A Potion to Die For: A Magic Potion Mystery Read Online Free PDF

don’t think he ever came into the shop at all. At least not while I was there. I need to check with my daddy and Ainsley.”
    He tapped a pen on the desk. “Are you sure Aunt Marjie is innocent?”
    “Caleb.”
    “Fine, fine.” He drummed his fingers on the desktop. “Seems to me that whoever had a grudge against him likely had one against you, too.”
    It was an angle I hadn’t thought of. “Me? Why?”
    “Why else would his dead body be in
your
shop? How many enemies do you have?”
    I bit my lip. “None that I know of.”
    “Liar, liar.”
    “Okay. A few.” People who’d come to me for advice and hadn’t liked what I said. Plus, as my mama mentioned, I had a bit of a temper and wasn’t afraid to speak my mind. “I have a hard time believing this is about me, though. What kind of cases was Nelson working right now?”
    Caleb leaned back in his seat. “The only case I know of is Coach Butts’s. Nelson took it over recently from a Birmingham firm.”
    That’s right. I should have remembered that. The case was the talk of the town.
    Coach Floyd Butts. A perfect surname for such a jackass of a man.
    Even though Coach and his wife insisted the last name was pronounced
Boots
, everyone around here still said
Butts
behind their backs. We were a childish lot.
    Until four months ago, forty-year-old Coach Butts was the high school gym teacher and the local youth baseball coach. That was until an audit concluded he’d pilfered league funds to the tune of twenty thousand dollars. At first he’d hired a fancy firm to defend him, but he fired them abruptly and then, at his older sister, Bernice’s, urging, hired Nelson. Bernice Morris worked as Nelson’s secretary, and had talked Nelson into taking the case pro bono as a favor to her.
    It was quite the favor.
    Especially since following Coach’s arrest his personality had taken a bit of a dark turn. He’d picked more fights around town in the past few months than I could count. Coach had become a very angry man, raging against . . . life in general.
    The town was split fifty-fifty on Coach’s guilt. I’d had Coach Butts for ninth-grade PE, when he was fresh out of college. I knew darn well he used to try to peek up the girls’ shorts when they climbed the ropes. I had serious doubts about his innocence.
    Nelson had quite the challenge defending him, but as far as I knew he’d thrown himself into the case and supposedly was doing a stellar job.
    “Do you know why Coach fired that Birmingham firm?” I asked.
    “Nope.”
    “Can you find out?”
    Caleb narrowed his eyes. “Why?”
    “Do I need to remind you that there’s a dead man in my shop?”
    It didn’t escape me that Coach Butts was one of my known enemies—ever since I reported him for looking up those shorts.
    I didn’t have much to do with him these days, except through interactions with his wife, Angelea, who I’d gone to school with. I didn’t agree with their relationship—they had started secretly dating while she was still a student in high school, and even though she’d been eighteen it still made my stomach turn a bit, with him being a teacher and all. They’d been married twelve volatile years now and had been separated more times than I could count, venturing off to date other people. Their latest breakup was a ten-month-long stretch last year that I thought would seal the fate of their marriage once and for all.
    But they always seemed to come back together, despite probably being better off without each other. Currently, they had been back together for almost six months now.
    It might be a record for them, one that probably had more to do with keeping up appearances in light of Coach’s recent run-in with the law than anything. Especially if the rumors that she was stepping out on him (again) were true.
    Angelea was one of those frustrating women who sought her worth in a man. Any man, it seemed, married or not.
    She was what my Grammy Adelaide would have called a vixen, and