Page 91 of Crossroads Magic
I unhooked the curtain as I left the bar. The curtain wasn’t just to block light or stop people from peering in. It was a remarkably good heat blocker, too. The room was distinctly cooler without it over the doorway.
Trevalyan was sitting on the last but one step when I moved into the hall. He patted the runner next to him. “Sit a minute,” he told me.
I sat next to him and sighed.
“You’ve had quite a morning, haven’t you?”
“I’ve learned…well, it doesn’t matter. You all know what I’m only just finding out. Tell me where you were the night of the solstice, Trevalyan. Just for my own information. I know you had nothing to do with my mother’s death.”
“I did not. The house directly behind mine…the grey one?”
I hadn’t taken in any details about the house directly behind his, except that therewasa house behind his. “It’s an empty one?” I guessed. Given the ratio of empty to occupied houses in this town, I had probably guessed right.
“Well, no one lives in it, if that’s what you mean,” Trevalyan said. “Wim uses it as a greenhouse. Works remarkably well, especially in winter. A classic greenhouse would be a king’s ransom to ship in here and build.”
“Okay?” I said, wondering where this was going.
“Just after midnight on the solstice, I woke up and smelled smoke coming from the house behind mine. I figured the house was on fire and scrambled over the fence to find out.”
“A fire could spread to other houses?”
“My cannabis plants are in there,” Trevalyan replied primly.
I pressed my lips together hard to not laugh. “So you went to rescue your plants. I see.”
“Wim and Olivia were already there. They were rebuilding the fires. The house has three fireplaces. Did I mention that?”
I shook my head.
“The old-fashioned brick chimney kind. Snow had got down the chimneys and put all the fires out. It had collapsed the flue of one of them, the one on the main floor, where my plants are. So I cleared out the chimney with a cleaning spell, which didn’t work as well as I expected, because all the snow and crud from years of use all dropped onto the wood in the fireplace. We had to clean the fireplace before we could lay a new one. Olivia was angry like a bee in a bottle. Especially as we were still working at it come seven that morning, getting the fire going, cleaning soot off plants and rotating the plants in front of the fire until the house had heated up again.”
I could imagine Olivia angry. She wouldn’t scream or yell. She would vibrate and speak coldly. And work silently with her teeth gritted to get a job like that done.
I sighed and put my face in my hands. “This is worse than I thought.”
“What is?”
I straightened up. “The only person who wasn’t with someone else, or that I’m convinced for other reasons was not involved in my mother’s death, is Juda. Ithoughthe was in the clear, because Broch and Benedict walked him home just after 11 and Benedict gave Juda a shot of something that knocked him out for at least four hours. But now I know my mother most likely died much later in the night than midnight…which makes it possible for Juda, the one person in town who was alone or unaccounted for at that time, to have done it.”
I put my face in my hands once more. “It seems wrong to point at the man just because he’s a little strange and scary. He had absolutely no reason to kill my mother.”
“She loved Juda,” Trevalyan said. “Like a son she never had. She would nag him to take care of himself, to work out, to eat properly. To dress as though he respected himself. And he loved her, as much as Judacouldlove someone. He would tease her about her lack of reasoning ability, but he would help her clear the dining room, too.”
Most murders are committed by family and friends.
“I don’t understand. It doesn’t make sense. Perhaps someonedidsneak into town that night. But that doesn’t make any sense, either. Why would they? My mother never left this place! It has to be someone here.”
Trevalyan wrapped his arms around my shoulders. “Now that you are here, there is one way to find out,” he said gently. “Let us be done with this.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“God, it’s socold!” Ghaliya said, wrapping her arms around herself. She wore layers of clothing and a heavy coat of Olivia’s, borrowed gloves, a scarf and a cap with a cheerful pompom on the top, but she stomped her feet in her borrowed boots and two layers of socks and breathed steam heavily into the air. “How long do we have to stay out here for, Mom?”
“Not much longer,” I said, glancing at my phone for the fiftieth time. Two fifty-three a.m.
We stood in the crossroad, which was a white square of snow that had been tamped down by everyone’s footsteps. Everyone else in the town was there except for Frida, who watched from the dining room windows. I could see her silhouette, outlined by the lights in the dining room.
Olivia was drinking something warm from a travel thermos. I suspected it was the last of the mulled wine, which I had served in a heated punchbowl for dinner tonight, as my contribution to the meal, even though the inn supplied the chicken and fixings and I had cooked them. Olivia had been over the moon about the mulled wine.
