So You Think You’re a Sleuth?

  THE TIME WITCH SERIES

  BOOK TWO

  A.A. ALBRIGHT

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organisations, places, events and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.

  Text Copyright © A.A. Albright 2023

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.

  Website: https://aaalbright.com

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  Contents

  1. Return to Pendulay

  2. The Terrible Twins

  3. Vince the Elephant

  4. Squabbling Siblings

  5. Surviving Sebastian

  6. Aunt Ava

  7. The Watch Stones

  8. We Didn’t Start the Fire

  9. Dead Woman Walking?

  10. Last Moments

  11. An Uncertain Fate

  12. The Changelings

  13. The Bond

  14. Sit on a Stick and Swivel

  15. Reasonable Snooping

  16. Jumping to Conclusions

  17. Yuppie Lair

  18. The Cult of Trent

  19. Date Night

  20. The Party from Heck

  21. The Search

  22. Run Away with Me

  23. Master of All Men

  24. Signs of Life

  25. When My End Began

  26. The Very Last Moment

  27. Down But Not Out

  28. The Right Way

  29. Digging Up the Dirt

  30. All the Time in the World

  For Joni, who always believed in magic

  Chapter 1

  Return to Pendulay

  As Mrs Danby handed out the eggs and toast, I forced a smile on my face. Being back in the house where I almost died wasn’t my idea of fun, but I needed to be here right now, so I’d happily fake it. What I couldn’t happily fake was an ease at being waited upon. Someone handing me my food in a restaurant was fine, but this? Mrs Danby was ancient, and she creaked and winced with every move.

  ‘Mrs Danby, you didn’t have to make us all breakfast,’ I told the old housekeeper. ‘As far as I’m concerned, this is your home, you know. Won’t you at least sit down with us and eat?’

  She gave us a humble smile – us being Dillis, Uncle Rick, Marbles and me. ‘That is very gracious of you, Mistress – I mean, Essie. It’s only that I’m used to a life of service, you see. It’s all I’ve ever known. Nannying for Mistress Etain all her childhood, and looking after her up until the moment she was brutally murdered. I couldn’t sit down and eat with you. It just wouldn’t feel right. I was born to serve, and that’s the way I like it.’

  Before I could say more, she bowed low and backed out of the morning room.

  Dillis tracked the housekeeper’s exit with her eyes. ‘An … interesting woman. Was she always like that, Rick?’

  Uncle Rick shrugged. ‘She came on as Etain’s nanny long after Essie’s dad and I had left Pendulay. We’d see her from time to time, whenever we popped over to try and convince Gerald not to hand Etain over to the Trents. She seemed a lot more relaxed when I met her back then, but I suppose a fair bit has happened in the meantime, hasn’t it?’

  My uncle turned his eyes to me. ‘You’re not enjoying being here, are you?’ he noted, mopping his sweaty brow with a napkin. He had just finished his morning workout, star-jumping and pretend-skipping along with his favourite supermodel instructor. ‘I knew coming back to Pendulay was a bad idea. It’s just …’

  I brightened my smile some more. ‘It’s fine, I’m fine. I like this creepy mansion. Oh, did I say creepy? I meant … gothic.’

  Rick chuckled. ‘It never used to seem creepy when I was a kid. It was just my house. But yeah, it feels a little creepy now, what with everything that’s happened.’

  What happened was that I came here with Julian Trent, thinking I was going to be in a safe house situation with my handsome new husband, when actually I was the bait for a Wayfarer sting against that very spouse.

  The Wayfarers were the supernatural police force in Ireland, and their tactics were … interesting. I’d almost died, because I got in the way of a stake thrown by my husband’s brother. I had no choice, really – Devlin, Julian’s brother, had thrown that stake at Dillis. There was no way I was going to let him kill her. We’d lost enough people thanks to the Trents. Only a few weeks ago, two of our neighbours, Jolene and Paula, had died at their hands. And way back in my formative years, that same family had murdered my parents.

  I’d healed up nicely from my recent injury, and Julian had been arrested for the murder of his first wife, as well as his involvement in the murders of Jolene and Paula. Devlin, his brother, had been arrested for murder, and the rest of the brothers had been arrested for their part in it all.

  Now, it was all over, and I was … well, I was okay. Pendulay Manor was officially back in the Pendulay family. Ownership reverted to Uncle Rick because, for one thing, he officially existed once more (he’d used magic to hide himself as part of a wider spell to protect me) and for another thing, it was illegal for Julian to profit from a murder he had committed.

  The reason we’d travelled to Granvar Bay, and stayed the night in Pendulay Manor, was because I was meeting my sister for the first time. She lived nearby, as part of the O’Mara Coven. We’d been supposed to meet last night, but she had postponed at the last minute, giving me no reason.

  She promised we would meet again early this morning, so Rick had suggested staying the night. He’d slept in his childhood bedroom, while Dillis had slept in one of the mansion’s many spare suites. I’d stayed in the same room as I’d occupied the last time I’d been here, but halfway through the night I’d gotten up and slept on a couch instead. Slept is perhaps not the right word. I’d tossed and turned, wrestling with strange dreams and intrusive thoughts.

  If my sister cancelled on me again this morning, I would probably head back to Dublin rather than spend another night in this house.

  It had been a month since I found out I had a sister. A month since I almost died. In that time, we’d held funerals for Paula and Jolene, and grieved for them. Rick had also undone any remaining magic which could be affecting my memory of the past.

  The trouble was, I still didn’t remember. It could be because I was four when my parents were murdered and Rick rushed me into hiding – but surely I should at least remember my sister.

  Marbles seemed to sense how upset I was, because he abandoned his plate of cold chicken and hopped onto my lap, purring and prancing, digging his claws in and rubbing his head against my belly. It wasn’t long since I’d learned he was actually my familiar, and not simply a pet cat – for years he’d been unable to communicate with me, or anyone. Nowadays, he was probably a bit too chatty, and opinionated, and insulting, and … well, I was beginning to enjoy the rare moments, like this one, when he simply purred and cuddled and kept his mouth shut.

  ‘Since you haven’t remembered,’ said Rick, ‘and you’re about to meet Belinda soon, I don’t think I can hold this off any longer.’

  I paused with my eggs halfway to my mouth. ‘Hold what off?’

  Marbles dug his claws in deeper. ‘I told you we should have told her weeks ago, Rick.’ My cat gazed up at me. ‘Essie, Belinda O’Mara is your sister, yes. But she’s also your twin.’

  ‘My twin.’ I gaped at Uncle Rick. ‘You couldn’t have told me this before?’ I looked from my uncle to Dillis, and then at my cat, reading the expression in all three pairs of eyes. ‘Wait … you did tell me before, didn’t you? Is this one of those occasions where I couldn’t handle the truth, so I scurried under my bed, and didn’t come out again until I’d purged it from my memory-bank?’

  ‘It’s one of those things, yes.’ Marbles was purring while he spoke, no doubt using some familiar-mojo to try and calm me down. ‘In fact, it’s the one thing that was always sure to send you scurrying. You and Belinda, you were like two peas in a pod. Separating the two of you was necessary to keep everyone safe from the Trents, but … you loved her so much that whenever you do remember her, the anxiety of being separated is just too much to bear.’

  ‘Good God, I’m a liability.’ I pushed my plate away. I hadn’t really fancied the eggs anyway. As soon as Mrs Danby began to serve them up, all I could think about was Julian, and how he had cooked me an enormous plate of scrambled eggs on my first night here. It irked me that Julian was always on my mind, even now – unlike my sister, who I’d apparently forgotten quite easily. ‘And does she – does she remember me?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rick. ‘She does. Belinda seems to remember everything, now the spell’s been undone.’

  ‘So I’m the slow twin. Great.’

  Chapter 2

  The Terrible Twins

  As I set foot on the beach, a sigh of contentment escaped me. Walking on sand always felt good, but this sand felt even better. It was as though warmth shot up through the soles of my shoes, through my feet, and into my whole body.

  ‘It’s a good feeling, isn’t it?’

  I turned at the sound of the voice, and saw her: a carbon copy of me, standing atop a dune, with her dark hair blowing in the wind. ‘You’re – you’re –’

  ‘You
r long-lost identical twin sister, yeah.’ She smiled nervously, a twitch in her jaw. ‘And this is Egg, although I’m sure Marbles has told you all about him.’

  For a moment, I almost didn’t see who she was referring to – with his light-coloured fur, Belinda’s cat seemed to blend with the sand. He was about the same size as Marbles, and his eyes were a matching shade of yellow. It was only his fur which was different.

  ‘Wow, you’re an unusual colour,’ I said, grinning at the cat. ‘Sort of eggshell. Is that why you’re called Egg?’

  Belinda’s jaw twitched again, and the cat rolled his eyes.

  ‘So, Marbles wasn’t lying,’ Egg said. ‘His witch really does have Swiss cheese for brains.’ At a warning stare from Belinda, he cleared his throat and sent an apologetic look my way. ‘Excuse me, Stell. It’s not your fault you’ve got mulch between your ears. Probably residual effects of Rick’s spell. Although … we’ve all recovered our early memories quite nicely.’

  Marbles stood in front of me, staring at the other cat. ‘Now Egg, I told you to go easy. Let’s you and me go for a stroll along the sand, while our witches talk about the elephant on the beach.’

  Before Belinda or I could argue, the cats took off.

  I glanced at my sister, and away again. She glanced at me, and then away again. Mostly, we looked out at the waves. Belinda had chosen this beach as our meeting place, and it was a wonderful choice. The sea air was warm, and the sand beneath my feet continued to give me a heady, steady buzz.

  ‘My familiar is called Egg because you and me really liked eggs when we were kids,’ said Belinda, finally breaking the silence. ‘It’s the kind of reason that made sense to us back then, I suppose. We didn’t realise he’d wind up being the colour of an egg. He was dark brown when he was a kitten. He and Marbles turned up together one day. They say they’re not related, and that they both just felt the urge to seek us out. But they’re very similar, aren’t they, in a funny way? One is like a photo negative of the other.’

  She jumped down from the dune, landing on the flatter sand beside me. ‘And yes, he called you Stell – because that’s what I called you when we were little.’

  ‘Stell.’ I whispered the name, feeling something close to a memory, but not quite. When I’d first seen the name Pendulay Manor on Julian’s and Etain’s insurance files, I’d felt something similar. Recognition. Familiarity.

  ‘I couldn’t manage to pronounce Estelle back then, for some reason,’ Belinda continued. ‘Even Essie was a stretch for me. But I’ll call you that now. And it’s totally okay that you don’t remember. It’ll come to you.’

  She was speaking so fast, so frantically. She reminded me of my friend Kim, when Kim was nervous. ‘What’s the “elephant on the beach”?’ I asked. ‘The fact that we’re identical?’

  She shrugged. ‘I mean, we can go with that if you like. Because it’s weird, right? I was so freaked out when I saw you in that Warlock Survivors’ Group last month. And if I hadn’t been wearing dark glasses and a hat, then I guess our awkward reunion would have come a lot sooner. I haven’t seen you at the meetings since, but … actually, I think maybe that’s the real elephant on the beach – our familiars think you and I need to sit down and have a chat about why we were both dumb enough to fall in love with warlocks. But there are way more important things to talk about, as far as I’m concerned. Like … did Rick tell you about Aunt Ava? Did he explain why I wanted to meet here, first, instead of at the Nine Hundred?’

  Rick and I had a lot of discussions, lately. I knew that the Nine Hundred was what the O’Maras called their coven homeland, because it sat on nine hundred acres. Their land ended on this beach, where the water hit the sand. He hadn’t told me much about Aunt Ava, only that she was my mother’s sister, and she’d spent all of these years looking after Belinda, and that we wouldn’t be meeting her straight away because she was unwell.

  ‘He said Aunt Ava was a bit under the weather,’ I told Belinda. ‘He said you wanted to get our meeting out of the way first, and wait until she’d perked up before you introduced us. Or reintroduced us, I suppose.’

  She plopped down onto the sand and patted the ground beside her. As I took a seat, she said, ‘Well, yes. What Rick doesn’t know, though, is that …’ She took some deep breaths. ‘Ava is unlikely to perk up. The healer doesn’t seem to think so, anyway.’

  ‘Oh.’ For a moment, I couldn’t think of what else to say. I didn’t remember Ava, but the news of her illness made me deeply, truly sad. I wasn’t sure I was entitled to feel that way, though. Belinda was the one who had grown up with our aunt. ‘What em … what’s wrong with her? If you don’t mind me asking.’

  ‘Of course I don’t mind. She’s your aunt, dummy. The thing is, though, I don’t actually know what’s wrong with her. She’s just sort of … wasting away.’ Belinda held out her hands. ‘Feel that wind? How strong it’s getting?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Well, it shouldn’t be,’ she said. ‘High up on the cliffs, at Pendulay and Trent Manor, that’s where the breeze stays. Here, on O’Mara land, we have perfect weather for each season. It leaks out a bit into Granvar Bay, making it warmer than other spots, but our land is where it’s best. You feel something, here and now, on this beach – a tingle, a warmth, right?’

  ‘I really do,’ I told her. ‘It’s kind of amazing. It’s part of what gives the area good weather?’

  She shrugged. ‘Usually. Except that right now, this is where it’s strongest. The closer you get to the vineyard, the weaker this magic becomes. It’s not supposed to be like that. If you’d been here even a couple of years ago, you’d have been blown away by the sort of magic that seeps out of the vineyard’s soil.’

  ‘Well, what’s wrong with it?’ I questioned. ‘Is it something we can fix?’

  Her eyes brightened. ‘I really like that you said “we”. And yes, I would love you to help us figure it out, because, well … I have this feeling that it could be connected to Aunt Ava’s illness. Our family, we each have gifts, particular kinds of magic we’re more adept with. Like … your power is manipulating time, but I take after our mother in that I’m more gifted with weather. Ava is something different again. She’s connected, truly connected, to the Nine Hundred, and to the vineyard in particular. The land is ailing, and she’s ailing, and … well, I’m trying to figure out why. It’s been getting steadily worse over maybe … two or three years. It’s hard to pinpoint when it started, exactly, but right now it's worse than ever. I had to tell you this because when you meet her, you might be shocked by how ill she is. I still get shocked by it, and I’ve been with her every day.’

  She cast me a glance. ‘I talk a lot, right? I don’t normally. I just … I guess I thought that a steady stream of chatter would cover up my nerves, but I think it’s just making me look like a nutter. Is it?’

  I looked at her dimpled chin, her brown eyes, this mirror-image of myself. ‘I’ve been pretty glad that you’ve filled in the gaps, actually. I’ve been known to chatter when I’m nervous, too – although mostly, I hide under the bed.’

  I’d expected her to laugh, but instead she gave me a look of sympathy.

  ‘Well, of course you hide under there,’ she said. ‘That’s what Mam and Dad taught you to do, in case the Trents ever came for you. We spent our childhood preparing for what inevitably came, because we knew what they were like. Even their women-folk couldn’t be trusted, because they were so bloody indoctrinated into the Cult of Trent.’

  ‘The Cult of Trent?’ I stared at her. ‘Is that what you call them? I feel so out of the loop. If only I could remember.’