The Witching on the Wall: A Cozy Mystery (The Witchy Women of Coven Grove Book 1) by Constance Barker Read Free Book Online

her mind any more. Maybe it was just the stress. Crazy people were crazy all the time, right? Maybe it was a little early to call in the shrink.
    She pulled into the tour office to give Poppy the updates on what was happening, but found the place empty. Maybe she was at the Caves, speaking with Martha. It was getting on into the afternoon.
    So Bailey left her car there and walked back down the long path to the Caves, trying to calculate the best way to cut the carpets so they could keep a lead on the camera crew. That seemed like the best way to do it, and if they had maybe four of five sections they could stay out of sight around the next bend; plus one straight ream of carpet wasn’t going to do it—the Caves had odd angles and turns that would bunch it up and she suspected Martha wanted it to be smoothed out, the way it was for big events like the Oscars or other celebrity award ceremonies.
    She rolled her eyes a little at that thought. What exactly did Martha think this event was going to do for her? AVT did some well-done documentaries, there was no doubt about that; Bailey loved them, but then she was a bit of a self-admitted nerd when it came to history and the odd, interesting bits of archaeological lore that AVT was particular focused on. Ten million viewers, this documentary was not likely to have.
    And the whole idea of ‘revealing the secret of the Seven Caves’ seemed almost silly. What could Martha possibly know that Bailey didn’t? Not to toot her own horn, but Bailey figured she knew about all there was to know about the Caves.
    When she arrived, the lights were set up, along with tripods and tracks for cameras, and there were locked boxes of equipment strewn about. Not even a guard was there to watch over all of it—not that one was really needed. Coven Grove did have a sheriff, but at this point Sheriff Tim Larson would probably hold the office until he retired or died, and it was practically an honorary title in any case. The crime rate in town was more of a footnote than an actual number. Probably something like ‘too small to calculate’. Other than the occasional teenage vandals or a drunk driver—both still rare—Coven Grove just didn’t have crime. There’d have been no way to get away with it. Everyone knew everyone else.
    Well, she had measurements to make anyway. She’d brought a tape measure with her, so she wandered into the entrance to the Caves.
    Every time she came here, she felt the same sense of familiar comfort. Being in the Caves felt as natural as being in her own home, and had that same sense of welcoming warmth and brightness even though the caves themselves were dim, lit only by the occasional shaft of light filtering down through holes in the cave ceiling.
    They were entirely natural caves, though the floor was worn from centuries of feet walking over them and in places had been smoothed out a little bit in the last two hundred years. Like any natural cave, the canvas upon which the various paintings and writing had been authored was uneven; but whoever had laid it all out in the first place seemed to have taken care to use that unevenness rather than trying to compensate for it. So the wide sections of murals had a certain quality of three dimensional intelligence to them.
    The cave paintings were a marvel of cultural cross-pollination. Some ancient explorer, she imagined, had probably been responsible for them, or a whole slew of them. Around ancient pictures of animals and figures of people, drawn in curling, winding sequences that put her in mind of Native American paintings she’d seen pictures of from elsewhere in the US, were letters in Greek, Arabic, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Norse runes—not Germanic; Bailey had taken an interest in them and learned the differences when she was only thirteen—and even long, winding lines of Ogham script that was historically reserved for marking on long branches but apparently had been transcribed here.
    It was like a travel