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

could gaze at the paintings and swim in the comfort the caves gave her any time she wanted. Now, she was at work and had a job to do. One that she’d hear no end of grief about if she was slow to complete it. She sighed, and got to work measuring and noting down the numbers and adjusting her mental calculations. They’d need at least seven different sections of the carpet, but two of the caves had roughly the same dimensions so maybe only five would be required.
    She proceeded through the sixth cave, confirmed her suspicion of what was needed, and then walked toward the threshold of the seventh and final cave.
    Something stopped her. The whispers in her head were gone now, driven off perhaps by the

 
    isolation of the caves, influenced by the near total silence of the place and calmed by the dull white noise of the ocean echoing through the place that had the strange effect of dampening all other noise entirely. Somehow, though, the lack of those whispers made her feel suddenly very alone and very small. The caves seemed to close in around her.
    Bailey was not claustrophobic, and had never feared being in the caves. Now, though, she had a horrible, creeping feeling in her spine, as though something was watching her. It didn’t feel exactly malevolent, whatever it was—her own stress, very likely, manifested in the dimness of the caves—but it felt… what was it?
    Like a warning, she realized. Go no further, it seemed to urge her. Turn around, leave. The feeling started as merely a fleeting instinct, but as she pushed through the narrow passage it became more and more insistent, until she couldn’t stop her own mind from chanting at her, “Go back, go back, go back…”
    It was unnerving, and her hands trembled against the cave wall as she guided herself through the unlit tunnel, following the illumination of some stage lighting that was tuned down to almost nothing ahead. Her shoe brushed an orange extension cord on the ground, and she nearly jumped at the sudden instinct that it was some brightly colored serpent before her eyes focused on it properly.
    She sighed. The tiny burst of adrenaline seemed to have cleared her mind a bit and she laughed at herself a little, which helped even more. One more cave to go, and she’d run back to the carpet shop to give them the specs.
    The final cave was undoubtedly of a lunar theme. The moon in its various phases, broken down into sevenths from the full moon to the new in a great circle that spanned the full width of the cave’s perimeter near the ceiling—but with one missing spot, as though the artist had meant to divine the upper wall into eighths but had, perhaps, never finished the work. It was a gap that made the moon paintings, each connected and encircled by letters and swirling lines, look like a circlet of white seen from inside some king or queen’s skull. Where the missing phase of the moon was, if that’s what was meant to have been there in the first place, there was one of the most fascinating paintings in the whole system. One that made no sense, other than perhaps as someone’s fancy.
    It was, seemingly, a door. It arched gracefully up, and was on one of the flattest planes on the walls. The lines of it were made up entirely of letters and figures, drawn so tiny that without good light and a magnifying glass it was impossible to parse them out. It must have taken ages to finish with only the tools of whatever ancient artist had undertaken it. She gazed at the door, and then sighed when she saw a crumpled pile of something at the base of it. A dress?
    She moved toward it to clean up the mess and then froze, her blood chilling as she saw it more clearly.
    It was a dress; but there was still someone in it.
    It was Martha Tells, and she was very clearly, very messily, deceased.
    Bailey screamed.
     

 
     
    Chapter 6
    The Sheriff’s department, an ambulance, and the local paper all arrived within half an hour of Bailey’s call. She barely remembered