Witch at Heart: A Jinx Hamilton Witch Mystery Book 1 (The Jinx Hamilton Mysteries) Read online

  WITCH AT HEART

  A JINX HAMILTON WITCH MYSTERY BOOK 1

  JULIETTE HARPER

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  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

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Also by Juliette Harper

  About the Author

  Copyright

  “I've heard it said that people come into our lives

  for a reason bringing something we must learn.

  And we are led to those who help us most to grow

  if we let them, and we help them in return.

  Well, I don't know if I believe that's true,

  but I know I'm who I am today because I knew you...”

  ― Stephen Schwartz, Wicked: The Complete Book

  and Lyrics of the Broadway Musical

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As always, we would like to thank our readers, who encourage us to spread our creative wings and explore new genres for stories about strong women embracing their dreams and supporting one another. Special thanks to our beta reader, Brenda Trimble, and to our faithful and patient proofreader, Sandra Jackson. And to Jennifer Radcliff, for her paging and design work and for being our first friend and mentor in the self-publishing world.

  1

  You’ve heard that old saying, “Be careful what you ask for, little girl, you may get it.” Well, I am living proof that sometimes, old saws can be pretty cutting edge. I said all I wanted to do was work at home and have as many cats as I could take care of. Maybe it was wish fulfillment or karma smacking me in the backside, but I am now single, 29, and the unpaid servant to four well-fed felines. We all live in the apartment above the store I inherited from my Crazy Aunt Fiona. No. Seriously. That’s what we called her. Crazy Aunt Fiona.

  I can see my mother now, handing me the receiver of the kitchen telephone, the one with the cord that was stretched out so straight you could wander over half the house with it. “Norma Jean, get in here and talk to your Crazy Aunt Fiona.”

  Yes, you read that right. Norma Jean. Mom is absolutely in love with Marilyn Monroe and chose to punish me with her obsession. Thank God Daddy heard that and said, “Lord God, woman, you have jinxed this child for life.” That’s the name that stuck. Jinx. Most people don’t even know my real name.

  Mine was a pretty conventional Southern Baptist raising in our tiny town. Mom is the devout one, and dad and me just try to stay out of trouble. By the time I made high school, I understood that we are actually “dancing Baptists.” Come Sunday morning a certain brand of amnesia kicks in about where the family might have been the night before and how much country music could have been involved in the activity.

  Crazy Aunt Fiona lived one town over and ran what mom referred to as a “rat’s nest of a tourist trap.” I could never figure out the second part of that statement since there wasn’t much in our neck of the woods to see. That was before I understood some people live all their lives cooped up in cities and can’t wait to enjoy some real countryside.

  The other part, about the rat’s nest, was a no brainer. Dad swore a guy could walk in off the street and say, “Excuse me, do you have a spark plug for a Studebaker?” and Fiona would have produced one. She sold everything from penny candy at the counter to love potions out the back door. You want a Moon Pie and some fishing worms? Fiona had it.

  The idea of a coherent inventory or any particular purpose for her store never seemed to enter her head. When she decided she wanted to serve food and the health board got all bent out of shape, Fiona just happily took the required state course, met their standards for food preparation and went right on about her business -- that is as long as the food inspector wasn’t in sight.

  “Everybody that comes in this place drinks homemade whiskey and would cook up road kill if it looked fresh enough,” Fiona declared. “They’re not gonna be catching any bubonic plague germs from me.”

  Truth be told, lots of folks came to Fiona to heal up from whatever was ailing them at the time. One summer I was sitting on the stool behind the counter at the store when a woman came in who had just buried her husband. She and Fiona stepped off to one side and I heard the woman say, “Mrs. Ryan, my heart hurts so bad without Jesse I just can’t breathe.”

  Aunt Fiona disappeared in the back of the store and came out with a piece of rose quartz on a silver chain. She said, “Now, honey, you just wear this over your heart so the magic can help you start healing. You get to thinking you can’t breathe, you hold onto this piece of quartz and you pray to Jesus.”

  After the woman left, I said, “Aunt Fiona, how can a rock make that lady feel better about her dead husband?”

  Aunt Fiona reached over and tucked my long hair behind my ears and patted my cheek with her ring-bedecked, blue-veined hand. “It’s not the rock that will heal her honey, it’s the belief that she can heal.”

  When Aunt Fiona would talk like that, I always felt like she was telling me things that were deep and wise because they were also simple and loving. People said Aunt Fiona was a witch woman, but the only spells I ever saw her cast were good common sense and a lot of love.

  When she passed on, I was still working the same job I got the week after I graduated high school, waiting tables down at Tom’s Cafe. It wasn’t a bad job. I made enough to feed my cats first, and myself with what was left over. I got to see everybody in town pretty much every day and the men only made half-hearted passes at me for the fun of it. Nobody was really trying to hassle me.

  The longer I worked there and the more cats I collected, the more mom clucked and said if I wasn’t careful I was going to wind up a “touched” old spinster just like Aunt Fiona. Then Fiona up and died and I got called into old Judge Baker’s office where I learned that I inherited Fiona’s shop and a pretty nice little sum of money.

  My mother had a fit, but I moved my cats and myself right on over to Briar Hollow and set myself up in Aunt Fiona’s shop. I figured once I got there, I’d learn how to run the place. I mean, honestly, if I just kept stocking the same stuff Aunt Fiona put out and people kept buying it, then I had to be at least a little successful. My basic plan was to fake running the store until I really knew how to do it and could make it my own.

  That first day when I pushed the wilted funeral wreath aside and put the old skeleton key in the lock, the smell of lemon verbana that always seemed to linger in the store made my throat close up missing Aunt Fiona. At my feet my cats, Zeke, Yule, Xavier and Winston yowled to be let out of their carriers. (I decided to start at the end of the alphabet and work backwards. If I get another one, he’s gonna be Vernon.)

  All my cats are toms. I’m telling you, ladies, it’s a plan I wish we could implement on the other half of our own species. You just take’em to the v
et for that one simple little surgery and all their grand ideas go away. You wind up with big lovable couch potatoes who purr just because you walk in the room.

  They’re all strictly inside cats and they prefer a good air conditioner, which was top on my list of upgrades to make to the facilities as soon as possible. It was early spring and still good and comfortable temperature-wise, but I did not want to listen to the boys complain once summer set in. Aunt Fiona’s old swamp cooler wasn’t going to work for any of us.

  I took the carriers upstairs and blessed Aunt Fiona for her double entry system. The stairs at the back of the store led up to a door that opened on a little vestibule. The next door put you in the apartment proper. Both could be locked so there weren’t going to be any unplanned escapes, not that my guys could summon up that much energy anyway.

  As soon as I opened the carriers, the gang set out to investigate their new digs. I shut the door behind me and went back down for my suitcase. The boxes could wait until morning. When I looked up at the storefront from the street, there was a pair of cats in each of the big windows animatedly discussing their view of downtown Briar Hollow.

  Lots of people might balk at the idea of living above a store on the town’s Main Street, but Briar Hollow is a sleepy little burg on the edge of the Blue Ridge. We get our fair share of summer tourists, and even more come leaf season, but it was never going to be enough to have me phoning in noise complaints to the local sheriff’s office. That is assuming I’d be able to wake the dispatcher up long enough to take the call.

  Aunt Fiona’s store -- well, my store now -- is right across the street from the courthouse. My front windows look straight at the Confederate Veteran’s monument complete with cannon and cannonballs. We like to tell the Yankees that we’re over the War of Northern Aggression because God knows their tourist dollars spend just fine, but truth be told, I’m betting the local Sons of the Confederacy keep that piece of artillery in firing condition.

  Next door to my new endeavor on the right, Amity Prescott runs a local craft shop complete with art classes. When I came over for Aunt Fiona’s funeral, Amity told me I just had to keep the store open on Wednesday nights from now on. “That’s when I host the ‘Draw Pictures While Drinking Wine’ evenings,” Amity said. “By the third bottle they all think they’re that Pick-asso feller and they’ll buy damned near anything.”

  On the left, Chase McGregor has his cobbler’s shop. He repairs footwear and makes all kinds of custom leather stuff, everything from journal covers to boots for Civil War re-enactors. The smell of new leather always comes wafting out his open front door, and well, to be real honest with you, Chase is not hard on the eyes. And he’s a fellow cat lover so we already have something in common. His cat, a lame old ginger named Festus, never limps any farther than the bench by the front door where he spends the mornings taking the sun and greeting passersby.

  If the Travel Channel ever bothered to show up in town, they’d label the community something like “bucolic and bohemian.” For me, being here is a chance for something more in life than waiting on tables. I love Aunt Fiona even more for thinking enough of me to leave me her shop.

  That first night, I settled in her big brass bed with all four of my cats and stared out the window at the moon rising over the courthouse. With the sound of happy purring filling the room and just before sleep claimed me, I remember saying, “Aunt Fiona, if you were a witch, I hope you left me your magic, too.”

  That might have been where I made my mistake.

  2

  The next morning, a little after dawn, I woke up under the combined and forceful gaze of four cats who were used to being fed at 5 a.m.

  “Come on,” I groused. “We talked about this. I don’t wait tables any more. There is no breakfast shift. The store opens at 9. You all can wait.”

  The cats exchanged a communal look of resignation. Clearly they didn’t want to have to do this the hard way, but I was leaving them no choice. A silent vote was taken and Winston apparently drew the short straw. He shook his head as if to say, “It didn’t have to come to this,” right before he jumped off the bed. In seconds he reappeared on the dresser and lifted his paw in the direction of a porcelain figurine.

  “You wouldn’t!” I said, outraged.

  Winston nudged the knickknack toward the edge and looked at me. In the crowd at the foot of the bed, three heads swiveled toward me. My turn in this contest of wills.

  “Winston,” I said sternly, “you get down from there right now.”

  That was not only a useless statement; it was a serious breach of etiquette. Cats don’t like to be ordered around.

  Winston fixed me with a sorrowful expression and that line from The Godfather shot across my mind. It’s just business. As I watched, he scooted the delicate figurine to the very lip of the dresser and looked at me without blinking. A long moment passed. I refused to be the one to break. Not again. Not this time. No sir . . .

  Fur met porcelain.

  I cracked.

  Throwing back the covers in a panic, I exclaimed, “Okay, fine,” but it was too late.

  The figurine teetered and fell. My hand shot out even though I was too far away to catch the fragile object. As I watched, the figurine slowed and hung suspended in mid-air. Without really knowing why, I brought my hand up, lifting the figurine with it. When the endangered breakable was once again level with the top of the dresser, I pushed forward very gently and watched as it settled safely back in place.

  Winston observed the whole process with studied feline impassiveness. Once the figurine was settled, he sniffed it and gave me an imperceptible nod. Well played, human. Then he jumped down and the entire pack went into the kitchen. All they’d wanted was for me to get up and feed them; they really didn’t care how that was accomplished.

  As for me, I stood rooted in place, my mouth hanging wide open just waiting for a fly to go buzzing right on in. I don’t know how long I would have stayed frozen there if the boys hadn’t started raising the roof with their yowling.

  I shuffled in the kitchen, flipped the light on, and doled out the morning rations. With a line of dining cats at my feet, I shook my head. “Get a grip, Jinx,” I said aloud to myself. “That was nothing but a half-awake dream. Serves you right for eating Doritos at bedtime.”

  Xavier looked up at me telegraphing his agreement. He’s a Cheetos man.

  Talking to yourself qualifies as a major perk of living with cats. If anyone comes in the room, you blame it all on the fur balls. “It must have been a dream,” I continued, stubbornly reasoning with myself. “That’s what happens when you spoiled brats wake me up out of a sound sleep. Everyone knows you can’t just put out your hand like that and . . . ”

  All the cats looked up when my self-justifying monologue morphed into a kind of choking gurgle that sounded very much like a hairball on its way north.

  You see, I’m one of those people who can’t talk if her hands are tied behind her back. When I said the words “put out your hand,” I did just that, accidentally raising a loaf of Wonder Bread clean off the counter where it now hung peacefully suspended in air right beside the spice rack.

  Cautiously I drew my outstretched hand toward my body and the bread followed. As it crossed the room, Zeke jumped straight up, making a grab for the plastic wrapper. On instinct, I jerked like I was pulling on a rope and the Wonder Bread shot at me like a guided missile, thwacking me in the face before landing at my feet, scattering cats right and left.

  Curious to see if it would work, I crooked my index finger toward the loaf, using the classic “come here” motion, and darn if that bread didn’t obey me like a well-trained coonhound.

  Standing there with the Wonder Bread in my hand, I asked the cats, “You all saw that, right?”

  A voice behind me answered. “They saw it, and so did I, honey.”

  It was my turn to jump like I’d been shot. When I whirled around, ready to beat off some attacker armed with nothing but a loaf of white bread, I
found Aunt Fiona standing in the doorway leading out to the living room.

  “Hi, Jinx,” she said pleasantly, before adding with just a hint of concern. “I think maybe you better sit down before you fall down, sugar.”

  “No,” I said, starting to back up. “Not only no, but hell no. I am not going to be seeing dead people.”

  “You’re not seeing just any dead people, Jinx,” Aunt Fiona said soothingly. “I’m your kin.”

  By this time, my back had hit the refrigerator and I had no choice but to stop. When I didn’t say anything, Aunt Fiona went on. “You’re squishing that bread, honey. Put it down.”

  My mother raised me to mind my elders, so I did as I was told, staring at Aunt Fiona all the while. My deceased aunt couldn’t have looked more like herself. Her long, gray hair was tied back, and she was wearing her usual “uniform” -- baggy jeans and a loose peasant blouse -- which was odd since we buried her in a nice pink polyester pantsuit.

  When I said as much, Fiona actually glared at me. “That’s a bone that needs picking with you, Jinx Hamilton. Why in tarnation did you let your Mama put me in that God awful git up?”

  Like I had any control over what my mother got in her head was “fitting and proper.”

  Setting my own mouth in a firm line, I said, “And just how was I going to stop her?”

  Aunt Fiona let out a disgruntled “harrumph,” which I took as a sign of begrudging agreement. My mother was her baby sister, the last of nine children, and, according to Fiona, mom couldn’t help it that she had a stick up her . . . well, you get the idea.

  This was not happening. I needed to hit the reset button on this whole thing.

  Without saying a word to my Aunt Fiona, who simply could not be there, I marched myself downstairs in my pajamas, stepped out on the sidewalk, took several deep breaths, and said, “Okay. Now. You’re awake. That was a dream. Go back up there and start this day over.”

  Just then a man walked by and gave me an odd look.

  I said good morning and then caught sight of myself in the front window of the store. I was wearing pink bunny slippers and my pajamas were covered in unicorns and rainbows. Okay then. Crazy lady on Main Street. Great. Just great.