A Lying Witch Read online

  I always sent clients to Fetch Me a Heart – we had a financial agreement. They ran our ads – we referred business back to them.

  I hesitated before sending the text. Did I really need this job? It would get me like three bucks. And to be honest, this wasn’t the best fortune I’d ever written. Not to say it wasn’t true – it was totally false. I couldn’t read the future. I could, however, spin a very convincing statistical lie.

  I rubbed my closed lips over my teeth as I battled with my tiny scrap of a conscience.

  I looked up as I still pondered whether to ignore the fortune request, let alone send this abysmal reply, and I noticed the outline of the cat.

  It was still watching me.

  “Christ, you’re creepy,” I admonished.

  I hit send.

  Three bucks in the bank.

  I turned my phone off just as the battery died.

  I stuck it securely under the couch, tugged the cushion back up, and tried to close my eyes.

  Just before I did, there was another flash of lightning.

  It lit up the cat.

  It was still sitting there and staring at me.

  Maybe it was just my overactive imagination, but I swore it shook its head like it was disappointed in me.

  Such little promise.

  Those three words jumped into my head and lodged between my eyes like a blow from a cricket bat.

  I squeezed my eyes closed and tried to ignore that repeating refrain.

  But it, like the storm, beat on in my head.

  Chapter 2

  I woke the next morning to a loud, insistent knock on the door.

  It took me several seconds to remember where I was. The room wasn't at all recognizable now it was day.

  For a few startled seconds, I took in the pleasant décor. There was a nice plush cream carpet throughout the large room. There were several wooden dressers and tables, and a TV stand with a modern flat screen TV that was a heck of a lot larger and better than the crappy CRT in my apartment back home.

  Trinkets lined the mantelpiece. Carved gemstones, inlaid abalone boxes, painted china. There were a few artful western oil paintings on the walls and the prettiest silk rug I’d ever seen – a green, blue, and pale red cherry blossom pattern that somehow didn’t clutter the room with all its detail.

  There was one glaring omission, though. While there were plenty of pictures and plenty of decorative objects, there were no photos of family.

  Whoever was outside knocked again.

  “Yeah, yeah, hold on,” I grumbled as I staggered off the couch.

  I instantly pressed a hand against my upper thigh where the cat had scratched me.

  And that… that's when I realized the cat was in exactly the same position it had retreated to last night. It was sitting there on the window sill in the bay window, propped up on the artful French provincial style white and blue cushions. And it was staring at me. Intently. It looked as if it hadn't moved a muscle.

  “Well that's creepy,” I muttered to myself as I hooked a right out of the sitting room door, walked down the hall, and reached the door.

  I opened it without any attempt to make myself neat and presentable. Because, hey, there was no chance. Not only had I spent the whole night curled up on the couch, but my hair was wet and matted from the storm, and my pants were torn in several places.

  I figured it would just be some neighbor here to pay their condolences.

  I opened the door and was greeted by a tall, handsome guy frowning down at me. He was handsome in that unconventional way you got sometimes. I'd seen bigger guys, better proportioned, with sparkling eyes and the kind of smiles that could sell everything from underpants to toothpaste.

  I'd seen guys with better jaws and stronger features. But there was something about the sheer force of this man’s gaze that was more compelling than any movie star could muster.

  I blinked in complete confusion as the guy almost growled at me. “Who the hell are you?”

  “My name is Chi,” I answered, suitably startled.

  “Where's Joan?” The guy's brows knotted together as he continued to shoot me the kind of look that told me while I found him intriguing and attractive, he thought I was something the cat had dragged in.

  I frowned. “Ah… you don't know?” I said carefully. Despite the fact this guy had been a rude prick so far, he clearly didn't know my grandmother was dead.

  I was good with surprisingly few situations. Telling a complete stranger a friend was dead was up there with being able to fly a plane.

  “Ah… she’s… she’s….”

  I continued to fumble over my words, and the guy continued to shoot me the kind of look that told me I had no place invading his field of vision.

  He half shoved past me. “Joan? It’s Detective Coulson.”

  I stiffened, shoulders riding up high near my ears.

  The guy saw it. His gaze darted over and locked on my obvious tension. “Where is Joan?” he asked through a suspicious growl.

  I could hardly keep the truth from him any longer. So I cleared my throat and used my most diplomatic voice. “Dead. She's dead.”

  You should have seen his eyes – they practically exploded from his head as his suspicion turned to outright rage. “What the hell did you do to her?” He started reaching for something by his hip, and I didn't need to be a genius to figure out it was probably a gun.

  I snapped my hands up and flushed so brightly it looked like my cheeks had changed into neon signs. “She died two weeks ago, heart attack. I’m her granddaughter. She left the house to me in the will. I’m meant to go through her stuff.”

  “I think I'd know if Joan had died,” the guy snapped.

  My hands still in the air, my heart still racing at one million miles an hour, I shook my head. “She really is dead. If you don't believe me, just look up her obituary on your phone. I think there was even a piece about it in your local news.”

  Either there was something about my tone, or the sheer look of non-murderous panic in my gaze, because the detective reached a hand into his pocket and plucked out his phone. He did, however, keep his other hand hovering close to the holster strap around his side.

  I stood there in total crazy fear as I waited for him to a) find the news piece on his phone, or b) grow bored and shoot me.

  Fortunately, he didn't have an itchy trigger finger today.

  I watched his features pale in shock as he obviously found the news piece. He even brought a hand up and clamped it over his mouth.

  The guy had been nothing but brutal and rude up till this point, but my heart still went out to him.

  “Oh… god… I’m… sorry, I had no idea. I've been out of town for a month.”

  I still had my hands in the air and shrugged through an empathetic wince. “It's okay.”

  With his hand still locked over his mouth in that familiar move all tough guys do when they're trying to swallow their emotions, he offered me a distracted nod again, then frowned at my arms. “You can put them down, ma’am. I'm sorry for the confusion.” He pushed a hand out. “My name is Detective Dave Coulson. I didn't mean to startle you like that. I'm sorry for your loss,” he added in the kind of tone that told anyone he wasn't lying.

  My hands dropped, and I tried to look as if I'd lost something too.

  An overbearing grandmother who thought my mom and I were frauds and who’d probably given me this house so that I could watch it slip away as I paid her bills?

  Yeah. Not a lot of disappointment there.

  Just as I caught myself thinking that, I winced.

  Never think ill of the dead. That was one of my rules – one of the few moral laws I hadn’t whittled away over the past few years.

  The guy obviously couldn't pick up my expression, because he continued shaking his head in sad commiseration. “Your grandmother was an incredible woman.”

  “She was?” I asked before I could shut my stupid mouth. “Ah – how did you know her?” I quickly chan
ged the subject as I brought my hand up and rubbed my arm distractedly.

  Aiya, I was cold. To the bone. That's what happens when you spend the night sopping wet on a couch. As soon as I was finished with this guy, I had every intention of finding the bath in this megalithic house and crawling into it for the rest of the day.

  “I was a client of hers,” the detective said.

  My brow scrunched into a confused line. “Client?”

  I had no idea what my grandmother had done for a living. My father had never told me.

  It was Coulson’s turn to look at me with a scrunched brow. “You don't… ah… know what your grandma did?”

  There was something hesitant about the way he said it. The first thing that popped into my mind was that old Joan was a madam of some description. Then again, I doubted a well-kempt detective would admit that to some stranger on the porch.

  I shook my head. “I'll be honest with you – it came as a complete surprise to me that she left this house to me. She hated me.”

  Crap – overshare! Complete and utter overshare. I'd already told myself on the plane trip over that if I met any of Joan’s friends, I’d pretend to be the dutiful grandchild. I wouldn't let on that she'd been one of the hardest women I'd ever met. I wouldn't let on that she’d pushed my parents away.

  But here I was, the first guy I met in town – a guy who happened to be a detective – and I was blowing my deepest secret.

  His brow knotted and his eyes glimmered with a hint of suspicion again. “Really?”

  I brought my hands up and wafted them around my face as if I were trying to ward off my stupidity. “I mean, I’d only met her a couple of times as a kid,” I clarified with a messy gulp that saw my throat push against my still-damp collar. “She didn't get on with my mother, so I never really had that much to do with her.”

  The guy relaxed a little. “Still, sorry to hear of your loss. How long are you planning on staying in town for?”

  I had every intention of packing up this house, selling all the contents, and putting it on the market as soon as I could, but I didn't really want to tell the earnest detective that. I pressed a smile over my lips. “I'm not really sure yet.”

  “Give the town a chance to grow on you; you'll be surprised,” he said. Then he nodded and smiled. And there it was again. That attractiveness I'd seen when I opened the door on him.

  It drew me in as I offered a wide smile of my own. “Thanks. And sorry again. Sorry you had to find out from me.”

  “Yeah.” He dropped his gaze, locked a hand on the back of his head, and stared at his polished shoes for a few seconds before offering one final nod. “See you around,” he said, offering a pause for me to fill in my name.

  “Chi.”

  His lip half-kinked in confusion. “Chi? That’s curious.”

  “Ah, it is?”

  “It's the name of her cat,” he clarified as he pointed behind me.

  I shifted over my shoulder to see that goddamn cat. There it was again, staring at me. Though I usually got along well with cats, I'd never been able to see any great intelligence in them. Sure, they always seemed to know when it was time to be fed, and they were heat-seeking missiles. But the look in this small black cat’s eyes was something else entirely.

  Then it struck me – my grandmother had named her cat after me. Did that mean she’d actually known who I was?

  I shook my head. As if. My grandmother had probably named her cat after me to piss off my mother.

  I offered the detective another smile. “I'm sorry again.”

  He turned to go but stopped. He shifted towards me again, his lips pressed flat in a curious smile. “What did you say you did again?”

  “Ah, I didn't say. I'm a…” I trailed off.

  My mother was proud of her fortune-telling ways. Proud that she'd introduced me to kau cim, or chi chi sticks, at the tender age of four. Proud I’d fallen back on it after I'd lost my jobs. But I knew full well the majority of people thought fortune tellers were complete fakes.

  And hey, we were.

  I knew some fortune tellers who honestly thought they were helping their patients. Maybe they really could tell the future – or maybe they were just so attuned to people’s emotions that they could offer common-sense advice that their client would otherwise dismiss.

  I was one of those fortune tellers who knew full well I was screwing my client over. That’s why I referred to them by the transactional term of client, not patient.

  Coulson looked at me pointedly as he waited for me to answer, and I realized with itching disappointment that I had to say something.

  “So what do you do?”

  “Ah, I am… I am… I'm a fortune teller. You know, cards and palms and things. I work in a restaurant. As kind of an attraction, I suppose…” I started weakly and ended even weaker, my voice garbled and all stuck in my throat.

  I expected the stiff-lipped detective to laugh his ass off at me. That, or roll his eyes and walk away. He didn't. He offered me another one of those curious smiles. The kind of smile that drew me all the way in and made me wonder what on earth he was thinking.

  “Fortune teller, ha? Just like your grandmother. In that case…” he trailed off as he fumbled with something in his pocket. He drew it out and handed it to me.

  It was his card. I accepted it and looked from it to him with a totally justified confused expression. “Ah….”

  He gestured towards the card. “I used to hire your grandmother regularly. She helped me with a lot of major cases.” He offered a sad smile. “I’m kind of hoping you can do the same. What’s your number?”

  I stood there and blinked at him.

  My mother always cautioned that opportunity flies past on the wings of a crane. Catch it, or some other lucky soul will.

  He cleared his throat when my pause became far too drawn out and uncomfortable.

  “Oh, ah, sorry. Yeah, my number—” I pushed a hand into my pocket to retrieve my card.

  I paused.

  For so many reasons.

  Firstly, my card would be sopping wet, and the 10-year old inkjet printer I’d used with recycled paper would mean my card would be nothing more than a soggy blob of faded ink.

  Oh, I also paused because this guy was a friggin detective, for crying out loud. My business card had a clipart cartoon of a woman staring into a crystal ball, that, on closer inspection was too small and looked more like a marble.

  “Ah sorry, I got soaked by the rain last night, so my cards got wet. If you have a pen, I can write my number down—”

  Before I could finish asking, he plucked a pen from his pocket and handed it to me.

  I turned his card over and wrote on the back.

  I handed it back to him, and he plucked out another card to give to me.

  “Thanks for that. I know your grandmother died recently, and I’m so sorry to hear about your loss. But I…” he winced in that polite way people do when they know they have to ask you something uncomfortable, “I have a case that’s proving impossible to crack. If you’re feeling up to it – and only if you’re feeling up to it,” he stressed seriously, “I’d sure appreciate your help.”

  My mind wasn’t working quickly enough, and my hands kept slipping off that proverbial crane’s tail. “Ha? You want me to work for you?”

  He paled, obviously thinking I was indignant that he’d asked the question. He put his hands up. “Look, I’m so sorry. It’s too soon. I wouldn’t have asked, but the case is serious—”

  “No, no it’s not too soon. You can employ me,” my mother answered. Her words. Her sentiment.

  Never turn down work. Especially work that pays.

  He relaxed. “Well, how about I give you a chance to settle in? I’ll call you in a couple of days?”

  I nodded.

  “Great.” With that, Detective Coulson turned away.

  I watched him until he walked the down the garden path to the gate and disappeared into a car on the opposite side of the
street.

  It took until I turned and closed the door before I realized something.

  Something seriously important.

  “Crap!” I crammed a hand over my mouth. “What did I just agree to?”

  That detective wanted me to help him with a case.

  This wasn’t some $3 text where I’d tell him to join a dating site and watch out for the color red.

  This would have real implications. Mainly for me.

  I slapped a hand on my head, and the whiplash sound echoed down the long corridor.

  I’d been way too quick to accept his offer.

  I yanked up his card and looked at his number, memorizing it as I muttered it under my breath.

  If his number came up on my phone, I wouldn’t answer.

  It was as easy as that.

  And if he came to the house? Ah, heck, I’d just pretend I was too overcome by my grandma’s death to take up the job.

  “Sorted,” I told myself firmly.

  Now that little drama was managed, my mind turned to something far more shocking.

  Joan had been a fortuneteller?

  If you believed my father, the reason for their split was that Joan didn't agree with ma’s fortune-telling. She thought it was for charlatans. Snake oil sellers.

  People who meddled in other’s destinies for nothing more than money.

  Heck, she was right. But she was wrong about one thing – that didn’t make us bad people. I wasn’t solely responsible for fortune-telling. It had existed long before I’d been born and would continue to exist long after I died.

  Fortune-telling was a fact of life. Of the economy. It was human nature that people wanted to find out what would happen next without having to wait around for the future to happen.

  Me? I just provided that service, even if that service wasn’t technically fit for purpose. It still provided people with a feeling that they were okay and that everything would work out.

  And that? That wasn’t a bad thing.

  Which meant I wasn’t a bad person.

  Still, Joan had hated fortunetellers, so unless Detective Coulson was playing some cruel game, Joan had been a damn hypocrite.