Two's Company, Three's a Coven, page 1
part #1 of Triplet Witch Sisters Mystery Series
Two's Company, Three's a Coven
by
Constance Barker
Copyright 2018 Constance Barker
All rights reserved.
Similarities to real people, places or events are purely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Sign up for Constance Barker’s New Releases Newsletter
I will never spam or sell your email address
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Two's Company, Three's a Coven
Part One: Reunion | Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part Two: Blue Rodrigo | Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Thanks for Reading
Catalog of Books
The Sun’s Blinding Stare
Part One: Reunion
Chapter 1
“You can’t take my babies. I done everything you said!”
Quinn Hutchinson caught the haunted eyes of two girls, five and eight, being led to a county car. Their mother, Ladonna Stackford, pleaded with her. Police in bullet-proof vests crawled all over the apartment building, blue armored insects.
“Ladonna, for God’s sake, there were guns and drugs in your apartment.”
“But they ain’t mines!”
Today was Wednesday, the half-day of the school week. Who had decided this? It made no sense. A crowd of people watched the police activity, veiled by feigned indifference. Some were infuriated that The Man was stomping all over an innocent woman and her children. Some were wondering where their next fix was coming from. None were on Quinn’s side.
“They were still in your apartment, Ladonna. Your girls had access to those weapons. To the smack. I’m not the one doing this to you. You are the one doing this to you.”
Tears welled in the woman’s eyes, though her stance widened, hands fisting. “It was Trevon. He doing this while I was at work, my kids in school. Dumb-ass didn’t know Wednesday was a half-day at school. Every fool knows this.”
“I thought you were done with Trevon.”
“I am. We through. But the man had a copy of my key. I didn’t know, Miss Hutchinson, I swear to the Lord I didn’t know.” Ladonna’s hands lightly fell on Quinn’s arms. “Please. This is a mistake. I’m nine months clean. Test my piss, test my blood. I’m holding down a job. I take care of my girls. I do. I do. I swear I do.”
Child Protective Services got the call when the Narcotics cowboys on the Oakland Police Department raided the apartment at nine this morning. Trevon Hollis and Marcus Ramirez had been under surveillance for a week. Like Ladonna said, their MO was to open up shop a half hour after Ladonna walked her girls to school and caught the 15 bus to work. It was possible her client knew nothing of the drug dealing out of her little one-bedroom. Still, rules were rules.
“Maybe we can work this out, Ladonna, but for now, my job is to make certain those girls are safe. I believe you’re providing for them, caring for them, but—” Quinn waved her hands around. “—look around, girl, does this look like you’re keeping them safe?”
“What you want me to do? Buy a house in the damn hills? I can barely afford this dump, even with Section 8. What can I do, Quinn? Can’t you help me?”
Quinn turned away to hide her helpless expression.
Sunlight had yet to burn through the marine layer, making the day as gray as Quinn’s mood. The words stuck in her head. Can’t you help me? Even at this late morning hour, a collision on 580 made the freeway feel like a line for a carwash. She needed to get home, get her head straight. Because she believed Ladonna, but even then, there was nothing Quinn could do, and so her little struggling family would be parted. Amid the fumes of idling, slowly moving vehicles, she thought about what her job, what her life had become.
After the hour it took to drive seven miles, gas gurgling away in the big Chevy Tahoe, she had to circle the block for twenty minutes until the no parking for street sweeping ended. She parked behind a ticketed car and crossed Adams to her flat. Or what used to be her flat. The housing crunch in the Bay Area had Nicked up her rent to the point where she had to take on roommates. Steve and Diane were a nice enough couple. They had the larger bedroom now. Quinn had the small one, with the garden view. But Steve’s cousin, Mike, an airline pilot, used the couch to crash when he was in town. It may have made her financial margin a little wider, but the crowd of people in her place pushed her toward the edge.
Ladonna Stackford was one of Quinn’s success stories. A year ago, the woman and her two children lived out of a Dodge Dart, not the new model, with Ladonna dealing and tricking to maintain her habit. Despite the monkey on her back, the woman was determined to be a good mother. She had turned her life around with Quinn’s help.
Quinn banged her fists on the steering wheel. This was not what she signed up for. Yet separating children from their mothers was what she did nearly every day. Overhead, the sun broke through the layer of fog. Palm trees swayed. The light breeze smelled of the bay. Why was everyone living in this paradise so miserable?
She reached for her briefcase purse on the passenger seat. Bright purple, the corner of a book caught her eye. Her mother’s organizer, the word Recipe embossed in the violet leather; she couldn’t remember putting it in her bag. Why would she? It was the only thing she had of her mother’s. In her two-plus decades on the planet, she had yet to meet the woman. The organizer was both a comfort and a mystery.
It was not a mystery simply because her mother was an unknown quantity. Quinn turned the book over and upside down. Before her eyes, the blank back of the book changed. A word embossed itself in the leather: Secrets.
The very nature of the book shifted when read from back to front. Pocket pages with clippings, ivory cards of hand-written recipes, mylar tabs separating sections, disappeared. She now flipped through vellum sheets, diagrams and poems scrawled in black ink. Most of it, Quinn could not decipher. But the wind through her half-open window blew the pages. She stared at a title. Exoneration.
“The light of truth as bright as day
Reveal the fact that none may sway
Illuminate beyond inveigh
Exonerate without hearsay
Exculpate, justice purvey
Absolve from guilt without delay.”
Quinn found herself reading the words aloud, again and again, with more force and more volume. For an instant, the street became clearer to her sight, brighter than the wan sun could account for. Her breath left her visibly, the interior of the Chevy now freezing. Looking to her lap, she saw the book had closed on its own.
She shivered, but the chill lasted only a moment. Had anything changed? Or had reading her mother’s poetry only comforted Quinn? Whatev. She had calls to make, emergency foster care to arrange, a meeting with her supervisor, and blah blah blah. There was no reason she couldn’t do it while eating a grilled cheese sandwich in her room.
Her cell rang as she secured the SUV. Her sister, Harvest. For some reason, her sister always seemed to know when Quinn was stressed out. “Shine on,” She answered the phone; a take on her sister’s full name, Harvest Moon Hutchinson. It had gone from bad joke to habit.
“Big Sis, I got news for you. I thought you might need some cheering up.”
How? How did she know this? “Right as usual.” Quinn smiled a little as she sorted out the door key from her ring. “What’s up?”
“I ran into your bestie, Rae Devon. She’s the assistant director for Human Services now.”
“Yeah, that’s old news.” Quinn unlocked the front door and started upstairs.
“What’s new news is, they’re hiring, Case Worker II. I asked if she would hire you. She said in a hot second.”
Quinn sighed. “We’ve talked about this before. I have a job, a career, even, an apartment, a car—”
“Yeah, but you’re always whining about it. C’mon, a halfway decent job in Northwest PA, and you can live like a queen. And this is a real deal, Sis. An opportunity. Don’t you miss the overwhelming snow? The sub-zero temperatures? The scorching, humid summers? The crushing boredom of living in the sticks?”
She climbed toward the third floor flat, chuckling a little. “Yeah, I do miss the crushing boredom a little.”
“Call her, Quinn. Come home. You know you miss it. Well, at least admit you miss us.”
Quinn did miss Harvest, and her little sister, Echo. “Jeeze, when was the last time we got together?”
“Two years ago. Christmas.”
Had it been that long? “Okay, I’ll definitely be home soon. To visit.”
“Gramma Em has cable now. We might even have the internet.”
“Temptress.”
Feeling lighter, Quinn unlocked the apartment door. During the day, there was a quantum of solitude, with Diane and Steve working, Mike flying to Japan or wherever. It was the only peace she had anymore.
A sound in the kitchen froze her feet in the living room. Male voice, singing “Lights” by Journey (badly), pans clattering, a sizzle of cooking followed by the scent of burning butter: oh, no, not this, she thought.
“Oo, I wanna be they-ay-ee-air, in my—Crap! Quinn!” Mike jerked around, the skillet hitting linoleum. He was dressed, or rather, undressed, in thong underpants and slippers. A grilled cheese sandwich slid across the floor.
Quinn averted her eyes. Mike had a pot belly going on over—brain skip—and skinny legs with knobby knees. “Just home for lunch,” she hurried to her room. In truth, she had lost her appetite.
“Hey, we all gotta let loose once in a while,” Mike called through the closed door.
Shaking her head, Quinn pulled out her phone and scrolled until she found Rae Devon’s number.
Chapter 2
Echo swiped sweat from her brow. The workshop of the Chandlery sweltered despite the early morning cool. Neither Gramma Em or Aunt Mary minded. Em threaded an antique tin mold with wicking, knotted hands a blur of familiar activity. Her Great-Aunt Mary took the temperature of eight sunken trays of colored, melted wax.
She loved to watch the old ladies at work, happy expressions of concentration on their wrinkled faces. Echo worked at the art of candle making herself, but seeing those experienced hands always filled her with a kind of awe.
Yesterday was wax day. They had boiled pounds and pounds of crushed honeycomb, straining the mix through big paper filters. This morning, they dumped out fat cakes of yellow beeswax from five-gallon buckets and set to melting them again. Today was stock day, Echo’s favorite. After Gramma’s beeswax candles were poured and dipped, after Aunt Mary’s candles were carved, Echo would create candles of her own from the leftovers.
Gramma, in particular, was a freakin machine. Once her molds were threaded, she closed the wick-ends with a dollop of wax. Closing her eyes, she chanted under her breath. Words that were so familiar to Echo:
“I shield you from the malady carried on breezes
The watery eyes, the sinusitis and sneezes
This curative instrument burn ye one hour each day
To relieve ye the symptoms of the fever of hay.”
She then dipped a heavy iron ladle into the pot of beeswax and filled her first mold. Once the six candles were full, she set the mold on a rack to harden. Then, from a bar above the boiler, she lifted doubled wicks and dipped them, one at a time, into the melted wax. Twenty four wicks, forty-eight candles. The hand-dipped ones sold for fifteen bucks a pair. That would be seven hundred twenty bucks. The molded tapers, thirteen inches long, sold for five dollars each, or thirty bucks for a dozen. That potentially added up to—
“Stop thinking like that, Echo. You’ve got a full ride at Fredonia. There’s no money in the candle biz.” Gramma could read Echo’s mind. College, despite the full scholarship to the State University of New York at Fredonia, appealed less and less as the summer waned.
“Oh, leave her be, Emma. She likes candle making, and the bees love her.” Aunt Mary produced a white columnar candle in the shape of a seven—pointed star. These she had molded out of wax with a low melt point during the week. Now, her station prepped with eight deep trays of beeswax, each skillfully colored to bright hues. She dipped a white candle into yellow wax.
Gramma grumped. “No grandchild of mine is going to be a chandler.” She eyed Mary, and then Echo. “You’re getting a degree, so you can get a decent job, like your sisters.” Gramma filled the next mold, set it to harden, and dipped the hanging wicks again.
Mary dipped and dipped until the white candle turned yellow. This she dunked in a bucket of water. By the time she lifted it, the hot wax had dried. This time, she lowered it into red wax. “Maybe she can get a business degree, run this place right.”
Echo shaved the yucky bottom off a cake of wax. She perked up. “You know, I think this place could really take off with a little more exposure—”
Gramma gave her the hairy eye ball, stopping the words in her throat.
“Full scholarship. Fredonia. Degree. No arguments.”
She dumped the cleaned cake into a melting pot. Echo had been selling her own candles online for a few months in secret. She had a couple thousand bucks in her PayPal account. She wanted to boast about it, but something made her shut up.
Mary switched to blue, then white, then a thick layer of black. Em poured her third mold. “Oh, don’t tell me you’re making a Pittsburgh Steelers candle.”
Em shrugged. “You gotta make what sells.” She dipped in the yellow again.
“Yeah, at Christmas, maybe. This is August. If you really want to make candles that sell, you should dip a Cleveland Browns candle.”
“If I wanna make a candle that smells, maybe. Who wants a brown candle? It’ll look like a big turd.”
South Fishburn, PA, sat so close to the New York border that you could hit the Empire State by spitting. And, in reality, that was about as much as there was to do in the little hamlet. It was also equidistant between Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Ohio, and Buffalo, New York.
“Pittsburgh’s a big turd,” Gramma muttered under her breath.
Mary muttered back. “Twenty-two division wins, sixteen AFC championships, six Super Bowl rings.” With the candle now bright yellow, the angles of the star points now round, Mary hung the candle by the wick and started carving. She worked with lightning speed, pulling out swoops and curls. On a blank spot, she stuck a round Steelers logo. With a smaller knife, she cut and twisted, the red, blue and white layers adding trim to the mostly black and yellow design. Ten minutes later, a fantasy structure appeared. Candy ribbons, bows, spires, formed a shape that dazzled the eye and at the same time, looked good enough to eat. Echo could see the places where the glow of the light would shine through.
With a bent knife, Aunt Mary carved a circle at the candle’s top, a well for the original dipping candle to melt. Once lit, it would burn down, leaving the slower-melting wax of the carving behind. After that, other candles could be inserted into the carved shape over and over again.
“You know, the inherit planned obsolescence of the candle is the thing that makes them valuable,” Gramma Em said. “Once they burn down, you go buy another one. It’s how we make money. Your carved candles stay around forever.”
Mary shrugged. “They can buy the replacement candles from us, too.” Satisfied, she gave the candle a dunk in clear wax, then in the bucket of water, and then placed it on a shelf. Other carved candles stood, some for Christmas, a few other sports teams (including a Cleveland Browns candle that was orange, not brown), and some that were just wonderful, fanciful confections of wax.
Gramma poured her last mold. The dipped candles were now fat and golden. One more go in the molten wax, and they were left to harden. In the meantime, Mary dipped and carved another candle, this one of white and two blues. Once carved, it resembled a snowflake, a wedding cake, blue spearmint candy floss. Mary’s candles were as breathtaking as Em’s were practical.
Air now redolent of honey brought curious bees swooping through the shop. Echo smiled. “Morning, girls.” They formed a swarm around her in greeting, orbiting in elaborate flight paths.
“What are you doing in here? Go out and make us some money, honey,” Gramma chided the insects.
A chant popped into Echo’s head. It was one of those things mother’s said as they rocked their babes to sleep. Echo had been rocked in such a fashion.
Buzzy, fuzzy, we bid you thrive, attend your home, defend your hive
Ignore your curiosities, collect your nectar from the trees
And flowers bloomed, their essence take, with it your wax and honey make
Think not of human mysteries, your strength lies in community.
Even Gramma cracked a smile as the old ladies joined in. In a moment, the bees left the Chandlery, off on the business of collecting nectar. Echo basked in the familiarity, in the satisfaction of the work. Mostly, she looked forward to stocking her own, secret internet candle shop with new items.
