A Witch Before Dying: A Wishcraft Mystery by Heather Blake Read Free Book Online Page B

pulled himself out of it. He’d passed away last year.
    I thought I’d done a fairly decent job of bringing Harper up right, but then again, I was prone to overlooking her mischievous streak, her penchant for finding trouble, and her ability to stick her nose into other people’s business.
    The judgment of “fairly decent” was obviously a matter of opinion.
    “Way to be a downer, Ms. Serious-Pants,” Harper said. “We’ve been waiting for the details of the crime scene. Start at the beginning. Don’t leave anything out.”
    There was that phrase again. Crime scene. I kicked off my shoes and looked from face to face. Starla and Mimi were as excited as Harper. Ghouls, the lot of them.
    I wasn’t sure what to say or where to start. In the past, I would have glossed over the whole situation. Tried to downplay the fact that someone had stuffed a woman into a suitcase and left her to die (as if that were possible to downplay!). But now…Harper’s enthusiasm for criminal investigations had definitely worn off on me as I started to tell them what had happened.
    The painting party was forgotten as the three sank onto the sheet-covered sofa. Eyes widened—especially at the part with the hand sticking out of the suitcase.
    Starla shook her head, interrupting. “Poor Elodie. That girl has been through so much in the past two years. First her mom goes missing; then she had to cancel her big wedding; now you’re saying she’s broke and has to sell her mom’s house…. And”—she let out a whooshing breath—“Patrice was inside the house all along?”
    I kept an eye on Mimi, who was curled in the corner of the couch, cuddling with Missy. Were some of these details too much for her? She didn’t appear to be bothered. In fact, she looked like a younger version of Harper—intent on absorbing every little detail.
    I was sitting on the floor—Harper didn’t have many furnishings yet. “Wait a sec. Elodie canceled her wedding? I’m confused. Aren’t she and Connor engaged?”
    Starla waved a paint roller as she talked. “They’ve been engaged forever, since college. They were supposed to have this big fairy-tale wedding about two years ago. Elodie had hired me to do the photographs, and she gushed and gushed about how lavish the wedding was going to be. Huge guest list, the best of the best. Then it all kind of fell apart. She had a big fight with her mom. The dress shop ordered the wrong gown. Her venue closed. The caterer quit. The deejay went to jail. A fewmonths later, Elodie and Patrice made up and Elodie managed to set another date, but then Patrice went missing.”
    “Elodie had a fight with Patrice?” I asked. “About what?”
    Starla shrugged. “I’m not sure. She never said. But it was a doozy—they didn’t talk for months.”
    “I can’t imagine being that mad at my mom,” Mimi said. She, I noticed, had put away her paintbrush and now held her mother’s diary. She’d been carrying it around with her everywhere lately. The cover was made of white leather, weathered with age. Mimi’s mother had died a couple of years ago, and it was through her diary that Mimi started learning about her Craft. The book was chock-full of Craft tidbits, which was both dangerous and incredibly resourceful.
    Dangerous because if the book fell into the wrong hands, the spells within could be used with nefarious intent. Resourceful because Melina had been an accomplished Crafter before she forfeited her powers to marry Nick, a mortal. I hadn’t read the diary, but from what Mimi had shared with me, the book was practically a how-to on practicing the Craft.
    “Unfortunately, it happens,” Starla said, sounding like she was talking from experience. “For a while Elodie kept hoping her mother would show up one day with a crazy story of where she’d been. But the days turned into weeks, into months. The big wedding was coming up and a decision had to be made. Elodie ended up canceling it, and as far as I know, it