Hallow Haven Cozy Mysteries Bundle Books 1-3 by Mara Webb (books to read fiction .txt) 📕

he said. By the time I looked back at the taxi, all three of them were somehow inside and it was driving away. Dang. I missed the interesting bit. I bet Brielle used magic, that had to be it, right?

I walked back into the house and wished I could remember exactly how I’d used my magic to change my clothes the last time. Miller and I had been caught out in a rainstorm before, back on one of the smaller islands, and my magic had taken over and dried us off and given us a dry outfit each. I still felt as if I had no control over my powers, they just sort of worked whenever I needed them.

“What do you make of all this then?” Miller asked as I stepped back into the living room. He was gesturing at the chaos that the attacker had caused.

“Maybe they didn’t know Jeff would be home, they were just trying to steal some stuff and he surprised them by coming back early,” I guessed.

“Jeff is a predictable man, Sadie. His route is always the same, the time he takes is always the same. You could set your watch by this guy,” Miller explained. “He does large parcel drop offs once a week, and the mail sorting he does in the late afternoon to early evening. You could ask anyone in all of Hallow Haven where Jeff would be at this time of day and they would know. He goes home after his deliveries to watch a few soaps, drink coffee and eat an egg salad sandwich.”

“So whoever broke in here knew he would be here?” I said.

“Exactly. It can’t be a coincidence that we have found a possible link between the dead man on Green Holt and Jeff, then Jeff is attacked.”

“They needed him to be here. They weren’t just randomly robbing his house, they were looking for something specific, they wanted him to tell them where it is,” I said. “Right?”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Miller nodded. “The question is, what were they looking for, and did they find it?”

11

“It’s complicated,” Effie huffed. This was the only response I had gotten from her and Kate since I mentioned Brielle. Miller was steering the powerboat towards Green Holt and I was wedged between a pile of suitcases and backpacks that the sisters had insisted on bringing. Fitz was sat beside Miller trying to give him tips on flossing and I was trying to stay out of it.

I had sensed that Brielle didn’t want to talk about her cousins, but she had obviously been busy dealing with an injured mailman. I had hoped that I was just reading too much into it, but Kate and Effie were being equally short with me about it.

“Well, now I’m involved,” Fitz meowed, leaping over the bags and nestling himself between our feet. “You’ve both tried to dodge Sadie’s questions, which has officially made it interesting.”

“Stay out of it, fuzz face,” Kate replied.

“Hey, be nice to him,” I smiled.

“You know what happens when you try to keep secrets from me…” Fitz teased.

“Oh no, please don’t start—” Effie protested. It was already too late.

“The importance of flossing cannot be understated, so I won’t. Over the next forty minutes I will outline the—” he began.

“No! Please. We’ll tell you,” Kate pleaded.

Fitz, when he was in his human form, was a dentist. It makes as little sense now as it did the day I found out. He had also been Greta’s familiar, when she was alive, and she had told me many times how she never got used to the idea of her cat companion performing root canals.

It seemed that his ‘party trick’ was to try and bore you to death with oral hygiene information until you caved and gave him whatever he wanted. It was ridiculous, but in his defense it never failed.

“You are such a push over,” Effie groaned. “I’ll tell you; Kate will forget bits and you guys need the whole story.”

The boat engine was loud enough that we were almost shouting in order to be heard. Effie was sat opposite me and Fitz was trying to climb onto her lap so that he had the front row seat for the story.

“She’s older than us,” Effie began. “She’s the wonder child, the golden girl. She did the med-school thing and she volunteered abroad and did all the goody-two-shoes stuff that makes the rest of us look bad. We tried to point out that she has healing magic and that it just made sense for her to be a doctor, but still it was as if nothing we ever did was good enough.”

“So you guys don’t speak because…?” I said, still unsure.

“Our whole family pooled their cash and paid for her studies,” Kate interrupted. “When it came down to it, there was no money left for me and Eff, and we couldn’t get loans due to some incidents with missed cell phone payments that I won’t go into.”

“You wanted to go to college, but you couldn’t afford it?” I asked. We were approaching the island now and Miller reduced the speed of the boat, meaning that the engine quietened, and we could hear each other without shouting.

“Pretty much,” Effie sighed. “I could have been an astronaut, Sadie. If I could have afforded college, had even the smallest interest in physics and wasn’t so scared of aliens, I could have been in space right now.”

“Yeah,” Kate cheered in agreement. “I could have been a journalist for some big-time newspaper or hosted my own show about nature or something.”

“Can’t you host a show without a college degree?” I asked.

“Well, yeah… but— I can’t remember why I didn’t go for that then…” she trailed off.

“It isn’t Brielle’s fault that all those things happened though, is it? You shouldn’t blame her for the decisions your family made,” I explained.

“I know, but we were really bitter teenagers when it all happened and now too much time has passed to do anything