She wrung her hands and started pacing again. “It’s my only chance.”
Ice slipped along my spine, making me shiver. “What do you mean, Alice? If you didn’t kill him…”
Her head whipped around, her expression a mix of panic and anger. “I didn’t kill anybody!”
Gilded gopher garters, the woman was a titch high strung. I lifted my hands. “I wasn’t suggesting you had. I was just going to say that, if you didn’t kill him you have nothing to worry about, right?”
Alice expelled a harsh breath. “Wrong. Oh, so wrong.” She stopped in front of me, grabbing my hands in a painful grip. “I didn’t kill him. But Gnomish is going to think I did. Which means we’re in danger from them…”
The icy fear spread through my organs, turning me into a Naida-shaped popsicle from the inside out. “We?” I squeaked. “Why am I in danger?”
“You don’t think they’re going to just leave a witness behind when they murder me and slice me up into a thousand tiny pieces, do you?”
I grimaced at the gory visual. “Ugh!”
Alice nodded as if pleased that I’d finally grasped the situation in all of its ugly entirety. “Grym is going to keep digging into this, and he’s going to find out…” She stopped suddenly, blinking rapidly, and then turned away from me and returned to pacing.
“Find out what?” I asked, my gaze narrowing.
“Nothing. We need to come up with a plan for figuring out how Gido was killed.”
I dropped back into the chair I’d been trying to vacate. I didn’t say anything because there was nothing I could say. If I’d thought I was untrained to be a KoA, I was triple that amount untrained to solve a murder. Then I had a thought. “Do you want me to work with Detective Grym…”
“No!” Alice screamed, slicing my question off like a hot knife through melted butter. “He’s going to pin this on me if he can. We need to find the killer and hand him to the detective. It’s the only way.”
I didn’t share her suspicion that Grym was incompetent. In fact, I believed he was really sharp. But she’d known him longer than I had. Maybe I was wrong. “I don’t know how to investigate a murder,” I told her.
She blew air through her lips, flapping a dismissive hand in my direction. “How hard can it be?”
I thought of Lea almost dying when we’d tried to discover how one large artifact had been taken out of the shop from under our noses. “Hard,” I said.
“Are you telling me you won’t even try?” Alice put her hands on her hips and glared at me.
I embraced a sudden wish that I’d been a bit faster in my escape. All I wanted to do was play with magical artifacts. It had never occurred to me that we’d be dealing with killers and deadly hexes. I took a deep breath and expelled it, shaking my head. “I’m telling you that I don’t know how much assistance I’m going to be. But I’ll be happy to help in any way I can.”
That seemed to calm Alice down, which in turn calmed me down. “Good. That’s good. Thanks, sweetums.” She headed toward the tea counter and I relaxed, thinking we were finally going to have our tea. But she walked past it to the closet. “Get your things. We’re going out.”
Even better! “Where are we going?”
Alice’s smile was brittle and a bit scary. “To the scene of the crime. We’re going to figure out how Gido was killed before that detective throws me in jail.”
10
What a Gnish
We stood at the edge of a small park in the middle of Arcane Avenue, four blocks up from Croakies. Yellow crime scene tape was wrapped around a spot that was about ten by twenty yards, which started at the sidewalk and stretched to a spot about three feet from the play structure at the center of the small park.
The grass inside the tape was well-trampled, but one area, in particular, was mashed beyond mere footsteps. From where we stood, it appeared to be a rectangular spot, about three feet long and two feet wide. “We need to get closer,” Alice said, shoving her glasses up her nose.
Oliver, the tree frog, sat on her shoulder, peering hopefully at the nearby trees. I’d never seen him outside of Alice’s ratty nest of brown hair, and wondered if the colorful little frog would make a hop for it if he saw an opening.
“Meow,” Fenwick informed us from his location near our feet.
Alice gave him a speculative look. “Hmm…I wonder…”
“Ma’am, you need to keep that animal outside the tape.”
I could almost hear Alice’s thought processes grinding to a halt. She looked up and threw a vacant smile at the young Enchanted cop standing near the play structure. I hadn’t noticed him when we arrived at the scene. But he was definitely there now.
As Fenwald batted at the yellow tape, the young cop put his hand on the butt of his gun. “I’ll shoot him if he steps one paw on that grass.”
The small crowd around us, who were also busily staring at the scene of the crime, gasped with outrage at his threat.
Despite the intimidating glare on his young face, I highly doubted the cop would shoot Fenwald. The public outcry would be more than the police would want to deal with just to protect a crime scene they’d probably already processed.
But, just in case, I reached down and scooped up the massive feline, groaning under his prodigious weight. “I think Fenny needs a diet,” I told Alice.
She didn’t seem to hear me. Her gaze had locked onto the tree a couple of feet from where we stood. “I could send Oliver up…”
I blinked. “Can you see what he sees?” I asked, my eyes going wide. The whole magical thing was just too cool. And fraught with so many icy possibilities.
“Don’t be silly,” Alice told me, rolling her eyes. “He’d have
