The Witching Place: Murder by Manuscript (A Curious Bookstore Cozy Mystery—Book 2)

CHAPTER ONE

Lex took a deep breath through her nose, inhaling the smell of the antique books. A sense of contentment settled over her. So many things were wrapped up in that familiar scent: the memory of her father and his used bookstore, a lifelong love of the books themselves—and, of course, her new workplace.

“Ah, there you are, Miss Blair.” Montgomery David, her boss, was standing behind her, framed in the arched doorway that led into this section of A Curious Bookstore. His neat white hair was smoothed down against his head, and he adjusted his glasses as he stood, always the picture of an old-fashioned gentleman.

“I’m just putting away the last of the new acquisitions,” Lex said, lifting another book out of the crate in front of her to wave at him.

“I just found this little gem in the pre-loved classics,” Montgomery said, with his usual distracted air. “It’s very good, very good. You might like it.”

He was brandishing a yellow cloth-bound book in his hand. Lex got up from her crouch beside the crate and stepped closer, taking it from his hand to examine it.

“What is it about?” she asked, thrilled already at the idea of trying another of Montgomery’s recommendations. Over the past few weeks, since she’d gotten her job back after a huge misunderstanding involving a murdered customer and a hoard of rare books, her employer had given her several volumes to read at home. She thought of it as something like homework—studying for her job—although it was much more enjoyable than anything she’d had to do in school.

“A donkey farmer,” Montgomery said, releasing the book into her hands and tucking his inside the pockets of his waistcoat—which, today, was lemon yellow, matched to a white shirt with a print of scattered bananas. “And his, ah…”

Lex knew she shouldn’t be tempted to fill in the gap. Montgomery’s long silences, the way he often trailed off at the end of a sentence, seemed so inviting. She couldn’t help herself. “Herd?” she guessed.

“Enchanted puppet,” Montgomery filled in.

As always, Lex was left a little speechless by just how wrong she had been. “It sounds interesting,” she said, opening the cover to look over the title plate. It was fiction, then. Montgomery’s suggestions tended to encompass any and all genres, and so far, she had enjoyed all of them.

“Of course, it’s an allegory,” Montgomery said, smoothing down his white hair over one ear. A tinkling sound from the hall caught their attention: a customer had just entered through the front door. “Yes, well. Well. I’d better…”

This time, Montgomery didn’t even allow Lex the time to deliver her guess as to the missing word, simply disappearing from the archway and going to greet the customer. Lex followed, but stopped short when she caught a glimpse of Mr. Cromwell, an incredibly shy customer who preferred not to be looked at. He hadn’t yet noticed her, so she retreated back to where she could no longer see the slim man in his black coat—even now, in the height of summer—since he only seemed comfortable in Montgomery’s presence.

She busied herself with putting away the rest of the books in the nonfiction room, slotting them into their correct places. Despite not having any kind of electronic system at all, Montgomery seemed to have a knack for knowing exactly which stock was needed amongst the hundreds of volumes on general sale: there was always precisely enough room on the shelves for the new books to slip into place.

It was only when Lex heard the bells above the door tinkling again, signaling Mr. Cromwell’s exit, that she took the now-empty crate and returned to the counter in the main room of the bookstore. She slipped behind the heavy wooden counter, stepping over Hecate—the resident black cat, who had been coddled until she had the run of the whole place—and finding her purse, so that she could slip the yellow book inside.

“Have you finished

Never Let Me Go

?” Lex asked, returning to stand on the other side of the counter, where Montgomery was painstakingly noting down the details of his sale to Mr. Cromwell in his ledger. She had recommended Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel to him last week, and to her surprise, a secondhand copy had turned up in the next day’s delivery, for Montgomery to read before he put it on sale with the rest. While Lex loved nonfiction books, Montgomery was a true fantasy fan, so a novel with scientific elements seemed like it would fit within the Venn diagram of their tastes.

Montgomery set his pen down for a moment, sighing deeply. “It was truly awful.”

Lex blinked. “You didn’t like it?”

“Oh, it was a wonderful book,” Montgomery told her, with clear seriousness. “But those poor children! I could barely stand to read on, except that I needed desperately to know if they would have a happy ending.”

Lex smiled, glad to know that the book had had the same effect on him as it did on her. “It’s just heartbreaking, isn’t it?”

The bells over the door chimed again, and Lex turned, ready to greet and help whoever had entered while Montgomery was finishing off his notation in the ledger. She recognized the new customer as a young man who had bought a book about unusual garden herbs a couple of weeks back, and gave him a nod and smile as he drifted into the main room.

“Hello,” he said, tugging at a rainbow-striped tie around his neck; he looked as though he had just come from work, in a dull gray suit and plain white shirt. It was almost closing time, and he must have left whatever his job was a little early to get time to visit. “Gosh, it’s hot out there, isn’t it?”

“It is,” Lex replied, with a smile. Inside the store it was as cool as ever, the old wood and stone not seeming to take the heat very well, but she had been out for a stroll at lunchtime and found herself seeking shade from the almost eighty-five-degree heat. “I’m glad to be out here and not in Boston anymore. My apartment used to be stifling from June onwards. Here, we have the sea breeze to cool things down a little.”

“Quite right,” the customer replied, shaking his head with a distasteful expression. “I’ve never liked the city. I couldn’t imagine myself living there.”

Lex was sure that was the same for most of the residents of Incanton, which really embraced the concept of a sleepy seaside town. Other than the murder of Mrs. Boddyworth last month—a big event, judging by the fact that people were still talking about it—not much seemed to happen in the area.

“I’m beginning to feel the same way.” She smiled, half out of politeness and half because it was true. As much as she had loved her life in Boston, as the nonfiction editor for a publishing house called Fully Booked, it was like a chapter that had been closed. She was done with it—and determined to make her life here work. “What can we help you with today?”

“Oh! Yes. I was wondering if you had any books on hydroponics,” he said. Lex remembered, as she pushed away from the counter to lead him to the nonfiction room, that his name was Jack.

“The herbs are going well?” she asked, figuring it had to be connected to the last book she sold him.

“No, well, that’s the problem,” Jack explained. “I think they’re not quite getting the balance of water and sunlight they need, so I want to try a different method.”

“Here we are,” Lex said, lifting a book about hydroponics from the shelf. Even though it was a very specific subject, Lex had spent a lot of time getting to know all the books on sale, and she found it easily.

“Thanks.” Jack grinned. “That’s perfect, Alexis. I’ll go take it to Monty to have it rung up.”

Lex smiled until he was out of sight, then turned back to the room, rearranging the display a little to make up for the missing book. She smiled at the thought of what Montgomery would say: that her good luck had helped her out again. He was always saying that, ever since she’d read a supposed good luck charm out loud from an old book—as if he really believed in something as silly as magic.

She was trying to learn everything that she could from Montgomery when it came to running a bookstore, because that was her goal: to run one of her own someday.

She had been thinking a lot just recently about what it would look like, how it would be laid out. As much as Lex loved the crooked floorboards and tiny side-rooms of A Curious Bookstore, she was thinking that her own place would be a single, open room, full of dark woods and cozy reading nooks scattered amongst the stacks. She had been saving up since moving to Incanton, and with the things she was learning here every day, she was getting closer and closer to her dream coming true.

Lex daydreamed for a moment, imagining the different themed displays she would put out to tempt people into reading certain titles. Maybe there would be one for epic coming of age stories, and another for tragic romances. She could theme the displays around current events—maybe match them to the latest blockbuster movies, thrillers about missing people, and adventures starring hard-boiled spy types.

Lex’s hands faltered on the books as she accidentally brought to her own mind something she had been avoiding for a little while: thinking about her father. He had gone missing when she was fifteen, and in the intervening seventeen years everyone seemed to have moved on: even her mother had remarried. But Lex had never given up hope. Working here, dreaming about her own bookstore—it only served to bring her closer to her memories of her father, and a happy childhood spent wandering his own stacks.

When she came to Incanton, she had promised herself that this new start didn’t just mean the beginning of her career in used books, with the eventual goal of opening her own place. She had resolved to find her father as well, to solve his disappearance once and for all. But shortly after moving here, she’d been sucked into a mystery of her own, needing to solve a murder in order to clear her own name. Then there had been the pressures of a new job, making new friends, settling into her own apartment—and time seemed to have slipped away from her.

But if she was being honest with herself, that wasn’t why she had made very little progress in her search over the last month. It was because she was afraid: afraid that, if she went looking for her father, she would find nothing. Or, somehow, worse: that he would be dead, had been all of these years, and there would be no tearful reunion.

Both of those options, however, paled in comparison to the pain of never knowing. Her shift was about to end, and there was no time like the present to make a change.

“You need to stop being a coward, Alexis Blair,” Lex muttered to herself, putting the final touch to the display and turning away from it, “and start looking for your father.”

She jerked to a halt, her heartbeat rocketing at the presence of a dark shape in the doorway—which turned out to just be Hecate, eyeing Lex with knowing golden eyes for a long moment.

Tonight

, Lex told herself, placing a hand over her racing heart as the cat slunk away. She was meeting a friend after work, and it would be the perfect time to start doing some research—the earliest possible opportunity. She couldn’t let it wait any longer.