Chapter One
A campground, I’ve found, is a good place to live if you’re a witch.
Better than most places. All of us folks who live at campgrounds are more about the trees and the sky and the birds than material possessions, and that’s a must for witchcraft. And when it comes to finding your coven, you can’t beat the communal, get-to-know-your-neighbor feel of a campground.
I’ve found friends here at Whispering Pines, let me tell you. Good ones.
The kind that will drink wine with you on a calm Tuesday evening as the sun sinks down, laugh at your jokes, and drive you home from the dentist ’cause you’re still woozy from the medicine.
That’s all a witch needs, you know. A place in nature to practice and good friends to practice with.
I’m lucky enough to say I have both—and I wasn’t going to let a little thing like a dead body in the newly renovated salt water pool spoil things for me.
That’s the sort of thing that can turn the tides at a campground for the worst, and I wasn’t about to let it happen. Not on my watch.
I suppose I’d better back up…
I’m Tamara Reese, sixty-four years young, host to the Whispering Pines Campground in Middleford, Maine.
If you asked around the place, I’m guessing you’d hear that I’m the one who keeps things running smoothly: the toilets and shower stalls scrubbed, the laundry room clean, the pool vacuumed (when there’s no darn dead body in it, that is).
I keep things running around this place, but the heart and soul of our campground has always been Birdy Montgomery. We all call her Birdy because she loves the birds, and the birds adore her right back. Heavens, I’ve called her Birdy for so long I can barely remember her birth name. To all of us, she’s Birdy and that’s that.
Birdy’s the type of woman who looks you right in the eye and holds your hand and isn’t afraid of giving a hug. All that makes me feel like I’ve known her my whole life even though I met her when I started out as host, five years back. You wouldn’t believe what that sort of affection can do for the soul. We all feel it around here. If the Whispering Pines had a heartbeat, it’d be found thrumming along inside Birdy’s vintage Shasta Airflyte, probably somewhere hidden in the cupboards behind the tea bags, crackers, and cans of soup.
Seeing as Birdy’s the heart and soul of the Whispering Pines, I took sharp notice when she came into the office a few months back, not acting her cheerful self.
“What’s wrong, honey?” I asked. (I don’t call many people honey, but Birdy’s an exception.) “One of the dryers out again?”
“It’s the pool.”
“What about it?”
“You’d better come see.”
I followed her out of my office, which is actually a closed-in porch off of the travel trailer I stay in—a real nice Keystone Cougar Fifth Wheel. We walked down the few stairs and out across the dirt lot.
It was the sort of late spring day that starts cool but you just know it will get to sunny-hot. The surfers would be out on the waves today and soon enough, I figured, we’d get a few surf bums renting out the tent sites. We’re only three miles from the beach, so we attract that lot.
The grass had a nice sheen to it, fresh with dew and still looking neat since I’d rode the mower across it only two days before.
I was about to ask Birdy what she thought of the lawn, because it really was looking nice and I felt proud of it. But before I could ask we walked up closer to the pool area gate and I looked at the shimmering water on the water’s surface and I got a funny feeling.
I can’t put my finger on what it was, even looking back and studying the matter. The best I can guess is that I saw something odd about the light on the surface of the water—a hint of darkness maybe, due to the body that was lying on the bottom.
Or maybe it was an energetic thing. The more I practice witchcraft, I’ve found, the better I am at picking up on things like that.
I twisted the combo lock on the gate and pushed the gate open.
Birdy led the way through.
“It’s too late to do anything because I’m sure he’s dead,” she said, sounding shaken. “I sat out in the sun chairs for an hour this morning with a view of the pool without noticing a thing. When I finally came in closer, thinking I’d take my dip, there he was. I saw the body right through the fence and came straight over to get you. He must’ve been in there all night, Tam.”
I walked closer to the edge, hardly believing the sight. The body looked like a shadow, only darker with some smudgy, blurry colors to it. I made out white-and-red striped pajamas and gray hair and—oh, dear!—I realized I knew who it was.
“Nicholas!” I said with a sharp inhale.
Birdy had joined me at the edge and now she reached out to wrap an arm around my shoulders and give a gentle squeeze. “I thought so, too. And I have a real ominous feeling about this. It’s in my bones. I think something violent happened here. He was murdered, maybe”
Now, Birdy’s been studying magic for practically her whole life, so I trusted her intuition right off the bat. “Murdered! What for?”
“Well, I’m not that good,” Birdy said sadly. “If I had a hunch, I’d spill it. All I feel is a sort of dark cloud hovering over this whole area.” She gestured to the rectangular pool and enclosed grounds that surrounded it.
The cement area looked bright in the morning light. White, plastic lawn chairs and patio chairs, plus a few round tables, also white and plastic, made up a seating area. Over near the shallow end of the pool there was a trunk, the lid hanging open. I could see bright pink and orange pool toys and floaties inside.
Even though I couldn’t see any evidence of foul play, the whole area felt creepy thanks to Birdy’s hunch about murder.
I shivered and rubbed my arms.
“Oh… What did he do this time, to get himself killed?” I took another step closer to the edge and continued peering down at the body.
I was sure that he’d done something awful.
Nicholas Hornsby was known for his terrible behavior. Of all my seasonal residents he was the most trouble, and he’d made the most enemies. Now, it seemed, he’d met his demise because of it.
“We’d better call the police, right?” Birdy asked, as a little gray finch swooped in and landed on her shoulder. She petted it and whistled softly. “He wasn’t a nice man alive, but he sure does look peaceful down there, doesn’t he?”
I had to admit that he did. Almost as if he was taking a snooze. “I’d never have guessed him to be the type to wear a patterned pajama set like that.”
“Folks are full of surprises, aren’t they?”
“They sure are. Poor Nicholas.”
“He’s in a better place now, I suppose,” Birdy said in a soft whisper, both to me and to the little bird.
***
The police arrived twenty minutes later and I showed them into the pool area. The officer in charge was a grumpy, gray-haired man with a rosy, bulbous nose that made me think of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.
He pulled me aside shortly after he set the others to work and asked me only a few clipped questions.
“You found him?”
“Birdy did first and she came over and got me. I’m the campground host, six months of the year. April through September.”
“How did she find him?” he wanted to know.
“I think you’d better ask her,” I said.
Another officer had whisked Birdy off to talk to her separately.
“I believe she was over there in her favorite chair for the sunrise, and then she walked this way and saw him through the fence.”
“Through the fence?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“I see. Did she go into the pool area then?”
“As I said, you’d better talk to her to get it right from the horse’s mouth, but I’ll tell you, too. No, she came to get me right away and we walked over together. I unlocked the gate—”
“It was locked?”
“Yes, it was. That combo lock there. We keep it that way so that only campers can access the pool. If it wasn’t locked the public could just stroll in right off the road. I keep an eye on things but I can’t watch all the time.”
“It’s a mighty tall fence...” he muttered, looking over. “Six feet, chain link. Hm.”
I got the sense he suspected foul play, like Birdy did. He acted very serious and business-like, and his eyebrows were pinched together so tight, they nearly touched.
“Then what?” he barked.
“We looked down at the body and saw he was dead. We called you.”
After giving me a speech about how he and his team would need to cordon off the area and question everyone staying in the campground, he dismissed me.
I retreated to the office and brewed up a hazelnut coffee in the Keurig. I sipped it as I leaned on my desk and watched them work.
Usually I love my office view—the sunlight sparkling on the pool water, the swath of green lawn, and the shadowy, dark woods beyond… But today I took no pleasure in the scenery.
Today the view gave me the jitters.
A few minutes later Birdy joined me. Soon we were both drinking coffees and staring out at the commotion. “They sure are combing the area,” Birdy said.
“Well, no one saw him die—that we know of—so the cause is unknown,” I said. “Now, if he’d dropped dead in front of someone after clutching his heart, that’d be one thing. But this is a whole different ball game. It’s suspicious, him in the pool like that, in his pajamas. They’ve got to try to figure out what happened, and that means they’ve got to look for clues.”
“I’m telling you, there was violence involved in his death. I can feel it.”
“I believe you,” I said. “And that begs the question: who did it?”
“Probably someone who knew him,” Birdy said. “Maybe even someone that lived here, at the campground, since it happened here. Nicholas did tend to upset folks around here.”
“He did, didn’t he?”
There were five officers on the scene as far as I could tell, and all of them were busy examining the pool area. One, a young man, crouched down near the lounge chair closest to the gate. He stared down at the ground as if examining something. I remembered sweeping around all of the chairs the night before at about nine, just before I locked up. There had been nothing on the ground then, so what was he looking at?
I noticed then how long the weeds were around the chain link fence. I’d mowed the day before. The riding mower was easy enough to manage, but the weed whacker was another story. Too heavy. I always left that to the hired help.
“Holly should be here to do the weed whacking soon,” I murmured. “I should call her and tell her what’s going on so she doesn’t get too much of a shock when she pulls in. I suppose I should call the Phillips, too.”
Georgiana and Roy Phillips technically owned Whispering Pines, though they lived upstate and barely ever set foot on the grounds.
I didn’t move an inch to reach for my phone. I couldn’t pull my eyes from the scene over by the pool. Now the young officer was snapping photos of whatever he’d spotted on the ground.
What the heck was it that had fascinated him so much?
It was 8:30 now and I could sense unrest spreading around my campground as quick as the black plague.
“I don’t like this,” I said. “Murder… here at Whispering Pines…”
“Me, either.” Birdy shook her head as she sipped.
“We’ve always been a nice community. Close-knit. We know one another.”
“The tent campers haven’t even arrived yet,” Birdy said. “Everyone here is long-term.”
“We had the best turnout I can remember at the opening potluck, and everyone seemed so friendly. I was sure this would be a good season for all of us. Marion brought her yam casserole with the marshmallows.” I said this last bit as if that proved the sweetness of our community.
The young officer who was crouched near the lounge chair stood up abruptly with something pinched between his fingers. He wore blue rubber gloves. He slipped whatever he’d found into a plastic bag.
Birdy sighed and placed a hand on my arm. “You know, it’s in the papers everyday. Crime rates are up all over Maine. Goodness, all over the country I’m guessing. For all I know, all over the world. People are stressed and we take it out on one another. It’s a shame, but there’s nothing we can do about it. Don’t you go beating yourself up about this.” She let her hand fall over mine and gave a couple reassuring pats. “I know how you are. Mrs. Responsible.”
“I don’t like it,” I repeated, because it was all I could think to say.
“It’s the way the world’s going,” Birdy said.
I stared out the window, feeling terribly depressed all of a sudden.
As I watched the young police officer seal the plastic bag and then jot a label across the front, I recognized him.
“Well, I’ll be darned! That boy’s been here before. He used to play on the basketball court.”
Birdy looked closer. “You’re right. If I’m not mistaken, that’s Janet and Booker Bell’s grandson. Look how he’s grown up. Used to be such a pudgy young thing, all dimples. He sprouted right up to six feet.”
“I wonder what he just found there by that lounge chair. I swept that spot carefully last night and I’m sure I didn’t miss anything.” My curiosity shot up out of the ground at about the rate of Jack’s magical beanstalk in the fairytale, bursting up through clouds.
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” I said. “Not here. Not at Whispering Pines.”
“What are you talking about?”
I was suddenly brimming with optimism—the kind you might call foolish, if you examined it too close.
“Birdy, honey, I’m not going to stand by and watch as our little campground here gets trampled to the ground by hate like this. We’ve got to put a stop to this—and I mean fast. I’m going to figure out who killed Nicholas Hornsby, and I’m going to make sure that whoever it was never sets foot in this campground again.”
I finished my last sip of hazelnut coffee and tossed my empty paper cup in the trash. “People here have to know that we look after our own, and that we don’t stand for things like this.”
I gestured out the window, toward the young officer. “Think of it—I already have an inroads to the police investigation. I’m sure that boy will talk to his grandparents about the goings on, and I can get it out of Janet or Booker. And besides that, we know everyone here better than the police ever will.”
Now that I had the idea in my head, I couldn’t let go of it.
Not even for one instant.
“The chores around here can wait,” I went on. “All except for the bathroom restocks. I mean, goodness gracious. We may have a murderer running around the place but we don’t have to go without toilet paper.”
“Are you nuts?” Birdy’s eyes twinkled.
“Maybe.”
“Well, Tam, if you’re really going to do this, then you might need some help.”
“I might.”
“I’m your girl, hon.” She smiled. “Where do we begin?”
