Blood Debt: A Green Witch Mystery by P L Matthews

Author:P L Matthews [Matthews, P L]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Independent
Published: 2024-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

The next morning, Rhianne found Alice singing as she lugged a hefty bundle, rugged and bulging at the seams.

Apart from her stone-looking skin, no one would peg her as a gargoyle right off the bat. At a mere six feet high Alice didn’t have the bulk or the height of her kin — unlike her brother Carl, who was built like a bouncer. If the bouncer also moonlighted as a mountain, that is.

She was a gargoyle ‘petite.’ But looks could be deceiving. That bag she was toting, treating it as if it were a puny sack of flour, weighed a whopping one hundred kilos.

“Hey, Alice! You’re in a good mood.” Oops, she hadn’t meant to imply she was grumpy, although, on occasion, her mood did swing more towards ‘stormy’ than ‘sunny.’

Alice grinned. “Hey, Rhianne. Bet you were up half the night thinking about the murder.”

It was true, she’d tossed and turned, her mind a whirlwind of clues and theories. “How can you tell?”

“Well, besides the fact that you’re as tenacious as a bloodhound on a scent, you have bags under your eyes.”

Ouch! Rhianne rubbed at her tired eyes.

“That’s going to make it worse.” Alice set down her geological haul and sliced it open.

Rhianne gave Alice a mock scowl. “Yeah, thanks for the eye-care tip. I was thinking about the drug angle.”

Alice arranged the rocks around a quaint garden display, with palms and a tranquil pond at its heart. “Oh yeah, that’s a good angle. But how did they gain access to the house?”

“There’s the possibility that they ordered a hit on him and maybe hired one of the existing house members.”

“So, figure out who in the house did it and you’ll probably find their bosses.”

It sounded pretty straightforward, but there was a flaw in the argument.

“I think Lord Bellmont is more interested in the mastermind behind the murder and not just the puppet who did the deed.” She raised a hand to forestall Alice’s response. “Besides, without knowing the motive, it’s going to be pretty hard to figure out who did it.”

Alice nodded, her attention split between the conversation and her landscaping. The effect of her efforts was rather picturesque. “What are you going to do? Go on a street hunt and find out who sold it to him? We didn’t find anything in his room, remember?”

Rhianne rubbed the back of her neck. “There’s a possibility that he hid some of the stash somewhere in the house. I’ll ask Oscar to go looking for it or see if Toto can sniff it out.” She should have thought of that earlier. Did Albert have an accomplice at the house, one of the servants, perhaps?

Finding the stash was one thing, but it wasn’t like it would come with a convenient note attached saying, ‘Property of the Big Bad’. Albert teaming up? Unlikely. He was more the lone wolf type, or perhaps a lone weasel. Although it would be very much like him to use someone without them even knowing about it.

She shook her head.

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