A Bite of Blueberry Page 6

  Priscilla had hoped that her godmother’s enthusiasm at the prospect of playing matchmaker would make her more willing to agree without knowing the terms. She supposed that after more than eight hundred years of life, Avalon couldn’t so easily be tricked into bargains anymore. Once a fae gave its word, it was honor bound to keep it, or lose a portion of its magic. Oaths were hard to wrest from the fae, even for something as trivial as a date, it seemed.

  “A boy in town was murdered.”

  “And you want me to rain down unholy vengeance on the perpetrator? I’m sorry, Priscilla, curses really aren’t my bag anymore,” she said.

  “But you’ll turn a trespasser into a frog,” Priscilla countered. “You’ll use your magic to curse someone who wasn’t doing any harm, but you won’t help when someone truly deserves it.”

  “There was something wrong with that man,” Avalon argued. “This person you’re looking for is just doing what humans do.”

  “Murder isn’t a normal human pastime, godmother,” Priscilla said through clenched teeth. “And your denigration of humans is really starting to annoy me. Could you be reasonable for once? I just need a spell to track him down.”

  Avalon shook her head. “No. I’m not going to help you seek out trouble.”

  Priscilla’s heart sank. She’d been counting on Avalon’s desperation to escape the spell that bound them together to get the supernatural help she needed.

  “He was only eighteen,” she whispered. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you, godmother? Some monster killed a child.”

  Avalon’s expression flickered for just a second before settling back into its usual haughty disdain. “I can’t help you.”

  “Perhaps I can,” Martino said, leaning further back in his chair. He’d rolled up his sleeves while they talked.

  Priscilla couldn’t tell if the room was too warm for a human to handle. Priscilla’s vampire body was technically dead, and she’d adapt within a short amount of time to the ambient temperature outside. Avalon didn’t appear uncomfortable either, but then again, she was fae. Priscilla wasn’t sure Avalon was even capable of doing something as undignified as sweating.

  Priscilla gave Martino a more thorough once-over than she had upon entering the room. The so-called magician was more rugged than he first appeared, with a day’s growth of beard shadowing his strong, square jaw. His nose was long and aquiline, like the profile of a Roman statue. There were tattoos on much of the skin she could see. They decorated his hands, wrists, and crawled up his neck. She wasn’t familiar with the language that they were written in, so the only tattoo that truly stood out to her was the star on his wrist. There was something familiar about it, but Priscilla couldn’t place where she’d seen it before.

  When he caught her staring, Martino rolled down one shirt sleeve hastily and flashed a smile that was supposed to make him look charming. Perhaps Priscilla had too much experience with con men, because it just looked oily and insincere to her.

  “What do you seem to be having trouble with, cara mia?”

  Priscilla bristled at the endearment. It reminded her unpleasantly of her sire, a Frenchman who had had a bad habit of sprinkling in flirtation into his everyday speech. She knew very well it could be used as a tactic to make someone lower their defenses and regard the speaker as more trustworthy.

  “I’m not supposed to reveal details of an ongoing investigation,” she said coolly.

  Martino cocked his head to the side. “But you were going to tell vita mia the details of the case,” he countered.

  “I was not,” Priscilla said.

  “You told her about the victim.”

  “It wasn’t anything that either of you couldn’t discover by reading his obituary in the paper,” Priscilla said.

  Her stomach twisted at the thought she’d soon be seeing Benedict’s name in print, next to the other recently deceased residents of Bellmare. It was the most rest he’d get for at least a week or two. Arthur wasn’t likely to release his remains to the family until the coroner had determined there was nothing more to be learned from the body.

  Martino shrugged. “It is up to you, Signorina Pratt.”

  “You seem confident in your ability to help, Mr. Romano. Exactly what help could a humble magician have for me?”

  Martino’s pleasant expression faltered for just a second, and Priscilla spied something colder and more calculating beneath. Within a few seconds, he’d rearranged his face into a mask of wounded disbelief.

  “Surely you don’t think I had a hand in this, cara mia?” He placed a hand over his heart in feigned shock.

  “It does seem a little convenient that you arrived here the day before a young man turned up dead. And you seem a little too eager to help.”

  Avalon hovered an inch off the ground in sudden agitation. “Don’t talk to my Romeo that way, Priscilla! He had nothing to do with this.”

  “Are you sure? Because I heard from Elaine Jameson that you were accosting a salesperson in a Nordstrom’s in Westwend that morning. You got tossed out. Was he with you?”

  Avalon’s gaze flicked to Martino before her mouth set. “He’s not a killer, Priscilla.”

  “What is that tattoo on his wrist?” Priscilla pressed. “He seemed eager to hide it from me, godmother.”

  “It’s just a tattoo,” her godmother said nervously, not looking her in the eye. Her godmother’s voice shook, indicating she was on shaky ground. The fae could not lie. They could omit the truth, paint it black, white, or green, but they couldn’t tell an outright untruth without losing their magic. Priscilla had touched on a nerve. If she pressed, perhaps this trip had not been wasted.

  “What do you know about that tattoo, godmother?”

  Avalon’s face hardened. “Get out, Priscilla.”

  “Ava—”

  “No. This residence is not mine, but while I pay the fare for this room, it is mine. Get out.”

  Put in those terms, Priscilla could not argue. If Avalon claimed this place as her temporary dwelling, she had the right to disinvite Priscilla, no matter how many times Noah said she could go in. Guest rights were a slippery slope for vampires. So Priscilla turned away from her godmother, stalking toward the door.

  A few seconds later, she was fuming alone in the hallway. Avalon was hiding something, and Priscilla wasn’t sure what. Worse, she hadn’t gotten Avalon’s help in tracking the killer, and she might have alerted the very man that she was onto his trail. The only positive she could take away from the visit was the fact that she now had something to report to Arthur. It wasn’t anything solid, but it was at least a lead.

  Priscilla trudged down the stairs, feeling thoroughly defeated. Noah met her at the bottom, a quizzical expression on his face. “Did everything go all right, Priscilla?”

  “Peachy,” she lied, forcing a smile. There was another positive. At least she wasn’t fae, and could lie to avoid unpleasant conversations. “Thank you for your help, Noah. Have a good night.”

  “You too, Priscilla,” he said with a weary smile.

  She had a feeling she’d used up her quota for pleasant evenings. There were probably a lot worse nights to come. She wasn’t looking forward to facing them.

  Chapter Six

  Priscilla decided to call Arthur on the way back home, to report her news. If Martino was somehow involved in Benedict’s murder, she wanted to tip the police off before he had a chance to skip town.

  Arthur answered the phone with a curt, “What now?”

  “Geez, Arthur, it’s just me. I thought you said you wanted help on this case.”

  “Priscilla,” he said, a note of surprise in his voice.

  “Who else were you expecting?”

  “Lucas or Nora Montgomery,” Arthur said darkly. “Or perhaps any magazine in the area that has caught wind of the fact that this is the second wealthy child to die in Bellmare in as many months. And, of course, there’s Antique Prism Filmworks, which keeps calling to ask if we’ve seen one of their executives.”<
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  “Antique Prism Filmworks?” Priscilla asked, though she had a sinking feeling she knew who the studio was looking for.

  “Yeah. They’re an up and coming film studio based out in LA. The bigshot on the phone kept telling me that I was messing with the wrong people. Apparently they’ve won several awards at the Sundance Film Festival in the last few years.”

  “And they’re calling us why?”

  Arthur snorted. “Like I’d know. Apparently, this Joseph Reed character makes frequent forays into our fair town. For what, I don’t know. But he’s been missing for the last forty-eight hours, and they called their local police. And their local police called to make inquiries of us. Jamie Emmerson was a nervous wreck by the time they were through.”

  There was a certain amount of satisfaction in the chief’s tone. Apparently he still hadn’t gotten over Jamie’s recent infatuation with his daughter, even though the two had been casually dating for close to six months.

  “Please tell me you didn’t make him suffer through an hour of that interrogation, Arthur.”

  “Not an hour,” Arthur admitted. “Just until he was good and sweaty. Anyway, I’ve made calls and no one has seen Mr. Reed in town. Have you seen or heard from him recently, Priscilla?”

  “No,” she lied carefully. With the more pressing matter of Benedict’s murder, she didn’t want to divert Arthur’s attention from the situation by revealing her godmother’s involvement in the disappearance. Joseph Reed would turn up ... eventually. What shape he’d be in when he did, she couldn’t say.

  Another car passed her. She was going as slow as she possibly could on the road while still remaining within the legal limits. The snow was not thick, but she still hated driving. Talking on the phone while doing so was stressful, but she’d decided she needed to let Arthur know before any of the pertinent details of the conversation slipped her mind.

  She half expected him to press her for more. It wasn’t like Arthur to drop subjects easily. If he’d been in the car with her and seen the twitch of her lips or the guilty shift of her eyes, maybe he’d have pursued the subject further. Instead, he said,

  “That’s good. I’ll tell them we haven’t seen their man anywhere around. He probably got lost or ran out of gas somewhere along the way.”

  “Yeah,” Priscilla agreed easily. “Anyways, Arthur, I was calling because there was a lead I’d like you to follow up on.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well, I had a friend recently roll into town, and she brought along a suspicious character named Martino Romano. I was wondering if you could do some digging into his background.”

  She heard the scratching of a pen on the other end of the line as he wrote the name down. “And why do you think he could be involved?”

  Priscilla hesitated, and nearly missed the turnoff to Bellmare as she tried to think of a way to explain her suspicions to him. A gut feeling wouldn’t impress a judge, if Arthur had to subpoena the information. Suddenly the only justifications she had for suspecting Martino Romano seemed very flimsy.

  “He came to town around the same time the murders occurred.”

  “So did about fifty other people, Priscilla,” Arthur pointed out. “Bellmare’s economy isn’t flourishing because of the people inside the town limits. Our bread and butter centers around the blasted reputation we’ve gained for murder and hauntings.”

  “He wants to know about the investigation. Didn’t you tell me once that criminals try to insert themselves into the investigation?”

  “Sometimes. But that’s not a hard and fast rule, Priscilla. Usually its serial killers that do that sort of thing, and so far we only have one body. Our guy won’t become a serial killer until he’s killed at least three. I hope you have more than that, because right now I don’t have anything I can bring this guy in on.”

  Priscilla was stumped. Martino Romano set her predator’s senses tingling. She knew, somehow, that he was dangerous, and she wanted to make sure that he never got the chance to hurt anyone in her town. These were her people to protect, and no smooth-talking Italian was going to lay a finger on them if she could help it.

  “He has a strange tattoo. He didn’t want me to see it.”

  Arthur sighed. “It’s hardly damning evidence, Priscilla. Can you at least tell me what it looked like?”

  She tried to describe the star she’d seen on Martino’s wrist. With another long sigh, Arthur cut off her rambling. “I’m going to need you to draw it for me, Priscilla. How soon can you drop by the precinct?”

  Priscilla bit her lip. “I really can’t right now, Arthur. I left your daughter in charge of the bakery for the last hour. It was longer than I was intending to be gone. I really need to get back into the swing of things if I want to keep my doors open.”

  “Then I’ll stop by Fangs in Fondant when I get a chance,” Arthur said. “It might take me a few hours. I still have to beat the Montgomery’s lawyers off with a stick. They act as if it’s our fault that the boy is dead.”

  Priscilla’s stomach lurched. Dead. Benedict Montgomery was dead. Why was that fact hitting her hard every time she was forced to face it? She’d seen countless people die over the centuries. Some of them had died naturally. Some of them, unfortunately, had become additions to the town’s grisly history. Benedict was different.

  She’d never seen a person less deserving of death. Benedict would have had a bright future ahead of him. He’d been a favorite for a football scholarship to Cornell University. She knew that he had had several admirers. He’d seemed like a good-natured kid when she’d spoken to him moments before his untimely end.

  “I need to go, Arthur,” Priscilla said faintly, taking the turn onto the square with excruciating slowness. It wasn’t really the lightly falling snow she was worried about. She’d survive a crash. But the sick feeling in her stomach was stealing her breath and making it hard to think. She needed to gather herself before she had a complete breakdown on the phone.

  “All right. I’ll see you when I see you, Pratt.”

  She hung up the phone without saying goodbye, pulled into an available space across the street from her shop, and hunched over her steering wheel. The desire to cry came to her, unbidden. What was wrong with her? Why was she so upset? She’d barely known the young man. Kierra Cunningham, the woman whose murder she’d helped solve six months before, was only a handful of years older. She’d known Kierra about as well, and yet, her death hadn’t had nearly the same impact.

  Perhaps it was because Benedict was one of her own? The small community that you lived in could almost become your kin in a way, especially when you were used to seeing them or heard about them on a regular basis.

  Tears could not come. Priscilla’s body was incapable of producing enough tears to cry unless she fed regularly on live human blood. The blood bags she purchased from a doctor in Westwend were expired and laced with awful chemicals to keep them from rotting. Cold, sterile blood could not give her the ability to weep.

  When she’d regained her composure somewhat, or had at least stopped visibly shaking, she opened the driver’s side door. And promptly hit a pedestrian walking just out of her view.

  The man went sprawling, and the box in his hands burst open upon impact with the sidewalk. Flowers of every shape and color littered the snow-glazed ground. The roses looked like drops of blood against the pale backdrop. She scrambled out of the car and offered her hand to the man.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t see you there. I just—”

  “You need to watch where you’re goin’, lady,” the man said, amid a string of swear words.

  “I’m sorry,” she repeated, bending to retrieve the nearest of the flowers, carefully avoiding the roses. This one was a beautiful lily of the valley, its fragrance soft and sweet. She offered it to the man. “I’m really sorry. I’ll help you pick them up.”

  Together, they retrieved flowers. The smell was a little strong when they were all mixed together, but she did her best to ignor
e it. After all, they wouldn’t have spilled if she hadn’t attacked the man with her car door.

  She got her first good look at the man when she straightened with an armful of flowers. He had wavy dark hair and a short, stocky frame. He looked relatively benign, all things considered, and she had a feeling she’d seen him somewhere, but couldn’t place his face. The only thing that caught her eye was the flower tattoos that decorated his exposed neck. She tried not to stare too long. Humans were not snack foods

  “Ya didn’t pick up any of the roses,” the man noted. He had a middle-American accent. Priscilla wondered if he’d grown up in the Midwest, or just picked up the vernacular on his own. “What? Ya not like roses or somethin’?”

  Priscilla felt like she owed him an explanation, even if he was being rude. “I can’t. Wild roses are supposed to be a vampire weakness.”

  The man’s eyebrows shot up. “You a vampire then, doll?”

  She almost cringed at the term of endearment. She’d had enough of that with Martino.

  “Why else would I have said it?”

  “Dunno,” he said with a shrug. “It’s just interesting, is all. My hometown has a few vamps. Good guys. Reliable, as long as I need ’em at night.”

  “What is it you do, exactly?” she asked.

  The man rolled his eyes. “What does it look like, doll? Ya think I’m just lugging around these flowers for my ma, huh?”

  If she could have managed it, Priscilla might have blushed. Her addled brain finally put together where she’d seen this man before. “You’re a florist.”

  “Ba-da-bing,” he said, giving her a wink. “And if you’d kindly hand over my wares, I’ll get out of here.”

  Wordlessly, she handed him her flowers. The quicker he left, the happier she’d be. Her anguish had been quickly erased by irritation with this man. It was true that what she’d done was rude, but he could have been less snide. It wasn’t as if she’d meant to hurt him.

  He stuffed them indelicately into the damaged box. Priscilla thought that was a little strange. Surely he wanted to sell them? Who wanted to buy a flower with a broken stem or ruffled petals? Then again, if these were the flowers that had adorned the community center during the breakfast, they’d already been bought and paid for and their condition didn’t matter now.