Free Witching The Night Away: A Cozy Mystery (The Witchy Women of Coven Grove Book 3) by Constance Barker

there. She was hovering around the edge of the place with her pad and pen, craning her neck to get a look inside like a vulture. Now was not a time to do any magic, then. Not while Gloria was looking on.
    “So, what now?” Avery asked, watching the woman from the driver’s seat. “We could distract her. Draw her away from the scene. How long does the spell you’ve got in mind take?”
    “A few minutes to set up,” Aiden said. “After that, it depends on what exactly happened, now much of an impression it made on the local enteric field. The state of the morphegenic fields of the victim and the killer. The angle of the sun and moon when it happened. It’s hard to say.”
    “Is the local temporal impression susceptible to solar decay?” Avery asked.
    Aiden didn’t answer right away.
    “I know about you and Avery,” Bailey muttered. “And I don’t care.”
    Aiden cleared his throat. “Yes, it is. But the sun is still low, and behind the door, so it shouldn’t have had much of an effect yet. We probably have until after noon. At that point, we’ll only have a few minutes.”
    “Then we should split up,” Bailey said. “If Gloria sees me here, she’ll have no end of questions. You two work out a distraction and see what you can find in the room. I don’t care how you do it. Be careful what you say to Gloria, though.”
    “Of course,” Aiden remarked.
    Avery shot him a look, and then rested a hand on Bailey’s arm as she reached for the handle to the passenger side door. “Where are you going, then?”
    “To the Sheriff’s department to check on my dad,” she said. “And to poke around heads at the coroner’s office.”
    “Want us to drive you there?”
    “It’s not far,” Bailey said. “And you need to keep an eye on Gloria for an opportunity.”
    She looked from one man to the other, but couldn’t think of anything else to say and didn’t feel much like saying anything. When they both gave her a nod of agreement, she got out of the car, and took off at a brisk pace toward the Sheriff’s office.
     
    Coven Grove’s Sheriff’s department was comprised of two buildings. The original Sheriff’s office, which was nearly a hundred years old, built in a colonial style that was part of the mismatched design of the town; and the newer, red-brick addition that was the city jail. Once upon a time, there had been five cells inside the Sheriff’s office that were rarely used. At some point, however, the county had funded a proper jail, as the county jail was no longer large enough for the incoming population of criminals and miscreants.
    Coven Grove’s jail was largely unused, save for the occasional hard lesson for a teenaged vandal or a safe place to sleep off a late night drinking binge after someone was caught driving drunk or passed out on the street, and those events were rare as well.
    Now, in one of those oft-unused cells, Bailey’s father was probably waiting for something to happen, helpless to change his fate by his own actions.
    She steeled herself when she pushed through the front door to the main office, and very carefully brought her gift into focus, listening to the thoughts that echoed through her mind from the people here.
    Most of it was useless. Everyone was shocked, of course, at another murder taking place so soon after the other. What was this town coming to? And Ryan Robinson of all people. Bailey’s blood nearly boiled when she heard the thoughts of some of the deputies who already believed he’d done it. Weren’t they supposed to be objective? Weren’t they supposed to collect all the evidence, and leave a conviction to the courts?
    When she nearly reached across the counter to slap the middle aged woman behind it with awful, triangular glasses that belonged in the sixties and something just this side of a bee-hive on her head—Darla Simmons, she was pretty sure the woman’s name was—Bailey pulled her gift back a little. It was too much like hearing people talk