He nodded slowly. “You think she might have confronted Karmen? That is interesting.”
And then I sucked in breath so hard I choked on my own tongue and started to cough. He looked at me sideways. “Are you all right?”
I shook my head. My throat was kind of burning, and my eyes were stinging. It took me a second to command my voice. “Violet.”
He turned to me. “Violet?”
“It was Violet who suffered from the hex.” I smacked myself on the forehead. “And I told her about it. She was so snarky and in such a bad mood when I took the afternoon off to go to Wallingford. And the next day we were in the shop together and I was subjected to all these miserable comments about how nice it was for me to have the afternoon off while she’d been stuck in the shop working.”
“She does get paid for her hours in your shop, doesn’t she?”
“Tell me about it. But she doesn’t see it that way.”
“I understand Violet is your cousin, but she’s never going to make employee of the month, is she?”
He could say that again.
“And today she didn’t come to work.” I could hear again the fake coughing and wheezing on the phone this morning. “What if she took the day off in order to come down here and confront Karmen? What if she killed her?”
“Let’s not jump to conclusions. She is your cousin. Are you certain she wasn’t genuinely ill?”
I shook my head. “She called this morning and made a big production of coughing and sniffling. Said she had a terrible headache and didn’t feel well and that she’d be spending the day in bed.”
“And you disbelieve her?”
“She was fine yesterday. And then suddenly today, she’s so ill she can’t come into work? She was faking it. But I just assumed she was still mad at me because I had taken an afternoon off without her and she was going to pay me back.”
“That does sound rather like something Violet would do.”
Still, I was really stretching here. “But would she really go and kill the woman who’d put the hex on her? I mean, Karmen didn’t even put the hex on her. She just sold the hex to someone who put it on Violet.”
“It was a very violent hex, though.” Rafe seemed to be thinking. I was thinking, too, and furiously.
I shook my head. “I can’t believe Violet would kill another witch.”
“Perhaps she didn’t plan to.”
I leaned back, closing my eyes and resting my head against the seatback. “I can’t believe two of the witches I’m closest to I’m now suspecting of murdering yet another of our sisters.”
“One could definitely argue that the world of witches will be better without Karmen.”
“Still, we don’t take vigilante justice into our own hands like that. First, do no harm.”
“I do not believe that Karmen lived by that rule.”
That was for sure. And Margaret Twigg would be the first one to want to punish a witch who brought bad magic to Margaret’s own territory.
And then Violet had very personal reasons to want revenge on Karmen.
Chapter 12
I replayed the scene in my mind when we’d found the witch Karmen. Not quite dead. And with her last bit of energy, she’d said, “The book.” I opened my eyes again and turned to Rafe. “What about her last words? She said, ‘The book,’ and then she died.”
“I’ve been wondering that, too. What could it mean?”
“I don’t know. But she was looking right at you when she said it.”
“I’m not sure in her final moments she really focused on anything.”
I wasn’t so sure about that. “What did your friend the don say about that book you wanted to discuss with him?”
He turned to me in surprise, as though I was changing the subject, but I wasn’t sure I was. “You mean that strange alchemy book?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a hobby of his, studying alchemy. It helps pass the time.”
“Is he a vampire?”
“Yes. He is.”
“How come I don’t know him?”
He looked slightly amused. “We don’t all knit. Some of us collect stamps or renovate houses. He studies alchemy.”
“Did he have any ideas about the book?”
“Why are you asking this?”
“Because she looked at you and said, ‘The book,’ and I’m wondering if she could have been referring to that book.”
He paused before answering. “Because we suspect her of being an alchemist, and that was an alchemy book?”
“A spellbound alchemy book. She’s both a witch and an alchemist.” Okay, it was a bit of a stretch, but it was kind of weird that the alchemy book had turned up right around the same time that she was selling hexes to hurt Violet. Now it turned out Karmen had been an alchemist. But then, Rafe got sent all kinds of strange books. Maybe there was no connection. Still, my intuition was tingling.
“Have you had any other strange and peculiar books come into your life recently?”
He took the turn-off into Oxford. “A very nice first edition of Lorna Doone. And your father was telling me about some scrolls he’d like me to go and have a look at.”
I’d call that a no.
Naturally, my grim work wasn’t done for the day. There were still two men in the tunnels to be magicked into forgetting they’d seen two old ladies attack a middle-aged one and then been confined in a dark tunnel for several hours.
Gran said she could do the forgetting spell, but I knew my magic was stronger.
That made me think about Gran moving away. “Are you sure Gran will be happy in Cornwall?”
“I can’t make anyone happy. All I can do is offer her a place to live where she’ll be safe.”
“Will she be bored, though?”
“Not if she’s kept busy.” He pulled up in front of Cardinal Woolsey’s. “What do you think about buying her a shop to run?”
I glanced at the pretty shop Gran had passed on to
