PI On A Hot Tin Roof

shouldn’t have, and written about it.
    She took down the box.
    Indeed, there was a journal in it, the first entry marked, “Love Spell.” Followed by, “Spell to Bind Suzanne.” And other spells. She closed the book, and found another in the box, this one printed. It was titled,
A Teen’s Guide to Witchcraft.
There was also a miniature cauldron, a stemmed glass, an ordinary stick, candles, incense, shells, and feathers. The guide outlined the tools a teenage witch would need, enabling Talba to identify the stick as a wand and the glass as a chalice stand-in. Talba knew enough about neopaganism to realize the apparatus was harmless. Lucy certainly wasn’t a practicing Satanist, but this wasn’t the sort of thing that usually went over in Catholic families. She’d known the kid was a rebel.
    And when she thought about it, if there was a diary, it would probably be in Lucy’s computer. This was Talba’s specialty—she had a great program that could get a simple password in about fifteen seconds, but she’d have to do without it today. No problem, though—she also had a knack for passwords, and Lucy’s was bound to have something to do with the stuff she’d just found. She tried out a few—“girlwitch,” “witch-girl.” “abracadabra”—with no success, and finally got out the witch book again, looking for likely buzzwords and finally happening upon “magick,” which worked. As simple as that. The kid believed in magic. She went to Lucy’s “favorites” file and clicked on “blog.”
    There it was: she had one. No juicy stuff there, but to Talba’s surprise, Lucy wrote poetry. Pretty good stuff, too. And she, Talba, was one of the best-known poets in the city. Now here was a hook.
    She logged off and went to fix lunch.
    She set the table for four, just in case, but Suzanne and Buddy were the only ones who showed up. Suzanne sat across the table from him, in a tight tank top, though it was February. “Lookin’ good, honey,” Buddy said. “But aren’t ya cold in that?”
    “Oh, no, I’m warm-blooded.”
    The judge laughed. “Now, that I can believe.”
    Uh-oh,
Talba thought, and sure enough, when she brought in the dessert, an uneasy silence had descended. “I don’t think I’ll have any,” Suzanne said. “I seem to have lost my appetite.” She looked pointedly at her father-in-law. Then she stood, tossed her napkin on the table, and left the room.
    “You gon’ pull a Royce on me?” Buddy called after her. “Come on back, I was just kiddin’ around.”
    She didn’t come back.
    “On the rag,” Buddy said, and winked at Talba.
    Uh-huh,
she thought.
Buddy, you are a bad, bad man.
He wasn’t close enough to have groped Suzanne (unless he’d tried to play footsie), but he’d sure as hell said something that freaked her out.
    “Now, this is what I call lunch. And very nicely served, if I may say so.”
    “Thank you, sir,” Talba said demurely. “Will you be in this afternoon? I thought I’d give your bedroom a good going-over.”
    “Do your worst,” he said. “I got some bidness to take care of.”
    She excused herself and went into the bathroom to call Eddie, to see if he could tail Buddy. But Eileen Fisher, the office manager, said he was out on a job. Well, no matter. If everyone stayed away, she had a lot of time to go through files.
    She repaired to Buddy’s office to dig up dirt, first checking his medicine cabinet, where she found Oxycontin. The date on the vial was recent. Something might be made of that, but she was bound to find something better. After a cursory search, however, she hadn’t. There was a checkbook, though, and she photographed all the names of the payees, just in case some of them were cops, deputies, or possible drug planters. It would take a while, but she could background them all.
    Lucy and Adele came home as she was finishing up. Quickly, she straightened the office and went out in the hall, where she loitered long enough to hear Lucy shouting, “I hate that! I’d never wear that in a million years.”
    “Lucy, you know Mardi Gras’s your dad’s favorite time of year. The least you can do is show him the respect of wearing something to his party that covers your belly button.”
    “You just don’t
get
it, Mommo!”
    “And you may
not
ask Danielle.”
    “Why? Because she’s black? I’m outta here.” And the girl burst out of her room at a run, sideswiping Talba with a fair-sized object she was carrying. “Omigod, I am so