The Purr-fect Crime: Willow Bay Witches #1 Read online

  The Purr-fect Crime

  Willow Bay Witches #1

  Samantha Silver

  Blueberry Books

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Also by Samantha Silver

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  “This is totally ridiculous,” I muttered to myself while sorting through what felt like a million different files strewn across my desk.

  “What’s more ridiculous,” asked Bee from her seat by the window as she looked outside onto the main street in Willow Bay. “The fact that you’re the least organized person on the planet, or the fact that you know this and still refuse to let Karen actually handle the work she was hired to do?”

  I glared at Bee from behind my desk. I knew exactly what I was looking for: a letter from the city asking me to participate in some capacity in the Willow Bay Summer of Fun festival. I knew it was in this pile somewhere. Just because I didn’t know exactly where it was didn’t make me that disorganized, did it?

  Willow Bay was a cute little seaside resort town on the Oregon Coast. Sheltered by the bay from the strong ocean currents, Willow Bay was about an hour from Portland, and every summer we were inundated by tourists looking to escape the city and spend a few days in our calm waters of the Pacific Ocean. We held a festival every year that featured food trucks, water-based competitions including the top surfing competition in the state, and family fun everywhere.

  I ran the vet clinic in town, and to be honest, I didn’t really get that much business from the tourists by sponsoring the petting zoo every year. But I loved this place, and felt that if I could spend a couple hundred dollars a year putting a banner up to bring more tourists here, well that was a price I was willing to pay.

  I’d lived in Willow Bay almost my whole life, only leaving for a few years to get my veterinary degree in Seattle. I was a west coast girl, all the way, though I didn’t exactly have those typical California looks. Chestnut brown, slightly wavy hair framed my face, reaching halfway down my back, although I usually tied it back in a ponytail. My bright green eyes were my favourite feature on my heart-shaped face, and I was also pretty thankful that genetics had blessed me with a little button nose.

  “Found it!” I declared triumphantly, grabbing the piece of paper and holding it above my head in victory. “You know I’d let Karen deal with this but Steve likes it when I answer him directly.” Steve Manning was the mayor of Willow Bay, and he was so connected that I always figured it was a good idea to stay on his good side.

  Karen was the receptionist here at the vet’s office, and to be honest, the only reason any paperwork ever got done around here. She was an absolute godsend.

  “Good, now can we finally go home?” Bee asked, getting up from her spot by the window and pacing around the floor. “After all, it’s Friday night. No one else does paperwork on a Friday night. You should be out there, looking for a man.”

  I raised an eyebrow slightly.

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. When was the last time you did the walk of shame? You’re twenty six years old, girle. Get yourself out there, before it’s too late.”

  I threw my head back and laughed.

  “Oh my God! I can’t believe I’m actually getting this lecture from you. I don’t want a boyfriend. I don’t have time for a boyfriend. And if I was into one night stands, I would go for it. But I’m focusing on my career right now, there will be time for boys later.”

  “That’s what they all say,” Bee replied, giving me a haughty look before moving back to her window seat.

  “Besides, if I had a guy in my life, you’d get jealous.”

  Bee gave me a mischievous look. “Oh, please. I like Sophie more than you, anyway.”

  I rolled my eyes. Sophie was my best friend, my roommate, and one of my vet assistants. We’d grown up together, ever since my parents had died in a car accident when Charlotte, my little sister, and I were just a few years old. Her mom had been best friends with my parents, and after they died, she took Charlotte and I in and raised us as her own. As a result, Sophie was almost more like a sister to me than a best friend. And as much as she was one of the most amazing people I knew, I also knew Bee did not like Sophie more than she liked me.

  “Whatever, Bee. I know you’re lying to me. Sophie teases you too much to be your favourite.”

  “We’re getting off topic, anyway,” Bee replied haughtily. “We’re supposed to be lamenting your complete and total lack of a social life.”

  “Do you know how hard it is to actually run a vet clinic?” I asked her.

  “How would you know? You just get Karen to do everything.”

  “Yes, and I had to find Karen, and I have to make enough money healing animals to pay her, and then pay Sophie, and then pay myself.”

  “I dunno, it looks pretty easy from where I’m sitting.”

  “Yeah, it would,” I muttered to myself as I sat at the computer and began typing a reply to Steve. “Now, if you don’t mind, one of us has actual work to do, so give me a few minutes to finish up and then we can head home.”

  “Good, I’m starving,” Bee replied, and I rolled my eyes. Bee was always starving.

  I wrote my letter to Steve confirming that I would, once again, be willing to be the naming sponsor for the petting zoo (Healthy Paws’ Petting Zoo always sounded good whenever I saw the sign), turned off the computer, grabbed my bag, made sure the back door was locked and then got ready to go.

  “Ok, Bee, you get your wish. Time to go home,” I told her, and the cat jumped onto my shoulder, purring contentedly at the knowledge that she was only about five minutes away from getting her dinner.

  Chapter 2

  Maybe I should explain a little bit.

  I was born a witch, into a family of witches. My parents were both witches, although I barely remember them. My sister, Charlotte, is also a witch. Sophie’s mom Lisa is a witch as well; that was one of the things that made her and my parents such good friends. And the thing about witches is that on top of the standard spells and potions we all learn, we each have one unique ability that only we can use. Mine is that I can talk to animals.

  All in all, it’s not that bad a skill to have. Growing up, before I realized that not everyone could do that, everyone just chalked up my conversations with neighbourhood cats, dogs, squirrels and birds as me having an overactive imagination.

  “Oh, she’s just such a sweet child. She thinks the animals talk back to her,” people would say.

  “She’ll grow out of it when she’s older.”

  “It’s good to let children let their imaginations fly, it makes them more creative.”

  Now that I was in my mid-20s, and I’d long since realized that I was the only person around with this ability, I tried to avoid having conversations with animals in public. It was one thing to ask a dog who’s a good boy, another completely to try explaining to him that if he’d stop pooping on the neighbour’s lawn then maybe the neighbour would stop putting up a sprinkler attached to a motion sensor to scare him off.

  When I say
I’m a witch, though, I don’t mean that I ride a broomstick, wear a pointy hat or have green skin. I look exactly the same as anyone else my age. In fact, I pretty much make an effort to look and act exactly like everyone else does when I’m in public. The thing about witches and wizards is that we don’t want to draw attention to ourselves. Not only are we not allowed to tell regular humans about our powers, but even if we were, it would probably be a pretty bad idea. I’ve seen X-men.

  I realize this isn’t Salem, or the middle ages anymore. People don’t actually believe in witches. Harry Potter lies firmly in the fiction section of the bookstore. But all of us witches out there still make a special effort to make sure that our secrets stay hidden from the non-magical public all the same.

  So I used my key to lock up the store instead of just muttering a locking spell at it and scratched Bee behind the ear as we walked towards my car parked a block away, and drove back to the little house I shared with Charlotte and Lisa.

  We lived on the outskirts of town, in the house that used to belong to my parents. As Lisa had been in charge of everything after our parents died, she decided to keep the house and rented it out to tenants, thinking that not only would it be a good investment for Charlotte and I when we grew up, but that we might also want to live where our parents had.

  I was almost four years old, and Charlotte was just six months old when our parents went out for an anniversary dinner. They had decided to make it special they would drive to Portland, and had dropped us off at Lisa’s for the night. On their way home they were hit head-on on the highway by a drunk driver, and both of them were killed instantly.

  I didn’t remember anything about my parents at all, and obviously Charlotte didn’t either. I wasn’t sure if this was a blessing or not; sometimes I wished I had even one memory of them.

  Still, I was glad Lisa had decided to keep the house for us. After I graduated from veterinary school and moved back here I moved in, along with Sophie and Charlotte, and this place just felt like home.

  It was a cute little bungalow, with a huge front porch that spanned the whole front side of the house. Painted in a light teal, with eggshell-white columns and dark red accents, it was the perfect little seaside town cottage. An old, brick fireplace ran up the whole right side of the house.

  The advantage of being a little ways outside of the town was the size of the lot; the backyard was about two acres in size and surrounded by woods; animals – both wild and domesticated - that were in need of help and didn’t have anywhere else to go often found themselves living in the small barn at the back of the property for a while until I had either nursed them back to health and let them back into nature, or found a suitable home for them. Right now, with spring just around the corner, we were housing one pregnant doe with a broken leg, an owl with an injured wing and two dogs who had been abandoned by the side of the road that the local shelter didn’t have room for.

  I pulled into the driveway and parked outside the garage. We just kept way too much crap in there for the car to fit. I opened the door and Bee jumped out, scampering through her kitty door and straight into the house without bothering to wait for me.

  I knew she had gone straight in to meow at Charlotte and Sophie, complaining to them that I starved her and was a terrible owner, and she was going to drop dead from hunger if her food bowl wasn’t filled right this instant.

  Eating was one of my cat’s favourite hobbies, in case you couldn’t tell. Complaining about everything was another.

  I grabbed my purse and walked in to hear Charlotte fussing over the world’s most spoiled cat, over the sound of the TV that was on, even though I knew no one would be watching it. Sophie liked it “for the noise”. Like our house was ever quiet to begin with.

  “Oh you poor thing, you look like you haven’t eaten for days,” I heard Charlotte cooing from the kitchen as she rummaged through the drawers for a can opener. “Angela starves you, I know. You don’t have to be able to talk to me for me to know that.” I rolled my eyes and laughed as I dropped my purse off on the table by the front door and made my way into the kitchen. Bee was sitting patiently, waiting for her food, her little tail moving here and there.

  “Yeah, you’re so hard done by, Bee,” I told her as my sister grinned at me. While I was the splitting image of our Italian mother at our age, according to photos Lisa had shown me, Charlotte definitely took more after our father. Where I had dark hair she was blonde, and while I had light skin, Charlotte was so pale Sophie and I had made fun of her for looking like a ghost on many a summer trip to the beach. Her shoulder length hair curled a little bit, and every time I looked at her I was reminded of all the people who never believed we were sisters as we were growing up.

  Bee dug into the food as I moved over to the counter to help Sophie make dinner. Sophie Mashito had been my best friend for as long as I could remember. Lisa, our parents’ friend who took us in when they died, is Sophie’s mom. She married a man from Japan when she was young, but they got divorced just after Sophie was born. Sophie had a slim face, but big round eyes that she inherited from her mom. Her small mouth liked to smile, and her straight black hair was streaked bright purple – a habit of Sophie’s that drove her mom insane. Sophie had a little bit of a wild side, for sure. Unfortunately for her, Sophie hadn’t inherited her mom’s witch gene, and had absolutely zero magical powers. She was allowed to know about us, though, since her mom was a witch.

  But right now, as she chopped up mushrooms to go into what looked like enchiladas, she looked as domestic as could be.

  “Let me help you,” I told her, grabbing a knife and a couple of peppers off the counter still waiting to be chopped.

  “We’re celebrating,” Sophie announced as I grabbed a cutting board and started chopping. “Charlotte aced another test.”

  “If we celebrated every single time that happened, we’d never stop eating,” I teased.

  “Oh you’re just jealous that we don’t celebrate every time you successfully spay a puppy,” Charlotte shot back, sticking her tongue out at me.

  “You mean that I’m actually doing medical work in the real world, and not just writing down theories on a piece of paper?”

  Charlotte was in her first year of med school in Portland, about an hour’s drive away, after getting top marks in her pre-med degree. She liked to tease me about the fact that I didn’t know how to heal humans at all, I liked to tease her about the fact that she still didn’t actually perform medicine on real humans yet. But in reality, I was super proud of her. Charlotte was so incredibly book smart, much more so than I was, I had to admit. She was going to make an amazing doctor.

  “You cheat at being a vet, anyway,” Sophie told me, glancing over at Charlotte. Sophie was the only one of us who wasn’t a witch. Her mom was one, but her father wasn’t, and she apparently got her witchy gene – or lack of it – from his side. She was the only non-witch who knew about our powers.

  “Why, because I can talk to the animals? That’s not cheating, that’s using my powers for good.”

  “Definitely cheating,” Charlotte agreed.

  “How is it different to you asking someone where it hurts?” I protested. They were ganging up on me, that wasn’t fair.

  “Because every doctor on the planet can do that. But you’re the only vet that can talk to their animals.”

  “Oh, so just because I’ve gone into a career that uses my strengths, that’s called cheating? Well in that case maybe you should go into construction Charlotte, since using your brain is cheating.”

  “Hey, hey, hey,” Sophie suddenly interrupted, holding up her hands. “Shut up, guys!”

  More out of surprise than anything, Charlotte and I both stopped and looked at Sophie, who was staring intently at the TV. The seven o’clock news had just started, and the top story actually had to do with Willow Bay – for once.

  “Thanks for joining us, I’m Tony Schmidt,” the salt-and-pepper haired white dude who looked like every other newscaster ever
started. “Tonight, our top story: the small community of Willow Bay is about to get a lot bigger, as the controversial Ocean Mist Resort project just today received approval from the state of Oregon to begin building on four plots of land. Here with a statement is the head of the Ocean Mist project, Zoe Wright.”

  The screen switched to a shot of a woman in a suit standing on the beach, her hair and makeup absolutely perfect.

  “I’m thrilled to announce that the state government has given us permission to build the Ocean Mist Resort on the land purchased three years ago by the company,” she told the group of reporters. “We’re scheduled to begin construction in two months, and in just over a year we will be welcoming over a hundred thousand extra visitors to Willow Bay every year.”

  Sophie grabbed the remote and turned off the TV in disgust.

  “Hey, you were the one who wanted to listen,” I told her.

  “Yeah, well, what was said disgusts me,” she replied. I nodded in agreement. For the last two years the Ocean Mist people had been trying to get their project approved. They were building a huge resort on the beach a little ways outside of town. Their resort was going to have over 500 rooms, six pools, two spas and all the fixings. Their plan was to put Willow Bay on the map, and it had been quite a point of contention in the local community. Some people thought it was a good thing; the extra visitors would add to the local economy, Willow Bay would become a bigger town, there’d be more jobs, that sort of thing. But others, including Sophie, Charlotte and myself, worried that a sterile resort that could house almost as many people as lived in the town, would destroy the small-town atmosphere and quaint little town feel the resort currently enjoyed.

  Unfortunately, the decision wasn’t up to us, and the decision that was made wasn’t what we were hoping for.

  “I guess we’re not celebrating anymore,” Charlotte said, shrugging her shoulders. “That sucks.”

  “We have to do something,” Sophie declared angrily, cutting the mushrooms with renewed vigour.