The Purr-fect Crime

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.

“Yeah, well, chopping those mushrooms up into dust isn’t going to do much,” I told her, raising an eyebrow. Realizing that maybe she was going a little bit overboard, Sophie stopped cutting.

“It’s just such a bad idea. The state legislators, they don’t have a clue about this town. Sure, some of them come and spend a few days here in the summer but that’s it!”

“You don’t have to convince me,” I told her. “But what can we do?” I grabbed a jar of black beans and handed it to Charlotte to open.

“Anything. Shouldn’t doing anything be better than nothing?” Sophie had always been the type to act before she thought. I knew she was trying to figure out if we could sneak out there in the middle of the night and set the whole area on fire, or something.

“If you come up with a solid plan, a legal plan,” I emphasized, “I’ll be happy to help. But for now, I’m starving and I want to eat so let’s focus on this food.”

Twenty minutes later the enchiladas were cooked, a salad was made and we were sitting down in front of the TV to eat. I loved my recipe for vegetarian enchiladas. I’d been a vegetarian for most of my life; it’s hard to bring yourself to eat meat when you can have a chat with the beef cattle and the sheep at the side of the road.

“Mmmm, these are awesome, Sophie,” Charlotte told her as she bit into the cheezy, gooey pile on her plate.

“I helped!” I argued.

“You chopped some peppers and opened a can, I’m taking full credit,” Sophie retorted, shoving a giant forkful in her mouth, a string of cheese getting stuck to the side of her chin.

“Some people can’t do that elegantly,” I teased, taking a biteful myself. They were damn good enchiladas. Charlotte and Sophie were both good cooks, I could make a decent grilled cheese but not much more than that.

“I think you did a great job,” Bee told me, sitting on the armchair next to me, eyeing my plate with a look that told me it wasn’t going to be safe to leave my food unattended.

“Stop sucking up, Bee, you’ve had your dinner,” I scolded the cat, making sure to cover the side of my plate with my arm so she couldn’t go for a sneak attack at my food.

“Since we’re celebrating me, and my total awesomeness in every respect, I declare that we should watch two Parks and Rec re-runs before I have to go study,” Charlotte announced, grabbing the TV remote and flipping over to Netflix.

“Works for me,” I replied, leaning back into the chair. Maybe this resort was going to change everything. But for now, everything in Willow Bay was just the way it always had been. Perfect. Little did I know how quickly all that was going to change.