“Yes, I’m planning on coming to the Magical Match Tea on Sunday! Lucille’s making us dresses. Isn’t she just the most exquisite seamstress you’ve everseen?”
“Who’s your match?” I asked.
“Now, just wouldn’t you love to know?” she cooed. “That’s a secret!”
“Did you decide on a fabric? The event is just around the corner.”
“Lucille assures me it isallunder control.” She glanced at Aidan. “So sorry you can’t come, Aidan, but it’s us girls only.”
“Actually, that’s not true,” I said. “The Welcome coven voted to allow anyone who wants to come with whatever match they want. The event is gender-inclusive.”
Reneetsked and made an exaggeratedly angry face, reminiscent of a toddler who didn’t get her way. I half expected her to stomp her heel. “Well, I don’t like that at all. This local insistence on everything being equal takes away the special, don’t you think? After all, men and women are not interchangeable. As we know very well, don’t we, Aidan?”
I had the sense she wasn’t talking about social norms.
“Renee, why did you send the cupcakes to Lily?” asked Aidan. “I assumed they were an invitation.”
“To her, not to you,” Renee responded.
“And yet we are here to speak to you together, a united force.”
“So I see. You know, Aidan, you really should relinquish your control over these young women,” Renee said. Her sweet, almost maternal mien was gone, replaced by steely-eyed ambition. “Lily could be so much more than she is, and Selena is ripe to become a powerful young woman. I think you’re afraid of the power they could wield without you and you’re holding them back.”
“With great power comes great responsibility—a lesson I fear you have yet to learn, Renee,” Aidan answered. “As for Lily and Selena, they make their own choices.”
“Just as in the case of that dear Calypso Cafaro? Would you say she made her own choices, Aidan?”
“We’re not here to speak about Calypso,” Aidan said.
“Oh, of course,” Renee said, looking at me. “We’re here to speak of some sort of unnamed ‘threat’ to your beloved San Francisco. Though why you think I’m any sort of threat is a mystery to me. After all, what’s wrong with trying the Renee way?”
“The Renee way?” I asked. “That’s a way?”
“It’s a lovely way!” She smiled. “Anyway, I’m just a humble cupcake baker. You two are the ones involved in murder and whatnot. It’s a shame, Lily, that your fiancé was involved with such an ugly thing.”
“He wasn’t,” I insisted.
She let out a quick laugh. “No? Strange that all the witnesses say otherwise.”
“It might have been a doppelgänger,” I said, though I still wasn’t convinced.
“A doppelgänger?” Now Renee laughed fully. “You don’t really expect me to believe that, do you?”
“It’s the truth,” I said. “Or... maybe not a doppelgänger per se, but some sort of look-alike.”
Renee laughed again, and I had to quell the urge to vault across the counter and punch her in the nose.
“Then what doyouthink happened?” I asked.
“I think you sent your boyfriend to take out dear Tristan Dupree, for fear that he’d come to work with me. Very clever of you to pick up on it so quickly, I have to say.”
“Except it wasn’t Sailor. Oh, and thanks for spiking the cupcakes.”
“What cupcakes?”
“The ones you sent over with Jamie.”
“Why would I do that?” Still smiling, Renee shook her head. “My, my, my, your man kills my man, and I barely even hold a grudge. And now you accuse me of, what? Trying topoisonyou with cupcakes?”
