THE WITCH AND THE TEA PARTY (A Rachael Penzra Mystery) by Elizabeth Shawn Page A

for her for long must have felt like they had,” Dora replied. To us she added, “I don’t think she missed anybody with her mean little remarks. Some of them I didn’t get, but I could tell they upset everyone in one way or another. If she was always like that, I wonder how she stayed alive as long as she did.”
    David knocked on the door, entering at our call. The two older ladies quickly brought him up to date on what had happened. When they finished their duet, he turned a puzzled face to me. “Someone was murdered at the party last night? With their tea?”
    I filled him in as thoroughly as I could in the time we had left before opening. “Why didn’t you call me?” he asked, looking a little hurt.
    “If there had been one thing you could have done besides hold me, I would have been on the phone first thing. But there was nothing to do but wait and wait.”
    “I would have been glad to hold you,” he said, still sounding a little huffy.
    “And I would have fallen to pieces if you’d been there to lean on,” I told him. “A lot of good that would have done. As it is, you’ll probably be stuck with most of the work today. I already feel as though I’ve been up twelve hours.” I got up and hugged him. “David, honestly, I kept telling myself it would only mean two of us had to stay awake.”
    “You don’t have to do everything yourself, Rachael,” he scolded, but he liked the hug in front of the other three. We both tend to be very private people about our romance.
    “What we all have to do is open the store,” Patsy interrupted our little cozy moment. “Can you go back into your place, Dora?”
    “The sheriff said I had to wait until he told me I could return,” she snorted. “If they didn’t find all the clues last night with all of them searching, anything that’s left is no doubt crushed by their big feet.”
    We left them to go back upstairs and headed for the day’s work.
    To say we were busy has to be the understatement of the year. We banned the Press by the simple expedient of having David escort them out when we claimed ignorance and said we had no statement to make. He has extensive training in varied martial arts, some I’m not sure even exist in the general public’s knowledge. He would seemingly gently take an elbow of a reporter who wouldn’t take no for an answer, and he’d ‘guide’ them outside. Since they tended to be tiptoeing along trying to get away from the grip, it must have hurt.
    “It won’t leave any marks,” was all my hero said to me when I asked him what exactly he had done to them. My own training is limited to pretty basic stuff. I’m good at it, but I don’t have any secret masterly moves at my disposal. My best move is to completely avoid conflict.
    People were slyly or openly curious about what had happened across the road. It was fascinating the stories they’d alr eady heard—or made up. Somebody has to make up those wild tales that circulate with every event of interest, particularly the bloody and macabre ones. I’ve always wondered exactly how they get going. Who has the nerve to make something up out of whole cloth? Or maybe each person just adds a little personal touch as it goes around.
    Whoever, or whatever, the answer is, throughout the day I heard that seven people had been stricken with poisoning (another note of interest: why seven in particular?), that Mrs. Brown-Hendricks had been struck with a rusty axe that had been amongst the innumerable items for sale in the store (the axe murder alternated with a rusty knife contingent), that Aunt Myrtle had been arrested along with Dora and Moondance, that Moondance had predicted the murder while doing a reading, and many other fascinating tales of mayhem. The man who told me she’d been shot quickly altered his story when I mentioned that nobody had heard a shot, adding that of course a silencer had been used. Adaptation seemed to be the driving force behind the stories.
    It didn’t make