Now, the same thing had happened to Kenneth and me.
So, taking all of that into consideration, it almost did seem like we were cursed. But I’d never let them know I was starting to believe it, just a little bit. Especially after the blowout that happened when Kenneth and I had gotten married. They’d told me he wouldn’t stick around, and I’d in turn said some equally unpleasant things.
But now, there I was, walking out into the bright sunshine of a summer’s day in Portland, single and heartbroken, just as they’d said I would be.
I shook myself away from those thoughts and instead turned to search for my mom. It was no use anticipating what she might say before she’d even said it. No, it was better to just wait and see.
To my surprise, I spotted her in the twenty-minute pick up zone, leaning against the hood of her bright red, 1994 Mustang convertible, shades over her eyes and bright red lipstick on her full lips.
Classic Mom.
She looked up as I approached, and her red curls glinted in the sunlight. I noticed a few streaks of gray in them that I hadn’t seen before, and realized with a start that my mom was getting older.
I was forty, after all. The woman was already sixty-five, though she didn’t look a day over fifty. People tended to mistake us for sisters constantly.
“Hi, Mom,” I greeted her as I mentally prepared myself for the avalanche of jabs at my broken marriage.
“Is that my baby girl?” My mom gasped playfully. She ripped her shades from her eyes and scrutinized me as if I was a piece of art in some big, famous museum. “Look at you, Ms. Shannon McCarthy!”
Jab number one. Regressing to my maiden name already.
“I see we’ve lost the ‘Mrs.’ title already,” I joked.
“Baby, the man divorced you.” She rolled her eyes and pulled a face at the thought of Kenneth. “Drop the M.R.S. Degree and get your ass back on the streets. Hell, if I still looked like you, that’s where I’d be right now!”
“You look exactly like me,” I laughed.
We were now face to face with each other, and my mom stopped to give me a real once over, the kind only a mother can give.
“How ya doing?” She asked softly, reaching out a hand to stroke my cheek.
The torrent of tears I’d been barely holding in for the last few weeks threatened to wash over me right then. There’s something about a mother’s touch that manages to bring out all of the suppressed emotions a girl would rather hide.
“Fine,” I whispered, but we both knew it was a lie.
“Well, let’s get home and see if we can improve upon ‘fine,’” she announced, grabbing my carry on and tossing it carelessly into the back of her convertible. “Your Grams made chicken ’n’ dumplings just for you.”
“Grams cooked for me?” I asked in astonishment. I truly couldn’t remember the last time the woman had made a meal that didn’t come from a box. Grams could do it, no doubt, but she always said cooking felt like a waste of time when there was ready made food for sale in the supermarkets.
“Don’t look so surprised when you walk in, kid,” Mom instructed as she peeled away from the parking space and started to race down the street at top speed. That was how she always drove, and she’d never once gotten a ticket for it. My mom could talk her way out of any situation, even speeding tickets. “She’s really proud of this meal, for whatever reason. Grams never cooked me food when I was heartbroken.”
“Well, did you ever go through a divorce?” I shot back.
Elle McCarthy glanced at me out of the corner of her eyes like she wanted to say something, but then shut her mouth and turned back to look at the road.
That was weird. My mom never kept her mouth shut about anything. Hell, I knew every time she had a UTI.
And Grams had cooked.
I wasn’t sure why, but a weird feeling settled in the pit of my stomach. Something was off, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
We pulled up to the quaint little cottage on the outskirts of Portland, and the jewel green door swung wide open to reveal Adora McCarthy in all of her glory. Her red hair had gone blonde and white with old age, and her porcelain skin sagged a bit at her neck and chin.
Her green eyes sparkled with the same youthful joy they had for as long as I could remember. For a ninety-year-old woman, she acted like she was still in her sixties.
I had some darn good genes.
“My granddaughter is home!” Grams sang in her thick Southern drawl as I sprang from the car and dashed up to hug her. “It’s a pity you had to come home because of that horrid man, but I’m still glad you’re back.”
“I missed you,” I murmured into her hair. It smelled of lavender and patchouli oil, a scent combination that was uniquely Grams.
“Well, you should have come back to visit more often!” She exclaimed, swatting me softly on the shoulder.
“Mama, she couldn’t, remember?” my mom replied as she marched through the door with my bag. “She was a big time D.A. in the city.”
“Right, of course,” Grams nodded seriously. “It’s much more important than helping us run our little shop.”
There it was. Jab number two. There would be plenty more where that came from.
“Don’t think about it like that,” I chided her, stepping into the house myself. “Besides, all of that’s in the past now.”
I sucked in a deep breath, smelling the sage and herbs that I had grown up with. Crystals and occult trinkets littered the mantle in the living room, while charms to ward off Fae and other demons hung over every doorway. The place looked like an eclectic mess.
But it was the eclectic mess I’d grown up with. Even though I didn’t believe in any of it, I still felt comforted by all of it, the way I had as a child. The charms and crystals and trinkets made me feel safe.
“Shannon, get your behind in this kitchen!” Grams called out. “The big city D.A. needs a home cooked meal.”
“Coming!” I called out.
I had just turned to the kitchen when I heard a familiar meow behind me. I turned to see Gram’s old cat, Herman, as he approached me, in the mood for our usual single pat greeting.
“Hey, buddy,” I murmured as I bent down.
For the first time in my entire adult life, I suddenly realized just how strange it was that Herman was even… alive. That might sound absolutely horrible, but the cat had been around for as long as I had been around. Longer, even, since Grams had him before I was born.
I mean, the cat had to be at least forty. I’d never heard of a cat living that long in my entire life.
As if Herman could hear my inner musings, he reached up and swatted my knee with his sharp claws.
“Ouch,” I hissed at him, instantly taking my hand back. “No pets for you if you’re going to act like that.”
“Meow!” Herman replied, before he stalked off with his tail held high.
“How the hell are you still alive?” I murmured when I watched him go.
I’d already seen too many strange things within the last day to give this seemingly immortal cat any more thought. So instead, I tried to shove the oddities out of my mind and turned back to the kitchen, where the aroma of freshly made chicken and dumplings filled my nostrils.
3
It took me less than a day to confirm that Mom and Grams were, in fact, acting extremely strangely. They made no more comments on my failed marriage. They didn’t try to tell me that men were useless, or that marriage was a made-up institution meant to keep women down and allow the patriarchy to flourish, or even make a not-so-subtle hint that I’d picked a job that was far too demanding.
They were walking on eggshells because I was getting a divorce. Maybe they felt guilty that, after all of these years wishing Kenneth would step out of our lives, he finally was.
I was in my childhood bedroom, complete with drawings of fairies and a pink canopy bed, on my second morning in Portland when my mom knocked on the door.
As she had when I was a teenage
r, Mom knocked once and then proceeded to just open the door, without even waiting for me to tell her to come in.
“Please, do, enter,” I said sarcastically.
“Privacy, sorry!” Mom put up her hands and then stepped back out into the hall dramatically. She closed the door and knocked again, but this time, she waited and didn’t come in straight away.
I should have been used to her antics after dealing with them for forty years, but they still never ceased to make me laugh.
“You may come in,” I called out, in my most posh voice.
“Why, thank you for allowing me entrance to your humble abode,” Mom replied, in an equally posh voice, as she entered.
“You are quite welcome,” I laughed. “What’s up?”
“I was just wondering if you wanted to come down to the shop with us this morning,” she replied. “It’s a full moon, so we’re expecting a bit of a rush. We could really use your help. I’ll even pay you! You do need a job after all.”
“Mom, I don’t really think being a cashier is on my list of desirable jobs,” I chuckled. I glanced down at the laptop in front of me, where I was searching for any and all law-related jobs in Portland and sighed. “I’d much rather be in the shop with you and Grams than going over this.”
“What is it?” She asked curiously.
“Just a bunch of nothing,” I replied. “I’m hoping some law firm needs a replacement, or one of the neighboring counties might need a criminal prosecutor.”
“That stuff is just too awful,” Mom sighed. “I don’t know how you do it.”
“Neither do I,” I murmured, more to myself than anyone else. Sometimes, seeing criminals day in and day out really did get to me.
But of course, my mom’s eyes immediately lit up as she latched onto my words.
“Do you think you might want to… quit? Find another line of work?” She asked hopefully.
I was about to say no, of course not, but something stopped me.
“Maybe,” I sighed. “I just don’t know what I’m doing anymore. At all.”
We sat in silence for a moment. For the first time in her life, Elle McCarthy was speechless. Not that I could blame her. I’d always had a plan for my life, up until now.
Now, I felt as if I was just floating through time and space, held down by nothing more than a loosely tied string that could fall away at any moment.
“Come to the shop,” Mom ordered, patting my leg. “A little bit of magic makes everything better.”
As was tradition, I rolled my eyes at that statement. But I couldn’t help thinking that maybe I was in need of a little magic at the moment.
My mom hadn’t lied.
The shop was busy. With the boom of millennial spiritualism and all those crazy people who believed in “woo” in the last ten or so years, business was better than ever. And, since Mom and Grams had a reputation among the Portland laypeople for being the go-to women on anything pagan, mystical, or magical, they had cornered the market long before those new, capitalist, fake shops could.
Not that I thought anything they sold was real. They just didn’t fake it, since the two of them believed in it all so hard. They’d even named the shop “Magic for Real.”
I spent the day reverting to my teenage self. But where I used to pack bags for cat ladies and strangely quiet people, I was now packing bags for young dudes in beanies and thirty-year-old moms with dyed blonde hair and vegan kale smoothies in hand. The crowd of customers had changed, but the shop sure hadn’t. There were still hand-tied sage bundles near the register, potions along the shelves, and altars for sale in the back.
“Having fun?” Grams asked halfway through the day, when I’d just finished stuffing a bag full of crystals and spell candles for a twenty-something guy with fifty holes in his face.
“Of course,” I replied with a smile, but it was a lie. I just wanted to placate my dear old grandmother.
She, of course, saw right through me.
“No, you’re not,” Grams chuckled. “I don’t know why you never appreciated the magic in this store, Shannon, but after forty years, I certainly know you don’t like it.”
“It’s not that I didn’t appreciate it,” I hedged. “I just… don’t believe in it.”
Grams paused and scrutinized me for a moment, in a way that made me feel like I was both under a microscope and naked in front of a crowd all at the same time, as if all of my secrets were stripped bare and displayed for everyone to see. It was… weird.
Her gaze trailed down to my hands, and for a moment, I could have sworn I saw her frown at them, as if there was something wrong.
Quickly, though, her green eyes snapped back to my face, and she managed a small smile.
“Of course you don’t,” she whispered.
Something in her tone told me she spoke more to herself than to me. Her green eyes glazed over for a moment, and she went somewhere far away. A split second later, she turned away from me and marched into the back.
“Close down the shop!” She called over her shoulder. “We’re reducing our hours today. You can go home, Shannon. Lock the door on your way out, would you, please?”
Grams hadn’t spoken to me like that since I was in high school. All of a sudden, I was reduced to a fifteen-year-old girl who was at the whim of her mom and grandmother again. Those old feelings came flooding back, and I realized exactly why.
Grams and Mom were hiding something from me. They’d acted like this when I was in high school, and they were doing it again. I’d never been able to figure out just what it was they hadn’t told me when I was a teenager, but I sure as hell wanted to try now. I was a full-grown woman, for heaven’s sakes! And a District Attorney! There was no reason they should hide anything from me.
I hurried to lock the door before any customers could come in, but instead of leaving, I retraced Grams’ steps and followed her into the back of the warehouse, where the employee break room was.
Not that anyone other than Grams, Mom, or Dina ever used the place. The three of them had never wanted to hire on any help, even when the store became so popular it would have made financial sense.
“No, we can’t tell her that!” I heard my mom hiss as I closed in on the break room.
Immediately, I stopped moving and opened my ears, listening as hard as I could.
I really had reverted to a teenager.
“What do you mean, we can’t, Elle?” That was Dina. “How would you feel if we had never told you?”
“Well, that would never have been an issue, now, would it?” Mom demanded. “Because we all know what happened when I turned twenty-one. And, unless she’s not telling us something, the same cannot be said—”
“What if that’s the reason?” Grams asked. “You know what’s been happening in this town. Don’t you think it would be smart if there were more of us?”
“Of course I know what’s been happening,” Mom snapped. “I read the news.”
My curiosity got the better of me in that moment. I wasn’t proud of it, since I could tell this conversation was awfully private, but it seemed to involve me, somehow. And if I was involved, then I sure as hell deserved to know.
So, I stepped around the corner with my arms crossed over my chest.
“What’s been happening in the news?” I asked.
Three wide sets of eyes met my own. Dina jumped up and pushed something behind her back, shielding it from my view, albeit not very well.
“Shannon!” Grams exclaimed. “I thought you went home already.”
“Well, I was about to, until I heard you guys having some sort of secret meeting,” I replied. “Spill. What’s going on?”
They looked from each other, to me, and back again.
“Shannon, baby, why don’t you go see your uncle down at the ice cream parlor?” Dina asked sweetly. “I’m sure he’d love to give you two scoops of your favorite ice cream!”
“Not cutting it, Auntie Deedee.” I shook my head. “I deal with lying criminals day
in and day out. I know when someone’s hiding something. What’s behind your back?”
On any other day, I would have felt awful for pushing them like this. It wasn’t my place to try and get information from them when they so clearly didn’t want to share.
But I was tired.
Tired of secrets, and lies, and late night meetings that I wasn’t invited to. Tired of feeling like there was something missing in my life, like I didn’t have a part of me readily available.
Like something was shut down inside of me.
They were all caught and, by the looks on their faces, they knew it, too. Slowly, as Mom vehemently shook her head and tried to make her stop, Deedee brought out the secret she’d shoved behind her.
It was a newspaper. She laid it flat out on the faux wood break room table and stepped back, looking up at me nervously.
“Take a look at this headline.”
I swear to God, I thought the damn thing was going to say that Kenneth had been murdered, or aliens had been discovered on Mars or, hell, that it turned out I was the Queen of Freaking England.
But the headline said none of those things. Instead, it blared: Three Women Murdered, Police Have No Leads.
“Oh, wow, that’s, uh, really sad,” I said, sort of in a state of shell shock. I was a D.A. I dealt with murder all the time, and often with the people who committed those crimes. As sad as it was, the three deaths of the Portland women didn’t really affect me. “Did you know them?”
“Well, no,” Mom hedged. Her green eyes went soft, though, like I would have expected if she actually did know them.
“Uh, okay, so why the big secret?” I was genuinely confused now. I’d lost all of the curiosity that had prompted me to come and investigate.
“Read further,” Grams instructed with a nod toward the paper.
Still confused, but willing to listen, I glanced down and started to read the article.
There wasn’t anything that would have suggested the need for such strange behavior. Three women had been murdered within the last week. They lived in different parts of town, worked at different jobs, and hung around in different social circles. The only thing that even tied these women together was the circumstances of their murders.
Forty, Fabulous and Fae Page 2
