The Witch and the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

relationship.
    I had an idea for something that Archie would be great at, but getting Evan to agree to it might be tricky. I wasn’t above begging, however.
    A police car rolled by, and I wondered how long it would take to learn how Miles was killed or why his body was in Ve’s garage. She and Marcus had gone to the police station to answer questions, and Harper had tagged along for moral support. I had high hopes Ve would be cleared soon enough. As far as I was concerned, my first step in making that happen for my aunt was talking with Dorothy Hansel Dewitt.
    Unfortunately, discussions with Dorothy rarely ended well, so I wasn’t looking forward to the conversation in the least.
    I glanced ahead and noticed a pickup truck parked in my driveway. The vehicle had been a familiar sight over the past few months since it belonged to Henry “Hank” Leduc, the contractor who’d been in charge of renovating my house. He stood at the truck’s tailgate, one hand on his toolbox, the other on his hip. He wasn’t alone.
    I slowed my steps, watching the pair carefully. Hank, the nephew of Terry Goodwin, looked a lot like his uncle. Which was to say he looked a lot like Elvis. If Terry was a dead ringer for the singer, Hank could pass as a decent impersonator. In his mid-thirties, he had the same dark wavy hair, prominent jaw, high cheekbones, and full cheeks as the famous musical icon. Under the brim of a ball cap, heavy-lidded blue eyes intently studied the woman next to him. A woman who happened to possess eyes even bluer than his own.
    Starla Sullivan, one of my best friends and Evan’s twin sister, had her hands shoved into the pockets of hercoat as she talked to Hank a mile a minute while rocking on her booted heels. Her long blond hair was tied back in a simple ponytail that swung as she continued to chatter and flash broad smiles. A camera hung from her neck, and a purple multipocketed waist apron was tied around her hips. As owner of Hocus-Pocus Photography, she often roamed the village as part of her job, snapping pictures of tourists that they could then purchase at her shop at the other end of the square. She also freelanced for the
Toil and Trouble
, the local newspaper.
    By the looks of her, she was either flirting shamelessly or asking a favor.
    I leaned toward the latter, but I wasn’t certain. Even though Starla had been dating Vincent Paxton, owner of Lotions and Potions, a bath and body shop, for nearly a year now—and they cared for each other deeply—they had some issues. The first and foremost being that he was a mortal and she was a witch. Her main craft was as a Wishcrafter, but she was half Bakecrafter, too. The exact opposite of her brother.
    And Vince wasn’t just a mortal; he was a Seeker, a mortal who was obsessed with witchcraft. When I first met him he had been convinced—despite the Craft’s best efforts to keep itself a secret—that witchcraft truly existed and wanted nothing more than to become a witch himself. After becoming a suspect in the murder of another Seeker, he’d cut back on talking about witches.
    And since dating Starla, he’d toned down his obsession even more, but he hadn’t stopped Seeking completely. Every once in a while he tried to engage one of us in a conversation about witches. We always shut down the talk quickly. Telling a mortal of our powers, even accidentally, was a huge violation of Craft law, and the penance was often the loss of powers.
    Despite Vince’s desire to become a witch, he was out of luck. Crafting was hereditary. There was no way to become a full witch without having been born with magical abilities. Vince
could
be adopted into our culture, albeit with no powers, if he married Starla. But only if she was willing to give up her own magic in exchange for telling him.
    Many Crafters opted to share the Craft secret when marrying a mortal because the price of lying to someone you truly loved