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  Witching On a Star

  A Wicked Witches of the Midwest Mystery Book 4

  By Amanda M. Lee

  Text copyright © 2014 Amanda M. Lee

  All Rights Reserved

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Books by Amanda M. Lee

  Prologue

  When you’re dead, time has no meaning.

  Days come and go. Weeks come and go. Maybe years come and go, too. I really have no sense of time. I just mark it in the back of my mind.

  Sunrise is like a gift and sunset is the inevitable curse that follows.

  I don’t like the dark. I never liked the dark, even when I was alive. The only company I have at night is the stars – and I do love the stars. I wish on them every night, just like my mama told me to do when I was alive. I wish for someone, anyone, to see me. For someone to talk to me. For someone to remember me. No one ever does, though.

  So I spend my days watching the water and the nights wishing for something I can never have. I like the way the water laps at the beach – when it’s not frozen in the winter, that is. I never got to wade in these waters when I was alive, but I could hear it brushing the bottom of the boat. It became soothing.

  Now that I’m dead, though, I can’t feel anything. Except loneliness, that is. I feel a profound sense of that.

  Most of the time, I wander around this place – which is literally falling apart due to the ravages of time and inclement weather – and I wait. What am I waiting for? I have no idea. I have no purpose, so I have nothing to look forward to. I just am.

  The few people that visit this place where woods and water meet don’t notice me. They can’t see me. That’s how I know I’m dead. I tried to talk to them at first, the ones that looked nice anyways. Most are armed with cameras and picnic baskets and they never see me as they spend an afternoon traipsing around my own personal hell – and then leave again. I have no idea where they go.

  Some that come to this area aren’t nice, though. I don’t know how I know that. Maybe it’s in the way they talk to each other, or in the way they look at each other – like animals ready to prey on the weak. I stay away from them. I never try to talk to them. They scare me.

  There’s a memory I’m trying to hold on to – and these people trigger it whenever I see them. I just can’t quite grasp it. All I know is that I don’t want to be here when they’re here. They say you can’t recognize evil in someone’s soul – but I can.

  I’ve started to branch out from this little area, though. I’ve seen all there is to see here and boredom still exists – even when you’re dead.

  Just over the bluff, there’s a small little town. It’s called Hemlock Cove. I’ve heard some of the hikers and picnickers call it that when they pass through. I don’t know why, but I feel that whatever I’m supposed to be doing is there. Whatever person I’m supposed to be looking for is there, too.

  I just have to figure out exactly what – or who -- that is. I wish I had a little magic to help me out.

  One

  “We’re at war!”

  “Great. I can’t wait,” I replied distractedly.

  “I’m serious. This is a war and I need my best soldiers. Bay Winchester, are you even listening to me?”

  I glanced up from the magazine I was idly flipping through and met my Great Aunt Tillie’s hostile countenance with a mixture of amusement and dread. “No, I got it. We’re at war. I didn’t realize I was one of your soldiers, though. I thought you could do this all alone. Isn’t that what you said last night?”

  Aunt Tillie was standing at a chalkboard she had erected in the living room of the family quarters at The Overlook – the bed and breakfast she ran with my mom and her two sisters – and she was clearly in a state.

  On the best of days, Aunt Tillie is a little persnickety. The past two months, though? Aunt Tillie was at the abject worst a person could possibly be. She was angry. She was vengeful. And, man, was she crotchety.

  At 4’11” tall and eighty-five years old, the casual observer wouldn’t exactly be quaking in their shoes when they went toe-to-toe with Aunt Tillie. Anyone that’s spent more than five minutes with her – and, in my case, twenty-seven years – would know she’s scarier than any mass murderer could ever be.

  I come from a family of witches, you see. Real witches. We’re not like fairy tale witches with magic shooting out of our fingertips – at least most of the time. We all have abilities, though. And Aunt Tillie’s abilities were used to wreak havoc, more often than not, on anyone that got in her way.

  Currently, she was in a right proper snit about a competing inn that was being constructed on the other side of Hemlock Cove. Under normal circumstances, this wouldn’t be cause for alarm. Hemlock Cove is a tourist destination in northern Lower Michigan – and another inn wouldn’t actually hurt The Overlook’s business. The fact that my father and two uncles were opening the inn, though, was the bone of contention for Aunt Tillie. She had spent the past eight weeks drawing up battle plans for her assault on the Dragonfly Inn – and they were getting more and more elaborate. That’s why she needed the chalkboard – to keep track of her diabolical schemes.

  “I can do it on my own,” Aunt Tillie said bitterly. “I just thought, since one of the evil-doers was your own father, that you would want to help.”

  “Evil-doers? When did you stop calling them bastions of hell?” I focused back on the magazine wearily.

  “Your mother said I’m not allowed to call them that anymore because it’s disrespectful,” Aunt Tillie sniffed.

  I cocked an eyebrow from my place on the couch. “And you listened? That doesn’t sound like you.”

  “Are you going to make fun of me or help me? You can’t do both.”

  “I’m a multi-tasker,” I countered. “I think I can probably do both.”

  “So, you’ll help?” Aunt Tillie’s face lifted hopefully.

  “No,” I shook my head, my shoulder-length blonde hair shaking around my shoulders as I did. “I’m not going to help.”

  “Why not?”

  “My mom told me that if I helped you that I would be grounded,” I responded truthfully.

  “You’re an adult. You can’t be grounded. You need to tell her that you can make your own decisions and that you can’t be controlled.”

  “You’re trying to control me,” I pointed out blithely.

  “That’s different,” Aunt Tillie said evasively. “I’m in the right. It’s okay to be bossy when you’re in the right.”

  “Ah, good to know.”

  “So, are you going to help me or not?”

  “No.”

  “You’re dead to me.”

  “Fine.”

  “No, you’re
really dead to me.”

  “It’s still fine.”

  “If you’re not going to help, then get out!”

  I looked up from the magazine again and fixed Aunt Tillie with a hard stare. Her close-cropped hair, which had been black in youth, was now totally gray and standing on end. Her round features – which I always likened to those of a hobbit – were pinched and ferocious. She clearly wasn’t letting this go.

  “You want me to leave?”

  “If you’re not going to help,” Aunt Tillie said stubbornly.

  “I was invited for breakfast,” I reminded her. “If I just leave, my mom will be ticked – and nobody wants that.” Least of all me. My mom was master of the guilt trip. And, while Aunt Tillie was scary, there were some ways that my mom managed to be even scarier – like when I purposely ignored a direct order. And I, along with my cousins, Thistle and Clove, had been expressly ordered to be at the inn for breakfast this morning. There was some big announcement my mom and aunts were all atwitter about.

  “Breakfast is in the kitchen,” Aunt Tillie said, turning back to her chalkboard and away from me. “There’s no need for you to be in here with me if you’re not going to help.”

  I couldn’t agree more. I got up from the couch, casting one last look at her board, and then went in the kitchen to join my mom, aunts and cousins in their breakfast preparations.

  My mom, who was busy ladling pancakes into the cast iron griddle, gave me a hard look when I entered the kitchen. “I thought I told you to watch your Aunt Tillie?”

  “I was, but she ordered me out if I wasn’t going to help her,” I shrugged, plucking a strawberry off the fruit plate and popping it into my mouth. Since spring was finally here – after a really long and hard winter (both on the weather and emotion fronts) – we were getting good produce again.

  My mom narrowed her eyes. “What’s she planning now?”

  “She wants to enchant a bunch of moles to create a series of holes under the Dragonfly and make the ground underneath unsteady,” I replied. “She thinks, if they dig enough holes, the inn will just collapse into them. Problem solved.”

  My cousin, Thistle, stopped cutting the tops off strawberries at the cutting board and laughed. Her hair, which changed with the seasons, was currently a bright purple (she said it was for Easter, but I knew it was just an attempt to irritate her mother). Her doe eyes were filled with mirth. “That’s actually not a bad idea.”

  “Where is she going to find the moles to enchant?” My other cousin, Clove, asked from her spot next to the sink. While I was blonde and fair, and Thistle was currently purple and fair, Clove had been blessed with olive skin and black hair like her mother and, ironically, Aunt Tillie in her youth. She was short like Aunt Tillie, too, while Thistle and I were several inches taller.

  “I don’t have any idea,” I replied. “Maybe she’s going to order them off the Internet. She always says you can buy anything on the Internet. She’s bought other animals online.”

  Aunt Twila, Thistle’s mom, involuntarily shuddered at the memory. A few months back, Aunt Tillie had ordered a scorpion named Fred with the intent of putting him in a guest’s bed. Fred had managed to escape, and my mom and aunts were convinced that Fred was still loitering around The Overlook somewhere.

  “We’ll have to make sure she doesn’t get any deliveries,” Aunt Marnie, Clove’s mom, sighed. “She’s always trying to sneak things in here.”

  “Hopefully that will change after this morning,” my mom said primly, tucking a strand of blonde hair behind her ear wearily. “She’ll be too distracted with other things to plot the downfall of the Dragonfly.”

  I glanced at my mother curiously. She’d been decidedly tight-lipped about the goings on at the Dragonfly Inn since she heard about it. She acted fine with everything, but I had a feeling that wasn’t true. While she and my father hadn’t parted on ugly terms, there had to be some sort of emotion roiling about inside of her now that he was back in Hemlock Cove. She never said anything to indicate that, though. In fact, Marnie and Twila had been quiet about the fact that their ex-husbands were involved with the new inn, too. I couldn’t help but wonder if the three of them were plotting something themselves.

  My mom glanced up and met my gaze. “What?”

  “Nothing,” I shook my head. “I was just wondering why you and Marnie and Twila haven’t really talked about the Dragonfly.”

  My mom pursed her lips. “What is there to say?”

  “Have you seen dad?”

  “No.”

  “Not even once?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a small town. That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”

  “Well, I’m sorry I can’t quench your curiosity with a bit of ugly gossip,” my mom said snidely. “There’s nothing to say. Why don’t you ask your father about it?”

  I had. He’d been as stingy with information as she was being. The truth was, though, while I had been out to the Dragonfly to visit my dad on several occasions, the conversation topics hadn’t run any deeper than the weather and construction updates. I wasn’t sure I was ready for any deeper conversations.

  “Winnie, don’t be mean to her,” Marnie chided her sister mildly. “It’s not her fault that Warren, Teddy and Jack are back. You shouldn’t take it out on her.”

  I raised my eyebrows at Clove behind her mother’s back. It wasn’t like Aunt Marnie to be the voice of reason. They were definitely up to something. Once glance at Thistle’s suspicious face told me she was thinking the same thing. Now wasn’t the time to talk about it, though. We would tackle that situation later. When we were alone.

  “I’m sorry,” my mom apologized stiffly. “That was uncalled for. Your Aunt Tillie is just driving me crazy.”

  “What else is new?” Thistle asked dubiously. “She’s always driving you crazy. That’s what she does best.”

  “She’s being really bad right now, though,” my mom muttered. “She got a big box delivered the other day. She wouldn’t let me see inside of it. I just know she’s got something big planned. It was probably filled with dynamite or something.”

  “She needs a license to order dynamite,” I said pragmatically. “She doesn’t even have a driver’s license. I don’t think you have to worry about that.”

  “Besides,” Thistle interjected. “She could make her own explosives here. She doesn’t need dynamite.”

  That thought didn’t make anyone feel better, so we just ignored it. “So, what’s the big surprise?”

  “You have to wait until your Aunt Tillie is in here,” Twila said, pushing her flame-red hair off her forehead as she finished arranging the fresh baked bread on a tray for the main dining room.

  “Go get her,” I instructed Clove. Despite myself, I was curious about their big announcement. It had to be something huge to distract Aunt Tillie.

  “Why me?” Clove visibly blanched. She was more fearful of Aunt Tillie than the rest of us.

  “Because you haven’t pissed her off today,” Thistle said sagely.

  Clove blew out a sigh. “Fine. But if she curses me, I’m blaming you.”

  What else was new?

  After a few minutes, Clove and Aunt Tillie made their way back into the kitchen. Aunt Tillie didn’t look thrilled to be there. “I’m here. What do you want to tell me?”

  My mom turned to her beloved aunt and fixed her with a hard glare. “You could at least try to be nice.”

  “Why? You’re never nice to me. Why should I be nice to you?”

  “We just bought you a really big gift,” my mom countered. “I think that deserves at least a modicum of respect.”

  Here’s the thing about Aunt Tillie: She’s spoiled rotten. She might be set in her ways, but she’s also someone that is open to a good bribe. She obviously doesn’t want to risk losing something really good.

  “Fine. You have my respect. Now, what’s the big announcement?”

  “Well, we were going to wait until after breakfast . . .” Marni
e hedged, exchanging a doubtful look with her sisters.

  Aunt Tillie’s newfound “respect” wasn’t going to last long; that much was obvious.

  “We decided, that since you lost your wine closet this winter for the new furnace,” my mom started.

  “And you handled that so well,” Thistle said bitingly.

  “That we were going to build you something new that would be all your own,” my mom continued, shooting Thistle a dark look.

  “A new wine closet?” Aunt Tillie looked less than impressed. “You called me in here to tell me you’re building me a new wine closet?”

  Aunt Tillie’s homemade wine was famous around Hemlock Cove. While we couldn’t prove it, the assumption was that she had a thriving side business selling the wine to guests and adventurous townspeople. Since she’d lost the space she used to make the wine two months ago, Aunt Tillie had been the queen of the perfected pout whenever the subject was broached. It was getting tiresome.

  “No, not a wine closet,” my mom said hurriedly. “We’re building you a greenhouse.”

  “A greenhouse?” Aunt Tillie looked dubious.

  “You’ve always wanted one,” Twila said hurriedly, frowning at Aunt Tillie’s less than stellar reaction.

  “You said it was too expensive,” Aunt Tillie reminded her. “Why now?”

  “Well, we’ve been saving up our money,” Marnie said evasively. “We’ve got a spot picked out at the back of the property and everything.”

  “It’s going to be big,” my mom said excitedly. “There’s going to be plenty of room for you to grow whatever you want.”

  “Whatever she wants?” Uh-oh.

  My mom realized what I was referring to immediately. “No pot,” she said. “You can’t grow pot in there.”

  Aunt Tillie also had a magically hidden pot field on the east side of our property that no one was supposed to know about. Unfortunately, almost everyone in town knew it was there – including local law enforcement. Aunt Tillie had cast a spell, though, that protected the field – for all intents and purposes. You could still see it, but only family – and a chosen few, like Thistle’s boyfriend, Marcus – could actually get to it.