Witch's Wheel

by Abby L. Vandiver

  And all I wanted to do was sell everything she wanted me to have.

  He popped back up. “Did I even talk to Yvonne Giordano?” He glanced over and saw his tuxedo hanging over the chair. “How long was I even there?” then he glanced over at the digital clock on his nightstand.

  “Eight o’clock?” He shook his head. “I never sleep this late.” He pulled the covers back and climbed out of bed. “Where is Caroline?”

  His cell phone rang, and he plopped back down on the bed and picked it up from the bedside table.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Are you alright, Teagan?” It was his Uncle Teddy.

  Still unsettled from the night before, Teagan was too much in a fog to wrap his mind around the questions he had for his uncle.

  “I’m alright,” Teagan said pushing himself up in the bed. “Where are you? What’s all that noise I hear?”

  “On my way up to my cabin. I’m going fishing.”

  “I needed to talk to you.”

  “Well talk boy, but hurry up. I’m sure you can hear my ride is here. I don’t have much time.”

  “No I mean, I need time to talk to you.”

  “Well, can it wait? I just wanted to check up on you because you were acting down right bonkers last night. Hanging around in that old wine cellar, seeing strange women, and not remembering anything that happened last night.”

  “I know, but I wanted to ask you about when you cut your hand?”

  “There you go with that again. I didn’t cut my hand last night.”

  “I know. And you know what I’m talking about. That night. You said my grandmother helped you wrap it up. Did she?”

  “What is this about? Did being in that house traumatize you or something?”

  “I just can’t figure it out.”

  “Figure what out?”

  “What happened? When it happened. I can’t explain what happened.”

  “You gotta get past that. Get past last night. You need to not let that bother you. It was a long time ago. I’m thinking now it probably is a good idea to sell that place, if it’s going to affect you like this.”

  “I know. I couldn’t even sleep last night. Tossing and turning.”

  “Are you okay now?”

  “Yeah, I am. Just got questions that’s all.”

  “Questions about wh – uh – hold on.” Teagan could hear all the background noise from the chopper. “Look. I gotta go.” Uncle Teddy came back on the phone. “We’ll talk tomorrow night when I get back. I already called Caroline and told her to look out for you.”

  “Why would you do that?” Teagan asked, irritation evident in his voice.

  “Because you’re acting strange, and it’s scaring me.” The noise in the background rose a few decibels. “You take care. I’ll see you later,” Uncle Teddy yelled into the phone, his voice barely audible.

  “Okay, bye,” Teagan said into the phone, not sure if his uncle heard him.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Teagan walked down to the first floor of his two-story, modern condo, barefoot and still in his green plaid pajama pants and a T-shirt. He crossed through the living room of the open floor plan, past the dining area and into the kitchen.

  “Morning,” he said to his assistant, Caroline, who was sitting on a stool at the large island.

  “You’re late coming down,” Caroline said. “I started to come up and get you. You’d said you wanted to get an early start.”

  He let out a pent up sigh. “I don’t know that I’ll be good for anything today,” he said.

  “I’ve got your protein drink ready for you.” Caroline pointed at the green concoction she’d put in his clear plastic blender bottle. “Thick and cold, just like you like it.”

  “I’d rather have coffee,” Teagan said.

  “Coffee?” An eyebrow went up.

  “Yes. Coffee. Is there anything wrong with that?” Teagan said and opened a cabinet door.

  “Nope. Nothing wrong with it, other than you never drink coffee.”

  “Well I want some today.” He opened another cabinet, shut it and turned and looked at Caroline. “Do I have any coffee?”

  She pointed to the Keurig coffee maker tucked into a corner of the Carrara marble-topped counter.

  He looked at it and back at her. “Do I know how to work that?”

  “I’ll work it for you,” she said.

  “That would be nice.” He pushed himself up on to the counter and watched as she popped open the top of the black and silver machine and dropped in a little container. She placed a red ceramic cup underneath and pushed a button.

  “Caroline, can I talk to you?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Let me grab my tablet.” She pointed to her iPad on the counter next to him.

  He placed his hand over it. “No. I mean about normal stuff. Not work.”

  “Oh.” She glanced at him and went back over to the coffee maker.

  He leaned forward, his eyes suddenly intense. “How horrible of a person am I?” Teagan asked.

  Caroline swung around and looked at him, a confused look on her face, nothing coming from her mouth.

  “Am I that bad that you don’t have an answer?”

  “I don’t think you’re horrible at all,” she said.

  “Why, because you have to be nice to your boss?” He gave her a smirk. “You can tell me the truth.”

  “I am telling you the truth.”

  He considered what she had said and wondered if she really felt that way. She had worked for him for more than six years, and he couldn’t remember really having a conversation with her. Sure she knew about the things in his life – his grandmother, his father, the Gabrisette House and vineyards, all revealed in off the cuff remarks. But today, he felt at a lost. So many thoughts running through his head. Teddy was out of range, and he needed help. She was the only one he had to talk to.

  “That coffee smells good,” Teagan said and smiled at her. “Doesn’t smell like regular coffee, though. Like the kind my grandmother used to drink.”

  “It’s hazelnut.”

  “Hazelnut.” He looked at her. “Will I like that?”

  “We’ve got twenty-five other flavors if you don’t.” She pulled out a drawer underneath where the coffeemaker sat and pointed.

  “The truth is that I am nothing like the man my grandmother wanted to be. I’ve let her down in more ways than you can imagine.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.”

  “It is.” Teagan nodded his head. “But I don’t want to let her down. Not anymore. I just don’t know what to do. How to fix everything.” He looked at Caroline. “How can I make up for the things I’ve done?”

  “Where is all this coming from?” Caroline handed him the cup of the steamy brew. “What happened to you at that party last night?” Caroline asked. “Your uncle was concerned and I’ve never seen you like this before.”

  “Like what?”

  “Unsure of yourself. Not happy with the things that you do. With you.” She pointed to the cup in his hand. “Drinking coffee.”

  “Am I that arrogant?”

  “Confident. And yes you are.”

  “I just don’t want to be the person that I am any more. I want to be the person that my grandmother wanted me to be.”

  “And who is that?”

  “A nice person.”

  “You’re nice.”

  “Kind. Kind-hearted. A person who wouldn’t sell-out the legacy she left behind.” He shook his head. “Figuratively and literally.”

  “Oh is that what this is about?” Caroline raised an eyebrow. “You’re feeling guilty because you’re selling your grandmother’s vineyard?”

  “And her house. And her life’s work. Everything that was her passion. What she lived for.”

  “Well you can’t change that, if that’s what you need to change. The closing on the property is next week. Yvonne Giordano would probably kill you with her bare hands if you tried to renege.”

&nbs
p; A choked chuckle came out in his sigh. “Are you supposed to be helping me feel better?”

  She chuckled. “Is it working?”

  “No.” He took a sip of his coffee. “Mmmm. This is good.” He took another sip and jumped off the counter. “Bottom line,” he said as he walked around to the dining room and pulled out a chair. “I didn’t grow up to be the man my grandmother wanted me to be. And starting today, I am going to try to be him.”

  “You grew up to be a good man.” She followed him into the room and stood behind one of the chairs at the six-foot table.

  “Ha!” Teagan choked out the word. “That’s according to whom it is you’re talking to. I pretty much take people’s money and get rich from it.”

  “No, you find them the things that they want.”

  “And I charge them an outrageous commission for it. I prey on their greed. My grandmother wasn’t like that. I used the talent and things that she possessed and taught me to take from people for my own selfish wants. She used what she had to give back.”

  “Well, right now you’re talking to me. And I say you’re a good man.” She smiled at him.

  He looked at her and then smiled back. And when he did, he noticed for the first time in the six years he’d known her, how her eyes sparked when she smiled.

  “How come you’re not drinking coffee?” Teagan asked.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know.” She wasn’t used to eating or drinking anything in front of him.

  “Well, get a cup,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said. “I will.”

  Silence lingered in the air as Caroline went through the motion of brewing herself a cup and Teagan sipped on his.

  “You know I was supposed to be there,” he said as she rounded the corner back to where he was sitting.

  “Be where?” Caroline asked. She took a seat across from him and blew into her cup.

  “At the fundraising gala my grandmother gave for Pastor Timothy Morrison’s charity.”

  “You weren’t there yesterday?” She frowned, her face muddled. “You were on your way there when you left here yesterday. Your uncle said you’d been there. What are you talking about?”

  “Not yesterday. The day my grandmother died. I was supposed to be there helping her out.”

  “Oh.” Caroline said and nodded. “You know, I was one of Pastor Tim’s kids back then.”

  “You were?” Teagan said. “During the time of that last fundraiser. You were one of the kids he’d bring?”

  “Yep. With five or six of the other kids.”

  He squinted his eyes. “I didn’t see you there.”

  “Because I wasn’t. I was supposed to be, but I got sick. Last minute thing.” She looked at Teagan. “And how could you have seen me? Didn’t you just say you weren’t there that afternoon?”

  “Yeah. No. I wasn’t there. I went to a friend’s sleepover.” Teagan shook his head. “You know I don’t even think I’ve ever seen that boy again after that night.” His gaze flickered up to Caroline. “I chose him over my grandmother, someone now who has no meaning in my life.”

  “You were young. Having fun was important to you.”

  “Would you have done it?” he asked her. “Picked a friend over your family?”

  “I was one of those children in ‘need’ your grandmother so graciously helped out.” Caroline said and made air quotation marks. “So, I couldn’t tell you if I would have or not. I didn’t have any family.”

  “I bet you wouldn’t have,” Teagan said. “You’re a good person. Especially with putting up with me.”

  “You pay me to put up with you,” Caroline said.

  “That’s true,” Teagan said. “But I wasn’t always such a bad person. I used to be nice. I let my grandmother’s death change me. Change my path in life.”

  “I don’t know that I was always the person I turned out to be,” Caroline said. “You’re grandmother’s death affected me too. Those yearly fundraisers stopped, and that meant hard times for the children at the home.” She grimaced. “For a while there, I was willing to do almost anything to get away from the poverty. From that life. Be any kind of person, as long as it got me away from there.”

  “But you didn’t turn out to be just ‘any kind of person.’”

  “I didn’t turn out that way for long,” Caroline said.

  “I couldn’t imagine you any way but how you are,” Teagan said.

  “And how is that?” Caroline asked and chuckled. “Do you think you really know me? Or even know me at all?” She narrowed her eyes and looked at him over the rim of her cup.

  Teagan studied her. “I guess I don’t,” he said and raised the cup to his lips.

  “It’s okay though. For a while I didn’t know myself. And when I realized I wasn’t the person I wanted to be, I didn’t lose any time changing my life around.”

  Teagan nearly choked on the coffee.

  “What’s wrong?” Caroline said. “Let me get you a paper towel.”

  “There’s no such thing as lost time,” he whispered the words.

  “What,” she said coming back with the napkin for him.

  “Nothing,” he mumbled.

  Lost time. Those words had echoed through Teagan’s unconscious mind, and spoken into being by those sisters. Now Caroline.

  The sisters told him that he couldn’t bring his grandmother back, but was there a way he could make up for the lost time of not doing the right thing?

  Why do those words keep haunting me? They must mean something.

  “. . . and then I met you,” Caroline said.

  “What?” Teagan said. Caroline’s word bringing him from his thoughts.

  “I met you, and I knew what I was supposed to do.”

  “Work for me taking other people’s money?” he said sarcastically.

  “No. Help you. Like your grandmother helped people like me.”

  “Am I people like you?” As the words escaped Teagan’s lips, he realized what he’d said and how it might sound. He reached out and touched her arm. “And I don’t mean that in a bad way.”

  “I didn’t take it in a bad way.” She smiled at him. “Everyone, I’ve come to learn, has been like me at some point in their life. A place where they could use a little understanding. A helping hand. A friend.”

  “Caroline, after last night I don’t know what I need.”

  “So you want to tell me what happened last night? I mean exactly what happened to make you wake up this morning wanting to change.”

  “You won’t believe me.”

  “Try me.”

  “You’ll think I’m crazy. Probably try to have me committed and take all my worldly possessions.” He waved his arm around his apartment.

  “You really don’t know me.”

  “You wouldn’t do anything like that?”

  “No. I wouldn’t.”

  “Well, I would if I heard a story like what happened to me last night.”

  Caroline leaned in, put her elbow on the table, and rested her chin in the palm of her hand. “I’m all ears.”

  “I saw my grandmother.”

  “In a dream?” she said.

  “No. At the gala.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Teagan decided to spill the beans.

  He told Caroline of his haunting dreams, the cryptic message it tried to relay to him, and how the sisters had used those same words.

  And now even Caroline had spoken them. And how all of that was just the beginning of the strange things that had happened to him.

  He told her all about that mysterious little watch shop she’d found for him. He described the uncommon, and maybe even supernatural, (although he barely let that word escape from his lips) women that he’d encountered there. How they claimed to be sisters although one was black and the other was white, and how sometimes it appeared that they took the form of a cat. He conveyed to her how the sisters explained that it was time travel, made possible by the wheels inside his grandmother’s watch tha
t allowed him to travel back in time to 1995. Time Travel, he repeated then explaining how it was the reason he was able to speak and interact with his ordinarily dead grandmother and father. He purposely left out how Einstein’s theory of relativity had played a role, the main reason being he didn’t understand it.

  And the whole time he told her of his magical and mystical account of the previous night’s happenings, Caroline didn’t flinch once.

  “And what happened when you came back up the cellar stairs?” she said completely engrossed in what should have customarily been an unlikely and implausible tale.

  He shook his head, and hunched his shoulders. “I don’t know. All I know is once I opened the door, I was back in the present.”

  They exchanged looks. Him searching her eyes for understanding, she grateful that he would share such an event with her.

  “What do you think?” Teagan asked after an awkward pause.

  “I think we need more coffee,” she said and grabbed both cups. “And I think we need to figure out what all this means,” she yelled back over her shoulder as she headed into the kitchen. “This has to have happened to you for a reason.”

  “You mean for reasons other than my mental health is deteriorating?” Teagan asked.

  “Yes. For reasons other than that.”

  “You know, I just want to get back there. To my grandmother. To save her.”

  “You weren’t able to save her yesterday.”

  “I know. And those sisters told me that I wouldn’t be able to change anything.”

  “So why do you think you can?”

  “I have to. I don’t have a choice.” He looked over at Caroline. “I must have gotten the information about how things happened that night wrong. Or I did something wrong.”

  The two were silent as Caroline brewed up more coffee. While she waited, she scrolled through her iPad and checked his appointments for the day. She glanced over the kitchen island at him sitting in the dining room staring out of the French doors. She knew he wasn’t going to get any work done that day. She went through and marked all the entries on the calendar “cancelled.”

  “What do you think you did wrong?” Caroline asked as she picked up the cups and headed back into the dining room.

  “Maybe my timing was off,” Teagan said. “I got distracted seeing my father and lost track of time.”