A Spoonful of Magic

by Irene Radford

  Flora bristled. “But all that witchcraft and obscene sacrifices were not the intent of our Founding Fathers. They meant that we could choose a Christian denomination.”

  “Since the Founding Fathers have all been dead for two hundred years, it’s a little hard to know what they intended.” My back was starting to itch like it would sprout wings or something. I longed for my wooden spoon to whap her upside the head and knock some civility, if not common sense, into her head. But no, I wore slacks and a sweater set as my nod to less casual than jeans and flannel shirt. So I didn’t have a back pocket for the spoon.

  “Well,” she hmphed. “I can see where your sympathies lie. As far as I’m concerned, we should burn the entire neighborhood to the ground and get rid of that bad influence.”

  I froze in place. Heat drained from my face. I looked into her smoke-colored eyes beneath the dowdy blonde French twist, and knew she believed every word she said.

  Smoke for eyes. No. I didn’t want to believe she would actually start fires in the old neighborhood just to make a point. I’d known her for ten years. Her son practically lived at my house. Actually, more and more he seemed to make excuses not to go home. Had she gone off the deep end? Deeper?

  “And I presume we can’t count on your votes in the primary either since you don’t even have the courtesy to display the campaign sign I sent over with BJ.”

  And then G’s roar of outrage drowned out everything else. “I do not appreciate you turning my daughter’s private birthday party into a photo op for your ill-advised campaign!”

  Bret raced out of the kitchen, grabbed Flora’s arm, and headed for the front door. He smiled and made nice noises to my guests. He did take pains to close the massive front door quietly and completely. But not before Flora said, “We should bring back burning at the stake.”

  I sagged against the doorjamb in disbelief. “How to ruin a nice day in two ugly minutes,” I whispered.

  G placed a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. We tilted toward each other, automatically seeking comfort.

  I straightened first. “Shara, have you found all the presents?”

  “Just a few more. Did you see what Dad got me? A silver necklace chain so I can wear my key all the time!” At least she didn’t call it a wand in public.

  A few of the adults made noises about needing to get home. Or flee the embarrassment.

  G looked to me like I could pull a rabbit out of the hat. That was his job. Mine was to clean up social messes caused by my bullying acquaintances. It was a wonder BJ had turned out so reasonable. But then he spent as much time here as he did at home. Jason never went to the Chamberses’ to play, even when he was five years old.

  And BJ was losing some of his normality if I cared to believe the kids when they said he’d added bullies to his group of friends.

  “I have a marvelous idea. The last performance of the This Is Halloween dance festival is a matinee on Halloween day, a Saturday. Let’s have a monster party afterward, invite the whole cast and crew and anyone else we know from work, the neighborhood, or school. Flora wants to burn witches? Let’s give her a whole haunted house full. Sound effects, flying blobs of gauze, monster masks, the works.”

  Come to think of it, BJ had never been allowed to trick-or-treat either. He’d done it secretively with Jason, of course. I figured what Flora didn’t know couldn’t hurt her.

  I wondered briefly where her ultraconservative, puritanical fanaticism came from. For a long time, I had suspected Bret joined the church as a power base for his political aspirations rather than belief.

  “I’ve got sheets of plastic foam I was going to shape and paint into tombstones for the display window,” Gayla added. “We could make an unholy cemetery out of your front yard. String fake cobwebs from the trees, too.” She found her tablet in her purse and began making notes.

  The other mothers came up with more outrageous ideas.

  “And we can open the attic,” I added.

  “Daffy, what about the . . . you know?” G jerked his head toward the upper levels of the house. He sounded outraged. This was his world we were honoring—or mocking, I wasn’t sure which.

  “It’s all part of the décor.”

  Twenty

  A NORMAL ROUTINE OF frantic dashing from place to place followed by long waits and hastily grabbed meals before the children settled into homework followed for the next week. G often dropped by to help the kids with their lessons. That was unusual enough to cause a few disruptions, but they soon settled to the routine. Fortunately, Belle needed little help with her math and physics lessons. She grasped them quickly and only worked the assignments by rote. No one else could help her. I had a feeling her teachers were challenged to keep up with her.

  We saw little of BJ. Jason reported that he was royally pissed when Belle had banned him from her party. I figured his teenage rebellion hormones had finally kicked in, and he was just being more blatant in expressing his likes and dislikes.

  His parents took umbrage at our “rudeness to our guests” at the party and stayed away as well.

  I barely noticed their absence until after it was all over and two weeks later G pointed out how well Belle managed her party. She helped me make delicate, crustless cucumber, watercress, and tuna salad sandwiches on white bread, with tea and tiny cakes. I appreciated her help even as I bit down my frustration that I did not totally control my kitchen.

  After tea, Belle and her friends indulged in chess games and math problems that left me bewildered.

  At the end of the month, Jason and four of his friends went out for pizza with only G hanging around the edges to supervise and drive. BJ met them at the pizza place, driving his own car, but did not come back to the house for video games, even though we had a new one he’d mentioned wanting to play repeatedly over the summer. Still in rebellion or something else?

  I’d taken Adolescent Psychology in college to get my unused teaching certificate, so I’d been warned to watch for changes in behavior as a sign of drug use. That really didn’t sound like BJ. Besides, his parents kept him on a very tight allowance and a tighter curfew. He shouldn’t have enough time or money for drugs.

  After the weekend of his birthday celebration, Jason’s rehearsals became intense. Not only was the company perfecting several short ballets for Halloween which would debut only two weeks away, they were casting and planning for The Nutcracker in December. I made him take his homework with him so he could work on it when he wasn’t actively dancing.

  And then disaster struck.

  “What are we going to do!” Tiffany wailed running out the stage door of the Old Vic Theater when I dropped Jason off. She wore her practice clothes of long-sleeved black leotard, pink tights, pink leg warmers, and pink ballet flats. She’d stuffed her feet into clogs to protect her slippers. Three more ballerinas streamed after her. “Maestro Bellini says we have to cancel Halloween and maybe Nutcracker as well. It won’t be Christmas without Nutcracker.”

  More tears. Jason opened his arms wide and hugged as many of the bevy as he could at once. I wasn’t certain if my boy was their confidant and friend or merely the conduit to me and my soaking salts and ointments for abused dancers’ feet. Whichever, he seemed to relish having his arms full of beautiful young women.

  “What happened?” I asked, stepping out of the van.

  More wails and tears.

  I ushered them all into the backstage area where it was warm and dry. Maestro Bellini, the ballet master and director of the company, paced the area, from closed curtains to dressing rooms to stage door, pulling at his abundant white hair. It wouldn’t be abundant much longer the way he was tearing at clumps of it. He, too, was clad in the male version of practice clothes: black T-shirt and tights, white socks that climbed almost to his knees (leg warmers of a sort), and black ballet slippers.

  “What happened?” I demanded in my most authoritative
, mother-of-teenagers voice.

  Maestro pointed toward a broken door in the far back corner by the corridor that led to dressing rooms and the staircase that led up to the classrooms. In the dim light, I could almost make out the words “Props, no admittance,” in decals on the steel fire door. “I smelled smoke when I came down from class and hurried to investigate,” he said, sounding as if he’d just left Rome with only rudimentary English lessons. A sure sign he was upset.

  The lock looked scorched and melted. Shara would have been neater. Whoever entered without permission or a key was not into finesse. I closed my eyes a moment and took a deep breath before peeking around the door where it sagged on its hinges. The smell of rancid smoke had dissipated but still clung to the wads of cloth inside the room. I’d smelled that kind of smoke before. At home and in my coffee shop.

  Instead of orderly racks of brightly colored and sequined costumes hanging neatly on hangers, each covered with old sheeting for protection from dust and accidental soiling by dirty hands, I saw heaps of torn satin and chiffon, tulle and velvet scattered about the room. Thrones and spindly chairs leaned drunkenly on weak or broken legs. Cardboard boxes and their contents of headgear, wigs, fans, and other accessories were scattered about.

  “Who would do such a thing?” I asked, bewildered.

  “No one sane,” Bellini spat, his Italian accent thick with distress.

  “Jason,” I called to the only nonhysterical person in sight. “Call 911 and ask for the police. Then help me figure out what’s missing.” As much as my fingers itched to start picking things up and transforming chaos into order, I knew not to touch anything until the police had examined and photographed everything.

  Looking at the mangled lock once more, I called G. I didn’t think a normal explosive or heat source could cause that much damage without sending the door across the stage into the audience seats.

  “Mom?” Jason drew me away from the crowd of dancers, most of them wailing. “I looked real quick and the only thing I didn’t see at least pieces of were the three sticks we painted up in jewel tones and covered in glitter with dangling feathers and such that the various sorcerers use as wands.”

  “What kind of sticks and where did they come from?” Bright paint and glitter would make them visible on stage.

  “We’d been using some drumsticks, but they were borrowed from the high school band and we had to return them, so we couldn’t paint them. They looked awful, and we could barely see them from the third row.”

  “The painted sticks?” I had to bring him back to topic or he’d talk for ages about the importance of props being bigger and gaudier than tasteful for stage work.

  “Two were polished wood. Maybe turned on a lathe, really smooth with gorgeous grain. The third looked like braided grape vines, really beautiful. It was a shame to cover up the natural woods, but we had to, to make them visible.”

  “Where did they come from?” I’d seen similar “sticks” in one of the magic shops in the neighborhood of Magical Brews. The owner turned them on his own lathe specifically to bring out the best wood grain. I hadn’t seen any braided wood, but the craft store sold wreaths of woven grapevines, so why not a wand? The shop owner sold his work as magic wands for the wannabe witches. And maybe to real ones, too, if that was what they craved as an extension of their magic.

  “Shara found them.” My son hung his head, unable to look at me. He knew as well as I that if Shara found them, she had to pick a lock to find them.

  “Where?”

  “Um . . .”

  “Where, Jason?”

  “Somewhere in the greenhouse.”

  My knees threatened to collapse. Shara had managed to break the wards on the evidence locker after all.

  G caught me as I swayed. He’d responded to my call faster than the police.

  “What did the smoke smell like?” G asked Maestro Bellini. He kept one eye on Daffy as she roused from a stunned trance. Her whispered words about Shara finding the wands in the greenhouse scared him.

  “Smoke is smoke,” the ballet master said with a European style shrug of the shoulders that required participation of every body part.

  “Was it sweet, like woodsmoke?” G persisted.

  “It smelled like it came straight from hell!” Bellini shouted, throwing his arms wide. “This ballet is cursed. We must cancel. It is the Tubular Bells! A cursed piece of music. We are cursed for performing it! Cursed, I say.”

  “Sulfurous smoke,” G mumbled to himself. “If not straight from hell, then from someone who’s been there recently.” He turned to find Daffy peering curiously into the prop room. “Daffy.” He spoke in a clearer, decisive voice to penetrate her shock. “I have to go and track down someone who shouldn’t be out of prison. Please stay and take care of . . .” he gestured as broadly as Bellini, “of this. I know you can get everything back on track. The show must go on. And there is no such thing as a curse.” There was, but not in this instance. He stalked quickly away, wrapping shadows around him as he passed. “And keep a close eye on Jason!”

  No one should be able to follow him. He had a wisp of smoke up his nose. Now he just had to follow it.

  This was an acquired talent, not one native to him. Still, he’d done it often enough that it shouldn’t be a problem. Shara was a maze runner, not a tracker. She’d be of no help.

  He stood at the edge of the parking lot, sniffing in all directions. There, north by northeast. toward Skinner Butte.

  A whiff of sandalwood incense replaced the acrid smoke. His heart sank. He knew that scent all too well. Long friendship and loyalty warred with his instinctive need to protect his family and the community.

  “Why, John? Why’d you do it? I never believed you capable of murder. Cheating on your taxes, yes. But the horrible murder of innocent victims? I don’t want to believe this, but I have to follow every clue. And you hold all the cards.”

  He called Ted’s private number. “I need you to stay close to Daffy and the kids for a few hours.”

  “Um . . . what am I up against?”

  G sighed. He didn’t have time for complicated explanations. “Can you just absorb any magic thrown in their vicinity?”

  “That’s my job.”

  “And clear out any residual at the theater.”

  “The theater? Is Tiffany okay?” The sound of tools hastily thrown into the back of his pickup accompanied his words.

  “She’s fine. Everyone’s fine for now. But there’s loose rogue magic about.”

  “Understood. And one more thing you should be aware of. There’s some mighty funky bookkeeping going on with our oldest friend. Innocent people are getting hurt. I just had to clean up some shoddy renovations by his people and reported the contractors to the Better Business Bureau. That corporation doesn’t exist anymore. The work would never have passed inspection without a hefty bribe, if they were done at all. And not doing an inspection costs a lot more money. But I know these guys are still around. I see them all the time at contractor supply stores.” He hung up as his truck engine roared to life and the sound of gravel flying beneath spinning tires covered any more words.

  “The show cannot go on,” Bellini insisted. “We have no costumes, and no money to replace them.” He sank his face into his palms and shook his head. His usually straight and proud body, superbly fit, sagged. He looked older, flabby, and despondent.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” I mused. “Jason, when the police have finished photographing and fingerprinting and whatever else they do, you and anyone else calm enough to take action, need to inventory and sort everything in the prop room. Decide what can be salvaged and what can be ripped apart at the seams and the fabric reused to patch something else.”

  I glanced around at the dancers, a few parents, and stage crew milling around looking hopeless. And Ted. Upright, responsible, and normal Ted. I felt as if the weight of the world
lifted from my shoulders. I could do this. Time to put the hangers-on to work. Work, the best therapy for disaster.

  “Tiffany, get out the company phone roster and divide it up. Call everyone and anyone. Find the people who know how to sew and recruit them.”

  “What are you going to do, Mom?” Jason asked. He looked a bit overwhelmed like he did when confronted with one of Belle’s math problems, or needing to find where he’d written down a password that Shara would instinctively know.

  His sisters had their own talents. They’d be just as bewildered if faced with learning a complex dance routine and executing it perfectly with only minutes to practice.

  “I’m going to do what I do best, organize a bake sale at the Saturday Market. We’ll have the money for replacement costumes or at least fabric by Monday.”

  “Ms. Deschants?” Tiffany asked. “Can we recruit contributions to the bake sale, too?”

  “Of course. I may be a professional baker, but I can’t do this alone.” Recipes for cookies, brownies, and cupcakes spun in my head. I needed flavor combinations that were unique and favorites at the same time, so people would spend money on them.

  “My mom has a bunch of old glass-top canning jars she was going to give to the thrift store,” a petite dark-haired dancer said. I think her name was Denise—Denise the girl Jason wanted to practice lifts with. “If you could fill them with those healing salts you give Tiffany, we could sell a ton of them. You could reimburse yourself for the ingredients, of course.”

  “We’ll help package everything up. Just tell us where and when,” Tiffany added.

  I nodded encouragement to each of them as they came up with good ideas.

  The chaos receded by increments.

  John Mooney, or Coyote Blood Moon, answered his cell phone on the first ring.

  “John, you run a booth at the Saturday Market, right?” I jumped right in without explanation.