Read Online One Potion in the Grave: A Magic Potion Mystery by Heather Blake - Free Book Online

open if one knew what they were doing.
    Hazel adjusted her top. “She says she did, and I believe her.”
    Inside the room, my breath caught at the damage done. The bedroom had been thoroughly and meticulously searched and destroyed. The pillows had been sliced open, the mattress. Floorboards had been jimmied. Curtains shredded. Dresser drawers had been emptied onto the floor, and furniture had been pulled away from the walls.
    Dylan came out and said, “Appears as though someone was looking for something specific.” He glanced at Katie Sue. “Are you sure you aren’t missing anything? Jewelry? Credit cards?”
    “Nothing of mine is missing. The only jewelry I brought is what I have on.”
    A diamond watch, the pink sapphire ring, and simple gold-hooped earrings.
    Eulalie gasped and grabbed Katie Sue’s hand. “My lord, child. Look at that stone.”
    Katie Sue tried to pull her hand back, but Eulalie was having none of it. “Is that real?”
    Tact was not a word in the Fowl family vernacular.
    “Of course,” Katie Sue said, her chin lifting in a strange defensiveness.
    “It’s
gorgeous
.” Eulalie cooed to the ring, “You’re gorgeous.”
    Katie Sue pried her hand away. “Thank you. It was a . . . gift.”
    Eulalie fanned her face. “Sister,” she said to Hazel with a teasing smile, “why don’t you buy me gifts like that? I’m sure you have an extra fifty thousand dollars lying around. I deserve it.”
    “Fifty thousand?” Dylan asked, his jaw dropping.
    Katie Sue fidgeted. “It’s insured for eighty.”
    Shoo-ee.
A gift that cost eighty thousand dollars? It had to come from someone with deep pockets. Someone like Warren Calhoun.
    “I’d say that’s just cause for someone to break in here,” he said.
    “I would break in to steal that ring,” Eulalie said. Then she looked around at our stunned expressions. “Did I say that out loud?”
    “I’m sure the break-in was random.” Katie Sue twisted the ring nervously. “I never take the ring off.”
    The break-in didn’t feel random to me. It felt . . . personal.
    A deputy loped down the hallway. Eulalie immediately forgot the ring and began fanning her cheeks with her gloves again, all the while batting her eyelashes and cocking a hip to give her thin rectangular shape some curves. She was in full-on flirt mode. I guess she hadn’t been kidding about finding a man.
    Dylan said, “Why don’t all y’all wait downstairs? I’ll be down in a bit.”
    Eulalie kept batting her lashes, and Hazel said, “You got dust in your eyes or something?”
    “Maybe so,” Eulalie retorted. “You should do a better job of cleaning this place.”
    “I never!” Hazel cried.
    “Obviously!” Eulalie countered.
    “Go on with the two of you,” I said, giving them a push.
    They rushed ahead, still quacking at each other.
    I fell in step with Katie Sue. “What do you think that was all about? Your room, I mean.”
    “Not sure,” she said.
    “And you don’t know what someone was looking for?”
    She looked me dead in the eye. “No. I’m sure it was random.”
    I didn’t believe her. And that realization took me by surprise. She
had
changed—more than her looks. It was best I kept that in mind. “I saw your mama outside when I came in. Did she come by for a visit?”
    She stopped short. “My mama? You’re sure?”
    I nodded.
    “I haven’t seen her since I left town ten years ago. No one knows my new identity . . . How’d she find me here?”
    “Maybe your letter to Jamie Lynn got back to her?”
    “Maybe,” she murmured. “Or more likely someone tipped her off.”
    “Someone like who? No one knows you’re here.”
    She didn’t answer me, and instead asked her own question. Her voice shook slightly as she asked, “Was Cletus with her?”
    Cletus Cobb was Katie Sue’s no-account stepdaddy. I studied Katie Sue and felt a surge of her fear. Latching on to my locket, I wondered what he’d done to her. Fear like that didn’t come