The Witching on the Wall: A Cozy Mystery (The Witchy Women of Coven Grove Book 1) by Constance Barker Page B

think.”
    “ Of course, Red,” Ryan said, and slipped his arm around her shoulder. He started to walk her toward the path back up to the office but she tugged him toward Trevor.
    “ Lets go around the crowd,” she sighed. “I’d rather not be accosted with questions. I don’t know anything more than they do at this point.”
    Ryan agreed, and Avery followed them shortly as the three of them walked between two parked, white cars with the gold star of the Coven Grove Sheriff’s department emblazoned on the sides. She took them to within a few yards of Trevor’s interview. He met her eyes for just a brief second before he answered some question the deputy had asked. She strained to hear.
    “ I was at my hotel room,” he said. “The whole time. No one was with me, though, so I understand. It’s possible that the hotel clerk saw me walk in, but I can’t know for sure. You’ll have to ask her.”
    “ I’ll do that,” the deputy said. “You sure there’s no one else you talked to on the way? Even on the street. You say you walked? Which route did you take?”
    “ I just sort of wandered, honestly,” Trevor answered, earnestly. “I don’t recall exactly which route I took. I remember a house with a red door, though, and…”
    They were out of range. Bailey wanted to stop, and go back, and listen in, but that would have been outrageously overt and Ryan would have seen right through it. She glanced up at him. Already there was a quiet light in his lined eyes, and he had his thinking face on. Avery did as well, both of them chewing things over, making their own theories.
    On the walk back up, Bailey tried calling Poppy again. For the second time, she got no answer. A nervous feeling settled into her stomach. This was the sort of time when Poppy should have been hovering over every aspect of the office. Bailey hoped she was okay. She couldn’t help thinking, suddenly, that something might have happened to the woman. After all, Martha was a washed up nobody, according to Trevor and Poppy both… but Poppy had money, and a business, and traveled all over. What if Martha had just been a casualty of something else? What if Poppy had been hurt or killed or abducted? After all, she had family with money.
    The other possible explanation, of course, was that Poppy had killed Martha herself, but that was the furthest thing from likely that Bailey could imagine. Poppy was an awful person at times, and she certainly had a temper. But she was driven by something far more powerful than her emotions, or any urges she might harbor toward anyone; Bailey had seen her bend over backward in pursuit of her singular principle, sacrificing everything for it.
    That principle, of course, was profit; and Martha’s death would cost Poppy somewhere in the range of seventy-five thousand dollars. If anything, Poppy was probably holed up in some bar outside of town, weeping into a glass of cheap white wine and contemplating how ruined her business was going to be after this.
    Only at that point did Bailey really think about it herself. She saw her dreams of taking over the tour business evaporate. Instantly, she felt guilty for it.
    Martha Tells had died on their watch. That’s what mattered. That, and that somewhere in this town a murderer was running loose; someone that had desecrated her precious Caves and tainted them, in her mind, forever. And that person, she very much wanted to see brought to justice.
    And, she determined at that moment, she’d do whatever she could to see that they were.
     

 
     
    Chapter 7
    The next two days were a blur to Bailey. As the person who’d found the body—no; found Martha, she couldn’t think of Martha as ‘the body’ without her chest tightening—she was both the talk of the town, and the prime witness not just for the Sheriff’s department, but for the local paper, the Coven Grove Weekly.
    When Ryan had worked for them full time it had been the Coven Grove Daily, but that changed as the