friends were anything to go by – then being on stage meant dyeing my hair and wearing a whole lot more make-up than I usually wore.

  We both had naturally auburn hair, but my mother’s was coloured to a vivid red with the help of henna. Her two best friends had bleached blonde and jet black hair, respectively. They all looked amazing, but I figured I’d save the hair dye until I actually needed it.

  ‘I keep telling him to get another job,’ she said. ‘Private investigators make my skin crawl. He was probably taking photos of someone’s cheating husband when it happened.’

  ‘Hm. Doesn’t sound all that bad a job to me. Cheaters deserve to get caught.’ Not that I was bitter about the fact that my last boyfriend had cheated on me or anything. I’d only take the slightest pleasure in making sure guys like that were caught before their loving girlfriends or wives had bought them expensive watches for their birthdays.

  My mother kept her eyes peeled for a space, finally finding one close to the entrance. ‘You know, things aren’t always that black and white, Katy. You always have to see things so … so … so morally. You’re constantly up on that high horse of yours, looking down on the rest of us. Which is why, at twenty-five, you’ve just been fired yet again.’

  I opened my door and jumped out quickly. ‘I wasn’t fired from the boutique,’ I said defensively. ‘I left because the manager had a diet pill racket going and she wanted me to push it on the customers. She changed the sizes on the clothes so they’d think they’d put on weight and go and buy her stupid pills and drinks.’

  ‘You walked out?’ My mother’s face was thunderous as she slammed her door shut. ‘You told me you’d been fired again.’

  Crap. ‘Well … I might have accidentally left a few details out.’ Accidentally on purpose, more like. ‘I had to walk out, Mam. It was the principle of the thing.’

  ‘It’s always the principle of the thing with you, isn’t it?’ She shook her head and marched to the door, where a nurse was standing, holding onto Uncle Faster’s wheelchair.

  The nurse looked frazzled, to say the least, and she’d only been with him for a few hours. What was I going to look like by the time I was finished?

  He grinned and waved at me. ‘Hey there, Curly Kate,’ he said.

  ‘Hey there, Uncle Faster.’ I waved half-heartedly with one hand, while I tried to even out my curly hair with the other. My mother called my auburn curls ‘adorable’ but if she liked them so much, then she wouldn’t spend a fortune getting her own curls straightened. Reluctant though I was to spend any more time than I needed to on my hair, if I didn’t spend a few minutes taming those curls in the morning, then I spent the day looking like I’d been electrified.

  My uncle poked the nurse in the arm and pointed at us. ‘Curly Kate is my niece, but she hates her curly hair and prefers I call her Katy. Isn’t she cute as a button? And Celine is my sister-in-law. Now, see how well she looks in all her make-up? That’s what I was trying to tell you, Lynn. A bit of lipstick, some blush, and you’d have all the fellas running after you.’

  The nurse gave my mother the once-over. ‘She does wear an awful lot of make-up, it’s true. But if looking like that catches the eye of men like you, then I think I’ll stick to the natural look. Oh, and if your family hadn’t turned up, I was going to wheel you out onto the motorway, you obnoxious old fart.’

  ‘Now, now, Lynn,’ he said mildly. ‘I know you’ll be all over me when I come to get my casts taken off.’

  She pushed the wheelchair (quite fast and forcefully, it must be said) in my direction, before turning on her heel and heading back inside. ‘Good riddance, Gilbert,’ she said over her shoulder.

  ‘I don’t wear too much make-up, do I?’ my mother said indignantly. ‘So much for bedside manner.’

  Uncle Faster gave my mother a wink. ‘You look gorgeous, Celine. She’s just jealous, so she is. Now come on. Get me home, will you? I have important work to do.’

  3. Women Don’t Get the Gene

  There was a reason that the nurse had called my uncle Gilbert instead of Faster, and that’s because his name was Gilbert. Gilbert Kramer, to be precise. He preferred us to call him Faster because, according to him, he’d always been faster than my father at running, swimming, and pretty much everything else.

  Apart from the fact that speed was an odd thing for a man to boast about, I also wasn’t sure how true it was. My dad had sure been quick when he’d run out on me and my mother so he could change his name to Dean Danger and join a terrible boyband. Not that I was angry about that or anything. Much.

  My parents had me when they were very young. I was just five when Dad joined the Danger Boys. He was twenty-two when he left with the band, but seventeen according to the promotional material. The promotional material also said that he was ‘single and looking for the right girl to make music with forever.’ In truth, he was married with a small child. He was in his forties now, and he was still on the road with the group. I couldn’t even remember the last time he’d called me on the phone.

  I stared up at the childhood home he’d shared with Uncle Faster, trying to get an idea of what he was like when he was a kid. It was a large, rambling house – number thirteen on a street called Nave Street. I’d often felt that the name was missing a K. The house had always been a tad on the unkempt side, and as the sun hid behind a passing cloud, it began to do a very good impression of a horror-movie set.

  Uncle Faster had invited us to come and live here on more than one occasion, but seeing as he’d winked suggestively at my mother each time, she’d turned him down.

  He tried the same spiel today, valiantly squeezing his rather large stomach in and using some of his spit to pat down his few remaining strands of hair. ‘You know, there’s always a place for you and Katy here, Celine,’ he said, yet again. ‘Much bigger than that little semi you’ve got. And I wouldn’t even ask you to pay me any rent. I mean, you’re family after all. Well, I mean I’d obviously expect you to cook and clean, but women love doing that sort of stuff anyway, don’t they?’

  My mother gritted her teeth, reapplied her lipstick and said, ‘This sort of nonsense is getting old, Faster. And you wonder why I keep turning you down?’ She turned away from him and gave me a brief hug. It was a good thing it was so brief, because another second of breathing in her perfume and I would have needed a new pair of lungs. ‘You’ll be okay, Katy. He’s paying you, remember. And think of it this way – at least you don’t have to come and see my latest play.’

  ‘I wish I could see your play tonight,’ I called after her as she walked back to her car. For once, I wasn’t lying. Yes, watching my mother’s terrible acting for three hours would be painful, but nothing near as painful as a stay with Uncle Faster.

  ‘Stop your daydreaming, Curly Kate,’ he said. ‘Probably thinking about shoes or dresses, I bet. Well, if you wheel me into my office nice and quick then I’ll run through what I want you to do. The home help’ll be here in a little while, so you won’t have to get your hands dirty.’

  ‘Oh, I wasn’t worried about that,’ I lied. I was. The image of helping my uncle onto the toilet had haunted me all morning long. ‘So is this home help a nurse or what?’

  ‘She’s a physio who’s well used to heaving injured people about the place. And she’s supposed to do housework as well, according to the agency. I specifically asked for a good-looking woman, so I’m quite looking forward to it.’

  I stopped wheeling his chair and stood in front of him, my arms crossed. ‘Let me guess – it was a woman who broke your legs.’

  He looked genuinely confused. ‘Why would you say that?’

 
I ignored him and opened his front door, finding the way impeded by a pile of mail. Scooping it up, I couldn’t help but notice the name on the envelopes.

  ‘Why does all of your mail say Gilda Granger instead of Gilbert Kramer?’

  He snatched the mail from my hands. ‘Because. Reasons.’

  I gave him my most sarcastic head-nod. ‘Sure. Reasons. They’re all out to get you, aren’t they Uncle Faster? Mam says you probably …’ My voice trailed off as a car pulled up next door, and the most handsome man in the world climbed out. This guy was better looking than the Hemsworth brothers, I kid you not. He was tall, with the perfect level of muscle. His hair was fair and his eyes were a deep, dazzling blue. He winked one of those lovely eyes at me and said, ‘Morning gorgeous,’ as he let himself into his house.

  ‘He … I … you …’ I stared accusingly at my uncle. ‘You know, if you’d told us he lived next door we might actually come over more often. Who is he? What age is he? Is he single?’

  Uncle Faster rolled his eyes. ‘I don’t know, and I don’t care. He’s been there a few months and he keeps himself to himself, just the way I like it. Now come on. Let’s get inside, Curly Kate, so you can make me a cup of tea.’

  ≈

  I rolled him into a messy office. I’d never been allowed to enter this room before, and now that I was finally seeing it, I began to wonder of the reason for the ban was because this place was a serious health hazard.

  Dusty old books and files were stacked everywhere, and I had to clear a large wooden chest out of the way before I could wheel him behind his desk. The walls were decorated with strange weapons – swords, knives, maces and bows, all in unusual shapes and metals – and there was a strong smell of herbs. I soon saw the origin. My uncle had dried fennel, oregano, and some other herbs I couldn’t identify hanging either side of his door. It was pinned up with what looked like small horseshoes.