The Girl with the Uninvited Ghost: Pandemonium Cozy Mystery #1

Chapter 8

Mahogany entered the kitchen and took the second port-o-hole from the envelope. She slapped the small circular black object onto the kitchen island, and a small hole appeared in the granite countertop.

She reached into the hole, which expanded to accommodate her arm, and felt around. Frowning, she pulled her arm from the port-o-hole, holding an object sealed in a clear plastic evidence bag.

"A wallet?" Mahogany turned the bag over in her hands to read the label. "Guy Miller? Crap. Bazgul placed the port-o-hole on your box instead of Magic Mike's."

Mahogany turned to Guy, who gazed at the wallet in her hands. His wide, dazed eyes stared unblinkingly.

"Were both of your boxes next to each other?" A ball of irritation formed in Mahogany's chest.

Guy shook his head, bringing himself back to the present. "Oh, yeah, I guess so. I was distracted at having my life reduced to a single box in a police station basement."

"Perfect. This day keeps getting better," Mahogany tossed the wallet back into the port-o-hole. A distant thud echoed through the hole as the wallet joined whatever else was in Guy's evidence box.

Neema breezed into the kitchen from the apothecary and headed straight for the steaming coffeepot on the counter. "Oh, I see you made it into the evidence locker." She glanced at the six-inch black hole in the countertop. She filled her mug and took a much-needed sip, eying Mahogany. "Isn't this a good thing? Why do you look as if someone just danced over your grave?"

Mahogany sighed, narrowing her eyes at Guy. "The port-o-hole is on Guy's box, not Mike's."

"So flip the hole over and pull Mike's box through," Neema said with a shrug. "You've been using port-o-holes since you were a kid. Flipping one reverses the other. Instead of reaching into Guy's box, you'll be reaching out of it."

"Oh, that is clever," Guy moved to stand beside Mahogany as she scratched at the edge of the magical portal with her index finger. She peeled it off the counter, flipped it with an irritated flourish, and slapped it back onto the granite.

Mahogany released a sigh that made Bazgul retreat to his cat tree and shoved both arms up her shoulders into the stretchy port-o-hole.

If anyone had been present in the evidence locker, they would have seen two knit-covered arms appear from a small black dot, no larger than a nickel, on the side of a white document box. The arms fumbled unseeing until they located another box, grabbed hold of it, and pulled it through the hole. Once through, the gap shrank to its original size, appearing as a small mark on the container's side. But no one was in the evidence locker to see this strange, magical occurrence.

Mahogany, Guy, and Neema stared at the box. Bazgul, having lost interest, gazed through the kitchen window as he perched on his cat tree, hungrily eying the neighbor cat as it sunned in a patch of morning light near Mahogany's Vespa.

"Now what?" Guy said, eying the red evidence tape securing the lid to the body of the box.

"Hang on," Neema said. She hurried from the kitchen to the living room. She returned and held out a short, bone-handled knife with an onyx blade.

"Oh, I know what that is!" Guy said. "It's a spectare, which is Latin for peek. It allows you to open all sorts of items and then reseal them without detection." Guy puffed himself up as if he'd just answered the winning question on Jeopardy. "Historically, spectare was a favorite object of fraudulent businessmen and suspicious housewives."

Mahogany took the spectare. "I was beginning to wonder what Magic Mike had taught you." She sliced through the tape and peered into the box. The bagged anelace lay across the top of the other items collected from the brownstone's crime scene.