Midlife Curses: A Paranormal Women's Fiction Mystery (Witching Hour Book 1) Read online

  Midlife Curses

  Witching Hour Book One

  Christine Zane Thomas

  By Christine Zane Thomas

  Witching Hour starring 40 year old witch Constance Campbell

  Book 1: Midlife Curses

  Book 2: Never Been Hexed

  Book 3: Must Love Charms

  Book 4: You’ve Got Spells

  Witching Hour: Psychics coming early 2021

  Book 1: The Scrying Game

  Tessa Randolph Cozy Mysteries written with Paula Lester

  Grim and Bear It

  The Scythe’s Secrets

  Reap What She Sows

  Foodie File Mysteries starring Allie Treadwell

  The Salty Taste of Murder

  A Choice Cocktail of Death

  A Juicy Morsel of Jealousy

  The Bitter Bite of Betrayal

  Comics and Coffee Case Files starring Kirby Jackson and Gambit

  Book 1: Marvels, Mochas, and Murder

  Book 2: Lattes and Lies

  Book 3: Cold Brew Catastrophe

  Book 4: Decaf Deceit

  Box Set: Coffee Shop Capers

  Contents

  1. In Witch I File for Divorce

  2. In Witch I Get Caught Speeding

  3. In Witch I’m Late for Work

  4. Yer a Witch, Constance

  5. In Witch I Discover a Dead Body

  6. The Village Vampire

  7. Bewitched Books

  8. In Witch We Meet Someone New

  9. Too Familiar

  10. Creel Creek After Dark, Episode 44

  11. The Faction

  12. In Witch I Meet My Familiar

  13. In Witch I Meet the Family

  14. Daylight

  15. In Witch I Go to the Top of the Hill

  16. In Witch We Learn Who’s the Boss?

  17. Paranormal Podcasts

  18. Creel Creek After Dark Episode 45

  19. In Witch I’m Accused

  20. In Witch I Get Robbed

  21. In Witch We Find the Cabin in the Woods

  22. The Vampire’s Estate

  23. Creel Creek After Dark Episode 46

  24. In Witch I Get Fired

  25. In Witch I Wait Three Days for a Phone Call…

  26. Liar, Liar

  27. In Witch Someone’s Pants are on Fire

  28. The Midsummer Festival

  29. Silver Bullet

  30. Use the Force, Constance

  31. The Wrong Doug

  32. Creel Creek After Dark Episode 47

  A quick note

  Ghost Dad

  Also By Christine Zane Thomas

  About Christine Zane Thomas

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright © 2020 by Christine Zane Thomas

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  For Jenn.

  “The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

  1

  In Witch I File for Divorce

  I stared at the email sitting at the top of my inbox. It made my insides want to leap to the outside, only I couldn’t pinpoint exactly why. At first glance, it looked completely benign. Only four words: “Meet me in five.”

  But I was on my hundredth glance. I stared at those words until my eyes blurred. I was still unable to glean any more information out of them.

  Those four words were in reply to a standard company email—software requirements for a new client. I’d asked to be CC’d on any correspondence between our sales and engineering team. At a small company like Swizzled Innovators, that meant I was added to an email between just two people—Melissa, our sales rep, and Mark, the head of engineering. Oh, and Mark also happened to be my husband.

  We’d started working there the same day. It was his idea, following several of his “brogrammer” friends from Yahoogle.

  I wondered if Mark had made a mistake—if he’d hit reply all accidentally. An easy mistake to make—one I’d made in the past, often to my detriment.

  I watched the door to his office, the one adjacent to my own. Back when we’d started at the company, we shared a small office. Back then, it was fun. Working all hours at a startup hadn’t seemed like a chore.

  Where is this meeting going to take place? I wondered. Is it a meeting at all or something else?

  Maybe Mark and Melissa get coffee together all the time. It weirded me out how easily Mark and Melissa rolled off the tongue—even in my head. In fact, it was so weird it made me shudder.

  There’s no “Mark and Melissa,” I told my inner monologue. Or perhaps it told me.

  Right on time, Mark left his office. I pretended not to notice. Oh, here’s my computer that just went to sleep. From the corner of my eye, I saw him glance my way, but he didn’t seem worried at all. That was a good sign.

  I had to stand to see where he went next—to the meditation room. The dark one-person only meditation room.

  Not a minute passed before Melissa scurried that way, stumbling on her too-high heels. She was awkward and self-conscious as a rule, but I could swear she used that trip as a ruse, to gauge if anyone was watching her.

  I ducked behind my door before the tall brunette could see me. Melissa flipped the sign on the meditation room from vacant to occupied and slipped into the dark room.

  The room had once been used for lactating mothers, when there was a lactating mother. Now, it was supposed to be for moments of quiet reflection. There was a fish tank, a white noise machine, and two cozy beanbags. It was a perfect storm. A storm I wasn’t quite ready to face.

  A few minutes later, I watched them leave. Only minutes. I knew Mark. He wasn’t one to worry about anyone else’s needs. In a way, it was funny. Melissa probably thought quickie meant something regarding time.

  I resigned myself to confronting him that night. My heart wasn’t breaking. It was crumbling into pieces as I went back to my desk.

  And I would’ve waited—I really would have—had I not caught them sneaking in there again later that afternoon.

  This time, I couldn’t sit idly by. I couldn’t ignore it happening multiple times right under my nose.

  Adrenaline coursing through my veins, I basically flew out of my office. And before I gave myself a chance to think about it, I knocked on the meditation room door.

  In the tone I reserve for company meetings—my most demanding voice—I said, “Mark, I need to see you right now. It’s urgent.”

  Heart pounding in my chest, I stormed down the hall toward the breakroom, unsure where to go, unsure what to do.

  This wasn’t the plan.

  The plan was to open a bottle of wine and to calmly but assertively ask Mark for a divorce. Still seeing red, I was anything but calm.

  “Constance,” Mark said. “Constance, it’s not what you think.”

  Mark trailed me like a dog with its tail between its legs. Except Mark’s tail was a belt dangling from his halfway down pants. He jerked them to his waist, zipped the zipper, clasped the belt, and said, “Okay, it is what you think. But I can explain.”

  My stomach churned and was on the edge of evicting its contents onto the grimy breakroom floor.
My eyes stung. Still, I resolved to keep it together, to put on a brave face—mostly because nearly half of the company was watching from their desks.

  This stupid open office floor plan. The tears began to flow down my cheeks.

  I should’ve seen this coming. A little voice in the back of my mind said it had. It said I told you—I told you he was up to something.

  Only, that little voice wasn’t so loud a week ago. It hadn’t warned the rest of me—the parts of my body doing all the work, pulling air into my lungs and pumping blood from my chest. Had those parts known, well, maybe I wouldn’t have ended up a red-faced monster with mascara smeared down my cheeks and snot cascading from my nose.

  My thick blonde hair was frizzed where I twisted it in frustration—an attempt to subvert my hands, to keep them from throttling Mark’s highly throttle-able neck.

  “It’s not you, it’s me,” Mark said twice. The first in an undertone, the second, loud enough for Steve in accounting to hear. Accounting was in the back by the stairs.

  Strike one and strike two. Obviously, it’s him. Who else could it be?

  Given the way he—and everyone else—was looking at me, that answer, too, was obvious.

  But I couldn’t let him win. He was just reeling off the same played out, cliché-of-a-phrase he’d heard in every romantic movie ever made. Not that Mark had seen many of those. Six, maybe seven. And they were all comedies starring Adam Sandler.

  “Of course it’s you,” I retorted. “I’m not the one who had my pants down with Melissa.”

  “It’s not Melissa’s fault either,” Mark said chivalrously.

  “Again, I know,” I reiterated. “It’s your fault and yours alone.”

  “Well,” Mark muttered, “not alone. I mean, you’re to blame for this too, right? It takes two to tango and all that. And it’s obvious there are some things that I haven’t been getting from our marriage.”

  I knew exactly what things he was talking about.

  “There’s more to a relationship than sex,” I said.

  “Keep your voice down, Constance.” First, he had the audacity to blame me, then he tried to shush me.

  Mark tried to put a hand on my shoulder. Reflexively, I pulled away. I knew that lowering our voices wasn’t going to help anything. The whole office could see and hear us. Some even had the temerity to walk by, their ears pricked like Doberman Pinschers.

  Granted, it was the middle of the day, and one or two probably wanted to retrieve their lunches from the office refrigerator. But most were there for the spectacle, lurking to get the inside scoop on the drama.

  I took a deep breath, then took in the scene. My formerly blue eyes—now undoubtedly red and blue—scanned the open floor plan. Every single person pretended to be busy all of a sudden, unwilling to look at me. Except Melissa, who was already back at her workstation with earbuds in her ears. She wasn’t listening to our argument. She pretended the confrontation had nothing to do with her. And maybe it didn’t.

  Maybe this is all my fault.

  Then Mark spoke, and I knew better. This was his fault. I should’ve seen it coming. I could’ve shielded myself from this inevitability.

  “It’s not just the lack of sex,” he whispered. “It takes a lot of work to, uh, make a relationship work. It’s been ten years. It’s not working.”

  “I know, Mark,” I said, mimicking his tone. “I was there too. We were working—working on this company. That’s all we’ve been doing the past few years.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what I’m trying to say,” he pleaded. “We’re here at work together, but you’d never know that we’re married. You’re always busy. Then we get home, and you go straight to sleep like you’re exhausted.”

  “I am busy. And I go to sleep because I am exhausted.”

  “Right, but can’t you see why I wanted to—I needed to—to sleep with someone else?”

  “Oh, you weren’t doing much sleeping.” Brody Hickman couldn’t hold his tongue any longer. He barged into the breakroom and refilled his coffee cup, officially making the breakroom, and our personal lives, fair game.

  A gaggle of employees streamed inside. They opened the refrigerator, shouldered into a line at the microwave, and like Brody, poured coffee into their cups, all of which had our company logo on the side.

  This was why I should never have taken a job with all of Mark’s friends and none of my own. I should’ve done something else with my life, not tried to micromanage code jockeys.

  It was too much. I wanted them gone. I wanted everyone to just stop. So, I yelled, “Stop it—all of you!”

  And they did. Everyone just stopped—even Mark.

  It was more than just a pause though. Much more. They froze, unmoving.

  It was a relief at first. The weirdness of it took a few seconds for my brain to comprehend.

  I tentatively waved my hand in front of Mark’s face. He didn’t blink.

  It was like on Saved by the Bell when Zach Morris said “time out” and everyone around him stopped what they were doing.

  Only that was a TV show and this was real life.

  My life.

  I was starting to freak out. This couldn’t be real. Then it clicked into place. I realized my words caused this.

  I screamed.

  I screamed again, loud and long, wishing for things to go back to normal.

  And everything did.

  Well, sort of. Mark and the staff unpaused, but now they were looking at me, wondering why I was screaming like I’d just met Pennywise the Dancing Clown.

  Brody took a sip of his coffee. “Why the hell is the coffee cold?”

  Fifteen minutes later, Randy, the HR manager, was in my office telling me that it wasn’t working out. Randy’s words were the human resources equivalent to Mark’s “it’s not you, it’s me.”

  Two hours after that, I was in another office—the office of my attorney. And Mark was served divorce papers the next day.

  I wasn’t going to wait around for the full six-month waiting period required by California law for the divorce to be final. I let Mark have everything—the house with its three hundred and twenty-five more payments, and the Tesla that I’d helped secure. And everything else he wanted—the TV, the other TV, the video game consoles, and our shared collection of Funko POPs. Well, except for the Harry Potter POPs, those were mine.

  I packed up Crookshanks, my fifteen-year-old Subaru Outback—the only car that was solely mine, the one I’d had since college—and I left.

  I started toward my Dad’s place in San Diego. But somewhere along the way, I changed my mind.

  I let Mark have the whole state. I just kept driving without anywhere in particular in mind. I stopped to sleep. I stopped to eat. But I didn’t consult a map or a phone. I was driving on autopilot.

  Two days later, I was surprised to find myself on an unfamiliar doorstep. My memory of the road trip faded into nothing. I couldn’t remember what roads I’d taken or what hotels I’d stayed in. Nothing. I had no recollection of how exactly I’d gotten here or where here was. I had no clue who was on the other side of that door.

  But I knocked on it anyway.

  I thought about running back to the car, but my feet might as well have been nailed to the porch. I couldn’t go back.

  The door cracked open and a narrow slice of an old woman’s face appeared. She was smiling.

  “Constance,” my estranged grandmother—Gran—said, pulling the door wide. “I’ve been expecting you.”

  2

  In Witch I Get Caught Speeding

  Great—just great, I thought. As if this day, this week, this whole year, could get any worse than it already is.

  Blue strobe lights illuminated the whole street. The lights bounced off walls and windows and trees. The asphalt glowed blue.

  I pulled Crookshanks onto the shoulder, slammed her into park, and rolled down my window. The engine whined—her way of saying “it wasn’t me that did anything wrong. It was you! Your foot on
the pedal.”

  The car had a point. I turned off the ignition.

  It was still dark outside, ten minutes to six. I had to be at work at 6:00 a.m.

  The job was new, something Gran had set up for me along with her spare bedroom—no questions asked, just saying she’d been expecting me.

  When I asked her why, she changed the subject and left my question unanswered. Every time I tried to circle back, she deflected me easily, with things like where I could find an easy job. After working myself to the bone in Silicon Valley, an easy job sounded pretty good.

  She’d failed to mention this easy job started at the crack of dawn.

  A tinge of gray light peeked over the sloping horizon. What passed as a mountain in Virginia amazed me. Still, there was beauty in them, and the hills kept the temperature moderately cool for it being so close to summer.

  The silhouette of a sheriff’s deputy strode through the blue light toward my window. I half-expected him to shine a flashlight in my face, but he stopped just behind the door and leaned toward the window, bent at the waist. His hand rested on the holster at his hip.

  In the dim light, I could just make out his features. He had dark hair, cut short under a ball cap. His mustache was thick and disorderly, framing his mouth—it was definitely out of regulations. There was a growth of stubble on his chin and cheeks that made me wonder why he bothered shaving at all. Despite his grizzly appearance, he was attractive. Lean. Dark eyes, a thin nose. Scrunching his mustached lips together tightly, he studied me.