I wipe Tony from my mind, fixing a smile on my face. “She did after I insisted.” That makes her smile. “Let’s get you home.”
28
Hello, Witch
ELOISE
After a long afternoon of chores, I grab a book from Grams’s library and lay down in bed. But the more I try to read, the more my mind churns. I finally give up, put the book aside, and reach for the October issue of Echo Mills magazine. For the three hundredth time, I inspect each page.
The phone rings. Only one person would be calling me right now —Maeve.
“Hello?” I’m still a little miffed about what went down at Bad Witches Club and all the secrets she’s been keeping from me. A fracture has silently formed between us, a passive divide of things unsaid that could fester like a wound if left untreated.
“I thought I’d come by tonight. We’re overdue for some girl time,” Maeve says.
“You bring the wine. I’ll make some snacks to go with the tea we’re going to spill.” Her laugh heals something inside me. We’ll get over this bump. I know we will.
“On my way,” she sings.
I pop out of bed and run downstairs. As luck would have it, Grams has some cheese puffs in the deep freeze. I preheat the oven and spread them on a cookie sheet, making a mental note that I need to dig into my hidden stash and buy groceries or I'll be eating sympathy casseroles forever.
A soft knock comes on the front door, and there’s Maeve, her black fringe drawing a stark line above heavy-rimmed glasses. Purple dragonflies decorate her casual black dress. A set of black moto boots completes her ensemble.
“Oh my gods, you look great, Eloise! You changed your?—”
I lunge at her, hugging her hard like she’s leaving for war. Pressure forms behind my eyes, and before I know what’s happening, I’m sobbing into her shoulder.
“Whoa. Are… are you okay?”
Wrestling my emotions under control, I wipe beneath my eyes. “Sorry. I guess I didn’t realize how much I needed a friend until I saw you there. This week has been… confusing.”
She winces. “Then I’m sorry to tell you this, but I think my visit tonight might not make things easier.”
I usher her toward the kitchen. “Start talking.”
Twenty minutes later, we’re two glasses and several cheese puffs in, and I’m more frustrated than ever. “Let me get this straight. You can see that Tony receives large sums of money via wire transfers from a shady foreign entity named Genesis Corp, but you can’t prove it precisely because it’s a shell company and the ownership of the account is locked down tighter than a nun’s coochie.”
“More or less.” Maeve giggles. “I claim zero expertise in nunanatomy.”
“But it’s weird. Your forensic accountants see the red flags.”
She massages the bridge of her nose like she’s getting a headache. “Yes. We’ve even questioned Tony about it. He has paperwork saying that the company is paying him for consulting services. His phone records back that up. Butshit, no consulting service is worth what they’re paying him. It amounts to millions of dollars.”
I show her the Echo Mills Today magazine and recap again everything we learned about the warehouse. “He’s behind this. I know he is. I saw that invoice. And the operation is coincidentally torn down, right after? It’s too fishy.”
“And it’s a free magazine with free ads. How would he make any money? It’s not even a good free magazine.” She rubs one of the pages between her fingers. “It feels like it’s printed on recycled paper, and there isn’t anything useful in here, unless you plan to wipe your ass with the pages.”
“I know! It doesn’t make any sense. Tony is an asshole, but he’s genuinely good at business. He wouldn't invest in something that didn’t pay off. And why the secrecy?”
Bending her fingers into claws, Maeve gives an angsty cry. “This stinks of tax evasion but without a direct link between him and Gold Weaver and Gold Weaver and Genesis, we’ve got nothing. As the goddess is my witness, I swear you married into the mob. Tony is up to some shady shit on a level on par with organized crime. We can see money coming in from Genesis but none going out from his companies, and definitely no outlays for a printing operation. When it comes to the courts, they’re going to believe the simplest explanation.” She slants me an empathetic look.
“That I didn’t see what I thought I saw.”
“Maybe he had an invoice, but it wasn’t his. Who knowswhere that came from or why it made him angry? Maybe he has a friend who runs the magazine.” She shakes her head. “I believe you but that’s what his lawyers are going to tell the judge.”
I lean my forehead against my fists, feeling deflated.
“Hey...” Maeve rubs my shoulder. “I’m going to keep trying. I just can’t figure out what he’s doing, and with less than two weeks until our court date, the chances that we figure it out before then are slight.”
